Donald Trump’s recent tweet that Democrats “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country” has drawn sharp rebuke from many quarters, including even a few fellow Republicans. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) responded that Trump’s tweet was “repugnant, reprehensible and repulsive”, George Takei noted that Trump’s comparison of immigrants to vermin “is opening the gates to all manner of horrors”, and Josh Marshall wrote that it “is literally out of the Nazi/anti-Semites’ playbook for talking about the Jewish threat. It was also a standard for talking about Chinese in the western United States”.
That last bit — about Chinese in the western US — reminds me of a story I first heard in a Nathan Masters report a couple of years ago in Lost LA. When African-American barber Lewis G. Green (no known relation to yours truly) tried to register to vote in Los Angeles County on April 16, 1870, the county clerk refused on the grounds that the 1849 California constitution allowed only white male citizens to vote. Although Green protested that the recently ratified US 15th Amendment said that voting rights shall not be denied on account of race, Mott replied that Congress had not passed any law to enforce the 15th Amendment, so there!
In 1870 Congress moved faster than it does now, and a bill to enforce the 15th Amendment was debated for final agreement in the House on May 27. In that debate, James A. Johnson (D-CA) gave an long and impassioned speech against the bill. Johnson, who was born and raised in the South and moved to California in his mid-20s, aimed most of his vitriol against Chinese-Americans, and his rhetoric then is mirrored by what Trump says now. Here’s part of Johnson’s 1870 speech:
The Chinese have driven the white woman from the wash-tub, from the sewing-machine, from the kitchen, and from the position of family and hotel domestics. He has driven white men from the fields, from the mines, from the factories, from the shoemaker’s bench, from the harness shop, has displaced him as a cigar-maker, and in fact has displaced him everywhere, to more or less extent, where capital can rule or a saving be made.
And so must it be as long as these hordes infest our country.
Sound familiar? Change “Chinese” to “Mexican”, the wash-tub to the coal mine, and the harness shop to the steel mill, and you’ll have one of Trump’s speeches today.
Johnson lost the debate, the bill was signed into law on May 31 as the Enforcement Act of 1870, and the barber Lewis G. Green finally got to register to vote in Los Angeles County on June 21, 1870. It’s sad to say that the United States under the Grant administration had more morals and principles and speed and competence than we do today. To make America truly great again, we need to go back to our longstanding ideals that abhor prejudice against immigrants and against people whose skin color does not happen to match Donald Trump’s.
(The image is from Johnson’s obituary, San Francisco Call, May 12, 1896.)