Made In America - Bill Bryson [99]
At the same time, the questions that were asked of immigrants at ports of entry became far more searching and insinuating. Arriving in America in 1921, G. K. Chesterton was astonished at the probing interview to which he had to submit. ‘I have stood on the other side of Jordan,’ he remarked later, ‘in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority.‘45 Finally, in 1924, a quota system was introduced and America’s open-door policy became a part of history.
By this time, however, immigrants everywhere were proving the iniquity of the prejudice against them. The eastern European Jews in particular showed a regard for education and self-improvement that should have been seen as a model. By 1927, two-thirds of New York’s 20,000 lawyers were Jewish,46 and thousands more had built distinguished careers as academics, musicians, playwrights, journalists, doctors, composers, entertainers and in almost every other field of human endeavour. Having faced four decades of complaints that they did not work hard enough, Jews now found themselves accused of working too hard.
A quiet drive began to restrict Jewish admissions to law schools (echoing present-day concerns over Asian domination of institutions of higher learning) and a new expression entered the language, five o’clock anti-Semitism, by which was meant that people would work with Jews during the day, if they must, but wouldn’t dream of socializing with them at night. For at least another three decades Jews would remain casually excluded from large parts of the American mainstream. Not until the 1960s could they hope to be admitted to non-Jewish country clubs, college fraternities and sororities, and other bastions of gentile life.
But the prejudice the Jews experienced paled when compared to that meted out to the most visible, least voluntary of all minorities: black Americans. It may come as a surprise to realize that blacks were one of the least numerous of immigrant groups to the United States, outnumbered by Swedes, Sicilians, Poles and almost every other national or ethnic block. Between 1505, when the first consignment of black slaves arrived in the Caribbean, and 1888, when slavery was finally outlawed in its last New World stronghold, Brazil, an estimated twelve million black Africans were transported across the Atlantic. The overwhelming majority, however, went to Brazil and the Caribbean. Just 5 per cent – no more than about half a million people – were imported into what was to become the United States.47
For obvious economic reasons, blacks were encouraged to propagate freely. As early as 1775, they accounted for 40 per cent of the population of Virginia, 30 per cent in North Carolina, Maryland and Georgia, and well over 60 per cent in South Carolina.48
Though the physical cruelties to which they were subjected have perhaps been somewhat inflated in the popular mind – most were at least passably fed and clothed by the standards of the day; it was after all in the slave-owner’s interest to look after his property – the psychological humiliations to which they were subjected are immeasurable. It was not merely the imposition of involuntary servitude but the denial of even the most basic human dignities that made American slavery so singularly odious. Fischer reports how a visitor to Virginia ‘was startled to see ladies buying naked male slaves after carefully examining their genitals’.49 Female slaves were routinely regarded as sexual playthings for owners and their overseers. Scarcely a plantation existed that didn’t have a sprinkling of mulattos (originally a Spanish term denoting a small mule), and visitors