As I spoke to my maternal grandmother—Agnes Lange McGlone—about our family and their journey to America, I found it hard to grasp the magnitude of even a single immigrant traveling on a ship to this country, let alone the millions whose posterity now inhabit our nation. Despite the overwhelming nature of immigration from all corners of the world to America, one truth resonated with me above the rest; the desire to seek out a better life for oneself and their family transcends not only cultural differences, but generations of individuals. In the late eighteen hundreds, as America was still tending to the wounds inflicted by the Civil War, Rudolph Lange—with no passport or legal documents of the sort—came to America on a German cargo ship. Completely alone and shockingly around the same age as myself (eighteen), Rudolph sailed into New York Harbor with almost nothing but certainty that he would never return to Germany, knowing a better life awaited him somewhere, here in America. Roughly a hundred years later, his granddaughter—Agnes Lange McGlone—found herself in a vastly different, yet surprisingly similar situation. Grappling with a divorce and single-motherhood, Agnes made the same decision as her German grandfather to seek out something better for herself and her daughter—my mother—Agnes, jr., in California. Though moving from New York to California is not quite as drastic of a move like Germany to America, both situations demand certain levels of strength. This timeless sense of desire for a new life can be traced back to the origins of humanity—exhibited by early nomadic groups of people in places like Africa and Asia—and unquestionably to those who engaged in the Columbian Exchange circa the Age of Discovery.

            Piecing together the complexities of the Columbian Exchange and the story of my family’s history—which withholds many mysteries, as do most—presents a challenge. However, this challenge has not only brought me closer to the true essence of my family’s identity, but has unveiled new questions about not only my own history, but that of people in general. Why did people come to America? On the surface, the answer to this question is fairly simple; America was the New World, the land of adventure and opportunity. Yet, in Charles Mann’s 1493, we are confronted with rather unsettling accounts of what the New World was really like—anything but the mystical, adventurous land we have encountered in romantic novels and films. While describing the experience of the Virginia Company, Mann reveals “The luckless, scurvy-ridden souls were dumped ashore… Altogether about two out of every three Europeans in Virginia died that year.”[1] Despite the horrors awaiting almost every colonist in the new world, Europeans persisted. The ships of explorers kept coming, and Englishmen—in addition to other Europeans—continued to come to America. The economic promises of new agricultural opportunities in the New World outweighed the plights presented by tensions with native peoples, famine, and more. The common thread connecting the millions upon millions of people who flooded the threshold of America, whether in the seventeenth century or nineteenth century, was a similar aspiration to discover something beyond what they had known in their homeland.

            Why did Rudolph Lange come to America? His story sounds more like an accident, as he was simply an employee on a cargo ship that broke down just as it made its way into New York Harbor, but he decided to stay nevertheless. Around the same time he arrived to America, the German government was stepping dangerously close to the possibility of a “trade war” with the United States when they imposed a ban on American potatoes[2]. Despite complicated economic relations, Germany’s disposition towards the United States did not inhibit its citizens from seeking a new life in the states—even if it meant doing so illegally. Rudolph stepped onto American soil as an illegal immigrant. Luckily, he spoke English, so his transition to American life was slightly easier than most. A few years after his arrival to the states, he married Mary Powers, a Catholic from North Dakota. Rudolph was originally a Protestant, having grown up in Saxony, Germany, and subsequently converted to Catholicism when he married Mary. Throughout their life, they had twelve children, ten of which lived to adulthood. One of their youngest sons, Richard, grew up to be the father of my grandmother, Agnes. My grandmother’s recollections of her grandfather, Rudolph, are vague. She told me her memory of him consists of a distant image of a man sitting on a chair, pipe in hand, rarely ever speaking to the children in the room. My grandma even said she “never saw the man smile.”[3] One could ascribe this cold demeanor to hyper-masculine expectations of men at the time, but I cannot help but attribute at least some of his isolated dispositions to the struggles he faced as a young man trying to start a life in a foreign country. Though I still do not know much about his life after he arrived in America, he raised a family that was able to thrive in this newfound homeland of his.

            One of the dozens of grandchildren related to Rudolph Lange, as I stated before, was my grandma, Agnes. She was born in Queens, New York circa the Great Depression in 1932. She is one of five children and at the age of eighteen, she married Tom McGlone. As a young man from Northern Ireland, Tom McGlone boarded a ship alongside his sister en route to America. Interestingly enough, Tom was actually born in Philadelphia, but he and his family moved back to Ireland once the stock market crashed. After the Depression and a world war, Tom still came back to America, with much encouragement from his mother. I believe this particular instance to display the true promise people saw in this country; they still came back even though they had left it once before. As my grandma sees it, “This country offered so much to people.”[4] The Irish, especially, viewed great opportunity in American life after the seemingly endless devastation brought upon their country by the Potato Famine. “The nation never regained its footing,”[5] and thus even decades after the initial blight, people like Tom came to America escaping not only economic disparity, but religious discrimination as well. A Catholic in Northern—predominantly Protestant—Ireland, Tom faced immense prejudice. As a result, he arrived to this country with almost no money but much ambition to establish a life for himself in a place that did not judge him for his religious convictions. A few years later, he met my grandmother, and they married soon thereafter. Almost twenty years later, they divorced, and my grandmother was then confronted with the social abnormalities of single-motherhood in the 1970s. In 1980, she bravely moved herself and my mother to the other side of the country—to California. Her journey to California, while not as majestic as those of immigrants traveling to America, was remarkable just the same. A good portion of my family now lives here, and despite the stark contrast between current Californian and Irish culture, we still maintain our “Irish-ness.”  Even though I never met my grandfather, Tom, the Irish identity he brought to America still survives among my family. Honeymoons to Ireland, claddagh rings, and framed “Irish Blessings” are all testaments not only to his Irish heritage, but to my grandmother’s as well.

            Though I enjoy discussing the history of my family and how it relates to the world-changing nature of the Columbian Exchange, I cannot write this essay without addressing the atrocities inflicted upon people who did not benefit from the Age of Discovery, particularly the Atlantic slave trade. As we continue to deal with the vivid scars left on the face of our nation by slavery, I have taken into account how my ancestry did little to contribute to that healing process. Even though my particular story does not directly connect to slavery, I contend it is worth mentioning since we are all woven into the fabric of humanity, and not simply our own lineage. Inherent among most early twentieth century white middle class individuals was racism. My family was certainly no exception, and my grandmother unhesitatingly addressed her parents’, grandparents’, and ex-husband’s discriminatory disposition towards black people while I interviewed her. I am eternally grateful for how my grandmother raised her children and grandchildren; lessons of equality rather than those of ignorance. She unknowingly inherited the admirable qualities of her grandfather, Rudolph—a drive to seek out a better life, despite the obstacles along the way—and let the rather despicable racist qualities of our family’s history go to rest. Furthermore, the Columbian Exchange clearly echoes throughout the commendable and reprehensible qualities of my family.

            A few pages of words hardly encompass the degree to which the Columbian Exchange shaped, and continues to shape our world, but this process surely opened my eyes to how the Columbian Exchange effects me and more importantly, my family. The reigning truth that connects the vast empires to the little-known individuals like Rudolph Lange—all participants of the Columbian Exchange—is that this world is increasingly interconnected by the desire to establish a better life for ourselves and our families.

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Bibliography

Agnes McGlone, Grandmother

Charles Mann, 1493, (New York: Vintage Books, 2011)

 

[1] Charles Mann, 1493, (New York: Vintage Books, 2011) p. 90

[2] Mann, p. 285

[3] Agnes McGlone, Grandmother

[4] Agnes McGlone, Grandmother

[5] Mann, p. 265