The End of the Myth, page 18
The Klan focused on many of the Roaring Twenties’ threats: jazz, immorality, Jews, high taxes, and African Americans. But it also increasingly fixated on the border, harassing migrants as far away as Oregon.28 “Thousands of Mexicans,” Evans said, “many of them communist, are waiting a chance to cross the Rio Grande and glut the labor marts of the Southwest.” Prohibition had turned many border towns honky-tonk, with liquor, marijuana, and narcotics run in from Mexico. The “cesspools of El Paso” was how one Baptist minister described the city’s dance halls, speakeasies, and brothels, which many Protestants blamed on Catholic Mexicans and Mexican Americans.29 El Paso’s Frontier Klan Number 100 vowed to “strive for the eternal maintenance of white supremacy.” The border Klan infiltrated fraternal organizations and Protestant churches, took over school boards, and quickly established a presence in local police and state national guards, where they helped reinforce minority white rule by suppressing the Mexican American vote.30
By 1922, violence on the border had grown so acute that the Department of State—an office that usually attends to foreign policy—felt compelled to intervene. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes wrote to the governor of Texas, pleading with the governor as if he were a sovereign foreign leader presiding over a rogue government carrying out an illegal occupation. “I beg urgently,” Hughes said, “to request that adequate measures be immediately taken to afford complete protection for Mexican citizens.” Hughes was concerned about an incident in the oil boomtown of Breckenridge. In November, a mob organized under the name White Owls had lynched a Mexican migrant and then marched through town threatening all people of color. This show of white power provoked a “sudden exodus” of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. It wasn’t “too extravagant to say,” wrote the New York Times of the incident, “that there is an open season for shooting Mexicans in unpoliced districts along the Rio Grande” (though it was often police doing the shooting). Mexico’s envoy to Washington started compiling a list of victims of vigilantism, counting “between fifty and sixty Mexicans” who had been violently murdered in 1922 alone.
“The killing of Mexicans without provocation,” the Times wrote, “is so common as to pass almost unnoticed.”31
5.
The United States Border Patrol was officially established two years later, as part of the comprehensive 1924 Immigration Act, and immediately became arguably the most politicized branch of law enforcement, even more so than J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. The debate leading up to the passage of the act was intense; nativists warned that with its open-border policy, the country was committing “race suicide” and was in danger of “mongrelization.” Forty thousand Klansmen marched on Washington demanding entrance restrictions. The 1924 law codified into immigration policy a xenophobia that had deep roots in the nation’s history. Immigration from Asia fell to practically zero, while arrivals from central and southern Europe were sharply reduced. Most countries were now subject to a set quota system, with western European countries assigned the highest numbers.
Mexico, though, was exempt, as those in favor of restriction lost out to business interests. “Texas needs these Mexican immigrants,” said the state’s Chamber of Commerce.32 There were also other indications that, despite having passed the 1924 law, Anglo-Saxonists were losing their grip on the country’s political and legal institutions. Puerto Ricans had been declared citizens by the Supreme Court, while Congress, in June 1924, voted to grant citizenship status to Native Americans born in the country. Wilson, despite his racism, had opposed immigration restrictions. And though his successors, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, were strong for limits, Harding (rumored to be both part African American and a member of the KKK) was the first twentieth-century president to give a speech specifically addressing civil rights. Speaking in 1921 in Birmingham, Alabama, he called for the granting of “full citizenship” to African Americans. Harding’s call was explosive: “untimely and ill-considered,” the Birmingham police rebuked the twentieth-century president, while a Mississippi senator said that if the “president’s theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion, then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States.”33 The Caucasian democracy was starting to come undone.
Having lost the national debate when it came to restricting Mexicans, and fearing they were losing the larger struggle in defense of Anglo-Saxonism, white supremacists took control of the newly established U.S. Border Patrol and turned it into a vanguard of race vigilantism. The patrol’s first recruits were white men one or two generations removed from farm life, often with military experience or with a police or ranger background. Their politics stood in opposition to the big borderland farmers and ranchers who wanted cheap labor.34 Unlike the Chamber of Commerce, they didn’t think that Texas—or Arizona, New Mexico, and California—needed Mexican immigrants. Earlier, in the mid-1800s, the Mexican–American War had unleashed a broad, generalized racism against Mexicans throughout the nation. That racism, in the years after 1924, distilled and concentrated along an increasingly focused line. Whatever the specific provisions of national immigration law, it was the agents who worked for the border patrol, along with customs inspectors, who decided who could legally enter the country from Mexico. They had the power to turn what had been a routine daily or seasonal event—crossing the border—into a ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and even more degrading. Migrants had their heads shaved, and they were subjected to an ever-more-arbitrary set of requirements and to the discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees.
The Juárez–El Paso bridge became something like a stage, or a gauntlet; as Mexicans crossed, they were showered with spit and racial epithets by federal employees of the U.S. government. Border patrol agents beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity. The patrol wasn’t a large agency at first, and its reach along a two-thousand-mile line was limited. But its reported brutality would grow as the number of its agents, over the years, increased. Migrants had no rights, which gave the patrol absolute impunity. Two patrollers, former Texas Rangers, were accused of tying the feet of migrants together and dragging them in and out of a river until they confessed to having entered the country illegally. Other patrollers were members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, active in border towns from Texas to California. “Practically every other member” of El Paso’s National Guard “was in the Klan,” one military officer recalls, and many had joined the border patrol upon its establishment.35
In 1929, before the stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover signed a law that, as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández puts it, advanced the “criminalization of informal border crossings.” The law had been introduced into Congress by Coleman Blease, South Carolina’s white supremacist senator, who as governor of his home state had publicly encouraged the lynching of African American men as “necessary and good.” Blease was brokering what Hernández calls a compromise between employers and restrictionists. Accepting the fact that Mexican migrants would be exempt from national quotas, the new law made it a crime to enter the country outside official ports of entry.36
Then, after Wall Street collapsed and unemployment spread, Hoover tried unsuccessfully to politicize anti-Mexican nativism to win reelection in 1932, hiring more agents and activating previously lax provisions of immigration law to place pressure on Mexican communities. At the same time, states like California and Texas took severe action against migrants and Mexican Americans, with some of the country’s leading intellectuals associating Mexicans with peril, disease, and menace (including one prominent professor of zoology who in the pages of the mainline North American Review worried about “racial replacement”).37 The federal government encouraged agencies set up to deal with unemployment to cull the labor force. Charles Visel, head of the Los Angeles chapter of Hoover’s unemployment relief agency, sent a telegram to the administration counting “four hundred thousand deportable aliens” in the United States. “We need their jobs,” he said. Visel suggested that police and sheriff’s offices stage high-profile raids “with all publicity possible and pictures,” a “psychological gesture” that would “scare many thousand alien deportables” into leaving the country. The White House gave the go-ahead.38 As employment rolls, and farm prices, collapsed, many migrants and Mexican Americans did leave, either because they were deported or in response to such threats. Estimates of how many vary, ranging from three hundred thousand to two million.39
“The present administration,” the New Republic observed in 1931, “is pursuing a general policy toward aliens which would delight the most fanatical member of the Ku Klux Klan.”
* * *
The 1924 Immigration Act, then, had an explosive effect. On the one hand, the limits it placed on the numbers of European and Asian migrants who could enter the United States reinforced Mexico’s importance as a source of cheap labor for the United States’ expanding economy. On the other hand, it created an agency—the U.S. Border Patrol—that institutionalized a virulent form of nativism and concentrated its animus on Mexican migrants.
To understand the nation’s current crisis—especially the way anti-migrant nativism has become the binding agent for what is now called Trumpism—one has to understand that the border, over the long course of its history, has effectively become the negation of the frontier. The long boundary separating Mexico from the United States served as the repository of the racism and the brutality that the frontier was said, by its theorists, to leave behind through forward motion into the future. To say that the frontier “marginalized” extremism isn’t just a metaphor or a turn of phrase. Anglo-Saxonism was literally pushed to the margins, to the two-thousand-mile border line running from Texas to southern California. Other kinds of racist extremism certainly found expression throughout the whole of the country, from lynching and Jim Crow to northern segregation.40 Supremacism was also kept sharp in the country’s serial wars. But an important current that has fed into today’s resurgence of nativism flows from the border.
One example in particular captures what could be called the nationalization of border brutalism, or the border-fication of national politics. In 1931, Harlon Carter, the Laredo son of a border patrol agent, shot and killed a Mexican American teenager, the fifteen-year-old Ramón Casiano, for talking back to him. Carter then followed his father into the patrol, becoming one of its most cruel directors. Presiding over Operation Wetback in the 1950s, Carter transformed the patrol into, as the Los Angeles Times wrote, an “army” committed to an “all-out war to hurl tens of thousands of Mexican wetbacks back into Mexico.”41 Carter was already a member of the National Rifle Association when he murdered Casiano, and he remained a high-ranking officer with the organization through his years with the border patrol. Then, in 1977, after his retirement from the patrol, he led what observers called an extremist coup against the (relatively) more moderate NRA leadership, transforming that organization into a key institution of the New Right, a bastion of individual-rights absolutism—in this case, for the right to bear arms. Likewise, it was a border patrol agent who in 2015 invited Donald Trump to tour Laredo’s port of entry, just a few days after Trump announced his presidential candidacy.
“It all started with the border. And that’s still where it is today,” run the first two lines of the Drive-By Truckers’ 2016 song “Ramón Casiano.” The song ends: “And Ramón still ain’t dead enough.”
TEN
A Psychological Twist
“To subdue the social wilderness.”
1.
Frederick Jackson Turner had originally conceived his Frontier Thesis as a sociology of vastness, using it to explain how seemingly infinite free land created a unique, vibrant political equality. It was then amended, by politicians, into an ideology of limitlessness, used to justify wars as far away as the Philippines. But starting around the second decade of the twentieth century, critics began to turn the thesis against itself. Turner and his followers had posited “the frontier” to account for all the bad things that the United States had managed to avoid: despotism, militarism, collectivism, class conflict, servility. Now, others started to give the same answer—“the frontier”—whenever they asked why the United States couldn’t have good things, like social rights, or a government with the capacity to respond to social problems, or a culture that wasn’t mawkish.
Turner especially valued individualism as a national virtue. But those who inverted Turner now regarded individualism, at least in its extreme form, as a vice, responsible for many of America’s ills. Walter Weyl, an editor of the New Republic, where much of this criticism took place, wrote in 1912:
The westward march of the pioneer gave to Americans a psychological twist which was to hinder the development of a socialized democracy. The open continent intoxicated the American. It gave him an enlarged view of self. It dwarfed the common spirit. It made the American mind a little sovereignty of its own, acknowledging no allegiances and but few obligations. It created an individualism, self-confident, short-sighted, lawless, doomed in the end to defeat itself, as the boundless opportunism which gave it birth became at last circumscribed.1
Weyl accepted Turner’s premise. Frontier democracy, “raw, crude,” was powerful, creating the nation’s wealth. But its “evil” lingered, in a reflexive anti-government sentiment that prevented adequate solutions to the country’s many problems: plutocracy, racism (“Our ten million Negroes, considered as a whole, are the most exploited section of the community”), class domination, and corruption. Where romanticists of the frontier said that its resources were unlimited, its vistas infinite, Weyl warned of the “new preëmptor,” a phrase he used to describe the economic monopolies that were exhausting the country’s raw material. “Like the pioneer, though on a much greater scale,” the preemptor “wasted, ravaged, and laid fire.” “Vast forests were destroyed by machinery with the rapidity of fire,” he wrote. Capitalism, Weyl said, had created a “social surplus” of wealth that the state should seize and distribute, in the form of education, health care, and other forms of economic security. Weyl argued for new forms of rational conservation in rural areas to save the natural world. For the urban “slum”—a phrase Weyl used with almost the same frequency that Turner did “frontier”—he urged applied policy to lift its residents out of poverty and illness.
Writing prior to World War I, Weyl was an optimist, believing that with the landed frontier closed, the “wild excesses” of “ultra-individualism” had come to an end. Citizens now had to develop the tools to address the crises of modern life. He called himself a socialist. But socialism for Weyl was as much a psychological as an economic state, an emotional recognition of limits, a check on a boundless id, which often expressed itself as a nostalgic yearning for a limitless frontier. Turner said that the American found himself by losing himself in the woods. Weyl said that, upon having hit the end of the road at the Pacific, the American found himself by “falling back upon” himself—and falling back on others, to realize that he is, indeed, a social being. The “soul of our new democracy is not the unalienable rights, negatively and individualistically interpreted, but those same rights, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ extended and given a social interpretation.”
Another critic who inverted Turner was Lewis Mumford. Nothing good took place in the woods, Mumford said, and nothing virtuous came out of them either. “The life of the pioneer was bare and insufficient,” he wrote in 1926, in a long essay called The Golden Day; “he did not really face Nature, he merely avoided society.” Human beings were social animals, and no individual, culture, or nation could withstand, in any healthy way, the “raw savagery” of frontier life, its wars, massacres, its “barbarities in dealing with the original inhabitants.” The “crudities of the pioneer’s sexual life,” which sublimated eros into violent trauma, were made manifest in an unrelenting “warfare against Nature, cutting down the forest and slaughtering its living creatures,” a “blind fury” that was then remembered with syrupy melancholy. The pioneer scalps an Indian, and a well-thumbed copy of Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” slips from his pocket. “Woman,” insomuch as she interrupted this romance, “was the chief enemy of the pioneer,” Mumford wrote. She reminded men that the world was made up of more than just them, nature, and Indians, and that there was such a thing as society and responsibility.2
Weyl hoped that Americans were on the cusp of developing a rational, social-democratic political culture, rooted in a clear-eyed understanding of class relations. Mumford didn’t think so. “When, after the long journey was over” and the pioneer came out of the woods, all he could do was respond to social problems in “covert pathological ways,” with spastic, hysterical panic prohibitions, against cigarettes, for example, alcohol, or even “the length of sheets for hotel beds.”
