United States | Trump in history

This land is our land

The current spasm of nativism is far from unique. That may be some consolation

He’ll make the trains run on time
|ATLANTA

A CENTURY ago many Americans fretted about a minority in their midst, which reputedly owed its first loyalty to an obscurantist faith, and which, in league with foreign conspirators, was poised to destabilise the country. In particular they suspected—as some Republican presidential candidates imply today—that houses of worship had become dens of sedition and vice. So it was that several states passed “convent-inspection” laws, to help uncover stashes of arms supposedly hidden in nunneries by Catholic traitors (as well as maidens immured against their will). Donald Trump, eat your heart out.

Actually Mr Trump’s plans for monitoring mosques are not the most egregious aspect of his anti-Muslim platform: the authorities of many mosques, having no wish to harbour extremists, already voluntarily liaise with the security services. Even uglier was the stampede, of governors and congressmen as well as presidential candidates, to insist that Barack Obama abjure his (rather paltry) plan to take in some 10,000 Syrian refugees next year. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz advocated the selective admission of Christian Syrians; Ben Carson compared dangerous refugees to rabid dogs. The fact that European passport-holders pose a much greater threat than fleeing Syrians barely disturbed this meanspirited chorus.

After the atrocities in Paris, Muslims have replaced the much-maligned Mexicans as the main object of nativist ire. Alas, the rhetorical potential of hypothetical Syrians was quickly exhausted; some candidates soon progressed from the Muslims they want to keep out to those already in America. Mr Trump pledges to deport the few Syrian refugees who have come (along with 11m undocumented migrants). He revived the discredited canard that thousands of Arabs in New Jersey celebrated the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001. Worst of all, perhaps, he entertained the idea of a register of American Muslims, a prospect at which even Mr Cruz balked. He later sought to finesse that, perhaps in characteristic confusion about his own policies, maybe in the confidence that his intended audience had already heard him. Of course, on Muslims, both he and Dr Carson have pre-Paris form: Dr Carson seemed to suggest that no Muslim should become president; Mr Trump failed to object when a questioner suggested America “get rid” of all of them.

These men do not speak for all Americans; but—not surprisingly, in the wake of the September 11th attacks—polls suggest their remarks do have a constituency and their bilious contest a prize. Muslims are the least-popular religious group in America, according to the Pew Research Centre. They are especially unloved among Republicans, who also tend to be most disenchanted with Barack Obama’s approach to counterterrorism. Sometimes, though, Mr Trump seems to be peddling something darker than anti-terror zeal. His strongman shtick, enthusiasm for waterboarding and nonchalance over the beating of a protester at a recent rally (“Maybe he should have been roughed up”) give off an incipient whiff of a kind of bouffant fascism.

To Americans alarmed by this intolerant turn, it may be some consolation to know that their country has taken and survived them before. For much of America’s history, Catholics were among the main targets of bigotry, often depicted as clannish, superstitious and loyal to a foreign power. That antipathy dated to colonial times, when one popular children’s game was called “Break the pope’s neck”; Guy Fawkes Night was widely celebrated until the revolution. Anti-Catholic agitation was exacerbated in the mid-19th century by escapees from Ireland’s potato famine and the arrival of Catholics from Germany. It manifested itself in the Know-Nothings, a secret society-cum-political movement, and in church-burnings and deadly riots. In California there was similar unease about the influx of Chinese.

Anti-papist feeling swelled again in the hardscrabble 1890s, this time directed in part at Italians and Slavs. Wayne Flynt, a historian at Auburn University, cites the lurid case of Sidney Catts, a Baptist minister from Alabama who became an insurance salesman in Florida and in 1917—on the back of his fearmongering—the state’s governor. Catts claimed Catholics were storing arms in a Tampa cathedral; there were whispers of a papal invasion, followed by the construction of a new Vatican in Palm Beach. Convents were scrutinised; anti-Catholic fraternities abounded. One such was consecrated precisely 100 years ago, on November 23rd 1915, when a giant cross was burned on a mountain outside Atlanta and, after a hiatus since Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn.

The Klan’s victims also included Jews, who, while never as reviled as American Catholics have been, were the subject of twin prejudices in the 1920s and 1930s. As Hasia Diner of New York University puts it, the upper stratum of society feared the Jews “were worming their way into elite institutions”, while some ordinary folk thought them “bent on undermining small-town American simplicity”. Among the latter camp’s champions was Henry Ford, who reproduced the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his Dearborn Independent, which was stocked in all his car showrooms. Jews were held to have caused the Wall Street crash and the first world war, and, as another war loomed, were allegedly bent on dragging America into it.

These are disparate incidents, but they suggest some patterns. One common circumstance is economic pain, whether that involves immigrants stealing jobs and resources or globalisation exporting them. Another is anxiety over national security, as in the interning of Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbour or the anti-communist witch-hunts of the cold war. A third is racial and religious unease. All these neuroses are combustibly combined in today’s post-recession panic about Muslims and Islamic State.

Get thee to a nunnery

America is by no means the only Western democracy prone to spasms of nativism. Nor is it the only country liable to forget—and so repeat—its misjudgments of earlier newcomers: look at Britain’s Jews and Ugandan Asians, both resented when they landed but now extolled as model minorities. Established immigrant communities can be uncharitable to later groups elsewhere, too. But there is a special disjuncture between America’s xenophobia and its lofty ideals, and sometimes (as in the past few weeks) a distinct ferocity in the way it is expressed, amplified as it is by the country’s competitive politics and First-Amendment outspokenness.

At bottom, the phenomenon has peculiarly American causes, sufficiently entrenched to be immune to the tightening of immigration rules since the 1920s or the varying moral claims of importunate foreigners: 61% of Americans, for example, opposed taking in Jewish children in 1939, slightly more than oppose admitting Syrian refugees now. One is the hope and conviction that the whole point of America is to protects its citizens, fortress-like, from perils and miscreants across the seas. Another is the slow, disconcerting evolution of a mostly white, Christian country to a more secular, patchwork nation.

Historians also speculate that some Americans’ intermittent hostility to outsiders is fundamentally religious in another way: a transmutation of a hunch that the devil walks among them, and that the faithful must be ever vigilant for his guises. That, on the other hand, is unlikely to apply to Mr Trump, whose acquaintance with Christianity seems almost as thin as his understanding of Islam.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "This land is our land"

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