American Xenophobia is Not New, 1960--2000 Was an Aberration

A HN reader asks "What happened to the US in the past fourty years?"

When I was a kid in the 80s, I had a US flag on my wall. What happened to the US in the past fourty years? It became a country that I don't really want to visit anymore. Every civilized nation behaves differently, at least towards citizens of allied nations. We are no enemies. Ain't no reason to treat us non-US citizens like people without any rights. - I am deeply saddened to see the US come this way, and I have no hopes that this will change in the forseeable future.

The trend unfortunately dates back through history. The 1960s through 1990s were a high period of openness to foreigners and globalisation, across the political spectrum, though not universally embraced. In particular the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, lifting nation-of-origin quotas and the 1961 formation of the Peace Corps saw a tremendous increase in non-European immigration and foreign students to the US, and of peaceful deployment of Americans to non-European nations. (Despite overlapping in part with the Vietnam War). Globalisation, beginning in large part with oil and the Middle East but extending to consumer, manufacturing, and service relationships, also played a major role. The "bad foreigners" existed, but were Communists, a relationship that shifted and softened beginning in the 1980s, with Islamic and generally Latin-American narcotics adversaries ascendant.

Richard J. Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", is a 1963 essay that "explores the influence of a particular 'style' of conspiracy theory and "movements of suspicious discontent" throughout American history." It's not specifically concerned with anti-foreign sentiment, but includes that. Wikipedia article.

But the xenophobic pattern is clear in the history of American Immigration law. Forced Mexican Repatriation (1932), The National Origins Formula (1924), California Alien Land Law of 1913, Anarchist Exclusion Act (1901), Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).

The Page Act (1875) barring "immigrants considered 'undesirable,' defining this as a person from East Asia who was coming to the United States to be a forced laborer, any East Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and all people considered to be convicts in their own country."

Samuel Finley Breese Morse, creator of the eponymous Morse Code, wrote an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic screed, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, initially anonymously though his name was later associated with the piece.

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.

-- Wikipedia

That itself is only one of a long line of examples of anti-immigrant, nationalistic, or racist sentiments expressed by business and industry leaders, including notably Henry Ford and Thomas Watson (IBM), both anti-semites and Nazi collaborators. See; Henry Ford and Anti-Semitism: A Complex Story (The Henry Ford Museum), Henry Ford Pioneered Modern Industry, Made America An Economic Power, And Was A Fervent Anti-Semite, and from the Algemeiner, IBM’s Role in the Holocaust: What the Newly Released Documents Show.

Mark Twain's On the Damned Human Race includes numerous essays highlighting abominable treatment of and policy toward foreigners (and others), notably during the Spanish American war, mostly dating from 1890-1910.

Ellsworth and Harris, The American Right Wing (1960) is a fascinating look at reactionary politics, much of it xenophobic and racist, largely of the 1940s and 1950s, with more than a few names familiar today.

True history is far darker than the highlight reels.

---

Adapted from an HN comment.

#UnitedStates #xenophobia #bigotry #immigration #SamuelMorse #HenryFord #ThomasWatson #MarkTwain #RightWing #RalphEllsworth #SarahHarris #FundForTheRepublic