Special to the Mirror by Paul Plante.
As a Viet Nam combat veteran, in many ways, I feel like an immigrant to this country, myself, despite the fact that I was actually born here.
In January of 1970, I was loaded on a plane at Bien Hoa airport in Viet Nam, for my journey to what then was called “the world,” and what a strange and hostile world it was to turn out to be.
I knew that I was in Viet Nam, of course, because a lot of smallish, brown-skinned people who called themselves Vietnamese, and had so for the last thousand years or better, told me they wanted me out of their country, because my kind did not belong there.
The same thing happened when I got off that plane back here, wherever “here” actually is.
We landed at some Air Force base out in California somewhere near San Francisco, where I had never been before, and the first thing I noticed was that when we got off the plane, there were buses waiting for us with ballistic chicken wire covering all the windows, just like the buses were in Viet Nam.
Silly me, I thought it was a bus sent back from Viet Nam, and they just hadn’t gotten around to taking the ballistic chicken wire from off the windows.
When I mentioned that to the driver, a civilian, he looked at me like I was some kind of fool, and he said, “boy, you been gone a long time, haven’t you!”
The ballistic chicken wire was to protect us from Americans throwing things through the windows at us, not Vietnamese trying to lob a hand grenade through the window.
When we got into San Francisco, at some armory I think it was, the bus literally pulled up on the sidewalk so when we got off the bus, the door to the armory was right in front of us, and we were hustled right in.
Inside, we were told not to go back outside in uniform, lest the mob descend on us and tear us apart.
The next day, after I was outprocessed, a taxi took me to the airport, whether Oakland or San Francisco, I’m not sure, since at that time I didn’t know there was a choice, and so I just told the taxi driver, “take me to the airprort.”
When I went it, it gave me the feeling of being a Christian entering into the floor of the Coliseum in Rome to be torn apart by lions for the amusement of the mob.
The corridor down which I had to go to get to my plane was lined on both sides with screeching, hollering, angry people spitting at us, and generally letting us know, like the Vietnamese had been doing, that our kind were not welcome here, nor wanted here, notwithstanding this happened to be where I was born.
And in many ways, I and other Viet Nam combat veterans have been treated as second-class citizens here, perhaps a step down from immigrants in some respects, ever since.
So when I read in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL., which Hillary Clinton claimed in The Hill was the “most progressive platform in history,” in the section “Fixing our Broken Immigration System” that “The United States was founded as, and continues to be, a country of immigrants from throughout the world,” in many ways, I felt I was one of them.
When I further read, “It is no coincidence that the Statue of Liberty is one of our most profound national symbols,” I had to ask myself, of what?
To a Viet Nam combat veteran, what is the Statue of Liberty a “profound national symbol” of, given that to the Vietnamese, we were foreign oppressors far worse than the French before us, precisely because we would not tolerate being done to us in this country what we were doing to the Vietnamese in theirs?
According to Wikipedia, the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté éclairant le monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in New York City, in the United States.
The copper statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and built by Gustave Eiffel, and was dedicated on October 28, 1886.
The Statue of Liberty is a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess, and she holds a torch above her head, and in her left arm carries a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) inscribed “July 4, 1776”, the date of the American Declaration of Independence.
A broken chain lies at her feet.
The statue became an icon of freedom and of the United States, and was a welcoming sight to immigrants arriving from abroad.
According to the National Park Service, the idea for the Statue of Liberty was first proposed by Édouard René de Laboulaye, the president of the French Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent and important political thinker of his time, and the project is traced to a mid-1865 conversation between Édouard René de Laboulaye, a staunch abolitionist and Frédéric Bartholdi, a sculptor. In after-dinner conversation at his home near Versailles.
Laboulaye, an ardent supporter of the Union in the American Civil War, is supposed to have said: “If a monument should rise in the United States, as a memorial to their independence, I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations.”
In another essay on their website, the Park Service suggested that Laboulaye was minded to honor the Union victory and its consequences, “With the abolition of slavery and the Union’s victory in the Civil War in 1865, Laboulaye’s wishes of freedom and democracy were turning into a reality in the United States.”
“In order to honor these achievements, Laboulaye proposed that a gift be built for the United States on behalf of France.”
“Laboulaye hoped that by calling attention to the recent achievements of the United States, the French people would be inspired to call for their own democracy in the face of a repressive monarchy.”
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So there is the Statue of Liberty, people, and while it might be a symbol to immigrants according to Hillary Clinton and her Democrats, who can invent American history on the fly to satisfy their political needs of the moment, in reality, it is a symbol to something else entirely – standing up to oppressive monarchy – a point the Vietnamese, who knew our political history better than most Americans, were well aware of, as they fought against the political repression we had brought to their country at the point of a bayonet, just like the Red Coats of English king George III tried to bring here back when.
The reality, people, is that in this nation, like returning Viet Nam veterans, immigrants have not always been welcome in this nation, and from the beginning, the subject of immigration has been a political football to be kicked around by the warring and feuding political factions in this country, to either benefit themselves, as the Democrats are now doing with respect to immigrants and immigration in their 2016 Party Manifesto, where they say,” We reject attempts to impose a religious test to bar immigrants or refugees from entering the United States, it is un-American and runs counter to the founding principles of this country,” which history shows to be totally untrue, and “Finally, Democrats will not stand for the divisive and derogatory language of Donald Trump, his offensive comments about immigrants and other communities have no place in our society, this kind of rhetoric must be rejected,” or to hurt the other faction, which takes us back to the beginning days of this country and the Alien and Sedition Acts and the anti-immigrant rhetoric that flourished in America back then in 1798, twenty-two (22) after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and eighty-eight (88) years before the Statue of Liberty was dedicated.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed by the Federalist-dominated 5th United States Congress and signed into law by President John Adams in 1798, and they made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen (Naturalization Act), as well as allowing the president to imprison and deport non-citizens who were deemed dangerous (Alien Friends Act of 1798) or who were from a hostile nation (Alien Enemy Act of 1798), and they criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government (Sedition Act of 1798).
The Federalists argued that the bills strengthened national security during an undeclared naval war with France.
The Alien Friends Act allowed the president to imprison or deport aliens considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” at any time, while the Alien Enemies Act authorized the president to do the same to any male citizen of a hostile nation above the age of fourteen during times of war, and The Alien Enemies Act remains in effect as Sections 21–24 of Title 50 of the United States Code.
According to the U.S. History.org website, clearly, the Federalists who were in charge of the federal government in 1798 saw foreigners as a deep threat to American security.
As one Federalist in Congress declared, there was no need to “invite hordes of Wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all the world, to come here with a basic view to distract our tranquillity.”
Not coincidentally, non-English ethnic groups had been among the core supporters of the Democratic-Republicans in 1796.
According to Wikipedia, opposition to the Federalists, the party of Alexander Hamilton, spurred by Democratic-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and Jemmy Madison, reached new heights with the Democratic-Republicans’ support of France, which was still in the midst of the French Revolution.
Some appeared to desire in the United States an event similar to the French Revolution, in order to overthrow the government.
When Democratic-Republicans in some states refused to enforce federal laws such as the 1791 whiskey tax, the first tax levied by the national government, and threatened to rebel, Federalists warned that they would send in the army to force them to capitulate.
As the unrest sweeping Europe spread to the United States, calls for secession reached unparalleled heights, and the fledgling nation seemed ready to tear itself apart.
Some of this agitation was seen by Federalists as having been caused by French and French-sympathizing immigrants so that the Alien Act and the Sedition Act were meant to guard against this perceived threat of anarchy.
Jumping forward in time, on December 7, 1941, responding to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the authority of the revised Alien Enemies Act to issue presidential proclamations 2525 (Alien Enemies – Japanese), 2526 (Alien Enemies – German), and 2527 (Alien Enemies – Italian), to apprehend, restrain, secure and remove Japanese, German, and Italian non-citizens.
On February 19, 1942, citing authority of the wartime powers of the president and commander in chief, Roosevelt made Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe military areas and giving him authority that superseded the authority of other executives under Proclamations 2525-7.
EO 9066 led to the internment of Japanese Americans, whereby over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the Pacific coast were forcibly relocated and forced to live in camps in the interior of the country, 62% of whom were United States citizens, not aliens.
Hostilities with Germany and Italy ended in May 1945, and with Japan in August.
Alien enemies, and US citizens, continued to be interned.
On July 14, 1945, President Harry S. Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2655, titled “Removal of Alien Enemies,” which proclamation gave the Attorney General authority regarding aliens enemies within the continental United States, to decide whether they are “dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States”, to order them removed, and to create regulations governing their removal.
The proclamation cited the revised Alien Enemies Act (50 U.S.C. 21–24) as to powers of the President to make public proclamation regarding “subjects of the hostile nation” more than fourteen years old and living inside the United States but not naturalized, to remove them as alien enemies, and to determine the means of removal.
On September 8, 1945, Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2662, titled “Removal of Alien Enemies”.
The revised Alien Enemies Act (50 U.S.C. 21–24) was cited as to removal of alien enemies in the interest of the public safety.
The United States had agreed, at a conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1942, to assume responsibility for the restraint and repatriation of dangerous alien enemies to be sent to the United States from Latin American republics, and in another inter-American conference in Mexico City on March 8, 1945, North and South American governments resolved to recommended adoption of measures to prevent aliens of hostile nations who were deemed to be security threats or threats to welfare from remaining in North or South America.
Truman gave authority to the Secretary of State to determine if alien enemies in the United States who were sent to the United States from Latin America, or who were in the United States illegally, endangered the welfare or security of the country.
The Secretary of State was given power to remove them “to destinations outside the limits of the Western Hemisphere”, to the former enemy territory of the governments to whose “principles of which (the alien enemies) have adhered”.
The Department of Justice was directed to assist the Secretary of State in their prompt removal.
On April 10, 1946, Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2685, titled “Removal of Alien Enemies”, citing the revised Alien Enemies Act (50 U.S.C. 21–24) as to its provision for the “removal from the United States of alien enemies in the interest of the public safety”.
In 1947 New York’s Ellis Island continued to incarcerate hundreds of ethnic Germans.
end quotes
For the record, Harry S. Truman was a Democrat, as was FDR.
So there is a bit of authentic reality, people, to counterbalance the inauthentic reality being fed to us on this question of immigration by Hillary Clinton and the Democrat party, who are making an issue of immigration for political gain for themselves, at the expense of the immigrants who are their pawns in this political struggle for political power here in the USA between the Democrats of Hillary Clinton and the Republicans of Donald Trump.
With the courtesy of the Cape Charles Mirror, I would like to continue this discussion in further installments, so thank you to the Cape Charles Mirror for providing me with this platform to do so, and thank you for your interest in this subject of importance to all of us, no matter which side of the issue you are on.
Carla Jasper says
Excellent! I look forward to further installments.
Thank you.
Carla Jasper
Paul Plante says
And here at this juncture, let me bring this discussion back around to its roots in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL. section “Fixing our Broken Immigration System,” which document Hillary Clinton recently proclaimed in The Hill to be the “most progressive platform in history,” although that statement is nothing more than a toxic mix of gibberish, drivel, pure poppycock and balderdash because the document is not progressive, it is coercive, as can be seen in the statement “Finally, Democrats will not stand for the divisive and derogatory language of Donald Trump, his offensive comments about immigrants and other communities have no place in our society, this kind of rhetoric must be rejected,” and to the point of this series of essays or disquisitions, which is to refute the statement therein that “The United States was founded as, and continues to be, a country of immigrants from throughout the world” with facts to the contrary from our own grade-school level American history, which apparently Hillary Clinton is totally devoid of knowledge of, unless she has set out to intentionally mislead people, instead.
So, two questions then:
1. Is that a true statement that the United States was founded as a country of immigrants from throughout the world?
2. Should it even matter?
The answer to no. 2, of course, can only be answered on a personal basis by each reader in here, let their conscience be their guide, and so I will instead turn our attention to no. 1 with this simple series of grade-school history questions:
A. Who were the Pilgrims?
B. Were the Pilgrims the immigrants who founded this nation as an immigrant nation for the rest of the immigrants to then be able to come to?
C. Were the Pilgrims the original citizens of the United States of America?
D. Did the Pilgrims introduce freedom of religious expression here in the United States of America and the concept of separation of church and state?
So who were they, people – were the Pilgrims immigrants, or were they in essence indentured servants or even slaves, if you will, of a bunch of speculator dudes in Jolly Olde known as The Adventurers, to whom the Pilgrims, who were colonists or settlers, not immigrants, since the Pilgrims were carrying England and its King and laws with them to a new land, not a new nation, were financially indebted?
According to MayflowerHistory.com, the Merchant Adventurers, who essentially owned the labor of the Pilgrims for a period of time in exchange for financing their passage, were the group of English investors whose capital funded the Pilgrims’ voyage on the Mayflower.
The joint-stock company they invested in hoped to make a profit from the fur trade, from fishing, and from any other method they could invent.
That, people is exploitation through colonization, not nation-building.
The Merchant Adventurers weren’t in it to start a new nation founded on immigrants, they were in it for their pockets.
The original number of investors in England owning a piece of the Pilgrims was initially about fifty, but began to drop substantially as various internal disputes arose.
After much financial problems, the flailing company reorganized in 1628, with James Shirley, Richard Andrews, John Beauchamp, and Timothy Hatherley, and a group of leading Plymouth colonists, buying out the remaining shareholders.
end quote
Notice that language, people, leading Plymouth colonists, not immigrants, because there will not be a United States of America for some time yet to come, and hence, there was no nation to be an immigrant to.
As to Plymouth Colony, it was an English colonial venture in North America from 1620 to 1691.
If my math is anywhere near right, people, that is seventy-one (71) years passing by there, where Plymouth remained an English colonial venture in North America, and hence, the Pilgrims, were British subjects; they were not immigrants, nor were they Americans.
At its height, Plymouth Colony occupied most of the southeastern portion of the modern state of Massachusetts.
Now, according to what should be a common history for all Americans, but obviously is not according to Hillary Clinton and the 2016 Democrat Manifesto above, which creates from whole cloth and thin air a competing alternate Democrat Party/Clinton version of American history, Plymouth Colony was founded by a group of Separatists initially known as the Brownist Emigration and Anglicans, who came to be known as the Pilgrims.
A group of separatists known to what should be our common American history history as the Brownist Emigration, not immigration as Hillary and her Democrats assert.
And note these words, as well: It was one of the earliest successful colonies to be founded by the English in North America, along with Jamestown and other settlements in Virginia, and the first sizable permanent English settlement in the New England region.
Colonies, people, colonies, and all of those people owed fealty and loyalty to an English king, not the United States of America, since there was no United States of America at that time.
Referring to CHAPTER XVIII, entitled “THE TOWN OF STEPHENTOWN.” of a work entitled “HISTORY OF The Seventeen Towns OF Rensselaer County FROM THE Colonization of the Manor of Rensselaerwyck to the Present Time” BY A. J. Weise, A.M., AS PUBLISHED IN THE TROY DAILY TIMES, TROY, N. Y. 1880, we find this description of early America, to wit:
The newly discovered country of America, which attracted in the seventeenth century a large number of emigrants from Europe to its shores, was of such vast an extent that very little of its true geography and topography was sufficiently known to furnish what might be thought correct and explicit information by which important boundary lines might be designated, as circumscribing the various land grants that had been conveyed by the kings of those countries that claimed portions of the continent by right of discovery.
For more than a century after the occupancy of the different portions of the territory of the new country by various companies and individual proprietors questions arose regarding the boundary lines of the greater and lesser divisions of land.
THE EASTERN BOUNDARY LINE DISPUTE.
The indefinite wording of the patent of New England granted by King James I. in 1620, was for a long time the cause of much controversy and belligerence respecting the position of the boundary line which should legally separate the province of New York from the territories of the adjacent New England provinces.
end quotes
Land grants in what is now the United States of America which had been conveyed by the kings of those countries that claimed portions of the continent by right of discovery!
This was not a nation founded by immigrants, people, how nice a soundbite that might sound.
It was property to be exploited for its natural products and raw materials.
For proof of that, let’s move west of the Pilgrims and north of Cape Charles to the Hudson River valley north of then New Amsterdam, now New York City, to the Manor of Rensselaerswyck, which is the name of a colonial estate in what is now New York state, specifically, a Dutch patroonship and later an English manor, owned by the van Rensselaer family which was located in what is now mainly the Capital District of New York in the United States.
The estate was originally deeded by the Dutch West India Company in 1630 to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a Dutch merchant and one of the company’s original directors.
end quotes
1630, people.
The Declaration of Independence won’t be until 1776, one hundred forty-six (146) years later.
And the Dutch West India Company.
No new nation founded by immigrants,
Getting back to Rensselaerswyck, it extended for miles on each side of the Hudson River near present-day Albany and included most of what are now the present New York counties of Albany and Rensselaer, as well as parts of Columbia and Greene counties.
Under the terms of the patroonship, the patroon had nearly total jurisdictional authority, establishing civil and criminal law, villages, a church (in part to record vital records, which were not done by the state until the late 19th century), and tenant farmers, not immigrants, were allowed to work on the land, but had to pay rent to the owners, and had no rights to property.
In addition, the Rensselaers harvested timber from the property.
The patroonship was maintained intact by Rensselaer descendants for more than two centuries, and at the time of the death of its last patroon, Stephen van Rensselaer III in 1839, his land holdings made him the tenth-richest American in history to date.
For length of operations, it was the most successful patroonship established under the West India Company system.
Long before the Pilgrims got here, upon discovery of the Albany area by Henry Hudson in 1609, the Dutch claimed the area and set up two forts to anchor it: Fort Nassau in 1614 and Fort Orange in 1624, both named for the Dutch noble House of Orange-Nassau which established a Dutch presence in the area, formally called New Netherland.
In June 1620, about the time the Pilgrims would be landing elsewhere as colonists, not immigrants, the Dutch West India Company was established by the States-General and given enormous powers in the New World.
In the name of the States-General, it had the authority to make contracts and alliances with princes and natives, build forts, administer justice, appoint and discharge governors, soldiers, and public officers, and promote trade in New Netherland.
In other words, this was an extension of Europe, not a new nation.
More to the point, it was a business venture, and in 1630, the managers of the West India Company, in order to attract capitalists to the colony, offered certain exclusive privileges to the members of the company.
The terms of the charter stated that any member who founded a colony of fifty adults in New Netherland within four years of the charter’s writing would be acknowledged as a patroon (feudal chief) of the territory to be colonized.
end quotes
Hey, dudes and yes, dudettes, too, how would you like to be a feudal chieftain?
How is that sounding to you?
Well if that tickles your fancy, have we got the deal for you!
Just get together a group of fifty of your friends and start a colony for us over there in the New World, and the gig is all yours!
And there is how it all started, people, regardless of what balderdash and twaddle Hillary and her Democrats want us to believe.
To illustrate that just a bit more, each patroon would have the chief command within their respective patroonship, having the sole rights to fish and hunt and if a city were to be founded within its boundaries, the patroon would have the power and authority to establish officers and magistrates, with each patroonship being free of taxes and tariffs for ten years following its founding.
Commercial venture, people, not a new nation founded by immigrants, as this following informs us:
The patroonships were precisely feudal: no colonists of a patroonship could leave the colony during their term of service without the written consent of the patroon, and the West India Company pledged itself to do everything in its power to apprehend and deliver up all fugitives from the patroon’s service.
end quotes
Indentured servants, people, immigrants, or slaves?
You be the judge.
Paul Plante says
“Finally, Democrats will not stand for the divisive and derogatory language of Donald Trump, his offensive comments about immigrants and other communities have no place in our society, this kind of rhetoric must be rejected.”
Those words, of course, as said above, are from the section entitled “Fixing our Broken Immigration System” as found in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL., which document Hillary Clinton wants us to believe is the “most progressive platform in history,” a specious claim which is hogwash and balderdash mixed in equal parts with toxic sludge as a binder to form a toxic mixture known as Hillary Clinton KOOL-AID, and in these increasingly violent times we find ourselves in, one must wonder at what Hillary Clinton is really getting at when she tells us, “Finally, Democrats will not stand for the divisive and derogatory language of Donald Trump,” and “his offensive comments about immigrants have no place in our society.”
Ah, yes, I see, Hillary, I certainly do see.
So, then, Hillary, what means of coercion do you intend to use on Trump to make him change his ways, to finally accept your stated premise that “the United States was founded as, and continues to be, a country of immigrants from throughout the world?”
From what version of American history do you derive that from, Hillary, pray tell, so as to be able to make a rational presentation to Trump that would convince him he was in any way wrong?
And while you are trying to find your sources, Hillary, how about these words on the subject of this nation’s founding, to wit:
In the case of the United States there is only the question of fact.
If they are in fact one people they are so in right, whatever the opinions and theories of statesmen, or even the decisions of courts; for the courts hold from the national authority, and the theories and opinions of statesmen may be erroneous.
end quotes
If they are in fact one people!
Are we?
Have we ever been?
If we are in fact a nation of immigrants, then how can we be one people?
And those words are from an American citizen in an earlier time named Orestes Brownson, held to be one of America’s most astute constitutional critics and friends, in CHAPTER IX, “THE UNITED STATES,” of the series of political essays entitled “THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC: ITS CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY” by O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D. NEW YORK, 1866, entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by P. O’SHEA, In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, wherein the author stated as follows:
In the volume which, with much diffidence, is here offered to the public, I have given, as far as I have considered it worth giving, my whole thought in a connected form on the nature, necessity, extent, authority, origin, ground, and constitution of government, and the unity, nationality, constitution, tendencies, and destiny of the American Republic.
end quote
Ah, yes, people – the destiny of the American Republic.
That happens to be us he is talking about there 151 years ago in 1866.
To discern where we are today, and here, let me say that I am for the safe and sane free movement of people into and out of this country, given that we are supposed to be what is called a “commercial republic,” not a despotism, which is what we had before when George III of England was in charge, let us go back in time to see where Brownson had us in 1866, so we can discern what might have changed in the interim time, to wit:
Certain it is that the States in the American Union have never existed and acted as severally sovereign states.
Prior to independence, they were colonies under the sovereignty of Great Britain, and since independence they have existed and acted only as states united.
The colonists, before separation and independence, were British subjects, and whatever rights the colonies had they held by charter or concession from the British crown.
The colonists never pretended to be other than British subjects, and the alleged ground of their complaint against the mother country was not that she had violated their natural rights as men, but their rights as British subjects — rights, as contended by the colonists, secured by the English constitution to all Englishmen or British subjects.
The denial to them of these common rights of Englishmen they called tyranny, and they defended themselves in throwing off their allegiance to George III., on the ground that he had, in their regard, become a tyrant, and the tyranny of the prince absolves the subject from his allegiance.
end quotes
WHOA!
Hold it!
Stop the presses here, before Hillary Clinton gets pulled through and rolled flat.
Look what this Brownson dude is saying here, people – the colonists never pretended to be other than British subjects!
But how can that be, when our own Hillary Clinton, herself a top Poly Sci grad from one of the most elite colleges not only in the United States, but the world as well, tells us we are really a nation of immigrants?
But if we were a nation of immigrants as Hillary Clinton says, then how on earth did they all end up being British subjects?
Did they all go the England first, to get naturalized over there as British subjects before coming here?
Getting back to Brownson for some clarification here, we have:
“Colonies are initial or inchoate states, and become complete states by declaring and winning their independence; and if the English colonies, now the United States, had separately declared and won their independence, they would unquestionably have become separately independent states, each invested by the law of nature with all the rights and powers of a sovereign nation.”
“But they did not do this.”
“They declared and won their independence jointly, and have since existed and exercised sovereignty only as states united, or the United States, that is, states sovereign in their union, but not in their separation.”
end quotes
Hmmmm, colonies are inchoate states, people, where the word “inchoate” is an adjective which means “just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.”
But wait, isn’t that making a mess out of Hillary’s alternate history here which says “the United States was founded as, and continues to be, a country of immigrants from throughout the world?”
Her founding myth seems to be coming apart at the seams here, according to Oreste Brownson, anyway:
As the colonial people were, though distributed in distinct colonies, still one people, the people of the United States, though distributed into distinct and mutually independent States, are yet one sovereign people, therefore a sovereign state or nation, and not a simple league or confederacy of nations.
end quotes
As the colonial people were, though distributed in distinct colonies, still one people, the people of the United States, though distributed into distinct and mutually independent States, are yet one sovereign people!
“One sovereign people,” people, not a nation of immigrants, which is a Tower of Babel nation destined, like Babylon, to fall.
Getting back to Brownson:
The United States having succeeded to the British sovereignty in the Anglo-American colonies, they came into possession of full national sovereignty, and have alone held and exercised it ever since independence became a fact.
end quotes
Anglo-American colonies!
That seems to exclude a lot of nationalities, does it not, and for the record, if you look closely at my last name and ponder on it for a moment, you will notice I have never been English, so I am not acting out of ethnic bias in here by quoting Brownson on the subject.
To the contrary, I am an American citizen born here, and by quoting Brownson, I am quoting authentic reality as I learned it in school, while rejecting, out of hand, the drivel and inauthentic reality being presented to us by the demagogue Hillary Clinton on behalf of her Democrat party, which brings to mind this political maxim introduced into American political thinking by Atticus in Atticus I for the Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser in Boston, Massachusetts on August 09, 1787, as follows:
The spirit of all parties is the same, and it ought to be received as a political maxim, that no violent party-man can be a good citizen.
end quotes
Getting back to Brownson and the founding of this nation:
The old Articles of Confederation, it is conceded, were framed on the assumption that the States are severally sovereign; but the several States, at the same time, were regarded as forming one nation, and, though divided into separate States, the people were regarded as one people.
end quotes
We keep coming back to that, don’t we – regarded as one people!
And back to Brownson:
The Legislature of New York, as early as 1782, calls for an essential change in the Articles of Confederation, as proved to be inadequate to secure the peace, security, and prosperity of “the nation.”
All the proceedings that preceded and led to the call of the convention of 1787 were based on the assumption that the people of the United States were one people.
That the united colonies by independence became united States, and formed really one and only one people, was in the thought, the belief, the instinct of the great mass of the people.
They acted as they existed through State as they had previously acted through colonial organization, for in throwing off the British authority there was no other organization through which they could act.
Moreover, the Articles of Confederation were drawn up and adopted during the transition from colonial dependence to national independence.
Independence was declared in 1776, but it was not a fact till 1782, when the preliminary treaty acknowledging it was signed at Paris.
Till then the United States were not an independent nation; they were only a people struggling to become an independent nation.
end quotes
Only a people struggling to become an independent nation!
That sounds quite a bit different than the divisive version of American history Hillary Clinton is trying to sell us, doesn’t it?
Getting back to Brownson:
What then is the fact?
Are the United States politically one people, nation, state, or republic, or are they simply independent sovereign states united in close and intimate alliance, league, or federation, by a mutual pact or agreement?
Were the people of the United States who ordained and established the written constitution one people, or were they not?
A people hitherto a part of another people, or subject to another sovereign, is not in fact a nation, because they have declared themselves independent, and have organized a government, and are engaged in what promises to be a successful struggle for independence.
The struggle must be practically over; the former sovereign must have practically abandoned the effort to reduce them to submission, or to bring them back under his authority, and if he continues it, does it as a matter of mere form; the postulant must have proved his ability to maintain civil government, and to fulfil within and without the obligations which attach to every civilized nation, before it can be recognized as an independent sovereign nation; because before it is not a fact that it is a sovereign nation.
The prior sovereign, when no longer willing or able to vindicate his right, has lost it, and no one is any longer bound to respect it, for humanity demands not martyrs to lost causes.
This doctrine may seem harsh, and untenable even, to those sickly philanthropists who are always weeping over extinct or oppressed nationalities; but nationality in modern civilization is a fact, not a right antecedent to the fact.
end quotes
There, people, is a much more accurate view of this nation’s founding than the toxic crap Hillary Clinton and her Democrats are spewing.
As to people, human beings as opposed to the appellation “immigrant,” Brownson states as follows:
The vicissitudes of time, the revolutions of states and empires, migration, conquest, and intermixture of families and races, have rendered it impracticable, even if it were desirable, to distribute people into nations according to their relations of blood or descent.
There is no civilized nation now existing that has been developed from a common ancestor this side of Adam, and the most mixed are the most civilized.
The nearer a nation approaches to a primitive people of pure unmixed blood, the farther removed it is from civilization.
All civilized nations are political nations, and are founded in the fact, not on rights antecedent to the fact.
A hundred or more lost nationalities went to form the Roman empire, and who can tell us how many layers of crushed nationalities, superposed one upon another, serve for the foundation of the present French, English, Russian, Austrian, or Spanish nationalities?
What other title to independence and sovereignty, than the fact, can you plead in behalf of any European nation?
Every one has absorbed and extinguished — no one can say how many — nationalities, that once had as good a right to be as it has, or can have.
Whether those nationalities have been justly extinguished or not, is no question for the statesman; it is the secret of Providence.
Failure in this world is not always a proof of wrong; nor success, of right.
end quotes
Sooooo.
Are we one people?
Or a nation of strangers, all in a very strange land where nothing makes any sense at all?
The candid world would like to know.
And in closing, while we ponder who we might in fact be, I would like to take us back again to August 09, 1787 and Atticus in Boston as follows:
If the temper and principles of the nation be wholly corrupt, their ruin is certain in the nature of things.
They must of necessity be slaves.
In vain did Brutus think to make the Romans free by killing Caesar.
The spirit of Romans had so totally forsaken them, that any man, who could assemble an army of desperadoes, might be a Caesar if he pleased.
In all these things the form of the government was not at fault.
Kearn Schemm says
Very glad you mentioned the German- and Italian- American Internment during WWII – most people think only the Japanese were interned. Immigration is a political football at present, but for good reason, wages have stagnated for decades due to a labor oversupply caused by mass legal (over one MILLION per year) and illegal (who knows how many) immigration. The surest way to get wages to raise is by limiting access to the labor market – unions have known this since the 1800s and have artificially limited access to the labor market to union members. Nations limit access to the labor market through immigration control. We need smaller numbers of legal immigrants and to cut off the flow of illegals completely.
Scott Wade says
Not sure what the point of this is. Is this meant to be a justification for stomping on civil liberties in times of national stress? Or a way to blame Democrats for Trump’s immigration policies? This is an example of cherrypicking the past to push a current agenda. When did Wikipedia become a legitimate resource for research?
A white guy that “feels” like an immigrant, gimme a break. You know why the caged bird sings, too right? Veterans were and are still treated harshly, but that doesn’t give one a monopoly on victimization.
These curious “smallish, brown-skinned people who called themselves Vietnamese,” are these similar to our “little brown brothers?” Were they not really Vietnamese? Is that what they called themselves? They weren’t the Nguồn or the Kinh?
Within ten years of the U.S. Constitution going into effect, the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by the Federalists. “Some appeared to desire in the United States an event similar to the French Revolution”- who exactly are these “some?” The Democratic-Republicans?
These acts infringed on 1st Amendment civil liberties. The “foreign threat” were newspaper editors and writers. The Sedition Act was meant to imprison U.S. citizens, or recent newcomers that wrote critical comments against the President. Many were Irish born, who had a dislike for pro-British policies of the Federalists. Also, a factor was the French, symbolized by Citizen Genet who paid for vessels to be outfitted to attack the French. He was recalled.
That’s quite a jump from 1798 to 1942, wasn’t there examples of Nativism in between? What about the American Party, known as the Know-Nothings?
Lincoln shut down newspapers in Baltimore, declaring martial law to help keep the border state of Maryland from seceding. He was a Republican, just sayin’.
What about the Espionage Act of 1918? This was designed to stifle anti-war and labor activists, such as Eugene V. Debs, who went to prison under it. It is still on the books to punish whistle-blowers by both parties, such as Chelsea Manning.
Executive Order 9066 was fully supported by both parties. It wasn’t a Demon-crat plot.
Oh yeah, Truman supported xenophobic policies and he was Democrat, just sayin’
How does one account for the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950’s under a Republican administration. Was this a Republican plot?
After September 11, 2001 the Republican administration under G. Bush signed into law the Patrion Act, allowing agents for a while anyway to undertake “sneak and peek” searches, in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. Yes, Obama re-upped it. That doesn’t make it right.
Immigrants have been used as pawns, and usually involves some sort of fear mongering. It has also been non-partisan, supported by most political leaders, the ones with power anyway.
Talk about “inauthentic reality” or an attempt to “invent American history on the fly to satisfy their political needs of the moment”
Paul Plante says
First of all, Scott Wade, I am unclear as to whose civil liberties are being “stomped on” here in what you are calling “times of national stress,” nor do you make any attempt whatsoever to identify who these people might be, and how this is happening, which is quite unhelpful to this discussion.
Is this meant to be a way to blame Democrats for Trump’s immigration policies?
Not hardly, and why would you think that?
And this is an not at all an example of cherrypicking the past to push a current agenda.
To the contrary, it is the first essay in a series on this subject, and since space is finite in here, I obviously cannot put the entire American history on this subject in here in one post.
And when did Wikipedia become a legitimate resource for research?
Years ago, as far as I know.
And can a white guy like me “feel” like an immigrant?
Why not, Scott Wade, since “immigrant” is really an empty word with any meaning you want to put to it?
As to these curious “smallish, brown-skinned people who called themselves Vietnamese,” the ones wearing ARVN uniforms and carrying rifles who were telling me and “my kind” to get out of their country back in 1969, and your question “are these similar to our ‘little brown brothers,’” I have no way of answering that, since I have no idea who you make reference to with the label “little brown brothers,” which is kind of a chauvinistic, insulting, demeaning and degrading way, isn’t it, to describe a people with a culture going back to at least 1100 A.D., long before this country came into existence?
Were they not really Vietnamese?
Is that what they called themselves?
As I recall it, anyway, yes, they did call themselves Vietnamese, but believe me, they were not there, armed as they were, to explain to me what name it was that they wanted to be called by.
They were there to tell me to get the hell out of their country, and that really was the gist of the whole conversation, to be truthful, as to why that was and how these people had come to that decision that they wanted us gone from their country, which they were not in a mood to share with us at that time.
As to your question, “Some appeared to desire in the United States an event similar to the French Revolution”- who exactly are these “some,” the answer is United States Vice President Thomas Jefferson.
According to what should be our common American history, writing to William Smith, John Adams’ secretary and future son-in-law, Thomas Jefferson seemed to welcome Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts:
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion . . . the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.”
And yes, the “foreign threat” did include newspaper editors and writers, as you say, but surely, Scott Wade, someone with your excellent grasp of American history recalls that the foreign threat really began with Edmond-Charles Genet, known to our history as Citizen Genet, the French ambassador to the United States during the French Revolution.
For those unfamiliar with Citizen Genet and the foreign threat he represented to this country, and how he ties in with these newspaper publishers and writers, the Citizen Genêt affair began in 1793 when he was dispatched to the United States to promote American support for France’s wars with Spain and Britain, this at a time when the United States of America was young and quite weak, and desired, therefore, to remain neutral in those foreign wars.
Genêt arrived in Charleston, South Carolina on the French frigate Embuscade on April 8, 1793, and instead of traveling to the then-capital of Philadelphia to present himself to U.S. President George Washington for accreditation, Genêt stayed in South Carolina where he was greeted with enthusiasm by the people of Charleston, who threw a string of parties in his honor.
As our history tells us, Genêt’s goals in South Carolina were to recruit and arm American privateers who would join French expeditions against the British and towards that end, he commissioned four privateering ships in total, including the Republicaine, the Anti-George, the Sans-Culotte, and the Citizen Genêt.
Working with French consul Michel Ange Bernard Mangourit, Genêt organized American volunteers to fight Britain’s Spanish allies in Florida, and after raising a militia, Genêt set sail toward Philadelphia, stopping along the way to marshal support for the French cause and arriving on May 18, 1793.
Genet’s actions endangered American neutrality in the war between France and Britain, which Washington had pointedly declared in his Neutrality Proclamation of April 22.
When Genêt met with Washington, he asked for what amounted to a suspension of American neutrality.
When turned down by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and informed that his actions were unacceptable, Genêt protested.
Meanwhile, Genêt’s privateers were capturing British ships, and his militia was preparing to move against the Spanish.
Genêt continued to defy the wishes of the United States government, capturing British ships and rearming them as privateers.
Washington sent Genêt an 8,000-word letter of complaint on Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s advice – one of the few situations in which the Federalist Alexander Hamilton and the Republican Jefferson agreed.
Genêt replied obstinately.
President Washington and his Cabinet then demanded that France recall Genêt as its Ambassador.
That caused a furor in the press at that time, with the pro-French newspapers of the Republicans attacking first Washington, and then John Adams during his presidency and the Quasi-War with France, which in turn resulted in the Sedition Act, an Act meant to imprison recent newcomers who wrote critical comments against the President, like James T. Callender, a political pamphleteer and journalist whose writing was controversial in his native Scotland and the United States who had a contemporary reputation as a “scandalmonger”, due to the content of some of his reporting.
In the United States, Callender was a central figure in the press wars between the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, and in the late 1790s, Thomas Jefferson sought him out to attack President John Adams, which Callender did.
As to George Washington, it is common knowledge in the United States of America that during his second administration, George Washington was severely attacked by radical opposition journalists, and serious attacks on the President began with Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793 and increased with the Genet affair of that year, but did not reach a crescendo until after Washington had signed and defended the Jay Treaty in 1795.
In the year before Washington’s retirement the attacks had become so extreme that “the President was assailed with a virulence such as few of his successors have suffered.”
The attacks against Washington were as varied as they were virulent, and according to his critics, he was ungrateful to France and he had conspired to destroy American liberty through a new alliance with Great Britain.
There, people, is the beginning of the foreign influence that was to result in the Sedition Acts and more importantly, the Alien Acts.
Bernard Mayo, author of “Myths and Men: Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson” (New York, 1963), 46-47, states that, “Few Chief Executives have been more grossly abused by the highly exaggerated American partisanship which has always amazed foreigners.”
According to the essay “Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Attack on George Washington,” Washington was the object of abuse because he was above partisanship, above petty political quarrels and most important to this discussion, he had resisted the conflict and strife of partisan division by pursuing, with high-minded determination, the establishment of a nation united in its opposition to foreign entanglements.
end quotes
A nation united in its opposition to foreign entanglements, people.
Is that who we are today, do you think?
Getting back to the essay “Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Attack on George Washington”:
In fact, however, it is a mistake to cast aside the assaults on Washington as nothing more than colorful but inconsequential examples of the extremes of journalistic rhetoric.
Newspaper abuse was admittedly common in the 1790s, and we might easily think that Washington was only receiving his natural share of that abuse.
But the truth is that Washington received much more than his share; much of the invective of the decade was consciously and concertedly directed at him.
In addition, because newspaper abuse was common, we have come to regard that abuse as little more than a literary trademark and style of newspapers of the age.
We have too often forgotten that the shrill editorials of the 1790s reveal the serious political polarities of the decade.
Conflict over basic political principles and policies, not consensus, characterized the era.
Journalists were not trying to better each other in some trite competition for the most sensational or novel editorials.
John Fenno, William Cobbett, Philip Freneau, Benjamin Franklin Bache and others were committed to definite political principles; the extremist editorials appearing in their newspapers were part of unrestrained campaigns by these men to have their principles prevail in a world that appeared to be at an important crossroad.
end quotes
I suggest that if Scott Wade were to go back to the top of the page and meditate on the title for a second, “ON IMMIGRATION AS A POLITICAL FOOTBALL IN AMERICA FROM THEN TO NOW!,” he would see that what I am doing in here as an American citizen concerned about these issues is connecting those times where those writers and publishers were struggling to have their principles prevail in a world that appeared to be at an important crossroad, to our times today, where we once again appear to be at an important crossroad in this country.
That is part of what the point of this is, people.
As to the American Party, known as the Know-Nothings, I wrote of them somewhat extensively in a previous essay in the CCM, so I won’t go back and repeat that information in here.
And how does one account for the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950’s under a Republican administration?
Fear, people, and hysteria, and yes, politics.
Why are we always so afraid?
A question for our times.
Stay tuned, more to come, and Scott Wade, thank you for your patriotism!
Chas Cornweller says
Although I know Mr. Wade, I do not profess to speak for him. I do know that he is a professor of history, here in the Tidewater area. I, also, looked up several of his references (history timeline anecdotes) and found them to be factual. That said, I would like to answer some of your questions, Mr. Plante.
First off, you ask, in your last statement to responding to Mr. Wade, and I quote,” what are we so afraid of?” That, is one juicy question. I’d love to field that one, if I may.
The answer comes down to economics, my dear Mr. Plante, economics. Economics and the fools who are running the show. Now, I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But I am not an ignorant fool either. And I am a pretty good judge of character. In other words, I can pretty well figure out, over a period of time, if someone is lying to me. Don’t try to sell me pudding and raisins, when I know damned well it’s crap and horseflies. The transparency of our present day national governance (notice I did not write government-more on that in a moment) is so sheer and obvious, even a dull knife such as myself can see the truth. Now, I used governance because it applies here. Governance: the action or manner of governing. Sway; control. As opposed to the term, government. Government: the governing body of a nation, state, or community. 2. The relation between a governed and a governing word. Do you see the difference? Because it’s very, very important. And it ties into your fear question.
The type of governance we are receiving from our present and from our past administrations has been one of a co-opted and dismantled Democratic Republic so far removed from that chamber in Philadelphia and those brilliant ideas of men, that it could only be compared to, as what was once an elegant Arabian horse, is now a sodden, muddy hog. That! Is what Mr. Wade was alluding to. We are no longer in Mr. Jefferson’s world. We are no longer thinking of human rights, such as John Adams envisioned. Mr. Washington, Dr. Franklin and James Monroe are dead and gone, gone to dust…never to return. Their ideas and dreams, just as vanquished. America is no longer the land of the free, home of the brave. We are Rome. We are as despotic as the Roman Senate complete with standing army and its mercenaries, games with bread and wine and a moral fiber to match. America is sick, wasteful, arrogant, cruel, selfish, blundering and short-sighted. Do I truly believe these things? Yes, I do. Do I feel every American represent these things? No, of course not. I know many, who give of their time, their talents, their labors to give back. I know many who have sacrificed greatly to benefit others. I know of families who have lost love ones in battle to preserve what little freedom most of us enjoy today. But, are we being taken advantage of? You bet the constitution we are. Who is taking advantage of us? That’s easy. Follow the money. Who has off shore accounts? Who makes policy within the banking industry? Who makes policy regarding our health care? Who makes policy and strategy and decides where the pieces are placed to bend societies to America’s will?
Mr. Plante, your biggest life experience, I gather-correct me if I am wrong- is Vietnam. I was a paperboy in nineteen seventy. I did not experience the heat, the smells, the damp or the culture of that country. I only read about it. I only saw the nightly news and heard the adults lamenting over whose child was being sent up next. First, thank you for your service. Secondly, I believe that war was wrong. I am sorry, but you were used. You could have died. And for what? For the people who didn’t even want you there? You could have died in a country that had been at war for nearly a thousand years, first with their neighbors to the north (China?) then the colonialist Dutch and then the French. And finally, to bail out France…America. With its finally tuned military and brand new Bell Howell helicopters and laser guided bombs and new-fangled computer driven artillery. Vietnam, just another proving ground for the Pentagon, while Gulf Oil and British Petroleum hurriedly drank the Bay of Tonkin dry of oil. Yeah, I am so very sorry to say this, but you were used. But that’s what governance does. Still does to this day.
So, what to fear today? Well, if I wanted to be really paranoid and frightened by every picture thrown up by the twenty-four seven cable news, pretty much everything. But, truly, what frightens me today…is ignorance. Like I said, I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But, some folks, who think that they are…are busy cutting and slashing through this world not realizing or caring to realize or even caring who or what they are bleeding dry. Immigration? Smoke and mirrors. Always has been. Taking our jobs? Really? I’d like to ask that commenter if they are willing to pick their own tomatoes, dig those roadside ditches? If not them, then who? They are not incorrect with the statement, you want wages to rise, curb immigration. That is a truth and a fact. And, with higher wages, come higher prices. Someone has to pocket those profits. Someone has to work at a low wage standard to keep prices down. It IS a conundrum. But, banishing brown skinned people with a different world view other than from up on that cross, only feeds those alligators in camo carrying semi-automatic weapons bent on acquiring the next barrel of crude. Governance breeds the fear. Fear gets the politicians elected. Ignorance keeps everyone blind to deeds of the elected officials.
I, too, hope you and Scott Wade continue the dialogue. He’s a smart guy. And he sure knows his history. Good day, Mr. Plante. Look forward to your next installment.
Paul Plante says
Chas Cornweller, let me say that it is always so good to hear from you in here, because in truth, Chas Cornweller, you are on your own side in here, just as I am on mine.
You speak for yourself, not some group or claque or faction, as do I, and Chas Cornweller, while we are on that subject of history, what we do in here with this oratorical back and forth comes to me through our democratic traditions in New York which came to us, not from the British, for sure, not from the Greeks, not from the Romans, including Cicero and Julius Caesar, who was not only a military genius, but a top orator, as well, at least according to Cicero; but from the Iroquois Indians who inhabited this area before the Europeans came.
The Iroquois were a powerful nation, Chas Cornweller, did you know that?
And they were an old nation, a highly civilized nation, notwithstanding their mighty war machine.
It was the Iroquois, Chas Cornweller, who taught the people of New York about democracy, a democracy where every person of adult age stands up in the circle, and has their unimpeded say on issues of importance to the people and the nation.
Ideas were advanced by the strength of the idea.
And that is the tradition I was taught when young, and to this day, I cleave to it, and by the way, of course I was used in VEET NAM; I was an infantryman, and we were used as CHUM, Chas Cornweller, you know, trash fish that you chop in pieces and throw on the water to draw in the game fish.
That is back in the days of infantrymen like me being literally a dime a dozen, throw away objects.
We were put out in the field to draw fire, Chas Cornweller, and then suppress it, or rather, give the artillery boys and the jet jocks with their bombs and napalm the chance to suppress it, for the sheer joy of blowing things up and causing widespread destruction.
Not a lot of need for intellectualizing there, and if you didn’t know that, or couldn’t accept that, and many could not grasp the concept, that yes, this government over here and this people over here were more than happy to have your life sacrificed over there to keep them damn COMMIES out of here along with Panama Red and the white horse he rode in on, you were a fool that stood a real good chance of being dead before the sun came up the next day, and that was that.
If you could accept that, Chas Cornweller, and think about it rationally for a moment here, what other choice did you really have; it was character building in ways being back over here would not have been.
But I digress, Chas Cornweller.
With regard to all those superfluous points that Scott Wade, ostensibly a professor of history here in the Tidewater area made above, Chas Cornweller, they are distractions away from the main theme of this thread which comes directly from its title as follows: ON IMMIGRATION AS A POLITICAL FOOTBALL IN AMERICA FROM THEN TO NOW!
Much of what he brought up on those supposed timelines, Chas Cornweller, and yes, you most certainly could look up several of his references (history timeline anecdotes) and find them to be factual; but notwithstanding all of that, it is relevant to nothing at all that we are discussing in here, so I did not bother responding to anything that may or may not have happened to poor Eugene Debs, who incidentally did not like Teddy Roosevelt or think much of him, if you can believe that, a point which Debs was not afraid to put in writing, as he did in “Roosevelt and His Regime” in 1907, where Debs stated:
I have since seen the nation mad with hero worship over this man Roosevelt, but I have not been impressed by it.
Very “great” men sometimes shrivel into very small ones and finally vanish in oblivion in the short space of a single generation.
The American people are more idolatrous than any “heathen” nation on earth.
They worship their popular “heroes,” while they last, with passionate frenzy, and with equal madness do they hunt down the sane “fools” who vainly try to teach them sense.
end quotes
Now, that is all true and factual, just as Scott Wade says, but, and here is the point, Chas Cornweller, and you are an intelligent and discerning man, so I am sure you see it – what on earth does any of that have to do with the subject of immigration being a political football in this country since its beginning days?
Yes, we as a compassionate and feeling people should feel sorry for Eugene Debs and what this nation did to him to persecute him for talking smack about Teddy Roosevelt, but that has nothing to do with immigration, so it is simply off-topic and a distraction.
My point in here is that immigration as a political issue is not new.
I know it is hard for the liberals and Clinton supporters to accept, as well as Hillary herself, but Trump is hardly breaking with any kind of American tradition with respect to immigration and national security.
So the only timeline that matters in this discussion, Chas Cornweller, the timeline Scott Ward either wittingly and willfully tried to steer us away from as part of his quite obvious partisan political agenda, or perhaps he did it in an unthinking manner, who can really tell, you know, is the timeline of Immigration Law stretching from right now today back several hundred years in an unbroken chain, right to this nation’s founding.
Said another way, Chas Cornweller, and this is the point our Scott Wade, ostensibly a professor of history here in the Tidewater area, is either missing totally, or else is trying to divert us from, immigration or entry of people of foreign birth not citizens of this country into this country has been a matter of national security right from the get-go, and in an unbroken chain undisturbed by the jailing of Eugene Debs, who actually remains a hero to some in this country, it remains so today, and like it or not, responsibility for our national security vis-à-vis immigration control has been vested in the Chief Magistrate of this country who right now happens to be Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton.
And that takes us back to Citizen Genet, Chas Cornweller, and sedition, which is defined in here as conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state, as Hillary Clinton very much seems to be doing today in this country, those being two important subjects relevant to this discussion that our Scott Wade blew right past in his efforts to take this discussion off topic.
As we are talking of historians, Chas Cornweller, this following on Citizen Genet comes to us from the Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State, to wit:
American foreign policy in the 1790s was dominated by the events surrounding the French Revolution.
end quotes
Foreign policy, Chas Cornweller, not Eugene Debs and the Espionage Act, or young George Bush and the Patriot Act, neither of which are relevant to this discussion.
Getting back to the Dept. of State Historian:
Following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792, the revolutionary French Government clashed with the monarchies of Spain and Great Britain.
French policymakers needed the United States to help defend France’s colonies in the Caribbean – either as a neutral supplier or as a military ally, and so they dispatched Edmond Charles Genêt, an experienced diplomat, as minister to the United States.
end quotes
Foreign meddling, Chas Cornweller, in our internal affairs.
Should we tolerate it?
And back to the historian:
The French assigned Genêt several additional duties: to obtain advance payments on debts that the U.S. owed to France, to negotiate a commercial treaty between the United States and France, and to implement portions of the 1778 Franco-American treaty which allowed attacks on British merchant shipping using ships based in American ports.
Genêt’s attempt to carry out his instructions would bring him into direct conflict with the U.S. Government.
end quotes
There is a part I thought that Scott Wade gave little thought to, to be truthful, that conflict Genet was to have with OUR government,, whether you happen to like it, or not.
According to the State Dept. Historian:
The French Revolution had already reinforced political differences within President George Washington’s Cabinet.
The Democratic-Republicans, led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, sympathized with the French revolutionaries.
The Federalists, led by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, believed that ties with Great Britain were more important.
end quotes
Foreign intrigue, Chas Cornweller, and foreign affairs, and national security, is there a scalpel sharp enough to separate them, do you think?
Getting back to history:
President Washington attempted to steer a neutral course between these two opposing views.
He believed that joining Great Britain or France in war could subject the comparatively weak United States to invasion by foreign armies and have disastrous economic consequences.
end quotes
The comparatively weak United States, Chas Cornweller – that is who the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Dept. of State was calling us, that before Barack Obama tuned us into the military powerhouse that we are today that has the rest of the world so scared of us today.
Getting back to the historian:
Genêt arrived in Charleston, South Carolina on April 8, 1793—calling himself “Citizen Genêt” to emphasize his pro-revolutionary stance.
Genêt immediately began to issue privateering commissions upon his arrival in Charleston, with the consent of South Carolina governor William Moultrie.
These commissions authorized the bearers, regardless of their country of origin, to seize British merchant ships and their cargo for personal profit, with the approval and protection of the French Government.
end quote
In a word, Chas Cornweller, this foreign subject was over here involving us in a foreign war, regardless of what our established federal government might have to say about it, which brings us to illegal plebiscites and sedition, as we see from this following.
When Genêt arrived in the U.S. capital of Philadelphia in May to present his credentials, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson informed him that the United States Cabinet considered the outfitting of French privateers in American ports to be a violation of the U.S. policy of neutrality.
Genêt ignored American warnings and allowed the outfitting of another French privateer, the Little Democrat.
Defying numerous warnings from U.S. officials to detain the ship in port, Genêt continued to ready the ship to sail.
Genêt also threatened to take his case to the American people, bypassing official government opposition.
Genêt failed to realize that Washington and his neutrality policy were politically popular, and that his pro-British enemies would depict such an attempt as foreign meddling in American domestic affairs.
end quotes
The important thing that Scott Ward passed right over, Chas Cornweller, was Genet’s attempt to have the American people themselves veto the national defense policy of a sitting American president, which is to say, Genet, a foreigner not a citizen of this country, but an agent for a foreign government, was trying to subvert our government, which is sedition.
Scott Ward missed the point that it is not the Sedition Acts of John Adams reign which are important, it is the concept of sedition, itself, that is important.
As Wikipedia tells us, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward insurrection against the established order.
Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority.
Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws.
Seditious words in writing are seditious libel.
A seditionist is one who engages in or promotes the interests of sedition.
end quotes
Is Hillary Clinton a seditionist, do you think, Chas Cornweller?
Is she a modern-day Citizen Genet who is taking her case concerning immigration and national security not to the president, but to the people directly to have them rebel and override the judgment of the president in regard to this matter?
In that, is Hillary Clinton trying to subvert our constitution while inciting discontent and resistance to lawful authority in this country?
Are those pertinent questions for our times, do you think?
And Scott Ward, please feel free to jump in here on that question.
As for the rest of us, stay tuned, people, more is yet to come!
Paul Plante says
For anyone just stopping by here for the first time, and are finding yourself wondering what in the heck Scott Wade, an esteemed history professer down here in the Tidewater, can possibly be talking about when he says above here, “Talk about ‘inauthentic reality’ or an attempt to ‘invent American history on the fly to satisfy their political needs of the moment,’” no, people, he is not raving.
What he is actually doing is quoting from the May 31, 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts that made then just plain Hillary Rodham, before she became the Hillary Clinton America knows and adores today, a national media sensation, as we were informed in April 13 2015 Counterpunch article “From Nixon Girl to Watergate – The Making of Hillary Clinton” by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair:
What first set Hillary in the national spotlight was her commencement address at Wellesley, the first time any student had been given this opportunity.
end quote
That national spotlight on Hillary that came on Hillary on May 31, 1969 then led in an unbroken chain from that moment to Hillary Clinton recently calling the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL., the “most progressive platform in history,” in The Hill, and in the section of that document entitled “Fixing our Broken Immigration System,” through that section, Hillary Clinton told us that “The United States was founded as, and continues to be, a country of immigrants from throughout the world,” and “It is no coincidence that the Statue of Liberty is one of our most profound national symbols.”
For those just now stopping by, it is from those two statements of Hillary Clinton that this series of essays, and the response of historian Scott Wade above here, have come from.
What message, people, is Hillary Clinton trying to send with that statement “The United States continues to be a country of immigrants from throughout the world,” and to whom?
And for what purpose?
What about those of us who are not immigrants?
What of us, Hillary?
Are we of little or no value in our own country, the way the Romans had become in theirs circa AD 410?
Is Hillary starting up an anti-Nativist party?
What is her game here?
Getting back to where this all started, with inauthentic reality and Hillary’s May 31, 1969 commencement speech that put her in the national spotlight where she has been ever since, Hillary was introduced at that momentous occasion in the political life of this nation on May 31, 1969 by Ruth M. Adams, ninth president of Wellesley College, who informed the 2,000 some souls in attendance, plus the national media, as follows:
In addition to inviting Senator Brooke to speak to them this morning, the Class of ’69 has expressed a desire [for a student] to speak to them and for them at this morning’s commencement.
There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be: Miss Hillary Rodham.
Member of this graduating class, she is a major in political science and a candidate for the degree with honors.
In four years she has combined academic ability with active service to the College, her junior year having served as a Vil Junior, and then as a member of Senate and during the past year as president of College Government and presiding officer of College Senate.
She is also cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us and it is a great pleasure to present to this audience Miss Hillary Rodham.
end quote
In her remarks, then-Hillary D. Rodham began as follows:
I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us—the 400 of us—and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now.
end quote
Now, people, although it might not yet be apparent, especially after Scott Wade has taken us around the barn a time or two by dragging poor victimized Eugene Debs into here along with the Espionage Act, neither of which have anything to do with immigration as a political football, although they make for a handy distraction if one want to change the subject, there is an unbroken chain of authentic reality which connects that moment in time when then just plain Hillary Rodham was telling some 2,000 people plus the media that she found herself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that her generation had been doing for quite a while, and this moment in time when you are reading these words in this thread, or essay, or disquisition, as you will have it be.
The subject of inauthentic reality came simultaneously into that speech and into the psyche or fabric of American political thought, as well as the lexicon, as follows:
Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education.
end quotes
What then Hillary Rodham was saying there, people, and what I am objecting to in here, in part, in fact, as a combat veteran, I find it insulting, is the underlying assertion Hillary makes in that statement that those of us in America outside the walls of elite Wellesley College, where Hillary was first set in the national spotlight on May 31, 1969, while I was an infantryman in Hau Nghia province in Viet Nam, are somehow burdened with this inauthentic reality Scott Wade then makes reference to above, a burden of inauthentic reality only a handful of people in this country can ever escape from, while the rest of us remain ignorant and benighted.
In a word, in here, in these essays, I am challenging that presumption of Hillary Clinton and yes, Scott Wade, that we are somehow burdened in our small lives as little people in America with inauthentic reality, so we are incapable of wrapping our smallish minds around such a politically-loaded question as immigration policy, and I am doing that challenging specifically on the subject of immigration in America being a political football from the time this nation was first formed as a nation.
In making that challenge, I am using the authentic reality of our American history to refute the inauthentic reality of the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL., that Hillary Clinton called the “most progressive platform in history,” in The Hill, although in truth, it isn’t and in fact, is far from being a progressive document.
Above here, Scott Wade says, “Not sure what the point of this is,” and you know what, people, that is both a good question, and a fair question, especially as it is coming from a history professor, and not just an unlettered common citizen.
The point, people, is this: the United States was not founded as a country of immigrants from throughout the world, and there is no evidence that either Hillary Clinton or Scott Wade can proffer to support that statement.
Which brings us, people, back to May 31, 1969 and that commencement speech of Hillary’s that Scott Wade borrows from above, where Hillary said this:
Many of the issues that I’ve mentioned—those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility—have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world.
But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar.
It talks about integrity and trust and respect.
end quotes
There it is, people, there is what underlies this discussion in here today – a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar – integrity and trust and respect.
With respect to those words, which are not trite at all, for the record, I am older than Hillary Clinton, and being older, I do not like being lied to by her, or fed a load of BULL**** billed as prime beef, such as that 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL., that Hillary Clinton called the “most progressive platform in history,” in The Hill, even though it is far from that, and so, given the opportunity, I am using it to challenge Hillary Clinton in public to support those statements with some facts.
In her May 31, 1969 commencement address, Hillary said “Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multimedia age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we’re feeling,” and isn’t that just so true, people?
But in all truth, when faced with that, it is up to each of us to endeavor to persevere, which is exactly what I am doing in here, with some help from Scott Wade.
And that takes us back to these most famous words from Hillary’s 1969 speech that Scott Wade borrows from above, to wit:
Within the context of a society that we perceive—now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see—but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men’s needs.
end quotes
It is in fact, people, our perception of it that it does hover often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men’s needs, and it is in an effort to avert the possibility of disaster in our country that I do speak out in here today.
That people, and Scott Wade, is what this is all about.
As to what was going on here at the time this country was founded, with respect to who was here, and why, I would for the moment refer us to an essay entitled “The ‘Non-Aligned Status’ of French Emigrés and Refugees in Philadelphia, 1793-1798” by Allan Potofsky, where we find as follows:
Yet, there were clear distinctions to be made, on the one hand, between the Counter-Revolution in the Vendée, the revolt of the refractory clergy, and noble defection to France’s military enemies; and, on the other hand, the 45,000 French nationals who had made a choice to flee from French territory to the United States and the uncharted American west.
Within the “American” émigré cluster, a third of the French nationals were in fact refugees rather than émigrés fleeing the slave rebellions of St.-Domingue after 1791.
As the census of 1790 counted 5 million men and women in the United States (neither enslaved nor Indian inhabitants were included), this meant that around 1% of the white population were émigrés or refugees taking flight from the French métropole or colonies.
Five thousand alone made their homes in the capital city of the United States, Philadelphia, meaning that in a city that numbered 28,500 in 1790, over one in six Philadelphians were French nationals.
end quotes
As Hillary so cogently noted in her May 31, 1969 commencement address which put her in the national spotlight where she has been ever since, “Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues,” and there is a case in point – are emigres and refugees really the same as “immigrants,” or doesn’t it even matter, given that we now live in a nation where words no longer have concrete meanings and in fact, are squishy enough to be used interchangeably?
Getting back to those emigres:
Far from accurately reflecting the bad press these men and women received as reactionary and treasonous aristocrats, the émigrés had made the affirmed choice of embracing the only other national republic in existence at the end of the eighteenth century.
The French contingent viewed Federalist America as a compelling destination because of its non-aligned status towards the warring powers of Europe proclaimed in April 1793.
In keeping with the American “struggle for neutrality,” George Washington’s controversial decision maintained the United States’ privileged position as a trading partner to all belligerent nations—until, that is, the 1794 Jay Treaty clearly tilted the young republic toward an Anglo-American commercial axis (Bowman).
The émigrés’ political motivation was thus based in the image of the United States as the anti-Coblence, the Austrian border city where Comte d’Artois, Lafayette, Dumouriez and other counter-revolutionaries fled in order to join the monarchical forces engaged in war on France.
By fleeing to America, the émigrés avoided all association with the 20,000 noble and bourgeois royalists that constituted the Counter-Revolutionary army of émigrés who took up arms, at one point or another, against the Republic (Boroumand).
ends quotes
“Fleeing to America,” people, is not the same thing as immigrating to America, and in my researches, one does not find the term “immigrant” applied to people coming to America in its founding days, as we shall further see.
So, that, people, paints a different picture of the founding days of this nation than does the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL., that Hillary Clinton called the “most progressive platform in history,” in The Hill, even though it isn’t, and with respect to all these statements being made in the media about immigration policy today, I thought it necessary to start at the beginning, and there I have done it.
Stay tuned, more to come, and as it is in all things in life, it is each of you who has to be the judge here, regardless of what side of the immigration question you are on, as to where the dividing line really is between the authentic reality of our actual American history as written, and the inauthentic reality as expressed in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL.
S. Anderson says
History is fascinatng. Your from then till now suggests its political now. It is but since ALL of the mainstream media are committing precision guided 24/7 attacks on the number one purveyor of immigration LAW its not political but back stabbing made up lies and distortions driving the discussion for the left. You can only put so many horses in the field before it turns to dust. Immigration should be called out on its number one effect, sustainability.
Paul Plante says
Good morning, S. Anderson.
There is a saying, “There is nothing new under the sun,” and so it is with the issue of immigration, or more properly, the allowing of people not citizens of this nation to enter this country, especially in a time of never-ending war such as we are embroiled in now, and the issue of the media, or the press, and the juvenile reportage we are getting from it today, especially on this issue of immigration.
“I deplore… the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them…”
“These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food.”
“From forty years’ experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.”
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.”
“Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”
“The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.”
“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
Who said those words, and when were they put in print?
The answer is, not recently, and certainly not by Donald Trump.
The author of those words was Virginian Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and this nation’s third president.
He was making those statements about the press circa 1804, give or take.
So what really has changed since then, besides nothing?
One of the reasons I started this thread on immigration as a political football, which it has been pretty much since Day One in this nation, quite frankly, was my disgust at the mindless, infantile reporting that we have been given on the subject of immigration by the MSM.
Reading that infantile crap, you would think we never had any laws governing immigration until Trump took office, which is simply wrong.
What makes Trump stand out here, and let me say I am not a fan of Trump, nor one of his supporters, is that however ham-handed he is doing it, he is enforcing the immigration laws as written, and he does stand out because his predecessor, the Marxist Barack Hussein Obama, was not enforcing those laws, by intent.
In FEDERALIST No. 37, titled “Concerning the Difficulties of the Convention in Devising a Proper Form of Government” to the People of the State of New York from the Daily Advertiser on Friday, January 11, 1788, James Madison, known as the “father of the Constitution,” and himself an American president, said “Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society,” and “An irregular and mutable legislation is not more an evil in itself than it is odious to the people.”
With respect to this issue of immigration, which has been turned into an issue of passion and hysteria by Hillary Clinton and the MSM, by and large, we most certainly have an irregular and mutable legislation which indeed is odious to the some of us, anyway.
What truly surprises me is how acceptable that state seems to be to so many people in this nation.
Does anyone have a clue as to why that is?
andy zahn says
The Lady is right where she belongs, in NY Harbor. Not to welcome law breakers but to welcome those who want a better life & are willing to EARN it.
When I was five my father took me to Coney Island from our home in NJ. On the bus to Penn Station, then the Hudson Tube train, now PATH, to NY & then the subway. I was in awe! First I had never seen so many people & then it seemed we went to the ends of the earth.
As each of my four sons turned five I gave them the same kind of experience by repeating another trip my dad took me on, which was a ride on the ferry to Staten Island from Manhatten. I loved the ferry ride & the hot dogs. Passing the Statue of Liberty, getting off & right back on without paying another five cent fare & again passing the Statue. What a beautiful work of art byEifel whose tower in Paris is also world famous.
For each son we drove from our home on the Jersey Shore to my home town of Irvington, took the 25 Springfield bus to Penn Station & then the Tube train to Canal Street. We walked to the Battery & then got on the ferry. On the trip with my youngest, returning from Staten Island and with the Statue in view we saw the beautiful Queen Mary outbound on its last sailing as an ocean liner. Oh, if only we had brought a camera!
There are two points to this story. First, this country loves immigrants but we want control over how many and what type we allow to enter. Certainly we don’t want criminals, terrorists or welfare types. Presidsent Trump is working 24/7 to this end, among others, while the liberals, the Fifth Column, objects to any sort of common sense.
Second, is the relationship and the importance of fathers to their children. All to often, by law, the father’s only duty is to pay child support if the father is know and if not known the taxpayers then assume this responsibility. A lack of family life is destroying our cities & beyond.
My father was my HERO! A soldier in WW I and a Naval officer in WW II. A city firefighter by profession. He took me places like Penn Station to see the trains arrive & Newark Airport. To Asbury Park to see the Morro Castle lying on the beach, a burned out hulk. We went to the shore & the mountains & he was my hunting & fishing buddy. He was my mentor & my DISCIPLINARIAN! I picked up his habits like working, supporting my family, gardening and providing food, shelter & heat. Doing & fixing things. A lot of learning took place on his days off and at the fire house & Naval base.
Paul Plante says
A point is in order here in reply to andy Zahn’s comment above that this country loves immigrants.
This thread is neither to bash immigrants, who I respect as fellow human beings, nor to advocate for immigrants.
Rather, I am taking a step back to look at the issue of immigration, itself, which has been inextricably bound up with this nation’s foreign policy and national defense right from the get-go.
For the record, I have good friends who are immigrants, and they brighten up my life considerably, which makes me glad that they are here, and when I was young, after WWII, I was surrounded by immigrants and many refugees fleeing violence in Europe, but this is not about them, at all.
It is about the issue of how people from other countries not citizens of this country get to cross our borders.
And as a person, a human being, I have no problem with people in other countries who want to have their customs and beliefs, just as I would ask them of me.
As an aside, this morning on the radio news, I heard some young person from Turkey, I think it was, lamenting about how people over here were being somehow unfair to him as an immigrant by making him feel unwelcome – “Your kind are not wanted here!”
When I heard that, I said join the parade, dude, maybe start going to group therapy with some Viet Nam veterans to talk about it, because they didn’t want us Viet Nam veterans here, either, and they were not ashamed or afraid to make that known to our faces, perhaps with a gob of spit to emphasize the point, and since there were no laws protecting the civil rights of disabled veterans in this country from hate speech like that by other Americans, they were free to have those opinions as American people, and believe me, they did.
What I am really doing in here, to get back to Scott Wade, our esteemed professor of history, and his existential question above, “Not sure what the point of this is,” is making a demonstration that the point is really quite simple – when it comes to immigration, no matter what side of the issue you are on, are we a nation of laws?
Or aren’t we, since there is not a third alternative.
If we have laws governing immigration, and it appears that we do, should a plebiscite of the people called by Hillary Clinton, who is coming to resemble a usurper like Marcus or Eugenius or Constantine III more and more lately, an alternate president, if you will, with her own band of followers such as those usurpers had, should her plebiscite be able to have veto on acts of the sitting president?
Does an American president really consider enforcement of the laws in terms of popularity?
Or does an American president enforce the law as written as a duty until that law is lawfully changed or amended or repealed?
Hillary’s faction would have it be the former, while not surprisingly, I am very much for the latter, and I base my position in part on FEDERALIST No. 43, “The Powers Conferred by the Constitution Further Considered,” to the People of the State of New York for the Independent Journal by James Madison, as follows:
6. “To guarantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government; to protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.”
In a confederacy founded on republican principles, and composed of republican members, the superintending government ought clearly to possess authority to defend the system against aristocratic or monarchial innovations.
The more intimate the nature of such a union may be, the greater interest have the members in the political institutions of each other; and the greater right to insist that the forms of government under which the compact was entered into should be SUBSTANTIALLY maintained.
end quotes
People from other countries, most certainly you are welcome here, but just as we in your country must respect your laws, in ours, it would not seem to be asking too much of you, if you want to come here from a foreign country with a foreign form of government, that here in our country, by the same Constitution Khizr Kahn pulled from his pocket at the Democrat National Convention to taunt Donald Trump with, although Kahn never opened it or pointed at anything inside of it, we have the greater right to insist that the forms of government under which the compact was entered into should be SUBSTANTIALLY maintained, and if you cannot accept that, and do not like that, you should really ask yourself why it would be that you would want to come here and live among us in the first place.
As Jemmy Madison said so very well in FEDERALIST No. 43, “The Powers Conferred by the Constitution Further Considered,” to the People of the State of New York for the Independent Journal:
Whenever the States may choose to substitute other republican forms, they have a right to do so, and to claim the federal guaranty for the latter.
The only restriction imposed on them is, that they shall not exchange republican for antirepublican Constitutions; a restriction which, it is presumed, will hardly be considered as a grievance.
end quote
Foreign people, you are welcome.
Foreign laws and foreign governments and foreign influence in our government. you are not.
And yes, it really is that simple, people.
andy zahn says
Are we a nation of laws? Ask the 9th Circuit. In my opinion the four judges who have now twice gotten between the President and his execution of his Constitutional & by U S Code sole power to control who enters this country is CRIMINAL. What has just happened is no different from any other obstruction of justice or of interferring with a police office in the performance of his legal duties.
With the present make-up of the U S Supreme Court there is a possibility of a 4 – 4 tie & then back to what Michelle Malkin calls tyrants in black robes, the 9th Circuit.
We are witnessing why the Constitution MUST be cast in stone and not subject to the feelings of judges or Justices. The Founding Fathers gave us a way to change the Constitution and they made it difficult ON PURPOSE.
After WW II we admitted many refugees & I remember in a short time some were demanding benefits from our government. We young brats got to yelling at them to go back where they came from.
I am so sick of hearing such as “rights”, “entitlements” & “single moms”. Just sitting there on your backside you have a “right” to housing, food, health care, college & trips to Florida on Spring break? If that is so, then why have most of us worked all our lives & saved our money to BUY all these essentials? We who have paid into Social Security & Medicare are ENTITLED to the benefits. We earned it & we paid for it. We who served in the military are ENTITLED to a flag over our coffin & some possible other benefits if we can get the help. In my view such as welfare & food stamps are NOT ENTITLEMENTS bur rather CHARITY, pure & simple.
Yeas ago we didn’t hear very much about RIGHTS but we did hear a LOT about RESPONSIBILITIES and we were taught that with every right there was a responsibility.
My father’s parents came from Germany/France & in his house German was spoken which gave him a leg up dealing with German POW’s. My mother’s father or grandfather came through Ellis Island & the spelling of her last name was changed. At Ellis Island there were REJECTS who were sent home. We wanted healthy people & people who wanted to be Americans and find work & support themselves. The Italians did masonry & built thingf. The Irish & Germans became cops & firefighters. The Jews became scholars, doctors, lawyers, bankers & retailers. Just a generality. At any rate they all fitted into a slot & helped build & MAKE THIS NATION “GREAT”.
Paul Plante says
Thank you, andy zahn.
The people on my father’s side were in Quebec, in Canada, in 1648.
They came there from France as EMIGRES – emigres being people who got the **** out of someplace, and ended up, as a result, like Alexander Hamilton, who came here from St. Croix as a foreigner, something his political enemies, and they were many and included Tommy Jefferson and our own Jemmy Madison, never let anyone forget, even calling him a Creole, which was a slur and was intended to be, someplace else to make their home, as my people did in Canada, before being recruited to come here to work in the mills, because the one thing the mills always needed to turn a profit for the rich who owned them, was a source of cheap labor.
Were they immigrants when they came here?
Did they have papers?
Who knows, I don’t, and frankly, I don’t care.
I was born here, and my father was born here, and he was a veteran of WWII, and that is all I have ever needed to know about it.
The father of the mother of my maternal grandfather came here from Bavaria, in Germany, and died of a fever down in South Carolina with Sherman’s Union Army, leaving behind a widow and children to fend for themselves.
Was he an immigrant?
Did he have papers?
Who knows, who cares?
As far as we are concerned, he was an American.
My German uncles fought in the U.S. Army against their German brethren in Germany, because my German uncles did not consider themselves German – they were Americans, and that was that, especially after WWII when they were back home here.
Despite the obvious fact that my roots can be traced back in time to elsewhere, this area having been covered by about a mile thick of ice only about 10,000 years ago or so, which made it hard for most people of any kind to live here, I have never thought of myself as coming from a family of immigrants, nor did either side of the family think of themselves as anything other than American.
Given that, as an American citizen born here of relatives back in some distant time who migrated to here from God knows where, I do not see where coming from immigrant roots constitutes a badge of honor of some type that would somehow render that person morally superior to someone like myself who was actually born here as a citizen.
But enough of that, since that is not what this thread is about, where my or anybody else’s family might have come from to get here – it is about whether or not we are a nation of laws, and whether we in fact have the right as a nation to control our borders, which is a policy question dividing this nation into two warring and feuding camps as can be seen from the incredible hype and hysteria being peddled in this PennLive article “Reworked Trump travel ban still attacks American values, advocates say” by Ivey DeJesus on March 06, 2017 at 3:41 PM, to wit:
Immigration advocates from across Pennsylvania on Monday decried President Trump’s new travel ban as bad policy and a strike against an inclusive America.
“This executive order is just like its previous version,” said Sundrop Carter, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration & Citizenship Coalition.
“It’s a direct attack on our country’s value and a direct attack on the values that we hold dear of creating diverse and inclusive and welcoming society.”
end quote
WHOA, stop the press conference for a minute, please!
Ah, Ms. Sundrop Carter, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration & Citizenship Coalition, could you please take a moment to clarify for us here where you came up with this charge of yours about “a direct attack on the values that we hold dear of creating diverse and inclusive and welcoming society?”
Where and when did those values come into existence, and who told you about them?
More to the point, how come I never heard about that growing up here?
What I grew up with as to our values is expressed quite well in the essay “America’s Founders and the Principles of Foreign Policy: Sovereign Independence, National Interests, and the Cause of Liberty in the World” by Matthew Spalding, Visiting Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation on October 15, 2010, as follows:
America’s Founders sought to define a national good that transcended local interests and prejudices.
The national good included the common benefits of self-defense and prosperity that all Americans would realize by participating in a large, commercial nation able to hold its own in an often hostile world.
But it was only with the constitutional rule of law that the higher purpose, or true national interest, of America could be realized.
That purpose was to demonstrate to all mankind the feasibility of self-government and the suitability of justice as the proper and sustainable ground for relations among nations and peoples.
The honor of striving for domestic and international justice would give moral purpose to the American character.
The United States would support, defend, and advance the cause of freedom everywhere.
It would be a refuge for the sober, industrious, and virtuous of the world, as well as for victims of persecution.
end quotes
A refuge for the sober, industrious, and virtuous of the world, as well as for victims of persecution – that is what I learned as a child this nation called the United States of America was to be.
And getting back to the hype and hysteria
Carter said Trump continued to make a clear statement that he intends to “silence and marginalize” vast swaths of diverse communities with his policies.
“We do not sign on to his agenda,” she said.
“We won’t be silenced and we will do our best to stand up and fight against these policies until we can stop them.”
end quotes
HUH?
Trump continued to make a clear statement that he intends to “silence and marginalize” vast swaths of diverse communities with his policies?
Vast swaths of what diverse communities?
And with what policies?
Why is it, people, that the media people never stop these people they are interviewing to ask them where they get this stuff from, because it sure is not our American history or law.
Getting back to the PennLive article:
Adanjesus Marin, director of Make the Road Pennsylvania, said the country and the courts would continue to reject the president’s travel ban.
“This new order will be no different,” he said.
“Pennsylvania has welcomed refugees and immigrants for generations, and this most recent attack is yet another blow to the principles of religious tolerance and support for refugees that have helped make our country strong.”
“We must continue to resist.”
Jonathan Jimenez, a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and a member of Make the Road, an immigration advocacy group, the president was reminding the country that he “doesn’t care” about American values.
“This racist policy is still a Muslim ban that will have the same effects as the previous one: to discriminate based on religion, to divide families, and to put the most vulnerable refugees seeking safety in danger,” Jimenez said.
“We must not allow that to happen.”
“This isn’t what America is about.”
“We will continue to stand against Trump’s hateful agenda.”
Julio Lopez, director of Make the Road Connecticut, said the new executive order singled out particular areas of the world and people for discrimination.
“We will do everything we can to stop it,” he said.
Carter said that if she had a “magic wand,” she would reverse all of Trump’s immigration executive orders, including those impacting so-called sanctuary cities and immigration enforcement.
“Every single one has been along the same agenda of clearly trying to erase immigrant and refugee communities from our society and making clear line that unless you are white or a Christian, you are suspect,” she said.
end quotes
Now, really, people, is that true – is it really true, as she says, that Trump is really trying to erase immigrant and refugee communities from our society and making clear line that unless you are white or a Christian, you are suspect?
Because if it is true, we in this nation, and I mean us citizens, are in a hell of a lot of trouble, with a real despot in the White House, and that is a serious matter, indeed, a matter which requires every loyal American citizen to stand up to Trump and say, wait a minute, here, bub, you’re over the line.
But what if it isn’t true, people?
In that case, why has that hype gone so long without challenge?
Why does the media never challenge or attempt to analyze those kind of wild allegations, which if true, are serious matter, indeed, as we are doing min here, thanks to Wayne Creed and the Cape Charles Mirror?
Just something to think about, people.
And yes, we got two feet of snow the other day.
Just saying.
Paul Plante says
And that, people, brings us back around to Scott Wade, an esteemed history professer down here in the Tidewater, and his comment “Talk about ‘inauthentic reality’ or an attempt to ‘invent American history on the fly to satisfy their political needs of the moment,’” and that comment in turn takes us back to these following words from the authentic reality of our own American history, as opposed to the inauthentic reality expressed in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform July 21, 2016 As Approved by the Democratic Platform Committee July 8-9, 2016 – Orlando, FL., which Hillary Clinton called the “most progressive platform in history,” in The Hill, even though it is far from being progressive, at all, to wit:,
Examine the new constitution with candor and liberality.
Indulge no narrow prejudices to the disadvantage of your brethren of the other states; consider the people of all the thirteen states, as a band of brethren, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, inhabiting one undivided country, and designed by heaven to be one people.
end quotes
Designed by heaven to be one people!
But were we, really, and looking around today, would you think that that was true, or a pipe dream?
And who was it who said those words, people?
Was it some crackpot who hated Muslims, with his talk about a “band of brethren, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, inhabiting one undivided country, and designed by heaven to be one people.”
Was it some right-wing lunatic making a direct attack on our country’s value and a direct attack on the values that we hold dear of creating diverse and inclusive and welcoming society?
Was it some Nativist idiot trying “silence and marginalize” vast swaths of diverse communities with his policies?
Was it some blithering idiot dealing yet another blow to the principles of religious tolerance and support for refugees that have helped make our country strong?
Was that really the expression of a racist policy that constituted a Muslim ban that would discriminate based on religion, divide families, and put the most vulnerable refugees seeking safety in danger?
Are those words really not what America is about?
Is America about something else entirely different then?
And if those words are not what America about, then what the heck is America about, and how do we ever find about it?
And was the purpose of those words to erase immigrant and refugee communities from our society and make clear the line that unless you are white or a Christian, you are suspect?
So many questions and so few answers, at least from our own Hillary Clinton who today said she is coming back out of the woods where she has been to unite the people of the United States into a band of brethren, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, inhabiting one undivided country, and designed by heaven to be one people.
As to who said those words, his name was David Ramsay (April 2, 1749 – May 8, 1815), and he was an American physician, public official, and historian from Charleston, South Carolina who happened to also be one of the first major historians of the American Revolution.
During the Revolution he served in the South Carolina legislature until he was captured by the British, and after his release he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1782–1783 and again in 1785–1786.
The son of an Irish emigrant, he was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Now, notice the word “emigrant” in there as we talk in here about immigration being a political football in America today.
Ramsay graduated at Princeton University in 1765, received his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1773, and settled as a physician at Charleston, where he had a large practice.
In 1787 Ramsay married Martha Laurens (1759-1811), daughter of Charleston-born Huguenot merchant, planter, and Revolutionary War statesman, Henry Laurens.
For anyone not familiar with the word, the Huguenots are an ethnoreligious group of French Protestants who follow the Reformed tradition, and the term was used frequently to describe members of the French Reformed Church until the beginning of the 19th century.
The Huguenots were French Protestants who were inspired by the writings of John Calvin and endorsed the Reformed tradition of Protestantism, contrary to the largely German Lutheran population of Alsace, Moselle, and Montbéliard.
Hans Hillerbrand in his Encyclopedia of Protestantism claims the Huguenot community reached as much as 10% of the French population on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, declining to 7–8% by the end of the 16th century, and further after heavy persecution began once again with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV of France.
Huguenot numbers peaked near an estimated two million by 1562, concentrated mainly in the southern and western parts of France.
As Huguenots gained influence and more openly displayed their faith, Catholic hostility grew, in spite of political concessions and edicts of toleration from the French crown.
A series of religious conflicts followed, known as the French Wars of Religion, fought intermittently from 1562 to 1598.
The Huguenots were led by Jeanne d’Albret, her son, the future Henry IV, and the princes of Condé.
The wars ended with the Edict of Nantes, which granted the Huguenots substantial religious, political, and military autonomy.
Huguenot rebellions in the 1620s prompted the abolishment of their political and military privileges.
They retained religious provisions of the Edict of Nantes until the rule of Louis XIV.
Louis XIV gradually increased persecution of them until he issued the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685), ending any legal recognition of Protestantism in France and forcing the Huguenots to convert or flee in a wave of violent dragonnades.
The “Dragonnades” were a French government policy instituted by Louis XIV in 1681 to intimidate Huguenot families into either leaving France or re-converting to Catholicism.
This involved the billeting of ill-disciplined dragoons in Protestant households with implied permission to abuse the inhabitants and destroy or steal their possessions.
The soldiers employed in this role were satirized as “missionary dragoons”.
Louis XIV claimed the French Huguenot population of 800,000 to 900,000 individuals was reduced to 1,000 or 1,500 individuals; a huge overestimate, although dragonnades were certainly the most devastating event for the minority.
By the death of Louis XV in 1774, French Calvinism was almost completely wiped out.
The bulk of Huguenot émigrés relocated to Protestant states such as England, Wales, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the Dutch Republic, the Electorate of Brandenburg and Electorate of the Palatinate in the Holy Roman Empire, the Duchy of Prussia, the Channel Islands, as well as majority Catholic but Protestant-controlled Ireland.
They also spread to the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa, the Dutch East Indies, the Caribbean, New Netherland, and several of the English colonies in North America.
Notice again the word “émigré” as opposed to “immigrant,” as well as the phrase “several of the English colonies in North America,” because people, believe it or not, there was no United States of America back then, just English colonies, and back in those days, the English Parliament believed that all British colonies existed to provide raw materials and to purchase manufactured goods from England for the general benefit of the British Empire.
How about that for authentic reality?
Getting back to Ramsay, who said “consider the people of all the thirteen states, as a band of brethren, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, inhabiting one undivided country, and designed by heaven to be one people,” as stated above, from 1782 to 1786, he served in the Continental Congress, and in the absence of John Hancock, Ramsay served as chairman of Congress, from November 23, 1785 to May 12, 1786.
As stated above, he was one of the American Revolution’s first major historians, and as such, he wrote with the knowledge and insights acquired by being personally involved in the events of the American Revolution.
In 1785 he published in two volumes “History of the Revolution of South Carolina,” in 1789 in two volumes “History of the American Revolution,” in 1807 a “Life of Washington,” and in 1809 in two volumes a “History of South Carolina.”
Of importance to this discussion, in 1789 he also wrote “A Dissertation on the Manners of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen.”
We today forget that prior to that time, there was no such thing as an American citizen, since those people were colonists, not citizens, and thus, being subjects of an English king, they had no experience with being a citizen, instead, which status confers responsibilities on the individual in a constitutional Republic that a subject of a king did not have.
Again with respect to this conversation, in “From a Revolutionary History to a History of Revolution: David Ramsay and the American Revolution.” by Peter C. Messer in the “Journal of the Early Republic” 2002 22(2): 205-233, Messer examined the transition in Ramsay’s republican perspective from his “History of the American Revolution” (1789) to his more conservative “History of the United States” (1816–17), noting that Ramsay’s works went from a call for active citizens to reform and improve societal institutions to a warning of the dangers of an overzealous population and the need to preserve existing institutions.
An overzealous population, people, think about it, is that what we have today?
In “David Ramsay and the Delayed Americanization of American History.” in Early American Literature 1994 29: 1-18. ISSN 0012-8163, Karen O’Brien argues Ramsay’s 1789 “History of the American Revolution” was one of the first and most accomplished histories to appear in the aftermath of that event.
So that is who David Ramsay was, and I quote him from his political essay in favor of ratification the United States Constitution entitled “An Address to the Freemen of South Carolina on the Subject of the Federal Constitution” in the Columbian Herald, Charleston, South Carolina on February 04, 1787 where Ramsay was writing as Civis.
So you be the judge, people, is that authentic reality?
Or is that inauthentic reality?
To close here, as to Muslim values perhaps clashing with what are said to be “American values,” at least today, in a MARKETWATCH article by Jeffry Bartash on June 13, 2016, we have as follows:
Although Obama on Monday again accused extremists of perverting Islam, the vast majority of Muslims world-wide believe homosexual is immoral.
In one of the largest polls of its kind ever conducted, Pew in 2013 found that more four-fifths of Muslims subscribe to that view.
And in at least 10 Muslim countries, homosexuality can actually be punished by death, though such cases are uncommon.
end quotes
In this highly divided country today, you would think that that authentic reality would have the right-wingers in this country screaming to bring in more of them, while the lefties and liberals would be screaming to keep them out.
And what is interesting is that Hillary Clinton, although she knows that to be true, or should, anyway, given her tour of duty as U.S. secretary of state, never raised a peep about that, especially in Muslim Saudi Arabia, where women can be stoned to death for adultery, and have been in recent years if you bother to follow the news.
One must wonder why.
Oh, yes, of course, politics, people, because in politics, you have to be many things to many people, and accordingly sometimes along the way, messy things like human rights just have to be left by the wayside.
Right, Hillary?
Paul Plante says
And bringing this back into modern times and making it much more relevant to the issue of immigration today, as opposed to back at this nation’s beginnings in the 1600’s when it was nothing more than a bunch of colonies or patents granted by foreign kings for plunder and exploitation, known as mercantilism, it was in the news only recently that the world’s happiest nation was not the United States of America, as exceptional in all the world as only we are.
In fact, we exceptional Americans sank to no. 14 on the list, as exceptional as we are.
Who was No. 1 was Norway.
So what the heck is up with that, people?
Is that a slap in the face to the Statue of Liberty, or what?
Where the heck do these Norwegians get off being more happy than us, when by damn, our own Declaration of Independence, which the Norwegians don’t have, not being exceptional Americans like us, guarantees us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Who on earth do they think they are, anyway, besides foreigners?
So how come these foreigners over there in Norway are robbing us of our happiness?
For that answer, and not wanting any fake news on the subject from an American sheet or rag, I went to a good British newspaper, The Guardian, on Tuesday, 21 March 2017, and this is the answer I got back:
Norway has moved up four places to knock Denmark off the top spot as the world’s happiest country, with Iceland and Switzerland rounding out the top four.
According to the World Happiness Report 2017, Norway ranked highly on the main factors found to contribute to happiness: “caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance”.
end quotes
WOW, people, how about that, especially that last part about good governance.
So I got to thinking, well, if that is where the happiness really is, then perhaps we in America should really be there instead of here, since here obviously makes us far less happy than we would be over there.
So how would we do that, become citizens of Norway?
And you know what, people?
They actually post online what you have to do, and it really is quite simple, as follows, right from their website:
OBTAINING NORWEGIAN CITIZENSHIP
To apply for Norwegian citizenship, you must have a valid residence permit in Norway.
You must also meet several other requirements, including the following:
•You must have documented or clarified your identity.
•You must be resident in Norway and intend to continue to live here.
•If you are married to, or are the registered partner or cohabitant of a Norwegian national, the time you have lived in Norway and the total time you have been married, registered partners or cohabitants, must be at least seven years.
You must have lived in Norway for a total of at least three years during the past ten years.
You must still be married, registered partners or cohabitants and live together at the time of the decision.
You must meet the requirements for a permanent residence permit in Norway.
•You must have completed 300 hours of tuition in the Norwegian language or be able to document sufficient skills in Norwegian or Sami.
•You must not have been convicted of a criminal offence or been ordered to undergo enforced psychiatric treatment or care (good conduct requirement).
•Under Norwegian law, it is in principle not permitted to have dual citizenship.
A person who applies for Norwegian citizenship must therefore renounce his/her former citizenship.
•Separate rules apply to children under the age of 12 and to people over the age of 55 who apply for Norwegian citizenship.
People who came to Norway before reaching the age of 18 must have lived here for a total of five years during the past seven years.
Remember that you must hold a valid permit while your citizenship application is being processed.
A permit is not valid simply because you have applied for citizenship.
You must therefore apply for renewal of your permit at least one month before it expires.
After becoming a Norwegian citizen, you will be invited to participate in a voluntary citizenship ceremony to mark the transition.
It is the County Governor who organises these ceremonies.
More information about citizenship, conditions and the procedure for applying is available at http://www.udi.no.
end quote
How about that now – all you have to do is ASK PERMISSION and SPEAK THE LANGUAGE!
But compared to here, people, isn’t that really cruel, expecting people going there to have to ask permission first?
Doesn’t that violate our human rights over here, them over there telling us over here we have to actually ask them over there to go over there, as if they owned the place and were going to hoard happiness all to themselves, instead of sharing it with the rest of us who deserve it just as much as them, if not more so, us being exceptional Americans and all that?
Where the hell do those Norwegians get off thinking they have their right to their own country, where they can make people have to speak to them in their language when everybody knows we are now a gl9obal society with no borders?
Is that what makes them happy then, knowing it is their country, and not ours?
Something to ponder, isn’t it?
Paul Plante says
And can any intelligent and rational discussion of the subject of immigration as a political football in this country from then to now along with the contentious issue of “immigrant rights” be complete without making mention of the famous Dorr Rebellion in 1841–1842, which was an attempt by middle-class residents to force broader democracy in the U.S. state of Rhode Island, where a small rural elite was in control of government?
The Dorr Rebellion, which ended up being a complete flop in too many ways relevant to the issue in our times today, specifically with this continual question of whether or not we are still a republic, or if that is deader than a doornail, despite language to the contrary in the federal Constitution and the Federalist Papers, to be replaced by a democracy where factions rule, and those not in the faction are essentially disenfranchised and denied protection of law, as I myself am here in New York state, and that courtesy of Sonia Sotomayor, now a Supreme Court Justice, from when she was a judge of the federal 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City in 2005, was led by Thomas Wilson Dorr, who mobilized the disenfranchised of his time, including immigrants only recently arrived, to demand changes to the state’s electoral rules.
At that time, the state of Rhode Island was still using its 1663 colonial charter as a constitution, which charter required that voters own land, while a later legislative rule also required that a man be white and own $134 in property in order to vote.
Because of the disenfranchisement of individuals, the state of Rhode Island was dominated by rural interests, much like Virginia back in Revolutionary War days, actually.
In Rhode Island at that time, representation in the legislature was by towns, so that under this geographic system, the larger populations in cities were dramatically under-represented, and the effect of that in the 1830s was that the rapidly growing industrial cities were far outnumbered in the legislature by representatives of rural towns, to the annoyance of major businessmen and industrialists of the cities, because the state legislature lagged in investing in infrastructure and other needs for urbanizing areas, and generally did not respond to urban needs.
Linking that to this thread on immigrants, because of the property requirement, not surprisingly, few immigrants or factory workers could vote, despite their growing numbers in the state.
In 1840 other states which had been receiving immigrants had a huge surge in voter turnout, but in Rhode Island, voting remained suppressed.
So, in Rhode Island, at first, it was the middle classes who took the lead in seeking change, including Dorr himself, who worked with the Rhode Island Suffrage Association.
But the Charter government, controlled by rural elites, fought back hard, to the point that for six weeks in 1842, there were actually two rival governments in Rhode Island, similar to what Hillary Clinton seems to be trying to create in the United States today with Hillary at the head of a rival government to Trump’s illegitimate government which, according to Hillary, when questioned by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times during Hillary’s first post-election interview at Tina Brown’s eighth annual Women in the World Summit in New York City. was given to Trump by the Russians, Jim Comey and misogynist men and women in this country who simply do not like Hillary because she is the archetypal “strong woman” in American society today, as told in the NBC NEWS story “Hillary Clinton Explains Why She Really Lost to Trump” by Kendall Breitman on Apr. 7 2017 at 8:02 am ET, to wit:
Almost four months after her stunning defeat, Hillary Clinton on Thursday primarily blamed her loss to President Donald Trump on four factors that were beyond her control.
The former Democratic presidential candidate cited Russian meddling in the election, FBI Director James Comey’s involvement toward the end of the race, WikiLeaks’ theft of emails from her campaign chairman, and misogyny.
She largely cited these factors for her defeat:
“A foreign power meddled with our election,” she said, labeling it “an act of aggression.”
“Certainly, misogyny played a role.”
“That has to be admitted,” she said.
Clinton added that “some people — women included — had real problems” with the idea of a woman president.
Clinton cited as damaging to her campaign Comey’s unusual decision to release of a letter on October 28, less than two weeks before Election Day, that said he was looking at additional emails related to the FBI probe of the former secretary of state’s use of a private server.
Weeks of disclosures of stolen emails from the personal account of then-Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, were particularly harmful, Clinton said, adding that it “played a much bigger role than I think many people yet understand.”
She said the combination of Comey’s actions and the WikiLeaks’ revelations “had the determinative effect.”
While Clinton said there were “lots of contributing factors” to her failure to secure the nation’s highest office, she called Russia’s interference the “weaponization of information.”
“I didn’t fully understand how impactful that was and so it created doubts in people,” Clinton said.
“But then the Comey letter coming as it did — just 10 days before the election — really raised questions in a lot of people.”
end quotes
WOW, heavy stuff, people, but my goodness, enough with the poor victimized Hillary Clinton, since we are talking about the Dorr Rebellion and immigrants rights in here., and not Hillary Clinton, who is more and more becoming America’s national drama queen with her on-going tale of woe about how devastated she is losing to Trump thanks to Comey, misogynists and the Russians.
In a showdown between the two rival governments in Rhode Island at that time, the Dorrite faction, led by self-proclaimed Governor Dorr, pulled back from violence after their cannon misfired, and one person died, a bystander killed by accident.
Because of the showdown, the Charter government compromised by writing a new constitution in 1843 that dropped the property requirement for men born in the United States but kept it for foreign-born citizens, while apportioning more seats in the legislature to the cities, a calculated divide-and-conquer move which satisfied the native-born protesters, so they had no further reason to complain, and so, largely deserted Dorr and the immigrants.
With respect to this thread on immigration, in that case, the state government in Rhode Island had the upper hand because the national government refused to intervene, and Democrats in other states gave Dorr only verbal encouragement, so that in the end, his cause was hopeless, with the result that he and five lieutenants were sentenced to life in prison.
They ended up being pardoned by the state governor in 1845 after the political agitation had ended, but as far as the immigrants went, the state did not drop the property qualifications for immigrant voters until 1888, at a time of increasing immigration.
With respect to this malarkey being peddled today by Hillary Clinton and her Democrat party that the United States of America were founded by and for immigrants, a specious assertion with no support in the authentic reality of our actual American history, as opposed to the inauthentic reality of Hillary’s bogus American history created out of thin air and balderdash by Hillary based on her audience and needs of the moment, under Rhode Island’s colonial charter, originally received in 1663, only male landowners could vote, and at that time, most of the citizens of the colonies were farmers and held land, so that this qualification was considered fairly democratic.
By the 1840s, the state required landed property worth at least $134 in order to vote, but at the same time, as the Industrial Revolution reached North America and many people left the farms for the cities, large numbers of people could no longer meet the minimum property requirement to vote, so that by 1829, 60% of the state’s free white men were ineligible to vote, while women and most non-white men were prohibited from voting.
Many of those who were disenfranchised were recent Irish Catholic immigrants or other Roman Catholics who lived and worked in the cities at salaried jobs, and some of them argued that an electorate made up of only 40% of the state’s white men, and based on a colonial charter signed by the British monarch, was un-republican and violated the United States Constitution’s Guarantee Clause, Art. IV: Sec. 4, which states in clear and unequivocal language that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government […]”).
Before the 1840s in Rhode Island, activists had made several attempts to replace the colonial charter with a new state constitution that provided broader voting rights, but all failed because the state lacked a procedure to amend the Charter, and the Rhode Island General Assembly, which was dominated by rural landowners, had consistently failed to liberalize the constitution by extending the franchise, enacting a bill of rights, or reapportioning the legislature based on demographic changes as the cities acquired much larger populations.
By contrast, as of 1841, most states of the United States had removed property requirements and other restrictions on voting, while Rhode Island was nearly the only state falling significantly short of universal white manhood suffrage.
Reminiscent of the role Hillary Clinton is playing in American politics today, by 1841, suffrage supporters led by Dorr gave up on attempts to change the system from within and in October of that year, they held an extralegal People’s Convention and drafted a new constitution which granted the vote to all white men with one year’s residence.
In one of those “well, that is the way it goes” moments in American history, along with who gets what before the next guy in a democracy, where everyone is not equal and never will be, Dorr had originally supported granting voting rights to blacks, but he changed his position in 1840 because of pressure from white immigrants, who wanted to gain the vote first.
“Sorry, black dudes, we know you have been living here for quite a while, but this is America, land of the Statue of Liberty, so we have to put these newly-arrived immigrants in line ahead of you, but trust us, your turn will someday come.”
At the same time as the Dorr-ite convention, the state’s General Assembly formed a rival convention and drafted the Freemen’s Constitution, with some concessions to democratic demands, and late in that year, the two constitutions were voted on, with the result that the Freemen’s Constitution was defeated in the legislature, largely by Dorr supporters, while the People’s Convention version was overwhelmingly supported in a referendum in December.
Much of the support for the People’s Convention constitution was from the newly eligible voters, but Dorr claimed that most of those eligible under the old constitution had also supported it, making it legal, so that in early 1842, both groups organized elections of their own, leading in April to the selections of both Dorr and Samuel Ward King as Governor of Rhode Island.
As King showed no signs of introducing the new constitution, matters came to a head, and King declared martial law, while on May 4, the state legislature requested the dispatch of federal troops to suppress the “lawless assemblages.”
President John Tyler sent an observer, then decided not to send soldiers because “the danger of domestic violence is hourly diminishing,” but Tyler also cited the U.S. Constitution and added that “If resistance is made to the execution of the laws of Rhode-Island, by such force as the civil peace shall be unable to overcome, it will be the duty of this Government to enforce the constitutional guarantee—a guarantee given and adopted mutually by all the original States.”
As most of the state militiamen were Irishmen newly enfranchised by the Dorr referendum, they supported him, but the Irish who played a growing role in Democratic politics in other states, such as Tammany Hall in New York City, only gave Dorr their verbal support, “you’re doing an awesome job, dude, keep it up,” while at the same time sending no money or men to help.
The “Dorrites” then led an unsuccessful attack against the arsenal in Providence, Rhode Island on May 19, 1842, with the defenders of the arsenal on the “Charterite” side, those who supported the original charter, including Dorr’s father Sullivan Dorr and his uncle Crawford Allen, who, at the time, owned the Bernon Mill Village in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, as well as many black men who had supported Dorr before he dropped them from his call for suffrage.
As stated above, Dorr’s cannon failed to fire and his army retreated in disarray.
After his defeat, Dorr fled to New York and returned in late June 1842 with armed supporters and assembled his forces on Acote’s Hill in Chepachet, where they hoped to reconvene the People’s Convention.
In response, Governor King called out the state militia which marched on Chepachet to engage the Dorrite forces, while Charterite forces were sent to Woonsocket to defend the village and to cut off the Dorrite forces’ retreat.
The Charterites fortified a house in preparation for an attack, but it never came, because Dorr disbanded his forces, realizing that he would be defeated in battle by the approaching militia, and fled the state, with Governor King issuing a warrant for Dorr’s arrest with a reward of $5,000.
As to where things went after that, the Charterites were finally convinced of the strength of the suffrage cause and called another convention, so that in September 1842, a session of the Rhode Island General Assembly met at Newport, Rhode Island and framed a new state constitution which was ratified by the old, limited electorate, was proclaimed by Governor King on January 23, 1843, and took effect in May.
That new constitution greatly liberalized voting requirements by extending suffrage to any native born adult male, regardless of race, who could pay a poll tax of $1, which would go to support public schools in the state, but that constitution retained the property requirement for non-native born citizens and prohibited members of the Narragansett Indian Tribe from voting.
With respect to republican government in this nation, where everyone, regardless of race, color or creed is equal in the eyes of the law, versus democracy, in Luther v. Borden (1849), the Supreme Court of the United States held that the constitutional right to change governments was unquestioned, but that the Supreme Court did not have the authority to interfere because the Constitutional guarantee of a “republican form of government” was a political question best left to the other branches of the federal government, a ruling which ducked the actual issue and had as its practical effect leaving the Dorrites in the cold, along with the immigrants, while upholding their opponents as the true government of Rhode Island.
As to Dorr, he returned in 1843 and was found guilty of treason against the state, and was sentenced in 1844 to solitary confinement and hard labor for life.
However, the harshness of the sentence was widely condemned, and Dorr was released in 1845, with his health now broken, and his civil rights were restored in 1851, which reinforces the fact that civil rights are not guaranteed by some natural law, but are granted by society.
As to the outcome with respect to where we might be today in this country, if anyone knew where that was, historians have long debated the meaning and nature of the rebellion with Mowry in 1901 portraying the Dorrites as irresponsible idealists who ignored the state’s need for stability and order, while Gettleman in 1973 hailed it as an early working-class attempt to overthrow an elitist government, and Dennison in 1976 seeing it as a legitimate expression of Republicanism in the United States, while at the same time concluding that like so often is the case in America, politics changed little for Rhode Islanders after 1842 because the same elite groups ruled the state with the Rhode Island Supreme Court writing in 1854:
“The union of all the powers of government in the same hands is but the definition of despotism.”
Thus, in one of those innumerable ironies that keep coming up in here, the same Court that convicted Dorr of treason against the charter in 1844 ruled ten years later that the charter had improperly authorized a despotic, non-republican, un-American form of government (Dennison, p. 196).
Hmmmmmm.
Now, that is something to think about in our times, today, isn’t it, as we keep hearing all these politicians today from Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton and Lindsey Graham on down the line all prattling on about “our democracy, our democracy, our democracy” ad infinitum!