By the 1780s and 1790s the new nation of the United States was, as the late Yale trained and Harvard Divinity School historian of American Christianity William Hutchison notes in his excellent Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 203), Protestant, Calvinist, and English-speaking. As Hutchison points out, in 1780 95% of Americans were Protestant, 90% of Americans were Calvinist, and 85% of Americans were English speakers and Calvinists. This new American nation was dominated economically, politically, and culturally by Protestant Congregationalists, Protestant Presbyterians, and Anglicans become Protestant Episcopalians. Only one member of the First Continental Congress of 1774 was not Congregationalist, Presbyterian, or Anglican. He was a disowned Quaker from Rhode Island. Only 600 of early 1780s America’s 3200 religious congregations were not English speaking; 80, for example, were dissenting Quaker, 65 were sectarian Methodist, 56 were “outsider” Catholic, 31 were non-English speaking Moravian, 24 were non-English speaking and “outsider” Dunker, 16 were non-English speaking and “outsider” Mennonite, and 12, in 1790, were sectarian “outsider” Shaker.
This demographic, cultural, economic, and political domination of the US by Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Calvinist, and English speakers, as Hutchison notes, created not only, in the early nineteenth century, an unofficial “mainstream” religious establishment in a United States where disestablishment was legally established; it also created American others. It created, in other words, an American cultural, counterculture, and subculture fringe. Hutchison, drawing on the work of the late University of Chicago American religious historian Martin Marty, argues that the American “cultural fringe”, American “dissidents”, American “outsiders”, and American “infidels”, faced, depending on how outside of the “mainstream” they were, three different reactions from American intellectual and popular or mass “mainstream” cultures. Deists and/or atheists like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Ethan Allen, Adventists like William Miller and Joshua Himes, and Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, were parodied, teased, ridiculed, and, in some cases, attacked intellectually, and in the case of Adventists often seen as “mad”. However, they did not, because they were in the end considered “insiders” and, in the case of Jefferson, Paine, and Allen, were also heroes of the American Revolution, experience physical attacks. Revivalists were parodied, ridiculed, and virulently attacked for their, from the point of view of the intellectual “mainstream”, course, gross, narcissistic, sinister, intolerant, fanatical, and sectarian behaviour in addition to their ideology. They too, however, were ultimately considered “insiders”.
On the other hand, as Hutchison points out, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormons were parodied, ridiculed, attacked intellectually, and sometimes, particularly in the case of the Shakers and the Mormons, physically attacked by mobs of American nativists. For Hutchison, the fundamental differences in the treatment of Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormons by American intellectuals and the American masses compared to Deists and/or Atheists, Adventists, Transcendentalists, and Revivalists, revolved around culture, specifically religious culture, political culture, and economic culture, and, crucially and ultimately, behaviour. In the case of Catholics, according to Hutchison, it was Catholic perceived ideological and behavioural devotion to a “tyrannical” pope and their perceived monastic sexual immoralities that made them “outsiders”. In the case of the Shakers, it was their perceived ideological and behavioural devotion to celibacy and communalism that made them “outsiders”. In the case of the Oneida Community, it was their perceived ideological and behavioural devotion to communalism and communal marriage that made them “outsiders”. In the case of Mormons, it was their perceived ideological and behavioural devotion to their practises of plural marriage, economic communalism, and theocratic and geographical zionism that made them “outsiders”.
Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormons were not alone in their ideological and behavioural cultural and behavioural “outsider” status as Hutchison notes. According to Hutchison, half of America’s 120 “experimental communities”, including Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormons, experienced nativist attacks in the nineteenth-century. Once, as Hutchison points out, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, Mormons, and the other American “experimental communities” gave up their ideological and behavioural “peculiarities”, however, they were able to largely assimilate into “mainstream” American culture, but then they were all, in the end, considered what we would today call “White”.
Between 1790 and 1860 America was, as Hutchison notes, changing. It was becoming more diverse both demographically and culturally. Between those years the population of the United States increased by 35% per decade. While English, Scots, and Protestant Scots-Irish immigrants continued to come to the US there was also an increase in non-English speaking immigrants coming to America. In the 1840s and 1850s, for instance, 50,000 Chinese came to America, many drawn by the gold rush, and many of whom settled in the Pacific Northwest and in Idaho and Montana where they constituted 30% and 10% of the population respectively. By 1850 increasing numbers of German Protestants and Irish Catholics migrated to the US. In 1790 only 9% of Americans were of German background and even fewer were of Irish Catholic background. However, by 1850 70% of the foreign-born cohort of the US was German and Irish. The arrival of German Lutherans and, to a lesser extent Scandinavian Lutherans, in significant numbers—in 1820 there were 800 Lutheran congregations while by 1860 there were 2000—chipped away at Calvinist dominance in American culture, American intellectual culture, and in American religion, and increased the number of non-English speaking churches and communities in the US. By 1860 there were over 1000 non-English speaking churches and communities along with non-English speaking colleges and seminaries, which rose from zero in 1790 to 12 in 1860. The United States victory in the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848 increased the numbers of Roman Catholics in the geographically expanding United States. All of these, increased tensions in the US and gave rise to various forms of nativism, some of them virulent and violent, such as those directed at the Chinese in the American West, forms of nativism that included murder, ethnic cleansing, and lynchings, and some of them even directed against Anglo-Saxon outsiders, such as the Mormons.
It was during the Gilded Age between 1877 and 1902, as Hutchison points out, that nativisms of all shapes and forms were given a veneer of scientific respectability, in the context of increasing immigration to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe, all across the Western world including in the United States. Social Darwinism, a unilinear racist adaptation of Darwinism, was used by racists and “nativists” to provide scientific justification for their prejudices and the discriminations that resulted from them. Proponents of Social Darwinism, many of them WASP’s, thought of White Protestants as the most fit of all “races”. In 1914 University of Wisconsin sociologist and Progressive Edward Alsworth Ross, for instance, compared those who immigrated to the US from Southern and Eastern Europe to the “primitive” peoples of the primitive past. Chairman of the New York Zoological Society and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Madison Grant (1865-1937), propounded a “racial history” of the world in his book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). For Grant, the Nordic “race” was the White “race” par excellence. In order to preserve the purity of the White Nordic “race”, Grant advocated the extermination of “undesirable” traits and “worthless race types” from the human gene pool (eugenics, good genes) and urged Americans to limit immigration into the US from Southern and Eastern Europe, lest the US commit “race” suicide and America, as he knew it, come to an end. American intellectual H.H. Goddard, who promoted and advocated giving immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and from Ireland, intelligence tests, regarded those coming to America from both regions and from Ireland, as “morons”” who should be prohibited from entering the United States lest they pollute American genetic stock. These intelligence tests, as is clear from the Army Intelligence Tests initiated in the late 1910s and early 1920s, indicate that those who were given them, alpha for the “literate” and beta for the “illiterate”, had to answer questions that were grounded in assumptions associated with American Northeastern WASP culture and cultural knowledges. There were questions on the alpha test about Cornell University, for instance, and questions about telephones and tennis courts, something the “illiterates” did not have, on the beta test. Needless to say, those who created these military tests saw them as empirical confirmation of Southern and Eastern European, Jewish, and Black “inferiority”. Even festivals and expositions of the era reflected the intellectual and popular nativism and racism of the age. The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, for instance, offered “ethnological” or “anthropological” displays of non-Whites set up by showmen but endorsed by prominent anthropologists which lent scientific credibility to elite WASP “racial” attitudes, particularly the notion that White men (it was a patriarchal society) and White society were the pinnacle of biological, social, and cultural evolution. All of this helped expand and extend the reach of American nativism and eventually helped build up support for American manifest destiny, the notion that the US should stretch from sea to shining sea, and for subsequent American expansionist foreign policy.
The mass popularity of nativist mentalities and policies is probably best seen, as a number of scholars including Hutchison have noted, in its impact on American immigration policy in the late nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century. In 1882 the US Congress excluded Chinese immigration into the United States trying to end the threat of what they called the “yellow peril”. In 1883 Congress banned convicts, paupers, and criminals from immigrating into the United States. In 1885 anarchists and “undesirables” were banned from entering the US. In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order excluding the Japanese from the US. In 1908 Congress mandated literacy requirements for immigrants. Between 1921 and 1927 limits were placed on Latin European and Slavic European immigration to the US. In 1921 emergency legislation imposed a quota system on immigration into the US, limiting the number of immigrants from Europe to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born members of the same nationality as determined by the 1910 census. It limited the number of immigrants to a total of 357,000 per year. In 1924 Congress passed the National Origins Act limiting immigration to the US even further by reducing the allowable number of immigrant entries to 2 percent. It used the 1890 census, since fewer Southern and Eastern European immigrants were in the US in 1890, as the base for calculating the number of immigrant’s permissible, and limited immigrant numbers to 165,000 per year. The act also barred immigration from the Far East entirely and prohibited non-citizens from buying and owning land in the US.
It would be the Cold War between the US and USSR after World War II, as Hutchison notes, that would ultimately undermine, at least, in retrospect, for the moment, American nativist immigration policy in the United States. It would also broaden the notion of who was "White". After World War II and during the Cold War it was difficult, of course, to maintain the illusion, given this American nativism and the consequent differential treatment of different peoples from different parts of the globe enshrined in American immigration law, that in the US everyone was equal when everyone was clearly not equal before American immigration law, something the USSR condemned along with the Jim Crow segregation of Whites and Blacks in the American South, in its global public relations battle with the United States. So, in 1965 the US Congress passed, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed a bill eliminating quotas favouring Northern Europeans in American immigration policy. As a result, fewer people immigrated to the US from Europe after 1965, fewer than 10% in fact, and more and more came from non-European countries. Between 1989 and 1993 more than half of the migrants to the United States came from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, and El Salvador. The last two groups, of course, were pushed out of Vietnam and El Salvador by civil wars in which the US played an important role. Between 2002 and 2006 an average of 1,021,884 migrants came to the US annually. By 2003 Hispanics overtook Blacks as the largest minority group in the US. By 2012, Asian American migrants to the US overtook Hispanic migrants coming to America making Asians the largest ethnic group in per capita terms migrating to the US. Between 2000 and 2015 the number of Asian Americans grew from 11.9 million to 20.4 million. This new immigration had an immense impact on America demographically, economically, culturally, and politically. By 2014 only 1 in 3 Americans were not White. In 2014 the number of White deaths exceeded the number of White births. By the early twenty first century, in other words, America, had become less European and more demographically diverse.
Given the White Anglo-Saxon and Nordic domination of the United States demographically, economically, politically, and culturally throughout much of American history, it should not be a surprise that, as Hutchison notes, American identity and Protestant identity were intertwined and interwoven together until well into the twentieth century. America was a Protestant nation and mainstream Protestants believed it should always be a Protestant nation.
Nor should mainstream Protestant reactions to the increasing diversity of the US, particularly during the Gilded Age and after, be surprising. Drawing on a wealth of popular culture “texts” from Protestant hymns to literary and religious tests by, for example, Horatio Alger and Charles Sheldon, from satiric and parodic cartoons to architecture, Hutchison delineates the three broad responses of the Protestant Establishment to increasing American diversity and the anxieties and fears it raised in the Club. Some of the Protestant reactions to this increasing diversity, as Hutchison notes, were reactive and nativist (the America for real “Americans” myth that resulted in immigration restrictions from the late nineteenth century until 1965) particularly during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Other Protestants reacted, particularly during the Progressive Era, in more assimilationist and inclusive ways (the America as a land of immigrants myth and the America as Protestant-Catholic-Jewish nation myth of the 1950s). Still other Americans, particularly after the 1960s, reacted in more pluralistic and multicultural ways (the America as mosaic myth where everyone should have a seat at the table and a voice at the table). All of them, as Hutchison makes clear, are still with us today and continue to play central and important roles in America’s continuing and seemingly never ending culture war.
Hutchison’s Religious Pluralism in America should be read by anyone interested in American history, American culture, American culture wars, American religious history, and the history of power in the United States. It should be read by anyone interested in how the United States got to now in its continuing culture wars, particularly the culture war relating to issues surrounding American identity. I cannot recommend it more highly.
Note: Portions of the material in this blog are drawn from the revised and expanded version of my book Mormon Studies: A Critical History published by McFarland in 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment