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History
truth is freedom
A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a
tree without roots
Marcus Garvey
tree without roots
Marcus Garvey
september 20, 2018
what use to be
history you should know
Louis Dalrymple’s The High Tide of Immigration-A National Menace was published in Judge Magazine on August 22, 1903.
america's greatest traitors of 20th century
'Not just in the US': amateur historian highlights Canada's forgotten racism
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Charles Daniels’ case reported in the Albertan in 1914. His story has re-emerged amid belated recognition of Canada’s past injustices. Photograph: Handout
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Viola Desmond, an early Canadian civil rights activist. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
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An amateur historian in Canada has highlighted a forgotten story of racial injustice, and one of the country’s earliest segregation lawsuits, in hopes of bringing recognition to civil rights pioneers.
In 1914, Charles Daniels bought a pair of tickets to see King Lear at Calgary’s Sherman Grand Theatre, but when he attempted to take his orchestra-level seat, he was told by ushers to move up to the balcony level, where other black patrons were seated.
Theatre staff told Daniels that his presence made the white patrons uncomfortable. Daniels protested – refused offers of a refund, and left.
“The fact that this happened in 1914, in Calgary, Alberta, blew my mind. It broke the whole narrative that these kind of things only happen in the United States,” said Bashir Mohamed, a civil servant who has been scouring the provincial archives in Edmonton for the last two years, and wrote about Daniels’s case in an essay for the Sprawl, a Calgary journalism site.
Daniels’s story has re-emerged amid a belated recognition across Canada of past injustices that have been largely absent from the national conversation on race.
At the time, the incident at the theatre was widely covered in local papers, with one running the headline: “CALGARY ‘NIGGER’ KICKS UP FUSS — Wants to Attend Theatre With ‘White Folks’ But Management Says No.”
Daniels retained a lawyer, sued the theatre over its policy of segregation – and won the case.
He was awarded $1,000, worth more than $17,000 USD today. During the trial he had said: “I think the humiliation is worth that amount.”
Mohamed said he had started research the history of black Canadians after reading an online commentator claiming that Canada does not have the same history of racial discrimination as the US. “When I was going through school, I never learned about this black history. But I always assumed there was something there,” he said.
Since then he has documented Canada’s racist place-names, the extensive presence of the Ku Klux Klan in western Canada, the effects of segregation and the fights of early – but largely forgotten – civil rights activists.
“I think it’s very important work… because there isn’t as much written about people of African descent within Alberta,” Jennifer Kelly, a University of Alberta education professor, told the CBC.
Daniel’s story has been told before, over the years and in different publications. But few Canadians are aware of the pioneering theatregoer, whose successful fight against discrimination predated the broader civil rights movement by decades.
“We have photos of Martin Luther King being arrested. We have mugshots. We have photos of Rosa Parks sitting on a bus. We have photos of her mugshot too,” he said.
But in Canada, the victims of racism were often seen as secondary to the story, he said: in Daniels’ case, newspaper reporters spoke with theatre management, but never Daniels. No images of Daniels were ever published.
“We don’t see photos of the black-only sections of the theatre. We don’t see photos of black patients being denied care, even know we know all those things happened,” said Mohamed. “Because these photos don’t exist, it’s hard to see these things as real that affected real people.”
Other civil rights activists are only recently gaining mainstream recognition in Canada. Viola Desmond, a black woman who refused to leave a whites-only area of a movie theatre in 1946, is to become the first Canadian-born woman to appear on the country’s $10 bill.
Amid a broader debate about Canada’s colonial heritage, some cities have removed of now-controversial historical figures, such as John A Macdonald, the country’s first prime minister and a notorious racist.
“There’s been this resurgence across Canada and the United States of people reclaiming their history,” said Mohamed, pointing out that Edmonton’s Oliver neighbourhood is named after Frank Oliver, the former federal minister who championed policies barring black immigration to Canada and successfully lobbied for the forced removal First Nations from their treaty lands.
“It’s led to really critical discussions of who we celebrate. And who we’ve forgotten.”
In 1914, Charles Daniels bought a pair of tickets to see King Lear at Calgary’s Sherman Grand Theatre, but when he attempted to take his orchestra-level seat, he was told by ushers to move up to the balcony level, where other black patrons were seated.
Theatre staff told Daniels that his presence made the white patrons uncomfortable. Daniels protested – refused offers of a refund, and left.
“The fact that this happened in 1914, in Calgary, Alberta, blew my mind. It broke the whole narrative that these kind of things only happen in the United States,” said Bashir Mohamed, a civil servant who has been scouring the provincial archives in Edmonton for the last two years, and wrote about Daniels’s case in an essay for the Sprawl, a Calgary journalism site.
Daniels’s story has re-emerged amid a belated recognition across Canada of past injustices that have been largely absent from the national conversation on race.
At the time, the incident at the theatre was widely covered in local papers, with one running the headline: “CALGARY ‘NIGGER’ KICKS UP FUSS — Wants to Attend Theatre With ‘White Folks’ But Management Says No.”
Daniels retained a lawyer, sued the theatre over its policy of segregation – and won the case.
He was awarded $1,000, worth more than $17,000 USD today. During the trial he had said: “I think the humiliation is worth that amount.”
Mohamed said he had started research the history of black Canadians after reading an online commentator claiming that Canada does not have the same history of racial discrimination as the US. “When I was going through school, I never learned about this black history. But I always assumed there was something there,” he said.
Since then he has documented Canada’s racist place-names, the extensive presence of the Ku Klux Klan in western Canada, the effects of segregation and the fights of early – but largely forgotten – civil rights activists.
“I think it’s very important work… because there isn’t as much written about people of African descent within Alberta,” Jennifer Kelly, a University of Alberta education professor, told the CBC.
Daniel’s story has been told before, over the years and in different publications. But few Canadians are aware of the pioneering theatregoer, whose successful fight against discrimination predated the broader civil rights movement by decades.
“We have photos of Martin Luther King being arrested. We have mugshots. We have photos of Rosa Parks sitting on a bus. We have photos of her mugshot too,” he said.
But in Canada, the victims of racism were often seen as secondary to the story, he said: in Daniels’ case, newspaper reporters spoke with theatre management, but never Daniels. No images of Daniels were ever published.
“We don’t see photos of the black-only sections of the theatre. We don’t see photos of black patients being denied care, even know we know all those things happened,” said Mohamed. “Because these photos don’t exist, it’s hard to see these things as real that affected real people.”
Other civil rights activists are only recently gaining mainstream recognition in Canada. Viola Desmond, a black woman who refused to leave a whites-only area of a movie theatre in 1946, is to become the first Canadian-born woman to appear on the country’s $10 bill.
Amid a broader debate about Canada’s colonial heritage, some cities have removed of now-controversial historical figures, such as John A Macdonald, the country’s first prime minister and a notorious racist.
“There’s been this resurgence across Canada and the United States of people reclaiming their history,” said Mohamed, pointing out that Edmonton’s Oliver neighbourhood is named after Frank Oliver, the former federal minister who championed policies barring black immigration to Canada and successfully lobbied for the forced removal First Nations from their treaty lands.
“It’s led to really critical discussions of who we celebrate. And who we’ve forgotten.”
Teachers Were the Real Heroes of School Desegregation
Often overlooked in histories of school desegregation are the teachers.
By Michael Gengler / History News Network - alternet
August 27, 2018, 9:05 AM GMT
“There was not a manual, and there was not anything other than let’s try this, and with the overriding principle that these young people should not have to pay too big a price both in terms of their academic learning, in terms of their safety, by going through this process, because they didn’t volunteer for it either. And we’re all in it, in that sense. And that was the beauty of it, I mean, there were so many beautiful moments, but a lot of ugly stuff.”– Shelton Boyles, a former English teacher, Gainesville, Florida
Often overlooked in histories of school desegregation are the teachers. Most were products of segregated colleges. Nothing in their training prepared them to teach integrated classes. After the lawyers and the courts had their say, the teachers had to make desegregation work. Failure was not an option. We have public schools in the South today because of their courage and tenacity.
School desegregation in the South proceeded in two stages. The Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (two opinions, 1954 and 1955), decreed that each segregated school district must change to a “racially nondiscriminatory school system.” The lower courts quickly decided that test was satisfied if black students could choose to transfer from their historically black schools to white schools. The South’s dual system of white and black schools remained in place.
I graduated from the white Gainesville High School in Florida in 1962, two years before the first blacks entered white schools there. My research of the Gainesville experience with desegregation has informed this article.
During the “freedom of choice” era of desegregation, only a minority of black students chose to transfer to white schools. They were expected to conform to the white schools’ expectations. Many of those students were middle class and college bound. Curricula, clubs, student government, and other activities in the white schools did not change.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1968 persuaded the Supreme Court that the South’s dual school system, even with freedom of choice, was not a “racially nondiscriminatory school system.” The black schools would have to be integrated or closed. In Florida, virtually all of the black high schools were closed. In Gainesville, the entire student body of Lincoln High School struck for 11 days in 1969 to protest its closing.
With full desegregation, teachers had to engage disaffected students of both races. African American teachers were expected not only to continue their normal instructional roles but also to help black students accommodate to desegregation. Frequently, that role included calming student disturbances. White teachers had to begin working with their new black students from the point at which segregation had left those students academically.
Unencumbered by reforms such as No Child Left Behind, teachers in the newly integrated classrooms could innovate. At Gainesville High, two white and one black teachers developed a three-hour block course called “Man and His Environment.” The course satisfied English, science and social studies requirements. The class included a representative group of students of both races and differing academic abilities. In other classes, many teachers took time out for students to tell something of their personal lives. Coaches fielded integrated sports teams. Principals found ways to get students of both races to work together on projects.
Masked by segregation, reading deficits were a major problem. Reading skills were needed not just for English classes but for all other subjects, even math. At the high school level, teachers were not expected to teach reading. However, in 1970, ten Gainesville High teachers enrolled in a junior college course for problem readers, to learn how to address their students’ reading issues. Curricula had to be revised to accommodate varying reading skills. Every teacher and every school were affected by student reading deficits.
Principal and football coach were the two most important positions in the high schools. In Gainesville, two new high schools opened in 1970. At the east side school, the last principal of Lincoln High School, a black, became principal and a white became football coach. On the more affluent, white west side, the new school’s principal was white and Lincoln’s last football coach took over the athletic program. At Lincoln, he fed his players Kentucky Fried Chicken before games. Speaking to a friend about his posting to the west side, he commented, “These kids, they ain’t going to be able to play football off of salads.” But he molded a successful program. A white player says the teams played all the harder for him, to protect him from the occasional racist sideline taunts.
Although the schools increased the numbers of deans who enforced discipline, at times the teachers had to be first responders. One white GHS English teacher recalls breaking up a fight in class between a white boy and a black boy. “I got right down on the floor in my little dress and high heels and I rolled around with them. I got them apart.”
Public education in Florida had been tarnished by the antics of Republican Governor Claude Kirk. Recruiting black teachers, already difficult, was made more so because of Kirk. The school district sent out a recruiting team of a white teacher and a black teacher to visit out-of-town colleges. When passing through Taylor County, Florida, the teacher who was not driving would get down on the floor of the car to avoid potentially hostile attention.
After the 1969-70 and 1970-71 school years, each of the principals of Gainesville High resigned. For 1971-72, 30-year-old Dan Boyd took over. The school board told him that if he resigned, there would be no other position for him in the county school system. Although without special training in racial matters, Boyd remained principal for 24 years. He did not lead from his desk. He worked out with the athletes in the weight room, traveled with the football team, and was visible on campus. A female student, remembering Boyd’s tight jeans, says all the girls had crushes on him.
Despite serious outbreaks of violence in 1970, the Gainesville schools slowly but steadily regained educational equilibrium. However, student engagement continues to be a key problem facing public schools. We can still learn from both white and black educators who taught through the desegregation years.
Often overlooked in histories of school desegregation are the teachers. Most were products of segregated colleges. Nothing in their training prepared them to teach integrated classes. After the lawyers and the courts had their say, the teachers had to make desegregation work. Failure was not an option. We have public schools in the South today because of their courage and tenacity.
School desegregation in the South proceeded in two stages. The Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (two opinions, 1954 and 1955), decreed that each segregated school district must change to a “racially nondiscriminatory school system.” The lower courts quickly decided that test was satisfied if black students could choose to transfer from their historically black schools to white schools. The South’s dual system of white and black schools remained in place.
I graduated from the white Gainesville High School in Florida in 1962, two years before the first blacks entered white schools there. My research of the Gainesville experience with desegregation has informed this article.
During the “freedom of choice” era of desegregation, only a minority of black students chose to transfer to white schools. They were expected to conform to the white schools’ expectations. Many of those students were middle class and college bound. Curricula, clubs, student government, and other activities in the white schools did not change.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1968 persuaded the Supreme Court that the South’s dual school system, even with freedom of choice, was not a “racially nondiscriminatory school system.” The black schools would have to be integrated or closed. In Florida, virtually all of the black high schools were closed. In Gainesville, the entire student body of Lincoln High School struck for 11 days in 1969 to protest its closing.
With full desegregation, teachers had to engage disaffected students of both races. African American teachers were expected not only to continue their normal instructional roles but also to help black students accommodate to desegregation. Frequently, that role included calming student disturbances. White teachers had to begin working with their new black students from the point at which segregation had left those students academically.
Unencumbered by reforms such as No Child Left Behind, teachers in the newly integrated classrooms could innovate. At Gainesville High, two white and one black teachers developed a three-hour block course called “Man and His Environment.” The course satisfied English, science and social studies requirements. The class included a representative group of students of both races and differing academic abilities. In other classes, many teachers took time out for students to tell something of their personal lives. Coaches fielded integrated sports teams. Principals found ways to get students of both races to work together on projects.
Masked by segregation, reading deficits were a major problem. Reading skills were needed not just for English classes but for all other subjects, even math. At the high school level, teachers were not expected to teach reading. However, in 1970, ten Gainesville High teachers enrolled in a junior college course for problem readers, to learn how to address their students’ reading issues. Curricula had to be revised to accommodate varying reading skills. Every teacher and every school were affected by student reading deficits.
Principal and football coach were the two most important positions in the high schools. In Gainesville, two new high schools opened in 1970. At the east side school, the last principal of Lincoln High School, a black, became principal and a white became football coach. On the more affluent, white west side, the new school’s principal was white and Lincoln’s last football coach took over the athletic program. At Lincoln, he fed his players Kentucky Fried Chicken before games. Speaking to a friend about his posting to the west side, he commented, “These kids, they ain’t going to be able to play football off of salads.” But he molded a successful program. A white player says the teams played all the harder for him, to protect him from the occasional racist sideline taunts.
Although the schools increased the numbers of deans who enforced discipline, at times the teachers had to be first responders. One white GHS English teacher recalls breaking up a fight in class between a white boy and a black boy. “I got right down on the floor in my little dress and high heels and I rolled around with them. I got them apart.”
Public education in Florida had been tarnished by the antics of Republican Governor Claude Kirk. Recruiting black teachers, already difficult, was made more so because of Kirk. The school district sent out a recruiting team of a white teacher and a black teacher to visit out-of-town colleges. When passing through Taylor County, Florida, the teacher who was not driving would get down on the floor of the car to avoid potentially hostile attention.
After the 1969-70 and 1970-71 school years, each of the principals of Gainesville High resigned. For 1971-72, 30-year-old Dan Boyd took over. The school board told him that if he resigned, there would be no other position for him in the county school system. Although without special training in racial matters, Boyd remained principal for 24 years. He did not lead from his desk. He worked out with the athletes in the weight room, traveled with the football team, and was visible on campus. A female student, remembering Boyd’s tight jeans, says all the girls had crushes on him.
Despite serious outbreaks of violence in 1970, the Gainesville schools slowly but steadily regained educational equilibrium. However, student engagement continues to be a key problem facing public schools. We can still learn from both white and black educators who taught through the desegregation years.
The Colonial Roots of Gun Culture
The origins of the U.S. gun obsession lie in the violent dispossession of Native Americans.
BY ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ - in these times
In the summer of 1970, while I was living and organizing in New Orleans with a women’s study-action group, we became caught up in a current of repression and paranoia. After a week of heavy police surveillance, we began receiving telephone calls from a man claiming to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The man threatened to burn down our building, and, of course, we didn’t trust the police, so we did not report it. Instead, we decided to arm ourselves. We saw it as a practical step, not a political act, something we needed for self-defense in order to continue working, not at all embracing armed struggle. In reality, once armed, our mindsets changed to match the new reality.
Gun-love can be akin to non-chemical addictions like gambling or hoarding, either of which can have devastating effects, but murder, suicide, accidental death and mass shootings result only from guns. While nearly anything may be used to kill, only the gun is created for the specific purpose of killing a living creature. The sheer numbers of guns in circulation, and the loosening of regulations on handguns especially, facilitate deadly spur-of-the-moment reflex acts.
Seventy-four percent of gun owners in the United States are male, and 82 percent of gun owners are white. The top reason U.S. Americans give for owning a gun is for protection. What are the majority of white men so afraid of?
Instead of dismissing the Second Amendment as antiquated and irrelevant, or as not actually meaning what it says, understanding the original purpose of the Second Amendment is key to understanding gun culture, and possibly the key to a new consciousness about the continuing effects of settler-colonialism and white nationalism.
One argument that runs through historical accounts of the thinking behind the Second Amendment is idealizing Anglo settler-farmers as fiercely independent and rightly fearing Big Brother government, insisting on settlers’ right to overthrow oppressive regimes. But, what colonists considered oppressive was any restriction put on them in regard to obtaining land. In the instances of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, the War of Independence itself, and many cases in between, the settlers’ complaint was the refusal of the British colonial authorities to allow them to seize Native land peripheral to the colonies.
Taking land by force was not an accidental or spontaneous project or the work of a few rogue characters. Male colonial settlers had long formed militias for the purpose of raiding and razing Indigenous communities and seizing their lands and resources, and the Native communities fought back. Virginia, the first colony, forbade any man to travel unless he was “well armed.” In 1658, the colony ordered every settler home to have a functioning firearm, and later even provided government loans for those who could not afford to buy a weapon.
These types of laws stayed on the books of the earliest colonies and were created in new colonies as they were founded. The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined these rights and obligations as constitutional law: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Second Amendment thus reflects this dependence on individual armed men to take and retain land.
The continuing significance of that “freedom” specified in the Bill of Rights reveals the settler-colonialist cultural roots of the United States that appear even in the present as a sacred right. Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities and nations. With the expansion of plantation agriculture, by the late 1600s they were also used as “slave patrols,” forming the basis of the U.S. police culture after emancipation.
That is the way of settler-colonialism, and that is the way of the gun—to kill off and control enemies. Violence perpetrated by armed settlers, even genocide, were not absent in the other British settler-colonies—Australia, Canada and New Zealand—but the people of those polities never declared the gun a God-given right. And the people of the other Anglo settler-colonies did not have economies, governments and social orders based on the enslavement of other human beings. The United States is indeed “exceptional.”
Gun-love can be akin to non-chemical addictions like gambling or hoarding, either of which can have devastating effects, but murder, suicide, accidental death and mass shootings result only from guns. While nearly anything may be used to kill, only the gun is created for the specific purpose of killing a living creature. The sheer numbers of guns in circulation, and the loosening of regulations on handguns especially, facilitate deadly spur-of-the-moment reflex acts.
Seventy-four percent of gun owners in the United States are male, and 82 percent of gun owners are white. The top reason U.S. Americans give for owning a gun is for protection. What are the majority of white men so afraid of?
Instead of dismissing the Second Amendment as antiquated and irrelevant, or as not actually meaning what it says, understanding the original purpose of the Second Amendment is key to understanding gun culture, and possibly the key to a new consciousness about the continuing effects of settler-colonialism and white nationalism.
One argument that runs through historical accounts of the thinking behind the Second Amendment is idealizing Anglo settler-farmers as fiercely independent and rightly fearing Big Brother government, insisting on settlers’ right to overthrow oppressive regimes. But, what colonists considered oppressive was any restriction put on them in regard to obtaining land. In the instances of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, the War of Independence itself, and many cases in between, the settlers’ complaint was the refusal of the British colonial authorities to allow them to seize Native land peripheral to the colonies.
Taking land by force was not an accidental or spontaneous project or the work of a few rogue characters. Male colonial settlers had long formed militias for the purpose of raiding and razing Indigenous communities and seizing their lands and resources, and the Native communities fought back. Virginia, the first colony, forbade any man to travel unless he was “well armed.” In 1658, the colony ordered every settler home to have a functioning firearm, and later even provided government loans for those who could not afford to buy a weapon.
These types of laws stayed on the books of the earliest colonies and were created in new colonies as they were founded. The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined these rights and obligations as constitutional law: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Second Amendment thus reflects this dependence on individual armed men to take and retain land.
The continuing significance of that “freedom” specified in the Bill of Rights reveals the settler-colonialist cultural roots of the United States that appear even in the present as a sacred right. Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities and nations. With the expansion of plantation agriculture, by the late 1600s they were also used as “slave patrols,” forming the basis of the U.S. police culture after emancipation.
That is the way of settler-colonialism, and that is the way of the gun—to kill off and control enemies. Violence perpetrated by armed settlers, even genocide, were not absent in the other British settler-colonies—Australia, Canada and New Zealand—but the people of those polities never declared the gun a God-given right. And the people of the other Anglo settler-colonies did not have economies, governments and social orders based on the enslavement of other human beings. The United States is indeed “exceptional.”
German-American history, largely erased, has lessons for our anti-immigrant era
Germans are the largest ancestry group in the U.S., but their identity has been largely disappeared. Here’s why
ERIKA SCHELBY - salon
JULY 27, 2018 10:00PM (UTC)
"The howl of the cave man.” This is how a 1918 Los Angeles Times article described the music of Brahms and Bach. A year earlier the U.S. had declared war against Germany and waded into the tragedy of the First World War. The propaganda machine was in full swing. Germans were brutes—close cousins of the barbaric Huns—and detesting all things German became a badge of patriotic pride. The time was also ripe for the contributions of German-Americans to be scrubbed from the history books. Figures like Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Blümner and Heinrich Balduin Möllhausen, whose contributions to the U.S. are vast, were eclipsed by caricatures of the brutish German lusting for American blood. German-Americans learned to keep a low profile and the collective demonization induced a historical amnesia from which we have yet to awaken.
Today, German-Americans are the largest ancestry group in the U.S., with some 50 million citizens, but their history and their identity has been largely disappeared. This may seem irrelevant, but the history of how it happened tells us a great deal about our present and how ethnic groups can come in and out of favor depending on the geopolitics of the day. As Art Silverman and Robert Siegel noted in an “All Things Considered” segment titled “During World War, the US Propaganda Erased German Culture”: “today … what happened a century ago has special relevance … World War I inspired an outbreak of nativism and xenophobia that targeted German immigrants, Americans of German descent, and even the German language.”
I grew up in Germany and was educated in the post-World War II model, which, for obvious reasons, stressed a respect for pluralism and cultivated a global view of politics and culture. As a result I’ve always been sensitive to the ways in which propaganda shapes our opinions of different communities. The daily scandals of how Latin American immigrants, many of them fleeing horrors that the U.S. had a hand in producing, are brutalized at our borders; and the harassment and attacks on Muslims come out of and occur alongside a propaganda campaign to dehumanize these groups as criminal, devious and irrational. The ethnicities change, but the message stays the same.
Unfortunately, this model has proven reliable in the effort to tar an entire population, and I’ve spent a good deal of time studying how it was applied to Germans and German-Americans. It begins with a well-crafted propaganda campaign initiated only days after the U.S. declared war on Germany. On April 13, 1917, President Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which recruited 150,000 academics, business people, and talent from the media and arts to promote the war to voters. Up to 20,000 newspaper pieces per week were printed based on “voluntary censorship” and CPI handouts. That was probably the birth of “embedded.” One of the CPI’s primary goals was to shape public opinion of the new enemies—Germans. Professor Vernon Kellogg, a member of the intelligentsia, who served this effort, eloquently expressed himself in a CPI publication, writing, “Will it be any wonder, if, after the war, the people of the world, when they recognize any human being as German, will shrink aside so that they may not touch him as he passes, or stoop for stones to drive him from his path?”
Hollywood did its part by producing films like “The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin and Wolves of Kultur,” which cemented the idea of Germans as a public menace in the minds of movie-goers. Super-patriotic volunteer groups joined in, whipping up a tidal wave of war hysteria, hunting for imaginary spies or saboteurs who did not exist, trampling civil rights along the way. Books were burned, citizens were tarred and feathered, German names of places, streets, foods, and objects were erased. Bach went from being a seminal composer to a villain whose work exemplified the monstrous German aesthetic. Teaching the German language was outlawed in more than a dozen states.
In that same year an anti-German mob demanded that the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee (once called the “German Athens”) cancel a scheduled performance of “William Tell” by Friedrich Schiller. They underscored their demand by placing a machine gun in front of the theater. When the theater offered to show a comedy instead the crowd threatened to “break up the Hun show.” The mob got its way and nothing showed on the night “William Tell” was due to run.
It is interesting to note that Schiller drew his inspiration from the American and French Revolution. “William Tell” was the same play W.E.B. Du Bois read in German at Fiske University before he studied in Berlin where his “first awakening to social reform began.”
On April 5, 1918, almost exactly a year after Wilson inaugurated the CPI, Robert Prager, a German miner living in Illinois, was lynched. Not only had he committed the sin of being a German immigrant, but he was suspected of being a socialist. Ironically, one of the reasons Prager’s application for membership in the United Mine Workers Union was declined was precisely because he was German. Eleven men were arrested, tried, and ultimately acquitted of the crime. On April 11, 1918, The Washington Post editorialized, “The more one ponders Senator Overman’s estimate of 400,000 German spies the harder it is to grow righteously indignant over the Illinois lynching.” Lee Slater Overman was a senator from North Carolina who chaired a committee zealously dedicated to routing out real or perceived spying and other treasonous activities on the part of Germans and others.
If the propaganda served the war effort, it also served the economic interests of the elite. Not unlike today, discontent among workers was profound. It ran so deep that the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, an arm of Congress, admitted: “The workers of the nation, through compulsory and oppressive methods, legal and illegal, are denied the full product of their toil … Citizens numbering millions smart under a sense of injustice and oppression. The extent and depth of industrial unrest can hardly be exaggerated.”
When miners in Bisbee, Arizona, went on strike in June 1917 Walter Dodge, president of Phelps Dodge Corporation, a mining company impacted by the strike, declared, “I believe the government will be able to show that there is German influence behind this movement.”
In a stroke of propagandistic genius cartoonist H.T. Webster managed to conflate the Kaiser, the top German aristocrat, with the International Workers of the World. His cartoon, which ran in the New York Globe in 1917, shows the acronym IWW printed over the Kaiser’s face.
By the time the war was over ordinary German-Americans had learned to lay low, speak English exclusively, and release any attachment to their cultural heritage. Perhaps the best measure of the success of the propaganda effort against Germans is how quickly and effectively they learned to de-identify as German. We may be tempted to mistake this for assimilation, but history shows the hand of coercion was placed firmly around the German-American community.
So, why care about this? After all, it’s not as if any American is being attacked or oppressed today based on their German heritage. For me, as a German-American and a student of history, the anti-German propaganda effort is no mere historical footnote or anomalous descent into xenophobia. It is a template—hardly the first, but a vivid one no less—for what we are seeing today. When I look at the faces of immigrant children forcibly separated from their families or hear anti-Muslim sentiment, I know that the demonization of communities does not happen accidentally and that an intellectual as well as legal and political infrastructure is required for them to become victims in the larger game of geopolitics. The material loss for those affected is incalculable and the loss of culture heritage for them and everyone else is often a quiet casualty of the war waged against them. History gives us the vantage point to see how and why enemies are created. It also gives us an unmistakable warning that we would be wise to heed.
Today, German-Americans are the largest ancestry group in the U.S., with some 50 million citizens, but their history and their identity has been largely disappeared. This may seem irrelevant, but the history of how it happened tells us a great deal about our present and how ethnic groups can come in and out of favor depending on the geopolitics of the day. As Art Silverman and Robert Siegel noted in an “All Things Considered” segment titled “During World War, the US Propaganda Erased German Culture”: “today … what happened a century ago has special relevance … World War I inspired an outbreak of nativism and xenophobia that targeted German immigrants, Americans of German descent, and even the German language.”
I grew up in Germany and was educated in the post-World War II model, which, for obvious reasons, stressed a respect for pluralism and cultivated a global view of politics and culture. As a result I’ve always been sensitive to the ways in which propaganda shapes our opinions of different communities. The daily scandals of how Latin American immigrants, many of them fleeing horrors that the U.S. had a hand in producing, are brutalized at our borders; and the harassment and attacks on Muslims come out of and occur alongside a propaganda campaign to dehumanize these groups as criminal, devious and irrational. The ethnicities change, but the message stays the same.
Unfortunately, this model has proven reliable in the effort to tar an entire population, and I’ve spent a good deal of time studying how it was applied to Germans and German-Americans. It begins with a well-crafted propaganda campaign initiated only days after the U.S. declared war on Germany. On April 13, 1917, President Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which recruited 150,000 academics, business people, and talent from the media and arts to promote the war to voters. Up to 20,000 newspaper pieces per week were printed based on “voluntary censorship” and CPI handouts. That was probably the birth of “embedded.” One of the CPI’s primary goals was to shape public opinion of the new enemies—Germans. Professor Vernon Kellogg, a member of the intelligentsia, who served this effort, eloquently expressed himself in a CPI publication, writing, “Will it be any wonder, if, after the war, the people of the world, when they recognize any human being as German, will shrink aside so that they may not touch him as he passes, or stoop for stones to drive him from his path?”
Hollywood did its part by producing films like “The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin and Wolves of Kultur,” which cemented the idea of Germans as a public menace in the minds of movie-goers. Super-patriotic volunteer groups joined in, whipping up a tidal wave of war hysteria, hunting for imaginary spies or saboteurs who did not exist, trampling civil rights along the way. Books were burned, citizens were tarred and feathered, German names of places, streets, foods, and objects were erased. Bach went from being a seminal composer to a villain whose work exemplified the monstrous German aesthetic. Teaching the German language was outlawed in more than a dozen states.
In that same year an anti-German mob demanded that the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee (once called the “German Athens”) cancel a scheduled performance of “William Tell” by Friedrich Schiller. They underscored their demand by placing a machine gun in front of the theater. When the theater offered to show a comedy instead the crowd threatened to “break up the Hun show.” The mob got its way and nothing showed on the night “William Tell” was due to run.
It is interesting to note that Schiller drew his inspiration from the American and French Revolution. “William Tell” was the same play W.E.B. Du Bois read in German at Fiske University before he studied in Berlin where his “first awakening to social reform began.”
On April 5, 1918, almost exactly a year after Wilson inaugurated the CPI, Robert Prager, a German miner living in Illinois, was lynched. Not only had he committed the sin of being a German immigrant, but he was suspected of being a socialist. Ironically, one of the reasons Prager’s application for membership in the United Mine Workers Union was declined was precisely because he was German. Eleven men were arrested, tried, and ultimately acquitted of the crime. On April 11, 1918, The Washington Post editorialized, “The more one ponders Senator Overman’s estimate of 400,000 German spies the harder it is to grow righteously indignant over the Illinois lynching.” Lee Slater Overman was a senator from North Carolina who chaired a committee zealously dedicated to routing out real or perceived spying and other treasonous activities on the part of Germans and others.
If the propaganda served the war effort, it also served the economic interests of the elite. Not unlike today, discontent among workers was profound. It ran so deep that the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, an arm of Congress, admitted: “The workers of the nation, through compulsory and oppressive methods, legal and illegal, are denied the full product of their toil … Citizens numbering millions smart under a sense of injustice and oppression. The extent and depth of industrial unrest can hardly be exaggerated.”
When miners in Bisbee, Arizona, went on strike in June 1917 Walter Dodge, president of Phelps Dodge Corporation, a mining company impacted by the strike, declared, “I believe the government will be able to show that there is German influence behind this movement.”
In a stroke of propagandistic genius cartoonist H.T. Webster managed to conflate the Kaiser, the top German aristocrat, with the International Workers of the World. His cartoon, which ran in the New York Globe in 1917, shows the acronym IWW printed over the Kaiser’s face.
By the time the war was over ordinary German-Americans had learned to lay low, speak English exclusively, and release any attachment to their cultural heritage. Perhaps the best measure of the success of the propaganda effort against Germans is how quickly and effectively they learned to de-identify as German. We may be tempted to mistake this for assimilation, but history shows the hand of coercion was placed firmly around the German-American community.
So, why care about this? After all, it’s not as if any American is being attacked or oppressed today based on their German heritage. For me, as a German-American and a student of history, the anti-German propaganda effort is no mere historical footnote or anomalous descent into xenophobia. It is a template—hardly the first, but a vivid one no less—for what we are seeing today. When I look at the faces of immigrant children forcibly separated from their families or hear anti-Muslim sentiment, I know that the demonization of communities does not happen accidentally and that an intellectual as well as legal and political infrastructure is required for them to become victims in the larger game of geopolitics. The material loss for those affected is incalculable and the loss of culture heritage for them and everyone else is often a quiet casualty of the war waged against them. History gives us the vantage point to see how and why enemies are created. It also gives us an unmistakable warning that we would be wise to heed.
Here are some of the ways that Mexicans made America great
History News Network - raw story
18 JUL 2018 AT 10:25 ET
Mexicans have contributed to making the United States in pivotal and enduring ways. In 1776, more of the territory of the current United States was under Spanish sovereignty than in the 13 colonies that rejected British rule. Florida, the Gulf coast to New Orleans, the Mississippi to St. Louis, and the lands from Texas through New Mexico and California all lived under Spanish rule, setting Hispanic-Mexican legacies. Millions of pesos minted in Mexico City, the American center of global finance, funded the war for U.S. independence, leading the new nation to adopt the peso (renamed the dollar) as its currency.
The U.S. repaid the debt by claiming Spanish/Mexican lands—buying vast Louisiana territories (via France) in 1803; gaining Florida by treaty in 1819; sending settlers into Texas (many undocumented) to expand cotton and slavery in the 1820s; enabling Texas secession in 1836; provoking war in 1846 to incorporate Texas’s cotton and slave economy—and California’s gold fields, too. The U.S. took in land and peoples long Spanish and recently Mexican—often mixing European, indigenous, and African ancestries. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo recognized those who remained in the U.S. as citizens. And the U.S. incorporated the dynamic mining-grazing-irrigation economy that had marked Spanish North America for centuries and would long define the U.S. West.
Debates over slavery and freedom in lands taken from Mexico led to the U.S. Civil War while Mexicans locked in shrunken territories fought over liberal reforms and then faced a French occupation—all in the 1860s. With Union victory, the U.S. drove to continental hegemony. Simultaneously, Mexican liberals led by Benito Juárez consolidated power and welcomed U.S. capital. U.S. investors built Mexican railroads, developed mines, and promoted export industries—including petroleum. The U.S. and Mexican economies merged; U.S. capital and technology shaped Mexico while Mexican workers built the U.S. west. The economies were so integrated that a U.S. downturn, the panic of 1907, was pivotal to setting off Mexico’s 1910 revolution, a sociopolitical conflagration that focused Mexicans while the U.S. joined World War I.
Afterwards, the U.S. roared in the 20s while Mexicans faced reconstruction. The U.S. blocked immigration from Europe, and still welcomed Mexicans to cross a little-patrolled border to build dams and irrigation systems, cities and farms across the west. When depression hit in 1929 (it began in New York, spread across the U.S., and was exported to Mexico), Mexicans became expendable. Denied relief, they got one-way tickets to the border, forcing thousands south—including children born as U.S. citizens.
Mexico absorbed the refugees thanks to new industries and land distributions—reforms culminating in the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938. U.S. corporations screamed foul and FDR arranged a settlement (access to Mexican oil mattered as World War II loomed). When war came, the U.S. needed more than oil. It needed cloth and copper, livestock and leather–and workers, too. Remembering the expulsions of the early 30s, many resisted going north. So the governments negotiated a labor program, recruiting braceros in Mexico, paying for travel, promising decent wages and treatment. 500,000 Mexican citizens fought in the U.S. military. Sent to deadly fronts, they suffered high casualty rates.
To support the war, Mexican exporters accepted promises of post-war payment. With peace, accumulated credits allowed Mexico to import machinery for national development. But when credits ran out, the U.S. subsidized the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, leaving Mexico to compete for scarce and expensive bank credit. Life came in cycles of boom and bust, debt crises and devaluations. Meanwhile, U.S. pharmaceutical sellers delivered the antibiotics that had saved soldiers in World War II to families across Mexico. Children lived—and Mexico’s population soared: from 20 million in 1940, to 50 million by 1970, 100 million in 2000. To feed growing numbers, Mexico turned to U.S. funding and scientists to pioneer a “green revolution.” Harvests of wheat and maize rose to feed growing cities. Reliance on machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, however, cut rural employment. National industries also adopted labor saving ways, keeping employment scarce everywhere. So people trekked north, some to labor seasonally in a bracero program that lasted to 1964; others to settle families in once Mexican regions like Texas and California and places north and east.
Documentation and legality were uncertain. U.S. employers’ readiness to hire Mexicans for low wages was not. People kept coming. U.S. financing, corporations, and models of production shaped lives across the border; Mexican workers labored everywhere, too. With integrated economies, the nations faced linked challenges. In the 1980s the U.S. suffered from “stagflation” while Mexico faced a collapse called the “lost decade.” In 1986, Republican President Ronald Reagan authorized a path to legality for thousands of Mexicans in the U.S. tied to sanctions on employers aimed to end new arrivals. Legal status kept workers here; failed sanctions enabled employers to keep hiring Mexicans—who kept coming. They provided cheap and insecure workers to U.S. producers—subsidizing profits in times of challenge.
The 1980s also saw the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the presumed triumph of capitalism. What would that mean for people in Mexico and the U.S.? Reagan corroded union rights, leading to declining incomes, disappearing pensions, and enduring insecurities among U.S. workers. President Carlos Salinas of Mexico’s dominant PRI attacked union power—and in 1992 ended rural Mexicans’ right to land. A transnational political consensus saw the erosion of popular rights as key to post-Cold War times.
Salinas proposed NAFTA to Reagan’s Republican successor, George H.W. Bush. The goal was to liberate capital and goods to move freely across borders—while holding people within nations. U.S. business would profit; Mexicans would continue to labor as a reservoir of low wage workers—at home. The treaty was ratified in Mexico by Salinas and the PRI, in the U.S. by Democratic President Clinton and an allied Congress.
As NAFTA took effect in 1994, Mexico faced the Zapatista rising in the south, then a financial collapse—before NAFTA could bring investment and jobs. With recovery, the Clinton era hi-tech boom saw production flow to China. Mexico gained where transport costs mattered—as in auto assembly. But old textiles and new electronics went to Asia. Mexico returned to growth in the late 1990s, with jobs still scarce for a population nearing 100 million. Meanwhile, much of Mexican agriculture collapsed. NAFTA ended tariffs on goods crossing borders. The U.S. subsidizes corporate farmers–internal payments enabling agribusiness to sell below cost. NAFTA left Mexican producers to face U.S. subsidized staples. Mexican growers could not compete and migration to the U.S. accelerated.
NAFTA brought new concentrations of wealth and power across North America. In Mexico, cities grew as a powerful few and favored middle sectors prospered; millions more struggled with informality and marginality. The vacuum created by agricultural collapse and urban marginality made space for a dynamic violent drug economy. Historically, cocaine was an Andean specialty, heroin an Asian product. But as the U.S. pressed against drug economies elsewhere, Mexicans—some enticed by profit; many searching for sustenance—turned to supply U.S. consumers.
U.S. politicians and ideologues blame Mexico for the “drug problem”—a noisy “supply side” understanding that is historically untenable. U.S. demand drives the drug economy. The U.S. has done nothing effective to curtail consumption—or to limit the flow of weapons to drug cartels in Mexico. Laying blame helps block any national discussion of the underlying social insecurities brought by globalization—deindustrialization, scarce employment, low wages, lowered benefits, vanishing pensions—insecurities that close observers know fuel drug dependency. Drug consumption in the U.S. has expanded as migration from Mexico now slows (mostly due to slowing population growth)—a conversation steadfastly avoided.
People across North America struggle with shared challenges—common insecurities spread by globalizing capitalism. Too many U.S. politicians see advantages in polarization, blaming Mexicans for all that ails life north of the border. Better that we work to understand our inseparable histories. Then we might work toward a prosperity shared by diverse peoples facing common challenges in an integrated North America.
The U.S. repaid the debt by claiming Spanish/Mexican lands—buying vast Louisiana territories (via France) in 1803; gaining Florida by treaty in 1819; sending settlers into Texas (many undocumented) to expand cotton and slavery in the 1820s; enabling Texas secession in 1836; provoking war in 1846 to incorporate Texas’s cotton and slave economy—and California’s gold fields, too. The U.S. took in land and peoples long Spanish and recently Mexican—often mixing European, indigenous, and African ancestries. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo recognized those who remained in the U.S. as citizens. And the U.S. incorporated the dynamic mining-grazing-irrigation economy that had marked Spanish North America for centuries and would long define the U.S. West.
Debates over slavery and freedom in lands taken from Mexico led to the U.S. Civil War while Mexicans locked in shrunken territories fought over liberal reforms and then faced a French occupation—all in the 1860s. With Union victory, the U.S. drove to continental hegemony. Simultaneously, Mexican liberals led by Benito Juárez consolidated power and welcomed U.S. capital. U.S. investors built Mexican railroads, developed mines, and promoted export industries—including petroleum. The U.S. and Mexican economies merged; U.S. capital and technology shaped Mexico while Mexican workers built the U.S. west. The economies were so integrated that a U.S. downturn, the panic of 1907, was pivotal to setting off Mexico’s 1910 revolution, a sociopolitical conflagration that focused Mexicans while the U.S. joined World War I.
Afterwards, the U.S. roared in the 20s while Mexicans faced reconstruction. The U.S. blocked immigration from Europe, and still welcomed Mexicans to cross a little-patrolled border to build dams and irrigation systems, cities and farms across the west. When depression hit in 1929 (it began in New York, spread across the U.S., and was exported to Mexico), Mexicans became expendable. Denied relief, they got one-way tickets to the border, forcing thousands south—including children born as U.S. citizens.
Mexico absorbed the refugees thanks to new industries and land distributions—reforms culminating in the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938. U.S. corporations screamed foul and FDR arranged a settlement (access to Mexican oil mattered as World War II loomed). When war came, the U.S. needed more than oil. It needed cloth and copper, livestock and leather–and workers, too. Remembering the expulsions of the early 30s, many resisted going north. So the governments negotiated a labor program, recruiting braceros in Mexico, paying for travel, promising decent wages and treatment. 500,000 Mexican citizens fought in the U.S. military. Sent to deadly fronts, they suffered high casualty rates.
To support the war, Mexican exporters accepted promises of post-war payment. With peace, accumulated credits allowed Mexico to import machinery for national development. But when credits ran out, the U.S. subsidized the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, leaving Mexico to compete for scarce and expensive bank credit. Life came in cycles of boom and bust, debt crises and devaluations. Meanwhile, U.S. pharmaceutical sellers delivered the antibiotics that had saved soldiers in World War II to families across Mexico. Children lived—and Mexico’s population soared: from 20 million in 1940, to 50 million by 1970, 100 million in 2000. To feed growing numbers, Mexico turned to U.S. funding and scientists to pioneer a “green revolution.” Harvests of wheat and maize rose to feed growing cities. Reliance on machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, however, cut rural employment. National industries also adopted labor saving ways, keeping employment scarce everywhere. So people trekked north, some to labor seasonally in a bracero program that lasted to 1964; others to settle families in once Mexican regions like Texas and California and places north and east.
Documentation and legality were uncertain. U.S. employers’ readiness to hire Mexicans for low wages was not. People kept coming. U.S. financing, corporations, and models of production shaped lives across the border; Mexican workers labored everywhere, too. With integrated economies, the nations faced linked challenges. In the 1980s the U.S. suffered from “stagflation” while Mexico faced a collapse called the “lost decade.” In 1986, Republican President Ronald Reagan authorized a path to legality for thousands of Mexicans in the U.S. tied to sanctions on employers aimed to end new arrivals. Legal status kept workers here; failed sanctions enabled employers to keep hiring Mexicans—who kept coming. They provided cheap and insecure workers to U.S. producers—subsidizing profits in times of challenge.
The 1980s also saw the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the presumed triumph of capitalism. What would that mean for people in Mexico and the U.S.? Reagan corroded union rights, leading to declining incomes, disappearing pensions, and enduring insecurities among U.S. workers. President Carlos Salinas of Mexico’s dominant PRI attacked union power—and in 1992 ended rural Mexicans’ right to land. A transnational political consensus saw the erosion of popular rights as key to post-Cold War times.
Salinas proposed NAFTA to Reagan’s Republican successor, George H.W. Bush. The goal was to liberate capital and goods to move freely across borders—while holding people within nations. U.S. business would profit; Mexicans would continue to labor as a reservoir of low wage workers—at home. The treaty was ratified in Mexico by Salinas and the PRI, in the U.S. by Democratic President Clinton and an allied Congress.
As NAFTA took effect in 1994, Mexico faced the Zapatista rising in the south, then a financial collapse—before NAFTA could bring investment and jobs. With recovery, the Clinton era hi-tech boom saw production flow to China. Mexico gained where transport costs mattered—as in auto assembly. But old textiles and new electronics went to Asia. Mexico returned to growth in the late 1990s, with jobs still scarce for a population nearing 100 million. Meanwhile, much of Mexican agriculture collapsed. NAFTA ended tariffs on goods crossing borders. The U.S. subsidizes corporate farmers–internal payments enabling agribusiness to sell below cost. NAFTA left Mexican producers to face U.S. subsidized staples. Mexican growers could not compete and migration to the U.S. accelerated.
NAFTA brought new concentrations of wealth and power across North America. In Mexico, cities grew as a powerful few and favored middle sectors prospered; millions more struggled with informality and marginality. The vacuum created by agricultural collapse and urban marginality made space for a dynamic violent drug economy. Historically, cocaine was an Andean specialty, heroin an Asian product. But as the U.S. pressed against drug economies elsewhere, Mexicans—some enticed by profit; many searching for sustenance—turned to supply U.S. consumers.
U.S. politicians and ideologues blame Mexico for the “drug problem”—a noisy “supply side” understanding that is historically untenable. U.S. demand drives the drug economy. The U.S. has done nothing effective to curtail consumption—or to limit the flow of weapons to drug cartels in Mexico. Laying blame helps block any national discussion of the underlying social insecurities brought by globalization—deindustrialization, scarce employment, low wages, lowered benefits, vanishing pensions—insecurities that close observers know fuel drug dependency. Drug consumption in the U.S. has expanded as migration from Mexico now slows (mostly due to slowing population growth)—a conversation steadfastly avoided.
People across North America struggle with shared challenges—common insecurities spread by globalizing capitalism. Too many U.S. politicians see advantages in polarization, blaming Mexicans for all that ails life north of the border. Better that we work to understand our inseparable histories. Then we might work toward a prosperity shared by diverse peoples facing common challenges in an integrated North America.
Coard: “Operation Wetback”: America's Worst Mass Deportation
Michael Coard - philly tribune
7/13/18
It was 64 years ago on July 15, 1954 that the U.S. Border Patrol began its widespread and notoriously racist deportation program — officially called “Operation Wetback” by the Dwight Eisenhower administration — by kicking out nearly 1.5 million Mexicans through the use of such despicable actions that involved, for example, the demanding of birth certificate identification of all so-called “Mexican-looking” people via apartheid-styled stop and frisk harassment.
I should mention that this “wetback” racial slur originated in the 1920s to describe Mexicans who swam the Rio Grande to reach America.
Donald Trump, born in 1946, was a budding 8-year-old racist in 1954. And by the time he reached 69 years old 61 years later, he was a full-fledged racist Republican presidential candidate who, in 2015, said Mexican immigrants are “bringing in crime. They’re rapists.” In 2014, he described Mexicans as “our enemies.”
As president, he declared that during his first 100 days in office, he would deport up to three million undocumented immigrants, meaning the Brown and Black ones. Not the white ones. As he stated earlier this year, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re s***hole countries. .... We should have more [white] people from Norway.”
Also as president, he initiated and implemented in 2018 a policy that has never — I repeat, never — before been initiated and implemented to separate thousands of immigrant, especially Mexican, infants and other children from parents fleeing imminent violence and/or dire poverty in their native land.
Let’s get back to 1954’s “Operation Wetback,” which is a perfect example of what Trump means by his “Make America Great Again” nonsense. By the way, when he and his 63 million racist supporters tell Mexicans to go back to their own country, those so-called immigrants should just plop down in Texas and explain that they and their ancestors are natives of that land — at least until America in 1845 stole the northeastern province of Mexico and declared it the 28th state and then began the Mexican-American War a year later and claimed victory in 1848.
And while our Mexican comrades are at it, they should mention that the American states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah are also part of their ancestral homeland. As a result, maybe Trump should go back to Germany and his stooges back to their various European countries.
As indicated by Erin Blakemore of The History Channel, “[This] short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants — some of them American citizens — from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico. ... During [this operation] ..., tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives. In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.”
Columbia University professor Dr. Mae Ngai similarly referred to the type of boats used as like “eighteenth century slave ships.”
UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez pointed out that the operation was “lawless ..., arbitrary ... [and] based on a lot of xenophobia ... and ... resulted in sizable large-scale violations of people’s rights, including the forced deportation of U.S. citizens.”
There were so many immigrant kidnappings, as I describe them, that The Conversation (which is a global network of newsrooms founded by British-Australian journalist Andrew Jaspan) reported that the Border Patrol was “converting public parks into concentration camps to detain at least 1,000 people at a time.”
These types of mass deportations actually began much earlier. During the 1930s, as uncovered by historian Francisco Balderrama, “The United States deported over one million Mexicans ..., 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.”
Yesterday’s 1954 immigration policy oozed from the same sewer that today’s 2018 immigration policy oozes: the racism sewer. It was a political response to white brainless KKK-type voters who illogically claimed that the backbreaking and labor-intensive farming jobs they didn’t want were being taken by Brown people. Wait ... What?!
I should note that in 2015, then-candidate Trump endorsed Operation Wetback in a campaign speech wherein he proclaimed, “I like Ike ... [who] moved a million-and-a-half illegal immigrants out of this country. ... Moved them way south. They never came back.”
I should also note that the Trump-like cretin who served as Southwest Border Patrol Chief during that operation was Harlon Carter. He’s the guy who had been convicted at age 17 of hunting down and murdering Mexican-American Ramon Casiano in Laredo, Texas in 1931 and later, years after his conviction was overturned on a (racist) technicality, became chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association. Anyone surprised? Nope.
You’ve just read about the old problem and the new problem. But what about the solution? It’s very simple: Abolish not only I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) but also any federal policy that does not allow people fleeing violence, persecution, or deadly poverty the right to due process proceedings which include court-appointed lawyers and a “preponderance of the evidence” burden placed on the government to disprove such claim of violence, persecution, or deadly poverty.
Oh, and by the way, when is any member of Congress gonna ask the indigenous Red people here what they think about the so-called (and misnamed) New World’s immigration policy since 1492 and America’s immigration policy since 1776? Red land reparations anyone?
I should mention that this “wetback” racial slur originated in the 1920s to describe Mexicans who swam the Rio Grande to reach America.
Donald Trump, born in 1946, was a budding 8-year-old racist in 1954. And by the time he reached 69 years old 61 years later, he was a full-fledged racist Republican presidential candidate who, in 2015, said Mexican immigrants are “bringing in crime. They’re rapists.” In 2014, he described Mexicans as “our enemies.”
As president, he declared that during his first 100 days in office, he would deport up to three million undocumented immigrants, meaning the Brown and Black ones. Not the white ones. As he stated earlier this year, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re s***hole countries. .... We should have more [white] people from Norway.”
Also as president, he initiated and implemented in 2018 a policy that has never — I repeat, never — before been initiated and implemented to separate thousands of immigrant, especially Mexican, infants and other children from parents fleeing imminent violence and/or dire poverty in their native land.
Let’s get back to 1954’s “Operation Wetback,” which is a perfect example of what Trump means by his “Make America Great Again” nonsense. By the way, when he and his 63 million racist supporters tell Mexicans to go back to their own country, those so-called immigrants should just plop down in Texas and explain that they and their ancestors are natives of that land — at least until America in 1845 stole the northeastern province of Mexico and declared it the 28th state and then began the Mexican-American War a year later and claimed victory in 1848.
And while our Mexican comrades are at it, they should mention that the American states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah are also part of their ancestral homeland. As a result, maybe Trump should go back to Germany and his stooges back to their various European countries.
As indicated by Erin Blakemore of The History Channel, “[This] short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants — some of them American citizens — from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico. ... During [this operation] ..., tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives. In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.”
Columbia University professor Dr. Mae Ngai similarly referred to the type of boats used as like “eighteenth century slave ships.”
UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez pointed out that the operation was “lawless ..., arbitrary ... [and] based on a lot of xenophobia ... and ... resulted in sizable large-scale violations of people’s rights, including the forced deportation of U.S. citizens.”
There were so many immigrant kidnappings, as I describe them, that The Conversation (which is a global network of newsrooms founded by British-Australian journalist Andrew Jaspan) reported that the Border Patrol was “converting public parks into concentration camps to detain at least 1,000 people at a time.”
These types of mass deportations actually began much earlier. During the 1930s, as uncovered by historian Francisco Balderrama, “The United States deported over one million Mexicans ..., 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.”
Yesterday’s 1954 immigration policy oozed from the same sewer that today’s 2018 immigration policy oozes: the racism sewer. It was a political response to white brainless KKK-type voters who illogically claimed that the backbreaking and labor-intensive farming jobs they didn’t want were being taken by Brown people. Wait ... What?!
I should note that in 2015, then-candidate Trump endorsed Operation Wetback in a campaign speech wherein he proclaimed, “I like Ike ... [who] moved a million-and-a-half illegal immigrants out of this country. ... Moved them way south. They never came back.”
I should also note that the Trump-like cretin who served as Southwest Border Patrol Chief during that operation was Harlon Carter. He’s the guy who had been convicted at age 17 of hunting down and murdering Mexican-American Ramon Casiano in Laredo, Texas in 1931 and later, years after his conviction was overturned on a (racist) technicality, became chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association. Anyone surprised? Nope.
You’ve just read about the old problem and the new problem. But what about the solution? It’s very simple: Abolish not only I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) but also any federal policy that does not allow people fleeing violence, persecution, or deadly poverty the right to due process proceedings which include court-appointed lawyers and a “preponderance of the evidence” burden placed on the government to disprove such claim of violence, persecution, or deadly poverty.
Oh, and by the way, when is any member of Congress gonna ask the indigenous Red people here what they think about the so-called (and misnamed) New World’s immigration policy since 1492 and America’s immigration policy since 1776? Red land reparations anyone?
A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICANS PRAISING THEIR OWN “GENEROSITY,” FROM THE GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS TO TRUMP’S CHILD SNATCHERS
Jon Schwarz - the intercept
July 12 2018, 8:14 a.m.
EARLIER THIS WEEK, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar celebrated the Trump administration for its treatment of immigrant children it has separated from their parents. “We have nothing to hide about how we operate these facilities,” said Azar on CNN. “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids.”
This magnanimous claim raises an obvious question: What are the othergreat acts of American generosity?
Of course, we know that the U.S. treatment of Native Americans has been extraordinarily generous. They were literally asking for it since before there was an America: The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for most of the 17th century was an Indian saying, “Come over and help us.”
So as President Andrew Jackson explained to Congress in 1829 when making the case for the Indian Removal Act, “Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself. … Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous.” The passage of the act the next year generously allowed the Cherokee to experience the Trail of Tears.
Sixty years later, in “The Winning of the West,” future President Teddy Roosevelt remained impressed by this example of American generosity. “In [our] treaties,” he wrote, “we have been more than just to the Indians; we have been abundantly generous. … No other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.”
Slavery, too, was an act of generosity. As Thomas Roderick Dew, who went on to become president of William & Mary College, put it in the famed 1832 treatise, “The Pro-Slavery Argument,” slaveowners were among the “most generous” Americans. Moreover, a slaveholder’s son, precisely because he witnessed his father enslaving others, “acquires a greater generosity and elevation of soul, and embraces for the sphere of his generous actions a much wider field.”
The Vietnam War was another high point in U.S. generosity. David Lawrence, then editor of U.S. News & World Report, proclaimed in 1966 that “what the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.”
More recently, we generously helped three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay kill themselves. “The manipulative detainees,” wrote Michelle Malkinsoon afterward, “reportedly used the generous civil liberties protections we gave them to plot their suicide pact.”
So we clearly have a long history about which to volubly praise ourselves. But we should be modest enough to realize that we have never matched the moral heights of the most generous man in history: Adolf Hitler.
Just before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the British ambassador to Germany wrote home to explain how frustrated Hitler was that he was not receiving credit for his generosity:
Herr Hitler replied that he would be willing to negotiate, if there was a Polish Government which was prepared to be reasonable. … He expatiated on misdoings of the Poles, referred to his generous offer of March last, said that it could not be repeated.
We shouldn’t feel too bad about the Poles’ ingratitude, however. Hitler had an advantage, because he was leading the Germans, who are naturally generous to a fault. Joseph Goebbels explained this in a generous 1941 article, titled “The Jews Are Guilty!“:
If we Germans have a fateful flaw in our national character, it is forgetfulness. This failing speaks well of our human decency and generosity, but not always for our political wisdom or intelligence. We think everyone else is as good natured as we are.
At this point, all we can do is pray that someday we will find it in our hearts to be as generous as 1940s-era Germans. Overall, we’re still a long way from that achievement, but certainly there seem to be some pioneers among us right now who are getting close.
This magnanimous claim raises an obvious question: What are the othergreat acts of American generosity?
Of course, we know that the U.S. treatment of Native Americans has been extraordinarily generous. They were literally asking for it since before there was an America: The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for most of the 17th century was an Indian saying, “Come over and help us.”
So as President Andrew Jackson explained to Congress in 1829 when making the case for the Indian Removal Act, “Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself. … Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous.” The passage of the act the next year generously allowed the Cherokee to experience the Trail of Tears.
Sixty years later, in “The Winning of the West,” future President Teddy Roosevelt remained impressed by this example of American generosity. “In [our] treaties,” he wrote, “we have been more than just to the Indians; we have been abundantly generous. … No other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.”
Slavery, too, was an act of generosity. As Thomas Roderick Dew, who went on to become president of William & Mary College, put it in the famed 1832 treatise, “The Pro-Slavery Argument,” slaveowners were among the “most generous” Americans. Moreover, a slaveholder’s son, precisely because he witnessed his father enslaving others, “acquires a greater generosity and elevation of soul, and embraces for the sphere of his generous actions a much wider field.”
The Vietnam War was another high point in U.S. generosity. David Lawrence, then editor of U.S. News & World Report, proclaimed in 1966 that “what the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.”
More recently, we generously helped three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay kill themselves. “The manipulative detainees,” wrote Michelle Malkinsoon afterward, “reportedly used the generous civil liberties protections we gave them to plot their suicide pact.”
So we clearly have a long history about which to volubly praise ourselves. But we should be modest enough to realize that we have never matched the moral heights of the most generous man in history: Adolf Hitler.
Just before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the British ambassador to Germany wrote home to explain how frustrated Hitler was that he was not receiving credit for his generosity:
Herr Hitler replied that he would be willing to negotiate, if there was a Polish Government which was prepared to be reasonable. … He expatiated on misdoings of the Poles, referred to his generous offer of March last, said that it could not be repeated.
We shouldn’t feel too bad about the Poles’ ingratitude, however. Hitler had an advantage, because he was leading the Germans, who are naturally generous to a fault. Joseph Goebbels explained this in a generous 1941 article, titled “The Jews Are Guilty!“:
If we Germans have a fateful flaw in our national character, it is forgetfulness. This failing speaks well of our human decency and generosity, but not always for our political wisdom or intelligence. We think everyone else is as good natured as we are.
At this point, all we can do is pray that someday we will find it in our hearts to be as generous as 1940s-era Germans. Overall, we’re still a long way from that achievement, but certainly there seem to be some pioneers among us right now who are getting close.
american corporations have never been PATRIOTIC!!!
American supporters of the European Fascists
(Read more)
Charles Lindbergh attending Nazi party in Berlin - 1935
A number of prominent and wealthy American businessmen helped to support fascist regimes in Europe from the 1920s through the 1940s. These people helped to support Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War of 1936, as well as Benito Mussolini, and Adolph Hitler.
Some of the primary and more famous Americans and companies that were involved with the fascist regimes of Europe are: William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK's father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush, National City Bank, and General Electric.
It should be noted that businessmen from many countries, including England and Australia, also worked with the fascist regimes of Europe prior to WWII. The fascist governments were involved in a high level of construction, production, and international business.
I.G. Farben, a German company, was the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise in the world during the early part of the 20th century. As such the company had many holdings in a variety of countries, including America. The American holdings of I.G. Farben included Bayer Co., General Aniline Works, Agfa Ansco, and Winthrop Chemical Company.
I.G. Farben was critical in the development of the German economy and war machine leading up to WWII. During this time I.G. Farben's international holdings along with its international business contracts with companies like Standard Oil, DuPont, Alcoa, and Dow Chemical were crucial in supplying the Nazi regime with the materials needed for war as well as financial support.
The Spanish Civil War was the precursor to World War II. Fascist Francisco Franco was aided by Hitler and Mussolini during the Spanish Civil War. At this time GM, Ford, DuPont, and Standard Oil were working with Franco and supplying the fascist powers of Europe. At this same time many Americans were protesting the goings on in Europe as well as the involvement of American companies in helping the fascist powers. A group of American volunteer soldiers known as the Abe Lincoln Brigade went to Spain during this time to fight against Franco in defense of the Spanish Republic. This group was made up primarily of leftist American groups, such as members of American socialist parties and communist parties.
The success of the fascists in Spain was an important first step in the building of fascist power in Europe and the stepping-stone for the Italian and German powers.
The support of American corporations, and lack of American intervention by the government, was crucial in the success of this first step.
American banks and businesses continued to support the fascist regimes of Europe legally up until the day Germany declared war on America and the activities were stopped under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Despite this, some companies and individuals still maintained a business relationship with the Third Reich. Ford and GM supplied European fascists with trucks and equipment as well as investing money in I.G. Farben plants. Standard Oil supplied the fascists with fuel. US Steel and Alcoa supplied them with critically needed metals. American banks gave them billion's of dollars worth of loans.
The following is excerpted from a report printed by the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1974:
The activities of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler prior to and during World War II...are instructive. At that time, these three firms dominated motor vehicle production in both the United States and Germany. Due to its mass production capabilities, automobile manufacturing is one of the most crucial industries with respect to national defense. As a result, these firms retained the economic and political power to affect the shape of governmental relations both within and between these nations in a manner which maximized corporate global profits. In short, they were private governments unaccountable to the citizens of any country yet possessing tremendous influence over the course of war and peace in the world. The substantial contribution of these firms to the American war effort in terms of tanks, aircraft components, and other military equipment is widely acknowledged. Less well known are the simultaneous contributions of their foreign subsidiaries to the Axis Powers. In sum, they maximized profits by supplying both sides with the materiel needed to conduct the war.
During the 1920's and 1930's, the Big Three automakers undertook an extensive program of multinational expansion...By the mid-1930's, these three American companies owned automotive subsidiaries throughout Europe and the Far East; many of their largest facilities were located in the politically sensitive nations of Germany, Poland, Rumania, Austria, Hungary, Latvia, and Japan...Due to their concentrated economic power over motor vehicle production in both Allied and Axis territories, the Big Three inevitably became major factors in the preparations and progress of the war. In Germany, for example, General Motors and Ford became an integral part of the Nazi war efforts. GM's plants in Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps....
Ford was also active in Nazi Germany's prewar preparations. In 1938, for instance, it opened a truck assembly plant in Berlin whose "real purpose," according to U.S. Army Intelligence, was producing "troop transport-type" vehicles for the Wehrmacht. That year Ford's chief executive received the Nazi German Eagle (first class)....
The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion by GM and Ford of their Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks.... On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored "mule" 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich's medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as "the backbone of the German Army transportation system."....
After the cessation of hostilities, GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. Government for wartime damages sustained by their Axis facilities as a result of Allied bombing... Ford received a little less than $1 million, primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck complex at Cologne...
Due to their multinational dominance of motor vehicle production, GM and Ford became principal suppliers for the forces of fascism as well as for the forces of democracy. It may, of course, be argued that participating in both sides of an international conflict, like the common corporate practice of investing in both political parties before an election, is an appropriate corporate activity. Had the Nazis won, General Motors and Ford would have appeared impeccably Nazi; as Hitler lost, these companies were able to re-emerge impeccably American. In either case, the viability of these corporations and the interests of their respective stockholders would have been preserved.
(READ MORE)
Some of the primary and more famous Americans and companies that were involved with the fascist regimes of Europe are: William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK's father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush, National City Bank, and General Electric.
It should be noted that businessmen from many countries, including England and Australia, also worked with the fascist regimes of Europe prior to WWII. The fascist governments were involved in a high level of construction, production, and international business.
I.G. Farben, a German company, was the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise in the world during the early part of the 20th century. As such the company had many holdings in a variety of countries, including America. The American holdings of I.G. Farben included Bayer Co., General Aniline Works, Agfa Ansco, and Winthrop Chemical Company.
I.G. Farben was critical in the development of the German economy and war machine leading up to WWII. During this time I.G. Farben's international holdings along with its international business contracts with companies like Standard Oil, DuPont, Alcoa, and Dow Chemical were crucial in supplying the Nazi regime with the materials needed for war as well as financial support.
The Spanish Civil War was the precursor to World War II. Fascist Francisco Franco was aided by Hitler and Mussolini during the Spanish Civil War. At this time GM, Ford, DuPont, and Standard Oil were working with Franco and supplying the fascist powers of Europe. At this same time many Americans were protesting the goings on in Europe as well as the involvement of American companies in helping the fascist powers. A group of American volunteer soldiers known as the Abe Lincoln Brigade went to Spain during this time to fight against Franco in defense of the Spanish Republic. This group was made up primarily of leftist American groups, such as members of American socialist parties and communist parties.
The success of the fascists in Spain was an important first step in the building of fascist power in Europe and the stepping-stone for the Italian and German powers.
The support of American corporations, and lack of American intervention by the government, was crucial in the success of this first step.
American banks and businesses continued to support the fascist regimes of Europe legally up until the day Germany declared war on America and the activities were stopped under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Despite this, some companies and individuals still maintained a business relationship with the Third Reich. Ford and GM supplied European fascists with trucks and equipment as well as investing money in I.G. Farben plants. Standard Oil supplied the fascists with fuel. US Steel and Alcoa supplied them with critically needed metals. American banks gave them billion's of dollars worth of loans.
The following is excerpted from a report printed by the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1974:
The activities of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler prior to and during World War II...are instructive. At that time, these three firms dominated motor vehicle production in both the United States and Germany. Due to its mass production capabilities, automobile manufacturing is one of the most crucial industries with respect to national defense. As a result, these firms retained the economic and political power to affect the shape of governmental relations both within and between these nations in a manner which maximized corporate global profits. In short, they were private governments unaccountable to the citizens of any country yet possessing tremendous influence over the course of war and peace in the world. The substantial contribution of these firms to the American war effort in terms of tanks, aircraft components, and other military equipment is widely acknowledged. Less well known are the simultaneous contributions of their foreign subsidiaries to the Axis Powers. In sum, they maximized profits by supplying both sides with the materiel needed to conduct the war.
During the 1920's and 1930's, the Big Three automakers undertook an extensive program of multinational expansion...By the mid-1930's, these three American companies owned automotive subsidiaries throughout Europe and the Far East; many of their largest facilities were located in the politically sensitive nations of Germany, Poland, Rumania, Austria, Hungary, Latvia, and Japan...Due to their concentrated economic power over motor vehicle production in both Allied and Axis territories, the Big Three inevitably became major factors in the preparations and progress of the war. In Germany, for example, General Motors and Ford became an integral part of the Nazi war efforts. GM's plants in Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps....
Ford was also active in Nazi Germany's prewar preparations. In 1938, for instance, it opened a truck assembly plant in Berlin whose "real purpose," according to U.S. Army Intelligence, was producing "troop transport-type" vehicles for the Wehrmacht. That year Ford's chief executive received the Nazi German Eagle (first class)....
The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion by GM and Ford of their Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks.... On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored "mule" 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich's medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as "the backbone of the German Army transportation system."....
After the cessation of hostilities, GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. Government for wartime damages sustained by their Axis facilities as a result of Allied bombing... Ford received a little less than $1 million, primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck complex at Cologne...
Due to their multinational dominance of motor vehicle production, GM and Ford became principal suppliers for the forces of fascism as well as for the forces of democracy. It may, of course, be argued that participating in both sides of an international conflict, like the common corporate practice of investing in both political parties before an election, is an appropriate corporate activity. Had the Nazis won, General Motors and Ford would have appeared impeccably Nazi; as Hitler lost, these companies were able to re-emerge impeccably American. In either case, the viability of these corporations and the interests of their respective stockholders would have been preserved.
(READ MORE)
Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and White Supremacy
The history of the statute that can make it a felony to illegally enter the country involves some dark corners of U.S. history.
by Ian MacDougall - pro publica
June 19, 8:15 p.m. EDT
...The federal law they say they are enforcing makes it a crime for foreign citizens to cross (or attempt to cross) the border into the U.S. anywhere other than an official port of entry. A first offense is a misdemeanor; a second unlawful entry is a felony.
The law’s ancestry dates back to World War I. Till that point, U.S. immigration laws had tended to be all or nothing: either no limits at all — or blanket bans for certain groups, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Others were free to enter provided they weren’t “lunatics,” polygamists, prostitutes, “suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease,” or so on.
The result was floods of immigrants: Between 1901 and 1910, for example, close to 9 million came to the U.S. As that happened, anti-immigrant attitudes mounted, with mass influxes from parts of Europe associated in the popular imagination with a litany of social problems, like urban poverty and squalor.
In May 1918, after the U.S. had entered World War I, Congress passed a statute called the Passport Act that gave the president the power to restrict the comings and goings of foreign citizens during wartime. A few months later, however, the war ended — and with it, the restrictions on border crossings.
Federal officials saw potential in the criminal provisions of the Passport Act — a maximum 20-year sentence — as a tool for deterring immigration. So prosecutors ignored the expiration of the law and continued to indict migrants under the Passport Act for unlawful entry into the U.S.
Anti-immigration sentiment continued to climb and the rhetoric of the era has resonance today. One anti-immigration group at the time claimed that immigrants tended to be “vicious and criminal” — the “bootleggers, gangsters, and racketeers of large cities.” The war, Columbia University historian Mae Ngai has written, “raised nationalism and anti-foreign sentiment to a high pitch.”
In response, Congress began clamping down. With the Immigration Act of 1924, it capped the flow at about 165,000 people a year, a small fraction of previous levels The statute’s quotas curtailed migration from southern and eastern Europe severely. Another 1924 law — the Oriental Exclusion Act — banned most immigration from Asia. At the same time, Congress made it easier to deport non-citizens for immigration violations.
In 1925, a federal appeals court put a halt to the practice of indicting migrants under the Passport Act outside wartime. But immigration officials liked what they’d seen, and by 1927, they were working on a replacement.
Two men spearheaded the effort that would lead Congress to criminalize unlawful entry into the United States. They were motivated by eugenics and white supremacy.
The first was James Davis, who was Secretary of Labor from 1921 to 1930. A Republican originally appointed by President Warren Harding, Davis was himself an immigrant from Wales who went by “Puddler Jim,” a reference to his job as a youthful worker in the steel mills of western Pennsylvania. At the time, the Department of Labor oversaw immigration, and Davis had grown disturbed by what he’d seen.
Davis was a committed eugenicist, and he believed principles of eugenics should guide immigration policy, according to The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot by the historian Hans Vought. It was necessary to draw a distinction, Davis had written in 1923, between “bad stock and good stock, weak blood and strong blood, sound heredity and sickly human stuff.”
In November 1927, Davis proposed a set of immigration reforms in the pages of The New York Times. Among his goals: “the definite lessening and possibly, in time, the complete checking of the degenerate and the bearer of degenerates.” One “phase of the immigration problem,” Davis wrote, was the “surreptitious entry of aliens” into the United States in numbers that “cannot even be approximately estimated.”
Deportation alone wasn’t enough to deter illegal immigration, Davis wrote. There was nothing disincentivizing the migrant from turning around and trying again. “Endeavoring to stop this law violation” by deportation only, he wrote, “is like trying to prevent burglary with a penalty no severer than opening the front door of the burglarized residence, should the burglar be found within, escorting him to it, and saying ‘You have no right here; see that you don’t come in again.’”
An immigrant who enters the country unlawfully, he concluded, “should be treated as a law violator and punished effectively.”
To bring his vision to fruition, Davis teamed up with a senator from South Carolina. Coleman Livingston Blease, a Democrat, was “a proud and unreconstructed white supremacist,” UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández wrote in her 2017 book City of Inmates.
Migrants from Mexico were one group whose numbers the increasingly powerful nativist elements in Congress hadn’t managed to restrict. Mexican workers were key to the booming economy of the southwest. Regional employers, particularly in the agricultural sector, had successfully lobbied Congress to block any bill that would choke off their primary source of inexpensive labor. As a result, migration from Mexico soared, with many Mexicans making illegal border crossings to avoid the cost and inconvenience of customs stations.
Blease saw in Davis’s proposal for criminal penalties a way to advance his vision of a white America, and he believed it would bridge the gap between the nativists clamoring for quotas and southwestern congressmen resisting them. Large-scale farmers didn’t mind criminal penalties, Hernández writes, so long as the law was enforced once the harvest was over.
The legislation wasn’t without its opponents, as the UCLA law professor Ingrid Eagly documented in a 2010 study of immigration prosecutions. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the bill. The ACLU felt it was unfair and unlikely to deter migration. An immigrant “may be quite ignorant of this law before he starts on his journey,” the group told Congress.
Despite the ACLU’s objections, a Republican-controlled Congress passed Davis and Blease’s bill in 1929. A Republican president, Herbert Hoover, signed it into law.
The law made it a crime to enter the United States unlawfully and, in so doing, “created the criminalization of the border,” Eagly said.
The statute was swiftly put to use. Between July 1929 and June 1930, according to a Department of Labor report, prosecutors brought more than 6,000 unlawful entry cases. “It is believed that it will prove an effective deterrent,” the report’s author wrote. (In his recent memo, Sessions made similar claims about the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.)
But the law didn’t reduce migration. By 1933, the Labor Department concluded that its rosy outlook had been wrong. The 1929 law “does not seem to have the deterrent effect expected,” noted a Labor Department report published that year.
It blamed budget limitations and judges wary of meting out serious sentences if a defendant was going to be deported anyway.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression achieved what prosecutions and deportations had not. Immigration plunged as the labor market in the United States dried up. Prosecutions for unlawful entry dropped to about 5,000 a year, according to a 2012 examination of the law by Doug Keller in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.
A shortage of labor during World War II prompted the U.S. to reverse course and encourage migration of temporary workers from Mexico through what it called the Bracero program. (The word refers to manual laborers in Spanish.)
Despite the earlier lessons, federal prosecutors began to focus their attention on bringing unlawful entry cases against Mexican migrants to deter workers from going around the Bracero program. By 1951, there were 15,000 illegal entry and re-entry prosecutions a year.
At the same time, Congress was working to overhaul American immigration law. The effort was spearheaded by two Democrats: Sen. Patrick McCarran and Rep. Francis Walter. Both were staunch anti-Communists who saw immigration — particularly from Eastern Europe and Asia — as posing a risk that Soviet or Maoist agents would infiltrate the country.
Their law is best known for preserving a quota system that meant about 85 percentof immigration visas annually went to people from northern and western Europe. But it also made a crucial change in the unlawful entry law.
In a counterintuitive move, Congress decided to reduce the penalties for unlawful entry — to a maximum of six months in prison. (It also added a felony provision for any additional illegal entry convictions.)
The change wasn’t driven by compassion or a shift away from criminalizing unlawful immigration. Rather, it anticipated the creation of federal magistrate courts that would handle the cases, according to Eagly, the UCLA law professor. A defendant facing a misdemeanor charge punishable by six months or less generally doesn’t have a right to a grand jury indictment or a jury trial. Once Congress established federal magistrate courts, prosecutors could bring criminal charges against far larger numbers of defendants.
A Democratic-controlled Congress passed the law in 1952, but it was vetoed by President Harry Truman. His veto message decried “carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations of our 1924 law.” Congress was unmoved and overrode his veto. (In this sense, Trump is correct that Democrats bear some responsibility for the unlawful entry law that underlies his administration’s new immigration policy.)
The unlawful entry statute has remained largely unchanged since 1952. In 1968, however, Congress finally passed a law establishing federal magistrate courts, allowing for a major expansion of charges under the unlawful entry law. Without the need to go through the grand jury process or deal with potential jury trials, immigration prosecutions — almost all for unlawful entry — shot up, Eagly found in her 2010 study: from 2,536 cases nationwide in 1968 to 17,858 in 1974.
The trend culminated in programs like Operation Streamline during the George W. Bush administration, in which magistrate judges along the border took simultaneous mass guilty pleas for unlawful entry. (An appeals court ended the practice in 2009.)
The use of the law hasn’t been a partisan matter. The number of such cases spiked to nearly 50,000 in the last year of the Bush administration, and it stayed in that range for most of the Obama administration, according to federal government data maintained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. By 2016, the number had fallen to about 35,000 — still higher than all but the last year of the Bush administration.
But the number of unlawful entry cases fell, the TRAC data shows, during Trump’s first year in office, to 27,000. (It had begun to rise again in recent months, however, even before Sessions announced the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.)
Convictions for immigration crimes now account for more than half of all federal criminal convictions.
The law’s ancestry dates back to World War I. Till that point, U.S. immigration laws had tended to be all or nothing: either no limits at all — or blanket bans for certain groups, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Others were free to enter provided they weren’t “lunatics,” polygamists, prostitutes, “suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease,” or so on.
The result was floods of immigrants: Between 1901 and 1910, for example, close to 9 million came to the U.S. As that happened, anti-immigrant attitudes mounted, with mass influxes from parts of Europe associated in the popular imagination with a litany of social problems, like urban poverty and squalor.
In May 1918, after the U.S. had entered World War I, Congress passed a statute called the Passport Act that gave the president the power to restrict the comings and goings of foreign citizens during wartime. A few months later, however, the war ended — and with it, the restrictions on border crossings.
Federal officials saw potential in the criminal provisions of the Passport Act — a maximum 20-year sentence — as a tool for deterring immigration. So prosecutors ignored the expiration of the law and continued to indict migrants under the Passport Act for unlawful entry into the U.S.
Anti-immigration sentiment continued to climb and the rhetoric of the era has resonance today. One anti-immigration group at the time claimed that immigrants tended to be “vicious and criminal” — the “bootleggers, gangsters, and racketeers of large cities.” The war, Columbia University historian Mae Ngai has written, “raised nationalism and anti-foreign sentiment to a high pitch.”
In response, Congress began clamping down. With the Immigration Act of 1924, it capped the flow at about 165,000 people a year, a small fraction of previous levels The statute’s quotas curtailed migration from southern and eastern Europe severely. Another 1924 law — the Oriental Exclusion Act — banned most immigration from Asia. At the same time, Congress made it easier to deport non-citizens for immigration violations.
In 1925, a federal appeals court put a halt to the practice of indicting migrants under the Passport Act outside wartime. But immigration officials liked what they’d seen, and by 1927, they were working on a replacement.
Two men spearheaded the effort that would lead Congress to criminalize unlawful entry into the United States. They were motivated by eugenics and white supremacy.
The first was James Davis, who was Secretary of Labor from 1921 to 1930. A Republican originally appointed by President Warren Harding, Davis was himself an immigrant from Wales who went by “Puddler Jim,” a reference to his job as a youthful worker in the steel mills of western Pennsylvania. At the time, the Department of Labor oversaw immigration, and Davis had grown disturbed by what he’d seen.
Davis was a committed eugenicist, and he believed principles of eugenics should guide immigration policy, according to The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot by the historian Hans Vought. It was necessary to draw a distinction, Davis had written in 1923, between “bad stock and good stock, weak blood and strong blood, sound heredity and sickly human stuff.”
In November 1927, Davis proposed a set of immigration reforms in the pages of The New York Times. Among his goals: “the definite lessening and possibly, in time, the complete checking of the degenerate and the bearer of degenerates.” One “phase of the immigration problem,” Davis wrote, was the “surreptitious entry of aliens” into the United States in numbers that “cannot even be approximately estimated.”
Deportation alone wasn’t enough to deter illegal immigration, Davis wrote. There was nothing disincentivizing the migrant from turning around and trying again. “Endeavoring to stop this law violation” by deportation only, he wrote, “is like trying to prevent burglary with a penalty no severer than opening the front door of the burglarized residence, should the burglar be found within, escorting him to it, and saying ‘You have no right here; see that you don’t come in again.’”
An immigrant who enters the country unlawfully, he concluded, “should be treated as a law violator and punished effectively.”
To bring his vision to fruition, Davis teamed up with a senator from South Carolina. Coleman Livingston Blease, a Democrat, was “a proud and unreconstructed white supremacist,” UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández wrote in her 2017 book City of Inmates.
Migrants from Mexico were one group whose numbers the increasingly powerful nativist elements in Congress hadn’t managed to restrict. Mexican workers were key to the booming economy of the southwest. Regional employers, particularly in the agricultural sector, had successfully lobbied Congress to block any bill that would choke off their primary source of inexpensive labor. As a result, migration from Mexico soared, with many Mexicans making illegal border crossings to avoid the cost and inconvenience of customs stations.
Blease saw in Davis’s proposal for criminal penalties a way to advance his vision of a white America, and he believed it would bridge the gap between the nativists clamoring for quotas and southwestern congressmen resisting them. Large-scale farmers didn’t mind criminal penalties, Hernández writes, so long as the law was enforced once the harvest was over.
The legislation wasn’t without its opponents, as the UCLA law professor Ingrid Eagly documented in a 2010 study of immigration prosecutions. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the bill. The ACLU felt it was unfair and unlikely to deter migration. An immigrant “may be quite ignorant of this law before he starts on his journey,” the group told Congress.
Despite the ACLU’s objections, a Republican-controlled Congress passed Davis and Blease’s bill in 1929. A Republican president, Herbert Hoover, signed it into law.
The law made it a crime to enter the United States unlawfully and, in so doing, “created the criminalization of the border,” Eagly said.
The statute was swiftly put to use. Between July 1929 and June 1930, according to a Department of Labor report, prosecutors brought more than 6,000 unlawful entry cases. “It is believed that it will prove an effective deterrent,” the report’s author wrote. (In his recent memo, Sessions made similar claims about the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.)
But the law didn’t reduce migration. By 1933, the Labor Department concluded that its rosy outlook had been wrong. The 1929 law “does not seem to have the deterrent effect expected,” noted a Labor Department report published that year.
It blamed budget limitations and judges wary of meting out serious sentences if a defendant was going to be deported anyway.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression achieved what prosecutions and deportations had not. Immigration plunged as the labor market in the United States dried up. Prosecutions for unlawful entry dropped to about 5,000 a year, according to a 2012 examination of the law by Doug Keller in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.
A shortage of labor during World War II prompted the U.S. to reverse course and encourage migration of temporary workers from Mexico through what it called the Bracero program. (The word refers to manual laborers in Spanish.)
Despite the earlier lessons, federal prosecutors began to focus their attention on bringing unlawful entry cases against Mexican migrants to deter workers from going around the Bracero program. By 1951, there were 15,000 illegal entry and re-entry prosecutions a year.
At the same time, Congress was working to overhaul American immigration law. The effort was spearheaded by two Democrats: Sen. Patrick McCarran and Rep. Francis Walter. Both were staunch anti-Communists who saw immigration — particularly from Eastern Europe and Asia — as posing a risk that Soviet or Maoist agents would infiltrate the country.
Their law is best known for preserving a quota system that meant about 85 percentof immigration visas annually went to people from northern and western Europe. But it also made a crucial change in the unlawful entry law.
In a counterintuitive move, Congress decided to reduce the penalties for unlawful entry — to a maximum of six months in prison. (It also added a felony provision for any additional illegal entry convictions.)
The change wasn’t driven by compassion or a shift away from criminalizing unlawful immigration. Rather, it anticipated the creation of federal magistrate courts that would handle the cases, according to Eagly, the UCLA law professor. A defendant facing a misdemeanor charge punishable by six months or less generally doesn’t have a right to a grand jury indictment or a jury trial. Once Congress established federal magistrate courts, prosecutors could bring criminal charges against far larger numbers of defendants.
A Democratic-controlled Congress passed the law in 1952, but it was vetoed by President Harry Truman. His veto message decried “carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations of our 1924 law.” Congress was unmoved and overrode his veto. (In this sense, Trump is correct that Democrats bear some responsibility for the unlawful entry law that underlies his administration’s new immigration policy.)
The unlawful entry statute has remained largely unchanged since 1952. In 1968, however, Congress finally passed a law establishing federal magistrate courts, allowing for a major expansion of charges under the unlawful entry law. Without the need to go through the grand jury process or deal with potential jury trials, immigration prosecutions — almost all for unlawful entry — shot up, Eagly found in her 2010 study: from 2,536 cases nationwide in 1968 to 17,858 in 1974.
The trend culminated in programs like Operation Streamline during the George W. Bush administration, in which magistrate judges along the border took simultaneous mass guilty pleas for unlawful entry. (An appeals court ended the practice in 2009.)
The use of the law hasn’t been a partisan matter. The number of such cases spiked to nearly 50,000 in the last year of the Bush administration, and it stayed in that range for most of the Obama administration, according to federal government data maintained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. By 2016, the number had fallen to about 35,000 — still higher than all but the last year of the Bush administration.
But the number of unlawful entry cases fell, the TRAC data shows, during Trump’s first year in office, to 27,000. (It had begun to rise again in recent months, however, even before Sessions announced the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.)
Convictions for immigration crimes now account for more than half of all federal criminal convictions.
Hawaii’s fight against Trump’s Muslim travel ban has long roots of resistance
As SCOTUS prepares to rule on Trump v. Hawaii, a reminder that Hawaii stood up for Japanese Americans in WWII
RAHNA REIKO RIZZUTO - salon
JUNE 16, 2018 5:00PM (UTC)
In 1945, my great uncle died for his country, one of 400,000 American soldiers who gave their lives during World War II. He was a member of the most decorated unit in the history of American warfare, one of the “little brown soldiers” that saved the Lost Battalion from Texas in the Vosges Mountains. Four casualties for every man saved. My great uncle, Robert Ozaki, shows up in written accounts of that battle, leading a bayonet charge when his lieutenant disappeared and was thought captured. He arrived at the hospital in Colorado with shrapnel in his back, and our family story has it that he kept shaking down his thermometer so that the doctors could attend to other soldiers.
Your hero? He served fiercely and with honor, and died in that hospital: a recipient of a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.
Your enemy? His own government branded him class 4-C, an “enemy alien,” and would not let his family attend his funeral.
Unless you are in the Marvel Comic universe, it’s hard to be both. But my Silver Star great uncle was Japanese-American. The decades leading up to the war were a time of virulent hatred for the Japanese, with terms like “inscrutable,” “repulsive” and “the yellow peril” thrown around freely. Racism was codified and supported by the president, Congress, the courts and local government, and urged on in headlines in the media. Robert Ozaki would have remained a “menace,” if it were not for Hawaii. And this month, as we await the ruling of the Supreme Court on Hawaii’s challenge to Donald Trump’s travel ban, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time that Hawaii stood up to the overt racist policies of the U.S. government and said no.
In 1942, after Pearl Harbor was attacked, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, giving the military broad powers to detain anyone on the west coast of the mainland determined to be a threat. Although it did not mention ethnicity, it was designed to target people of Japanese ancestry and it did. Nearly 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and their immigrant parents were rounded up, stripped of their citizenship, labeled enemy aliens, and imprisoned behind barbed wire in incarceration camps across the country. My infant mother, her parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents were with them.
In what world are infants and old ladies a threat? In a world where anti-Japanese (and “Asiatic”) sentiment already had a long and ugly history. After importing them first as cheap labor, immigration from Japan had been completely banned. Laws had already been passed to ensure that the Japanese could never become citizens or own property. But their children were American citizens, and as they began owning farms and businesses, hysteria grew. The propaganda machine (the fake news of the 1940s) taught Americans that “Japs” were snakes, beasts, who would marry your daughters, rape the world and steal your stuff; they were to be slapped, smacked, banished and exterminated. American citizenship, hard work, community service and a clean record did not help those individuals then, just as law-abiding immigrants are not safe now. The messages were violent and they were everywhere.
It was a racism rooted in greed: Within a few decades, Japanese-American farms on the West Coast were seven times more profitable than the average. Japanese Americans controlled two-thirds of the Los Angeles flower market, and were projected to produce 40 percent of the produce needed for the war effort. In giving them a week to dispose of everything they owned, and holding them prisoner in camps where they could not make enough money to pay the taxes on any properties they still owned, the evacuation effectively stripped them of everything.
The mission that was accomplished by Roosevelt’s Executive Order was not safety for America. Despite the excuse of national security, there was not one single case of espionage during the war. The result was the successful cleansing of the West Coast of all persons of Japanese ancestry, and the transfer of between $150 million and $400 million of assets back into Caucasian hands.
In the territory of Hawaii, however, events spun out differently, with history-making results. There, martial law was also declared, with similar exclusion orders. However, the commanding general, Lt. Gen. Delos Emmons, refused to evacuate the Japanese Americans, who made up 37 percent of the population and a significant portion of the economy. Emmons flipped the script, arguing that it was better for the overall economy to leave them free. He refuted the rumors, false claims of espionage and the violently anti-Japanese sentiment that was fueling calls for exclusion. Instead, he chose to do something radical: to treat the Japanese Americans as lawful, loyal citizens, and trust them. He even gave them back their guns.
After Pearl Harbor was bombed, Japanese Americans serving in the Hawaii Territorial Guard were discharged at first, but petitioned to continue to serve. Emmons eventually placed them into a lone battalion, the 100th, or One-Puka-Puka. Some 10,000 Japanese American men living in Hawaii volunteered to enlist. Their fierce dedication altered the face of the war for the Japanese Americans. Pressured to find a home for the battalion, the U.S. government began to reconsider their status. The War Department asked for volunteers from behind barbed wire, and eventually began drafting men out of the camps to create the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team that would include the 100th Battalion. The 442nd proved that they were not snakes by earning more than 18,000 military awards among 14,000 soldiers, including 9,486 Purple Hearts, 560 Silver Stars and 21 Medals of Honor.
Today, 75 years later, racism is still rampant, and still a smokescreen for greed. All the horrifying treatment of humans that is playing out in our daily newsfeeds — within our own country and at our borders — is based on the same triggers, and the same arguments. Today’s monsters are still people of color, immigrants, people who don’t speak our language. They are still born from our worries about our safety and our fears that there is a lack of jobs and money and that there is not enough for us. As we twist ourselves in knots to erase or justify our actions (turning off body cameras, claiming to be protecting child refugees while we build new for-profit prisons for their parents), it is worth remembering that our safety does not come from threatening the safety of others. Quite the opposite. Our fears imprison us all. Racism is taught; it is deliberate. And until we can see through the lie that we are each other’s enemies, we cannot follow the money and the power to understand who our teachers are.
In 18 long months, the Trump administration has distinguished itself by its many racist and discriminatory policies and executive orders. The actions of its agencies are routinely being challenged in court. Though racism is hardly new in our country (the Japanese American incarceration being just one small example), it is clearly blossoming, thanks to the propaganda that is, once again, infusing the media and every branch of government, and coming from the top. The argument that this revised travel ban is not racist is bogus. It is worth remembering that Executive Order 9066 did not mention ethnicity or race but was to apply to “any or all persons.” Both were justified on grounds of national defense. Just as Roosevelt’s order was a tool for racism, this administration’s actions and words make it clear that the travel ban will be another tool in our growing arsenal against people who are “other,” who we are being told are threatening our safety and our stuff.
In the 1940s, the Supreme Court rejected the first three challenges to the incarceration, before finally ruling that the government had no legal right to imprison a loyal citizen. The damage was already done. In 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act apologizing for the incarceration, he repeatedly mentioned the bravery of the Japanese American soldiers as proof that the incarceration was a “mistake” and one “based solely on race.”
These reversals may not have been possible if Hawaii had buckled under and followed a different path. Our safety will not be gained in lawsuits. Justice may not be supreme. We must all find a way to question the propaganda and the policies that have been designed to separate us and to see each other as human. If we need assurance that our enemy may indeed be our hero, the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Team is a potent reminder that beneath the different skin and eyes of “the other” may beat 9,486 Purple Hearts.
Your hero? He served fiercely and with honor, and died in that hospital: a recipient of a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.
Your enemy? His own government branded him class 4-C, an “enemy alien,” and would not let his family attend his funeral.
Unless you are in the Marvel Comic universe, it’s hard to be both. But my Silver Star great uncle was Japanese-American. The decades leading up to the war were a time of virulent hatred for the Japanese, with terms like “inscrutable,” “repulsive” and “the yellow peril” thrown around freely. Racism was codified and supported by the president, Congress, the courts and local government, and urged on in headlines in the media. Robert Ozaki would have remained a “menace,” if it were not for Hawaii. And this month, as we await the ruling of the Supreme Court on Hawaii’s challenge to Donald Trump’s travel ban, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time that Hawaii stood up to the overt racist policies of the U.S. government and said no.
In 1942, after Pearl Harbor was attacked, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, giving the military broad powers to detain anyone on the west coast of the mainland determined to be a threat. Although it did not mention ethnicity, it was designed to target people of Japanese ancestry and it did. Nearly 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and their immigrant parents were rounded up, stripped of their citizenship, labeled enemy aliens, and imprisoned behind barbed wire in incarceration camps across the country. My infant mother, her parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents were with them.
In what world are infants and old ladies a threat? In a world where anti-Japanese (and “Asiatic”) sentiment already had a long and ugly history. After importing them first as cheap labor, immigration from Japan had been completely banned. Laws had already been passed to ensure that the Japanese could never become citizens or own property. But their children were American citizens, and as they began owning farms and businesses, hysteria grew. The propaganda machine (the fake news of the 1940s) taught Americans that “Japs” were snakes, beasts, who would marry your daughters, rape the world and steal your stuff; they were to be slapped, smacked, banished and exterminated. American citizenship, hard work, community service and a clean record did not help those individuals then, just as law-abiding immigrants are not safe now. The messages were violent and they were everywhere.
It was a racism rooted in greed: Within a few decades, Japanese-American farms on the West Coast were seven times more profitable than the average. Japanese Americans controlled two-thirds of the Los Angeles flower market, and were projected to produce 40 percent of the produce needed for the war effort. In giving them a week to dispose of everything they owned, and holding them prisoner in camps where they could not make enough money to pay the taxes on any properties they still owned, the evacuation effectively stripped them of everything.
The mission that was accomplished by Roosevelt’s Executive Order was not safety for America. Despite the excuse of national security, there was not one single case of espionage during the war. The result was the successful cleansing of the West Coast of all persons of Japanese ancestry, and the transfer of between $150 million and $400 million of assets back into Caucasian hands.
In the territory of Hawaii, however, events spun out differently, with history-making results. There, martial law was also declared, with similar exclusion orders. However, the commanding general, Lt. Gen. Delos Emmons, refused to evacuate the Japanese Americans, who made up 37 percent of the population and a significant portion of the economy. Emmons flipped the script, arguing that it was better for the overall economy to leave them free. He refuted the rumors, false claims of espionage and the violently anti-Japanese sentiment that was fueling calls for exclusion. Instead, he chose to do something radical: to treat the Japanese Americans as lawful, loyal citizens, and trust them. He even gave them back their guns.
After Pearl Harbor was bombed, Japanese Americans serving in the Hawaii Territorial Guard were discharged at first, but petitioned to continue to serve. Emmons eventually placed them into a lone battalion, the 100th, or One-Puka-Puka. Some 10,000 Japanese American men living in Hawaii volunteered to enlist. Their fierce dedication altered the face of the war for the Japanese Americans. Pressured to find a home for the battalion, the U.S. government began to reconsider their status. The War Department asked for volunteers from behind barbed wire, and eventually began drafting men out of the camps to create the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team that would include the 100th Battalion. The 442nd proved that they were not snakes by earning more than 18,000 military awards among 14,000 soldiers, including 9,486 Purple Hearts, 560 Silver Stars and 21 Medals of Honor.
Today, 75 years later, racism is still rampant, and still a smokescreen for greed. All the horrifying treatment of humans that is playing out in our daily newsfeeds — within our own country and at our borders — is based on the same triggers, and the same arguments. Today’s monsters are still people of color, immigrants, people who don’t speak our language. They are still born from our worries about our safety and our fears that there is a lack of jobs and money and that there is not enough for us. As we twist ourselves in knots to erase or justify our actions (turning off body cameras, claiming to be protecting child refugees while we build new for-profit prisons for their parents), it is worth remembering that our safety does not come from threatening the safety of others. Quite the opposite. Our fears imprison us all. Racism is taught; it is deliberate. And until we can see through the lie that we are each other’s enemies, we cannot follow the money and the power to understand who our teachers are.
In 18 long months, the Trump administration has distinguished itself by its many racist and discriminatory policies and executive orders. The actions of its agencies are routinely being challenged in court. Though racism is hardly new in our country (the Japanese American incarceration being just one small example), it is clearly blossoming, thanks to the propaganda that is, once again, infusing the media and every branch of government, and coming from the top. The argument that this revised travel ban is not racist is bogus. It is worth remembering that Executive Order 9066 did not mention ethnicity or race but was to apply to “any or all persons.” Both were justified on grounds of national defense. Just as Roosevelt’s order was a tool for racism, this administration’s actions and words make it clear that the travel ban will be another tool in our growing arsenal against people who are “other,” who we are being told are threatening our safety and our stuff.
In the 1940s, the Supreme Court rejected the first three challenges to the incarceration, before finally ruling that the government had no legal right to imprison a loyal citizen. The damage was already done. In 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act apologizing for the incarceration, he repeatedly mentioned the bravery of the Japanese American soldiers as proof that the incarceration was a “mistake” and one “based solely on race.”
These reversals may not have been possible if Hawaii had buckled under and followed a different path. Our safety will not be gained in lawsuits. Justice may not be supreme. We must all find a way to question the propaganda and the policies that have been designed to separate us and to see each other as human. If we need assurance that our enemy may indeed be our hero, the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Team is a potent reminder that beneath the different skin and eyes of “the other” may beat 9,486 Purple Hearts.
America’s segregated shores: beaches' long history as a racial battleground
For decades officials imposed regulations to restrict African Americans’ use of public beaches – and the fight for equal access is far from over
Andrew W Kahrl
the guardian
Tue 12 Jun 2018 06.00 EDT
Children from Hartford’s North End play at the private Madison Beach Club, exercising their legal right to the wet sand portion of the shore. Photograph: Bob Adelman
Summer has arrived, which, for many Americans, means day camps for children, afternoons lounging by a pool, and weekend trips to the beach. But for many others, summer brings new burdens, frustrations and fears: the end of free or reduced meals for children at schools, the added cost of childcare and the search – often in vain – for safe, affordable and accessible places to play and cool off on a hot day.
Summers have long been America’s most segregated season. Nowhere is this more evident than along the nation’s beaches and coasts, one of the chief destinations for vacationers and pleasure seekers, and a perennial site of racial conflict and violence. The infamous 1919 Chicago race riot, which lasted seven days and claimed 38 lives, began on the shores of Lake Michigan, when white youth gang members stoned to death a black teenager named Eugene Williams after he had accidentally drifted across a color line in the water. In its aftermath, African Americans learned to avoid the city’s lakefront. As a child, black Chicagoan Dempsey Travis remembers, “I was never permitted to learn to swim. For six years, we lived within two blocks of the lake, but that did not change [my parents’] attitude. To Dad and Mama, the blue lake always had a tinge of red from the blood of that young black boy.”
In the decades that followed, local governments across the US enacted a host of policies and practices designed to segregate places of outdoor leisure by race and effectively exclude people of color from public beaches. In the south, those methods were quite explicit. Coastal cities such as Norfolk, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Miami, Florida, prohibited African Americans from stepping foot on any of their public beaches, and for years ignored blacks’ demands for public beaches of their own. Whites’ indifference to the health and humanity of black communities often had deadly consequences. Throughout the Jim Crow era, shockingly high numbers of black youth drowned each summer while playing in dangerous, and unsupervised, bodies of water. When white officials did respond to black demands for beaches and parks of their own, they invariably selected remote, polluted, often hazardous, locations. In Washington DC, officials designated Buzzard’s Point, a former dumping ground located downstream from a sewage plant, as an appropriate location for the city’s “colored” bathing beach. In New Orleans, it was a remote site on Lake Pontchartrain, 14 miles from downtown, surrounded on both sides by fishing camps that dumped raw sewage into the lake. One health official described the waters offshore as “grossly contaminated” and wholly unfit for bathing.
In the north, whites employed more subtle, but no less effective, methods of segregation. Predominantly white suburbs and towns in the north-east, for example, designated their public beaches for residents only, or charged exorbitant access fees for non-residents, or barred non-residents from parking near the shore, all designed to keep minority populations in neighboring cities out. City officials, meanwhile, failed to provide black neighborhoods with safe and decent places of public recreation and deliberately made beaches and pools frequented by middle-class whites inaccessible to the poor and people of color.
Here, too, whites’ determined efforts to keep black people out of their pools and off their beaches cost black children their lives. On a hot summer day in June 1968, teenagers Howard Martin and Lemark Hicks left their families’ low-income public housing units in Port Chester, New York, and went in search of a place to cool off. Hours later, scuba divers pulled their lifeless bodies from the depths of the Byram river, where the two African American boys had drowned while swimming, unsupervised, in the river’s dangerous currents. While the boys screamed for help, less than a mile away lifeguards kept a watchful eye over children playing in the surf at Byram Beach, one of three public beaches in the neighboring town of Greenwich, Connecticut. But despite its close proximity, these beaches, and the safety they afforded bathers, were not an option for Martin, Hicks, and all other black children living in Port Chester. They were for Greenwich residents only.
Such senseless tragedies fueled black unrest and played no small role in sparking urban uprisings during the long, hot summers of the 1960s. In 1968, public housing residents in Hartford, Connecticut, staged a series of protests following the drowning deaths of several children along a dangerous section of a river that snaked through their housing project. City officials had repeatedly ignored parents’ demands to fence off the area or, better yet, provide the neighborhood with a public swimming pool, and instead scolded parents for not keeping a better watch over their children. “This is what causes riots,” protest leader Barbara Henderson said in response. The Kerner commission concurred. In its 1968 report on the “riots” that had engulfed urban black America in previous summers, it listed “poor recreation facilities and programs” as the fifth most intense grievance of black populations in riot-torn cities, just behind policing practices, unemployment and underemployment, housing and education. In response, cities hastily built above-ground swimming pools and placed sprinklers on fire hydrants in black neighborhoods.
But aside from these modest gestures, little was done to address the underlying causes of summertime segregation and recreational inequality. In recent decades, fiscally distressed cities have slashed funding for outdoor recreation programs for disadvantaged children, and closed or sold off public parks, beaches and swimming pools in poorer neighborhoods, while affluent communities continue to employ the same tactics for keeping “undesirables” out of their parks and off their shores. Earlier this spring, officials in Westport, Connecticut, dramatically increased parking fees and slashed the number of passes sold to non-residents at its public beach. The move came after locals complained about the growing numbers of outsiders there the previous summer. In the exclusive community of Palos Verdes Estates, California, a gang of wealthy local whites (known as the “Lunada Bay Boys”) has been waging a decades-long campaign of terror against non-residents, especially African Americans, who seek access to the town’s public beach. Local residents have subjected visitors to beatings and assaults, racist epithets, sexual harassment, dog attacks, death threats, property destruction and vandalism, all with the tacit approval of local law enforcement. Officials in this and other affluent beachfront communities in Los Angeles, meanwhile, have for years thwarted attempts by the city’s regional transit authority to offer direct bus routes from black and brown inner-city neighborhoods to the beach. As a result, it is common to find black children living in Los Angeles who have never even seen the Pacific Ocean, much less spent a day on its shores.
Like schools and neighborhoods, the persistence of racial separatism in places of play didn’t just happen by chance. Nor does it, as some might claim, simply reflect people’s personal preferences. It is the result of public policies and private actions that, by design, aimed to segregate bodies of water by race and allow whites to claim the most desirable outdoor spaces to themselves. Many of these policies and practices remain in effect today. Undoing them is critical to making public space in America truly public, and to ensuring that all Americans enjoy the basic human right to leisure and recreation.
Summers have long been America’s most segregated season. Nowhere is this more evident than along the nation’s beaches and coasts, one of the chief destinations for vacationers and pleasure seekers, and a perennial site of racial conflict and violence. The infamous 1919 Chicago race riot, which lasted seven days and claimed 38 lives, began on the shores of Lake Michigan, when white youth gang members stoned to death a black teenager named Eugene Williams after he had accidentally drifted across a color line in the water. In its aftermath, African Americans learned to avoid the city’s lakefront. As a child, black Chicagoan Dempsey Travis remembers, “I was never permitted to learn to swim. For six years, we lived within two blocks of the lake, but that did not change [my parents’] attitude. To Dad and Mama, the blue lake always had a tinge of red from the blood of that young black boy.”
In the decades that followed, local governments across the US enacted a host of policies and practices designed to segregate places of outdoor leisure by race and effectively exclude people of color from public beaches. In the south, those methods were quite explicit. Coastal cities such as Norfolk, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Miami, Florida, prohibited African Americans from stepping foot on any of their public beaches, and for years ignored blacks’ demands for public beaches of their own. Whites’ indifference to the health and humanity of black communities often had deadly consequences. Throughout the Jim Crow era, shockingly high numbers of black youth drowned each summer while playing in dangerous, and unsupervised, bodies of water. When white officials did respond to black demands for beaches and parks of their own, they invariably selected remote, polluted, often hazardous, locations. In Washington DC, officials designated Buzzard’s Point, a former dumping ground located downstream from a sewage plant, as an appropriate location for the city’s “colored” bathing beach. In New Orleans, it was a remote site on Lake Pontchartrain, 14 miles from downtown, surrounded on both sides by fishing camps that dumped raw sewage into the lake. One health official described the waters offshore as “grossly contaminated” and wholly unfit for bathing.
In the north, whites employed more subtle, but no less effective, methods of segregation. Predominantly white suburbs and towns in the north-east, for example, designated their public beaches for residents only, or charged exorbitant access fees for non-residents, or barred non-residents from parking near the shore, all designed to keep minority populations in neighboring cities out. City officials, meanwhile, failed to provide black neighborhoods with safe and decent places of public recreation and deliberately made beaches and pools frequented by middle-class whites inaccessible to the poor and people of color.
Here, too, whites’ determined efforts to keep black people out of their pools and off their beaches cost black children their lives. On a hot summer day in June 1968, teenagers Howard Martin and Lemark Hicks left their families’ low-income public housing units in Port Chester, New York, and went in search of a place to cool off. Hours later, scuba divers pulled their lifeless bodies from the depths of the Byram river, where the two African American boys had drowned while swimming, unsupervised, in the river’s dangerous currents. While the boys screamed for help, less than a mile away lifeguards kept a watchful eye over children playing in the surf at Byram Beach, one of three public beaches in the neighboring town of Greenwich, Connecticut. But despite its close proximity, these beaches, and the safety they afforded bathers, were not an option for Martin, Hicks, and all other black children living in Port Chester. They were for Greenwich residents only.
Such senseless tragedies fueled black unrest and played no small role in sparking urban uprisings during the long, hot summers of the 1960s. In 1968, public housing residents in Hartford, Connecticut, staged a series of protests following the drowning deaths of several children along a dangerous section of a river that snaked through their housing project. City officials had repeatedly ignored parents’ demands to fence off the area or, better yet, provide the neighborhood with a public swimming pool, and instead scolded parents for not keeping a better watch over their children. “This is what causes riots,” protest leader Barbara Henderson said in response. The Kerner commission concurred. In its 1968 report on the “riots” that had engulfed urban black America in previous summers, it listed “poor recreation facilities and programs” as the fifth most intense grievance of black populations in riot-torn cities, just behind policing practices, unemployment and underemployment, housing and education. In response, cities hastily built above-ground swimming pools and placed sprinklers on fire hydrants in black neighborhoods.
But aside from these modest gestures, little was done to address the underlying causes of summertime segregation and recreational inequality. In recent decades, fiscally distressed cities have slashed funding for outdoor recreation programs for disadvantaged children, and closed or sold off public parks, beaches and swimming pools in poorer neighborhoods, while affluent communities continue to employ the same tactics for keeping “undesirables” out of their parks and off their shores. Earlier this spring, officials in Westport, Connecticut, dramatically increased parking fees and slashed the number of passes sold to non-residents at its public beach. The move came after locals complained about the growing numbers of outsiders there the previous summer. In the exclusive community of Palos Verdes Estates, California, a gang of wealthy local whites (known as the “Lunada Bay Boys”) has been waging a decades-long campaign of terror against non-residents, especially African Americans, who seek access to the town’s public beach. Local residents have subjected visitors to beatings and assaults, racist epithets, sexual harassment, dog attacks, death threats, property destruction and vandalism, all with the tacit approval of local law enforcement. Officials in this and other affluent beachfront communities in Los Angeles, meanwhile, have for years thwarted attempts by the city’s regional transit authority to offer direct bus routes from black and brown inner-city neighborhoods to the beach. As a result, it is common to find black children living in Los Angeles who have never even seen the Pacific Ocean, much less spent a day on its shores.
Like schools and neighborhoods, the persistence of racial separatism in places of play didn’t just happen by chance. Nor does it, as some might claim, simply reflect people’s personal preferences. It is the result of public policies and private actions that, by design, aimed to segregate bodies of water by race and allow whites to claim the most desirable outdoor spaces to themselves. Many of these policies and practices remain in effect today. Undoing them is critical to making public space in America truly public, and to ensuring that all Americans enjoy the basic human right to leisure and recreation.
Colin Kaepernick Is Righter Than You Know: The National Anthem Is a Celebration of Slavery
Jon Schwarz - the intercept
August 28 2016, 12:08 p.m.
6/11/18
Before a preseason game on Friday, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When he explained why, he only spoke about the present: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. … There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Twitter then went predictably nuts, with at least one 49ers fan burning Kaepernick’s jersey.
Almost no one seems to be aware that even if the U.S. were a perfect country today, it would be bizarre to expect African-American players to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Why? Because it literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans.
Few people know this because we only ever sing the first verse. But read the end of the third verse and you’ll see why “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not just a musical atrocity, it’s an intellectual and moral one, too:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” Americans hazily remember, was written by Francis Scott Key about the Battle of Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812. But we don’t ever talk about how the War of 1812 was a war of aggression that began with an attempt by the U.S. to grab Canada from the British Empire.
However, we’d wildly overestimated the strength of the U.S. military. By the time of the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814, the British had counterattacked and overrun Washington, D.C., setting fire to the White House.
And one of the key tactics behind the British military’s success was its active recruitment of American slaves. As a detailed 2014 article in Harper’s explains, the orders given to the Royal Navy’s Admiral Sir George Cockburn read:
Let the landings you make be more for the protection of the desertion of the Black Population than with a view to any other advantage. … The great point to be attained is the cordial Support of the Black population. With them properly armed & backed with 20,000 British Troops, Mr. Madison will be hurled from his throne.
Whole families found their way to the ships of the British, who accepted everyone and pledged no one would be given back to their “owners.” Adult men were trained to create a regiment called the Colonial Marines, who participated in many of the most important battles, including the August 1814 raid on Washington.
Then on the night of September 13, 1814, the British bombarded Fort McHenry. Key, seeing the fort’s flag the next morning, was inspired to write the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
So when Key penned “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,” he was taking great satisfaction in the death of slaves who’d freed themselves. His perspective may have been affected by the fact he owned several slaves himself.
With that in mind, think again about the next two lines: “And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
The reality is that there were human beings fighting for freedom with incredible bravery during the War of 1812. However, “The Star-Spangled Banner” glorifies America’s “triumph” over them — and then turns that reality completely upside down, transforming their killers into the courageous freedom fighters.
After the U.S. and the British signed a peace treaty at the end of 1814, the U.S. government demanded the return of American “property,” which by that point numbered about 6,000 people. The British refused. Most of the 6,000 eventually settled in Canada, with some going to Trinidad, where their descendants are still known as “Merikins.”
Furthermore, if those leading the backlash against Kaepernick need more inspiration, they can get it from Francis Scott Key’s later life.
By 1833, Key was a district attorney for Washington, D.C. As described in a book called Snowstorm in August by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, the police were notorious thieves, frequently stealing free blacks’ possessions with impunity. One night, one of the constables tried to attack a woman who escaped and ran away — until she fell off a bridge across the Potomac and drowned.
“There is neither mercy nor justice for colored people in this district,” an abolitionist paper wrote. “No fuss or stir was made about it. She was got out of the river, and was buried, and there the matter ended.”
Key was furious and indicted the newspaper for intending “to injure, oppress, aggrieve & vilify the good name, fame, credit & reputation of the Magistrates & constables of Washington County.”
You can decide for yourself whether there’s some connection between what happened 200 years ago and what Colin Kaepernick is angry about today. Maybe it’s all ancient, meaningless history. Or maybe it’s not, and Kaepernick is right, and we really need a new national anthem.
Twitter then went predictably nuts, with at least one 49ers fan burning Kaepernick’s jersey.
Almost no one seems to be aware that even if the U.S. were a perfect country today, it would be bizarre to expect African-American players to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Why? Because it literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans.
Few people know this because we only ever sing the first verse. But read the end of the third verse and you’ll see why “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not just a musical atrocity, it’s an intellectual and moral one, too:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” Americans hazily remember, was written by Francis Scott Key about the Battle of Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812. But we don’t ever talk about how the War of 1812 was a war of aggression that began with an attempt by the U.S. to grab Canada from the British Empire.
However, we’d wildly overestimated the strength of the U.S. military. By the time of the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814, the British had counterattacked and overrun Washington, D.C., setting fire to the White House.
And one of the key tactics behind the British military’s success was its active recruitment of American slaves. As a detailed 2014 article in Harper’s explains, the orders given to the Royal Navy’s Admiral Sir George Cockburn read:
Let the landings you make be more for the protection of the desertion of the Black Population than with a view to any other advantage. … The great point to be attained is the cordial Support of the Black population. With them properly armed & backed with 20,000 British Troops, Mr. Madison will be hurled from his throne.
Whole families found their way to the ships of the British, who accepted everyone and pledged no one would be given back to their “owners.” Adult men were trained to create a regiment called the Colonial Marines, who participated in many of the most important battles, including the August 1814 raid on Washington.
Then on the night of September 13, 1814, the British bombarded Fort McHenry. Key, seeing the fort’s flag the next morning, was inspired to write the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
So when Key penned “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,” he was taking great satisfaction in the death of slaves who’d freed themselves. His perspective may have been affected by the fact he owned several slaves himself.
With that in mind, think again about the next two lines: “And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
The reality is that there were human beings fighting for freedom with incredible bravery during the War of 1812. However, “The Star-Spangled Banner” glorifies America’s “triumph” over them — and then turns that reality completely upside down, transforming their killers into the courageous freedom fighters.
After the U.S. and the British signed a peace treaty at the end of 1814, the U.S. government demanded the return of American “property,” which by that point numbered about 6,000 people. The British refused. Most of the 6,000 eventually settled in Canada, with some going to Trinidad, where their descendants are still known as “Merikins.”
Furthermore, if those leading the backlash against Kaepernick need more inspiration, they can get it from Francis Scott Key’s later life.
By 1833, Key was a district attorney for Washington, D.C. As described in a book called Snowstorm in August by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, the police were notorious thieves, frequently stealing free blacks’ possessions with impunity. One night, one of the constables tried to attack a woman who escaped and ran away — until she fell off a bridge across the Potomac and drowned.
“There is neither mercy nor justice for colored people in this district,” an abolitionist paper wrote. “No fuss or stir was made about it. She was got out of the river, and was buried, and there the matter ended.”
Key was furious and indicted the newspaper for intending “to injure, oppress, aggrieve & vilify the good name, fame, credit & reputation of the Magistrates & constables of Washington County.”
You can decide for yourself whether there’s some connection between what happened 200 years ago and what Colin Kaepernick is angry about today. Maybe it’s all ancient, meaningless history. Or maybe it’s not, and Kaepernick is right, and we really need a new national anthem.
The white supremacist roots of the Republicans’ so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws
Tamara Draut, Salon - raw story
07 JUN 2018 AT 12:57 ET
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon hand down its decision in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, which challenges the ability of public sector unions to collect “fair share” fees from workers who are covered by a negotiated union contract but don’t want to join the union. While the case may seem technocratic, its argument is one thread of a well-worn tapestry by conservatives: attacking union rights to thwart working-class solidarity, especially across racial and ethnic lines.
At the heart of the case is what are deceptively known as “right-to-work” laws, which were conceived with the sole intention of maintaining racial wage hierarchies in the Jim Crow South as part of a larger conservative backlash to the success of union organizing in the years immediately following the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) in 1935. We have to go that far back because what Congress did in that year, as long ago as it seems, greatly constrains working-class power today.
The Wagner Act essentially legalized the rights of employees to organize in unions and developed the process of union certification through a new agency created under the law, the National Labor Relations Board. It’s hard to overstate the radical nature of this law at the time it was enacted — and how surprising it was that the law was upheld by the Supreme Court. It seemed destined to be overturned, given the Court’s longstanding opposition to government involvement in the economy.
Indeed, most of the big corporations at the time — DuPont, General Motors and Republic Steel — ignored the law under this assumption, carrying on their normal business of fighting union attempts by firing activists, hiring spies, and stocking up on guns and tear gas. They funded the legal challenge to the National Labor Relations Act and a major public relations effort to smear the law in the court of public opinion. But in a 1937 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, the Supreme Court declared the Wagner Act constitutional by sustaining Congress’s power to regulate employers under the commerce clause.
Within a year-and-a-half, 3 million new workers voted to be represented by a union in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As America entered World War II and demand for machinery, ammunitions and aircraft soared, another 5 million workers voted for a union in just three years, including many women and African-Americans, who had gained new protections under federal contracts related to the war effort.
By the end of the 1940s, nearly one-third of American workers were unionized, winning contracts for better wages, job security and benefits. With unprecedented gains in the North and Midwest, the CIO set its sights on organizing the Jim Crow South. Termed Operation Dixie, the CIO aimed to organize one million Southern white and black workers, provoking the ire of Southern segregationists who rightly worried that working-class solidarity between blacks and whites would uproot the political power structure of the South.
It turned out that the Wagner Act did exactly what it was supposed to do — unleash a great spurt of workplace democracy — and segregationists and business leaders were less than pleased. So Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress drafted a bill that would amend the Wagner Act by gutting many of the hard-fought labor rights it guaranteed. The bill, passed over President Truman’s veto, is known as Taft-Hartley for its co-sponsors, Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred Hartley.
Taft-Hartley provided so-called free-speech rights to employers during an NLRB election, providing companies ample time and leeway to spread false and anti-union information to its workers. Employers could now hold mandatory meetings with workers to detail the perils of welcoming a union into the workplace, intimating that their jobs, or indeed the entire factory, might up and disappear. The Taft-Hartley amendments also outlawed industry-wide strikes, secondary boycotts, and sympathy strikes and gave the president more expansive authority to obtain injunctions against strikes if they jeopardized national interests.
Its most ideological mandate was to require all union officers to sign an affidavit saying that they were not members of the Communist Party. At the time, some of the most effective organizers in the labor movement were Communists. After Taft-Hartley was passed, some unions collapsed and others were purged from the CIO or left rather than signing the pledge. As intended, this provision of the law neutered the most radical and effective elements in the labor movement and washed the labor movement free of its most ardent supporters of women’s and civil rights.
Taft-Hartley also allowed states to pass “right-to-work” laws, which gave workers, even in a unionized workplace, the right to refuse to pay fair-share fees. Under these laws, workers can free-ride — enjoy the benefits of representation without having to pay for it — which makes the establishment and sustenance of a new union a much riskier proposition. In states without right-to-work laws, all workers who benefit from a union contract must pay a fair-share fee, even if they decline union membership. This fee basically represents the worker’s portion of the costs of the union’s providing collective bargaining and other benefits. This is a smaller fee than the overall union dues, which cover broader costs, such as political funding and lobbying.
That loss of revenue makes organizing in right-to-work states much more financially precarious and is a major reason that union density in those states is so much lower. In the aftermath of Taft-Hartley, a number of states quickly passed so-called “right-to-work” laws. Ten states, mostly in the South, passed them immediately in 1947, followed by another half dozen or so in the early 1950s.
It’s a technocratic policy with profound consequences, dreamed up by a rather infamous segregationist.
The development and promotion of “right-to-work” laws is largely credited to Vance Muse, a Texas oil industry lobbyist and known white supremacist who warned that without such legislation to impede union organizing, “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” When it came to squashing working class solidarity, big business and segregationists forged common cause — an alliance in the history books with significant impacts on worker’s rights today.
Right-to-work laws and other anti-union efforts are aimed at consolidating economic and political power for businesses and capital by preventing any whiff of working-class solidarity. Through union dues, the labor movement can amass significant resources to engage in voter turnout, agenda setting and issue advocacy, all on behalf of ordinary Americans. It is that amassing of political power — in addition to the fairer distribution of profits — that is so threatening to conservatives and corporate America. After all, big labor has been responsible for advances in our day-to-day lives that still make conservatives livid: Medicare, Medicaid and, yes, Obamacare too; unemployment insurance; Social Security; the 40-hour workweek; pensions (what’s left of them, anyway); the minimum wage. These are just the greatest hits; many other humane advances in our lives owe their existence to labor unions.
Big business saw the weakening of union rights as the first step in a campaign to bring down the entire New Deal order, and weren’t shy about saying so. At the end of the war, Alfred Sloan, CEO of General Motors, spoke honestly about his disdain for the New Deal, saying, “It took 14 years to rid this country of Prohibition. It is going to take a good while to rid the country of the New Deal, but sooner or later the ax falls and we get a change.”
Power in America might be thought of as being historically represented by two scales. On the left is labor and on the right is capital. When one side loses political clout, the other side gains it. Today the right side of the scale overpowers the left. And that was no accident.
If the court sides with the plaintiff in Janus, it would essentially nationalize “right-to-work” laws in the public sector. All of us will pay the price — in the form of lower wages, job insecurity, miserly benefits and soaring inequality — so America’s plutocrats can tighten the political and economic vise that leaves most of us struggling.
These same plutocrats will point the finger for our struggles at new immigrants, black people and the poor, in a well-worn narrative that allows some politicians and their corporate donors to tilt the rules in their favor while the rest of us fight among ourselves for the leftovers. But we can change. We can come together across racial and ethnic lines to elect new leaders who will represent all of us, not just the wealthy few. We can start by refusing to fall for the divide-and-conquer politics at issue in the Janus case.
At the heart of the case is what are deceptively known as “right-to-work” laws, which were conceived with the sole intention of maintaining racial wage hierarchies in the Jim Crow South as part of a larger conservative backlash to the success of union organizing in the years immediately following the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) in 1935. We have to go that far back because what Congress did in that year, as long ago as it seems, greatly constrains working-class power today.
The Wagner Act essentially legalized the rights of employees to organize in unions and developed the process of union certification through a new agency created under the law, the National Labor Relations Board. It’s hard to overstate the radical nature of this law at the time it was enacted — and how surprising it was that the law was upheld by the Supreme Court. It seemed destined to be overturned, given the Court’s longstanding opposition to government involvement in the economy.
Indeed, most of the big corporations at the time — DuPont, General Motors and Republic Steel — ignored the law under this assumption, carrying on their normal business of fighting union attempts by firing activists, hiring spies, and stocking up on guns and tear gas. They funded the legal challenge to the National Labor Relations Act and a major public relations effort to smear the law in the court of public opinion. But in a 1937 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, the Supreme Court declared the Wagner Act constitutional by sustaining Congress’s power to regulate employers under the commerce clause.
Within a year-and-a-half, 3 million new workers voted to be represented by a union in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As America entered World War II and demand for machinery, ammunitions and aircraft soared, another 5 million workers voted for a union in just three years, including many women and African-Americans, who had gained new protections under federal contracts related to the war effort.
By the end of the 1940s, nearly one-third of American workers were unionized, winning contracts for better wages, job security and benefits. With unprecedented gains in the North and Midwest, the CIO set its sights on organizing the Jim Crow South. Termed Operation Dixie, the CIO aimed to organize one million Southern white and black workers, provoking the ire of Southern segregationists who rightly worried that working-class solidarity between blacks and whites would uproot the political power structure of the South.
It turned out that the Wagner Act did exactly what it was supposed to do — unleash a great spurt of workplace democracy — and segregationists and business leaders were less than pleased. So Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress drafted a bill that would amend the Wagner Act by gutting many of the hard-fought labor rights it guaranteed. The bill, passed over President Truman’s veto, is known as Taft-Hartley for its co-sponsors, Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred Hartley.
Taft-Hartley provided so-called free-speech rights to employers during an NLRB election, providing companies ample time and leeway to spread false and anti-union information to its workers. Employers could now hold mandatory meetings with workers to detail the perils of welcoming a union into the workplace, intimating that their jobs, or indeed the entire factory, might up and disappear. The Taft-Hartley amendments also outlawed industry-wide strikes, secondary boycotts, and sympathy strikes and gave the president more expansive authority to obtain injunctions against strikes if they jeopardized national interests.
Its most ideological mandate was to require all union officers to sign an affidavit saying that they were not members of the Communist Party. At the time, some of the most effective organizers in the labor movement were Communists. After Taft-Hartley was passed, some unions collapsed and others were purged from the CIO or left rather than signing the pledge. As intended, this provision of the law neutered the most radical and effective elements in the labor movement and washed the labor movement free of its most ardent supporters of women’s and civil rights.
Taft-Hartley also allowed states to pass “right-to-work” laws, which gave workers, even in a unionized workplace, the right to refuse to pay fair-share fees. Under these laws, workers can free-ride — enjoy the benefits of representation without having to pay for it — which makes the establishment and sustenance of a new union a much riskier proposition. In states without right-to-work laws, all workers who benefit from a union contract must pay a fair-share fee, even if they decline union membership. This fee basically represents the worker’s portion of the costs of the union’s providing collective bargaining and other benefits. This is a smaller fee than the overall union dues, which cover broader costs, such as political funding and lobbying.
That loss of revenue makes organizing in right-to-work states much more financially precarious and is a major reason that union density in those states is so much lower. In the aftermath of Taft-Hartley, a number of states quickly passed so-called “right-to-work” laws. Ten states, mostly in the South, passed them immediately in 1947, followed by another half dozen or so in the early 1950s.
It’s a technocratic policy with profound consequences, dreamed up by a rather infamous segregationist.
The development and promotion of “right-to-work” laws is largely credited to Vance Muse, a Texas oil industry lobbyist and known white supremacist who warned that without such legislation to impede union organizing, “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” When it came to squashing working class solidarity, big business and segregationists forged common cause — an alliance in the history books with significant impacts on worker’s rights today.
Right-to-work laws and other anti-union efforts are aimed at consolidating economic and political power for businesses and capital by preventing any whiff of working-class solidarity. Through union dues, the labor movement can amass significant resources to engage in voter turnout, agenda setting and issue advocacy, all on behalf of ordinary Americans. It is that amassing of political power — in addition to the fairer distribution of profits — that is so threatening to conservatives and corporate America. After all, big labor has been responsible for advances in our day-to-day lives that still make conservatives livid: Medicare, Medicaid and, yes, Obamacare too; unemployment insurance; Social Security; the 40-hour workweek; pensions (what’s left of them, anyway); the minimum wage. These are just the greatest hits; many other humane advances in our lives owe their existence to labor unions.
Big business saw the weakening of union rights as the first step in a campaign to bring down the entire New Deal order, and weren’t shy about saying so. At the end of the war, Alfred Sloan, CEO of General Motors, spoke honestly about his disdain for the New Deal, saying, “It took 14 years to rid this country of Prohibition. It is going to take a good while to rid the country of the New Deal, but sooner or later the ax falls and we get a change.”
Power in America might be thought of as being historically represented by two scales. On the left is labor and on the right is capital. When one side loses political clout, the other side gains it. Today the right side of the scale overpowers the left. And that was no accident.
If the court sides with the plaintiff in Janus, it would essentially nationalize “right-to-work” laws in the public sector. All of us will pay the price — in the form of lower wages, job insecurity, miserly benefits and soaring inequality — so America’s plutocrats can tighten the political and economic vise that leaves most of us struggling.
These same plutocrats will point the finger for our struggles at new immigrants, black people and the poor, in a well-worn narrative that allows some politicians and their corporate donors to tilt the rules in their favor while the rest of us fight among ourselves for the leftovers. But we can change. We can come together across racial and ethnic lines to elect new leaders who will represent all of us, not just the wealthy few. We can start by refusing to fall for the divide-and-conquer politics at issue in the Janus case.
just like trump!!!
(NYT) Evidence Shows That Nixon Betrayed The U.S. In Order To Become President
the intellectualist
5/28/18
Evidence shows that President Richard Nixon colluded with the South Vietnamese for the purpose of winning the 1968 election over his Democratic opponent Herbert Humphrey. By doing so, Mr. Nixon betrayed the United States for his own personal ambitions.
At the time, President Lyndon B. Johnson was negotiating a peace settlement with the North Vietnamese.
Nixon, through a trusted intermediary, contacted the South Vietnamese and promised them a better deal if they refused to work with Johnson. By 1968, 30,000 Americans had already died in America’s war in Vietnam.
The South Vietnamese, apparently believing Nixon’s promises, chose not to cooperate in American peace negotiations, damning the process.
Nearly 60,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam by the time the U.S. fled in 1975.
Following his resignation, Nixon denied harming peace talks between the Johnson Administration and North Vietnam, however, evidence discovered following Mr. Nixon’s death eviscerates these claims of innocence.
According to the New York Times:
“Now we know Nixon lied. A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks, which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election. On Oct. 22, 1968*, he ordered Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the initiative.
Haldeman’s notes return us to the dark side. Amid the reappraisals, we must now weigh apparently criminal behavior that, given the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast Asia, may be more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate.”
In a conversation with the Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, the minority leader, Johnson lashed out at Nixon. “I’m reading their hand, Everett,” Johnson told his old friend. “This is treason.”
“I know,” Dirksen said mournfully.
Johnson’s closest aides urged him to unmask Nixon’s actions. But on a Nov. 4 conference call, they concluded that they could not go public because, among other factors, they lacked the “absolute proof,” as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement.”*
At the time, President Lyndon B. Johnson was negotiating a peace settlement with the North Vietnamese.
Nixon, through a trusted intermediary, contacted the South Vietnamese and promised them a better deal if they refused to work with Johnson. By 1968, 30,000 Americans had already died in America’s war in Vietnam.
The South Vietnamese, apparently believing Nixon’s promises, chose not to cooperate in American peace negotiations, damning the process.
Nearly 60,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam by the time the U.S. fled in 1975.
Following his resignation, Nixon denied harming peace talks between the Johnson Administration and North Vietnam, however, evidence discovered following Mr. Nixon’s death eviscerates these claims of innocence.
According to the New York Times:
“Now we know Nixon lied. A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks, which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election. On Oct. 22, 1968*, he ordered Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the initiative.
Haldeman’s notes return us to the dark side. Amid the reappraisals, we must now weigh apparently criminal behavior that, given the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast Asia, may be more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate.”
In a conversation with the Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, the minority leader, Johnson lashed out at Nixon. “I’m reading their hand, Everett,” Johnson told his old friend. “This is treason.”
“I know,” Dirksen said mournfully.
Johnson’s closest aides urged him to unmask Nixon’s actions. But on a Nov. 4 conference call, they concluded that they could not go public because, among other factors, they lacked the “absolute proof,” as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement.”*
The Retired General Who Stopped a Wall Street Coup
General Smedley Butler blew the whistle on a millionaire-led effort to oust FDR and the New Deal.
By Jim Hightower - other words
May 23, 2018
Many Americans would be shocked to learn that political coups are part of our country’s history. Consider the Wall Street Putsch of 1933.
Never heard of it? It was a corporate conspiracy to oust Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had just been elected president.
With the Great Depression raging and millions of families financially devastated, FDR had launched several economic recovery programs to help people get back on their feet. To pay for this crucial effort, he had the audacity to raise taxes on the wealthy, and this enraged a group of Wall Street multimillionaires.
Wailing that their “liberty” to grab as much wealth as possible was being shackled, they accused the president of mounting a “class war.” To pull off their coup, they plotted to enlist a private military force made up of destitute World War I vets who were upset at not receiving promised federal bonus payments.
One of the multimillionaires’ lackeys reached out to a well-respected advocate for veterans: Retired Marine general Smedley Darlington Butler. They wanted him to lead 500,000 veterans in a march on Washington to force FDR from the White House.
They chose the wrong general. Butler was a patriot and lifelong soldier for democracy, who, in his later years, became a famous critic of corporate war profiteering.
Butler was repulsed by the hubris and treachery of these Wall Street aristocrats. He reached out to a reporter, and together they gathered proof to take to Congress. A special congressional committee investigated and found Butler’s story “alarmingly true,” leading to public hearings, with Butler giving detailed testimony.
By exposing the traitors, this courageous patriot nipped their coup in the bud. But their sense of entitlement reveals that we must be aware of the concentrated wealth of the imperious rich, for it poses an ever-present danger to majority rule.
Never heard of it? It was a corporate conspiracy to oust Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had just been elected president.
With the Great Depression raging and millions of families financially devastated, FDR had launched several economic recovery programs to help people get back on their feet. To pay for this crucial effort, he had the audacity to raise taxes on the wealthy, and this enraged a group of Wall Street multimillionaires.
Wailing that their “liberty” to grab as much wealth as possible was being shackled, they accused the president of mounting a “class war.” To pull off their coup, they plotted to enlist a private military force made up of destitute World War I vets who were upset at not receiving promised federal bonus payments.
One of the multimillionaires’ lackeys reached out to a well-respected advocate for veterans: Retired Marine general Smedley Darlington Butler. They wanted him to lead 500,000 veterans in a march on Washington to force FDR from the White House.
They chose the wrong general. Butler was a patriot and lifelong soldier for democracy, who, in his later years, became a famous critic of corporate war profiteering.
Butler was repulsed by the hubris and treachery of these Wall Street aristocrats. He reached out to a reporter, and together they gathered proof to take to Congress. A special congressional committee investigated and found Butler’s story “alarmingly true,” leading to public hearings, with Butler giving detailed testimony.
By exposing the traitors, this courageous patriot nipped their coup in the bud. But their sense of entitlement reveals that we must be aware of the concentrated wealth of the imperious rich, for it poses an ever-present danger to majority rule.
The Myth of the Roosevelt “Trustbusters”
Teddy and FDR weren't the anti-corporate crusaders that they're portrayed as by populists today.
By Robert D. Atkinson and Michael Lind - the new republic
May 4, 2018
Getty (x2)
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, amid growing concerns about income inequality and wage stagnation, politicians and pundits on the left and right have blamed the problems of twenty-first-century America on a familiar populist scapegoat: big business. The solution, they say, can be found in the nation’s past—in particular, the reign of two twentieth-century presidents.
In the early 1900s, the narrative goes, Theodore Roosevelt waged war on corporate concentration as a crusading “trustbuster.” A generation later, during the Great Depression, his cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt stood up for small banks against Wall Street’s big bullies. The Roosevelts saved America from plutocracy and created a golden age for the middle class. Thus, many argue, we need a new generation of trustbusters to save us from the robber barons of tech and banking.
It makes for a compelling case. But it’s based on a false history.
Teddy Roosevelt was far from the business-bashing “trustbuster” of popular memory. The Republican president distinguished between “good” and “bad” trusts, telling Congress in 1905, “I am in no sense hostile to corporations. This is an age of combination, and any effort to prevent combination will not only be useless, but in the end, vicious…”
It is true that his administration brought 44 antitrust actions against corporations and business combinations, including the Northern Securities railroad company and the “beef trust” in meatpacking, which were ultimately broken up by the Supreme Court. But Roosevelt had profound doubts about antitrust, observing that “a succession of lawsuits is hopeless from the standpoint of working out a permanently satisfactory solution” to the problems posed by big business. Indeed, he wanted to replace antitrust policy with federal regulation of firms by a powerful Bureau of Corporations, whose decisions would be shielded from judicial review.
His Republican successor in the White House, William Howard Taft, initiated twice as many antitrust lawsuits in four years as Roosevelt had done in his seven and a half years in office. Privately, Roosevelt raged when the Supreme Court ordered the break-up of Standard Oil, in an antitrust lawsuit begun under his administration and completed under Taft: “I do not see what good can come from dissolving the Standard Oil Company into 40 separate companies, all of which will still remain really under the same control. What we should have is a much stricter government supervision of these great companies, but accompanying this supervision should be a recognition of the fact that great combinations have come to stay and we must do them scrupulous justice just as we exact scrupulous justice from them.”
Anger at Taft was one of the factors that motivated Roosevelt to run for president again in 1912 as the candidate of the Progressive Party. The party’s platform reflected his view that big business overall was a positive force, but needed federal regulation: “The corporation is an essential part of modern business. The concentration of modern business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for national and international business efficiency.” The remedy for abuse was not mindlessly breaking up big firms, but preventing specific abuses by means of a strong national regulation of interstate corporations.
Like Roosevelt, FDR is falsely remembered as an enemy of big business. When running for office in 1932, the Democrat mocked the populists who supported antitrust: “The cry was raised against the great corporations. Theodore Roosevelt, the first great Republican Progressive, fought a Presidential campaign on the issue of ‘trust busting’ and talked freely about malefactors of great wealth. If the government had a policy it was rather to turn the clock back, to destroy the large combinations and to return to the time when every man owned his individual small business. This was impossible.” FDR agreed with his cousin that the answer was regulation, not breaking up big corporations: “Nor today should we abandon the principle of strong economic units called corporations, merely because their power is susceptible of easy abuse.”
In his first term, FDR in attempted to restructure the U.S. economy under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), a system of industry-wide minimum wages and labor codes, which small businesses claimed gave an unfair advantage to big firms. In his second term, after the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA in 1935, Roosevelt briefly fell under the influence of Robert Jackson, Thurman Arnold, and other champions of an aggressive approach to antitrust in the Justice Department. But when World War II broke out, such an approach became an impediment to enlisting major industrial firms for war production, and FDR sidelined the antitrust advocates.
Surely FDR wanted to “break up big banks,” though, given his support of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933? That’s a myth, too.
FDR and Senator Carter Glass of Virginia shared the goal of separating commercial and investment banking, ending what FDR called “speculation with other people’s money.” But they were also hostile to what American populists loved—the fragmented system of small, unstable local “unit banks” protected from competition with big eastern banks by laws against interstate branch banking. To prop up local banks, Representative Henry B. Steagall of Alabama pushed an old populist idea: federal deposit insurance. Shortly before his election in 1932, FDR explained why he opposed the policy in a letter to the New York Sun: “It would lead to laxity in bank management and carelessness on the part of both banker and depositor. I believe that it would be an impossible drain on the Federal Treasury to make good any such guarantee. For a number of reasons of sound government finance, such a plan would be quite dangerous.”
FDR was so opposed that he threatened to veto the bank reform legislation if it included deposit insurance. In the end, in order to enact other reforms he favored, he reluctantly signed the Glass-Steagall bill. If FDR had prevailed, there would be no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Today, the growth and consolidation of multinational corporations presents American democracy with genuine policy challenges. But the answer need not come from bogus history; real history will suffice. Teddy Roosevelt argued that “big trusts” must be “taught that they are under the rule of law,” yet added that “breaking up all big corporations, whether they have behaved well or ill,” is “an extremely insufficient and fragmentary measure.”
And FDR said: “Nor today should we abandon the principle of strong economic units called corporations, merely because their power is susceptible of easy abuse.” The answer to the problems caused by corporate concentration, the Roosevelts agreed, is prudent government oversight and using antitrust laws to police abuses—not to break up every big company simply because it’s big.
In the early 1900s, the narrative goes, Theodore Roosevelt waged war on corporate concentration as a crusading “trustbuster.” A generation later, during the Great Depression, his cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt stood up for small banks against Wall Street’s big bullies. The Roosevelts saved America from plutocracy and created a golden age for the middle class. Thus, many argue, we need a new generation of trustbusters to save us from the robber barons of tech and banking.
It makes for a compelling case. But it’s based on a false history.
Teddy Roosevelt was far from the business-bashing “trustbuster” of popular memory. The Republican president distinguished between “good” and “bad” trusts, telling Congress in 1905, “I am in no sense hostile to corporations. This is an age of combination, and any effort to prevent combination will not only be useless, but in the end, vicious…”
It is true that his administration brought 44 antitrust actions against corporations and business combinations, including the Northern Securities railroad company and the “beef trust” in meatpacking, which were ultimately broken up by the Supreme Court. But Roosevelt had profound doubts about antitrust, observing that “a succession of lawsuits is hopeless from the standpoint of working out a permanently satisfactory solution” to the problems posed by big business. Indeed, he wanted to replace antitrust policy with federal regulation of firms by a powerful Bureau of Corporations, whose decisions would be shielded from judicial review.
His Republican successor in the White House, William Howard Taft, initiated twice as many antitrust lawsuits in four years as Roosevelt had done in his seven and a half years in office. Privately, Roosevelt raged when the Supreme Court ordered the break-up of Standard Oil, in an antitrust lawsuit begun under his administration and completed under Taft: “I do not see what good can come from dissolving the Standard Oil Company into 40 separate companies, all of which will still remain really under the same control. What we should have is a much stricter government supervision of these great companies, but accompanying this supervision should be a recognition of the fact that great combinations have come to stay and we must do them scrupulous justice just as we exact scrupulous justice from them.”
Anger at Taft was one of the factors that motivated Roosevelt to run for president again in 1912 as the candidate of the Progressive Party. The party’s platform reflected his view that big business overall was a positive force, but needed federal regulation: “The corporation is an essential part of modern business. The concentration of modern business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for national and international business efficiency.” The remedy for abuse was not mindlessly breaking up big firms, but preventing specific abuses by means of a strong national regulation of interstate corporations.
Like Roosevelt, FDR is falsely remembered as an enemy of big business. When running for office in 1932, the Democrat mocked the populists who supported antitrust: “The cry was raised against the great corporations. Theodore Roosevelt, the first great Republican Progressive, fought a Presidential campaign on the issue of ‘trust busting’ and talked freely about malefactors of great wealth. If the government had a policy it was rather to turn the clock back, to destroy the large combinations and to return to the time when every man owned his individual small business. This was impossible.” FDR agreed with his cousin that the answer was regulation, not breaking up big corporations: “Nor today should we abandon the principle of strong economic units called corporations, merely because their power is susceptible of easy abuse.”
In his first term, FDR in attempted to restructure the U.S. economy under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), a system of industry-wide minimum wages and labor codes, which small businesses claimed gave an unfair advantage to big firms. In his second term, after the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA in 1935, Roosevelt briefly fell under the influence of Robert Jackson, Thurman Arnold, and other champions of an aggressive approach to antitrust in the Justice Department. But when World War II broke out, such an approach became an impediment to enlisting major industrial firms for war production, and FDR sidelined the antitrust advocates.
Surely FDR wanted to “break up big banks,” though, given his support of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933? That’s a myth, too.
FDR and Senator Carter Glass of Virginia shared the goal of separating commercial and investment banking, ending what FDR called “speculation with other people’s money.” But they were also hostile to what American populists loved—the fragmented system of small, unstable local “unit banks” protected from competition with big eastern banks by laws against interstate branch banking. To prop up local banks, Representative Henry B. Steagall of Alabama pushed an old populist idea: federal deposit insurance. Shortly before his election in 1932, FDR explained why he opposed the policy in a letter to the New York Sun: “It would lead to laxity in bank management and carelessness on the part of both banker and depositor. I believe that it would be an impossible drain on the Federal Treasury to make good any such guarantee. For a number of reasons of sound government finance, such a plan would be quite dangerous.”
FDR was so opposed that he threatened to veto the bank reform legislation if it included deposit insurance. In the end, in order to enact other reforms he favored, he reluctantly signed the Glass-Steagall bill. If FDR had prevailed, there would be no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Today, the growth and consolidation of multinational corporations presents American democracy with genuine policy challenges. But the answer need not come from bogus history; real history will suffice. Teddy Roosevelt argued that “big trusts” must be “taught that they are under the rule of law,” yet added that “breaking up all big corporations, whether they have behaved well or ill,” is “an extremely insufficient and fragmentary measure.”
And FDR said: “Nor today should we abandon the principle of strong economic units called corporations, merely because their power is susceptible of easy abuse.” The answer to the problems caused by corporate concentration, the Roosevelts agreed, is prudent government oversight and using antitrust laws to police abuses—not to break up every big company simply because it’s big.
Bigotry stopped Americans from intervening before the Holocaust. Not much has changed
By JAMES GROSSMAN - la times
APR 29, 2018 | 4:05 AM
Children looking at the Statue of Liberty, on June 4, 1939. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
A ruthless dictator unleashes terror on his own citizens. Those fleeing elicit sympathy — but encounter obstacles to entering the United States. Americans learn of mass killings, but their moral revulsion doesn’t easily turn into policy or military intervention. One thing remains consistent: America doesn’t want refugees, at least not of this ilk; those people aren’t welcome here.
Historians like me are wary of the adage that “history repeats itself.” But comparisons and analogies help us learn from the past, showing us how context matters and conventional wisdom deceives. To most Americans in 1945, “those people” meant “European Jews.” Today, they are Syrians, Congolese, Hondurans.
No visitor to the new exhibition “Americans and the Holocaust” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., will walk away with conventional wisdom about World War II intact. In the 1930s, anti-Semitism rested comfortably within American ideologies of race, but this context, not widely acknowledged at the time, has now virtually disappeared from mainstream collective memory. Instead, America’s pre-Pearl Harbor isolationism is viewed as a mistaken but understandable disinclination to intervene in another European war, further tempered by the suggestion that Americans had only slight knowledge of Nazi depravity.
Museum visitors enter the new exhibit’s galleries in 1933 and walk through 12 years without the benefit of 80 years of hindsight. They see what Americans knew about events in Nazi Germany as they learned it. Public opinion (as documented by polls) and U.S. policy are revealed within that context.
It is a sobering journey. Americans knew that something was dreadfully wrong in Germany. As early as 1932, and even more in 1933, popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Time and Newsweek included major stories on the persecution of Jews in Germany and on Nazi governance. Hitler and Goebbels appeared on covers of Time in 1933, with Goebbels accompanied by a clear message: “Say it in your dreams — THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME.”
An imaginative crowdsourcing effort carried out by the museum uncovered no fewer than 15,000 U.S. newspaper articles documenting persecution published between 1933 and 1945. Newsreels told the same story.
Commentators who have the benefit of hindsight have criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his refusal to intervene. In 1933, the U.S. ambassador to Germany recorded in his diary Roosevelt’s instructions: “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited. But this is also not a governmental affair.” It comes across as cold-hearted in retrospect, but Roosevelt understood his fellow Americans; they would not march to war — or even expend substantial public resources — to save Jews.
If this feels in any way familiar, consider what comes next. Even when 94% of polled Americans claimed to “disapprove of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany,” 71% of them opposed permitting any more than a trickle of German Jews to enter the United States — two weeks after Kristallnacht. Two-thirds of Americans opposed admitting refugee children in 1939.
America kept its doors closed to the people for whom they professed sympathy. This sentiment, shaped by racism, was nothing new, nor was it confined to immigrants. One need only cross the Mall to the National Museum of African American History and Culture to be reminded that in the 1850s white Northerners were as repulsed by the suggestion that emancipation would result in black migration northward as they were by the cruelty of slavery.
Anti-Semitism would remain central to American foreign policy even as the nation stared down Nazi Germany. The United States entered the war in Europe, of course, but Roosevelt was shrewd enough to cast the move as fighting fascism on behalf of democracy. The war was about preserving American values, not saving European Jews.
At war’s end, Americans encountered graphic, overwhelming evidence of what they had been hearing about regularly since the first news reports about the death camps in 1942. Films, photographs, articles and official documents laid out the horrific details of ghettos, concentration camps and gas chambers. Aside from the Jewish media, however, few of these accounts named the victims as Jews.
Terrible people those Nazis, those fascists. The survivors of their terror, however, the “displaced persons,” still could not be trusted to be our neighbors even if there was an orderly bureaucracy of refugee screening, documented here by a wall of letters and official forms.
The ring of familiarity impels us to ask chilling questions about our current moment.
Historians like me are wary of the adage that “history repeats itself.” But comparisons and analogies help us learn from the past, showing us how context matters and conventional wisdom deceives. To most Americans in 1945, “those people” meant “European Jews.” Today, they are Syrians, Congolese, Hondurans.
No visitor to the new exhibition “Americans and the Holocaust” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., will walk away with conventional wisdom about World War II intact. In the 1930s, anti-Semitism rested comfortably within American ideologies of race, but this context, not widely acknowledged at the time, has now virtually disappeared from mainstream collective memory. Instead, America’s pre-Pearl Harbor isolationism is viewed as a mistaken but understandable disinclination to intervene in another European war, further tempered by the suggestion that Americans had only slight knowledge of Nazi depravity.
Museum visitors enter the new exhibit’s galleries in 1933 and walk through 12 years without the benefit of 80 years of hindsight. They see what Americans knew about events in Nazi Germany as they learned it. Public opinion (as documented by polls) and U.S. policy are revealed within that context.
It is a sobering journey. Americans knew that something was dreadfully wrong in Germany. As early as 1932, and even more in 1933, popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Time and Newsweek included major stories on the persecution of Jews in Germany and on Nazi governance. Hitler and Goebbels appeared on covers of Time in 1933, with Goebbels accompanied by a clear message: “Say it in your dreams — THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME.”
An imaginative crowdsourcing effort carried out by the museum uncovered no fewer than 15,000 U.S. newspaper articles documenting persecution published between 1933 and 1945. Newsreels told the same story.
Commentators who have the benefit of hindsight have criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his refusal to intervene. In 1933, the U.S. ambassador to Germany recorded in his diary Roosevelt’s instructions: “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited. But this is also not a governmental affair.” It comes across as cold-hearted in retrospect, but Roosevelt understood his fellow Americans; they would not march to war — or even expend substantial public resources — to save Jews.
If this feels in any way familiar, consider what comes next. Even when 94% of polled Americans claimed to “disapprove of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany,” 71% of them opposed permitting any more than a trickle of German Jews to enter the United States — two weeks after Kristallnacht. Two-thirds of Americans opposed admitting refugee children in 1939.
America kept its doors closed to the people for whom they professed sympathy. This sentiment, shaped by racism, was nothing new, nor was it confined to immigrants. One need only cross the Mall to the National Museum of African American History and Culture to be reminded that in the 1850s white Northerners were as repulsed by the suggestion that emancipation would result in black migration northward as they were by the cruelty of slavery.
Anti-Semitism would remain central to American foreign policy even as the nation stared down Nazi Germany. The United States entered the war in Europe, of course, but Roosevelt was shrewd enough to cast the move as fighting fascism on behalf of democracy. The war was about preserving American values, not saving European Jews.
At war’s end, Americans encountered graphic, overwhelming evidence of what they had been hearing about regularly since the first news reports about the death camps in 1942. Films, photographs, articles and official documents laid out the horrific details of ghettos, concentration camps and gas chambers. Aside from the Jewish media, however, few of these accounts named the victims as Jews.
Terrible people those Nazis, those fascists. The survivors of their terror, however, the “displaced persons,” still could not be trusted to be our neighbors even if there was an orderly bureaucracy of refugee screening, documented here by a wall of letters and official forms.
The ring of familiarity impels us to ask chilling questions about our current moment.
US Holocaust Museum exhibition examines America's response to nazism abroad
A new exhibition looks at the motives, pressures and fears that shaped America’s response to the murder of Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 40s
David Smith in Washington
the guardian
Sun 29 Apr 2018 01.00 EDT
We want visitors to ask why rescue of Jews didn’t become a priority,’ said exhibition curator Daniel Greene. Photograph: Joel Mason-Gaines/United States Holocaust Memorial
What did they know and when did they know it? And why didn’t they do more to stop it?
The motives, pressures and fears that shaped America’s response to the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s are the subject of a provocative new exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
Americans and the Holocaust debunks the myth that Americans lacked access to information about the persecution of Jews as it was happening, demonstrates that they had little appetite to take in refugees from Europe and illustrates that President Franklin Roosevelt’s primary focus was on winning a war, not ending a genocide.
“We show how Americans’ isolationism after world war one, our own xenophobia, racism and antisemitism, and then the catastrophe of the Great Depression, an economic crisis, shape Americans’ responses to nazism,” said exhibition curator Daniel Greene. “Americans had a lot of information about the threat of nazism in real time including, after 1942, murder of Jews across Europe, and we want visitors to ask why rescue of Jews didn’t become a priority.”
The warning signs were there. In the 1930s, the exhibition recounts, popular US news magazines reported almost weekly on Hitler and Nazi Germany, including the targeting of Jews, communists and other political opponents. One striking display includes Time magazine covers featuring Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a Newsweek cover dominated by Hitler at a Nazi rally and a Vanity Fair cover with a caricature of Hitler superimposed on a giant swastika.
No less fascinating is a Cosmopolitan magazine from March 1932 in which American journalist Dorothy Thompson interviews Hitler. The article begins: “When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In less than 50 seconds I was sure I was not. It took just that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.”
But Thompson also observed: “Antisemitism is the life and soul of Hitler’s movement. The Nazis lose no opportunity to insult the Jews.”
A digital touchscreen display of a US map allows visitors to tap any state and see how regional newspapers of the time were also sounding the alarm. On 29 March 1933, for example, the Dallas Morning News carried a front page headline: “Nazi Chiefs Order Jewish Boycott; Even School Children Are Included.”
Greene said: “The media landscape of the 1930s and 40s includes newspapers, magazines, newsreels, radio, and right across all this media we see that Americans could have had access to information about the threat of Nazis if they were paying close attention. One of the things we really want people to understand is it’s not a story that you only had if you were on the coast or in a big metropolitan city. Across the country Americans could read about the threat of nazism.”
In the spring of 1933, the exhibition records, tens of thousands of Americans signed petitions protesting the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, but the US made no official statement against the German regime. In June that year, Roosevelt said: “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited. But this is also not a government affair.”
In 1938 Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, which saw coordinated attacks on thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany, made banner headlines on front pages from Atlanta to Philadelphia to San Francisco. Roosevelt, who told a press conference that it had “deeply shocked” the American public, was asked by a reporter: “Would you recommend a relaxation of our immigration restrictions so that Jewish refugees could be received in this country?” The president replied: “This is not in contemplation; we have the quota system.”
Roosevelt’s legacy in relation to refugees has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, but the exhibition is even-handed. Greene said: “One of the things I’ve thought about here is when does a president try to lead public opinion and when does he follow it. So public opinion is against entering into the war but Roosevelt tries to lead it towards intervention. Public opinion is very much against letting in refugees and he decides that’s not what he’s going to spend his political capital on.
“Roosevelt is a political animal and he’s always making decisions based on politics. Part of politics is thinking about popularity and what do the American people think, and the American people at this time are clear about what they think about admitting refugees.”
Opinion polls several weeks after Kristallnacht found that 94% of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews, but 71% did not want more Jewish refugees to come to the US.
Americans and the Holocaust has stories of heroic individuals who went against the grain to rescue Jews from Europe, but also of Yale University students who founded the America First Committee to oppose US intervention in the second world war. They won the support of aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in a speech in Iowa in 1941 accused Jews of being “war agitators”. Lindbergh’s 1941 diary and an insignia given to him on Hitler’s behalf for services to world aviation are on display.
America entered the war and Hollywood got on board. But popular films of the era emphasised the fight for democracy rather than nazism’s victims. Even Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, depicted stranded refugees without mentioning Jews explicitly, though director Michael Curtiz and several supporting players were Jewish. An exception was The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplin, one of whose costumes is on show.
The killing continued on an industrial scale and by December 1942, radio broadcaster Edward Murrow was clear: “What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.” But the US government’s priority was the defeat of nazism. It rejected pleas to bomb rail lines that transported Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, its gas chambers or the entire camp as “impracticable” and a “diversion” from winning the war.
By 1945, as the Nazis collapsed, American magazines ran some of the first widely circulated photographs from concentration camps. On 7 May, Life stated: “For 12 years since the Nazis seized power, Americans have heard charges of German brutality … Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence.”
Greene said: “What you’re seeing in a lot of the media in the 30s and 40s is information, but words. It’s really April and May 1945 that you start to see, in our mass media, visual evidence of the atrocities. And it does make me wonder if, in the 1940s, we can say seeing is believing and so Americans have of a lot of information but they don’t fully believe.”
Even then, the needle barely moved. In a December 1945 poll, 69% of people said the US should admit the same or fewer people from Europe each year than it did before the war. Only 5% said it should admit more.
The motives, pressures and fears that shaped America’s response to the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s are the subject of a provocative new exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
Americans and the Holocaust debunks the myth that Americans lacked access to information about the persecution of Jews as it was happening, demonstrates that they had little appetite to take in refugees from Europe and illustrates that President Franklin Roosevelt’s primary focus was on winning a war, not ending a genocide.
“We show how Americans’ isolationism after world war one, our own xenophobia, racism and antisemitism, and then the catastrophe of the Great Depression, an economic crisis, shape Americans’ responses to nazism,” said exhibition curator Daniel Greene. “Americans had a lot of information about the threat of nazism in real time including, after 1942, murder of Jews across Europe, and we want visitors to ask why rescue of Jews didn’t become a priority.”
The warning signs were there. In the 1930s, the exhibition recounts, popular US news magazines reported almost weekly on Hitler and Nazi Germany, including the targeting of Jews, communists and other political opponents. One striking display includes Time magazine covers featuring Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a Newsweek cover dominated by Hitler at a Nazi rally and a Vanity Fair cover with a caricature of Hitler superimposed on a giant swastika.
No less fascinating is a Cosmopolitan magazine from March 1932 in which American journalist Dorothy Thompson interviews Hitler. The article begins: “When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In less than 50 seconds I was sure I was not. It took just that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.”
But Thompson also observed: “Antisemitism is the life and soul of Hitler’s movement. The Nazis lose no opportunity to insult the Jews.”
A digital touchscreen display of a US map allows visitors to tap any state and see how regional newspapers of the time were also sounding the alarm. On 29 March 1933, for example, the Dallas Morning News carried a front page headline: “Nazi Chiefs Order Jewish Boycott; Even School Children Are Included.”
Greene said: “The media landscape of the 1930s and 40s includes newspapers, magazines, newsreels, radio, and right across all this media we see that Americans could have had access to information about the threat of Nazis if they were paying close attention. One of the things we really want people to understand is it’s not a story that you only had if you were on the coast or in a big metropolitan city. Across the country Americans could read about the threat of nazism.”
In the spring of 1933, the exhibition records, tens of thousands of Americans signed petitions protesting the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, but the US made no official statement against the German regime. In June that year, Roosevelt said: “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited. But this is also not a government affair.”
In 1938 Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, which saw coordinated attacks on thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany, made banner headlines on front pages from Atlanta to Philadelphia to San Francisco. Roosevelt, who told a press conference that it had “deeply shocked” the American public, was asked by a reporter: “Would you recommend a relaxation of our immigration restrictions so that Jewish refugees could be received in this country?” The president replied: “This is not in contemplation; we have the quota system.”
Roosevelt’s legacy in relation to refugees has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, but the exhibition is even-handed. Greene said: “One of the things I’ve thought about here is when does a president try to lead public opinion and when does he follow it. So public opinion is against entering into the war but Roosevelt tries to lead it towards intervention. Public opinion is very much against letting in refugees and he decides that’s not what he’s going to spend his political capital on.
“Roosevelt is a political animal and he’s always making decisions based on politics. Part of politics is thinking about popularity and what do the American people think, and the American people at this time are clear about what they think about admitting refugees.”
Opinion polls several weeks after Kristallnacht found that 94% of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews, but 71% did not want more Jewish refugees to come to the US.
Americans and the Holocaust has stories of heroic individuals who went against the grain to rescue Jews from Europe, but also of Yale University students who founded the America First Committee to oppose US intervention in the second world war. They won the support of aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in a speech in Iowa in 1941 accused Jews of being “war agitators”. Lindbergh’s 1941 diary and an insignia given to him on Hitler’s behalf for services to world aviation are on display.
America entered the war and Hollywood got on board. But popular films of the era emphasised the fight for democracy rather than nazism’s victims. Even Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, depicted stranded refugees without mentioning Jews explicitly, though director Michael Curtiz and several supporting players were Jewish. An exception was The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplin, one of whose costumes is on show.
The killing continued on an industrial scale and by December 1942, radio broadcaster Edward Murrow was clear: “What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.” But the US government’s priority was the defeat of nazism. It rejected pleas to bomb rail lines that transported Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, its gas chambers or the entire camp as “impracticable” and a “diversion” from winning the war.
By 1945, as the Nazis collapsed, American magazines ran some of the first widely circulated photographs from concentration camps. On 7 May, Life stated: “For 12 years since the Nazis seized power, Americans have heard charges of German brutality … Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence.”
Greene said: “What you’re seeing in a lot of the media in the 30s and 40s is information, but words. It’s really April and May 1945 that you start to see, in our mass media, visual evidence of the atrocities. And it does make me wonder if, in the 1940s, we can say seeing is believing and so Americans have of a lot of information but they don’t fully believe.”
Even then, the needle barely moved. In a December 1945 poll, 69% of people said the US should admit the same or fewer people from Europe each year than it did before the war. Only 5% said it should admit more.
This is what’s really going on when the United States starts pushing ‘religious freedom’ around the world
The Conversation - raw story
25 APR 2018 AT 11:22 ET
...Religion and American empire
In 1775, in the early days of the American Revolution, George Washington prepared the Continental Army to invade the Canadian colonies in order to convince the inhabitants to join the rebellion against the British. As Colonel Benedict Arnold prepared to lead the charge, Washington warned him to respect the religious liberty of Catholics in Quebec and avoid unnecessary conflict. He wrote:
“While we are Contending for our own Liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of Conscience in others.”
Although Congress passed the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791, religious liberty applied only to “respectable” Protestant denominations, like Baptists and Methodists, who grew rapidly in the first decades of the 19th century. As historian David Sehat explains Protestant denominations created a “moral establishment” that acted like official churches did in Europe. As in Europe, this moral establishment persecuted minority faiths, like Catholics, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses.Washington’s advice was followed in Canada but not in the newly founded United States, where Catholics found themselves facing discrimination.
A way of projecting American power
America’s record of promoting religious liberty abroad was also spotty. Religious liberty largely meant the rights of missionaries to go out and convert “heathens” to Protestant Christianity.
For example, government agents and missionaries in the 19th century trampled on the religious rights of conquered Native American nations by taking away their children and placing them into faraway residential schools that forbade them from practicing their native faiths. The United States banned certain native religious ceremonies, like the Ghost Dance, because of fears that the ritual stirred up rebellion.
In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain and took possession of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, Spanish colonies that were both predominantly Catholic. As historian Tisa Wenger has pointed out, promoting religious freedom in the colonies was a way for the United States to expand its empire.
The idea that the United States would spread religious freedom through its policies made Americans feel like liberators even when they acted like conquerors.
According to historian Anna Su, the United States attempted to remake these coloniesin its image by separating church and state and divesting Catholic religious orders of their property. President William McKinley reasoned that the Filipinos could not be trusted to make that separation themselves.
Ironically, the American claim that promoting religious freedom in the world was its sacred mission was one of the reasons the country became an empire.
Two versions of religious freedom
Many Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans demanded the right to worship freely and to organize their lives as they saw fit. Their appeals, however, fell on deaf ears until the early 20th century, when liberal Protestants and Jews began championing a vision of religious liberty aimed at protecting minority rights, not just the rights of the Christian majority.
These progressives wanted to disassociate religious liberty from empire and promote it through international law. Lutheran academic O. Frederick Nolde led a liberal Protestant effort to enshrine religious liberty in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
For Nolde, religious freedom was important among other human rights, including social and economic rights. He argued that people had the right to live free from discrimination and that religious freedom was one of the ways of protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Nolde was hired by Federal Council of Churches, one of the most powerful religious lobbies in the United States.
Nolde and his associates were in the vanguard. It was only over time that the liberal Protestant and Jewish communities came to be more accepting of same-sex relationships and more supportive of church-state separation and other causes to protect minorities.
Evangelical view
Meanwhile, evangelicals and conservative Catholics embraced a different version of religious freedom, one that had the promotion of Christianity at its heart.
Evangelist Billy Graham, for example, worried in the 1950s that the Soviet Union was promoting atheism across the world, so he highlighted the country’s oppression of religious people and called on the United States to do more to free them. At home Graham opposed many of the court decisions that removed Bible reading and prayer from public schools.
Ironically, many conservatives seemed to believe that religious liberty was largely for people abroad, not at home. They opposed court decisions that they saw as infringing on the rights of Christian communities to pass on their values to their children. Evangelicals were also skeptical about Catholics having a more prominent role in American society, especially following the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Religious freedom abroad?
More recently, the legislation that created the position of ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom – Brownback’s new job – was in essence, the result of evangelical concern over the persecution of Christians in China and the Middle East in the 1990s.
It was under pressure from evangelical groups, such as the Christian Coalition, the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Association of Evangelicals, that Congress, in 1998, passed the International Religious Freedom Act to do more to protect Christians abroad.
The bill gained support among more liberal Protestant, Catholic and Jewish communities as well, along with secular human rights groups. But disagreements about religious liberty remained. While evangelicals were fretting over the fate of Christian communities, progressive groups wanted to see religious freedom as part of a broader human rights agenda.
To the progressives, religious freedom was part of a larger canvas of human rights issues. It was no surprise that President Barack Obama, for example, appointed Suzan Johnson Cook, a religious leader with a passion for human rights and subsequently David Nathan Saperstein, Brownback’s predecessor. Saperstein was a rabbi who had advocated on a range of social justice issues.
These appointments were in keeping with progressive beliefs. As political theorist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd explains, religious freedom could not be isolated from many social, economic and political forces that lead to conflict. Elevating religious concerns above other human rights issues could, in fact, lead to more harm than good.[...]
In 1775, in the early days of the American Revolution, George Washington prepared the Continental Army to invade the Canadian colonies in order to convince the inhabitants to join the rebellion against the British. As Colonel Benedict Arnold prepared to lead the charge, Washington warned him to respect the religious liberty of Catholics in Quebec and avoid unnecessary conflict. He wrote:
“While we are Contending for our own Liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of Conscience in others.”
Although Congress passed the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791, religious liberty applied only to “respectable” Protestant denominations, like Baptists and Methodists, who grew rapidly in the first decades of the 19th century. As historian David Sehat explains Protestant denominations created a “moral establishment” that acted like official churches did in Europe. As in Europe, this moral establishment persecuted minority faiths, like Catholics, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses.Washington’s advice was followed in Canada but not in the newly founded United States, where Catholics found themselves facing discrimination.
A way of projecting American power
America’s record of promoting religious liberty abroad was also spotty. Religious liberty largely meant the rights of missionaries to go out and convert “heathens” to Protestant Christianity.
For example, government agents and missionaries in the 19th century trampled on the religious rights of conquered Native American nations by taking away their children and placing them into faraway residential schools that forbade them from practicing their native faiths. The United States banned certain native religious ceremonies, like the Ghost Dance, because of fears that the ritual stirred up rebellion.
In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain and took possession of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, Spanish colonies that were both predominantly Catholic. As historian Tisa Wenger has pointed out, promoting religious freedom in the colonies was a way for the United States to expand its empire.
The idea that the United States would spread religious freedom through its policies made Americans feel like liberators even when they acted like conquerors.
According to historian Anna Su, the United States attempted to remake these coloniesin its image by separating church and state and divesting Catholic religious orders of their property. President William McKinley reasoned that the Filipinos could not be trusted to make that separation themselves.
Ironically, the American claim that promoting religious freedom in the world was its sacred mission was one of the reasons the country became an empire.
Two versions of religious freedom
Many Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans demanded the right to worship freely and to organize their lives as they saw fit. Their appeals, however, fell on deaf ears until the early 20th century, when liberal Protestants and Jews began championing a vision of religious liberty aimed at protecting minority rights, not just the rights of the Christian majority.
These progressives wanted to disassociate religious liberty from empire and promote it through international law. Lutheran academic O. Frederick Nolde led a liberal Protestant effort to enshrine religious liberty in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
For Nolde, religious freedom was important among other human rights, including social and economic rights. He argued that people had the right to live free from discrimination and that religious freedom was one of the ways of protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Nolde was hired by Federal Council of Churches, one of the most powerful religious lobbies in the United States.
Nolde and his associates were in the vanguard. It was only over time that the liberal Protestant and Jewish communities came to be more accepting of same-sex relationships and more supportive of church-state separation and other causes to protect minorities.
Evangelical view
Meanwhile, evangelicals and conservative Catholics embraced a different version of religious freedom, one that had the promotion of Christianity at its heart.
Evangelist Billy Graham, for example, worried in the 1950s that the Soviet Union was promoting atheism across the world, so he highlighted the country’s oppression of religious people and called on the United States to do more to free them. At home Graham opposed many of the court decisions that removed Bible reading and prayer from public schools.
Ironically, many conservatives seemed to believe that religious liberty was largely for people abroad, not at home. They opposed court decisions that they saw as infringing on the rights of Christian communities to pass on their values to their children. Evangelicals were also skeptical about Catholics having a more prominent role in American society, especially following the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Religious freedom abroad?
More recently, the legislation that created the position of ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom – Brownback’s new job – was in essence, the result of evangelical concern over the persecution of Christians in China and the Middle East in the 1990s.
It was under pressure from evangelical groups, such as the Christian Coalition, the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Association of Evangelicals, that Congress, in 1998, passed the International Religious Freedom Act to do more to protect Christians abroad.
The bill gained support among more liberal Protestant, Catholic and Jewish communities as well, along with secular human rights groups. But disagreements about religious liberty remained. While evangelicals were fretting over the fate of Christian communities, progressive groups wanted to see religious freedom as part of a broader human rights agenda.
To the progressives, religious freedom was part of a larger canvas of human rights issues. It was no surprise that President Barack Obama, for example, appointed Suzan Johnson Cook, a religious leader with a passion for human rights and subsequently David Nathan Saperstein, Brownback’s predecessor. Saperstein was a rabbi who had advocated on a range of social justice issues.
These appointments were in keeping with progressive beliefs. As political theorist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd explains, religious freedom could not be isolated from many social, economic and political forces that lead to conflict. Elevating religious concerns above other human rights issues could, in fact, lead to more harm than good.[...]
100 years ago this week, a German-American was lynched by self-proclaimed patriots
History News Network - raw story
03 APR 2018 AT 12:03 ET
On the outskirts of Collinsville, Illinois, in the early hours of April 5, 1918, a small group of men lynched German immigrant Robert Paul Prager. Born in Dresden, Prager had come to America in 1905 looking for opportunity. Traveling through the Midwest, he worked as a skilled union baker, and during World War I he obtained work as a laborer in an area coal mine. Prager’s killers accused him of spying for the German army. They said that he had plotted to blow up the mine where he worked. Some thought he was a dangerous Socialist who had opposed American entry into World War I. Others would later add the charge that Prager was a “white-slaver” trafficking in young women. Although no solid evidence of Prager’s alleged espionage or terrorism or immoral activities surfaced in the weeks following his death, a jury took only forty-five minutes to acquit the accused lynchers. The men who killed Prager, they said, were patriots.
Over the last century, the Prager lynching has served as a cautionary tale about the dangers of war hysteria. The town of Collinsville, then a booming coal mining center, now a bedroom community near St. Louis, has never lived the incident down. It seemed then and now to illustrate the worst of small-town, ignorant, flag-waving, mindless patriotism. But appearances can deceive. The real story behind the Prager lynching can teach a surprisingly inspiring lesson about the capacities of ordinary working people.
Let’s begin with Joseph Riegel, another German-American coal miner and the ringleader of Prager’s lynch mob. Like all Illinois coal diggers, Riegel belonged to District 12 of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Unlike mining districts in West Virginia, Kentucky, and parts of Pennsylvania, Illinois was 100 percent union. Every coal mine in the Land of Lincoln was a union mine. The state’s 90,000 union miners had a reputation for left-wing radicalism. Many voted for Socialist Party candidates and elected miners to local offices. The party’s national secretary was Adolph Germer, a former coal miner from Mt. Olive. But the miners were also politically divided. More conservative miners were represented by Frank Farrington, who served as president of District 12 during the war. While Socialist miners said that America’s war to “make the world safe for democracy” was a scam to make money for American profiteers, Farrington went overboard to boost the American war effort and keep miners on the job.
Rank-and-file miners like Joseph Riegel were caught in the political crossfire. In July 1917, after the US entered the war, the high cost of living spurred a group of Collinsville miners, including Riegel, to go on strike. Mose Johnson, a local UMWA official allied with Farrington, tried to get the miners back to work. He spread the rumor that German spies were behind the strike. He argued with striking miners in the union hall. And when the dispute spilled into the street, Johnson threw Riegel to the ground and sent him to the hospital with a dislocated elbow. The message was clear—if you were loyal to your fellow workers you were disloyal to your country.
But wartime coal mining strikes continued. From April to October 1917, some 25,000 Illinois miners walked off the job. They put their lives at risk every day. Since coal companies were making wartime profits hand over foot, miners figured they were entitled to their fair share. The Wilson Administration was alarmed. The American war economy ran on coal. In collaboration with coal companies and union officials, they pulled out all the stops to get the coal miners back to work. US Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, himself a former coal miner, told Illinois miners that America was like a union that had declared a “strike against the tyranny of the German government.” By going on strike against American coal operators, the striking miners were the real scabs. They were traitors to the American cause. Rebel workers like Joseph Riegel were under tremendous pressure to prove just how loyal they were.
In early 1918, as American troops began to fight and die in the bloody trenches of Europe, pressure built up at home to silence dissent. George Creel, who headed up President Wilson’s war propaganda agency, promised to “weld” American pro-war sentiment into “one white-hot mass instinct.” Clamor grew for a Sedition Act—passed after Prager’s lynching—that would make opposing the war illegal. In small towns throughout Illinois, local superpatriots accosted suspected “pro-Germans” on the street. They made them kiss the American flag. They made them sing patriotic songs. And in Robert Prager’s case, they went further, stringing him up on a hackberry tree on the edge of town. Joseph Riegel had proved his case—no one could call him a slacker now. He was a true American. The lynching served to keep dissenting voices quiet for the remainder of the war. And Illinois miners stayed on the job.
But as soon as World War I came to a close, a new class war erupted around the country. The Nation magazine called it “the unprecedented revolt of the rank and file.” Illinois miners—including Robert Prager’s former coworkers—participated in a protest strike in support of socialist Tom Mooney, falsely accused of setting a bomb in a patriotic parade. When they were punished for that strike under wartime regulations (still in effect based on a technicality), they rebelled against state UMWA officials and demanded a militant program that emboldened the union to call a national strike in November 1919. Betrayed by both Democrats and Republicans, many miners voted for candidates of the newly-organized Labor Party. They even called for the Wilson Administration to withdraw troops from Soviet Russia, where American troops fought the new Bolshevik revolutionary government. Illinois miners transformed George Creel’s “white-hot mass instinct” into a white-hot class instinct that promoted the collective struggle for a better world.
The men who lynched Robert Prager brought World War I home to Collinsville. Like millions of working people throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, who fought for their respective rulers in the trenches, they killed one of their own. The war dealt a powerful blow to the cause of working-class solidarity. It tore people apart. But the fanatical patriotic sentiment in Collinsville has to be understood in the context of the intense class conflict that rocked the Illinois coalfields during and after the war. In a real sense, Prager’s lynching was a perverse tribute to the impressively high level of labor solidarity that working people had achieved.
Over the last century, the Prager lynching has served as a cautionary tale about the dangers of war hysteria. The town of Collinsville, then a booming coal mining center, now a bedroom community near St. Louis, has never lived the incident down. It seemed then and now to illustrate the worst of small-town, ignorant, flag-waving, mindless patriotism. But appearances can deceive. The real story behind the Prager lynching can teach a surprisingly inspiring lesson about the capacities of ordinary working people.
Let’s begin with Joseph Riegel, another German-American coal miner and the ringleader of Prager’s lynch mob. Like all Illinois coal diggers, Riegel belonged to District 12 of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Unlike mining districts in West Virginia, Kentucky, and parts of Pennsylvania, Illinois was 100 percent union. Every coal mine in the Land of Lincoln was a union mine. The state’s 90,000 union miners had a reputation for left-wing radicalism. Many voted for Socialist Party candidates and elected miners to local offices. The party’s national secretary was Adolph Germer, a former coal miner from Mt. Olive. But the miners were also politically divided. More conservative miners were represented by Frank Farrington, who served as president of District 12 during the war. While Socialist miners said that America’s war to “make the world safe for democracy” was a scam to make money for American profiteers, Farrington went overboard to boost the American war effort and keep miners on the job.
Rank-and-file miners like Joseph Riegel were caught in the political crossfire. In July 1917, after the US entered the war, the high cost of living spurred a group of Collinsville miners, including Riegel, to go on strike. Mose Johnson, a local UMWA official allied with Farrington, tried to get the miners back to work. He spread the rumor that German spies were behind the strike. He argued with striking miners in the union hall. And when the dispute spilled into the street, Johnson threw Riegel to the ground and sent him to the hospital with a dislocated elbow. The message was clear—if you were loyal to your fellow workers you were disloyal to your country.
But wartime coal mining strikes continued. From April to October 1917, some 25,000 Illinois miners walked off the job. They put their lives at risk every day. Since coal companies were making wartime profits hand over foot, miners figured they were entitled to their fair share. The Wilson Administration was alarmed. The American war economy ran on coal. In collaboration with coal companies and union officials, they pulled out all the stops to get the coal miners back to work. US Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, himself a former coal miner, told Illinois miners that America was like a union that had declared a “strike against the tyranny of the German government.” By going on strike against American coal operators, the striking miners were the real scabs. They were traitors to the American cause. Rebel workers like Joseph Riegel were under tremendous pressure to prove just how loyal they were.
In early 1918, as American troops began to fight and die in the bloody trenches of Europe, pressure built up at home to silence dissent. George Creel, who headed up President Wilson’s war propaganda agency, promised to “weld” American pro-war sentiment into “one white-hot mass instinct.” Clamor grew for a Sedition Act—passed after Prager’s lynching—that would make opposing the war illegal. In small towns throughout Illinois, local superpatriots accosted suspected “pro-Germans” on the street. They made them kiss the American flag. They made them sing patriotic songs. And in Robert Prager’s case, they went further, stringing him up on a hackberry tree on the edge of town. Joseph Riegel had proved his case—no one could call him a slacker now. He was a true American. The lynching served to keep dissenting voices quiet for the remainder of the war. And Illinois miners stayed on the job.
But as soon as World War I came to a close, a new class war erupted around the country. The Nation magazine called it “the unprecedented revolt of the rank and file.” Illinois miners—including Robert Prager’s former coworkers—participated in a protest strike in support of socialist Tom Mooney, falsely accused of setting a bomb in a patriotic parade. When they were punished for that strike under wartime regulations (still in effect based on a technicality), they rebelled against state UMWA officials and demanded a militant program that emboldened the union to call a national strike in November 1919. Betrayed by both Democrats and Republicans, many miners voted for candidates of the newly-organized Labor Party. They even called for the Wilson Administration to withdraw troops from Soviet Russia, where American troops fought the new Bolshevik revolutionary government. Illinois miners transformed George Creel’s “white-hot mass instinct” into a white-hot class instinct that promoted the collective struggle for a better world.
The men who lynched Robert Prager brought World War I home to Collinsville. Like millions of working people throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, who fought for their respective rulers in the trenches, they killed one of their own. The war dealt a powerful blow to the cause of working-class solidarity. It tore people apart. But the fanatical patriotic sentiment in Collinsville has to be understood in the context of the intense class conflict that rocked the Illinois coalfields during and after the war. In a real sense, Prager’s lynching was a perverse tribute to the impressively high level of labor solidarity that working people had achieved.
The Americans who helped Hitler
History News Network - raw story
26 MAR 2018 AT 11:25 ET
Why were so many “great” Americans tarred with a pro-Nazi brush? Henry Ford. Connecticut Banker and Senator, Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of the Bush presidents. Charles Lindbergh. Even the first, albeit short-lived, America First Committee (1940-1941) with its origins at Yale University allowed itself to become infiltrated by dangerous agents of the Third Reich in America.
Granted, at the outset, there was some considerable sympathy for Hitler in Europe and America. The real enemy, Communism, had swept away the Russian Empire, and was making headway in Europe. Spain had gone communist. Fascism was seen as an antidote to the hammer and sickle. But Hitler’s personal interest in infiltrating America, as early as 1925, was purely economic. Germany needed foreign exchange to stay afloat. It was drowning in hyperinflation. A loaf of bread cost a trillion Reichsmarks. Wheelbarrows and muscles were needed to transport the cash to the bakery. Yesterday’s marks became tomorrow’s kites or paper toys for children—that’s how quickly they were devalued. But few Americans recognized that America’s bankers were behind the bankrupt currency. The names Morgan, Bush, Chase, Union Banking Corporation, First National City are just some that spring to mind.
Germany needed foreign exchange more than anything else to get back on its feet. From 1933, Hitler cunningly lassoed other Americans to help him in his task. Where else could he turn for money coupled with an unwillingness to stop his European expansion plan? As a failed artist, art seemed as good a place to start as any. Alfred H. Barr, Founding Director of the Museum of Modern Art, knew he was buying art taken from German museums that Hitler deemed to be “Entartarte” or “degenerate.” Barr befriended one of Hitler’s art dealers, Karl Buchholz, and was a close personal friend of the Hamburg-born art aficionado Curt Valentin from the time Valentin’s feet hit terra firma in 1937 New York. So Hitler got his foreign exchange, initially from looted museum art, later from desperate, mostly Jewish families, and Barr filled his new museum under the guise of “saving modern art.”
Barr was far from alone. American banks, like Chase National, were involved in a scheme to bring dollars to Germany in something called the Rückwanderer Mark Scheme. And why not? They had to do something to stop the rot on their poor Mark investments of the 1920s. Literally meaning “returning home,” the Rückwanderer Mark was designed to allow Germans living in the U.S.A. who wanted to return to Germany—on a temporary or permanent basis—to buy Rückwanderer Marks at an advantageous exchange rate. The Reichsbank allowed any returnees to Germany to exchange half of their dollars at the favorable RM 4.10 rate, even though the real exchange rate was only RM 2.48.
How could a bankrupt country afford such largesse? The surplus was paid from blocked accounts and assets once owned by refugees fleeing Germany, mostly Jews. The refugees lost an additional 25 percent minimum through a mechanism called a “flight tax,” which was often as elastic as a rubber band. The elasticity stemmed from the official practice of restricting refugees to one small suitcase to take with them and valuing any nonmonetary assets for two or three cents (pfennigs) on the Reichsmark. “The German government,” the FBI noted, “thereby netted a profit in dollars of nearly 90 percent.”
American Companies trading Rückwanderers needed to pay wholesalers, among which were a host of companies, including American Express, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and the Swiss import-export firm Interkommerz in America, run by Henri Guisan, son of the commander-in-chief of the Swiss army. Jean Guisan, a close family relation, got the idea to introduce the seductive American, Florence Lacaze Gould (wife of the youngest son of American robber baron Jay Gould and the subject of my biography), to act as their “clean skin” banker in Monaco and France. The man who vetted Mrs. Gould was August T. Gausebeck, a German national working in New York since 1933. Gausebeck had the backing of the wealthiest supporters of Hitler including Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush’s main banking client. Gausebeck’s New York company, Robert C. Mayer & Co., and his German-inspired investment company called the New York Overseas Corporation, were the primary vehicles complicit in the theft of millions from Jews fleeing Germany. They should have received an acknowledgement somewhere for helping Hitler and Göring to build the Luftwaffe.
But have a heart. Uncle Sam did get around to stopping them. In 1943. The Neutrality Act in the United States prohibited loans and gifts to belligerent nations. J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, was told in October 1939: “Representatives approach investors and indicate to them that Germany will undoubtedly win the war… and that marks will undoubtedly increase many times in value.” Hoover was onto the scam like any mollusk clinging to a juicy rock. What attracted Hoover’s attention was Gausebeck, that German resident alien who was secretly funding the anti-Semitic campaign of Father Charles Coughlin on the radio. Coughlin? Just a minute….
Surely the Canadian-American Catholic priest who took to the airwaves since June 1930 could not have been in direct Nazi pay? Wrong. The National Archives are littered with documents proving that the priest was on the take. And why not? The America he broadcast to in 1930 was bust, just like Germany after 1918. Investors in the stock market were looking at profits down some 45.9 percent in the leading two hundred industrial companies. Steel production was down 60 percent; automobile production a staggering 60 percent. Farmers selling wheat in the autumn of 1930 were getting half of what they had been offered in 1929. Office workers, if they still had jobs, watched the breadlines form and wondered if the lines might not be for banks about to close. (By December, there were 328 banks closing each month.)
So when Father Charles E. Coughlin took to the airwaves on Station WJR Detroit with his richly mellow, reassuring voice, his ingratiating charm just begged his listeners to wrap their arms around and listen to his own brand of “Fireside Chat.” Cloaking his fascist message in words of the times, Father Coughlin had discovered his pulpit. His listeners were, like the Germans in 1918, angry. Really angry at bankers. They feared the Communists more than the Fascists, and like other demagogues, Coughlin built his Church of the Little Flower on the wretchedness of others. By early 1933, it was estimated that Coughlin had an audience of ten million people in the U.S.A, and only a handful of critics. But that December, CBS refused to renew his contract unless his sermons were submitted to censorship prior to his broadcasts. Why?
Incensed Americans—Jews, Protestants, Catholics and others—ran to Father Coughlin’s defense. No one else stood up for America’s poor. They became members of his People’s Lobby, partly-funding his programs on another station, increasing his hook-up from twenty-nine to thirty-five stations. Enter August T. Gausebeck, Göring’s banker in America. If Coughlin took off the gloves and plainly said what he meant, Gausebeck would fund any shortfalls the good father might experience—in five to ten dollar untraceable donations. So Coughlin, freed from tedious financial burdens, spoke out against the C.I.O. and organized labor; against the League of Nations, swaying millions to vote as he saw it. Coughlin threw his considerable weight behind Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in the good father’s opinion, brought about Roosevelt’s first presidential victory. Angered that Roosevelt did not recognize his contribution, he turned on the president-elect. Coughlin publicly called Roosevelt a “liar.” That was his first big mistake.
He also spoke out vociferously against the “money lenders”—meaning Jews—and adopted the platform of a man eager to install the first American Reichstag. Coughlin leaned further to the right, republishing the disreputable forgery The Protocols of Zion in his magazine Social Justice and attacked American unionism as having its headquarters in Moscow. (Much of the commentary in Social Justice regarding Jews was taken verbatim from the speeches of Joseph Goebbels, literally line by line.)
Roosevelt was in the pocket of the “money lenders,” Coughlin endlessly jeered. Cheered at the German-American Bund meeting at Madison Square Garden in 1939, Coughlin and his platoons of Christian Front followers were revealed as nothing more than criminal thugs, out to terrify the neighborhoods they lived in. As hundreds were arrested for their violence and pointed racial hatred, claiming Coughlin as their spiritual father, the radio priest ran hot and cold in reply, depending on his audience.
By the time Pearl Harbor came, Coughlin had three-quarters of the United States clamoring for his scalp and demanding to lock up his lunatic fringe. Like Hitler, his little empire lasted a scant twelve years. The Catholic Church had cut him loose, clearly recognizing Nazi ideals, Nazi methods and the un-Christian message Coughlin preached. Yet his fascist worldview remains a danger today. Preaching hatred is not freedom of expression. It is dangerous, deadly propaganda—intent on destroying our souls through fear. We would all do well to learn the lessons of history, and understand how forces that use our democracy against us work.
Granted, at the outset, there was some considerable sympathy for Hitler in Europe and America. The real enemy, Communism, had swept away the Russian Empire, and was making headway in Europe. Spain had gone communist. Fascism was seen as an antidote to the hammer and sickle. But Hitler’s personal interest in infiltrating America, as early as 1925, was purely economic. Germany needed foreign exchange to stay afloat. It was drowning in hyperinflation. A loaf of bread cost a trillion Reichsmarks. Wheelbarrows and muscles were needed to transport the cash to the bakery. Yesterday’s marks became tomorrow’s kites or paper toys for children—that’s how quickly they were devalued. But few Americans recognized that America’s bankers were behind the bankrupt currency. The names Morgan, Bush, Chase, Union Banking Corporation, First National City are just some that spring to mind.
Germany needed foreign exchange more than anything else to get back on its feet. From 1933, Hitler cunningly lassoed other Americans to help him in his task. Where else could he turn for money coupled with an unwillingness to stop his European expansion plan? As a failed artist, art seemed as good a place to start as any. Alfred H. Barr, Founding Director of the Museum of Modern Art, knew he was buying art taken from German museums that Hitler deemed to be “Entartarte” or “degenerate.” Barr befriended one of Hitler’s art dealers, Karl Buchholz, and was a close personal friend of the Hamburg-born art aficionado Curt Valentin from the time Valentin’s feet hit terra firma in 1937 New York. So Hitler got his foreign exchange, initially from looted museum art, later from desperate, mostly Jewish families, and Barr filled his new museum under the guise of “saving modern art.”
Barr was far from alone. American banks, like Chase National, were involved in a scheme to bring dollars to Germany in something called the Rückwanderer Mark Scheme. And why not? They had to do something to stop the rot on their poor Mark investments of the 1920s. Literally meaning “returning home,” the Rückwanderer Mark was designed to allow Germans living in the U.S.A. who wanted to return to Germany—on a temporary or permanent basis—to buy Rückwanderer Marks at an advantageous exchange rate. The Reichsbank allowed any returnees to Germany to exchange half of their dollars at the favorable RM 4.10 rate, even though the real exchange rate was only RM 2.48.
How could a bankrupt country afford such largesse? The surplus was paid from blocked accounts and assets once owned by refugees fleeing Germany, mostly Jews. The refugees lost an additional 25 percent minimum through a mechanism called a “flight tax,” which was often as elastic as a rubber band. The elasticity stemmed from the official practice of restricting refugees to one small suitcase to take with them and valuing any nonmonetary assets for two or three cents (pfennigs) on the Reichsmark. “The German government,” the FBI noted, “thereby netted a profit in dollars of nearly 90 percent.”
American Companies trading Rückwanderers needed to pay wholesalers, among which were a host of companies, including American Express, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and the Swiss import-export firm Interkommerz in America, run by Henri Guisan, son of the commander-in-chief of the Swiss army. Jean Guisan, a close family relation, got the idea to introduce the seductive American, Florence Lacaze Gould (wife of the youngest son of American robber baron Jay Gould and the subject of my biography), to act as their “clean skin” banker in Monaco and France. The man who vetted Mrs. Gould was August T. Gausebeck, a German national working in New York since 1933. Gausebeck had the backing of the wealthiest supporters of Hitler including Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush’s main banking client. Gausebeck’s New York company, Robert C. Mayer & Co., and his German-inspired investment company called the New York Overseas Corporation, were the primary vehicles complicit in the theft of millions from Jews fleeing Germany. They should have received an acknowledgement somewhere for helping Hitler and Göring to build the Luftwaffe.
But have a heart. Uncle Sam did get around to stopping them. In 1943. The Neutrality Act in the United States prohibited loans and gifts to belligerent nations. J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, was told in October 1939: “Representatives approach investors and indicate to them that Germany will undoubtedly win the war… and that marks will undoubtedly increase many times in value.” Hoover was onto the scam like any mollusk clinging to a juicy rock. What attracted Hoover’s attention was Gausebeck, that German resident alien who was secretly funding the anti-Semitic campaign of Father Charles Coughlin on the radio. Coughlin? Just a minute….
Surely the Canadian-American Catholic priest who took to the airwaves since June 1930 could not have been in direct Nazi pay? Wrong. The National Archives are littered with documents proving that the priest was on the take. And why not? The America he broadcast to in 1930 was bust, just like Germany after 1918. Investors in the stock market were looking at profits down some 45.9 percent in the leading two hundred industrial companies. Steel production was down 60 percent; automobile production a staggering 60 percent. Farmers selling wheat in the autumn of 1930 were getting half of what they had been offered in 1929. Office workers, if they still had jobs, watched the breadlines form and wondered if the lines might not be for banks about to close. (By December, there were 328 banks closing each month.)
So when Father Charles E. Coughlin took to the airwaves on Station WJR Detroit with his richly mellow, reassuring voice, his ingratiating charm just begged his listeners to wrap their arms around and listen to his own brand of “Fireside Chat.” Cloaking his fascist message in words of the times, Father Coughlin had discovered his pulpit. His listeners were, like the Germans in 1918, angry. Really angry at bankers. They feared the Communists more than the Fascists, and like other demagogues, Coughlin built his Church of the Little Flower on the wretchedness of others. By early 1933, it was estimated that Coughlin had an audience of ten million people in the U.S.A, and only a handful of critics. But that December, CBS refused to renew his contract unless his sermons were submitted to censorship prior to his broadcasts. Why?
Incensed Americans—Jews, Protestants, Catholics and others—ran to Father Coughlin’s defense. No one else stood up for America’s poor. They became members of his People’s Lobby, partly-funding his programs on another station, increasing his hook-up from twenty-nine to thirty-five stations. Enter August T. Gausebeck, Göring’s banker in America. If Coughlin took off the gloves and plainly said what he meant, Gausebeck would fund any shortfalls the good father might experience—in five to ten dollar untraceable donations. So Coughlin, freed from tedious financial burdens, spoke out against the C.I.O. and organized labor; against the League of Nations, swaying millions to vote as he saw it. Coughlin threw his considerable weight behind Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in the good father’s opinion, brought about Roosevelt’s first presidential victory. Angered that Roosevelt did not recognize his contribution, he turned on the president-elect. Coughlin publicly called Roosevelt a “liar.” That was his first big mistake.
He also spoke out vociferously against the “money lenders”—meaning Jews—and adopted the platform of a man eager to install the first American Reichstag. Coughlin leaned further to the right, republishing the disreputable forgery The Protocols of Zion in his magazine Social Justice and attacked American unionism as having its headquarters in Moscow. (Much of the commentary in Social Justice regarding Jews was taken verbatim from the speeches of Joseph Goebbels, literally line by line.)
Roosevelt was in the pocket of the “money lenders,” Coughlin endlessly jeered. Cheered at the German-American Bund meeting at Madison Square Garden in 1939, Coughlin and his platoons of Christian Front followers were revealed as nothing more than criminal thugs, out to terrify the neighborhoods they lived in. As hundreds were arrested for their violence and pointed racial hatred, claiming Coughlin as their spiritual father, the radio priest ran hot and cold in reply, depending on his audience.
By the time Pearl Harbor came, Coughlin had three-quarters of the United States clamoring for his scalp and demanding to lock up his lunatic fringe. Like Hitler, his little empire lasted a scant twelve years. The Catholic Church had cut him loose, clearly recognizing Nazi ideals, Nazi methods and the un-Christian message Coughlin preached. Yet his fascist worldview remains a danger today. Preaching hatred is not freedom of expression. It is dangerous, deadly propaganda—intent on destroying our souls through fear. We would all do well to learn the lessons of history, and understand how forces that use our democracy against us work.
The first school shooting was more than 150 years ago — and changed the way courts see the Second Amendment
Sarah K. Burris - raw story
24 MAR 2018 AT 09:10 ET
More than 150 years ago, in Louisville, Kentucky, William Butler was murdered by Matthews F. Ward. It was the first ever school shooting and it was merely 1853.
A Politico Magazine piece recalled Butler, a 28-year-old immigrant teacher from northern states, who moved to found the Louisville School, for the “best” families in town. Matthews Ward was the older brother of a student named William Ward, who was a son of a prominent cotton merchant.
It began when Ward was reportedly eating chestnuts in class. Butler confronted him but Ward denied he was eating in class. Butler called the student a liar and administered corporal punishment, beating him in front of the class.
When Ward’s brother learned of what transpired, he purchased two pistols and went to the school with their other brother, Bob. Matthews confronted the teacher and allegedly called him a “damned scoundrel” and a “coward.” There was a scuffle and during the altercation, Ward pulled his pistol and shot Butler. The boys fled the schoolhouse and students carried Butler to a doctor. Still, he died days later.
Ward was arrested and charged with murder. The trial was a “news sensation,” Politico reported, with headlines all over the country. At the time, the public was shocked and disgusted with violence in schools. They believed it should be a protected place for children to learn. The idea of a student killing his brother’s teacher was unthinkable in societal decorum.
At the time, the American public was growing increasingly frustrated with gun violence. Opposition was growing and the case became an example for activists seeking to regulate guns.
When the Second Amendment was ratified into the Constitution, gun ownership rates were, but the weapons weren’t handguns or automatic weapons or military-style guns. Most owned lighter muskets for hunting or guns used for shooting birds. Some even owned guns they used to fight off animals that attacked crops. Americans considered owning a military-grade weapon to be a burden. Yet, the government wanted white men to purchase the weapons for public defense. At the same time, guns weren’t the weapon of murder. Instead blunt instruments were more effective.
But when the trial began for Ward, times had changed, with small weapons that could be easily concealed, like the pistols Ward had, were becoming more prevalent.
The defense argued that Ward’s confrontation of the teacher had nothing to do with the crime. The only portion that was of concern to Kentucky courts was that he pulled a pistol. Ward’s attorneys argued he had a reasonable fear for his life and thus “deadly force” was justified. The jury acquitted Matthews Ward.
The decision sparked condemnation with abolitionists particularly angry. Gun control activists were horrified by the broad interpretation of the Second Amendment by the court and the jury. Legal critics argued that the interpretation “veered too far from mainstream American constitutional thought, which had always balanced the right of self-defense against other rights, such as the right to enjoy peace,” Politico explained. Under this legal interpretation, Ward’s actions weren’t about the Second Amendment but distorting the law and encouraged anarchy instead of liberty.
A Politico Magazine piece recalled Butler, a 28-year-old immigrant teacher from northern states, who moved to found the Louisville School, for the “best” families in town. Matthews Ward was the older brother of a student named William Ward, who was a son of a prominent cotton merchant.
It began when Ward was reportedly eating chestnuts in class. Butler confronted him but Ward denied he was eating in class. Butler called the student a liar and administered corporal punishment, beating him in front of the class.
When Ward’s brother learned of what transpired, he purchased two pistols and went to the school with their other brother, Bob. Matthews confronted the teacher and allegedly called him a “damned scoundrel” and a “coward.” There was a scuffle and during the altercation, Ward pulled his pistol and shot Butler. The boys fled the schoolhouse and students carried Butler to a doctor. Still, he died days later.
Ward was arrested and charged with murder. The trial was a “news sensation,” Politico reported, with headlines all over the country. At the time, the public was shocked and disgusted with violence in schools. They believed it should be a protected place for children to learn. The idea of a student killing his brother’s teacher was unthinkable in societal decorum.
At the time, the American public was growing increasingly frustrated with gun violence. Opposition was growing and the case became an example for activists seeking to regulate guns.
When the Second Amendment was ratified into the Constitution, gun ownership rates were, but the weapons weren’t handguns or automatic weapons or military-style guns. Most owned lighter muskets for hunting or guns used for shooting birds. Some even owned guns they used to fight off animals that attacked crops. Americans considered owning a military-grade weapon to be a burden. Yet, the government wanted white men to purchase the weapons for public defense. At the same time, guns weren’t the weapon of murder. Instead blunt instruments were more effective.
But when the trial began for Ward, times had changed, with small weapons that could be easily concealed, like the pistols Ward had, were becoming more prevalent.
The defense argued that Ward’s confrontation of the teacher had nothing to do with the crime. The only portion that was of concern to Kentucky courts was that he pulled a pistol. Ward’s attorneys argued he had a reasonable fear for his life and thus “deadly force” was justified. The jury acquitted Matthews Ward.
The decision sparked condemnation with abolitionists particularly angry. Gun control activists were horrified by the broad interpretation of the Second Amendment by the court and the jury. Legal critics argued that the interpretation “veered too far from mainstream American constitutional thought, which had always balanced the right of self-defense against other rights, such as the right to enjoy peace,” Politico explained. Under this legal interpretation, Ward’s actions weren’t about the Second Amendment but distorting the law and encouraged anarchy instead of liberty.
Forced sterilization programs in California once harmed thousands – particularly Latinas
The Conversation - raw story
22 MAR 2018 AT 17:43 ET
In 1942, 18-year-old Iris Lopez, a Mexican-American woman, started working at the Calship Yards in Los Angeles. Working on the home front building Victory Ships not only added to the war effort, but allowed Iris to support her family.
Iris’ participation in the World War II effort made her part of a celebrated time in U.S. history, when economic opportunities opened up for women and youth of color.
However, before joining the shipyards, Iris was entangled in another lesser-known history. At the age of 16, Iris was committed to a California institution and sterilized.
Iris wasn’t alone. In the first half of the 20th century, approximately 60,000 people were sterilized under U.S. eugenics programs. Eugenic laws in 32 states empowered government officials in public health, social work and state institutions to render people they deemed “unfit” infertile.
California led the nation in this effort at social engineering. Between the early 1920s and the 1950s, Iris and approximately 20,000 other people – one-third of the national total – were sterilized in California state institutions for the mentally ill and disabled.
To better understand the nation’s most aggressive eugenic sterilization program, our research team tracked sterilization requests of over 20,000 people. We wanted to know about the role patients’ race played in sterilization decisions. What made young women like Iris a target? How and why was she cast as “unfit”?
Racial biases affected Iris’ life and the lives of thousands of others. Their experiences serve as an important historical backdrop to ongoing issues in the U.S. today.
‘Race science’ and sterilization
Eugenics was seen as a “science” in the early 20th century, and its ideas remained popular into the midcentury. Advocating for the “science of better breeding,” eugenicists endorsed sterilizing people considered unfit to reproduce.
Under California’s eugenic law, first passed in 1909, anyone committed to a state institution could be sterilized. Many of those committed were sent by a court order. Others were committed by family members who wouldn’t or couldn’t care for them. Once a patient was admitted, medical superintendents held the legal power to recommend and authorize the operation.
Eugenics policies were shaped by entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender and ability. Working-class youth, especially youth of color, were targeted for commitment and sterilization during the peak years.
Eugenic thinking was also used to support racist policies like anti-miscegenation lawsand the Immigration Act of 1924. Anti-Mexican sentiment in particular was spurred by theories that Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans were at a “lower racial level.” Contemporary politicians and state officials often described Mexicans as inherently less intelligent, immoral, “hyperfertile” and criminally inclined.
These stereotypes appeared in reports written by state authorities. Mexicans and their descendants were described as “immigrants of an undesirable type.” If their existence in the U.S. was undesirable, then so was their reproduction.
Targeting Latinos and Latinas
In a study published March 22, we looked at the California program’s disproportionately high impact on the Latino population, primarily women and men from Mexico.
Previous research examined racial bias in California’s sterilization program. But the extent of anti-Latino bias hadn’t been formally quantified. Latinas like Iris were certainly targeted for sterilization, but to what extent?
We used sterilization forms found by historian Alexandra Minna Stern to build a data set on over 20,000 people recommended for sterilization in California between 1919 and 1953. The racial categories used to classify Californians of Mexican origin were in flux during this time period, so we used Spanish surname criteria as a proxy. In 1950, 88 percent of Californians with a Spanish surname were of Mexican descent.
We compared patients recommended for sterilization to the patient population of each institution, which we reconstructed with data from census forms. We then measured sterilization rates between Latino and non-Latino patients, adjusting for age. (Both Latino patients and people recommended for sterilization tended to be younger.)
Latino men were 23 percent more likely to be sterilized than non-Latino men. The difference was even greater among women, with Latinas sterilized at 59 percent higher rates than non-Latinas.
In the first half of the twentieth century, approximately 20,000 people – many of them Latino – were forcibly sterilized in California.
In their records, doctors repeatedly cast young Latino men as biologically prone to crime, while young Latinas like Iris were described as “sex delinquents.” Their sterilizations were described as necessary to protect the state from increased crime, poverty and racial degeneracy.
Lasting impact
The legacy of these infringements on reproductive rights is still visible today.
Recent incidents in Tennessee, California and Oklahoma echo this past. In each case, people in contact with the criminal justice system – often people of color – were sterilized under coercive pressure from the state.
Contemporary justifications for this practice rely on core tenets of eugenics. Proponents argued that preventing the reproduction of some will help solve larger social issues like poverty. The doctor who sterilized incarcerated women in California without proper consent stated that doing so would save the state money in future welfare costs for “unwanted children.”
The eugenics era also echoes in the broader cultural and political landscape of the U.S. today. Latina women’s reproduction is repeatedly portrayed as a threat to the nation. Latina immigrants in particular are seen as hyperfertile. Their children are sometimes derogatorily referred to as “anchor babies” and described as a burden on the nation.
Reproductive justice
This history – and other histories of sterilization abuse of black, Native, Mexican immigrant and Puerto Rican women – inform the modern reproductive justicemovement.
This movement, as defined by the advocacy group SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective is committed to “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
As the fight for contemporary reproductive justice continues, it’s important to acknowledge the wrongs of the past. The nonprofit California Latinas for Reproductive Justice has co-sponsored a forthcoming bill that offers financial redress to living survivors of California’s eugenic sterilization program. “As reproductive justice advocates, we recognize the insidious impact state-sponsored policies have on the dignity and rights of poor women of color who are often stripped of their ability to form the families they want,” CLRJ Executive Director Laura Jiménez said in a statement.
This bill was introduced on Feb. 15 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, along with Assemblymember Monique Limón and Sen. Jim Beall.
If this bill passes, California would follow in the footsteps of North Carolina and Virginia, which began sterilization redress programs in 2013 and 2015.
In the words of Jimenez, “This bill is a step in the right direction in remedying the violence inflicted on these survivors.” In our view, financial compensation will never make up for the violation of survivors’ fundamental human rights. But it’s an opportunity to reaffirm the dignity and self-determination of all people.
Iris’ participation in the World War II effort made her part of a celebrated time in U.S. history, when economic opportunities opened up for women and youth of color.
However, before joining the shipyards, Iris was entangled in another lesser-known history. At the age of 16, Iris was committed to a California institution and sterilized.
Iris wasn’t alone. In the first half of the 20th century, approximately 60,000 people were sterilized under U.S. eugenics programs. Eugenic laws in 32 states empowered government officials in public health, social work and state institutions to render people they deemed “unfit” infertile.
California led the nation in this effort at social engineering. Between the early 1920s and the 1950s, Iris and approximately 20,000 other people – one-third of the national total – were sterilized in California state institutions for the mentally ill and disabled.
To better understand the nation’s most aggressive eugenic sterilization program, our research team tracked sterilization requests of over 20,000 people. We wanted to know about the role patients’ race played in sterilization decisions. What made young women like Iris a target? How and why was she cast as “unfit”?
Racial biases affected Iris’ life and the lives of thousands of others. Their experiences serve as an important historical backdrop to ongoing issues in the U.S. today.
‘Race science’ and sterilization
Eugenics was seen as a “science” in the early 20th century, and its ideas remained popular into the midcentury. Advocating for the “science of better breeding,” eugenicists endorsed sterilizing people considered unfit to reproduce.
Under California’s eugenic law, first passed in 1909, anyone committed to a state institution could be sterilized. Many of those committed were sent by a court order. Others were committed by family members who wouldn’t or couldn’t care for them. Once a patient was admitted, medical superintendents held the legal power to recommend and authorize the operation.
Eugenics policies were shaped by entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender and ability. Working-class youth, especially youth of color, were targeted for commitment and sterilization during the peak years.
Eugenic thinking was also used to support racist policies like anti-miscegenation lawsand the Immigration Act of 1924. Anti-Mexican sentiment in particular was spurred by theories that Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans were at a “lower racial level.” Contemporary politicians and state officials often described Mexicans as inherently less intelligent, immoral, “hyperfertile” and criminally inclined.
These stereotypes appeared in reports written by state authorities. Mexicans and their descendants were described as “immigrants of an undesirable type.” If their existence in the U.S. was undesirable, then so was their reproduction.
Targeting Latinos and Latinas
In a study published March 22, we looked at the California program’s disproportionately high impact on the Latino population, primarily women and men from Mexico.
Previous research examined racial bias in California’s sterilization program. But the extent of anti-Latino bias hadn’t been formally quantified. Latinas like Iris were certainly targeted for sterilization, but to what extent?
We used sterilization forms found by historian Alexandra Minna Stern to build a data set on over 20,000 people recommended for sterilization in California between 1919 and 1953. The racial categories used to classify Californians of Mexican origin were in flux during this time period, so we used Spanish surname criteria as a proxy. In 1950, 88 percent of Californians with a Spanish surname were of Mexican descent.
We compared patients recommended for sterilization to the patient population of each institution, which we reconstructed with data from census forms. We then measured sterilization rates between Latino and non-Latino patients, adjusting for age. (Both Latino patients and people recommended for sterilization tended to be younger.)
Latino men were 23 percent more likely to be sterilized than non-Latino men. The difference was even greater among women, with Latinas sterilized at 59 percent higher rates than non-Latinas.
In the first half of the twentieth century, approximately 20,000 people – many of them Latino – were forcibly sterilized in California.
In their records, doctors repeatedly cast young Latino men as biologically prone to crime, while young Latinas like Iris were described as “sex delinquents.” Their sterilizations were described as necessary to protect the state from increased crime, poverty and racial degeneracy.
Lasting impact
The legacy of these infringements on reproductive rights is still visible today.
Recent incidents in Tennessee, California and Oklahoma echo this past. In each case, people in contact with the criminal justice system – often people of color – were sterilized under coercive pressure from the state.
Contemporary justifications for this practice rely on core tenets of eugenics. Proponents argued that preventing the reproduction of some will help solve larger social issues like poverty. The doctor who sterilized incarcerated women in California without proper consent stated that doing so would save the state money in future welfare costs for “unwanted children.”
The eugenics era also echoes in the broader cultural and political landscape of the U.S. today. Latina women’s reproduction is repeatedly portrayed as a threat to the nation. Latina immigrants in particular are seen as hyperfertile. Their children are sometimes derogatorily referred to as “anchor babies” and described as a burden on the nation.
Reproductive justice
This history – and other histories of sterilization abuse of black, Native, Mexican immigrant and Puerto Rican women – inform the modern reproductive justicemovement.
This movement, as defined by the advocacy group SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective is committed to “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
As the fight for contemporary reproductive justice continues, it’s important to acknowledge the wrongs of the past. The nonprofit California Latinas for Reproductive Justice has co-sponsored a forthcoming bill that offers financial redress to living survivors of California’s eugenic sterilization program. “As reproductive justice advocates, we recognize the insidious impact state-sponsored policies have on the dignity and rights of poor women of color who are often stripped of their ability to form the families they want,” CLRJ Executive Director Laura Jiménez said in a statement.
This bill was introduced on Feb. 15 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, along with Assemblymember Monique Limón and Sen. Jim Beall.
If this bill passes, California would follow in the footsteps of North Carolina and Virginia, which began sterilization redress programs in 2013 and 2015.
In the words of Jimenez, “This bill is a step in the right direction in remedying the violence inflicted on these survivors.” In our view, financial compensation will never make up for the violation of survivors’ fundamental human rights. But it’s an opportunity to reaffirm the dignity and self-determination of all people.
U.S. Guilty of More Election Meddling Than Russia, Has Done To Other Countries For Over A Century
By David Love - atlanta black star
March 18, 2018
With news of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election seizing the spotlight each day, America is now faced with the prospect of being victimized by the same practices it has promoted throughout the world. While Russia is receiving attention for its interference in the internal politics of the United States, Britain and other European nations, Uncle Sam has a long history of disrupting foreign governments, engaging in regime change, deposing elected leaders and even assassinating them.
Comparing the United States and Russia and their respective histories of overt and covert election influence in other countries, the former wins decisively. Carnegie Mellon University researcher Dov H. Levin has created a data set in which he found between 1946 and 2000, the U.S. interfered in foreign elections 81 times, while the Soviet Union and later Russia meddled on 36 occasions. “I’m not in any way justifying what the Russians did in 2016,” Levin told The New York Times. “It was completely wrong of Vladimir Putin to intervene in this way. That said, the methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by the United States and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or disinformation to newspapers.”
Africa and the Caribbean provide ample evidence of a history of U.S. meddling in the elections of other nations. For example, Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was overthrown and assassinated in 1961 by the Belgians, who were reportedly aided and abetted by the CIA. The U.S. also had its own plan, which was not implemented, to assassinate Lumumba by lacing his toothpaste with poison, and otherwise remove him from power through other methods.
In 1966, the CIA was involved in the overthrow of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah by way of a military coup. According to CIA intelligence officer John Stockwell in the book “In Search of Enemies,” the Accra office of the CIA had a “generous budget” and was encouraged by headquarters to maintain close contact with the coup plotters. According to a declassified U.S. government document, “The coup in Ghana is another example of a fortuitous windfall. Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black African. In reaction to his strongly pro-Communist leanings, the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-Western.” CIA participation in the coup was reportedly undertaken without approval from an interagency group that monitors clandestine CIA operations.
The U.S. Marines were on hand in 1912 to assist the Cuban government in destroying El Partido de Independiente de Color (PIC) or the Independent Party of Color, which was formed by descendants of slaves and became the first 20th century Black political party in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. PIC — which believed in racial pride and equal rights for Black people — engaged in protest after the Cuban government banned the race-based party from participating in elections. In putting down the PIC, the United States invoked the Platt Amendment, which allowed American intervention in Cuban affairs. The military action from U.S. and Cuban forces resulted in the massacre of 6,000 Black people.
The U.S. occupied the Dominican Republic twice — from 1916 until 1924, controlling the government and who became president, and again in 1965, opposing elected president Juan Bosch, supporting a military coup and installing Joaquin Balaguer. President Reagan took advantage of the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop of Grenada and orchestrated its long planned invasion of the Caribbean nation, justifying the invasion on the grounds the regime was anti-American and supported by Cuba.
America is known for a high degree of intervention and coup sponsorship in Haiti, with military occupations and support for brutal dictators, and the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide under both Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush. In 2009, during the Obama administration, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup and forced to fly to a U.S. military base at gunpoint and in his pajamas in an act of American-endorsed regime change. Although there was no evidence the Obama administration was involved in the coup, it did not stop it from taking place. The United States called for new elections rather than declaring a coup had taken place, and contributed to the subsequent deterioration and violence in Honduras. Elsewhere in Latin America, the U.S. was involved in the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company.
In 1953, the CIA, with help from Great Britain, engineered a coup in Iran, overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and installing a puppet regime under the Shah. This, after Mossadegh nationalized the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later known as BP. In 1965, the U.S. Embassy supported the rise to power of Indonesia’s brutal dictator General Suharto, and enabled his massacre of over half a million Indonesians.. Ten years later, the U.S. helped Suharto with political and military support in his invasion of East Timor, which had declared independence from Portugal. The Indonesian occupation killed more than 200,000 Timorese, one third of the population.
With the 2016 presidential election, America now has experienced having another country meddle in its internal affairs — something which the U.S. has perpetrated against other nations for more than a century.
Comparing the United States and Russia and their respective histories of overt and covert election influence in other countries, the former wins decisively. Carnegie Mellon University researcher Dov H. Levin has created a data set in which he found between 1946 and 2000, the U.S. interfered in foreign elections 81 times, while the Soviet Union and later Russia meddled on 36 occasions. “I’m not in any way justifying what the Russians did in 2016,” Levin told The New York Times. “It was completely wrong of Vladimir Putin to intervene in this way. That said, the methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by the United States and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or disinformation to newspapers.”
Africa and the Caribbean provide ample evidence of a history of U.S. meddling in the elections of other nations. For example, Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was overthrown and assassinated in 1961 by the Belgians, who were reportedly aided and abetted by the CIA. The U.S. also had its own plan, which was not implemented, to assassinate Lumumba by lacing his toothpaste with poison, and otherwise remove him from power through other methods.
In 1966, the CIA was involved in the overthrow of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah by way of a military coup. According to CIA intelligence officer John Stockwell in the book “In Search of Enemies,” the Accra office of the CIA had a “generous budget” and was encouraged by headquarters to maintain close contact with the coup plotters. According to a declassified U.S. government document, “The coup in Ghana is another example of a fortuitous windfall. Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black African. In reaction to his strongly pro-Communist leanings, the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-Western.” CIA participation in the coup was reportedly undertaken without approval from an interagency group that monitors clandestine CIA operations.
The U.S. Marines were on hand in 1912 to assist the Cuban government in destroying El Partido de Independiente de Color (PIC) or the Independent Party of Color, which was formed by descendants of slaves and became the first 20th century Black political party in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. PIC — which believed in racial pride and equal rights for Black people — engaged in protest after the Cuban government banned the race-based party from participating in elections. In putting down the PIC, the United States invoked the Platt Amendment, which allowed American intervention in Cuban affairs. The military action from U.S. and Cuban forces resulted in the massacre of 6,000 Black people.
The U.S. occupied the Dominican Republic twice — from 1916 until 1924, controlling the government and who became president, and again in 1965, opposing elected president Juan Bosch, supporting a military coup and installing Joaquin Balaguer. President Reagan took advantage of the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop of Grenada and orchestrated its long planned invasion of the Caribbean nation, justifying the invasion on the grounds the regime was anti-American and supported by Cuba.
America is known for a high degree of intervention and coup sponsorship in Haiti, with military occupations and support for brutal dictators, and the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide under both Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush. In 2009, during the Obama administration, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup and forced to fly to a U.S. military base at gunpoint and in his pajamas in an act of American-endorsed regime change. Although there was no evidence the Obama administration was involved in the coup, it did not stop it from taking place. The United States called for new elections rather than declaring a coup had taken place, and contributed to the subsequent deterioration and violence in Honduras. Elsewhere in Latin America, the U.S. was involved in the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company.
In 1953, the CIA, with help from Great Britain, engineered a coup in Iran, overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and installing a puppet regime under the Shah. This, after Mossadegh nationalized the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later known as BP. In 1965, the U.S. Embassy supported the rise to power of Indonesia’s brutal dictator General Suharto, and enabled his massacre of over half a million Indonesians.. Ten years later, the U.S. helped Suharto with political and military support in his invasion of East Timor, which had declared independence from Portugal. The Indonesian occupation killed more than 200,000 Timorese, one third of the population.
With the 2016 presidential election, America now has experienced having another country meddle in its internal affairs — something which the U.S. has perpetrated against other nations for more than a century.
Coard: America's 12 Slaveholding Presidents
Michael Coard - philly tribune
3/10/18
In my Freedom’s Journal columns on February 24 and March 3 here in The Philadelphia Tribune, I exposed the lies about President George Washington’s supposed wooden teeth and Thomas Jefferson’s supposed innocently romantic love affair with Sally Hemings.
Washington’s teeth were actually yanked from the mouths of our enslaved ancestors and Jefferson actually raped Sally repeatedly while she was just a child.
In response to both columns, white racists went certifiably crazy (I mean crazier) and denied and yelled and screamed and hollered and insulted. They also trolled on social media. Unfortunately for them, they’re gonna need a straight-jacket after reading this.
This week’s topic is about the twelve United States presidents who enslaved Black men, women, boys, and girls. And before you crazy racists start talking nonsense about those so-called “great” patriots simply being “men of their times,” you need to know that the anti-slavery movement amongst good white folks began in the 1730s and spread throughout the Thirteen Colonies as a result of the abolitionist activities during the First Great Awakening, which was early America’s Christian revival movement. Furthermore, the anti-slavery gospel of the Second Great Awakening was all over the nation from around 1790 through the 1850s.
America is and always has been a Christian country, right? Therefore, if the Christian revivalists weren’t men (and women) of that slaveholding time, why weren’t those twelve presidents who led this Christian country?
Beyond the religious abolitionist movement, the secular abolitionist movement was in full effect in the 1830s, thanks to the likes of the great newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison. Presidents knew how to read, right?
By the way, John Adams, the second president (from 1797-1801) and his son John Quincy Adams, the sixth president (from 1825-1829), never enslaved anybody. And they certainly were men of their times. Maybe they knew slavery was, is, and forever will be evil and inhumane.
Here are the evil and inhumane 12 slaveholding presidents listed from bad to worse to worst:
12. Martin Van Buren, the eighth president, enslaved 1 but not during his presidency. By the way, that 1 escaped.
11. Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth president, enslaved 5 but not during his presidency. In office from 1869-1877, he was the last slaveholding president.
10. Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth president, enslaved 8 but not during his presidency. However, when he was Military Governor of Tennessee, he persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to remove that state from those subject to “Honest Abe’s” Emancipation Proclamation.
9. William Henry Harrison, the ninth president, enslaved 11 but not during his presidency. However, as Governor of the Indiana Territory, he petitioned Congress to make slavery legal there. Fortunately, he was unsuccessful.
8. James K. Polk, the eleventh president, enslaved 25 and held many of them during his presidency. He also stole much of Mexico from the Mexicans during the 1846-1848 war in which those Brown people were robbed of California and almost all of today’s Southwest.
7. John Tyler, the tenth president, enslaved 70 and held many of them during his presidency. He was a states’ rights bigot and a jingoist flag-waver who robbed Mexico of Texas in 1845.
6. James Monroe, the fifth president, enslaved 75 and held many of them during his presidency. He hated Blacks so much that he wanted them sent back to Africa. That’s why he supported the racist American Colonization Society, robbed West Africans of a large piece of coastal land in 1821, and created a colony that later became Liberia. The Liberian state of Monrovia is named after that racist thug.
5. James Madison, the fourth president, enslaved approximately 100-125 and did so during his presidency. He’s the very same guy who proposed the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause.
4. Zachary Taylor, the twelfth president, enslaved approximately 150 and held many of them during his presidency. During his run for president in 1849, he campaigned on and bragged about his wholesale slaughter of Brown people when he was a Major General in the Mexican-American War. And white folks in America elected him.
3. Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, enslaved 150-200 and held many of them during his presidency. By the way, Jackson, nicknamed “Indian Killer”- whom fake President Donald Trump describes as his all-time favorite- wasn’t just a brutal slaveholder. He was also a genocidal monster who was responsible for the slaughter of approximately 30,000-50,000 Red men, women, and children. Moreover, he signed the horrific Indian Removal Act of 1830 that robbed the indigenous people of 25 million acres of fertile land and doomed them and their descendants to reservation ghettos.
2. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, enslaved 267 and held many of them during his presidency. For more info about this child rapist, read my March 3 column
1. George Washington, the first president, enslaved 316 and held many of them during his presidency. For more info about the man whose teeth were “yanked from the heads of his slaves,” read my February 24 column.
Washington’s teeth were actually yanked from the mouths of our enslaved ancestors and Jefferson actually raped Sally repeatedly while she was just a child.
In response to both columns, white racists went certifiably crazy (I mean crazier) and denied and yelled and screamed and hollered and insulted. They also trolled on social media. Unfortunately for them, they’re gonna need a straight-jacket after reading this.
This week’s topic is about the twelve United States presidents who enslaved Black men, women, boys, and girls. And before you crazy racists start talking nonsense about those so-called “great” patriots simply being “men of their times,” you need to know that the anti-slavery movement amongst good white folks began in the 1730s and spread throughout the Thirteen Colonies as a result of the abolitionist activities during the First Great Awakening, which was early America’s Christian revival movement. Furthermore, the anti-slavery gospel of the Second Great Awakening was all over the nation from around 1790 through the 1850s.
America is and always has been a Christian country, right? Therefore, if the Christian revivalists weren’t men (and women) of that slaveholding time, why weren’t those twelve presidents who led this Christian country?
Beyond the religious abolitionist movement, the secular abolitionist movement was in full effect in the 1830s, thanks to the likes of the great newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison. Presidents knew how to read, right?
By the way, John Adams, the second president (from 1797-1801) and his son John Quincy Adams, the sixth president (from 1825-1829), never enslaved anybody. And they certainly were men of their times. Maybe they knew slavery was, is, and forever will be evil and inhumane.
Here are the evil and inhumane 12 slaveholding presidents listed from bad to worse to worst:
12. Martin Van Buren, the eighth president, enslaved 1 but not during his presidency. By the way, that 1 escaped.
11. Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth president, enslaved 5 but not during his presidency. In office from 1869-1877, he was the last slaveholding president.
10. Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth president, enslaved 8 but not during his presidency. However, when he was Military Governor of Tennessee, he persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to remove that state from those subject to “Honest Abe’s” Emancipation Proclamation.
9. William Henry Harrison, the ninth president, enslaved 11 but not during his presidency. However, as Governor of the Indiana Territory, he petitioned Congress to make slavery legal there. Fortunately, he was unsuccessful.
8. James K. Polk, the eleventh president, enslaved 25 and held many of them during his presidency. He also stole much of Mexico from the Mexicans during the 1846-1848 war in which those Brown people were robbed of California and almost all of today’s Southwest.
7. John Tyler, the tenth president, enslaved 70 and held many of them during his presidency. He was a states’ rights bigot and a jingoist flag-waver who robbed Mexico of Texas in 1845.
6. James Monroe, the fifth president, enslaved 75 and held many of them during his presidency. He hated Blacks so much that he wanted them sent back to Africa. That’s why he supported the racist American Colonization Society, robbed West Africans of a large piece of coastal land in 1821, and created a colony that later became Liberia. The Liberian state of Monrovia is named after that racist thug.
5. James Madison, the fourth president, enslaved approximately 100-125 and did so during his presidency. He’s the very same guy who proposed the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause.
4. Zachary Taylor, the twelfth president, enslaved approximately 150 and held many of them during his presidency. During his run for president in 1849, he campaigned on and bragged about his wholesale slaughter of Brown people when he was a Major General in the Mexican-American War. And white folks in America elected him.
3. Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, enslaved 150-200 and held many of them during his presidency. By the way, Jackson, nicknamed “Indian Killer”- whom fake President Donald Trump describes as his all-time favorite- wasn’t just a brutal slaveholder. He was also a genocidal monster who was responsible for the slaughter of approximately 30,000-50,000 Red men, women, and children. Moreover, he signed the horrific Indian Removal Act of 1830 that robbed the indigenous people of 25 million acres of fertile land and doomed them and their descendants to reservation ghettos.
2. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, enslaved 267 and held many of them during his presidency. For more info about this child rapist, read my March 3 column
1. George Washington, the first president, enslaved 316 and held many of them during his presidency. For more info about the man whose teeth were “yanked from the heads of his slaves,” read my February 24 column.
Using Ink and Urine, He Secretly Recorded the Nazis' Horrors
Anthony Acevedo was a medic captured at the Battle of the Bulge, kept in Berga
By Kate Seamons, Newser Staff
Posted Mar 9, 2018 9:06 AM CST
(NEWSER) – After the Pearl Harbor attack, Anthony Acevedo was determined to defend his homeland—which meant returning to it. Acevedo was born in 1924 in California to Mexican parents who were deported 13 years later; he and his siblings went to Mexico, too, and he re-entered the US at age 17 to join the Army. In October 1944, Acevedo found himself a medic in Europe. Just a few months later, at the Battle of the Bulge, he was captured, and began a journal that would end up being hugely significant, one that's coming back into view in the wake of Acevedo's Feb. 11 death at age 93. Acevedo was one of 350 "undesirables," US soldiers that included Jews and were sent to the slave labor camp at Buchenwald known as Berga in February 1945, reports CNN.
Half the soldiers sent there didn't make it out alive, and Acevedo journaled every US death he observed, as well as horrors experienced there, including his own: being made to fill the bullet holes left in the heads of dead soldiers with wax to mask the shootings. He told CNNin 2008 that dandelion leaves were a "gourmet meal" compared to their normal rations: soup cooked from rats and cats, and bread made from sawdust, ground glass, and barley. The Press-Enterprise reports he weighed just 87 pounds by April 1945. CNN notes that the US didn't recognize the ordeal of the soldiers kept at Berga until Acevedo went public with his story in 2008. Acevedo donated his diary, which he concealed in his pants and wrote using ink mixed with urine or snow, to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010. (The museum just took a stand against Aung San Suu Kyi.)
Half the soldiers sent there didn't make it out alive, and Acevedo journaled every US death he observed, as well as horrors experienced there, including his own: being made to fill the bullet holes left in the heads of dead soldiers with wax to mask the shootings. He told CNNin 2008 that dandelion leaves were a "gourmet meal" compared to their normal rations: soup cooked from rats and cats, and bread made from sawdust, ground glass, and barley. The Press-Enterprise reports he weighed just 87 pounds by April 1945. CNN notes that the US didn't recognize the ordeal of the soldiers kept at Berga until Acevedo went public with his story in 2008. Acevedo donated his diary, which he concealed in his pants and wrote using ink mixed with urine or snow, to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010. (The museum just took a stand against Aung San Suu Kyi.)
The Complex History of 'In God We Trust'
It's not a motto that reflects universally shared historical values but a Christian perspective—one that is embraced by President Trump and the modern GOP.
By David Mislin / The Conversation - alternet
February 21, 2018, 12:06 PM GMT
In his address to the National Prayer Breakfast on the morning of Feb. 8, President Donald Trump emphasizedthe centrality of faith in American life. After describing the country as a “nation of believers,” Trump reminded his audience that American currency features the phrase “In God We Trust” as does the Pledge of Allegiance. He also declared that “our rights are not given to us by man” but “come from our Creator.”
These remarks come a week after Trump linked religion with American identity in his first State of the Union address. On Jan. 30, he similarly invoked “In God We Trust” while proclaiming an “American way” in which “faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life.”
But the history of such language is more complex than Trump’s assertions suggest.
The place of “In God We Trust,” and similar invocations of God in national life, have been a subject of debate. From my perspective as a religious history scholar, they reflect a particular view of the United States, not a universally accepted “American way.”
The Civil War
Political rhetoric linking the United States with a divine power emerged on a large scale with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. M.R. Watkinson, a Pennsylvania clergyman, encouraged the placement of “In God We Trust” on coins at the war’s outset in order to help the North’s cause. Such language, Watkinson wrote, would “place us openly under the divine protection.”
Putting the phrase on coins was just the beginning.
In 1864, with the Civil War still raging, a group supported by the North’s major Protestant denominations began advocating change to the preamble of the Constitution. The proposed language – which anticipated President Trump’s remarks about the origin of Americans’ rights – would have declared that Americans recognized “Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government.”
If the amendment’s supporters had succeeded in having their way, Christian belief would be deeply embedded in the United States government.
But, such invocations of God in national politics were not to last. Despite lobbying by major Protestant denominations such as the Methodists, this so-called Sovereignty of God amendment was never ratified.
Though “In God We Trust” was added to coins, it was not added to the increasingly common paper money. In fact, when coins were redesigned late in the 19th century, it disappeared from coins as well.
As I demonstrate in my book, these developments were related to the spread of secularism in the post-Civil War U.S. For many people at the time, placing religious language in the Constitution or on symbols of government was not consistent with American ideals.
The revival of ‘In God We Trust’
The 1950s, however, witnessed a dramatic resurgence of religious language in government and politics. It was that decade that brought “In God We Trust” into widespread use.
In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill placing the phrase on all American currency. One sponsor of that legislation, Congressman Charles Bennett, echoed the sentiments that had inspired the Sovereignty of God amendment during the Civil War. Bennett proclaimed, that the U.S. “was founded in a spiritual atmosphere and with a firm trust in God.”
The next year, “In God We Trust” was adopted as the first official motto of the United States.
Both of these developments reflected the desire to emphasize Americans’ religious commitment in the early years of the Cold War. Historians such as Jonathan Herzog have chronicled how leaders ranging from President Eisenhower to the evangelist Billy Graham stressed on the strong faith of the nation in setting the U.S. apart from the godlessness of Soviet communism.
Recently, however, Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse has shown that religious language was not merely rhetoric against communism. “In God We Trust” reflected domestic concerns as well.
The belief in American religiosity that put “In God We Trust” on coins and made it the national motto in the 1950s had emerged over several decades. Conservative businessmen had allied with ministers, including Billy Graham, to combat the social welfare policies and government expansion that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
These wide-ranging programs, designed to tackle the Great Depression, irked many conservatives. They objected to government intervention in business and Roosevelt’s support for labor unions.
As Kruse notes, this alliance of conservative business leaders and ministers linked “faith, freedom, and free enterprise.”
In this way then, President Trump’s repeated assertions of “In God We Trust” could be said to reflect certain American values. But, as my research shows, for much of U.S. history, the acceptance of such values ebbed and flowed.
“In God We Trust” is a not a motto that reflects universally shared historical values. Rather it represents a particular political, economic and religious perspective – one that is embraced by President Trump and the modern GOP.
These remarks come a week after Trump linked religion with American identity in his first State of the Union address. On Jan. 30, he similarly invoked “In God We Trust” while proclaiming an “American way” in which “faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life.”
But the history of such language is more complex than Trump’s assertions suggest.
The place of “In God We Trust,” and similar invocations of God in national life, have been a subject of debate. From my perspective as a religious history scholar, they reflect a particular view of the United States, not a universally accepted “American way.”
The Civil War
Political rhetoric linking the United States with a divine power emerged on a large scale with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. M.R. Watkinson, a Pennsylvania clergyman, encouraged the placement of “In God We Trust” on coins at the war’s outset in order to help the North’s cause. Such language, Watkinson wrote, would “place us openly under the divine protection.”
Putting the phrase on coins was just the beginning.
In 1864, with the Civil War still raging, a group supported by the North’s major Protestant denominations began advocating change to the preamble of the Constitution. The proposed language – which anticipated President Trump’s remarks about the origin of Americans’ rights – would have declared that Americans recognized “Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government.”
If the amendment’s supporters had succeeded in having their way, Christian belief would be deeply embedded in the United States government.
But, such invocations of God in national politics were not to last. Despite lobbying by major Protestant denominations such as the Methodists, this so-called Sovereignty of God amendment was never ratified.
Though “In God We Trust” was added to coins, it was not added to the increasingly common paper money. In fact, when coins were redesigned late in the 19th century, it disappeared from coins as well.
As I demonstrate in my book, these developments were related to the spread of secularism in the post-Civil War U.S. For many people at the time, placing religious language in the Constitution or on symbols of government was not consistent with American ideals.
The revival of ‘In God We Trust’
The 1950s, however, witnessed a dramatic resurgence of religious language in government and politics. It was that decade that brought “In God We Trust” into widespread use.
In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill placing the phrase on all American currency. One sponsor of that legislation, Congressman Charles Bennett, echoed the sentiments that had inspired the Sovereignty of God amendment during the Civil War. Bennett proclaimed, that the U.S. “was founded in a spiritual atmosphere and with a firm trust in God.”
The next year, “In God We Trust” was adopted as the first official motto of the United States.
Both of these developments reflected the desire to emphasize Americans’ religious commitment in the early years of the Cold War. Historians such as Jonathan Herzog have chronicled how leaders ranging from President Eisenhower to the evangelist Billy Graham stressed on the strong faith of the nation in setting the U.S. apart from the godlessness of Soviet communism.
Recently, however, Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse has shown that religious language was not merely rhetoric against communism. “In God We Trust” reflected domestic concerns as well.
The belief in American religiosity that put “In God We Trust” on coins and made it the national motto in the 1950s had emerged over several decades. Conservative businessmen had allied with ministers, including Billy Graham, to combat the social welfare policies and government expansion that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
These wide-ranging programs, designed to tackle the Great Depression, irked many conservatives. They objected to government intervention in business and Roosevelt’s support for labor unions.
As Kruse notes, this alliance of conservative business leaders and ministers linked “faith, freedom, and free enterprise.”
In this way then, President Trump’s repeated assertions of “In God We Trust” could be said to reflect certain American values. But, as my research shows, for much of U.S. history, the acceptance of such values ebbed and flowed.
“In God We Trust” is a not a motto that reflects universally shared historical values. Rather it represents a particular political, economic and religious perspective – one that is embraced by President Trump and the modern GOP.
Andrew Johnson’s failed presidency echoes in Trump’s White House
The Conversation - raw story
19 FEB 2018 AT 07:43 ET
Andrew Johnson
The two have much in common. Like Trump, Johnson followed an unconventional path to the presidency.
A Tennessean and lifelong Democrat, Johnson was a defender of slavery and white supremacy but also an uncompromising Unionist. He was the only U.S. senator from the South who opposed his state’s move to secede in 1861. That made him an unconventional yet attractive choice as Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 when Republicans took on the mantle of the “Union Party” to win support from Democrats alienated by their own party’s anti-war stance.
Six weeks after becoming vice president, an assassin’s bullet killed Lincoln and catapulted Johnson to the presidency.
Republican reception mixed for JohnsonLike Trump, Johnson entered the White House with a mixture of skepticism and support among Republicans who controlled Congress. He was a Southerner and a Democrat, which concerned them. But his courageous Unionism and blunt criticism of rebels – “Treason must be made infamous and traitors punished,” he proclaimed – impressed congressional leaders, who believed that he would take a firm approach to the South.
Through bold assertion of executive authority, Johnson quickly reconstructed state and local governments in the South. Because African-Americans were excluded from the process, these regimes were controlled by Southern whites, most of whom had been loyal Confederates. Predictably, they adopted laws designed to keep African-Americans in a servile position.
Southern officials also stood by and even abetted whites who unleashed a wave of violence against former slaves. For example, in July 1866, New Orleans police participated in a massacre that left 37 African-Americans and white Unionists dead and more than 100 wounded.
Unlike today’s Republicans, most of whom have become more loyal to Trump, Reconstruction-era Republicans pushed back against Johnson. They viewed emancipation as a crowning achievement of Union victory and were determined to ensure that former slaves enjoyed the fruits of freedom. Although they hoped to avoid conflict with the president, in early 1866, they adopted measures designed to establish color-blind citizenship and protect former slaves from injustice.
No fan of negotiationLike Trump, Johnson’s instinct was to attack rather than negotiate. A states’ rights Democrat and proponent of white supremacy, Johnson rebuffed Republicans’ efforts at compromise. He responded to Republican civil rights legislation with scathing veto messages. In September 1866, he toured the North, leveling personal attacks against congressional leaders and seeking to rally voters against them in the midterm elections.
Growing up poor and illiterate, Johnson had developed a deep hostility for African-Americans, believing that they looked down on people like him. His private conversations were laced with racist invective. After meeting with a delegation led by the black leader, Frederick Douglass, for example, he exclaimed to his secretary, “I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any n—-r, and he would just as likely cut a white man’s throat as not.”
In speeches on the campaign trail and in Washington, Johnson cast his opposition to Republican civil rights policy in language that today appears clearly racist. He sought to appeal to voters — North as well as South – who felt threatened by African-American gains.
In vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Johnson argued that African-Americans, who had “just emerged from slavery,” lacked “the requisite qualifications to entitle them to the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.” Indeed, he asserted, the law discriminated “against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners [who had to reside in the U.S. for five years to qualify for citizenship] in favor of the negro.”
Made excuses for Southern racismJohnson excused racist violence in the South. Ignoring facts that had been widely reported in the press, Johnson held Republicans in Congress responsible for encouraging black political activism during the New Orleans massacre. That was the July 1866 riot where a white mob – aided by police – set upon African-American marchers and their white Unionist sympathizers, leaving 37 African-Americans and white Unionists dead and more than 100 wounded.
“Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts,” Johnson charged, “and they are responsible for it.” Whites who encouraged blacks to demand the right to vote, not the white mobs and police who attacked them, bore responsibility, Johnson implied.
Like Trump, Johnson fancied himself a populist. He saw himself as a principled defender of the people against Washington insiders bent on destroying the republic. By refusing to seat senators and representatives from the reconstructed states of the former Confederacy, he charged in 1866, congressional leaders were riding roughshod over the Constitution.
“There are individuals in the Government,” Johnson told an audience in Washington, D.C., “who want to destroy our institutions.”
Later, when confronted by catcalls from Republican partisans, Johnson fired back.
“Congress is trying to break up the Government,” he said, casting congressional leaders as enemies of the Union in the mold of secessionist heroes Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.
Combining egotism, victimhood and paranoia in a manner similar to Trump, Johnson portrayed himself as the nation’s much maligned savior.
“I am your instrument,” he told one audience. “I stand for the country, I stand for the Constitution.”
The public could get tickets to attend the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.
Johnson saw his opponents as enemies bent not just on impugning the legitimacy of his presidency but whose “intention … [is] to incite assassination.” In a melodramatic and revealing pledge, he proclaimed, “If my blood is to be shed because I vindicate the Union … then let it be shed.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Johnson’s presidency ended badly.
Reviled by African-AmericansWhile lauded by white Southerners, he was reviled by African-Americans and most Northerners for disgracing the office of the presidency. Thomas Nast, the popular political cartoonist, lampooned him, the press chastised him and private citizens expressed their disgust.
Commenting on Johnson’s electioneering tour of the North, Mary Todd Lincoln said acidly that his conduct “would humiliate any other than himself.”
Congressional Republicans overrode Johnson’s vetoes and tied his hands on matters of policy. In 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach him but the Senate fell one vote shy of the two-thirds majority necessary to remove him from office.
As his term came to an end in 1869, his successor, Ulysses Grant, refused to ride to the inauguration in the same carriage as the disgraced Johnson, who then declined to attend the ceremony. Instead, he remained at the White House, leaving it for the last time to go to his Tennessee home — and perhaps a more receptive audience of like-minded Southerners — after the inauguration was over.
Presidents succeed by appealing to shared values, uniting rather than dividing, making strategic use of the respect Americans have for the office, and avoiding the gutter. Andrew Johnson failed on all counts, destroying his presidency and bringing himself into contempt.
The Washington Post’s Senior Editor Marc Fisher writes that Donald Trump learned as a real estate developer and entertainer “that what humiliates, damages, even destroys others can actually strengthen his image and therefore his bottom line.”
Will those lessons serve Trump well as president? Or will they condemn him to Johnson’s ignominious fate?
Donald Nieman, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Binghamton University, State University of New York
A Tennessean and lifelong Democrat, Johnson was a defender of slavery and white supremacy but also an uncompromising Unionist. He was the only U.S. senator from the South who opposed his state’s move to secede in 1861. That made him an unconventional yet attractive choice as Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 when Republicans took on the mantle of the “Union Party” to win support from Democrats alienated by their own party’s anti-war stance.
Six weeks after becoming vice president, an assassin’s bullet killed Lincoln and catapulted Johnson to the presidency.
Republican reception mixed for JohnsonLike Trump, Johnson entered the White House with a mixture of skepticism and support among Republicans who controlled Congress. He was a Southerner and a Democrat, which concerned them. But his courageous Unionism and blunt criticism of rebels – “Treason must be made infamous and traitors punished,” he proclaimed – impressed congressional leaders, who believed that he would take a firm approach to the South.
Through bold assertion of executive authority, Johnson quickly reconstructed state and local governments in the South. Because African-Americans were excluded from the process, these regimes were controlled by Southern whites, most of whom had been loyal Confederates. Predictably, they adopted laws designed to keep African-Americans in a servile position.
Southern officials also stood by and even abetted whites who unleashed a wave of violence against former slaves. For example, in July 1866, New Orleans police participated in a massacre that left 37 African-Americans and white Unionists dead and more than 100 wounded.
Unlike today’s Republicans, most of whom have become more loyal to Trump, Reconstruction-era Republicans pushed back against Johnson. They viewed emancipation as a crowning achievement of Union victory and were determined to ensure that former slaves enjoyed the fruits of freedom. Although they hoped to avoid conflict with the president, in early 1866, they adopted measures designed to establish color-blind citizenship and protect former slaves from injustice.
No fan of negotiationLike Trump, Johnson’s instinct was to attack rather than negotiate. A states’ rights Democrat and proponent of white supremacy, Johnson rebuffed Republicans’ efforts at compromise. He responded to Republican civil rights legislation with scathing veto messages. In September 1866, he toured the North, leveling personal attacks against congressional leaders and seeking to rally voters against them in the midterm elections.
Growing up poor and illiterate, Johnson had developed a deep hostility for African-Americans, believing that they looked down on people like him. His private conversations were laced with racist invective. After meeting with a delegation led by the black leader, Frederick Douglass, for example, he exclaimed to his secretary, “I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any n—-r, and he would just as likely cut a white man’s throat as not.”
In speeches on the campaign trail and in Washington, Johnson cast his opposition to Republican civil rights policy in language that today appears clearly racist. He sought to appeal to voters — North as well as South – who felt threatened by African-American gains.
In vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Johnson argued that African-Americans, who had “just emerged from slavery,” lacked “the requisite qualifications to entitle them to the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.” Indeed, he asserted, the law discriminated “against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners [who had to reside in the U.S. for five years to qualify for citizenship] in favor of the negro.”
Made excuses for Southern racismJohnson excused racist violence in the South. Ignoring facts that had been widely reported in the press, Johnson held Republicans in Congress responsible for encouraging black political activism during the New Orleans massacre. That was the July 1866 riot where a white mob – aided by police – set upon African-American marchers and their white Unionist sympathizers, leaving 37 African-Americans and white Unionists dead and more than 100 wounded.
“Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts,” Johnson charged, “and they are responsible for it.” Whites who encouraged blacks to demand the right to vote, not the white mobs and police who attacked them, bore responsibility, Johnson implied.
Like Trump, Johnson fancied himself a populist. He saw himself as a principled defender of the people against Washington insiders bent on destroying the republic. By refusing to seat senators and representatives from the reconstructed states of the former Confederacy, he charged in 1866, congressional leaders were riding roughshod over the Constitution.
“There are individuals in the Government,” Johnson told an audience in Washington, D.C., “who want to destroy our institutions.”
Later, when confronted by catcalls from Republican partisans, Johnson fired back.
“Congress is trying to break up the Government,” he said, casting congressional leaders as enemies of the Union in the mold of secessionist heroes Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.
Combining egotism, victimhood and paranoia in a manner similar to Trump, Johnson portrayed himself as the nation’s much maligned savior.
“I am your instrument,” he told one audience. “I stand for the country, I stand for the Constitution.”
The public could get tickets to attend the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.
Johnson saw his opponents as enemies bent not just on impugning the legitimacy of his presidency but whose “intention … [is] to incite assassination.” In a melodramatic and revealing pledge, he proclaimed, “If my blood is to be shed because I vindicate the Union … then let it be shed.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Johnson’s presidency ended badly.
Reviled by African-AmericansWhile lauded by white Southerners, he was reviled by African-Americans and most Northerners for disgracing the office of the presidency. Thomas Nast, the popular political cartoonist, lampooned him, the press chastised him and private citizens expressed their disgust.
Commenting on Johnson’s electioneering tour of the North, Mary Todd Lincoln said acidly that his conduct “would humiliate any other than himself.”
Congressional Republicans overrode Johnson’s vetoes and tied his hands on matters of policy. In 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach him but the Senate fell one vote shy of the two-thirds majority necessary to remove him from office.
As his term came to an end in 1869, his successor, Ulysses Grant, refused to ride to the inauguration in the same carriage as the disgraced Johnson, who then declined to attend the ceremony. Instead, he remained at the White House, leaving it for the last time to go to his Tennessee home — and perhaps a more receptive audience of like-minded Southerners — after the inauguration was over.
Presidents succeed by appealing to shared values, uniting rather than dividing, making strategic use of the respect Americans have for the office, and avoiding the gutter. Andrew Johnson failed on all counts, destroying his presidency and bringing himself into contempt.
The Washington Post’s Senior Editor Marc Fisher writes that Donald Trump learned as a real estate developer and entertainer “that what humiliates, damages, even destroys others can actually strengthen his image and therefore his bottom line.”
Will those lessons serve Trump well as president? Or will they condemn him to Johnson’s ignominious fate?
Donald Nieman, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Binghamton University, State University of New York
BLOWBACK: HOW ISIS WAS CREATED BY THE U.S. INVASION OF IRAQ
Mehdi Hasan - the intercept
January 29 2018, 6:49 a.m.
“YOUR BROTHER CREATED ISIS,” college student Ivy Ziedrich told a startled Jeb Bush after a town hall meeting in Reno, Nevada, in May 2015. The then-Republican presidential hopeful tried to defend his elder sibling, former President George W. Bush, by blaming the rise of the Islamic State on Barack Obama, “because Americans pulled back” from Iraq in 2011.
It sounds a bit conspiratorial, right? Calling Dubya the creator of ISIS? The reality, however, is that Ziedrich’s accusation wasn’t far off the mark.
Had it not been for Bush’s catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003, in defiance of international law, the world’s most feared terrorist group would not exist today. ISIS is blowback.
In this week’s episode of my six-part series on blowback, I examine the three ways in which Bush’s misadventure in Mesopotamia helped birth a group that the U.S. now considers to be one of the biggest threats to both U.S. national security and Middle East peace.
First, foreign military occupations tend to radicalize local populations and breed violent insurgencies. Take Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Or Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In Iraq, the U.S. morphed from heroic liberators into brutal occupiers within a matter of weeks. In Fallujah, which would later become an ISIS stronghold, U.S. troops opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protesters in April 2003, killing and wounding dozens of Iraqis.
The shootings, the torture, the general chaos, all helped drive thousands of Iraqis from the minority Sunni community into the arms of radical groups led by brutal gangsters, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq, formed in 2004 to fight U.S. troops and their local allies, was a precursor organization to … ISIS.
Second, in May 2003, in a criminally stupid and reckless move, the U.S. occupying authorities disbanded the Iraqi army. That’s right: The U.S. made more than half a million well-armed and well-trained Iraqi troops unemployed overnight. No less an authority than Gen. Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state and America’s former top soldier, would later describe those jobless soldiers as “prime recruits for insurgency.”
In recent years, many of the top commanders in ISIS have been identified as former senior officers in Saddam Hussein’s army. Coincidence?
Third, the U.S. military detained tens of thousands of Iraqis, many of them noncombatants, at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, where imprisoned jihadis were able to not only radicalize new recruits in plain sight, but also plan future operations and attacks. “Many of us at Camp Bucca were concerned that instead of just holding detainees, we had created a pressure cooker for extremism,” compound Cmdr. James Skylar Gerrond would later remark.
One former Bucca detainee, incidentally, was none other than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Yes, the self-proclaimed caliph and leader of ISIS who, according to Iraqi terrorism expert Hisham al-Hashimi, “absorbed the jihadist ideology and established himself among the big names” while at Bucca.
To be clear, then, ISIS is blowback from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And don’t just take my word for it. Listen to David Kilcullen, a former adviser to both Gen. David Petraeus and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, considered to be one of the world’s leading counter-insurgency experts. “We have to recognize that a lot of the problem is of our own making,” Kilcullen told Channel 4 News in March 2016. “There, undeniably, would be no ISIS if we hadn’t invaded Iraq.”
It sounds a bit conspiratorial, right? Calling Dubya the creator of ISIS? The reality, however, is that Ziedrich’s accusation wasn’t far off the mark.
Had it not been for Bush’s catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003, in defiance of international law, the world’s most feared terrorist group would not exist today. ISIS is blowback.
In this week’s episode of my six-part series on blowback, I examine the three ways in which Bush’s misadventure in Mesopotamia helped birth a group that the U.S. now considers to be one of the biggest threats to both U.S. national security and Middle East peace.
First, foreign military occupations tend to radicalize local populations and breed violent insurgencies. Take Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Or Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In Iraq, the U.S. morphed from heroic liberators into brutal occupiers within a matter of weeks. In Fallujah, which would later become an ISIS stronghold, U.S. troops opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protesters in April 2003, killing and wounding dozens of Iraqis.
The shootings, the torture, the general chaos, all helped drive thousands of Iraqis from the minority Sunni community into the arms of radical groups led by brutal gangsters, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq, formed in 2004 to fight U.S. troops and their local allies, was a precursor organization to … ISIS.
Second, in May 2003, in a criminally stupid and reckless move, the U.S. occupying authorities disbanded the Iraqi army. That’s right: The U.S. made more than half a million well-armed and well-trained Iraqi troops unemployed overnight. No less an authority than Gen. Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state and America’s former top soldier, would later describe those jobless soldiers as “prime recruits for insurgency.”
In recent years, many of the top commanders in ISIS have been identified as former senior officers in Saddam Hussein’s army. Coincidence?
Third, the U.S. military detained tens of thousands of Iraqis, many of them noncombatants, at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, where imprisoned jihadis were able to not only radicalize new recruits in plain sight, but also plan future operations and attacks. “Many of us at Camp Bucca were concerned that instead of just holding detainees, we had created a pressure cooker for extremism,” compound Cmdr. James Skylar Gerrond would later remark.
One former Bucca detainee, incidentally, was none other than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Yes, the self-proclaimed caliph and leader of ISIS who, according to Iraqi terrorism expert Hisham al-Hashimi, “absorbed the jihadist ideology and established himself among the big names” while at Bucca.
To be clear, then, ISIS is blowback from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And don’t just take my word for it. Listen to David Kilcullen, a former adviser to both Gen. David Petraeus and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, considered to be one of the world’s leading counter-insurgency experts. “We have to recognize that a lot of the problem is of our own making,” Kilcullen told Channel 4 News in March 2016. “There, undeniably, would be no ISIS if we hadn’t invaded Iraq.”
Trump ain’t new: America has a long history of racist presidents
Trump's racism is only a throwback to other commanders-in-chief when America was “great"
By David A. Love - January 15, 2018
the grio
Some have called Donald Trump the most racist U.S. president in modern times, if not the most racist president ever, for his crude and highly offensive comments calling Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.”
However, Trump does not stand alone. As dangerous and violent as his words are today, they are but a throwback to what other commanders-in-chief have said and done during darker times–when America was “great,” according to Trump.
It makes sense to start off with the first U.S. president, the father of the country, George Washington—who owned over 300 slaves when he died. Washington ordered his overseer Anthony Whitting to keep a slave named Gunner working hard and “continue throwing up brick earth.” Gunner was 83.
And when Whitting whipped a slave named Charlotte, Washington approved. “Your treatment of Charlotte was very proper,” Washington wrote, “and if she or any other of the servants will not do their duty by fair means, or are impertinent, correction (as the only alternative) must be administered.”
When Washington was president living in the Executive Mansion in Philadelphia, he evaded a Pennsylvania law freeing any slave who lived in the state for over six months. The father of this country sent his human property back down to Mount Vernon whenever the six months were about to expire. A few of Washington’s slaves escaped, including his cook Hercules, who ran away on Washignton’s birthday.
Third president Thomas Jefferson owned as many as 140 slaves. Jefferson spent years raping his slave Sally Hemings—his wife’s half-sister—since she was a child. Hemmings bore six children. And this man enslaved his own kids. Jefferson said the “unfortunate difference of color” of Black people made them less beautiful than whites.
Andrew Jackson–Trump’s hero– was one of the worst American presidents, and also one of its most racist. He owned hundreds of slaves, and censored anti-slavery mailings from Northern abolitionists while president. Nicknamed “Indian killer,” he committed genocide against of Native Americans, including women and children. His Indian Removal Act removed 46,000 native people from their land, making 25 million acres available to white settlers and slaveowners, while 4,000 Cherokee people died during the “Trail of Tears” forced relocation to the West.
The great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln was a racist as well. During a debate in his run for Senate in 1858, Lincoln said “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” And in 1862, he tried to convince Black folks that they should self-deport and colonize in Central America, telling them it would be “extremely selfish” not to do it.
With a deep hatred of Black people, Andrew Johnson believed America should have a white man’s government. He blamed “the radical Congress” after the slaughter of Black activists by white police officers in New Orleans. Johnson opposed the 14th Amendment, and vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 granting equal protection to all citizens, as he doubted it was “sound policy to make our entire colored population” U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, Johnson also issued pardons to wealthy Confederate traitors, and gave his blessing to the Southern states to issue the “black codes” reinstituting slavery by another name. He also spoke of the need to relocate “warlike” Indians to reservations.
Vice President Mike Pence once compared Trump to Teddy Roosevelt, who called white Americans “the forward race” and minorities “the backward race.” Regarding Native Americans, he said “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
Woodrow Wilson was a racist, even by the extremely racist standards of his day. This president resegregated the federal government, and when a group of Black professionals led by journalist Monoroe Troter met with him to protest the policy, he told them, “Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”
Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, which glamorized the Ku Klux Klan as saviors of the white South–in the White House. The film even quoted the president: “The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”
Wilson, who was against civil rights for Black people, said the film could “teach history with lightning,” and opposed Reconstruction because “the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.”
Calvin Coolidge, responsible for the racist Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted nonwhite people into the country, said “America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.”
The 32nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rounded up more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War Two and locked them up in prison camps, while sparing Italian- and German-Americans the same fate.
Despite the important pieces of civil rights legislation he signed, Lyndon B. Johnson was racist, to be sure. When he nominated Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court rather than a less-well known African-American judge, he explained, “when I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a nigger.”
Johnson once asked his chauffeur Parker if he preferred to be called by his name rather than “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.” When Parker said yes, Johnson angrily said, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.” He called civil rights legislation “the nigger bill.”
Richard Nixon was racist and anti-Semitic. The “law and order” president waged a war on drugs against Black people and the antiwar left, and used a Southern Strategy in his 1968 campaign to appeal to white Southerners’ resentment over civil rights.
“Do you know, maybe one black country that’s well run?,” Nixon told Henry Kissinger on the phone from the Oval Office, speaking about Jamaica. “Blacks can’t run it. Nowhere, and they won’t be able to for a hundred years, and maybe not for a thousand.” Of the Jewish community, Nixon said, “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”
Ronald Reagan brought us the racist stereotype of the “welfare queen,” who is presumably a Black woman. “There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands. She’s got Medicaid, is getting food stamps and welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”
In 1980, Reagan chose to launch his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964–and proclaim his support for “states’ rights.”
President George H.W. Bush was known for the infamous Willie Horton campaign ad in his 1988 bid against Michael Dukakis. The ad depicted Horton, a Black convict who was released from prison under a weekend furlough program while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, and committed armed robbery and rape. Invoking an image of Black criminals who rape and murder white women, and tapping into a visceral white fear of Black men, the ad helped send Bush to the White House.
Although some jokingly called him the “first Black president,” Bill Clinton built a career off the backs of Black folk. When he was governor of Arkansas and running for president in 1992, he went back home to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled man named Ricky Ray Rector—just to look tough on crime.
He enacted welfare reform based on myths of Black laziness, and through his 1994 crime bill, Clinton presided over the mass incarceration of Black people.
George W. Bush called himself a compassionate conservative, but as Kanye West said, “Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” The government neglect and inaction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina devastated Black lives in New Orleans, prompting Bush to tell his FEMA director that “Brownie” was doing a “heckuva job,” and Bush’s mother Barbara to say things were “working very well” for the evacuees and they were better off because they “were underprivileged anyway.”
Now, that’s a lot of racism. Although Trump has indeed earned his white supremacist credentials, there is a lot of racism to go around throughout American presidential history. We must understand the context for his offensive comments and understand this is nothing new.
However, Trump does not stand alone. As dangerous and violent as his words are today, they are but a throwback to what other commanders-in-chief have said and done during darker times–when America was “great,” according to Trump.
It makes sense to start off with the first U.S. president, the father of the country, George Washington—who owned over 300 slaves when he died. Washington ordered his overseer Anthony Whitting to keep a slave named Gunner working hard and “continue throwing up brick earth.” Gunner was 83.
And when Whitting whipped a slave named Charlotte, Washington approved. “Your treatment of Charlotte was very proper,” Washington wrote, “and if she or any other of the servants will not do their duty by fair means, or are impertinent, correction (as the only alternative) must be administered.”
When Washington was president living in the Executive Mansion in Philadelphia, he evaded a Pennsylvania law freeing any slave who lived in the state for over six months. The father of this country sent his human property back down to Mount Vernon whenever the six months were about to expire. A few of Washington’s slaves escaped, including his cook Hercules, who ran away on Washignton’s birthday.
Third president Thomas Jefferson owned as many as 140 slaves. Jefferson spent years raping his slave Sally Hemings—his wife’s half-sister—since she was a child. Hemmings bore six children. And this man enslaved his own kids. Jefferson said the “unfortunate difference of color” of Black people made them less beautiful than whites.
Andrew Jackson–Trump’s hero– was one of the worst American presidents, and also one of its most racist. He owned hundreds of slaves, and censored anti-slavery mailings from Northern abolitionists while president. Nicknamed “Indian killer,” he committed genocide against of Native Americans, including women and children. His Indian Removal Act removed 46,000 native people from their land, making 25 million acres available to white settlers and slaveowners, while 4,000 Cherokee people died during the “Trail of Tears” forced relocation to the West.
The great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln was a racist as well. During a debate in his run for Senate in 1858, Lincoln said “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” And in 1862, he tried to convince Black folks that they should self-deport and colonize in Central America, telling them it would be “extremely selfish” not to do it.
With a deep hatred of Black people, Andrew Johnson believed America should have a white man’s government. He blamed “the radical Congress” after the slaughter of Black activists by white police officers in New Orleans. Johnson opposed the 14th Amendment, and vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 granting equal protection to all citizens, as he doubted it was “sound policy to make our entire colored population” U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, Johnson also issued pardons to wealthy Confederate traitors, and gave his blessing to the Southern states to issue the “black codes” reinstituting slavery by another name. He also spoke of the need to relocate “warlike” Indians to reservations.
Vice President Mike Pence once compared Trump to Teddy Roosevelt, who called white Americans “the forward race” and minorities “the backward race.” Regarding Native Americans, he said “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
Woodrow Wilson was a racist, even by the extremely racist standards of his day. This president resegregated the federal government, and when a group of Black professionals led by journalist Monoroe Troter met with him to protest the policy, he told them, “Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”
Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, which glamorized the Ku Klux Klan as saviors of the white South–in the White House. The film even quoted the president: “The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”
Wilson, who was against civil rights for Black people, said the film could “teach history with lightning,” and opposed Reconstruction because “the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.”
Calvin Coolidge, responsible for the racist Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted nonwhite people into the country, said “America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.”
The 32nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rounded up more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War Two and locked them up in prison camps, while sparing Italian- and German-Americans the same fate.
Despite the important pieces of civil rights legislation he signed, Lyndon B. Johnson was racist, to be sure. When he nominated Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court rather than a less-well known African-American judge, he explained, “when I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a nigger.”
Johnson once asked his chauffeur Parker if he preferred to be called by his name rather than “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.” When Parker said yes, Johnson angrily said, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.” He called civil rights legislation “the nigger bill.”
Richard Nixon was racist and anti-Semitic. The “law and order” president waged a war on drugs against Black people and the antiwar left, and used a Southern Strategy in his 1968 campaign to appeal to white Southerners’ resentment over civil rights.
“Do you know, maybe one black country that’s well run?,” Nixon told Henry Kissinger on the phone from the Oval Office, speaking about Jamaica. “Blacks can’t run it. Nowhere, and they won’t be able to for a hundred years, and maybe not for a thousand.” Of the Jewish community, Nixon said, “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”
Ronald Reagan brought us the racist stereotype of the “welfare queen,” who is presumably a Black woman. “There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands. She’s got Medicaid, is getting food stamps and welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”
In 1980, Reagan chose to launch his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964–and proclaim his support for “states’ rights.”
President George H.W. Bush was known for the infamous Willie Horton campaign ad in his 1988 bid against Michael Dukakis. The ad depicted Horton, a Black convict who was released from prison under a weekend furlough program while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, and committed armed robbery and rape. Invoking an image of Black criminals who rape and murder white women, and tapping into a visceral white fear of Black men, the ad helped send Bush to the White House.
Although some jokingly called him the “first Black president,” Bill Clinton built a career off the backs of Black folk. When he was governor of Arkansas and running for president in 1992, he went back home to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled man named Ricky Ray Rector—just to look tough on crime.
He enacted welfare reform based on myths of Black laziness, and through his 1994 crime bill, Clinton presided over the mass incarceration of Black people.
George W. Bush called himself a compassionate conservative, but as Kanye West said, “Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” The government neglect and inaction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina devastated Black lives in New Orleans, prompting Bush to tell his FEMA director that “Brownie” was doing a “heckuva job,” and Bush’s mother Barbara to say things were “working very well” for the evacuees and they were better off because they “were underprivileged anyway.”
Now, that’s a lot of racism. Although Trump has indeed earned his white supremacist credentials, there is a lot of racism to go around throughout American presidential history. We must understand the context for his offensive comments and understand this is nothing new.
Yes, your ancestors probably did come here legally — because 'illegal' immigration is less than a century old
Kevin Jennings
la times
When Nathalie Gumpertz arrived in New York in 1858, she was 22, single and ready to build a life in her new country. Without thinking twice about her legal status, she got off the boat, made her way to the Lower East Side (then known as Klein Deutschland, or “Little Germany,” due to the preponderance of German immigrants in the neighborhood) and eventually married, had four kids and settled at 97 Orchard St., the historic tenement house that is now the heart of the Tenement Museum, where I serve as president.
More than six decades later, in 1925, Rosaria Baldizzi arrived in New York to join her husband Adolfo at the same building, 97 Orchard. Baldizzi had a cloud hanging over her head that would remain there for the next two decades, one that Gumpertz never worried about: She had not entered the U.S. legally, and therefore had to worry about possible deportation.
What happened to make these two women’s experiences so different? In the years between their arrivals, “illegal” immigration was invented.
For those clamoring for a wall against immigrants, it may come as a surprise to learn that there were no federal laws concerning immigration until well into the history of the United States. When people say “my ancestors came here legally,” they’re probably right. For the first century of the country’s existence, anyone could land here and walk right off the boat with no papers of any kind, just as Gumpertz did. Coming here “illegally” did not even exist as a concept.
The first federal general immigration law was enacted in 1882. It prohibited from entering the U.S. “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” In other words, unless you were physically or mentally incapable of taking care of yourself, you were in — unless you were Chinese.
That’s because the first sweeping federal restriction on immigration also came in 1882, in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Troubled by the influx of Chinese workers — who helped build the transcontinental railroads, among other things — Congress enacted a wholesale ban on their further immigration that year. To enforce the ban, a bureaucracy had to be created, leading in 1891 to the establishment of the federal Bureau of Immigration, the first body charged with enforcing federal immigration law.
Beyond these restrictions, however, federal immigration laws remained relatively lax: If you were an able-bodied, non-Chinese person, you could come “legally” for several more decades. You didn’t have to speak a word of English or be literate in any language at all. In fact, it was not until 1917 that Congress required that immigrants pass a literacy test, and even then they could pass in any language, not just English.
When a massive influx of new immigrant groups came at the turn of the 20th century — Italians from Southern Europe and Jews from Eastern Europe, largely — a backlash began to build. In 1924, President Coolidge signed into law the National Origins Act, the primary aim of which was to severely restrict the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The new law required for the first time that immigrants to the U.S. have visas, introducing the concept of “having papers” to American immigration policy.
The concept of being an “illegal” immigrant pretty much dates back to 1924 — less than a century ago. For most of American history, coming here “legally” meant next to nothing. And almost none of those who came here “legally” a century ago would make it across the border under today’s far more stringent standards.
Baldizzi would not become “legal” until a special immigration provision was enacted to offer amnesty to mainly European immigrants who arrived without proper documentation after 1921, who had established families, and who had already lived in the U.S. for seven years. She applied for legal status under the new policy and earned her citizenship three years later, in 1948. Only then, for the first time in more than two decades, could she stop worrying about her immigration status.
What constitutes “legal” immigration has been a moving target throughout our history. Americans who crow about their law-abiding ancestors may want to learn a little more about immigration history before wishing for a return to the “good old days” — when pretty much anyone could come to the U.S. “legally.”
More than six decades later, in 1925, Rosaria Baldizzi arrived in New York to join her husband Adolfo at the same building, 97 Orchard. Baldizzi had a cloud hanging over her head that would remain there for the next two decades, one that Gumpertz never worried about: She had not entered the U.S. legally, and therefore had to worry about possible deportation.
What happened to make these two women’s experiences so different? In the years between their arrivals, “illegal” immigration was invented.
For those clamoring for a wall against immigrants, it may come as a surprise to learn that there were no federal laws concerning immigration until well into the history of the United States. When people say “my ancestors came here legally,” they’re probably right. For the first century of the country’s existence, anyone could land here and walk right off the boat with no papers of any kind, just as Gumpertz did. Coming here “illegally” did not even exist as a concept.
The first federal general immigration law was enacted in 1882. It prohibited from entering the U.S. “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” In other words, unless you were physically or mentally incapable of taking care of yourself, you were in — unless you were Chinese.
That’s because the first sweeping federal restriction on immigration also came in 1882, in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Troubled by the influx of Chinese workers — who helped build the transcontinental railroads, among other things — Congress enacted a wholesale ban on their further immigration that year. To enforce the ban, a bureaucracy had to be created, leading in 1891 to the establishment of the federal Bureau of Immigration, the first body charged with enforcing federal immigration law.
Beyond these restrictions, however, federal immigration laws remained relatively lax: If you were an able-bodied, non-Chinese person, you could come “legally” for several more decades. You didn’t have to speak a word of English or be literate in any language at all. In fact, it was not until 1917 that Congress required that immigrants pass a literacy test, and even then they could pass in any language, not just English.
When a massive influx of new immigrant groups came at the turn of the 20th century — Italians from Southern Europe and Jews from Eastern Europe, largely — a backlash began to build. In 1924, President Coolidge signed into law the National Origins Act, the primary aim of which was to severely restrict the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The new law required for the first time that immigrants to the U.S. have visas, introducing the concept of “having papers” to American immigration policy.
The concept of being an “illegal” immigrant pretty much dates back to 1924 — less than a century ago. For most of American history, coming here “legally” meant next to nothing. And almost none of those who came here “legally” a century ago would make it across the border under today’s far more stringent standards.
Baldizzi would not become “legal” until a special immigration provision was enacted to offer amnesty to mainly European immigrants who arrived without proper documentation after 1921, who had established families, and who had already lived in the U.S. for seven years. She applied for legal status under the new policy and earned her citizenship three years later, in 1948. Only then, for the first time in more than two decades, could she stop worrying about her immigration status.
What constitutes “legal” immigration has been a moving target throughout our history. Americans who crow about their law-abiding ancestors may want to learn a little more about immigration history before wishing for a return to the “good old days” — when pretty much anyone could come to the U.S. “legally.”
DONALD TRUMP’S VILE WORDS SHOULD REMIND US THAT AMERICA OWES EVERYTHING TO HAITIANS
Jon Schwarz - the intercept
January 12 2018, 4:00 a.m
ACCORDING TO THE Washington Post, President Donald Trump referredto Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” during an Oval Office meeting about immigration on Thursday. The Post also reported that Trump then said that the U.S. should try to attract more immigrants from places such as Norway.
Most reactions to this have understandably focused on Trump’s berserk racism. But it’s worth remembering that his comments are grotesque for another reason: Without the bravery of Haitians, Thomas Jefferson would never have been able to complete the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and the United States as we know it today would not exist.
This has been almost completely forgotten in the U.S., so now’s as good a time as any to remind ourselves.
Most Americans don’t know that France once colonized huge swaths of North America. At this point, the main remnant of this history is when we go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and drunkenly scream, “Laissez les bons temps rouler.”
But in the late 1700s, France effectively “owned” much of what is today the U.S., as well as the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The French named it Saint-Domingue. Today it’s called Haiti.
France turned Saint-Domingue into a slave society with one goal: to produce the largest quantity of commodity crops, particularly sugar, as possible. It eventually supplied 75 percent of all the sugar on earth and generated more wealth than all 13 American colonies together.
This level of productivity required baroque cruelty. An estimated one-third of each shipment of enslaved Africans died within three years of arriving in Saint-Domingue. One who survived later asked these rhetorical questions about the French:
Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?”
Unsurprisingly, this led to intermittent slave revolts. Surprisingly, a rebellion that began in 1791 eventually succeeded a decade later — the only time a slave revolt won in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
By 1803, France had lost tens of thousands of soldiers and was dangerously low on cash. So Napoleon offered Jefferson, then president, the deal of a lifetime: France would sell all of French Louisiana to the U.S. for just $15 million. This, as you recall from fifth-grade history, was the Louisiana Purchase.
Just a glance at a map shows why this made America the country it is now. It’s not simply that the U.S. acquired 828,000 square miles, which instantly doubled the size of the country (and still represents one-quarter of the U.S. land mass). Just as significantly, our new territory ran from Canada down to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, opening the way for our further expansion westward to the Pacific Ocean.
So no Haitian rebellion, no Louisiana Purchase; no Louisiana Purchase, and the U.S. would have been cooped up east of the Mississippi River, perhaps forever.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Alexander Hamilton wrote just after the deal was concluded:
To the deadly climate of St. Domingo, and to the courage and obstinate resistance made by its black inhabitants are we indebted. …
Bonaparte found himself absolutely compelled by situation, to relinquish his darling plan of colonising the banks of the Mississippi: and thus have the Government of the United States, by the unforseen operation of events, gained. … Let us then, with all due humility, acknowledge this as another of those signal instances of the kind interpositions of an over-ruling Providence …
Trump obviously isn’t going to, with all due humility, acknowledge that we are indebted to the courage and obstinate resistance of Haitians. But the rest of us can and should.
Most reactions to this have understandably focused on Trump’s berserk racism. But it’s worth remembering that his comments are grotesque for another reason: Without the bravery of Haitians, Thomas Jefferson would never have been able to complete the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and the United States as we know it today would not exist.
This has been almost completely forgotten in the U.S., so now’s as good a time as any to remind ourselves.
Most Americans don’t know that France once colonized huge swaths of North America. At this point, the main remnant of this history is when we go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and drunkenly scream, “Laissez les bons temps rouler.”
But in the late 1700s, France effectively “owned” much of what is today the U.S., as well as the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The French named it Saint-Domingue. Today it’s called Haiti.
France turned Saint-Domingue into a slave society with one goal: to produce the largest quantity of commodity crops, particularly sugar, as possible. It eventually supplied 75 percent of all the sugar on earth and generated more wealth than all 13 American colonies together.
This level of productivity required baroque cruelty. An estimated one-third of each shipment of enslaved Africans died within three years of arriving in Saint-Domingue. One who survived later asked these rhetorical questions about the French:
Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?”
Unsurprisingly, this led to intermittent slave revolts. Surprisingly, a rebellion that began in 1791 eventually succeeded a decade later — the only time a slave revolt won in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
By 1803, France had lost tens of thousands of soldiers and was dangerously low on cash. So Napoleon offered Jefferson, then president, the deal of a lifetime: France would sell all of French Louisiana to the U.S. for just $15 million. This, as you recall from fifth-grade history, was the Louisiana Purchase.
Just a glance at a map shows why this made America the country it is now. It’s not simply that the U.S. acquired 828,000 square miles, which instantly doubled the size of the country (and still represents one-quarter of the U.S. land mass). Just as significantly, our new territory ran from Canada down to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, opening the way for our further expansion westward to the Pacific Ocean.
So no Haitian rebellion, no Louisiana Purchase; no Louisiana Purchase, and the U.S. would have been cooped up east of the Mississippi River, perhaps forever.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Alexander Hamilton wrote just after the deal was concluded:
To the deadly climate of St. Domingo, and to the courage and obstinate resistance made by its black inhabitants are we indebted. …
Bonaparte found himself absolutely compelled by situation, to relinquish his darling plan of colonising the banks of the Mississippi: and thus have the Government of the United States, by the unforseen operation of events, gained. … Let us then, with all due humility, acknowledge this as another of those signal instances of the kind interpositions of an over-ruling Providence …
Trump obviously isn’t going to, with all due humility, acknowledge that we are indebted to the courage and obstinate resistance of Haitians. But the rest of us can and should.
