Then, as now, a position of authority can be an invitation to abuse others. In the Dust Bowl days the Los Angeles police chief sent 125 officers "to act as bouncers at the state border," in the words of PBS' American Experience website.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio isn't the first of his kind.
Trump's brand of bigotry goes back a long way in this country. Baptists were marginalized and brutalized by Anglicans in colonial Virginia, and the attacks read like a listing of recent anti-Muslim hate crimes. Baptists were "pelted with apples and stones," and "commanded to take a dram" -- of alcohol -- "or be whipped." Their services were "broken up by a mob," and they were "pulled down and hauled about by (the) hair."
In an eerie echo of recent anti-Muslim bomb plots, at least one colonial Baptist was even the target of an attempted bombing.
What about Trump's own paternal background? Prejudice against German Americans is as old as the nation itself. Benjamin Franklin wrote these words in 1751:
"Why should Pennsylvania ... become a Colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?" (emphasis ours)
The fear of "Germanization" is echoed in present-day remarks about "creeping Sharia law." As for complexions: Whiteness is an evolving concept that at times has marginalized Italians, the Irish, Jews, and people of German ancestry like Trump himself.
Nor did the hatred of Trump's ancestry die with Benjamin Franklin. The Alien Enemy Act was used against people of German background during World War I, and they became the objects of national hatred.
The National Archives tell the story: German-language newspapers were shut down or forced out of business. Bilingual churches were pressured to stop conducting services in German, in a foreshadowing of Trump's proposal to monitor and close mosques. German-language societies and even choral groups were disbanded as "volunteer watchdog societies reported on such German American gatherings and activities to federal authorities."
"German Americans became the 'face of the enemy,'" the National Archives article adds, "as their businesses were boycotted and many people of German heritage were physically and verbally attacked."
In a Flag Day Speech in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson said this about people of Donald Trump's ethnicity: "The military masters of Germany ... have filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators."
Wilson didn't say he saw thousands of German Americans cheering on New Jersey rooftops as Germany invaded Belgium. But he might just as well have. Bigotry never changes.
Trump's brand of hate is nothing new. We have had demagogues before. We will have them again.
... And the defending people said, They bring disease, they're filthy. We can't have them in the schools. They're strangers. ("The Grapes of Wrath")
We were all strangers here once, all except the first people of this land. Some people can't remember that, because they're too consumed with hate, or fear, or anger, or ambition. Some see themselves as different from the black, the brown, the LGBT, the differently gendered, the Muslim, the Jew. But it's true. We were all strangers once.
If we're not careful, we may become strangers again.
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