Who built the bridge?
Different countries, same story.
The new bridge was finished. On each side of the big river stood the broad stone bases. From each stone base rose a high, slender steel tower. … Between the two high slender steel towers hung two great cables in a long swooping, lovely curve. ... There was the road, hung from the great cables by hundreds of smaller ones. Today that road was to be opened. ... The morning paper had a picture of the beautiful bridge on the front page and carried big headlines: “OPENING OF NEW BRIDGE BUILT BY TOWN AND STATE. Ajax Construction Co. builds another great bridge.” Yes, in a way the town and the state and the construction company built the bridge. But not with their hands. Whose hands had built the bridge, anyway?
– Lucy Sprague Mitchell, “Who Built the Bridge?”
In my collection of childhood books, one of the most well loved is a tattered volume called Holiday Storybook, published in 1952. My grandparents gave it to me in 1962, when I was nine years old. You can still see the two lines of pink glitter I applied to the book’s spine to decorate the title. The anthology contained stories for each of the country’s holidays, across religions and cultures. The fact that it offered two stories to commemorate United Nations Day gives you a sense of the flavor of this book, which I suspect was something of an outlier when it came to 1950s children’s literature.
One of my favorite stories featured Labor Day. Written by progressive educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell around 1941, it told the story of a bridge built in an unnamed American town. The bridge is seen through the eyes of the town’s children, whose immigrant fathers – from Italy, Ireland, Poland, and other countries – labored on the project as stonemasons, steelworkers, and more.
The Key Bridge disaster
I thought of this story last week, when Baltimore’s Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River, hurling six immigrant construction workers to their deaths.
When the news hit, I was transfixed with horror, along with the rest of the nation. The all-night road repair crew had been on break, eating a meal in their cars. Suddenly those cars were in free fall. We squeeze our eyes shut against the mental image, taking refuge in the unspoken, unspeakable thought: It happened, but not to me. Because I don’t do that kind of work, and never will.
A majority of construction workers in the Baltimore-Washington corridor are Latino or African American; 39 percent are immigrants. So it was no surprise to learn that the eight men on the Key Bridge, only two of whom survived, had come from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. We learned that they were longtime Maryland residents and experienced construction workers, hard-working husbands and fathers who helped support extended families in Maryland and in their home countries.
Love immigrants, hate immigration?
It’s often said that when thousands of people suffer some calamity, that’s a statistic, easily ignored; but when the press features a few individuals and we learn their names, see their faces, and hear their stories, we are moved.
So it was last week, when the media published the bridge victims’ names and countries and hailed the perilous work they were doing on the graveyard shift to make Maryland roads safer. CASA, an immigrant services organization that counted two of the bridge workers as members, noted an “outpouring of love and support and prayers” in response to the tragedy. By a week after the accident, with two men’s bodies recovered from their submerged pickup truck and four more presumed dead, over $500,000 in donations had streamed in to aid the victims’ families.
Petula Dvorak, a Washington Post columnist, noted the irony:
Social media was a lovefest of thoughts and prayers for those men. “Pray for the souls of those construction workers!” “Please pray for the missing construction workers and their families.” “These people are heroes.” But when it comes to the reality of who these workers were, how they got here and why they came, more than half of us lose our minds – and our hearts.
Dvorak pointed out that 61 percent of Americans, and 91 percent of Republicans, see illegal immigration as a “very serious” problem, according to a recent poll. More than half of the poll’s respondents said they supported building a border wall. She asked:
Does America need a more searing visual image than eight men working for their piece of the America dream – filling potholes on a terrifying bridge in 1 a.m. darkness – to understand that our nation was built by immigrants, runs on immigrant labor and needs immigrants?
Essential workers at risk
The surge of immigration that began in 2022, which has so many voters in a panic, is fueling US economic growth. It does so by bringing working-age people to the United States at a time when the enormous boomer generation – my generation – is retiring. Because of growth in the labor force, mainly due to immigration, gross domestic product will be about $7 trillion greater over the next decade than it would have been otherwise, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Many immigrants, including some without permanent legal status, are classified as essential workers. They do the most necessary and, often, the most dangerous jobs. Civilian occupations with the highest fatal work injury rates include roofing, iron and steel work, construction, and agriculture – all done disproportionately by foreign-born workers. The eight men on the Key Bridge were part of a vast, often unseen workforce that risks their lives daily to keep the US economy running. It takes a thousand-foot cargo ship crashing into a bridge, reducing it to twisted rubble, for us to see these workers and the work they do.
A Republican in the Maryland legislature, Del. Ric Metzgar, whose Baltimore County district includes many Central Americans, said after the disaster that he favors a quick path to citizenship for immigrants. “They’re hard workers,” he said. “Let’s be honest — they do the work that we don’t want to do.”
Fighting nativism, then and now
By 1941, when Lucy Sprague Mitchell wrote “Who Built the Bridge?,” the United States had received waves of immigration over a century from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and other countries of Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as from China, Japan, and Mexico. All of these nationalities, to varying degrees, were affected by exclusionary laws and quotas, social discrimination, and violence instigated by nativist groups. This was the setting in which Mitchell wrote her story for a teachers’ manual published by the New York–based Council Against Intolerance in America. Mass immigration from Central America lay in the future, so the bridge builders in Mitchell’s tale were immigrants from Europe, along with one whose description suggests an African American.
In some ways the story reflected the sensibilities of its time. The workers’ accents are exaggerated, underscoring their foreignness. But Mitchell – the first dean of women at the University of California at Berkeley, and co-founder of the Bank Street College of Education – had a clear objective in mind: to fight nativism by instilling values of tolerance in children. She sought to humanize immigrants and show that they were part of the fabric of American life, producing wealth for the whole society.
Her story concludes:
New Americans and old Americans, workers in stone, workers in cement, workers in steel; sandhogs, tugboat captains and bridge engineers; miners and railroad men – workers of many kinds built that great bridge. The great new road across the big river was the work of many Americans – to be used by all.
Fast-forward 83 years, and Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, a physician born and raised in East Baltimore’s Greektown, told the New York Times how little had changed:
Every single Baltimorean felt that bridge fall down. … The bridge was one of the first jobs really available to a lot of the immigrant populations in Baltimore city. My dad, who worked as a painter on the bridge, said if you were an able-bodied person that knew how to do any level of construction or painting and you’re an immigrant, chances are you worked on that bridge. … Not to sound cheesy, but it was a bridge to the American dream. And the first and last hands touching that bridge were immigrants that came here to pursue that.
Important story!! Thank you
Well said!