Nothing Changes
There is a reason that the First Amendment to the US Constitution deals with freedom of religion, and religious tests are specifically outlawed for any office. Religion was the first form the hatred of “other” took in the United States.
Kevin Hayden at American Street notes that things have gotten ugly in the immigration debate, but this is a very old problem
What became the American Party started in 1843 in New York. It was better known as the “know nothing movement,” because the people involved often said: “I know nothing about it.” It was a virulent reaction to new immigrants and they wanted the laws changed to give preference to those born in the US.
A much of the anger/fear/resentment was directed towards the new immigrants because a lot of them were Catholic.
This problem came to a head in one of the nastiest campaigns ever waged [including the efforts of Atwater and Rove]: the Presidential election of 1884 between the Democrat, Grover Cleveland and the Republican, James Blaine.
While the election also featured Mugwumps, Prohibition, and the first full campaign by a woman, it was the illegitimate child, and rampant corruption that is best remembered.
In New York at a campaign rally for Blaine, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Dickinson Burchard¹ made this statement: “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”
For some reason the Irish Catholics in New York City decided to vote, and Grover Cleveland won New York and the Presidency by a little more than a thousand votes.
Coming forwarded into the 20th century you have William J. Simmons and the second Klan that was reborn in 1915 in Georgia.
To the racism of the first iteration, the second Klan added religion and ethnicity. If you weren’t a WASP, you had no value and weren’t really an “American.”
This is stuff is like dandelions – if you don’t get all of the root, it just pops up somewhere else.
1. The Rev. Dr. Burchard was a cousin of the Democratic Congressman from Wisconsin also named Samuel Dickinson Burchard. They are distant relatives of mine and there are more damn Samuel Dickinson Burchards and Seneca Barton Burchards than should ever be allowed in my family tree. Oh, President Cleveland invited the Rev. to the White House, and he went.
23 comments
Quite honestly I’ve never understood the fear and loathing of Catholics, but then again, I never saw the point in getting involved in Religious Wars. I have better things to do with my time.
On a separate note, those upstarts can tell me I’m not really an American, but since my mother’s family came to this country in the 1600’s and we’ve been helping to build this country (or tear it down depending on which ancestor we’re referencing) a helluva lot longer than they have, they can just stfu.
The Burchard branch were late comers from Massachusetts. My oldest roots in this country were Dutch and Palatine German who arrived in the Mohawk Valley of New York when it was still called New Holland. They had had all of the religious conflict anyone ever needed and no churches were built in the Mohawk Valley until after the Revolution, most of the Baptist versions by Burchards.
It’s xenophobia, plain and simple. All you need are a few fast talkers to blame all the world’s problems on someone else.
That bridge didn’t fall because it wasn’t properly maintained, it was because of a plot by “them” to get “us.” You can’t get a job because “they” are taking “your” job, not that the government made it easy, convenient and cheap to outsource your job.
Late as always to discover good things, I just finished reading What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank. He explains the conservative “revolution” (in Kansas at least, though I believe it applies more broadly) as the result of the willful redirection of ordinary citizens’ righteous anger toward things that have nothing to do with the actual causes (mostly economic) of their discontent, things that are instead hot-button social-conservative issues, a redirection perpetrated by people who stand to benefit in money and power from the results of their hate- and fear-mongering.
That “plot by ‘them’ to get ‘us'” seems to be an always reusable tool when the wealthy look for ways to persuade the nonwealthy to vote against their own economic interests. Xenophobia, racism, religious bigotry, anti-gay bigotry and hatred of the “liberal elite” are really all the same thing, and they’re really all misguided, and they will destroy us if we do not successfully combat these deliberately seeded wrongheaded notions.
Funny you should mention this. Pat Buchanan has offered up another reason why white people should be very scared about the invasion of brown people and all the black people living in America. His article in the New Hampshire Union Leader wonders why studies are done of black-on-black crime, and no one ever mentions all the horrific, frightening black-on-white crime and violence.
His conclusion?
Somehow, these two paragraphs demonstrate where the racism really is — and it’s not where he says it is.
Gee, Steve, you didn’t think they would admit that the corporations are importing illegals to replace American workers and out-sourcing to keep workers “in their place.” I notice no one ever talks about the buses that pick up these undocumented people and take them to Iowa and the Carolinas. No news about the vans with Brazilians that showed up on the Florida Panhandle after Katrina. They would have us believe that Guatemalans work up one day and decided to steal a job hauling roofing tiles to new houses in Santa Rosa Beach. Follow the money – who benefits, who makes the big bucks?
The gated communities are paying Americans to do their landscaping. No one is hiring Americans to be maids and nannies.
The workers are getting screwed, and the “other” are blamed so the workers don’t figure out who’s really abusing them.
Аня, there are no hard crime statistics in existence prior to 1970, and since that time they have been spotty. Every thing prior to that time is a guess. I was part of the reporting when I was in law enforcement and was a bit shocked when I found that out. In the reviewed studies all of the pre-1970 stuff was labeled “estimate.”
There is not systematic reporting of the racial identity of victims or suspects in any of the crime reports. I filled out the paperwork and the boxes for that information don’t exist. That information would have to be derived from scanning the individual crime reports.
The only important statistic that you need for crime prevention is the number of males between 15 and 45. That is the group that commits almost all crime. If the group increases [Baby Boom], crime increases. Look at the numbers – crime started to decline in 1992 when the Boomers started to hit 46. You want to reduce crime – throw all of the males between 15 and 45 in jail.
Another point to know is that the higher your economic level the more likely you are to report crime. Poor people don’t have insurance, so there’s no point in filing a police report for a burglary or robbery. Poor people don’t trust the police, so there is no point in asking the police for help.
Another point is that when businesses rip off poor people, Pat Buchanan doesn’t think it’s a crime.
Apparently, Mr. Buchanan never had to fill out a police report. But then, neither has most of his audience.
The race information is on the individual crime report, but when you consolidate those reports to send to the state police and FBI, you are providing the numbers for classifications of crime, Your department is classified as rural, suburban, small town, city, or major city. Crimes are broken down as property, violence, drugs, sex, etc. The categories come from the Feds and rarely match the laws of the state, so they aren’t uniform no matter what the name of the report is.
It’s a bit odd to be pushing that in New Hampshire. The New Hampshire State Police came to the Regional Criminal Justice Training Center in Rochester, New York for minority relations training [I was in the class] and two of the officers said they had never actually met anyone from a minority before the class, because there were no minorities living in their area of New Hampshire unless you count the French Canadians.
buchanan is probably reading the hate sites that proliferate all over the web. if you google “black on white crime” you get a dogpile of them, all claiming that black on white crime is 50 or 100 times worse than white on black crime. as if larger white on black crime numbers would be something to be proud of. ugh.
looks like most violent crimes are intra-, rather than inter-racial.
New Hampshire’s relative lack of diversity as never stopped the Union Leader from trying to stir the pot, and Buchanan’s column is syndicated nationally.
When I first moved to NH back in 1984, I would have been hard pressed to find a person of color anywhere other than Nashua, a southern tier city. Things have changed over time. My previously 99.9% white apartment complex has become a rainbow: Black, Hispanic, and Asian tenants have joined the mix in significant numbers.
Manchester, the state’s largest city and the city in which the Union Leader is published, has become host to a large number of Somali immigrants, all of whom are black, and many of whom are Muslim. The Union Leader has been doing it’s best to drive them out, and Buchanan’s column is just the latest salvo in it’s ongoing battle using the usual reactionary/conservative fear-mongering tactics which we have come to know and love.
The latest cause célèbre is the New Jersey murders that involved undocumented immigrants which is a bit inconvenient as it would appear to be Hispanic on Black violence, as do most police brutality cases in Miami.
Hipparchia the majority of murders involve people who know each other [my favorite investigator used to say that marriage is the number one cause of murder in the US], which is the reason solving serial murders takes so long, while most murders are resolved quickly. Most violent crimes follow the same pattern, i.e. suspects and victims know each other, which in the US normally means they are in the same ethic group.
I took the class in the 1970’s Аня, so that would follow my experience. The Union Leader is often a parody of itself on some of it’s crusades. In the old days when it was the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour they would have a member of their round table from the Union Leader and the input was always “interesting.”
Having Muslims in the neighborhood that people meet on a daily basis makes it difficult to whip up fear. People have a hard time fearing convenience store clerks and plumbers.
the way i heard it: husbands and boyfirends are a significant cause of death for women.
i’ve spent about half my life living or working in the company of people who are some color other than me. i recently moved to a very white neighborhood and i still haven’t quite adjusted to the paleness all around me.
Actually, murder is the high point among crimes committed by women. A woman in is much more like to be in prison for murder in New York than any other non-drug crime, but you are still talking about very small numbers for anything other than drugs.
I’m talking about felonies only.
As a military brat who then went to college and into the military, I was an “outsider” most of my life.
the odd part, or the part i didn’t expect maybe, is that i feel more like an outsider here in “my own ethnic group” than i did in more colorful places.
[i hear dandelion tea is supposed to be good for you]
The meaning of “outsider” changes with the group, race is only the most obvious parameter. Within a racial group other factors are used, just as absurd.
[Dandelion wine isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever drunk.]
axis of evil: ouzo, nyquil, sweet tea. worse than moonshine, retsina, or amoxicillin. i’ve never had dandelion wine, so i don’t really know where to rank that one. not sure i’ve ever had dandelion tea either, now that i think about it.
true about outsiders.
I didn’t mind real ouzo in Greece which is served in small glasses with water, but I’m not overly fond of liquorice. I preferred to the retsina you bought as you climbed to the Acropolis.
i am overly not-fond of licorice, vastly preferring the taste of pine tar, given a choice between the two. this might be a result of a childhood spent being brainwashed by euell gibbons: ever eat a pine tree? many parts are edible. apparently this brainwashing was only partly successful: i would so rather chew on pine tar than eat grape-nuts.
probably i wouldn’t mind a lot of things if i were really sitting in greece, soaking up real greek sunshine and eating real greek food. if i ever get there, i’ll probably try the ouzo.
If you are planning to go there’s less now than when I was flying out of Glyfada. Pollution, wildfires. and the building for the Olympics has really messed things up.
made me google, dammit. that word looks welsh, not greek. elegant and stylish, huh?
unfortunately, the industry that cares only about the health of its ceos’ bank accounts has taken all my money, without giving me back any of my health, thus insuring that the only trips i’ll be taking to somewhereotherthanhere in the foreseeable future will be via google earth.
Sorry, I should have said suburban Athens. We flew out of the Athenae airport which like Rhein-Main was dual military/civilian use at the time of the colonels.
no apology needed. i like googling.