“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” read the words on the Statue of Liberty. But the laws passed on Capitol Hill were quite different: Keep the huddled masses away. America already had strict immigration legislation and tough, inflexible quotas. Public opinion in 1945 was resolutely against easing such rigidities. Truman was a hero here, leading where he could have lain low, taking risks, even telling George Marshall he could claim the credit for the master plan that helped to rescue Europe because a “Truman Plan” would never make it through the Senate.
Just as dismayingly, the British, left as well as right, did not leap to help the homeless or defenseless. “Let them be displaced,” said the Daily Mirror, complaining we’d taken in “most of the scum” from Europe and given others the cream. We don’t want the “illiterate, the mentally deficient, the sick, the aged, the politically suspect and behaviorally disruptive” working here, said the New Statesman. And yet slowly, patiently, sometimes with judgment, often with luck, the problem was solved — or at least moved on to another stage and another generation.
Shephard does not draw pat lessons or modern conclusions from any of this. He is content to tell us what happened next, in detail, and often vividly. But you can’t read The Long Road Home without jolts of sudden relevance — whether of political frailty, electoral insularity, or from registering the basic factors, such as existing immigrant communities to join up with, that make some migrations far more successful than others.
A good story or a bad one for mankind? In the end, more good than bad — but full of awful warnings. And, from Shephard, a riveting and often entirely fresh story, shrewdly assembled, very well told.
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