Laura Ingraham has been rightly condemned for her comments on Wednesday that “some of us no longer recognize our own country” due to “demographic changes that have been foisted upon us” against our will.
Granted, she did some of this foisting herself when she adopted a daughter from Central America, and that makes her comments harder to understand. But to define Americans in terms of demography is just something Americans should never do.
To be sure, there is a long history in this nation of descendants of earlier immigration waves resisting the arrival of those who come later. Once they’re here long enough to believe themselves natives, they often freely join those descended from earlier immigrants in objecting to others who came after them. The English and Scots resented the Irish. The Scots, English and Irish resented the Germans, who came from outside their own isles. The Scots, English, Irish and Germans resented the Poles, Jews, and Italians, who came from outside of northwestern Europe. The English, Scots, Irish, Germans, Poles, Jews and Italians later resented the Asians and Latin Americans, who had not come from Europe at all.
This was not true of all of them, naturally. Many of them were a lot more receptive. But it was not until after the second World War, with the common experience of making war, along with the Nazi example of where demographic tribalism ultimately leads, that the tribes really seemed to blend into one.
“A century ago the Irish were considered by many Americans as members of a separate and inferior race,” Michael Barone writes in his book, “The New Americans.” “Plenty of Anglo New Yorkers routinely used adjectives like ‘low-browed,’ ‘savage,’ ‘bestial,’ ‘wild,’ and ‘simian’ to describe the Irish Catholic ‘race.’”
The legendary cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed Irishmen almost as monkeys and drew Catholic bishops’ hats to resemble crocodiles jaws. As Andrew Greeley described the evolution of the Irish stereotype over the decades “by midcentury, he was a gorilla … His face was a mask of simian brutality and stupidity. It was only in the late nineteenth and early centuries that Paddy began to evolve.” It was not until 1960 that an Irish Catholic was elected as president, and he had the manner and bearing of an upper-class WASP, who was accepted (though his father was not) as one of their own by the British aristocracy during his father’s disastrous term as ambassador in the late 1930’s.
The arc of the Kennedys, though extreme and dramatic, is not unlike those of millions and millions of non-Anglo-Saxons as they passed over time into the larger American culture, as the Hispanics and Asians are doing today.
Some time ago, Hillel Fradkin, director of the Muslim Center at the Hudson Institute, described to a panel the celebration of Thanksgiving at the public school he attended on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Nobody there had an English last name or extraction, but everyone believed, with a fierce, intense passion, that those Pilgrim Fathers were theirs. That’s what this country does to those who come to it.
Exactly what damage does Ingraham think that Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and Nikki Haley have done to endanger her party and movement, let alone her country? In the face of the harm being done by her dolt of a president, they are trying to keep them alive.
