Category: American history

Truth v. Myth: “Born Fighting”

Senator James Webb (D-VA) published his book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America in 2004; the Smithsonian Channel just broadcast the video adaptation recently. It was aired in two parts. Part 1 focused on Scotland, beginning with Hadrian’s Wall, and followed the eventual appearance of Protestantism in Scotland, the conflicts with England over non-conformism, and the recruitment of Protestant Scots by England into the north of Ireland to settle land seized by the English government from Catholic Irish landholders (thus changing the Irish population, it was hoped, and calming the place down for English rule). The Scots encountered growing hostility from the native population they were helping to colonize, and after the siege and battle of Londonderry, in which they received no help from England in beating off the Catholic Irish, many of the Scots—now called Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish by the native population who did not accept even those born in the country as Irish, left for another English colonial land: America.

This first part of the documentary was not perfect, but it was at least technically accurate in most of its details. The second part goes dramatically off-course into the damaging kind of us-vs-them, who’s-a-real-American, America-is-about-violence, and racial politics that is characteristic of myth. We’re going to take the time to rebut the myth perpetuated by one of our Senators because it’s important to call people in high office on the damage they do to historical truth and our own citizens’ perception of what our country stands for.

Like most people who have a thesis that one group of people, one invention, one idea, etc., has shaped the course of world history, Webb consistently makes statements about the Scots-Irish that could be true of any group. “This culture shaped America”, he begins, “…creating the very basis of American democracy.” Which culture that is part of America has not shaped it? Which culture has left no imprint on our government, political history, treasured ideas, or important battles? And since our democracy has been constantly evolving since 1775, no one group can claim to have established the basis of that democracy. (If you had to choose, you’d have to say Americans of English descent. The men who framed our government and put its ideals and principles into law were overwhelmingly of English background.)

Webb’s elevator description of the Scots-Irish is “fight, sing, drink, pray”. This to him sums up their willingness to fight any war, their resolve and determination, their rebellious refusal to submit to “outside” law, and their strict morality. Again, it’s not hard to think of other groups do not have the same reputation: the Irish, Greeks, and Mexicans come to mind. But Webb begins part 2 with the story of the first Scots-Irish in America, again recruited by the English to put down the locals and act as colonizers. Scots-Irish people settled in Pennsylvania on the borderlands between Quaker settlement and Native Americans. Webb describes their experiences there in what he calls “the unimproved wilderness”. The word “wilderness” comes up frequently, and is never questioned as inaccurate (as the land had been settled, hunted, and known by its native inhabitants for millennia). The Quaker refusal to fight is mentioned repeatedly, and seems to be put out there to deride the Quakers and anyone else who questions the value of violence and war. This is a theme that runs through the show.

Again, at the end of the Pennsylvania section, Webb says that the “flood” of Scots-Irish immigrants that followed “would eventually transform America”, and again it’s a claim you could make about anyone, including the English, French, and Germans who preceded  or came along with the Scots-Irish just about wherever they went.

It is almost funny when Webb describes the pioneers in the Shenandoah Valley who “carried their few belongings with them” (unlike all other pioneers?) into the “wilderness” only to discover “they weren’t alone”. The fact that the land was inhabited is, of course, the first indicator of its not being a wilderness. The Native Americans whose land the pioneers were settling are basically presented as threatening, though it is of course the natives who were threatened by white settlement and claims of land ownership.

When the French and Indian War began, Webb says, the Scots-Irish fought eagerly and made their name as “unflinching fighters”. He characterizes their attitude as “This is my land and I’m going to stay here and protect it and if I have to, I will fight for it.” Which again is the precise attitude of every group of people in human history who have been in a war on their own territory. Only the Native Americans, in this case, really had the right to say it.

Already, Webb is making a case he will repeat many times: the Scots-Irish a) like to fight, b) are brave (really braver than anyone else), and c) show their independence by fighting. The first tenet really discredits the second two. People who like to fight aren’t really brave, and they don’t fight for independence, but because it’s what they do. The Scots-Irish on the frontier fought because that’s what they had been hired to do by the British governors who brought them in (payment being the right to settle and the grant of religious freedom) and they wanted to keep the land they had settled. That is not really about bravery or independence.

In fact, we have seen the Scots-Irish now as established colonizers, people with no hesitation to help a colonial power destroy native people in return for those people’s lands. It is odd that this is never addressed in Webb’s tale of the Scots-Irish as freedom-loving people who always fought tyranny.

His description of the period between the end of the French and Indian War and the beginning of the Revolutionary War is, politely put, difficult to understand. “Britain tightened its grip over America’s east coast. And now, isolated from British colonial rule to the east, the Scots-Irish frontiersmen settled into their American roots… and turned their backs on bigotry in America’s colonial towns”.

The bizarre inaccuracies—British rule had always been most present on the east coast (which is why the British brought in the Scots-Irish to colonize the western frontier); but after the war concentrated more and more on controlling the western frontier; as frontierspeople the Scots-Irish had always been isolated from coastal society; and bigotry is never relegated to urban areas (see plantation life)—slowly make sense only as the show goes on and Webb talks about Andrew Jackson. Webb reveres Jackson, and has apparently bought into the idea Jackson and his followers evangelized for, that “elites” were running America and a cabal of “aristocrats” in the cities was ruining the nation. The idea that Jackson put power in the hands of average people is not true; he put his friends and financial backers into federal office regardless of their qualifications, he was a wealthy slaveholder, and he had no special regard for the rights of the “little guy”, as any Native or black American would tell you.

As for the idea that the previously isolated Scots-Irish were isolated still after the war, it’s not really true. Germans and Huguenots moved in large numbers into the American south from the mid-1600s right up to the Revolutionary War. Many of the Germans were Protestants unable to worship as they wished at home, and of course the Huguenots left everything behind in France to come to America in the name of religious freedom. Webb would have viewers believe the Scots-Irish were the only people in America (maybe in the world) who sacrificed for their freedom of religion, left everything behind, and braved the hardships of the frontier with no help from outside. All of the colonies of the south were first settled, of course, by the English. Most of them were non-conformists, just like the Scots-Irish, who refused to compromise their faith and left all behind in the name of freedom. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky, the Scots-Irish came in after the Huguenots and Germans.

The Revolutionary War saw many Scots-Irish enlist, just as it saw many members of all the groups in the colonies enlist. Webb focuses on the Battle of King’s Mountain of 1780, in which 900 Scots-Irish militia men routed 1200 British soldiers. The British, rigidly sticking to “European battle formation”, were mown down by the sniping Scots-Irish who were smart enough to use guerrilla tactics. Webb states there were 500 British casualties and 28 American. The ragged, poor militia “destroyed” the British army.

But it wasn’t completely that way. The British did not remain in formation, standing still waiting to get shot, but instead made repeated bayonet charges, which, while unsuccessful in winning the battle, at least made some sense. Of the five American militia leaders, one was of Huguenot descent (John Sevier), two were governors, two served in Congress, and two served in state legislatures; three were born into wealth, and one married into it. So the leadership was not completely rag-tag. The casualties were 244 killed, 163 wounded, and 668 taken prisoner for the British, and 29 killed and 58 wounded for the Americans. One reason for the high British death count was that the militia men continued firing after the British put up a white flag.

We’ll end this post with Webb’s second bizarre leap away from historical fact: he claims that “In 1783, America acknowledged the efforts made by the overwhelmingly Scots-Irish militiamen in the south in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution”. First, the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791 with the rest of the original Bill of Rights (the Constitution wasn’t written and ratified until 1787). Second, a starkly modern political agenda is expressed here as historical fact. Webb goes on to say basically that people in the south care so much about gun ownership because they were once frontiersmen, and the frontiersman’s duty to protect his family over time turned into a right “for people with a long history of mistrust of the central government. There’s a saying around here: I’ll give up my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Where to begin. First, what region of our nation never had a frontier? Is it that the north was never frontier land? The west? Every region of the present United States began as frontier land, where people had muskets or rifles to hunt with and to fight Indians and to use as part of the local militia in times of war. Second, either gun ownership is about self-reliance (the frontiersman) or it’s about not believing in government. If it’s that southerners never trusted the federal government, that’s not about the frontier. That’s a mistrust of the federal government that was shared by New Englanders, Mid-Atlantic states residents, and every other region you can think of. That’s what made creating the federal government in 1787 so difficult; even the “elites” on the east coast had their doubts about it turning into a tyranny. (It’s funny that this suspicious government is the one that made a special Amendment to preserve the rights of the Scots-Irish. One wonders what prevented them from looking more kindly on such a government.)

Webb, I think it’s fair to say, is looking at 1791 through the lens of 2011 and 1865 to say that the south is right not to trust the unfair northern government that oppresses it today and has oppressed it since the end of the Civil War. (You’ll see why I say this in the next post.) But the Second Amendment was not written to give people a way to create a state; our Founders believed that our system of law, our democracy, would keep people safe and free. It’s our government and the laws it is based on and that it enforces that create our liberty, independence, freedom, whatever you like to call it. Guns are not law, they are an alternative to law. So I quarrel with Senator Webb’s description of the origins of the Second Amendment, and the validity of the southern (as he calls it) attachment to weapons. The Amendment was not written as a thank-you to the Scots-Irish, and it is not about substituting gun ownershp for centralized government.

Next time: Jackson, the Civil War, and how the entire middle class is Scots-Irish

Taxation = Slavery

As always, when history is being made in the present, or the present is clearly marked in a historical cycle, we delve into it here on the HP.

In this case, it is the debate in Congress over whether to raise the debt ceiling or default. The main sticking point has been the refusal of a sizable minority of Republicans, mostly belonging to the Tea Party faction, to allow the federal government to collect tax revenue. This group demands tax breaks for the wealthy, including corporations, and the maintenance of tax loopholes that allow millions of dollars of tax revenue to go uncollected.

This is not the place to go into the details of their platform, or the response by moderate Republicans and Democrats. Here, the issue is the extreme instransigence of the Republican minority on the issue of taxation. It has become, to them, a crime for the government to raise taxes or even to collect taxes. To them, there is no compromise on taxation: you are either for it (and therefore un-American) or against it. Again, we’ll leave aside for this post the historical fallacy of anti-tax advocates calling themselves “Tea Party”; read about that here. For now, we’ll focus on the black-and-white issue they have turned taxation into. It’s hard to think of a time when Congress was so completely divided, so unwilling and unable to compromise on an issue; when you look back at our history, only one comparable time comes up—the slavery debates of the late 1850s.

You could not compromise on slavery during those Congresses. You were for it or against it, and this divide worked its way into many other, seemingly unrelated issues, and the uncompromisable issue of slavery could not be resolved. Congress could no longer function to govern the country, and civil war ensued at the 1860 election.

Today, Congress’ refusal to accept compromise on taxation is quite similar to the earlier Congress’ refusal to accept compromise on slavery. But there are two key differences: first, the American people were becoming just as divided over slavery as their representatives; second, slavery really is an issue you can’t seriously compromise on.

Americans in the 1850s didn’t want to fight a war over slavery, but they were rapidly becoming more polarized over it. Even those who didn’t particularly want abolition for morality’s sake blamed slavery for all of America’s ills, and would have gotten rid of it for economic or political reasons. Their representatives’ furor over slavery was not out of line, then, with Americans’ feelings about slavery. It does not seem accurate to make that claim today. Many Tea Party Congress members have said their constituents contacted them to say it’s okay to raise taxes to avoid default, but those members refused to do so out of principle. The extreme polarization in Congress today does not really have its roots in how Americans are feeling.

And taxation is not slavery. It’s not a black-and-white, moral issue that no one can take a moderate stance on. The government raises taxes in order to provide services. It’s a very simple and fundamental tenet of government. We have representation to our government to decide what services and how much taxation, not to stop the collection of tax revenue.

The taxation issue is part of a larger move to reduce the federal government to a negative function: the federal government will not provide social services (no Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, etc.), will not regulate business (protect the environment, police Wall Street, etc.), will not really legislate (instead, Constitutional Amendments will be put in place to handle social issues), amd will not extend civil rights to immigrants, gay people, etc. All it would do under this plan, apparently, is fund wars.

No one really wants to live in that world. It is undemocratic, and unself-sustaining. This experiment with such negative chaos is a dangerous one. The first experiment ended in civil war; it remains to be seen where we are headed in the next 20 years.

Truth v. Myth: “My family’s name was changed at Ellis Island!”

This is a popular one. Almost anyone you ask will tell you that unfeeling and ignorant Americans changed hard-to-pronounce “foreign” names at Ellis Island, ruining people’s self-esteem and making genealogical research very difficult for their descendants.

But at its heart, this does not make sense. You will learn in the same essay, or book chapter, etc., that every language under the sun was spoken at Ellis Island, and that hundreds of people worked as translators… and that names were changed by officials who didn’t know how to spell them. How can it be that there were hundreds of translators and none of them working alongside officials to translate (spell out) names? How can it be that none of those officials were immigrants themselves who would know the names? First, an important truth is that the majority of people coming through Ellis Island did not have their names changed. Name changes were the exception, not the rule.

But some did happen. To see why, let’s start at the beginning. Here’s how people got from Europe to America during the 19th and early 20th centuries: you either bought a ticket in your home country (let’s say Hungary) or traveled from your home country to a European port city (let’s say Le Havre, France) and bought a ticket there. Once you had a ticket, your name was listed in the ship’s register. This register was vital—during the period under discussion here, the most important thing once you got to the U.S. was that officials find your name on the ship’s register. This meant you were not a stowaway, had enough money to have bought a ticket, and were generally solid immigration material. The only two requirements for entry into the U.S. were having your name on the ship’s register and passing a quick “six-second” physical (see Illegal immigrants must be stopped!).

But you are Hungarian, and the ship’s register is being written by a French person. Does he know how to spell your name? Most likely the French registrar does not speak Magyar. Most likely you are illiterate and cannot write your name yourself. Unless you have a literate Hungarian friend with you, or have learned to write one thing—your name—you have to settle for saying your name as slowly and carefully as possible, and hope for the best. If your name is Székely, likely the French official will transliterate that as something like “Ciquay”, and you will never know the difference. You get on the ship and arrive in America.

At Ellis Island, the ship’s register is read by an official. He is assisted by an interpreter who speaks Magyar. You tell her your name, but she can’t find it on the register as Székely. She does find Ciquay, and reads the first name, and eventually, by talking with you, puts two and two together. She and the official confer: officially, your exact name must be on the register, but clearly a transliteration has taken place. Since the register cannot be altered, you have two options: insist on Székely and be sent home to try again, or accept Ciquay. Yes, you most likely accept Ciquay, or Seekay (if you came through Liverpool) or Zikee (if you came through Hamburg), and you go off to live your life in America. The official allows you to do this, since he understands the error that took place in France. You can also accept the new spelling of your name, which many immigrants did. Why? Because it was written on the papers they got at Ellis Island, and they didn’t want to make those papers look falsified. They also rarely had to write their own names, and, because they were illiterate and were not used to writing their names, they ended up accepting the misspelling by passing it along to their children, who did learn to read and write (English)  in American schools—it became more familiar to them than the real spelling.

Once you settle in with other Hungarian immigrants, one of them might point out how your name is supposed to be spelled, but you may not care enough to change it, especially since the correctly spelled name will now contradict your papers. Top this off with the desire of many immigrants to Americanize their lives, including their names, and you have a family now going by the name Seekay for decades to come. The error is only found later by suspicious descendants who know their family is Hungarian but can’t find the name Ciquay or Seekay in any list of Hungarian names. These grandchildren eventually find that the name was changed when the ancestor came to America. But it was not Ellis Island that changed the names, it was Ellis Island that accepted the changes made in Europe. Ellis Island was the site of conferences about whether to accept misspellings and changes made at European ports.

It was tricky. No one wanted to take the chance of being refused admission to the U.S. because their real name was not on the register, and those who understood that their name was misspelled were often willing to let it ride in order to get through immigration with no difficulties. Immigration officials at Ellis Island, working with translators or using their own knowledge, usually accepted the transliteration, not out of ignorance or xenophobic spite but because it would make things easier for the immigrant. Immigrants who spoke English were more often able to later fix misspellings, but many could not or did not make the correction.

So many Americans and Europeans blame the proliferation of spellings of names on poor Ellis Island officials. But the real reasons for the Reillys, Rileys, Reilleys, and Reilys in the U.S. are illiteracy in the European home nations, monolinguist ships’ officials in Europe, and flexible immigrants and officials at Ellis Island.

Anti-immigrant, anti-American laws building steam

We’ve commented previously on the HP about states introducing unconstitutional voting restriction laws, nominally meant to stop voter fraud (which has never been proven as chronic or widespread), but really meant to target and deport immigrants. These include requiring voters to have a government-issued photo ID at the polls. Now the Times is reporting laws being passed in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina that basically create a police state in which anyone who “looks foreign” and can’t produce ID can be arrested and, if an immigrant—even a legal one—deported.

According to the editorial, these laws include removing illegal immigrants working under the table, reporting students who are immigrants or even American-born children of immigrants. Why target Americans who have immigrant relatives? Because other laws make it illegal to give an undocumented immigrant a ride in your car. By making native-born citizens afraid of immigrants and their native-born American children, these laws create a clear criminal class of immigrants and their friends and relatives.

To what end? I think the author puts it well: “It has long been clear that America is suffering for lack of a well-functioning immigration system that better protects workers and families, promotes lawfulness at the border and in the workplace, and gives hardworking people a path to legality. Congress’s inaction has let the states run amok with their own destructive ideas. Supporters insist they are only trying to enforce the law. But trying to catch and deport 11 million people is lunacy. The damage to this country — its citizens and its laws — is enormous.”

Trying to find illegal immigrants by terrorizing everyone in the U.S. is not only impractical and guaranteed to fail, it’s un-American. And since the people usually behind these laws say they must protect the American way from immigrants, you would think they would be the most resistant to passing any un-American laws. But the authors and promoters of these laws are the most un-American of people, and so hardly fit to decide who is a threat to our nation.

The U.S. has gone through many cycles of immigrant fear. In the 1850s it was the dirty Irish ruining the country. In the 1890s it was the hideous Chinese. In the 1920s it was the barbaric eastern Europeans. Now it is the lawless Mexicans (and all Latin Americans) who will destroy our country for the sheer fun of it. To reiterate a statement from our earlier post “Illegal Immigration must be stopped!”, the U.S. has made it harder to enter this country legally and get a green card or citizenship than ever before in its history, and that is the only reason why we have so many illegal immigrants today:

“If we reverted to our earlier, extremely simple requirements for entering the country and becoming a citizen, we would not have illegal immigrants. If we choose not to go back to the earlier requirements, we have to explain why. The usual explanation is that if we made it as simple now as it once was to enter this country and become a citizen, the U.S. would be “flooded” with “waves” of Latin Americans, poor and non-English-speaking, ruining the country. Which is exactly the argument that has always been made against immigrants, be they Irish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Each group is going to destroy the country and American culture and society. It never seems to happen.

But it might happen now, with Latin American immigrants, not because they will destroy the country but because those in the U.S. who are so afraid of them will rip the country apart trying to keep them out. Taking the long view, I can say there’s hope that that won’t happen. But it will take a good fight to get all Americans to realize that the key to this nation’s success has always been the open-door policy.

Immigration will always be with us—thank goodness! The only informed position on the challenges it poses is a historically informed position.”

It was true before, and it’s still true now.

What does the United States national anthem mean?

Our poor national anthem. It has a bad reputation for being very hard to sing, and for arcane language that comics love to make fun of. When I was growing up it was also chastised for being militaristic–“America the Beautiful” would have been a better choice of anthem, according to some (of course, we’ve got nothing on “La Marseillaise” for blood-thirstiness in anthems).

But here at the HP we like our anthem. It pinpoints a distinct historical moment, being an inspired first-hand account of the moment of national anxiety we experienced during the War of 1812 at the Battle of Fort McHenry (see more on that here). Here’s how we tell it in our post “The Burning of Washington and the Battle of New Orleans”:

“The British navy had been terrorizing the Atlantic coast, particularly the Chesapeake Bay area, from the start of the war. The U.S. had few warships with which to challenge the British, who sometimes sent detachments to coastal towns offering them the choice of paying a fine or being bombarded. The British moved up the Chesapeake Bay in the summer of 1814, heading not really toward Washington but toward Baltimore.

…The attack [on Baltimore] was two-pronged: a land attack on North Point and a siege of Fort McHenry in the harbor. Major General Samuel Smith stopped the British at North Point, in an unexpected and certainly unusual American victory. All now waited to see how the siege would go at the important fort. Major George Armistead was in charge of U.S. defenses there. Bombardment of the fort by British ships began on September 13th. Nearly 2,000 cannonballs were launched at the fort over 24 hours, but damage was light.

The British commander decided to land troops west of Fort McHenry, hoping to lure the U.S. army away from North Point, but Armistead discovered them and opened fire, scattering the landing party of British soldiers. Early on the morning of September 14, the giant American flag that local seamstress Mary Pickersgill and her daughter had made was raised over the fort, to replace the one torn apart the night before. Seeing that the fort still stood in American hands, British land forces withdrew and returned to the ships. British General Cochrane then withdrew the fleet to prepare for the attack on New Orleans.

Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer who had gone on a mercy mission to the British to gain the release of an American doctor who had been captured but had previously tended British soldiers. Key was on a truce ship in Baltimore Harbor during the bombardment. When morning dawned on the 14th, and Key saw his country’s flag still flying over Fort McHenry, he wrote the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the back of a letter in a paroxysm of joy. It became the U.S. national anthem in 1931.”

This is the dramatic moment that gave birth to our anthem. The first stanza, which is all we ever sing, is a question. It can be boiled down to this: Tell me, can you see our flag still flying after the bombardment, or have we been defeated?

Let’s go over it in pieces:

O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light,/What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming: As the sun is rising after a long night of British bombardment of our fort, can you see the flag that was flying last night as the sun set, which, as Americans, we had proudly hailed (saluted) as the light faded and the attack began?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,/O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?: We could see the flag at the ramparts, or defensive wall, of the fort, flying high during the battle.

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,/Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there: All through the night, the exploding British missiles periodically lit up the flag; every so often we could see that it was still flying, and we had hope that the fort had not surrendered.

O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?: Tell me, is the flag still flying, meaning we have not lost the war, and our nation is still free? (Or is the very different flag of Britain flying over Fort McHenry?)

It is an anguished question about the fate of the nation, that first stanza. It’s odd that we don’t sing the other stanzas, which are just as dramatic but more victorious. Stanza 2 reveals that the flag is indeed there: “Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,/In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:/’Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Stanza 3 vents some fury at the British: “And where is that band who so vauntingly swore/That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,/A home and a country, should leave us no more?/Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution./No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave”.

Stanza 4 is fully triumphant:

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust;”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

One has to wonder why we don’t sing this final stanza, in which the U.S. is a “Heaven-rescued land” with a special place in God’s plan. Is it simply because songs are usually shortened to just the first stanza? It’s odd that the verse of our anthem that we sing at moments of national triumph is the verse that is fraught with terror and uncertainty, and not the verse bursting with self-confidence.

But we like that first stanza, with its breathless anticipation; it catches a moment of great importance in our nation’s history and reminds us just how many millions of Americans over the centuries have burned with anxiety for this country, and seen it through very difficult times. It’s not a blood-thirsty, militaristic song, but a narrative of military triumph allowing for the continued moral victory of democracy.

Freedom to Vote Threatened… again

In Spring 2011, a bloc of Republican legislators and governors renewed the push to end alleged rampant voting fraud in the U.S. by requiring that people registered to vote show a government-issued photo ID, like a driver’s license, in order to vote. This caused an angry reaction amongst opponents of any move to set up what they call barriers to voting. Which side is right? What does the Constitution say about voting?

Surprisingly little. There is nothing about voting rights in the original body of the Constitution. That first Constitution simply states that officers of the government will be chosen by the People and the Electors. There were many Amendments made to the original Constitution in a very short time, and by 1791 the Twelfth Amendment addressed voting only to explain how the Electoral College was supposed to work. The Fifteenth Amendment extended the vote to black males in 1870, and the Seventeenth Amendment gave the People the right to vote directly for their Senators in 1913. In 1920, the Ninteenth Amendment extended the vote to women of all races, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 abolished the poll tax. Finally, in 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment made age eighteen the legal voting age.

So if there is nothing in the Constitution about who can vote, how can asking for photo ID be wrong, or illegal?

If we look at the six Amendments that address voting, we see that all but one—the one about the Electoral College—expands the definition of who can vote. Black men and then all women are given the vote, people are allowed to vote directly for their Senators (who had previously been chosen by the Electoral College), younger people can vote (voting age had been 21). Most significantly of all, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 abolished the poll tax. Poll taxes were a shameful tool of white supremacists, who set up fees that “everyone” had to pay in order to vote. In reality, only black people were forced to pay a fee in order to vote, and the white supremacists running the polls made sure it was so expensive for most black citizens to pay the poll tax that they simply could not vote. It was an effective way of stripping black Americans of their right to vote and of keeping Civil Rights legislation moving at a snail’s pace, since only white people were voting, and most in the South did not vote for people who supported that legislation.

So the sum of all Constitutional Amendments regarding voting since 1870 has been to let more people vote, and to keep the process just. No one has to pay to vote in this c0untry. It is the right of a citizen to vote. All people have to do is register.

There have, of course, been ongoing attempts to make voting very difficult for the poor and the non-white. Minimal staffing at government offices ensure hours-long waits for registration, and often those who register find that they are not on the list of registered voters at their polling places. Polling places are often few and far between in poor districts, again ensuring a long drive or bus ride to the polling place and another hours-long wait to vote. Votes from poor districts are sometimes “lost” on the way to the official tallying places. Everything but a poll tax has been put in place to maintain the white and powerful status quo.

The reason usually given for these hindrances to voting is that there has been voting fraud—in poor and non-white districts only. The implication here is that of course the poor and non-white are not honest, and that the immigrants who make up this group either don’t understand democracy or want to destroy it. We have to protect the U.S. from immigrants, the poor, and the non-white, and so we must police voting very closely.

Evidence of massive and continual voting fraud is never presented, just as the hindrances already in place in underserved districts’ polling places are never acknowledged. Asking for a government photo ID is a blatant attempt to reinstate a racial and ethnic barrier to voting. Advocates say, Everyone has a driver’s license, so what’s the big deal? The only people who don’t have a driver’s license are illegal immigrants, and they shouldn’t be voting anyway. Those against the ID respond that many people don’t have a driver’s license, including many elderly people and some physically impaired people.

But the problem is not that photo IDs are not as common as we think. It’s that asking for anything but proof of registration—having your name on the list of voters for your polling place—is a poll tax. It’s a barrier to voting. It makes it harder for some citizens to vote, for no good reason. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say you have to have proof of citizenship to vote. You need that to register, and if you are registered, and your name is on the list at your polling place when you show up to vote, you do not have to show any further proof of your right to be there.

Once we demand proof of citizenship at the polling place, we may as well—and might well—ask for a small fee to be paid, or your photo to be taken, or your signature on a loyalty oath. This is not our democracy. We have to fight any attempt to require ID or any other proofs of citizenship or loyalty at the polling place vigorously, or our next Amendment will be a giant step backward from the previous five.

White Americans in the minority by 2019

A report issued by the Census Bureau, based on the latest census results, states that by 2019, the majority of children born in the United States will be non-white.

We’ve been looking at the 2010 Census results and race, and this new parsing of the data is interesting in many ways. First, let’s look at the facts:

–The Hispanic population is growing faster than white, black, or Asian populations because of Hispanic people’s higher birthrates.

–Why is the white birthrate so low? Because white people have fewer children and have them later in life.

–Thus, the white population is aging far faster than the Hispanic, Asian, or black population. The median age of white people in the U.S. is 41 years old, while the median age of Hispanic people in the U.S. is 27 years old.

–The number of white children in the U.S. has fallen by 4.3 million since the last Census was taken in 2000. The number of Hispanic and Asian children has increased by 5.5 million.

–The number of black children in the U.S. has also fallen by 2 percent. The report states that “Over all, minorities now make up 46.5 percent of the under-18 population”, but it seems they are hardly “minorities” at this point. White children are currently the minorities in 10 states.

It’s not surprising that groups with higher birth rates are outstripping those with lower birth rates, but of course it is nearly impossible for the nation to receive this objective data objectively. Many white Americans are no doubt concerned that they are losing their majority status in this country.

This is only natural. No group wants to lose its socio-economic-political power/control. Look at the vicious backlash that men’s groups deal out to women who support equal rights, that straight groups deal out to gay people who support equal rights, etc. Those who have power want to keep it—not universally, but generally. Not every man hates feminism, not every straight person hates gay rights. But a substantial portion—a majority—are opposed because these groups pose a threat to the male or the straight grip on power.

Now a substantial portion of white Americans may react with fear and anger to this news. It will add fuel to the fire of anti-immigrationists, and likely lead to calls for quotas on Latin American immigration. Those Latinos already in the U.S. will be castigated by some for not speaking English, taking U.S. jobs, and other actions that have nothing to do with how many children they have. I think Asian Americans will escape this vitriol for the most part, because it is Latinos who are the more visible immigrants.

One of the arguments of these white Americans will be that incoming Latinos do not respect, understand, or plan to support the “American way”, by which they will mean representative democracy, English speaking, and suburban comfort and norms. This is the same dire accusation leveled at Irish immigrants in the 1840s (no, they were not considered to be white at that time), Germans in the 1860s, Chinese people in the late 1800s-early 1900s, Italians and eastern Europeans in the early 20th century (again, not considered white), etc. Every new group is castigated as deliberately, gleefully destroying the nation they have just arrived in.

In all of these cases, the reports of the American way’s death were exaggerated. Will it be the same this time? It depends. It depends on education.

All of those previous immigrants were educated in American public schools that inculcated American values in them, sometimes cruelly, often with the excitement and true devotion that their teachers, former immigrants themselves in many cases, felt for their new country. In fact, making sure immigrant children got an American education in civics and the workings of the American democratic system so they would become loyal citizens was a key goal of American primary education for the bulk of the 20th century. And it worked. For most of the 20th century the average American was a first- or second-generation immigrant who knew a lot about the three branches of government, the Bill of Rights, due process, etc. That American voted and participated in the political system. And thus the American way, and the nation, did not die.

But I’m not sure that is true now. Now American K-12 education system has no real focus, riven as it is with internal and external conflicts, except perhaps for testing. And civics—learning about our government, its purpose, its structure, and the importance of citizen participation—is rarely a part of K-12 education. Many states no longer require that civics be taught at all. Schoolchildren today are ignorant of civics, and therefore the average American cannot name the three branches, how they work together, how the state and federal governments align, etc., and citizen political participation is at an all-time low.

And that’s for white children. What about the non-white children soon to make up the majority of American students? They are likely to go to the worst, most under-funded schools, where learning to read and write and do math is not guaranteed. They learn nothing about civics, about their government—except that so many people in that government don’t want them here. This will only get worse by 2019. As the Times article puts it, “Will the older generation pay for educating a younger generation that looks less like itself? And while the young population is a potential engine of growth for the economy, will it be a burden if it does not have access to adequate education?”

We all know the mantra that “children are our future.” It is true. If we want the American way to be the way of the future, if we want the country to be preserved as it is/should be, we must educate this non-white generation the way we educated previous immigrant generations, and the way we educate the white generation. We have to start treating children born in this country to Latino parents, and children whose parents bring them here, as the Americans they are, and give them the education we assume white children should have.

Because the real fear many white Americans have is that immigrant and black people will drastically change this country if they take the majority because they do not share “white values.” What are “white values”? American values assumed to be the natural birthright of white children but values that must be laboriously inculcated into non-white children, who somehow genetically resist them. Justice for all, innocent until proven guilty, government of by and for the people, etc. Those are American values. But they are not naturally a part of the makeup of white Americans—as we have noted elsewhere on the Historic Present—every American has to learn these values. They go against human nature, and human history. Everyone has to learn them, every new generation, black, white, Asian, or Latino. You get the nation you pay for. You reap what you sow. If we want the American way, we have to teach it. If we refuse to teach new immigrant American children about their country, if we throw civics education away, it is we who will guaranty the ruin of our country, not those children.

So these numbers should not panic anyone. We are privileged to live in a moment of real historical change in our country—one of many. If we cherish our country, we will make sure every child in it knows that s/he is an American, and we will teach every child what that means, and how to live it.

Race, segregation, and Census 2010—what does it mean?

In our final installment in the very short series on race and Census 2010, we try to draw some conclusions about segregation and integration in the U.S. today.

It may seem contradictory that many white Americans feel their towns and neighborhoods are home to more non-white residents than ever before at the same time that non-white segregation is holding steady or, for Asian Americans, increasing slightly. If a town goes from 90% white to 77% white, that is an appreciable, visible change—but it’s still a white majority that should be shrinking faster, given the pace of Latino and Asian immigration.

According to The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census (which is the official report by Logan and Stults, as referenced in part 2 of this series), “the typical white lives in a neighborhood that is 75% white, 8% black, 11% Hispanic, and 5% Asian. This represents a notable change since 1980, when the average whites’ neighborhood was 88% white, but it is very different from the makeup of the metropolis as a whole.” How is the average white American’s experience different from the “metropolis as a whole”?

“The experience of minorities is very different. For example, the typical black lives in a neighborhood that is 45% black, 35% white, 15% Hispanic, and 4% Asian. The typical Hispanic lives in a neighborhood that is 46% Hispanic, 35% white, 11% black and 7% Asian. The typical Asian lives in a neighborhood that is 22% Asian, 49% white, 9% black, and 19% Hispanic.” 

There is an interesting chart that appears after this illustrating this data, which basically shows how likely you are to experience white neighbors according to your race. Asians’ neighbors are 50% white, Hispanics’ and black Americans’ neighbors are 35% white. White Americans’ neighbors are 77% white. Asian Americans are the only one of the four groups who do not live in neighborhoods in which they are the majority. In neighborhoods where most Asian people live, whites and Hispanics make up the majority of residents.

Assessing segregation and integration data by city requires a lot of background information. While black-white segregation fell dramatically in both New Orleans and Kansas City, in New Orleans it was because so many black people were forced to leave the city when Hurricane Katrina destroyed their neighborhoods, while in Kansas City the integration has no negative, temporary, “act of God” backstory—the people of the city are just integrating more.

The historian has to consider why it is black Americans who are still least likely to integrate in large numbers with white Americans. There’s never one reason. It’s a combination of factors, including the fact that Hispanic and Asian Americans are more likely to be considered newcomers who might adopt white culture, and therefore be acceptable, while black Americans are seen as possessing a unique culture that a) will never change and b) is diametrically opposed to white culture. The well-documented centuries of slavery and Jim Crow that describe black-white relations lead to suspicion and resentment, fear and anger on both sides, while the identically horrible racist campaigns against Asians in the late 19th- and early-to-mid-20th centuries are not as well-known outside the Asian American population, and therefore Asian Americans have more of a “blank slate”. Housing discrimination is still an issue, or course, most seriously for black Americans, but also for Latinos and Asian Americans. 

While color works against black Americans, language works against Hispanics. For at least 170 years, and maybe since 1700, Americans have inveighed against foreigners coming in and refusing to speak English, trying to overthrow English, working as agents of a foreign government. So it goes with Latino immigrants today. Latinos are moving away from their Latino immigrant neighborhoods—in 1980, 55% of Latinos lived in majority Latino neighborhoods, while in 2010 40% do. That’s quite a drop. And data shows that as Latinos raise families in the U.S., they are very likely to stop speaking Spanish entirely. A second-generation Asian American is far more likely to speak an Asian language than is a second-generation Latino American to speak Spanish.

This is just the barest summary of part of the information in the 2010 Census. Studying the Census is one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking things you can do. This latest window into who we are as Americans has its depressing and its uplifting aspects. We have to take our cue from its findings and do what we can to keep integration moving steadily upward, and segregation vanishing into the past.

Segregation and Census 2010

In this second installment in a very short series on the 2010  U.S. Census results, we’ll look at one parsing of that data by John Logan of Brown University and Brian Stults of Florida State University . The focus here, at Census Analysis: Nation’s diversity grows, but integration slows, is black, Latino, white, and Asian residential patterns.

How is integration slowing? Here are the bullet findings:

  • Black-white segregation averaged 65.2 in 2000 and 62.7 now.
  • Hispanic-white segregation was 51.6 in 2000 and 50 today.
  • Asian-white segregation has grown from 42.1 to 45.9.

As Logan and Stults point out, white Americans basically live in mostly white neighborhoods—77% white. That is down from 88% white in 1980, but still pretty segregated. Black and Latino Americans live in black and Latino neighborhoods, and Asian Americans, whose integration rate into white neighborhoods had been growing, now increasingly live in Asian or other non-white neighborhoods.

Black and Latino neighborhoods are becoming even more homogenous. I happened to hear Dr. Logan on the radio explain it this way: if, in 1990, you were a Latino, you lived in a neighborhood that was mostly Latino, but not entirely. It might be 50% Latino, 30% black, 20% Asian. But in 2010, that same neighborhood is likely to be %70 Latino, 20% black, and 10% Asian. The same goes for black Americans–their neighborhoods are increasingly less racially diverse.

This is explicable when it comes to Latinos because of increased Latino immigration–there are more Latinos coming into the U.S. and moving into majority Latino neighborhoods. (This is particularly true in the southwest.) One in 6 Americans is now Latino; this is reflective of increased Latin American immigration since the 1970s.

In the case of black Americans, the increasing homogeneity of black neighborhoods may be due to the falling rate of Asian integration into white neighborhoods and the slow pace of Latino integration. Again, on the radio Dr. Logan said that white neighborhoods are usually integrated first by Asian people, then by Latino people, and then by black people. If fewer Asian and Latino people are integrating, there is less integration by black people.

It will be interesting to learn in a few years, when sociologists conclude their investigations, why Asian American segregation is increasing, and how quickly Latinos move out of new-immigrant neighborhoods into mixed neighborhoods. Every new immigrant group starts out in homogenous immigrant neighborhoods—every major American city has its Little Italy, Chinatown, Little India, etc. It’s natural to live amongst people who speak your language and share your experiences. But then they begin to move out, and to integrate into non-immigrant society. The fact that black Americans remain least likely to integrate is a red flag to all Americans, a wake-up call saying we all need to get over the slave-era idea that black Americans are different—too different—from all other Americans to assimilate.

While integration should move faster, I remain optimistic. At least it continues to happen. As usual, the U.S. leads the way in integrating people of literally every nation, race, culture, religion, and ethnicity in the world into one American people. As we see European nations just now beginning, in the last two decades, to try to cope with serious immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and struggling with race riots, protests, and fascist movements as a result, we remember that it is always hard for human beings to live together, and it takes a concerted effort to make that possible in this nation—an effort we have to continually renew.

Next time: summarizing the data