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The fault, dear Americans, is not in our leaders, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Dear DUers, some history and some observations about immigration, prohibition, the KKK, and Catholicism, if you please:
Illegal immigration wasn't actually criminalized until 1929 when prohibitionists and anti-Asians made laws criminalizing Mexicans crossing the border illegally; giving preferential treatment to white, Anglo-Saxon Europeans, much like today.
That edict has become the tool that this republican administration is using to dehumanize ALL immigrants in America as the federal government's new Stasi-like state security service and secret police which has no apparent limits on the brutality with which the mercenary-like new, mostly white recruits hired with the appeal to "defend your culture," as if we were still back in the 1920s and the KKK was the driving force in our politics again.
...excerpt from The Klan and The Catholics
09.28.16 | Aidan Lee
Alfred E. Smith was the first American Catholic to run for presidential office when he secured the Democratic nomination in 1928. A strong opponent of prohibition, Smith doubted that it could be effectively enforced and feared it might lead to an erosion of faith in the rule of law. As a result, he advocated for the law’s repeal. But many Americans supported it and in addition to his Irish heritage, New York background, and Catholic faith, many voters found him off-putting. Smith ended up losing–badly–to Herbert Hoover, who took 58.2 percent of the vote and all but 8 of the 48 states. Most painful of all for Smith, however, was the discovery that his home state of New York hadn’t voted in his favor.
The cultural context of the 1928 election helps us understand why Smith lost so badly. Rewind to 1924, when the Ku Klux Klan was at its height in American politics. The Klan perceived the waves of new immigrants from predominantly-Catholic countries like Ireland and Italy as a “threat” to their vision of America as an Anglo-Protestant nation. As a result, the Democratic Party had two distinct groups at their nominating convention in 1924: the “rural wing” led by KKK-endorsed William Gibbs McAdoo, and the new, immigrant, “urban wing” led by Al Smith. These sides clashed head-on at the convention, but the party ended up with the dark-horse candidate, John W. Davis, who promptly lost to Calvin Coolidge.
Robert A. Slayton, a professor of American history at Chapman University and author of Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith, characterizes 1920s America as a country caught in a cultural civil war between “small-town and big-city America.” Part of this culture war was the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Ratified in 1919, it was the culmination of decades of work by activists in what is now known as the Third Wave of the Temperance movement.
Groups like the Anti-Saloon League, which drew support from Protestant denominations, claimed that consumption of alcohol led to moral corruption, criminal behavior, and domestic violence. But is was more than that – for many, the stance on Prohibition was tied to cultural, religious, and domestic identity. Many Protestant Americans thought of Catholic immigrants, who congregated in cities and had a less rigid relationship to alcohol, as cultural and religious ‘others.’ They quickly became targets of the temperance movement.
https://backstoryradio.org/blog/the-klan-and-the-catholics/
Alfred E. Smith was the first American Catholic to run for presidential office when he secured the Democratic nomination in 1928. A strong opponent of prohibition, Smith doubted that it could be effectively enforced and feared it might lead to an erosion of faith in the rule of law. As a result, he advocated for the law’s repeal. But many Americans supported it and in addition to his Irish heritage, New York background, and Catholic faith, many voters found him off-putting. Smith ended up losing–badly–to Herbert Hoover, who took 58.2 percent of the vote and all but 8 of the 48 states. Most painful of all for Smith, however, was the discovery that his home state of New York hadn’t voted in his favor.
The cultural context of the 1928 election helps us understand why Smith lost so badly. Rewind to 1924, when the Ku Klux Klan was at its height in American politics. The Klan perceived the waves of new immigrants from predominantly-Catholic countries like Ireland and Italy as a “threat” to their vision of America as an Anglo-Protestant nation. As a result, the Democratic Party had two distinct groups at their nominating convention in 1924: the “rural wing” led by KKK-endorsed William Gibbs McAdoo, and the new, immigrant, “urban wing” led by Al Smith. These sides clashed head-on at the convention, but the party ended up with the dark-horse candidate, John W. Davis, who promptly lost to Calvin Coolidge.
Robert A. Slayton, a professor of American history at Chapman University and author of Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith, characterizes 1920s America as a country caught in a cultural civil war between “small-town and big-city America.” Part of this culture war was the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Ratified in 1919, it was the culmination of decades of work by activists in what is now known as the Third Wave of the Temperance movement.
Groups like the Anti-Saloon League, which drew support from Protestant denominations, claimed that consumption of alcohol led to moral corruption, criminal behavior, and domestic violence. But is was more than that – for many, the stance on Prohibition was tied to cultural, religious, and domestic identity. Many Protestant Americans thought of Catholic immigrants, who congregated in cities and had a less rigid relationship to alcohol, as cultural and religious ‘others.’ They quickly became targets of the temperance movement.
https://backstoryradio.org/blog/the-klan-and-the-catholics/
It's interesting that the KKK back then virulently opposed the immigration of Europeans, mostly because they were Protestants and the favored influx of the millions of Europeans were mostly Catholics; and they were white and able to vote.
Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, eastern Europe, French Canada, and southern Germany had poured into the country by the millions in the previous decades, competing with native-born American workers for jobs and driving down wages. Worse for the Klan was that immigrants voted, particularly in the big cities where they supposedly supported crooked political machines, most prominently New York City’s notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall. The Klan also associated immigrants with drunkenness and saloons (in an era of Prohibition), as well as with being un-American because of their languages, foods, and customs.
The great majority of Klan members were Protestants who feared Catholics because they were convinced the average Catholic was completely under the thumb of his or her parish priest or (worse) a foreign, authoritarian Church hierarchy led by the pope. “Most Klansmen,” noted historian David Chalmers, “did not believe that they were opposing the Catholic because of his religion but because hierarchical control from Rome prevented his assimilation.” Or as Alabama’s U.S. Senator J. Thomas Heflin put it: “God has raised up this great patriotic organization [the Klan] to unmask popery.”
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-ku-klux-klan-in-the-1920s
The great majority of Klan members were Protestants who feared Catholics because they were convinced the average Catholic was completely under the thumb of his or her parish priest or (worse) a foreign, authoritarian Church hierarchy led by the pope. “Most Klansmen,” noted historian David Chalmers, “did not believe that they were opposing the Catholic because of his religion but because hierarchical control from Rome prevented his assimilation.” Or as Alabama’s U.S. Senator J. Thomas Heflin put it: “God has raised up this great patriotic organization [the Klan] to unmask popery.”
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-ku-klux-klan-in-the-1920s
Racists, bigots, and demagogues - who get the most attention and the most support in America for their views and campaigns against 'illegal' immigrants - have become just fine with the white Anglo-Saxons who have become a large part of the fabric of America and their votes; havong turned the majority of their hatred, fears, and self-interest against Mexicans and Latin Americans voting in our elections and competing for jobs, and not just the ones who run afoul of our immigration laws, as evidenced by the republican administration's military campaign waged against entire communities.
Americans haven't come up with a more moral or even a credible economic justification for our attitudes against people migrating to our country, and in so many ways, our criminalization of a human need or desire to migrate to opportunity, or away from danger is at odds with the stories we tell ourselves about the goodness of our people and the justness of our society.
We have a mob action against immigrants today, sanctioned and exercised by the federal government in Americans name. We don't need defense against the people we work and live among everyday; brought to fear our neighbors because of politicians' opportunistic lies behind the brutality they and the courts allow.
Many of those in the U.S. who support criminalizing all migrants who run afoul of our immigration laws, hide antipathies behind what are vastly unfounded fears and outright lies that our politicians have taught Americans to use when they mob up against migrants in our legislatures and railroad them out of the country in Potemkin, Kafka-like hearings with 'administrative' judges meting out criminal penalties of punishment against mostly working people and their families like they're terrorists.
If you're encouraging or enabling the criminalization of all migrants that run afoul of our immigration laws, you're advantaging all of that punitive action by our government on top of LIES politicians have revived from our nation's racist past to curry the favor of Americans fearful of and hateful toward mostly Mexicans, Latin Americans, and Asians, perpetuateing and expanding that prevaricating racism across the country.
It's no different than the way politicians a century ago exploited Americans' fears about people immigrating to this country as an extension of their own political and religious zeal; to consolidate political power for their own narrow and partisan interests.
Why won't our politicians tell us the truth? Why do so many in our own party continue to politic and legislate on top of these lies, even as we watch the unconscionable treatment of so many working people and their families?
We need to demand our politicians tell us the truth about immigrants in America, and act on that, instead of encouraging and allowing the brutal treatment and punishment of migrants; all for fealty to our politicians' projections, and their cowardice toward confronting the racists and bigots in society who have cowed so many of us for centuries with their absolute bullshit.
We can see the ignorant past has become prolouge. The fault, dear Americans, is not in our leaders, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.*
