Damn you, Hendrik Hertzberg. I was going to link George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island in reply to the continued screeching about how we shouldn’t brook any mosques within (fill in your number of steps, blocks, miles, or planets) near the World Trade Center, but then you had to go do it yourself. It’s worth linking, because the people screaming about the Cordoba House are often the same people who dress themselves up in late 18th century garb and claim to be speaking for the Founding Fathers themselves. But in that era, the building of synagogues was controversial—-the congregation in question set up in Rhode Island precisely because they were the first colony to wholly embrace religious freedom—-and the congregants wrote President Washington with no little concern to discover his views on whether or not they had a right to worship freely. He replied:
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
Ross Douthat, putting his faux historian hat on, has begged to differ with our first President. We should sanction bigotry, he argues, because bigots are an awesome weapon to force people to behave the way I’d personally like them to do so. Douthat argues there are two Americas, one that loves all this liberal freedom and tolerance stuff, and one that has screeched like little babies at the thought of all that. Of these two groups, he says:
But both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success.
For those following along at home, he’s basically saying that both Washington’s words of anti-bigotry and religious freedom and the KKK’s political stance have been beneficial to America. Sure, he doesn’t talk directly about the KKK or about Washington—-he’s smart enough to realize that saying, “The Klan had a point, they just took it too far,” isn’t how you win friends in 2010. But that’s one of the groups he’s talking about with his odious argument that odious nativism has been a good thing for our country because it caused foreigners to assimilate faster. Douthat’s in a tough spot. He knows well enough that the screaming about the Cordoba House owes itself to a long and ignoble tendency in American history that helped produce the KKK (the KKK of the 1920s more than the Reconstruction era one) and the Know-Nothings. He knows that the modern ugly bigotry has these roots, so he chooses to dignify this long history by soft-pedaling and outright lying about their stances, and refusing to name names. But I will. Here’s Douthat:
But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora — and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms, and quickly.
The “expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms” is a lie, as Jamelle Bouie points out.
But this is bad history; the nativists of 19th-century America weren’t much interested in having “new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture,” rather, the nativists of mid-19th-century America wanted to keep immigrants off of American shores. In its 1856 platform, the American Party—otherwise known as the “Know-Nothing Party”—pushed for the mass expulsion of poor immigrants, and declared that “Americans must rule America, and to this end native-born citizens should be selected for all State, Federal, and municipal offices of government employment, in preference to all others.”