My grandmother, the "dreamer"

It was the late Spring of 1892 and my paternal grandmother celebrated her first birthday on a ship crossing the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Her parents left their native Poland to seek a new life in America.  My grandmother was a "dreamer."

One hundred and twenty-five years later, President Donald Trump has told "dreamers" that they are no longer welcome in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  (Dreamers are individuals in the U.S. who were brought to the country at an early age without documentation but have assimilated to U.S. culture and have been educated by U.S. school systems.)

DACA

President Barack Obama created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in June of 2012 after Congress failed to act,  but President Trump has decided to end DACA, ..... maybe.   DACA provided for administrative relief from deportation. It protects eligible immigrant youths who came to the United States when they were children from deportation. DACA gives young undocumented immigrants: 1) protection from deportation and 2) a work permit.

As of the1930 census, thirty-eight years after my grandmother's ocean journey, she was still not a citizen of the United States, but she became a productive member of US society until her death at the age of 92.  I have yet to find any documentation that she ever became a US citizen, although I believe she did sometime after 1930.

From the day the first settlers sailed up the James River and founded Jamestown in 1607, we have been a country of immigrants. Over the past 400 years, we have seen waves of immigrants seek the dreams of a new life in this great country.

Waves of immigration

The first wave was in the late 18th Century and early 19th.  These immigrants came primarily from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany.  The second wave of immigrants came from the 1820s to the 1860s.  These immigrants also came from European countries, primarily Germany, England, and Ireland.  The third wave from 1880 to 1914 were primarily from Eastern European countries, although the Western states saw a flood of immigrants from Asian countries.  The fourth wave, beginning in 1965 and continuing to present day is primarily from Hispanic countries and Asian countries.

The vast majority of these new immigrants became productive members of our melting pot of a society.  There are those who can only point to the bad acts of a very small minority of immigrants as one of their rationales on severely restricting immigration.  To the contrary of the sometimes hyperbolic rhetoric of the anti-immigration folks,  most major studies have shown a negative correlation between the percentage of non-documented immigrant population and crime rates.

Perhaps the wisdom of songwriter George Jackson provides some simple wisdom to the flawed argument of anti-immigrant enthusiasts.  "One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch."

Huddled masses

The United States, at least a majority,  have lived up to the words of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"  

Unfortunately, a sometimes vocal majority have believed and still believe that those immortal words only applied to them and not to those who came after.  They believe and believed the "golden door" should be slammed shut to prevent the "huddled masses" from over running "their" country.  Few beliefs fly more directly into the face of the beliefs that make our country the last refuge of those "yearning to breathe free."

DACA exemplifies the beliefs that make our country what it is.  It is consistent with the beliefs that allowed our nation to flourish and become one of the greatest nations the world has ever seen.  It helped create a country that is the freest society in the world.  It has not been an easy road, because some vocal minorities have thrown roadblocks in the way.

The Know Nothings

Our history is rife with anti-immigrant sentiment, but a particular example from the 19th Century may help us with the way forward.  In the late 1840s and early1850s, a political movement started known as the "Native American" party or just the "American" party, but most commonly know as the "Know Nothing" party.  (The nickname "Know Nothing" party came about because members of the "American Party" would claim to "know nothing" when asked about their political activities.

The Know Nothings were alarmed by an influx of immigration from Europe.  Many of the new immigrants were Roman Catholics, and this did not sit well with the predominant Protestant population.  The party reached its peak in the 1856 election when former President Millard Fillmore garnered 21.5 percent of the national Presidential vote as the standard bearer of the Know Nothing Party.  He ran on a nativist/anti-immigrant platform.

In 1855, a little known Illinois politician and future President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a friend:

"I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Fortunately for us all, the thoughts of Lincoln won the day, and have won the day for most of the 162 years that have passed since Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed.  Those same thoughts won the day when my grandmother, the dreamer, came to this country, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

We can only hope that the modern day Know Nothings join their 19th Century Know Nothings on the ash heap of history.

Obama not the first to use comedy to promote his agenda

Millard Fillmore

There has been a lot of criticism on the right about Obama appearing with Zach Galifianakis on Between Two Ferns in a comedy interview to promote Obamacare, even prompting Fox's Bill O'Reilly to say Abraham Lincoln wouldn't have done it.  Well, Bill, we think Lincoln would have done just about anything to save the Union, but Funny or Die wasn't around back then.

We had Buzz run some searches on the Univac 3000, and he found some interesting historical promotions by former Presidents.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford posed nude for a number of low circulation women's magazines in order to promote his WIN or Whip Inflation Now program.  His promotion included an eight page pictorial in the now defunct coupon magazine the Frugal Shopper.  Unfortunately, no copies of the November 15, 1975 edition of the magazine are still in existence.  Apparently, the late Katharine Hepburn purchased all the known remaining copies of the magazine in 1986, but it is not known whether she was a big fan of Jerry Ford or just a very frugal shopper.

Millard Fillmore, our 13th President, actually started a milk carton campaign, not dissimilar to the missing children campaign popularized in the 1980s.  Instead of children, Fillmore and members of his cabinet appeared on milk cartons, with the slogan "Have you seen this man?"  Fillmore discontinued the campaign when it turned out that Postmaster General Samuel D. Hubbard became the most popular milk carton, even surpassing Attorney General John J. Crittenden and himself.

Calvin Coolidge, a man generally regarded as our funniest American President, appeared in the early days of television on a variety show hosted by Henry Ford entitled Spot the Jew Among the Gentiles.  Ford realized the new medium of television would take off someday, but his antisemitic views greatly influenced his attempts at humor and programming.  Coolidge, not much of a campaign strategist didn't realize that there were fewer than 1000 television sets in the country, so his "Keep Cool with Coolidge" campaign failed in helping him secure a third term in the Oval Office.

Abraham Lincoln did in fact promote a "Save the Union" campaign in an early vaudeville act with then General Ulysses S. Grant.  Lincoln played straight man to the often hilarious and irreverent Grant.  The show had moderate success during some of the darker days of the Civil War, but the show fell apart after a performance in Nelson County, Kentucky, when Grant discovered the Jim Beam distillery.

And, finally, Thomas Jefferson, our third President appeared in public service pamphlets promoting abstinence with Sally Hemings.  The public service campaign was in response to a syphilis outbreak after Lewis and Clark returned from exploring the new lands of the Louisiana Purchase.  Jefferson was a widower at the time, so he posed for the pamphlet photo with one of his domestic servants.  The irony of choosing Hemings was that Jefferson fathered a number of children with Hemings.

Will the GOP go the way of the Whigs

After losing the popular vote in 5 out of the last six elections and facing an electorate that just doesn't agree with a lot of their hard right policies, the Republican Party is hurting and may be headed down the road to marginalization at best or extinction at worst.  They may join the Whigs on the ash heap of history.
For about 30 years, the Whig Party was a major national political party in the United States.  They won two Presidential elections, one in 1840 with popular General William Henry Harrison, and one in 1848 with another popular general Zachary Taylor.  Both died in office.
In the 1850s, the party fell apart.  It was primarily replaced with the Republican Party, but many Whigs jumped ship and joined the Democrats or one of a number of smaller parties, including the Know Nothing Party and the Constitutional Union Party.  In fact by 1856, the party failed to nominate a standard bearer.
The major causes of the downfall of the Whig Party were a failure to keep the coalition of divergent views together and the issue of slavery.  Many Southern Whigs supported slavery, while Northern Whigs generally opposed it, at least the expansion of it beyond the Old South.
The Republican Party of today is facing its own crisis, primarily brought on by a drift to the conservative right.  There are no more moderate Republicans.  Moderate is a dirty word in the Republican Party.  It has come to take on the same bad connotations as "liberal."
This drift to the right is popular with the base, but has little to attract swing voters.  The great middle in this country that decides elections is okay with the fiscal conservative policies spouted by the GOP, but the GOP stance on women's issues, gay marriage, and immigration has turned off a substantial portion of the voters in the middle.
The Republican Party also faces a demographic problem.  The GOP has become the party of older white men.  The electorate is becoming browner and blacker and more female.  These are three groups that vote Democratic, and it appears the numbers will only get worse for the GOP.
The African American vote has been strongly Democratic for over a generation.  The Hispanic vote has dropped from around 40 percent for the GOP to about 25 percent.  The women's vote has switched from fairly even to about a 15 point edge for the Democrats.  All three of these groups are growing in numbers, with the Hispanic vote growing the fastest.
The National Republican Committee (NRC) conducted an "autopsy" on the 2012 election, and came to the obvious conclusion that they need to get a better percentage of the vote from these three groups.  The problem is they believe it is a failure to get their message across, and if they fine tune their message, these groups will flock to the GOP.
The NRC is dead wrong.  These groups have heard the GOP message loud and clear, and they don't like what the GOP is selling.  It's not the branding of the message that turns off these groups, it is the message.
A large percentage of these groups are totally turned off by the GOP's harsh stance on immigration, their attempts to suppress the African American vote, and their 1950s attitude towards women. Hispanics favor some sort of amnesty and path to citizenship for undocumented aliens, African Americans want to be able to vote without facing Jim Crow type hurdles at the polls, and women don't want the government interfering with decisions they make on their own bodies.
If the GOP doesn't break free from the stranglehold of the conservatives and religious right, they will join the Whigs on the ash heap of history.  We won't see a one party state, but it may take a while for a new party, more moderate than the GOP, to challenge the grand Democratic coalition.