Immigrants and Animals: A Trope of American History

Gabriel Winant has a piece about the racist attacks on the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio at the New York Review of Books. He goes into the history of Springfield quite a bit and you should read the whole thing, but I wanted to highlight the long history of racists lying about what immigrants eat in order to demonize them.

Springfield’s factories, however, drew more of their labor from the internal hinterland than from the peasantries of Italy, Poland, and Austria-Hungary. The poor folk of the US South who could no longer scratch out a living as debt peons growing cotton or digging coal endured the ordeal of adjustment as well. And not only the black migrants whom plebeian white Northerners greeted with violence, but also the thousands of white “hillbillies”—the ancestors of J.D. Vance. As the historian Max Fraser shows in his recent book Hillbilly Highway, they too had “the undesirable qualities of the new immigrant.”

 In nearby Dayton, for example, landlords rented to “hillbillies” by the week, fearing they would skip out on leases; the health department bemoaned that they had to be instructed on “cleanliness, immunizations, sanitation, and nutrition” at a fourth-grade level. “Our laws and customs are different from anything they’ve known,” complained a Cincinnati cop.

With each new wave, the same howl rose from an American throat: this group is too different, too unprepared, too ill-bred: these Irish, these Chinese, these Italians, these Jews, these “colored people,” these hillbillies, these Mexicans, these Salvadorans, these Venezuelans, these Haitians. In 1909, for instance, California newspapers published stories claiming that Chinese gang warfare in San Francisco was fueling a trade in cat meat. “There is a superstitious belief among the Chinese that if their warriors are fed on the flesh of wild cats, they will assimilate the ferocity of the beasts.” In 1911 a Brooklyn man accused “a gang of foreign laborers”—ethnicity unspecified—of catching and eating his three cats. Then, as now, the provenance of the account was indirect; the story was thirdhand by the time it was printed.

To say that economic development and the creative destruction that attends it—discarding or elevating old working populations, installing new ones—creates a new phantasmagoria of cat-eating immigrants in every generation is only to describe from another angle the basic historic problem of the American working class. Continually flushed with new entrants, the working class in this country has always heard in one ear an appeal to detest the newcomers, to abhor their lawless ways and their degenerate habits. This voice has sometimes come from within the house of labor, although almost invariably its right wing. In 1902 the president of the AFL, Samuel Gompers, cowrote a pamphlet insisting that “sixty years’ contact with the Chinese, twenty-five years’ experience with the Japanese and two or three years’ acquaintance with Hindus should be sufficient to convince any ordinarily intelligent person that they have no standard of morals by which a Caucasian may judge them.”

It’s always the same shit. It’s just now the people making these claims have last names such as Rufo, a sign of how the degeneracy of the Italian race has affected our national body and collective mind…..