Immigrant-hating and the Illinois democracy
Quick – how big a part of Illinois’ population in recent years has consisted of unauthorized immigrants. Ten percent? Fifteen? Twenty? In 2012, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, it was 3.7 percent. Not exactly a teeming horde, yet President Obama’s recent executive order to prevent the unnecessary deportation of such people – humane in intent and temporary and limited in its effects – excited the inner Jeremiah in the state’s Republican Congress members. “By blatantly bypassing Congress to execute this illegal executive order,” they warned in a joint statement, “the president is neglecting the interest of the American people, diminishing our national security [and] undermining the rule of law.”
Each of those assertions is vulnerable to arguments, but arguments have seldom prevailed in calming the fear and loathing with which so many of our people regard immigrants, authorized and otherwise. Within a few decades of settlement, Illinois’ Euro- Americans – themselves immigrants of course – had come to regard themselves as natives. Beginning in the 1830s and ’40s the arrival of Germans, who spoke an incomprehensible language, and Irish, who obeyed an incomprehensible church, stirred the natives to use the power of government of the people and for the people against these people.
Illinoisans in 1854, recalls Michael Burlingame, anticipated today’s immigrant hysterics in being convinced that immigrants were the source of “crime, corruption, pauperism, wage reductions [and] voter fraud.” The cure then as now was an America only by native Americans, in which naturalization (if the anti-immigrant American Party were put in power) would take 21, not five years, and Roman Catholics would be barred from public office. Like all single-issue parties, this one’s candidates never won power but it influenced those who did; it is plausible to wonder whether nativist votes didn’t help elect enough sympathetic legislators that Stephen A. Douglas went to Washington in 1858 as the next U.S. senator from Illinois instead of Abraham Lincoln.
The influx into post-Civil War Chicago of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe left Downstaters fearful of granting more seats in the General Assembly to politicians catering to (meaning meeting the needs of) a class of citizen many found suspect because of their origins. The General Assembly, like the defenders of the Alamo when faced by Santa Anna’s army, held out against the dark-skinned horde for a half a century by ignoring the Constitution and suspending decennial redistricting. Illinois by then was an urban state in social and economic terms, but the deliberate disenfranchisement of many hundreds of the thousands of urban Illinoisans helped it remain rural in political terms until a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s made such gerrymandering unconstitutional. Mid-Illinois was one of the chief beneficiaries of this rotten system, and thanks to it the region was able to maintain for decades a degree of political clout in statewide affairs to which its population no longer entitled it.
As argued by sociologist Steven M.
Buechler in The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois, 1850- 1920, the ambition of the early women’s rights activists was to change the fundamental institutions – marriage, work, politics – that kept all women second-class citizens. This social movement to empower women of all classes was aborted when the poor and working class came to include immigrant Catholics and Jews. Suffragist activists shifted their focus to politically palatable improvements in women’s legal status rather than their economic status; thus did women’s progress come to be measured by the right of educated women to practice law, for example, while immigrant women continued to be exploited in sweatshops.
The program of the defunct American Party was taken up by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s. Ever since, like a virus resident in the body, Klanism breaks out again when the body politic is under stress. Such a period was the 1920s, when a parade in the capital city of about 2,000 Klan members included a float calling for the closure of Ellis Island. Someone claiming to represent the Klan circulated recruitment material in Effingham and several northern Illinois towns recently, warning that unauthorized immigrants in this country are “destroying America.” Happily, locals didn’t join up, they called the cops.
The unease about immigrants can be seen, like a shadow on an x-ray, all over Illinois history. You can see it in the official lynching of the Haymarket anarchists, whose real crime was being German and strange, and in the anti-German (not just anti-Kaiser) war fever in World War I, and you can see it in the enduring distaste among Downstaters for Chicago as a place and an idea.
One hundred and sixty years ago the American Party asked Lincoln to run under their banner. Lincoln’s reply ought to be read by his party’s titular descendants. As Burlingame recounts it, Lincoln asked who, exactly, are these “native Americans”? “Do they not,” he said, “wear the breech-clout and carry the tomahawk? We pushed them from their homes and now turn upon others not fortunate enough to come over as early as we or our forefathers. Gentlemen of the committee, your party is wrong in principle.”
Contact James Krohe Jr. at [email protected]
