The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada [1st ed.] 9783030524432, 9783030524449

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-v
Introduction (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 1-9
What Attracts People to Othering? (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 11-26
Erasing a People: Indigenous People and Indigenous Residential Schools (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 27-43
The Politics of Anti-semitism, 1920–1940 (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 45-67
Wartime Othering: The Enemy Within (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 69-81
Cold War: Othering on the Home Front (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 83-104
The Politics of Race in the United States and Canada (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 105-124
The Maligning of Muslims (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 125-147
Conclusion (Allan Laine Kagedan)....Pages 149-159
Back Matter ....Pages 161-164

Citation preview

The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada

Allan Laine Kagedan

The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada

Allan Laine Kagedan

The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada

Allan Laine Kagedan Carleton University Ottawa, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-52443-2 ISBN 978-3-030-52444-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Kickstand/E+/Getty Image This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

1

Introduction

2

What Attracts People to Othering?

11

3

Erasing a People: Indigenous People and Indigenous Residential Schools

27

4

The Politics of Anti-semitism, 1920–1940

45

5

Wartime Othering: The Enemy Within

69

6

Cold War: Othering on the Home Front

83

7

The Politics of Race in the United States and Canada

105

8

The Maligning of Muslims

125

9

Conclusion

149

Index

161

v

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 2016, Americans elected Donald Trump as President. President Trump eschewed a number of traditional Republican policies such as free trade, preferring tariffs to encourage trade concessions by other countries. He argued for a larger government, rather than a smaller government, in the form of more surveillance of the borders and in the homeland to root out illegal migrants. He also appeared to win the support of people who valued an older America, one that had fewer, less influential, minorities. The President’s remarks, tweets, and actions, were seen as negative toward establishment institutions like the media, minority groups, and women. In 2015, and again in 2019, Canadians elected Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister. Justin Trudeau had a strong political pedigree: his father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was known for passing into law a Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect citizens from the overreach of government. Pierre Trudeau was also known for transforming Canada’s immigration system from one that favored European immigrants to a system that opened the door to immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Justin Trudeau’s own election and reelection were built on a strong articulation of the benefits of diversity and inclusiveness. A rarely articulated but key issue that arose in both the Canadian and American elections was the value of citizenship, regardless of one’s ethnic background, gender, or sexual orientation. Certain voices called for a return to a majoritarian culture, which rejected the notion of equality and equal treatment of all citizens. © The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_1

1

2

A. L. KAGEDAN

At the same time as Canada and the United States were hearing calls to reconsider a middle of the road, traditional liberal political and legal consensus, Europe was seized with similar issues. In a hotly contested referendum, the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. In 2019, British voters confirmed their support for “Brexit” by electing Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Marginal political parties across Europe that purveyed negative views of immigrants and nonwhite people surged in the public opinion polls and made gains in Parliament. To be sure, countries recently freed from communism like Poland and Hungary saw a rise in xenophobic parties, but so did politically and economically advanced countries like Germany and Denmark. The Western World is experiencing a recrudescence of xenophobic thinking, in particular its penchant for othering.1 This significant change was the impetus for writing this book. The topic of this book is the development and expression of the politics of othering in the United States and Canada. Unlike in Europe, far-right parties are few and far between in North America. However, othering has been present and is present. Othering may be understood as the efforts of members of a politically dominant group to marginalize and subordinate a minority or a politically weaker group. Xenophobia is a dislike of foreigners. Since Western countries are multiethnic, and since dislike of the unlike has included negative attitudes toward women and gay people, it is necessary to use a term that is broader than xenophobia. A preferable term to express this concept is othering. Othering is also distinct from, though related to, nativism. Nativism refers to a preference by some people in a society, for other people whose families have lived for several generations in that society. By including women and gays, othering is broader than nativism though both share a disdain for minorities. Othering is not the exclusive property of the far right. The far left also has engaged in othering, focused mostly on “elite” or allegedly wealthy people. Joseph Stalin led a campaign against “kulaks,” better-off peasants who were accused of fomenting counter revolution. Scholars estimate that several million of these kulaks were deported, imprisoned, and killed. Hugo Chavez, the deceased leader of Venezuela, railed against “Oligarchs,” who included businesspeople and professionals, and said that the Catholic Church was comprised of “devils.” Chavez disdained and ignored the vital charitable work the Church conducted with orphans and other vulnerable people. So, othering is a phenomenon that is present in the left and the right.

1

INTRODUCTION

3

No study of contemporary othering can avoid taking account of populism, a seeming blend of left and right ideas. Populism has many definitions. One useful definition is that the populist sees society as divided into two homogeneous groups: the people and the elite.2 The people are the vast majority and they generally have good sense and work hard. The elite is a smaller number of people who are wealthier, have more prestige, and take advantage of the people through corrupt practices, manipulation, and deceit. Many far-right parties in Europe join populism with nativism—the view that the majority group should dominate a society— and a strong preference for law and order and social conservatism in general (less favorable to gays and women’s rights). There are parties, such as the British Veritas party in 2005, that eschew nativism and othering, while promoting populism and not advocating an authoritarian perspective.3 Taken together—populism, nativism, and a kind of authoritarian perspective—inform the platforms of European populist radical right parties that have elected members to the legislature and garnered headlines since the 1980s. Curiously in terms of economics, the European populist radical right parties have been on both sides of the traditional left–right political spectrum. Historically, left and right have been divided over the issue of equality of result.4 Left-wing parties have tried to reduce economic inequality as much as possible, through higher taxes and more social benefits. Right-wing parties press for lower taxes and fewer public funds aimed at reducing economic inequality. All social welfare programs—from government-sponsored health care to social security— move in the direction of greater economic equality. Cutbacks to these programs can move away from equality, hence further right. In Europe, populist radical right parties in some cases have favored more social benefits for workers—a traditional left-wing demand, while others have engaged in welfare chauvinism—a wish to deny social benefits to immigrants and refugees. Welfare chauvinism, inasmuch as it reduces social benefit payments, is where traditional right views meet the right whose target is the minorities. Canada and the United States have certainly heard from political actors who advocated for populism, and some have also advocated for nativism and authoritarian policies in a democratic context. A critical distinction between the advocates of populist radical right ideas and more extreme political actors, according to Cas Mudde, is that

4

A. L. KAGEDAN

popular radical right supporters are democrats who believe in competing in elections and in majority rule.5 Another component of the far right which exhibits othering may be termed extremist.6 Extremists are anti-democratic. They believe in a strong leader who will rule without checks and balances that are maintained through an independent judiciary and a free press. Extremists are looking to remake society in a revolutionary fashion: to create a homogeneous society by reducing the influence and in some cases the presence of minorities. They believe that they can reverse a slide toward what they see as societal decadence and engineer a national rebirth.7 It is on the extreme that one moves toward fascism, a revolutionary effort to remake social reality. These radical anti-democrats can engage in extreme, violent, othering. Should democracy succumb, the consequences for minorities would be severe. This book will examine how, and under what conditions, othering, encompassed in populism and other political concepts, has been translated into politics and policy. What has been the level of influence of this type of thinking on Canada and the United States since the late nineteenth century? Has the weight of the politics of othering remained at the same level in both countries over time? What are the factors behind differences in the use of political othering in each country? Has this disjunction always been in play or is it a recent development? What is a likely future path for othering in both countries? The book will follow a methodology that includes case studies and, turning to the historical record, adopt a comparative approach. Case studies can illuminate facts and provide insights about how societies treat an issue. As well, our case studies will identify key societal actions in the past (1870s to 1990s) that continue to have important implications today. The book includes case studies that will help to explain patterns in American and Canadian politics with reference to a number of minority groups. The cases chosen have received attention from scholars, thereby increasing the amount of information that will help to shed light on othering in both countries. The cases flow one after another historically so that we cover a series of time periods. This will shed light on whether or not and if so, how, othering politics evolves. Finally, each case will have a contemporary resonance in terms of the issues it raises so that they will be of greater interest to readers. This book will argue that the right–left paradigm is not useful when analyzing the politics of othering, a foundational human tendency. The politics of othering has been practiced in both the United States and

1

INTRODUCTION

5

Canada since the nineteenth century (our period of study is from the nineteenth century to today). Politicians and opinion leaders have used othering to score points and gain more support. These politicians and opinion leaders “supplied” the othering of minorities in response to a “demand” by a significant portion of the public for action against the targeted groups. The public demand for othering was based on a human tendency to dislike the unlike. The proportion of the public that made this demand for othering grew larger in the context of fears and uncertainties about personal financial pressures, war, terrorism, and seeming social/cultural threat. All othering—the demeaning of and discrimination against, and violent treatment of minorities—is abhorrent. With exceptions, prior to World War II, the politics of othering had comparatively worse impacts on Canadian minorities compared with American minorities, while since World War II, the politics, of othering was more significant in the United States than in Canada. Factors that fed into this flip include the history of slavery in the United States versus English– French political duality in Canada, Canadian social policy advances after World War II, and the valuing of citizenship that grew in Canada after World War II. This book is not a history of othering or discrimination. Nor does it probe the serious, and often tragic impacts of othering on individuals. Its scope is more limited. It tries to compare how politicians and public figures have used othering to advance their interests in a series of cases, set in a similar timeframe. The minorities referenced are considered in distinct periods of history. There is one exception: Blacks in the United States and Canada. The experience of Black Americans, over centuries, and the politics that has surrounded their treatment, have helped to shape American society and politics. The much smaller number of Blacks in Canada has meant that they have not attracted as much political attention. So, for this minority, the book takes a broader historical view from the late nineteenth century through to the eve of the twenty-first century. The term of choice in this book to describe the dislike of the unlike is othering. Many terms can be found in common parlance to refer to negative views and policies toward specific minorities—racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia—and unquestionably specific circumstances have affected the politics of othering in these cases. But, as I will argue later, the tendency to dislike the unlike is global and timeless. We should not think that such a negative attitude will ever pertain to one minority to the exclusion of other minorities.

6

A. L. KAGEDAN

The cases will be analyzed through a series of research questions regarding othering and politics. Some questions will be applied to all the case studies, while others will be designed to assist the analysis of a smaller number of cases. Examples of the broader research questions are: What statements, proposals, policies, and practices were advocated and implemented that reflected othering? What were the political/economic/cultural motives behind the othering? Was the intention to use othering articulated openly or masked? Were the proposals and policies shared across the U.S.–Canada border? What were the forces opposing these proposals, policies, and practices and how effective were they in opposing them? What was the impact of othering on policy? A comparative politics approach permits us, by holding constant a large number of factors that characterize both the United States and Canada, to focus on a point of difference: receptivity to othering messages. By choosing two similar countries, and comparable institutions in these countries, we are able to show that the politics of othering exists in these advanced countries, and describes the conditions that permit it to make political gains. This could contribute to studies of the far right in politically and economically advanced European countries and to our broader understanding of othering. Canada and the United States have much in common. They are geographic neighbors. English is the predominant language of both countries. Christianity is the religion of 67.3% of Canadians and of 73.7% of Americans. Historically, following the millennia of life here of Indigenous people, the British conquered both lands. Both countries have democratic institutions, and a court system that supports the rule of law. Both are federal countries, with power divided between the federal government and states and provinces. The United States and Canada are each other’s largest trading partners. They are joined militarily through the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) which also joins military efforts on the seas surrounding each country. United States media is watched across Canada and Canadian media is consumed in America. Canadian writers and musicians are equally well known in the United States. American film and music stars are known to almost all Canadians. The book will provide, in Chapter 2, a conceptual chapter that will examine the basis of othering. It will seek to explain the basis of an othering perspective, and demonstrate the validity of this analysis by referring to studies from the social sciences and then explore its implications

1

INTRODUCTION

7

through an historical study of the United States and Canada. It will also discuss the role of the Holocaust in influencing the study of othering and the establishment of international institutions formed after World War II, particularly the United Nations in its early years, whose purpose was to deter othering as did international treaties like the Genocide Convention. Following the conceptual chapter, the book will turn to history for insight into the politics of othering. The book will focus on seven case studies of the same minority group present in both countries. Chapter 3 will focus on the residential school system established by the United States and Canada to eliminate Indigenous culture, and by extension, contact with family and tradition among thousands of Indigenous children. The case studies will cover the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. The residential school system is just one aspect of the broader experience and treatment of Indigenous peoples but, given its significance, it will be our focus. Political and social issues relating to Indigenous people in Canada in the United States remain at the center of public debate. Chapter 4 will look at how the politics of othering affected Jews between World War I and World War II. This was a critical time in the history of Jews—even as they sought to integrate into the societies that had accepted them as immigrants, they faced resentment in the context of the Great Depression and hostile propaganda supported by the emerging Nazi movement in Germany. Chapter 5 will take us to World War II. In the lead up to war, a strong politics of othering was directed against Japanese—immigrant and native—in both the United States and Canada. In a deliberate, calculated and cruel manner, Japanese were removed from their homes on the West Coast and shipped inland, their property largely stolen, and their freedom sharply curtailed. In Chapter 6, we leave behind, briefly, ethnic minorities for nonethnic minorities. In the early postwar period, a politics of othering targeted people who could be linked to communism. This anti-communist effort played in both countries but much more sharply in the United States than in Canada. Canada escaped McCarthyism. We shall explore why. During the Cold War, both countries also engaged in a purge of LGBTQ people in the civil service and the military under the guise of protecting security. Chapter 7 looks at the politics of othering with respect to Blacks in the United States and Canada. The degree to which the treatment of Blacks drew public attention and attracted the interest of politicians and public opinion leaders differed in scope and in kind between the two countries. The politics of othering with respect to Blacks gripped the United States

8

A. L. KAGEDAN

historically but did not grip Canada, despite the fact that the othering of Blacks occurred in both countries. Chapter 8 will consider how politicians have used fears of Islam to try and win votes. It will examine the situation following September 11, 2001, which saw the mass killing of Americans and twenty-four Canadians, raised security questions about Muslims as the attackers loudly and falsely claimed that their actions related to their faith. The attack of 9/11 was followed by the repeated occurrence of terrorist attacks such as those at the 2013 Boston Marathon, the 2015 San Bernardino attacks, and the 2017 attack on pedestrians and cyclists in New York City, all carried out by legal residents of the United States. Chapter 9 will be the concluding chapter that will use the information and analysis derived from the preceding chapters to explain the difference between the relative success and failure of the politics of othering at the national level in the United States and Canada. It will also compare what we learned about the politics of othering in Canada and the United States with those politics, identified with the far right, in Europe, and project future trends for Canada and the United States. This book is an effort to contribute to a number of areas of scholarly inquiry. Following World War II, the American academic community turned its focus to the sources of far-right thinking, America and its allies having fought and won a war against Nazi Germany. Books8 such as The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, 1950) explored the social psychology of people attracted to the far right, attributing to them rigid, hierarchical views, and intolerance of difference. Writers in the later 1950s and early 1960s looked at organizations like the John Birch Society to develop an understanding of the far right (Bell, 1955). In the 1980s and later, scholars began to connect authoritarian thinking with human universals— or behaviors that humans have exhibited over millennia (including Donald Brown). These anthropological studies have continued through to today. This book will try to harness the insights of social science regarding othering, and then apply it to the history of the United States and Canada, going back to the nineteenth century. The objectives of the book are several: to test social science hypotheses about the fortunes of the politics of othering; and to examine the politics of othering in both the United Statesand Canada. More recent writers have tried to analyze contemporary American life for insight into the politics of othering.9 Class division in America has become the basis for political division and antagonism, that opens the

1

INTRODUCTION

9

door to the politics of othering (Charles Murray, 2012). A sense of falling backward in relation to other Americans led to far-right thinking in another analysis (Arlie Russell Hochschild, 2016). Conflict between largely unacknowledged classes goes back centuries according to Nancy Isenberg (Isenberg, 2017). Poorer whites saw in Black Americans a group that they could characterize as below themselves, setting the table for the politics of othering often characterized as far-right thinking. In Canada, much less attention has been paid to the politics of othering. Canada is an avowedly diverse country, and in fact the real threat of secession by Quebec has generated focused attention rather than the fortunes of the politics of othering often referred to as farright thinking. Some have written about how a national (and provincial) political party known as Social Credit harbored far-right thought.10 But renewed interest in political othering in Canada is of recent vintage and reflects discussion in the United States. For instance, in 2018 Maxime Bernier, a member of Parliament and former Cabinet Minister broke with his party to form a new party in an attempt to marry anti-diversity thinking with traditionally libertarian views.

Notes 1. The New Oxford Companion to Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, “Other, the,” accessed online on February 18, 2019. 2. Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 13–26. 3. Mudde, 145. 4. Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of Political Disctinction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 60. 5. Cas Mudde, The Far Right in America, New York: Routledge, 2018, 1–3. 6. Hans-George Betz and Carol Johnson, Chapter 3, The Populist Radical Right: A Reader, Routledge, 2016, 190. 7. Roger Griffin, ed., International Fascism, London: Arnold, 1998, 30. 8. Theodor Adorno, ed., The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper, 1950. Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right, New York: Doubleday, 1964. Donald Brown, Human Universals , New York: McGraw Hill, 1991. 9. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Crown Forum, 2012. Arlie Russell Hochshild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, New Press, 2016. Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, New York: Penguin Books, 2016. 10. Bob Hesketh, Major Douglas and Alberta Social Credit, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

CHAPTER 2

What Attracts People to Othering?

We launch rockets that reach the moon, cure severe diseases, and negotiate international trade agreements. Despite our achievements, our human nature continues to challenge us. One problematic universal human tendency is the dislike of the unlike. In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance sums up this concept this way: “We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us.”1 Throughout history, humans have struggled with the implications of their natural suspiciousness of other people who are different. The negative implications of hostility to, and suspiciousness of, those who are different, or othering, are brought into bold relief when looking back in time. Based on the genetic studies of modern humans, scientists have inferred that, between five thousand and seven thousand years ago, the degree of diversity among chromosomes of males (low during a distinct time period) and females (high during the same period) showed a sharp difference. Neither climate change, nor disease can explain this relative lack of male genetic diversity. Using a mathematical model of conflict and competition, the scientists concluded that warfare claimed male lives more than female lives, reduced the number of males, and eliminated Ychromosome lineages, effectively creating a biological bottleneck. If left unchecked, this set of circumstances could have led to the disappearance of all males and thereby of humans.2

© The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_2

11

12

A. L. KAGEDAN

Over the centuries, groups of families or tribes became larger, agriculture arose to provide food, trade increased, and conflict between tribes diminished in favor of relations based on mutual benefit, such as trade in goods and materials. Male numbers recovered and Y-chromosome diversity returned. However, it is speculated that some the negative effects of clan competition on Y-chromosome diversity may still be seen in regions like Central Asia where tribal life remained important in the twentieth century.3 As tribes grew ever larger, scholars, politicians, teachers, and leaders developed concepts to bridge the divide between in-group and outgroup perspectives. Essentially, the notion of citizenship entails setting aside group differences in favor of the interests of a political unit. It also makes an individual’s status—as a citizen or non-citizen—more important that their membership in a group. Citizenship trumps tribe. The unit— a state—now defined a new in-group: citizens. The idea of international human rights goes even farther: the whole human race is one, and all humans deserve to be treated fairly, with compassion. In fact, advanced countries have embraced a liberal international consensus: people inside each country must be treated equally and fairly, and disputes between states must be negotiated. This perspective is at odds with ethnocentrism. The gap between the liberal international perspective and tendencies such as ethnocentrism and chauvinism has been mined by the politicians and opinion leaders operating in the context of advanced democracies. But it is easy to see that the embrace of citizenship by nation states, tied to notions of equal treatment of all, let alone world human rights, is a huge leap forward for humanity compared with tribal relations. Citizenship pushes against universal ways of tribal thinking that reach back millennia. In fact, nationalism often tends to reduce “full” citizenship to people in a majority in-group (white Americans/Canadians). And although international human rights have been discussed and promoted for over seventy years, most of the world’s population does not enjoy them. Both citizenship and international human rights must contend with ethnocentrism, chauvinism, and narrow nationalism, based on ethnicity. Othering, now considered a favored practice of political extremists, is as old as human existence. Anthropologist Donald Brown published a book about human universals in 1991.4 By collecting evidence from around the globe, Brown identified hundreds of shared human behaviors spanning a wide range of areas of human endeavor from child-rearing to

2

WHAT ATTRACTS PEOPLE TO OTHERING?

13

culture. One of the most striking pieces of evidence gathered by anthropologists to demonstrate the existence of human universals relates to language and color. If a group has two words for colors, the two colors it will name are white and black. If the language has room for three colors, they are white, black, and red; four colors, white, black, red, and green. Social Psychology studies have found that infants as young as three months old distinguish faces from their own racial group from other racial groups, and that preschoolers will favor their group—an in-group—over other groups.5 The human universals of greatest interest for us are those that relate to human interaction. These behavior patterns run along two lines. Within a group, behaviors include empathy, fairness, and sharing. Between groups, humans universally are ethnocentric and see their group as superior to other groups. Relations with an out-group, with outsiders, is either hostile or instrumental—trading food for tools, for example. The natural dislike of others, and the tendency of groups to engage in conflict with other groups, is still with us. At its most extreme, ethnocentrism translates into political revolution, the death of democracy, and genocide. At less intense levels, dislike of the unlike produces a wish to eliminate or rid society of an identifiable group—in an unspecified way— or a wish to limit the rights of the minority group. These actions are designed to permit the majority group to maintain its superiority through discrimination and social exclusion. The other side of the dislike coin is group solidarity: if you are like me, I like you—we are one community. The notion of citizenship creates a new group which encompasses people from different ethnic and religious groups. The development of communities is based on this trait and mutual respect and group unity offer help to the individual. The grafting of older, tribal solidarity onto diverse societies is essential for peace in a multiethnic society. The sum total of human universals collected by Donald Brown encompass what has been seen traditionally as “human nature.” Steven Pinker has pointed out that this new understanding of human nature (now termed “human universals”) came at a time when social science had moved away from ancient notions of human nature, spoken of by Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, and other great thinkers. For many decades in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries scholars rejected the notion of human nature. Instead, scholars saw humanity as divided by diverse and unequal cultures. The anthropologist Margaret Meade argued against the notion that there were human universals. Writing in the 1930s and 1940s, she

14

A. L. KAGEDAN

studied isolated tribes and observed differences in behavior. For instance, she observed that in Samoa, unlike in America, adolescents did not have a challenging social life. But further research showed this was not true and that adolescents had as challenging a time in Samoa as they did in the United States or Canada.6 Anthropologist Franz Boas, considered the father of cultural anthropology, saw European culture superior as to other cultures, but held out hope that so-called “inferior” cultures could catch up. The notion of a hierarchy of cultures opens the door to exclusion and discrimination. But for Boas it was better than the alternative view: that mankind was divided into unequal races, and that racial characteristics were permanent across generations. Ruth Benedict, Boas’ student, also focused on culture, not human nature.7 It took the brutality of war to turn the page for Benedict back toward the idea of human nature or, in Donald Brown’s conception, human universals. In a pamphlet called “The Races of Mankind” designed to inspire all those fighting the Nazis, Benedict wrote: “The world is shrinking.” The nations fighting fascism include “the most different physical types of men…All the peoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin.” The pamphlet triggered a negative reaction from Americans who wanted to keep the white and Black “races” separate. They accused Benedict of being a communist—a handy epithet readily tossed at all who objected to Jim Crow, a system designed to keep Blacks separated from, and living in inferior conditions to, whites.8 To concede that there are human universals such as ethnocentrism is a starting point to recognize how othering can be used as a political tool that opens the door to policies based on prejudice. The existence of othering does not negate the fact that there are also human universals of in-group notions of fairness and empathy. The question is: how can societies convince people to override certain negative tendencies for the benefit of the whole society? The human rights of a minority group are protected by the decision of the majority to respect those rights, in addition to the minorities’ assertion of its rights. The rule of law itself is premised on most people deciding to respect the law— and supporting legally elected governments through their votes and their taxes. No society, however advanced, is immune from the threat of in-group, out-group conflict. The quest over the past four centuries to build a liberal international consensus—respect for the rule of law, democracy, an independent judiciary, free expression, and giving primacy to the rights of individuals, regardless of their membership in a group—was accompanied by an effort

2

WHAT ATTRACTS PEOPLE TO OTHERING?

15

to bury or deny human nature, in effect to claim that it does not exist. The human mind, in this view, was a blank slate to be written on by parents, family members, and society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau puts forward the notion that our ancestors in the ancient past were noble savages at peace with fellow humans and with nature. Hobbes took a quite different view: without a strong governing power, people would be at war with one another. This perspective accords with what we know of all periods of history.9 Ethnocentrism and chauvinism have always challenged the liberal international consensus. In the modern context, othering is a bedrock component of authoritarianism. Under authoritarian governments, free speech must yield to controlled speech. Free-markets succumb to heavily regulated markets. Free trade is replaced by tariff barriers. Free religious expression gives way to a state religion. Citizenship loses value and membership in “the nation” gains status. After all, since many societies are multiethnic and multireligious, the establishment of a regime that strives for majority rule, sameness from minorities, and a docile media, and places the majority in a superior position to others, is what we know as authoritarian. For Karen Stenner, a political scientist, authoritarianism is a hostility toward difference and a preference for sameness. It is a political framework on an individual level—not on a governmental level—and it exists within the context of a democracy. This concept of authoritarianism fuses together a belief in strict law and order and a nativist tendency to other minorities. She argues that the expression of authoritarianism, which can remain beneath the surface, will come to notice—gain fellow-traveler support—in response to perceived “threats” or threatening situations. In the absence of a perceived threat, authoritarians can remain quiet and can appear to be conservative, libertarian, or even liberal. The view that one’s society is facing social chaos—from crime, licentiousness, protest—is what drives authoritarianism, not concern over international affairs.10 When it comes to political labels, Stenner rejects the idea that conservative is coincident with authoritarian. Conservatives resist change, while authoritarians embrace change to reduce diversity and promote uniformity and conformism.11 In fact, conservatives generally embrace the liberal international consensus—respect for the rule of law, a free press, free expression, and negotiation between states. However, some selfidentified conservatives would lean more to the authoritarian side. Curiously, the variable which tracks most closely with authoritarian thinking is attitudes toward child-rearing. Values such as obedience to

16

A. L. KAGEDAN

parents and a focus on orderliness were found to align with authoritarian thinking versus thinking for oneself and having a social conscience. Using a data-set from Europe and America in late 2016, Stenner and Jonathan Haidt conclude that, in twenty-nine liberal democracies, 33% of the majority (white) population leaned toward authoritarianism in their values (although about 40% self-described as being liberal). The rest of society is nonauthoritarian (37%) or is neutral (29%). Authoritarians are a significant political constituency.12 How do people arrive at an authoritarian way of thinking? In addition to a pattern of child-rearing, Stenner offers that it can begin with cultural socialization, narrow life experiences, or a lack of education. Stenner applied her analysis of authoritarianism to race relations in the American south.13 In a survey of white Southerners, individuals who were identified as authoritarian were given a choice of white or Black interviewers. The “authoritarians” expressed a clear preference for a white interviewer over a Black interviewer.14 A high-level education correlated with the liberal (Stenner uses the term libertarian) consensus versus authoritarian views.15 In the presence of Black interviewers, liberals and authoritarians condemned white supremacists and militia groups. However, with white interviewers, authoritarians showed some sympathy for white supremacists.16 Similarly, with a white interviewer, authoritarians complained about what they saw as moral decay and anarchy in America.17 In terms of public policy, authoritarians will call for legal discrimination against minorities, restrictions on immigration, limits on free speech, and the regulation of personal behavior in the matters of school prayer, abortion, sexuality, and punitive enforcement.18 These views are not tied to an economic downturn, but remain in place in good and bad economic times. In societies with strong institutions that defend minorities (courts, police, media), the dialogue can get rough between authoritarians and supporters of a liberal international consensus but remain civil and nonviolent. In the twenty-first century, in Western countries, populist radical right parties are non-violent, and believe in democracy. However, if institutions are weak and political parties bent on remaking society are focused on getting rid of an elite or an ethnic other, the result can be the harsh treatment of minorities. When democracy dies minorities are at supreme risk.

2

WHAT ATTRACTS PEOPLE TO OTHERING?

17

Germany provides the best illustration of the movement from a broadly liberal political structure to a revolutionary regime, that is authoritarian and anti-democratic. Germany moved from low-level othering in a democracy to genocide under a dictator. The arch of developments in Germany is well documented. Events in Germany establish guideposts for the battle between ethnocentrism and inclusion, and indeed led to a legal line in the sand around extreme othering. This is why we now turn to Germany and the Holocaust.19 Article 2 of the Convention on Genocide defines it as follows20 : In the Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The experience of Nazi Germany had profound implications for our time. Under the Nazis, othering progressed to genocide—which caused the death of six million Jews, and the death, incarceration, and injury of millions of other civilians. Some of these murdered individuals opposed the Nazis politically—many others were politically inactive but were seen as other by the Nazis because of their ethnic or sexual identity, because they were defined as “weaker” in Nazi eyes. The tragic and catastrophic effects of othering in the Nazi case triggered the development of international human rights standards. In particular, it motivated nations to issue the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration states21 : All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

This reflected the universal human values of empathy, cooperation, and fairness. Historically, as mentioned, these values were applied within a

18

A. L. KAGEDAN

group, and now the idea had emerged of applying the values to all groups of people. What happened in Nazi Germany was the total opposite of these principles. People who did not fit their definition of worthy—ethnic Germans—were stripped of their dignity and killed in the millions. The Universal Declaration set a path of the writing of documents and the construction of institutions to try and ensure that, to the degree possible, nations are discouraged from engaging in genocide and ethnocentrism. Given the innate nature of ethnocentrism, it is hardly surprising that the principles enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been breached repeatedly over the past seven decades. But at least this activity has become easier to discern, and in some cases, easier to oppose than previously. In Germany, and in Europe generally, the framing of negative views of Jews traces back millennia, to the beginning of Christianity and Islam. The features of in-group solidarity and negative views of the out-group developed in the centuries following the founding of Christianity. For instance, the Papal Bull l Hebraeorum gens (“The Jewish People”) 1569, of Saint Pius V, which led to the expulsion of Jews from some of the Papal States, begins as follows: The Jewish people fell from the heights because of their faithlessness and condemned their Redeemer to a shameful death. Their godlessness has assumed such forms that, for the salvation of our own people, it becomes necessary to prevent their disease.

But what concerns us here is the modern framing of the Jews in a negative light. In Germany, in the nineteenth century, hostile perspectives of Jews were staples of the German nationalist movement. It was alleged that Jews in Germany were a blight on the country, that they were dishonest, disloyal, and had a negative influence on German culture. The hostile framing of the Jews caught the attention of Friedrich Nietzsche whose own sister married a nationalist who promoted anti-Semitism. Writing in the 1880s, Nietzsche admits that, at one time, he himself had been drawn into nationalism and anti-Jewish thinking, which he equates with hostility to all other nationalities—Italians and French included. Nationalism is more than support for the nation state and its citizens. It is support for a portion of the citizenry, the “founder” people, and excludes all who have followed them into citizenship. What is striking about Nietzsche’s analysis

2

WHAT ATTRACTS PEOPLE TO OTHERING?

19

is his assessment that by the late nineteenth century the negative framing of the Jews is pervasive in Germany22 : I have never met a German who was favorably inclined towards the Jews; and however unconditionally all cautious and politic men may have repudiated real anti-Jewism,[anti-Semitism] even this caution and policy is not directed against this class of feeling itself but only against its dangerous immoderation, and especially against the distasteful and shameful way in which this immoderate feeling is expressed—one must not deceive oneself about that.

He refers to historians like Heinrich von Treitschke, and he could have mentioned Houston Stewart Chamberlain who spun theories of alleged negative Jewish influence in Germany and Europe. Nietzsche describes the Germans as having a weak stomach, and expresses concern about German reaction to the increasing of number of Jews fleeing Russia and immigrating into Germany. Immigration was a trigger for othering in the nineteenth century, and again in the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century. Immigrants are not yet citizens and so to the authoritarians they are fair game. Immigrants are an easier target than fellow citizens. The notion of eliminating the Jews of Europe dates back to Nietzsche’s time. A study of fifty-one prominent anti-Semitic writers whose works appeared between 1861 and 1895 revealed that nineteen called for the physical elimination of the Jews.23 In other words, by the 1880s, the dislike of Jews pervaded Germany. This does not mean that, on a day-to-day basis, people did not do business with Jews or even behave in a neutral or friendly way toward them. In fact, in his early life Adolph Hitler himself had positive relations with Jews on an individual level. When Hitler’s mother, Klara, was diagnosed with cancer, she was treated by a Jewish doctor, Dr. Bloch. Hitler had respect and affection for this physician. On the day of Klara’s funeral, Hitler went to Dr. Block’s office to express his gratefulness. When, under Hitler’s orders Jews began to be persecuted in Germany in the 1930s, he personally arranged for Dr. Block to leave Germany under the protection of the Gestapo.24 As a young person, Hitler sold paintings to two Jews who owned picture-framing and art shops, and this granted him a modicum of financial stability.25

20

A. L. KAGEDAN

Several factors led Germany to move from dislike of Jews to their active persecution. During the First World War, it was common to claim that Jews were shirking their duty in fighting for Germany, which was not true (as evidenced by the dilemmas faced by the Nazis in persecuting Jewish war veterans). It was also alleged that Jews had betrayed Germany. Added to this was the perception that Jews engineered the Bolshevik Revolution—and that Jews dominated the Bolshevik leadership. In fact, it was after his war service and when he was in a German military academy that Hitler learned of allegations that Jews were responsible for the German defeat (much more convenient than Germans admitting their own blunders) and that Jews were also responsible for the Russian Revolution.26 The German military academy was Hitler’s school of anti-Semitism. It is not surprising that the German military, having recently suffered a stinging defeat, would look for ways to excuse themselves by claiming that they were stabbed in the back. The military was primed to focus on events in Russia and the new Soviet government and perhaps tying Jews to this new structure made it seem to be a less formidable rival. The economic situation of Germany deteriorated throughout the 1920s, but particularly after the stock market crash of 1929. Germany had to pay reparations to the victorious allies in World War I and part of German territory was occupied for the allies to take reparation benefits directly from German soil. After the stock market crash, banks that had loaned money to Germany called the loans, which triggered a doubling of unemployment. Political battles between left and right intensified with violence a common element.27 Hitler’s actions in embracing anti-Semitism were intended to enhance his public stature and increase his political power. Over time, this tactical choice became a profound belief in the cause of Nazism, a revolutionary movement that buried democracy and pressed for war. As Nazi leader, Hitler’s political career focused on two goals: to rid Germany (and Europe) of Jews and to seize territory in Eastern Europe to create living space for Germans.28 Indeed, if Jews provided the main support for Bolshevism, then eliminating them would move Germans closer to defeating the Soviets and claiming their expanded living space. These ideas enamored Hitler to his followers and gave him clear objectives. The othering Hitler supported the political Hitler. The revolutionary ideology of Nazism was built through traditional nationalist ideology including anti-Semitism designed to advance the

2

WHAT ATTRACTS PEOPLE TO OTHERING?

21

political quest to win over the German people and then to march to victory in war. A curious incident from the early 1930s sheds light on the political component of Nazism. Canadian businessman Samuel Bronfman and his wife were traveling on a ship in the early 1930s. They encountered a young German businessman who, like Bronfman, was involved in the trade of acholic beverages. His name was Joachim Von Ribbentrop. Von Ribbentrop was the future Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany. When challenged by Bronfman about Nazi actions against Jews, Ribbentrop responded that this was all just politics.29 The speeches made against Jews fed on popular dislike of them. Adding to the use of the Jewish card in speeches was how physical acts against Jews could fire Hitler’s base of support. Hitler believed that most people wanted bread and circuses. This phrase is attributed to the Roman satirist Juvenal who observed that issues of public policy were of little interest to most people who cared more for bread and circuses and would reward politicians for these goods with their support.30 In Hitler’s case, the persecution of the Jews provided both bread— theft of the property of Jews was standard practice under Nazi rule—and circuses—the spectacle of physical attacks on Jews and their institutions were enthusiastically adopted by Nazi followers. In his hostility to the Jews, Hitler was reflecting the thinking of the Nazi party and beyond. In fact, the 1920 program of the Nazi Party called for the denial of civil rights to Jews, their registration, and the banning of Jews from contributing to or owning newspapers.31 So, in addition to being an organizing principle for the Nazi regime, the policy of persecuting Jews was politically beneficial for German politicians, and benefited the invading Nazis in countries they occupied during the war. As German forces moved East, they found willing accomplices almost everywhere they traveled. The countries east of Germany—Poland, the Baltic States, Belorussia—were under Soviet rule following the MolotovRibbentrop agreement. The Soviets imprisoned, deported, and killed many elite members of these countries. When the Germans arrived, they made it clear that the Jews were representatives of the recently departed Soviets and that they should be made to pay a price for Soviet behavior. This double occupation perfectly set conditions for massive revenge seeking. In fact, in Minsk, the Germans forced Jews to assemble in their best clothing and sing Soviet revolutionary songs before removing them to a killing location.32 The theft of

22

A. L. KAGEDAN

Jewish property and the brutal treatment of Jews repeated itself in one country after another. The framing of negative attitudes toward Jews—their othering—did not happen overnight. It took decades for the negative ideas to be articulated and made politically saleable. Despite the pervasive dislike of Jews, their genocide would not have happened had it not been the case that a party which promoted their views gain power, was led by a charismatic individual who made the othering of Jews a cardinal feature of his program. And the severe economic pressures on Germans, and wounded national pride over the World War I debacle, fed the flame of othering. In order to commit genocide, the ultimate act of othering, the Nazis had to overwhelm in as many Germans as possible any residual empathy for the persecuted groups, in particular Jews, and convince Germans that there no chance of cooperating with these persecuted people. The Nazis were effective propagandists. They were able to convince Germans that their policies were justified. A police battalion member, speaking after the war, described his thinking when committing acts of genocide33 : I would also like to say that it did not at all occur to me that these acts could be unjust. It is true that I know that it is also the duty of the military …to protect the innocent, but I was then of the condition that the Jews were not innocent but guilty. I believed the propaganda that all Jews were criminals and sub-humans and that they were the cause of Germany’s decline after the First World War.

It became unthinkable for German soldiers to disobey orders to eliminate Jews. The Nazis recruited and deployed personnel to commit genocide. For the purposes of this study, it is important to consider whether, even among those whose role it was to commit genocide, there was ambivalence, and even empathy for the victims. Christopher Browning wrote an account of the actions of one police group that was ordered to conduct the mass killing of Jews in the town of Jozefow. This group was made up of reservists who generally came from the working class or lower middle class. Among them were barbers, tailors, and construction workers. Browning discovered that, although the order to eliminate Jews was carried out, it created challenges. The commander of the police group, a World War I veteran, Trapp, was personally uncomfortable with the order. When issuing the order, he said that anyone who did not wish to carry it out could be given other duties.

2

WHAT ATTRACTS PEOPLE TO OTHERING?

23

A dozen men out of some 500 stepped out of line.34 Browning estimates that, once the shooting had begun, between 50 and 100 of the men stepped away. Following the massacre, police commander Trapp asked that his group be excused from further killing. The higher command agreed. In one instance, the other Jews had not arrived, so Trapp released the Jews that his men had rounded up.35 Subsequently, his group was involved in pushing Jews to get on trains to concentration camps or handing the Jews over to others, recruited from the local population, to engage in killing. Given the challenges to killing Jews that gunfire posed, the option of creating concentration camps with a few devoted staff members would be particularly appealing to the Nazi high command. The experiences of the police group indicate that, despite pervasive negative attitudes toward Jews, despite the propaganda onslaught of the Nazis, and despite the peer pressure of their colleagues, a few men displayed a queasiness that hinted at the human universal value of empathy for members of the human family. Reports on one action where Jews were forced to go to the city’s marketplace noted that there were very few women with children delivered to this killing ground. The Nazi hierarchy said that there should be a social event—a kind of celebration—following a massacre to take the men’s minds off the events of the day. One military commander got into a debate with the Nazi authorities, when he thought to protect Jewish artisans who could help the war effort from being executed. He lost this argument. The Nazis engaged in othering of a wide variety of groups. Indeed, the racial perspective of the Nazis essentially looked down on all groups who could be exploited and attacked—Roma, Slavic people. As well, Germans who were homosexual or those considered weak mentally or physically were also subject to punishment or even death. The Nazis believed that the woman’s place was in the home with the children (a belief generally adopted by authoritarians). In fact, when, early in the twentieth century, women in Germany began to occupy clerical positions—which used to be held exclusively by men, rumors spread that it was the Jews who owned the factories who gave the women work. In 1934, Hitler told an audience that Jewish intellectuals had invented the idea of women’s emancipation.36 In 1935, during a speech to the National-Socialist Women’s Congress, Hitler declared, with regard to women’s rights37 :

24

A. L. KAGEDAN

in reality, the granting of so-called equal rights to women…does not confer equal rights at all, but constitutes the deprivation of rights, since they draw women into a zone where they can only be inferior.

As mentioned, the international recognition of human rights came after— and as a result of—the Nazi regime, so was not a barrier to Nazi actions. However, there were standards of rights of Germans that reflected the liberal international consensus which caused headaches for the Nazis. One instance of this was the years-long debate within Nazi circles of who was considered to be a Jew—would two Jewish grandparents make you a Jew, or one grandparent? In fact, the Wannsee conference38 on the Jewish question, held on January 20, 1942, focused on this vexing question. Jews who fought for Germany in World War I posed another dilemma: should they, too be persecuted? Ultimately, the Nazi ideology removed all doubts regarding the need to eliminate Jews. Beyond this, the Nazis had difficulty with the both the Catholic and Protestant Churches some of whose leaders were critical of Nazi actions. Privately, the Nazis looked forward to the day when all Churches could be closed but, for tactical reasons they made deals with the Churches whenever they could, and jailed recalcitrant leaders. Politically, social democrats opposed Nazi policies and they were hunted down once the Nazis seized power. Significant economic pressure, political chaos, and public shame over defeat in World War I together with charismatic leadership and effective propagandizing led to the triumph politically of a revolutionary ideology that opened the door to genocide. The Nazi politicians played the ethnocentric and chauvinistic strings on the human “violin” and severed the other strings—of empathy and cooperation—in a paroxysm of hatred and destruction. Fortunately, in the United States and Canada, the arch from othering to the adoption of a revolutionary ideology that was responsible for the genocidal killing of millions has not been crossed. But, as we will see in the case studies, the United States and Canada have been the scene of efforts to erase Indigenous culture and family ties that constitute a form of genocide, and other policies that were targeted against ethnic, religious, political, and sexual minorities. In all these cases, the policies came from a process that involved a significant part of the population and the efforts to politicians and opinion leaders. The violent acts of a number of lone wolves in recent years has shocked publics in both countries by individuals charged with the attacks: (Alex

2

WHAT ATTRACTS PEOPLE TO OTHERING?

25

Minassian, April 23, 2018, Toronto), Blacks (Dylan Roof, June 17, 2015, Charleston), Muslims (Alexandre Bissonette, January 29, 2017, Quebec City), and Jews (Robert Bowers, October 27, 2018, Pittsburgh). But to understand how we reached our current situation; it is important to go back in time to see how the two countries that are our focus—the United States and Canada—dealt with minorities in their midst. At least some of the shock is related to an uneasy recognition that the narratives offered by these individuals mirror the rhetoric that is more pervasive in the society, including on social media platforms.

Notes 1. J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, New York, HarperCollins, 2016, 3. 2. Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw, and Marcus Feldman, “Cultural Hitchhiking and Competition Between Patrilineal Kin Groups Explain the Post-NeolithicY-Chromosome Bottleneck,” Nature Communications, Vol. 9, No. 2077 (2018), 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-043 75-6. OPEN. 3. Cultural Hitchhiking, p. 10. Reference is made here to the Betsilio highlanders of Madagascar. 4. Donald Brown, Human Universals , Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. A list of humans universals may also be found in Steven Pinker, Blank Slate, New York: Penguin Books, 2002, 455–59. 5. Brown, 13. Dr. May Ling Halim and Dr. Sarah Gaither, “How to raise anti-racist babies, according to psychology”, NBCnews.com, June 28, 2020. 6. Brown, 9. 7. Pinker, 22–23. 8. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind, October 25, 1943. Public Affairs Committee, New York. https://archives.org/details/ RacesOfMankind, accessed on October 28, 2018. 9. Pinker, 5–7. 10. Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 13–35. 11. Stenner, 138–39. 12. Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt, “Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies,” in Case R. Sunstein, ed., Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America, New York: William Morrow, 2018, p. 192 and footnote 5 on p. 219. 13. Stenner, 210–66. 14. Stenner, 210–12.

26

A. L. KAGEDAN

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Stenner, 221. Stenner, 255–56. Stenner, 258. Stenner, 270. Stenner, 324. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, preventgenocide.org, accessed on June 6, 2017. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, un.org, accessed on June 6, 2017. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, gutenberg.org, accessed on June 6, 2017. Daniel Johan Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 71. Volker Ulrich, Hitler, Ascent, 1899–1939, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016, 27–28. Ulrich, 42. Ulrich, 70–79. Ulrich, 218–21. Ulrich, 231. Michael R. Marrus, Samuel Bronfman: The Life and Times of Seagram’s Mr. Sam, Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 1991, 168. https://www.merriam-webster.com, “Bread and Circuses”. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, New York: Penguin Books, 2003, 179. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, 2012, 318–75. Kurt Mobus, former police battalion member, who served in Chelmno, testing on November 8, 1961 in Goldhagen, 179. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 2017, 71. Browning, 76–77. Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, New York: Penguin Books, 2005, 331. Volkisher Beobachter, September 15, 1935. http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/Wannsee/wansee minutes.html, accessed on June 13, 2017.

CHAPTER 3

Erasing a People: Indigenous People and Indigenous Residential Schools

As we have discussed, othering involves the self-identification of groups of people and the relationship between groups. We have seen how, once groups or tribes are identified, a universal process of differentiation occurs. All groups see themselves as superior and see other groups as inferior. Groups are hostile to one another—occasionally violent as well. Relations between groups are instrumental—that is, based on a business proposition that benefits both parties or that the stronger party imposes on the weaker party. Around the globe, the relationships between settler populations and Indigenous people fit this pattern. The initial encounter involved hostility and violence, with the industrially superior settlers, over time, winning the wars. However, when the wars ended, the Indigenous people became part of the countries that the settlers created. Although some Indigenous peoples were granted citizenship in settler societies, others were not and lived as the subjects of a treaty between the state and the tribe. But across the board, in all the continents, settler or majority groups saw Indigenous peoples as inferior, fundamentally different, and decided to try to get instrumental value out of them by turning them into regular citizens. Cultural genocide of Indigenous people occurred on a global scale. In many instances, this meant removing the Indigenous children from their parents, stripping the children of their culture, and putting them to work to maintain the very schools they had been forced to attend.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_3

27

28

A. L. KAGEDAN

The situation was worse in countries with an in-house agent of assimilation: politically influential Christian Churches who saw an opportunity for missionary work among the Indigenous peoples and moved forward most decisively with the creation and maintenance of Indigenous residential school systems. The deep involvement of Churches in Indigenous residential schools for Indigenous people would appear to diverge from the model of intergroup relations devoted solely to instrumental, business purposes. But from the Churches’ perspective the deal they were offering to the Indigenous children was the greatest benefit possible: personal salvation. Here, there was an effort, which had such negative impacts on Indigenous people, to entice them into a new community. But, as we will see, these efforts that might appear on their face to show some compassion or empathy, in fact, were part of a system to destroy Indigenous culture and undermine family relationships. A current of thinking in the United States and Canada prior to World War II that was informed by othering was Social Darwinism. This perspective had a significant effect on most of the minority groups that we will be examining in our case studies, including Indigenous people. Social Darwinism affected the thinking of political elites in both the United States and Canada including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister William Lyon McKenzie King. This school of thought is identified with Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Social Darwinism posits that specific groups of people, ethnic groups, mirrored development in the animal kingdom. Just as evolution bequeathed a wide variety of animals, each one adapted to its environment, so history left humanity with historically evolved ethnic groups who had adapted, and who had now inherited physical and moral characteristics which they could not change. Social Darwinists were from the Western World and, as we have noted, all groups, including Anglo-Saxons, considered themselves to be superior. Accordingly, if the peoples of European origin were superior, then other peoples were less intelligent, less honest, and less hard-working. Social Darwinism was othering masquerading as social science. Social Darwinism supported and influenced policy-makers in the United States and Canada in such varying contexts as the treatment of Indigenous, Black, and Japanese people. In addition to Social Darwinism, with its attempt to discern historically evolved characteristics of ethnic groups, the twentieth century up to and including World War II also had its share of blunt, outspoken

3

ERASING A PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …

29

commentators who proclaimed the superiority of Anglo-Saxons and the inferiority of all others. A prominent advocate of this position was a British writer, Goldwyn Smith. Smith was appointed professor history at Oxford, but eschewed scholarship, and preferred commenting on current affairs. For Smith, who left England for an academic appointment at the newly established Cornell University, and then settled in Toronto, the American Revolution was a grave tragedy because it had shattered the Anglo-Saxon world. Goldwyn Smith came to the view that, over time, Canada should join the United States to compensate for the Britain–U.S. break, and then suppress the outlander—French Quebec. Smith bemoaned the migration into Anglo-Saxon countries of Asians, Blacks, and Jews and objected to the entrance of women into the University. Because he favored the reduction, if not end, of the British Empire, and because he subscribed to the Manchester school of economics which advocated for free trade, he was considered to be a liberal. Smith befriended the young Mackenzie King, and influenced a generation of English Canadians to look down on immigrants, Indigenous people, Asians, Blacks, and assertive women. Before getting to our subject matter—the creation of Indigenous residential schools in the United States and Canada—it is useful to describe how widespread this institution was created internationally. First, let us turn to Latin America. In the Southeastern Peruvian Amazon most boarding schools were set up by Christian Missions as part of the civilization process in the 1960s. Mexico established boarding schools to assimilate Indigenous children. The schools were directed to boys, many of whom left for cities at the end of their education. In Venezuela, religious orders would sign contracts with the government for missionary activity. The creation of boarding schools was one of these missions. From the 1920s to the 1970s, the Friars of the Capuchin Order set up boarding schools and day schools for the Warao peoples. But in the 1970s, the schools were turned over to the government. Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia had similar approaches to their Indigenous populations.1 In Australia, Christian Churches were at the forefront of the creation of residential schools for Indigenous children. Begun in the 1940s, mission schools focused on Christianization and manual labor rather than preparation for higher education. Abuse was prevalent, and schools were poorly maintained. Disease, malnutrition, and sexual violence were commonplace. Children were often forced to work in white homes where they were in many cases sexually abused.2

30

A. L. KAGEDAN

In Scandinavia, efforts were undertaken to assimilate the Sami people by removing children to special schools run by missionary groups. Later, the state would assume responsibility for the education of Indigenous people. The schools ran from the nineteenth century to the 1960s. In some cases, the Sami had already been converted to Christianity so the loss of language and culture was not as traumatic as not all the changes happened at once. As well, in Finland, the Indigenous residential schools also had regular Finnish students who lived in remote areas occupied by Indigenous people and also attended classes in these schools. This meant that, overall, the schools were better run than schools that accepted only Indigenous students.3 In the Soviet Union, in the 1920s and early 1930s, the northern Indigenous people were given rights to autonomy and their own culture. However, these were taken away from them in the 1930s and schools were established to assimilate the children. The boarding schools were abandoned in the later Soviet era in favor of local day schools. The treatment of the Indigenous peoples reflected broader Soviet policy toward national minorities: in the 1920s, there was acceptance and even encouragement of minority cultures but in the 1930s there was severe retrenchment and punishment meted out to leaders of minority communities.4 China after 1949 adopted the minorities autonomy approach of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s in an attempt to win the support of minority groups for the new regime. However, during the 1960s Cultural Revolution schools in minority regions were forced to teach only in Mandarin.5 In Botswana, the Indigenous San/Basarwa people were moved to schools in the 1990s. The children are separated from their parents and see them only at the end of the term. In 1999, 120 primary school children tried to run away from a hostel and one of them, an eight-year-old, died from exhaustion.6 As we have seen, the harsh treatment of Indigenous people is a matter of global practice. While in Europe, societies by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had adopted notions of citizenship and learned to integrate diverse groups into society, Indigenous peoples maintained tribal structures. The scene was set for a difficult interaction between the European settlers of the United States and Canada and the Indigenous peoples who had been living on that land for millennia. The industrial level of European countries made it possible for them to conquer large tracts of

3

ERASING A PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …

31

territory and defeat Indigenous groups. This opened the door to colonization of many continents, including the North American continent, by European settlers. The focus of this chapter is the Indigenous residential schools’ system in the United States and Canada. This system was but one component of relations between the societies and Indigenous people. Other components included: relations during conflict, negotiation over land rights, the provision of health and other services to Indigenous people. This chapter does not attempt to arrive at an overall comparison between the United States and Canada in all these areas. However, the Indigenous residential schools are a valid focus because they were part of policy toward the Indigenous in both countries, they spoke to the fundamental perspectives and values of the majority group interpreted by politicians who agreeing with this othering, and they had a long-term impact on the lives of Indigenous young people. In the encounter between settlers and Indigenous people in the United States and Canada, war gave way to othering. Indigenous life, beliefs, and practices were demeaned by political leaders. The European settlers managed their relations with their new neighbors in a manner that was bigoted and met the criteria for genocide. The Genocide convention calls those who “forcibly transferred the children of the group to another group” as having committed a genocidal act.7 The intent of this genocidal act is the erasure of a culture and the destruction of family relations. The explicit intent of the residential school system was to effectuate the removal of Indigenous children from the Indigenous community, to replace Indigenous beliefs with the Christian religion, and to make an Indigenous child into a white man or woman. Conditions in the boarding schools, in both the United States and Canada, were brutal. With parents far away, the children were prey to sexual assault, harsh punishments like whipping and the deprivation of food. Miscreants were held in small rooms to imitate a jail. Food provision was often poor as was hygiene. As a result, epidemics of tuberculosis, trachoma, measles pneumonia, and mumps regularly swept through the schools.8 We must remember that, historically, tribal groups disliked and attacked other tribal groups. In the instances where a group decided that it was in its advantage to do business with another group, the relationship was purely instrumental. In fact, one of the calculations made by

32

A. L. KAGEDAN

American and Canadian leaders in establishing the Indigenous residential schools was that, by educating the young, they would abandon the reservations, fit into general society, and reduce government expenses to support Indigenous people.9 In the United States, the schools were funded in part through the labor of the students themselves. Furthermore, if these schools succeeded, in many cases the young people felt outside of their own culture but not accepted by general society, and this led to issues of alcohol addiction. The schools inculcated a self-hatred of Indigenous culture that could even contribute to suicide.10 The overriding objective of the schools was not education. The focus was on separating children from their families, communities, traditions, and language in order to remake them into facsimiles of the European settlers. The Indigenous communities valued education but they also valued their traditions, language, and way of life. What the settler societies told them was that they could not have both at the same time. One of the costs of the schools was the loss of insights that came from Indigenous communities. A key insight was that humans survived based on their ability to live in harmony with nature.11 In order to compare the United States and Canada with respect to Indigenous residential schools, we will look at four criteria. The first criterion is whether or not the authorities sought and received consent from the parents in taking children to the Indigenous residential schools. It is true that consent obtained under duress—through threats of consequences or promises of benefits—diminishes to the point of virtually eliminating the value of consent. But efforts to obtain consent, however flawed, are significant in a number of ways. First, if the consent was arrived at freely, then removing the children would not constitute cultural genocide. Second, the right of Indigenous parents to decide on their children’s education showed some—perhaps not much—respect for their role as parents. Finally, the consent issue was alive in policy councils in the United States and Canada and indicates the degree to which the policy makers wanted to pay some attention to the needs of the Indigenous communities as opposed to their own instrumental needs to have more European-like citizens in their countries. A second criterion helpful to comparing the two countries is whether or not, and to what extent, the schools were religious, religiously neutral, that is secular, or respectful and inclusive of Indigenous culture. From the

3

ERASING A PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …

33

perspective of the religious organizations that administered the schools, it was necessary and to the benefit of the Indigenous children to accept their version of Christianity. From the point of view of a believer, this was a true path and one that could lead to personal salvation. But from the Indigenous perspective, Christianity was a foreign belief system that would not benefit their children and indeed would harm them insofar as their own customs were abandoned and beliefs rejected. There was a spectrum of policies on this matter. On one side, there were efforts to convert Indigenous children to Christianity—or, to be more precise, a denomination of Christianity. On the other side, there was a recognition that Indigenous beliefs and culture deserved respect, rather than contempt and rejection. Between these two approaches was a secular approach where religion would be kept out of the school environment. A third criterion that provides a basis for comparison was the distance of the school from the reservation where the parents lived. Some Indigenous residential schools were on the same reservation where their parents lived. Other residential schools were near the reservation. Still other residential schools were distant, and required a train or plane ride for the children to get to the schools. The residential schools that were closer to the parents made it easier for the children to spend nights, weekends, or holidays at home with their families and learn the Indigenous way of life. A fourth criterion that facilitates our analysis is whether or not the education and training the children received were of use to them or their communities. In a number of cases, the children received nearly no education and spent their time on chores to keep the schools running. This practice is instrumentalist at its core: unwanted schools, cultural deprivation, and using the children’s labor to keep these institutions operating. First, let us turn to the issue of parental consent. In the United States, there was debate over the issue of whether or not to seek parental consent to take children to the Indigenous residential schools. In 1891 and 1893, Congress passed measures to encourage parents to send their children to residential schools. The methods of encouragement included withholding rations, clothing, and other benefits from parents who refused to let their children attend school.12 In 1894 and 1895, Congress stipulated that, in order to remove a child from their home state, it was necessary to get parental consent. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Daniel Browning stated that “even ignorant and superstitious parents have rights, and their

34

A. L. KAGEDAN

parental feelings are entitled to consideration.”13 In 1896, a clarification was issued: now the consent would have to be in writing. The net impact of these decisions was to reduce the movement of young children to distant Indigenous residential schools. The question of religious or secular schools for Indigenous students was a topic of hot debate in the United States. On the one hand, there were notions of the separation of Church and State. On the other hand, the presence of missionaries and other religiously devoted people, who would work in remote conditions with low pay would argue for their involvement in the schools. Since the whole point of missionary work was conversion to one’s own religion, there was lively competition between the Catholic and Protestant Churches for the supervision of Indigenous residential schools. In the United States, a significant step away from Church involvement in Indigenous education was the establishment in 1879 of a governmentrun school at the Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. General Pratt, a Civil War veteran, was given responsibility to reform Indigenous men who were charged with crimes. Pratt took them to Florida for a light incarceration and found that, with time, they proved to be honest, competent, intelligent individuals. Pratt hit on the idea of creating an industrial type Indigenous residential boarding school at an unused military facility in Pennsylvania. Pratt was convinced that his students had to lose all their Indigenous culture in order to become productive citizens. He ran Carlisle like a military facility. Pratt’s seeming success led to the creation of a number of these government-run off-reservation Indigenous residential schools. Over time, the allure of Pratt’s Carlisle model began to fade. His type of school was expensive to run. It produced some excellent athletes, some of whom competed successfully in the Olympics (Jim Thorpe was one of these), but overall its academic achievements were limited.14 General Pratt was highly admired in Washington when he opened Carlisle, and by 1900 there were twenty-five schools modeled on Carlisle.15 Pratt’s hostility to all things Indigenous—through not to individual students—lost favor in Washington, as did the high cost and the limited academic achievement of the students. He also ran afoul of Washington policy makers. Pratt called for the dismantling of the Indian Affairs Bureau and strongly criticized senior officials who were in charge of Indian matters. Pratt was dismissed in 1904, and Carlisle began a rapid decline.16 By 1914, the military required use of the Carlisle facility for troops preparing for World War 1, and the school was shut down, as were other Pratt-type schools.

3

ERASING A PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …

35

The government funding of Catholic Indigenous residential schools became an issue in the 1884 election.17 The beginning of anti-Catholic sentiment, which was to rise in the early twentieth century, was at play. By 1889, 75% of the contract funds for Indian Schools went to the Catholic Church.18 In 1899, President Harris appointed William Morgan as Indian Commissioner. Morgan, a Civil War era General, was also a Baptist Minister. He favored a secular school system for the Indian Schools.19 Between 1895 and 1900, most government funding of the mission schools was phased out. By the early twentieth century, the Catholic Church won the right to get funds for schools if they received the approval of the Indigenous tribe. By the turn of the century, there was political criticism not only of Christian religious education but also of totally secular education. In 1897, Indian Superintendent Hailman called upon educators to understand the benefits of Indigenous heritage.20 In 1901, a report for the U.S. government declared Indian policy to be a failure, and recognized that to succeed educators needed the Indigenous families’ support.21 In 1907, the Indian Commissioner Francis Ellington Leupp advocated for the inclusion of Indigenous music, art, and customs in the curriculum.22 In all, and in an uneven fashion, there was a movement in terms of Indian education away from a dismissing of Indigenous culture to the beginning of a recognition of its value. From 1898 to 1910, Estelle Reel was the Superintendent of Indian schools. She is credited with making the schools more child-centered and responsive to students’ needs. She encouraged the use of a stand-up sandbox where students could build paths and lakes and install posts to discuss how to survive in nature. The sandbox changed with the seasons. This educational device benefitted students who came from a culture that related closely to natural environments and events. In 1905, Superintendent Reed declared that “The Child’s natural love for his mother-tongue must be respected.” Unfortunately, she also reflected a growing tendency in Western thought, rooted in Social Darwinism, that tied ethnic background and race to intellectual ability. From this perspective, Indigenous children had lower than average intelligence.23 An important distinction was the number of Indigenous residential schools, whose aim was the assimilation of the Indigenous, versus the number of day schools, which were located on the reservation with the students returning home each night. A further distinction was between

36

A. L. KAGEDAN

Boarding schools that were on the reservation—still close to family—and those that were off the reservation, more distinct from family. The trend in the United States, after 1900, was to reduce the number of Indigenous children removed from their homes to be sent to schools far away, and to increase the number of Indigenous children who attended school on the reservation. There was even the beginning of day schools on the reservation and access for Indigenous children to public schools. In 1900, 64.3% of Indigenous children were in boarding schools with 28% in off-reservation boarding schools.24 In 1925, the figures were: 29.2% in boarding schools, with 13% in off-reservation boarding schools. The conditions at the Indigenous residential schools were so bad that students attempted to run away and even to burn down the school. In 1880, when a boarding school opened in Fort Hall Idaho few Indigenous students enrolled. The Superintendent asked the police to round up students—but the police refused. At this point, the Superintendent called in the army to assist.25 In 1905, two girls burned down a reservation boarding school, and one of them was charged criminally and sentenced to life imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth.26 In the United States, the construction of Indigenous residential schools, and in particular off-reservation Indigenous residential schools was a low point. This education for extinction approach gradually lost favor so that the percentage of Indigenous children in these schools was half in 1925 what it was in 1900. The Carlisle School, once seen as the best approach, now was the target of criticism. The school produced a number of Olympic athletes, and provided education to a few students who were able to adapt, but it was judged too expensive to run.27 In 1901, the United States realized that a total assimilation approach would fail. A new perspective that involved more consideration of the needs of the students gradually took hold, reducing the impact of the politics of othering. The Canadian approach to the education of Indigenous children resembled and also differed from the American approach. In both countries, the founding doctrine of Indigenous education was assimilation. This meant the effort to obliterate not only Indigenous culture but to reduce or sever relations between parents and children. While the American approach evolved away from assimilation by the 1920s, the Canadian approach retained this concept until the 1960s. As mentioned, the issue of parental consent as applied to Indigenous residential schools is clouded—since consent under duress is not true

3

ERASING A PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …

37

consent. The significance of this concept in the context of Indigenous schools is that, establishing day schools on the reservations, where the children lived at home, made it much easier for parents to consent. In the United States, Congress passed several measures in the 1890s to require parental consent for a child to attend an Indigenous residential school away from home. In Canada, in 1894, the government declared that, although Indigenous residential school attendance was voluntary, an Indian Agent or Justice of the Peace could send a child of unfit parent to Indigenous residential school. In Canada, the government decided in 1920 to remove the requirement for parental consent to place a child in an Indigenous residential school.28 In the United States, the Churches played a diminished role in the twentieth-century Indigenous residential schools. In Canada, the Churches played a dominant role until the 1950s. From their perspective, the Indigenous residential school was the surest way to salvation for the Indigenous children. The further the children were from their pagan-believing parents and tribes, the better. Indeed, in Canada, the act of forcibly removing children from parents attracted little public attention through the decades. What mattered to officials in Ottawa were funding questions—how the cost of the Indigenous residential schools would be divided between the Churches and the government. Churches in some cases established schools on their own, and then sought government funding. Even when Canada, in imitation of the United States, established “industrial” schools for Indigenous children, Church officials were put in charge of these schools. As was the case in the United States, there was active—at times acrimonious—competition for students and federal funds among the Churches. From time to time, a Canadian government official or Church layperson would raise questions about the Indigenous residential schools. However, unlike in the United States. this high-level internal criticism did influence policy toward the Indigenous residential schools. Presumably, wishing to avoid a direct confrontation with Church officials, no criticism was directed at the principle of removing children from parents under duress, and there was little or no reference to reports—anecdotal— of sexual abuse, harsh discipline, poor food, and disease. Rather, the critics questioned the efficacy of running Indigenous residential schools which were expensive and did not produce better results than less costly day schools.

38

A. L. KAGEDAN

In both the United States and Canada there was debate between creating day schools on reservations, or creating boarding schools inside or away from the reservations. In Canada, early decisions created a strong off-reservation system, involving travel of hundreds of miles for the children. In 1879, Prime Minister John A. MacDonald sent Nicholas Flood Davin to the United States to study American approaches to Indigenous schooling. This was the hopeful beginning of the Carlisle School, and Davin returned with a plan for Canadian industrial schools. Critically, the Canadian industrial type schools were, unlike in the United States, still headed by Church officials. Davin argued that Indian Bands should have no say in matters relating to schooling and that children should be separated from parents if they were to stand any chance of becoming educated.29 At this foundational time, the government advisor, Flood Davin, agreed with the Church leadership. Bishop Vital Grandin of St. Albert near Edmonton wrote to Hector Langevin, the Public Works Minister, that the Church should be given children at age five and kept by the Church institution until age twenty-one. He claimed that Indigenous parents wanted this separation to improve their children’s prospects.30 Canadian critics of the Indigenous residential schools were senior officials and Ministers elected to Parliament and chosen for Cabinet by the Prime Minister. Martin Benson, an official at the Department of Indian Affairs, offered a trenchant critique of the industrial Indigenous residential schools in 1897. His comment shows disdain and condescension toward Indigenous people but also empathy. It would be a mistake to expect too much of the Indigenous students31 : …the education and civilization of the Western Indians is still in its infancy and we should be content to let them creep for a time before they attempt to walk. It is only a few years since they were wild untamed savages, living by the chase, hunting in small bands or families.

Benson pointed out that the industrial schools did not teach farming techniques—skills that could easily be used in Indigenous communities. Instead, it taught industrial skills that were not helpful for students without follow-up apprenticeships. Churches did not see themselves as obligated to find apprentice positions for Indigenous students.

3

ERASING A PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …

39

Benson argued that the training offered was of little or no value. The school staff members engaged in constant bickering with one another, and it was common to find in the schools “ignoramuses, idlers, time -killers and salary-grabbers.” Furthermore, the Churches played too large a role in the selection of teachers. In sum, Benson recommended a government takeover of the schools.32 Benson’s views were echoed by James A. Smart, the Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs. He reported that the popularity of industrial schools, now twenty-two in number, was declining. He even raised the point that day schools on the reserves could play a larger role in Indigenous education. He was careful not to be seen as opposing a role for the Churches33 : There is a natural tendency to run to extremes, and it seems questionable whether the recognition of the undoubted advantages of boarding and industrial school has not tended to an undervaluation of day schools on the reserves, which in the older provinces especially have done, and are doing a work by no means to be despised. It is true that the transformation from the natural condition to that of civilization can be more speedily and thoroughly accomplished by means of boarding and industrial schools, but even then, it is questionable whether the day school should not provide the initial stage of preparation for the benefits of the boarding and industrial schools.

Smart went on to note that running the industrial and boarding schools was expensive, and mentioned that to provide them with training that they will not likely use would be harmful to them.34 These hesitations on the part of officials eventually led to the end of the industrial schools but not to the end or reduction of Indigenous residential boarding schools. The Church forces, and their political supporters maintained the system and the politics of othering won another victory. A second effort to reduce the Indigenous residential schools’ system came in 1909. Deputy Minister Frank Pedley argued that, instead of creating industrial schools beginning in the 1880s, it would have been better to improve education on the reservation. This could have assisted both children and adults—the adults kept out of Church-run schools since they were deemed to be beyond redemption.35 Pedley favored improving day schools and restricting boarding schools to areas where there was an Indigenous population not located on a reserve.

40

A. L. KAGEDAN

Pedley had the support of a lay leader of the Anglican Church, a Toronto lawyer named Samuel Blake.36 Blake believed that the Indigenous residential schools were a drain on Church resources. He was also concerned with the reports of Indian Affairs Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Peter Bryce, who in a 1907 report drew attention to the high death rate in the Indigenous residential schools. According to the report, at Emmanuel College Indigenous residential school in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, nearly one-quarter of the students who had passed through the school during a seventeen-year period had died.37 Pedley also had the ear of the Minister, Frank Oliver, a lay leader of the Anglican Church. On the one hand, Oliver adopted measures to deprive Indigenous people of land that was contested by settlers. On the other hand, he argued that the practices of separating Indigenous children from their parents were a bad idea, which would make educational success less likely and was contrary to his personal religious beliefs: in terms of successful education and a betrayal of his perspective on religious teaching. He wrote: My belief is that the attempt to elevate the Indian by separating the child from his parents and by educating him as a white is a deplorable failure. I believe that the best that can be done for the Indian is to accept the family conditions established by Providence…In other words, a good day school on a reserve is a better means of improving the conditions of the Indians than the industrial or even the boarding schools.

Oliver went one step further: he challenged the Churches on religious grounds—cautiously to be sure38 : I hope you will excuse me for so speaking but one of the most important commandments laid upon the human by the divine is love and respect by children for parents. It seems strange that in the name of religion a system of education should have been instituted, the foundation principle which not only ignored by contradicted this command.

In addition to the politicians, a lay leader of the Anglican Church urged change. But the efforts to change the course of Indigenous residential schools in Canada failed because of the strong objections of the Churches who were able to convince federal leaders to leave things as they were. Led by Calgary Anglican Archdeacon J. W. Tims and Red Deer Methodist

3

ERASING A PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …

41

school principal Arthur Barner, missionaries in the West inundated Ottawa with petitions to continue Indigenous residential schooling. Tims argued that the medical problems were exaggerated, and that behavior problems in the schools were rare. Besides, if Anglicans gave up the schools, they feared, then the Catholics would be in charge of all the Indigenous residential schools. For instance, Regina School Principal R. B. Heron urged Oliver to convene a conference of school principals and others before making any changes to the system.39 In Canada, Indigenous residential school numbers peaked in the 1956– 1957, when 11, 539 Indigenous children were enrolled in them.40 However, in the 1950s, the tide began to turn in Canada. At the same time as Indigenous residential schools were gaining students, the on-reservation day school program also grew. From 1945–1946 to 1954– 1955, the number of day school students increased from 9532 to 17,947. In 1951, the Indian Act was amended to enable the federal government to negotiate the entry into public schools of Indigenous children.41 As for the value of the education, in Canada there was a special emphasis on keeping costs down by using the children in the schools for maintenance work. It was common for students to spend half of each day doing chores.42 It is also the case that Canada spent less per student than the United States, meaning that teachers were not paid as well and generally, the school experience was inferior. In 1937, Canada paid $180 per student, while the United States paid $350.43 In the United States, policy debates and discussions meant that by 1929, 13% of Indigenous children were placed in off-reservation Indigenous residential schools. In Canada, muted debates occurred with strong opposition to change from the Churches. The result was that Canada reached the position of the United States—of having some 13% of Indigenous children in Indigenous residential schools—only in the 1960s, forty years later. Time and again in Canada, faced with the pressure from the Churches, the government backed down in its reform plans. It did not have the political will to fights these influential players. The last Canadian Indigenous residential schools were closed between 1995 and 1998.44 Seen in its historical context, the situation in Indigenous residential schools before 1920—and even following 1920—showed more evolution toward a system that was less assimilatory and brutal in the United States than in Canada. It is interesting to note that, after the fact, there has been more followup regarding the Indigenous residential schools’ program in Canada than

42

A. L. KAGEDAN

in the United States. Canada has formally apologized for its treatment of Indigenous children, offered financial compensation, and created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to tell the story of the Indigenous residential schools and to engage with survivors of the schools on their own efforts to recover. The United States has not taken similar action, despite calls to do so from Indigenous groups. President Obama apologized for the schools in 2009 as part of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2010. In 2015, Michelle Obama described the Indigenous residential schools as involving “…separating children from their families and sending them to boarding school designed to strip them of all traces of their culture, language and history.”45 There have been additional apologies from U.S. political figures generally for the treatment of Indigenous people, though not focused on the Indigenous residential schools issue.46

Notes 1. Andrea Smith, Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People and Boarding Schools: A Comparative Study, https://www.un.org, accessed on July 2, 2019, 10–12. 2. Smith, 12. 3. Smith, 18–19. 4. Smith, 20–21. 5. Smith, 22. 6. Smith, 26–27. 7. The text of the Genocide Convention may be found at https://www.ohc hr.org, accessed on June 23, 2019. 8. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995, 120–25. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Honoring the Truth, Reconciling the Future: Summary of the Final Report, 2015. 9. Jon Reyner and Jeanne Elder Norman, American Indian Education: A History, 2nd ed., Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2017, 3. 10. Reyner and Elder, 5–6. 11. Reyner and Elder, 17. 12. Adams, 63–64. 13. Adams, 65. 14. Reyner and Elder, 149–59. 15. Margaret Connell Szasz, Education and the American Indian, 3rd ed., University of New Mexico Press, 1999, 9–10.

3

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

ERASING A PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …

43

Adams, 321–23. Reyson and Elder, 93. Reyson and Elder, 92. Reyner and Elder, 93. Adams, 316. Adams, 307. Adams, 316. Reyson and Elder, 103–6. Adams, 320. Adams, 216. Adams, 230. Adams, 155–57. Honoring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final%20Reports/Executive_ Summary_English_Web.pdf, accessed on July 2, 2019, (TRC Summary), 60–62. TRC Summary, 156–57. TRC Summary, 159. Canada’s Indigenous Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939 TRC, http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final%20Reports/Volume_ 1_History_Part_1_English_Web.pdf, accessed on July 2, 2019, (TRC History, Part 1), 133. TRC History, Part 1, 140–44. TRC History, Part 1. TRC History, Part 1, 226. TRC History, Part 1, 231–32. TRC History, Part 1, 228. TRC History, Part 1, 229. TRC History, Part 1, 232. TRC History, Part 1, 233–34. TRC Summary, 63. TRC Summary, 68. TRC Summary, 78. TRC Summary, 59. TRC Summary, 70. Mary Annette Pember, “When Will US Apologize for Genocide of Indian Boarding Schools?”, HuffPost, December 5, 2017, https://www.huf fpost.com/?guccounter=1accessed, accessed on July 2, 2019. CBS Sacramento, “Governor Newsom Calls Native American Treatment Genocide,” sacramento.cbslocal.com/2019/06/18/governor, accessed on July 2, 2019.

CHAPTER 4

The Politics of Anti-semitism, 1920–1940

The 1930s in North America are identified with the Great Depression and the run-up to the second World War. For Jews, the 1930s represent a time when anti-Semitism loomed large. The othering of Jews stretches back millennia. But a new chapter in this ancient practice began in 1933 when Adolph Hitler achieved political preeminence in Germany. Media reports told of the first steps of the Nazi regime against Germany’s Jews— expulsion of Jews from the professions and the Universities, the smashing of shops owned by Jews, and the attacks on individual Jews, celebrated by the Nazis, that went unpunished. In the context of events in Germany, the othering that Jews experienced in the United States and Canada hit harder than it might have done otherwise. By the 1930s, the resentment toward and fear of Jews was cresting in the North American cities where Jews lived. The number of Jews had grown precipitously since 1900. The first immigrant generation struggled to learn a new language—English—and sought to adapt to the culture of their adopted country. Despite discrimination, some Jews worked and saved enough money to buy houses in neighborhoods that had known few Jews. It was then that Jews were seen as a threat—as true competitors. The second American and Canadian-born generation of Jews spoke English, had adapted culturally and now sought careers in the respected professions of medicine, law, and teaching.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_4

45

46

A. L. KAGEDAN

Hoary anti-Semitic tropes linked Jews with international financial manipulation. In the 1930s, with the Depression triggering mass unemployment and worsening poverty, the notion that malign foreign forces had brought ruin to the country could be oddly comforting since the blocking or defeating of those forces seemed possible—or least politicians pretended that defeating the alleged evil-doers would solve one’s economic issues. Besides, one’s own decisions, and the decisions of those around one, were not to blame for the problems. It was the others’ fault. In some situations, othering offers false solutions to real problems— and in other situations, othering concocts bogus issues that invite equally false solutions. The demand in society for words and actions to curb Jewish immigration and, later, to stymie the professional aspirations of Jews found a number of ready political “suppliers.” In order to be able to draw comparisons and contrasts between the United States and Canada with respect to the politics of othering directed against Jews in the period 1920–1940, we will examine involvement in othering by elected political leaders and opinion leaders, and developments in immigration and education. At this period of time, populism animated political leaders and opinion leaders, and influenced policies and practices in immigration and education. Two contextual points must be made. First, populism emerged prior to the interwar period, and it continues to exert influence in the twenty-first century. However, in terms of our study, the period of time between the two World Wars is when populism turned against Jews. Second, populism contributed to the thinking of politicians and opinion leaders, and affected policies of government, but it was one of a number of influential factors behind the politics of othering. The second half of the interwar period was the time of the Great Depression. The fears and the suffering that engulfed most people in the United States and Canada in the wake of this economic meltdown drove up the demand for solutions from politicians and public figures. Populism supplied a solution however problematic and unrealistic. In both the United States and Canada, populism gave a home to othering. Populism is a political concept that identifies the “good” people facing a “corrupt” elite. The definition of “the people” and the “elite” is variable. But it is always clear that the people are a much larger number of individuals (read voters) than the elite. Populism can focus on how the people are financially exploited by the elite. It can also emphasize cultural

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

47

standards that are shared by most people—in religion, food, clothing, entertainment, and contrast this with the culture of the elite that is at odds with these standards. When bigotry is mixed into the populist brew, the good people are hard-working, and law-abiding, tax-payers, who are members of the majority ethnic group, while the elite (comprised of majority group and minority group individuals) directs these tax resources to undeserving minority groups that take advantage of welfare payments. For that matter, the elite is pictured as liberal, immoral or unpatriotic. In the 1930s, and before and since, populists have associated Jews with the elite, easily transitioning to othering. Michael Kazin argues that populism in the United States is rooted in Protestant notions of an individual’s personal relationship with a God that exists for all people, not just the wealthy and haughty, and the Enlightenment idea that ordinary people could think about issues and arrive solutions to problems better than the upper class and monarchy.1 In other words, populism had a democratic feel to it: it was what most people wanted. The independence of the individual with respect to access to religion and to God opened the door to more self-confidence of the average person who was, almost always, a producer—which, in the eighteenth century meant a farmer. There emerged a line of thinking that “we, the people” of the United States were producers. Notably, these producers did not include Black Americans. Blacks had been slaves and were not welcome in the ranks of populism.2 We, the people meant we the white people. In fact, populism saw white abolitionists as part of the elite, since, by freeing the slaves, the wages of hard-working producers would be diminished.3 If “the people” were white farmers or working men, then who were the elite? For Jeffersonians in the nineteenth century, the British were the elite; for Jacksonians, it was the “money power” rooted in Britain but influential in America. In fact, in the nineteenth century the elite included the wealthy Southern plantation owners in the south, a “slave elite.” Unlike Marxism, which categorized people according to their relationship to the means of production (owners versus workers), the populists told working people that they were at odds with a small group of wealthy people—factory owners and their enablers—lawyers, accountants, government officials. The bank was the main tool of this elite. The bank itself, for populists, was not productive—it produced nothing of value. Banks’ loans were unfair, with their terms—high interest rates—too harsh. Like the banks, lawyers, and accountants performed no useful function. They

48

A. L. KAGEDAN

did not produce food, like farmers did, and they did not produce tangible products like furniture or automobiles. Populism harkened back to a medieval type of economy where physical products mattered most and people engaged in bartering. Populism did not support the equality of all (including all minorities). But populists did want more funds from the system run by the elite. The question was: how can we squeeze more out of the elite or, in fact, disempower it and share the spoils? Politicians discerned a demand by producers of goods for solutions and calculated that, if solutions could be found, they would win power. In 1892, the People’s Party was formed in St. Louis. The People’s Party appealed to farmers—and offered to help them to fight the banks. It also offered its support to Prohibitionists, to help them end the scourge of liquor that was promoted by the liquor interests.4 The People’s Party called for the nationalization of the railroads (to help the farmers move their produce to market at a lower cost). It advocated for graduated income tax and the coinage of gold and silver, policies which eventually were adopted by government. Another populist group in this time period was the Knights of Labor which opened its ranks to workers but barred members and helpers of the elite: bankers, land speculators, lawyers, liquor dealers, and gamblers. These men were seen as preying on weaker men to earn profit and produce nothing of value. The Knights of Labor and other populist groups opposed immigration since migrants meant competition that could depress the wages of the working man.5 An economic message was at the core of the populist message in the 1930s. Populism was uncomfortable with a modern economy that functioned on stores of value, like money, to facilitate trade and investment. A writer named Gertrude Coogan wrote two books that provided a theoretical basis for populist ideas. Coogan was a statistician, not an economist. Her ideas were flawed but appeared to be convincing to many in the 1930s and beyond.6 Coogan sees money as representing a good or service given up by an individual who has not claimed the true value of this good or service. In other words, a farmer grew and sold crops and in exchange, instead of receiving goods of an equivalent value, got money. The more an individual produced, but did not get compensated adequately and immediately in terms of goods, the more value the individual lost, since money was a poor substitute for goods. Coogan’s concept did not take account of money that had been inherited or borrowed.

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

49

Coogan correctly saw the government as the creator of money. While it is true that the government prints or coins money, money is a store of value for goods and services traded in a marketplace. The value of goods is determined by supply and demand for the goods. For Coogan, money was essentially public, not private property. The government should determine its value through the regulation of the price for goods and services. And if demand should cause a price of a good or a service to rise, then the government could print more money to meet the rise in prices thereby helping individuals to survive challenging economic times. In Coogan’s system, there would be no private lending through banks, and the government, when loaning money to citizens, would not charge any interest. In this system, there is a limited role for commercial enterprise. The government would control the whole of the economy. For Coogan, the market place should be anything but free. She believed that all goods and services could be counted and ascribed a total value. Once this was done, the government could control the value through opening or closing the money taps. A state authority would confer or erase the value of any good or service. How this system would accommodate international trade is uncertain. How government would have to grow, and how government officials would have to be honest and never make a mistake, is also unspoken. Coogan’s prescriptions for the government was for big government, and for a docile and shrunken free market. Individuals and businesses would have no access to loans. And in the 1930s her idea of government printing money and handing it out, at will, was a recipe for inflation and currency collapse. Populists promised an end to poverty, no unemployment, handsome pensions for the elderly, and an economy that never suffered from a downturn. For populists such as Farther Coughlin, Coogan’s analysis was the key to populist victory. Here was an approach that could lead to full employment, no poverty, and ample pensions for the elderly. The government would provide the funds and, if necessary, print more funds. This inflationary spiral could be managed, populists believed. But, as Coogan pointed out, there was one roadblock to this economic nirvana: the banks and international bankers. The existing system, including the Federal Reserve, was designed by banks and bankers to fill their own pockets. This was a manipulative, malign group. Historically, populists associated the banks with Jews.

50

A. L. KAGEDAN

These populist notions were important not only in the United States, but as we shall see, in Canada as well, and played a key role in the politics of othering Jews. Although Presidents would use elements of populist discourse, no President joined the populists in attacks against Jews. Woodrow Wilson, as President of Princeton University, hired the first Jewish faculty member, and as President of the United States, appointed Louis Brandeis, a Jew, to the Supreme Court.7 He also supported the Balfour Declaration issued by Britain that laid the basis for the founding of the State of Israel. Herbert Hoover was a friend of the American Jewish community. Before becoming President, he was deeply involved in efforts by the American Jewish community to help Jews in Eastern Europe, and took great exception to an attack on Jews in the Polish city of Pinsk in 1919. He was a leader of the American Relief Administration (ARA) that brought humanitarian relief to Russia. This put him in touch with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, that financed a program in the Soviet Union to create Jewish farming colonies to assist Jews to transition out of business, which was on the road to be banned by the Soviet government. Thousands of Jews were settled on these colonies in the south Ukraine and in the Crimea.8 Based on his ties to American Jews, Hoover even sent an emissary to Henry Ford to persuade him to abandon his support for anti-Jewish ideas (Ford stopped his othering briefly, but then resumed it).9 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) like his immediate predecessors did not engage in othering directed at Jews. In fact, FDR encouraged Jews to join his Administration and facilitated the entry of Jews into the civil service. So numerous were his appointments of Jews to high positions in government that the Jewish community itself worried about this creating a backlash.10 The three most prominent public figures in America in the period 1920 to 1940 who engaged in the othering of Jews were Father Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Henry Ford. Their words frightened Jews who were aware of how the words of politicians in Germany were having such a profound impact on Jews in that country. Father Charles Coughlin was born in Canada in 1891. He was ordained as a Catholic Priest in 1916, and he moved to the United States in 1923, accepting a position at a parish near Detroit, Michigan.11 Coughlin became interested in the medium of radio to encourage people to donate funds to his small Church. Coughlin was a skilled orator

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

51

who spoke clearly and with a reassuring voice to the growing number of his listeners. His first focus was the Ku Klux Klan, which had organized a chapter in Detroit. The Klan, known for its othering of Black Americans, at that time also othered Catholics. Coughlin criticized the Klan and defended his faith and his parish. Now comfortable on the airwaves, Coughlin expanded his oratorical repertoire. America found itself in Depression with rising unemployment and the shuttering of businesses. Coughlin took aim at the unscrupulous financial forces that, he claimed, were responsible for triggering the Depression. In the early 1930s, Coughlin was a strong supporter of FDR. Coughlin’s broadcasts reached some thirty million Americans. A typical statement by Coughlin, made in 1933, follows: We were determined once and for all to attack and overpower the enemy of financial slavery; to oppose and to defeat those who still support the ancient heresy of the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.

In a way, Coughlin was taking a page from the Protestant Evangelical preachers who had audiences of thousands: he had an audience of millions. At the time, he was also reflecting a view widely held in the Catholic Church. For instance, Pope Pius wrote about “the immense power and despotic economic domination, consolidated in the hands of a few” who “control credit and rule the lending of money.”12 By 1934, Coughlin decided to create his own political vehicle, distinct from FDR. He founded the Union for Social Justice. The organization never developed into something beyond a venue for Father Coughlin publicizing his views. In Coughlin’s view, the elitist villains responsible for the Depression and indeed for the outbreak of World War I were bankers who, in order to raise interest rates, had created a scarcity of funds that triggered the Depression, and who sought to create a demand for loans from both sides in World War I. Coughlin repeated these populist nostrums, which provided simple—if false—explanations of problematic events such as war and economic depression. The populist explanation of World War I ignored great power politics, ethnic issues, and military considerations. Instead, populists focused on the decisions of international bankers. As regards the Great Depression, populists ignored the decisions of thousands of investors and focused on the allegedly malign, self-interested actions of a few bankers. Here, hope beckoned. If the Great Depression

52

A. L. KAGEDAN

could be pinned to a few bankers, then the bankers could be defeated and Depressions banished forever. For Coughlin, the crash of 1929 could be attributed to the Federal Reserve, created in 1913 to regulate banking. For populists, the creation of a coordinating body for banks was akin to the creation of a criminal gang or network put in charge of law enforcement. These criminals reduced the money supply to force factories to close, boost unemployment, and compel working people to seek loans at high rates of interest. Coughlin’s idea was to close the Federal Reserve and put the power to decide on the money supply in the hands of working people. Gertrude Coogan had written that this was possible. Coughlin supported the activity of unions, but rejected the efforts of union leaders to oppose owners. Instead, the workers and owners should work together as a spiritual community. In 1935, Coughlin organized a letter-writing campaign against U.S. accession to the world court. By 1936, Coughlin and other populists organized the Presidential candidacy of William Lemke,13 a Republican Congressman from North Dakota who in 1934 had co-sponsored a bill that would reduce the banks’ ability to repossess farms. FDR signed the bill into law, but it was struck down by the Supreme Court, though later reintroduced successfully without FDR’s support. Lemke became the candidate of the Union Party, a third party, created by Coughlin. The Union Party received some two percent of the votes in the election and did not win any votes in the Electoral college. This stunning defeat and apparent repudiation of Coughlin’s message drove him further down the path to a strident populism and his engagement in bigoted remarks about Jews. The notion that Jewish bankers, such as the Rothschilds, were at the core of international banking that caused world wars and economic depressions, now found increasing expression in Coughlin’s broadcasts. By 1938, Coughlin was also speaking favorably of Benito Mussolini. In 1938, Coughlin’s organization, the Union for Social Justice, began to publish excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious Tsarist tract that pretended to provide evidence of a conspiracy led by Jews to control the world. By 1939, Coughlin was speaking admirably of Hitler. Union for Social Justice gangs attacked stores owned by Jews. For Coughlin, othering was an add-on element, rather than a principal element, of his perspective and program. Another prominent individual who engaged in othering directed at Jews was Gerald L. K. Smith.14

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

53

Smith was a successful Minister in the Disciples of Christ Church. But politics attracted him more than religion. He became an organizer for State Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana who was spearheading a “Share the Wealth” campaign. Long died in 1935, and Smith offered his organizational skills to Francis Townsend, a physician who developed a plan, he believed, to defeat the Great Depression.15 Townsend’s plan called for the government to give every senior over 60 years age a pension of $200 a month (about $46,000 annually in 2019 dollars),16 and the senior would have to spend this money within 30 days. Townsend assessed that the increased economic activity would generate employment, and the payment of taxes, so that the plan would pay for itself. This was unrealistic. For one thing, there was no guarantee that the seniors would engage in new, additional spending, with their $200 pension cheque—they might save some or all of it, depending on what other financial resources were available to them. Furthermore, it is not clear at all that, even if additional government revenue was generated through the 2% sales tax Townsend proposed, that it would be able to pay the bills for the pension plan. Although FDR rejected the plan, which would have been inflationary and would have drained the federal coffers, he moved forward with a social security plan that is funded by a tax on an individual’s employment. After the failure of the Lemke presidential campaign, Gerald Smith began his own effort that involved the othering of Jews, who he considered to be evil, though his magazine, “The Cross and the Flag.” He continued his activities into the 1970s. A third key public figure who engaged in the othering of Jews in the interwar period was Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company.17 Ford, himself a businessman and industrialist, publicly valued farmers over city dwellers, and wanted to build factories in suburbs where a man could work in a plant and continue to farm. He stood with farmers in their mistrust of bankers and middlemen.18 Ford carefully crafted a childhood for himself that in fact never happened. He said that he had to use his father’s tools secretly when in fact his father gave him the run of the tool shop. In addition, Ford, who was a businessman, never designed a car—others did that.19 In 1918 Ford ran for a Senate seat but refused to say anything publicly. He was narrowly defeated by Truman H. Newberry. He then hired lawyers and detectives to find dirt on Newberry and was able to convince

54

A. L. KAGEDAN

a judge that Newberry had overspent and Newberry resigned. Ford, an uneducated man, felt vindicated: he had exposed corruption.20 In his autobiography, My Life and Work, Ford engaged in the othering of Jews, in the context of interwar politics21 : An impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what has come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world a group of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain unknown, that does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that belongs to no nation whatever but is international—a force that uses every government, every widespread business organization, every agency of publicity, every resource of national psychology, to throw the world into a panic for the sake of getting still more power over the world. An old gambling trick used to be for the gambler to cry “Police!” when a lot of money was on the table, and, in the panic that followed, to seize the money and run off with it. There is a power within the world which cries “War!” and in the confusion of the nations, the unrestrained sacrifice which people make for safety and peace runs off with the spoils.

About American Jews he wrote without explicitly naming them22 : There is in this country a sinister element that desired to creep in between the men who work with their hands and the men who think and plan for the men who work with their hands. The same influence that drove the brains, experience and ability out of Russia is busily now engaged in raising prejudice here.

Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, accused an agrarian leader in California, Aron Sapiro of manipulating farmers on behalf of a Jewish conspiracy. Sapiro sued Ford, and Ford was convinced to write an apology in 1927. However, despite this, he renewed his efforts to stop what he saw as the menace the Jews posed by using European publishers to publish anti-Semitic materials.23 Ford and Hitler admired one another.24 Thousands of copies of the Dearborn Independent were circulated in Germany and in Europe, offering further validity to Hitler’s arguments. Ford himself did not advocate violence toward Jews. But Ford’s arguments resembled Hitler’s arguments. Ford’s public support, publishing support, and possibly financial support helped Hitler to go on a path to achieving his goal of eliminating Jewish influence and Jewish lives.

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

55

Why was Henry Ford so attracted to anti-Semitism? It could be because he and his father figure, Thomas Alva Edison were hostile to financiers, and some of these were Jews. Ford told a colleague that an encounter with Jews who wanted to buy him out and take over his company was what set him his path.25 This was a hostility that was a deep part of populism. As well, he hired pro-German officials who promoted anti-Semitism as Hitler moved into power.26 Ford never held elective office, but his stature as a business leader, and his vast financial resources, no doubt contributed to hostility toward Jews in modern America. Negative perceptions of Jews, fed by Henry Ford, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Father Coughlin, public opinion leaders who engaged in the politics of othering, aligned with and helped to increase support for policies and practices to limit Jewish access to the United States and to blunt their influence once they had arrived. In order to reduce the number of Jews and other less desirable nationalities from immigrating to the United States, in 1924 the Congress passed the Reed-Johnson Act that dramatically cut the immigration of supposed undesirables. There was a sharp drop in Jewish immigration after 1924. The Reed-Johnson Act defined immigrants by their region of origin, which for Jews was Eastern Europe. The act pegged the immigration level at 2% of the population of that group in the United States in 1880. The Act reduced Eastern European and southern European immigration into a trickle, and completely ended Asian immigration. By 1924 some two million Jews, nearly all from Eastern Europe, had immigrated to the United States. From 1921 to 1931, an average of 30,513 Jews immigrated annually to the United States.27 This Act’s provisions remained in the place until 1952, though provision was made exceptionally to accept an out of quota number of Jewish refugees who had survived Nazism in the late 1940s.28 One supporter of the 1924 immigration restriction act was John Rankin, Democrat of Alabama. He supported the segregation of Black Americans and opposed making lynching a federal crime. Echoing a populist notion of Jews being part of a manipulative elite, he blamed Jews for “strikes in the Midwest, inflation and depression in Germany, the starvation of millions of Christians in the Ukraine, and race mixing in South America.”29 A House Committee Report states that “If there were in existence a ship that could hold three million human beings, then the three million Jews of Poland would board to escape to America.”30

56

A. L. KAGEDAN

Having reviewed political leadership, immigration policy, public opinion leaders, and their engagement in othering of Jews, we now look at how public institutions, principally educational institutions, treated Jews. In the interwar period, discrimination against Jews was widespread among professional schools and liberal arts schools. Discrimination occurred in three periods: 1870–1917, getting ready; 1918–1947, imposition and maintenance; and 1948–present, decline. It was in the 1920s that the second generation of Jews began to apply for higher education, and universities-built defenses to try to reduce the number of Jews admitted.31 At a meeting of Deans of New England colleges in May 1918, Columbia decided to use a personality test and a questionnaire about religious affiliation to reduce Jewish enrollment. A picture was also required. The percentage of Jews in the entering class dropped from 40 percent to 20 percent in three years. Princeton established a quota in 1923, so that the percentage of Jews admitted dropped from 25 out of 635 in 1926 to 5 out of 635 in 1935.32 Columbia Medical school reduced the percentage of Jews from 50% in 1923 to 20% by 1928. By 1940, it stood at 6.4%. Cornell medical school reduced Jewish enrollment from 40% in 1920 to 5% in 1940. Both law schools and law firms restricted Jews.33 In California, the President of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, was a champion of eugenics and strictly limited the entry of Jews and nonwhites into the University.34 After World War II, when allied forces defeated the Nazis and information about the Holocaust began to circulate in the media, the discriminatory practices of colleges and professional schools were denounced by politicians and exposed by the media. Slowly but surely, discrimination ended.35 In the matter of the othering of Jews between the two World Wars, Canada took a similar path as had the United States, with some notable differences. Three Prime Ministers served in the interwar period: Arthur Meighen, Richard Bennett, and William Lyon Mackenzie King. Meighen and Bennett were leaders of the Conservative Party and Mackenzie King led the Liberal Party. Arthur Meighen served as Prime Minister for brief periods in 1920– 1921 and 1926. He appears to have had friendly relations with the Jewish

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

57

community of Canada. Here, for example, is a letter he wrote to the editor of a new newspaper called the Jewish Review for its first edition36 : Dear Sir: The Jewish citizens of Canada have fully contributed their quota to the upbuilding and advancement of the country, and a Review devoted to the diffusion of news and views making for a more complete realization of the duties of citizenship will be a publication of great value. Jewish spirit and endeavor have given much to the world, and we may look forward to a still wider contribution in the future.

Meighen was a supporter of Britain in its own support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. R. B. Bennett, a Conservative leader, is not known to have spoken in public about Jews. The only recorded interaction relates to a matter of political calculation. A Quebec Conservative official gave a financial donation of $25,000 to Adrien Arcand, a perennial failed candidate who supported Nazism and, by bringing Adolph Hitler’s messages to Canada, envisioned a new country without Jewish influence, or indeed, Jews.37 William Mackenzie King, a Liberal Leader, like his predecessors, said little about Jews in public. The Liberal Party had Jewish Members of Parliament. However, unlike other Prime Ministers, King left a diary of his life, including his role as Prime Minister. The diary, and other reports made of conversations with King, revealed a generally negative attitude toward Jews tinged with sympathy for them, when Hitler assumed power in Germany. As the Jewish refugee crisis grew more severe after 1938, it became a political issue in Canada and whatever his personal views on the plight of refugees, the politics of othering suggested that Jews were not wanted in great numbers. In fact, the government closed its doors to Jewish refugees, admitting a handful of individuals with the financial resources and social connections to gain entrance.38 In the United States, the proponents of populism were prominent individuals, like Father Coughlin, who could influence public opinion. The 1936 candidacy of William Lemke, populist, failed. In Canada, there were no opinion leaders at the popularity level of Father Coughlin. However, there was a provincial government which was elected on a populist platform. The Social Credit Party was elected as the government of Alberta in 1936 in the midst of the Great Depression.

58

A. L. KAGEDAN

Just as Gertrude Coogan was a writer who provided American populists with their perspective, in Canada it was a British electrical engineer turned economic guru, Clifford Hugh Douglas, also known as C. H. Douglas. Like Coogan, Douglas developed a theory that would appeal to producers of goods and services, that is, a large percentage of the population. In the past, according to Douglas, producers of goods and services bartered for other, needed, goods and services. Then, token or money began to be used for trade purposes. But now these producers lost control of the value of their products. Banks were created and now gained control of money, further divorcing producers from their products’ value. Money could be affected by inflation or fraud. Now, for the first time, producers fell into debt. Producers were economic slaves of the banks, themselves run by financiers and international bankers. In Douglas’ view, banks and financiers not only controlled individual debtors, but governments themselves were now in their debt. In order to wage war or to pay social benefits to their citizens, states joined the ranks of the economic slaves. How could this conundrum be solved to the benefit of the producers? The government, elected by the people, would have to blunt the power of the banks and could offer no-interest credit to people to maintain their production businesses. The government would control prices and wages. The government, having conquered the economic space, could now end poverty and provide economic security for all people. Again, like Coogan, Douglas’ prescriptions are for big government. Unlike with socialism, this approach did not see economic equality for all as a goal, but it certainly promised greater equality. What stood in the way of this cure for economic ills? From the Social Credit perspective, the malign and self-interested forces arrayed against the implementation of Social Credit were the banks and their bosses, the international bankers. Among these international bankers were prominent Jewish banking families, like the Rothschilds. In Douglas’ view, a larger group of Jews was behind the power of the banks, and were guilty of numerous machinations designed to increase their wealth and power. The operations of this group, in Douglas’ view, are captured in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here Douglas and his followers linked up with Henry Ford and Father Coughlin. But unlike these others, Douglas shared, through his writing, a perspective that portrays Jews, going back

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

59

to the middle ages, as the manipulators who gave birth to the modern economy, for their own benefit. One observer assesses that the Protocols were a key element in Douglas’ economic awakening, and that Social Credit—in all its elements—was designed to blunt the far-reaching arms of the Jewish conspiracy.39 Writing in 1944, Douglas is consumed with “the Jewish problem”40 : … it is probable that the Jewish question will be one, if not the major preoccupation of the twentieth century. How much persecution there really has been will not be known until a much later date. That there has been some is quite logical and understandable. The inflation racket inflicted untold hardships on the general body of the German people. Germanspeaking Jews were conscious exceptions. They appeared to be possessed of large quantities of American currency or credit and used it to buy out every German business, and even personal property…

In a book titled The Brief for the Prosecution, published in 1945, Douglas shared his perspective on how Jews have influenced broad sectors of British society41 : It is not a coincidence that the Whigs, Quakers and non-conformists, became bankers and collaborators with the Jews, both resident and continental. They were fundamentalists. The “Old Testament” was a record of the sayings and doings of an omnipotent if somewhat irrational Ruler, who spoke Elizabethan English and had a private staircase to Mount Sinai.

Douglas goes on to claim that Hitler himself was a descendent of the Rothschilds. Douglas also believed that “…a coherent Jewish policy…. can be seen in full operation in practically every country in the world, and on both sides of the fighting line. It is the conditions which are inseparable from total war which alone make possible the erection of the bureaucratic state …as the instrument of World Domination.”42 Alberta was particularly vulnerable to swings in credit and interest rates. For years, the United Farmers Alliance had complained about the monetary system. So, the kindling wood was ready for Douglas’ othering spark. In light of the trying conditions of interwar Alberta, the Social Credit message, which involved blunting malign world forces and their local allies, worked. Social Credit was elected to govern Alberta in 1936, and also sent 17 members to the federal Parliament.

60

A. L. KAGEDAN

Upon election, tension arose between Douglas and his Alberta supporters, who wanted to take more radical action to free Alberta from the clutches of finance, on the one hand, and William Aberhardt, who preferred to take a slower pace. For example, an elated Douglas called on Premier Aberhardt to take steps to remove federal power from Alberta by expelling the RCMP and creating an Alberta police force. Aberhardt rejected this. The significance of Social Credit for our study is that this ideology was fueled, in part, by bigotry. Its economic plans were unrealistic, and many of its proposals were struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. The reflex action of its supporters was to blame malign forces for these setbacks, rather than accept that some of their proposals were not feasible. The conspiratorial cast of mind got stuck in the minds of many Social Credit supporters for decades. One example of this was a pamphlet produced by Social Credit in the late 1930s that identified “Banker Toadies,” many of whom were active in the Conservative Party. The pamphlet provided advice on how to deal with these individuals43 : God made Bankers Toadies, just as he made snakes, slugs, snails and other creepy-crawly, treacherous and poisonous things. NEVER therefore, abuse them—-just exterminate them.44

Here we have Social Credit supporters calling for genocidal action against bankers and Conservatives. The built-in bigotry in Social Credit has a special significance for Jews because Social Credit won success at the provincial level and won seats in the federal Parliament. In the United States, this level of bigotry existed at a rhetorical level but did not earn its promoters electoral success comparable to the electoral triumph of Social Credit in Canada. English Canadians and French Canadians lived a life apart in the interwar period, aptly described by novelist Hugh McLennan as the “two solitudes.” We will first look at Quebec and then at Ontario, the two provinces with the largest Jewish populations to evaluate the presence of the politics of othering directed against Jews in the period between the two world wars. French Quebec between the wars was devoted to the Catholic Church and continuing to develop its consciousness as a nation. It is important to remember that the interwar period came long before the Catholic Church adopted a more tolerant and respectful attitude toward Jews (Nostra

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

61

Aetate, 1965). So, the starting point for Quebec attitudes toward Jews was negative. Against this background, and in light of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who seemingly all of a sudden had entered Quebec, opinion leaders reacted with dismay. One influential figure, Abbe Lionel Groulx, spent his career trying to reconcile Catholicism with nationalism. But from time to time he would echo the themes that Jews are arch capitalists and, at the same time, arch communists. He found truth in the false Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. In fact, Groulx argued that only the Jews themselves denied that this document told a true story in order to hide their own culpability.45 Andre Laurendeau, a young nationalist leader who would recant his anti-Semitic views following World War II,46 said in 1933 that: Jews represent a wild and dangerous dream that we must suppress at all cost: messianism. The Israelites aspire [to] the day when their race will dominate the world. They do not come from one nation, but they come from every country, everywhere the power is communicated by one, they run the politics.

In addition to these central figures in Quebec, as mentioned, a journalist named Adrien Arcand published a newspaper, Le Goglu, that mirrored the publications of Nazi Germany.47 Two public incidents occurred which underscored a hostility toward Jews. The “Achat Chez Nous” program, supported by various nationalist groups and some Church parishes, was established to persuade Quebecois to shop the stores of other Quebecois. This effort to bolster Quebec business had little if any success since people had become used to shopping for value and were not prepared to compromise based on ethnicity. This effort quickly was accompanied by calls to boycott stores owned by Jews, who allegedly supported anti-Christian communism, and instead to patronize stores owned by Christians.48 A second public expression of hostility toward Jews came from the medical community. As we will see, McGill University established a quota for Jewish medical and law students. As a result, some Jewish students opted to be trained at the French-language University of Montreal. A problem arose when a Jewish graduate of this university began a medical residency at a local hospital. His colleagues went on strike, and the strike

62

A. L. KAGEDAN

spread to all medical residents in Montreal. The matter was settled when the Jewish medical resident left Montreal for the United States.49 Opinion in Ontario toward Jews, like in Quebec, was negative. In 1926, a Good Friday message from a Christian leader decried the allegedly negative influence that Jews had on finance, education, and the press.50 There was resentment of the efforts by Jews to reduce the teaching of Christianity in the public schools. And signs of “Gentiles Only” went up on the picnic grounds of the Toronto Islands. A provincial member of Parliament and a veteran of World War I, John Glass, put forward a bill to have these signs banned. His efforts were condemned by a leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail, as anti-democratic and anti-British. Glass’ efforts, which continued through the 1930s, were unsuccessful. Finally, after the war, his bill passed.51 There was an ongoing situation in Toronto that triggered much comment and affected public opinion regarding Jews. The situation related to a public beach that was a place of special pride to the local community, known as the Beaches community. By the late 1920s, Jews, particularly recent immigrants, discovered the “Beaches.” The local community, while acknowledging that their neighborhood beach was a public beach, resented the “invasion” of Jews. Community members alleged that the “invaders” changed into their bathing suits in their cars, and left garbage strewn on the beach. A local organization to oppose the presence of Jews on the beach was formed that chose, no doubt to gain attention, the name the “Swastika Society.” Their public relations gambit succeeded. By introducing the Nazi symbol to a community issue over beach behavior, more people took an interest in the conflict and it attracted media attention. Anger rose in the Jewish community which now saw the issue of the beach seemingly joined with a seeming rise in pro-Nazi sentiment in Toronto. There were efforts to find a middle-way solution to the beach question but beach issues continued to crop up.52 In summer, Toronto parks hosted sporting events several times a week. In one venue, Christie Pits, a baseball game was held in which one of the teams had many Jewish members. Crude remarks about Jews made by spectators earned an equivalent crude response. But when several supporters of a team unfurled a Nazi flag, supporters of the largely Jewish team ran over to the flag-bearers and tore the flag down. A melee ensued. In what appeared to be a well-planned event by both sides, youths flocked into the park with bats, chains, and knives. By the time police arrived,

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

63

several youths were sent to hospital. The battle of Christie Pits gained the status of legend in the Toronto Jewish community. In a twist of fate, researchers in the 1980s sought in vain to find a few well-known members of the Swastika Society, and learned that a number of them had served in the Canadian armed forces and died fighting against the Nazis in World War II.53 Compared with the United States, Canada did not enact as restrictive immigration legislation, which disadvantaged Jews in the middle 1920s. On average, Canada admitted 3793 Jews annually between 1921 and 1931. The American population in the 1921–1931 period was about twelve times the size of the Canadian population during the same time period. However, the United States admitted eight times the number of Jews. So, proportionately, Canada was more open to Jewish immigration in the 1921–1931 period than the was the United States. Education is a key to professional success and financial stability for individuals and for families. As was true in the United States, Canadian educational institutions took measures to stem the flow of Jews into their institutions. The restrictions on Jews applied throughout the educational system. At McGill Medical School, Jews counted for some 40% of students in the early 1920s, and were less than 10% by the 1940s. Squeezed out of McGill, some Jews studied medicine at the University of Montreal. McGill University also established strict limits on the admission of Jews to the University in general.54 In Toronto, it was an accepted practice to refuse Jews teaching positions in the public schools unless they had served in a remote community for a number of years. This practice likely reduced the attraction to the teaching profession for a number of Jews, keeping the number of Jews in the system low. In 1935, the University of Toronto turned down the application for a position from Gerhard Hertzberg, a leading German scientist, likely on the assumption that, like other refugee scholars, he was a Jew. Hertzberg would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1971. Writing in 1937, an Osgoode Hall Law Professor doubted that student Bora Laskin would succeed in the legal profession given his Jewish background.55 Bora Laskin defied this assessment to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1973. There was a bright spot in Canada with respect to quotas against Jews: Dalhousie University. While McGill and the University of Toronto drove down the number of Jews in their medical schools, Dalhousie resisted.

64

A. L. KAGEDAN

The percentage of Jews in Dalhousie medicine was around the 40% mark in the interwar period, and a number of these individuals were American. The credit for this principled resistance goes to the unusual and controversial Dalhousie University President, Carleton Stanley.56 Stanley served as President of Dalhousie from 1931 to 1945. He received a Master’s Degree from Oxford, where he studied English, Classics, and History. He earned an academic appointment at the University of Toronto but then, unusually, left the University to engage in business and became a sales agent for a textile manufacturer, which allowed him to travel widely. He was not a socialist but supported civil liberties and advocated on behalf of people handed jail sentences for their support of communism. In speeches, Stanley focused on the threat of Hitler and Nazism to the idea of a University. In 1933, he said in a speech: I think I should be doing much less than my duty if I did not pause to invite you all, this morning, older and younger, to reflect on the terrible catastrophe that has overtaken academic life in Germany…[A]s a learned society I believe we should realize, and be warned, that what has happened in Germany is a threat and a potent menace to intellectual freedom everywhere.

Stanley criticized Britain for not intervening in the Spanish civil war in defense of democracy. He harshly criticized Neville Chamberlin’s position on Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia: So, freedom is one, and uniform. The enemies of freedom are multiform. The enemies of freedom are not only those sadistic monsters who gloat over torturing human flesh. They are all those respectable, proper, conventional, ease- loving, tuft-hunting, must-be-in-the-swim people who will not listen to a distant call for help, if that call be inconvenient; who are nervous about expressing an opinion, or damning folly and injustice, until the “right people” have so expressed themselves; who want to serve God and Mammon at one and the same time; who have no real love and no undying hate.

Jews lived in tense environments in both the United States and Canada in the interwar period. The balance sheet when trying to compare attitudes and actions, that is, the politics of othering, toward Jews is mixed. Elected politicians in the United States were more favorable toward Jews than elected politicians in Canada. The presence of people who believed in the

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

65

Protocols of the elders of Zion in the Social Credit Party—elected provincially and federally—counted against Canada. In terms of opinion leaders, though present in both countries, they were far more prominent in the United States. There were no Canadian equivalents to Father Coughlin and Henry Ford. On immigration, Canada was more open to Jews than the United States was, for the period of study. Finally, the education situation was poor for Jews in both countries, with a point of light shining forth from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Notes 1. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. 2. Kazin, 13–14. 3. Kain, 21. 4. Kazin 27–29. 5. Kazin, 35–36. 6. Gertrude Coogan, Money Creators, Chicago: Sound Money Press, 1935. 7. Brandies’ papers are located at Harvard Law School, http://ocp.hul.har vard.edu/ww/people_brandeis.html. 8. Allan L. Kagedan, Soviet Zion, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 9. Sonja P. Gentling, “The Engineer and the Shtadlanim: Herbert Hoover and American Jewish Non-Zionists, 1917–1928,” American Jewish History, Vol. 88, No. 3 (September, 2000). 10. Richard Breitman and Allan L. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, Boston: Harvard, 2013. 11. https://www.fathercoughlin.org/father-coughlin-biography.html, accessed on April 26, 2019. 12. Kazin, 117. 13. Edward C. Blackorby, “William Lemke: Agrarian Radical and Union Party Presidential Candidate,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 49, No. 1 (June, 1962), 67–84. 14. Glen Jeansoone, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 15. For a critique of the Townsend Plan, see https://socialwelfare.library.vcu. edu/social-security/the-townsend-plan/, accessed on April 26, 2019. 16. dollartimes.com, accessed on April 4, 2019. 17. Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews, New York: Stein and Day, 1980. 18. Lee, 6–7. 19. Lee, 8–9. 20. Lee, 11. 21. The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Life and Work by Henry Ford, 104.

66

A. L. KAGEDAN

22. Ford, My Life and Work, 3. 23. Victoria Saker Woeste, Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012, 1–11. 24. Lee, 45–66. 25. Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, New York: Public Affairs, 2001. 26. Lee, 139–62. 27. American Jewish Year Book, New York: American Jewish Committee, 1931, 263. 28. Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948, Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1982, Preface, x. 29. Robert Michael, A Concise History of American Antisemitism, Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2005, 141. 30. Robert Michael, 135. 31. Marcia Graham Synnott, “Anti-semitism and American Universities”, in David Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in America, University of Illinois Press, 1986, 233–66, 234. 32. Synnott, 239. 33. Synnott, 264. 34. Synnott, 264. 35. Synnott, 265–66. 36. https://newspapers.lib.sfu.ca/mcc-cjr-collection, Jewish Review, accessed on April 27, 2019. 37. Erna Paris, Jews: An Account of Their Experience in Canada, Toronto: Macmillan, 1980, 53. 38. Abella, 17–37. 39. Bob Hesketh, Major Douglas and Alberta Social Credit, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 40. Major C. H. Douglas, The Brief for the Prosecution, Liverpool: KRP Publications, 1945, 41. 41. Douglas, 15. 42. Douglas, 41–42. 43. Hesketh, 170. 44. Gerald Tulchinsky, Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community, Toronto: Stoddard, 1998, 178. 45. Ira Robinson, A History of Antisemitism in Canada, Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015, 64. 46. Gerald Tulchinsky, Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community, Toronto: Stoddard, 1998, 178. 47. Alan Davies, ed., Antisemitism in Canada, Waterloo: Wildfred LaurierPierre, 1992, Anctil, Interlude of Hostility, Quebec, 1919–1939, 157. 48. Pierre Anctil, Hsitoire des Juifs du Quebec, Montreal: Boreal, 2017, 197. 49. Anctil, 195.

4

THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM, 1920–1940

67

50. Stephen Speisman, “Antisemitism in Ontario: The Twentieth Century,” in Alan Davies, ed., Antisemitism in Canada, Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 1992, 117. 51. Speisman, 123. 52. Cyrill Levitt and William Shaffir, The Riot at Christie Pits, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987, 81–104. 53. Levitt and Shaffir, 215. 54. Robinson, 73–75. Also in Robinson see Pierre Anctil, Interlude of Hostility, Quebec, 1919–1939, 135–65. 55. Robinson, 70. 56. Barry Cahill, “The Higher Educator as ‘Intellocrat’: The Odyssey of Carleton Stanley,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’education, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2002), 67–91.

CHAPTER 5

Wartime Othering: The Enemy Within

Recognition of difference and the dislike of people who look different from oneself or have a different religion or culture is basic to human nature, one of the human universals. Some politicians and opinion leaders in modern, post-tribal society build, curate, and pitch the need to take action against a minority. In all the cases in this book, dislike joined with fear—threats of a security nature, for instance, are necessary components of a successful othering campaign, that is, one that leads to government actions against a targeted group—through discrimination, internment, disempowerment. The politics of othering, as noted, is the supply of a solution to a public demand for action against a minority. The public demand could originate with bigots. But the demands are most influential when they also relate to broader concerns about grievances toward a minority that are linked to security, the economy, or social and cultural life. Throughout recorded history, politicians have chosen to aggregate those demands and supply a “solution” by putting a group in its place—a lower place. The politics of othering works because it weaves a convincing narrative that links a minority group with a threat against society. During World War II, both the United States and Canada expelled people of Japanese ancestry—citizens and non-citizens alike—from their homes on the West Coasts of the two countries. The governments stripped off the signifier of common purpose enshrined by citizenship

© The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_5

69

70

A. L. KAGEDAN

or nationality and confined American and Canadian Japanese in internment camps. To be sure, this action occurred when both nations were at war with Japan. The public demand for security was at perhaps its highest level, and politicians decided to respond to this demand by supplying a radical action against Americans and Canadians of Japanese origin. But the expulsion of the Japanese origin people did not originate with World War II: the politics of othering were in force, working against the Japanese origin people since the nineteenth century. In examining the policies of the United States and Canada toward people of Japanese ethnicity, I will look at several criteria to facilitate comparison. First, since the expulsions were justified publicly on a security basis, how credible were reports that indicated that Japanese origin people who lived on the West coasts posed a threat? Second, once expulsion occurred, were there efforts to mitigate its effects, for example, by exempting certain individuals from internment and by finding employment for the displaced individuals? Third, once the War was over, did policy change and, if so, when? Visceral antagonism toward the Japanese was apparent in both countries long before war loomed. Japan was closed off to foreigners until in 1853 Admiral Matthew C. Perry led a naval force to Japan and threatened to attack unless Japan opened itself to trade.1 Japan permitted trade but did not, initially, allow its citizens to leave. So, Japanese migration to the United States and Canada began slowly. Japanese immigration first to the United States and then to Canada began in the nineteenth century. Japanese people also settled in Peru and in other South American countries. The 1790 U.S. Immigration Act limited naturalization—the achievement of citizenship following immigration—to white people, and, after 1870, also to Africans (Black Americans). Asians could not be naturalized. In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that persons born in the United States were U.S. citizens, regardless of ethnic origin. Canada did not have white-only provisions in its early immigration legislation. But as late as 1947 Prime Minister McKenzie King stated that there was no wish to encourage significant immigration from Asia. Japanese immigrants to both countries worked in farming, fishing, and hotels, with a few individuals moving into teaching and the clergy.2 With the dawning of the twentieth century, the United States, Canada, (and Australia) sought ways to block Japanese immigration. Othering (dislike of the unlike) showed up in myriad ways. U.S. Labor opposed Japanese immigration on the ground that Japanese Labor would undercut the interests of workers. This argument was based on commonplace

5

WARTIME OTHERING: THE ENEMY WITHIN

71

thinking that employment availability was a zero-sum game in which a Japanese immigrant took a job from an American worker. This did not take account of the contribution to industrial growth provided by immigration which produced many more jobs and better paying jobs for the workers. In fact, more immigration and a larger workforce could mean a healthier economy and stronger labor unions. After 1905, Japan was seen as a powerful nation, having defeated Russia in war. Commentators in the United States hit on the strategy of identifying Japanese immigrants as agents of the Japanese government.3 Now, in addition to long-standing hostility toward Japanese immigrants as economic competitors, there was a national security argument to feed the politics of othering. Early in twentieth century, the British Columbia Legislature passed a measure to block Japanese immigrants from pubic employment. The federal government, led by Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier, disallowed this measure out of concern that it would harm Japan’s relations with Britain, the mother country. Not to be deterred, the British Columbia Legislature deprived the Japanese of voting rights in 1895—and the federal government did not challenge this measure.4 By 1906–1907, Japanese immigrants to the United States and Canada had established themselves financially. From a public policy perspective, they were ideal immigrants. However, the dislike of the unlike joined with resentment at their economic success to prompt strong actions by individuals and governments. In 1906, the San Francisco School Board segregated ethnic Japanese students from white students. The Japanese government protested to the U.S. government. In response, the U.S. government convinced San Francisco to desegregate on the basis that the United States would cut off Japanese immigration—which it did. This U.S. decision to block immigration from Japan triggered a rise in Japanese immigration to Canada. The upshot: street violence in Vancouver. On September 7, 1907 there was a riot in Vancouver in which Japanese shops were smashed and looted. The Prime Minister, Robert Borden, was moved to declare that British Columbia should remain “A White Man’s Province.”5 Although the property was damaged in the Vancouver riot, there were no deaths or injuries. Despite this, supporters of removing the Japanese from British Columbia for decades to come would claim that expulsion was to protect the Japanese from the mob—when their real purpose was to feign empathy while engaging in othering.

72

A. L. KAGEDAN

Japanese remained interested in immigration to the United States and Canada but both countries took measures to reduce Japanese immigration. As we saw in the previous chapter, in 1924, the United States cut back on all immigration from Europe and from Asia. In 1929, the Canadian government successfully pressured Japan to curtail emigration.6 Looking back to the nineteenth century, we have seen that both the United States and Canada were uncomfortable with Japanese immigration. But discomfort turned to expulsion during World War II and this related to biased views linked with security concerns. Two lines of military and security thinking influenced U.S. and Canadian decision-making on people of Japanese origin. First, there was the perspective outlined in an influential book written by Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (1909), about a growing threat to the United States from Japan. Lea assessed that Japan would, one day, attack the United States. He also assessed that the United States was behind Japan in war preparations, and that, if Japan landed on U.S. soil, it would be difficult to dislodge them, given the distance between the points of invasion on the West Coast and military supplies stored and personnel located in the East. He wrote that Washington State, Oregon and California would be seized by Japan.7 Lea saw Japanese immigrants as combatants in any U.S.–Japanese conflict. He comments that, should Japan attack Hawaii, the Japanese immigrants there, many of them military veterans, would easily defeat the U.S. battalion stationed there.8 Lea does not comment directly on Japanese immigrants to the West Coast, but he published documents demanding an end to Japanese immigration to the West Coast in his book. One of the reasons cited for banning the Japanese is the strategic military risk their presence posed.9 The Valor of Ignorance contains two forwards from retired military leaders. Both make the point that the armed forces of the United States were inadequately funded, and that Lea’s study proves the need for more funds. Lea’s book was an early example of how useful it is for lobbyists for more personnel and weapons to be able to point to a threat. U.S. and Canadian actions against Japanese immigrants were a marriage of convenience for a number of interested parties. The Valor of Ignorance established a link between an attack by the government of Japan on the United States, and the local American Japanese community. The notion that the Japanese who lived on the West Coast or in Hawaii would be allies of the Japanese government

5

WARTIME OTHERING: THE ENEMY WITHIN

73

was captured in a 1933 U.S. Army intelligence report on Japan. This assessment gathered together Lea’s strategic view with Social Darwinist perceptions of the Japanese as fanatical, duplicitous, and arrogant. These strategic projections, when tethered to popular dislike of the Japanese, overwhelmed contrary evidence, based on investigation, that a Japanese invasion was unlikely. As the possibility of war drew closer, the U.S. government launched investigations about potential disloyalty on the part of American Japanese. The findings of these inquiries were that, with the exception of a few individuals, people of Japanese origin were loyal to their adopted country. The government kept its investigative findings to itself, leaving the public exposed to anti-Japanese sentiments.10 Unburdened by the facts, the politicians who saw political advantage in calling for the removal of people of Japanese origin from the West Coast saw the impending conflict as a golden opportunity to ride the waves of anti-Japan sentiment to success. With the commencement of hostilities with Japan, both governments took advice from their military leaders about the conduct of battle. However, the many decisions affecting people of Japanese origin who were immigrants and citizens were made by politicians who directed military and civilian officials. Both the U.S. President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, were biased against Asians, including the Japanese.11 Before the war, the treatment of Japanese in both countries was similar with the significant exception of the right to vote and to participate in the political process—available to the American Japanese but not the Canadian Japanese. In order to be in a position to compare the behavior of the United States and Canada toward people of Japanese origin, we will now look separately at events in the two countries. In the United States, all non-citizens of Japanese origin were declared to be enemy aliens, subject to a curfew and travel limits, as well as to have to turn over shortwave radios and cameras. Both citizens and noncitizens were excluded from areas near the West Coast. Fishing craft was grounded and newspapers shuttered, though they were permitted to open again in 1943 under censorship rules.12 Frank Knox, who was the Secretary of the Navy, had pinned the blame for Pearl Harbor on a fifth column in the United States—which was false but politically useful in diffusing any criticism of the government for missing signals of an imminent attack. A government commission

74

A. L. KAGEDAN

convened to explain the intelligence failure regarding the Pearl Harbor attack pointed to a failure of analysis and a lack of communications, but it also referred to Japanese spies, based on diplomatic missions, and their helpers, presumably Japanese Americans.13 The drumbeat of calls to expel the Japanese Americans from the West Coast grew ever louder. A coalition of politicians and opinion leaders led the charge for the expulsion of Japanese, who, they argued, posed a security threat. Coalition members included: Earl Warren, who later led the Commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy, and served as the California Attorney General; business groups; and local politicians. The Hearst and McClatchy newspaper chains trumpeted the need to remove the Japanese from the West Coast.14 The President signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942 that facilitated the creation of military zones from which “any and all person might be excluded.” Citizens’ rights were canceled. As mentioned, no people of Japanese origin were permitted in the Western half of Washington State, Oregon and California, and the southern half of Arizona.15 The U.S. government decision to uproot all people of Japanese origin—including American citizens—was tested in court.16 Fred Koremetsu, 23, decided to defy a government order to leave his home and job (his parents complied with the order). Koremetsu tried to disguise his Japanese origin by submitting himself to plastic surgery on his eyes and changed his name to Clyde Sarah, saying that he was of Spanish and Hawaiian descent. On May 40, 1942, the FBI arrested Koremetsu for violating the order to leave the West Coast, and Koremetsu agreed to let the American Civil Liberties Union fight his case. Koremetsu was sent to an Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, but the ACLU fought on with this case. On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court voted 6–3 to uphold the order to Korematsu, on the ground that the order was based on military necessity, not race. Efforts to conceal othering by claiming that a policy was for security or another societal value is a standard practice of political othering. Justice Robert Jackson, in his dissent, referred to the decision as “the legalization of racism” that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He compared the exclusion order to the “abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy.” In this case,

5

WARTIME OTHERING: THE ENEMY WITHIN

75

and in all the case studies in this book, the courts generally supported policy decisions based on the politics of othering, since in each case the issue that was selected for focus was not ethnic group or political group membership, but security or some other basis. The law rarely proved to be a barrier to the politics of othering in United States, Canada, and globally. Even if a measure against a minority was stopped by the courts, in the run-up to the case the supporters of the measure loudly broadcasted that the minority was to be feared and demeaned. Over a ninety-day period in the spring of 1942, U.S. officials removed 109,427 American Japanese from their homes to assembly centers under military supervision. Horse race-tracks, abandoned due to war, were some of the facilities retro-fitted to house the displaced persons.17 Once expulsion had occurred, contrary impulses took hold: government officials began to treat Japanese Americans as American citizens, rather than as unwanted foreigners. By 1943, the American government took steps to improve conditions of the expelled individuals. College students were allowed to leave the internment camps—or not to have to report to them in the first place—in order to attend school. A person who could obtain a letter of employment could also leave the internment camps. In addition, American citizens of Japanese origin were authorized to work at war plants. This permit leave system permitted 34,000 people to leave the internment camps in 1943 and 1944.18 The agency in charge of the assembly centers provided education for inmates, sponsored newspapers, and supported leisure activities.19 Some improvement of conditions in the internment camps were complemented by the decision by the American government to recruit American Japanese to serve in the armed forces. In the end, some 33,000 American Japanese served in the war, and in 1944, President Roosevelt thanked them for their service. Citizenship bested bigotry.20 With the threat of a Japanese invasion virtually gone, FDR decided to place the War Relocation Authority, which was responsible for the internment camps for Japanese, under the aegis of the Department of Interior. Harold Ickes, the head of the Department, was known to favor improved treatment of the Japanese.21 When FDR died on April 12, 1945, there were still 53,000 Japanese in the confinement camps, and 1800 at Tule Lake, an internment camp for people of security concern. The confinement camps were closed by the end of 1945 and Tule Lake was closed in 1946.22 Americans of Japanese origin were permitted to resettle on the West Coast as of January 2, 1945. Some 3000 immigrants and 1327 citizens repatriated to Japan.23

76

A. L. KAGEDAN

Canada made the decision to expel Canadians of Japanese origin from the British Columbia Coast five days after the United States had taken similar action. If the Americans had decided otherwise, it is unclear which course Canada would have chosen. But the visceral antagonism toward the Japanese by the media, local politicians, and others, sealed the fate of Japanese Canadians. For instance, the Creston Review of New Denver, British Columbia, referred to the Japanese as “apes [who are] sly, treacherous, dishonest, and hate white men.”24 One group that pressed for the expulsion of the Japanese was the Fishermen’s Protective Association. The group was supported by Liberal MP Alan Chambers who called for Japanese to “be forever excluded from the woods and the hills, the farms and from industries.”25 At a Cabinet meeting on January 8, 1942, Ian Makenzie, who had served as the Minister of National Defense and now was the Minister of Pensions and National Health, led the call for expulsion, admitting that in British Columbia there was “intense economic jealousy of the Japanese and a wish in some quarters to appropriate their property.”26 Behind the public national security rationale for evacuation of the Japanese lay jealousy and greed. Although there were voices opposing the expulsion of the Japanese from the West Coast, public opinion in British Columbia strongly favored it. These views were not restricted to British Columbia. The Globe and Mail in Toronto wrote that the Japanese in Canada “would remain an alien, isolated element, discontent with their environment and perennially disloyal at heart.”27 Once Canada took the decision to expel the Japanese from the Coast, their property was confiscated and sold with proceeds to the owners, less the cost of processing, or sold by the owners themselves at a low price. In Vancouver, a frustrated piano owner, when offered $15 by a buyer, pushed the piano into the bay. Local populations stole items from now-vacant homes. The expulsion began with families being assembled on fairgrounds in Vancouver, British Columbia. This was the case with 4000 Japanese who were taken to the Hastings Park Exhibition Grounds. Sanitary facilities were limited. There was no Japanese food, only Western food. The first group of Japanese arrived at the Exhibition Grounds on March 16, 1942 and the last group left there on September 30, 1942 when they were sent to camps in the interior of British Columbia.28 Some 1500 Japanese approached the authorities to say that they had savings, and that they would take care of their own resettlement. These

5

WARTIME OTHERING: THE ENEMY WITHIN

77

wealthier people made their way to smaller towns in the interior. Some succeeded—others failed and turned to the government for subsidies.29 Following the War, a public debate occurred on how to treat the Japanese Canadians. There were several schools of thought regarding how to treat Japanese: (1) deport all to Japan; (2) deport all except those who prove they are loyal to Canada; (3) disperse all across Canada with British Columbia accepting some on a quota basis. A few opinion leaders called the idea of deporting naturalized Japanese Canadians “Hitler-like.”30 In the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor of the New Democratic Party, one faction rejected the idea of repatriation of native-born Japanese as abhorrent while the other faction said that the public and workers favored total repatriation of all Japanese from the country. The compromise conclusion: not all Japanese should be repatriated.31 A Consultation Council led by the United Church organized an ecumenical resolution signed by Anglicans, Baptists, and Roman Catholics. It called demands for expulsion of all Japanese “preposterous” and characteristic of Nazism. Policies based on “national and racial prejudices, exacerbated by wartime passions” would hurt trade and relations, could push toward a new World war “and do violence to the conscience of a very large section of the Canadian people.”32 By Order in Council 469, the government liquidated abandoned property, and the proceeds of the sales were given to the owners with deductions for processing. The funds were distributed on a monthly basis, to reduce the chance of the money being lost or stolen. In a number of locations, Japanese families lived in hotels, abandoned offices and with friends, as the men tried to find work. The Labor Department’s National Selective Service Agency looked for jobs for the Japanese across the country. There were successes and failures: Toronto and Montreal accepted some, while Ottawa refused to accept any. We do not have statistics on the success of this dispersal effort, but it seems less successful than the one conducted by the United States. And, because the Japanese—including those who were naturalized—did not have the vote, there was no political advantage to acting on their behalf. With respect to their treatment of their own citizens, the United States did better than Canada in the case of its own naturalized Japanese. U.S. citizenship counted for more than Canadian nationality (Canadian citizenship was recognized legally after January 1, 1947). Canadian officials, perhaps uncomfortable with this difference, noted it in their

78

A. L. KAGEDAN

reports.33 As U.S. citizens, people of Japanese origin joined the Democratic and Republican parties and by 1936 there were nine Japanese origin representatives in the Hawaii legislature.34 Indeed, in the summer of 1944, the Canadian government passed a bill to permit Canadian soldiers, including prisoners of war, to vote, while it continued the disenfranchisement of Japanese Canadians, on the ground that a Legislature (British Columbia) had itself disenfranchised them.35 On December 17, 1945, Prime Minister Mackenzie King tabled three orders-in-council under the War Measures Act. The first Order-in-Council (Privy Council 7356) stripped their status as Canadian nationals from Japanese who had decided to return to Japan. The second Orderin-Council (Privy Council 7357) created a Commissioner to rule on Japanese who had been interned and who were not Canadian nationals. The third Order-in-Council (Privy Council 7355) authorized the Minister of Labour to deport: Japanese nationals who requested repatriation and were in interned as of September 1, 1945; naturalized Japanese who had not revoked their repatriation requests as of September 1, 1944; and Canadian-born Japanese who had not revoked their request for repatriation before receiving deportation orders. Justice Minister Louis St Laurent clarified that no decision had been made on Canadian-born Japanese who wished to remain in Canada. Parliament, not Cabinet, would have to make this decision.36 On February 20, 1946, the Supreme Court rendered a split decision. The Chief Justice and two others concluded that the orders were legal with respect to Japanese men. However, there was uncertainty about the validity of the measures proposed by the government as applied to wives and children. So, an appeal to the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was required to settle the matter.37 Public opinion was split. Some wanted no Japanese in Canada and paid no attention to the issue of nationality. A few voices spoke up for the Japanese who were Canadian nationals. The Toronto Star noted that one of the Nazis’ crimes was the deportation of civilians on racial and religious grounds: “This is precisely what Canada is doing in respect to her Japanese citizens (in fact Canadian nationals).” British Columbia wanted the deportation of as many Japanese as possible. The Montreal Committee on Canadian Citizenship (comprised of Canadian Jewish Congress, Saint-John-Baptiste Society, and the Young Men’s Christian Association [YMCA]) opposed repatriation of Canadian citizens to Japan and sought funds for the appeal to the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.38

5

WARTIME OTHERING: THE ENEMY WITHIN

79

On December 2, 1946, the Judicial Council said that Canada could deport Canadian nationals as outlined in the Orders in Council. But the ground had shifted in Cabinet. The Prime Minister himself now opposed deportation. Canada had a new citizenship act in force as of January 1, 1947. On January 24, 1947, a press release was issued stating that no deportations would take place while noting that the removal “… of those whose continued presence would be undesirable in Canada has been accomplished on a voluntary basis.”39 Although attitudes were changing, there was still enough antagonism in British Columbia for the government to continue orders keeping Japanese away from the coast in 1948. Finally, in 1949, the British Columbia government agreed to permit Japanese to return, and gave them the right to vote. The Canadian government followed suit shortly thereafter.40 In both the United States and Canada, antagonism toward the Japanese began decades before World War II. Othering—the dislike of the unlike—was widespread. Under conditions of war, when the antagonism added fuel to the perspective that the Japanese were an adjunct to the Japanese military—with no proof—harsh actions were taken against the entire Japanese community, immigrant, and resident alike. U.S. officials and political leaders placed enough emphasis on the unifying concept of citizenship to advance Japanese status by creating a Japanese American military unit that saw combat in Europe. The United States also provided more active assistance to the displaced Japanese than did their Canadian counterparts. And, perhaps most striking, the end of hostilities with Japan did not see the end of Canadian hostility to their Japanese, who only gained the vote in 1949. As we saw with Indigenous people, and also with Jews, the American focus on the rights of citizens benefitted minorities and this was true for people of Japanese origin during World War II. The absence of citizenship in Canada prior to 1947 harmed minorities. The politics of othering, as we have mentioned, is, among other things, an effort to undermine citizenship—or any form of status that applies to all long-term residents of a country in order to mobilize the majority group to turn against one or more minorities. The politicians leading this othering effort to retreat from citizenship strive to benefit politically from this enterprise. The politics of othering seeks to divide citizens into smaller groups who are playing a zero-sum game where majorities win and minorities lose.

80

A. L. KAGEDAN

Notes 1. Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Freda Hawkins, Canada and Immigration: Public Policy and Public Concern, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972, 92–93. 2. Robinson, 10–11. 3. Robinson, 13. 4. Robinson, 12–13. 5. Robinson, 14–15. 6. Robinson, 24. 7. Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance, New York: Harper and Bothers Published, 1909, 257. 8. Lea, 250–51. 9. Lea, 319–321. 10. Robinson, 32–39, 55. 11. Robinson, By Order, 72. 12. Robinson, 61–63. 13. Robinson, 61–63. 14. Robinson, 85–86. Robinson, By Order, 29. 15. Robinson, 104. 16. Facts and Case Summary, Korametsu. US, uscourts.gov. 17. Robinson, 104, 129. 18. Robinson, 181–82, 186–87. 19. Robinson, 286. 20. Robinson, 203. 21. Robinson, By Order, 203–4. 22. Robinson, By Order, 250. 23. Robinson, 252, 260. 24. Patricia E. Roy, J. L. Granatstein, Masako Iino and Hiroko Takamura, Mutual Hostages: Canadians and Japanese During the Second World War, Toronto: University of Toronto, 1990, 19. 25. Roy, 24–25. 26. Roy, 31. 27. Roy, 128. 28. Roy, 107–10. 29. Roy, 117–18. 30. Roy, 118–19. 31. Roy, 120–22. 32. Roy, 123. 33. Roy, 128. 34. Robinson, 25–29.

5

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Roy, Roy, Roy, Roy, Roy, Roy,

130. 173. 177. 173–75. 180. 185.

WARTIME OTHERING: THE ENEMY WITHIN

81

CHAPTER 6

Cold War: Othering on the Home Front

America emerged from World War II as a great power, now outmatching Britain as an international force. This new international role opened the door to fresh anxieties among Americans and offered politicians new opportunities to take advantage of those fears. The decline of Britain and the significant role Canada played in World War II left Canada more independent than before, more able to set its own course. This translated into a different political path than the one the United States took in the Cold War. Othering, as has been mentioned, is the ascription of negative behavior and bad character (dishonesty, selfishness, power-grabbing, manipulativeness, low intelligence) to ethnic, religious, and racial groups. Othering can also apply to people with unpopular political views and to LGBTQ individuals, who are a minority group based on their sexuality. This chapter will examine the othering of citizens of the United States and Canada who held left-wing views and LGBTQ individuals. The focus of writing and research has been on anti-Communism with the research on the purging of LGBTQ people a more recent topic of study. First, we will turn to the othering of people with left-wing views. As discussed in Chapter 2, by left-wing views we mean support for policies and laws that would distribute wealth more equally. These policies could relate to the level of taxation of income and estates, provision of welfare funds for low-income people, universal health care paid for by taxes, and a well-funded public school system. It could also relate © The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_6

83

84

A. L. KAGEDAN

to the protection of workers through recognition of unions. These leftwing views align with liberal democracy and a free-market economy. Communism, however, calls for a social revolution that would bring the Communist Party into power in order to ensure common ownership of the means of production and put an end to liberal democracy. Communism, a defunct ideology, claimed to strive for an end to all economic inequality. In fact, in 1957, Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav communist leader who became a dissident, revealed that the Soviet Union and other communist countries were ruled by an upper class with access to education, food and health care unavailable to ordinary citizens. The Soviet government engaged in massive human rights violations, including genocide—an outcome facilitated by the imposition of a dictatorship. The story of the Cold War includes the othering of people with leftwing, including communist, views, and the othering of gay people. The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s had a direct effect on the travails of leftwing people during Cold War. In international affairs, the Soviets, and, for that matter, their Russian successors, have always been great power realists, seeking to expand their influence and power whenever and however possible. The Soviets found it convenient to cloak their great power actions as an effort to bring the blessings of communism to the whole world. In the late 1930s, the Soviets perceived an opportunity to gain influence in Spain. Following centuries of monarchic rule and decades of authoritarian rule, Spain became a democratic republic in 1931. However, people who favored authoritarianism rebelled against the government and were supported by Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union supported the democratic side, which included liberals and socialists, and provided them with funds, armaments, and military training. A number of communists from the United States and Canada volunteered to fight in Spain, on the democratic side, and came into contact with Soviet officials who supplied them with weapons and Soviet military personnel who trained and commanded them. By 1939, the civil war in Spain had ended with the victory of General Franco’s forces. The Soviet Union was unable to reach an understanding with Britain and France to stop Germany from its plan to conquer Europe. Moscow recalibrated the Soviet position toward Europe and signed a peace pact with Hitler, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Agreement. This pact, which lasted for twenty-two months, involved the Soviet Union supplying Nazi Germany with raw materials, such and oil and iron, that helped Germany to conquer Western Europe.1

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

85

From the 1920s to the 1950s, and beyond, there was a politically active communist movement in the United States and Canada. Communists saw the Soviet Union as a benevolent left-wing power whose foreign policy objective was peace and worker-led democracy through communism. In Canada, communists were elected to the federal and provincial legislatures. In addition to siding with the Soviet Union on international issues, the Communist Parties of the United States and Canada supported left-wing causes in domestic matters.2 In the period we are examining, the late 1940s and early 1950s, the failings of Soviet communism were not as well-known as was the case after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech that denounced Joseph Stalin. In addition, the Soviet Union, having signed a peace accord with Nazi Germany, was then attacked by Germany in June 1941 and, for the remainder of the war, was an ally of the United States and Canada. So, for a brief period, the Soviet Union was seen as an ally. This opened the door for American and Canadian communists to spy for the Soviet Union since it provided them with a plausible alibi for betraying their own countries. The people who worked for the Soviet Union argued that they were helping promote world peace, a common refrain of Communist Parties. Our challenge is to analyze how politicians used the Cold War to score points domestically. Two targets of the politics of othering during the Cold War were people who held left-wing views and gay people. In Canada, fifteen people, who mostly were scientists working on classified matters, were charged with providing security-sensitive information to the Soviets and they were subjected to varying degrees of criminal prosecution and private sector sanctions. In the United States, thousands of people were pilloried publicly and sanctioned, especially through job loss and blacklisting, by newspapers, school boards, universities, film studios, and other institutions. Few of these people had access to classified national security information, and few were charged with supplying the Soviet Union with secret information. To try to understand the quite different domestic reactions of the United States and Canada to the Cold War, we will first look at what happened in the United States and then turn to Canada. Cold War America is identified with McCarthyism. What is McCarthyism? It is the name given to the activities of the U.S. government, and state governments, in the late 1940s and early 1950s to fight communism and communists. Senator McCarthy chaired a committee in the Senate that investigated communist activity in the United States. But

86

A. L. KAGEDAN

the main actor in anti-Communism was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that held hearings across the United States to identify and seek to “rehabilitate” communists. Both these committees swept up individuals who were left-wing and may have had a brief relationship or no relationship at all with communism. Established in 1938, the HUAC, assisted by the FBI, found communists in the government, the military, but also in schools, in newspapers, and in the entertainment industry. The HUAC demanded that the supposed supporters of communism name others who were communists. Nearly all who testified refused to comply. Their summons to the Committee and their refusal to testify against others were publicized and, depending on the circumstances, they were incarcerated or fired, and then blacklisted by other employers. As mentioned, the perceived threat from the Soviet Union and by extension from communists in America receded during the war following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. U.S. Communist Party leader Earl Browder, who had been incarcerated, was released by order of the President. Browder worked to stop strikes and even get a no-strike pledge from unions. In 1943, the Soviet Union dissolved the Comintern, its agency to promote communism abroad, seemingly as a good-will gesture to his new allies, the United States (Roosevelt) and the United Kingdom (Churchill).3 In the heady days following World War II, American communists hoped for continued good relations with the government, and cooperation with noncommunist liberals on social policy matters. They sought a second New Deal. Looking beyond America, American communists supported the creation of a United Nations to bring a New Deal to the whole world.4 The war’s end coincided with significant espionage revelations to the effect that American spies had revealed atomic secrets to Soviet intelligence. In November 1945, Elizabeth Bentley, an American who spied for the Soviet Union, approached the FBI and provided details of her spy work that implicated over one hundred Americans. Spies who were identified were prosecuted criminally and two spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed. The Soviets were interested in information on nuclear weapons and more generally information on armaments, military planning, and foreign policy plans. The United States faced a challenge from the Soviet Union internationally, but also domestically in light of the revelations of spying. The

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

87

reaction of the U.S. government, private sector, and politicians involved many hundreds if not thousands of individuals. The presence of communists and the real threat posed by Soviet spying provided a vehicle for politicians, buoyed by interested parties, to strike a blow against not only communism but left-wing thinking generally, thereby narrowing political choice for Americans. As Ellen Schrecker has pointed out, the target of anti-communists was, in fact, left-wing ideas in general—what one might call social democratic ideas. Individuals affected by McCarthyism recovered their careers by the 1960s, but the network of causes through which they offered “a meaningful alternative to the American mainstream was gone forever.”5 Anti-communist activities in the United States predated the postwar concerns about Soviet spy rings. The key Congressional committee, the HUAC was founded in 1938 and held hearings to investigate the activities of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group, and the activities of the Communist Party and of socialist groups. In 1947, Truman issued an Executive Order establishing a Loyalty Review Board to vet the civil service with the purpose of detecting and then ousting communists.6 In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act that required communist organizations and their members to register with federal authorities and in 1954 Congress passed the Communist Control Act that declared the Communist Party to be “the agency of a hostile foreign power.”7 The Senate Internal Security Committee was established in 1951 and in 1953 Joseph McCarthy became its chairman. States also joined the anti-Communism juggernaut. The New York State Rapp-Coudert Committee targeted alleged communist professors. The Tenney Committee in California created a list of subversive organizations and individuals. In the South, States established anti-Communism investigations following the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in order to be able to label the civil rights movement as a communist front-group.8 Concern about communists had existed since the Russian revolution in 1917 and persisted through World War II. Fear of communism was tempered by the brief situational alliance with the Soviet Union. However, by 1946, strikes were occurring with regularity and the Hearst Press tried to make the case that Moscow and communists were directing the strikers. President Truman created a Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty to prevent communists from entering the civil service. The FBI

88

A. L. KAGEDAN

was given the task of assuring government employee loyalty. On the international front, Truman asked Congress for authority to provide military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey as both were in jeopardy of communist take-overs. For our comparative purposes, a key feature of othering left-wing adherents was that they were targeted whether or not they were privy to government secrets. In 1947, Congress took the HUAC to Hollywood, and persons who were questioned and did not answer satisfactorily received prison sentences. Hollywood executives blacklisted anyone who was called to testify before the HUAC.9 Efforts to root out communists, and those people whose viewpoint was left-wing, picked up steam when Senator McCarthy, in 1950, brandished a piece of paper that he claimed was a list of two hundred and fifty communists in the State Department (a piece of political theater: he did not have a list). State Department official Alger Hiss was charged with perjury in 1948 in relation to his testimony about allegations that he supported communism. McCarthy’s public relations acumen raised the profile of anti-Communism in America and around the world.10 The great power behavior of the Soviet Union created a demand among Americans for actions against communists, who were allied with the Soviet Union. A series of Soviet moves set the stage for an anticommunist campaign: the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949; the “loss” of China to communism, also in 1949; the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 as a result of communist aggression; the Soviet running of spy rings that compromised national security; successful Soviet efforts to take control of Eastern Europe; and Soviet campaigns against religious believers and on human rights generally, to the point of genocide (famine in Ukraine). Public opinion surveys taken in 1952 and 1954 confirmed broad public demand for anti-communist actions. Against this backdrop, politicians and others with own agendas jumped into supply measures against communists and others who were not communist but held left-wing views. For the Republicans, the identification of Alger Hiss, a high-level operative for FDR, as a communist was fortuitous. The Republicans treasured McCarthy’s accusations which put Democrats on the defensive. For example, McCarthy claimed that a well-known writer on Asian affairs, Owen Lattimore, was an agent of the Soviet Union. By pointing to Lattimore, McCarthy initiated a second front in the domestic war against communism: the notion that certain disloyal Americans had schemed

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

89

with Russia to “lose” China, so that it, too, could become a communist country. Lattimore supposedly played a central role in this alleged perfidy. In fact, Lattimore, who had grown up in Asia, had, over his career spent time in the Soviet Union and made sympathetic statements about the USSR that angered its critics and interested the FBI. In his writings, Lattimore characterized the Moscow show trials as a sign of true democracy, and observed that inmates of a Siberian prison camp were fit and wellfed. He met with Mao Tsetung and Chou Enlai. His critics accused him of being a communist who contributed to the “loss” of China. It suited his accusers to attribute to Lattimore superhuman control over events in Asia. In fact, the United States provided significant military support to the Chinese Nationalist Forces but the Communist forces beat them. No one person—let alone a single American official—“lost China.” The FBI kept a surveillance file on Lattimore. FDR appointed Lattimore to a number of advisor positions on Asian affairs. Lattimore’s links with the Russians and the Chinese and his ties to FDR made him an ideal target for McCarthy.11 Although Lattimore never engaged in espionage for the Soviets, his many writings and activities and his inability to recall minor events from earlier decades enabled his Senate accusers to claim that he lied to Congress. He was convicted of perjury but appealed and won. The Lattimore affair was great publicity for the Republicans. The communist issue helped to turn the political tide in favor of the Republicans, with General Dwight Eisenhower winning the presidency in 1952. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover welcomed the McCarthy era. Hoover developed a method of feeding information to McCarthy and to the HUAC about alleged communists.12 If an accused individual named other communists, then more investigation was warranted. AntiCommunism increased the public prestige and workload of the FBI and gave Hoover access to politicians who, in the end, would vote in favor of the appropriation of more funds for the FBI to hunt communists. For American business, anti-Communism proved useful as a means of limiting the rights of labor unions, targeting labor leaders, and suppressing left-wing ideas. The HUAC took aim at both the National Labor Relations Board and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.13 In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the rights of unions and contained a provision to block communists from serving in leadership positions in unions. The concern was that communist leaders would engage in political strikes, not necessarily in the best interests of

90

A. L. KAGEDAN

the workers but rather to advance the communist agenda.14 By equating labor demands with communism, business leaders gained public support for their perspective. One case that illustrates how business took advance of the anticommunist campaign related to a union issue. In 1948, Dorothy Bailey, President of the United Public Workers Union was suspended from her job and then interrogated about her political beliefs. She had never been a member of the Communist Party and her suspension was not based on a claim of incompetence or other malfeasance. When she appealed her suspension, the D.C. Court of Appeal ruled that, because she was not facing criminal sanction, she had no right to challenge her employer’s decision to suspend her. Here, in one blow, an employer—aided by an indifferent court—used public sentiment against communism to hurt a union and end the career of a Black American woman.15 For people who opposed equal rights for Black Americans, the 1954 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that segregated schools were not equal, triggered a call in the U.S. South for “massive resistance.” Indeed, Southern politicians knew that the Communist Party supported civil rights for Black Americans. How convenient to claim that the civil rights movement was communist led and inspired. In fact, if Southern leaders could convince America that, by supporting civil rights they were in fact supporting communism, then it would be a victory for continued segregation.16 Anti-Communism played a useful role in a rapidly rising religious force: the evangelicals. As the twentieth century progressed, and science and technology became more important in day-to-day life, people’s level of religious belief declined. So, it was important to validate the notion of evil in contemporary terms. Communism came to the rescue—as the broad public feared and reviled communism—a current evil that stood in for older notions of evil, like the Devil. There is a sharp distinction between the United States and Canada regarding how the politics of othering was used to harm people with leftwing views. The United States and Canada knew of the challenges that Russia posed, but chose to interpret those challenges differently when it came to the homeland. American and Canadian communists faced quite different realities. Canada did not have a HUAC or its equivalent. Canada did have people who supported communism and were politically active, and even successful politically.

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

91

Canada did not experience McCarthyism. School teachers, University professors, film producers, journalists were not hauled before a committee of Parliament and questioned as to their loyalty, based on their participation in, or association with persons who participated in, Communist Party meetings. Security clearances were put in place for civil service positions, and people with communist connections were removed from security sensitive positions. But they were placed in positions that did not require access to secrets—they remained government employees. The reasons for this sharp difference between the two countries, in terms of the othering of communists and people with left-wing views, did not relate to a lack of awareness on the part of Canadians of the threat posed by communism. The Security Service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had focussed on the threat posed by communism since the 1920s. The Service employed John Leopold, himself an immigrant from Europe who was Jewish, to lead its investigative efforts. Multilingual Leopold developed numerous human sources in communist groups and provided the Service with a steady flow of intelligence. Leopold remained active through World War II.17 In Quebec, the Catholic Church fueled popular opposition to communism. Some members of the political elite were adherents of right-wing currents of thinking from France. A key figure in this French rightwing group was in fact a native of France, historian and publicist Robert Rumilly. The right and left political factions in France date back to the French Revolution. A new chapter in relations between these two factions opened in 1894 with the Dreyfus case. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer, was accused and convicted of treason. He was later exonerated. The Dreyfus case saw a sharp division between liberals and right-wing followers. The French right were fervent opponents of socialism and communism. The issue for Quebec politicians was how to curry favor with the Church, and thereby win public approval, through actions taken against communists. In fact, Quebec, alone in Canada, passed a padlock law in 1937 that gave police the authority to padlock any premises where communist activities were being held.18 This law was passed in the midst of conflict in Quebec tied to the Spanish Civil War. In response to a mass meeting supported by Canadian communists to support the Republican side in Spain, a group of students from the University of Montreal threatened violence if the meeting occurred. Church leaders sided with the students. Premier Duplessis saw this as propitious moment to apply

92

A. L. KAGEDAN

the Padlock law. The provincial police padlocked the printing shop of a communist newspaper, and threw a communist leader out of his house on the grounds that the communist leader held communist activities there, padlocking it as well.19 Quebec was not the only province where there was anxiety about communist activities. In Ontario, George A. Drew sought to use anticommunist sentiment as a mainstay of his political career. From his beginning as Mayor of the city of Guelph, through his ascension to the position of Premier of the Province of Ontario and then his role as Leader of the Conservative Party and thereby leader of the Opposition in the federal Parliament, Drew tried to use his anti-communist views as a path to power. There will be more discussion of Drew later in this chapter. The point here is that a canny politician in Ontario, looking to the U.S., believed that anti-Communism could win him votes.20 As we have seen, like the case in the United States, the Canadian government had long been investigating the activities of communists, and the publics in Quebec and in Ontario—at least a significant portion— feared communism. But what catapulted anti-Communism to its full extent in the United States was the revelation that American communists were helping the Soviet Union by stealing national security secrets. This “smoking gun” element was front and center in Canada as well. In Canada, a Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko defected in December 1945. Like the American Elizabeth Bentley did for Americans, Gouzenko pointed a finger at Canadians who were communists or friendly to the Soviet Union, and who, he alleged, passed national security secrets to the Soviets. The news of Soviet spying in the United States and Canada aligned with the speech of Winston Churchill in March 1946, in which he used the term “iron curtain” to describe the future of relations between the Soviet Union and Western countries.21 Gouzenko’s job was to send coded messages from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa to GRU (Soviet military intelligence) Headquarters in Moscow. In the closed-knit Soviet community in Ottawa, Gouzenko made a few mistakes—such as leaving a piece of paper with sensitive material near his desk, so that a cleaner found it—and expected (or was told) he would be sent back to Moscow as punishment. He concocted a scheme to bring home a number of secret intelligence documents that laid bare Soviet espionage efforts in Canada as well as in the United States. As a result of the Gouzenko revelations, the government established a Commission of Inquiry, the Kellock-Tashereau Committee, led by two

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

93

retired Supreme Court judges. In predawn raids, the police arrested fifteen individuals who were brought to testify before the Commission. The government used the provisions of the War Measures Act, still in force postwar, to hold the individuals in custody and permit no contact with a lawyer or family members. The Committee identified twenty Canadians as having spied for the Soviet Union. Ten individuals were convicted of violating the Official Secrets Act, and ten were acquitted.22 One of those arrested, Fred Rose, was a member of Parliament. Rose performed a key espionage role for the Soviets: he received taskings from the Soviet KGB chief, and passed these on to people whom he had recruited. As was true in the United State, in Canada as well the Soviets were interested in information on armaments, and in particular atomic weapons. It is true that some of the fifteen who were interviewed and not charged criminally nevertheless faced barriers to pursuing their careers in the academic world. But there was no massive outing of left wingers in the Universities, in the film and the arts, and in the schools—unlike what happened in the United States. The case of the National Film Board (NFB) is illustrative of how concern about left-wing ideas and about communism was dealt with in Canada. The NFB was founded and led by John Grierson, who was born in Scotland and made a name for himself in film-making before coming to Canada. Grierson coined the term “documentary.” His own politics were on the left, and during World War II, he had done film work on the Soviet Union. George Drew, the Leader of the Opposition party in Parliament, made the claim that the Department of National Defence was using private contractors to make films because the NFB, led by Grierson, could not be trusted to do so. The government said that it would investigate the matter and proceeded to replace Grierson with Arthur Irwin, a person with conservative views. The government also stated that several individuals— who were not named—were fired. But it is important to remember that the NFB was a federal agency that could be entrusted with confidential work. It was not a private-sector enterprise. Grierson was on the radar of U.S. anti-communists and was not allowed to work in the United States, so he returned to Scotland and then, ultimately, returned to Canada in order to teach. There is another component of the NFB story that shows how Maurice Duplessis, who donned the mantle of anti-communist with the Padlock

94

A. L. KAGEDAN

Law, also could drop this just as quickly if it was politically expedient to do so. Duplessis, reflecting antagonism to left-wing thinking and to communism, had forbade Quebec institutions from showing NFB films. The Prime Minister, Louis St. Laurent, approached Duplessis and told him that the government planned to build a headquarters for the NFB in Montreal, providing a large number of short-term and long-term jobs for the province. Duplessis lifted his ban on the NFB and never criticized it again.23 On the political level, the main champion of anti-Communism, already mentioned, was George Drew. Drew came from a family of United Empire Loyalists, people who remained loyal to Britain and left the United States after the American Revolution. Drew fought in World War I and was seriously injured, losing the use of one arm. Early in his political career, he hit on the idea of calling his political opponents communists, or allies of communists. Drew traveled to the Soviet Union and provided an insightful and accurate picture of a society in which there was much poverty and no room for political debate. Religious freedom was absent.24 George Drew believed that journalists friendly to the Soviet Union had painted a too rosy picture of the country, a reasonable view. But as a politician, Drew saw advantage in tying his political opponents to communism—though they clearly were not communists. In March 1938, Drew gave a speech in which he claimed that the Canadian Civil Liberties Union was a communist front, and that there were forty schools across the country giving three-week courses in communist tactics. This was invention.25 Drew devised a scheme to use police officers to spy on his Liberal and Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) social democratic political opponents. So incensed were his opponents that a judicial commission was struck, which largely agreed with this accusation. The Commission found no evidence linking Drew directly to this scheme. However, archival records reveal that Drew received detailed surveillance reports addressed to him, with no indication of their source—mostly likely the police.26 As Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, Drew raised the idea in Parliament of a Committee to investigate communists. Drew also proposed that membership in a communist group should be made a criminal offense. The governing Liberals turned him down. Louis St. Laurent stated that he also found communism repugnant but that the best way to fight it “is to make democracy work as a system benefitting no particular class or group, but benefitting all members of the population.”27 By

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

95

the end of 1951, Drew dropped his focus on communism as a political weapon. It has been suggested that the reason that Canada did not embrace McCarthyism is because its political system permitted the Liberal majority to squelch this approach. In the United States, even had President Truman been opposed, Congress would have gone forward. It has also been suggested that the Canadian elite was more cohesive than the American elite, and so there was resistance to launch an attack on “one’s own.”28 Earlier in this chapter, we noted how anti-communist and anti-leftwing othering served the political interests of business in blunting the stature of unions. In Canada, business was not as organized or as driven to use anti-Communism to pursue their interests, George Drew notwithstanding. But it can be argued that there was a third compelling reason for Canada not following the lead of the United States when it came to anti-Communism. And this related to the nature of anti-Communism in Quebec. Quebec politics from the middle 1930s to the late 1950s was dominated by Maurice Duplessis, the Premier, supported by Camilien Houde, the mayor of Montreal. Duplessis and Houde were supported by an elite group, including journalists and Church leaders, who followed the ideas of the French right-wing. In France, the right-wing was anti-communist and anti-capitalist, placing the blame for modernity and its ills on the Jews. People like Charles Maurras and Jean Barres opposed republican government and favored a return to rule by the King. They also identified Jews with the ills bequeathed by modernity: hedonism, greed, falsehoods, and denationalization. The anti-Semitism of the French right would align well with emerging Nazi party in Germany. During World War II, the French right-wing supported the Marshal Petain regime headquartered in Vichy. Although unhappy with the conquest of France by the Nazis, the French right-wing blamed the liberals for French defeat. The right-wing found common ground with the Nazis. Vichy France sent communists, socialists and Jews to the concentration camps and gas chambers. One of these people was Leon Blum, a former French Prime Minister. After the war, Vichy officials, who worked with the Germans to kill French Resistance fighters, left-wingers, and Jews, were sought on criminal charges by the new government led by General Charles de Gaulle. A number of Vichy officials escaped punishment by leaving France for

96

A. L. KAGEDAN

Quebec. After all, it was known in Vichy that it had many supporters in Quebec. Although a few of the Vichy escapees evaded detection and settled in Quebec, one of the prominent ones did not. His name was Jacques de Bernonville. Jacques de Bernonville was a long-time follower of the French rightwing. A senior police official before the war and German occupation of France, by 1943 he was on the German payroll. After the war, he escaped to Quebec, disguised as a priest and using false documents. After a chance encounter with a former member of the French Résistance in a small Quebec town, de Bernonville turned himself into to the authorities in 1948 and claimed refugee status.29 De Bernonville felt welcome in Quebec. As mentioned, the Quebec elite and others favored Petain and the Vichy regime. Historian Robert Rumilly was a strong advocate of de Bernonville. Consider this note from Georges Pelletier, the publisher of Le Devoir, a leading newspaper, on August 10, 1940 that echoed the xenophobia of the French right aimed at immigrants: Look around you, as you go about Montreal. Look at the doors of various shops, at various homes, at various small and medium-sized businesses. Look at them the way you ought to look at them. And you will see what you ought to see. Large numbers of foreigners, from all over, who are not from America except though immigration, who landed here from Germany, from Russia, from Poland, not from England or France –people just passing through, foreigners.

Further evidence of Petain’s popularity in Quebec comes from Elizabeth de Miribel, who represented the Free French government in exile in Quebec30 : French Canadians have boundless admiration for Marshal Petain…. the men in power are faithful readers of Maurras…and have never tolerated France’s domestic policies [of state secularism].

Vichy’s representative in Quebec mocked de Miribel31 : Your ancestor, Marshal de Mac-Mahon must be turning in the grave at the thought that you are working for the Judeo-Communo-Gaullists.

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

97

Echoing the same sentiment, Father Arsenault, writing in La Droite, stated that32 : “For us, Petain is the new France, the France purged of its parasites and its vices…”. Not surprisingly, there was considerable debate in Quebec about whether to agree to President de Gaulle’s request to extradite de Bernonville to France or to grant him refuge in Quebec. His supporters argued that, above all, de Bernonville was an anti-communist and that he was a French patriot. However, decisions on refugee status rested with the Federal government. After years of legal wrangling, de Bernonville got word that he would be deported to France. He escaped to Brazil and lived there until he was assassinated in 1972, allegedly by the son of a caretaker of his residence.33 The significance of the de Bernonville affair for our analysis is that the anti-Communism was alive and well in Quebec. The case shows the depth of support for anti-Communism in Quebec even if this meant treating favorably a Vichy official who worked with the Nazis. Duplessis would have welcomed a Canadian-style McCarthyism and his partner in this enterprise would be George Drew. George Drew developed cordial relations with Maurice Duplessis. They wrote to each other about the threat posed by communism. A newspaper of the day said that anti-Communism was an “ace in the hole” for all those who opposed the Liberal Party.34 Since the Progressive Conservative Party under George Drew was trying to promote a Canadian version of McCarthyism it would have been self-defeating for the Liberal government to adopt a McCarthyite approach in Canada. To do so would mean strengthening their political opponents—Duplessis in Quebec and Drew, who had become the federal Conservative leader. It could have paved the way for George Drew to become Prime Minister. Canada’s refusal to follow the United States down the road to McCarthyism had significant and long-term consequences. Just as McCarthyism closed the door to social democratic ideas in the United States, the door to such ideas remained open in Canada. One such idea was publicly-funded medical insurance or universal Medicare. More broadly, refusing to step in line with U.S. McCarthyism permitted the construction of a more generous welfare state than in the United States. This meant that people of modest means felt under less day-today pressure from immigrants or minorities who were making progress economically.

98

A. L. KAGEDAN

If Canada withstood U.S. anti-communist pressure to a significant degree, it was less successful in stemming the tide of the othering of gays. The othering of LGBTQ people aligns with the othering of all of the minorities which are examined in this book: their different sexuality made them targets of hostility and ultimately victims of the politics of othering. Analysts have analogized hostility toward LGBTQ people with hostility toward Jews. Both groups are “invisible” compared with visible minorities and both have been seen as challengers to traditional Christian religious belief. One recent notable instance of the practice of the politics of othering against Jews and LGBTQ people happened in Egypt in 2011. Hosni Mubarak, in an effort to win the competition with the Muslim Brotherhood for public support, engineered the broadcast of a television series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and ran a public campaign against the participation of LGBTQ people in public life.35 The benefit for politicians and opinion leaders in othering gays is that addresses a demand arising from anxiety about social change caused by less deference to religious authorities, and changes in the roles of women and men. Twentieth-century developments like rural migration to the cities resulted in a transformation akin to the industrial revolution that brought forward political efforts to restabilize a changing society through rigid conformism.36 The othering of LGBTQ people during the Cold War parallels the treatment of people with left-wing views. Just as the campaign against leftists began well before World War II, so did the campaign against LGBTQ people. In the United States, the seeds of the purge of gays were sewn in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1919–1921, FDR, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, authorized the investigation of gays at the Newport Naval Base, using young sailors as decoys to entrap gay men. FDR authorized J. Edgar Hoover to investigate accusations made against Sumner Welles, a top foreign policy advisor. It was alleged that Welles had propositioned porters and waiters on a train ride. Hoover then offered to FDR to find “dirt” on Senator Walsh, a political opponent, but was not able to produce any results for FDR. The mass enlistment in World War II led to more visibility of gays in armed forces.37 Another source of focus on homosexuality was the publication in 1948 of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. This best seller stated that same-sex experiences were more common than generally thought to be the case.38

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

99

The most damaging idea to come out of the increased public awareness on the presence of LGBTQ individuals in the community harnessed the anxieties of the Cold War to other gays. Soviet intelligence organizations routinely tried to place foreigners in compromising positions— through bribery and/or sexual activity caught on camera. Armed with this material, Soviet intelligence organizations would try and blackmail the foreigner into working for them—becoming a Soviet spy. The idea was that these individuals could not be trusted with confidential information because they would be targets of blackmail by Soviet agents, and that the blackmail would succeed in making them Soviet agents because they would fear that their gay sexuality would be revealed. This notion was not based on a single case of a Soviet agent having successfully blackmailed and recruited a gay person—and indeed, this Soviet (and more recently Russian) ploy never succeeded. But it was a seemingly logical and most convenient point to make which cast anxiety about LGBTQ people into a security framework. This idea remained operational in the United States until lawsuits set it aside in the 1970s, and remained in place in American and Canadian security organizations (particularly the military) until the 1990s. The politics of othering toward gays supplied popular demand for action against gays. When Senator McCarthy began his anti-communist campaign in the early 1950s, three-quarters of the mail he received was about gays, not communists.39 On February 20, 1950, Senator McCarthy singled out two cases of homosexuals in the State Department who allegedly posed a risk to security.40 Once again, as was the case with the Japanese, security became the alibi for othering. J. Edgar Hoover decided to make a purge of gays a centerpiece of FBI focus in the early years of the Cold War. He began to assemble lists of individuals who were allegedly homosexual, based on arrest records, and correlated those arrested on morals charges with people who had applied for public service jobs or were hired into the public service. Hoover also initiated a “sex deviates” program with the idea of collecting information from local police about gays. Hoover then shared this information with numerous law enforcement organizations and with Universities. The FBI maintained these records until 1978.41 In addition to McCarthy and Hoover, Congress at large got into the act of othering gays. A Senate Committee led by Senator Hoey concluded in its final report that “sex perverts in government constitute security

100

A. L. KAGEDAN

risks.” This conclusion was published and shared widely both within the United States and with allies and international organizations.42 Unlike the case with communists, there were no public hearings regarding the presence of gays in government. But the public maligning of gays as unreliable and dishonest meant that LGBTQ people were fired, and were shunned by society. This othering triggered depression, promoted addiction, and ended, in some cases, in suicide. In Canada, the othering of LGBTQ people occurred under the guise of protecting security. Following the Gouzenko revelations about Soviet intelligence agents recruiting Canadians to spy for Russia, Canada instituted a system of security clearances. All members of the civil service required a security clearance from lower level jobs to senior jobs.43 The RCMP was given the task of investigating civil servants to determine whether they were gay. Departments and agencies also employed their own security people who could conduct inquires on whether an employee was gay. In the late 1950s, a Progressive Conservative Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, raised questions about the ongoing purge of gay people, and asked whether there was a way of retaining people of talent who were making a contribution to the public’s benefit. But Diefenbaker’s question did not curtail efforts to root out gays.44 A 1964 Security manual stated that the RCMP was in charge of determining if a civil servant showed a sign of “general deviation, particularly homosexuality on the part of the applicant [for the security clearance] or spouse; sexual deviates are potential targets for blackmail and, as such, poor security risks.”45 Don Wall, the Secretary of the Security Panel that oversaw all security matters, including clearances, visited Washington in 1960 and saw how the United States was using polygraph machines to try and find out if an applicant for a job was gay. Wall found this approach too intrusive, so he looked for an alternative.46 Canadian academics advising the security community came up with a machine to serve this purpose. Among police officers, the device became known as the “fruit machine” reflecting an antigay epithet. The Fruit Machine was a device that showed a person images of nearly nude men and women and then took a picture of the viewer’s eye pupil to see if a picture led to an enlarged pupil. The development of the Fruit Machine came as a result to extensive and long-term cooperation between security officials and professors of psychology interested in issues of sexuality and deviance. The research was supported by the Security

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

101

Panel and then carried out by the RCMP Security Service and the military. The notion was to recruit straight men and women and gay men and women and see if one could determine clear pupillary divergence. Recruitment efforts failed. The developers of the “fruit machine” had ideas of improving results further by measuring the participant’s perspiration when looking at the pictures. Another idea was to measure a participant’s response to statements that were branded typically male or typically female, to determine if an individual was gay. The Fruit Machine work was abandoned in 1967. It never was used on a practical basis—the standard approach was to investigate sexual behavior and then act.47 Hundreds and perhaps thousands of Canadian Civil servants were subjected to the gay purge in government. There were a few cases of the purge that attracted public attention when they happened or afterward. John Watkins was the Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the middle 1950s. Following retirement, suspicion developed that he was gay and he was questioned by the RCMP and admitted that the Soviets attempted to blackmail him because of a homosexual relationship he had with a Russian, but that he had resisted their efforts. Although at the time, the RCMP officially concluded that Watkins had not succumbed to Blackmail, RCMP officers still believed that he had done things to please the Soviets. Watkins died of a heart attack during interrogation by the RCMP.48 Another example of the gay purge related to a top foreign affair official, John Holmes. When Holmes was serving in Ottawa, it was discovered that he was gay. Holmes was considered by colleagues and superiors to be among the most capable and talented Canadian diplomats. However, he was asked to leave the department because of his sexual orientation. Holmes became a professor and lectured and wrote on international relations. Late in life, he was awarded the Order of Canada in recognition of his contributions to the country.49 Canada followed in lockstep behind the United States in the political othering of gays.50 The decision to exclude LGBTQ people from positions that required a security clearance came from the Cabinet and was implemented by a senior committee, the Security Panel and then implemented by the RCMP which had the mandate to investigate crimes and, in this instance, whether an individual was gay. In the case of anti-Communism, the politics of othering was less successful in Canada than in the United States. When it comes to the treatment of LGBTQ people and how they were othered during the Cold

102

A. L. KAGEDAN

War, it is clear that in the United States the pillorying of gays was more public than in Canada. The public promotion of othering increases the number of members of a minority group who are demeaned and who suffer from discrimination. On an individual level, both countries took unjustified action against their own citizens. This led to much personal tragedy and a significant loss of talent to both countries.

Notes 1. Claudia Weber, “The Changing Reading of the Hitler-Stalin Alliance,” The Wilson Center, August 23, 2019, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blogpost/the-changing-reading-the-hitler-stalin-alliance, accessed on August 26, 2019. 2. Merrily Weisbord, The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communists, the Spy Trial, and the Cold War. 3. M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970, 130–33. 4. Heale, American Anticommunism, 132–33. 5. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1988, 365. 6. Hamby, 428. 7. M. J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–65, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998, 5–6. 8. Heal, Red Scare, 11–25. 9. Heale, American Anticommunism, 138–39, 146–47. 10. Heale, American Anticommunism, 150–51. 11. Heale, American Anticommunism, 154–55. 12. Heale, American Anticommunism, 153. 13. M. J. Heale, Red Scare, 10. 14. Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 422–25. University of Chicago Law review, accessed on August 18, 2019. https://chicagounbound.uch icago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&htt psredir=1&article=2711&context=uclrev. 15. Schrecker, 274, 281. 16. Brown, Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Heale, American Anticommunism, 176. 17. Amy Knight, How the Cold War Began, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005, 50–51. 18. Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 , Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, 301.

6

COLD WAR: OTHERING ON THE HOME FRONT

103

19. Conrad Black, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977, 175. 20. “‘Kirk Niergarth, No Sense of Reality’: George A. Drew’s Anti-communist Tour of the USSR and the Campaign for Coalition Government in Ontario, 1937,” Ontario History, Vol. 107, No. 2 (2015), 213–33. 21. Heale, American Anticommunism, 134. 22. Reg Whitaker, Gregory Kealey and Andrew Parnaby, Secret Service: Political Policing IN Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, 183. 23. J. W. Pickersgill, My Years with Louis St. Laurent, Toronto: University of Toronto, 1975, 146–47. 24. Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Drew Papers. Volume 82, “Watson Kirckonnel”. 25. LAC, Drew Papers, File “Louis Kon”. 26. LAC, Drew Papers, File 309E, “Communism”. 27. P. J. W. Pickersgill, My Years with Louis St. Laurent, Toronto: University of Toronto, 1975, 146–48. 28. Clark’s argument is that the Canadian political elite was tighter than the American political elite. Reg Whitaker, Secret Service, 286. 29. Yves Lavertu, The Bernonville Affair, Montreal: Robert Davies Publishing, 1995, 1–31. 30. Lavertu, 36–37. 31. Lavertu, 37. 32. Lavertu, 40. 33. Lavertu. 34. LAC, Drew Papers, Volume 36, File 309E, “Communism”. 35. Michael J. Bosia and Meredith Weiss, Political Homophobia in Comparative Perspective, 17. 36. Bosia and Weiss, 21. The authors refers to the work of Carl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944. 37. Douglas M. Charles, Hoover’s War on Gays, University of Kansas Press, 2015, 14–47. 38. Judith Adkins, “‘These People Are Frightened to Death’: Congressional Investigation and the Lavender Scare,” Prologue Magazine, Vol. 48, No. 2 (summer 2016). 39. David K. Johnson “America’s Cold War Empire: Exporting the Lavender Scare,” in Weiss and Bosia, eds., 55, 74; 57. 40. Douglas M. Charles, Hoover’s War on Gays, University of Kansas Press, 2015, 80. 41. Charles, 94–96. 42. David Johnson, 59. 43. Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010, 77.

104 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

A. L. KAGEDAN

Kinsman, 90. Kinsman, 84. Johnson, “America’s Cold War Empire,” 70. Kinsman, 68–77. Kinsman, 95–97. Kinsman, 136. Kinsman and Gentile, is the best overall account of Canada’s treatment of gays during the Cold war.

CHAPTER 7

The Politics of Race in the United States and Canada

This book has investigated a number of cases of how politics has played into the treatment of various minority groups. Some of these groups have been in North America for centuries. While in the case of Indigenous people our focus has been on residential schools, a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history in North America of Indigenous people traces back millennia. Another long-standing minority are people of African descent, Black people. Blacks arrived in the lands that were to become the United States and Canada as slaves in the seventeenth century. Slavery ended in the United States in 1865, at the conclusion of the Civil War. In Canada, slavery ended in 1834 but had been sharply declining since 1808 when Britain made slavery illegal. But the end of slavery in both countries did not mean the end of the othering of Blacks—instead, othering took new forms. The politics of othering has created the conditions for the sustained degradation of Black people. Despite advances, these conditions and this politics remains active in the twenty-first century. This chapter will take a long view of the politics of race, beginning at the time of slavery and then focussing on the 1950s to the 1990s. The reason I chose this longer time period is the signal significance of race in the American political context, on the one hand, and the muchignored history of Blacks in Canada, on the other. We will see that the Black community in Canada rarely, if ever, became a focus of politics. The Black community of the United States, proportionately, has always © The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_7

105

106

A. L. KAGEDAN

been larger than the Black community of Canada. This difference has persisted. In 2016, Blacks comprised 12% of the U.S. population while Blacks in Canada counted for 3.9% of the population.1 This differential counts in two ways. The politics of othering, as we have seen, always benefits from fear and anxiety. In politics, numbers matter. The larger a minority group is in a particular setting, the higher their public profile and this translates into a greater incentive for politicians to engage in othering so as to profit from the concerns of members of the majority group. Second, once Blacks had the right to vote, the larger number of voters, the greater the possibility of politicians using any gains for equality as leverage to stir up anxiety among the majority group. Blacks were brought to the United States as slaves. Slaves were treated as subhumans, not as fellow humans. The slaves were used instrumentally as a business would use equipment, or, as was referenced at the time, treated much like farm animals. The treatment of Blacks fits into the historical and universal pattern of one group seeing another group as an instrument of its will, nothing more. Any sense of common humanity was absent. Enslaved people could not marry, learn to read, or meet in groups. Slaves were bought, sold, and traded. They could not own property.2 Slaves were also bred, especially after 1834, when Britain outlawed slavery and it was difficult to find ships to bring slaves to America. They could be beaten and even killed if they resisted or disobeyed their masters.3 Slavery lasted from the arrival of the first slaves in 1619 until the end of slavery in 1865, following the Civil War—246 years. Once slavery ended, there was a brief time period of hope, known as the era of Reconstruction. In 1865, Blacks were granted citizenship and in 1868 they were given voting rights. However, defeat in war did not change attitudes toward Blacks that had developed over three centuries. A majority of white southerners saw Blacks as inferior and yet, at the same time, threatening. Politicians seeking support from this majority did everything they could to keep Blacks marginal and powerless. The method of restricting Blacks changed over time. It ranged from segregation—and inferior schools—to barriers placed on voting. The courts, at times, pushed against this political campaign to limit Blacks, but, at other times, supported it. In 1896, in Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court accepted segregation as constitutional. Now freed from slavery Blacks moved West and North. Western states like California and Northern States like New Jersey took a leaf from Southern states and passed laws to forbid Blacks from marrying whites, and to establish segregated schools.4

7

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

107

In 1865, General William Sherman issued an order providing thousands of 40-acre plots to Black families, but later President Andrew Johnson rescinded these grants.5 Health services provided to Blacks in the South were inferior to those provided to whites. During the Civil War era, smallpox struck Black communities in the South harder than white communities. White communities ignored the health needs of Black communities. Again, we see a situation where there was little or no compassion toward the out-group, and no desire to use public funds to help them. People who wanted to keep Blacks powerless and weak were indifferent to poor Black health.6 From 1896 to the 1950s, the politics of race evolved. Blacks in the South were suppressed in terms of power and influence, but began to explore how they might improve their situation. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks left the South for the North and the West and found more support there for organizing to improve their status. This quest for Civil Rights spanned the 1950s to the 1970s and played out in all of America. The politics of race was now American politics. The period from the 1950s to the 1990s saw Black aspirations for equality become a central focus of national politics. There were two principal elements at play: Black aspirations and white support, on the one hand, and white resistance on the other hand. Politicians contemplated what positions to take in this situation. In the 1950s, the Republicans made a play for the votes of Blacks and their white allies, but beginning in the 1960s, the Democrats took over this position. Through the years, the Republicans became expert at appealing to people uncomfortable with Black aspirations, especially on matters that touched them personally, like school busing. The politics of othering curated and encouraged fear of Black Americans, alleging that they were lazy, unintelligent, violent. With the support of the courts, Blacks made progress in many areas of life, but were always faced with public resistance on which politicians capitalized. Voting in elections proved to be a key target of those who aimed to foil plans for equality of Blacks: the fewer Black votes, the better. In the immediate post-World War II period, some 750,000 Blacks, 15% of the total of five million in the Southern states, voted. But for some people who wanted to reduce Black influence, even this percentage was too high. Election officials took measures to reduce the number further and the voting percentage declined down to 10%.7 The cause of Civil Rights won a battle in 1954. The Supreme Court decided, in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that

108

A. L. KAGEDAN

contrary to Plessy, separate is not equal when it comes to education. The 1954 decision triggered new forms of anti-Black resistance. For example, White Citizen Councils were formed in the Southern states.8 In August 1955 Emmet Till, a fourteen-year-old young man from Chicago who was visiting the South spoke to and whistled at a white woman. He was killed, brutally. This outrage gained national attention. Consternation grew as the killers were exonerated by the Courts. Till’s mangled body was transported for viewing back to his home in Chicago. A national conversation erupted. The Emmet Till case triggered a financial boost for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).9 Although Civil Rights efforts were focussed on the Southern states, a huge demographic shift had occurred in the Black population—by 1956, 50% of the Black population lived in Northern States.10 President Eisenhower supported the decision in Brown in 1954, and sent troops to Little Rock to ensure that Black students could enter a previously segregated school. He understood the depth of Southern white resistance to change and had served in a military that was segregated. In 1956, Democratic Congressmen published a Southern Manifesto objecting to the Court’s decision in Brown, stating that “it is destroying amicable relations between the white and Negro races…” So, in the late 1950s, it appeared that Southern Democrats would defend the old order in the South which aimed to malign and suppress the aspirations of Blacks. However, Republicans were interested in gaining Black support, and the support of those who favored Civil Rights. Eisenhower asked Attorney General Herbert Brownell to draft Civil Rights legislation, which was done. This Civil Rights Legislation, passed into law in 1957, established a federal Civil Rights Commission and created a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice with a mandate to investigate rights violations.11 President John Kennedy, a master at public statement, pushed the Democratic Party toward stronger support for Black Americans. In a speech on June 11, 1963 Kennedy took advantage of the focus on free world, as opposed to the Communist World, and asked whether Americans could accept being “the land of the free except for the Negroes.”12 But on the ground, public opinion surveys found that white support for Civil Rights was limited. Eighty percent of whites surveyed opposed the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, either because they felt it demeaned President Kennedy or made too many claims on the public purse.13

7

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

109

Then, history turned on its axis. Senator Lyndon Johnson, himself considered to be a Southern Democrat, decided to support Civil Rights. He used his political acumen to convince his Democratic colleagues to support a Civil Rights bill that addressed segregation, voting rights, and employment. The enforcement provisions were strengthened with time but key principles of Civil Rights were laid down. Johnson used his political acumen to get the support of more liberal Western Democrats for this legislative effort, in exchange for his support for a proposal for the government to build a Dam at Hells Canyon in the Western U.S. Now, at least, the Democrats had matched—and bettered—the Republicans in putting forward a Civil Rights bill.14 But there was a political price to be paid by the Democrats. President Johnson said that, with the 1964 legislation, the Democrats had delivered the South to the Republicans for his lifetime, and the lifetime of all those in the room.15 The issue of Black civil rights had been a political football since the Civil War and now it took a new turn. Gradually, politicians active in the Republican Party found it politically profitable to other Blacks. This did not happen overnight. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President against Lyndon Johnson, did not enter the public sphere as a racist. In fact, Goldwater told supporters that if anyone used his name to justify race-based violence, then, he, Goldwater, would drop out of the race. However, politicians who did engage in the politics of othering moved into Goldwater’s corner where they could have a greater influence on policies than among Democrats. One most reluctant supporter was Gerald L. K. Smith, a long-time promoter of the idea of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. Smith struggled with the fact that Goldwater had Jewish ancestry. But, ultimately, Smith supported Goldwater.16 It was a slow marriage of political convenience that led Goldwater to absorb extreme otherers like Louisiana Judge Leander Perez, a fierce opponent of Civil Rights who said that “his” Blacks were “animals right out of the jungle” and that supporters of Civil Rights were “Zionist Jews.”17 Essentially, the Goldwater presidential run cemented the curious connection between advocates of free enterprise and people opposed to equality for Black Americans. Federal and State legislatures were responsible for implementing Civil Rights laws and creating programs aimed to correct the historical disadvantages for Blacks, going back three centuries. So, advocates of limited and small government, opposed to government action generally, could appeal to those whose concern was not free enterprise but the continued limitation of the power and status of Black

110

A. L. KAGEDAN

Americans by denying them access to social welfare programs, quality education, adequate housing, and even voting.18 This political marriage of convenience, between the quest for limited government and the objective of keeping Blacks economically and politically marginalized, lasted from the 1960s to the 2000s. As issue after issue arose, this dual perspective was brought to bear. A third leg of this stool was local rights, a smaller version of states’ rights. Here, again, the real goal was to deny equality to Blacks, but the formula was that the wishes of communities (white communities) should be respected and this permitted them to keep out Blacks. Arlie Russell Hochshild, who wrote a study of Tea Party supporters, developed a narrative that described the thinking of the people she studied in Louisiana. She thought that it would help to describe the nature of the “threat” that whites felt that Blacks represented in terms of a narrative. The narrative depicts a long line of people looking up a hill. On the other side of the hill is the American Dream. As it is, many people are ahead of you in the line inching their way up the hill, and others are behind you. You feel that you are not really moving forward very quickly toward the promised American Dream. But, suddenly, there are people cutting into the line, getting ahead of you. They are pushing you further backward from your goal. Those “line cutters” are using affirmative action and other programs to get ahead of you.19 The politics of othering often failed at the ballot box or appeared little or not at all. Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater. Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976, Bill Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996, and Barrack Obama defeated John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. But when the politics of othering Black Americans was absent or low key on the presidential ballot, it was still winning victories at the state level. In 1965, when the Voting Rights Act became law, there were marches and demonstrations in Southern cities to promote civil rights. This triggered mass arrests. Dr. Martin Luther King quipped: “This is Selma, Alabama. There are more Negros in jail with me than are on the voting rolls.” In 1964, a measure designed to permit discrimination in housing, proposition 14, was adopted by California having been approved by ballot. The proposition did not mention Blacks; instead it focused on the notion of personal freedom: Neither the State nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall deny, limit or abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person, who willing to desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline

7

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

111

to sell, lease or rent such property to such person or person as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.20

This popular measure was rescinded in 1974, having been defeated in the Courts. But the support for the measure reflects the strategic use of legislative power to embolden resistance to Civil Rights illustrated a practical approach to the politics of othering. In the summer of 1965, as Proposition 14 was moving forward, riots broke out in the Black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. The Los Angeles Police Chief pinned the blame for the riots on Civil Right Legislation.21 This simple proposition appeared to be more appealing than the reality that discrimination, marginalization, impoverishment, and hopelessness fueled the riots, and provided a rationale for not addressing these vexing issues. This notion caught on nationally: Civil Rights equals rioting. When riots occurred in Chicago, North Carolina Democratic Senator Sam Ervin declared that the more Civil Right laws passed, the more rioting occurred. So Civil Rights was the problem.22 The Wall Street Journal chimed in that the more money that was spent on Black areas, and the more Civil Rights measures passed, the more rioting would occur.23 Soon, there were calls to repeal Civil Rights legislation in order to reestablish peace and order.24 The riots became a known summer phenomenon in cities across America. In 1967, it was Newark and Detroit’s turn to riot that prompted great anger in Congress.25 When Richard Nixon was elected to succeed Lyndon Johnson, his actions reflected the success of othering efforts. Nixon embraced the notion advanced by George Wallace that any gain for Blacks through Civil Rights would mean a social cost placed on average whites.26 Here, again, one sees the refrain common in discussions of immigration: the economic pie is static and if another group gets part of it, there is less for the rest of us. This picture of economic life as a zero-sum game discounted the idea that economic growth created more jobs. Some white Americans believed that their neighborhoods and jobs were under threat. Similarly, their schools, they believed, were imperiled. In fact, schools became a public battleground. The method used to try and create schools that integrated white and Black students, busing, was approved by the City of Boston in 1972 through the Racial Imbalance Act. By 1974, opposition to school busing was so strong that the Massachusetts Governor announced that the Act would be replaced by

112

A. L. KAGEDAN

a voluntary system. A new effort to integrate at the Highschool level was put forward by a Judge in June 1974, which involved the pairing of South Boston and Roxbury High schools, so that every South Boston sophomore would attend Roxbury Highschool and every Roxbury Junior would attend South Boston Highschool. When Senator Edward Kennedy tried to speak publicly in favor of this plan he was mobbed, threatened, and assaulted.27 By 1968, the antagonism toward Blacks had become so strong that Dr. King feared that Blacks would be thrown into concentration camps “…like they did to our Japanese brothers and sisters in World War II.”28 The pattern was set. The politics of racial othering continued at the Federal, State, and local levels that permitted some integration of schools, the launching of affirmative action programs, and an increasing number of Black voters and elected officials. But all along, there were challenges, opposition, and setbacks. Ronald Reagan, speaking in 1966, said that all Americans should be equal before the law but that no more should be done for anyone through law and regulations (read school integration, affirmative action, voter enrollment campaigns). In 1973, Reagan said that the election of a Black person, Tom Bradley, as Los Angeles Mayor proved that racism was dead. In other words, the race problem had been solved, there should be no programs or actions taken to help Blacks achieve equality.29 Political efforts to identify Blacks with threats to the community—to schools, jobs, neighborhoods—or with criminal activity was a tool used by George H. W. Bush in his victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Bush campaign ran ads about Willie Horton, a Black man, who had been convicted of murder and then, under a plan approved by Republicans, was released and committed additional crimes. Bush alleged that Dukakis was soft on crime—but a key aspect of the advertisement was that the criminal was a Black man.30 The prominent role of race in politics continued into the twenty-first century. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 led to a brief drop in racial aversion followed by a sharp upsurge in racial aversion among Republicans.31 The fact of a Black person as President served as a political rallying cry as Obama’s success was based on his ability to increase the pool of Black voters. In 2004, Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry won 11.8 million Black votes—Obama won 15.5 million Black votes in 2008. The ability of Black voters and their allies to reshape the race question in America, and possibly to begin a second Civil Rights

7

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

113

push forward, inspired a strong counter-demand for a person to oppose a feared “displacement” of whites in America.32 Housing is a key area used in the politics of othering in the United States. A house in a safe neighborhood increases in value and its sale often yields a profit—that can be passed down to children as an inheritance that enhances their own financial stability. Where one lives is tied to the schools to which one’s children have access. A better education establishes a path to a better job, and again, more financial security and improved life chances. In 2017, in the United States, median white income was $60,000 and median Black income was $37,000 (about 62%). Median white assets were $134,000 versus Black assets, $11,000 (around 8%). The huge gulf in assets is tied to housing.33 As we have seen in previous chapters, the politics of othering can affect housing and education. In the United States, until the last quarter of the twentieth century, government policy defined where whites and Blacks lived.34 Private discrimination played a role in residential segregation but this was supported and led by government action.35 From the Great Depression of the 1930s to the postwar era, there was a housing shortage for working-class and lower middle-class Americans. The government stepped in to build new housing—but the housing was segregated by race, or barred Blacks altogether.36 The “neighbourhood composition rule,” established by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, established that housing projects in white areas could only accept whites, and housing projects in Black areas could only accept Blacks.37 In 1933, the government created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to help homeowners who were about to go into default. It bought the mortgages and then created new mortgages at a low interest rate and a long payback period (up to 25 years). Before issuing a loan, HOLC assessors (real estate agents) assessed whether the homeowner could make the payments. To gauge risk, agents created colored maps, with red representing the greatest risk, and green the safest areas. If African Americans lived in an area, it was considered risky, hence red and “redlined.” Sometimes HOLC took a chance on a red-lined area, but rarely.38 Under the 1949 Housing Act, local officials could determine whether a housing project would be segregated.39 American cities had a pattern of locating incinerators and industrial facilities in Black neighborhoods. This contributed to the neighborhoods being considered slums, reduced the value of properties, and harmed the finances of Black families. The intent was to off-load unpleasant, even

114

A. L. KAGEDAN

unhealthy facilities to Black areas. This is yet another demonstration of the perils of in-group, out-group thinking that overcame the idea of citizenship—one community of Americans. As mentioned previously, there is no empathy or friendliness to people outside of your group. At best, the relationship, if not outrightly hostile, is instrumental. The key point is that there is no sense of togetherness, community. When Black Americans protested this unfair zoning that bought incinerators and industrial plants to their neighborhoods, the Courts generally rejected the complaint on the ground that the intent of placing these facilities in black areas was not motivated by bias against them.40 More palatable reasons were always found for these decisions such as the price of real estate and the access to major roadways. The politics of othering has real-world consequences like the ones discussed here. The undoing of the penalties imposed on Black families, over centuries, will not be simple or straightforward. Housing has been a key area of discussion for many decades. In 1968, the Kerner Commission proposed that the federal government undertook efforts to improve housing in Black neighborhoods and also opened the door to housing in the suburbs. In both the Johnson Administration and in the early years of the Nixon Administration, plans were drawn up to improve the housing situation of Black Americans, but these were not implemented. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as a domestic policy advisor to Nixon, stated that “the poverty and isolation of minority groups in central cities is the single most important problem of the American city today.” A Policy Brief published by the Othering and Belonging Institute in 2020 put forward two ideas of how to improve the housing situation. One idea is to design public housing to accommodate people of different economic levels, with some receiving subsidies for their rent. Another proposal was to simplify zoning rules to permit different forms of housing—single occupancy, rental buildings, and townhouses, in a variety of neighborhoods.41 Another idea has been put forward by Senator Elizabeth Warren: provide a substantial grant to first-time homebuyers who live in a formerly “redlined” neighborhood for a down payment on a house anywhere in the country.42 The issue of how Blacks are treated remains, decades after the beginning of the Civil Rights movement and four hundred years after slaves began to arrive in the United States, as a central issue of public discussion—a key political issue in America. Now, we turn to Canada.

7

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

115

There are significant differences between the Black communities in the United States and Canada. Black community members in the United States, in the main, arrived as slaves from Africa. The slaves numbered 3.52 million in 1860.43 In Canada, the first Blacks to arrive, similarly, were slaves. But there were far fewer slaves in Canada than in the United States. By 1759, the year when British General Wolfe defeated French General Montcalm, there were 3604 slaves in Canada. Of these, 1132 of them (0.03% of the number of Black slaves in America) were Black (the remainder Indigenous). The slaves in Canada generally served as domestic servants. In New France, later Quebec, there were no Black work gangs, only servants. Slaves were sold at the public market—the largest sale was five slaves. Indigenous slaves sold for 400 livres (pounds) while African slaves sold for 900 livres.44 In 1787, Northern U.S. States abolished slavery and some Canadian slaves escaped to the United States to gain their freedom.45 Another early group of Blacks to come to Canada came from Jamaica. This group was called the Maroons. These descendants of slaves were trained by the Spanish rulers of the West Indies to fight the British. When the British defeated Spain and conquered Jamaica, they had to contend with an armed force of West Indians who relocated to the mountains. These internal opponents created fear among the British. In 1739, the British ruler of Jamaica struck a deal with his British counterpart in Nova Scotia, and deported thousands of Maroons there, along with funds for their settlement.46 History took a new turn with the American revolution in 1776. At the time of the American Revolution Britain was moving away from slavery and banned it in 1808. Sensing an opportunity to stir the pot in an America divided on the slavery issue, Britain promised any Black slave who came to the British side would win their freedom. This ploy was used in 1776 and again in 1812. Shortly after the Revolution, Americans loyal to Britain left the United States for the British colony of Canada. In August 1782, ships set sail from Charleston, South Carolina for Nova Scotia, carrying 4230 whites and 7163 Blacks, their servants. By 1787, there was a Black population of 4000 in Nova Scotia.47 By the 1820s, slavery was being curtailed in Canada and was banned in 1834. So, there was a period of some fifty years in which Canada offered the possibility of freedom to U.S. slaves. Matters became even more pointed after 1850, when the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act that mandated law enforcement to capture runaway slaves.

116

A. L. KAGEDAN

From the 1820s to the 1860s, American slaves found freedom in Canada. Abolitionists created a verse that reflected this reality48 : I’m now embarked for yonder shore, Where a man’s a man by law, De iron horse will bear me o’re To shake de lion’s paw; O righteous Father Wilt thou not pity me, And help me get on to Canada, Where all de slaves are free.

We do not know how many people used the underground railroad to transport slaves who had escaped from their masters in the Southern states to Canada—the numbers could be in the hundreds or even the thousands. But the symbolism of a Black person becoming free once in Canada was powerful in itself. It showed what was possible. In the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries the dynamics of Black migration was quite clear: if moving meant freedom or better treatment, people were prepared to move. The city of Cincinnati provided an interesting case in point. In the 1820s, the Cincinnati began to place restrictions on free Blacks. A Black delegation wrote to the Upper Canada Lieutenant governor to ask for land, and they received a positive response in principle, with a request for payment. The Black community had trouble finding the funds until the Quakers helped them move to Canada. The fact that Canada had successfully attracted Black workers troubled Cincinnati which now reversed itself and reduced the harsh measures it had imposed on this Black population.49 In 1851–1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which described the treatment of slaves in the South and how slaves could escape to a free life in Canada. Her book was based on the autobiography of Josiah Henson who escaped slavery to found a settlement and labor school in Canada.50 One of the most successful Black settlements was called Elgin and was located near Hamilton, Ontario. Three hundred Black families lived there, and the settlers’ descendants became police officers and postmasters.51 On the eve of the Civil War, John Brown visited the Black community in Chatham, Ontario to seek the support of freed Slaves for a new Constitution which would eliminate slavery. Brown was also recruiting for his planned guerilla warfare effort in the service of the new Constitution. He

7

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

117

was successful in recruiting Osborne Anderson, who evaded capture in the historic raid on a military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry on October 17, 1859, a precursor to the Civil War. Brown met with Harriet Tubman, an advocate for Black rights, who lived part of the year in Canada.52 With the end of the Civil War, the British versus American rivalry, in which Blacks were treated as a bargaining chip, ended. Some Blacks who had settled in Canada returned to the United States. The Black community that had been established in Canada since the 1700s remained in place.53 While in the United States the status and treatment of Blacks became a significant national and local political issue, the same was not true in Canada. The smaller, geographically scattered Black community did not receive national attention with the exception of immigration. There were policies and politics that affected Blacks at the provincial level, and impacts on the areas of education and housing. Canadian Confederation occurred in 1867. Canada was still closely tied to Britain and its distancing from the mother country happened gradually, in part through proving itself in battle in World War I and World War II, and partly through the decline of Britain itself after World War II. Immigration policy was part of the mandate of the federal government. From Confederation to the 1960s, Canada strongly restricted the admission of Blacks. The Canadian government was determined to keep the number of Black immigrants to Canada to a minimum. By 1950, the percentage of Blacks in the Canadian population was below 1%.54 Career options for Canadian Blacks were limited. By the middle of the twentieth century, Canada admitted about 100 Blacks a year. All were directed to work on the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), or, for a time, on steamship lines. Work conditions were harsh, and required the men to be away from their families for days at a time. At the same, if one followed all the rules, the work was steady and, with tips, permitted men to support their families. The Canadian sleeping car porters got in touch with A. Phillip Randolph and asked to join his union, despite the negative pressure of the railroad. The day before the Canadian porters signed on with the union, on May 17, 1945, the railroad hired its first white porter. By 1955, the CPR opened the door for Blacks to be promoted to train conductor.55 There were individuals who had the opportunity to rise above the job of a porter and achieve professional success. They were people who had roots in Canada reaching back to the period of time when slaves found

118

A. L. KAGEDAN

freedom in Canada. An illustrative story is that of James Watson, who was born in 1911, and rose to become a prominent lawyer. Watson worked as a train porter—one of the few options for employment—to support himself through law school and for the early years of private practice. Watson’s grandfather, James Munroe, escaped slavery in the United States and found work on the railroads in Canada. By the middle 1950s, public pressure began to grow in Canada for an end to racial immigration quotas and the adoption of a merit-based system to evaluate immigrants. On February 16, 1955, the Toronto Star criticized the government for its quota on Black immigrants and Asian immigrants, stating that: “There can be only one interpretation of such a selective policy, namely, that it reflects a belief in white supremacy.”56 By 1962, Canada had moved away from racial quotas and Canada adopted a policy of multiculturalism in 1971. One observer saw the embrace of multiculturalism as the nail in coffin of white supremacy. According to Cecil Foster: “Trudeau’s historic announcement would mark the official end of the tragic experiment of trying to create a European state out of North American aboriginal lands…keeping it as a…White Man’s country.”57 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was realistic and prescient about the declaration of multiculturalism. He understood that public support for it should never be taken for granted. He grasped that he was pushing against an ever-present tide. On April 17, 1982, Pierre Trudeau said58 : The Canadian ideal which we have tried to live, with varying degrees of success and failure for a hundred years, is really an act of defiance against the history of mankind. …. It should not surprise us, therefore, that even now we sometimes feel the pull of those old reflexes of mutual fear and distrust.

The positive change at the federal level in immigration policy in the 1980s was a long-fought development. In the area of education as well Black Canadians fought an uphill battle for equal treatment. In 1850 in Canada West, later to become Ontario, the legislature passed a law permitting five or more Blacks to ask the local school board to create a separate school for Blacks. St. Catherine’s established a separate school in 1846, before it was legal to do so. Where a separate school did not exist, Black students were asked to sit on the benches in the back of the class. This placing of Black students at the back of the class

7

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

119

also occurred in Nova Scotia. By 1862, there were separate schools in London, Windsor, and Harwich, near Chatham.59 The Chatham separate school closed in 1891, under pressure from the Black community. Hamilton’s separate school closed in 1895. The last Black school to close was Amherstburg in 1917. Like in Ontario, there were separate Black schools in Nova Scotia. The last segregated schools stopped functioning in the 1960s.60 Canada at the federal and provincial levels did not engage in actions to sustain segregation between Blacks and whites. However, there is a notable instance of a Black community that was othered by the province of Nova Scotia and particularly by the City of Halifax. As mentioned, Blacks have lived in Nova Scotia in significant numbers since American independence in 1776. They were given poor land to farm and unclear title to the land. In 1864, five Black families decided to buy land at the North end of Halifax. These families built a Church and school and the area became known as Africville. Halifax offered the possibility of jobs that paid wages, and the location of Africville made it easy to fish. By 1964, there were several hundred residents of Africville.61 The city of Halifax was not friendly to Africville. Many people referred to Africville as n-word town.62 In seeming imitation of actions taken in American cities, as we have seen, Halifax located its garbage dump next to Africville. The city never provided water and sewerage services to the area, while it did provide those services to neighboring areas. By the middle 1950s, the city decided to remove the inhabitants from the area. With little consultation with the residents of Africville, the city began removing inhabitants in 1964, with the last ones moved out in 1970. The city offered financial compensation of $606,890 to families removed (about $4,855,120.00 in 2019 dollars) or about $50,000 per family, and waived hospital fees and tax bills.63 Despite an end to immigration quotas, the adoption of multiculturalism as a national principle, and the end of separate schools or discriminatory treatment within schools, the othering of Blacks has continued at a local level. In 1992, there were riots in Toronto involving Black youth. The immediate triggers were police actions against members of the Black community and other instances of discrimination as well. But there were deeper reasons for the riots. The government struck a Commission of Inquiry to uncover the causes of the violence. In his Report on Race Relations in Ontario, issued in June 1992, Stephen Lewis, a former political leader, was clear in his evaluation. “What

120

A. L. KAGEDAN

we are dealing with” Lewis wrote, “is anti-Black racism. It is Blacks who are being shot, it is Black youth that is unemployed in excessive numbers, it is Black students who are inappropriately streamed in schools, it is Black kids who are disproportionately dropping out…”. Lewis asserted that the doors of equality are slammed shut for Black professionals. Expressing a sentiment that echoed American observers, Lewis said that there is a palpable fear among Black mothers who worried that when their sons left for the day, they would not be coming home that night.64 In 2017, a United Nations panel examined the situation of Blacks in Canada. It cited statistics that 50% of Black Canadians lived in poverty compared with 10% of white families as of 2000. A 2019 report, using data from 2004 to 2014, concluded that it is almost twice as likely for a Black family to have difficulty feeding its members than for a white family to do so.65 Data taken from the censuses of 2006 and 2016 reveal that a lower number of Black youth attend university than non-Black youth (17% versus 26%), and that among Black adults 21% are low income compared with 12% of the nonBlack community.66 Although books were written and media articles and reporting appeared about anti-Black othering in Canada, the issue did not play on a national political stage. That changed during the 2019 election campaign. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had made support for diversity a central component of his brand. During the campaign, the media revealed that Trudeau had appeared in blackface and brownface on at least three occasions as adult. When asked by journalists if there were other such instances, he said that he did not remember and therefore could not say whether or not he had appeared in blackface more times. Trudeau’s behavior shocked many in the public—particularly in light of his father, Pierre Trudeau’s crafting, endorsement, and implementation of an immigration and general policy that, supposedly, had buried white supremacism (though Pierre Trudeau’s cautious comment is worth remembering.). Justin Trudeau apologized, by saying, “What I did was hurtful to people who live with intolerance and discrimination every day. I recognize that, and I take full responsibility for it. I know that I let a lot of people down with that choice, and I am deeply sorry.”67 As if to complement the blackface revelations that showed that race, ethnicity and the politics of othering existed in Canada, the 2019 election saw a new party in Canada: The People’s Party, led by Maxime Bernier. Bernier is a prominent Conservative politician who had unsuccessfully sought the leadership of the Conservative Party and then founded his own

7

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

121

party. Bernier himself did not engage in othering Blacks and declared that he did not want racists in his party. But his supporters celebrated what they termed Canada’s European heritage, often a coded way of showing a preference for cultures built by whites. Bernier’s party won no seats in the election—indeed, he lost his own seat to a Conservative Party candidate. But his party attracted enough votes to hurt the Conservative Party in five or six seats, which fell to the Liberals.68 Looking at the politics of race in both the United States and Canada since the seventeenth century, we see similarities and differences. The United States practiced slavery for sixty years more that Britain, and by extension, Canada. Canada, still under British rule, provided a haven for escaping Black slaves in the first half of the nineteenth century. Both Canada and the United States engaged in segregation of Black students, but it was more limited and of shorter duration in Canada. The situation of Blacks in the United States became a top national issue in the nineteenth century, and has remained available for politicians ever since. It is a prime example of the politics of othering. The situation of Blacks in Canada has stayed out of the national headlines at least until 2019, and only then began to become a topic of discussion nationally. At the same time, policies at the national and local levels in Canada othered Blacks until the 1960s, and discrimination still persists as evidenced by the lower educational and income levels of Blacks in Canada. What seems to be true for both countries is that personal bias that translates into institutional bias has harmed Black economic achievement and unfairly limited the career possibilities of Blacks. The future stakes for both the United States and Canada of dropping the politics of othering Blacks and changing their reality are high and getting higher. Progress may be slow but it is necessary. As Martin Luther King Jr. said: If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.

Notes 1. “2016 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimate,” U.S. Census Fact Finder. American Community Survey. Retrieved February 19, 2018. Census Profile, 2016 Census. Statistics Canada, Retrieved November 6, 2017. 2. The New York Times, 1619, 17–18.

122

A. L. KAGEDAN

3. Julia Floyd Smith, Slave and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750– 1860, University of Tennessee Press, 1991, 104. 4. The New York Times, 1619, 20–21. 5. The New York Times, 1619, 83. 6. The New York Times, 45. 7. Robert Caro, Master of the Senate, 691. 8. Caro, 700. 9. Caro, 702–7. 10. Caro, 775. 11. Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, New York: Random House, 2012, 705–30, and John Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, New York: Free Press, 2003, 269. 12. To hear Kennedy’s statement on race relations, please go to www. networker.www.3.50megs.com/jfk16.html. For context, please see Rick Pearlstein, Before the Storm, 206–8. 13. Rick Pearlstein, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, New York: Nation Books, 2001, 213. 14. Caro, 898–1002. 15. Pearlstein, Before, 365. 16. Pearlstein, Before, 428. 17. Pearlstein, Before, 432. 18. Cornell Belcher, Black Man in the White House, 49–50. 19. Arlie Russell Hochshild, Strangers in Their Own Land, New York: New Press, 2016, 135–51. 20. California Constitution, article 1, para. 26 (Adopted November 3, 1964). 21. Rick Pearlstein, Nixonland, 70–71. 22. Pearlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, New York: Scribner, 2008, 108–9. 23. Pearlstein, Nixonland, 121. 24. Pearlstein, Nixonland, 122. 25. Pearlstein, Nixonland, 197–98. 26. Belcher, 55. 27. Pearlstein, Nixonland, 289. 28. Pearlstein, 250. 29. Pearlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014, 552, 563. 30. Belcher, 57. 31. Belcher, 144. 32. Belcher, 177–9. 33. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017, 184. 34. Rothstein, vii. 35. Rothstein, vii.

7

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

THE POLITICS OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

123

Rothstein, 18–19. Rothstein, 21. Rothstein, 63. Rothstein, 31. Rothstein, 54–56. Othering and Belonging Institute, University of California at Berkeley, “The Road Not Taken: Housing and Criminal Justice 50 Years After the Kerner Commission Report,” June 2020, 23–25. https://medium.com—@teamwarren, “My Housing Plan for America”. The data for the 1860 Census may be found at www.census.gov. Robin Winks, Blacks in Canada, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997, 7–15. Winks, 21–22. Winks, 70–80. Winks, 37. Winks, 243. Winks, 150–55. https://archive.org/details/lifejosiahhensonOOhensrich. Winks, 217. Tony Horowitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, New York: Hentry Holt, 2011, 80–83, 120. Winks, 289. Cecil Foster, They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada, Windsor, ON: Biblioasis, 2019, 24–25. Foster, 74, 222. Foster, 152. Foster, 262. Foster, 271. Winks, 371, 374, 376. Foster, 368, 371, 376. Graham Reynolds, Viola Desmond’s Canada, Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 50. Donald Clairmont and Dennis Magill, Africville: The Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community, Canadian Scholar’s Press, 1999, 30–59. Winks, 420. Clairmont, 167, 189–90. Stephen Lewis, Report on Race Relations, Government of Ontario, 1992. United Nations Report and Laurie Monsebratten, “Black Families Twice as Likely to Go Hungry as White Households, Study Shows,” Toronto Star, October 23, 2019. Two studies from Statistics Canada provided extensive information on the issues facing Black Canadians. These studies can be found at: www.150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006…; www.150.statcan.gc.ca/ n1/pub/89-657….

124

A. L. KAGEDAN

67. Justin Trudeau, September 19, 2019, 5:57 pm. Phillip S. S. Howard, “Trudeau in Blackface: A Symptom of Canada’s Widespread Anti-Black Racism,” September 20, 2019 in The Conversation (conversation.com). 68. Zachary Kamel, “Maxime Bernier’s Alt-Right Problem,” Toronto Star, February 19, 2019. Charlie Pinkerton, “PPC Votes Appear to Have Cost the CPC Some Seats, but Former Tory Strategist Isn’t Sure,” iPolitics, October 22, 2019. This conclusion was reached based on the number of votes earned by the PPC and assuming that most of these votes would have gone to the Conservatives. There is no certainty of how where their votes would go, however, the fact that the leader was a long-time Conservative suggests that most of his supporters would have voted Conservative if, say, Bernier had been the leader.

CHAPTER 8

The Maligning of Muslims

We have seen how “us” versus “them” is a universal pattern of human thought. Another way of looking at this is through an in-group and an out-group perspective. Although this way of thinking always has its followers, it takes politicians and public opinion leaders to translate it into state-sponsored othering. The politics of othering involves a clever weaving of fact (often paltry but exaggerated) and fiction intended to demean a group—or even to demonize it—in advance of politicians using fear and dislike of the group to create policies and laws against them. We have seen how epochal events such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War have provided kindling—created demand—for the fire—supply—of othering. In this chapter, we will provide an historical context, rooted in international relations, that affects the politics of othering Muslims in the United States and Canada. After providing this context, we will look at political actions in the United States and then political actions in Canada that reflect othering. Negative attitudes toward Muslims or Middle Eastern people stretch back in history. Since the seventeenth century, Western publics have seen Middle Easterners as uncivilized and violent but also incompetent.1 These images have persisted into our own time. In Raiders of the Lost Arc (1981) the Arabs are, by turns, blood-thirsty and foolish. A leading light of the wrestling world of the 1960s–1990s went by the name Abdullah the Butcher—which seemed much more threatening—and, therefore, © The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_8

125

126

A. L. KAGEDAN

more marketable—than his real name, Lawrence Robert Shreeve. An FBI sting operation against oil executives who were open to giving/taking bribes was called AbScam—aligning illegal behavior with Arabs.2 One of the principal characteristics of international relations over the past half century is the tensions, and wars, between Western countries and countries with majority Muslim populations. All wars are bloody, costly, and tragic in their human toll. These conflicts have set the scene for the othering of Muslims in the United States and Canada. Another arc of Western-Middle Eastern conflict is terrorism. Terrorists pursue a political agenda of reducing Western influence and placing their group in control of territory (as was the case with ISIS), who claim to be following the tenets of Islam in their political quest. With the proclamation of a Caliphate in 2014, ISIS sought to establish itself as a place to which Muslims should travel and attracted youth from Western countries to join the ISIS cause. While wars and terrorism provide the context for the othering of Muslims, their othering is of a piece with the othering used against other minorities covered in this book: Indigenous, Jews, Japanese, left-wingers, gays, and Blacks. In the 1970s and 1980s there were no terrorist attacks on American soil from groups claiming ties to Islam. On September 20, 1984, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed, in the overall context of a civil war. The first terrorist attack in the United States in which the perpetrators claimed ties to Islam was the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York City on February 26, 1993, which claimed six lives and 1042 injured. With this attack, people began to think about, and feel threatened by, Middle Eastern extremism. There was a second terrorist attack on U.S. soil in 1993—carried by Mir Aimal Kansi on January 25, 1993 at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.3 During questioning, Kansi said that he was motivated to revenge American military actions and CIA operations in Muslim-majority states. Kansi was executed by lethal injection in 2002.4 Although the 1990s saw significant attacks by individuals claiming ties to Islam in Algeria, France, India, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, from the U.S. perspective, there was only one other attack: on August 7, 1998, the U.S. Embassies in Dar Es Salam and Nairobi were bombed with a significant death toll—224—and the number of injured in the thousands. As we leave the 1990s, despite the attacks in New York and Washington in 1993, the threat seemed to focus on U.S. Embassies, not on the homeland. Put simply, these attacks affected fewer people in the United States and therefore were less politically salient.

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

127

September 11, 2001 was a watershed moment.5 After decades of U.S. intervention in Middle Eastern conflicts, the conflict was now playing out in the homeland. On that day, nineteen men hijacked four U.S. commercial aircraft bound for the West Coast of the United States. The projected destinations of the planes meant they would be larger aircraft with a higher amount of airplane fuel. Two of the hijacked aircraft crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Centre, and 2753 people died as a result. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon, killing 184 people (125 Pentagon personnel and 59 passengers on the aircraft), and a fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after the passengers tried and failed to regain control of the aircraft from the terrorists. The target of the fourth plane is not known, but there is speculation that it was another Washington target, such as the White House, the Capitol Building, or the Central Intelligence Agency (which, as we have seen, had already been the target of a terrorist attack).6 The 9/11 attacks put the threat of terrorism by individuals claiming ties to Islam and to a terrorist group that itself claimed ties to Islam as a key security issue for Americans. The phrase “war on terrorism” captured this transition. The much-touted power of America, which had been identified as the only superpower following the Soviet collapse in 1991, had been challenged. The enemy was focussed, imaginative, and capable. The media coverage of September 11, 2001 was followed up by the United States and its allies launching a war in Afghanistan and then a war in Iraq. So now people who claimed ties to Islam had attacked the homeland and Americans were fighting in one, then two wars located in Muslim-majority countries. Observers have pointed out that white nationalist terrorism, such as the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, poses as great or greater a threat to Americans that terrorism carried out by people who claim ties to Islam. There is no question that this threat—which has cost hundreds of innocent lives over the past two decades—is significant. Law enforcement and the justice system treats these attackers as mass murderers or terrorists and their punishment—if they survive the attack itself—is life in prison or death. Law enforcement also collects intelligence on them to try and deter attacks. Despite the severity of these attacks, they do not represent the politics of othering directed against a minority. Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians were treated during the World War II era as an enemy population—many were involuntarily resettled inland, others were deported to Japan. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, and the Balkans were foreign wars, and came to be viewed and

128

A. L. KAGEDAN

understood as part of a great power struggle with Russia, China or both. Now, by the early 2000s, there was a new war with a seemingly capable enemy—Al Qaeda—one that could attack the United States itself, and recruit adherents from the American population. Given this reality, many members of the public were ripe for us versus them appeal directed against Muslims. The interweaving of concepts taken from Islam with acts of terrorism was a focus of journalistic reporting for decades before 9/11. The Iranian Revolution, which set in train the taking of American hostages, was led by Ayatollah Khomeini. This same individual issued an order to assassinate the British Muslim writer Salman Rushdie for his allegedly disrespectful writings about Islam. The assassination order matter continued for many years and established in many American minds a negative view of actions that purported to be protective of Islam.7 September 11, 2021 will mark twenty years from the attacks of 9/11. The two decades following the tragedy of September 11 have included times of peace punctuated by terrorism and war. From 2002 to 2012 there were no terrorist attacks in the United States. There were attacks in Europe and elsewhere, all covered extensively by the U.S. media and, with the growth of the internet, this information became readily available to Americans. But when domestic terrorism waned, military engagement with majority Muslim countries waxed. America’s war in Afghanistan began weeks after the September 11, 2001 attack. In 2011, the United States had 101,000 troops in the country. A drawdown of American forces and hand-over to Afghan forces happened at the end of 2014.8 A total of 2,218 U.S. military personnel were killed in the Afghan war.9 The War in Afghanistan, in which the enemy advocated a version of fundamentalist Islam, more than covers the years of no terrorist attacks in the United States. The Iraq War was shorter, but deadlier, for America. America suffered 4419 deaths during the Iraqi conflict.10 The conflict began in 2003 and ended in 2010. At its height, Operation Iraqi Freedom involved 144,000 troops. Following 2010, a newly named mission, Operation New Dawn took over with some 50,000 troops which lasted till 2011.11 Conflict bred more conflict. Shortly after the United States pulled out of Iraq, not completely but significantly, a new actor appeared on the scene: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This quasi-state emerged from the ashes of a defeated Iraq and a weak Syria, and claimed territory

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

129

in Iraq and Syria. It also actively recruited followers from abroad to join the growing State. At its peak, ISIS had control of 12 million people, and significant oil resources. Now, once again, American troops were involved with fighting an enemy that proclaimed its adherence to a form of Islam. The leaders of ISIS traded on the notion of creating a Caliphate. A caliphate is an Islamic state led by an Islamic leader or caliph, who is considered to be a political-religious successor to Prophet Mohamed, and a leader of the entire Muslim community.12 Using this ancient concept for their own current political purposes, ISIS leaders actively recruited supporters from around the world and in particular young women and men from Western countries. Declaring the establishment of a Caliphate was a drawing card.13 Although ISIS lost its territory in March 2019 with the fall of Baghuz, Syria, concern about ISIS cells remained.14 On October 27, 2019, President Trump announced the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader. Although fears of a recrudescence of ISIS remained a concern, it was the turning of a page. It remains to be seen whether or not the pattern of peace, terror, war, peace will continue. It is interesting to note that war casualties played a significant political role in the 2016 Presidential elections. Donald Trump ran on platform that emphasized removing American troops from foreign conflicts. In 2016, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which saw higher than average casualties, voted for Trump, by a margin of less than one percent. Based on casualty totals for all states, had Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin seen fewer war casualties, they could have voted for Hilary Clinton, thereby paving her way to the Presidency.15 For our purposes, the voters affected by the loss of family members or members of their community in wars against Muslim-majority countries or a group like ISIS, could well be in the sights of people practicing the politics of othering Muslims. Here an international situation—as we have seen many times in this book—becomes fodder for domestic political operators. As military engagement with Muslim-majority states declined after 2012 (with the exception of military support for the local forces battling ISIS), domestic terrorism surged. There were terrorist attacks in the United States for every year from 2013 to 2017. What is key for our analysis—the political fallout of terrorism—is that all but one of the attacks involved people who had immigrated to the United States, some as small

130

A. L. KAGEDAN

children. This would benefit purveyors of the politics of othering Muslims and immigrants generally. The 2013 Boston Marathon attack was carried out by two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose family had immigrated to the United States. Both brothers were born overseas. Although publicly the brothers seemed to be integrating into American life, in fact, they were not. The family was Chechen in origin—a group that had been in conflict with Russia, and with the Soviet Union, since the eighteenth century. During World War II, the Soviet government accused Chechen leaders of working with the Nazis against the Soviet Union.16 Instead of punishing the collaborators, the Soviet government deported all the Chechens and erased their political unit. The Chechens were dispersed to Central Asia— which is where the Tsarnaev family originated. After 2001, the Chechen insurgents began to identify with extremist Islam, and the brother who survived the investigation into the attack claimed that he was radicalized through the internet. However, in light of their connections to, and self-identification with Chechnya, the attack may have been motivated as much by loyalty to the Chechen cause as with radical Islam. In 2012, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, spent six months in Dagestan and Chechnya.17 But in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing almost no mention was made of the Chechen identity of the family, and politicians and opinion leaders engaged in othering Muslims placed the blame for the attack on all Muslims.18 On October 23, 2014, Salim Farouq Abdul-Malik attacked four New York City policeman with a hatchet, injuring one seriously, before being shot by police. Known previously as Zale Thompson, he had converted to Islam.19 The attack in San Bernardino in 2015, in which fourteen people were killed, was committed by a married couple. The female attacker, Tashfeen Malik, posted her “bayat” or oath of allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook shortly before the attack.20 The June 2016 attack in Orlando, carried out by Omar Mateen that claimed 49 lives, kept the fuel for othering flowing. Here were immigrants to America, or children of immigrants, attacking their fellow citizens. In addition, the Islamic State emerged out of the chaos of the Iraq war and, again, American troops were involved in a war with a group claiming connection to Islam. The brutal killings meted out by ISIS to Americans and other Westerners received wide media coverage and also were projected on the internet by ISIS itself.

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

131

In the years following the 9/11 attacks there have been actions at the state level and at the federal level that were rooted in the historical and contemporary perceptions of Muslims and represent the politics of othering. The two areas we will focus on for the United States is the campaign to ban the alleged attempt to impose Shariah law on society at the state level and the implementation of a federal ban on immigration and travel from a number of Muslim-majority countries, among others. Unbeknownst to Americans, who had experienced terrorism at home and war abroad in the Middle East, the gravest threat facing them according to promotors of the Sharia threat was nonviolent. The promotors’ notion was that, surreptitiously, and nonviolently, malevolent forces had infiltrated the United States at its highest levels, and was, in the near term, in a position to impose a system of law that permits honor killing, punishment for blasphemy, and other measures. Do not worry too much about terrorism, the Sharia opponents advised, but do worry about a shadowy group called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, was allegedly behind a series of front organizations that would foist Sharia on an unsuspecting America without firing a single shot. Through targeted funding, the Universities had become submissive to the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the Brotherhood has been so effective in co-opting those in power in the United States that it was on the verge of victory21 : The [Muslim} Brotherhood has succeeded in penetrating our educational, legal and political systems, as well as top levels of government, intelligence, the media, and U.S. military, virtually paralyzing our ability to plan or respond effectively.

One must assume that most Americans had never heard of the Muslim Brotherhood. Further, the Muslim Brotherhood historically has been tied to groups that engaged in terrorism, such as Hamas. But this was beside the point. The key to this theory of ‘stealth Shariah’ is a law enforcement raid that took place in 2007 on the Holyland Fund—a charitable organization that in fact had been funneling money to Hamas. A number of officials of the Fund were charged and convicted. But in the course of the investigation law enforcement unearthed many documents that revealed the aspirations, at different times, of the Muslim Brotherhood members for America. One document from 1991 spelled out the hope that, one day, a universal Caliphate would be established—and that, at this end of

132

A. L. KAGEDAN

days, the whole world would either convert to Islam or at least submit to it so that Sharia could be in place globally. Indeed, in June 2014 ISIS declared it had established a worldwide Caliphate.22 The Muslim Brotherhood is generally a conservative organization whose focus is not on America but on the Arab and Muslim world. Its vision is for the triumph of traditional forces in Arab and Muslim countries—a difficult and unfinished task—remains a vision. For example, the Egyptian government has banned the Muslim Brotherhood and the effort to gain power in Egypt is rather more relevant than any notion of pressing Shariah on a Western country. In fact, after 9/11, organizations in the United States that were linked in the Holyland Charity documents with the Muslim Brotherhood, like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), denounced the attack and worked closely with the FBI to prevent more attacks.23 So, actions of the Muslim Brotherhood or related organizations, if they stray into supporting a terrorist group, are punishable by law. There is no sense of an effort or capability of this group to foist Shariah on an unsuspecting America or, for that matter, on any Western country—and so far failing to gain much ground in Muslim-majority countries. The proponents of stealth Shariah had their work cut out for them. Their approach was to revive the model of anti-Communism that worked so well in the 1950s to now be replicated for radical Islam. The book, Shariah, The Threat to America (2010) is an effort to build support for an anti-Shariah movement that reaches the level of success of antiCommunism. As we have seen in Chapter 6, the net impact of antiCommunism in the United States was to marginalize and rule out social democratic policy proposals on such issues as publicly-funded medical insurance. By the 2000s, with the demise of the Soviet Union, the anticommunist card was no longer effective as a wedge to fight liberal ideas. Perhaps an anti-Shariah effort, fueled by concerns over terrorism at home and abroad, could gain enough support to defeat new liberal proposals on social policy by claiming that their proponents were, in fact, in league with the Muslim Brotherhood, working to impose Shariah on America. As we have seen, in the case of anti-Communism, there was kindling all around. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state that had global aspirations and recruited spies in America and elsewhere. Similarly, the anti-Shariah movement had the examples of 9/11 and the multiple terrorist actions by people who claimed to be following Islam. Indeed, the creation of ISIS led to the proclamation of a Shariah-led state in

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

133

which unthinkable violations of human rights, genocide of groups like the Yazidis, and mistreatment of dissenters, was commonplace. But the McCarthyite branding as Communists or social democrats and liberals for a domestic political purpose was a different enterprise from keeping the Soviet Union in check. Similarly, the protection of society from terrorism is different from claiming that mythical pro-Shariah forces were infiltrating American society with a realistic chance of undermining American institutions. The anti-Shariah effort tried to meld concern for the rights of women onto its agenda of defeating a liberal or social democratic agenda. The book refers to the case of a Judge in New Jersey who seemingly accepted a husband’s claims that his unacceptable behavior toward his wife was consistent with his religion. This judgment was soon overturned. But it provided proof for the anti-Shariah advocates that a “clear and present danger” of Shariah faced the United States. It had many unwitting supporters—not coincidentally who supported the Democratic Party. In other words, if you did not fight against Shariah, then you were a disloyal American, and were opening the door to the end of American institutions—just as the left-wingers were in the anti-communist era. In a clear statement of the point of anti-Shariah efforts, the book is titled “Team B” a reference to a 1976 analytical effort by academics working with the U.S. intelligence community to evaluate Soviet military developments that dissented from a more benign view. Team B did not relate to communist subversion of the United States so it is a rather odd analytical companion of an anti-Shariah effort directed at Americans. Rather, Team B is a metaphor for an alternative view of an accepted perspective on a military challenge to America. The accepted view is that America should fight terrorism but not Islam, and that shariah issues were not a threat to American institutions. The alternative view is that Shariah is a clear and present danger to American institution, which makes the terrorist challenge a comparatively less important matter. Anti-Shariah efforts failed legally but succeeded politically. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, since 2010, forty-three states have introduced 201 anti-Sharia law bills. There has been no action at the federal level. In fact, a federal judge in Oklahoma blocked an anti-Shariah amendment proposed in that state, which won 70% support at election time, on the ground that it violated the First Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits the establishment of a state religion.24 Even if the

134

A. L. KAGEDAN

word Shariah is dropped from these measures ultimately, the campaign still delivered a political message. The net impact of the anti-Shariah effort is to single out a text attached to a religion for opprobrium. This demeans and makes suspect all those who respect the text or who are suspected of respecting it. It would be as if the Bible, Old and New Testament, were demeaned and thus if Christians and Jews who were suspected of promoting the Bible or even respecting the Bible were acting against the public interest. These acts are superfluous since U.S. courts would not comply with foreign law. Just as Soviet practice was linked to thousands of Americans during the Cold War, this effort tried to link Muslims in general to a conspiratorial purpose. But the notion that people with liberal ideas favor the introduction of Shariah law that is anything but liberal has become a common theme of political fear mongering and discourse. It is an effort to draw a line between acceptance of Muslims as equal citizens and views seen as liberal on a range of other matters. It is an effort to create a new religion-based anti-Communism. The prominence and persistence of terrorist actions, and the wars that were fought for close to two decades after 2001, presented perfect conditions for the elaboration of the politics of othering directed against Muslims. Public commentators and politicians saw an opportunity to gain support by using fear and anger over wars and terrorism to demean Muslims and to limit their rights. As mentioned, in the case of Japanese Americans during World War II extraordinary measures were taken including taking Japanese Americans into custody, expelling Japanese from the West Coast and deporting some Japanese back to Japan. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has had contingency plans to detain and deport many Muslim Americans. Although these plans have never been implemented, it is striking that history can be a useful guide to societal behavior as othering moves to even more dangerous level, a matter, as we shall see, that has got the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court.25 It has been argued that national security measures in aviation and law enforcement investigations regarding terrorism have been implemented in a biased fashion that has discriminated against Muslims.26 It is true that, in the wake of 9/11 a number of mistakes have been made that have harmed individuals, and there is an ever-present requirement for security and law enforcement officials to guard against discriminatory treatment

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

135

of all groups. But it is not true that security actions have been taken exclusively to deal with terrorism committed by individuals who claim a link to Islam. The imposition of costly and inconvenient but necessary security measures at federal buildings was triggered by the white nationalist attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1994. So, the purpose of the measures is not, per se, to other a community: they are to protect that community and all communities. The non-adoption of security measures—assuming that the threat of terrorism is real—would translate into a greater number of terrorist attacks. The political fallout of more terrorist attacks could well create more support for the politics of othering Muslims. One of President Trump’s first initiatives in office was to put in place restrictions on the admission to the United States of citizens of a number of Muslim-majority countries, and several non-Muslim countries, on the ground that the security vetting carried out by the countries was inadequate and the persons therefore permitted to travel to or immigrate to the United States posed a security risk. The Presidential proclamation did not list all Muslim-majority countries. It named Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad, Venezuela, and North Korea—six predominantly Muslim. Soon, Chad was dropped from the list. The Presidential proclamation was challenged in court, and, on its third iteration came before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court in a 5-4 decision ruled in favor of the proclamation in June 2018. The majority on the Court accepted the argument made by the White House that the President has the authority to make national security judgments in the realm of immigration, notwithstanding statements made by the President against Muslims in general, including that “Islam hates us,” that there should be a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” effectively a “Muslim ban.” In her dissent from the majority, Justice Sotomayor cited many of the same comments made by President Trump about Muslims and rejected the White House’s arguments that the proclamation enhanced national security. What is notable in the Supreme Court judgment is that it references the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korametsu decision, which approved of the government’s plan to expel all people of Japanese origin from the West Coast, and states that it rejects this decision. The Supreme Court is alert to the fact that an immigration ban today could become tomorrow’s internment of an othered group.

136

A. L. KAGEDAN

The statements cited by the Supreme Court justices, are textbook “us versus them” comments that depict all Muslims—with no respect to their citizenship, including American citizenship—as a threat to America. This maligning of Islam and Muslims, journalists have reported, wins votes. But it also creates fear among Muslims in the United States, and could be seen as a justification for those who commit hate crimes against Muslims or discriminate against them, and delays the integration of Muslim immigrants into American life. The alienation of Muslims who are loyal citizens or law-abiding immigrants reduces the capacity of law enforcement to recruit informants who can help to prevent terrorist attacks and be used to testify in court against the alleged terrorist conspirators.27 Robert Bowers, who attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh was motivated in part by the idea that a well-established organization of American Jews, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was assisting Syrian refugees to enter America and thereby threatening the security of Americans.28 It is clear that, without 9/11, the subsequent terrorist attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the political value of taking actions against Muslims would have been much diminished. But the use or nonuse of othering is a political choice. It is interesting that President Bush, in the weeks after 9/11, made a practice of showing respect for Islam, calling it a religion of peace. He received advice on how to handle the high running feelings against Islam by Norm Mineta, a Cabinet member who is a Japanese American and who, together with his family, were expelled from their home in San Jose and placed in an internment camp in Wyoming.29 Canada and the United States parted ways on how the politics of othering operated before and after the tragic events of 9/11. The Canadian experience made for less welcoming territory for the othering of Muslims. Canadian embassies were not attacked by terrorists in the years before 9/11. Although a Canadian Ambassador, Ken Taylor, helped American hostages escape Iran, Canada maintained diplomatic relations with Iran until 2012. Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan began after September 11, 2001 under Prime Minister Jean Chretien. It was a mission authorized by the UN Security Council. The mission was terminated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in March 2014, and Canada did not participate in the follow-on mission Operation Resolute, which began in January 2015. About 40,000 Canadian Armed Forces personnel were deployed

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

137

to Afghanistan over the years of engagement. One hundred and fiftynine Canadians died in Afghanistan. In addition to serving military, this total includes one diplomat, who was assassinated by the Taliban and two accountants working on development assistance.30 Canadian public opinion was most supportive of the Afghan mission in the immediate period after 9/11—71% in favor, 27% opposed. Support dropped significantly as the years passed and as casualty numbers grew: by 2008, 38% favored and 56% opposed—a notable reversal. Following the end of active combat in 2011, the percentage of those favorable to the mission went up to 54 but was never to recover the immediate postattack support.31 Although Liberal and Conservative governments tried to link the Afghanistan mission to security, by the mid-2000s they abandoned this rationale as Canadians did not feel threatened by terrorism. Afghanistan was not an election topic in 2006, 2008, or 2011. There was little discussion in Parliament about the military mission in Afghanistan. Rather, there was a focus on domestic issues such as political leadership and economic issues.32 The Canadian governments, both Liberal and Conservative, reflecting public opinion, depicted the Afghanistan War not as one driven by national security needs, but one motivated by the need to help our allies, principally the United States.33 The one great controversy that arose during the Canadian deployment to Afghanistan was how the Canadian military treated detained Afghans. Canada delivered the detainees, in accordance with UN rules, to the local authorities whose treatment of the prisoners was considered harsh and below human rights standards. In other words, the Canadian Forces were between a rock and hard place with respect to Afghan detainees. What is notable is that, in the middle of a conflict, Canadians—or at least Canadian politicians and public opinion leaders—were exercised about how the Afghan adversaries were being treated.34 In the United States, there were terrorist attacks in 1993, then in 2001, and subsequently in 2013–2017. The death toll from these attacks was in the thousands—close to 3000 from a single day, 9/11 alone. In the Canadian case, there were two terrorist attacks that claimed two lives. In both cases, the victims were serving military. In both cases, the attackers were killed. The political significance of the attacks was diminished by three factors: first, in the public mind, the loss of military personnel, tragic on a personal and family level, is more expected

138

A. L. KAGEDAN

that the loss of people going to work or flying on an aircraft. Second was the view, prominent in the media and absorbed by the public, that mental illness or mental disability had as much or more to do with the attacks as terrorist groups that claimed ties to Islam. Third, the attacks occurred within two days of one another and did not recur, making them different from seemingly continuing attacks, year after year, as was the case in the United States. The first Canadian terrorist attack occurred on October 21, 2014. Martin Couture-Rouleau, the attacker, used his car to run over and kill a Canadian soldier. Couture-Rouleau was known to law enforcement before committing this act. He had converted to Islam in 2013. In the summer of 2013, Couture-Rouleau tried to leave Canada likely to travel to the Middle East to join a terrorist group. Couture-Rouleau was arrested by the police, who seized his passport, but then released him. Shortly before Couture-Rouleau’s attack, ISIS had called for its followers to use any means at their disposal—including cars—to target people in Western countries. So, Couture-Rouleau, likely feeling trapped in Canada, drove to a building forty kilometers from Montreal that housed provincial and federal administrative offices, including an office for the military. CoutureRouleau waited for an appropriate target for two hours in a parking lot adjacent to the building. Two soldiers walked out of the building and Couture-Rouleau ran them over, killing one and injuring the other. He then fled with the police in pursuit and ultimately was shot dead by police.35 The second attack was carried out by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, 32. He was a laborer and small-time criminal who seemed to be mentally unstable.36 Zehaf-Bibeau spent time on the streets in 2011, where was arrested for robbery and uttering threats. When in British Columbia Zehaf-Bibeau grew interested in Islam and told people that he wanted to travel to Syria for language and religious studies. By 2013, he moved back to Montreal where his parents lived. A neighbor recalls ZehafBibeau’s father calling on his son to stop obsessively cleaning his car, which was clean already. On October 2, 2014, Zehaf-Bibeau checked into a men’s shelter in Ottawa and began to try and get a passport. This raised issues given his criminal record and there were also national security concerns. His mother was the head of the Immigration Section for the Immigration Refugee Board, and Zehaf-Bibeau may have felt that she could help him get a passport.37

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

139

In both cases, the individuals were born in Canada, tried to leave and were either deprived of or denied passports and then attacked soldiers— with two deaths. The Canadian media suggested that mental illness was a factor. The fact that both wanted to leave and that their targets were military would tend to diminish how threatening they seemed to the public. There is a sharp contrast between these terrorists and the perpetrators of 9/11, and of other terrorist attacks in the United States. The political actions taken in Canada toward Muslims differed significantly from those actions taken in the United States, notably the ban on entry of people from several Muslim-majority countries, and the promotion and adoption of rules against the use of Sharia law in numerous states. We will look at several issues to outline the Canadian experience at the federal level, and also the case of legislation adopted in Quebec regarding the wearing of religious symbols. In Canada, the politics of othering Muslims saw little action in the decade after 9/11. This appeared to be changing with the election of a majority Conservative government in 2011. In the Canadian system, the political party with the largest number of seats in Parliament can lead a minority government. Minority governments are always looking over their shoulders so as not to trigger an election—unless the political circumstances are such that they are almost guaranteed a victory. However, if a government holds a majority of seats in the House of Commons it is freer to take actions that other parties oppose, without the political risk of losing the confidence of the House of Commons, thus triggering an election. As a majority, the Conservatives took steps that moved in the direction of the othering of Muslims but none of these measures, and promised measures, survived their defeat in the 2015 election. Canadian citizenship ceremonies are carried out under the Citizenship Act (the Act) and its regulations. The Harper government decided to forbid women from wearing a niqab during citizenship ceremonies. This ban was achieved not through legislative change or regulatory amendment but an updating of the Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s (CIC) policy manual. It provoked a vocal counter-reaction. It was successfully challenged in court and the government appealed. By then it was 2015, and the Conservatives were defeated by the Liberals. The newly elected Liberal government dropped the appeal, and so the niqab is permitted at citizenship ceremonies.38 On June 18, 2015, late in its electoral mandate, the Canadian Parliament passed the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act. Later,

140

A. L. KAGEDAN

during the election period, the government promised, should they be returned to office, to create a Barbaric Cultural Practices tip line to be monitored by the RCMP.39 Here was a case, to reverse the adage, of a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The content of the law related to forced child marriages, polygamy, and honor killing. All these were matters related to the rights of girls and women. There was debate over whether the legislation was necessary, in light of existing criminal sanctions, but no one questioned the value of focusing on these matters. What stood out politically was the title of the legislation. If the title had been the “Promotion of the Rights of Women Act” it would not have attracted criticism. However, the reference to “Barbaric Cultural Practices” coupled with content of behaviors that are popularly associated with some Muslim-majority countries, led critics to see the act as an expression of xenophobia. The title could be read to mean that the culture tied to these practices was a barbaric culture as a whole. It was clear to all that the practices were those identified with traditional interpretations of Islamic law and practiced in certain Muslimmajority countries. The government’s effort in proposing this bill was to create a coalition of supporters of human rights and people who had a negative view of Islam. It succeeded in passing the bill—which was not open to question as it had a majority in the House of Commons—and the bill became law in June 2015. But, once passed, criticism of the Bill continued, especially its title. The title was dropped through a private member’s bill in the Senate which was then supported by a new Liberal government elected in October 2015.40 The civil war in Syria was underway in the fall of 2015 when Canadians went to the election polls. During the election campaign, a picture appeared on the news media of a three-year-old boy, Aylan Kurdi, who was escaping Syria with his family. The little boy had drowned and the camera showed him lying dead on a beach in Turkey. A rumor circulated that the boy and his family had applied for admission to Canada but had been rejected—which was not true. In fact, the boy’s father, the only survivor of the quest for refuge, told the media that the family’s goal was to join a relative in Vancouver. But the parties opposing the Conservatives were able to make the case that, given the government’s other actions that showed a suspicion of Muslims, that it bore some responsibility for the child’s death. Compassion trumped othering. It was a public relations nightmare for the Conservative government, which was then pressed even more strongly on its policy of helping refugees from Syria. The Liberals

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

141

were elected with a majority and announced a dramatic increase in the number of Syrian refugees Canada would accept—from November 2015 to February 2016, Canada accepted 26,172 Syrian refugees.41 In 2015, after their electoral defeat, the Conservatives launched a leadership race. Dr. Kellie Leitch, a Conservative member of Parliament from Ontario, joined the contest. Dr. Leitch proposed that all immigrants and visitors to Canada be screened for their values prior to admission. Dr. Leitch defended her proposal on the ground that some immigrants may condone acts like stoning gays. Her proposal provoked questions and criticism including from her fellow Conservatives. Which values were the desired values? Wasn’t the purpose of the integration of immigrants to introduce them to the values of their new country? In addition, it was impractical—to vet all immigrants and visitors would lead to huge travel delays and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Few operational details of the proposals were shared. But as political theater it suggested that immigrants could not be trusted, and had to be monitored because of their errant values, (such as stoning gays). In June 2017, Dr. Leitch retweeted a story about spousal violence allegedly committed by a Syrian refugee now in Canada. She wrote: “A battered wife and a bloody hockey stick. That is the legacy of Trudeau’s Syrian refugee program.” The Conservative immigration critic did not criticize Dr. Leitch directly, but said that the Conservative Party’s vision was to help the world’s most vulnerable, including refugees. In January 2018, Dr. Leitch announced that she was leaving politics.42 If the Conservatives, having won a majority, introduced several measures critical of what they saw as certain Islamic practices, their opponents, the Liberals, after 2015 having won a minority moved in the opposite direction: they proposed a motion that, among other things, condemned Islamophobia. The motion did not define Islamophobia but named it along with racism and discrimination as a matter that should be studied and combatted. The motion asked government to quell the growing public climate of hate and fear and directed the Parliamentary House of Commons’ Heritage Committee to collect data on hate crime reports, and conduct needs assessments for affected communities and present findings of these assessments within eight months. The intent of the motion was to fight the othering of Muslims. But in the public discourse, all the focus went to Islamophobia, which the legislation did not define, and which opened the door to a narrative that suggested that the measure would prohibit any form of criticism of

142

A. L. KAGEDAN

any version of Islamic belief or practice. Not only did most members of the Conservative Party oppose the motion, but several groups emerged specifically to combat what they argued was an attack on freedom of speech. These groups enlisted the support of a number of reform-oriented Muslims who feared that matters were moving in a direction where they, themselves, would not be able to comment critically on more traditional interpretations of Islam. An Angus Reid poll said that 42% of Canadians were against the motion with 29% in favor. The Liberals rejected proposals to drop the term Islamophobia and used its majority to pass the motion. It is unlikely that they anticipated the firestorm of public debate the motion would trigger.43 The 2019 Canadian Federal election saw the emergence of a new party, the People’s Party, led by former Conservative Minister Maxime Bernier. The People’s Party revived the idea championed by Dr. Kellie Leitch of establishing a values test for immigrants, as mentioned above. Maxim Bernier accused Justin Trudeau of having room in his party for people who want to impose Shariah on Canada, echoing the American antiShariah campaign. One of the candidates of the People’s Party sent out emails criticizing Muslims. The People’s Party did not elect any members in 2019, and the leader of the party, Maxime Bernier, lost his own seat, which he had held as a Conservative, to a Conservative Party candidate.44 In the Canadian election campaign in 2019, Prime Minister Trudeau was accused of trying to impose Shariah law on Canada. This accusation was included in a youtube video.45 In a tweet that showed Justin Trudeau and Conservative leader Andrew Sheer meeting with a person dressed in traditional Muslim dress, Bernier wrote: “Reminder that in Canada, you can pander to people who PROMOTE SHARIA LAW AND WIFE BEATING, and the media will never bother you with this. They will only call you an extremist if you fight to preserve Canadian values…”.46 At the federal level, proposals critical of Islam or Muslims have failed to serve as a winning political gambit. Here there is a correlation to context—the limited exposure of Canadians to war and terrorism against countries or groups that claim ties to Islam. It is not for the lack of politicians prepared to move in this direction as against a too small or too scattered number of members of the public who support such an approach. Supply exceeded demand. The politics of othering failed. A key development at the political level that involves Muslims occurred in the province of Quebec that passed a law focused on the wearing of

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

143

religious symbols. This province’s actions have been criticized by other provinces and by the federal government. To understand the Quebec law, local context is necessary. Quebec is a majority French-speaking province. Quebec culture itself has minority status in Canada and in North America. Since the 1960s, when a “Quiet Revolution” radically diminished the role of the Catholic Church in public life, Quebec politics has struggled with the question of how to preserve Quebec language and culture. One line of effort has been to pass legislation that protects the French language. Another significant political effort has been a campaign to separate Quebec from Canada, which became the subject of two referenda, in 1980 and 1995. The second referendum was close to a tie, with the “No” vote winning with 50.58%. Another dynamic in Quebec have been moves to secularize public institutions. In 2000, Quebec abandoned Catholic and Protestant public schools substituting in their stead English and French school boards. A key issue in Quebec is how to integrate immigrants into French Quebec culture and society. One of the concessions gained by Quebec in its continual negotiations with the federal government for more power was for increased authority in the matter of immigration selection. This was motivated by a desire to attract to Quebec more French-speaking immigrants. Quebec got its wish. However, Quebec may not have fully realized that many of the French-speaking immigrants would be Muslim. In 2007, Jean Charest, the Premier of Quebec, launched a study of how to achieve “reasonable accommodation” among different cultural and religious groups. The Commission found that there was insecurity among the French Quebecois population with respect to maintaining its language and culture. The Commission advocated that judges, Crown prosecutors, prison guards, and police—officials involved in law enforcement—not wear religious attire while on duty. In 2013, the Quebec government tried to translate reasonable accommodation into law through a Charter of Values. This law dramatically expanded the scope of those who were not permitted to wear religious attire: public sector employees, doctors, nurses, teachers, and child care workers. The clothing to be proscribed was the hijab, the turban, and the kippah. In the ensuing public and political debate, some said that, in the spirit of secularization of public life, the crucifix in the National Assembly should also be removed.47 After a series of fits and starts, the proposed law became law in

144

A. L. KAGEDAN

2019. The law bans the wearing of religious clothing by teachers, police officers, and government lawyers, as well as by other public servants. The crucifix was duly removed from the National Assembly of Quebec. The Act has been widely criticized by other provincial governments and, as of the end of 2019, is facing a series of court challenges.48 A principal focus of discussion, since public consultations on reasonable accommodation began in 2007, has been the impact of a religious clothing ban on the employment of Muslim women. Quebec is the only jurisdiction in North America to have a religious clothing ban, although some European countries have taken similar steps. A study of the basis for public support of a measure for the ban concluded that the government managed to create a coalition of “strange bedfellows” to win support for the law. These “strange bedfellows” are, on the one hand, “enlightenment liberals” who believe in a strong and forthright secularization of the state and have little patience for a role for religion in the public sphere, and “conservative nationalists” who believe in reducing diversity and maintaining the cultural dominance of the majority group.49 Conservative nationalism reflects ethnocentrism with an assist from intolerant liberals can easily translate into the politics of othering— the demeaning of minority groups. The conservative nationalism is more intense in Quebec than in the rest of Canada because of the cultural insecurity created by Quebec’s minority situation in North America. How do we evaluate the politics of othering in the United States and Canada since 9/11? American foreign policy, which included military intervention in the Middle East, triggered a dynamic that had, as an unintended consequence, increased success for the politics of othering Muslims in the United States. In blood and treasure, the United States has experienced much more harm from groups that claim ties to Islam than Canada has endured. The loss of life of Americans is many times greater than the loss of life of Canadians, even accounting for population differences. The potential demand for othering, should it be triggered by politicians and opinion leaders was greater in the United States than in Canada. The context for this difference is the roles that each country played in international relations, as we have discussed above. American politicians and opinion leaders have lobbied for and enacted policies and laws at the federal and state levels that directly or indirectly are targeted at Muslims. The federal “Muslim ban” in immigration, and the multistate measures sold as protection against a stealthy Shariah takeover of America have no equivalent in Canada.

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

145

In Canada, on the federal level, there were modest efforts to shine a light on “barbaric cultural practices” which, first, put forward measures to protect girls and women, and second, became a touchstone for the 2015 election that saw a removal of that title from the Act. The Trudeau government, elected in 2015, was able to bring over 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada, many sponsored by private groups and charitable organizations, and included churches, mosques, and synagogues. Quebec alone took legal action that targeted Muslims and other minorities based on a European-style drive to secularism in public life and also a nationalism rooted in cultural insecurity that translated into negative attitudes toward Muslims.

Notes 1. Erik Love, Islamophobia and Racism in America, New York: New York University Press, 2017, 4. 2. Love, 4–5. 3. http://courts.state.va.us/opinions/opnscvtx/1980797.txt. Accessed on November 16, 2019. 4. Tim Weiner, “Killer of Two at CIA Draws Death Sentence,” The New York Times, January 24, 1988. 5. www.cnn.com/2013/07/27/us/seotenber-11-anniversary-fast-facts/ index.html. Accessed on November 16, 2019. 6. www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-was-flight-93-target/. Accessed on November 16, 2019. 7. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, New York: Columbia University, 2006, 91–96. 8. Mark Landler, “U.S. Troops to Leave Afghanistan by End of 2016,” The New York Times, May 24, 2014. 9. Defense.gov, “Casualty Statistics as of 11 November 2019.” Accessed on November 16, 2019. 10. DCAS.dmdc.osd.mi/dcas/pages/casualties_oif.xhtml. Accessed on November 15, 2019. 11. Peter Baker, “In Speech on Iraq, Obama Reaffirms Drawdown,” The New York Times, August 2, 2010. 12. Wadad Kadi and Aram A. Shain, “Caliph, Caliphate,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2031, 81–86. 13. Rukmini Callmachi and Faith Hassan, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS Leader Known for His Brutality, Is Dead at 48,” The New York Times, October 27, 2019, update on October 31, 2019.

146

A. L. KAGEDAN

14. Rukmini Callmachi, “ISIS Caliphate Crumbles as Last Village in Syria Falls,” The New York Times, March 23, 2019. 15. Kriner and Shen, “Battlefield Casualties and the Ballot Bo Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost the White House?,” http://forschungsnetzverk. at/downloadpub/2017_SSRN-id989040_usa.pdf. Accessed on February 3, 2020. 16. Alexander Nekrich, The Punished Peoples, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978, 91–92. 17. Eric Schmitt, Michael S. Schmidt, and Ellen Barry, “Bombing Inquiry Turn to Motive and Russian Trip,” The New York Times, April 20, 2013. 18. Scott Shane, “Boston Muslims Struggle to Wrest Image of Islam From Terrorists,” The New York Times, June 15, 2015. 19. Shimon Prokupecz and Greg Botelho, “Man Attacks New York Police Officers with a Hatchet,” CNN, October 24, 2014. Accessed on November 15, 2019. 20. Rukmini Callimachi, “Islamic State Says ‘Solders of Caliphate’ Attacked in San Bernardino,” The New York Times, December 5, 2015. 21. Shariah: The Threat to America, Center for Security Policy, 2010, 39. 22. Sanjeev Kumar H.M., “ISIS and the Sectarian Political Ontology: Radical Islam, Violent Jihadism and the Claims for Revival of the Caliphate,” India Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2018), 119–37. 23. On CAIR, see the May 2, 2011 statement, “CAIR Welcomes Elimination of Osama Bin Laden,” prnewswire.com. Accessed on February 3, 2020. On the Muslim Brotherhood, see Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West, New York: Columbia University, 2010. 24. James C. McKinley, Jr., “Judge Blocks Oklahoma’s Ban on Using Shariah Law in Court,” New York Times, November 30, 2010. 25. Lori Peek, Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans After 9/11, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. 26. Please see Erik Love, Islamophobia for these arguments. 27. Ben Wofford, “The Forgotten Government Plan to Round Up Muslims,” Politico, August 19, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ 2016/08/secret-plans-detention-internment-camps-1980s-deportationarab-muslim-immigrants-214177. 28. Julie Turkewitz and Kevin Roose, “Who Is Robert Bowers, the Suspect in the Pittsburgh synagogue Shooting,” New York Times, October 27, 2018. 29. Peek, 27. Also http://minetalegacyproject.com/timeline. Accessed on February 3, 2020. 30. Kim R. Nossal and Jean C. Boucher, The Politics of War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001–2014, Vancourver: UBC Press, 2017, xii, 6. 31. Nossal, 57. 32. Nossal, 70, 100. 33. Nossal, 44–54.

8

THE MALIGNING OF MUSLIMS

147

34. Nossal, 117–35. 35. CBC News, posted October 21, 2014. 36. Colin Freeze and Les Perreaux, “Suspected Killer in Ottawa Shootings Had Religious Awakening,” The Globe and Mail, October 22, 2014. 37. Allan Woods and David Bruser, “What Propelled Michael Zehaf-Bibeau on the Path to Radicalization,” October 24, 2014. 38. “Liberals End Attempt to Ban Niqabs from Citizenship Ceremonies,” National Post, November 16, 2015. 39. “Conservatives Vow to Create a Barbaric Cultural Practices Act Tip Line,” Globe and Mail, October 2, 2015. 40. “Conservatives Vow to Establish ‘Barbaric Cultural Practices’ Tip Line,” Globe and Mail, October 2, 2015. 41. “Syrian Refugees in Canada: Four Years After the Welcome,” The Conversation, December 2, 2019, theonversation.com. 42. Stephen Maher, “The Cautionary Tale of Kellie Leitch, MacLean’s, January 24, 2018,” Kellie Leitch on twitter, June 18, 2017. 43. CBC News, March 23, 2017, “House of Commons Passes AntiIslamophobia Motion”. 44. “Zachary Kamel, Martin Patriquin and Alheli Picazo, Maxim Bernier’s Alt-Right Problem,” Toronto Star, February 8, 2019. Also see Elizabeth Mcsheffrey and Alexander Quon, “Maxime Bernier Says N.S.PPC Candidate’s Tweets Were Racist but She Won’t Face Consequences,” Global News, October 12, 2019. Andrea Bellemare, “How a Misleader YouTube Video Is Stoking Fears About Shariah Law Before the Federal Election,” CBC News, July 26, 2019. 45. Andrea Bellemare, “How a Misleader YouTube Video Is Stoking Fears About Shariah Law Before the Federal Election,” CBC News, July 26, 2019. 46. Maxime Bernier, Tweet, July 18, 2019 at 11:43. 47. A. Bilodeau, L. Turgeon, S. White, and A. Henderson, “Strange Bedfellows? Attitudes Toward Minority Religious Symbols in the Public Sphere,” Politics and Religion (2018), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/s17550 48317000748. 48. Jonathan Montpetit, “One Law, Many Challenges: How Lawyers Are Trying to Overturn Quebec’s Religious Symbols Law,” CBC News, December 12, 2019. 49. A. Bilodeau, L. Turgeon, S. White, and A. Henderson, 1–25.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion

The book began its exploration of the politics of othering by looking for the sources of this human tendency to divide the world—and society— into “us” and “them.” The argument is that the “us” versus “them” tendency, which aligns with othering—the demeaning of a minority group—is seen throughout recorded human history. It forms part of the human behavioral repertoire. Although it can be managed through parental or peer influence, education, the creation of institutions, or the passing of laws, we will still face the challenge of othering, and the politics of othering. After all, effective law enforcement does not mean an end to crime. Some politicians, sensing this tendency to other, will seek to use it to their own advantage. Leveraging pressures of economic, political, or cultural strain, these politicians and opinion leaders will try to focus anxiety on “those people.” The politics of othering emboldens, curates, and marshals people who are uneasy about myriad issues to demand that something must be done about “those people.” The politics of inclusion, on the other hand, led by politicians and opinion leaders aims to build social solidarity, respect for all citizens, and compassion for noncitizens. The book sought to look at how seven minority groups—Indigenous, Jews, Japanese, left-wingers, gays, Blacks, and Muslims—felt the effects of the politics of othering at various periods from the late nineteenth century until the twenty-first century. Politicians and public opinion leaders, feeding on bias and anxiety in the public, characterized these groups as problematic.1 This occurred during a war situation (World War © The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9_9

149

150

A. L. KAGEDAN

II, for instance), a period of economic stress (like the Great Depression), a time of fear that a minority group would gain too much power (Civil Rights advances such as voting rights for Blacks Americans), for example. The kindling built up by historical context could be set on fire by the politics of othering. Any and all acts of othering are destructive—of individual lives and of social peace. Social interactions are based on a modicum of respect and trust. Once compromised, the results are policies and laws that discriminate, marginalize, and, in some instances can trigger relocation or culturally-focused genocide. Our task has been to look at how the politics of othering operated in the United States and Canada in a number of cases since the late nineteenth century. Based on the cases we selected, we found that, with an exception, the politics of othering had more salience in Canada prior to World War II, and more purchase in the United States after World War II. The key exception to this pattern relates to Black Americans. Black Americans were citizens of the United States but this fact helped them less than it assisted other minorities subjected to political othering. How can we explain the differential treatment of these same groups, on both sides of the border, with one trend showing itself before World War II and another trend revealing itself after the War? This is a complex question. The case studies in this book point to a number of factors that influenced the success or failure of the politics of othering: citizenship, education, social mobility, pragmatic diversity, anti-hate legislation, and the extent of foreign military intervention.

Citizenship Early in the book, it was pointed out that the idea of citizenship stands against the othering of minorities. This is because, once granted citizenship, an individual acquires rights in the legal system not available to noncitizens. Although politicians could engage in the othering of citizens, in some cases, there was successful recourse to the courts and, for that matter, a demand that citizens be treated differently than noncitizens. It is worth noting that Canada did not have its own citizenship until 1947. Before then, Canadians were considered nationals of Canada and subjects of the British Crown. Through wartime sacrifice and the building of Canada and the decline of Great Britain as a world power, the country awarded itself citizenship. In the case of the Japanese Americans,

9

CONCLUSION

151

and perhaps also Indigenous Americans, the fact that many were citizens mattered and offered a counterweight to the politics of othering— suggesting a politics of inclusion. This distinction between The United States and Canada ended in 1947.

Education Education can inform people about how to overcome prejudices—to see situations from a variety of points of view. Education also can help people find employment, reducing their vulnerability to economic pressures. It is difficult to compare education in the United States to education in Canada. However, it is possible to find data that reveals the results of the education—at least the contemporary results. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been assessing educational outcomes in its member states, which include the United States and Canada, for decades. In 2000, the OECD launched the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA measures the ability of 15-year-old students in OECD countries to use their knowledge to solve problems in mathematics, to evaluate their literacy level, and to take other measurements that would indicate how successful the students will be in transitioning into the labor force. In 2015, the U.S. PISA score was 488, two points above the average OECD Score. The Canadian PISA score was 523. The OECD also noted that in Canada the performance level was similar across social backgrounds.2

Social Mobility Social policy translates into social mobility. Being able to move up the socioeconomic ladder prevents resentment of others—specifically of minority group members—who may be seen as moving up as, or more quickly. In Canada, it is easier for a low-income person to move up into middle income than in the United States. In the United States one-half of the children born to low-income families themselves become low income; in Canada, 30% of children from low-income homes will become lowincome themselves.3 Greater social mobility in Canada is a result of a more effective education system, a health care system which does not plunge certain families into bankruptcy or poverty. In fact, according to the OECD, Canada is a highly socially fluid country. Nearly 75% of

152

A. L. KAGEDAN

Canadians aged 25–64 were in a different social class than their parents between 2002 and 2014.4 In the United States, individuals of working age get health care on the basis of their employment. If their employment ends, so does the health care coverage. Even if one has health care, there are many copayments and deductibles. A significant illness or disability could severely harm someone financially. Two government programs, Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for low-income people, offer some assistance. The stress around health care is another point of difference between the two countries, which can lay the basis for a search for a scapegoat that can come in the form of othering.

Pragmatic Diversity The acceptance of difference is characteristic of the politics of inclusiveness as against the politics of othering. Difference is most easily accepted between political equals. In Canada, the crucible for inter-group relations was a situation of “us” versus “them” in Canada: the English speaking and the French speaking. The English had defeated the French in battle in 1759, but permitted Quebec to exist, to a large extent, as a French-speaking territory and to live under French-inspired Civil Law as opposed to British Common Law. Significantly, Quebec had its own legislature that was always run by French Canadians. Quebec sent representatives to the Federal Parliament, and a number of French Canadians served as Prime Minister from the nineteenth century onward. It is true that, prior to the Quiet Revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, an English elite dominated business—but that changed after World War II. Starting in the 1960s, an independence movement grew in Quebec which threatened the unity of the country. Two referenda on independence—or sovereignty—were held. The first referendum was a lopsided victory for remaining in Canada. But the second referendum in 1995 was a nail-biter, with the “remain” side winning by less than 1%. For successive federal governments it was clear that, if national unity were to be maintained, there would have to be an acceptance of diversity between Englishspeaking and French-speaking Canadians. The two majorities meant that there was no single, monolithic majority for politicians prone to othering to launch their appeals. The political significance of duality emerged following the Quiet Revolution in Quebec when Quebec asserted itself and, at times, even leaned toward independence. Before the Quiet Revolution, Quebec was under the dominance of the Catholic Church and

9

CONCLUSION

153

authoritarian-leaning leaders who “delivered” Quebec votes. The fact of duality existed, but did not have as much significance for an acceptance of diversity nationally. It was on the basis of this political duality and diversity that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau built the idea of broader diversity—called multiculturalism at the time. Since then, it has been recognized that the English-Speaking and French-speaking cultures have dominant positions, together with a special position for Indigenous peoples and respect for minority cultures. The United States, like Canada, is diverse. But the historical situation was rather different: sharp inequality between groups. Black Americans were enslaved and possessed no political rights until after the Civil War. Even then, Blacks were subjected to segregation and many other policies to reduce their power and access to political participation and representation and to a better life. The political othering of Black Americans by politicians and opinion leaders, over generations, has taken various forms and used devices like linking Civil Rights to communism, and denying social programs to help Blacks on the grounds that the election of a single Black politician, like Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, meant the historically generated problems of Blacks were solved.

Anti-hate Legislation In the United States, limits are placed on speech that incites “imminent lawless action.” In Canada, there is a broader approach to hate speech, which has been upheld by the Courts. Canada adopted anti-hate legislation in 1970. The immediate cause was the activity of neo-Nazi groups in Canada that were inspired by and mirrored neo-Nazi groups in the United States. There have been few prosecutions under the anti-hate provisions of the Criminal Code and therefore limited jurisprudence on the subject. But the cases have helped to flesh out what is, and what is not, hate speech. In 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada described hate speech as follows5 : Hatred is predicated on destruction, and hatred against an identifiable group therefore thrives on insensitivity, bigotry and destruction of both the larger group and the values of our society…. Hatred is … an emotion that, if exercised against members of an identifiable group, implies that those individuals are to be despised, scorned, denied respect and made subject to ill-treatment on the basis of group affiliation.

154

A. L. KAGEDAN

Beyond the Criminal Code, the Broadcasting Distribution Regulations Act prohibits6 : …any abusive comment or abusive pictorial representation that, when taken in context, tend to or is likely to expose an individual or group or class of individuals to hatred or contempt on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age or mental or physical disability.

For the politics of othering, the fact that hate speech is in the Criminal Code and in other public documents gives people who are keen to use othering pause. They can try and camouflage their purpose but always risk being exposed. The measures send a strong and effective message of disapproval.

Foreign Military Intervention There seems to be a correlation between engagement in foreign military activity and intervention and the increased demand for othering. With exceptions, many of the enlisted military personnel are individuals who are less educated or of more modest means. The level of military casualties tends to fall unevenly in society with wealthier people sustaining fewer losses. Canada followed Britain into World War I, and though Canada took its own decision regarding World War II, it remained closely tied to Britain, a great power. However, after World War II, Canada assumed the role of a middle power and engaged in foreign military operations as part of a coalition under the banner of the United Nations or NATO, for example. Middle power Canada built up a significant welfare state in the 1950s and 1960s. Quite simply, Canada was at peace with many states, not at war, and less vulnerable to terrorism. This reduced the demand for othering in Canada in the postwar era. With World War II, America as a superpower was born. American bases were established around the globe. U.S. forces engaged in a wide range of conflicts in Korea, Vietnam and later in Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Canadian military joined in Korea, Somalia, and Bosnia, but stayed out of Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The self-willed role as a superpower made the United States into a target for attack and subversion at a level unknown to Canada. From the perspective of those

9

CONCLUSION

155

deployed into combat, foreign engagement was accepted but not sought, and the consequences for families and individuals could be severe. U.S. engagement with the Middle East since the 1960s, which involved economic investments and the establishment of military bases made the United States a key target for Middle East terrorists and, ultimately, was chosen as the target for attacks by al Qaeda—leading to a “demand” for actions to be taken against Muslims.

The Next Stage The case studies in this book have demonstrated that the politics of othering has been practiced in both the United States and Canada since the nineteenth century. Indeed, it has been an important factor in all recorded history. The past is prologue. There will be ongoing efforts by politicians and public figures to light the othering flame. Their success or failure will depend on current context—the balance of forces between conditions that assist or detract from othering. The factors we identified earlier in this chapter will affect the balance of forces. The value placed on citizenship versus the value placed on group loyalty; education levels; social mobility prospects; health care; foreign military interventions of long duration and high cost in military killed and injured. None of the factors turn on a dime: they are affected by policy choices and unexpected events. They are also affected by leadership—people who help interpret events to the public. Politicians decide on policy. Media figures, and people who communicate with thousands on social media, influence the vote seekers. There is no inevitability to political othering: the choice of using othering as a political weapon is a choice every politician and opinion leader must make. Looking forward both in the United States and Canada and to Europe and beyond, the future is likely to resemble the past: years of relative inclusiveness followed by eras of heightened othering at a political level. The kindling for the fire—in the form of broad-based discontent over one’s economic situation, involvement in a foreign conflict, as well as pandemic disease and climate change, may heighten persistent unease over people who look different and may practice a different culture. This toxic brew opens the door for politicians to practice the politics of othering. The decision of the government of Modi in India to question the citizenship of Muslims is a case in point. It appears to have won popular support among the majority Hindu population in India and, depending on how

156

A. L. KAGEDAN

vigorously it is pursued, can trigger civil strife and even conflict with its nuclear neighbor, Pakistan. Brexit, itself a product of an othering politics that called for Britain to defend its own interests against those of Europe, may, once instituted snowball into English-Scottish conflict, increasing the possibility of Scottish independence and the further splintering of the European Union itself. For all countries, the choices they and their political leaders make on the othering-inclusiveness continuum will be among the most significant political choices they will ever make.

What Is to Be Done? What are some strategies that can be adopted at the macro and micro levels to bend minds away from othering and toward inclusiveness? If we can reach the moon, why can’t we respect one another? Here are a few thoughts on reducing the demand for othering.

Education for Diversity This book has pointed to fundamental tendencies among humans to immediately trust and favor those like themselves and mistrust and spurn people who differ from themselves. There are innumerable cases of people overcoming basic othering tendencies to embrace a pluralistic view that disregards differences and values character over complexion. A key to this more open view is education in its broadest remit. Parents of majority-group white children face the challenging task of encouraging their children to understand concepts like discrimination and ask them how they would feel if faced with this type of situation. Children who attend a school with ethnically different children, or a playgroup or a youth group with children who look different will naturally feel more comfortable with difference for the rest of their lives. In both the United States and Canada, there are myriad programs in schools to encourage respect for diversity. As we saw in Chapter 7, the U.S. government facilitated the racial segregation of cities, which led in the 1960s and 1970s to effort to physically integrate schools through busing, and which triggered a strong political reaction. Canada never segregated its cities and never engaged in busing. Today, busing is gone and other efforts such as creating socioeconomic diversity in schools in the United States are underway. In both countries, educational authorities have recognized that othering can hurt the well-being of students who belong to an ethnic, religious, racial, or sexual minority.

9

CONCLUSION

157

For high school students, the history of the treatment of minority groups should be studied to provide a context for how a student might respond to an othering statement. This book has its focus on the politics of othering. Everyone involved in political life—a largely self-contained elite—must swear off the use of othering as a tool, no matter how tempting it would appear to be. The costs of political othering are enormous. This behavior can lead to deportation of an identifiable group, mass discrimination, altercations on the street, job discrimination. Quite simply, it is immoral to take such action, knowing that any benefit you derive personally from it will be at the expense of vulnerable individuals. And it will also be at the expense of working together on the big issues facing society—poverty, environmental issues, justice. Here, as elsewhere in politics, character counts along with a concern for all citizens. Words precede action. Hate speech and othering can be negatively affected by laws, policies, guidelines in two ways. First, if a society and its court system is open to hearing cases against persons accused of hate speech, it sends a signal to all who wish to make othering statements that they could violate the law, depending on how they say or communicate their views. This warning applies to politicians who, also, must weigh their words. By no means are hate speech laws or rules a panacea for othering— negative attitudes toward identifiable groups, if spoken in private or tied to public issue areas—such as national security—can escape scrutiny. And if the level of public antipathy to a group is profound, then either the hate speech legislation is weakened or scrapped, or the stretching of boundaries is permitted. But insofar as hate speech legislation reflects a sustained public consensus it can hamper promoters of the politics of othering. The world has been transformed by online activity. People who are promoting extreme but marginal views can now promote them at low cost, and enter a global community of people who share their views. Left unchallenged, conspiracy narratives can trump truth. The online businesses that permit such connection have an opportunity to influence the politics of othering by establishing guidance, akin of broadcast standards in the mass media, when complaints are received about alleged hate speech. Facebook, YouTube, and other online actors must wrestle with this difficult area—and this is essential, given the signal advantage that online activity can provide to purveyors of bigotry. In fact, technology can help people see, hear, and indeed, aided by carefully Virtual Reality applications (which avoid inadvertently reinforcing bias), that permit users

158

A. L. KAGEDAN

to better understand the role of a minority person and what it feels like to experience othering. Universities also have a role to play in the matter of othering. Since 9/11, Universities have embraced the study of national security issues, which were neglected previously. This has involved research, recruitment of specialists, and the coming together of disciplines from economics to psychology, history, political science, and military affairs. The same must be done for the study of othering, and, in particular, the politics of othering. Every person and every day are unique. But the human repertoire in the matter of othering keeps repeating itself over the millennia. It is worth pooling academic resources to gain more understanding of the contexts of othering, the opportunists who drive it, their opponents, its impacts on individuals, and on society. Knowledge of otherings’ doings will not end their career any more than the study of criminology has translated into the end of crime. But knowing how a human phenomenon operates helps devise approaches to reduce it. Recently, the history of bigotry and the impact of the politics of othering have received more public attention. Minorities hurt by acts of political leaders and their supporters have raised the question of taking down statues, removing paintings, and renaming streets and buildings. Insofar as these monuments give honor to these individuals, who were involved in political othering, removing pictures or statues of them may not prove as useful as confronting what they, with the support of their societies, actually did. The placing of a monument in a museum or other location where the monument can be enhanced by providing historical context is worth considering. Erasing these monuments can have the unintended consequence of denying ourselves and future generations knowledge of the past warts and all. Historical amnesia is dangerous and a missed opportunity to educate. Since a tendency to dislike the unlike is deeply ingrained in human history, one never knows when or where it will bite. Forewarned is forearmed. Every year, the Auschwitz concentration camp receives millions of visitors. It is a testament to a real historical tragedy. Imagine if the camp was demolished. This would rob us of a global teaching opportunity and would not honor the memory of the victims. The social contract around monuments, pictures, or names of people who led actions against minorities should be that, if they remain in place or if they are moved to a more suitable location or collection, we must add to them. A plaque or exhibit could provide basic context and reference a website for more information.

9

CONCLUSION

159

In all the cases examined in this book the leaders responsible for actions against minorities had public support. How will we—ourselves and our leaders—respond the next time a pressured situation arises? Will we address the issue or seek easy and false solutions? The politics of othering fails when the vast majority of people choose to look at the challenges they face squarely and reasonably, reject nonsolutions and embrace the principle of inclusiveness.

Notes 1. Dr. May Ling Halim and Dr. Sarah Gaither, “How to raise anti-racist babies, according to psychology,” NBCnews.com, June 28, 2020. 2. The data is taken from a number of sources. Oecdbetterlifeindex.org. “A Broken Elevator: How To Promote Social Mobility,” OECD, http://www. oecd.org/social/broken-elevator-how-to-promote-social-mobility-978926 430185-en.htm. Accessed on February 6, 2020; Miles Corak, “Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults?,” Discussion Paper, 1993, Institute for the Study of Labor, March 2006. http://ftp.iza.org/dp1993.pdf. Accessed on Feburary 6, 2020. 3. Miles Corak, “Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross-Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility,” Discussion Paper 1993, March 2006. Research on Economic Inequality, Vol. 13, No. 1, 143–188. 4. “A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility,” OECD, June 15, 2018 found at: oecd.org. 5. Supreme Court of Canada, R. v. Keegstra, 1990-12-13, scc-csc.lexum.com. 6. Broadcasting Distribution Regulations Act, to be found at: laws.justice. gc.ca.

Index

A Africville, 119, 123 Alfred P. Murrah Building, 127, 135 American South, 16 Anti-Communism, 132, 134 Anti-hate legislation, 150, 153 Anti-Semitism, 5, 18–20, 45, 55, 66, 95 Arcand, Adrien, 57, 61 Authoritarian, 3, 8, 9, 15–17, 19, 23, 25, 84, 153 B Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, 139 Benedict, Ruth, 14, 25 Bennett, Richard, 56 Bentley, Elizabeth, 86, 92 Blacks, 5, 7, 8, 14, 16, 25, 28, 29, 47, 105–121, 126, 149, 150, 153 Boas, Franz, 14 Borden, Robert, 71 Brexit, 2, 156 Brown, Donald, 8, 12–14 Browning, Christopher, 22

Bush, George H.W., 110, 112, 136, 146

C Caliphate, 126, 129, 131, 132, 145 Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), 117 Carlisle Barracks, 34, 36, 38 Chechnya, 130 China, 30, 88, 89, 128 Christianity, 6, 18, 30, 33, 62 Christie Pits, 62, 63, 67 Citizenship, 1, 5, 12, 13, 15, 18, 27, 30, 57, 69, 70, 75, 77, 79, 106, 136, 139, 147, 150, 155 Civil Rights, 21, 87, 90, 107–112, 114, 150, 153 Civil War (Spain), 64, 84 Civil War (U.S.), 34, 35, 91, 105–107, 109, 116, 117, 126, 140, 153 Cold War, 7, 83–85, 98, 99, 102, 104, 125, 134 Communism, 2, 7, 61, 64, 84–91, 93–95, 97, 153

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. L. Kagedan, The Politics of Othering in the United States and Canada, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52444-9

161

162

INDEX

Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), 77, 94 Couture-Rouleau, Martin, 138

D Dalhousie University, 63–65 De Bernonville, Jacques, 96, 97 Democrats, 4, 24, 88, 107–109, 133 Diefenbaker, John, 100 Douglas, Clifford Hugh, 58–60, 66 Drew, George A., 92–95, 97, 103 Dreyfus, Albert, 91 Duplessis, Maurice, 91, 93–95, 97

E Eisenhower, Dwight D., 89, 108, 122 Ethnocentrism, 12–15, 18, 144 Executive Order 9066, 74

F Far-right thinking, 6, 8, 9 Fishermen’s Protective Association, 76 Fruit Machine, 100, 101

G Genocide Convention, 7, 31, 42 Germany, 2, 7, 8, 17–24, 45, 54, 55, 84, 85, 87, 95, 96 Glass, John, 62 Gouzenko, Igor, 92, 100 Grierson, John, 93 Groulx, Lionel, 61

H Hiss, Alger, 88 Hitler, Adolph, 19–21, 23, 26, 45, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 64, 77, 84, 86

Hochshild, Arlie Russell, 9, 110, 122 Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), 113 Hoover, Herbert, 50, 65 Hoover, J. Edgar, 89, 98, 99 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 86–90 Human rights, 12, 14, 17, 24, 26, 84, 88, 133, 137, 140 Human universals, 8, 9, 12–14, 23, 25, 69

I Indigenous people, 6, 7, 24, 27–42, 79, 105 Internment camps, 70, 75, 136 Islam, 8, 18, 126–130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146

J Jamaica, 115 Japan, 70–73, 75, 77–79, 127, 134 Japanese, 7, 28, 69–80, 99, 112, 126, 127, 134–136, 149, 150 Jews, 7, 17–25, 29, 45–47, 49, 50, 52–65, 79, 95, 98, 109, 126, 134, 136, 149 Johnson, Lyndon B., 107, 109–111

K Kansi, Mir Amal, 126 Kellock-Tashereau Committee, 92 King, Dr. Martin Luther, 110, 112, 121 King, William Lyon-McKenzie, 28, 29, 56, 57, 73, 78 Knox, Frank, 73 Korematsu, Fred, 74

INDEX

L Lattimore, Owen, 88, 89 Laurendeau, Andre, 61 Lea, Homer, 72, 73, 80 Lewis, Stephen, 119, 120, 123 Liberal international consensus, 12–16, 24

M Maroons, 115 McCain, John, 110 McCarthyism, 7, 85, 87, 91, 95, 97 McGill University, 61, 63 Molotov-Ribbentrop, 84 Muslim Brotherhood, 98, 131, 132, 146 Muslims, 8, 25, 125, 126, 128–132, 134–136, 139–146, 149, 155

163

134–136, 139, 140, 142, 144, 149, 150, 152–158

P Padlock Law, 91, 92, 94 Pinker, Steven, 13, 25 Populism, 3, 4, 46–48, 52, 55, 57 Pratt, Richard Henry, 34

Q Quebec, 9, 29, 57, 60–62, 67, 91, 92, 94–97, 115, 139, 142–145, 147, 152, 153

N National Film Board (NFB), 93, 94 Nativism, 2, 3 Nazi, Nazis, 7, 8, 14, 17, 18, 20–24, 45, 56, 62, 63, 78, 84, 85, 87, 95, 97, 130, 153 New Deal, 86 Nietzsche, Fredrich, 18, 19, 26 Nixon, Richard, 111, 114 Nova Scotia, 65, 115, 119

R Rankin, Senator John, 55 Reagan, Ronald, 112, 122 Republicans, 1, 78, 88, 89, 107–109, 112 Residential school system American, 29, 31–37, 41, 42 Canadian, 29, 31–33, 37–43 International, 29, 30 Right-left paradigm, 4 Rose, Fred, 93 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 60, 91, 100, 101, 140 Rumilly, Robert, 91, 96

O Official Secrets Act, 93 Ontario, 60, 62, 67, 92, 103, 116, 118, 119, 123, 141 Othering, 2–9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 31, 36, 39, 45–47, 50–57, 60, 69–71, 74, 75, 79, 83–85, 88, 90, 91, 95, 98–102, 105–107, 109–114, 120, 121, 125–127, 130, 131,

S Sami people, 30 Schrecker, Ellen, 87, 102 Segregation, 55, 90, 106, 109, 113, 119, 121, 153, 156 Shariah, 131–134, 142, 144, 146, 147 Slavery, 5, 51, 105, 106, 115, 116, 118, 121 Smith, Goldwyn, 29 Social Credit Party, 9, 57–60, 65

164

INDEX

Social Darwinism, 28, 35 Soviet Union, 30, 50, 84–89, 92–94, 101, 130, 132, 133 Stalin, Joseph, 2, 85, 102 Stanley, Carleton, 64, 67 Stenner, Karen, 15, 16, 25 St. Laurent, Louis, 78, 94 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 116 Supreme Court, Canada, 153, 159 Supreme Court, U.S., 50, 52, 63, 70, 74, 78, 87, 90, 93, 106, 107, 134–136 Swastika Society, 62, 63 T The Valor of Ignorance, 72, 80 Till, Emmet, 108 Tribe, tribal, 12, 13, 27, 30, 31, 35 Trudeau, Justin, 1, 120, 124, 142 Trudeau, Pierre, 1, 118, 120, 153 Trump, Donald, 1, 129, 135 Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar, 130

Tsarnaev, Tamerlan, 130 Tubman, Harriet, 117

V Von Ribbentrop, Joachim, 21

W Wallace, George, 111 Wall, Don, 100 Wannsee Conference, 24 Watkins, John, 101 World War I, 7, 20, 22, 24, 34, 51, 62, 94, 117, 154 World War II, 5, 7, 8, 28, 45, 56, 61, 63, 69, 70, 72, 79, 83, 86, 87, 91, 93, 95, 98, 107, 112, 117, 125, 127, 130, 134, 150, 154

Z Zehaf-Bibeau, Michael, 138, 147