The Immigrant Other: How the Nativist mindset fed on fear and resentment
Eliminationism in America, Part 11: New arrivals to U.S. shores were easily 'Otherized' targets of hateful violence, regardless of color--but especially when they were nonwhite
Part 11 of 14: [Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.]
Probably the most vivid—not to mention accurate—portrayal of an American eliminationist hatemonger ever committed to film was delivered by the British actor Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York, playing the fictionalized version of a real-life Nativist character named “Bill the Butcher” (whose actual last name was Poole; in the film, his surname has been changed to Cutting).
Relatively early in the film, he has a key verbal exchange with the real-life Tammany Hall political manipulator “Boss” Tweed (played by Jim Broadbent), who boasts: “You may or may not know, Bill, that every day I go down to the waterfront with hot soup for the Irish as they come ashore. It’s part of building a political base.”
Cutting responds: “I've noticed you there, you may have noticed me.”
“Indeed I have,” Tweed answers in a disapproving tone. “Throwing torrents of abuse to every single person who steps off those boats.”
Cutting gleefully retorts: “If only I had the guns, Mr. Tweed, I'd shoot each and every one of them before they set foot on American soil.”
While Cutting may have been a fictitious character, this dialogue perfectly aligns with the real-life Bill Poole: vicious, unrepentantly violent, and utterly self-assured about his superiority. His real last words (in the film, at the culmination of a street brawl; in real life, after being shot by Tammany thugs): “Good bye, boys, I die a true American!”
The key to the effectiveness of eliminationist rhetoric is how it conceptualizes its targets as embodiments of the Other: an alien presence toxic to our cultural and physical well-being. The Other is often readily identified as nonwhite, but not always. Throughout our history, no group of Americans is more vulnerable to being designated the Other than immigrants—both white and nonwhite. This reality was at the heart of the first major anti-immigrant movement, the Nativists of 1830-1860, who primarily targeted Irish and German immigrants who flooded American shores in that period.
As always, the trick was to find ways to depict the targets as subhuman and worthy of elimination, regardless of skin color. So the demeaning stereotypes concocted by the Nativists about their Irish immigrant targets emphasized their alleged drunkenness, incivility, laziness, ignorance or proclivity towards violence. One recurring theme of these caricatures gave the Irish simian features: ape-like posture, extended jaws, or fleshy lips. These depictions alluded to the alleged “Africanoid” roots of the Irish, which reinforced the Nativist conviction that the Irish occupied an inferior rung in Anglo-American society. As Noel Ignatiev observes in his 1995 book How the Irish Became White: “In the early years Irish were frequently referred to as ‘niggers turned outside out’; the Negroes, for their part, were sometimes called ‘smoked Irish,’ an appellation they must have found no more flattering that it was intended to be.”
Nativist cartoon artists such as Thomas Nast sketched Celtic ape-men with sloping foreheads and monstrous appearances, creating an image embedded in the popular imagination, and blamed them for the ills of New York’s toxic politics. Resentment towards the Irish reached nationwide proportions, embodied by the appearance of “No Irish Need Apply” signs that appeared in business owners’ windows.
The Irish already comprised one the largest immigrant groups in the late 19th century, particularly in North Philadelphia, but their numbers kept growing in the following decades, and ballooned after Ireland’s famine exodus of the late 1840s, induced by the British-engineered Great Potato Famine. Among the native-born population, a combination of economic insecurity and rapid mechanization of many crafts and trades, engendered uneasiness and resentment.
This coalesced into the Nativist movement, in which American-born Protestant Anglos described themselves as “native” Americans in contrast to the “invading” Irish immigrants. The narrative was a now-familiar one: the Irish isolated themselves from the larger society and were unwilling to assimilate, and they embraced “unAmerican” beliefs and behaviors. The perceived role of the Catholic Church in Irish culture and politics was a focus of their ire, fueling rhetoric that accused Irish Catholics of rigidly adhering to the directives of the pope in Rome.
While brutish gang leaders like Bill the Butcher comprised many of the Nativist movement’s leading figures, their ideological claims were adopted by a number of famous cultural and political figures. One of these was Samuel Morse, the self-proclaimed inventor of the telegraph, who adopted Nativism as a pet cause. In 1835 he published a tract titled Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, which claimed that a “Papist” conspiracy by the Vatican was trying to seize control of American politics by outnumbering native-born voters:
Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been, a system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism, cloaking itself to avoid attack under the sacred name of religion. They will be deeply impressed with the truth, that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country.
As always, the Nativists wrapped themselves in the jingoistic bunting of patriotism. One clandestine fraternal society of native-born Protestant men formed in New York in 1849 called itself the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. Its members swore sacred oaths and exchanged secret passwords, extolling a return to a golden-age America they once knew, a land of “Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism.” Around the country, similar secret societies sprouted to life across the country, with names like the Black Snakes and Rough and Readies suggesting the menace they represented.
All these societies eventually coalesced under the banner of the American Party, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant entity whose members were called the “Know-Nothings” (when confronted about their politics, they claimed to “know nothing”). Only native-born citizens and non-Catholics were acceptable candidates. “Know-Nothings believed that Protestantism defined American society. From this flowed their fundamental belief that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values,” writes Jay P. Dolan in The Irish Americans: A History.
Violence was the hallmark of the Nativist movement, with Protestant mobs attacking Irish neighborhoods and individuals (as Gangs of New York vividly portrays). Riots aimed at driving out Irish immigrants broke out in New York and Boston, and culminated in the May 1844 anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia. Nativist mobs attacked and destroyed two Catholic churches, and dozens died in the surrounding chaos. Nativists attacked an Irish-manned firehouse, attempted to commandeer a hose carriage, and eventually burnt the structure down. Nativists looted and destroyed Irish homes for days.
The movement’s conspiracist paranoia was also deeply ingrained. When Pope Pius IX donated a block of fine Italian granite for construction of the Washington Monument in 1852, a Baltimore pamphleteer warned that it was part of the “Papist” plot, suggesting that the stone could be used symbolically by the pope to launch an immigrant uprising to take over America. “The effects of this block, if placed in the monument, will be a mortification to nearly every American Protestant who looks upon it,” he warned, “and its influence upon the zealous supporters of the Roman hierarchy will be tremendous—especially with foreigners.” So a Nativist gang seized the granite block and threw it into the Potomac, where it mostly remained until 1892, when dredgers recovered a large chunk of it.
Germans who comprised part of the post-1830 immigrant waves were similarly subjected to Nativist eliminationism, depicted as brutish and violent louts prone to criminality; German funeral processions were attacked by Nativist mobs, and preachers like the Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg claimed Germans would flood the nation with "unprecedented wickedness and crimes." This simmering hatred lingered for generations; early in the 20th century, anti-German-immigrant sentiment was revived by the First World War. States banned German-language schools and removed German books from libraries. Suddenly, German Americans became “hyphenated Americans” who suspiciously practiced their own traditions instead of “assimilating” into Anglo-American culture. President Woodrow Wilson admonished: “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him, carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic when he gets ready.”
Over time, white immigrants like the Irish and Germans were able to blend in and assimilate more readily than their nonwhite counterparts, who were more readily identifiable and whose supposed racial inferiority was a permanent feature resulting from existing attitudes about nonwhite Americans such as Natives and Blacks. This was particularly the case during the era when social Darwinism and eugenics were driving the cultural narratives. It simply gave the Nativists grist for their mill, which continued churning out eliminationist hate campaigns targeting the arrival of new waves of nonwhite immigration.
As we have seen, these attitudes and beliefs were foundational for the eliminationist politics and accompanying violence directed against Asian immigrants—first, the Chinese who came to the West in the mid-1800s, and then later the Japanese who arrived to fill the niches once occupied by the Chinese workers whose emigration to the United States was outlawed after 1882, thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The reaction to Asian immigration was notable for the appearance, for the first time, of an effort not merely to prevent their arrival but to actively deport those already here, accompanied by the requisite eliminationist action, including violent massacres and concentration camps.
But by the end of World War II, anti-Chinese animus had subsided, due at least officially to China’s status as an ally against Japan; and anti-Japanese hatred sharply declined in the 1950s, due in no small part to the gallantry of Japanese-American soldiers who served in Europe and later publicity about their exploits.
But the impulses that generated anti-immigrant Nativism in America for over a century have always been deeply embedded in our culture. So in very short order they turned their attention to the slow-building wave of immigration to the United States by nonwhites from Latin American nations, embodied in the popular imagination by the crews of migrant workers whose labors were essential to harvesting American farmers’ crops.
Agitation over the rising numbers of these migrants in the 1950s—including pushback from the government of Mexico, which was trying to keep workers in the country, despite persistent poverty and hunger-related issues—led the Dwight Eisenhower administration to undertake a program of mass deportation that ultimately resulted in over a million Latinos being rounded up and removed from the United States. They barefacedly adopted a well-known racial slur as its official name, calling it “Operation Wetback.”
Attorney General Herbert Brownell announced the start of the mass deportation in April 1954, and in short order a task force of 800 agents swept through southern California searching for illegally employed immigrants. Throughout 1954 and '55, federal agents started setting up roadblocks and conducting massive raids complete with trucks and airplanes; one raid resulted in the apprehension of 1,000 immigrants over four days.
The immigrants caught up in these raids were handed off to the Mexican government, which ostensibly would transport them to the interior, where jobs were supposed to be waiting for them. But the conditions during transport were often horrifying: A later congressional investigation compared at least one of the cargo ships used to a Middle Passage slave ship, calling it a "penal hell ship." Transport over land by trucks was not any better: Immigrants described being shoved into trucks "like cows," taken just 10 miles over the border and dumped in the desert with no water or food.
A number of the deportees were U.S. citizens. The apprehended immigrants were often deported without any opportunity to contact their families, or to recover their property in the United States. They often ended up in unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where finding their way home or supporting their families became a struggle. It was not uncommon for deportees to be stranded without any food or employment when they were released in Mexico. And the extreme work conditions sometimes killed them: 88 deported workers died in 112°F heat in July 1955.
Eventually, these deportations died down as the U.S. government saw they provided little benefit and were still largely ineffective in the face of ongoing illegal immigration encouraged by American farmers. But the campaign against Hispanic immigrants was only just beginning.
Next: The Latino Scapegoat