Document Analysis: Immigration:
Read Louis Adamic’s (Slovenian Boy) recollections of his first memories of America and his decision to immigrate from Slovenia, available below
As a boy of nine, and even younger, in my native village . . . I experienced a thrill every time one of the men of the little community returned from America’ Five or six years before, as I heard people tell, the man had quietly left the village for the United States, a poor peasant clad in homespun, with a mustache under his nose and a bundle on his back; now, a clean-shaven Amerikanec, he sported a blue-serge suit, buttoned shoes very large in the toes and with india-rubber heels, a black derby, a shiny celluloid collar, and a loud necktie made even louder by a dazzling horseshoe pin, which, rumor had it, was made of gold, while his two suitcases of imitation leather, tied with straps bulged with gifts from America for his relatives and friends in the village. In nine cases out of ten, he had left in economic desperation on money borrowed from some relative in the United States; now there was talk in the village that he was worth anywhere from one to three thousand American dollars. And to my eyes he truly bore all the earmarks of affluence. Indeed, to say that he thrilled my boyish fancy is putting it mildly. ‘With other boys in the village, I followed him around as he went visiting his relatives and friends and distributing presents, and hung onto his every word and gesture.
Then, on the first Sunday after his homecoming, if at all possible, I got within earshot of the nabob as he sat in the winehouse or under the linden in front of the winehouse in Blato, surrounded by village folk, ordering wine and klobase-Carniolan sausages-for all comers. paying for accordian-players, indulging in tall talk about America, its wealth and vastness and his own experiences as a worker in the West Virginia or Kansas coal-mines or Pennsylvania rolling-mills, and comparing notes upon conditions in the United States with other local Amerikanci who had returned before him….I remember that, listening to them, I played with the idea of going to America when I was but eight or njne….In America everything was possible. There even the common people were “citizens,” not “subjects,” as they were in Austria and in most other European countries. A citizen, or even a non-citizen foreigner, could walk up to the President of the United States and pump his hand. Indeed, that seemed to be a custom in America. There was a man in Blato, a former steel-worker in Pittsburgh, who claimed that upon an occasion he had shaken hands and exchanged words with Theodore Roosevelt, to whom he familiarly referred as “Tedi”-which struck my mother very funny. To her it seemed as if someone had called the Pope of Rome or the Emperor of Austria by a nickname. But the man assured her . in my hearing that in America everybody called the President merely “Tedi.”
Mother laughed about this, off and on, for several days. And I laughed with her. She and I often laughed together.
Excerpts from Laughing in the Jungle Louis Adamic.
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What was Louis Adamic’s first impressions of America? Why was he drawn to America?
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