"The Swimmers" By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Although I didn’t originally think that this story would directly relate to immigration, it ended up really illustrating what can happen to a family that chooses to immigrate. It also illustrated more modern immigration, which helped because I could mostly only picture it in the 18 and 1900s. In this story, a man named Henry moved to Paris from Virginia to start a family with Choupette, a French girl. After a few years, they were at the beach and a bunch of people from America were there. One girl started drowning and Henry saved her even though he didn’t know how to swim. She taught Henry and his sons how to swim and got him thinking about moving his family to America to provide a better life for them. But, once they got to America, about three years later their family was torn apart and Choupette left Henry for another man and he was desperately trying to get custody of his children. I had never really thought about people immigrating here from France before reading this story. I also thought the comments Fitzgerald wrote about America were really interesting because Henry was an immigrant in France and then in America because so much time had passed since he was there last, which proves how quickly a person can adapt to another culture and way of living. “In England, property begot a strong place sense, but Americans, restless and with shallow roots, needed fins and wings.” (521) Here, he is saying that in Europe, people lived by tradition, ancestry, inheritance and property. But, in America, people are all trying to leave their past in the past and leave behind inheritance and traditions; all they need is money and the ability to let go of yesterday. After a lot happened, he ends the story with a last thought: “France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter- it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.” (527) To me, this quote is saying that Americans aren’t really tied down to anything tangible. Each person, no matter how different, lives for the ideas this country was built off of and the willingness to believe that they will get you through to the next day.