Ethnic Hegemonies in American History, Part 2

Thomas Hart Benton, “Bootleggers,” 1927

2,860 words

Part 2 of 2

The First World War and the Great Depression

In 1912 Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, became president for eight years when regular and Progressive Republicans split. Wilson’s roots were northern Scots-Irish, but he experienced the South’s brutal invasion by northern troops as a child and worked in Greater New England-dominated academic culture as an adult. Consequently his sympathies were more with English-descended northern and southern elites than the Scots-Irish center, and he was more a Progressive than a Populist despite his Democratic affiliation. He appreciated the importance of race, however, and social separation of whites and blacks was maximal in his administration. He is most remembered for bringing America into World War I despite a peace platform, which was largely motivated by his sense of ethnic solidarity with British elites. His decision almost certainly saved the British from defeat.[1]

At the war’s end, largely Jewish-led Communist revolutions seized power briefly in Germany and Hungary and for nearly a century in Russia. None of these turned out well for Jews as a whole, however, and all generated intense anger because of indiscriminate killing of non-Jews. Their brief victory in Germany provoked an anti-Jewish revolution, ultimately causing their worst demographic disaster since Bogdan Khmelnitsky freed Ukrainians from Polish and Jewish domination in 1654. Even in Russia a wily Georgian Communist Josef Stalin broke their power by 1927. The left did not successfully revolt in the United States, however. It barely survived repression falling hardest on its rural non-Jewish former populist factions at the Wilson administration’s end. The American left has consequently persisted into the twenty-first century as a Jewish-dominated movement that would otherwise be scarcely recognizable to its post-World War I activists.[2]

Thomas Hart Benton, “City Activities,” 1930

In 1921 Greater New England Republicans returned to power in a landslide made possible by millions of previously politically inert German-Americans and other European immigrants in the populist heartland who had been angered by the war against their ethnic kin in Europe and by intense government-orchestrated discrimination at home.[3] Lingering Greater New England progressivism finally ended mass immigration and brought ethnic stability, but financial excess led to economic disaster in 1929.[4] The resulting misery returned the Democrats to power for another twenty years.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal politically united white Americans more than at any time since the pre-Civil War White Republic, even as blacks remained socially separate. Corporate excesses were curbed and organized labor encouraged. Economic inequality among whites began to decline significantly for the first time since the Gilded Age. A balance between protecting private property and encouraging public purposes was achieved, resulting in infrastructure of lasting value and quality. A national élan consequently developed that helped win the Second World War.[5]

The New Deal had a dark side as well, however. Scientific research on racial diversity was virtually ended because of conflict with its ideology of equality and its association with German National Socialism. Communists and their close allies, still overwhelmingly Jewish, were welcomed into the New Deal as full participants, even while working openly as agents of the Soviet Union.

The Second World War and After

Roosevelt also secretly maneuvered to subvert a strong peace movement and draw America into World War II on the Soviet side against Germany, despite great public opposition. Anglo-Saxon ethnic solidarity honed during World War I, anti-German pressure from an increasingly influential Jewish community, and Soviet sympathy among the left all helped blind Roosevelt to the nuances of mid-twentieth century European power politics. Germany was consequently demonized while the Soviet Union, a regime surpassing it in brutality and mass murder, was idealized. World War II thus ended with Europe’s eastern half enslaved for another 44 years.[6]

Thomas Hart Benton, “Embarkation — Prelude to Death,” 1942

National Socialist Germany officially embraced racial research and ethnic nationalism, but paradoxically it ultimately subverted its racial nationalism by emphasizing minor linguistic differences at the expense of authentic kinship. It consequently treated genetically nearly identical Slavic neighbors like the Poles with brutality while allying with the Japanese, who sought to ethnically cleanse Oceania of whites. Its defeat had the long-term result of tarnishing ethnic nationalism into the next century so even defense against mass non-white immigration remains difficult.

Roosevelt’s death near the war’s end transferred the presidency to his Vice President Harry Truman, who was not expected to do well politically. As in the aftermath of the First World War, a German-American reaction in the populist heartland, and an Irish Catholic one in the urban northeast, shifted control of congress to the Republicans for the first time since 1931. Truman soon faced revolts in his party from pro-Soviets led by Henry Wallace because of hardening relations with Stalin, and from southern Democrats under Strom Thurmond for weakening social separation of blacks and whites. Despite expert opinion that he would fail to survive this perfect political storm, Truman won the election of 1948 because of his strong roots in America’s Scots-Irish heartland.[7]

Republicans finally gained the presidency in 1952, when the party’s Greater New England wing and its candidate Dwight Eisenhower outmaneuvered Robert Taft, the candidate of the party’s heartland populist wing, which included many World War II skeptics who viewed the Soviet Union rather than Germany as the main enemy. In that year’s election Eisenhower easily triumphed over Democrats who were now reduced to their southern and urban base.

Following the election, the Taft wing’s last champion, Senator Joseph McCarthy, representing the German-Irish anti-Communism of Catholic “old immigrants,” was quickly suppressed with the blessing of Eisenhower, who used Truman’s Cold War with the Soviets as a cover for building America’s postwar empire. Governments unfriendly to American corporations in Iran and Guatemala were soon covertly eliminated. Efforts to end American Communist influence, which flourished under Truman despite his occasional resistance, ended for good under Eisenhower with the fall of McCarthy. Paradoxically, as American opposition to anti-communism increased domestically, the continuing Cold War intensified opposition to communist states abroad. New Deal policies limiting domestic corporate power and promoting relative income equality continued long past the depression, however, so the Eisenhower years of the 1950s are still fondly remembered as a time of unprecedented happiness and prosperity.[8]

The Democratic Party slightly expanded its traditional base to win the close election of 1960, but just a few years later its nature changed significantly. By 1964 the civil rights movement, a concerted attack on traditional southern race relations, was elevated to its primary issue. In response, the South, which was the party’s strongest region until 1960, became its weakest region in 1964 and every subsequent election. By 1968 in the name of reform a movement led by Jews like Allard Lowenstein as well as some Greater New Englanders attacked and permanently stripped power from the party’s traditional northern Irish-led urban labor base, a split exemplified by the televised confrontation at that year’s Democratic convention in Chicago between Richard Daley, its Irish mayor, and Connecticut’s Jewish senator Abraham Ribicoff. By 1972 Daley wasn’t even permitted to attend the next convention. In the same year, the charismatic George Wallace inspired a momentary flare-up of white nationalist resistance, winning the Democratic Party primaries in northern industrial Michigan and Maryland, before he and his campaign were crippled by one of the gunmen who changed so much in American politics in the 1960s.[9]

The Rise of Jewish Hegemony

Political and economic power in the Eisenhower years was still tightly held by a Greater New England establishment narrowly located in two places: (1) an axis from Fairfield County, Connecticut to Manhattan and (2) in and around Washington, D.C. But it soon began to be challenged by an increasingly powerful Jewish establishment, which lobbied against programs targeting the long involvement of its kin with communism and other subversive movements.[10]

Thomas Hart Benton, “Hollywood,” 1938

Jewish influence on American thought had been significant since a virtual Jewish monopoly on motion pictures was established at the start of the twentieth century,[11] but it increased dramatically in the 1950s when television entered most homes and sharply reduced community discourse.[12] Jews were also influential in book publishing and dominant in many other areas that shaped culture from art criticism[13] to Broadway[14] and comics.[15] Most significantly, and facilitating the rest, they controlled the New York Times and the Washington Post, the most influential newspapers in America’s two power centers.[16] Media dominance also facilitated successful efforts of well-connected Jews in the scientific community like Franz Boas, Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg), Richard Lewontin, and Stephen J. Gould to suppress research on human biodiversity.[17]

Since Israel’s 1948 founding, its interests have been the number one cause of America’s organized Jewish community. In 1956 the United States opposed and forced the withdrawal of an Israeli invasion into Egypt. In 1967 it fully supported Israel’s similar invasion and subsequent occupation of Egypt’s Sinai region despite a simultaneous Israeli attack on the United States Navy ship Liberty that killed 34 of its crew. Since then, the United States has given undeviating bipartisan support to Israel, despite increasingly outrageous actions that have provoked nearly unanimous condemnation by world opinion. When presidents like Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and George H. W. Bush, a Republican, made just tentative steps toward foreign policy evenhandedness, they suffered firestorms of media abuse and were limited to single terms.[18] More recently, Israel has even used the United States as a surrogate to attack and destroy Iraq, which was hostile to Israel but never a threat to America.[19]

Another measure of hegemony is economic power. By 1979 Jewish per capita income in the United States was 66 percent greater than that of the nation’s founding British-descended ethnic groups, which had even fallen 26 percent behind descendents of Japanese imported as Gilded Age cheap labor.[20] It is a cliché in academia and the media that America is run by “privileged white males,” disparagingly called WASPS (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants), but this doesn’t withstand scrutiny. In Los Angeles, for example, so-called WASPs are 16 percent behind Jews in median household income.[21] Mike Davis describes Los Angeles’s shift from WASP to Jewish hegemony in detail.[22]

The rise of Jewish hegemony is not like previous shifts of ethnic hegemony in America. Unlike past hegemonic groups, Jews are non-British and claim roots outside Europe despite long residence and significant ancestral origins there. They are also a much smaller group. British groups collectively constitute from 25 to 45 percent of America’s population, depending on the method of enumerating a now highly mixed population. Jews, in contrast, are just 2 percent. Jews are also widely dispersed across the country, unlike previous hegemonic ethnic groups, which were the largest population in regions encompassing multiple states. Jews are a majority in only certain neighborhoods of some metro areas, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles.[23]

Jews and the New Left

Much of the Jewish hegemony’s power came from dominating America’s left, but the normal function of the left everywhere else is equalizing incomes and power between social classes, which would have been highly disadvantageous to Jews once they became America’s richest and most powerful ethnic group. The experience of National Socialism in Germany taught Jews to regard white working people not as a natural constituency to be organized, but as another “peasantry” capable of erupting into pogroms. The experience of Stalinism in the USSR showed Jews that orthodox Marxism was a golem that could escape their control. The solution was to create a New Left that would more reliably secure Jewish power and Jewish interests. The consequence is the seeming paradox of an America that has become ever more oligarchic as it moves further to the left.

Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, 1968

The beginning of this shift can be traced to 1943, when the American Jewish Committee hired the Frankfurt School, a group of refugee German Jewish Marxists, as consultants on making America safe for Jews. Germany had long been a relatively safe place for its small but highly prosperous, influential, and assimilated Jewish community. But when National Socialism turned Germans violently against Jews, the Frankfurt School concluded that Jews could be safe only if traditional European culture and values were destroyed everywhere, including the United States. The Frankfurt School saw ethnic homogeneity as a danger to Jews, because they are more apparent as outsiders in homogeneous societies. Conversely, they saw ethnic diversity as good for Jews, because they are less conspicuous in such societies.

Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and anonymous

Unlike traditional Marxism, the Frankfurt School’s constituency was no longer the proletariat, but the “marginalized,” the “outsiders.” Classical Marxism’s images of heroic white proletarians were replaced by the image of Archie Bunker, “America’s favorite bigot,” who every Sunday delivered moronic tirades against the New Left’s constituencies: Jews and their symbolic and political proxies, namely, non-whites, homosexuals, feminists, and the abnormal and subnormal of all descriptions.

Unlike traditional Marxism, the Frankfurt School did not pursue social equality, but social inclusion, access, and upward mobility for Jews and their proxies. The civil rights movement worked to smash white working class communities and public education. Affirmative action effectively excluded numerous whites from the full range of social institutions their ancestors had created. Feminism and gay rights struck at the heart of cultural and biological relations between men and women, devalued children, and promoted narcissistic consumerism that made the rich richer.

Eventually America’s Central Intelligence Agency and Ford Foundation spread Frankfurt School ideology to its many satellite countries so the entire world would become safe for multi-national consumer capitalism.[24] In short, the New Left provided a remarkably functional ideology for entrenching Jews at the pinnacles of wealth and power and crowding out whites resisting Jewish hegemony or deviating from the Jewish agenda.[25]

Perhaps the New Left’s greatest success was its conversion of America’s greatest demographic cohort into its most effective subverters, namely the baby boomers born between 1946 and 1953 who came of age in the 1960s, the decade the Jewish Establishment’s hegemony was established.[26]

Notes

1. Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars.

2. Howard Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2005). Cf. Ginsberg’s The Fatal Embrace.

3. Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 2nd edition, revised (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1956).