SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 2010
HISTORY REVIEW BY STEVEN V. ROBERTS
Taking up arms — and assimilation
D
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avid Laskin quotes a New York educator named Ellwood P. Cub- berley, writing in 1909 about the floodtide of
immigration then slapping at American shores: “These South- ern and Eastern Europeans are of a very different type from the Northern Europeans who preced- ed them. Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative, and not possessing Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order and government, their coming has corrupted our civic life.” Sound familiar? Americans
have always been profoundly am- bivalent about immigration. We cherish our own foreign-born an- cestors and then erupt in spasms of hostility typified by modern Cubberleys such as Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan. In the 1840s the Know Nothing Party de- nounced Catholic newcomers from Germany and Ireland; in the 1940s Japanese Americans
THE LONG WAY HOME An American Journey From Ellis Island to the Great War
By David Laskin Harper. 386 pp. $26.99
were interned as security risks. Contemporary nativists direct their animosity at Hispanics and Muslims, but the basic argument has not changed: America is now perfect. Time to pull up the gang- plank. The aliens will corrupt our character and our culture. The haters were wrong then,
and they are wrong now. They to- tally misunderstand the essential grit and grain of America. We are never perfect, never static, never finished. We are constantly en- riched by new blood, energy and ideas. As Barack Obama put it in his inaugural address, “Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.” In this compelling book, Las- kin makes this same point by fol-
lowing the lives of 12 American doughboys who had been born in Europe and who then returned there to fight for their adopted country in World War I. It’s an imaginative concept, and Laskin mines family legends and official documents to tell the stories of these ordinary foot soldiers from Italy and Ireland, Poland and Russia, Slovakia and Norway. Ironically, many of them first
left home to escape military serv- ice (I know this tale well — both of my grandfathers came here fleeing the czar’s army). Once here they re-created customs and communities that mirrored life in the Old Country. There’s a le- gitimate concern today that Spanish-speaking immigrants don’t join the mainstream fast enough, but that’s hardly a new story. Joe Chmielewski never spoke English in Fifficktown, Pa., Laskin writes, but “there was really no need or opportunity. In the 1910s, everyone he knew or
KLMNO
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Now here’s the point: When your parents tell you to eat your broccoli [and] you don’t know yet whether you are going to like them or not, you got to try them!” — President Obama, on the moral of Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham”
had to deal with at the mine, at home, in the tavern, in church spoke Polish.” In his Yiddish- speaking Newark, N.J., neighbor- hood, noted Sam Goldberg, “if a dog came around he’d have to prove he was Jewish before they let him in.” These immigrants brought their loyalties as well as their lan- guages, and their politics some- times conflicted with official pol- icy. The Irish hated the British, and the Jews hated the Russians, so large elements in both groups sympathized with the Germans. One American of German ances- try wrote home from the battle- fields of France, “I never know when I might be shooting at one of my own cousins or uncles.” These mixed feelings triggered fears that immigrants would re- sist the draft when it was in- stituted in 1917, but the reverse happened. “The most remarkable thing is how well and willingly the foreign element has respond-
ed,” one government clerk report- ed. “They seem anxious to serve the country of their adoption.” At times, the “foreign element” had trouble carrying out their good intentions. Many were sub- ject to verbal and even physical abuse. Boot camp meant adjust- ing to new foods, rituals and idi- oms: “For a lot of the foreign- born guys,” Laskin writes, “it was like emigrating all over again.” But war changed everything. It gave the foreigners a whole new identity, not just a new uniform. Laskin describes what happened when these immigrant soldiers deployed to Europe: “Back home, they were the foreigners, but when a bunch of them sat down
together in a noisy smoky bar full of Aussies and Brits and French and Belgians, the dagos and yids and hunkies were all Yanks no matter how thick their accents.” Today’s immigrants don’t be- come Yanks in the trenches of France. That transformation oc- curs in the farmlands of Florida, the factories of Pennsylvania, the laboratories of California and, sometimes, on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. This story, like this country, never ends.
Steven V. Roberts’s new book,
“From Every End of This Earth,” details the lives of 13 immigrant families in modern America.
PSYCHOLOGY
THE POLITICS OF HAPPINESS What Government Can Learn From the New Research on Well-Being
By Derek Bok Princeton Univ. 262 pp. $24.95
HISTORY REVIEW BY ADRIAN HIGGINS
The crime behind the cuppa
T
he subtitle of this com- mendable book reads thus: “How England Stole the World’s Fa- vorite Drink and
Changed History.” Not to nitpick, but England didn’t steal the drink in question: tea. That feat was accomplished by a Scotsman named Robert Fortune, and tea is the second-most-guzzled liq- uid on the planet, water being the first. One thing is incontro- vertible, however. Robert For- tune did change the course of history.
Gardeners know him as the ex- plorer who brought to the West such lovely ornamental plants as winter jasmine, tree peonies and the Japanese anemone. But it was his single-minded and some- times perilous pursuit of another plant, Camellia sinensis, that in his day brought him a measure of fame and celebrity, if not the enduring gratitude of all the tea drinkers to follow. Fortune re- galed Victorians with published accounts of his adventures, but these were dispassionate. With her probing inquiry and engag- ing prose, Sarah Rose paints a fresh and vivid account of life in rural 19th-century China and Fortune’s fateful journey into it. Inferior teas were already cul-
tivated in British-controlled In- dia. But the East India Company, the de facto colonial power, guessed correctly that if it could establish vast new plantations in the Himalayas, using the finest Chinese teas, it would reverse its corporate decline while placing the ascendant British empire at the center of the global tea trade. This lofty scheme rested on the shoulders of Fortune, still in his 30s but a seasoned plant ex- plorer who had collected for the Royal Horticultural Society, had a knowledge of China and Chi- nese, and had run the Chelsea Physic Garden in the heart of London (still going strong). In a fateful 12-month period that be- gan in the fall of 1848, Fortune made two tea-collecting trips in eastern China while disguised as a mandarin. The subterfuge was necessary to get around the ban on foreigners traveling to the in- terior. The first expedition was to the Zhejiang and Anhui provinces, where green tea was cultivated and processed. The second was to the even more distant — and coveted — black tea districts in the Wuyi Mountains in Fujian province. Among Fortune’s achievements was confirming that black tea was derived from the same plant as green tea, but processed differently. “It was grown high among the fingerlike mountain karsts,” writes Rose, “where the thin air and chilly nights produced the richest oo- longs, pekoes, and souchongs, the finest black teas in the world.” China had been fiercely protective of its tea, and For- tune’s espionage proved one of the boldest acts of industrial pi- racy on the books. This will strike many as rich, given Chi- na’s present-day reputation in this area. In preparation for his mission, Fortune shaved much of his head
What truly makes people happy? Until fairly recently, this question could be answered only anecdotally or perhaps philo- sophically. However, as former Harvard University president Der- ek Bok explains in “The Politics of Happiness,” that is changing with the advent of happiness research, a relatively new field that is finally gathering empirical data on people’s general satis- faction and the pleasure or displeasure they derive from certain activities.
Bok not only lays out what these re- searchers are finding but also identifies how government officials can use these studies as they design and evaluate poli- cies. Some of the findings are far from surprising, such as research showing that solid marriages, deep friendships, involvement in charitable activities and residence in a stable democracy all strongly correlate with happiness. But others, such as the notion that humans are poor judges of what makes them happy, contradict expectations. As
an example, Bok points out that in recent decades Americans have watched much more TV, even though studies show we are not as happy in front of the tube as we are playing with our kids or going for a jog. Furthermore, he argues, many people cling to the idea that increased wealth will make them happier, but re- search demonstrates that this is mostly untrue. Not only does individual prosperity fail to match up with con- tentment: Bok notes that average levels of happiness in the United States have barely risen over the past half-century, even as our economy has grown substantially. And that’s where gov- ernment comes into the picture. “If happiness has changed so little over decades of increasing prosperity, does it make much sense for public officials to attach such importance to economic growth as a measure of the nation’s progress?” he asks. Bok is not suggesting we give up on economic expansion, but he en- courages officials to consider other measures of success. Edu- cation policy, for example, should focus not only on building a productive workforce, but also on fostering passions and stimu- lating creative thought. Policymakers working on health care could take a closer look at sleep disorders, depression and chronic pain, afflictions that are low-profile but widespread, ac- counting for a great deal of unhappiness. With his clear analysis and outside-the-box ideas, Bok encour- ages thoughtful consideration of what we should want for our- selves and expect from our government.
— Sarah Halzack
halzacks@washpost.com
NATURE
STILL LIFE Adventures in Taxidermy
By Melissa Milgrom Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 285 pp. $25
SSPL/GETTY IMAGES
Rather than trade for tea, the British decided to steal seedlings and grow their own.
FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History
By Sarah Rose Viking. 261 pp. $25.95
and had a braid of hair woven into what remained before don- ning a silken coat. “He hoped the fact that his facial features were not Chinese or that he was nearly a foot taller than every man around him would not be consid- ered too suspicious in a nation already ruled by foreigners,” she writes. His sojourns were long and laced with danger, disease, hardship, maddening betrayal by his Chinese servants and his own subterfuge. Through it all he maintained the cold tempera- ment of a spy on a mission. In spite of this, the treachery brought Fortune a moment of re- gret, if not shame, when an el- derly, arthritic monk entered Fortune’s monastic digs to kow- tow, thinking him an elite if strange and far-off countryman. “It was Robert Fortune’s only oc- casion for self-reproach in nearly
two years of stealing secrets from China,” Rose writes. Square-jawed and phlegmatic, Fortune was also a plantsman and naturalist who was touched, indeed surely changed, by the beauty of mist-shrouded moun- tains and winding river valleys largely unseen by Western eyes, and which he found even more beautiful than the landscape of his own country. “Fortune was overcome,” Rose says, “as he as- cended ever higher into the clouds and the bamboo forests.” Fortune’s discovery of the tea
plant’s cultural needs and the techniques for producing green and black types proved as vital to the enterprise as the actual col- lection of the plant material. The British love of black tea, its flavor tempered by milk and sugar, was cemented when Fortune report- ed that the Chinese green tea ex- ported to the United Kingdom had been colored and adulterat- ed with poisonous dyes. Most of the plants and seeds from his green tea expedition perished after they arrived in In- dia because of delays in shipping the cargo and poor cultivation
practices. But he carried on with his work in the Wuyi Mountains while determining that his new specimens would survive the sea voyage to India better as seed- lings in terrariums than as seeds. With Fortune’s treasure, the
East India Company and its suc- cessors established vast planta- tions in Ceylon, East Africa, Bur- ma and, most important, the mountain regions of India. They fueled an industrial revolution at home, funded a global empire abroad and helped to intertwine the “cuppa tea” with British life and culture forever. “For All the Tea in China” cries
out (well, the reader does) for maps of Fortune’s journeys by sea, river and road. It also suffers from an absence of illustrations and early photographs to set the scene. But if ever there was a book to read in the company of a nice cuppa, this is it.
higginsa@washpost.com
When Norman Bates wasn’t slicing up the Bates Motel’s clien- tele, he spent many lonely nights at the front desk dabbling in his favorite hobby: taxidermy. Bates’s pastime may be a minor detail in “Psycho,” but it fed the stereotype of taxidermists as creepy guys who play with animal guts. Horror movies “always have taxi- dermy on the walls,” complains Bruce Schwendeman, one of the many taxidermists Melissa Milgrom hung out with while researching “Still Life,” a, ahem, dissection of a discipline that’s part craft, part art and, at least to this ve- gan reader, totally disgusting. “In the name of journalism, I lower my face into the blue bucket, my gag ampli- fied in the confined space,” Milgrom writes of her experience inspecting a pickled penguin carcass. Once her stom- ach settles, she learns how to stuff a squirrel. Though she never quite gains an appetite for taxidermy — “Why kill [some- thing] just to obsessively bring it back to
life?” she wonders — her love of her subject’s quirkiness comes through nonetheless. Her coverage of the World Taxidermy Cham- pionships, for example — a biennial gathering where taxidermists “strut their stuff as celebrated animal artists” — is hilarious but re- spectful. If Milgrom weren’t such a capable writer, readers con- templating this event might have been begging to be put out of their misery.
—Justin Moyer
moyerj@washpost.com
used BOOKsale
Adrian Higgins is a garden columnist for The Washington Post.
April 16 to April 19, 2010
Friday, April 16 · 8:00 am-8:00 pm · Saturday, April 17 · 9:00 am-6:00 pm Sunday, April 18 · 12:00 pm-6:00 pm · Half-Price Day
Monday, April 19 · 5:00 pm-8:00 pm · $10 Bag-of-books Day
9101 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20814 301.657.4322, ext. 372 •
www.stoneridgebooksale.org
Forty-second Annual Used Book Sale
100,000 Books and Records · 80 categories Free Admission · Ample Parking
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