In this as in other ghastly situations we face as a nation, we are often too quick to assume they are unprecedented, and that the writers of the past will have little direct light to shed upon them. I have been reading these past two weeks, however, two works by our Great American Authors that provide more insight than one might expect on our present historical moment.
Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (1955) and Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent (1960) are both products of the American mid-century; other than that, they would seem at first glance to have little in common, and to belong to very different milieux. Miller's play is set among longshoremen on the New York docks and depicts the consequences of an incestuous obsession within a working-class Italian family in Brooklyn. Steinbeck's novel -- his last -- describes the social rise and moral decline of a Yankee WASP living in Long Island.
Both works, however, share something unexpected. Both centrally involve a group of "illegal immigrants." And in both works, it is the decision of the main character to call immigration enforcement on them that is their greatest, most mortal sin -- the final seal upon their moral self-immolation.
Miller's play and Steinbeck's novel were written in the twilight years of the U.S. immigration system first established in 1921. In that year, Congress passed a law that was explicitly designed to perpetuate a certain ethnic and racial composition of the United States. The "Emergency Immigration Act" set quotas for the number of people who could enter the country from each nationality, and these limits were set based on the percentage of the U.S. public that each national group comprised at the time of the Act's signing.
As was not lost on people in subsequent decades, this was a frankly racist immigration law -- one informed by the popular scientific racism of the day and designed to favor white, Northern European immigrants, at the expense of people who came from most other parts of the globe.
One of the nationalities most likely to be excluded under the 1921 law were Italians, and by the time Miller and Steinbeck were writing the above-mentioned works, the inequity and cruelty of this situation was becoming increasingly unmistakable. Italy was still recovering from the ravages of the war and had produced a generation of economic refugees, many of whom were desperate to find work in the United States. Their poverty was a byword in much the same way many people now think of subsaharan Africa.
The guilt of the situation was made more acute by the fact that many American GIs had only just returned from doing time as the occupiers of the defeated adversary. In Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) --- a novel published the same year Miller's play was staged, and which is very similar in outlook and generational angst to Steinbeck's book -- our protagonist is shadowed in the midst of his postwar affluence and comfort by the fact that he fathered an illegitimate child in Italy during the war -- a child he imagines must now be penniless and starving.
Because the Italians escaping starvation could not enter the country legally, they came through illicit networks. Miller's play introduces us to the slang-term of "submarines" for the undocumented dock workers of the era. In A View from the Bridge, two of these undocumented workers come to live with the central characters through a family connection. Since they are only able to come over through a smuggling network, a sizable portion of their wages at the docks initially have to be spent in paying down a ruinous debt to the smugglers -- still the case today with many migrant workers and asylum-seekers in the North American and European corridors.
In The Winter of Our Discontent, meanwhile, the undocumented character is not a worker, but the owner of the grocery chain where our down-at-the-heels WASP protagonist is employed. He tells everyone in town that he arrived in the country in 1920 -- placing him in the United States just before the exclusionary 1921 law was passed. He cannot prove he has been in town that long, however, and one of the coldest acts in the protagonist's moral degradation is to eventually call the federal authorities on him -- gambling on the hope that he will inherit the store if he does so.
Both Miller's play and Steinbeck's novel are about much more than the immigration system, however. A View from the Bridge is also a high-intensity family drama in which a man's obsessive and tyrannical concern with his niece's "purity" conceals an unspoken incestuous desire -- a theme we might recognize from sources as diverse as Faulkner and Scarface.
Steinbeck's novel, meanwhile -- far less successful as literature than Miller's play -- is a heavy-handed didactic piece about the decline of American morals in the postwar era. The book is populated by implausible characters -- a "teenage" son who speaks in a juvenile argot that is plainly a cranky author's contempt-laden impression of a child raised on gangster-movies, rather than actual human speech; as well as a Steinbeck stand-in main character whom we are apparently meant to like, most of the time, but whom we don't, and whose moral decline ultimately seems less like an aberration than a logical working out of all the prejudiced, priggish, and Pecksniffian tendencies the character has already displayed.
The novel also irritatingly shifts between third and first person voice without cause, and the allusive style of the narrator/protagonist is frequently cloying.
The novel also irritatingly shifts between third and first person voice without cause, and the allusive style of the narrator/protagonist is frequently cloying.
Finally, the novel suffers from the fact that its underlying judgment of its own age and historical milieu have not borne up well in hindsight. It is hard to see 1961 as the winter of anyone's discontent, frankly, compared to what came after. The examples Steinbeck gives of the corruption and decadence of his age seem, by their profound insignificance, actually to confirm the almost Edenic naivety of the period. When the best you can do by way of scandal is the Charles Van Doren TV quiz show affair and an essay contest in which the protagonist's hated teenage son plagiarizes from the speeches of Henry Clay, you know you are living in an age of innocence.
How could anyone think these events could rank as major transgressions in a world that was about to witness assassination and a war built on lies? Unless -- and here's the worrying possibility -- the Charles Van Doren scandal was so unsettling not because of the scale of the corruption, but because he was a WASP from a "good family" who "ought to have known better," in which case Steinbeck's novel is really mourning the "passing of the great race" almost as surely as the 1921 immigration law at which his book takes aim.
If Steinbeck's book is in part a tale of WASP decline in a somewhat Spenglerian key, however, it unfolds this familiar story -- one that has really not aged well -- so as to reach some surprising and paradoxical conclusions. Steinbeck seems to suggest that enacting policies of racial and ethnic exclusion is precisely one of the ways in which the WASP ruling class has forfeited their previous honor and their claim to a distinctive moral character.
After Steinbeck's protagonist calls the feds on his employer, he eventually learns that Marullo was a better embodiment of American ideals and aspirations than he ever could be. Ultimately, it is Marullo the "outsider" who believes in the promise of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, and it is the main character, the WASP, who sells him out in order to steal a profitable grocery chain out from under him.
This is the novel's key point -- one it makes with a lack of subtlety, to be sure, and a great deal of didacticism, but with genuine feeling and pathos nonetheless.
Miller's riveting, moving, and justly famous play, by contrast, is no doubt the more immortal work of the two. Both works, however, are ultimately cries against the inhumanity of the immigration system that at the time prevailed.
In Miller's play, the protagonist Eddie calls immigration enforcement on the two "submarines" -- Marco and Rudolpho -- one of whom wishes to marry the niece who is the object of Eddie's obsession. Both left Italy because there were no jobs there, and because Marco's children had been reduced as a result to drinking soup broth for a meal. At the end of the play, Eddie's wife Beatrice pleads with the federal agents who come to take them away. Who're they hurtin', for God's sake, she says, what do you want from them? They're starving over there, what do you want!
Miller's and Steinbeck's works reflect the postwar liberalism that ultimately swung American public opinion around to oppose the unjust nationality quotas in the immigration law. This led President Johnson to sign the new Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which he explicitly linked to the civil rights movement of the time, famously stating that the new law was intended to "correct a cruel and enduring wrong" -- namely, that of racial and ethnic discrimination in U.S. immigration policy.
As Saul Alinsky once wrote, however, every solution to a problem creates new injustices of its own. The 1965 INA did abolish the discriminatory quota system, replacing the former nationality caps with a new system that assigned the same quota to every nation. While apparently taking the immigration system in the direction of greater inclusivity, however, this change also established new forms of exclusion that had not existed previously. As racist and unjust as the pre-1965 law had been, it was silent on the subject of immigration from the Western hemisphere, and did not include any caps or quotas for immigrants from Mexico, Central America, or anywhere else south of the U.S. border.
The 1965 law, therefore, eventually created a new form of "illegal immigration," a new undocumented workforce -- this time made up largely of Latin Americans. These are the more recent generations of economic refugees, forced to escape violence and poverty by the same means any of us would take in their position. In a Reuters article earlier this week, the journalist quotes a Salvadoran man who might just as well be speaking in the voice of Marco and Rudolpho: "There is no work here and we want to improve (our lives), to get ahead for our families, for our children."
When one reads accounts of the U.S. government today rounding up hundreds of workers and deporting them from their families, one wishes to cry out with Beatrice: Who're they hurtin', for God's sake; They're starving over there, what do you want!
Indeed, the nationalities may be different, but the story is just the same as the one told by Miller and Steinbeck. If I were a theater director, I would know exactly how to stage A View from the Bridge in 2019. Some of the names would have to be changed, but only slightly. Rudolpho would become Rodolfo. Marco and Eduardo could stay the same. The snatches of non-English dialogue would be in Spanish rather than Italian. One might move the action from Brooklyn to Dallas or the American Southwest. But the underlying story would be the same.
There would be people in both cases who were placed at the mercy of exploiters and of the vindictiveness and covetousness of their neighbors, simply because of where they were born and the way they entered the country. They would be punished for no crime but that of feeding themselves and their families. And the people who call them in -- and the government that arrests them -- might see themselves simply as enforcing a law, maybe even as fulfilling a public duty -- one as just and timeless as any other. And in fact they are enforcing apartheid.
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