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 in opposition to the 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 (who called themselves the American Party). In this 1857 speech, Henry Winter Davis "told Congress the unamerican Irish Catholic immigrants are 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.
Update — Matt McIrvin points us to Erica Lee's book America for Americans: A history of xenophobia in the United States.
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.
David Morris said,
November 1, 2024 @ 4:30 am
"Don't give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Don't send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I hide my lamp beside the golden door!"
With apologies to Emma Lazarus
Matt McIrvin said,
November 1, 2024 @ 6:59 am
Lou Reed's parody of the Lazarus poem in "Dirty Boulevard" was more acerbic:
"Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor — I'll piss on 'em
That's what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let's club 'em to death and get over with,
and just dump 'em on the boulevard"
And the Statue of Bigotry's dictum will probably always be with us, with the descendants of every group of immigrants claiming the next ones are *different* this time.
Matt McIrvin said,
November 1, 2024 @ 7:07 am
Erika Lee's "America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States" is an excellent book about this going back to colonial times.
American fear of the current wave of immigrants, whatever that happens to be, and couched in almost exactly the same terms every time, definitely predates the United States even being a country.
David L said,
November 1, 2024 @ 9:38 am
I moved to Maine a couple of years ago and have got to know a native Mainer, now in her 90s, who grew up in the Lewiston area. She told me that when she was young, there were French-speaking children her age whose parents knew little English, and who lived in largely French-speaking neighborhoods. But the children were more or less bilingual, or spoke English better than French.
I gather that there was an official movement by the state of Maine to suppress the speaking and learning of French, and these days there are few if any L1 French speakers in the state, although there are many people with clearly French family names.
Rodger C said,
November 1, 2024 @ 10:46 am
I never noticed that Germans had different "complexions" than English people, but then Franklin ascribed "swarthiness" to Swedes. He seems to have been very concerned with skin color and to have known very little about it.
Jake V. said,
November 1, 2024 @ 11:10 am
@Hector
Why are you certain that’s what he said? This article from the Associated Press makes me think it’s definitely up to interpretation at some level.
https://apnews.com/article/326e2f516a94a470a423011a946b6252
Jarek Weckwerth said,
November 1, 2024 @ 12:53 pm
@Jake V: Exactly. Biden's gaffe is a perfect candidate for the kind of analysis we often see on here. Since the two strings are indistinguishable phonologically, the most obvious path of analysis would be to look at co-reference resolution in this type of situation. For me, as a non-native speaker, the assertion that the first part contained the apostrophe form is a stretch. We would need a breakfast experiment to resolve this; maybe corpus frequencies would be enough? But of course if Mark's free choice to not do that ;)
Daniel said,
November 1, 2024 @ 1:26 pm
@Rodger C, what makes you think you are smarter than Ben Franklin and can dismiss him so casually as knowing very little about what he speaks, when you yourself proclaim ignorance ("I never noticed")?
Maybe consider that he had a point and figure out what it is! I suppose Swedes could be considered swarthy in that they can tan quite easily despite their untanned skin being quite light. Englishman and Irish tend to get red and not tan much. Little differences may have been more visible in the past when travel was less frequent, when there was less mixing between ethnicities.
Chester Draws said,
November 1, 2024 @ 3:35 pm
A couple of facts are relevant here:
Puerto Ricans are not immigrants to the US. Calling them that is a slur to many of them. I'm not even a US citizen and I was surprised to see a LL post implying that.
In any case, the Republican comedic reference was to the island, not its people. (Go back and read the actual "joke", and you will see that.) And that is because Puerto Rico has a very serious garbage problem, which has been common knowledge for a long time, plus other environmental concerns that would not be tolerated in the states.
The world would be a better place if the original comment was read in the intended context and not blown out of proportion, Biden's response was not blown out of proportion because he doesn't speak well, and it we all took care with the words we use.
Kate Gladstone said,
November 2, 2024 @ 11:44 am
It is strange to see Franklin asserting that Germans have (and that, he takes it for granted, their descendants will forever have) even a different complexion from that of English-descended Americans. How could he have believed this?
David L said,
November 2, 2024 @ 11:50 am
I suppose Swedes could be considered swarthy in that they can tan quite easily despite their untanned skin being quite light.
Not any Swedes that I have ever come across. They are like the English. They go from pale to lobster red to peeling then back to (a tiny bit less) pale again. I speak from experience.
Rodger C said,
November 2, 2024 @ 11:58 am
Daniel, I've certainly seen more types of people than Ben Franklin. But then he also thought that Irish Protestants (my people, predominantly) were worse savages than the Indians–this for the crime of doing what the Quakers invited us to America for, viz. to protect their precious pacifist posteriors from the natives who were mysteriously angered by their encroachments.
Hector said,
November 2, 2024 @ 12:24 pm
@Jake V.
I'm certain because it would be totally out of character for Biden to call all of Trump's supporters "garbage," and also the pronoun "his" in "his demonization" is plainly anaphoric. So what expression is it anaphoric on? Surely, "His supporter". This is a sort-of-clever and appropriate thing for Biden to have said; just the sort of thing he characteristically does. The alternative hypothesis that the AP and so many others garden-pathed onto is that Biden's remark did not refer to the comedian's comment at all, but just was a spontaneous and very foolish expulsion of bile about Trump and his supporters.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
November 3, 2024 @ 6:33 am
@Hector: Evidently the stenography team at the White House did not think it was out of character, and those people are extremely familiar with Joe Biden's habits since it's their job to be familiar with them. Also, their initial interpretation can be argued to provide a human analogue to a corpus analysis; no apostrophe seems intuitively much more likely. That's why an actual corpus/forensic approach would be welcome.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
November 3, 2024 @ 8:39 am
Say, I have an idea — why don't we all just go ahead and assume (e.g., from now until, maybe, January 2029, for starters) that any time one of these silly posts comes up, all the Democrats are going to say that Republicans gaffe more frequently and worse than Democrats, and all the Republicans are going to say than Democrats gaffe more frequently and worse than Republicans, with neither side particularly interested in the truth of the matter (as if any such "truth" would, in fact, "matter"), just so long as the wagons have been properly circled?
There, I fixed that for yinz — now, with this assumption in place, we don't need these posts and comments anymore because we all know how they will all begin, sputter about for awhile, and end.
And those of us who are neither Democrats nor Republicans, and who couldn't give a *skid-i-s as to whose ox is being gored, can get on with reading about language stuff.
Philip Taylor said,
November 4, 2024 @ 6:44 am
"those of us who are neither Democrats nor Republicans" — i.e., 98.97% of the world's population. [Sources deleted as their presence appears to be forcing this comment in the queue for moderation].
Jonathan Smith said,
November 4, 2024 @ 3:06 pm
This post is about xenophobic language in Amurcan history, for the confused. 'Tis a thing.
Re: swarthy Swedes etc., the problems is us — given the prominence of the social category White, the fact that those so grouped in fact display a very large range of skin tones as assessed via e.g. spectrophotometry winds up suppressed. Who knows what Franklin saw and through exactly which difference social lens(es). Incidentally, that's why it's dumb to want AI Roman emperors to be "white" not "black" (!?) — or Mary in yer local Nativity play, with folks these days pleased if the young actress be say Swedish and huffy about the woke if she be say Chinese.
Vanya said,
November 4, 2024 @ 4:00 pm
I grew up in New Hampshire in the 1970s-80s. Prejudice against French-Canadians was still perceptible as background noise. It was certainly fairly strong among my grandparents' generation.
It is strange to see Franklin asserting that Germans have (and that, he takes it for granted, their descendants will forever have) even a different complexion from that of English-descended Americans. How could he have believed this?
Easily? In real life most Germans don't look like the Nazi image. Rheinland and Southern Germans are often dark haired and tan well in the sun. English people, especially of Nordic descent, do not tan well. If Franklin was exposed mostly to German farmers and laborers who spent a lot of time outdoors and mostly merchant class English – Americans, who spent far less time outdoors, he could easily have come to the conclusion that Germans were "darker".