Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signs immigration law 124 years after great-grandmother's journey

Originally Published:Monday, April 26th 2010, 9:39 PM
Updated: Tuesday, April 27th 2010, 8:21 AM

Drew/AP; Petersen/Getty

Records suggest that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's great-grandmother arrived in the United States in 1886. Where would the governor be without the drive of this immigrant?

When she came here as an Arizona delegate to the 2004 Republican National Convention, Jan Brewer seemed as sunny as her home state.

"Just fantastic," she exclaimed about New York. "So many things to see!"

Things like the Statue of Liberty, which had just reopened after being closed after 9/11. The monument was dedicated in 1886, which public records suggest was the very year Brewer's great-grandmother arrived in New York from England.

Sarah Jane Marble was not yet 14, one of the very souls invoked in the famous inscription.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

By one relative's account, in seeking a new life, the great-grandma's family even changed their surname from Wilford. She married Francis Drinkwine, and they lived for a time in Iowa.

Their son Perry Edgar Drinkwine moved on to Polk County, Minn., where he married Rose Ford. The long-lost family surname seems to have resurfaced with the birth of Perry Wilford Drinkwine.

Wilford, as his family called him, married Edna Bakken. The couple had a young son, and remained in Minnesota until the outbreak of World War II.

"Wilford Drinkwine believed his country needed him," Brewer said in a speech a month ago. "He moved his young son and his wife, Edna, halfway across America for a job in the Nevadadesert. I was born a couple of years later."

The future governor was 11 when her father succumbed to lung disease from prolonged exposure to munitions chemicals. The mother opened a dress shop and worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week.

"I worked right beside her every day after school and on weekends," Brewer recalled.

In one of those miracles of hard-earned opportunity that comprise America, the widow's daughter grew up to become the Arizona secretary of state and a delegate to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York.

One hundred and eighteen years after her great-grandmother arrived in America, Brewer stood in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, next in line for governor.

And it must have meant nothing at all.

For now that she is governor, Brewer has signed an immigration bill that spits in Lady Liberty's face.

The new law seeks to slam shut that golden door. It goes so far as to make it a crime not to carry papers proving you are not just some tempest-tossed soul who arrived in this country unbidden.

"Your papers, please!" is the talk of totalitarianism.

Brewer speaks dramatically of her father moving the family halfway across America, but says nothing of the great-grandmother who arrived the same year the Statue of Liberty became a symbol of welcome to all those seeking a new life.

Maybe I am misreading the public records.

Or maybe Brewer does not know her family's history.

Most likely, she imagines there is a difference between the Europeans who sought refuge here in times past and Hispanics who dare to cross into her state.

I cannot answer those questions because my inquires regarding her family's arrival in America were met with silence.

That's just a politician's silence, though.

The silence to listen to is the one invoked by the Statue of Liberty's inscription, the poem in which Emma Lazarus describes how Lady Liberty announces her invitation to the huddled masses.

"Cries she with silent lips."

MICHAEL DALY