Far-right movements like Trumpism are as old as this country itself, and while sometimes their rhetoric is cloaked in economic and “cultural” terms, they all share a common thread: white nationalism, xenophobia, nativism and fear of the “others.” As historian Kenneth C. Davis observed in a New York Times op-ed, "Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself."
Of course, the first unwanted immigrant invaders were Europeans, in particular the English invaders, who had a much different “relationship” with indigenous peoples than did the Spanish and the French. The Spanish certainly mistreated and abused indigenous peoples, but the Papal Bull of 1537 laid out the “official” policy of the Spanish government toward them:
The said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.
The French followed this declaration more to the letter than the Spanish (with the exception of African slaves, who were not “indigenous” to the land); the French dealt with Native Americans largely on equal terms and did not attempt to steal or drive them off their land, and thus had a much more amicable relationship with them than did their English counterparts.
But you hear a different language from the English invaders, and after two centuries of gestation, none other than Thomas Jefferson, who like Benjamin Franklin held a “noble savage” stereotype of Native Americans, nevertheless first concocted the first “Indian removal” plan if they refused to “assimilate” on the white man’s terms. However, he was sidetracked by conflicts with the British and didn’t want to start a war with the Natives just yet. That would have to wait for Andrew Jackson, who declared that Native Americans “have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race…they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere [before] long disappear.”
Before the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado in 1864, the culmination of a conflict that was initiated from the anger aroused when chiefs from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes agreed to a new treaty that reduced their reservations to just 1/13 their former size for the sake of “peace,” John Chivington, a former Methodist pastor and then commanding U.S. volunteers, decided to find an Indian camp to attack and did not care that the one he was attacking was a band of peaceful Indians: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!…I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heavens to kill Indians.” Most of those slaughtered at Sand Creek were women and children. Kit Carson, upon hearing of the massacre, said “You call sich soldiers Christians, do ye? And Indians savages? What der yer s'pose our Heavenly Father, who made both them and us, thinks of these things?”
Estimates of the number of Native Americans in what now comprises the continental U.S. at the time of the first appearance by English colonists vary widely (or wildly), but even by the lowest estimate, 1.5 million, by 1900 the population of Native Americans had been reduced to just 15 percent of that number to 238,000—and that is not even close to being a true account of the genocidal impact of the English and their descendants, given the number of presumed births among the Natives over the centuries probably at least doubled the number available to be killed.
Throughout the 19th century there was bitter debate whether the original inhabitants of this land should be granted citizenship, and thus have the same right not to be murdered as any other citizen. This did not occur until 1924, but the right to vote was at the discretion of the states, and some states barred Native Americans from voting at all until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, Native Americans remained virtually powerless against abuses and land theft by whites, whose so-called “treaties” were habitually broken or ignored, leaving them in a habitually impoverished state.
But if the genocide of Native Americans in the continental U.S.—as many expected or hoped would occur—ultimately failed, it nevertheless should be put into its proper perspective, which in fact only makes it seem worse. The genocide of Native Americans, whether intended or by “collateral damage,” was greater even than the Holocaust, where the end of the World War II saved 37 percent of the Jewish population in Europe. Incidentally, half of all the Jewish victims were citizens of Poland; Polish collaborators included police, railway workers and civilians who denounced Jews in hiding. A 2018 law passed in Poland made it a “crime” to make allegedly “false” claims about Polish involvement in the Holocaust. On the other hand, the near total genocide of Native Americans, like most discussions involving white “privilege” in this country, isn’t a part of the “historical legacy” that the youth of this country are required to know. We don’t have to be hypocrites about telling the truth in this country, right Sen. Marco Rubio?
As bad as the English attitude toward the indigenous peoples were, the attitudes of many of the English colonialists (as they certainly were to Native Americans) toward German immigrants wasn’t much different than that of the Roman historian Tacitus, who observed that the German barbarians lacked the civilized qualities of the Romans:
When not engaged in warfare they spend a certain amount of time in hunting, but much more in idleness, thinking of nothing else but sleeping and eating. For the boldest and most warlike men have no regular employment, the care of house, home, and fields being left to the women, old men, and weaklings of the family. In thus dawdling away their time they show a strange inconsistency - at one and the same time loving indolence and hating peace.
Benjamin Franklin’s attitude toward “stupid and swarthy” German immigrants sounds suspiciously “modern”:
"Few of their children in the country learn English... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.” While some were “good” people, Franklin nevertheless believed that most German immigrants were "generally of the most ignorant stupid sort of their own nation.” Franklin feared that a “flood” of German immigrants would destroy the “character” and “culture” of the country, and he was also of the mind of Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg, who claimed that German immigrants would bring "unprecedented wickedness and crime."
In time, of course, the white “American” willingness to allow other white groups to integrate and assimilate is at odds with how they treat other groups. The generality see only “strangers” who they avoid “mixing” with, because they looked “different,” and being “different” tends to be accompanied by negative stereotypes—not just of Hispanics, who many regard little better than “vermin” in this country, but Muslims, whose “culture” is even more “problematic” for so-called “Christians.”
But while Muslims have an “alien” culture to be feared, Hispanics must deal with ignorance. White nationalist and anti-immigrant fanatic Jason Richwine’s racism is so embedded in his very being that he felt compelled to write his Harvard dissertation on his belief that “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
That was only the assumption
that Richwine started out with, and of course as has been pointed out by
critics, he “confirmed” his personal view by cherry-picking the worst numbers
in his “data” to degrade Hispanics in the generality. No doubt like the so-called Army IQ tests during World War I that found eastern European immigrants "mentally challenged" and were used to justify the 1924 immigration law, low test scores were typically due to poor English skills. He ended the dissertation by asserting “From
the perspective of Americans alive today, the low average IQ of Hispanics is
effectively permanent.” This was too much racism even for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which saw fit to force Richwine's resignation from the organization.
Some people were “surprised” that one those who approved of Richwine’s thesis was a so-called “liberal,” Christopher Jencks, who when asked by The Nation if he would share his reasoning for approving this deliberately racist screed, his reply was “Nope, but thanks for asking.” But we could find a “clue” to it in his book The Black White Test Score Gap, in which he argues “cultural” and “psychological” issues are to blame rather than matters of environment and discrimination.
Richwine further came under criticism for using his “findings” to “suggest” immigration policy. His ideas were of course useful to Trump’s chief racial “strategist,” Stephen Miller, who didn’t just come up with the idea of excluding all immigrants of certain unwanted physical features disturbing the pallid landscape by himself. In fact, this goes way back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924, which not only banned migration from Asia, and China specifically, but also severely limited immigration from eastern and southern Europe, who likely would "send" those who were regarded as “mentally" and morally "inferior.”
In fact, the Border Patrol was founded specifically to stop not immigration from Latin America, but from China; in one of his last films in 1950, The Breaking Point, John Garfield played a fishing boat captain who, in desperate financial condition, agreed to illegally transport Chinese migrants into the U.S. in his boat. The exclusion act was nullified in 1943, but it was the 1965 immigration law, which put a cap on immigration from Latin America for the first time, that allowed the mass migration from Asia that we see even more of today.
The origins of white nationalist and nativist movements started as soon as English settlers set foot in this country, including religious intolerance, and throughout its history this country saw the “re-emergence” of such movements at certain times of “stress.” In his classic study Regeneration Through Violence, Richard Slotkin pointed out that white America always needed some dark-skinned group to beat on. Probably the most “influential” movement insofar as it revealed the blackest part of the American psyche that has never left us, was the so-called “American Party,” better known as the Know Nothing Party which emerged in the 1850s. Its titular “leader,” a thug named William “Bill the Butcher” Poole, became a “martyr” when he was killed in a barroom brawl with immigrants. According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine by Lorraine Boissoneault,
Approximately 250,000 people flooded lower Manhattan to pay their respects to the great American. Dramas performed across the country changed their narratives to end with actors wrapping themselves in an American flag and quoting Poole’s last words. An anonymous pamphlet titled The Life of William Poole claimed that the shooting wasn’t a simple barroom scuffle, but an assassination organized by the Irish. The facts didn’t matter; that Poole had been carrying a gun the night of the shooting, or that his assailant took shots to the head and abdomen, was irrelevant. Nor did admirers care that Poole had a prior case against him for assault with intent to kill. He was an American hero, “battling for freedom’s cause,” who sacrificed his life to protect people from dangerous Catholic immigrants.
Thus began the political movement against “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” all catchwords to describe Irish and Catholic immigrants generally, most of the Irish escaping the potato famine that gripped Ireland at the time, as well as British repression. Catholics were viewed—like they were in Britain—as having “divided loyalties,” allegedly more loyal to the dictates of the Pope than to America and democracy. Besides, they were all “vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.” Of course, the underlying element of all of this was economics and the conceit of Protestants in the belief that this was “their” country. The strength of the Know Nothing movement was great enough to lead to the election of governors and majorities in some state legislatures.
According to Christopher Phillips, a professor of history at University of Cincinnati, “the Know Nothings displayed three patterns common to all other nativist movements. First is the embrace of nationalism. Second is religious discrimination: in this case, Protestants against Catholics rather than the more modern day squaring-off of Judeo-Christians against Muslims. Lastly, a working-class identity exerts itself in conjunction with the rhetoric of upper-class political leaders.”
Historian Elliott J. Gorn would also note that such “Appeals to ethnic hatreds allowed men whose livelihoods depended on winning elections to sidestep the more complex and politically dangerous divisions of class.” We can see this continuing to this day, with working class “poor whites” being conned by their true oppressors—corporate America and its political puppets—into viewing vulnerable racial and ethnic groups as the “enemy” instead of natural compatriots.
Boissoneault notes that although white nationalism and nativism receded briefly during the Civil War and ended the Know Nothing Party as a political entity, what motivated its supporters was far from over. “But nativism never left, and the legacy of the Know Nothings has been apparent in policies aimed at each new wave of immigrants.” The “old stock” of immigrant America now cannot countenance the appearance refugees and immigrants from Latin America and the Muslim countries.
We can also call this fascism, and in fact as in Europe in the 1930s, fascist movements with an American “twist” existed, and acknowledging its re-emergence today is only a formality. In a New Statesman article by Sarah Churchwell last year entitled “The Return of Fascism,” she states
Whatever one’s opinion of Donald Trump, there is no denying that his political success to date represents its own kind of triumph of the will, one built on a political carnivalesque. Trump’s manifest need for the adoration of his crowd, his desire to exhibit to the world the cheering hordes of his political rallies, may seem like an ersatz copy of the authentic rallies of fascist leaders of yore. The fact that show business is at the heart of Trump’s unstable political project sometimes leads to the argument that Trump isn’t fascist, but merely an entertainer. Fascism was always about entertainment, however: the deep root of its poison was that it made hatred entertaining.
And again it must be pointed out that there is nothing “new” about Trumpism. It is just a new name for an old problem in this country. Trumpists used to call themselves the “Tea Party” movement, which was funded by the Koch Brothers and driven by barely concealed racist impulses directed at Barack Obama, especially by its “Southern wing.” Before that was the anti-government extremism during the Clinton administration that was acted upon by Timothy McVeigh and the Bundys, Strom Thurmond’s “State’s Rights” Party that didn’t disguise its racist, anti-civil rights origins, the far-right American Independent Party, on whose ticket was George Wallace, who won five states in the 1968 election—which surprisingly didn’t hurt Richard Nixon, whose “Southern Strategy” played to the racist fantasies of Southern whites and turn the Republican Party from the “party of Lincoln” to the party of white nationalism and fascism of today.
As Prof. Phillips observed, those who are “confused” about why Trumpism has taken such a hold on so much of this country, including politicians who should know better, they need to look farther back than yesterday: “One can’t possibly make sense of current events unless you know something about nativism. That requires you to go back in time to the Know Nothings. You have to realize the context is different, but the themes are consistent. The actors are still the same, but with different names.”
That is exactly what I’m saying. But one thing is very different now: unlike in the past, now white nationalists and nativists not only have a “voice” in Trump, but in someone who has no sense of morality or ethics and when given the opportunity will use his power for evil—exciting the worst in people and “confirming” through the baldest of lies the most outrageous conspiracies that have created a dangerous and delusional anti-American and anti-democratic mindset that both Republicans and right-wing media have further propagandized for no other reason but to be “contrary”—unless, of course, they really are fascists.
No comments:
Post a Comment