ICYDK: The American Left Was Built on Asian Exclusion
In 1840 — forty-seven years after the US gained independence from Britain — the US population was 17.06M. 83.2% of this population was white (14.19M), 16.8% was black (2.87M). Only ~2% was Catholic in 1820 (hard to find reliable historical data on Catholic population) and ~.08% Jewish in 1840. However, ramping up in the 1840s, people belonging to these “outsider” groups began to immigrate in large numbers, with the biggest share of immigrants coming from Ireland and Germany. Immigration from Ireland was driven by the Potato Famine (1845–1852, which was actually an economic mismanagement problem as Ireland was ruled by England at the time). Germany went through a series of upheavals in the middle of the century that spurred immigration to America, including the failed revolution of 1848. The German Confederation of 39 states was founded in 1815 and the Unification of Germany took place in 1871. The Potato Famine disproportionately affected southern and western Ireland, where Catholics were the overwhelming majority (close to 90%; previous immigration from Ireland was predominantly Protestant). Germans were a diverse group: approximately 51% Protestant (mostly Lutheran — Martin Luther was, of course, German), 26% Roman Catholic, and 1% Jewish. Many German immigrants were communists (the Communist Manifesto was first published in 1848 in German but fell into obscurity when the uprisings of 1848 failed and their proponents jailed or suppressed; Marx himself was exiled to London).
At the same time, the discovery of gold in California in 1848 drew prospectors from around the world. The Chinese population in the US went from less than 400 in 1848 to 25K by 1852. This is just after the First Opium War (1839–1842) and coincides with the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). The Catholic population surged to 6.9% by 1850, which made Catholicism the largest single Christian denomination if Protestant denominations are counted separately. The anti-Catholic political party the Know Nothings reached their high point in the 1850s in reaction but was quickly eclipsed by the Civil War (1861–1865; Irish Catholics, German Catholics, and Polish Catholics fought in large numbers for the Union, with many being new immigrants). The 1860 census recorded 31.4M with an Asian population of .1% (35K) and a Jewish population of .48% (150K). The 1880 census recorded 50.15M with an Asian population of .2% (100.3K) and a Jewish population of .51% (256K). There was a financial crisis in Europe and North America (Panic of 1873) from 1873 to 1877 known as the “Long Depression” in Britain and the “Great Depression” in the US (until the larger depression in 1929 overshadowed it).
1) Chinese Exclusion
The first anti-Chinese laws were introduced in this period. The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 (part of the Reconstruction Amendments following the Civil War) established birthright citizenship, and as a consequence of this the first federal immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, was passed barring East Asian forced laborers (coolies) and East Asian women. With birthright citizenship, the children of Asian couples would automatically become US citizens. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which was renewed and strengthened ten years later with the Geary Act) was an expansion of the Page Act. These laws effectively froze the Chinese-American population in place at their 1882 levels. According to census, California’s Asian population fell from 75,218 in 1880 to 73,619 in 1890 and Nevada from 5,419 to 2,836. Washington and Oregon experienced small rises in their Asian population. Asians in New York rose from 926 in 1880 to 3,083 in 1890 (Pfaelzer 290). The Geary Act also prohibited Chinese from bearing witness in court. Asians were already barred from owning property and from becoming citizens (the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to “free white persons”; naturalization was extended to blacks but not Asians in the Naturalization Act of 1870).
It was in this context that the wave of anti-Chinese purges took place in California and the Pacific Northwest in the 1880s. In total, Pfaelzer counts nearly 200 towns whose Chinese populations are on record of having been purged (253). Often the record of the purge was proudly proclaimed in the local press. If the exclusion laws prevented new Chinese immigrants from entering the country and establishing a political base, it was the purges that guaranteed that Chinese labor already in the country would not compete with white labor under any circumstances.
. . . After the Civil War, the new trade-union movement took up the anti-Chinese cause and the Knights of Labor spread the racist message through the Workingman’s Party. White boot makers, cigar rollers, cooks, and woodcutters who were competing with the lower-paid Chinese workers joined in the brutality.
The Driven Out was spurred by Irish and German immigrants fearful of job competition and by destitute, unemployed white migrants from the East Coast who felt betrayed by the false promises of new industry in eastern cities . . . West Coast Jews, too, participated in the anti-Chinese violence: in San Francisco in the 1880s, the Anti-Coolie League met at B’nai B’rith on Friday nights, at the start of the Jewish Sabbath.”
(Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. UC Press, 2008, p. XX. B’nai B’rith is a German Jewish fraternal organization and the parent organization of the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel. The claim is not sourced in Pfaelzer’s book, but Pfaelzer herself is Jewish so we assume the claim must have some legitimate basis. B’nai B’rith still operates today out of Washington, D.C.)
Just at this time in the early 1880s, the Knights of Labor burst onto the national scene and grafted the purges of the Chinese onto the new labor movement. In contrast to craft unions, the Knights promised to build inclusive “vertical” assemblies. Organized in California only one year after the Lumberman’s Union, the Knights attracted workers designated by the American Federation of Labor [probably the precursor to the AFL, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions] as “unskilled” — loggers and miners — unifying young labor clubs with their demands for a weekly payday, an eight-hour day, and the abolition of child labor. But excluded from the organization that promised to unite as many workers as possible were the Chinese.
. . . [The Knights’] Humboldt assembly lasted for five years, the peak years of the Chinese roundups. Led by Millard Fillmore Gardner, the Knights organized assemblies from Crescent City down to the Mendocino County line, and soon Arcata’s assembly 3424 had one hundred members. And the new Knights assemblies in Blue Lake, Freshwater, Crescent City, Smith River, Port Kenyon, and Ferndale all promoted the anti-Chinese purges of 1885–1886. (Pfaelzer 151)
The Knights of Labor was the first national organization of working-class people in the US (and had chapters in Canada, the UK, and Australia). They included both skilled and unskilled workers, women, and blacks, but excluded Asians. They may have been majority Catholic, which means they were disproportionately Catholic since Catholics were probably around 10% of the US population in 1880. They expanded exponentially in the early 1880s — just at the time of the anti-Chinese purges — then lost most of their membership to the American Federation of Labor by the end of the decade. It is almost as if their sole role in history was to keep the Chinese from gaining a foothold in America. They organized against Chinese from town to town at ground level. The activity of the Knights of Labor was given the blessing of the Catholic hierarchy in America and may have had support in the Vatican itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_Labor
The Knights of Labor attracted many Catholics, who were a large part of the membership, perhaps a majority. Powderly [the Knights’s leader] was also a Catholic. However, the Knights’s use of secrecy, similar to the Masons, during its early years concerned many bishops of the church. The Knights used secrecy and deception to help prevent employers from firing members. After the Archbishop of Quebec condemned the Knights in 1884, twelve American archbishops voted 10 to 2 against doing likewise in the United States. Furthermore, Cardinal James Gibbons and Bishop John Ireland defended the Knights. Gibbons went to the Vatican to talk to the hierarchy.[19] In 1886, right after the peak of the Knights of Labor, they started to lose more members to the American Federation of Labor.
Irish, Cornish, Welsh, and Swedish members of the Knights of Labor were responsible for one of the worst incidents of ethnic violence in US history, the 1885 Rock Springs massacre, in which a mob of about 150 Knights members killed between 28–50 Chinese workers and set fire to about 80 Chinese camp houses. The massacre included scalping, branding, mutilation, decapitation, and dismemberment. Women participated from the sidelines. One Chinese miner’s genitals were removed as a trophy. The US government paid compensation to the Qing government without admitting legal responsibility, considering the perpetrators to be a foreign element.
In the early autumn of 1885, the Knights of Labor asked the Chinese miners to join a strike. The Chinese refused and violence began. On September 2, a force of about 150 Irish-born miners marched to Chinatown armed with shotguns. After firing a volley into the air, they ordered the Chinese to leave. The Chinese fled, pursued by the white miners, who now fired directly at them. The Chinese quarters were set ablaze, and thirty-nine houses owned by the company and about fifty owned by the Chinese burned to the ground. Those Chinese miners who remained in their homes that day, perhaps of illness or injury, perished in the flames. (Pfaelzer 210)
Probably the most vitriolic anti-Chinese labor organizer of this period was the first-generation Irish Catholic immigrant Denis Kearney, founder and leader of the Workingman’s Party of California from 1877 through the 1880s. The character Dylan Leary on the TV series Warrior is based on Kearney. A colorful speaker, Kearney was openly racist and frequently advocated violence. He coined the slogan “The Chinese Must Go” which was taken up by other anti-Chinese organizations like the Knights of Labor. Kearney ended all his speeches with the phrase, often as a non sequitur. Within two years of its formation, Workingman’s Party candidates took over the California State Legislature and rewrote the state constitution to exclude Chinese. Chinese citizens were denied the right to vote and they created the California Railroad Commission to oversee the railroad companies that hired Chinese workers. Many of these discriminatory laws were overturned in court, but ultimately the Workingman’s Party policies laid the groundwork for the federal Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (and subsequent expansions). Ironically, Kearney immigrated in 1868 and was thus advocating for the removal of some proportion of Chinese who had been in America longer than him:
Assaults and looting in Chinatown marked the last days of July. By early autumn, thousands of unemployed men had formed a workers’ political party to purge the Chinese. Denis Kearney, a young Irish American and a member of the “pick handle brigade,” emerged as its leader and began his infamous outdoor “sandlot” meetings . . . Kearney understood how to turn rage about unemployment, the price of food, and the huge land grants to the railroads against the Chinese: “When the Chinese question is settled, we can discuss whether it would be better to hang, shoot, or cut the capitalists to pieces. In six months we will have 50,000 men ready to go out . . . We are ready to do it . . . If the ballot fails, we are ready to use the bullet.” (Pfaelzer 78)
2) Asian Exclusion
Beginning around the late 1880’s, the steady stream of new immigrants that had begun to transform America earlier in the century became a rushing river. The US population more than doubled from 1880 to 1920 — from 50.15M to 105.7M — with approximately 23M being new immigrants. Catholics rose to 15.8% of the total by 1900. Jews grew from .51% in 1880 to 3.2% in 1920. Steamships and railroads made trans-Atlantic travel cheaper and more accessible to a wider range of people, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe (i.e. Italy, Greece, Hungary, Poland and other Slavic states). Immigration from Italy, a Catholic stronghold through the Protestant Reformation, was driven by the Italian Unification (or Risorgimento, 1848–1871); Ashkenazi Jewish immigration by the pogroms in Russia and the Pale of Settlement. This wave of immigrants tended to settle in large urban enclaves (as opposed to forming small communities throughout the country) and served as the labor pool of the rapidly developing industrialization of that period. An intellectual movement called the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, had encouraged German Jews to abandon Yiddish in favor of proper German and classical Hebrew, and emphasized cultural assimilation. This new wave of Jews, which was at least 8x larger than the existing Jewish-American population, spoke Yiddish, was less culturally assimilated, and was often politically quite radical. Many were members or sympathizers of socialist or anarchist organizations such as the Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party active in the Russian Empire between 1897 and 1920. The famous Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman immigrated in 1885.
In 1886, the Knights of Labor intervened in a cigar makers’ strike in New York City and attempted to undercut the craft union representing the cigar workers by negotiating directly with the manufacturers. This was highly controversial and — along with the failure of two large strikes the KoL organized and the Haymarket affair — caused a mass exodus from the Knights’ umbrella organization to what would become the American Federation of Labor or AFL (now AFL-CIO). The co-founder and president of the AFL from its beginning until his death in 1924 (with the exception of one year) was a working-class English Jewish immigrant named Samuel Gompers. Gompers was president of the Cigar Makers’ International Union local that had fought the Knights of Labor over its attempt to intervene in their strike and a founding member of the forerunner of the AFL, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions or FOTLU, which the KoL withdrew from over organizational principles (FOTLU struggled to gain members until it transformed into the AFL).
Despite being nearly 50% first- or second- generation immigrants, the AFL under Gompers’ leadership consistently supported immigration restrictions and vehemently opposed immigration from Asia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Gompers
Gompers, like most labor leaders, opposed unrestricted immigration from Europe because it lowered wages. He strongly opposed all immigration from Asia because it lowered wages and, in his judgement, represented an alien culture that could not be assimilated easily into that of the U.S.[21] Gompers bragged that the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), later renamed the American Federation of Labor (AFL), “was the first national organization which demanded the exclusion of coolies from the United States”.[22] He and the AFL strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned the immigration of Chinese, and published a pamphlet entitled “Some reasons for Chinese exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which shall survive?” in 1901.
The AFL also organized a race-based labor boycott by fixing white stickers to cigars made by unionized white workers in order to distinguish them from cigars made by Chinese:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Federation_of_Labor
The AFL also began one of the first organized labor boycotts when they began putting white stickers on the cigars made by unionized white cigar rollers while simultaneously discouraging consumers from purchasing cigars rolled by Chinese workers.
Gompers was one of eighteen “vice-presidents” (along with industrialist Andrew Carnegie) of the Anti-Imperialist League that was established in 1898 to oppose annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Gompers opposed annexation for the same reason he opposed Chinese immigration: he considered Asians to be an unassimilable race that would lower labor standards in the US if allowed in. Here is an excerpt from one of his speeches on the topic:
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/historyofus/web09/features/source/C14.html
If the Philippines are annexed what is to prevent the Chinese, the Negritos and the Malays coming to our country? How can we prevent the Chinese coolies from going to the Philippines and from there swarm into the United States and engulf our people and our civilization? If these new islands are to become ours, it will be either under the form of Territories or States. Can we hope to close the flood-gates of immigration from the hordes of Chinese and the semi-savage races coming from what will then be part of our own country?
In the wake of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, America passed its most restrictive immigration law in its history in the Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson-Reed Act. The 1924 Act was in many ways a response to the wave of Southern and Eastern European immigration of the last ~40 years, which was by far the largest influx of non-Anglo-Saxon blood in the country’s history up to that point. It also closed the doors completely to Asia. Since Chinese were already excluded in 1882, the bill was called the “Japanese Exclusion Act” by Japanese and violated the Gentleman’s Agreement between the US and Japan from 1907. (After Chinese exclusion, Japanese became the largest East Asian immigrant group.) Japanese diplomats protested strongly against passage of the bill and one Japanese committed seppuku in front of the US Embassy in Tokyo. The act pegged single-country immigration quotas to 2% of the 1890 census. Overall, the new law cut total immigration in half, but in a very lopsided way. Immigration from Britain and Ireland fell by 19% but immigration from Italy fell by 90%. Britain, Ireland, and Germany had the highest representation in the 1890 census. The law was so restrictive that in 1924 several countries in Southern and Eastern Europe (i.e. Italy, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Spain) saw more nationals leave the US than arrive as immigrants.
The Johnson-Reed Act was not controversial at the time. Gompers’ American Federation of Labor, African-American leaders, and the Ku Klux Klan all supported the bill. It passed both houses of Congress with clear super-majorities. What is interesting about the 1924 Act is that the only debate seemed to be how to draw the formula for the national-origin quotas and not the more restrictive provision entirely barring immigration from Asia. The law banned immigration from any alien ineligible for citizenship. This was not about Asians becoming US citizens; it was about shutting Asian presence out of the country as completely as possible, even as non-citizens. In 1952, the McCarren-Walter Act revised the 1924 Act and removed the provision against “aliens ineligible for citizenship” but set a quota of 100 immigrants per Asian country and 2000 for the entire “Asiatic barred zone.” This move was celebrated by Asian-American advocacy groups. In comparison, the “discriminatory” 1924 Act reduced immigration from Italy from roughly 200k to 4,000 per year.
While most of the country focused on the question of ethnic white immigration, it was again an Irish Catholic who championed the cause of restricting East Asians. The son of famed California newspaper editor and Irish immigrant James McClatchy, Valentine McClatchy dedicated the rest of his life after retiring from the newspaper business to lobbying for the exclusion of the Japanese, which he had begun writing about as early as 1915. McClatchy was a key member of the California-based Asiatic Exclusion League, which was founded by Irish and Norwegian immigrant labor leaders, and became secretary of its successor organization the California Joint Immigration Committee after the 1924 Act was passed. The AEL used strong-arm tactics to ensure that the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act were enforced and lobbied to have the law extended to Japanese, Koreans, South Asians, and later Mexicans and Filipinos, rallying around the concept of America as a “white man’s country.”
3) Black America and Immigration
There has been a strong anti-immigrant current among black Americans for as long as black Americans have been capable of articulating an independent political identity (remember that free blacks still had to compete in the labor market), and that current was often specifically anti-Asian:
Some African Americans, familiar with the racial brutality facing the Chinese, attacked the anti-Chinese codes . . .
Yet despite the recognition that whites oppressed both groups, African Americans in the postbellum era were forging a new relation to American nationhood and could themselves participate in discriminating against the Chinese. The black press frequently reenforced stereotypes of the “yellow peril,” at times describing the Chinese as “filthy, immoral and licentious — according to our notions of such things” and expressed disgust for the “grotesque appearance” of the Chinese, whose shaved heads, remarked one paper, resembled “pig tail tobacco.”
In an effort to establish their own legitimacy as American citizens, many African Americans juxtaposed their new civic status with the stereotype of the Chinese as short-term residents or sojourners. The “Orientals,” claimed one black newspaper, would be “less odious and onerous” if they came “with the intention of remaining.” Bell concluded that Chinese “habits, customs, modes of living, manner of worship (faith or religion it cannot be called) are all at variance with our ideas.” Unlike the Chinese, he said, African Americans deserved the rights of full citizenship, for the black man was “a native American, loyal to the Government, and a lover of his country and her institutions — American in all his ideas; [and] a Christian by education.”
(Pfaelzer, 79–80. The entire passage, subtitled “African Americans and the Chinese” 79–81, is worth reading.)
This anti-immigrant current among blacks reached a peak during and after WWI, when European immigration was temporarily halted and native blacks saw first-hand how ethnic white immigrants had been preventing them from moving up into the skilled trades and the industrial sector. Here is a 1924 quote from the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph in which he argues that the Johnson-Reed Act did not go far enough. A. Philip Randolph was one of the most prominent black leaders between the generations of W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. and organized the March on Washington in 1963 in which King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech:
https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-Indigestion-Philip-Randolph-Radical-and-Restrictionist
“Instead of reducing immigration to 2 percent of the 1890 quota, we favor reducing it to nothing…. We favor shutting out the Germans from Germany, the Italians from Italy…the Hindus from India, the Chinese from China, and even the Negroes from the West Indies. This country is suffering from immigrant indigestion.” Randolph made clear that his reason was economic and social. “It is time to call a halt on this grand rush for American gold,” he said, “which over-floods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living, race-riots, and general social degradation. The excessive immigration is against the interests of the masses of all races and nationalities in the country — both foreign and native.”
The leading black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier in 1933 made this statement while arguing that foreigners should be barred from working railroad jobs:
No different from many white restrictionists, the Pittsburgh Courier, for instance, could not refrain from coupling pejorative stereotypes with its economic nationalism. In addition to its economic argument, the paper held that Americans should monopolize Pullman porter jobs on the railroads because the Japanese were “too short to make it down the upper birth without a ladder.”
However, since Chinese were ethnically cleansed from the country at the time and the total East Asian population was minuscule, the primary concern for black leaders was white immigration. Again in 1924, the leading black civil rights newspaper The Chicago Defender made this argument for restricting immigration:
It is vitally important to keep the immigration gates partly closed until our working class gets a chance to prove our worth in occupations other than those found on plantations. The scarcity of labor creates the demand. With the average American white man’s turn of mind, the white foreign laborer is given preference over the black home product. When the former is not available, the latter gets an inning.
Here is a passage from the famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech that Booker T. Washington made in 1895 to industrialists, pleading with them to employ native black labor instead of immigrant white labor:
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/multimedia/booker-t-washington.html
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I have said to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped to make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.
In 1929, W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder of the NAACP, wrote:
Colored America has been silent on the immigration quota controversy for two reasons: First, the stopping of the importing of cheap white labor on any terms has been the economic salvation of American black labor . . .
Many more examples documented here: https://cis.org/Report/Cast-Down-Your-Bucket-Where-You-Are-Black-Americans-Immigration
4) The New Deal Coalition
The New Deal refers to a series of big-government policies and programs enacted from 1933 to 1939 as a response to the Great Depression. The New Deal Coalition is the alignment of political constituencies that backed those policies, benefitted from them, and subsequently became absolutely dominant in the 20th century. The New Deal Coalition won every presidential election from 1932–1964 (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson; Eisenhower was a pro-New Deal Republican) and controlled both houses of Congress for all but four years from 1932–1980 (Republicans won small majorities in 1946 and 1952). By the time the coalition declined politically, it had seeped into or set up pathways to seep into every institution in America: from local governments to the State Department to the Ivy League to school curriculum to mass media. In many ways we live today in an America that was remade by the New Deal Coalition in the 20th century.
This is how the NDC is described in the first paragraph of its wiki (i.e. NOT my words):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal_coalition
At various points, the coalition included labor unions, blue collar workers, racial and religious minorities (such as Jews, Catholics, and African-Americans), farmers, rural white Southerners, and urban intellectuals.
The NDC half-century includes every US military intervention in Asia: World War II (obviousy), the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Remember it was Johnson — the champion of the NDC civil rights legislation — who escalated US involvement in Vietnam (receiving broad powers to use conventional US military forces there with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 by a near unanimous Congress), and it was Nixon — the NDC’s antichrist — that drew down US forces. It is also during the NDC half-century that the US abandoned its largely non-interventionist or isolationist foreign policy that went all the way back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s principle of “no entangling alliances” (of course, one large exception to this tendency was the Spanish-American War in 1898 which resulted in the annexation of the Philippines). It is a legacy of the NDC that America finds itself today in a state of near perpetual war in the Middle East.
Domestically, Japanese internment camps during WWII, often cited among the worst injustices faced by Asian Americans, were an NDC policy. From 1942–1946, about 120K Japanese, mostly on the West Coast, were forcibly relocated to concentration camps in the interior of the country. Approximately two-thirds were US citizens. The US Census Bureau provided specific individual census data to assist the relocation effort, which it denied until the 2000s. The camps were authorized by an executive order signed by Roosevelt that gave military commanders the ability to designate “exclusion zones” in the US. Implementation was left to the head of the Western Defense Command, John L. DeWitt and Karl Bendetsen. While both testified for the necessity of internment, Bendetsen, a second-generation Lithuanian Jew, was the architect of the plan and pressured DeWitt to accept a harder line, stating, “I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.” In 1988, Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act (based on a commission to study the camps in 1980) that provided $20K in compensation for every internee still living at the time, totaling $1.2B. (Ultimately 81,800 people qualified for reparations and $1.6B was disbursed.) Bendetsen adamantly opposed both the commission and reparations — while also downplaying his role in the policy — until his death in 1989. In 1998, a controversy began over the term “internment camp” in the run-up to an exhibit about the camps at Ellis Island. “Internment” is a legal term in international law that refers to the detention of enemy nationals during wartime and is considered lawful. Several academics had suggested that the correct term is “concentration camp,” since the vast majority of detained Japanese were US citizens. However, the American Jewish Committee objected to this use, claiming the term had acquired a specific and exclusive meaning after the Holocaust, until a joint statement was added to the exhibit defining “concentration camp” broadly but clearly stating that the Nazi concentration camps were of a different nature. Only two US politicians openly opposed the camps and both were anti-New Deal conservatives: Scots-Irish (Ulster Protestant) Governor of Colorado Ralph L. Carr, whose vocal defense and protection of the Japanese is widely thought to have ended his political career, and the staunch non-interventionist Episcopalian Senator from Ohio Robert A. Taft.
The NDC exerts cultural influence or “soft power” primarily through popular culture. The elimination of competition with the Asian exclusion laws gave these groups an economic basis to exist in America; the NDC gave them political power; many decades after the fracturing of the political coalition, a cultural dominance has taken hold that was in many ways incubated by NDC institutions. Jews did not “take over” Hollywood. Hollywood was built by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant theatre proprietors who had become successful enough to branch out into making films. They moved to Southern California to skirt enforcement of Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patent Company’s monopoly on film technology, which was formed to keep them — at the time known as “independents” — out of the filmmaking business. Film was considered “low-brow” culture for the working class — a distinction that has almost completely dissolved today. Besides the great Italian-American directors Scorsese and Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock, Roger Corman (Jewish-Catholic), Robert Altman, Brian De Palma, Sylvester Stallone (Jewish-Italian), Mel Gibson, Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino (now Israeli), Mark Wahlberg and many lesser known were all raised Catholic or have Catholic roots. The man almost single-handedly responsible for the Rural Purge in network television in the early 70s was Fred Silverman, whose father was Jewish and mother was Roman Catholic. Catholics are surprisingly overrepresented as late-night TV show hosts (Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno). The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that created NPR and PBS was passed by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress and signed into law by a Democratic president (Johnson). With a current endowment of just $258M, NPR may be the most cost-effective NDC propaganda machine in history. While Jewish influence in rock and pop music is fairly well known (Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Billy Joel, Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Bob Marley, Ramones, Perry Farrell, Beck to name a few), Catholics are also disproportionately represented in the genres. Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Sonic Youth, Chris Cornell (also part Jewish), Jack White, Ben Gibbard, Lady Gaga are some prominent examples of rock/pop musicians who either identify as Catholic or were raised Catholic to some degree (not just partial Irish or Italian heritage). In the 80s and 90s, rap was developed with the help of Jews (who of course promoted African-American blues and jazz earlier in the century with producers like Jerry Wexler and the Chess brothers and have a long history in the entertainment industry as promoters going back to Europe in the 19th century): Morris Levy with Sugar Hill Records; Seymour Stein with Ice-T; Jerry Heller with N.W.A., J.J. Fad, Black Eyed Peas, and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony; Rick Rubin with Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys; and Leila Steinberg with Tupac. In 2008, when Nas rapped, “Try telling Bob Dylan, Bruce, or Billy Joel they can’t sing what’s in they soul” (“Hero”), many felt it was the magnanimous heralding of a new post-racial America. But Nas’ list of “authentic” white musicians is two Jews and one Catholic.
Today, the American Left often points to the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as an example of how the civil rights movement (the crowning achievement of the NDC) served Asian Americans. The only problem is the Hart-Celler Act was never intended to increase Asian immigration. The provision giving preference to immigrants with family ties to US citizens was actually thought to limit how many Asians could come under the law. Since Asians were only .55% of the population in 1960, the drafters of the law assumed the number of family members of Asian Americans who would seek immigration to the US would be proportional (LOL). The Hart-Celler Act was intended to lift the restrictions on “ethnic” white immigration that had been put in place in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act:
The new law got rid of lopsided national quotas and considered immigrants based on their skills and close relationships to people who were already in the U.S.
It was a way for politicians to speak to one particular demographic that was growing in political power, explained Mae Ngai, a history professor at Columbia University. In the 1950s and 60s, “ethnic” whites — the children and grandchildren of Italians, Eastern European Jews, Hungarians, and others who had come to America at the turn of the 20th century before preferential national quotas were put in place — were becoming a voting bloc and playing active roles in unions like the AFL-CIO. They became a big force behind the election of a super-majority of democrats in both houses of Congress.
It is important to state that the historical trends in this article are true in aggregate, not individually. Neither Jews nor Catholics or blacks have ever voted 100% for any party. Jews voted 90% for Roosevelt and Truman, 83% for Kennedy, and 90% for Johnson (against Barry Goldwater, an Episcopalian with Polish- and English-Jewish paternal grandparents). They supported Hubert Humphrey against Nixon at 81%. Jewish support for Democrats then fluctuated until Clinton, who they supported at 80%. Catholics went for Roosevelt between 70%-80% and voted for New Deal candidates between 62% and 78% (Kennedy). After Kennedy, who may have won his very narrow victory due to strong Catholic support, Catholic allegiance to the Democratic Party began to wane. Catholics backed Nixon’s reelection over McGovern 54%-46% in 1972 and are now considered roughly 50/50 in national elections. (Also remember that the Catholic Church has been losing members for decades, both in the US and globally. There are more ex-Catholics than any other religion.) The 1932 election was the last time a Republican candidate won the majority of black votes (black America had been quite loyal to the party that emancipated them from slavery). Since then, blacks have steadily increased their support for Democrats and have voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since Carter in 1976 at above 80% (with a peak in 2008 for Obama at 95%). When the NDC lost its Southern white constituency and some of its white Catholic support after 1964, the black vote became proportionately more important to Democrats.
The NDC lives on — just barely — to this day. This is a snapshot of the white American Left in 2021 (most people understand where black Americans come from politically):
- Joe Biden — only the second Catholic President (both Irish Catholic) after John F. Kennedy. Was first elected Senator of Delaware at the age of 29 in 1972. If anyone thinks that Biden’s Catholicism can’t be as ethno-religiously tribal as the 1880s, take a look at this article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/vatican-warns-us-bishops-about-rebuking-biden-other-catholic-pols/ar-BB1gApD0
- Nancy Pelosi — Italian-American Catholic, first elected to the House of Representatives of one of the safest Democratic districts in the country in 1987, although involved in Democratic Party politics since childhood. Her father was a Democratic congressman from 1939–1947 and subsequently Mayor of Baltimore from 1947–1959. Her brother became Mayor of Baltimore from 1967–1971.
- Charles Schumer — born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family from Ukraine, began his political career at the state level in New York in 1975, first elected to congress in 1981.
- Andrew Cuomo — Italian-American Catholic who began in politics in Bill Clinton’s cabinet and was elected Governor of New York in 2010. His father was Mario Cuomo, a second-gen Italian American and Governor of New York from 1983–1994. Mario Cuomo was widely considered the frontrunner for the Democratic Party candidacy in the 1992 presidential election until Bill Clinton stepped into the race. His reluctance to run for national office earned him the nickname “Hamlet on the Hudson.” There has never been an Italian president, although the first Catholic major-party presidential candidate, Al Smith (1928), was 1/4 Italian (and ½ Irish).
- Bernie Sanders — 1.5 gen Jewish American born in Brooklyn in 1941, attended the University of Chicago and became involved in both the youth organization of the Socialist League of American and SNCC. First ran for office as governor of Vermont in 1971. First elected to Congress in 1990 and became a Senator in 2007.
- Anthony Fauci — third-gen Italian American from Brooklyn, raised Catholic, born in 1940 (he is 80 years old). Joined the NIH after his residency in 1968, became chief of an NIAID laboratory in 1980 and director of the NIAID in 1984.
- Bill de Blasio — third-gen Italian on his mothers side and mixed white American on his father’s, but raised by his mother’s family. Both parents were accused of being communist sympathizers in the 50s.
- Chesa Boudin — born in NYC to Jewish members of the radical leftist organization the Weather Underground in 1980. At 14 months, his biological parents were convicted and imprisoned for their role in the triple murder that occurred during the 1981 Brink’s robbery, after which he was adopted by the more famous Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. His biological parents are descended from a long line of Marxists going back to the late 19th century.
This is why the Left is talking about a “Green New Deal.” Their greatest moment was the NDC half-century (1932–1980) — possibly the most spectacular non-military takeover of a nation-state in human history. But that coalition (the people who represent it and the policies that came out of it) has nearly been exhausted. They need a new “big tent” idea to continue operating in the 21st century. And they need the Asians they accidentally let in to continue to either follow their lead or be silent, like the Asians they silenced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
If there is one recurring theme on Asian Reddit, one thing that defines life as an Asian American, it is the glaring discrepancy between the Left’s rhetoric on race and “social justice” and the actual treatment Asian Americans receive both day-to-day and institutionally (i.e. affirmative action, mass media, the “bamboo ceiling”). I am telling you here and now: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
