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Notes -
Let me start by admitting that I find your manifesto-posting poorly constructed, intermittently dishonest, and suggestive of bad faith. I think you’re burying the lede partly to fool people into thinking there’s more substance to this argument, and partly to avoid moderation for naked outgroup-bashing. Your thesis appears to boil down to:
Early Americans didn’t politicize immigration
At some point they started to do so
(muttering about Jewish interests)
Therefore the Democrats are
evilanti-AmericanWith that said, I will try to address a couple of your actual points.
This seems like pretty good evidence that immigration was quite salient by 1900. Is Hamilton mentioned to make the Schuylers seem more established? He’s almost the textbook case of an immigrant who both integrated into and shaped society.
The Constitution took effect in 1789, suggesting one hundred years of settling, followed by 150 of immigration. That’s a lower bound if you neglect the role of immigrants in the antebellum period, which you seem to be doing by redefining who counts as an immigrant at will. This is sophistry.
You’ve just spent a comment and a half providing evidence for the ideological roots. Why pick the 1950s?
Ah, there it is. None of this works if you can’t gesture threateningly at everyone’s favorite elites. Blaming old money and Catholics only gets your breakpoint to the mid-late 1800s. And you need that breakpoint to be later and later to prop up your distaste for modern Democrats. The Southern Strategy is small potatoes compared to the political realignments that happened in the Progressive and Reconstruction eras.
By all rights, blaming the Jews shouldn’t get your inflection point past the Fabian Society, either, but the point is rather moot. For all your hand-wringing over radical historians, this revisionism isn’t any better.
I agree more or less entirely with this post, but would add the more specific remark: a big deal is made of the "immigrant" (meaning foreign born) population never exceeding 15%, when
a) that is quite a lot of people
b) glosses over the downstream effects of this. The children of those immigrants are going to be native born, but they will still exist in immigrant communities and the "settler" population (meaning the Anglos) will dwindle as a share of the population. These groups have been almost entirely assimilated, but you can still see the residual social structures of German, Irish, Italian, Polish, etc... immigration, especially in major cities. Hell, you can see it today - most Hispanic Americans were born in the US. Despite this, they are still seen as (and many see themselves as) immigrants. This is a major part of what shapes the "Nation of Immigrants" narrative. It's not that at any point that the US had a majority immigrant population - its that the American populace has a collective memory of immigration/having immigrated. Contrast with Europe (or almost any part of the Old World, really), where this collective memory is very much absent. (Another major part is just the obvious impact that immigrants and immigration have had on almost every aspect of American culture).
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