THE “WRETCHED REFUSE.”

THE “WRETCHED REFUSE.” We Americans like to take pride in the Emma Lazarus poem I posted on the Fourth, but there is another way of reading it. A European—and especially a member of the European upper classes–can read it as saying that it was the losers who fled to America while the successful stayed behind. In WAR AND REMEMBRANCE, Herman Wouk invents a German military historian who narrates the events of World War II from a German point of view. The historian’s comment on the Battle of the Midway is: “The United States of America has been a lucky nation and this luck held remarkably on June 4, 1942. How long it will hold in the future, only the dark gods know who bestowed on this crass mercantile nation of mongrelized blood and cowboy culture a virgin continent with almost infinite natural resources.”