I had to sign up and create an account at the Wall Street Journal just so I could click through and read the argument that is made in this dumb article. It is weaker than I thought.
WSJ:
“Are you a heritage American? According to a group of online weirdos who call themselves conservatives (and possibly Vice President JD Vance), probably not.
The “heritage-American” concept refers to those who can trace their ancestry back to the beginning of American history. The earlier the better. In a convenient distillation of this view, one viral post on X assigned “grades” based on how far back one’s “stock” traced …
While they’ll never admit it, the heritage-American crowd owe a debt to the 1619 Project, which recast American history as dependent on slavery. In a roundabout way, they affirm the view espoused by Stephen Douglas, the Illinois senator who debated Abraham Lincoln before the Civil War. Douglas argued that America “was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s founder, believes the same thing …
Besides, the heritage-American concept doesn’t survive basic scrutiny. Leave aside how African-Americans and Native Americans confound it …
None of this means that being an American is the birthright of all the world’s people. Rising to the occasion of America’s experiment in self-government is hard, as it should be. But a rejection of aristocratic pretensions to hierarchy is at the heart of what it means to be an American. Claims of hereditary superiority resemble nothing so much as the feudal conceptions of life that generations of Americans—including the Founding generation—intentionally left behind.”
Where do I even start critiquing this?
1. First, Abraham Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas in that 1858 Illinois Senate race. At that time, Illinois had the harshest black code in the country which completely banned blacks from settling there under its state constitution. It was a misdemeanor for blacks to stay in Illinois for more than 10 days.
In the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Lincoln himself conceded that he believed that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” In the context of a multiracial society, he conceded to Douglas that he was in favor of “having the superior position assigned to the White race.” He also denied the charge that he supported allowing blacks “to intermarry white white people.”
Stephen Douglas, of course, represented the mainstream consensus on race in the antebellum era. The Supreme Court had just ruled in the Dred Scott decision in the previous year that blacks were not American citizens. The Dred Scott decision created an uproar in New England which was the only region of the country which had black citizenship. It explicitly stated that blacks were an “inferior class” that had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Lincoln was arguing in favor of blacks being second class citizens with basic civil rights like the right to own property, but short of having the right to vote, sit on juries, intermingle with or marry White people. Lincoln did not support placing blacks on the same plane as Heritage Americans because that was routinely denounced as “Black Republicanism.”
2. Second, Theodore Roosevelt was an Anglo-Saxon triumphalist who glorified the conquest of North America in his 1889 book The Winning of the West.
Roosevelt was an Anglo-Dutch New Yorker who was eager to include Ellis Islanders in his triumphalist American national project. He was not an “antiracist” by any stretch of the imagination. He explicitly denied that Americanism was “a matter of creed, birthplace or national descent” instead preferring to see it as a matter “of the soul and the spirit.” Even so, Roosevelt was an outspoken eugenicist and a close friend of Madison Grant who praised his book The Passing of the Great Race. He feared Old Stock Anglo-Protestant Americans were committing race suicide due to their declining birth rate.
This Puck cartoon from 1903 called “The Idle Stork” illustrates the concept of race suicide which was popularized by Roosevelt. The idle stork has nothing to do because native born upper class WASP women choose to limit the size of their families. The strenuous stork is worked to death by delivering numerous babies to lower class European immigrants pouring into America. Roosevelt supported the extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act and negotiated the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 which restricted immigration from Japan. The crisis with Japan had been sparked by race riots on the West Coast. California’s population was 1% Japanese and that was considered too much at the time.
3. Third, Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924 into law which built on the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 and the Immigration Act of 1917 to ban immigration from all of Asia. In a 1921 article for Good Housekeeping magazine called ‘Whose America Is This?’, Coolidge wrote, “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons” and “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.”
4. Fourth, American Indians only gained American citizenship in Calvin Coolidge’s time when he signed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. The Constitution itself excluded Indian tribes from the Census because they were not considered “Native Americans.” Most continue to live on semi-sovereign Indian reservations which were created for them because they were not initially incorporated into America as citizens with equal rights. The whole concept of “civil rights” was created because of the Dred Scott decision which is why Congress had to pass the 14th Amendment to establish black citizenship.
5. Finally, the Founders restricted American naturalization to “free white persons” in the Naturalization Act of 1790 and repeatedly reaffirmed the decision in subsequent acts in 1795, 1798 and 1802. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 ended the outright ban on immigration from Asia, but capped overall immigration from Asia at 2,000 people annually. Sen. Pat McCarran crafted the bill to protect America from “Jewish interests” that wanted to further liberalize our immigration laws and who succeeded in the 1960s.
As late as the 1960s, the city of Montgomery, AL had laws which prohibited Whites and blacks from playing games like cards, dice, dominoes and checkers in public parks. The Montgomery Bus Boycott contested the local statute which segregated public transportation. Most American states had anti-miscegenation laws and segregation laws until the Cold War. The U.S. military that fought the Nazis in World War II was still heavily segregated. Blacks were banned from joining the Marines in John Adams time.
The hazy Con Inc. vision of the “American Founding” is a fantasy.
Blood has always mattered in American history. It is why we built an elaborate racial caste system which endured for three centuries and which determined who was eligible to be an American.
Here’s an excerpt on the racial values of Southerners around a century ago from C. Vann Woodward’s book Origins of the New South: 1877-1913:
“Over the years there evolved along with the caste system a generally accepted credo of race among white Southerners. In 1913 Thomas Pearce Bailey, a Southern educator, set down this “racial creed of the Southern people” with such candor and accuracy that it may serve as the best available summary:
1.) “Blood will tell.”
2.) The white race must dominate.
3.) The Teutonic peoples stand for race purity.
4.) The Negro is inferior and will remain so.
5.) “This is a white man’s country.”
6.) No social equality.
7.) No political equality.
8.) In matters of civil rights and legal adjustments give the white man, as opposed to the colored man, the benefit of the doubt; and under no circumstances interfere with the prestige of the white race.
9.) In educational policy let the Negro have the crumbs that fall from the white man’s table.
10.) Let there be such industrial education of the Negro as will best fit him to serve the white man.
11.) Only Southerners understand the Negro question.
12.) Let the South settle the Negro question.
13.) The status of peasantry is all the Negro may hope for, if the races are to live together in peace.
14.) Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest Negro.
15.) The above sentiments indicate the leadings of Providence.”
Racial hierarchy used to be at the heart of what it meant to be an American.
The Alabama Democratic Party used a rooster as its symbol until the late 1960s with the banner “white supremacy for the Right” on the ballot. The rooster was used because it was a proud animal. It is what inspired Stokely Carmichael to popularize the black panther as a counter.
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