Late last year we did the fun thing and visited New York City. We also did the patriotic thing, and visited Ellis Island.

That's the spot in New York harbor where many of our ancestors first stepped on United States territory. In its heyday, from 1892 to 1924, more than twelve million humans made the progression from ship to shore to city and onward to the rest of the States.

Simply walking through the Great Hall with the ghosts of immigrants past is enough to suggest the angst and ambition that used to swirl there.

Immigrants had to have papers in order and stand up for the "six second medical inspection" that meant the difference between landing in America or going back home.

I was startled to learn that first and second class passengers simply sailed past Ellis Island and landed directly in New York City. "The theory being," according to the Ellis Island Foundation web site, "if a person could afford to purchase a first or second class ticket, they were less likely to become a public charge in America due to medical or legal reasons."

Money talks. Poverty walks.

This particular history came to mind today when I read in the paper: "Library axes Spanish works of adult fiction."

A county library board in Georgia voted to eliminate $3,000 from their budget that would have been used to purchase Spanish-language fiction.

The chairman of the library board told an AP reporter, "Such book purchases would lead readers of other foreign languages to demand the same treatment. We can't supply pleasure reading material for all language groups, so we're not going to go down that road."

Another board member said the decision was taken "after some residents objected to using taxpayer dollars to entertain readers who might be illegal immigrants."

Raul Gonzalez of the National Council of La Raza snapped back: "A vast majority of the people who don't speak English as their first language... guess what... they're citizens of the US."

There's a great deal of resonance in this racist contretemps. The library story sparked synapses in my tired brain. I thought of Ellis Island. I pondered the hypocritical debate now going on in Congress over immigration. And I recalled an outstanding novel I read recently.

In The March novelist E. L. Doctorow portrays General William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 "march to the sea" through the eyes of a number of contemporary fictional characters.

Doctorow's historical novel is based on deep research. There's much to learn here about how the Civil War was felt by everyday people swept up in the carnage and social change.

As Sherman's 60,000 Union troops marched through Georgia and up into the Carolinas, they left a 50-mile-wide wake of purposeful destruction. The army lived off the farms and fields they found, and as they went they freed the black slaves and destroyed the old plantation system.

Gradually another army formed up behind Sherman, made up of dispossessed slaves looking for deliverance in a new world.

It didn't turn out very well, as you may know. Sherman didn't want and could not feed this black army of refugees. Confederate guerillas shot and abused them whenever possible. Efficient Union Army pillaging left little for them to eat and nowhere to live.

Black folks were immigrants twice over. Brought here as slaves, they were set free into a world that despised and feared them. Uneducated by fiat of slave law, impoverished and homeless, only a few succeeded in setting up independent freeholds.

Ellis Island shut down in the 1920's when anti-immigrant agitation reached its reactionary peak. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Alien Contract Labor Law, literacy tests, quota laws and the National Origins Act.

"It was an attempt to preserve the ethnic flavor of the 'old immigrants,' the Ellis Island web site states. "The perception existed that the newly arriving immigrants mostly from southern and eastern Europe were somehow inferior to those who arrived earlier."

It's a sorry soup: Racism that has not ended; the renewal of struggles over immigration; the failure and futility of war. Wouldn't it be nice if we could finally LEARN something from the old stories?

Aired Sunday June 25, 2006 at 10:55 am and Wednesday June 28, 2006 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

The March by E. L. Doctorow. Random House hardcover $25.95. ISBN 0375506713.

The history page at Ellis Island Foundation: http://www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/ellis_island_history.asp