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#NowReading The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America by Eric Kaufmann (HUP)
Contra the contemporary popular imagination of the American Revolution, most Americans were not animated by liberal rights' theorists, but by the belief that they were a chosen, providential people as Anglo-Saxon protestants.
Founding fathers declared their "ancient" "Anglo-Saxon liberties", making a particular and racial appeal, not a universalist one.
Nor was America considered a "melting pot" prior to the Nation of Immigrants agitation of the Mid-20th century. Americans defined themselves as White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, and immigrants were expected to conform to the Anglo ideal.
American Manifest Destiny was tied to this Anglo-Saxonism, with Walt Whitman declaring "What has miserable inefficient Mexico...to do... with the mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?"
The Know-Nothings appeared as a political force almost immediately after substantial Catholic immigration, stating "the grand work of the American Party is the principle of nationality... we must do something to protect and vindicate it. If we do not it will be destroyed."
What distinguishes the success of earlier nativist movements from our own times was the alliance of WASP elites with WASP provincials, whether Artistic, Academic, or Political. The second Klan referred to William Jennings Bryant as "the greatest Klansman of our time"
"Immigration had never been popular. Its principal backers were large businesses who wishes to maintain low wage levels in their factories."
"In the later '20's...nobody wanted to come, so for a long time American public opinion lived in the consciousness... that America was completed... No one expected that America would again become an immigrant society"
I remember Obama putting "Tocqueville" on his Understanding America reading list, and he's de rigueur for NeoCons and the source of the "all the world coming together in America" stuff (though he's been purposefully misread, as well.) Long story short, he's full of shit.
The founders on immigration: Hamilton is aping Gobineau
The public school as a tool of assimilation into the Anglo Protestant ideal
Turner's Frontier thesis as a break with Anglo-Saxonism
I'm canceling Gobineau
Teddy Great Replacement poasting
Organized labor were at the forefront of immigration restriction in the 19th and early 20th century. Their great adversary: big business. "To quell dissent within their party, Republican elites accused their populist wing of racism and ethnic bigotry"
Reminder that twitter commies literally believe that billionaires have and are trying to trick the white working class into disliking mass migration. Don't tell them the AFL lobbied for the '24 immigration restriction act.
"The most significant group to favor liberal immigration policies in the 19th c., commercial and manufacturing interests exerted a disproportionate influence on American politics through campaign financing and... corruption"
Enough for now, I'll finish this tomorrow
