Ellis Island

Note: This is not your regularly-scheduled programming, but it’s just a personal essay that I wanted to publish.

I recently¹ had the chance to retrace my great-grandfather’s steps at Ellis Island.

This was very emotional and personally meaningful to me. Almost embarrassingly, it only really hit me that I was actually on a “pilgrimage” of sorts as the tour boat was about halfway from Liberty Island to Ellis. And it hit me like a ton of bricks — no, a freight train, because I remained alternating between silently bawling and straining to collect myself pretty much until we got in line for the return ferry. I was lucky that my saint of a girlfriend was there to keep my 12-year-old sister occupied while I walked the halls and took in the gravity of where I was walking and standing. The inside of my mask was soaked with snot and tears.

A pedantic physicist will tell you that the universe is expanding, the Milky Way moving through its supercluster, the Sun orbiting through the Milky Way, and the Earth of course around the Sun, such that relative to almost any coordinate system one might pick — a good one, for example, would be the origin point of the Big Bang — no person has ever occupied even an appreciable approximation of the same point in space, let alone shared such a point with their descendants or ancestors.

I may be a pedant and a physics major, but I’m more sentimental than that guy. The inertial reference frame relative to the places we humans build and inhabit² is good enough for me.

The point is, many of us may indeed retrace our ancestors’ steps in various mundane ways. When my dad took me to the old site of Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis as a child, we undoubtedly crossed the paths that he and his father had taken to see many a Cardinals game. Among all the various locations in town the four of us have visited, it’s even possible that my great-grandfather, Giuseppe, had taken my grandfather there as well. Four generations of Muccigrosso men’s personal paths have probably intersected at various points on the sidewalks of a defunct baseball stadium that now serves as a Boys and Girls Club.

---

This — my journey to Ellis Island — was different.

What hit me about this pilgrimage was that it wasn’t just about retracing physical steps. I was retracing an experience. At least, that’s how it felt. This may sound silly, but maybe it was just the fact of being on a boat — as opposed to walking or driving along some bridge. There’s something powerful, after all, about being able to take in grand things at a human scale, without always having to focus on the road. But even in that simple, silly fact, lies an important truth. We here in America are separated from “the mother country” by water — a whole ocean of it! And the craft that Giuseppe arrived in, on both his journeys, was a boat. It wasn’t a tour ferry, that’s for sure, but the Ellis Island records say that neither of the boats he arrived on were one of those huge ocean liners that you see in Hollywood movies. That is to say, our respective boats were probably even of somewhat similar size.

So.

I was on a boat, pulling in to the very same dock that he had.

What made me proud, was to think about how far along I’ve come since he made that fateful journey. When Giuseppe came through that place, he was an outsider. Men with guns told him where to go, and he had no choice but to comply. He had no right to be there, at least by any law. He was at the mercy of strangers who could easily have told him he had the wrong politics, the wrong race, the wrong disease, or dozens of other things that could have prevented his entry to America — or worse! He could barely spell his name. He’d been drafted into the service of a failing king. Italians struggled to put food on the table in an age of unprecedented inequality.

I returned as a citizen. A free citizen. An American citizen. In between bouts of silent bawling, I walked those same halls proud and tall, my head held high. No men with guns stopped me, or told me where to go — well, okay, that had already happened at the security checkpoint back in Battery Park, but that’s 21st-century American security theater for ya. At any rate, there I stood. Successful. Educated. Happy. So well-fed, that I have to devote spare time to exercise to stay in reasonable shape — an unimaginable luxury to people who lived through actual famines in their lifetime.

To paraphrase a saying popular today in the Black community:

I am my great-grandfather’s wildest dream.

---

There’s a really dumb line out there these days, which immigration hawks like to imagine is an epic trump card for them to self-satisfiedly plop down on the table: “If we don’t have borders, we’re not a real country!”.

The funny part is, America had an almost total “open door policy” up until 1924, when a KKK-led anti-immigrant backlash officially closed that door. Before that, we of course enforced our borders with customs and whatnot, but even up until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Chinese were just as free as anyone else in the world to just show up here and start plugging away at whatever future they could build for themselves and their posterity.

I don’t want to get stuck in the weeds here; all of that was just to highlight what this has to do with that great fabled public mythology: the “Promise Of America”. For whatever struggles and discrimination they did face, for the most part my ancestors on both sides got about the best version of the deal as any other group that arrived on these shores. My French-German side settled on either free or cheap land in 1820s Missouri that was almost certainly stolen from Indians³, and that land kept them healthy and prosperous enough to send sons to fight for the Union, and eventually join the middle class in early-20th-century St. Louis. Giuseppe, for his part, didn’t have to wait between 6 and 28 years to enjoy the fruits of being an American.

Although later reforms have dismantled the most obvious injustices of 1924, we as a society have still not reckoned with the fact that today’s insanely long wait, born in the hatred of the 1920s, fundamentally breaks the Promise Of America. Before any Wall was even a twinkle in Roger Stone’s eye, the immigration debate had already become fixated on “high-skilled immigration” and “seasonal workers” and the various forms of abuse that arose from large-scale border, drug, and security enforcement operations. And yet, before indulging these distractions, no one stopped to ask whether the system we already had was anything remotely resembling a just implementation of the Promise Of America.

I don’t see how anyone could honestly argue that waiting for up to a third of one’s life is just.

---

Amidst all our polarization today, the two prevailing schools of thought often get unfairly caricaturized by each other. But it’s not hard to grossly describe them as one school where “it is more fashionable to be cynical about whether a hypocritical America ever really meant her Promise, let alone can fulfill it amidst all of today’s injustice”, against another where “the superficialities of American patriotism are uncritically mistaken for the real thing, and a great lie is told about what America is while disingenuously ignoring or even willfully denying the Promise that America has made”.

Social media has sucked us into a vortex of daily talking points, outrageous headlines, and polarizing hatred over this false dichotomy. But what truly matters about America is her Promise. Written in its first draft by — of all people! — one of the earliest Italian-Americans, it rests among the most famous sentences in the entire English language:

All men are by nature equally free and independent. Such equality is necessary in order to create a free government. All men must be equal to each other in natural law.

Of course, you may be more familiar with this version:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The darkest parts of our history undeniably coincide with the times, places, and people who hypocritically championed these words⁴. But as to the words themselves, and their Promise? There is nothing truer.

This is the shining light that must guide us out of our present darkness. It is the light that guided the nation’s forefathers out of their own hypocritical darkness. It is the light that guided our ancestors — like my great-grandfather — to these blessed shores.

I don’t care how unfashionable it’s become to say this. I know I may often come across as a cynic in these writings, but I’m just an optimist and an idealist who understands the need to temper the inherent naivete of those outlooks with some healthy skepticism. What I do know to be true is that fashionable cynicism will never defeat the great lie about America, nor get us anywhere closer to her Promise.

There is no other way. That’s not a statement meant to polarize — “you’re either with me or against me!” — but merely a simple statement of our options. The great lie is, well, a lie, a non-option. Duh. Cynicism, for its part, is a dead end, a self-fulfilling prophecy of our own defeat, losing sight of the true goal of justice for mere lack of having witnessed enough of its abundance.

The Promise Of America is not a distant fantasy, or dated, empty rhetoric; it’s the only viable roadmap for emerging from human society’s barbaric origins and tendencies. Its power is far from a mirage: Every modern nation that America’s fashionable cynics love to hold up as examples of better alternatives, was at some point in the past 250 years inspired by America’s example, and set out to import our Promise to their own shores. If immigrants have been our best import, the people who “made America great”, then the Promise of America has been our best export. That’s a track record of success, not failure and hypocrisy.

There is no other way.

---

Ellis Island reminded me that something as old-fashioned and spiritually-tinged as a pilgrimage is still possible, even from within the cloak of secularism and materialist modernity that is impossible not to surround ourselves with these days. I felt a sense of wonder and awe at sharing an experience across the sands of time with a man I never knew but to whom I owe everything. It was his courage, and the courage of dozens of other ancestors who made the same fateful trip across the Atlantic, that made my life possible. And without the Promise Of America, I wouldn’t be here.

This pilgrimage was a religious experience. Like most religious experiences, I doubt it was the same for me as it was for anyone else. Hell, I know — just a few weeks ago, some of my old college friends made the same trip to Liberty and Ellis Islands, and for them it was just another overhyped tourist trap. For my little sister, it was a day of getting carted around NYC from place to place by Big Brother and his girlfriend, punctuated by a handful of sights and smells that managed to penetrate her shroud of ADHD — she loved trying Szechuan, at least — although I do hope that the experience is one that sticks with her and grows in significance as she gets older.

But for me, it was a pilgrimage I never thought I’d have. My younger self never even imagined I’d be living in the New York area. I had planned this trip to Ellis Island just to get the touristy sights out of the way for my sister, so that we could do the more fun, less touristy stuff on later trips, and also out of a vague sense that I owed it to my heritage as a product of immigrants to go see the National Museum of Immigration.

I had originally set out to write this essay as a recommendation to go to Ellis, to take in all the things that had overwhelmed me. But that doesn’t make sense anymore. What I can say, though, as my only recommendation, is this: For 2022, go find your own pilgrimage, whatever that looks like for you. It’s been a rough couple years, and this is something we all need.

May you all go out, and find your truth. And may we all rededicate ourselves to the Promise Of America. It is not dead, it is not spent, it has not been mined for all it could ever provide. It can never be overwhelmed by its foes, foreign or domestic. But it’s on us to muster the courage to keep this Promise, to ourselves, to each other, and to our posterity, in order to achieve the sort of abundance our own forefathers gave us.

1. Okay, a few months ago in October.

2. In other words, “Earth”.

3. They even found a trove of ancient arrowheads that was kept in the family until some time in the 90s/2000s when someone finally got smacked with the good sense to donate them to the museum in Cahokia, IL. I remember seeing entire cases full of them as a child, not understanding the dark implications of how they ended up in my grandma’s study.

4. Although it should be noted to his credit that Philip Mazzei, the father of those words, was the first to establish a slavery-free vineyard in America, which still exists in Virginia to this day. He was probably one of the few non-hypocrites of the time, so good on him.