Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious and Racial Prejudice in America

A Short History of Ethnic, Religious and Racial Prejudice in America

Philip Perlmutter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780765604064
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317466215
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: History

For all its foundation on the principles of religious freedom and human equality, American history contains numerous examples of bigotry and persecution of minorities. Now, author Philip Perlmutter lays out the history of prejudice in America in a brief, compact, and readable volume. Perlmutter begins with the arrival of white Europeans, moves through the eighteenth and industrially expanding nineteenth centuries; the explosion of immigration and its attendant problems in the twentieth century; and a fifth chapter explores how prejudice (racial, religious, and ethnic) has been institutionalized in the educational systems and laws. His final chapter covers the future of minority progress.

Chapter One

The Seeds of Contempt

Although rightfully hailed as a land of opportunity, freedom, equality, and justice, America has also been criticized as a nation born, bred, and nurtured in interracial, interethnic, and interreligious rivalries and conflicts, wherein one group’s well-being was often achieved at another’s expense. Rarely were the conflicts a matter of absolute right or wrong, though each group claimed to be the injured party and utilized varied means to advance or protect itself, including invidious rules and regulations, murder, and war.

From the time of America’s discovery to the nineteenth century, Old and New World conflicts were replicated and magnified. Immigrants from the same region or country tended to form colonies, outposts, settlements, and communities, as well as a variety of group-specific religious, ethnic, social, and fraternal organizations. Few were the groups not in contention with one another because of differing beliefs or competing ambitions.

Intergroup conflicts often involved problems of ethnicity and race: Indians versus Indians, Whites versus Whites, Whites versus Indians, Whites versus Blacks, and Blacks versus Indians. Religion also provided a focus of conflict, pitting Protestant against Protestant, Catholic against Catholic, Protestant against Catholic—and all of these against other religions. The profusion and polarity of European Christians—Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Quakers, Anglicans, and Anabaptists—were carried over to the New World, where at varying times Catholic Spain, Portugal, and France vied with each other or with Protestant Holland and England.

Finally, geopolitics created conflict as each European power sought to establish its private territory: the English, Dutch, Swedes, and Scotch along the East Coast; the French in the north and south central areas; the Spanish in the Southwest, Southeast, and Far West; and the Russians in the Pacific Far Northwest. Far from home, they encroached on each other’s territories and particularly on those of the Indians, who in their own intertribal differences made alliances with one or another European power.

The most successful European invaders, of course, were the English, whom the Sieur d’Iberville, in 1699, accurately predicted would expel all others because however much they enriched themselves, they “do not return to England but stay and will flourish by their riches and their great efforts; while the French abandon them and retire as soon as they have gained a little wealth.”¹ Slowly but surely, the other European powers were forced to withdraw, first by the English and then by the Americans.

If in the nineteenth century a clear pattern of group pluralism, prejudice, succession, and exploitation existed, its early forms were seen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Poor Whites—indentured servants, redemptioners, and convicts—were encouraged to immigrate to America to do menial labor. Cervantes labeled America a refuge for the scum of all Spain.² What White people could not or would not do, Indians were compelled to do, and failing that, indentured Europeans, convicts, and Black slaves were brought over to do. In the pursuit of profits and power, the early immigrants and colonizing companies, like later industrial employers, stimulated Black-White and Indian-Black rivalries. Ethnic prejudice was widespread, with Germans, Scotch Irish, Irish, and Scots the least liked and often assigned or encouraged to settle in areas that served as buffers to the Spanish in the South, the French in the West and North, and Indians wherever they were. Throughout the time, the European colonists feared uprisings, attacks, or rebellions by those indentured, enslaved, or confined to the frontiers.

Some early writers went so far as to claim that America’s very discovery was a mistake, which led to the extermination of Indians and their civilization, the provocation of imperialist wars, the extension of slavery, the spread of fatal diseases, and the depopulation of Europe’s talented and enterprising young men. “All strength and all injustice were on the side of the Europeans,” said Holland’s Abbe Corneille De Pauw in 1768, who argued that because the natives in America had only weaknesses, “they were therefore bound to be exterminated, and exterminated in an instant’s time … the conquest of the New World, so celebrated and so unjust, has been the greatest of all misfortunes to befall mankind.”³

Other commentators romanticized America as a New World to which only people of goodwill and courageous heart fled in search of freedom and the peaceful pursuit of happiness. They were portrayed as benign discoverers and explorers, who brought religion, morality, and civilization to an illiterate, savage, and sinful native population. To such observers from afar, America was synonymous with liberty and an opportunity to start a new life, free of religious, political, and economic taboos and tyranny. The military brutality, religious intolerance, and ethnic prejudice of the time were ignored or played down, however, except for the memories and folklore of their victims.

A fair reading of American history will show that though there was evil in America, all was not so. The distinction is both logically and historically crucial for understanding American intergroup relations. Just as America was a land of Indian dispossession and Black enslavement, so was it one of refuge and opportunity for countless religious, political, and economic émigrés. And just as scoundrels, criminals, and killers came here, so did good and compassionate people, who decried the injustices about them and demanded their compatriots conform to a standard of behavior that would make the New World better than the Old World and closer to the ideals of the Promised Land.

Indian-Indian Relations Before Columbus

If contemporary American is a pluralistic wonderworld, the same was true before Columbus landed. For millennia, Asian nomads, hunters, and explorers settled the lands from the Bering Sea to Cape Horn. Not until man occupies another planet, wrote one scholar, will he explore so vast a domain. Siberian immigrants allegedly came to America in 22,000 B.C. and reached South America by 9400 B.C. In Brazil, recent archeological findings suggest that human life existed at least 32,000 years ago.⁴

At the time Columbus set sail, estimates on how many natives lived in the Americas range from some 8 million to more than 75 million. What is fairly certain is that they developed some 160 language families, with at least 1,200 dialect subdivisions, totaling more native-language families than in the rest of the world. Moreover, contrary to stereotypes of Indians as high-cheeked, hawk-nosed, and red-skinned, they reflected more variations in height, face, and color than in the whole White racial stock.⁵

With such diversity, it is not surprising that before the first Europeans came, there were native-native conflicts that involved torture, murder, scalping, cannibalism, and slavery. Because they had no guns or horses, the Indians fought on foot with bows and arrows, stone-tipped spears, and clubs. In one form or another, slavery was practiced by the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, the Cuna of Central America, Northwest coastal tribes, and various tribes in Louisiana, Florida, and northward up the coast to Virginia. Male Indian slaves were often subject to harsher treatment than females and children. Tlingit Indians killed slaves and used their bodies as foundations for house posts or totem poles. The Kwakiutl sometimes killed their slaves on the beach so that their bodies could be used as rollers for incoming canoes of esteemed guests. In the Southeast, the feet of slaves were often mutilated to prevent their running away. At times, powerful tribes (such as the Tsimshians and Chinooks) raided weaker ones for prisoners, who were then sold as slaves to wealthier but less powerful tribes. Even among the Eskimos, blood feuds, quarrels, and wars abounded over women or hunting and fishing boundaries.⁶

A few Indian tribes practiced scalping and head taking as wartime rituals, particularly the Tunicas and Muskogeans in the Southwest. The practice of scalping spread to many tribes when the White settlers provided bounties for the scalps of enemy Indians.

Cannibalism was also practiced by such tribes as the Aztecs, Tupinamba, Guarani, and the Caribs, after whom the word cannibalism was coined. The Guarani of South America killed some 60,000 Arawakan Chane and enslaved the remainder, a few of whom were slaughtered when their captors felt hungry. One demographer estimated that the Aztecs alone sacrificed 250,000 people a year, eating their limbs and feeding their torsos to animals. Forced tribute and labor were common practices, even among the highly advanced Indian societies, so that when the Spanish took over, it meant little more than a change of masters.⁷

Farther north, the Iroquois, Hurons, Algonquins, Montagnais, and Ottawas frequently cannibalized captured Indian and European enemies after ceremoniously torturing them. In describing Iroquois practices, one observer wrote, “Then, they tear the heart from the breast, roast it upon the coals, and, if the prisoner has bravely borne the bitterness of the torture, give [it] seasoned with blood, to the boys, to be greedily eaten, in order, as they say, that the warlike youth may imbibe the heroic strength of the valiant man.”⁸

Throughout North America, intertribal warfare, slave taking, and plunder were common. The early-seventeenth-century French missionary Gabriel Sagard reported scarcely any Indian “nation which is not at war and dissension with some other, not for the purpose of possessing their territory and conquering their country, but solely to exterminate them if possible and take revenge for some slight wrong or unpleasantness.”⁹

At their worst, Indians were no different from Europeans back home or in America. Both Catholics and Protestants tortured and killed each other and dissenters within their ranks. Martin Luther favored burning witches, and John Calvin had no hesitancy in having his theological opponent, Michael Servetus, burned alive. Depending on who was in power in England, Protestants or Catholics were tortured, hanged, burned, or beheaded. In a four-year period, “Bloody Mary,” the daughter of Henry VIII, burned 300 Protestants.¹⁰

When Europeans confronted Indians, both discovered the other’s savagery, “but in the inevitable conflict of a culture of iron with Neolithic cultures, the sword was bound to sharpen itself on the stone.”¹¹ By introducing horses, metal knives, hatchets, and especially guns and rum, the Europeans consciously and unconsciously intensified inter-Indian disunity and warfare. Unfortunately for the Indians, they never foresaw the destruction that was to befall them.

The “First” in America

From the earliest days of America’s recorded history, a profusion of claims and theories existed about who the first residents and “discoverers” were. One Norse saga told of how some seamen, in 1029, driven off course on the way to Iceland, touched land somewhere south of the Chesapeake Bay, where they met people who “appeared to them that they spoke Irish.” Another saga referred to the area as Irland-it-Mikla, that is, Great Ireland.¹²

Some early Spanish writers said that the Indians probably descended from such groups as Carthaginians, Jews, Chinese, Tartars, Romans, Japanese, Koreans, Egyptians, Moors, Canary Islanders, Ethiopians, French, English, Irish, Germans, Trojans, Danes, Frisians, or Norsemen. Father Gregorio Garcia, in the sixteenth century, saw similarities between Indians and Jews because both were cowards, lacked charity, and did not believe in Jesus, which also explained why Jews were dispersed and Indians persecuted. Another Spanish writer claimed that western Indian languages contained many Hebrew and Yiddish words and that the natives, like Jews, had long noses, spoke gutturally, wore side curls, and were circumcised.¹³

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans projected biblical explanations. For having dared build the Tower of Babel, God had punished the residents, scattering them throughout the world, with those farthest from Creation’s center the most fallen from Grace. In England, in 1650, the Reverend James Thorowgood published a book, Jews in America or Probabilities that those Indians are Judaical. In An Historical and Geographical Account of Pennsylvania, published in 1698, the first inhabitants were said to resemble “the Jews very much in the Make of their Persons, and Tincture of their Complexions … and have a kind of Feast of Tabernacles, laying their Altars upon Twelve Stones.”¹⁴

On the other hand, to the famed Dutch scholar and statesman Hugo Grotius, Indians in the North were descended from Norwegians, those in the Yucatan from Ethiopians, and those in Peru from Chinese. Some Indians were thought to be of Welsh descent because of their fair skins, blue eyes, blond hair, and Welsh-sounding words. A young English Methodist was sent to America to find and reconvert them, only to report, “I could not meet such a people, and from intercourse I have had with Indians from latitudes 35 to 49, I think you may safely inform our friends they have no existence.”¹⁵

By the late eighteenth century, a belief grew that the thousands of mounds of earth in the Mississippi Valley were not built by Indians but by a more intelligent race, probably White and possibly Jewish, who, though no longer there, proved a White racial ownership and a justification for displacing Indians. Early-nineteenth-century American men of science proffered a number of explanations: the “first” Americans were Malays conquered by Tartars from northwest Asia, who in turn became Indians; they were descendants of Noah, who had come after the Flood or had migrated from North Africa via the West Indies, to be followed by Romans, Egyptians, Norwegians, Welsh, Greeks, and others; or they were indeed Indians, but related to Egyptians who had developed the civilizations of Mexico and Peru.¹⁶

By the century’s end, priority of discovery became saturated with Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic pride, leading many a nativist and New England patrician to oppose the creation of a Columbus Day holiday because Columbus was Catholic, never set foot on the continent, and was usurping credit due Leif Ericson.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to Revised Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Seeds of Contempt
• 2. The Weeds of Contempt
• 3. Proliferation of People and Problems
• 4. The Expansion of Democratic Pluralism
• 5. The Teaching of Contempt
• 6. The Future of Minority Progress
• 7. Notes
• Index
• About the Author