Ed Gulley took the refugee children out into his cornfield to see the corn seeds beginning to sprout. His grandson Jeb is on the left, his wife Carol to the far right.

I was deeply affected by this artist, this man of the soil, kneeling down to show these lost and struggling children the true story of America. Every farmer in America was an immigrant or refugee when the American Family Farm sparked the great revolution and fought much of it.

I thought of the hatred and bigotry aimed at these innocent and defenceless children. On my Facebook Page yesterday, a woman I know and have sometimes admired gloated when it was discovered that the bomber and murderer in Manchester, England was the son of immigrants from a foreign and Muslim country Libya.

She expressed no sympathy for the victims or sadness about the violence in the world, terrorist and other.  She just gloated because it proved, to her, the wisdom of banning immigrants and persecuting them. “She,” she said in delight, “the man arrested in Manchester was the children of immigrants.” She was so happy.

Now, she preened, those squishy-headed people will see just how bad immigrants are.

Bigotry and the exploitation of hate and fear is as much a part of the history of democracy, past and present,  as the flag.

I thought of Abraham Lincoln, who even at the beginning of his political career in the Illinois State Legislature, wrote a letter condemning the popular anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party, as it was called.

“I am not a Know-Nothing,” he wrote. “How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me pretty rapid….When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners and Catholics. When it comes to this i should  prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – Russia, for example, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

The Know-Nothings are here, and ascending again. Our progress in degeneracy continues. There are those who believe we are all created equal except the refugees and immigrants who are dangerous and depraved and inferior.

Ed Gulley’s dirty hands and the seeds they pulled up from the soil on his knees are what the real America is all about, those hard-working and fearless immigrants and refugees who came to this country and fed a new nation and  helped create the most prosperous and freest (to many) country in the world.

I am not a Know-Nothing. And how could I be? How can anyone abhor the oppression of anyone and be in favor of degrading entire classes of people from other places who also wish to be created equal?  And I am not moving back to Russia either, my grandmother just barely left.

And how, I wonder,  could anyone watching this hard-working and devoted farmer, artist and animal lover not see the true spirit of America. I hope these refugee children saw it too, I think they did.