by Alex Wagner
But there were other, nefarious reasons that the great American heartland remained monochromatically white: Southerners made it very hard for newly freed black folk to leave the region. The exodus of former slaves to the Midwest was greatly complicated by racial animus.
The National Park Service oversees many of the records relating to the Homestead Act, and details the various pernicious challenges that kept Southern blacks from leaving the South during Reconstruction:
Southern whites continued to oppose the exodus….Many went to extreme measures to try to keep blacks from emigrating, including arrest and imprisonment on false charges and the old standby of raw, brute force. African-Americans suffered beatings and other forms of violence at the hands of whites desperate to keep them in the South. Though these typical forms of intimidation did not really prevent many freed blacks from leaving, the eventual refusal of steamship captains to pick them up did.11
It was hard to settle a new place if you weren’t allowed to leave the old one.
When my father said the land was free, he hadn’t thought about—or cared to know, particularly—the price that had been paid by someone else. All that free land wasn’t really free, as it turned out.
I called the National Park Service to find out who had taken parcels of Allamakee soil for themselves, following passage of the Homestead Act. There were six settlers: Two men named John Carroll and James May took land in 1874; Melvin Lang in 1886; William Clark in 1890; John Thomas in 1894; and Charles Widman in 1927. A very helpful man named Blake Bell from the NPS reiterated that none of these men were named Henry Wagner. While this undermined my father’s proposed reason for Henry Wagner’s choice of Iowa as his new home (“They were giving land away”), it also absolved me of some guilt, although not entirely.
Ultimately, I couldn’t get away from the fact that we had accepted, at face value, the notion that all this had been somehow easy, or miraculous; that golden opportunity had shone itself precisely at the right moment, and that there were no strings attached. It wasn’t as if I now expected Carl Wagner, Jr., to pay reparations to the Winnebago of Wisconsin, or to offer a family plot to the families of former slaves, but, in retrospect, the ho-hum narrative about our Iowa origin story seemed lazy, if not foolish—and it made me wonder what other self-serving, just-so stories were woven into our family history, ready to be unwound.
“A handful of Native Americans were the most ethnic people in town,” my dad had said. What a wonder this was, his lily-white Lansing, his monochromatic Main Street. “The only person of color I saw before college was the dry cleaner.”
Well, there was a reason for that.
So what had been lost in the happy story of Henry Wagner’s assimilation? What did I really know about Henry? What did he do in the Old World, why did he leave, and why did he (possibly) conceal his religion when he arrived in America? Why did he come to Iowa, of all places?
His life was largely the province of myth: According to my father, he was erudite, some sort of multilingual translator, a man of the merchant class who appreciated crystal and lace. But where exactly did he come from and how did he end up in northeastern Iowa, which was, at the time of his arrival, very nearly the American frontier? Why leave what was presumed to be a very comfortable existence in Luxembourg to decamp for the wilds of Allamakee County? And who the hell had led him there?
I wanted to know the answers to these questions not just for curiosity’s sake, but because it had become clear that things were more complex than our Rockwellian family tableau and its homemade doughnuts and hopscotch Saturdays would suggest. I didn’t want the Hallmark version of our family story. Survival and success almost always necessitated something breaking along the way—and the harmony of our origin story smacked of delusion.
Admitting this motivation probably makes me sound like a person with many issues (and I certainly am), but the complexities and subterfuges that characterize Twenty-first-Century American life (WMDs, catfishing, electoral college votes versus popular votes) had taken their toll on me, and it was impossible to reconcile such a simplistic narrative with what I had learned about survival and success. I was discovering through this research that my American origin story—and, for that matter, probably everyone’s—was messy. My father’s story—generically, the White Immigrant Origin Story (WIOS)—was a familiar one: Most of my white friends had one. “We came from Ireland, and my great-grandfather made a good, honest life in America, and now we have Super Mario Bros. and a sport utility vehicle.”
This is what I’d grown up understanding; this was the family history in circulation when I went over to Meredith Mullen’s house after school to feast on hard salami sandwiches with French’s mustard and take a dip at her mother’s country club’s swimming pool. It was a benign story during my childhood years, but the WIOS is nonetheless a source of much horror and grief in American life: It is a story about virtue, freedom, fairness, opportunity, cheerful assimilation, and hard work, and it is a lie. Even after my most rudimentary investigation—a few calls to the National Park Service and some extensive Googling—my own family’s WIOS had collapsed. That experience drove home this truth: Almost no one achieves their success or secures their place in this country in singular, godly fashion.
The typical WIOS is filled with easy lines like my father’s explanation for his grandfather’s destination: “They were giving away land.” Of course they weren’t—someone a few years earlier had stolen it and killed the people who once lived on it and then given it away to someone else—and we had conveniently decided to gloss over that reality. But because enough people agreed to the WIOS, enough people didn’t ask questions or look under the rock, it didn’t matter that the land was stolen and its shepherds slaughtered. It didn’t really matter how many brown folks and black folks raised an eyebrow or a hand or a fist in complaint or caution. Nor did it matter how many of those people asked for the same things that defined the WIOS and were denied—or worse.
Ironically, the WIOS didn’t even work for white folks, in the end; all the erasing and revision, the rounded corners and sanded edges, left its inheritors with something flat and blanched, full of empty calories. It wasn’t nourishing, it was generic and forgettable, and, most crucially, it eventually wore thin. And when the truth inevitably started to emerge, however many years later and at whomever’s hand, it became cause for shame and denial. Who wanted to be born of the people who’d ousted the Winnebago? Who wanted to be the kin of a former slave owner? Nobody, really. You couldn’t find a new family, couldn’t choose your own roots (if only!)—and so, instead, you had to dig deeper into the mythmaking of the WIOS, double down on its fantastical origins: Once upon a time, things in America had been great, and simple, and pure—how else would we have made it?—and, dammit, we need to get back to that time.
Here was a dangerous proposition: If you went too far down this rabbit hole, you’d realize there was nothing much on the other side. But this simplicity—the belief in the goodness of a certain people and their inherently superior nature, their infallibility, the notion that nothing fetid or rotten preceded them—it was intoxicating. When people speak of these simplified lies as manifestations of white privilege, we sometimes forget that privilege feels good—and a lot of people are willing to pay a price for it.
* * *
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When I was in college, my mother moved to Europe and married a tall Dutchman named Joost who enjoyed two things above all else: smoking and driving at high speeds. Every summer I would visit them in Amsterdam and inevitably we would take a vacation in some nearby European country. Joost’s preferred method of transportation was the car (of course), and so one summer we piled into his ride: Joost, my mother, my grandmother (in town to buy Amsterdam diamonds and complain about my mother’s disorganization around the house), and me.
These drives were not short and necessitated many stops at European rest stations
, where you could purchase a full roast chicken and Swiss chocolates for the road. One day, Joost decided it would be beautiful to take a detour to Alsace-Lorraine: We would forgo the rest station and stop instead for dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Joost could then smoke too many cigarettes at his leisure.
We exited the car—Mya Mya Gyi, Tin Swe Thant, Alex Wagner—three generations of Burmese women (one half-Burmese), and walked into the restaurant. It was the sort of place that offered small tufted seats for the pint-sized manicured dogs that some women preferred to keep as companions once their husbands grew tired of talking to them and their children had left the house. The clientele was more German than French, and it was decidedly chilly when we three Burmese Queens entered the room. The maître d’ wouldn’t look at us and said something snooty (and very likely racist) to Joost—which he declined to translate. (He was the only one of us who spoke German.)
The women eyed us icily, as if we had somehow polluted the air of the restaurant. The dogs looked on, passive. But what I remember most about that moment was how mortified I was to be with my Asian mother and grandmother. How much browner they made me feel, how different they made me seem to other people, and therefore how much more out of place I felt. If I had just been sitting with Joost, perhaps the atmosphere would have been warmer, the service better, the experience easier, the dogs friendlier. I would appear less obviously brown, less obviously from some other place. I can see, looking back, how enticing it was to simplify, to blanch, to wish the darker or seemingly more complicated parts away. And it shamed me. (We suffered through dinner on principle, then vowed never to stop in Alsace-Lorraine again. To be clear, this was not any kind of hardship.)
For the sake of all of us—not just brown people or black people or white people—it is imperative to shatter the lie that anyone’s origin story is a streamlined thing born of virtuous behavior or fortuitous decision-making, and that anything different is somehow lesser. For me, this meant finding out as much as I could about whatever the Wagner clan might have forgotten, and top of the list was the possible forsaking of Our Jewish Roots. A discovery here would confirm that there was indeed a lie at the heart of my family myth, that there was a complicated story about race within my seemingly white family, and within its (false) construct, there was (major bonus) a place I belonged beneath the bleaching.
Interviewing family members for their admittedly subjective recollections of our possible Jewish heritage had been useful to a certain point. But now I needed specific confirmation from some sort of independent authority. That meant documentary evidence: things such as birth certificates and marriage licenses. Census data! I had been through the proverbial paper mill in my travels to Burma. I fought hard to reclaim documentation about our people—looked high and low for evidence about what we’d lost—and the search had turned quixotic, in the end. That which I did find had been wholly unexpected, had sent me off in a different direction altogether.
But I had faith that the paper trail in the West might be better preserved: For one thing, Western Europe hadn’t fallen prey to a repressive military government that had systematically destroyed records in a bid to rewrite history. No, Western Europe had fallen prey to a fascist dictator who had systematically destroyed whole countries! And yet, Europe’s libraries, I knew, had not been ransacked, pillaged, or left out on the streets: There were legendary research archives across the continent. America’s records of who had arrived here and when were still intact—as far as I knew. I had hope, however uninformed, that the records I was looking for had been preserved.
As much as I knew about Henry Wagner’s place of arrival in northeastern Iowa, I had little information about the man himself. When did he meet and marry his wife? (Was it really a shipboard romance?) Was his last name really Wagner? Apparently, he spoke several languages, among them, French, German, and Yiddish: Would census forms from the Old World list his profession and therefore suggest how he came to speak all three? Why did he leave the Old World to come to America? Was there any evidence—here or in Europe—of his flight from home and why he’d made it? Surely such a thing wouldn’t be listed on, say, a utility bill, but perhaps there was some kind of legal record that I could find in the Luxembourg archives. And then, of course, the central mystery: Was he Jewish?
The easiest place to start was Henry’s arrival in the United States. There would be an immigration record that would list his name, birth date, and birthplace, and from there I might trace his steps backward or forward. I knew I was looking for a Henry Wagner born in Luxembourg around 1849—my father had mentioned something about Henry having been involved in the Franco-Prussian War but didn’t know any of the details. Luckily, and for reasons far more important than my little heritage research project, this was a short war. I had the years 1869 to 1871 to play with (I figured it would be all the more comprehensive to include the years immediately preceding and following the war itself).
How many people emigrated from Luxembourg to the United States in this time period? As it turns out, not all that many. According to the archives of the main entry point for immigrants arriving in America pre–Ellis Island—the Castle Garden database—only 561 Luxembourgers arrived in 1869.1 A mere 277 left for America in 1870. And 829 departed for the New World at the conclusion of the war in 1871. From Henry’s alleged hometown of Esch-sur-Alzette, only 187 males departed his district that year. I started my research online—digitized immigration records had already revealed this much. I hadn’t even stepped out of my house yet: This was going to be so easy!
Unlike my Burmese travails, genealogical research in the twenty-first century for descendants of Europeans means mostly a lot of Internet surfing and chat room kibbitzing. The bulk of government records, including passenger manifests, naturalization forms, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and census surveys, have been digitized by private, for-profit companies (and, in some cases, the National Archives), and after dutifully entering my American Express number in a series of required fields, I gained entry to a portal into the past.
As it turns out, it wasn’t so easy.
At first glance, I came across several “Henry Wagner” characters who fit the proverbial bill. One—twenty-three years old at the time of arrival—landed at the port of New York in May 1869 on the SS Paraguay, entering not via Ellis Island (which had yet to open) but at nearby Castle Garden, now known as Castle Clinton. The last time I’d been to Castle Clinton National Monument, it had been converted to a public performance space where I’d seen Cat Power sing to an audience of sweaty millennials. I wonder what this potential great-grandfather would’ve made of his Burmese American descendant going to see plaintive indie rock in the building where he’d entered the New World over a century prior.
Because this Henry Wagner was described as a painter, I imagined he would’ve been a creative thinker, which is exactly what made me dubious that this particular Henry Wagner was actually my great-grandfather. Nothing about the stories I’d heard thus far suggested he was a man of the arts, though, of course, you never knew. Nothing suggested he’d be a fluent speaker of Yiddish, either. The man was a mystery.
Another Henry Wagner arrived July 25, 1870, but apparently came from Prussia and had been born in Germany, so this seemed to make him, at first, an unlikely candidate. But I couldn’t dismiss him out of hand, because I soon learned that men from Luxembourg were often listed by the U.S. government as German, because they spoke German, or had German accents and otherwise possessed a passing familiarity with German culture. The German Empire, properly speaking, didn’t even exist until 1871—which meant that the roughly sixteeen hundred Luxembourg-born men who immigrated to America in my targeted time frame could have been lumped in the immigration rolls with the approximately seven hundred thousand to one million men of German stock who did so from 1860 to 1870. (By the 1880s there were nearly 1.5 million of them.)2 And there were a lot of Wagners in the German world!
It was a massive Wagnerian headache.
I looked and looked at the immigration records online and found many Henry Wagners who’d arrived in New York from Germany over the years in question—ones who came here professing to immigration officials that they were farmers or merchants (duly noted on the intake rolls but not, apparently, a mandatory question) or, more often, nothing at all, because in the end they were coming to America to become whatever they would be. They left from the ports of Boulogne-sur-Mer and Hamburg and Liverpool and Cherbourg and entered America mostly through the port of New York (there were also lesser numbers entering through Philadelphia, Baltimore, Galveston, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Boston), and they came in on ships named Etruria or Phoenicia or Normannia, hulking steamers operated by White Star and Cunard and Inman, with two or three coal stacks to power them through the one- or two-week voyages across thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean.
There were so many Henry Wagners that (sort of) fit the bill that it was nearly overwhelming. But as confusing as this became for my research purposes, it was also beautiful, in a weird way. The multitudes of these men with the same name, all coming to the same place to start anew—or fleeing their various disasters. “Henry Wagner” became, for me “John Q. Public.” The name meant nothing; it was just a placeholder for the experience.
So if there was a surfeit of Henry Wagners in the passenger manifests of the late 1800s, I figured it would make sense to start looking for other records from later on in my great-grandfather’s life. If I had more biographical details, that might narrow the search for his arrival year in the United States. From there, I could establish his date of departure from the Old World, and then possibly trace more of his life back in Luxembourg using whatever census forms ye ole Grand Duchy made available to nosy, patriarchy-shattering amateur genealogical detectives like myself.