Lincoln's Electric Cord Speech

A different perspective on the origins of American multiculturalism.

There are those - and here I have in mind one Canadian commentator at Majority Rights - who will claim that American multiculturalism had its ultimate roots in the "great wave" immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - the so-called "race replacement that dare not speak its name."

But if we shift back to a famous speech by a well known American in the year 1858, we will find that the real ultimate roots of multicultural American "constitutional patriotism" was in the first large scale "race replacement that dare not speak its name" - the migration of Germans, Irish, Frenchmen, and Scandinavians into an America whose founding population was primarily of British Protestant stock. Yes, there were some other ethnies present, but these were a decided minority of the White population and, as Lincoln suggests, had little or nothing to do with the founding of America. As of 1858, these peoples were seen as essentially foreign to the American experience, and their assimilation into America was viewed as an example of disentangling citizenship from an ethnic basis.

See here.

…Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, sometime about the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings I suppose have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I suppose to be some of them.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty—or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country,—with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men,—we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves—we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

Greg Johnson on White Unity, Immigration, and America

See here.

Actually, I agree with much of what Johnson says here, especially in that reproduced below, with emphasis added - including that we should emphasize Northern European immigration to strengthen the ethnic core of this nation and to further encourage the assimilation of the Eastern and Southern European "white ethnics." And that from the original Old Stock perspective, all later European immigration was a "mitigated" disaster.

A favorite argument of immigration advocates is to seek out Italian, Polish, Irish, or other “ethnic” (i.e., non-Anglo-Saxon) Americans, and say: “They wanted to keep you out too, you know, so how can you side with people who want to keep out Somalis and Haitians and Mexicans?” Of course, in doing so, immigration advocates tip their hand. They know diversity is a source of weakness among whites. It undermines our solidarity, and our enemies seek to exploit that.

To my ears, there is nothing more grating today than a white American talking about his “Anglo-Saxon” identity. It is grating for two reasons. First, most of them are Euro-mutts anyway. Second, pure Anglo-Saxons like me are the people who gave this country away in the first place, and if “we” are going to take it back, we are not going to do it alone. Perhaps, then, we should begin by shutting up, setting aside our old prejudices against fellow whites, and learning to work with the Irish and Italians and Poles who as a rule are far less hamstrung by “white” guilt, emotional repression, and reluctance to take our own side in a fight.

That said, I can still grant that the Anglo-Saxons of the past had good arguments for wanting to exclude other white ethnic groups. They knew that ethnic diversity was a source of social conflict and weakness, even when the diversity was among fellow whites. The same arguments are even more cogent today when applied to non-white immigration, since non-whites cannot be assimilated without the destruction of the white race and white civilization.

When it was founded, the United States was primarily an Anglo-Saxon society. If we really take seriously the idea that diversity weakens a society and homogeneity strengthens it, then we must conclude that the US should have striven to become even more homogeneously Anglo-Saxon. And that implies that if the US permitted immigration at all, it should have been only from Great Britain. That means no Irish, Germans, Poles, Swedes, Norwegians, Italians, Greeks, etc. need apply.

But immigrants from Europe are not like non-whites. The peoples of Europe have common racial and cultural roots that make it possible for Irishmen, Germans, Italians, and Frenchmen to all become Americans. Europeans can be assimilated. But non-whites can never become Americans, except in a purely legal sense. This means that immigration from the whole of Europe was not an unmitigated disaster for the United States.

But we must be objective enough to admit that it was a (mitigated) disaster nonetheless. Just because non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants were assimilable, that does not mean that they had the same interests as the Americans who were already here. Their arrival depressed wages, just as non-white immigration does today. Immigration aided the rise of an establishment of rootless, raceless men, just as non-white immigration does today. Immigration led to an increase in crime and violence, just as non-white immigration does today. Immigration diluted the political power of Anglo-Saxons, just as non-white immigration dilutes white political power today.

I do not deny that many immigrants who would have been excluded by this argument made enormous contributions to this country. But, by the same token, there is no way to calculate the Anglo-Saxon geniuses who may have been lost because of the social dislocations caused by immigration. Furthermore, it is possible to point out real contributions by Jews and other undesirables, but does that constitute an argument for letting them in? If the contributions of a Jonas Salk do not trump considerations of homogeneity, then why should the contributions of a Nikola Tesla?

How would the vastness of America have been settled without immigration? Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Without immigration to fill sweatshops and coolie gangs with the half-starved refuse of Europe and Asia, the capitalist class would have lost a significant advantage over the working class. Wages would have been higher and work weeks would have been shorter. And since the only way to add new workers would have been reproduction, the system would have encouraged large families and made sure the children were properly educated. Big business would have developed more slowly, if at all — which is fine.

America’s large and prosperous working class would have developed much sooner, along with a large and prosperous middle class of farmers and shopkeepers. Both groups would have had the resources and the leisure to protect their rights and liberties from the plutocrats and do-gooders and war-mongers. America would have been a freer, less divided, more harmonious, and happier society.

Well, it was not to be.

Now white America is a mixture of people from all over Europe, slowly being submerged in a rising tide of mud.

If we are going to survive as a race, we have to unite as one. In this context, I understand why my fellow White Nationalists are hesitant to revisit old debates about immigration. How does it help the cause of white unity in today’s America to look at failed arguments to exclude the Irish, the Slavs, and the Italians?

The Americans of the past wanted to hold onto their Anglo-Saxon identity, and they failed. With each new generation, there is more and more mixing between the descendents of different European immigrant groups. What is emerging is a generic white American, with a sense of his interests merely as a white. The linguistic and cultural divisions of the Old World are fast disappearing, and with them the ability of our enemies to exploit them.

This need not be seen as a loss. After all, there is still a France. There is still a Poland. There is still a Germany. And Americans will probably still celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day and Oktoberfest. It will simply be the same crowd at both events.

But how is this a gain? America may be the place where we recreate the original unity of the white race before it was divided and pitted against itself. In order to preserve and advance this emerging (or re-emerging) white unity, we need to stop and then reverse the influx of non-whites into the United States.

Aside from barring non-whites, what sort of immigration policies would a White Nationalist America have? I would of course open our borders to persecuted whites in Rhodesia and South Africa. But does that apply across the board? Do we open our borders to persecuted Muslim Kurds and Afghans too? Some of them are not just white, but Nordic.

Here Johnson becomes absurd, and confuses phenotype with race. First, very few "Kurds and Afghans" are phenotypically "white" in the European sense, let alone "Nordic!" Second, even "Nordic" Asiatics are genetically distant from Europeans - a "Nordic" Afghan is going to be more genetically distant from a Swede than a swarthy Greek. Why not just stick to Europeans?

And how white is white? Most of the peoples of the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia have to be categorized as Caucasians. Even pure-blooded Dravidians of South India, unmixed either with the Aryans or with the Australoid aborigines, are Caucasian, even though their complexions are sometimes blacker than Blacks’. There is, in short, quite a lot of diversity within the Caucasian race.

But we should remember that in politics diversity brings weakness and homogeneity brings strength. Therefore, we should be quite hesitant to accept any immigrant simply because he or she is Caucasian in the broad sense.

Since the population and culture of white America is still primarily Northern European, I would like to see immigration policies that preserve and strengthen that element. If we value greater homogeneity, the quickest way there is to promote immigration from Northern Europe.