Our boast has been that we are a Christian people, with Morality at the center of our civilization…Besodden Europe, worse bescourged than by war, famine and pestilence, sends here her drink-makers, her drunkard-makers, and her drunkards, or her more temperate and habitual drinkers, with all their un-American ideas of morality and government; they are absorbed into our national life but they are not assimilated; with no liberty whence they came, they demand unrestricted liberty among us, even to license what we loathe…they dominate our Sabbath, they have set up for us their own moral standards, which are grossly immoral; they govern our great cities…until foreign control or conquest could achieve little more through armies and fleets.40
Similar emotions and fears powered the appearance of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Unlike its predecessor of the 1870s in the South, this short-lived but widespread movement was based chiefly in the Midwest and was devoted to anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and antimodernist sentiment, with negrophobia present but of lesser importance. It was deeply steeped in evangelical Protestantism and reflected among other things the agricultural depression of the 1920s and the pressure it was putting on the old farming communities and the old core populations (plus German Protestants).41
The end of open immigration in 1924 reduced the appeal of such movements.42 This measure in turn owed a great deal to two episodes of public hysteria that were strongly fed by nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment: the wave of anti-German feeling that swept the country in 1917–1918 after America entered World War I, and the “Red Scare” of 1919–1920. During the first, the religious preacher Billy Sunday declared that “if you turn hell upside down, you will find ‘made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.”43
These two movements both saw the widespread use of the term “Americanism,” or “one hundred percent Americanism,” and demands that immigrants must be either rapidly assimilated or deported. Hysteria and even violence against German Americans was especially strong in Texas. Stanley Coben has written that the Red Scare drew on certain enduring tendencies among many Americans: “hostility towards certain minority groups, especially radicals and recent immigrants, fanatical patriotism, and a belief that internal enemies seriously threaten national security.”44
Prohibition itself, of course, was later perceived to fail utterly even in its own terms; not merely to be rejected by so much of the population as to be unenforceable, but to have corrupted the police and judiciary, and given a critically important boost to the growth of organized crime. However, as Morone argues, even when such laws as the Volstead or Mann Acts failed, they left behind a new layer of federal bureaucracy, and above all, police—as in more recent times, the “war against drugs” and now the “war against terrorism.” Far from being the work of ultimately irrelevant fringe groups, these movements mobilized millions of people, greatly influenced wider political behavior, and helped transform the American state.
Irish American Nationalism
So deep was the defeat of Prohibition and the humiliation of the controversy over evolution that for some 50 years after Congress (under pressure from President Roosevelt) repealed Prohibition in 1933, it was assumed that no extensive movement of this kind could ever again take place in America.45 Thus Daniel Bell wrote in 1979 (just as the new Christian Right was about to make its appearance in response to the cultural, sexual, and black revolutions of the 1960s and defeat in Vietnam) that while this kind of “backlash” continued, it had been compelled to take a new form, that of nationalism, in the specific form of McCarthyite “Americanism” and anti-Communism.46
McCarthyism was indeed the classic example of a movement that brought together previously mutually hostile groups of white “middle class” Americans behind an essentially nationalist program strongly marked by traditions of Protestant cultural paranoia, but in ostensible defense of the American Creed of freedom, democracy, and law.47 It succeeded in uniting ultranationalism, “Lockean absolutism” (in Louis Hartz’s phrase), religious–cultural reaction, bitter class resentment, and (to a lesser and more veiled extent) anti-Semitism in one mass of hatred. McCarthyism was in some ways a precursor of the alliance between the white South and culturally conservative northern and midwestern white ethnic groups, which at the start of the twenty-first century forms a key foundation of the Republican Party, and of which nationalism is a vital element.
McCarthyism thus also symbolizes the way in which certain previously excluded ethnicities have been able to merge with the old core groups through militant nationalism. McCarthy was prefigured by the fascistic “radio priest,” Father Charles Coughlin, in the mid-1930s, who similarly mixed anti-Communism and antielitism, though in his case—due to the Depression and the legacy of Catholic social thought—this also included explicit attacks on capitalism, and was also much more overtly anti-Semitic.48
McCarthy himself was a Catholic Irish petty bourgeois from a farming background in Wisconsin (with a German American mother). His alliance with white Anglo-Saxon Protestant reaction was created by a mixture of anti-Communism and bitter class resentment. Viewed in its own terms, McCarthyism seems like a modern version of the irrational “great fears” of peasant Europe (as the “witch hunt” analogy is of course meant to suggest). Viewed as a rather typical petty-bourgeois nationalist maneuver to displace existing WASP elites by accusing them of lack of patriotism, it becomes much more comprehensible, and even rational.49
As noted in the last chapter, one aspect of populist nationalism in the United States has always been a very strong element of class antagonism against the “East Coast elites.” This is a hatred in which old “core” Protestant populations and newer immigrants can join, and has helped the populist nationalist tradition to become multiethnic. The origins of the strong strain of anti-intellectualism in this American tradition owe much to a fusion of class hostility to the educated elites and religious–cultural fear of their supposed culture of atheism.50
This anti-intellectual and antielitist sentiment is at the emotional heart not only of the Tea Parties, but of the widespread mass contempt on the Right for expert opinion on climate change. If it does not fuel belief in creationism (this, of course, has far older religious roots), it certainly contributes to a willingness among many Americans to accept creationism as a reasonable argument, and to react against attempts by the intellectual elites to keep it out of schools and universities. A Gallup survey of 2007 found 39 percent of Americans polled declaring that creationism (defined as a belief that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form sometime in the past 10,000 years) is “definitely true,” and another 27 percent declaring it is “probably true.” Only 18 percent declared that evolution is “definitely true”—though 35 percent declared it “probably true,” indicating a considerable number of people who think that both creationism and evolution are “probably true.”51
McCarthy can also be seen as in some ways the high—or low—point of a certain set of patterns in Irish America that had been developing for well over a century. Of course, his stance also reflected the strong anti-Communism of the Catholic Church at the time, in part because of the savage oppression to which it was being subjected by Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe.
Also of great importance, however, was bitter Irish American ethnic and class resentment of the old northeastern Protestant elites, stirred up by the quasi-racist contempt with which they were treated for so many years by those elites: the term “white nigger,” the vicious racist cartoons portraying the Irish as subhuman monkeys, the notices reading “no Irish need apply,” the continual, ostentatious social contempt—as well as, of course, wider anti-Catholic sentiments that in 1928 contributed to the humiliating defeat of Al Smith, the first Irish American candidate for president.
One way in which the Irish sought integration was by stressing their whiteness, to escape the hated “white nigger” epithet and join the ruling race. This established a pattern of cooperation in racial matters between the Irish and the white
South during the Civil War—and especially in the New York conscription riots of 1863, posed a real threat to Union victory. Always present under the surface, it became of great political importance once again from the 1960s on, when many Irish and other white ethnic working class groups joined the white South in quitting the Democratic Party in protest at supposed Democrat pandering to the blacks.52
Class, however, was always almost as important as race. “From start to finish, McCarthy got his largest response from the New York Irish when he attacked the institutions of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Establishment.”53 This rhetorical appeal to the masses against the treacherous elites and intellectuals has of course been a characteristic of radical nationalist movements since their beginnings.54 Rarely, however, has it been so explicit as in the United States. As a recent defender of McCarthy, Ann Coulter, has written, “[McCarthy’s] appeal was directed to a sturdier set—the mass of ordinary Americans…From McCarthy to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, it is conservatives who appeal to workers. When Republicans ignite the explosive power of the hardhats, liberals had better run for cover…McCarthy was beloved by workers. He had a gift for appealing to the great common sense of the American people.”55
This hatred of the intellectual elites was strengthened by the failure of the Irish Catholics as a group to advance beyond a certain socioeconomic level—lower middle class and upper working class—even as a much more recent immigrant group, the Jews, went rocketing past them as the twentieth century progressed. It became strongly associated with a measure of anti-intellectualism, in part because for a long time the Irish of America—in striking contrast to their compatriots at home in Ireland—failed to produce an intellectual class in proportion to their numbers.56
McCarthyism also appeared at a time when the Irish Americans as a group had reached the maximum political power they were to achieve in America, and had begun to decline politically. John F. Kennedy’s presidency and Tip O’Neill’s speakership were both a number of years in the future, but at the local level in New York and the other great northern cities, the power of the old Irish Democratic machine was already in decline, whittled away by other immigrant groups.57
One other factor should be kept in mind, because it fits into wider American patterns of defeat and the embittered nationalism that they help produce: the Irish sense of historical defeat, oppression, and dispossession by England. For if the Confederate South’s historical experience of defeat is unique among America’s geographical sections, this is certainly not true of its ethnic sections: Irish, Poles, and other American immigrants all brought with them ethnic memories of defeats even more terrible than those of the South. Even the southern Italians had been conquered, despised, and exploited by northern Italians, while Jews and Armenians had suffered infinitely more horrendously. Indeed, in many cases it was precisely the attacks and oppression they had suffered that brought the immigrants to America’s shores.
All these groups have had a certain tendency to compensate for past humiliation and suffering by glorying in American national power—and, of course, in many cases (the Irish included), seeking to harness that power to the achievement of their own national aims. Many have sought to overcome their exclusion from the centers of national power, wealth, and prestige by becoming “200 percent” American nationalists.58
The Irish American novelist and essayist Thomas Flanagan has attributed the contradictions in the character and work of John Ford (John Aloysius Feeney) to “his double sense of himself as both American and Irish…Like Eugene O’Neill, he believed that being Irish carried with it a burden of moods, stances, loyalties, quarrels with the world. Working with the most popular of American cultural forms, he was conscious of a majority culture, from which the Irish, despite their bellicose loyalty to it, stood somewhat apart.”59
Ford’s Fort Apache is a fascinating summary of some of these contradictions. The U.S. Army is portrayed as a kind of Irish clan, with a smattering of former Confederate soldiers and WASP officers. Toward the WASP upper classes, symbolized by Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) and his daughter, there is a mixture of resentment, contempt, admiration, and desire for intermarriage.60
As shown in Ford’s work, and in accordance with their self-image, cultural tradition, and economic status, the Irish Americans sought to overcome their exclusion not only through militant nationalism, but specifically through being “first in war.”61 They have sought with great success to turn the image of the fighting Irishman from a drunkard in a saloon to that of Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan leading his regiment into the Argonne in 1918, and the Sullivan brothers dying to a man on the USS Juneau off Guadalcanal in 1942. This success was rooted in the fact that it reflected something real about the Irish Americans—as demonstrated by Ford himself, who though well overage for military service, showed conspicuous courage and determination as a documentary filmmaker for the U.S. Navy in World War II. In Hollywood, the Irish American actor, James Cagney, played both Irish criminals and Irish soldiers.62
In seeking prestige and national integration through bellicose nationalism, the Irish strongly resembled the white South after the Civil War—and according to Grady McWhiney, came from the same ultimate roots anyway.63 John Ford’s admiration for the military record of the Confederacy emerges both from some of his Westerns and from his biopic of “history’s most decorated Marine,” Lieutenant General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, whose grandfather was killed fighting for the Confederacy.64
For part of the twentieth century the Irish Americans, like other ethnic groups, had a particular need to assert their military nationalism because this had been made suspect by their stance in the early years of both World War I and II. In the run-up to both wars, hostility toward Britain had led many of them to take up positions of fierce isolationism, which led to accusations of treachery when America did go to war.
However, during the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s “the Irish derived a strong temporary advantage from the McCarthy period…In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham [a Catholic college in New York with mainly lower middle class Irish American students] men would do the checking.”65
This image is still exploited by blowhard nationalist Irish American media figures like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, with their talk of America being “the greatest best country God ever gave man” [sic].66 Although both are of middle class backgrounds, in an effort to appeal to their specific audience, both have adopted a proletarian style, and O’Reilly has even allegedly constructed a fake Irish American working class background for himself.67
For a long time the Irish-dominated American Catholic Church itself was thoroughly nationalist, a spirit that only increased in the first years of the cold war: “Irish, Catholic and American became almost identical in the Irish-American mind.”68 Since the 1960s, however, this nationalistic orientation of the American Catholic Church as a whole has changed somewhat.
First, Vatican II licensed the development of liberal and reformist tendencies that have survived through subsequent decades of reaction. Then these were mobilized by opposition to the Vietnam War. But equally important, the Catholic Church is, of course, a universal church. Its inevitable and instinctive tendency to a certain internationalism and respect for international institutions can be seriously at odds with American nationalism. This has become apparent since the end of the cold war, when Pope John Paul II, a great hero of anti-Communism, took positions on international affairs that seriously angered American nationalists, including Catholics, by strongly criticizing Israel and opposing the Iraq War. No such international inhibition has affected the American fundamentalist churches, which are indeed now the most purely national Christian churches outside the Orthodox world.
The Christian Right
From the end of Prohibition to the 1970s, however, these fundamentalist churches were largely absent from direct politics. They were almost
in a form of “internal emigration,” so completely did the dominant culture appear to have shifted against them. One book of essays on the new religious Right of the 1980s and 1990s is revealingly entitled No Longer Exiles, and a 1979 essay on the Jewish tradition in America described demands to define the United States as a Christian nation “local eccentricities.” Max Lerner’s monumental work of 1957, American Civilization, devotes only 14 pages (703–717) out of 950 to a systematic examination of Christianity in America.69
This process was encouraged by the waves of mockery that fell on fundamentalists after the so-called Monkey Trial in 1925, when a teacher, John Thomas Scopes, was prosecuted by the state of Tennessee for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. The state won the case, but the arguments of the populist and evangelical leader, former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who appeared for the prosecution, were made to appear utterly foolish by the defense and the media (with Mencken inspired to some of his most ferocious sallies). Bryan declared that “all the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution. It would be better to destroy every other book ever written, and just save the first three verses of Genesis.”70
It seemed for decades that such figures would never again be taken seriously in national politics; in other words, that the United States would in fact take much the same path as the rest of the industrialized world.71 These decades strengthened still further the feeling among Protestant fundamentalists of being a persecuted minority, “strangers here, as in a foreign land,” as the hymn has it. This feeling has old roots in the Christian tradition, but also fed into wider sentiments of defeat, alienation, and paranoia on the Right in America.72
Thus Lyndon Johnson, whose entire political career occurred in the decades between the repeal of Prohibition and the emergence of the new Christian Right, never had to deal with this particular kind of politics at a national level. In their standard textbook on U.S. history, published in 1969, Samuel Eliot Morison and his colleagues entitled the section on Prohibition, the Scopes Trial, and the revived Ku Klux Klan, “Nineteenth Century America’s Last Stand.”73
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