From The Forever War (Nick Bryant, 2024) pp166-8
Only in 1965, the year that the United States became a truly multiethnic democracy, did the US government embrace the concept of a multiethnic immigration policy. Again, the architect was Lyndon Johnson, who ended racial quotas by signing the Immigration and Nationality Act, in a ceremony conducted with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop. And again, the white backlash was quick in coming.
Always it is worth remembering how many new immigrants returned home, rather than making their homes in America: of how a mass influx was followed by a mass exodus. Of the 55 million Eastern Europeans who migrated to America between 1846 and 1940, the historian Tara Zahra estimates that between 30 and 40 per cent returned home, after becoming disillusioned with life in America or feeling homesick — what she calls ‘the Great Departure’ .
Tensions between immigrant groups have been a recurring problem. At the outbreak of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to embroil the United States in the conflict partly grew from the fear of exposing ethnic divisions, and in particular the rivalries between Anglophiles and the Irish and Germans. ‘We definitely have to be neutral,’ Wilson warned in 1914, ‘since otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other.’
The notion of the ‘American dream’, the belief that hard work will be rewarded with economic abundance and social upward mobility, can also be hallucinatory. The US capitalist system has long been geared towards those at the top of the ladder — the slave owners, the robber barons, the ‘one percent’ – rather than strivers trying to make an ascent. Though colonial America was more economically egalitarian than other countries at the time, there was a steep rise in income equality from the beginning of the 19th century, with the fracturing taking place along familiar lines: urban versus rural, north versus south, white versus non-white.
America witnessed a ‘great levelling’ between 1910 and 1970, partly, as the economists Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter Lindert have pointed out, because the First World War destroyed so much private wealth and government intervened more aggressively to curb capitalist excess. But the wealth gap opened up again in the 1970s, and since then income polarisation has gone hand in hand with political polarisation. Between 1989 and 2016, the year that Trump won election, the wealth gap between the richest and poorest families more than doubled.
The very term ‘American Dream’ has also been misappropriated. First coined in the 1930s by the historian James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America — his publisher rejected his preferred title “The American Dream’ – the phrase was originally intended to describe a new national credo which rejected the materialism of the Gilded Age, and the greed of the super-wealthy robber barons. Adams was trying to advance a more egalitarian ethos, the ‘dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone’. As the historian Sarah Churchwell has pointed out, The American dream – far from validating a simple desire for personal advancement — once gave voice to principled appeals for a more generous way of life.’?” It was only in the post-war years that the phrase came to be associated primarily with consumerism, materialism and financial self-centredness.
From the Salem witch trials to the rise of QAnon, from PT. Barnum to Donald J. Trump, America has always been prone to fantasy, post-truthism, conspiratorialism, information manipulation and alternative facts. The Pilgrim Fathers made land believing that Satan would conspire against them, During the revolution, George III was cast as the anti-Christ, Hamilton, the father of the country’s financial system, was seen as the frontman for a cabal of Jewish financiers. The Confederates believed the north was conniving against them. Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published the horribly anti-Semitic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the 1970s, it was claimed that the moon landing had been faked – a drama produced by Walt Disney, Scripted by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The °90s were awash with conspiracies that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered their friend and aide, Vince Foster, who had taken his own life in 1993.
An ‘American tradition’ is how the historian Robert A. Goldberg described this strain of thinking in his 2001 study, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, which originated with the messianism of the first Anglo-Saxon settlers, and was fuelled thereafter by suspicion towards other racial, religious and ethnic groups. Conspiratorialism became a byproduct of exceptionalism and pluralism.” The author Kurt Andersen identified the same essential continuity in Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500Year History: ‘Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s, and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.” It brings to mind the poet Robert Penn Warren’s warning that ‘a crazy man is a large-scale menace only in a crazy society’.
Tgk1946's Blog 