Nativists or Know-Nothings, as they used to style themselves, obsess about the balkanization of America because new immigrants are not like us. But when has America ever been all the same? People tend to forget that Catholics and Jews and Italians did not have an easy time as immigrants. It took a long while before American WASPs stopped burning houses of worship and otherwise making life miserable for newcomers. Nor was life always amicable among American Protestants - they had all manner of internecine strife, and some towns actually whipped heretics out of town. Being a fellow Protestant wasnt enough in those days; people feared the smallest differences in creed. The KKK was as much anti-Catholic as it was anti-black. Pennsylvania had so many Germans that the possibility of writing official documents in that language was considered. Relations among people of German and English descent were sometimes civil, sometimes not. Yet, we got over it - not by encouraging fear of foreigners, but by telling the natives to behave like decent human beings.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 06:08:10 +0000