RSN Fundraising Banner
FB Share
Email This Page
add comment

writing for godot

Please God, Bless America

Print
Written by Benjamin L. Palumbo   
Tuesday, 04 September 2018 13:35

PLEASE GOD, BLESS AMERICA*

While the debate about immigration rages, fueled by Trump’s call to hatred, we should heed this warning from the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. It is worth reviewing the history of US immigration so we are not condemned to repeating its most dreadful consequences.

Our first law regarding immigration was passed in 1790 during George Washington’s presidency. It addressed naturalization by restricting citizenship to free white persons. Thus, from our beginning, our history of dealing with immigration was rooted in racism.

KNOW-NOTHINGISM

After independence, America’s borders were open for most of the rest of the18th and most of the 19th centuries. However, around 1840, with famine and revolution sweeping over Europe, millions of Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians poured into our country. The response was outrage and hatred accompanied by anti-religious bigotry. This gave rise to the Know-Nothing Party (officially the American Party) which won a number of elections in various states. While the Know-Nothing’s were upset at the large numbers of Scandinavians, the main target of their fury was the Roman Catholicism of the Germans and Irish. An example of the intensity of this occurred in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, when twenty-two people were killed and two Catholic Churches and two Catholic schools were set on fire.

By the late 1850’s the nation’s attention had shifted to the growing threat of secession. And then it was riveted on our devasting Civil War and the turbulent aftermath we know as reconstruction. The issue of immigration was not reawakened until the 1880’s when a new wave commenced, this time from Southern and Eastern Europe. In 1882 our first law restricting immigration was passed, targeting the Chinese despite the tremendous contribution Chinese laborers had made earlier to the successful construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad. Racial bigotry, to be sure.

THE IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION LEAGUE

The new wave continue unabated, and the resistance to it grew. In 1894 The Immigration Restriction League was founded by “upper class” Bostonians. Yes, Boston. The city of my birth, and my father’s. Boston, “the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God”. Or so it was then. Not so now. Ironically, the beautiful gift from France, The Statue of Liberty, opened a mere two years later, welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of others’ teeming shores. That is the America we all should hold up with pride, like the Statue holds up here torch of freedom. But that is not Trump’s idea.

The anti-immigration violence displayed in Philadelphia in the 1840’s returned. In New Orleans in 1891, a mob lynched eleven Italians who had been accused of murdering the Police Chief, David Hennessy, even though they had been tried and acquitted of the crime. They were immigrants, you see, and from Southern Europe.

As the debate over immigration intensifie, efforts at restriction took the form of laws requiring literacy tests. The first passed Congress in 1897, but was vetoed by Democrat Grover Cleveland. Passed again in 1913 and 1915 they too were vetoed by Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Finally, in 1917, another was passed which became law over Wilson’s third veto.

EUGENICS

While these struggles were taking place, the pseudoscience known as eugenics reached our shores from England. What was eugenics? A doctrine of racial superiority. And which races were designated superior? Why those who, like the proper Bostonians, traced their origins to Northern and Western Europe. Ironically, listed among the superior races were the Irish who had suffered such vicious discrimination during their first mass migration to America in the 1840’s. Eugenics was quickly embraced by many prominent and wealthy people, convinced, no doubt, of their superiority by the very prominence and wealth they enjoyed. Even the great Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, the leading progressive of his time (who would be rejected by today’s Trump-adoring Republicans) embraced eugenics. In a speech in 1905 before before an organization of mothers, TR railed against the use of birth control by upper class women as contributing to the danger of the offspring of immigrants overtaking the white population and contributing to “race suicide”. Sound familiar?

THE DILLINGHAM COMMISSION

In 1907, Republican Senator William Dillingham of Vermont was appointed head of a commission to investigate immigration. The work of the Dillingham Commission was heavily influenced by eugenics advocates. It’s voluminous report was delivered in 1911. Perhaps it is appropriate to cite two of the consequences of the belief in eugenics before recounting the Commission’s recommendations. Because eugenics embraced racial superiority, it called for the elimination of those considered to be progenitors of inferior humans. In the U.S., that led to 66,000 forced sterilaizations in 32 states. One of the great Supreme Court Justices in our history, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who was appointed to the court by TR, upheld sterilization laws. As terrible as that decision was, there were much worse consequences: American eugenicists established relationships with German colleagues in the 1930’’s who enthusiastically embraced the doctrine. So did Germany’s leader, the mass murderer Adolph Hitler, devoted to the concept of the “Master race”. Such were the consequences of dividing human beings into superior and inferior categories.

Sadly, the Dillingham Commission embraced the concept that humanity consisted of races, not nationalities or language groups. Thus, there were Polish, Magyar (now Hungarian), Croatian, Russian, Romanian, Greek, Hebrew and other races. Not nationalities. It actually concluded that there were two Italian races, Northern and Southern, with the Northern Italian race being designated Teutonic. Why? Because fifteen hundred years before the Dillingham report was issued, the Goths had invaded and conquered northern Italy. Absurd!

To the eugenics craze and the Dillingham Commission’s conclusions about race, add the return of the Ku Klux Klan in full force in 1915. It’s membership grew rapidly and, significantly, spread well beyond its southern roots. In addition to being anti-Black, it became anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. Tragically, we see it reappearing today among white supremicists such as those who “demonstrated” in Charlottesville and among whom Republican President Trump said were “good people”.

In this toxic atmosphere, like that which Trump has fostered, several pieces of restrictive legislation were introduced. One which passed the Congress was vetoed by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, the same President who had reintroduced segregation in the nation’s Capitol. In 1921, Republican President Warren Harding called the Republican Congress into special session to pass immigration legislation. Congress did, and he signed a quota-based law. Although it was restrictive, a much stronger  version was passed in 1924 and signed into law by Republican President Calvin Coolidge (in fairness, most of the minority Democrats voted for it). The legislation was named for two Republican legislators: Senator Albert Johnson of Wadshington State and Congressman David Reed of Pennsylvania. Following disagreements between the House and Senate over the quota size and the year on which to base it, the most restrictive formula of the two bills was adopted: 2% rather than 3% of those identified as foreign born, based on the 1890 rather than the 1920 census. The effect was to drastically limit overall immigration, but especially from Southern and Eastern Europe. The total available immigration was set at 165,000, less than 20% of the pre-WWI average. A more precise example of the law’s discrimination is what happened to one of the targeted groups: in the first decade of the 20th century, an annual average of 200,000 Italians entered the country. The new law limited that to 4,000.

The law’s racism also was demonstrated by the ban it imposed on most Asian immigration, including form Japan, even though Japan had been our ally only a few years before in WWI. This infuriated the Japanese who already had been insulted by the refusal of the US and the UK to include an anti-racism provision in the preamble to the League of Nations covenant at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This contributed to rising tensions between our countries. Interestingly, no restrictions were place on immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere. House sponsor Reed explained that the bill “treat(s) them as part of the fraternity of western nations”, and he rebutted criticism that immigration would decrease by asserting it would actually increase “by a very large immigration from Canada and Mexico”. Wow! Hear that Trump?

RACIAL SUPERIORITY THE DRIVING FORCE

The 1924 debate leaves no doubt that racial superiority and discrimination were driving forces behind the bill. For example, Republican Senator LeBaron Colt of R.I. argued that nationality was not an accurate description of the source of immigration and that race was better, i.e., immigrants from Eastwern and Southern Europe were not of the white race. And when Colt asked the Republican Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot ( who speaks only to God) Lodge whether the Scotch, Welsh, English and Irish were of a different race, Lodge answered, “Oh, of course”. When Republican Senator John Harreld of Oklahoma stated that immigration based on race meant there would be more Hebrew immigrants than any other race because they were scattered all over the world, Lodge assured him that the Jewish people wanted to be identified by nationality. Of course, one of the reasons for restricting immigration from Eastern Europe was that a large number of immigrants from there would have been Jews.

When these restrictions were passed, the Congress and the Presidency, like today, were controlled by the Republicans. In the debate over the legislation, phrases like “alien indigestion”, “foreign invaders”, Bolshevists”, “the scum of Europe”, were used. Today, similar hateful names are hurled: “radical Islamists”, Mexican murderers and rapists”, “terrorists”. This time the hate is being used against those from Mexico who were welcomed in the 1924 Act; at others like refugees fleeing persecution and death; and at many who simply follow a different religion: Islam. Yes, Trump and his Republicans are following the same path blazed by their party almost a century ago. For shame!

There are multi-millions of Americans who trace their ancestry to Southern and Eastern Europe. My grandparents emigrated from Italy, my wife’s from Hungary. Our extended family now includes those who trace their ancestry to other nations excluded on the basis of both the pseudo-science eugenics and sheer bigotry: Poland, Croatia, and Korea. We have many, many friends who trace their ancestry from all over the globe.And most of us must be grateful that these ancestors reached America’s then-welcoming shores before the restrictions of the Johnson-Reed Act took effect. It also is important to remember that if those restrictions had gone into effect in 1890, the year of the census on which they were based, rather than 1924, few, if any of us would be here.

I confess to great disappointment and anger when I hear those of Southern and Eastern European origin rail against today's immigrants in the same way that their ancestors were unjustly criticized and besmirched. I hope they will come to understand that the 1924 act was based on the belief that their forefathers and mothers belonged to inferior “races” and therefore, by extension, they too would be considered inferior. That racist belief was patently false. Yet today, Trump and his followers are making the same baseless charges. They have no more truth today than they did in 1924. I pray they reject these awful exhortations, as these immigrants are motivated by the same promise of America as were their own ancestors.

Let us, therefore, heed Santayana, study our past, and thus avoid repeating the awful, tragic, bigotry that was a huge part of our attitude toward immigrants. Let us instead be inspired by France’s gift to us which has, for over a century and a quarter, been the symbol of America.

*The song GOD BLESS AMERICA prays that God will “stand beside her and guide her..”. It was written by Irving Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant who came to our shores in 1893, If the Johnson-Reed act had been in effect in 1890 rather than 1924, Berlin, and so many others, would never have been admitted and we would have been the poorer for it.

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page

 

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

RSNRSN