PETRUCCI: Entitlement, hate pervade US history
“Look at the hordes of Dutch and Irish thieves and vagabonds, roaming about our streets, picking up rags and bones ... Look at the English and Scotch pick-pockets and burglars, crowding our places of amusement ... Look at the Italians and French mountebanks, roaming the streets of every city in the Union ... Look at the wandering Jews, crowding out business streets with their shops as receptacles for stolen goods, encouraging thievery and dishonestly among our citizens ... Look at the Irish and Dutch grocers and rum-sellers monopolizing the business which properly belongs to our native and true-born citizens.” While this excerpt might sound like a President Donald J. Trump who accidentally traveled too far back in his time machine on the hunt for his distant cousin and former President Ronald Reagan, it is actually an 1844 election circular from the “Know-Nothings” political party and published in the New York Daily Plebeian.
Fast forward to Saturday, Oct. 27. A 48 year-old man stormed into Tree of Life Congregation and opened fire on Jewish worshippers, taking 11 lives. That same week, a white 51-year-old man, was accused of fatally shooting two Black people in a Louisville, Ky. grocery store after his failed attempt to enter a Black church.
So, what do the “Know-Nothings” party’s detest for the immigrants supposedly taking the jobs and goods which presumably belong to “native and true-born citizens” and the tragedies experienced in the past couple weeks have to do with one another?
From the text "Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History," a wholly abridged version of United States history illuminates something significant about the the American worker’s literal and figurative relationship to land, who has created the American Dream and how the events of this week were as much about hate as they were about entitlement.
Land ownership is seen as one of the hallmarks of the so-called American Dream. In 1800, approximately 12 percent of the U.S. labor force worked for wages. The definition of economic independence was based on a family’s ability to sustain themselves. A large majority of goods like clothing and food were produced by the family for the family. Queue the male-headed homestead who settles together and works off of the land where wife, Debra, and seven children split wood, tend to animals and slosh around in the pre-in-ground pool called manure.
Farm families were linked by kinship networks within settlements. This allowed families to trade goods and limited their connection to large urban markets. As of 1820, just one-fifth of the North’s farm output reached a market outside of their local communities. While widespread inequality still existed between landless farm laborers and landowners, many landless workers were able to acquire land by working for land owners. The South was also largely agrarian and were already exploiting an enslaved labor force to produce goods for export.
A mix of factors, including transportation and communication improvements transformed the Northern American farmer’s relationship to the land and most importantly to the market. But it was the farm family’s growing population coupled with land scarcity which marked an important shift from relying on the family for goods to market dependence.
After the American Revolution, agreements like the Northwest Ordinance gave the U.S. government access to control land distribution and encouraged white settlement on these lands with the exclusion of Native Americans. Many farm families moved westward into Western New York, the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes leading to obvious conflicts with Natives who had already inhabited the lands for centuries.
In order to buy new land, many had to raise the cash to purchase this land. Thus, their products needed to have cash-value within the market rather than just familial utility. As families created more goods for market, they became more reliant on the purchase of goods from the market.
Enter: The Industrial Revolution. Many understand this period as one which was spurred by an innovation in technology and manufacture. Yet, it was the presence of a workforce unable to produce for themselves on their former land which forced them to work for others and ultimately sustain this revolution.
Some workers moved to industrial centers to sell their own labor. It was here that they were met with immigrant workers. Native-born white peoples migrated to urban centers and immigrants sold their labor to others for the first time in the name of “economic independence”. Competition between workers enabled divisions among workers to flourish. As urban populations grew, economic disparities between rich and poor widened.
As depicted in the above circular from 1844, political and business elites created a fear of immigrants. It was this fear of immigrants or otherness that aimed to further divide working class peoples who viewed each other as job competition rather than people who were equally disenfranchised by low wages and poor working conditions. Employees saw one another as the barrier to achieving greatness rather than questioning who benefited from these very chasms — their employers.
So, the competition between the white “native-born” and the “other," is one which has been brewing and manifesting itself for centuries. Whether it be in the form of land or work, those who have a right to “succeed” has always been the white settler, it has manifested itself in the form of entitlement. We see this in the case of the tragedies which occurred this week and in the demonization of the migrant “caravan” making its way to the U.S. Even when the white settler is himself disenfranchised by the emerging labor system, he will blame the other rather than looking above himself to see who is devouring capital to his detriment.
Francesca Petrucci is a School of Arts and Sciences senior double majoring in journalism and media studies and political science and minoring in Spanish. Her column, "The Annoying Vegan Millennial," runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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