The greatest pleasure in life is
doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
Who Will Protect Us From Our Protectors?
After Bernanke
This blog predicted some time back that Fed Vice Chair Yellen would be named to replace Bernanke. Over the past week, there has been a strange fixation with former Clinton/Obama economic adviser Larry Summers. But never fear: I soon saw a Hill piece about Dem Senators wanting to break the glass ceiling with Yellen; this is the easiest prediction I've made since I wrote Solicitor General Kagan would be nominated to SCOTUS. Does that mean I mean I support Yellen or Summers? Ask me if I prefer the devil or the deep blue sea; they are both easy money-printing maniacs ...
Grover Norquist on Immigration: Thumbs UP!
Immigration is a wonderful thing--Norquist largely reflects my point of view. He doesn't talk the Senate bill here, but you can hear towards the end when he is talking, like I've been mentioning, of fixing the disease, not the symptoms, of illegal entry--fix the broken working visa law. Whereas the Senate bill is a half measure I would reluctantly support, it tightly limits legal temp workers--sort of the economic equivalent of the US shooting itself in the foot. Why? Crony unionism. The unions see more workers not as growing the pie but as zero-sum, undermining compensation. The unions basically gave a face-saving, trivial quota to provide a facade of a compromise with Senate Republicans. Much ado has been made of the "conservative" anti-immigration populists, but in reality it was Sen. Obama whom, on behalf of the unions, sabotaged the 2007 immigration bill by kicking out the temp worker compromise. How ironic that immigrants would subsequently buy into Obama's "progressive" rhetoric.
I particularly loathe the populists whom are like the latest incarnation of the nativist Know-Nothings. They provide a facade they are concerned about the impact on social welfare net program costs. The correct response is to reform any programs, but I want to point out for the record we had strong immigration in the nineteenth century--well before the morally hazardous, corrupt domestic programs stemming from that blot on American history, the disastrous FDR Administration. I have pointed out my Franco-American roots; it was the Catholic Church, not the American government, whom assisted immigrants in need.
Here is an excerpt from a 1892 Gray Lady editorial, which could also be applied to Latinos or Asians:
It is said that there are more French-Canadians in New-England than there are in Canada....Mr. FRANCIS PARKMAN has ably pointed out their singular tenacity as a race and their extreme devotion to their religion, and their transplantation to the manufacturing centres and the rural districts in New-England means that Quebec is transferred bodily to Manchester and Fall River and Lowell. Not only does the French cure follow the French peasantry to their new homes, but he takes with him the parish church, the ample clerical residence, the convent for the sisters, and the parochial school for education of the children. He also perpetuates the French ideas and aspirations through the French language, and places all the obstacles possible in the way of the assimilation of these people to our American life and thought. There is something still more important in this transplantation. These people are in New-England as an organized body, whose motto is Notre religion, notre langue, et nos moeurs.... It is next to impossible to penetrate this mass of protected and secluded humanity with modern ideas or to induce them to interest themselves in democratic institutions and methods of government. They are almost as much out of reach as if they were living in a remote part of the Province of Quebec. No other people, except the Indians, are so persistent in repeating themselves. Where they halt they stay, and where they stay they multiply and cover the earth...There is apparently but one way in which this conquest can be arrested. That is to compel the use of the English language in all the schools of American citizen...when an immigration like that of the French Canadians in New-England takes possession of the centres of population and has the power to crowd out the less productive race in the struggle for the survival of the fittest, the free actions of American institutions is not strong enough to counteract these designs, and it is only by national legislation that the difficulty can be reached.
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| Anti-Franco/Catholic KKK Courtesy of Worcester Museum Lecture |
Know-Nothings in Bath [Maine] burned a church used by Roman Catholics on July 6, 1854. On October 14, 1854, Ellsworth Know-Nothings tarred and feathered Jesuit priest John Bapst and rode him out of town on a rail.
[D]uring the 1920′s worried that foreign culture, religion, and politics would contaminate Anglo-American society, some Maine people did not want the new immigrants in the state and joined a rejuvenated Ku Klux Klan...The new Klan was based on a debate over “Americanism”– what it meant to be an American and who deserved to be here. Thus, the Klan’s new agenda included hatred of foreigners.. Led by King Klegle F. Eugene Farnsworth of the Maine Realm, recruits targeted [mostly Franco-American] Catholics, Jews, and African Americans throughout the state. Claiming anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 members in 1924, Maine’s Ku Klux Klan presented itself as a respectable social club. The Klan’s leaders or “klegles” recruited ministers, politicians, doctors, and other members of the community who made the Klan seem reputable. Fanning fears that immigrants might gain control of the U.S. government, the Maine Klan organized as a political party. Their platform included the argument that Catholics could not be loyal to the United States because they owed allegiance to the Pope. Franco-Americans fought Klan members in street demonstrations in Greenville, Fairfield, and on the bridge between Biddeford and Saco in 1924.
With 150,000 members in 1920, Maine possessed the largest, most active Ku Klux Klan outside of the south. This group targeted the Franco-Americans rather than the African Americans, because they were Catholic, different than the people that were already in Maine. They were scared that the number of these people would become so large that they would take over Maine. Klan members would include 1 out of every 10 English-speaking Mainers. Businessmen, bankers, ministers, politicians, and newspaper editors were the main starters of this Klan.
This so-called "Second Klan" aimed its propaganda not only at African-Americans, but also at Catholics, Jews and "foreigners." In 1920s Maine, the African-American and Jewish populations were quite small, where they existed at all. There can be little doubt that the Klan's main focus in Maine was Catholic "foreigners," the vast majority of whom were the relative newcomers from Québec. The Second Klan was part of a wider Nativist movement representing a backlash against the wave of immigration, much of it from southern and eastern Europe, which was perceived as a threat to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of the United States.From a decent Irish-American op-ed in the Gray Lady on the meaning of St. Patrick's Day:
St. Patrick’s Day isn’t really about Ireland. It’s about our ancestors leaving that country, often in bitter circumstances, and risking everything on a hazardous journey and being met with fierce hostility and scorn. It is about immigrants struggling, and mostly succeeding, in their new life, or making success possible for their children and grandchildren.The Catholic Gaelic Irish were the first cohort consistently labeled as “immigrants” in the modern, quasi-pejorative sense, and their experience established a stereotype, a template, applied ever since to whichever national or ethnic group happened to be the latest impoverished arrivals: French-Canadians, Chinese, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics. It’s embarrassing to listen to prosperous 21st-century Americans with Irish surnames lavish on Mexican or Central American immigrants the same slurs — “dark,” “dirty,” “violent,” “ignorant” — once slapped on our own, possibly shoeless, forebears. The Irish were seen as unclean, immoral and dangerously in thrall to a bizarre religion. They were said to be peculiarly prone to violence.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Bob Gorrell and Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups Redux
The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"
