Anti-immigrant slurs: an American history
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Or a sketch of the history, anyhow, since there's far too much of it to cover in a mere blog post.
The idea of immigrants as "garbage" is in the news because of Donald Trump's assertion in a speech and an interview last week that "we're like a garbage can for the rest of the world", followed by Tony Hinchcliffe's offensive jokes at Trump's MSG rally about Puerto Ricans (who are American citizens, of course, but are often lumped in with Spanish speakers from Central and South America). And then there was Joe Biden's comment, and Trump's trash truck stunt in Wisconsin.
Let's go back 102 years, to a quotation from William Joseph Simmons, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in an address delivered on April 30, 1922, and published in the Klan's journal The Searchlight:
Right here within our own borders, the great and mighty city of Boston, which tries to lay claim that it is the cradle of America (tries is all it can do), and holds itself up as the paragon of American principles, has, if my information is correct, seventeen schools in which the English language is never spoken, and not an English thought or an American ideal. These schools are for the children of French-Canadians who have come across the border and each of these schools are under the domination of a foreign potentate who is in nowise sympathetic with American ideals and institutions. Right here in our own land twenty-one towns in the state of Connecticut are under the domination and control of the Italian-Dago influence. Then you hear folks talk about "we Americans” and of America as the melting-pot where the stamp and impress of all nations can come in and shape our destinies. It is no such thing. It is a garbage can! Not a melting-pot. . . . My friends, your government can be changed between the rising and the setting of one sun. This great nation, with all it provides, can be snatched away from you in the space of one day, and that day no more than ten hours. When the hordes of aliens walk to the ballot box and their votes outnumber yours, then that alien horde has got you by the throat. . . . Americans will awake from their slumber and rush out for battle and there will be such stir as the world has never seen the like. The soil of America will run with the blood of its people.
(At least, that's how the speech is quoted by Charles Sweeney in "The Great Bigotry Merger", The Nation 7/5/1922 — I haven't been able to find The Searchlight on line.)
The parallel with current anti-immigration rhetoric is striking, except that the "hordes" Simmons warns against are French Canadians and Italians.
And then we can go back another 67 years, to Abraham Lincoln's 1855 letter to Joshua Speed:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" 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 pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].
That's a place-holder for a denunciation of Irish and German Catholic immigrants as politically- and socially-threatening trash. Many such complaints can be found in the writings and speeches of those Know-Nothings, including this 1857 speech by Henry Winter Davis, who "told Congress the unamerican Irish Catholic immigrants were to blame for the election of James Buchanan":
The recent election has developed in an aggravated form every evil against which the American party protested. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country — men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election. Again in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present result.
And finally, let's go back another century to Benjamin Franklin's "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.", 1751:
[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
So no "garbage" — but things that "swarm" and "herd" are maybe halfway between trash and human beings.
You can read a bit more about Franklin's essay in "Palatine boors swarming into our settlements" (2/4/2017), which also notes that
Those "Palatine boors"were presumably farmers from the Palatinate, in what's now Germany. So there's a potential problem with the idea of citing Franklin in support of current White House views on strong immigration control — from Wikipedia:
Donald Trump's paternal ancestry is traceable to Kallstadt, a village in the Palatinate, Germany.
Hector said,
October 31, 2024 @ 7:59 pm
The Biden "trash" "gaffe" is a nice example of a garden-path-ish case in the wild. He said, "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter's — his [the supporter's] demonization of Latinos is unconscionable." And he was nearly universally taken to have said, "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His [Trump's] demonization of Latinos is unconscionable."
Jenny Chu said,
October 31, 2024 @ 8:10 pm
It is actually kind of comforting to see that the anti-immigrant rhetoric has been around for so long – makes me think that maybe things are not actually getting worse!
Off topic: have people always referred to the venue in NYC as MSG? I can only read that as referring to the seasoning.
Hector said,
October 31, 2024 @ 9:31 pm
My grandfather was an usher there in the 60s and 70s and always called it The Garden.
J.M.G.N. said,
October 31, 2024 @ 9:34 pm
"Spanish speakers from Central and South America"
I'd go further to say with all Ibero-Americans, or American Iberophones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibero-America
Barbara Phillips Long said,
October 31, 2024 @ 9:38 pm
It was interesting to see the bit about French Canadians. I was a teen in the 1960s and lived in the foothills of the northern Catskills. I was surprised to encounter virulent prejudices against French Canadian workers — my own family didn’t have that particular prejudice, but my parents grew up elsewhere in New York State. There was a lot of anti-Catholicism, too, and that may have influenced the negativity about French Canadians.
I did learn a bunch of ethnic smears from other students in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, I was aware those terms were considered rude. My interpretation of etiquette was that it was as much about kindness as it was about formality. Reluctantly, I have come to accept that there is a lot of truth in LBJ’s jibe about how even the poorest folks want to have someone — anyone — to look down on.
Palatine Germans:
The area I grew up in was partly settled by Palatine Germans, but that took place earlier than Franklin’s 1751 remarks (around 1712 and after). The upstate New York Palatines had fled Germany, settled outside London, and were sent to the Hudson Valley to create ship-building supplies during the reign of Queen Anne. Once they worked off their debt, they were told they would receive land. The whole thing was a fiasco — the Hudson Valley did not have the right natural resources to produce naval supplies — and so some Palatines left the work camps to settle on the lands they believed they had been promised. The results were a legal mess, but some Palatines managed to stay. I would describe them as refugees or asylum seekers, not immigrants.