Who made who great?

A picture of Albert Ehrlick with his dog in the backyard of his Laurel, Montana home sometime in early 1930s. (Photo courtesy of Darrell Ehrlick)

Today, as the calendar would have it, is my day to write a column, as is the case most Thursdays.

The calendar also reads June 20, 2024.

Not a day that should trigger much fanfare, but for me, a date with deep historical significance.

If he were alive, my grandfather, Albert S. Ehrlick, would celebrate his 100th birthday today. A century ago, he became the second child and first son born to Samuel and Mary Ehrlick in ramshackle house literally on the wrong side of the tracks. There was no electricity, no water and no English, a language he picked up in elementary school after having his fingers whacked with a ruler, and being called a “dumb kraut.”

He was born to parents, both from Russia, who fled for their lives to arrive in America, doing the backbreaking labor of tending and harvesting sugar beets here. You know, migrant farm labor.

Headlines of the newspapers at the time warned of their invasion and the dangers of mixing with these people whose skin was white, but whose clannish church customs and a low, nearly pidgin German were a threat to the perceived purity of America’s institutions.

Albert dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help feed the family that included eight other children, including several toddlers who would perish due to lack of medicine and money. Eventually, “Al” earned a general education diploma, became the mayor of Laurel and a longtime city councilman.

Paycheck to paycheck he built his modest house, just blocks from where he’d been born, sometimes using the lumber from old boxcars that were being salvaged near those same railroad tracks that crisscross Laurel.

The approaching footsteps of this lumbering man still make the hardwood floorboards of his house creak in my mind. He was born to this working-class family who, in the words of a Bob Dylan song, only knew how to keep on keeping on.

The immigration fight of his youth wasn’t so unlike those of my children’s. His great-grandson, whose life overlapped his for just 10 days and who shares the name of Albert’s father, already has heard plenty in his 12 years about the threat of invasions, or about those who are alleged to be clandestinely crawling over the border, reportedly to destroy our way of life.

The rhetoric would have likely had a familiar ring to it.

A century ago, the threat was so omnipresent in Montana that leaders banned German from being spoken publicly. Americans didn’t even bother to understand that the German my grandparents heard was so disfigured from several centuries of isolation in Russia that it was hardly intelligible to those who had migrated from Germany. The categorization and lumping everyone together then was just as imprecise and uninformed as calling all Spanish speakers “Mexicans,” or assuming that everyone from the Middle East is Muslim or a terrorist.

So scared and concerned about the dangers of being singled out for being disloyal, or having a mob show up at their door with a noose (which was happening in Montana to German-speaking people during World War I) that they changed their name as a sort of peace-offering to prove they were fully American.

But changing a letter at the end of a last name to fuzzy up its origins didn’t do much to change to change people’s minds, I suspect.

Instead, Sam Ehrlick, Albert’s father, known colloquially as “Sam, Sam the Garbage Man,” found a place in the railroad town by being so strong that the city had no choice but to hire him because he could lift the same amount of garbage that ordinarily required two men, cutting the labor cost in half. And Albert, his son, worked just about every day that I knew him, trading his blue cloth refinery Dickies-brand clothes for a similar set after dinner, when he went out to his garage to either work on locks, keys, chainsaws, televisions, radios or welding projects — all side-hustles he used to make a little extra money. In the Ehrlick household, you could be a lot of things, including a tough person with opinions to match; the one thing that was not tolerated was anything that smacked of loafing.

I am not sure when my family became American officially. Sure, I have the certificates of naturalization for my great-great grandparents, assuring them they wouldn’t be chased out of the country like the last place. But when they crossed the threshold from being a danger to an asset is uncertain.

As we approach another ’24 with concerns about immigration and our national complexion, don’t be fooled: We’ve been here before. The names have literally been changed, and the skin tone may be different.

The problem is not that people, regardless of political party, want to make America great. It’s that they believe making America great is something that can be completed, instead of a continuous cycle of assimilation, stubborn determination and hope for their families.

And if America means anything more than a name that describes a geographic chunk of land in North America, it means that somewhere, maybe not so unlike the house that would freeze in the wintertime because the family had nothing to put in the stove, another son of an immigrant will be born. And maybe with any luck, that child’s grandson will be able to trace a centennial that doesn’t just mark a birthday, but a multi-generational journey toward our own version of the American dream.

We’ve got it backwards: It’s not we who need to make America great again; it’s this country that has given us the space to become great.

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