I have been thinking of Donald Trump and of my grandfather. His name was Shmuel Finklestein. The two are linked, though neither knew the other. It is Trump's rants against Mexican immigrants, branding them rapists and murderers, that both unites and divides the two men. My grandfather did not come across the border with Mexico. He came through the port of New York. But he was no less among the unwanted. At fifteen, he was the "wetback" of his day -- a "fussgayer," or "footwalker" who, with his mother, father, brothers and sisters, fled their sorry life in Romania, plagued by pogroms, laws that stripped them of citizenship, the right to go to school, own land, or hold jobs. They took what little they could carry on their backs and set out by foot looking for a place that might take them in. Europe turned its back on them.
The year was 1902. There were a lot of Americans back then who shared the views of a Donald Trump, that America was no place for what was seen as the refuse of humanity. Among them was the American Secretary of State, John Milton Hay, who tried to convince the government of Romania to ease up on their Jews -- not out of any compassion for them, but in the hope they would then not come to America. Nine days before my grandfather and his family boarded the ship in Le Havre, France, a New York Times headline cited Secretary Hay: "Says Present Harsh Treatment Breeds Men who Are Not Desirable Immigrants To This Country."
Secretary Hay declared, "The pauper, the criminal, the contagiously or incurably diseased are excluded from the benefits of immigration only when they are likely to become a source of danger or a burden upon the community." (Trump couldn't have said it any better himself.) Even most American Jews did not want them, fearing they would embarrass them with their poverty, their superstitions, and their backward ways.
"The Romanian Jews have no goals, they wander planless about like a horde of Northern water-rats endeavoring to elude the grasp of the birds of prey... No one desires them, everybody sends them farther on ...." So wrote the Jewish Criterion of Pittsburgh in 1900 that nonetheless took pity on them and whose Jewish community was one of the very few to reach out to them.
And so my grandfather and his family made a home for themselves in Pittsburgh.
But my grandfather had no illusions of what awaited him here. He would in time erase his background -- change his name from "Shmuel" to "Sam" and from "Finklestein" to "Stone." Now, "Sam Stone," he would record on all legal documents, including his passport and a falsified birth certificate, that he had been born in Pittsburgh, not Romania, and he invented a whole new past rather than suffer the stigma that was borne by those who came from such lowly places. Such reinventions, then as now, were commonplace.
But my grandfather would, in the fullness of time, start a business, provide jobs for many (not make his name for declaring "You're Fired!"), marry (and stay married to the same woman for 53 years), have three daughters, serve in the infantry of World War I (for him there was no deferment to attend an Ivy League school), and, in the Great Depression, anonymously provide relief to some 100 local families who were struggling. In the Second World War, he donated hundreds of overcoats for London's needy citizens. No one outworked him -- not even you, Mr. Trump. He died driving himself to work at age 94. It was another 30 years before even his own children would learn that he was not native-born, and that he had been among the unwanted.
Unlike you, Mr. Trump, his sole inheritance was the memory of a desperate trek and the prospect of something better at the end -- not unlike that which our newest arrivals from the South bring with them. Aside from the lies he told on his documents, (Yes, your birther tirades against President Obama would have chilled my grandfather to the bone) he never broke a law, never avoided an honest debt or declared bankruptcy, (and no, he did not have billions at the time) never left a town any the worse for being there (think Atlantic City), and never, ever showed disdain for those who came to this land in dire need. No, he had no grand ambitions to lead a nation. For him, it was enough to raise a family and help his neighbors. But Mr. Trump, between the two of you, it was he who understood what it means to be American, that ultimately, this land is, and always has been, a place for The Unwanted -- it is only the bigot that is unwelcomed.