David Levering Lewis Quotes
Government doesn't do much for the new Americans. The assumption is that they'll take care of themselves if they work hard enough.
Lewis, David Levering. Interview. 1900, directed by David Grubin, American Experience, PBS, 1998.
She was referring to the Muslim immigrants who were then coming into Europe in large numbers. Europe in general, and Italy in particular, have never had the American experience of assimilation of large numbers of immigrants, and many Muslims came to Europe just for the economic opportunities but did not like or respect the culture or the values. Some even preached hatred of the Christian West and fomented terrorism. This was different from America where Muslim immigrants arrived and despite the difficulties of new immigrants most thrived and were able to assimilate yet maintain their religion and cultural customs. At the same time many American Islamic immigrants represented the more modern Islamic which valued freedom and pluralism and unlike most Muslim nations of today, appreciated the advanced, modernistic, tolerant Islam of 1000 years ago when tolerance and freedom of thought within an Islamic framework made some Muslim countries the most advanced in the world.
Between 1820 and 1867, the American Colonization Society would relocate 13,000 freed American blacks to Liberia. The present-day capital of Liberia, Monrovia, is named after Monroe.
This quotation became a very polarizing stimulus in the country with anti-immigration people using it in support of their program to restrict immigration and with liberals and Hispanic groups who saw the quotation as a discriminatory unfounded charge.
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
DPs were “displaced persons” -- the euphemism for people who were no longer welcome in their country of birth. Congress, made up mostly of immigrants or the children of immigrants who were poor and downtrodden, were not enthusiastic about the United States absorbing many of the world’s DPs resulting from WWII.
David Levering Lewis is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and a professor of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois (in 1994 and 2001, respectively). He is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.
