This Day In American History January 1

The Library Of Congress

Happy New Year!

The Leonard and Felicia Bernstein family sent New Year’s Day (January 1) greeting cards to extended family and friends during the holiday season. Holiday card pictures are among the eighty-five photographs for the 1960s now available online in the Leonard Bernstein Collection, 1920-1989 held by the Library of Congress Music Division.

With more than 400,000 items including music and literary manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, audio and video recordings, fan mail, and other materials, this collection, donated by the Bernstein family in 1992, is one of the largest and most varied special collections in the Music Division.

During the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein donated the sketches and piano-vocal scores from West Side Story to the Library of Congress. The holograph piano-vocal score of the song, “Something’s Coming” composed by Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim for the character of Tony, is one of the items on display in the Imagination portion of the exhibition of the American Treasures of the Library of Congress.

* View photographs from each decade of the life of this American composer in the Bernstein Photo Gallery.
* Browse the Leonard Bernstein Chronology for important events in Bernstein’s life.
* Browse Leonard Bernstein in William P. Gottlieb: Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz for portraits of Bernstein.
* Search Leonard Bernstein in Music, Theater & Dance for additional photographs as well as information on other special collections that reference Bernstein.
* Visit the exhibition American Treasures of the Library of Congress to see other creations of the American Imagination.
* Search the Today in History Archive on the keyword composer to view other features on American musical artists such as George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and George M. Cohan.
* Visit the Official Leonard Bernstein Site for more information about the composer and his works.

“Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free”

On January 1, 1892, a fifteen-year old Irish girl named Annie Moore became the first of the more than twelve million immigrants who would pass through the doors of the Ellis Island Immigration Station in its sixty-two years of operation. This small island off the New Jersey coast in the New York Harbor lies in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Together, these two landmarks have welcomed millions of immigrants to America.

The film opens with a view of the steam ferryboat William Myers laden with passengers approaching a dock at the Ellis Island Immigration Station. The vessel is docked, the gangway is placed, and the immigrant passengers are seen coming up the gangway and onto the dock where they cross in front of the camera.

Immigrants who had just completed their journeys across the Atlantic Ocean would dock at Ellis Island, where they disembarked. The passengers were screened by doctors for obvious physical ailments and by officers who reviewed their legal documents. If they were in reasonably good health and their papers were in order, immigrants were allowed into the United States within a few hours of their arrival.

“At seven o’clock our boat lifted anchor and we glided up the still waters of the harbour. The whole prow was a black mass of passengers staring at the ferry-boats, the distant factories, and sky-scrapers. Every point of vantage was seized, and some scores of emigrants were clinging to the rigging. At length we came into sight of the green-grey statue of Liberty, far away and diminutive at first, but later on, a celestial figure in a blaze of sunlight. An American waved a starry flag in greeting, and some emigrants were disposed to cheer, some shed silent tears. Many, however, did not know what the statue was. I heard one Russian telling another that it was the tombstone of Columbus.

We carried our luggage out at eight, and in a pushing crowd prepared to disembark…. At a quarter to ten we steamed for Ellis Island. We were then marched to another ferry-boat, and expected to be transported somewhere else, but this second vessel was simply a floating waiting-room. We were crushed and almost suffocated upon it. A hot sun beat upon its wooden roof; the windows in the sides were fixed; we could not move an inch from the places where we were awkwardly standing, for the boxes and baskets were so thick about our feet; babies kept crying sadly, and irritated emigrants swore at the sound of them. All were thinking–“Shall I get through?”

From p. 42-43, With poor immigrants to America; by Stephen Graham.

Source: Library of Congress