The 2010 Census data is in!!

It’s a very exciting historical moment when census data is published. It is a real example of the historic present; you see where your every day lived reality fits into much bigger, much longer historical frames—where you are in an era. We’re going to take a look at the census data from a few angles. The first step is to dive in to the raw data, which you can do in a fascinating way at Mapping the U.S. Census. Rollover a county to see general data, enter an address, zip code, or city at top right to get amazingly detailed maps–for example, if you put in your zip code just that area comes up (your very own “census tract”). Take a look at where you live, or have lived, and see the changes.

Then take a look at Prof. John Logan’s census analysis . Logan is a sociologist at Brown University who has studied census data for decades. He has interesting analysis on segregation and the impact of race—as in, what difference does it make if Asians begin moving to white neighborhoods, as opposed to Latinos, as opposed to black people?

Next time: How we are sorted

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke?

One of my vivid memories of school-based learning is of being in fourth or fifth grade, reading about the early English colonization efforts in Virginia in our Social Studies textbook. This included a paragraph on the Lost Colony of Roanoke: its English colonists were left there with the promise that another ship would come with more people and supplies, the first English baby born in America, Virginia Dare, was born there, supply ships were delayed by years, and when a ship finally did arrive, the colony was deserted and in disrepair, with only the word “Croatoan” carved on a tree. The account ended with the statement that no one knows what “Croatoan” meant, or what happened to the people of the colony, and that Roanoke remains a mystery to this day.

Startled and deeply upset by this closure-free story, I used my fourth-grade knowledge of how to get information: I went to the glossary of the textbook and looked up “Croatoan”, fully expecting to see a sizable entry explaining it. I have to laugh when I remember my shock to find a short entry that said something like “Unidentified term; see colony of Roanoke”. Still holding on, I duly looked up “colony of Roanoke” expecting to find an answer, and was once again brutally disappointed. It was the first time a resource book had ever failed to provide an answer to something for me, and an inauspicious start to my career as a historian.

Over the years since then, I’ve had the same mild interest in Roanoke that most Americans have, idly wondering what happened there, but figuring we’d just never know. Then I read A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America, by James Horn (2005), and was exposed to the very likely solution of this mystery. We’ll explore the whole story in this brief series, drawing on Horn’s fantastic book, starting with the founding of the colony.

Roanoke was originally planned by Sir Walter Ralegh and a group of experienced explorers, sailors, and financiers. It was to be located on the mid-Atlantic coast for strategic reasons: England was looking for a foothold in the continent well north of the Spanish in Florida and well south of the French in Canada. The English had seen French settlements in northern Florida crushed by the Spanish, and knew that the Spanish were well aware of England’s own plan to use Atlantic settlements as bases for raids on the rich Spanish shipping routes running from the Caribbean to Spain.

Roanoke Island was chosen by Ralegh and his team after a scouting voyage to the coast picked it out as a good spot. Ralph Lane led the band of slightly more than 100 men who arrived on the island in 1585. Lane was a soldier, and the first building built was a fort, as much to protect the colonists from Spanish attack as American. The group in fact felt confident about good relations with their American neighbors, as the scouting trip had come back to England with two American guides, Manteo and Wanchese, who seemed to welcome the plan for a colony in their midst.

Through the summer of 1585 the men explored the region, and entered the Chesapeake Bay area (where Jamestown would later be founded). Lane visited Menatonon, chief of the Chowanocs, in Spring 1586, and was told perhaps the first of many misunderstood stories of riches to be found just a little farther inland. Lane, like most European explorers, believed he was being told about hordes of gold in bottomless mines just a few miles west, on the Pacific Coast. (The vastness of the continent was undisclosed at this time to all but a few mostly luckless Spanish explorers.) Lane wrote that Menatonon told him of a king in the west who had so many pearls that “his beds, and houses [were] garnished with them… that it [was] a wonder to see” [Horn 31]. As Horn points out, this was actually a description of Wahunsonacock, known generally to history as Powhatan, because he was the leader of the Powhatan people.

Lane returned to Roanoke with the good news, but it was quickly forgotten, as trouble began brewing with the colony’s American neighbors.

Next time: Secotans v. Roanokes

Consequences of the Mexican War

Part the last of our series on interesting facets of the Mexican War concludes with the 1848 peace Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the United States full ownership of Texas, with its western border at the Rio Grande, and the modern States of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, almost all of Arizona, Colorado, and part of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming (the rest of Arizona and New Mexico would be acquired through the 1853 Gadsden Purchase). In return, Mexico received a little over $18 million in compensation and forgiveness of $3.25 million owed by Mexico to the U.S.

Immense as the territories ceded by Mexico were, there were a number of U.S. Senators who urged Congress to take advantage of Mexico’s internal political chaos and force it to also give up its states of Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas, in today’s northeastern Mexico. This would have extended the U.S. hundreds of miles beyond Texas’ current southern border. Partly because there was growing opposition to the war in the U.S. (Illinois Rep. Abraham Lincoln was opposed), and partly because the parts of Mexico that the U.S. had so long desired, particularly California, were already handed over, Congress declined to pursue the war any longer, and this plan was dropped.

The Mexican Cession was at once a great acquisition for the U.S. and the end of the U.S. as it had been. The new lands made the slavery debate impossible to resolve through political compromise. The 1820 Missouri Compromise would have allowed slavery in New Mexico, Arizona, and the southern half of California, but not in Colorado, Utah, Kansas, or Wyoming. But anti-slavery Americans were not about to let California, the greatest prize of them all, the one that held out the most promise to small farmers and free labor, become a slave state (since a state could not be half-free, half-slave, California ran the risk of becoming a full slave state). Pro-slavery Americans knew that New Mexico and Arizona were not lands that lent themselves to plantation farming, and determined more fiercely than ever to have California, and the farmland that would become Kansas, too.

Free-Soil, free-labor, anti-slavery, and abolitionist Americans said now was the time to contain slavery altogether—to see the new territories not in the context of the north-south line of the Missouri Compromise, but as The West, a new entity that was not bound by the north-south politics or agreements of the eastern states. Keep slavery out of The West, they said, and keep it contained in the southern states until slave states were so outnumbered by free states, and slavery such an anomaly in the country, that slavery itself would die out.

Pro-slavery Americans had been ready for this fight for years. The nation had expanded along the Missouri Compromise line for nearly 30 years, it was the law of the land, there was no reason to change it, and any anti-slavery agitation in The West would be illegal, and punishable by law.

The problems the Mexican Cession caused would have to be quickly hammered out in the Compromise of 1850, a five-part piece of legislation that tried to create true compromise between anti- and pro-slavery Americans, not along purely geographical lines, but more philosophically. Slavery was not banned in the West (1), but California would enter the Union as a free state, end of story (2). Each of the remaining western territories that wanted to become a state would decide on its own whether to come in as slave or free: popular sovereignty let the people in the territory vote on their status before applying for statehood (3). The Fugitive Slave Act was introduced, which allowed slaveholders to violate the personal liberty laws in free states (4), and slavery would remain a feature in the capital, Washington, DC (5).

This Compromise would be short-lived. As settlers poured into all regions of the Cession, the stakes became higher and higher on both sides of the slavery issue. Pro-slavery Americans needed numbers; they couldn’t allow slavery to be restricted to the existing southern states or their needs would never be met in Congress, where free-state Representatives and Senators would far outnumber slave. Anti-slavery Americans also needed numbers, to reduce slavery to a regional curiosity of a small number of states, rendered economically useless. The battles over how western states would come into the Union led to vote-rigging, where people from outside a territory would pour in when it came time to vote slave or free, making a mockery of the concept of popular sovereignty. The violence that ensued in these situations was made legendary in Bloody Kansas.

In short, the Mexican War was most important both for expanding the U.S. and for hastening the coming of the Civil War. Both events made the nation greater, one geographically, one morally. It was a dress-rehearsal for the Civil War in that so many men who fought together in the Mexican War fought against each other in the Civil War, including both Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee. And it nearly completed the U.S. conquest of the continent between Canada and what was left of Mexico (the last bits settled in the Gadsden Purchase). The discovery of gold in California the year after the war ended spurred not only Californian settlement but the western rush of pioneers that dominated American demographics until the end of the 19th century. It also left the United States as the undisputed great power of the western hemisphere—a great deal of impact for a war that is often skipped over as students of U.S. history move from the Revolutionary War directly to the Civil War.

California, Californios, and Americans

Part 4 of our series on interesting aspects of the Mexican-American War takes us to California. California is part of the Mexican War, of course, because what is now the State of California was northern Mexico at that time. While many Easterners in the U.S. talked almost mystically of the riches of California, and how it was the fairest land on the continent, the distance and the fact that it was a foreign country kept the number of U.S. settlers in Upper California very small.

John C. Frémont was an American who wanted to annex California, and hoped to do so almost single-handedly. He had been granted permission by the U.S. government to explore in the west, and was supposed to be canvassing the Disputed Area (now Oregon and Washington) in December 1845, but Frémont took his time moving through northern Mexico, dragging his feet and looking for a chance to lead his small group of armed men in an attack on the Mexican government in Upper California. He tried to start a revolution at Gavilan Peak but was told to cease and desist immediately by the U.S. consul in Upper California, Thomas Larkin. This was in early 1846, and the U.S. was not yet at war with Mexico. There was no reason to expect U.S. support for a minor insurrection begun in its name and likely doomed to failure.

Once war was declared in May, and Americans in California got word of it in June, things moved quickly. By mid-July, Sonoma, Monterey, and Yerba Buena (today’s San Francisco) were quickly occupied by American and pro-American settlers, including Frémont. The Mexican government was let down by its governor, Pío Pico, who fled, and the emboldened Americans occupied Los Angeles in mid-August. This occupation was carried out by U.S. Marines as well as settlers, but the local Mexican population was not intimidated, and launched a counter-attack under José María Flores. These Californios were unaided by the Mexican government, which was fighting U.S. forces far to the east; the Californios were defending their land from hostile occupation and seizure, and they defeated over 300 Americans, including Marines, at the two-day Battle of Dominguez Rancho in early October. In early December, Californios fought U.S. soldiers under General Stephen Kearny to a standstill near San Diego.

With the weight of the U.S. government behind the push to annex Upper California, however, the efforts of the Californios were doomed. By mid-January 1847, U.S. forces (including Frémont and his men) had won two significant battles and the majority of the remaining Californios surrendered. On January 13, 1847, the Treaty of Cahuenga was signed. This was a treaty strictly between the Californios and the U.S. military forces in Upper California, ending the fighting in Upper California. California would not change hands until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the next year.

Next time: The end of the war

The U.S. declares war on Mexico

Part 3 of our series on interesting facts and background to the Mexican War addresses the U.S. declaration of war and the factors leading up to it.

You will recall from part 2 that the U.S. saw two distinct threats to its ability to gain control of the Pacific Coast: Britain, which owned land from the southern border of today’s Alaska to the current southern border of British Columbia, Canada, and which had designs on the disputed territory just south (today’s States of Washington and Oregon); and Mexico, which owned Upper California (today’s State of California). Britain was taken out of the picture by the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which removed British claims to the disputed territory. Now there was only Mexico to deal with.

Relations between the two countries had been strained by the Texan independence movement, in which American citizens who moved to Mexico to settle its northern state of Coahuila y Tejas decided, after a short residence, to create an independent state there called Texas. The Mexican government responded in 1829 by levying a property tax, putting high taxes on American imports, and prohibiting slavery. Because Americans in Coahuila y Tejas outnumbered native Mexicans, and because internal political strife in Mexico made it difficult to fully command the northern states, they were able to ignore those laws, particularly the one against slaveholding. But when General Antonio López de Santa Anna became dictator of Mexico in 1834, he was determined to bring Coahuila y Tejas firmly back under Mexican control, and when the Texans declared their independence in 1836, Santa Anna traveled north to squash them.

Santa Anna’s defeat at the Battle of San Jacinto seemed to leave the Texans free to declare their independence. They did so, claiming all the territory in yellow on the map below (courtesy of Wikipedia), which they actually had settled, and then all the land in green as well, which they had not, and which, as you see, extended all the way north into Wyoming.

Because of the unsettled state of Texas, with its disputed borders and no official treaty with Mexico stating that it gave up Coahuila y Tejas, the U.S. was relatively slow to move when Texans made it clear they wanted to join the Union. The biggest potential problem was Texas’ claim to the Rio Grande as its western border which, as you can see, cut deeply into Mexico. U.S. politicians realized Mexico would not accept the U.S. annexing a new state that claimed so much Mexican soil as its own. When Texas was brought into the Union, in 1845, no mention of the Rio Grande border was made, and the U.S. made no formal claim to the land up to the river.

Still, Mexico was outraged with the annexation of Texas by the United States. Mexico had never officially ceded Coahuila y Tejas to the Texans. It was both the disastrous political instability in Mexico City and pressure from Britain and France, both of which had recognized Texas as a U.S. state, that kept the nation from immediately marching the full force of the army into its northern state and reclaiming it. Mexico did not declare war, but did break off diplomatic relations with the U.S.

In response, President Polk, who wanted the Rio Grande border, sent General Zachary Taylor to Texas to claim it. Again, Texas and the Rio Grande were just a means to an end for Polk and for most Americans—controlling the western lands up to the Rio Grande was one step closer to owning the Pacific, and Upper California. An army launched from the Rio Grande could be in California much sooner and with much less difficulty than one launched from the Mississippi River.

This is made clear by the secret cash offer Polk made to President José Joaquín de Herrera on November 10, 1845: $25 million for the lands up to the Rio Grande, and also for Upper California and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico; U.S. forgiveness of a $3 million debt Mexico owed the U.S.; and another $25-30 million to sweeten the deal.

It was too late. Mexicans were outraged when the deal was made public. They would not be bought. National honor was at stake. President Herrera was accused of treason for having entertained Polk’s representative and was deposed. The new government under General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga stated its intention to re-claim Texas and retain all of Mexico’s northern states.

Polk ordered Taylor to take his army to the Rio Grande—into Mexico itself—and ignored Mexican demands to withdraw. This invasion sent the Mexican army north, and in April 1846 sixteen American soldiers on a patrol were killed by Mexican cavalry at the Nueces River. The Nueces, as you can see on the map, is just north of the Rio Grande in the boot of modern-day Texas and was the actual border of Texas (unlike the Rio Grande, which was the Texans’ desired border). Polk went to Congress on May 11 and stated that since the attack had occurred on the Nueces, officially U.S. territory because it was the actual State of Texas, Mexico had “shed American blood upon American soil”. Polk asked Congress to declare war, which it did on May 13th.

Mexico was likely irritated to hear the Nueces righteously claimed as American soil, since again there had never been a signed treaty handing over its northern state to the Texans or to the U.S. It declared war on July 7.

The debate in the U.S. Congress over whether to declare war fell along party lines—Whigs being mostly against it, Democrats being mostly for it. This sounds familiar to us today, but it was not the norm back then (see The Birth of Red and Blue States for more on this.) The Democrats were becoming more identified with Southern slaveholding interests. They wanted to fight for Texas, and the rest of northern Mexico, to make more slave states, and to bolster the slave-state population. Pro-slavery Americans worried that their influence was shrinking as the west was won in more northern areas. The free North was expanding faster than the slave South. If stalwartly slave Texas could be secured and substantially expanded west, it would be easy to continue the westward drive of slavery through what would become New Mexico and part of Arizona (Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico) and the great prize of California itself.

The Whigs were becoming more identified with Northern free state interests, and knew exactly why the Southern Democrats were so eager to go to war. In the end, however, the Whigs were not united enough to challenge the Southern Democrats on the slavery issue, or to resist the war fever that swept Washington. They also longed to annex California, the most desired land in the west, and so they voted for war.

Next time: California in the Mexican War

Fifty-four Forty or Fight!

The second post in our series on the interesting background of the Mexican War is on Oregon.

While Mexico held the desirable land of Upper California, it was Great Britain which provoked the first conflict with the U.S. on the Pacific Coast, and Oregon that was the disputed territory.

Today’s States of Washington and Oregon were, in 1846, a disputed area that Britain called the Columbia District and the U.S. called the Oregon Territory. By 1840, British citizens and officials in Canada began to petition London to annex the Columbia District—the disputed zone—and make it a part of the British Empire, an extension of British Canada. It was in part expanded American settlement in the disputed zone—what the settlers called Oregon Territory—that led the British to call for annexation.

Unfortunately for those advocates of British expansion, a new government in London led by Prime Minister Robert Peel came to power in 1841 which advocated strengthening Britain’s home defenses and home industry rather than further colonial expansion. While Britain was not actively working, then, to annex the disputed zone, Americans did not know this, and in 1844 the Democratic party began to insist that the U.S. not only officially incorporate the Oregon Territory, but also British Canada up to the border with Russian Alaska—the border at latitude 54°40′.

The Oregon Dispute was on. James Polk became president in 1844 and began negotiations with Great Britain for a U.S. annexation of the disputed zone up to the 49^th parallel—the modern-day borderline between Washington State and Canada. But Democratic politicians, led by an Indiana Senator and a Missouri Congressman, called for the U.S. to annex British Canada up to 54°40′, and the catchphrase “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” was born.

Of course, while there were always a few Manifest Destiny hotheads calling for war in the west in this period, neither nation really wanted to fight another war. The U.S. and Britain had been in conflict over western land on the North American continent since 1763, when the French and Indian War ended and the British forbid American settlers to move west of the Appalachians. Now, after the Revolution and the War of 1812, both sides wanted a diplomatic answer to the conflict over the disputed zone.

They got one, in the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which set the current border between the U.S. and British Columbia, Canada. But why did the conflict fizzle out so quickly? And why is this post about Canada and the Pacific Northwest in our series on the Mexican War?

The answer is that at the same time it was negotiating with Britain over the disputed zone, the U.S. was teetering on the brink of war with Mexico over Texas. Texas, the territory that most Americans would have traded in a heartbeat for Upper California, had been admitted into the Union as a state in 1845, despite the fact that it had never been officially given its independence by Mexico. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with the U.S. and prepared for war. The U.S. needed a victory in Texas to pave the way for a smooth annexation of Upper California; Mexico had to be defeated by and in fear of the U.S. to make that possible. So war over Texas it must be, and matters in the Pacific Northwest had to be wrapped up. It was also key to have firm and official U.S. control of the lands bordering Upper California, so that Mexico would be surrounded by U.S. territory, and could be invaded if necessary from the north.

Next time: The Mexican War begins

Origins of the Mexican War; or, the fight for the Pacific Coast

Welcome to our series on the Mexican War. Rather than outline the events of the war itself, which are easily found in many other places, we’ll focus here on the less well-known aspects of that war, the drivers and the players who, in different ways, brought the war on and saw it through.

The Mexican War (1846-8) is often seen today as a major example of U.S. western expansion at all costs, at the expense of Mexico alone. While there were many Americans at the time who believed in the nation’s Manifest Destiny—its right and even its duty to expand across the continent and take possession of it—the situation surrounding the Mexican War, American motives and actions leading to that war, and the nations involved were more complex than they seem.

Mexico was going through tremendous upheaval at the time. In 1846 four different presidencies took office. Democratic Mexican self-government was hampered by a colonial history which left few Mexicans with the experience or understanding of democratic self-government. Internal revolutions convulsed the nation and made it very difficult for the Mexican government to exert control over its northern territories, particularly Texas, which was quickly filling up with American citizens who, over the course of the 1830s, began to see themselves as citizens of an independent republic.

Most Americans, however, when they looked west, were far more interested in California than Texas. “Upper California” was the territory that is now most of the State of California (“Lower California” being what is now the Baja peninsula in Mexico), and it was considered the finest land in the west. Upper California was part of Mexico, but it was part of the expansion plans of the United States, Great Britain, and Russia.

Each of these nations wanted to claim the entire Pacific Coast, from the Arctic Circle to the present-day U.S.-Mexican border, for itself. Russia had been enjoying a lucrative fur-trading industry on the Pacific Coast since the early 1700s, with trading posts established from Alaska to just north of San Francisco. Alaska was shown on maps as “Russian America.” For Russia, taking control of Upper California from Mexico would be the first, most important step in taking control over its entire fur trading territory. Great Britain of course controlled Canada as a colony, and had an established presence north of the modern-day border of Washington State. But many Britons wanted to seize the Oregon Territory, which was tentatively claimed by the United States, extending British Canada right down to the border with Mexico (the present-day northern border of California).

A map of the Pacific Coast in 1846 would show Alaska as Russian America, with British Canada to its south, extending to its modern border with the State of Washington, a “disputed zone” that is today’s Washington and Oregon south of that, and Mexico (today’s California) south of that. There was no official U.S. presence at all on the Pacific Coast—no U.S. state or territory from the Arctic Circle to modern-day Mexico. There were American citizens living in Upper California, but their population was dwarfed by that of the native Mexicans.

But the U.S. wanted Upper California, and the Oregon Territory (today’s States of Washington and Oregon), and many Americans set out for both destinations in anticipation of U.S. annexation at some point. While Americans in Texas fought their own war against Mexico, it would be the Oregon Territory that first pushed the U.S. itself toward war in the west.

Next time: Fifty-four forty or fight!

What are the freedoms we have as Americans?

Citizens of the United States have been proud of their freedom for many generations. It has become a shorthand—we are admired for our freedom, hated for our freedom, we need to preserve our freedom, fight for our freedom… the list goes on. But, inspired by Dr. Rufus Fears’ interesting lecture on the topic, we thought it would be helpful to provide a clear definition of our “freedom” in the U.S. We’ll start by referencing Dr. Fears’ categories of freedom, then provide our own analysis of how they play out in American society.

As Dr. Fears points out, there are basically three types of freedom: national, individual, and political.

National freedom is the independence of a political state—freedom from occupation or other foreign control.

Political freedom is the right of citizens of a political state to participate in government (through voting or acting as a representative) and to have a fair trial.

Individual freedom is the freedom to do and say what you will so long as you don’t hurt anyone—freedom of speech, assembly, religion, freedom to choose where you live or what job you do or don’t do, freedom to make money and spend it as you please.

Of all these freedoms, national is the oldest and perhaps the most widely accepted. It’s hard to find a country, city-state, or any other unified entity that has not placed self-preservation at the top of its priorities. Historically, it has been the only freedom that is universally honored; that is, while many states still do not grant full individual or political freedoms, it’s hard to find one that does not stand for national freedom. Only completely failed states like Somalia or Sudan cannot and do not provide national freedom to their citizens.

Political freedom is about as ancient as national freedom; just about every society has a “ruling class”, whether it is Iron Age priests, medieval lords, or modern representatives to Congress. Rulers—kings, presidents, etc.—have almost always had political bodies advising them, managing the government, and/or curtailing the ruler’s powers. Extending political freedom beyond the top 2% of the population to the lower 98% of the people—granting real democracy—has been rare in human history. The concept of a fair trial has changed over time, and been infrequently offered.

Individual freedom—the rights Americans are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights—is the least common type of freedom. Very few societies have been willing to let their citizens do whatever they want so long as no one is hurt. Individual freedom is a result of true representative democracy, which has been rare in human history and is still not the type of government offered by most nations of the world. The only way for a tiny minority—sometimes just one person in the form of the ruler—to control millions of other people is to strip them of their right to complain, to move away, to become rich, etc. They must remain completely under the control and at the mercy of the ruler/governing class, whose power is exercised by deciding what is legal and what is not and finding that most things are illegal.

So where do we stand in the United States when it comes to these three freedoms? We are in the unique position of enjoying all three of these freedoms, a situation that is almost unparalleled in human history. The Founders worked unbelievably hard to create a government that was strong enough to protect the state (national freedom), offer fair representation before the law and equal participation in the government (political freedom), and give its citizens complete personal liberty (individual freedom). The latter is especially important; in fact, we as Americans believe national and political freedom cannot really exist without individual freedom.

This is what makes the United States unique and admirable, but it does create some problems, which we’ll get into in the next post.

Next time: The problem with triple freedom

Truth v. Myth: Illegal Immigrants must be stopped!

In light of the continuing legal concern with illegal immigration, most notably the anti-immigrant laws passed in Arizona in spring 2010, we’re re-posting a Truth v. Myth staple on immigration and why it is now so often illegal.

Most of us never stop to ask why illegal immigration is now so common, but never was before. Americans have always tried to stop certain types of immigrants—Irish, Chinese, Jewish, etc.—but you will not find battles over illegal immigrants (except when people from those banned groups somehow got into the country). There was no such issue, really, as “illegal immigration” throughout our long history of immigrants. So why is it such an issue today?

The single answer is that we now make it much harder to become a legal immigrant than we have ever done before. That’s it. It’s not that today’s immigrants are more criminal. It’s not that our own sainted immigrant ancestors were more law-abiding. It’s simply a matter of changing the law to make it harder to become a citizen, a process put in motion after WWII.

So here’s the original post, with a few new additions:

Myth: Immigration used to be good, but now it is bad.

Supporting myth: Today immigrants are shiftless, lazy, and/or criminal, whereas they used to be hardworking people trying to make a better life for their children.

“Proof” of myth: Immigrants today don’t bother to learn English, want Spanish to be the official language of the U.S., refuse to become legal U.S. citizens, working here illegally instead, and constantly enter the U.S. illegally without even trying to become citizens because they want a free ride without paying taxes.

You know what I so often hear when Americans talk about immigration now?

1. They support anti-immigration laws.

2. Sure, their ancestors were immigrants, and they’re proud of that.

3. But their ancestors “followed the rules,” and therefore deserved to be here, while

4. Immigrants today have not followed the rules, and therefore do not deserve to be here.

This is a powerful myth. It seems to ring true. But do you know what the “rules” were for immigrants coming through Ellis Island for so many years? Look healthy and have your name listed on the register of the ship that brought you. That was it. “If the immigrant’s papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these ‘six second physicals.’”

When I visited the Ellis Island museum in 1991, I saw a film that said you also had to provide the address of a friend, sponsor, or family member who would take you in. And off you went.

So I don’t think we’re handing out prizes to past immigrants who followed those rules. They were pretty easy to follow. If that’s all we asked of Mexican immigrants today, we wouldn’t have illegal immigrants.

Immigrants today are faced with much more difficult rules. In other words, they actually face rules.

Go to Google and type in “requirements for U.S. citizenship.” I don’t know how many million pages come up. You petition for a Green Card—or rather, you have a family member already in the U.S. or a U.S. employer become your petitioner, and fill out the visa petition. Your employer-petitioner has to prove a labor certificate has been granted, that you have the education you need to do the job, that s/he can pay you, etc.

Then you’re on the waiting list—not to get a Green Card, but to apply for a Green Card.

One could go on and on. Basically, it’s much harder to get into the U.S. today and to become a citizen than it was when most white Americans’ ancestors came through.

The real problem with immigrants today is the same as it was in 1840: each generation of Americans hates and fears the new immigrants coming in. In the 1850s, the Irish were the scary foreigners destroying the nation. In the 1880s it was the Italians. Then the Chinese, then the Eastern Europeans, then the Jews, now the Mexicans.

Each generation looks back to earlier immigrants as “good,” and views current immigrants as bad. In the 1880s, the Irish were angry at the incoming Italians. In the 1900s, the Italians were banning the Chinese from coming in. As each immigrant group settles in, it tries to keep the next group out.

It’s really time we ended this cycle. Here are some quick pointers:

1. Latin American immigrants are not qualitatively different than previous European immigrants.

2. Spanish-speaking immigrants do NOT refuse to learn English; in fact, the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants are less likely to speak the old language than the children of other groups (that is, more children of Chinese immigrants speak Chinese than children of Mexican immigrants speak Spanish).

3. Your European immigrant ancestors honored nothing when they came to the U.S. but their desire to be here. They didn’t anxiously adhere to “the rules.” They did the bare, bare minimum that was asked of them, which was easy to do.

4. 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.

Tea Party, Health Care, “Reload”—the long view

We don’t usually get into current-day politics here at the HP, but when big-ticket history is being made, we have to mention it. Right now, the United States is in the midst of a long, rolling series of major changes that will make this present day of ours as deeply studied and debated by historians as the run-up to the Civil War or the civil rights movement.

Right now, the health care bill that passed Congress this month is causing an almost inexplicable torrent of rage amongst a small portion of Americans. These are the small minority of very vocal people who always want to stop the American experiment of accepting and driving social change (see The Great American Experiment), a reactionary fraction who always believe the past was better than the present and far better than the ominous future the latest social change is going to unleash.

In these times, it’s good to be a historian, because you have the long view. You know that there have always been these reactionary groups, ranging from the inane to the harmful. The “Know-Nothings” or American Party in the 1830s and 40s terrorized Catholic Americans and won many political seats on a platform of stopping immigration from undesirable countries, eradicating Catholicism, and generally setting up a police state run by white Protestants. In the late 1800s, groups like the Immigration Restriction League and the Workingmen’s Party authorized terror against immigrants; WP leader Dennis Kearney led his men on a rampage through San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1877, destroying homes and businesses, to inaugurate his campaign against Chinese immigration. The state of California eventually passed several laws stripping Chinese immigrants of their civil rights.

In more recent history, the reaction of the fringe against the Civil Rights movement and the federal laws and Supreme Court rulings that championed equal rights for all races is fresher in our memory.

So when faced with the Tea Partiers and brick-throwing anti-health care fringe of 2010, we can defuse their seeming power by reminding ourselves, and others, that these groups come and go at moments of national crisis or change, they spew their hate and then after a decade or so they disappear. Temporarily, of course; there’s always the next fringe group to take over for them. But they remain fringe because of their illogic and their basis in hatred and fear.

A columnist at the New York Times presents a good summing up of the current situation, pointing out that the fringe has predicted doom and the death of America many times without accuracy. They are never right because they fail to take into account the fact that the majority of Americans are on board with the Experiment, with change and progress. The majority of Americans know, as we lay out in The Great American Experiment, that “America’s story is one of constantly tackling the big—the biggest—problems, ahead of everyone else, with very little to guide us but those founding principles that nag at our conscience. And each time we’ve made progress, extending civil rights to more and more people, it’s been because that old spirit of taking a gamble, of performing the ultimate experiment, took over and led us to the right decision.

“As we think today about what divides Americans, I think it boils down to the fact that some Americans no longer want to experiment. They want to close the lab down. We’ve gone far enough into the unknown, making it known, they say; now let’s stop—let’s even go backward. We were wrong to conduct some of our experiments in liberty, and that’s the source of all our problems. Gay people shouldn’t be treated equally. Black people shouldn’t run the country. Women shouldn’t hold high office. Muslims shouldn’t be granted habeas corpus.

“Whenever one of those Americans talks about the problem with our country today, they talk about how we should be like we once were, back when white people who defined marriage as one man-one woman and were Protestant veterans built this nation. They feel they are losing their birthright, their legacy.

But those Americans are wrong. What their ancestors really were was scientists. Experimenters. Radicals who always considered the impossible possible.”

Frank Rich agrees: “If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.”

But that won’t happen. You can’t fight demographics, and America’s population is changing and the result will be: America. Our population has always been changing, always been growing too fast, always been diluted with people from new regions and nations, and we have always kept on, struggling and fighting and eventually breaking through prejudice and habit to achieve new heights of civil rights and equality of opportunity. It’s what we do. It’s why we’re great.

So as you ponder the rage of the fringe, remember they are the fringe. The rest of us will keep on experimenting, like real Americans.