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A commenter notes about Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s obsession with recounting all the times he was victimized by anti-Semitism in the Hollywood Hills:
“His entire life is a self-created drama of brave endurance of microaggressions. It’s not unreasonable to assume that he possesses a strong predisposition to embellish non-events of his past.”
Right. But the strange thing is that the circumstances of Weiner’s past are extremely non-obscure. It’s not like he’s telling stories about all the raging anti-Semitism at some high school in Spokane, and we might believe him because who knows anything about Spokane? No, Weiner keeps talking about the early 1980s at the most famous high school in the center of Celebrityville, what’s now Harvard-Westlake in Coldwater Canyon, over Mulholland Drive from Beverly Hills.
I know a lot about Harvard-Westlake because it was my high school’s arch-rival in debate. One of my teachers in high school went to work at Harvard School when Weiner was there in 1981: Dr. K. was a brilliant man with a Harvard Ph.D. and a complicated life story. He’d been a Jesuit, he’d been married, now he lived in a big house overlooking the Hollywood Bowl and had 11,000 classical LPs on vinyl. Don’t tell Weiner, but Dr. K’s cousin was rumored to have been Führer of the Third Reich for a week in May 1945. But I always assumed that Dr. K. was part Jewish, which was presumably why his side of his rich German family was in America.
That’s kind of my point, which is that Diversity was already a real thing in this part of L.A. when I was growing up (and Weiner, from the richer side of the Hollywood Hills, is six years younger than me). Society was getting complicated in ways that the rest of the country only began to understand decades later. For example, Dr. K. told me at lunch in 1981 that Harvard School had a policy of discriminating against Oriental applicants because they didn’t contribute as much to classroom discussions as their test scores would indicate. Presumably, opinionated students like Weiner were preferred, even if they weren’t as smart. Today, we hear that Harvard University is being sued by Asian-Americans for discrimination in admissions, but I heard about discrimination against Asians at Harvard School 34 years ago.
It’s a little bit like how I can relate to Barack Obama (b. 1961) because Honolulu was like L.A., only much more so. But nobody is interested in how racially integrated little Barry’s kindergarten class was in 1965. Instead, when New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a quasi-biography of Obama, he called it The Bridge and made it, somehow, all about the 1965 civil rights struggle on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, even though Obama spent 1965 feeding the hamster in Miss Yomiguchi’s kindergarten class along with little Jimmy and Soon-mi. It was a bestseller.
In contrast, I wrote a book putting Obama into the context of his growing up at a prep school in Hawaii and going to college in Los Angeles in 1981. It was not a bestseller.
Similarly, Weiner loves to tell interviewers about how Jews were a down-trodden one-eighth or one-tenth of the student body at Harvard School, even though a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner article from 1981 mentions that two-fifths of the student body was then Jewish. It’s a bizarre thing to dissemble about since Harvard and Westlake (the boys school and the girls school merged in 1989) figure in the lives of so many prominent people. According to Harvard-Westlake’s Wikipedia page, it’s alumni include Shirley Temple, Jon Lovitz, H.R. Haldeman, gay basketball player Jason Collins, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Tori Spelling, swimmer Dara Torres, Mark Harmon, astronaut Sally Ride, Governor Gray Davis, reluctant NFL player Jonathan Martin, Salon founder David Talbott, etc etc
Looking at this long list of famous alumni, I’m starting to wonder if what really bugged Weiner was that Harvard-Westlake seems to have been especially attractive to students who are half-Jewish, like Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Reitman, Jason Segel, Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, and Mayor Eric Garcetti. Perhaps when Weiner claims his class was only 1/8th Jewish, he’s only deigning to count the Real Jews, and he remains agitated by all the part-Jewish kids at Harvard Westlake. How do they fit into his ethnocentric vision of the world?
Weiner is a half dozen years younger than me, and in our generation, Jews typically made it a point of ideological pride to attend public schools, unlike us weird Catholics and those snobby Protestants. I knew a lot of Jewish kids on the debate team at Beverly Hills HS, which was absurdly well-financed (it even had its own oil wells) relative to my private Catholic high school, but the point was that BHHS was still a public school. That Jewish attitude vanished after busing in LAUSD began in 1978 when Weiner was 13 — Jewish politicians in the Valley led the struggle against busing, but were vanquished. Now L.A. is full of private Jewish schools (e.g., Mike Milken build a lavish one on Mulholland Drive), but there were few Jewish private schools at the time.
Weiner grew up in Hancock Park a couple of miles outside the border of Beverly Hills, so he couldn’t go to BHHS where he probably would have been happy, and went to super-expensive Harvard-Westlake instead. Perhaps, being highly ethnocentric and already worried about betraying American Jewish tradition by going to a private school, he was then alienated and freaked out by all the half-Jewish kids at Harvard-Westlake.
That’s just speculation, but Jewish culture has a useful tendency to ret-con intra-ethnic resentments into prized examples of anti-Semitism.
This thing about classroom discussion being highly valued puzzles me. Don’t the teachers usually manipulate and guide them anyway? Discussions amongst youths are usually just an exercise between the know-nothings and know-just a little bit types. What do kids know anyway? Aren’t discussions which veer into unapproved territory or those that displease the teacher personally just get shut down?
The essence of Justice Powell's opinion in the Bakke case was that schools cannot discriminate to achieve equal percentage of doctors/lawyers/whatever in the general population. Colleges can only discriminate in student admissions to provide diversity of opinion in the classroom and on campus. The "Harvard Plan" (since Harvard was a model of such discrimination) was ok. In short, racial/ethnic discrimination is allowed on campus because it gives us more smart-mouth 18 year old kids talking more ill-informed trash.
The odd thing is that kids in medical school (the Bakke defendant) really don't give a crap about navel gazing and reflecting on other med students' life experiences in some classroom Platonic symposium. They are going to a trade school and are interested in memorizing tons of technical info.
The Asian mindset is that the smart person is quiet and studious. Respect the teacher; they know the subject and you are there to learn, so shut up and learn. Just because someone is a loudmouth (by answering in class or questioning the teacher) does not mean that they are smart.
Personally I think this attitude is bollocks but there it is.
You sound like the people I've encountered in education who discourage science classes from having kids learn how to actually make circuits under the rationale that the we can just buy pre-made stuff cheap from China.
It depends a great deal on the individual professor. While academics within the less rigorous fields, may vote overwhelmingly Democrat, they're not all the closed-minded, P.C. mongering, Social Justice Warriors of which we read (and disdain). Some of them are pretty decent people, who do a pretty good job (even if the tuition at the institution where they teach, may still be a total rip-off).
Boy, that IS speculation. There’s no particular resentment of mischlings in modern (non-Orthodox) Jewish culture. You just totally made that up.
Yeah, but interesting speculation, with personal memories, facts, and factoids to back it up.
Pointing out the post's shortcomings in the comments is good. Providing higher-grade speculation or plausible alternative explanations is even better. Unlike at many sites, the host here won't spike your comment for doing that.
Oh yes there is. Although resentment may not be the mot juste. It is closer to insecurity, fear, loathing. There's definitely a complex about love relations with Gentiles.
That's like someone coming on here and saying "we black people have no particular resentment against Oreos."
But you actually have a label for the phenomena.
Free birthright trips to Israel are set up to get Jewish kids to fall in love with other Jewish kids on the trip or with Israelis.
Elliott Abrams, grand high muckety-muck of Middle Eastern policy in the Bush Administration, wrote a not very controversial book in the 1990s about how to cut down on intermarriage.
I could pull up a lot more examples like this.
Look, Weiner is another example of the kind of powerful guys I want more of on my side: Jews who tend to be natural concentric loyalists. I want them on the side of their fellow American citizens.
Conservatives tried a long experiment in not subjecting them to any kind of reasoned critique. At first, back about 1969, it seemed to be working, but in recent decades, it's stopped working. If a privileged group is above criticism so they don't fear being embarrassed over hypocrisy, they will tend to indulge their most self-servingly contradictory stances, like nationalism for Israel and globalism for America.
As an alternative, I offer a fair compromise: patriotism for America and Israel. But of course there's little pragmatic reason to settle for this when you can have it all because you are above criticism.
I made classroom discussions better.
In the hands of a skilled teacher, a student like Sailer opens up a whole new realm of possible ways of looking at the world and making sense of it for the above average but conventional student. Such experiences and the character they engender are nothing less than the bedrock of a functional republic/free society. This was the original rationale for merit-based scholarships before U.S. News rankings and the like, but it can start as early as schooling does.
the adherents of both political tribes (cons and libs) eschew logic and objectivity…they operate almost entirely on propaganda programming…they operate like bees or ants or termites…independent thought is verboten…you make fun of the other side…
so, yes, those books are not logical…they sell these books to the liberals and the liberals will eat them up…
and they are a good target..but so is your side… what about the nonsensical books on your side?
Gold.
> Boy, that IS speculation.
Yeah, but interesting speculation, with personal memories, facts, and factoids to back it up.
Pointing out the post’s shortcomings in the comments is good. Providing higher-grade speculation or plausible alternative explanations is even better. Unlike at many sites, the host here won’t spike your comment for doing that.
I speculated about Weiner having strong opinions on his part-Jewish fellow students at Harvard School not being Real Jews because in his interview in The Tablet with David Samuels he goes on at some length about how only 15 out of 120 students were Jewish and then returns to the topic saying only 10% of the students were Jewish but they were high achievers so everybody overestimates what percent were Jewish. He's quite worked up over the statistics of 34 years ago.
How do we charitably reconcile his memories with a 1981 newspaper article, which may be an article he even refers to in his interview, saying the student body was 40% Jewish? One possibility is different methodologies for treating part-Jewish kids statistically. If your dad is, say, Tony Curtis and your mom is Janet Leigh, maybe you'd be counted as part of the newspaper article's 40%, but you wouldn't count in Weiner's 10%.
Or maybe Weiner is just delusional.
He wasn’t talking about “modern (non-Orthodox) Jewish culture”. He was talking about Matthew Weiner’s psyche.
I think Steve is on to something here, although I suspect it more to do with looks than being a half jew.
And height.
Sure, we have “diversity” but there are a lot of physical standards that can’t be so easily removed. I don’t know what he looked like in high school, but he looks like George Costanza and isn’t tall.
On a side note, that is what makes Bobby Jindal’s ascent more remarkable — he does look like a scrawny dark Indian geek. As opposed to Nicky Haley, or Kamala Harris, who are fine looking women.
So a lot of micro resentments there.
Certainly those some qualities have been oppressing, say, Mark Zuckerberg to take a random example.
Jews who internalize the God’s chosen people story are going to act out against interlopers. Whitey is the interloper from hell.
If you’re a Jew who notices things then you notice from a young age that Whitey is interloping in a major way.
It starts with the Greeks and goes all the way to the Five Eyes and present day.
If you’re a person who notices things then hitting a light switch begins to irritate. Motoring down a highway begins to irritate. Philisophical discussions begin to irritate. As does art and literature. And on and on.
In fact a whole lot of human achievement begins to be processed as one long excruciating exercise in interloping by Whitey.
There could be something else going on here: Matthew Weiner is short and bald.
The worst is ugly short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life - to be born short. I have never been friends with a short man in my life. Don't trust them; they are mean, and they want to kill you
He threw his pre-teen son at the blonde shiksa for God's sake.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/why-men-black-iii-started-166112?page=2
Even though his school was 40% Jewish, I bet he was bullied in high school and he has blown up his revenge fantasies into his lifelong work, as have many of the other recurring characters in the iSteve-sphere. Richard Dawkins recently tweeted that Tories were looking to legalize fox hunting because they are bullies who like to pick on the weak. Seemed like another opening into the psyche of a adult previously-bullied kid.
Boy, that IS speculation. There’s no particular resentment of mischlings in modern (non-Orthodox) Jewish culture.
Oh yes there is. Although resentment may not be the mot juste. It is closer to insecurity, fear, loathing. There’s definitely a complex about love relations with Gentiles.
“This thing about classroom discussion being highly valued puzzles me.”
The essence of Justice Powell’s opinion in the Bakke case was that schools cannot discriminate to achieve equal percentage of doctors/lawyers/whatever in the general population. Colleges can only discriminate in student admissions to provide diversity of opinion in the classroom and on campus. The “Harvard Plan” (since Harvard was a model of such discrimination) was ok. In short, racial/ethnic discrimination is allowed on campus because it gives us more smart-mouth 18 year old kids talking more ill-informed trash.
The odd thing is that kids in medical school (the Bakke defendant) really don’t give a crap about navel gazing and reflecting on other med students’ life experiences in some classroom Platonic symposium. They are going to a trade school and are interested in memorizing tons of technical info.
Grand Admiral Doenitz wasn’t “Fuehrer of the Third Reich” for a week, a day–or for the 23 days between Hitler’s death and the dissolution of Doenitz’s governnment at Flensberg. The title of “Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor” is one that Hitler had made for himself, combining the previously-separate offices of President and Chancellor, upon the death of President Hindenberg. In his will, Hitler separated those offices again, assigning the title of President to Doenitz and that of Chancellor to Joseph Goebbels. When Doenitz assumed the office of President, however, Goebbels was dead, so Doenitz appointed Finance Minister Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk as “Leading Minister” (in effect, Reich Chancellor, although Schwerin refused to take that title).
It might be forgiven to people who live outside S. California, but if you’re talking West L.A. — with or without Ventura Fwy neighborhoods over in the Valley, makes no difference — Jews have been in the driver’s seat for more than 2 generations. It’s simply common knowledge if you have any firsthand experience of the area. Nobody is too upset about it (well, maybe the Iranians are). There are tons of places in the world where it’s tough to be Jewish, but West L.A. ain’t one of them.
On the other hand the S.F. Valley never had the prestige of, say, Cheviot Hills or these various pre-1917 rancho locales that are close to the airport and the beach and all that crap; so diversity hit the two regions in different ways. Rich Middle Easterners of various legitimate professions flooded into West L.A. and the poorer, read: Spanish-speaking ethnics went to the Valley (who, because living near central L.A. is still expensive, trended more affluent over time than the dirt-poor peasants who today comprise Orange County). Matthew Weiner’s portrayal of the time period rings false, but he might be getting away with it elsewhere, cuz not everybody is as obsessed with Jew minutia as Sailer is. In Colorado or Minnesota they probably find his tales plausible. The speculation about half-Jews is fairly paranoid and pulled-out-of-your-ass, and doesn’t match with behavior of people I’ve observed. It’s not like Skull & Bones or whatever, where they trace your ancestors — most local tribesmen probably have to rely on JewOrNotJew.com for the last say on such matters.
Short would explain why he couldn’t go to BHHS even though he lived in Hancock Park. My father in law and his brothers all went to BHHS before WWII even though they were living outside the district. The school needed ringer football players because the BH showbiz kids were only trying out for the tennis team. The school was happy to dip into the Wilshire district to recruit a string of 6′ 2″ German boys.
Don’t forget his squeaky voice — indeed the terrible acting on MM, even by cable budgetary standards, can be explained by the producers casting folks who looked & sounded the part. Don Draper has a good timbre to his voice but is otherwise laughably unbelievable for the show’s c.v. on him. Betty has a nice set of snow globes.
Often at some point through high school, there are kids who will end up smarter or are already smarter than the teacher. When they contribute to classroom discussion, it definitely adds value. When they don’t understand what the teacher is doing and ask a question, everyone in the class benefits because no one else probably understood what was going on either.
The Asian mindset is that the smart person is quiet and studious. Respect the teacher; they know the subject and you are there to learn, so shut up and learn. Just because someone is a loudmouth (by answering in class or questioning the teacher) does not mean that they are smart.
Personally I think this attitude is bollocks but there it is.
The young Barry did not start school until just after The Beatles stopped touring:
***
“Dunham and Soetoro married on March 15, 1965, on Molokai. They returned to Honolulu to live with her son as a family.[17] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Soetoro returned to Indonesia on June 20, 1966.[18] Dunham and her son moved in with her parents at their house. She continued with her studies, earning a B.A. in anthropology in August 1967, while her son attended kindergarten in 1966–1967 at Noelani Elementary School.[19][20]”
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Barack_Obama#Parents.27_background_and_meeting
***
Sort of like Don “the body-snatcher” Draper.
“Don’t tell Weiner, but Dr. K’s cousin was rumored to have been Führer of the Third Reich for a week in May 1945. ”
Mitchell and Webb did a bit about why it sucked to be Admiral Doenitz:
A New Fuhrer
Speaking of California, education, antiquarianism, and the like, you may be interested in my latest blog post where I analyze academic outcomes by race/ethnicity and school district in California to address assertions about the presumed effects of “concentrated poverty”. I cross-referenced several years of CA Dept. of education test data with ACS figures on median income, education levels, and poverty rates by race/ethnicity, along with various school “quality” measures like funding, class size, “segregation”, etc etc.
OT but awesome (especially the comments): http://dailybruin.com/2015/05/07/man-wanted-for-writing-hateful-speech-on-kaufman-hall-wall/
Someone like Jake Gyllenhaal would probably have been more popular with girls than Matthew Weiner. That’s a very likely reason for the resentment.
with a last name that is also slang for a specific part of the male anatomy.
Did anybody else feel that Leonard, the nebbishy accountant at the encounter group who lived life locked in an emotional refrigerator, was a stand-in for Weiner, and that being embraced by Don – the vanquished would be goy king – was a benediction and the fulfillment of a wish for him?
A lot of TV shows and Hollywood movies come from a jewish neurotic mind, the movie Taken was written by a jew from NYC, Robert Mark Kamen.
To most of the non iSteve, Jew noticing world he is just another rich white guy. He’s just signaling to the world that he’s a victim too, an underdog in fact! Donald Sterling was Jewish until he said the wrong thing. Then he was just another rich white bigot.
As the magnificently coiffed Teuton Karl Lagerfeld observed….
The worst is ugly short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life – to be born short. I have never been friends with a short man in my life. Don’t trust them; they are mean, and they want to kill you
OT – I’ll happily have a Jewish doctor (in fact I have one), black or Hispanic, not so much
Acceptance rates at US medical schools in 2014 reveal ongoing discrimination against Asian-Americans and whites
http://www.aei.org/publication/acceptance-rates-us-medical-schools-2014-reveal-ongoing-racial-profiling-affirmative-discrimination-blacks-hispanics/
In my experience the knowledgeable ones keep quiet and the annoying attention seekers end up spouting whatever pops into their heads.
“His entire life is a self-created drama of brave endurance of microaggressions. It’s not unreasonable to assume that he possesses a strong predisposition to embellish non-events of his past.”
Well said.
Talk about Occam’s Butterknife. Is it really necessary to do a historically-integrated psychoanalysis of people who embellish all the microaggressions they claim to have heroically survived?
A simpler explanation is that making mountains out of molehills is encouraged and rewarded these days, so more and more people who think they can get away with it take part.
Here ya go:
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mental-illness-and-the-jews/
I’ll l bet you did. In all seriousness.
In the hands of a skilled teacher, a student like Sailer opens up a whole new realm of possible ways of looking at the world and making sense of it for the above average but conventional student. Such experiences and the character they engender are nothing less than the bedrock of a functional republic/free society. This was the original rationale for merit-based scholarships before U.S. News rankings and the like, but it can start as early as schooling does.
It’s a personality type.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
Benjamin Netanyahu.
Stephen Glass.
What do they all have in common?
The purpose is to provide practice in the ways groups of grown-ups solve problems/figure things out, while also exposing students to the thought processes of other students where they can learn by example, both good and bad. Often it is a way for a student to see how not to do something, without losing face by messing up himself. This is usually a big concern for both Black and Asian students, ironically.
I’ll keep a discussion on topic, remove disruptive/abusive students, and spur things with a question if they bog down.
Usually quite a bit more than when they started. That’s the purpose.
If the teacher takes things personally, but that sort of teacher will have bigger problems than poor discussions. The tricks is to ask the students if they approve of the territory they’re in, and on what grounds.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/sailer-vs-taylor-round-ii-citizenism-vs-white-nationalism
Blacks blame their practice of colorism on whites rather than on the blacks that practice it. Maybe this tendency is a feature of victimitis, not necessarily Jewishness.
And an effeminate manner.
He threw his pre-teen son at the blonde shiksa for God’s sake.
No “particular” resentment of “mischlings”. Interesting that you would use what is a derogatory word rather than restate the term half-Jewish.
That’s like someone coming on here and saying “we black people have no particular resentment against Oreos.”
I caught a snippet of an interview with him the other day, and in it he talks about how until the success of Mad Men, in his family and friends’s circles he was just “his wife’s loser husband, the kind of guy you call when someone needs to be picked up from the airport in the middle of the day, because you know he doesn’t have anything better to do” He was laughing when he said it, but I bet for someone of his background to live like that for years would feed a lot of resentments…
SWPL feminists and lesbians are fuming that Peggy did not embark on a new business venture with Joan. They are also angry that Peggy ended up with the cisgendered Heterosexual White male Stan. Maybe they were hoping Peggy and Joan would become a vibrantly diverse progressive Lesbian power couple in the business world. Or if Stan was played by Don Cheadle for example, they would not have been upset that she ended up with him. The only time the Left thinks White Heterosexuality is a good thing is when it involves a White woman falling in love with a Black man.
Yeah, but interesting speculation, with personal memories, facts, and factoids to back it up.
Pointing out the post's shortcomings in the comments is good. Providing higher-grade speculation or plausible alternative explanations is even better. Unlike at many sites, the host here won't spike your comment for doing that.
Steve has a lot of interesting things to say and he posts more or less whatever comes to his mind. One of the great things about the internet is that you are not space limited – he doesn’t just get 1 column per week or whatever. So maybe 60% of what he says is more true than ANYTHING you will ever read in the MSM (because he is not afraid to mention the elephant(s) in the room), 30% is a matter of opinion or not proven – maybe right/maybe wrong and 10% (Matthew Weiner hates mischlings) is completely wide of the target. That’s still a great batting average in my book if you compare it with someone like Krugman who is totally wrong 90% of the time.
Maybe Steve has made a wild, unsupported guess that Weiner, almost uniquely among American Jews, secretly harbors a special hatred toward half-bloods and somehow he guessed right, but personally I doubt it – it just doesn’t ring true to me, it just doesn’t fit the tenor of the times or the man.
Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly), I was more comfortable with the unapologetic ethnic Ashkenazi Jews like Weiner and counted a few of them as close friends. Most of these outwardly Jewish types did indeed go to public schools, and my affinity for them and my own humble kind was of what convinced me to leave private school against my parents' wishes.
The people who stood out to me as the most self-assured in the ethnic milieu of the time were on the Jewish side the Sephardim, and on the Christian side the Italians. Neither seemed to feel any need or desire to diminish their origin or resent the ethnic other. That seems kind of noble to me in retrospect, and I'm still not sure why they had that kind of ethnic self-esteem.
In the end, the problem with Weiner is that he has this fantasy that only ethnic Jews faced any barriers in the privileged white world. Apparently, he can't seem to conceive of the fact that the same people he resented would throw up ramparts against middle and working class gentiles, which suggests a profound self-absorption and parochialism.
Have ethnic Jews really had it harder than ordinary white gentiles? Maybe Mr. Weiner knows better, as is suggested by the prole origins of his character Don Draper, but that certainly isn't reflected in his choice of the term "white power." There is no such thing as white power. Unprivileged whites are cruelly used as a foil for the powerful to deflect attention from what's really going on. Morally speaking, it's a repugnant practice, and Weiner should be ashamed of himself for resorting to that.
>>There’s no particular resentment of MISCHLINGS in modern (non-Orthodox) Jewish culture.
But you actually have a label for the phenomena.
There is no real Yiddish word for this, because traditionally either your mother (and her mother, etc., ad infinitum) was Jewish and therefore you were Jewish (regardless of who your father was) or she wasn't, in which case you weren't Jewish at all. Being Jewish was a binary thing - there was no .5 value.
I’m curious as to what your alternative to researching a topic, weighing evidence, and discussing that evidence in a calm, structured setting is- Jerry Springer and WorldStarHipHop, perhaps?
You sound like the people I’ve encountered in education who discourage science classes from having kids learn how to actually make circuits under the rationale that the we can just buy pre-made stuff cheap from China.
Winner winner, chicken dinner. The entertainment industry is powered by the energy of short, bald men who are angry and resentful about it. The most hated producer in Hollywood not named Scott Rudin is a guy named Walter Parkes (formerly Wally Fishman), who is despised largely for being tall and having a great head of hair in a town full of balding gnomes. There’s a hilarious article about the disastrous making of Men in Black 3 that’s filled with anonymous quotes complaining about the guy’s “great hair.”
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/why-men-black-iii-started-166112?page=2
Steve, you’re really ahead of the curve here. The interest in just who is “privileged” and who is a “minority” is heating up.
Yesterday, the Stanford Review (ostensibly, a conservative medium) published this article about the recent dust-up on campus about the BDS movement.
If I had not known better, I would have thought they were trying to steal and parody your blog:
http://stanfordreview.org/article/bridging-the-anti-semitism-gap/
(emphasis is mine)
The author, a student called Elliot Kauffman, I guess doesn’t grasp the reality that in California, EVERYONE is a minority now.
I certainly do not believe that Jewish people control the media, or the banks, or that there is a secret cabal whereby a handful of Jewish men is running the world. But denying that, relative to their proportions in the US (2%) or California (3%), Jewish people are enormously over-represented in top government, business, education, and entertainment positions strikes me as an absurd denial of reality.
BOTH of our senators (Boxer and Feinstein) are Jewish. According to the Hillel Guide to Campus life, 15% of Stanford students are Jewish. (At Harvard, 26%). Three of the nine Supreme Court justices are Jewish (Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan).
How on earth would any discussion about “privilege” ignore the elephant in the room?
@iSteve
You’re right about the weird Jewish self-righteousness about attending “public” schools. I’m a catholic kid who went to beverly hills high and was recently bewildered to hear my high school buddies who are now sending their kids there expressing satisfaction that their kids are not going to “private” school.
Of course beverly hills has a special police to make sure outsiders are not sneaking their kids to their shangri-la…
Bible stories often begin with a genealogy that links the protagonist to Adam and thus to the creation event. Because in the left’s creation myth, everything started in the 1960′s, it is important to link Obama to the events in Selma. This helps us to get the big picture of how creation is unfolding.
Obama, in a way, is a metaphysical second coming of the victory at Selma. At Selma good people bravely and decisively broke the power of white racists. Obama today continues to break the power of the white racists by ruling over them and by inviting millions of non-white immigrants who will break their power permanently. That is how Obama and Selma are connected.
The eschatology of their belief system is that when white power is finally annihilated, there will be a heaven on earth.
I don’t think Steve’s insight is wild in the least. I saw the same tension when I was growing up. As an Anglo-Nordic prole (i.e. ordinary western Washington white kid), I saw the world of privilege from an outsider’s perspective, kind of like Weiner. I went to a private school on scholarship, and the Episcopalian “WASPs” included a whole lot of pretenders, most of whom (although not all) were part Jewish. The real Anglo Episcopalians were above all committed to hanging on to whatever ill-gotten gains they’d inherited from their red-handed grandfathers, their civic religion being not so much ethnic pride as a sort of poorly-concealed miserliness. Maybe I’m biased, but a lot of these people came off to me as entirely unprincipled fakes animated by nothing but a sense of ambition and greed.
Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly), I was more comfortable with the unapologetic ethnic Ashkenazi Jews like Weiner and counted a few of them as close friends. Most of these outwardly Jewish types did indeed go to public schools, and my affinity for them and my own humble kind was of what convinced me to leave private school against my parents’ wishes.
The people who stood out to me as the most self-assured in the ethnic milieu of the time were on the Jewish side the Sephardim, and on the Christian side the Italians. Neither seemed to feel any need or desire to diminish their origin or resent the ethnic other. That seems kind of noble to me in retrospect, and I’m still not sure why they had that kind of ethnic self-esteem.
In the end, the problem with Weiner is that he has this fantasy that only ethnic Jews faced any barriers in the privileged white world. Apparently, he can’t seem to conceive of the fact that the same people he resented would throw up ramparts against middle and working class gentiles, which suggests a profound self-absorption and parochialism.
Have ethnic Jews really had it harder than ordinary white gentiles? Maybe Mr. Weiner knows better, as is suggested by the prole origins of his character Don Draper, but that certainly isn’t reflected in his choice of the term “white power.” There is no such thing as white power. Unprivileged whites are cruelly used as a foil for the powerful to deflect attention from what’s really going on. Morally speaking, it’s a repugnant practice, and Weiner should be ashamed of himself for resorting to that.
There are a ton of movies making fun of actors and moguls. Satires on movie writers? Barton Fink and Adaptation come to mind.
“Harvard and Westlake (the boys school and the girls school merged in 1989) figure in the lives of so many prominent people.”
Jack Heston, grandson of WW2 Vet and Actor Charlton Heston, also graduated from Harvard-Westlake about five yrs ago.
Trying to recall what Weiner’s dad did so that he could afford to pay the exorbitant tuition. It was mentioned that at present Harvard-Westlake’s tuition runs about 27k per yr. so even if it was “only” 12k per yr back around 1980 when Weiner was a student, that was still some mucho bucks.
Somehow, post-busing, Jewish Americans managed to look out for their kids and now seem to make it a point of pride of having sent their kids to elite private schools as well as throwing exorbitant bar-mitzvahs (ex. hiring a famous hip hop/rapper to MC the event).
“That’s right, when ya got it, flaunt it!” –Max Bialistoch in The Producers
A simpler explanation is that making mountains out of molehills is encouraged and rewarded these days, so more and more people who think they can get away with it take part.
How many hundreds of millions of words have been published about all things “Mad Men” related? But how few have touched critically on what Weiner himself seems to think is central?
The worst is ugly short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life - to be born short. I have never been friends with a short man in my life. Don't trust them; they are mean, and they want to kill you
Lagerfeld sounds like a character in “Bruno.”
Whelp, that settles it; I’m Anglo-Saxon, and they’re a minority, so I’m a minority too. Same goes for every Euro ethnicity.
I suppose this is why the Usual Suspects guard the megaphone like the nuclear football.
The worst is ugly short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life - to be born short. I have never been friends with a short man in my life. Don't trust them; they are mean, and they want to kill you
I’m short and the experience of this short man is that after a certain number of interactions with tall men, whose attitude is one of contempt based on nothing but the height difference, well, the short man withdraws from the tall world. There may be some particularly fierce short men who actually do want to kill tall men and may, if they reach boss status, act on that impulse; but most short men just get the message of contempt early in life and stop looking for friendship or peer consideration from the tall.
Living in Hancock Park, he would have been in the LAUSD and zoned for either Fairfax or LAHS. Imagine how unhappy that would have made him.
Though you only have to go back a half-generation before Weiner to a time when Fairfax was still a good school.
Back in the late 1970s, it had a fair contingent of non-Catholics who lived there, and a few of them were Jews.
If any of them are reading Sailer, they might let us know what it was like.
Daniel Murphy, by the way, is now called Yeshiva Aharon Yaakov-Ohr Eliyahu.
OT:
The most peculiar thing I’ve read in a long time. A study is out saying that the suicide rate for children between the ages of 5 and 11 (that’s right, 5-11) is now higher for blacks than it is for whites, the only age group for which this true. Whites normally have much higher suicide rates than blacks. What are we talking about–I mean, in terms of real numbers?
That’s right per million, which would equate to about 10 suicides nationally per year among black children ages 5 to 11 (assuming about 4 million black children in those age groups). How they assesses these were suicides and not accidents, murders, etc., seems problematic to me, but this was the cause for a NY Times headline.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/health/suicide-rate-for-black-children-surged-in-2-decades-study-says.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly), I was more comfortable with the unapologetic ethnic Ashkenazi Jews like Weiner and counted a few of them as close friends. Most of these outwardly Jewish types did indeed go to public schools, and my affinity for them and my own humble kind was of what convinced me to leave private school against my parents' wishes.
The people who stood out to me as the most self-assured in the ethnic milieu of the time were on the Jewish side the Sephardim, and on the Christian side the Italians. Neither seemed to feel any need or desire to diminish their origin or resent the ethnic other. That seems kind of noble to me in retrospect, and I'm still not sure why they had that kind of ethnic self-esteem.
In the end, the problem with Weiner is that he has this fantasy that only ethnic Jews faced any barriers in the privileged white world. Apparently, he can't seem to conceive of the fact that the same people he resented would throw up ramparts against middle and working class gentiles, which suggests a profound self-absorption and parochialism.
Have ethnic Jews really had it harder than ordinary white gentiles? Maybe Mr. Weiner knows better, as is suggested by the prole origins of his character Don Draper, but that certainly isn't reflected in his choice of the term "white power." There is no such thing as white power. Unprivileged whites are cruelly used as a foil for the powerful to deflect attention from what's really going on. Morally speaking, it's a repugnant practice, and Weiner should be ashamed of himself for resorting to that.
Weiner isn’t a great artist, but he’s not a bad one either, so his creation isn’t as dopey as his interviews, which are, in part, a symptom of the intellectually debased Who-Whom times we live in. But they are also indicative of how little penalty in terms of public embarrassment there is for exposing your pettiest, most delusional, most self-pitying side these days … if you are a Who instead of a Whom. David Samuels in The Tablet got Weiner to ‘fess up to all sorts of derisory motivations, but virtually nobody noticed that there was anything absurd about Weiner’s self-image.
Matthew Weiner isn't a great artist? His creation Mad Men was ranked as the second greatest television drama of all time.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/breaking-bad-game-thrones-rank-time-best-dramas-list-article-1.1912409
And, of course, there's also the fact that Weiner very clearly has a nostalgic love for the '50s-'60s Jet Age Moderne aesthetic: the Connery Bond, North by Northwest, The Man From Uncle, Original Series Star Trek, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, etc. He tells himself that he's critiquing it, but that's just an excuse for loving what he knows he should hate.
For example, I recently rewatched the Godfather movies (I had never seen III, which I thought was a parody.) And on one of the discs there an hour long special showing Coppola going through his thinking as he's working up Godfather III. And FFC came across as a very nice man, and a very sweet and positive and family-oriented man, and also as something of an idiot. It was hard to watch.
I am at a disadvantage because I think we watched only one or two episodes of "Mad Men" years ago, so I cannot comment on the show (I can't comment on most of the big TV shows that people watch, because I don't watch them: Never saw Oprah either.) But this sounds like a post hoc attempt to gild the lily of the show's run by tying it into the most noble of contemporary visions: the eradication of white privilege. IOW, it sound phony, whether Weiner believes it or not.
I have to say, I’m a halfie myself and never noticed any resentment against halfies, unless you count the double presents on holidays.
Now, short and bald…that I’ll buy.
“Weiner isn’t a great artist”
Matthew Weiner isn’t a great artist? His creation Mad Men was ranked as the second greatest television drama of all time.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/breaking-bad-game-thrones-rank-time-best-dramas-list-article-1.1912409
???
The set-designers, photography, lighting and costume gals are the artists of that show
Acceptance rates at US medical schools in 2014 reveal ongoing discrimination against Asian-Americans and whites
http://www.aei.org/publication/acceptance-rates-us-medical-schools-2014-reveal-ongoing-racial-profiling-affirmative-discrimination-blacks-hispanics/
My GP has a Spanish surname, but he is a Mayo Clinic-trained, conquistador-American.
Well, to be fair, black colorism wouldn’t exist if whites didn’t exist. It wasn’t a think in Sub-Saharan Africa before white conquest and settlement, was it? And it doesn’t seem to be as much of a thing in the Muslim world, where slavery and manumission were common.
Colorism is of modern origin.
It is safe to assume that the buyers of white slaves in the Middle Ages and later preferred them to be white.
His wife’s “loser husband” who was a writer and producer on The Sopranos? With great ambition and success comes great insecurity, apparently.
Yeah, this was commented on some time back.There’s a tension between Weiner’s aesthetic impulses and the ethnic resentments that boil within his psyche. One half of him wants to do a show that’s about sticking it to those WASP bastards, but the artistic self gets in the way, runs interference, as it were.To cite only the most obvious example, PC critics have been demanding a POC main character on the show for years.But Weiner never gave in.Why? Clearly, the “stick it to the WASPs” side of his personality would love to place a Black martyr on the show, front and center.But the aesthetic side of him balks at that.He know that it would be bad art.
And, of course, there’s also the fact that Weiner very clearly has a nostalgic love for the ’50s-’60s Jet Age Moderne aesthetic: the Connery Bond, North by Northwest, The Man From Uncle, Original Series Star Trek, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, etc. He tells himself that he’s critiquing it, but that’s just an excuse for loving what he knows he should hate.
- Not as a delusional stereotype among white racists, but as a fact.
- Not as wholly justified retribution, but as bad.
Growing up in Hancock Park, Weiner was more in proximity to black criminals than I was over in the less posh but more geographically insulated SF Valley. Jews in particular resented blacks mugging old Jewish ladies of modest means in the adjacent Fairfax district.
Showtime’s Episodes might count.
I think part of it too is that it can be very deflating for a fan of some artist or creative person to hear the oftentimes pedestrian and even puerile motivations and intentions that actually lie behind a work or creation that we admire.
For example, I recently rewatched the Godfather movies (I had never seen III, which I thought was a parody.) And on one of the discs there an hour long special showing Coppola going through his thinking as he’s working up Godfather III. And FFC came across as a very nice man, and a very sweet and positive and family-oriented man, and also as something of an idiot. It was hard to watch.
I am at a disadvantage because I think we watched only one or two episodes of “Mad Men” years ago, so I cannot comment on the show (I can’t comment on most of the big TV shows that people watch, because I don’t watch them: Never saw Oprah either.) But this sounds like a post hoc attempt to gild the lily of the show’s run by tying it into the most noble of contemporary visions: the eradication of white privilege. IOW, it sound phony, whether Weiner believes it or not.
As someone else said, he loved and embraced the aesthetic and excelled at writing a soap opera. He cast beautiful people and sprinkled in enough business to keep men interested. This is what kept people coming back.
“Colorism” has been a thing in the Middle East for thousands of years (it’s also present in East Asia).And Black physical features as a whole are looked down upon in the Muslim Middle East.
Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly), I was more comfortable with the unapologetic ethnic Ashkenazi Jews like Weiner and counted a few of them as close friends. Most of these outwardly Jewish types did indeed go to public schools, and my affinity for them and my own humble kind was of what convinced me to leave private school against my parents' wishes.
The people who stood out to me as the most self-assured in the ethnic milieu of the time were on the Jewish side the Sephardim, and on the Christian side the Italians. Neither seemed to feel any need or desire to diminish their origin or resent the ethnic other. That seems kind of noble to me in retrospect, and I'm still not sure why they had that kind of ethnic self-esteem.
In the end, the problem with Weiner is that he has this fantasy that only ethnic Jews faced any barriers in the privileged white world. Apparently, he can't seem to conceive of the fact that the same people he resented would throw up ramparts against middle and working class gentiles, which suggests a profound self-absorption and parochialism.
Have ethnic Jews really had it harder than ordinary white gentiles? Maybe Mr. Weiner knows better, as is suggested by the prole origins of his character Don Draper, but that certainly isn't reflected in his choice of the term "white power." There is no such thing as white power. Unprivileged whites are cruelly used as a foil for the powerful to deflect attention from what's really going on. Morally speaking, it's a repugnant practice, and Weiner should be ashamed of himself for resorting to that.
Since you mentioned it, what is going on?
And, of course, there's also the fact that Weiner very clearly has a nostalgic love for the '50s-'60s Jet Age Moderne aesthetic: the Connery Bond, North by Northwest, The Man From Uncle, Original Series Star Trek, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, etc. He tells himself that he's critiquing it, but that's just an excuse for loving what he knows he should hate.
A few seasons ago, a theme on Mad Men was the rise of black crime in NYC in the 1960s. The show got some criticism for treating it:
- Not as a delusional stereotype among white racists, but as a fact.
- Not as wholly justified retribution, but as bad.
Growing up in Hancock Park, Weiner was more in proximity to black criminals than I was over in the less posh but more geographically insulated SF Valley. Jews in particular resented blacks mugging old Jewish ladies of modest means in the adjacent Fairfax district.
“Jefferson says:
“Weiner isn’t a great artist”
Matthew Weiner isn’t a great artist? His creation Mad Men was ranked as the second greatest television drama of all time.”
Steve said he wasn’t a bad one either. Second greatest TV drama of all time? First greatest? Who cares – it’s still TV. Not great, but not bad sounds about right for a talented TV dramatist like Weiner.
And, of course, there's also the fact that Weiner very clearly has a nostalgic love for the '50s-'60s Jet Age Moderne aesthetic: the Connery Bond, North by Northwest, The Man From Uncle, Original Series Star Trek, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, etc. He tells himself that he's critiquing it, but that's just an excuse for loving what he knows he should hate.
So we should just look at the artistic creation and not worry about the creator?
Matthew Weiner isn't a great artist? His creation Mad Men was ranked as the second greatest television drama of all time.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/breaking-bad-game-thrones-rank-time-best-dramas-list-article-1.1912409
Says the New York Times
???
The set-designers, photography, lighting and costume gals are the artists of that show
I took a corporate finance theory course in UCLA B-School from a brilliant old entrepreneur who had used cutting edge theory to make highly profitable decisions in the manufacturing business he owned. I was his favorite student because I could be counted on to confidently spout out in class the plausible but totally wrong ideas that most students secretly were thinking, but had the sense to keep their mouths shut:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/sailer-vs-taylor-round-ii-citizenism-vs-white-nationalism
- Not as a delusional stereotype among white racists, but as a fact.
- Not as wholly justified retribution, but as bad.
Growing up in Hancock Park, Weiner was more in proximity to black criminals than I was over in the less posh but more geographically insulated SF Valley. Jews in particular resented blacks mugging old Jewish ladies of modest means in the adjacent Fairfax district.
Yeah, there was quite a bit of hoopla over Roger Sterling getting mugged (at gunpoint) by a Black mugger.There was also a very negative reaction to when Don Draper’s kids ran into a semi-crazy Black lady who was robbing Don’s apartment.
Well, there is the oft-cited observation that Jews getting mugged/robbed/otherwise attacked by Black criminals in NYC in the late ’60s-early ’70s was one of the reasons for the rise of neo-conservatism.
Steve, missing the forest for the trees.
There would be no appreciable difference if say, Joss Whedon wrote “Mad Men.” Or any difference in the stuff about racism, sexism, anti semitism, either.
What is important about Matthew Weiner is not that he’s a Jew. He might as well be a different species from Michael Bay, Adam Sandler, and Rob Schneider. No, what is important is that Weiner is a middling upper class guy who resents not being King.
That’s it basically. His whole anti-White guy, anti-Middle Class, anti-American schtick is the same as Joss Whedon’s. Other than sexy vampires, you could mix up Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mad Men and not tell which scene was which other than better production values in Mad Men. Anti-suburbs? Check! Nuclear family source of all evil? Check! White guys either sexy and bad or nerdy and sexless and icky? Double Check!
Steve both Weiner and Whedon have the same beef. They hate The Man, when in fact they are part of … The Man. A big part. Just not the boss.
And that is the REAL source of their anger. Jealousy and rage that the universe does not bow down to them and worship them as great creators. Hence their picking safe targets to win the accolades of the only people who matter — the upper levels of the Aristocracy. Not their own mid-tier.
I’m coming to the wisdom of a landed aristocracy. THERE the only way to advance from mid-tier aristocracy to the top was marriages made wisely. Not beating up the White Middle Class.
“Well, there is the oft-cited observation that Jews getting mugged/robbed/otherwise attacked by Black criminals in NYC in the late ’60s-early ’70s was one of the reasons for the rise of neo-conservatism.”
John Podhoretz and Bill Kristol–who both grew up on the Upper West Side in that period–have each said exactly that.
I have no idea–you and John Derbyshire are basically the only people I read!
This basic observation explains a lot. One might call it the “Ted and Fred” game. If Ted is in charge, and wants to stay in charge, a good strategy is to loudly accuse Fred of being the one who is really in charge and therefore responsible for everything that has gone so horribly wrong including being mean to poor Ted. It’s why the truly rich abandoned their obvious mansions in Newport for equally luxurious houses that now repose behind a long line of tall hedges from which only emerges the end of a driveway and a plain mailbox.
Yes, and you could replace Ted with "Democrats" and Fred with "Republicans," and vice versa, and it would also be true.
The concept of statistical significance was invented by a mad scientist named Yakub.
maybe it’s so the teachers don’t get bored?
Yeah but were they taller?
Arachnophopia wouldn’t amount to much without spiders.
Colorism is of modern origin.
It is safe to assume that the buyers of white slaves in the Middle Ages and later preferred them to be white.
I bet the rugby players at his school hit puberty earlier.
Yeah, but interesting speculation, with personal memories, facts, and factoids to back it up.
Pointing out the post's shortcomings in the comments is good. Providing higher-grade speculation or plausible alternative explanations is even better. Unlike at many sites, the host here won't spike your comment for doing that.
For generations, people like Matthew Weiner have been redrawing the pictures we have in our heads of America’s past. So, it’s interesting and useful to speculate on their ethnic motivations and biases, especially when Weiner loves to talk about his ethnic motivations and biases.
I speculated about Weiner having strong opinions on his part-Jewish fellow students at Harvard School not being Real Jews because in his interview in The Tablet with David Samuels he goes on at some length about how only 15 out of 120 students were Jewish and then returns to the topic saying only 10% of the students were Jewish but they were high achievers so everybody overestimates what percent were Jewish. He’s quite worked up over the statistics of 34 years ago.
How do we charitably reconcile his memories with a 1981 newspaper article, which may be an article he even refers to in his interview, saying the student body was 40% Jewish? One possibility is different methodologies for treating part-Jewish kids statistically. If your dad is, say, Tony Curtis and your mom is Janet Leigh, maybe you’d be counted as part of the newspaper article’s 40%, but you wouldn’t count in Weiner’s 10%.
Or maybe Weiner is just delusional.
- Not as a delusional stereotype among white racists, but as a fact.
- Not as wholly justified retribution, but as bad.
Growing up in Hancock Park, Weiner was more in proximity to black criminals than I was over in the less posh but more geographically insulated SF Valley. Jews in particular resented blacks mugging old Jewish ladies of modest means in the adjacent Fairfax district.
That sounds like the past tense version of Rod Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility.”*
“The black crime wave was a fiction, and white people deserved what they got.”
*http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-law-of-merited-impossibility/
“There’s no particular resentment of mischlings in modern (non-Orthodox) Jewish culture. You just totally made that up.”
Free birthright trips to Israel are set up to get Jewish kids to fall in love with other Jewish kids on the trip or with Israelis.
Elliott Abrams, grand high muckety-muck of Middle Eastern policy in the Bush Administration, wrote a not very controversial book in the 1990s about how to cut down on intermarriage.
I could pull up a lot more examples like this.
Look, Weiner is another example of the kind of powerful guys I want more of on my side: Jews who tend to be natural concentric loyalists. I want them on the side of their fellow American citizens.
Conservatives tried a long experiment in not subjecting them to any kind of reasoned critique. At first, back about 1969, it seemed to be working, but in recent decades, it’s stopped working. If a privileged group is above criticism so they don’t fear being embarrassed over hypocrisy, they will tend to indulge their most self-servingly contradictory stances, like nationalism for Israel and globalism for America.
As an alternative, I offer a fair compromise: patriotism for America and Israel. But of course there’s little pragmatic reason to settle for this when you can have it all because you are above criticism.
Why do you go against...the Bible?
Like I mean...this question was settled 2000 years ago...
They will never be on your side Steve.
I know you know this but are just mouthing platitudes, but just in case you aren't :)
Yes, but that's distinct from resentment. What older, more traditionally oriented Jews fear is their grandkids being raised outside Judaism completely. (And on a grander scale that happening frequently enough to spell the death-knell of Jewish culture). Obviously marrying a non-Jew substantially increases that chance. Nobody cares about Jews being romantically involved with non-Jews, but they do care about the possibility of the spouse raising the kids Christian.
My wife is Jewish and I'm not. The same applies to her mother (Catholic father). Never once have either experienced any animosity from other Jews, and the majority of their family friends are other New York Jews. That's because my mother-in-law raised her kids Jewish. I've certainly observed a certain distaste (discrimination is probably too strong a word) for hereditary Jews that are raised or convert to practicing Christians. (Generally Jews becoming non-practicing or even atheistic, is not viewed in bad terms for myriad reasons).
The most illustrative example I can think is the Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes where Larry David attends a baptism. The Jewish groom is converting to Christianity. Larry arrives late, sees a man he thinks is drowning in the river, and pulls him out. All the Jews secretly tell him after that they think he did a good thing. They didn't care that the man was marrying a gentile (even Larry himself was), but they viewed the groom as a traitor for abandoning Judaism.
Bill Hamilton’s rugby teammates called him “Caveman” and “Apeman.”
Our current Left (sic) doesn’t think, they feel.
Off topic but this touches on steves common theme of Jews questioning their alliance with the left.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/american-jews-the-last-leftist-jews-in-the-world/
I speculated about Weiner having strong opinions on his part-Jewish fellow students at Harvard School not being Real Jews because in his interview in The Tablet with David Samuels he goes on at some length about how only 15 out of 120 students were Jewish and then returns to the topic saying only 10% of the students were Jewish but they were high achievers so everybody overestimates what percent were Jewish. He's quite worked up over the statistics of 34 years ago.
How do we charitably reconcile his memories with a 1981 newspaper article, which may be an article he even refers to in his interview, saying the student body was 40% Jewish? One possibility is different methodologies for treating part-Jewish kids statistically. If your dad is, say, Tony Curtis and your mom is Janet Leigh, maybe you'd be counted as part of the newspaper article's 40%, but you wouldn't count in Weiner's 10%.
Or maybe Weiner is just delusional.
The latter. You are trying to make sense of resentments – resentments are not rational by definition. Of course he is going to underestimate and he doesn’t have to use any special counting method – he can just make sh_t up to suit his preferred narrative.
Was there anything in my post that suggested that?
It is clear that I flipped your comment 180 degrees.
One would think that would have occurred to me when I was bolding all those phrases but it didn't.
the lucky ones get brains and brawn
He’s a successful Jew; they learn to self-deprecate in the crib to prevent anyone from finding them threatening. Have we learned nothing from Woody Allen and George Costanza?
But you actually have a label for the phenomena.
The label was the German/ Nazi name for part Jews (mixed-breeds), which I used tongue in cheek. It is not really in current use by Jews or anyone else.
There is no real Yiddish word for this, because traditionally either your mother (and her mother, etc., ad infinitum) was Jewish and therefore you were Jewish (regardless of who your father was) or she wasn’t, in which case you weren’t Jewish at all. Being Jewish was a binary thing – there was no .5 value.
Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly), I was more comfortable with the unapologetic ethnic Ashkenazi Jews like Weiner and counted a few of them as close friends. Most of these outwardly Jewish types did indeed go to public schools, and my affinity for them and my own humble kind was of what convinced me to leave private school against my parents' wishes.
The people who stood out to me as the most self-assured in the ethnic milieu of the time were on the Jewish side the Sephardim, and on the Christian side the Italians. Neither seemed to feel any need or desire to diminish their origin or resent the ethnic other. That seems kind of noble to me in retrospect, and I'm still not sure why they had that kind of ethnic self-esteem.
In the end, the problem with Weiner is that he has this fantasy that only ethnic Jews faced any barriers in the privileged white world. Apparently, he can't seem to conceive of the fact that the same people he resented would throw up ramparts against middle and working class gentiles, which suggests a profound self-absorption and parochialism.
Have ethnic Jews really had it harder than ordinary white gentiles? Maybe Mr. Weiner knows better, as is suggested by the prole origins of his character Don Draper, but that certainly isn't reflected in his choice of the term "white power." There is no such thing as white power. Unprivileged whites are cruelly used as a foil for the powerful to deflect attention from what's really going on. Morally speaking, it's a repugnant practice, and Weiner should be ashamed of himself for resorting to that.
As Steve points out, this stuff is getting pretty old, but within the living memory of (older) Jewish people, there was a time in America (not Weiner’s time – we are talking mostly pre-1960s and mostly pre-WWII) when there was straight up racial discrimination against Jews. Not quite as bad as for blacks, but not great either. Not just country clubs (which really affect just a small % of people) but employers, hotels, universities, etc. which either didn’t take any Jews at all or took a very small number. There was similar discrimination against other immigrant groups (Italians and before that the Irish) but nothing of the type against white Protestants regardless of social class. Obviously they were not going to let you into their exclusive social clubs but as far as jobs, hotels, college admissions, etc. there was just nothing like that. I’m talking about actual formal discrimination (e.g. hotels would put in its ads the word “restricted” which was a polite way of saying “no Jews allowed”. If by mistake Mr. Goldberg tried to book a room, there would be “no rooms available”).
But could he have stayed in a B'nai Zion lodge? Need I ask?
Your hypothetical Mr. Goldberg never really had a problem finding a room in the US. He may have had a problem staying in the highest status lodgings, but for him to call that racism when most whites were similarly disadvantaged would be some kind of chutzpah, AKA bullshit.
There's a reason that there are so many Jews in the US: we were very nice and fair to them compared to where they came from, and I've had old Jews say that to me. And in return guys like Weiner smear us all as racist antisemites.
What an asshole.
Pardon the language, but this concept of white gentile American guilt vis a vis Jews is highly offensive to me.
Free birthright trips to Israel are set up to get Jewish kids to fall in love with other Jewish kids on the trip or with Israelis.
Elliott Abrams, grand high muckety-muck of Middle Eastern policy in the Bush Administration, wrote a not very controversial book in the 1990s about how to cut down on intermarriage.
I could pull up a lot more examples like this.
Look, Weiner is another example of the kind of powerful guys I want more of on my side: Jews who tend to be natural concentric loyalists. I want them on the side of their fellow American citizens.
Conservatives tried a long experiment in not subjecting them to any kind of reasoned critique. At first, back about 1969, it seemed to be working, but in recent decades, it's stopped working. If a privileged group is above criticism so they don't fear being embarrassed over hypocrisy, they will tend to indulge their most self-servingly contradictory stances, like nationalism for Israel and globalism for America.
As an alternative, I offer a fair compromise: patriotism for America and Israel. But of course there's little pragmatic reason to settle for this when you can have it all because you are above criticism.
I’ll take your compromise, now let me work on the other 6,999,999
(I don’t even care about Israel that much one way or the other…I’ll root for them over Palestine in a vague way, but it’s not worth sending American troops over.)
I always had the sense Bill Buckley got everyone to pass on the anti-Semitism because it got too much of a bad odor after WW2.
But, I could be wrong.
Though you only have to go back a half-generation before Weiner to a time when Fairfax was still a good school.
Too bad, he could have gone to school with Flea and the other Peppers.
Free birthright trips to Israel are set up to get Jewish kids to fall in love with other Jewish kids on the trip or with Israelis.
Elliott Abrams, grand high muckety-muck of Middle Eastern policy in the Bush Administration, wrote a not very controversial book in the 1990s about how to cut down on intermarriage.
I could pull up a lot more examples like this.
Look, Weiner is another example of the kind of powerful guys I want more of on my side: Jews who tend to be natural concentric loyalists. I want them on the side of their fellow American citizens.
Conservatives tried a long experiment in not subjecting them to any kind of reasoned critique. At first, back about 1969, it seemed to be working, but in recent decades, it's stopped working. If a privileged group is above criticism so they don't fear being embarrassed over hypocrisy, they will tend to indulge their most self-servingly contradictory stances, like nationalism for Israel and globalism for America.
As an alternative, I offer a fair compromise: patriotism for America and Israel. But of course there's little pragmatic reason to settle for this when you can have it all because you are above criticism.
“Look, Weiner is another example of the kind of powerful guys I want more of on my side”
Why do you go against…the Bible?
Like I mean…this question was settled 2000 years ago…
They will never be on your side Steve.
I know you know this but are just mouthing platitudes, but just in case you aren’t
For example, I recently rewatched the Godfather movies (I had never seen III, which I thought was a parody.) And on one of the discs there an hour long special showing Coppola going through his thinking as he's working up Godfather III. And FFC came across as a very nice man, and a very sweet and positive and family-oriented man, and also as something of an idiot. It was hard to watch.
I am at a disadvantage because I think we watched only one or two episodes of "Mad Men" years ago, so I cannot comment on the show (I can't comment on most of the big TV shows that people watch, because I don't watch them: Never saw Oprah either.) But this sounds like a post hoc attempt to gild the lily of the show's run by tying it into the most noble of contemporary visions: the eradication of white privilege. IOW, it sound phony, whether Weiner believes it or not.
What’s interesting is that I’ve seen every episode of the show and largely enjoyed it. Not until Steve exposed The Tablet interview and now the Paris Review interview do I see the resentment writ large. I was watching some of the first episodes last week during their marathon showing. Weiner really made normal, every day Americans out to be total assholes. A 2nd viewing confirms how Weiner feels about White Christian America.
As someone else said, he loved and embraced the aesthetic and excelled at writing a soap opera. He cast beautiful people and sprinkled in enough business to keep men interested. This is what kept people coming back.
Maybe the worst was Betty's bitchy friend Francine (pregnant and smoking and drinking) complaining about "those people" in Florida with the "big noses." And Betty is portrayed as the hateful ice queen for properly and finally insulting Jimmy the Jewish comedian after Jimmy shocked her by telling her their spouses were sleeping with each other. Betty is upset by the news of her husband's adultery and replies defensively to him, "You people are ugly and crude" - a perfectly fair assessment of Jimmy's rude behavior to other people. Betty walks away and he remarks, "What people do you mean, comedians?"
Free birthright trips to Israel are set up to get Jewish kids to fall in love with other Jewish kids on the trip or with Israelis.
Elliott Abrams, grand high muckety-muck of Middle Eastern policy in the Bush Administration, wrote a not very controversial book in the 1990s about how to cut down on intermarriage.
I could pull up a lot more examples like this.
Look, Weiner is another example of the kind of powerful guys I want more of on my side: Jews who tend to be natural concentric loyalists. I want them on the side of their fellow American citizens.
Conservatives tried a long experiment in not subjecting them to any kind of reasoned critique. At first, back about 1969, it seemed to be working, but in recent decades, it's stopped working. If a privileged group is above criticism so they don't fear being embarrassed over hypocrisy, they will tend to indulge their most self-servingly contradictory stances, like nationalism for Israel and globalism for America.
As an alternative, I offer a fair compromise: patriotism for America and Israel. But of course there's little pragmatic reason to settle for this when you can have it all because you are above criticism.
“Free birthright trips to Israel are set up to get Jewish kids to fall in love with other Jewish kids on the trip or with Israelis.”
Yes, but that’s distinct from resentment. What older, more traditionally oriented Jews fear is their grandkids being raised outside Judaism completely. (And on a grander scale that happening frequently enough to spell the death-knell of Jewish culture). Obviously marrying a non-Jew substantially increases that chance. Nobody cares about Jews being romantically involved with non-Jews, but they do care about the possibility of the spouse raising the kids Christian.
My wife is Jewish and I’m not. The same applies to her mother (Catholic father). Never once have either experienced any animosity from other Jews, and the majority of their family friends are other New York Jews. That’s because my mother-in-law raised her kids Jewish. I’ve certainly observed a certain distaste (discrimination is probably too strong a word) for hereditary Jews that are raised or convert to practicing Christians. (Generally Jews becoming non-practicing or even atheistic, is not viewed in bad terms for myriad reasons).
The most illustrative example I can think is the Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes where Larry David attends a baptism. The Jewish groom is converting to Christianity. Larry arrives late, sees a man he thinks is drowning in the river, and pulls him out. All the Jews secretly tell him after that they think he did a good thing. They didn’t care that the man was marrying a gentile (even Larry himself was), but they viewed the groom as a traitor for abandoning Judaism.
There was a lot more discrimination against everyone 70 years ago, because civil society was relatively unfettered. Hence my great grandfather could stay in a Sons of Norway lodge, while a Jew couldn’t. But neither could an Irishman, an Anglo-American, and certainly not a German.
But could he have stayed in a B’nai Zion lodge? Need I ask?
Your hypothetical Mr. Goldberg never really had a problem finding a room in the US. He may have had a problem staying in the highest status lodgings, but for him to call that racism when most whites were similarly disadvantaged would be some kind of chutzpah, AKA bullshit.
There’s a reason that there are so many Jews in the US: we were very nice and fair to them compared to where they came from, and I’ve had old Jews say that to me. And in return guys like Weiner smear us all as racist antisemites.
What an asshole.
Pardon the language, but this concept of white gentile American guilt vis a vis Jews is highly offensive to me.
Jews did the same thing, and still do: e.g., Birthright free trips to Israel are carefully designed to incubate romance among Jews and only among Jews.
from a [non-Jewish] Massachusetts resident [with a Jewish sounding last name] who wrote to the Keoka Farm
Guest House in Waterford, Maine, in quest of an accommodation.
The hotel advised him that it catered only to a "Gentile
clientele."
"It looks like we both made a mistake," the Massachusetts
man replied. "You thought I was Jewish and I thought you
were American."
It's highly offensive to me, too, and I'm Jewish. This sort of slander of the Gentile by the Jew, and Jewish leadership in modern revolutionary movements, probably helps to account for the tragic aspects of modern Jewish history.
If Ted is in charge, and wants to stay in charge, a good strategy is to loudly accuse Fred of being the one who is really in charge and therefore responsible for everything that has gone so horribly wrong including being mean to poor Ted.
Yes, and you could replace Ted with “Democrats” and Fred with “Republicans,” and vice versa, and it would also be true.
What a strange notion. I’m tall (6’4″) and I don’t think less of short men. In fact, unless they are freakishly short (dwarf or pygmy), I don’t even notice their height. I doubt I’m unusual in this regard.
Reminds me of the exchange in Mad Men, when Ginsberg (young, socially awkward entry level copywriter) is upset at Don Draper (tall, charismatic, rich, handsome) for dropping his idea at the client meeting:
Ginsberg: What do I care, I've got a million ideas. A million of them.
Don Draper: Good, I guess I'm lucky you work for me.
Ginsberg: I feel bad for you.
Don Draper: I don't think about you at all.
Why do you go against...the Bible?
Like I mean...this question was settled 2000 years ago...
They will never be on your side Steve.
I know you know this but are just mouthing platitudes, but just in case you aren't :)
Never’s a long time. Study up on Romans 9-11.
Headline I’d like to some day see: “Teachers Strike for Better Students”.
Check your Height Privilege.
But could he have stayed in a B'nai Zion lodge? Need I ask?
Your hypothetical Mr. Goldberg never really had a problem finding a room in the US. He may have had a problem staying in the highest status lodgings, but for him to call that racism when most whites were similarly disadvantaged would be some kind of chutzpah, AKA bullshit.
There's a reason that there are so many Jews in the US: we were very nice and fair to them compared to where they came from, and I've had old Jews say that to me. And in return guys like Weiner smear us all as racist antisemites.
What an asshole.
Pardon the language, but this concept of white gentile American guilt vis a vis Jews is highly offensive to me.
The hotel discrimination thing is much misunderstood. The hotels that had ethnic restrictions tended to be long-term resorts where wealthy people took their families to have their heirs socialize with, and maybe get engaged to, suitable heirs of similar families. The English had Downton Abbey-style country estates for stimulating romance among the invited, so Americans built country clubs and resort hotels to do the same thing, but a little more economically efficiently. Part of what you paid for was the resort pre-screening its guests to be suitable in-laws for you so that your youngsters didn’t fall in love with somebody outside of the conventional marriage boundaries.
Jews did the same thing, and still do: e.g., Birthright free trips to Israel are carefully designed to incubate romance among Jews and only among Jews.
As you suggest, there's no doubt Jews did the same thing. It confounds me when I see them claim that this is somehow evidence of discrimination.
In fact, the one time I really got into it with a Jewish friend of mine was when she told me that I couldn't hang out with her ultraorthodox friend because she didn't associate with gentiles, to which I casually replied "what a b*tch." The tirade I was treated to after that, which included strident denunciations of Jesus Christ, was a real eye-opener, although in retrospect I think my little Ashkenazi friend probably had motives other than purely religious to keep me away from her female acquaintances.
LOL
But Weiner wasn’t self-deprecating. He appeared to be genuinely agitated over all the anti-Semitism he felt he had experienced in the Hollywood Hills.
It's about the instinctive lack of a filter, not a conscious act of deprecation.
Call it the flaccid upper lip.
> What a strange notion. I’m tall (6’4″) and I don’t think less of short men. In fact, unless they are freakishly short (dwarf or pygmy), I don’t even notice their height. I doubt I’m unusual in this regard.
Reminds me of the exchange in Mad Men, when Ginsberg (young, socially awkward entry level copywriter) is upset at Don Draper (tall, charismatic, rich, handsome) for dropping his idea at the client meeting:
Ginsberg: What do I care, I’ve got a million ideas. A million of them.
Don Draper: Good, I guess I’m lucky you work for me.
Ginsberg: I feel bad for you.
Don Draper: I don’t think about you at all.
It is said Barack Obama had an effect on classroom discussions also. What if fate had put Sailer and Obama in the same classroom at some point?
Doesn’t it make a whole lot more sense to think that what this guy is angry about is that his father is a world famous neurologist and he is a television producer? I would assume in the world he grew up in, and to his father, world famous neurologist beats television producer by a very long shot. And yes, he probably did feel people were slighting him, but isn’t it possible they were slighting him, but just not for the reason he states. But to admit that people might not give you the respect your Dad received, because his achievements cannot be matched, is a very hard thing to do.
If Weiner resents gentiles being romantically involved with Jews, it seems a little strange that he decided to take Jon Hamm from obscurity to one of the most recognizable actors on the planet. After all, even when Mad Men premiered, Hamm was already in a decade-long relationship with his Jewish girlfriend.
And height.
Sure, we have "diversity" but there are a lot of physical standards that can't be so easily removed. I don't know what he looked like in high school, but he looks like George Costanza and isn't tall.
On a side note, that is what makes Bobby Jindal's ascent more remarkable -- he does look like a scrawny dark Indian geek. As opposed to Nicky Haley, or Kamala Harris, who are fine looking women.
So a lot of micro resentments there.
Certainly those some qualities have been oppressing, say, Mark Zuckerberg to take a random example.
There does seem to be something to (some) Jews and sexual marketplace insecurity. Superior intelligence and relative familial affluence don’t go as far in the college party scene as many a college freshman would have expected. It’s all about physical appearance and Game.
In 2013, high school senior Suzy Lee Weiss, made a small splash with a piece in the WSJ mocking the Ivy application process rigmarole.
Five months later she had a second piece in which we learned she was taking a gap year in Israel. In this piece she includes a vignette about accompanying a friend for a weekend visit to Penn State. One of her takeaways from the experience included:
She seems to think she’s being humorous…
As the fall term was just starting at the time of writing, she also lamented that she would be stuck sitting at home for awhile while her friends were away at college “enriching their curious minds and hooking up in their dorm rooms.”
She sounds like the type of girl who would run interference at a bar / party scene and cock block all the guys hitting on her friends. Not to protect the girls’ chastity or anything, but for the opportunity to fornicate with one of them herself at a later, suitable point in time.
“I would assume in the world he grew up in, and to his father, world famous neurologist beats television producer by a very long shot.”
You’d be wrong about the world he grew up in. Maybe there were a few people on his street in Hancock Park who didn’t think much of show biz folk — that’s another one of Weiner’s complaints of anti-Semitism — but the world within a 10 mile radius of his house is vastly more impressed with him being the creator of “Mad Men” than his father saving lives.
But could he have stayed in a B'nai Zion lodge? Need I ask?
Your hypothetical Mr. Goldberg never really had a problem finding a room in the US. He may have had a problem staying in the highest status lodgings, but for him to call that racism when most whites were similarly disadvantaged would be some kind of chutzpah, AKA bullshit.
There's a reason that there are so many Jews in the US: we were very nice and fair to them compared to where they came from, and I've had old Jews say that to me. And in return guys like Weiner smear us all as racist antisemites.
What an asshole.
Pardon the language, but this concept of white gentile American guilt vis a vis Jews is highly offensive to me.
I’m not talking about ethnic lodges, just plain old, open to the public (except Jews, and literally needless to say, blacks) hotels. Maybe you don’t have good insight into this being from Washington – the article below mentions Washington specifically as a state that did NOT have any restricted hotels. Call it whatever you want, but the plain fact is that certain hotels up until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not accept Jewish guests no matter how rich or socially prominent they were. In some areas (e.g. Ft. Lauderdale and Delray Beach), virtually 100% of establishments would not take Jews (at least during the high season). Non-Jewish whites were NOT similarly disadvantaged. These were not super-elite hotels, just plain old hotels (and for some reason, especially resort hotels). Maine and Florida (as summer and winter resorts) seemed to be particularly bad.
If a sign that says “Gentiles only” is not “racism” in your book then I don’t know what counts as racism. Be honest and say that you are OK with racism and antisemitism but don’t pretend that it didn’t exist or that Jews were not singled out, because they were. Now, 1963 is 50+ years ago, but this stuff really existed back then
This article from the mid-1950s describes how widespread the practice was:
http://mainejews.org/docs/Colby/Facts195503.pdf
One complaint cited by the Committee counsel was received
from a [non-Jewish] Massachusetts resident [with a Jewish sounding last name] who wrote to the Keoka Farm
Guest House in Waterford, Maine, in quest of an accommodation.
The hotel advised him that it catered only to a “Gentile
clientele.”
“It looks like we both made a mistake,” the Massachusetts
man replied. “You thought I was Jewish and I thought you
were American.”
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don't think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs.
You are confusing racism (thought crime) with discrimination.
Anyway, I can't speak for Steve but I'm ok with racism and antisemitism. I'm also okay with discrimination for that matter.
Jews did the same thing, and still do: e.g., Birthright free trips to Israel are carefully designed to incubate romance among Jews and only among Jews.
When my grandmother went to San Francisco in the 1930s, the Sons of Norway provided her with lodging and found her a suitable place to stay in the Mission. The idea was to make sure nice young Norwegian women could keep their honor intact in the big city. She ended up marrying my half-Irish cowboy grandfather there, so maybe it didn’t work exactly as intended, but she was never anything but an honest woman, so it wasn’t a total failure.
As you suggest, there’s no doubt Jews did the same thing. It confounds me when I see them claim that this is somehow evidence of discrimination.
In fact, the one time I really got into it with a Jewish friend of mine was when she told me that I couldn’t hang out with her ultraorthodox friend because she didn’t associate with gentiles, to which I casually replied “what a b*tch.” The tirade I was treated to after that, which included strident denunciations of Jesus Christ, was a real eye-opener, although in retrospect I think my little Ashkenazi friend probably had motives other than purely religious to keep me away from her female acquaintances.
As someone else said, he loved and embraced the aesthetic and excelled at writing a soap opera. He cast beautiful people and sprinkled in enough business to keep men interested. This is what kept people coming back.
I recently binge re-watched the first and second seasons and the anti-goyism was astonishing.
Maybe the worst was Betty’s bitchy friend Francine (pregnant and smoking and drinking) complaining about “those people” in Florida with the “big noses.” And Betty is portrayed as the hateful ice queen for properly and finally insulting Jimmy the Jewish comedian after Jimmy shocked her by telling her their spouses were sleeping with each other. Betty is upset by the news of her husband’s adultery and replies defensively to him, “You people are ugly and crude” – a perfectly fair assessment of Jimmy’s rude behavior to other people. Betty walks away and he remarks, “What people do you mean, comedians?”
TV pays much more than film so that’s where the smart people tend to go. In TV the “Showrunner” is the dominant player, and Directors & Writers are simply hired guns.
TV is extremely competitive and audience-dependent. Showrunners don’t have the freedom of using their job for self-therapy no matter what they might say in an interview. It makes as much sense to psychoanalyze Weiner based on his TV show, as it does to psychoanalyze the Showrunner of a Zombie Romance about his/her childhood encounters with zombies and romance. TV is about ratings, not self-expression.
The hotel discrimination thing is much misunderstood…
Can you recommend any further readings on this?
from a [non-Jewish] Massachusetts resident [with a Jewish sounding last name] who wrote to the Keoka Farm
Guest House in Waterford, Maine, in quest of an accommodation.
The hotel advised him that it catered only to a "Gentile
clientele."
"It looks like we both made a mistake," the Massachusetts
man replied. "You thought I was Jewish and I thought you
were American."
Well, maybe I just don’t know about these things, because I’m from Washington and as the report you linked says there wasn’t any discrimination here. Nevertheless, I remember when the ADL commissioned graphic posters to be plastered on the inside of Seattle Metro buses denouncing whites for discrimination in public transit (in violent black neighborhoods, nonetheless — isn’t that nice?) that never happened in Seattle. How’s that for justice, eh?
I mean, a few rude hotels in Maine and Florida (alleged by the ADL), and IT’S ON! Time to blood libel them gentiles from sea to shining sea, yessirree!
Steve I think hits the nail on the head (as usual) - resorts were by definition places you went with your family and the customers didn't want little Muffie hanging around those dark Jewish boys at the pool. These same hotels had no problem with Jews attending the dentists/accountants/lawyers convention in the off=season where their clientele's future gene pool was not at stake. Maybe they were really right about this but don't pretend that it never happened.
And Woody Allen wasn’t genuinely agitated about life in general?
It’s about the instinctive lack of a filter, not a conscious act of deprecation.
Call it the flaccid upper lip.
from a [non-Jewish] Massachusetts resident [with a Jewish sounding last name] who wrote to the Keoka Farm
Guest House in Waterford, Maine, in quest of an accommodation.
The hotel advised him that it catered only to a "Gentile
clientele."
"It looks like we both made a mistake," the Massachusetts
man replied. "You thought I was Jewish and I thought you
were American."
Maybe that is why the Pritzkers bought the Hyatt Hotel chain. But the Old World Jews of the Austrian Empire had the better attitude. Theodore Dalrymple writes this about Stephen Zweig, the famous Austrian Jewish writer:
To me, Zweig's story sounds like classic sour grapes - "those grapes were sour anyway", says the wolf who can't reach them.
Not least, because the Sachers that owned the hotel (and who had created Sacher Torte) were Jewish.
Would gentiles with no aristocratic status but with lots of money (e.g. made in industry) also have felt like intruders among the titled people at the Sacher during the period Sacher refers to?
It is my understanding that many of the famous Viennese winter balls are still open only to aristocrats.
Second this. Basically, the natural state of affairs is for everybody to be shorter than you, so height really doesn’t register. They’re all just some people down there somewhere. I’m a little surprised when I come across someone the same height or taller.
> There does seem to be something to (some) Jews and sexual marketplace insecurity. Superior intelligence and relative familial affluence don’t go as far in the college party scene as many a college freshman would have expected. It’s all about physical appearance and Game.
This is an artifact of population genetics and sociology. It’s well known that within sub-populations height and IQ have approximately 20% correlation with each other. The same can probably be said of intelligence and other physical attributes: muscular development, waist-to-hip ratio, facial symmetry, etc. All have positive correlations to IQ within sub-populations.
However these correlations are weak to non-existent between populations. Smart people are usually tall, but smart races don’t appear any taller than normal. In modern society, people are strongly assorted based on intelligence. Which means the median Jew most frequently interacts with +1SD intelligence gentiles. The median Jew has the same height as the median gentile, but +1SD intelligence gentiles typically have +0.2SD heights. Thus the typical Jewish person would overestimate gentile heights based on a biased personal sample.
Incidentally this is also why whites perceive blacks to be taller, even though the two groups have equal height distributions. Since median black IQ is -1.0SD, white folks generally interact much more with the right side of the bell curve. (Low IQ blacks frequently live in ghettos, and rarely interact with white people in any meaningful way). Hence a white person’s black associates will tend to be taller than his white associates.
TV is extremely competitive and audience-dependent. Showrunners don't have the freedom of using their job for self-therapy no matter what they might say in an interview. It makes as much sense to psychoanalyze Weiner based on his TV show, as it does to psychoanalyze the Showrunner of a Zombie Romance about his/her childhood encounters with zombies and romance. TV is about ratings, not self-expression.
Weiner psychoanalyzes himself at length.
My main bit of speculation is trying to figure out a way to charitably reconcile the demographic statistic he recalls in an agitated fashion and a contemporary reference in the newspaper.
Maybe Matt Weiner only counts people as Jewish if they have black hair? With the Arthur Fonzarelli-style leather jacket as an optional extra?
Poor guy.One can only imagine the ostracism that he experienced, being one of the tiny handful of people with dark hair in SoCal......
And that worked out great for the Austrian Jews in the end.
To me, Zweig’s story sounds like classic sour grapes – “those grapes were sour anyway”, says the wolf who can’t reach them.
The Habsburg Empire was a paradise for Jews, and had it not gone down in 1918 would have remained so.
Types like you don't like it precisely because the Jews within it were happy and, often, rich. What you probably most dislike is that many were converting to Christianity - like the family of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, you will not be pleased to learn (if indeed you have ever heard of him) is buried in a Catholic cemetery in Cambridge.
You obviously have some kind of ax to grind that is distorting your perception of reality. You’re entitled to your own opinions but not to your own facts. It wasn’t a few hotels, it was perhaps a majority of resorts and it wasn’t alleged by the ADL, it really happened.
Steve I think hits the nail on the head (as usual) – resorts were by definition places you went with your family and the customers didn’t want little Muffie hanging around those dark Jewish boys at the pool. These same hotels had no problem with Jews attending the dentists/accountants/lawyers convention in the off=season where their clientele’s future gene pool was not at stake. Maybe they were really right about this but don’t pretend that it never happened.
Max Bialystok, as in Bialystok, Poland.
Steve I think hits the nail on the head (as usual) - resorts were by definition places you went with your family and the customers didn't want little Muffie hanging around those dark Jewish boys at the pool. These same hotels had no problem with Jews attending the dentists/accountants/lawyers convention in the off=season where their clientele's future gene pool was not at stake. Maybe they were really right about this but don't pretend that it never happened.
Said the kettle to the pot.
As someone else said, he loved and embraced the aesthetic and excelled at writing a soap opera. He cast beautiful people and sprinkled in enough business to keep men interested. This is what kept people coming back.
I’ve only seen one episode of this show. How much of its appeal is simply due to nostalgia? If it were set in an ad agency today, with the same plot lines, would it have been so popular?
She’s actually half-Jewish, and the other half is descended from Swedish nobility, IIRC.
What would Vermont Royster think about that column? How far that rag has fallen.
from a [non-Jewish] Massachusetts resident [with a Jewish sounding last name] who wrote to the Keoka Farm
Guest House in Waterford, Maine, in quest of an accommodation.
The hotel advised him that it catered only to a "Gentile
clientele."
"It looks like we both made a mistake," the Massachusetts
man replied. "You thought I was Jewish and I thought you
were American."
If I am not mistaken, Italian-Americans and other Southern Europeans experienced similar discrimination, albeit to a lesser extent (not because of Catholicism but because of their ethnic background). Prejudice against them was less intense, but a more important factor would have been that fewer Italian-Americans in the 1950s could afford to stay at fancy hotels and resorts or live in areas with restrictive covenants (e.g. Grosse Pointe MI, which had a screening process and point system for Jews and “ethnic whites”, based on appearance, manners, accent, etc.)
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs.
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs."
Italians faced worst discrimination from WASPs than the Jews ever did. The worst thing that happened to Jews in America was not being able to join a golf country club, while the worst thing that happened to Italians in America was getting straight up lynched.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/opinion/falco-italian-immigrants/
There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation's early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn't African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
What was the reaction of our country's leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were "a rather good thing." The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as "... sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." An editorial the next day argued that: "Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. ..."
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous."
I’ve seen a few episodes. It has great costumes and set design, and it lets SWPLs feel good about how more enlightened they are. Effectively it’s re-litigating the 60′s with the modern day left as judge, jury, and show runner.
Sunset Boulevard?
I speculated about Weiner having strong opinions on his part-Jewish fellow students at Harvard School not being Real Jews because in his interview in The Tablet with David Samuels he goes on at some length about how only 15 out of 120 students were Jewish and then returns to the topic saying only 10% of the students were Jewish but they were high achievers so everybody overestimates what percent were Jewish. He's quite worked up over the statistics of 34 years ago.
How do we charitably reconcile his memories with a 1981 newspaper article, which may be an article he even refers to in his interview, saying the student body was 40% Jewish? One possibility is different methodologies for treating part-Jewish kids statistically. If your dad is, say, Tony Curtis and your mom is Janet Leigh, maybe you'd be counted as part of the newspaper article's 40%, but you wouldn't count in Weiner's 10%.
Or maybe Weiner is just delusional.
I speculated about Weiner having strong opinions on his part-Jewish fellow students…
Weiner says here:
Q: At the same time that Jews were assimilating, there would have been intrafamily clashes, right? Like between Ginsberg and his father, between maybe Jane Siegel and her parents. The parents staying in the city, their better-educated children moving to the suburbs, marrying non-Jews, not attending synagogue, becoming less religious. And yet the series didn’t show a lot of these clashes.
A: I think that Rachel Menken’s meeting with Don about what Israel means to her is a complete symbol of that. And her father coming into the agency and saying, “It reminds me of a czarist ministry” and her saying, “Luckily I don’t know what that is.”
You’ve heard the expression, “Lace-curtain Irish?” The first time I heard that I was like, “Wow! I can’t believe we don’t have an expression like that!” (Laughs). And one of the other writers said, “Yes, we do. It’s, “Who do you think you are?’ (laughs).
We’re speaking in terrible generalizations. And there’s so many exceptions to all of these things. But if you look at the story of “The Jazz Singer,” for example, this road of assimilation never goes away. We’re seeing it right now with the trans community. You’re seeing every side of, “What are you trying to be? The thing that you hate? Your own thing? Are you you better than everybody else now? Are you just trying to be normal?”
Jewish identity is very important to him and you seem to be on to something.
The interviewer, Lisa Lednicer, says in opening:
It’s about the rise of meritocracy in the workplace and the decline of the WASP establishment. It’s about outsiders seeking a way in, grasping for a gauzy version of the American Dream while blotting out their grimy pasts.
In other words, it’s a story about the Jewish American experience, even though creator Matthew Weiner insists that it has never been a Jewish show.
There is a reason why its not a Jewish show...but some jewishnes was in it.
A show only and about Jews wouldnt have any broad appeal or viewership.
But if you notice in almost every popular TV show there is some little dropping or reference or nugget about Jews.
They 'insert ' some Jewishness here and there but they know Jewishness itself could never be the basis for a widely watched series...it just wouldnt interest the majority of TV viewers.
For identity Jews like Weiner, and there are a lot of his type, knowing this just really further pisses them off and keeps them resenting it.
If they want to make a show all about Jews it has to be about Moses or the holocaust--and even there the nazis share the stage---and are taller, handsome and have spiffy uniforms....lol
Same here (I’m 6′ 5″). I sometimes catch myself staring just a bit, which gives me some sympathy for the many people who return the favor to me. (Even in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, there’s some frank gawping at the very tall on occasion; in some places in the mainland, it gets pretty old . . . .)
It’s discrimination porn, Steve. That’s what it is. For some reason there’s a market for it among the polity.
Free birthright trips to Israel are set up to get Jewish kids to fall in love with other Jewish kids on the trip or with Israelis.
Elliott Abrams, grand high muckety-muck of Middle Eastern policy in the Bush Administration, wrote a not very controversial book in the 1990s about how to cut down on intermarriage.
I could pull up a lot more examples like this.
Look, Weiner is another example of the kind of powerful guys I want more of on my side: Jews who tend to be natural concentric loyalists. I want them on the side of their fellow American citizens.
Conservatives tried a long experiment in not subjecting them to any kind of reasoned critique. At first, back about 1969, it seemed to be working, but in recent decades, it's stopped working. If a privileged group is above criticism so they don't fear being embarrassed over hypocrisy, they will tend to indulge their most self-servingly contradictory stances, like nationalism for Israel and globalism for America.
As an alternative, I offer a fair compromise: patriotism for America and Israel. But of course there's little pragmatic reason to settle for this when you can have it all because you are above criticism.
It’s awful white of you, but there is zero interest in taking up that offer from the other side. Any attempt to pressure them as you suggest by noticing their hypocrisy will be met with rage and repression.
I have a friend who’s 6’5″. When he was single, he made a point of pursuing tall women, partly out of preference, but partly as a way of reducing competition. He’d spot a > 5’9″ girl in a bar, standing by herself, and just go up to her and say, “Hi, I’m ____”. Ended up marrying a 6’2″ woman who’s an exec in a big tech company.
Didn't work for me, though -- I had a couple of fairly disastrous attempts at dating 5'8"-5'9" girls, then ended up going out with several 5' 3" cuties; the last one is now Mrs Calvinist.
His analogizing being a transexual to being Jewish or Irish is bizarre. A less PC interviewer would have tried to unpack that. It would be great to Steve interview Weiner. Maybe they have some acquaintances in common who could try to set it up?
“Jewish culture has a useful tendency to ret-con intra-ethnic resentments into prized examples of anti-Semitism.”
This is an excellent observation. Just think of the origin of the word “k***”, used by German Jews to disparage Eastern European Jews.
I recall how in his film ‘Homicide’, David Mamet had gentile characters fling that epithet at Jews as if that were a standard interaction, when in real life I’ve pretty much never encountered the word used anywhere, except occasionally by jerky WNs like those on Roissy’s comment board.
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don't think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs.
“If I am not mistaken, Italian-Americans and other Southern Europeans experienced similar discrimination, albeit to a lesser extent (not because of Catholicism but because of their ethnic background). Prejudice against them was less intense, but a more important factor would have been that fewer Italian-Americans in the 1950s could afford to stay at fancy hotels and resorts or live in areas with restrictive covenants (e.g. Grosse Pointe MI, which had a screening process and point system for Jews and “ethnic whites”, based on appearance, manners, accent, etc.)
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs.”
Italians faced worst discrimination from WASPs than the Jews ever did. The worst thing that happened to Jews in America was not being able to join a golf country club, while the worst thing that happened to Italians in America was getting straight up lynched.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/opinion/falco-italian-immigrants/
There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation’s early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn’t African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
What was the reaction of our country’s leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were “a rather good thing.” The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as “… sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.” An editorial the next day argued that: “Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. …”
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.”
There's no point in arguing who was discriminated against the worst ( it was the blacks by far) but I guess in the modern world people compete for discrimination Pokemon points. I'd say that the Jews and the Italians, arriving at the same time, got treated roughly the same. The successful (Democrat) strategy has been for all (formerly) discriminated groups to unite against those who discriminated against them rather than arguing who was more oppressed.
Discrimination against Jews was not unique but that doesn't mean it wasn't real either or that now that it's (largely) over it should go down the memory hole. After what happened in Germany, Jews realized what was really at stake - what started out as being snubbed at the country club ended with gas chambers, so no vestige of racism, however harmless or even rational, could be allowed to remain - that fire had to be completely doused. This accounts for the fervor with which any public display of even mild racism gets stamped out nowadays.
The non-economic half of the problems of mass immigration both now and then are the same thing - excess males leading to one or more of:
- violent competition for girl friends
- gangs
- sexual violence
- forced prostitution
- targeting of underage girls
And in a lot of cases that half of the problem gradually disappears as the gender balance is restored.
Don't forget the anti-Nordic racism and lynchings. An anti-Norweigan lynch-mob in Wisconsin:
The lynching of Hans Jakob Olson
"He was reported to have worn deer antlers tied to his head ... bull’s testicles ... slashed teats off of cow's udders ... They dragged Hans Jakob out from his bed to a nearby tree. They asked him to leave and never return. Hans was defiant. ... Again, they asked him to leave the area and never return. Hans refused. This time they strung him up for good and most of the men walked away. ... Berta made some coffee for those who remained."
There you have it, racist Northerners having a picnic and sipping coffee in the shade of a tree with a poor Norweigan hanging from it. All in the name of the "honor" of their udders.
The Williams Brothers
a dozen men in lumberjack clothes grabbed him, throwing a noose around his neck ... The rope was thrown over the limb of a tree by the side of the courthouse, and many willing hands pulled the rope taut. ... A noisy crowd of a moment ago was silent. Slowly it dispersed.
What about the lynching of NW European protestants in Wisconsin?
Lynchings In Wisconsin...a verified list
1854, Frederick Cartwright
1855, David F. Mayberry
1855, George DeBar
1861, Marshall Clark
1868, John Nevel
1869, William H. Spain
1869, Patrick Wildrick
1871, a butcher
1875, Isiah and Amos Courtwright
1881, Edward Maxwell
1884, Nathaniel “Scotty” Mitchell
1888, Andrew Grandstaff
1889, Hans Jacob Olsen
1891, Anton Sieboldt
Great strategy, in that there are some lovely tall girls out there looking for nice tall men.
Didn’t work for me, though — I had a couple of fairly disastrous attempts at dating 5’8″-5’9″ girls, then ended up going out with several 5′ 3″ cuties; the last one is now Mrs Calvinist.
Hawaii would have sunk in the ocean like Atlantis from the potent energies of their clash.
But could he have stayed in a B'nai Zion lodge? Need I ask?
Your hypothetical Mr. Goldberg never really had a problem finding a room in the US. He may have had a problem staying in the highest status lodgings, but for him to call that racism when most whites were similarly disadvantaged would be some kind of chutzpah, AKA bullshit.
There's a reason that there are so many Jews in the US: we were very nice and fair to them compared to where they came from, and I've had old Jews say that to me. And in return guys like Weiner smear us all as racist antisemites.
What an asshole.
Pardon the language, but this concept of white gentile American guilt vis a vis Jews is highly offensive to me.
…this concept of white gentile American guilt vis a vis Jews is highly offensive to me…
It’s highly offensive to me, too, and I’m Jewish. This sort of slander of the Gentile by the Jew, and Jewish leadership in modern revolutionary movements, probably helps to account for the tragic aspects of modern Jewish history.
Vermont C. Royster. The “C” is for Connecticut, excellently.
God knows I’m a fan of the Nutmeg State in all its infinite variety, but not once have I considered naming a child after it.
Is there not something ironic about a self-identified jew complaining about being discriminated against?
Mad Men is a soap opera. I don’t think it’s really “about” Weiner doing anything in a systemic and thematic fashion.
The Asian mindset is that the smart person is quiet and studious. Respect the teacher; they know the subject and you are there to learn, so shut up and learn.
While I know that Asians say that, the actual practice is to simply give the teacher whatever the hell he says he wants so you can get an A. And then if you don’t get the A, scream and rant and rave and see if you can pressure or scare or bribe the teacher into changing his mind.
And no, “learning” is not involved.
What isn't?
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs."
Italians faced worst discrimination from WASPs than the Jews ever did. The worst thing that happened to Jews in America was not being able to join a golf country club, while the worst thing that happened to Italians in America was getting straight up lynched.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/opinion/falco-italian-immigrants/
There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation's early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn't African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
What was the reaction of our country's leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were "a rather good thing." The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as "... sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." An editorial the next day argued that: "Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. ..."
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous."
Leo Frank was also lynched. We’ve just been through a long discussion about how anti-Semitic exclusion applied NOT just at country clubs but at workplaces, hotels, universities, etc.
There’s no point in arguing who was discriminated against the worst ( it was the blacks by far) but I guess in the modern world people compete for discrimination Pokemon points. I’d say that the Jews and the Italians, arriving at the same time, got treated roughly the same. The successful (Democrat) strategy has been for all (formerly) discriminated groups to unite against those who discriminated against them rather than arguing who was more oppressed.
Discrimination against Jews was not unique but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real either or that now that it’s (largely) over it should go down the memory hole. After what happened in Germany, Jews realized what was really at stake – what started out as being snubbed at the country club ended with gas chambers, so no vestige of racism, however harmless or even rational, could be allowed to remain – that fire had to be completely doused. This accounts for the fervor with which any public display of even mild racism gets stamped out nowadays.
Groups tend to be discriminated against in approximate proportion to how much they deserve to be discriminated against. Stereotypes exist for a reason - because they're generally true.
Violent and low impulse control blacks, pushy rude jews, uptight and repressed WASP's.
Great “art” (and I will call MM that) is, always has been, fueled by physical and emotional insufficiency. Of course Weiner’s neurotic/creative palate is driven by more than just his Jewishness. People like him don’t have the luxury of squandering their time fulfilling society’s self-adulation of their physical wonderfulness.
The Asian mindset is that the smart person is quiet and studious. Respect the teacher; they know the subject and you are there to learn, so shut up and learn.
While I know that Asians say that, the actual practice is to simply give the teacher whatever the hell he says he wants so you can get an A. And then if you don't get the A, scream and rant and rave and see if you can pressure or scare or bribe the teacher into changing his mind.
And no, "learning" is not involved.
Mad Men is a soap opera.
What isn’t?
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs."
Italians faced worst discrimination from WASPs than the Jews ever did. The worst thing that happened to Jews in America was not being able to join a golf country club, while the worst thing that happened to Italians in America was getting straight up lynched.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/opinion/falco-italian-immigrants/
There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation's early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn't African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
What was the reaction of our country's leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were "a rather good thing." The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as "... sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." An editorial the next day argued that: "Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. ..."
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous."
From what I can see, the lynched Italians were in fact guilty and some jurors were bribed. I am not going to shed tears over a bunch of mobsters getting lynched. It is just disappointing that they didn’t lynch all of the accused, they only got 57% of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hennessy
The Asian mindset is that the smart person is quiet and studious. Respect the teacher; they know the subject and you are there to learn, so shut up and learn.
While I know that Asians say that, the actual practice is to simply give the teacher whatever the hell he says he wants so you can get an A. And then if you don't get the A, scream and rant and rave and see if you can pressure or scare or bribe the teacher into changing his mind.
And no, "learning" is not involved.
I suspect the actual practice varies by East Asian country of origin.
Racism per se isn’t stamped out nowadays and isn’t a concern; only “racism” (or racism, without the quotes) against non-white groups is seen as heresy. Hating white people (and Christians) is just fine. And the Weimar wasn’t marked by Jews being “snubbed at the country club”; they pretty much ran the show at the time.
My mistake and I apologize.
It is clear that I flipped your comment 180 degrees.
One would think that would have occurred to me when I was bolding all those phrases but it didn’t.
There's no point in arguing who was discriminated against the worst ( it was the blacks by far) but I guess in the modern world people compete for discrimination Pokemon points. I'd say that the Jews and the Italians, arriving at the same time, got treated roughly the same. The successful (Democrat) strategy has been for all (formerly) discriminated groups to unite against those who discriminated against them rather than arguing who was more oppressed.
Discrimination against Jews was not unique but that doesn't mean it wasn't real either or that now that it's (largely) over it should go down the memory hole. After what happened in Germany, Jews realized what was really at stake - what started out as being snubbed at the country club ended with gas chambers, so no vestige of racism, however harmless or even rational, could be allowed to remain - that fire had to be completely doused. This accounts for the fervor with which any public display of even mild racism gets stamped out nowadays.
Right, and the Sudeten Germans were being crushed under the yoke of that madman Edvard Beneš. Spare us the glib rationalizations. The fervor is accounted for by the power it gives to the libelers. 99% of us come from families that had it hard one way or another back in the day, and the 1% are the ones running the anti-racism racket.
Poor white Protestants might have been treated poorly because they were poor, but as soon as you struck gold in your mine or whatever, you could buy a house in Newport and no one needed to know about how poor your ancestors had been. If anything, rags to riches tales were admired so someone like Carnegie who was a (white Protestant) immigrant who had been born in a one room weaver's cottage was all the more admired for it and allowed to join the highest social circles, whereas even if you were a millionaire's daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
Every single one of those comments involves analyzing the tension between the tale and the teller.So, no, I don’t believe in some kind of 1930s style New Critical,” regard only the urn, not the craftsman who made it ” approach to Mad Men.
Well, going on this bit here:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/matthew-weiner-on-how-mad-men-is-driven-by-his-resentment-of-wasp-country-clubs/?highlight=matt+weiner
Maybe Matt Weiner only counts people as Jewish if they have black hair? With the Arthur Fonzarelli-style leather jacket as an optional extra?
Poor guy.One can only imagine the ostracism that he experienced, being one of the tiny handful of people with dark hair in SoCal……
Poor guy.One can only imagine the ostracism that he experienced, being one of the tiny handful of people with dark hair in SoCal……"
There is a Saturday Night Live skit called "The Californians" which portray coastal SoCal beach towns as Blondtopias. Everybody is blond except the Mexicans.
Before the immigration wave that began in the 1960s, something like 2/3 of the white population of the US was Protestant and there was simply no history of discrimination against white Protestants. I realize everyone wants to climb on the victim bus nowadays but you can’t retcon history and invent a history of discrimination that simply did not exist.
Poor white Protestants might have been treated poorly because they were poor, but as soon as you struck gold in your mine or whatever, you could buy a house in Newport and no one needed to know about how poor your ancestors had been. If anything, rags to riches tales were admired so someone like Carnegie who was a (white Protestant) immigrant who had been born in a one room weaver’s cottage was all the more admired for it and allowed to join the highest social circles, whereas even if you were a millionaire’s daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
Give it up. The Holocaust didn't happen here, and the implication that it would have if the people of this country had been given half an inch is the grossest sort of libel and amounts to fighting words. There are still men in this country who have the sense to recognize those for what they are and the balls to respond appropriately. Don't think that is a game you can play without a price.
And you can shove your "victim bus" up your ass. Just because we don't have the time or the effeminacy to play the victim game doesn't give you an opening to rewrite the history of our country to your advantage. Of course there was discrimination against Protestants, there still is. I can't take communion at a Catholic church, but nor do I want to or expect to, anymore than I expect a marching band to welcome me into formation because I brought my sax.
Of course there was and is more serious discrimination against people who are white, or male, or Protestant, both on those terms and also others like union members, or hillbillies, or ex-cons, or smart-asses who don't know when to keep their mouths shut, or you name it. That's life, and not just in America.
The very WASP establishment you decry are the ones who've weaponized your bigotry against the rest of us to undermine the Republic that brought our ancestors, and yours', here in the first place to perpetuate their illegitimate power and wealth. Stop aiding and abetting them.
The hypocrisy is thick. Jewish exclusivity is just part of being Jewish. WASP exclusivity is a crime.
whereas even if you were a millionaire’s daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
I truly don't understand this grievance. This seems to be a particular Jewish insecurity. Notwithstanding all the believed benefits that accrue to standing with the elite, I do not want to associate with people who do not want to associate with me, and most of the people I have known in life have felt similarly.
My parents bought a lot near a lake in Silver Lake, Wisconsin in the late 50′s. The was a covenant stated on the deed that read “This property is not to be sold to Negros or Jews.”
Interesting.
Not least, because the Sachers that owned the hotel (and who had created Sacher Torte) were Jewish.
Would gentiles with no aristocratic status but with lots of money (e.g. made in industry) also have felt like intruders among the titled people at the Sacher during the period Sacher refers to?
It is my understanding that many of the famous Viennese winter balls are still open only to aristocrats.
I never watched an single episode of this show because the very early reviews about it talked about how “it shows how much we have changed and what we all thought about race and gender in the 60′s.” In other words it was a primer about how we are supposed to think and a pigeonhole for how people have always been obsessed about race and gender. It also came off as some elitist version of history and not what was really happening at the time. Reading Steve’s articles, after not having actually watched the show, I feel vindicated! Reading reviews of the show when it first came out, I wanted to grab the reviewer and say “we did not all work in lily white offices, having sex with our secretaries!”
from a [non-Jewish] Massachusetts resident [with a Jewish sounding last name] who wrote to the Keoka Farm
Guest House in Waterford, Maine, in quest of an accommodation.
The hotel advised him that it catered only to a "Gentile
clientele."
"It looks like we both made a mistake," the Massachusetts
man replied. "You thought I was Jewish and I thought you
were American."
“Be honest and say that you are OK with racism and antisemitism but don’t pretend that it didn’t exist or that Jews were not singled out, because they were.”
You are confusing racism (thought crime) with discrimination.
Anyway, I can’t speak for Steve but I’m ok with racism and antisemitism. I’m also okay with discrimination for that matter.
There's no point in arguing who was discriminated against the worst ( it was the blacks by far) but I guess in the modern world people compete for discrimination Pokemon points. I'd say that the Jews and the Italians, arriving at the same time, got treated roughly the same. The successful (Democrat) strategy has been for all (formerly) discriminated groups to unite against those who discriminated against them rather than arguing who was more oppressed.
Discrimination against Jews was not unique but that doesn't mean it wasn't real either or that now that it's (largely) over it should go down the memory hole. After what happened in Germany, Jews realized what was really at stake - what started out as being snubbed at the country club ended with gas chambers, so no vestige of racism, however harmless or even rational, could be allowed to remain - that fire had to be completely doused. This accounts for the fervor with which any public display of even mild racism gets stamped out nowadays.
Except anti-white racism which pours out of the MSM 24/7.
There's no point in arguing who was discriminated against the worst ( it was the blacks by far) but I guess in the modern world people compete for discrimination Pokemon points. I'd say that the Jews and the Italians, arriving at the same time, got treated roughly the same. The successful (Democrat) strategy has been for all (formerly) discriminated groups to unite against those who discriminated against them rather than arguing who was more oppressed.
Discrimination against Jews was not unique but that doesn't mean it wasn't real either or that now that it's (largely) over it should go down the memory hole. After what happened in Germany, Jews realized what was really at stake - what started out as being snubbed at the country club ended with gas chambers, so no vestige of racism, however harmless or even rational, could be allowed to remain - that fire had to be completely doused. This accounts for the fervor with which any public display of even mild racism gets stamped out nowadays.
“There’s no point in arguing who was discriminated against the worst ( it was the blacks by far) but I guess in the modern world people compete for discrimination Pokemon points.”
Groups tend to be discriminated against in approximate proportion to how much they deserve to be discriminated against. Stereotypes exist for a reason – because they’re generally true.
Violent and low impulse control blacks, pushy rude jews, uptight and repressed WASP’s.
Oh yeah, sure. All those white Rhodesians killed and raped by ZANU PF definitely deserved it. Same with the Koreans shop owners attacked by black American rioters. How about the Arab Christians despised by their cousin-f'n Muslim countrymen? The noble Tutsis hacked to death by stupid, brutish Hutus? The ethnic Chinese porgrom'd by neanderthal-like Indonesians.
Give me a break, throughout human history interracial hatred and violence rarely has about zero correlation to who deserved it. In fact usually just the opposite, the smartest, wealthiest and and hardest-working groups are brought down a peg by the masses of envious losers. This is particularly true for extreme, genocidal violence. Racism driven by derision usually is much more minor. An underclass minority can easily be controlled and segregated. Racism driven by resentment is much more likely to result in extermination.
The majority genuinely fears the power, wealth, influence and intelligence of the superior sub-group. A half-measure is as likely to blow back at you. Jim Crow doesn't work, its all or nothing. The more noble and successful the group, the bigger the target they are.
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs."
Italians faced worst discrimination from WASPs than the Jews ever did. The worst thing that happened to Jews in America was not being able to join a golf country club, while the worst thing that happened to Italians in America was getting straight up lynched.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/opinion/falco-italian-immigrants/
There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation's early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn't African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
What was the reaction of our country's leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were "a rather good thing." The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as "... sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." An editorial the next day argued that: "Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. ..."
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous."
Mass immigration is generally disproportionately young males with all of what should be the obvious consequences.
The non-economic half of the problems of mass immigration both now and then are the same thing – excess males leading to one or more of:
- violent competition for girl friends
- gangs
- sexual violence
- forced prostitution
- targeting of underage girls
And in a lot of cases that half of the problem gradually disappears as the gender balance is restored.
As someone else said, he loved and embraced the aesthetic and excelled at writing a soap opera. He cast beautiful people and sprinkled in enough business to keep men interested. This is what kept people coming back.
That’s the irony really – people don’t notice the racial hatred in the dialog because they’re too busy staring at the good genes.
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs."
Italians faced worst discrimination from WASPs than the Jews ever did. The worst thing that happened to Jews in America was not being able to join a golf country club, while the worst thing that happened to Italians in America was getting straight up lynched.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/opinion/falco-italian-immigrants/
There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation's early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn't African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
What was the reaction of our country's leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were "a rather good thing." The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as "... sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." An editorial the next day argued that: "Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. ..."
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous."
For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — [...] It was Italian-Americans.
Don’t forget the anti-Nordic racism and lynchings. An anti-Norweigan lynch-mob in Wisconsin:
The lynching of Hans Jakob Olson
“He was reported to have worn deer antlers tied to his head … bull’s testicles … slashed teats off of cow’s udders … They dragged Hans Jakob out from his bed to a nearby tree. They asked him to leave and never return. Hans was defiant. … Again, they asked him to leave the area and never return. Hans refused. This time they strung him up for good and most of the men walked away. … Berta made some coffee for those who remained.”
There you have it, racist Northerners having a picnic and sipping coffee in the shade of a tree with a poor Norweigan hanging from it. All in the name of the “honor” of their udders.
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs."
Italians faced worst discrimination from WASPs than the Jews ever did. The worst thing that happened to Jews in America was not being able to join a golf country club, while the worst thing that happened to Italians in America was getting straight up lynched.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/opinion/falco-italian-immigrants/
There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation's early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn't African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
What was the reaction of our country's leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were "a rather good thing." The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as "... sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." An editorial the next day argued that: "Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. ..."
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous."
In Wisconsin, despised ethnics with last names like “Williams” could be lynched for no reason (although participants might claim involvement in a hose-stealing gang and murder).
The Williams Brothers
a dozen men in lumberjack clothes grabbed him, throwing a noose around his neck … The rope was thrown over the limb of a tree by the side of the courthouse, and many willing hands pulled the rope taut. … A noisy crowd of a moment ago was silent. Slowly it dispersed.
Poor white Protestants might have been treated poorly because they were poor, but as soon as you struck gold in your mine or whatever, you could buy a house in Newport and no one needed to know about how poor your ancestors had been. If anything, rags to riches tales were admired so someone like Carnegie who was a (white Protestant) immigrant who had been born in a one room weaver's cottage was all the more admired for it and allowed to join the highest social circles, whereas even if you were a millionaire's daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
Than why are so much of Edith Wharton ‘s books about old money excluding new money from high society?
You don’t “run into” robbers, they seek you out. Apartments are burgled.
That, and getting mugged/robbed/otherwise attacked by the taxman. They, unlike their parents, earned enough to be the targets of “progressive” rates.
Poor white Protestants might have been treated poorly because they were poor, but as soon as you struck gold in your mine or whatever, you could buy a house in Newport and no one needed to know about how poor your ancestors had been. If anything, rags to riches tales were admired so someone like Carnegie who was a (white Protestant) immigrant who had been born in a one room weaver's cottage was all the more admired for it and allowed to join the highest social circles, whereas even if you were a millionaire's daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
JackD,
Give it up. The Holocaust didn’t happen here, and the implication that it would have if the people of this country had been given half an inch is the grossest sort of libel and amounts to fighting words. There are still men in this country who have the sense to recognize those for what they are and the balls to respond appropriately. Don’t think that is a game you can play without a price.
And you can shove your “victim bus” up your ass. Just because we don’t have the time or the effeminacy to play the victim game doesn’t give you an opening to rewrite the history of our country to your advantage. Of course there was discrimination against Protestants, there still is. I can’t take communion at a Catholic church, but nor do I want to or expect to, anymore than I expect a marching band to welcome me into formation because I brought my sax.
Of course there was and is more serious discrimination against people who are white, or male, or Protestant, both on those terms and also others like union members, or hillbillies, or ex-cons, or smart-asses who don’t know when to keep their mouths shut, or you name it. That’s life, and not just in America.
The very WASP establishment you decry are the ones who’ve weaponized your bigotry against the rest of us to undermine the Republic that brought our ancestors, and yours’, here in the first place to perpetuate their illegitimate power and wealth. Stop aiding and abetting them.
Italian Americans from the Northeast and Rust Belt did not join the upper middle class in large numbers until the late 1960s-early 1970s (about a generation later than Jews) and I don’t think there was as much desire to emulate or be accepted by WASPs."
Italians faced worst discrimination from WASPs than the Jews ever did. The worst thing that happened to Jews in America was not being able to join a golf country club, while the worst thing that happened to Italians in America was getting straight up lynched.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/opinion/falco-italian-immigrants/
There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation's early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn't African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
What was the reaction of our country's leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were "a rather good thing." The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as "... sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." An editorial the next day argued that: "Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. ..."
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous."
For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891
What about the lynching of NW European protestants in Wisconsin?
Lynchings In Wisconsin…a verified list
1854, Frederick Cartwright
1855, David F. Mayberry
1855, George DeBar
1861, Marshall Clark
1868, John Nevel
1869, William H. Spain
1869, Patrick Wildrick
1871, a butcher
1875, Isiah and Amos Courtwright
1881, Edward Maxwell
1884, Nathaniel “Scotty” Mitchell
1888, Andrew Grandstaff
1889, Hans Jacob Olsen
1891, Anton Sieboldt
Give it up. The Holocaust didn't happen here, and the implication that it would have if the people of this country had been given half an inch is the grossest sort of libel and amounts to fighting words. There are still men in this country who have the sense to recognize those for what they are and the balls to respond appropriately. Don't think that is a game you can play without a price.
And you can shove your "victim bus" up your ass. Just because we don't have the time or the effeminacy to play the victim game doesn't give you an opening to rewrite the history of our country to your advantage. Of course there was discrimination against Protestants, there still is. I can't take communion at a Catholic church, but nor do I want to or expect to, anymore than I expect a marching band to welcome me into formation because I brought my sax.
Of course there was and is more serious discrimination against people who are white, or male, or Protestant, both on those terms and also others like union members, or hillbillies, or ex-cons, or smart-asses who don't know when to keep their mouths shut, or you name it. That's life, and not just in America.
The very WASP establishment you decry are the ones who've weaponized your bigotry against the rest of us to undermine the Republic that brought our ancestors, and yours', here in the first place to perpetuate their illegitimate power and wealth. Stop aiding and abetting them.
There was no real history of genocide in Germany either – it was the land of Mozart and Goethe, whereas the US had just committed genocide against the American Indians only a few decades before. FDR put the Japanese in concentration camps. Maybe if the war had gone a little more poorly he might have decided that they needed to be executed as traitors. One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that genocide is not committed by monsters but by ordinary humans who think that they are doing what’s best for their country. The next thing you know, you are dropping napalm on children. America has a wonderful history of rule of law MOST of the time, but not ALL of the time.
And your definition of “discrimination” is strained beyond its ordinary reading. Discrimination is understood to mean that you are denied opportunities DESPITE meeting all of the prerequisites – you are a great opera singer but you still can’t sing on stage BECAUSE of your race or whatever.
If you want to make a direct comparison with something that the Jews experienced in Europe, try the Expulsion from Spain.And maybe he would have decided to sacrifice them at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.The Japanese in Hawaii were left untouched.As were the Japanese on the East Coast.Was it a regrettable event? Yes, bu these attempts to compare it to the Holocaust are ludicrous.
The story of the encounter between European settlers and America’s native population does not make for pleasant reading. Among early accounts, perhaps the most famous is Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1888), a doleful recitation of forced removals, killings, and callous disregard. Jackson’s book, which clearly captured some essential elements of what happened, also set a pattern of exaggeration and one-sided indictment that has persisted to this day.
Thus, according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a “vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record.” By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people.” In the judgment of Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., “there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a ‘race’ of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history.”
The sweeping charge of genocide against the Indians became especially popular during the Vietnam war, when historians opposed to that conflict began drawing parallels between our actions in Southeast Asia and earlier examples of a supposedly ingrained American viciousness toward non-white peoples. The historian Richard Drinnon, referring to the troops under the command of the Indian scout Kit Carson, called them “forerunners of the Burning Fifth Marines” who set fire to Vietnamese villages, while in The American Indian: The First Victim (1972), Jay David urged contemporary readers to recall how America’s civilization had originated in “theft and murder” and “efforts toward . . . genocide.”
Further accusations of genocide marked the run-up to the 1992 quincentenary of the landing of Columbus. The National Council of Churches adopted a resolution branding this event “an invasion” that resulted in the “slavery and genocide of native people.” In a widely read book, The Conquest of Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale charged the English and their American successors with pursuing a policy of extermination that had continued unabated for four centuries. Later works have followed suit. In the 1999 Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by the scholar Israel Charny, an article by Ward Churchill argues that extermination was the “express objective” of the U.S. government. To the Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, similarly, genocide is the “only appropriate way” to describe how white settlers treated the Indians. And so forth.
That American Indians suffered horribly is indisputable. But whether their suffering amounted to a “holocaust,” or to genocide, is another matter.
It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century. Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject speak of an inflated “numbers game”; others charge that the size of the aboriginal population has been deliberately minimized in order to make the decline seem less severe than it was.
The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the ethnologist James Mooney proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5 million, nearly five times as high as Mooney’s, while Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the aboriginal population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the present territory of the United States at about 10 million.
From one perspective, these differences, however startling, may seem beside the point: there is ample evidence, after all, that the arrival of the white man triggered a drastic reduction in the number of native Americans. Nevertheless, even if the higher figures are credited, they alone do not prove the occurrence of genocide.
To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important reason for the Indians’ catastrophic decline—namely, the spread of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known by scholars as a “virgin-soil epidemic”; in North America, it was the norm.
The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans.
About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby, “but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath.” It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.
To some, however, this is enough in itself to warrant the term genocide. David Stannard, for instance, states that just as Jews who died of disease and starvation in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, Indians who died of introduced diseases “were as much the victims of the Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs.” As an example of actual genocidal conditions, Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as “furnaces of death.”
But right away we are in highly debatable territory. It is true that the cramped quarters of the missions, with their poor ventilation and bad sanitation, encouraged the spread of disease. But it is demonstrably untrue that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were unconcerned with the welfare of their native converts. No matter how difficult the conditions under which the Indians labored—obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical care, corporal punishment—their experience bore no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos. The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the diseases that afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they could do for them. By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghettos, and quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and medicine; unlike in Stannard’s “furnaces of death,” the deaths that occurred there were meant to occur.
The larger picture also does not conform to Stannard’s idea of disease as an expression of “genocidal war.” True, the forced relocations of Indian tribes were often accompanied by great hardship and harsh treatment; the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to territories west of the Mississippi in 1838 took the lives of thousands and has entered history as the Trail of Tears. But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and sometimes after only minimal contact with European traders. True, too, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of divine providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that Europeans did not come to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases.
Or did they? Ward Churchill, taking the argument a step further than Stannard, asserts that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the way the great bulk of North America’s native population disappeared: “it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed.” In brief, the Europeans were engaged in biological warfare.
Unfortunately for this thesis, we know of but a single instance of such warfare, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the British garrisons west of the Allegheny mountains. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw as the Indians’ treacherous and savage modes of warfare, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote as follows to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”
Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst’s suggestion, but whether he himself carried it out is uncertain. On or around June 24, two traders at Fort Pitt did give blankets and a handkerchief from the fort’s quarantined hospital to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his journal: “I hope it will have the desired effect.” Smallpox was already present among the tribes of Ohio; at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak in which hundreds died.
A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense “ ‘trade blankets’ to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota.” He continues:
Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter’s. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to scatter and seek “sanctuary” in the villages of healthy relatives.
In this way the disease was spread, the Mandans were “virtually exterminated,” and other tribes suffered similarly devastating losses. Citing a figure of “100,000 or more fatalities” caused by the U.S. Army in the 1836-40 smallpox pandemic (elsewhere he speaks of a toll “several times that number”), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival.
Supporting Churchill here are Stiffarm and Lane, who write that “the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets by the U.S. Army to Mandans at Fort Clark . . . was the causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40.” In evidence, they cite the journal of a contemporary at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.
But Chardon’s journal manifestly does not suggest that the U.S. Army distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on the inadvertent spread of disease by a ship’s passenger. And as for the “100,000 fatalities,” not only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers, but he too points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter’s as the cause. Another scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also refuted the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.
Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of the United States government at this time to vaccinate the native population. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program continued in force for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on the part of some officials. Still, as Thornton writes: “Vaccination of American Indians did eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox.”
To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians; neither can the large number of deaths as a result of disease be considered the result of a genocidal design.
Still, even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by mistreatment and violence. Should some or all of these deaths be considered instances of genocide?
We may examine representative incidents by following the geographic route of European settlement, beginning in the New England colonies. There, at first, the Puritans did not regard the Indians they encountered as natural enemies, but rather as potential friends and converts. But their Christianizing efforts showed little success, and their experience with the natives gradually yielded a more hostile view. The Pequot tribe in particular, with its reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness, was feared not only by the colonists but by most other Indians in New England. In the warfare that eventually ensued, caused in part by intertribal rivalries, the Narragansett Indians became actively engaged on the Puritan side.
Hostilities opened in late 1636 after the murder of several colonists. When the Pequots refused to comply with the demands of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the surrender of the guilty and other forms of indemnification, a punitive expedition was led against them by John Endecott, the first resident governor of the colony; although it ended inconclusively, the Pequots retaliated by attacking any settler they could find. Fort Saybrook on the Connecticut River was besieged, and members of the garrison who ventured outside were ambushed and killed. One captured trader, tied to a stake in sight of the fort, was tortured for three days, expiring after his captors flayed his skin with the help of hot timbers and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner was roasted alive.
The torture of prisoners was indeed routine practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Valuing bravery above all things, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners. unable to withstand the rigor of wilderness travel were usually killed on the spot. Among those—Indian or European—taken back to the village, some would be adopted to replace slain warriors, the rest subjected to a ritual of torture designed to humiliate them and exact atonement for the tribe’s losses. Afterward the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it in a ceremonial meal, and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory.
Despite the colonists’ own resort to torture in order to extract confessions, the cruelty of these practices strengthened the belief that the natives were savages who deserved no quarter. This revulsion accounts at least in part for the ferocity of the battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when a force commanded by John Mason and assisted by militiamen from Saybrook surprised about half of the Pequot tribe encamped near the Mystic River.
The intention of the colonists had been to kill the warriors “with their Swords,” as Mason put it, to plunder the village, and to capture the women and children. But the plan did not work out. About 150 Pequot warriors had arrived in the fort the night before, and when the surprise attack began they emerged from their tents to fight. Fearing the Indians’ numerical strength, the English attackers set fire to the fortified village and retreated outside the palisades. There they formed a circle and shot down anyone seeking to escape; a second cordon of Narragansett Indians cut down the few who managed to get through the English line. When the battle was over, the Pequots had suffered several hundred dead, perhaps as many as 300 of these being women and children. Twenty Narragansett warriors also fell.
A number of recent historians have charged the Puritans with genocide: that is, with having carried out a premeditated plan to exterminate the Pequots. The evidence belies this. The use of fire as a weapon of war was not unusual for either Europeans or Indians, and every contemporary account stresses that the burning of the fort was an act of self-protection, not part of a pre-planned massacre. In later stages of the Pequot war, moreover, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, further contradicting the idea of genocidal intention.
_____________
A second famous example from the colonial period is King Philip’s War (1675-76). This conflict, proportionately the costliest of all American wars, took the life of one in every sixteen men of military age in the colonies; large numbers of women and children also perished or were carried into captivity. Fifty-two of New England’s 90 towns were attacked, seventeen were razed to the ground, and 25 were pillaged. Casualties among the Indians were even higher, with many of those captured being executed or sold into slavery abroad.
The war was also merciless, on both sides. At its outset, a colonial council in Boston had declared “that none be Killed or Wounded that are Willing to surrender themselves into Custody.” But these rules were soon abandoned on the grounds that the Indians themselves, failing to adhere either to the laws of war or to the law of nature, would “skulk” behind trees, rocks, and bushes rather than appear openly to do “civilized” battle. Similarly creating a desire for retribution were the cruelties perpetrated by Indians when ambushing English troops or overrunning strongholds housing women and children. Before long, both colonists and Indians were dismembering corpses and displaying body parts and heads on poles. (Nevertheless, Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were tried in Boston for the brutal murder of three squaws and three Indian children; all were found guilty and two were executed.)
The hatred kindled by King Philip’s War became even more pronounced in 1689 when strong Indian tribes allied themselves with the French against the British. In 1694, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered all friendly Indians confined to a small area. A bounty was then offered for the killing or capture of hostile Indians, and scalps were accepted as proof of a kill. In 1704, this was amended in the direction of “Christian practice” by means of a scale of rewards graduated by age and sex; bounty was proscribed in the case of children under the age of ten, subsequently raised to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, genocidal intent was far from evident; the practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in reprisal for the extensive scalping carried out by Indians.
_____________
IV
We turn now to the American frontier. In Pennsylvania, where the white population had doubled between 1740 and 1760, the pressure on Indian lands increased formidably; in 1754, encouraged by French agents, Indian warriors struck, starting a long and bloody conflict known as the French and Indian War or the Seven Years’ War.
By 1763, according to one estimate, about 2,000 whites had been killed or vanished into captivity. Stories of real, exaggerated, and imaginary atrocities spread by word of mouth, in narratives of imprisonment, and by means of provincial newspapers. Some British officers gave orders that captured Indians be given no quarter, and even after the end of formal hostilities, feelings continued to run so high that murderers of Indians, like the infamous Paxton Boys, were applauded rather than arrested.
As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts multiplied. So far had things progressed by 1784 that, according to one British traveler, “white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.”
Settlers on the expanding frontier treated the Indians with contempt, often robbing and killing them at will. In 1782, a militia pursuing an Indian war party that had slain a woman and a child massacred more than 90 peaceful Moravian Delawares. Although federal and state officials tried to bring such killers to justice, their efforts, writes the historian Francis Prucha, “were no match for the singular Indian-hating mentality of the frontiersmen, upon whom depended conviction in the local courts.”
But that, too, is only part of the story. The view that the Indian problem could be solved by force alone came under vigorous challenge from a number of federal commissioners who from 1832 on headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs and supervised the network of agents and subagents in the field. Many Americans on the eastern seaboard, too, openly criticized the rough ways of the frontier. Pity for the vanishing Indian, together with a sense of remorse, led to a revival of the 18th-century concept of the noble savage. America’s native inhabitants were romanticized in historiography, art, and literature, notably by James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his long poem, The Song of Hiawatha.
On the western frontier itself, such views were of course dismissed as rank sentimentality; the perceived nobility of the savages, observed cynics, was directly proportional to one’s geographic distance from them. Instead, settlers vigorously complained that the regular army was failing to meet the Indian threat more aggressively. A large-scale uprising of the Sioux in Minnesota in 1862, in which Indian war parties killed, raped, and pillaged all over the countryside, left in its wake a climate of fear and anger that spread over the entire West.
Colorado was especially tense. Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians, who had legitimate grievances against the encroaching white settlers, also fought for the sheer joy of combat, the desire for booty, and the prestige that accrued from success. The overland route to the East was particularly vulnerable: at one point in 1864, Denver was cut off from all supplies, and there were several butcheries of entire families at outlying ranches. In one gruesome case, all of the victims were scalped, the throats of the two children were cut, and the mother’s body was ripped open and her entrails pulled over her face.
Writing in September 1864, the Reverend William Crawford reported on the attitude of the white population of Colorado: “There is but one sentiment in regard to the final disposition which shall be made of the Indians: ‘Let them be exterminated—men, women, and children together.’ ” Of course, he added, “I do not myself share in such views.” The Rocky Mountain News, which at first had distinguished between friendly and hostile Indians, likewise began to advocate extermination of this “dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race.”
With the regular army off fighting the Civil War in the South, the western settlers depended for their protection on volunteer regiments, many lamentably deficient in discipline. It was a local force of such volunteers that committed the massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado on November 29, 1864. Formed in August, the regiment was made up of miners down on their luck, cowpokes tired of ranching, and others itching for battle. Its commander, the Reverend John Milton Chivington, a politician and ardent Indian-hater, had urged war without mercy, even against children. “Nits make lice,” he was fond of saying. The ensuing orgy of violence in the course of a surprise attack on a large Indian encampment left between 70 and 250 Indians dead, the majority women and children. The regiment suffered eight killed and 40 wounded.
News of the Sand Creek massacre sparked an outcry in the East and led to several congressional inquiries. Although some of the investigators appear to have been biased against Chivington, there was no disputing that he had issued orders not to give quarter, or that his soldiers had engaged in massive scalping and other mutilations.
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The sorry tale continues in California. The area that in 1850 became admitted to the Union as the 31st state had once held an Indian population estimated at anywhere between 150,000 and 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, the number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, disease was the single most important factor, although the state also witnessed an unusually large number of deliberate killings.
The discovery of gold in 1848 brought about a fundamental change in Indian-white relations. Whereas formerly Mexican ranchers had both exploited the Indians and provided them with a minimum of protection, the new immigrants, mostly young single males, exhibited animosity from the start, trespassing on Indian lands and often freely killing any who were in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860: “There never was a viler sort of men in the world than is congregated about these mines.”
What was true of miners was often true as well of newly arrived farmers. By the early 1850’s, whites in California outnumbered Indians by about two to one, and the lot of the natives, gradually forced into the least fertile parts of the territory, began to deteriorate rapidly. Many succumbed to starvation; others, desperate for food, went on the attack, stealing and killing livestock. Indian women who prostituted themselves to feed their families contributed to the demographic decline by removing themselves from the reproductive cycle. As a solution to the growing problem, the federal government sought to confine the Indians to reservations, but this was opposed both by the Indians themselves and by white ranchers fearing the loss of labor. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied.
One of the most violent, between white settlers and Yuki Indians in the Round Valley of Mendocino County, lasted for several years and was waged with great ferocity. Although Governor John B. Weller cautioned against an indiscriminate campaign—“[Y]our operations against the Indians,” he wrote to the commander of a volunteer force in 1859, “must be confined strictly to those who are known to have been engaged in killing the stock and destroying the property of our citizens . . . and the women and children under all circumstances must be spared”—his words had little effect. By 1864 the number of Yukis had declined from about 5,000 to 300.
The Humboldt Bay region, just northwest of the Round Valley, was the scene of still more collisions. Here too Indians stole and killed cattle, and militia companies retaliated. A secret league, formed in the town of Eureka, perpetrated a particularly hideous massacre in February 1860, surprising Indians sleeping in their houses and killing about sixty, mostly by hatchet. During the same morning hours, whites attacked two other Indian rancherias, with the same deadly results. In all, nearly 300 Indians were killed on one day, at least half of them women and children.
Once again there was outrage and remorse. “The white settlers,” wrote a historian only 20 years later, “had received great provocation. . . . But nothing they had suffered, no depredations the savages had committed, could justify the cruel slaughter of innocent women and children.” This had also been the opinion of a majority of the people of Eureka, where a grand jury condemned the massacre, while in cities like San Francisco all such killings repeatedly drew strong criticism. But atrocities continued: by the 1870’s, as one historian has summarized the situation in California, “only remnants of the aboriginal populations were still alive, and those who had survived the maelstrom of the preceding quarter-century were dislocated, demoralized, and impoverished.”
Lastly we come to the wars on the Great Plains. Following the end of the Civil War, large waves of white migrants, arriving simultaneously from East and West, squeezed the Plains Indians between them. In response, the Indians attacked vulnerable white outposts; their “acts of devilish cruelty,” reported one officer on the scene, had “no parallel in savage warfare.” The trails west were in similar peril: in December 1866, an army detachment of 80 men was lured into an ambush on the Bozeman Trail, and all of the soldiers were killed.
To force the natives into submission, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after the Civil War commanded the Indian-fighting army units on the Plains, applied the same strategy they had used so successfully in their marches across Georgia and in the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them to their winter camps, where numbing cold and heavy snows limited their mobility. There they destroyed the lodges and stores of food, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the deaths of women and children.
Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in conformity with the laws of war accepted at the time. The principles of limited war and of noncombatant immunity had been codified in Francis Lieber’s General Order No. 100, issued for the Union Army on April 24, 1863. But the villages of warring Indians who refused to surrender were considered legitimate military objectives. In any event, there was never any order to exterminate the Plains Indians, despite heated pronouncements on the subject by the outraged Sherman and despite Sheridan’s famous quip that “the only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Although Sheridan did not mean that all Indians should be shot on sight, but rather that none of the warring Indians on the Plains could be trusted, his words, as the historian James Axtell rightly suggests, did “more to harm straight thinking about Indian-white relations than any number of Sand Creeks or Wounded Knees.”
As for that last-named encounter, it took place on December 29, 1890 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By this time, the 7th Regiment of U.S. Cavalry had compiled a reputation for aggressiveness, particularly in the wake of its surprise assault in 1868 on a Cheyenne village on the Washita river in Kansas, where about 100 Indians were killed by General George Custer’s men.
Still, the battle of Washita, although one-sided, had not been a massacre: wounded warriors were given first aid, and 53 women and children who had hidden in their lodges survived the assault and were taken prisoner. Nor were the Cheyennes unarmed innocents; as their chief Black Kettle acknowledged, they had been conducting regular raids into Kansas that he was powerless to stop.
The encounter at Wounded Knee, 22 years later, must be seen in the context of the Ghost Dance religion, a messianic movement that since 1889 had caused great excitement among Indians in the area and that was interpreted by whites as a general call to war. While an encampment of Sioux was being searched for arms, a few young men created an incident; the soldiers, furious at what they considered an act of Indian treachery, fought back furiously as guns surrounding the encampment opened fire with deadly effect. The Army’s casualties were 25 killed and 39 wounded, mostly as a result of friendly fire. More than 300 Indians died.
Wounded Knee has been called “perhaps the best-known genocide of North American Indians.” But, as Robert Utley has concluded in a careful analysis, it is better described as “a regrettable, tragic accident of war,” a bloodbath that neither side intended. In a situation where women and children were mixed with men, it was inevitable that some of the former would be killed. But several groups of women and children were in fact allowed out of the encampment, and wounded Indian warriors, too, were spared and taken to a hospital. There may have been a few deliberate killings of noncombatants, but on the whole, as a court of inquiry ordered by President Harrison established, the officers and soldiers of the unit made supreme efforts to avoid killing women and children.
On January 15, 1891, the last Sioux warriors surrendered. Apart from isolated clashes, America’s Indian wars had ended.
The Genocide Convention was approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948 and came into force on January 12, 1951; after a long delay, it was ratified by the United States in 1986. Since genocide is now a technical term in international criminal law, the definition established by the convention has assumed prima-facie authority, and it is with this definition that we should begin in assessing the applicability of the concept of genocide to the events we have been considering.
According to Article II of the convention, the crime of genocide consists of a series of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such” (emphases added). Practically all legal scholars accept the centrality of this clause. During the deliberations over the convention, some argued for a clear specification of the reasons, or motives, for the destruction of a group. In the end, instead of a list of such motives, the issue was resolved by adding the words “as such”—i.e., the motive or reason for the destruction must be the ending of the group as a national, ethnic, racial, or religious entity. Evidence of such a motive, as one legal scholar put it, “will constitute an integral part of the proof of a genocidal plan, and therefore of genocidal intent.”
The crucial role played by intentionality in the Genocide Convention means that under its terms the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide. The lethal diseases were introduced inadvertently, and the Europeans cannot be blamed for their ignorance of what medical science would discover only centuries later. Similarly, military engagements that led to the death of non-combatants, like the battle of the Washita, cannot be seen as genocidal acts, for the loss of innocent life was not intended and the soldiers did not aim at the destruction of the Indians as a defined group. By contrast, some of the massacres in California, where both the perpetrators and their supporters openly acknowledged a desire to destroy the Indians as an ethnic entity, might indeed be regarded under the terms of the convention as exhibiting genocidal intent.
Even as it outlaws the destruction of a group “in whole or in part,” the convention does not address the question of what percentage of a group must be affected in order to qualify as genocide. As a benchmark, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has suggested “a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole,” adding that the actual or attempted destruction should also relate to “the factual opportunity of the accused to destroy a group in a specific geographic area within the sphere of his control, and not in relation to the entire population of the group in a wider geographic sense.” If this principle were adopted, an atrocity like the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a specific single locality, might also be considered an act of genocide.
Of course, It is far from easy to apply a legal concept developed in the middle of the 20th century to events taking place many decades if not hundreds of years earlier. Our knowledge of many of these occurrences is incomplete. Moreover, the malefactors, long since dead, cannot be tried in a court of law, where it would be possible to establish crucial factual details and to clarify relevant legal principles.
Applying today’s standards to events of the past raises still other questions, legal and moral alike. While history has no statute of limitations, our legal system rejects the idea of retroactivity (ex post facto laws). Morally, even if we accept the idea of universal principles transcending particular cultures and periods, we must exercise caution in condemning, say, the conduct of war during America’s colonial period, which for the most part conformed to then-prevailing notions of right and wrong. To understand all is hardly to forgive all, but historical judgment, as the scholar Gordon Leff has correctly stressed, “must always be contextual: it is no more reprehensible for an age to have lacked our values than to have lacked forks.”
The real task, then, is to ascertain the context of a specific situation and the options it presented. Given circumstances, and the moral standards of the day, did the people on whose conduct we are sitting in judgment have a choice to act differently? Such an approach would lead us to greater indulgence toward the Puritans of New England, who fought for their survival, than toward the miners and volunteer militias of California who often slaughtered Indian men, women, and children for no other reason than to satisfy their appetite for gold and land. The former, in addition, battled their Indian adversaries in an age that had little concern for humane standards of warfare, while the latter committed their atrocities in the face of vehement denunciation not only by self-styled humanitarians in the faraway East but by many of their fellow citizens in California.
Finally, even if some episodes can be considered genocidal—that is, tending toward genocide—they certainly do not justify condemning an entire society. Guilt is personal, and for good reason the Genocide Convention provides that only “persons” can be charged with the crime, probably even ruling out legal proceedings against governments. No less significant is that a massacre like Sand Creek was undertaken by a local volunteer militia and was not the expression of official U.S. policy. No regular U.S. Army unit was ever implicated in a similar atrocity. In the majority of actions, concludes Robert Utley, “the Army shot noncombatants incidentally and accidentally, not purposefully.” As for the larger society, even if some elements in the white population, mainly in the West, at times advocated extermination, no official of the U.S. government ever seriously proposed it. Genocide was never American policy, nor was it the result of policy.
The violent collision between whites and America’s native population was probably unavoidable. Between 1600 and 1850, a dramatic surge in population led to massive waves of emigration from Europe, and many of the millions who arrived in the New World gradually pushed westward into America’s seemingly unlimited space. No doubt, the 19th-century idea of America’s “manifest destiny” was in part a rationalization for acquisitiveness, but the resulting dispossession of the Indians was as unstoppable as other great population movements of the past. The U.S. government could not have prevented the westward movement even if it had wanted to.
In the end, the sad fate of America’s Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed no good solution to this clash. The Indians were not prepared to give up the nomadic life of the hunter for the sedentary life of the farmer. The new Americans, convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant the original inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required by the Indians’ way of life. The consequence was a conflict in which there were few heroes, but which was far from a simple tale of hapless victims and merciless aggressors. To fling the charge of genocide at an entire society serves neither the interests of the Indians nor those of history.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/were-american-indians-the-victims-of-genocide/
For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891
Double lynching in Michigan of despised foreigners (Canadians):
The McDonald Boys
1881 … two lumberjacks from Canada, Frank McDonald and John McDougal. … the mob strung the bodies up on one of the railroad crossing signs … It’s claimed that the prostitutes were forced to lie with the muddy, bloodied bodies.
I tend to notice build more than height (again, unless the height is freakishly tall or short). Is the guy frail, wiry, burly, or obese? That’s what usually registers with me, not height.
In other words, watch out!Behind every WASP lurks the soul of a Nazi.Standard PC boilerplate.The kind of stuff that makes so many Jews feel so good.
Dear fellow, please read a good standard history of the Holocaust (cf, for example, the quite solid work of Raul Hilberg).Then read a solid account of American interactions with the Amerinds from, say, 1790 on.Say, something like William Osborn: The Wild Frontier: atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee .The two events are not directly comparable.To cite only the most obvious objections, the US government never set up Death Camps, or deployed Einsatzgruppen.Indeed, remarkably few Amerinds died due to direct violence:
And here’s a nice article from Commentary (of all places):https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/were-american-indians-the-victims-of-genocide/
If you want to make a direct comparison with something that the Jews experienced in Europe, try the Expulsion from Spain.
And maybe he would have decided to sacrifice them at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.The Japanese in Hawaii were left untouched.As were the Japanese on the East Coast.Was it a regrettable event? Yes, bu these attempts to compare it to the Holocaust are ludicrous.
On September 21, the National Museum of the American Indian will open its doors. In an interview early this year, the museum’s founding director, W. Richard West, declared that the new institution would not shy away from such difficult subjects as the effort to eradicate American-Indian culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a safe bet that someone will also, inevitably, raise the issue of genocide.
The story of the encounter between European settlers and America’s native population does not make for pleasant reading. Among early accounts, perhaps the most famous is Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1888), a doleful recitation of forced removals, killings, and callous disregard. Jackson’s book, which clearly captured some essential elements of what happened, also set a pattern of exaggeration and one-sided indictment that has persisted to this day.
Thus, according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a “vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record.” By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people.” In the judgment of Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., “there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a ‘race’ of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history.”
The sweeping charge of genocide against the Indians became especially popular during the Vietnam war, when historians opposed to that conflict began drawing parallels between our actions in Southeast Asia and earlier examples of a supposedly ingrained American viciousness toward non-white peoples. The historian Richard Drinnon, referring to the troops under the command of the Indian scout Kit Carson, called them “forerunners of the Burning Fifth Marines” who set fire to Vietnamese villages, while in The American Indian: The First Victim (1972), Jay David urged contemporary readers to recall how America’s civilization had originated in “theft and murder” and “efforts toward . . . genocide.”
Further accusations of genocide marked the run-up to the 1992 quincentenary of the landing of Columbus. The National Council of Churches adopted a resolution branding this event “an invasion” that resulted in the “slavery and genocide of native people.” In a widely read book, The Conquest of Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale charged the English and their American successors with pursuing a policy of extermination that had continued unabated for four centuries. Later works have followed suit. In the 1999 Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by the scholar Israel Charny, an article by Ward Churchill argues that extermination was the “express objective” of the U.S. government. To the Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, similarly, genocide is the “only appropriate way” to describe how white settlers treated the Indians. And so forth.
That American Indians suffered horribly is indisputable. But whether their suffering amounted to a “holocaust,” or to genocide, is another matter.
It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century. Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject speak of an inflated “numbers game”; others charge that the size of the aboriginal population has been deliberately minimized in order to make the decline seem less severe than it was.
The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the ethnologist James Mooney proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5 million, nearly five times as high as Mooney’s, while Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the aboriginal population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the present territory of the United States at about 10 million.
From one perspective, these differences, however startling, may seem beside the point: there is ample evidence, after all, that the arrival of the white man triggered a drastic reduction in the number of native Americans. Nevertheless, even if the higher figures are credited, they alone do not prove the occurrence of genocide.
To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important reason for the Indians’ catastrophic decline—namely, the spread of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known by scholars as a “virgin-soil epidemic”; in North America, it was the norm.
The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans.
About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby, “but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath.” It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.
To some, however, this is enough in itself to warrant the term genocide. David Stannard, for instance, states that just as Jews who died of disease and starvation in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, Indians who died of introduced diseases “were as much the victims of the Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs.” As an example of actual genocidal conditions, Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as “furnaces of death.”
But right away we are in highly debatable territory. It is true that the cramped quarters of the missions, with their poor ventilation and bad sanitation, encouraged the spread of disease. But it is demonstrably untrue that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were unconcerned with the welfare of their native converts. No matter how difficult the conditions under which the Indians labored—obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical care, corporal punishment—their experience bore no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos. The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the diseases that afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they could do for them. By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghettos, and quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and medicine; unlike in Stannard’s “furnaces of death,” the deaths that occurred there were meant to occur.
The larger picture also does not conform to Stannard’s idea of disease as an expression of “genocidal war.” True, the forced relocations of Indian tribes were often accompanied by great hardship and harsh treatment; the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to territories west of the Mississippi in 1838 took the lives of thousands and has entered history as the Trail of Tears. But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and sometimes after only minimal contact with European traders. True, too, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of divine providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that Europeans did not come to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases.
Or did they? Ward Churchill, taking the argument a step further than Stannard, asserts that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the way the great bulk of North America’s native population disappeared: “it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed.” In brief, the Europeans were engaged in biological warfare.
Unfortunately for this thesis, we know of but a single instance of such warfare, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the British garrisons west of the Allegheny mountains. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw as the Indians’ treacherous and savage modes of warfare, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote as follows to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”
Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst’s suggestion, but whether he himself carried it out is uncertain. On or around June 24, two traders at Fort Pitt did give blankets and a handkerchief from the fort’s quarantined hospital to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his journal: “I hope it will have the desired effect.” Smallpox was already present among the tribes of Ohio; at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak in which hundreds died.
A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense “ ‘trade blankets’ to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota.” He continues:
Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter’s. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to scatter and seek “sanctuary” in the villages of healthy relatives.
In this way the disease was spread, the Mandans were “virtually exterminated,” and other tribes suffered similarly devastating losses. Citing a figure of “100,000 or more fatalities” caused by the U.S. Army in the 1836-40 smallpox pandemic (elsewhere he speaks of a toll “several times that number”), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival.
Supporting Churchill here are Stiffarm and Lane, who write that “the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets by the U.S. Army to Mandans at Fort Clark . . . was the causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40.” In evidence, they cite the journal of a contemporary at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.
But Chardon’s journal manifestly does not suggest that the U.S. Army distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on the inadvertent spread of disease by a ship’s passenger. And as for the “100,000 fatalities,” not only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers, but he too points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter’s as the cause. Another scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also refuted the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.
Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of the United States government at this time to vaccinate the native population. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program continued in force for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on the part of some officials. Still, as Thornton writes: “Vaccination of American Indians did eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox.”
To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians; neither can the large number of deaths as a result of disease be considered the result of a genocidal design.
Still, even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by mistreatment and violence. Should some or all of these deaths be considered instances of genocide?
We may examine representative incidents by following the geographic route of European settlement, beginning in the New England colonies. There, at first, the Puritans did not regard the Indians they encountered as natural enemies, but rather as potential friends and converts. But their Christianizing efforts showed little success, and their experience with the natives gradually yielded a more hostile view. The Pequot tribe in particular, with its reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness, was feared not only by the colonists but by most other Indians in New England. In the warfare that eventually ensued, caused in part by intertribal rivalries, the Narragansett Indians became actively engaged on the Puritan side.
Hostilities opened in late 1636 after the murder of several colonists. When the Pequots refused to comply with the demands of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the surrender of the guilty and other forms of indemnification, a punitive expedition was led against them by John Endecott, the first resident governor of the colony; although it ended inconclusively, the Pequots retaliated by attacking any settler they could find. Fort Saybrook on the Connecticut River was besieged, and members of the garrison who ventured outside were ambushed and killed. One captured trader, tied to a stake in sight of the fort, was tortured for three days, expiring after his captors flayed his skin with the help of hot timbers and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner was roasted alive.
The torture of prisoners was indeed routine practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Valuing bravery above all things, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners. unable to withstand the rigor of wilderness travel were usually killed on the spot. Among those—Indian or European—taken back to the village, some would be adopted to replace slain warriors, the rest subjected to a ritual of torture designed to humiliate them and exact atonement for the tribe’s losses. Afterward the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it in a ceremonial meal, and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory.
Despite the colonists’ own resort to torture in order to extract confessions, the cruelty of these practices strengthened the belief that the natives were savages who deserved no quarter. This revulsion accounts at least in part for the ferocity of the battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when a force commanded by John Mason and assisted by militiamen from Saybrook surprised about half of the Pequot tribe encamped near the Mystic River.
The intention of the colonists had been to kill the warriors “with their Swords,” as Mason put it, to plunder the village, and to capture the women and children. But the plan did not work out. About 150 Pequot warriors had arrived in the fort the night before, and when the surprise attack began they emerged from their tents to fight. Fearing the Indians’ numerical strength, the English attackers set fire to the fortified village and retreated outside the palisades. There they formed a circle and shot down anyone seeking to escape; a second cordon of Narragansett Indians cut down the few who managed to get through the English line. When the battle was over, the Pequots had suffered several hundred dead, perhaps as many as 300 of these being women and children. Twenty Narragansett warriors also fell.
A number of recent historians have charged the Puritans with genocide: that is, with having carried out a premeditated plan to exterminate the Pequots. The evidence belies this. The use of fire as a weapon of war was not unusual for either Europeans or Indians, and every contemporary account stresses that the burning of the fort was an act of self-protection, not part of a pre-planned massacre. In later stages of the Pequot war, moreover, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, further contradicting the idea of genocidal intention.
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A second famous example from the colonial period is King Philip’s War (1675-76). This conflict, proportionately the costliest of all American wars, took the life of one in every sixteen men of military age in the colonies; large numbers of women and children also perished or were carried into captivity. Fifty-two of New England’s 90 towns were attacked, seventeen were razed to the ground, and 25 were pillaged. Casualties among the Indians were even higher, with many of those captured being executed or sold into slavery abroad.
The war was also merciless, on both sides. At its outset, a colonial council in Boston had declared “that none be Killed or Wounded that are Willing to surrender themselves into Custody.” But these rules were soon abandoned on the grounds that the Indians themselves, failing to adhere either to the laws of war or to the law of nature, would “skulk” behind trees, rocks, and bushes rather than appear openly to do “civilized” battle. Similarly creating a desire for retribution were the cruelties perpetrated by Indians when ambushing English troops or overrunning strongholds housing women and children. Before long, both colonists and Indians were dismembering corpses and displaying body parts and heads on poles. (Nevertheless, Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were tried in Boston for the brutal murder of three squaws and three Indian children; all were found guilty and two were executed.)
The hatred kindled by King Philip’s War became even more pronounced in 1689 when strong Indian tribes allied themselves with the French against the British. In 1694, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered all friendly Indians confined to a small area. A bounty was then offered for the killing or capture of hostile Indians, and scalps were accepted as proof of a kill. In 1704, this was amended in the direction of “Christian practice” by means of a scale of rewards graduated by age and sex; bounty was proscribed in the case of children under the age of ten, subsequently raised to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, genocidal intent was far from evident; the practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in reprisal for the extensive scalping carried out by Indians.
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IV
We turn now to the American frontier. In Pennsylvania, where the white population had doubled between 1740 and 1760, the pressure on Indian lands increased formidably; in 1754, encouraged by French agents, Indian warriors struck, starting a long and bloody conflict known as the French and Indian War or the Seven Years’ War.
By 1763, according to one estimate, about 2,000 whites had been killed or vanished into captivity. Stories of real, exaggerated, and imaginary atrocities spread by word of mouth, in narratives of imprisonment, and by means of provincial newspapers. Some British officers gave orders that captured Indians be given no quarter, and even after the end of formal hostilities, feelings continued to run so high that murderers of Indians, like the infamous Paxton Boys, were applauded rather than arrested.
As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts multiplied. So far had things progressed by 1784 that, according to one British traveler, “white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.”
Settlers on the expanding frontier treated the Indians with contempt, often robbing and killing them at will. In 1782, a militia pursuing an Indian war party that had slain a woman and a child massacred more than 90 peaceful Moravian Delawares. Although federal and state officials tried to bring such killers to justice, their efforts, writes the historian Francis Prucha, “were no match for the singular Indian-hating mentality of the frontiersmen, upon whom depended conviction in the local courts.”
But that, too, is only part of the story. The view that the Indian problem could be solved by force alone came under vigorous challenge from a number of federal commissioners who from 1832 on headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs and supervised the network of agents and subagents in the field. Many Americans on the eastern seaboard, too, openly criticized the rough ways of the frontier. Pity for the vanishing Indian, together with a sense of remorse, led to a revival of the 18th-century concept of the noble savage. America’s native inhabitants were romanticized in historiography, art, and literature, notably by James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his long poem, The Song of Hiawatha.
On the western frontier itself, such views were of course dismissed as rank sentimentality; the perceived nobility of the savages, observed cynics, was directly proportional to one’s geographic distance from them. Instead, settlers vigorously complained that the regular army was failing to meet the Indian threat more aggressively. A large-scale uprising of the Sioux in Minnesota in 1862, in which Indian war parties killed, raped, and pillaged all over the countryside, left in its wake a climate of fear and anger that spread over the entire West.
Colorado was especially tense. Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians, who had legitimate grievances against the encroaching white settlers, also fought for the sheer joy of combat, the desire for booty, and the prestige that accrued from success. The overland route to the East was particularly vulnerable: at one point in 1864, Denver was cut off from all supplies, and there were several butcheries of entire families at outlying ranches. In one gruesome case, all of the victims were scalped, the throats of the two children were cut, and the mother’s body was ripped open and her entrails pulled over her face.
Writing in September 1864, the Reverend William Crawford reported on the attitude of the white population of Colorado: “There is but one sentiment in regard to the final disposition which shall be made of the Indians: ‘Let them be exterminated—men, women, and children together.’ ” Of course, he added, “I do not myself share in such views.” The Rocky Mountain News, which at first had distinguished between friendly and hostile Indians, likewise began to advocate extermination of this “dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race.”
With the regular army off fighting the Civil War in the South, the western settlers depended for their protection on volunteer regiments, many lamentably deficient in discipline. It was a local force of such volunteers that committed the massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado on November 29, 1864. Formed in August, the regiment was made up of miners down on their luck, cowpokes tired of ranching, and others itching for battle. Its commander, the Reverend John Milton Chivington, a politician and ardent Indian-hater, had urged war without mercy, even against children. “Nits make lice,” he was fond of saying. The ensuing orgy of violence in the course of a surprise attack on a large Indian encampment left between 70 and 250 Indians dead, the majority women and children. The regiment suffered eight killed and 40 wounded.
News of the Sand Creek massacre sparked an outcry in the East and led to several congressional inquiries. Although some of the investigators appear to have been biased against Chivington, there was no disputing that he had issued orders not to give quarter, or that his soldiers had engaged in massive scalping and other mutilations.
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The sorry tale continues in California. The area that in 1850 became admitted to the Union as the 31st state had once held an Indian population estimated at anywhere between 150,000 and 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, the number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, disease was the single most important factor, although the state also witnessed an unusually large number of deliberate killings.
The discovery of gold in 1848 brought about a fundamental change in Indian-white relations. Whereas formerly Mexican ranchers had both exploited the Indians and provided them with a minimum of protection, the new immigrants, mostly young single males, exhibited animosity from the start, trespassing on Indian lands and often freely killing any who were in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860: “There never was a viler sort of men in the world than is congregated about these mines.”
What was true of miners was often true as well of newly arrived farmers. By the early 1850’s, whites in California outnumbered Indians by about two to one, and the lot of the natives, gradually forced into the least fertile parts of the territory, began to deteriorate rapidly. Many succumbed to starvation; others, desperate for food, went on the attack, stealing and killing livestock. Indian women who prostituted themselves to feed their families contributed to the demographic decline by removing themselves from the reproductive cycle. As a solution to the growing problem, the federal government sought to confine the Indians to reservations, but this was opposed both by the Indians themselves and by white ranchers fearing the loss of labor. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied.
One of the most violent, between white settlers and Yuki Indians in the Round Valley of Mendocino County, lasted for several years and was waged with great ferocity. Although Governor John B. Weller cautioned against an indiscriminate campaign—“[Y]our operations against the Indians,” he wrote to the commander of a volunteer force in 1859, “must be confined strictly to those who are known to have been engaged in killing the stock and destroying the property of our citizens . . . and the women and children under all circumstances must be spared”—his words had little effect. By 1864 the number of Yukis had declined from about 5,000 to 300.
The Humboldt Bay region, just northwest of the Round Valley, was the scene of still more collisions. Here too Indians stole and killed cattle, and militia companies retaliated. A secret league, formed in the town of Eureka, perpetrated a particularly hideous massacre in February 1860, surprising Indians sleeping in their houses and killing about sixty, mostly by hatchet. During the same morning hours, whites attacked two other Indian rancherias, with the same deadly results. In all, nearly 300 Indians were killed on one day, at least half of them women and children.
Once again there was outrage and remorse. “The white settlers,” wrote a historian only 20 years later, “had received great provocation. . . . But nothing they had suffered, no depredations the savages had committed, could justify the cruel slaughter of innocent women and children.” This had also been the opinion of a majority of the people of Eureka, where a grand jury condemned the massacre, while in cities like San Francisco all such killings repeatedly drew strong criticism. But atrocities continued: by the 1870’s, as one historian has summarized the situation in California, “only remnants of the aboriginal populations were still alive, and those who had survived the maelstrom of the preceding quarter-century were dislocated, demoralized, and impoverished.”
Lastly we come to the wars on the Great Plains. Following the end of the Civil War, large waves of white migrants, arriving simultaneously from East and West, squeezed the Plains Indians between them. In response, the Indians attacked vulnerable white outposts; their “acts of devilish cruelty,” reported one officer on the scene, had “no parallel in savage warfare.” The trails west were in similar peril: in December 1866, an army detachment of 80 men was lured into an ambush on the Bozeman Trail, and all of the soldiers were killed.
To force the natives into submission, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after the Civil War commanded the Indian-fighting army units on the Plains, applied the same strategy they had used so successfully in their marches across Georgia and in the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them to their winter camps, where numbing cold and heavy snows limited their mobility. There they destroyed the lodges and stores of food, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the deaths of women and children.
Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in conformity with the laws of war accepted at the time. The principles of limited war and of noncombatant immunity had been codified in Francis Lieber’s General Order No. 100, issued for the Union Army on April 24, 1863. But the villages of warring Indians who refused to surrender were considered legitimate military objectives. In any event, there was never any order to exterminate the Plains Indians, despite heated pronouncements on the subject by the outraged Sherman and despite Sheridan’s famous quip that “the only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Although Sheridan did not mean that all Indians should be shot on sight, but rather that none of the warring Indians on the Plains could be trusted, his words, as the historian James Axtell rightly suggests, did “more to harm straight thinking about Indian-white relations than any number of Sand Creeks or Wounded Knees.”
As for that last-named encounter, it took place on December 29, 1890 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By this time, the 7th Regiment of U.S. Cavalry had compiled a reputation for aggressiveness, particularly in the wake of its surprise assault in 1868 on a Cheyenne village on the Washita river in Kansas, where about 100 Indians were killed by General George Custer’s men.
Still, the battle of Washita, although one-sided, had not been a massacre: wounded warriors were given first aid, and 53 women and children who had hidden in their lodges survived the assault and were taken prisoner. Nor were the Cheyennes unarmed innocents; as their chief Black Kettle acknowledged, they had been conducting regular raids into Kansas that he was powerless to stop.
The encounter at Wounded Knee, 22 years later, must be seen in the context of the Ghost Dance religion, a messianic movement that since 1889 had caused great excitement among Indians in the area and that was interpreted by whites as a general call to war. While an encampment of Sioux was being searched for arms, a few young men created an incident; the soldiers, furious at what they considered an act of Indian treachery, fought back furiously as guns surrounding the encampment opened fire with deadly effect. The Army’s casualties were 25 killed and 39 wounded, mostly as a result of friendly fire. More than 300 Indians died.
Wounded Knee has been called “perhaps the best-known genocide of North American Indians.” But, as Robert Utley has concluded in a careful analysis, it is better described as “a regrettable, tragic accident of war,” a bloodbath that neither side intended. In a situation where women and children were mixed with men, it was inevitable that some of the former would be killed. But several groups of women and children were in fact allowed out of the encampment, and wounded Indian warriors, too, were spared and taken to a hospital. There may have been a few deliberate killings of noncombatants, but on the whole, as a court of inquiry ordered by President Harrison established, the officers and soldiers of the unit made supreme efforts to avoid killing women and children.
On January 15, 1891, the last Sioux warriors surrendered. Apart from isolated clashes, America’s Indian wars had ended.
The Genocide Convention was approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948 and came into force on January 12, 1951; after a long delay, it was ratified by the United States in 1986. Since genocide is now a technical term in international criminal law, the definition established by the convention has assumed prima-facie authority, and it is with this definition that we should begin in assessing the applicability of the concept of genocide to the events we have been considering.
According to Article II of the convention, the crime of genocide consists of a series of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such” (emphases added). Practically all legal scholars accept the centrality of this clause. During the deliberations over the convention, some argued for a clear specification of the reasons, or motives, for the destruction of a group. In the end, instead of a list of such motives, the issue was resolved by adding the words “as such”—i.e., the motive or reason for the destruction must be the ending of the group as a national, ethnic, racial, or religious entity. Evidence of such a motive, as one legal scholar put it, “will constitute an integral part of the proof of a genocidal plan, and therefore of genocidal intent.”
The crucial role played by intentionality in the Genocide Convention means that under its terms the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide. The lethal diseases were introduced inadvertently, and the Europeans cannot be blamed for their ignorance of what medical science would discover only centuries later. Similarly, military engagements that led to the death of non-combatants, like the battle of the Washita, cannot be seen as genocidal acts, for the loss of innocent life was not intended and the soldiers did not aim at the destruction of the Indians as a defined group. By contrast, some of the massacres in California, where both the perpetrators and their supporters openly acknowledged a desire to destroy the Indians as an ethnic entity, might indeed be regarded under the terms of the convention as exhibiting genocidal intent.
Even as it outlaws the destruction of a group “in whole or in part,” the convention does not address the question of what percentage of a group must be affected in order to qualify as genocide. As a benchmark, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has suggested “a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole,” adding that the actual or attempted destruction should also relate to “the factual opportunity of the accused to destroy a group in a specific geographic area within the sphere of his control, and not in relation to the entire population of the group in a wider geographic sense.” If this principle were adopted, an atrocity like the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a specific single locality, might also be considered an act of genocide.
Of course, It is far from easy to apply a legal concept developed in the middle of the 20th century to events taking place many decades if not hundreds of years earlier. Our knowledge of many of these occurrences is incomplete. Moreover, the malefactors, long since dead, cannot be tried in a court of law, where it would be possible to establish crucial factual details and to clarify relevant legal principles.
Applying today’s standards to events of the past raises still other questions, legal and moral alike. While history has no statute of limitations, our legal system rejects the idea of retroactivity (ex post facto laws). Morally, even if we accept the idea of universal principles transcending particular cultures and periods, we must exercise caution in condemning, say, the conduct of war during America’s colonial period, which for the most part conformed to then-prevailing notions of right and wrong. To understand all is hardly to forgive all, but historical judgment, as the scholar Gordon Leff has correctly stressed, “must always be contextual: it is no more reprehensible for an age to have lacked our values than to have lacked forks.”
The real task, then, is to ascertain the context of a specific situation and the options it presented. Given circumstances, and the moral standards of the day, did the people on whose conduct we are sitting in judgment have a choice to act differently? Such an approach would lead us to greater indulgence toward the Puritans of New England, who fought for their survival, than toward the miners and volunteer militias of California who often slaughtered Indian men, women, and children for no other reason than to satisfy their appetite for gold and land. The former, in addition, battled their Indian adversaries in an age that had little concern for humane standards of warfare, while the latter committed their atrocities in the face of vehement denunciation not only by self-styled humanitarians in the faraway East but by many of their fellow citizens in California.
Finally, even if some episodes can be considered genocidal—that is, tending toward genocide—they certainly do not justify condemning an entire society. Guilt is personal, and for good reason the Genocide Convention provides that only “persons” can be charged with the crime, probably even ruling out legal proceedings against governments. No less significant is that a massacre like Sand Creek was undertaken by a local volunteer militia and was not the expression of official U.S. policy. No regular U.S. Army unit was ever implicated in a similar atrocity. In the majority of actions, concludes Robert Utley, “the Army shot noncombatants incidentally and accidentally, not purposefully.” As for the larger society, even if some elements in the white population, mainly in the West, at times advocated extermination, no official of the U.S. government ever seriously proposed it. Genocide was never American policy, nor was it the result of policy.
The violent collision between whites and America’s native population was probably unavoidable. Between 1600 and 1850, a dramatic surge in population led to massive waves of emigration from Europe, and many of the millions who arrived in the New World gradually pushed westward into America’s seemingly unlimited space. No doubt, the 19th-century idea of America’s “manifest destiny” was in part a rationalization for acquisitiveness, but the resulting dispossession of the Indians was as unstoppable as other great population movements of the past. The U.S. government could not have prevented the westward movement even if it had wanted to.
In the end, the sad fate of America’s Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed no good solution to this clash. The Indians were not prepared to give up the nomadic life of the hunter for the sedentary life of the farmer. The new Americans, convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant the original inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required by the Indians’ way of life. The consequence was a conflict in which there were few heroes, but which was far from a simple tale of hapless victims and merciless aggressors. To fling the charge of genocide at an entire society serves neither the interests of the Indians nor those of history.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/were-american-indians-the-victims-of-genocide/
Attack is the best form of defense proved once again.
There's no point in arguing who was discriminated against the worst ( it was the blacks by far) but I guess in the modern world people compete for discrimination Pokemon points. I'd say that the Jews and the Italians, arriving at the same time, got treated roughly the same. The successful (Democrat) strategy has been for all (formerly) discriminated groups to unite against those who discriminated against them rather than arguing who was more oppressed.
Discrimination against Jews was not unique but that doesn't mean it wasn't real either or that now that it's (largely) over it should go down the memory hole. After what happened in Germany, Jews realized what was really at stake - what started out as being snubbed at the country club ended with gas chambers, so no vestige of racism, however harmless or even rational, could be allowed to remain - that fire had to be completely doused. This accounts for the fervor with which any public display of even mild racism gets stamped out nowadays.
Well, except for discrimination that ensures Jewish supremacy in the state of Israel…..That gets a free pass.
Maybe Matt Weiner only counts people as Jewish if they have black hair? With the Arthur Fonzarelli-style leather jacket as an optional extra?
Poor guy.One can only imagine the ostracism that he experienced, being one of the tiny handful of people with dark hair in SoCal......
“Maybe Matt Weiner only counts people as Jewish if they have black hair? With the Arthur Fonzarelli-style leather jacket as an optional extra?
Poor guy.One can only imagine the ostracism that he experienced, being one of the tiny handful of people with dark hair in SoCal……”
There is a Saturday Night Live skit called “The Californians” which portray coastal SoCal beach towns as Blondtopias. Everybody is blond except the Mexicans.
The story of the encounter between European settlers and America’s native population does not make for pleasant reading. Among early accounts, perhaps the most famous is Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1888), a doleful recitation of forced removals, killings, and callous disregard. Jackson’s book, which clearly captured some essential elements of what happened, also set a pattern of exaggeration and one-sided indictment that has persisted to this day.
Thus, according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a “vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record.” By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people.” In the judgment of Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., “there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a ‘race’ of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history.”
The sweeping charge of genocide against the Indians became especially popular during the Vietnam war, when historians opposed to that conflict began drawing parallels between our actions in Southeast Asia and earlier examples of a supposedly ingrained American viciousness toward non-white peoples. The historian Richard Drinnon, referring to the troops under the command of the Indian scout Kit Carson, called them “forerunners of the Burning Fifth Marines” who set fire to Vietnamese villages, while in The American Indian: The First Victim (1972), Jay David urged contemporary readers to recall how America’s civilization had originated in “theft and murder” and “efforts toward . . . genocide.”
Further accusations of genocide marked the run-up to the 1992 quincentenary of the landing of Columbus. The National Council of Churches adopted a resolution branding this event “an invasion” that resulted in the “slavery and genocide of native people.” In a widely read book, The Conquest of Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale charged the English and their American successors with pursuing a policy of extermination that had continued unabated for four centuries. Later works have followed suit. In the 1999 Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by the scholar Israel Charny, an article by Ward Churchill argues that extermination was the “express objective” of the U.S. government. To the Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, similarly, genocide is the “only appropriate way” to describe how white settlers treated the Indians. And so forth.
That American Indians suffered horribly is indisputable. But whether their suffering amounted to a “holocaust,” or to genocide, is another matter.
It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century. Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject speak of an inflated “numbers game”; others charge that the size of the aboriginal population has been deliberately minimized in order to make the decline seem less severe than it was.
The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the ethnologist James Mooney proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5 million, nearly five times as high as Mooney’s, while Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the aboriginal population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the present territory of the United States at about 10 million.
From one perspective, these differences, however startling, may seem beside the point: there is ample evidence, after all, that the arrival of the white man triggered a drastic reduction in the number of native Americans. Nevertheless, even if the higher figures are credited, they alone do not prove the occurrence of genocide.
To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important reason for the Indians’ catastrophic decline—namely, the spread of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known by scholars as a “virgin-soil epidemic”; in North America, it was the norm.
The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans.
About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby, “but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath.” It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.
To some, however, this is enough in itself to warrant the term genocide. David Stannard, for instance, states that just as Jews who died of disease and starvation in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, Indians who died of introduced diseases “were as much the victims of the Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs.” As an example of actual genocidal conditions, Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as “furnaces of death.”
But right away we are in highly debatable territory. It is true that the cramped quarters of the missions, with their poor ventilation and bad sanitation, encouraged the spread of disease. But it is demonstrably untrue that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were unconcerned with the welfare of their native converts. No matter how difficult the conditions under which the Indians labored—obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical care, corporal punishment—their experience bore no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos. The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the diseases that afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they could do for them. By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghettos, and quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and medicine; unlike in Stannard’s “furnaces of death,” the deaths that occurred there were meant to occur.
The larger picture also does not conform to Stannard’s idea of disease as an expression of “genocidal war.” True, the forced relocations of Indian tribes were often accompanied by great hardship and harsh treatment; the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to territories west of the Mississippi in 1838 took the lives of thousands and has entered history as the Trail of Tears. But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and sometimes after only minimal contact with European traders. True, too, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of divine providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that Europeans did not come to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases.
Or did they? Ward Churchill, taking the argument a step further than Stannard, asserts that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the way the great bulk of North America’s native population disappeared: “it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed.” In brief, the Europeans were engaged in biological warfare.
Unfortunately for this thesis, we know of but a single instance of such warfare, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the British garrisons west of the Allegheny mountains. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw as the Indians’ treacherous and savage modes of warfare, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote as follows to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”
Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst’s suggestion, but whether he himself carried it out is uncertain. On or around June 24, two traders at Fort Pitt did give blankets and a handkerchief from the fort’s quarantined hospital to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his journal: “I hope it will have the desired effect.” Smallpox was already present among the tribes of Ohio; at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak in which hundreds died.
A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense “ ‘trade blankets’ to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota.” He continues:
Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter’s. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to scatter and seek “sanctuary” in the villages of healthy relatives.
In this way the disease was spread, the Mandans were “virtually exterminated,” and other tribes suffered similarly devastating losses. Citing a figure of “100,000 or more fatalities” caused by the U.S. Army in the 1836-40 smallpox pandemic (elsewhere he speaks of a toll “several times that number”), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival.
Supporting Churchill here are Stiffarm and Lane, who write that “the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets by the U.S. Army to Mandans at Fort Clark . . . was the causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40.” In evidence, they cite the journal of a contemporary at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.
But Chardon’s journal manifestly does not suggest that the U.S. Army distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on the inadvertent spread of disease by a ship’s passenger. And as for the “100,000 fatalities,” not only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers, but he too points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter’s as the cause. Another scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also refuted the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.
Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of the United States government at this time to vaccinate the native population. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program continued in force for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on the part of some officials. Still, as Thornton writes: “Vaccination of American Indians did eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox.”
To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians; neither can the large number of deaths as a result of disease be considered the result of a genocidal design.
Still, even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by mistreatment and violence. Should some or all of these deaths be considered instances of genocide?
We may examine representative incidents by following the geographic route of European settlement, beginning in the New England colonies. There, at first, the Puritans did not regard the Indians they encountered as natural enemies, but rather as potential friends and converts. But their Christianizing efforts showed little success, and their experience with the natives gradually yielded a more hostile view. The Pequot tribe in particular, with its reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness, was feared not only by the colonists but by most other Indians in New England. In the warfare that eventually ensued, caused in part by intertribal rivalries, the Narragansett Indians became actively engaged on the Puritan side.
Hostilities opened in late 1636 after the murder of several colonists. When the Pequots refused to comply with the demands of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the surrender of the guilty and other forms of indemnification, a punitive expedition was led against them by John Endecott, the first resident governor of the colony; although it ended inconclusively, the Pequots retaliated by attacking any settler they could find. Fort Saybrook on the Connecticut River was besieged, and members of the garrison who ventured outside were ambushed and killed. One captured trader, tied to a stake in sight of the fort, was tortured for three days, expiring after his captors flayed his skin with the help of hot timbers and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner was roasted alive.
The torture of prisoners was indeed routine practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Valuing bravery above all things, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners. unable to withstand the rigor of wilderness travel were usually killed on the spot. Among those—Indian or European—taken back to the village, some would be adopted to replace slain warriors, the rest subjected to a ritual of torture designed to humiliate them and exact atonement for the tribe’s losses. Afterward the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it in a ceremonial meal, and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory.
Despite the colonists’ own resort to torture in order to extract confessions, the cruelty of these practices strengthened the belief that the natives were savages who deserved no quarter. This revulsion accounts at least in part for the ferocity of the battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when a force commanded by John Mason and assisted by militiamen from Saybrook surprised about half of the Pequot tribe encamped near the Mystic River.
The intention of the colonists had been to kill the warriors “with their Swords,” as Mason put it, to plunder the village, and to capture the women and children. But the plan did not work out. About 150 Pequot warriors had arrived in the fort the night before, and when the surprise attack began they emerged from their tents to fight. Fearing the Indians’ numerical strength, the English attackers set fire to the fortified village and retreated outside the palisades. There they formed a circle and shot down anyone seeking to escape; a second cordon of Narragansett Indians cut down the few who managed to get through the English line. When the battle was over, the Pequots had suffered several hundred dead, perhaps as many as 300 of these being women and children. Twenty Narragansett warriors also fell.
A number of recent historians have charged the Puritans with genocide: that is, with having carried out a premeditated plan to exterminate the Pequots. The evidence belies this. The use of fire as a weapon of war was not unusual for either Europeans or Indians, and every contemporary account stresses that the burning of the fort was an act of self-protection, not part of a pre-planned massacre. In later stages of the Pequot war, moreover, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, further contradicting the idea of genocidal intention.
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A second famous example from the colonial period is King Philip’s War (1675-76). This conflict, proportionately the costliest of all American wars, took the life of one in every sixteen men of military age in the colonies; large numbers of women and children also perished or were carried into captivity. Fifty-two of New England’s 90 towns were attacked, seventeen were razed to the ground, and 25 were pillaged. Casualties among the Indians were even higher, with many of those captured being executed or sold into slavery abroad.
The war was also merciless, on both sides. At its outset, a colonial council in Boston had declared “that none be Killed or Wounded that are Willing to surrender themselves into Custody.” But these rules were soon abandoned on the grounds that the Indians themselves, failing to adhere either to the laws of war or to the law of nature, would “skulk” behind trees, rocks, and bushes rather than appear openly to do “civilized” battle. Similarly creating a desire for retribution were the cruelties perpetrated by Indians when ambushing English troops or overrunning strongholds housing women and children. Before long, both colonists and Indians were dismembering corpses and displaying body parts and heads on poles. (Nevertheless, Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were tried in Boston for the brutal murder of three squaws and three Indian children; all were found guilty and two were executed.)
The hatred kindled by King Philip’s War became even more pronounced in 1689 when strong Indian tribes allied themselves with the French against the British. In 1694, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered all friendly Indians confined to a small area. A bounty was then offered for the killing or capture of hostile Indians, and scalps were accepted as proof of a kill. In 1704, this was amended in the direction of “Christian practice” by means of a scale of rewards graduated by age and sex; bounty was proscribed in the case of children under the age of ten, subsequently raised to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, genocidal intent was far from evident; the practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in reprisal for the extensive scalping carried out by Indians.
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IV
We turn now to the American frontier. In Pennsylvania, where the white population had doubled between 1740 and 1760, the pressure on Indian lands increased formidably; in 1754, encouraged by French agents, Indian warriors struck, starting a long and bloody conflict known as the French and Indian War or the Seven Years’ War.
By 1763, according to one estimate, about 2,000 whites had been killed or vanished into captivity. Stories of real, exaggerated, and imaginary atrocities spread by word of mouth, in narratives of imprisonment, and by means of provincial newspapers. Some British officers gave orders that captured Indians be given no quarter, and even after the end of formal hostilities, feelings continued to run so high that murderers of Indians, like the infamous Paxton Boys, were applauded rather than arrested.
As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts multiplied. So far had things progressed by 1784 that, according to one British traveler, “white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.”
Settlers on the expanding frontier treated the Indians with contempt, often robbing and killing them at will. In 1782, a militia pursuing an Indian war party that had slain a woman and a child massacred more than 90 peaceful Moravian Delawares. Although federal and state officials tried to bring such killers to justice, their efforts, writes the historian Francis Prucha, “were no match for the singular Indian-hating mentality of the frontiersmen, upon whom depended conviction in the local courts.”
But that, too, is only part of the story. The view that the Indian problem could be solved by force alone came under vigorous challenge from a number of federal commissioners who from 1832 on headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs and supervised the network of agents and subagents in the field. Many Americans on the eastern seaboard, too, openly criticized the rough ways of the frontier. Pity for the vanishing Indian, together with a sense of remorse, led to a revival of the 18th-century concept of the noble savage. America’s native inhabitants were romanticized in historiography, art, and literature, notably by James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his long poem, The Song of Hiawatha.
On the western frontier itself, such views were of course dismissed as rank sentimentality; the perceived nobility of the savages, observed cynics, was directly proportional to one’s geographic distance from them. Instead, settlers vigorously complained that the regular army was failing to meet the Indian threat more aggressively. A large-scale uprising of the Sioux in Minnesota in 1862, in which Indian war parties killed, raped, and pillaged all over the countryside, left in its wake a climate of fear and anger that spread over the entire West.
Colorado was especially tense. Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians, who had legitimate grievances against the encroaching white settlers, also fought for the sheer joy of combat, the desire for booty, and the prestige that accrued from success. The overland route to the East was particularly vulnerable: at one point in 1864, Denver was cut off from all supplies, and there were several butcheries of entire families at outlying ranches. In one gruesome case, all of the victims were scalped, the throats of the two children were cut, and the mother’s body was ripped open and her entrails pulled over her face.
Writing in September 1864, the Reverend William Crawford reported on the attitude of the white population of Colorado: “There is but one sentiment in regard to the final disposition which shall be made of the Indians: ‘Let them be exterminated—men, women, and children together.’ ” Of course, he added, “I do not myself share in such views.” The Rocky Mountain News, which at first had distinguished between friendly and hostile Indians, likewise began to advocate extermination of this “dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race.”
With the regular army off fighting the Civil War in the South, the western settlers depended for their protection on volunteer regiments, many lamentably deficient in discipline. It was a local force of such volunteers that committed the massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado on November 29, 1864. Formed in August, the regiment was made up of miners down on their luck, cowpokes tired of ranching, and others itching for battle. Its commander, the Reverend John Milton Chivington, a politician and ardent Indian-hater, had urged war without mercy, even against children. “Nits make lice,” he was fond of saying. The ensuing orgy of violence in the course of a surprise attack on a large Indian encampment left between 70 and 250 Indians dead, the majority women and children. The regiment suffered eight killed and 40 wounded.
News of the Sand Creek massacre sparked an outcry in the East and led to several congressional inquiries. Although some of the investigators appear to have been biased against Chivington, there was no disputing that he had issued orders not to give quarter, or that his soldiers had engaged in massive scalping and other mutilations.
_____________
The sorry tale continues in California. The area that in 1850 became admitted to the Union as the 31st state had once held an Indian population estimated at anywhere between 150,000 and 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, the number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, disease was the single most important factor, although the state also witnessed an unusually large number of deliberate killings.
The discovery of gold in 1848 brought about a fundamental change in Indian-white relations. Whereas formerly Mexican ranchers had both exploited the Indians and provided them with a minimum of protection, the new immigrants, mostly young single males, exhibited animosity from the start, trespassing on Indian lands and often freely killing any who were in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860: “There never was a viler sort of men in the world than is congregated about these mines.”
What was true of miners was often true as well of newly arrived farmers. By the early 1850’s, whites in California outnumbered Indians by about two to one, and the lot of the natives, gradually forced into the least fertile parts of the territory, began to deteriorate rapidly. Many succumbed to starvation; others, desperate for food, went on the attack, stealing and killing livestock. Indian women who prostituted themselves to feed their families contributed to the demographic decline by removing themselves from the reproductive cycle. As a solution to the growing problem, the federal government sought to confine the Indians to reservations, but this was opposed both by the Indians themselves and by white ranchers fearing the loss of labor. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied.
One of the most violent, between white settlers and Yuki Indians in the Round Valley of Mendocino County, lasted for several years and was waged with great ferocity. Although Governor John B. Weller cautioned against an indiscriminate campaign—“[Y]our operations against the Indians,” he wrote to the commander of a volunteer force in 1859, “must be confined strictly to those who are known to have been engaged in killing the stock and destroying the property of our citizens . . . and the women and children under all circumstances must be spared”—his words had little effect. By 1864 the number of Yukis had declined from about 5,000 to 300.
The Humboldt Bay region, just northwest of the Round Valley, was the scene of still more collisions. Here too Indians stole and killed cattle, and militia companies retaliated. A secret league, formed in the town of Eureka, perpetrated a particularly hideous massacre in February 1860, surprising Indians sleeping in their houses and killing about sixty, mostly by hatchet. During the same morning hours, whites attacked two other Indian rancherias, with the same deadly results. In all, nearly 300 Indians were killed on one day, at least half of them women and children.
Once again there was outrage and remorse. “The white settlers,” wrote a historian only 20 years later, “had received great provocation. . . . But nothing they had suffered, no depredations the savages had committed, could justify the cruel slaughter of innocent women and children.” This had also been the opinion of a majority of the people of Eureka, where a grand jury condemned the massacre, while in cities like San Francisco all such killings repeatedly drew strong criticism. But atrocities continued: by the 1870’s, as one historian has summarized the situation in California, “only remnants of the aboriginal populations were still alive, and those who had survived the maelstrom of the preceding quarter-century were dislocated, demoralized, and impoverished.”
Lastly we come to the wars on the Great Plains. Following the end of the Civil War, large waves of white migrants, arriving simultaneously from East and West, squeezed the Plains Indians between them. In response, the Indians attacked vulnerable white outposts; their “acts of devilish cruelty,” reported one officer on the scene, had “no parallel in savage warfare.” The trails west were in similar peril: in December 1866, an army detachment of 80 men was lured into an ambush on the Bozeman Trail, and all of the soldiers were killed.
To force the natives into submission, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after the Civil War commanded the Indian-fighting army units on the Plains, applied the same strategy they had used so successfully in their marches across Georgia and in the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them to their winter camps, where numbing cold and heavy snows limited their mobility. There they destroyed the lodges and stores of food, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the deaths of women and children.
Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in conformity with the laws of war accepted at the time. The principles of limited war and of noncombatant immunity had been codified in Francis Lieber’s General Order No. 100, issued for the Union Army on April 24, 1863. But the villages of warring Indians who refused to surrender were considered legitimate military objectives. In any event, there was never any order to exterminate the Plains Indians, despite heated pronouncements on the subject by the outraged Sherman and despite Sheridan’s famous quip that “the only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Although Sheridan did not mean that all Indians should be shot on sight, but rather that none of the warring Indians on the Plains could be trusted, his words, as the historian James Axtell rightly suggests, did “more to harm straight thinking about Indian-white relations than any number of Sand Creeks or Wounded Knees.”
As for that last-named encounter, it took place on December 29, 1890 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By this time, the 7th Regiment of U.S. Cavalry had compiled a reputation for aggressiveness, particularly in the wake of its surprise assault in 1868 on a Cheyenne village on the Washita river in Kansas, where about 100 Indians were killed by General George Custer’s men.
Still, the battle of Washita, although one-sided, had not been a massacre: wounded warriors were given first aid, and 53 women and children who had hidden in their lodges survived the assault and were taken prisoner. Nor were the Cheyennes unarmed innocents; as their chief Black Kettle acknowledged, they had been conducting regular raids into Kansas that he was powerless to stop.
The encounter at Wounded Knee, 22 years later, must be seen in the context of the Ghost Dance religion, a messianic movement that since 1889 had caused great excitement among Indians in the area and that was interpreted by whites as a general call to war. While an encampment of Sioux was being searched for arms, a few young men created an incident; the soldiers, furious at what they considered an act of Indian treachery, fought back furiously as guns surrounding the encampment opened fire with deadly effect. The Army’s casualties were 25 killed and 39 wounded, mostly as a result of friendly fire. More than 300 Indians died.
Wounded Knee has been called “perhaps the best-known genocide of North American Indians.” But, as Robert Utley has concluded in a careful analysis, it is better described as “a regrettable, tragic accident of war,” a bloodbath that neither side intended. In a situation where women and children were mixed with men, it was inevitable that some of the former would be killed. But several groups of women and children were in fact allowed out of the encampment, and wounded Indian warriors, too, were spared and taken to a hospital. There may have been a few deliberate killings of noncombatants, but on the whole, as a court of inquiry ordered by President Harrison established, the officers and soldiers of the unit made supreme efforts to avoid killing women and children.
On January 15, 1891, the last Sioux warriors surrendered. Apart from isolated clashes, America’s Indian wars had ended.
The Genocide Convention was approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948 and came into force on January 12, 1951; after a long delay, it was ratified by the United States in 1986. Since genocide is now a technical term in international criminal law, the definition established by the convention has assumed prima-facie authority, and it is with this definition that we should begin in assessing the applicability of the concept of genocide to the events we have been considering.
According to Article II of the convention, the crime of genocide consists of a series of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such” (emphases added). Practically all legal scholars accept the centrality of this clause. During the deliberations over the convention, some argued for a clear specification of the reasons, or motives, for the destruction of a group. In the end, instead of a list of such motives, the issue was resolved by adding the words “as such”—i.e., the motive or reason for the destruction must be the ending of the group as a national, ethnic, racial, or religious entity. Evidence of such a motive, as one legal scholar put it, “will constitute an integral part of the proof of a genocidal plan, and therefore of genocidal intent.”
The crucial role played by intentionality in the Genocide Convention means that under its terms the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide. The lethal diseases were introduced inadvertently, and the Europeans cannot be blamed for their ignorance of what medical science would discover only centuries later. Similarly, military engagements that led to the death of non-combatants, like the battle of the Washita, cannot be seen as genocidal acts, for the loss of innocent life was not intended and the soldiers did not aim at the destruction of the Indians as a defined group. By contrast, some of the massacres in California, where both the perpetrators and their supporters openly acknowledged a desire to destroy the Indians as an ethnic entity, might indeed be regarded under the terms of the convention as exhibiting genocidal intent.
Even as it outlaws the destruction of a group “in whole or in part,” the convention does not address the question of what percentage of a group must be affected in order to qualify as genocide. As a benchmark, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has suggested “a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole,” adding that the actual or attempted destruction should also relate to “the factual opportunity of the accused to destroy a group in a specific geographic area within the sphere of his control, and not in relation to the entire population of the group in a wider geographic sense.” If this principle were adopted, an atrocity like the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a specific single locality, might also be considered an act of genocide.
Of course, It is far from easy to apply a legal concept developed in the middle of the 20th century to events taking place many decades if not hundreds of years earlier. Our knowledge of many of these occurrences is incomplete. Moreover, the malefactors, long since dead, cannot be tried in a court of law, where it would be possible to establish crucial factual details and to clarify relevant legal principles.
Applying today’s standards to events of the past raises still other questions, legal and moral alike. While history has no statute of limitations, our legal system rejects the idea of retroactivity (ex post facto laws). Morally, even if we accept the idea of universal principles transcending particular cultures and periods, we must exercise caution in condemning, say, the conduct of war during America’s colonial period, which for the most part conformed to then-prevailing notions of right and wrong. To understand all is hardly to forgive all, but historical judgment, as the scholar Gordon Leff has correctly stressed, “must always be contextual: it is no more reprehensible for an age to have lacked our values than to have lacked forks.”
The real task, then, is to ascertain the context of a specific situation and the options it presented. Given circumstances, and the moral standards of the day, did the people on whose conduct we are sitting in judgment have a choice to act differently? Such an approach would lead us to greater indulgence toward the Puritans of New England, who fought for their survival, than toward the miners and volunteer militias of California who often slaughtered Indian men, women, and children for no other reason than to satisfy their appetite for gold and land. The former, in addition, battled their Indian adversaries in an age that had little concern for humane standards of warfare, while the latter committed their atrocities in the face of vehement denunciation not only by self-styled humanitarians in the faraway East but by many of their fellow citizens in California.
Finally, even if some episodes can be considered genocidal—that is, tending toward genocide—they certainly do not justify condemning an entire society. Guilt is personal, and for good reason the Genocide Convention provides that only “persons” can be charged with the crime, probably even ruling out legal proceedings against governments. No less significant is that a massacre like Sand Creek was undertaken by a local volunteer militia and was not the expression of official U.S. policy. No regular U.S. Army unit was ever implicated in a similar atrocity. In the majority of actions, concludes Robert Utley, “the Army shot noncombatants incidentally and accidentally, not purposefully.” As for the larger society, even if some elements in the white population, mainly in the West, at times advocated extermination, no official of the U.S. government ever seriously proposed it. Genocide was never American policy, nor was it the result of policy.
The violent collision between whites and America’s native population was probably unavoidable. Between 1600 and 1850, a dramatic surge in population led to massive waves of emigration from Europe, and many of the millions who arrived in the New World gradually pushed westward into America’s seemingly unlimited space. No doubt, the 19th-century idea of America’s “manifest destiny” was in part a rationalization for acquisitiveness, but the resulting dispossession of the Indians was as unstoppable as other great population movements of the past. The U.S. government could not have prevented the westward movement even if it had wanted to.
In the end, the sad fate of America’s Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed no good solution to this clash. The Indians were not prepared to give up the nomadic life of the hunter for the sedentary life of the farmer. The new Americans, convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant the original inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required by the Indians’ way of life. The consequence was a conflict in which there were few heroes, but which was far from a simple tale of hapless victims and merciless aggressors. To fling the charge of genocide at an entire society serves neither the interests of the Indians nor those of history.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/were-american-indians-the-victims-of-genocide/
From blatant Jewish racism towards Europeans (Weiner) to white people defending themselves from accusations of racism.
Attack is the best form of defense proved once again.
Well I am rusty on the sax, but I am a very talented singer and in good practice. Should I go up on stage at the local opera house and expect to join in the singing? I guess I’d better sue if they don’t welcome me, else next thing you know they’ll be whipping out the Zyklon B.
A lot of orchestras do blind auditions for musicians (the musician sits behind a curtain) in order to make sure that they are really picking the best musical talent and not just someone who looks the part.
Groups tend to be discriminated against in approximate proportion to how much they deserve to be discriminated against. Stereotypes exist for a reason - because they're generally true.
Violent and low impulse control blacks, pushy rude jews, uptight and repressed WASP's.
I don’t think history will bear you out there. It’s more often about the strong dominating the weak, which is still no excuse to abrogate freedom of association out of hand, just reason to guard against its explicit abuse.
"I don’t think history will bear you out there. It’s more often about the strong dominating the weak, which is still no excuse to abrogate freedom of association out of hand, just reason to guard against its explicit abuse"
I more specifically meant in the US. Anyway, I wasn't speaking of abuse, I was speaking of discrimination. White people don't like to live around blacks because (with exceptions) their behavior is awful. At least in comparison to the standards of behavior most white people are used to. Now that we're no longer allowed to keep them out of neighborhoods or refuse to let them patronize businesses, people find other ways to discriminate. Why? Because they deserve it.
I would argue that not wanting to live around blacks isn't a form of abuse of blacks. It is a form of not wanting to put up with their appalling behavior.
The more "different" a subgroup chooses to be (or in some cases, can't help themselves), the more they'll be discriminated against by the minority. That is perfectly natural. Calling it "bad" is liking saying 2+2 equaling 4 is bad, or the sun rising in the East is bad.
No one can really be this obtuse. If Desiderius shows up at the auditions for the local opera and there’s a position open and everyone agrees that you are the best contratenor but they just can’t let you have the job because you are a Lombard, that’s discrimination. If it’s for a valid reason (you are the SECOND best one for the position and it has nothing to do with the fact that you are a Lombard) it ain’t.
A lot of orchestras do blind auditions for musicians (the musician sits behind a curtain) in order to make sure that they are really picking the best musical talent and not just someone who looks the part.
The Asian mindset is that the smart person is quiet and studious. Respect the teacher; they know the subject and you are there to learn, so shut up and learn. Just because someone is a loudmouth (by answering in class or questioning the teacher) does not mean that they are smart.
Personally I think this attitude is bollocks but there it is.
“Respect the teacher; they know the subject and you are there to learn, so shut up and learn. ”
We’ll at least the Asians still recognise there is such as an thing as an expert, ie, someone who knows a lot about a particular subject and has an ongoing desire to find out more about it. The modern left/liberal view in the West, is that knowledge is subjective and there are no experts, so the teacher should serve as a facilitator to help children (who are all equal in intelligence and curiosity) discover their own inner wisdom.
I wonder if iSteve has had a chance to see Andrew Joyce’s article up on the Occidental Observer about organized Jewish efforts to censor the Internet and outlaw any speech critical of Jews or Israel. It would be great to have a post about this.
Poor white Protestants might have been treated poorly because they were poor, but as soon as you struck gold in your mine or whatever, you could buy a house in Newport and no one needed to know about how poor your ancestors had been. If anything, rags to riches tales were admired so someone like Carnegie who was a (white Protestant) immigrant who had been born in a one room weaver's cottage was all the more admired for it and allowed to join the highest social circles, whereas even if you were a millionaire's daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
As if Jewish society — social, political, commercial — doesn’t often discriminate against outgroup members.
The hypocrisy is thick. Jewish exclusivity is just part of being Jewish. WASP exclusivity is a crime.
whereas even if you were a millionaire’s daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
Weiner’s determination to sublimate his ethnic animus with it might explain why Mad Men made such a vacuous whole despite brilliantly crafted parts.
Weiner thought he was going to take us on Draper’s journey to WASP privilege, maybe reveal something about it. Does anyone think he achieved that? Viewed one way, I see the show as Weiner’s attempt to get to that story, and failing. Like someone mentioned above, he would have loved to give us a Hero of Color, but he knows it would have instantly rendered (or revealed) the show (as) trite. Is a Matthew Weiner capable of drawing the dread conclusions therein?
The guy did an awful lot of research to give us meticulous realism in dress and sets and in placing the action in a historical timeline, but the show feels shy and bowdlerized about the real meat of the story: the attitudes, speech and beliefs of its people.
So the show is whatever you want it to be. It’s conservative, it’s liberal; it’s feminist, it’s a celebration of traditional sex roles; it’s nostalgic, it’s progressive; it’s a floor wax…
That's a good one. How about wall paper?
A fitting epitaph for the 60s.
“This thing about classroom discussion being highly valued puzzles me. Don’t the teachers usually manipulate and guide them anyway? Discussions amongst youths are usually just an exercise between the know-nothings and know-just a little bit types. What do kids know anyway? Aren’t discussions which veer into unapproved territory or those that displease the teacher personally just get shut down?”
It depends a great deal on the individual professor. While academics within the less rigorous fields, may vote overwhelmingly Democrat, they’re not all the closed-minded, P.C. mongering, Social Justice Warriors of which we read (and disdain). Some of them are pretty decent people, who do a pretty good job (even if the tuition at the institution where they teach, may still be a total rip-off).
Weiner thought he was going to take us on Draper's journey to WASP privilege, maybe reveal something about it. Does anyone think he achieved that? Viewed one way, I see the show as Weiner's attempt to get to that story, and failing. Like someone mentioned above, he would have loved to give us a Hero of Color, but he knows it would have instantly rendered (or revealed) the show (as) trite. Is a Matthew Weiner capable of drawing the dread conclusions therein?The guy did an awful lot of research to give us meticulous realism in dress and sets and in placing the action in a historical timeline, but the show feels shy and bowdlerized about the real meat of the story: the attitudes, speech and beliefs of its people.
So the show is whatever you want it to be. It's conservative, it's liberal; it's feminist, it's a celebration of traditional sex roles; it's nostalgic, it's progressive; it's a floor wax...
Floor wax…
That’s a good one. How about wall paper?
A fitting epitaph for the 60s.
OT:
There’s a funny video at YouTube by Swedish nationalists that shows them trolling the haute bourgeois neighbourhood that votes for multiculturalism in principle but gets none in practice. The video’s called “Multiculturalism comes to Saltsjöbaden “
I have never watched Mad Men. Realized today that few people actually watch the show.
Sunday night: Two reruns of “I Love Lucy” from the 1950s, scored the highest total viewers of all scripted shows that night.
“Lucy” had 6.4 million total viewers. That’s almost twice the very high “Mad Men” score of 3.3 million viewers on Sunday.
- The final episode of Newhart was watched by 29.5 million viewers.
- The final episdoe of Seinfeld was watched by 76.3 million viewers.
Mad Men's 3.3 million viewers would put it in the record books ... if it had hit that in Sweden or New Zealand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts
Groups tend to be discriminated against in approximate proportion to how much they deserve to be discriminated against. Stereotypes exist for a reason - because they're generally true.
Violent and low impulse control blacks, pushy rude jews, uptight and repressed WASP's.
> Groups tend to be discriminated against in approximate proportion to how much they deserve to be discriminated against.
Oh yeah, sure. All those white Rhodesians killed and raped by ZANU PF definitely deserved it. Same with the Koreans shop owners attacked by black American rioters. How about the Arab Christians despised by their cousin-f’n Muslim countrymen? The noble Tutsis hacked to death by stupid, brutish Hutus? The ethnic Chinese porgrom’d by neanderthal-like Indonesians.
Give me a break, throughout human history interracial hatred and violence rarely has about zero correlation to who deserved it. In fact usually just the opposite, the smartest, wealthiest and and hardest-working groups are brought down a peg by the masses of envious losers. This is particularly true for extreme, genocidal violence. Racism driven by derision usually is much more minor. An underclass minority can easily be controlled and segregated. Racism driven by resentment is much more likely to result in extermination.
The majority genuinely fears the power, wealth, influence and intelligence of the superior sub-group. A half-measure is as likely to blow back at you. Jim Crow doesn’t work, its all or nothing. The more noble and successful the group, the bigger the target they are.
I mentioned discrimination. You're referring to mass murder. Are you really so dense as to conflate the two?
"The majority genuinely fears the power, wealth, influence and intelligence of the superior sub-group. A half-measure is as likely to blow back at you. Jim Crow doesn’t work"
Got it. People don't like being around blacks because of their wealth, influence, and intelligence. That's certainly a...novel...interpretation.
“” Groups tend to be discriminated against in approximate proportion to how much they deserve to be discriminated against.””
“I don’t think history will bear you out there. It’s more often about the strong dominating the weak, which is still no excuse to abrogate freedom of association out of hand, just reason to guard against its explicit abuse”
I more specifically meant in the US. Anyway, I wasn’t speaking of abuse, I was speaking of discrimination. White people don’t like to live around blacks because (with exceptions) their behavior is awful. At least in comparison to the standards of behavior most white people are used to. Now that we’re no longer allowed to keep them out of neighborhoods or refuse to let them patronize businesses, people find other ways to discriminate. Why? Because they deserve it.
I would argue that not wanting to live around blacks isn’t a form of abuse of blacks. It is a form of not wanting to put up with their appalling behavior.
The more “different” a subgroup chooses to be (or in some cases, can’t help themselves), the more they’ll be discriminated against by the minority. That is perfectly natural. Calling it “bad” is liking saying 2+2 equaling 4 is bad, or the sun rising in the East is bad.
Poor white Protestants might have been treated poorly because they were poor, but as soon as you struck gold in your mine or whatever, you could buy a house in Newport and no one needed to know about how poor your ancestors had been. If anything, rags to riches tales were admired so someone like Carnegie who was a (white Protestant) immigrant who had been born in a one room weaver's cottage was all the more admired for it and allowed to join the highest social circles, whereas even if you were a millionaire's daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
>>…..if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
I truly don’t understand this grievance. This seems to be a particular Jewish insecurity. Notwithstanding all the believed benefits that accrue to standing with the elite, I do not want to associate with people who do not want to associate with me, and most of the people I have known in life have felt similarly.
> As if Jewish society — social, political, commercial — doesn’t often discriminate against outgroup members.
Of course every group discriminates to some extent against other groups. But its very easy to demonstrate that among all sub-groups of whites, Jews suffered the most (economically) from discrimination in early-to-mid 20th century. Like others have said intra-white discrimination was rampant circa 1925: Scotch-Irish against Norwegians, Dutch against Italians, WASPs against Jews, Jews against WASPs, etc. By the standard of then, intra-white discrimination is non-existent in modern-day America.
So the relative change in status of an ethnic group between 1925 and today is a very strong indicator of how much discrimination impacted them in the past. (I’ve excluded non-whites, because modern affirmative action policies still clearly discriminate (either positively or negative) on those groups). Clearly Italians and Norwegians on net suffered from 1925 discrimination, as those groups are both much more relatively successful today than in the past.
But Jews by far have changed the most in relative standing in the past century of American history. If WASPs suffered as much from Jewish discrimination as Jews did from WASP discrimination, then why has the virtual elimination of both been much better for Jews than WASPs? There’s very few plausible alternatives for why Jews are so much more successful today than in the past, besides disproportionate discrimination against them. You might cite that many were recent immigrants, but even the third generation American Jews of 1950 were much less successful than modern American Jews.
An academic study a half century ago came to the conclusion that German Jews in America were the biggest economic beneficiaries of the clannishness of the era. The 1968 Commentary review by Marshall Sklare of Birmingham’s “Our Crowd” begins with a discussion of how profitable this endogamous clannishness had been to the German Jews of Wall Street:
"Ten years ago, Barry E. Supple, an economic historian then teaching at Harvard, published a scholarly article which demonstrated that in the 19th century a significant share of American investment banking was concentrated in Jewish hands. In reviewing the history of such banking houses as Kuhn, Loeb; J & W Seligman; Goldman, Sachs; and Lehman Brothers, Supple drew attention to the fact that it was not only common for the children and relatives of the partners of a given firm to marry each other, but that marital alliances frequently occurred among, as well as within, the different Jewish banking houses.
"Indeed, Supple’s careful analysis showed that the role of marriage in business went even further than this. The scions of banking families would marry the offspring of the owners of large German-Jewish companies in a variety of fields, and these companies—some of them later to become the country’s leading department stores and mail-order firms—would then raise capital through the banking houses with whom they had formed family connections. …
"The Jewish firms had no monopoly over corporate financing, for Gentile houses—led by Drexel, Morgan—controlled a substantial share of the banking business. The Gentile houses, however, lacked the network of kinship ties which Supple uncovered in his patient genealogical probing. … it was his intention to show that the Jewish firms, and not their Gentile counterparts, constituted the “ideal type” of business combination prior to the rise of the mammoth corporation. He was particularly impressed by the tightly knit social network created by the Jewish firms around family, temple, city clubs, and philanthropic organizations; and he viewed their clannishness as “a valid and often necessary means of creating an identity of interests and attitude most conducive to business activity and development.”
http://takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_the_golf_nazi_steve_sailer/print#ixzz3adV2pJI5
You did not demonstrate that either or both were eliminated. Hence your conclusion that Jews suffered more than WASPs from discrimination is weakened. But don't let me rain on your adversity parade. I don't want to come between a man and his deserved allotment of suffering.
Sunday night: Two reruns of “I Love Lucy” from the 1950s, scored the highest total viewers of all scripted shows that night.
“Lucy” had 6.4 million total viewers. That’s almost twice the very high “Mad Men” score of 3.3 million viewers on Sunday.
That’s great.
http://www.showbiz411.com/2015/05/19/i-love-lucy-was-sunday-nights-number-1-scripted-show-nearly-twice-as-many-viewers-as-mad-men-finale
Oh yeah, sure. All those white Rhodesians killed and raped by ZANU PF definitely deserved it. Same with the Koreans shop owners attacked by black American rioters. How about the Arab Christians despised by their cousin-f'n Muslim countrymen? The noble Tutsis hacked to death by stupid, brutish Hutus? The ethnic Chinese porgrom'd by neanderthal-like Indonesians.
Give me a break, throughout human history interracial hatred and violence rarely has about zero correlation to who deserved it. In fact usually just the opposite, the smartest, wealthiest and and hardest-working groups are brought down a peg by the masses of envious losers. This is particularly true for extreme, genocidal violence. Racism driven by derision usually is much more minor. An underclass minority can easily be controlled and segregated. Racism driven by resentment is much more likely to result in extermination.
The majority genuinely fears the power, wealth, influence and intelligence of the superior sub-group. A half-measure is as likely to blow back at you. Jim Crow doesn't work, its all or nothing. The more noble and successful the group, the bigger the target they are.
“Oh yeah, sure. All those white Rhodesians killed and raped by ZANU PF definitely deserved it. Same with the Koreans shop owners attacked by black American rioters. How about the Arab Christians despised by their cousin-f’n Muslim countrymen? The noble Tutsis hacked to death by stupid, brutish Hutus? The ethnic Chinese porgrom’d by neanderthal-like Indonesians”
I mentioned discrimination. You’re referring to mass murder. Are you really so dense as to conflate the two?
“The majority genuinely fears the power, wealth, influence and intelligence of the superior sub-group. A half-measure is as likely to blow back at you. Jim Crow doesn’t work”
Got it. People don’t like being around blacks because of their wealth, influence, and intelligence. That’s certainly a…novel…interpretation.
Sunday night: Two reruns of “I Love Lucy” from the 1950s, scored the highest total viewers of all scripted shows that night.
“Lucy” had 6.4 million total viewers. That’s almost twice the very high “Mad Men” score of 3.3 million viewers on Sunday.
I hope Matthew Weiner’s new reality series, The Cossacks of Coldwater Canyon does better for him than this last one.
- The final episode of Newhart was watched by 29.5 million viewers.
- The final episdoe of Seinfeld was watched by 76.3 million viewers.
Mad Men’s 3.3 million viewers would put it in the record books … if it had hit that in Sweden or New Zealand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts
That 3.3 million should be quite alright from AMC's perspective.
C’mon Jack, don’t be so hard on yourself.
It doesn’t matter a whit that my basso profundo is the purest in the land as determined by blind taste test. The reason they will not let me join is that I haven’t rehearsed the material with the rest of the company. They have a shared set of experiences which I do not and they’ve put in weeks of hard work together that I have not.
Likewise if I traipse into a Catholic Church without completing my catechism class, receiving Confirmation, and performing Penance and expect to partake of the Body and the Blood with them, or to join a Jewish country club to share tales of the bar mitzvah I’ve never had. People want to hang with others with whom they can relate, and that’s often about decades, in some cases generations, of shared experiences and common endeavors.
It’s the most human thing in the world, not some inhuman monstrosity, and to imagine it so is the very bad faith that Paul speaks of in Romans 9-11, even while assuring his fellow Jews that it is not their ultimate fate to suffer in it eternally. Give it up, man, and join the rest of the human race.
Of course every group discriminates to some extent against other groups. But its very easy to demonstrate that among all sub-groups of whites, Jews suffered the most (economically) from discrimination in early-to-mid 20th century. Like others have said intra-white discrimination was rampant circa 1925: Scotch-Irish against Norwegians, Dutch against Italians, WASPs against Jews, Jews against WASPs, etc. By the standard of then, intra-white discrimination is non-existent in modern-day America.
So the relative change in status of an ethnic group between 1925 and today is a very strong indicator of how much discrimination impacted them in the past. (I've excluded non-whites, because modern affirmative action policies still clearly discriminate (either positively or negative) on those groups). Clearly Italians and Norwegians on net suffered from 1925 discrimination, as those groups are both much more relatively successful today than in the past.
But Jews by far have changed the most in relative standing in the past century of American history. If WASPs suffered as much from Jewish discrimination as Jews did from WASP discrimination, then why has the virtual elimination of both been much better for Jews than WASPs? There's very few plausible alternatives for why Jews are so much more successful today than in the past, besides disproportionate discrimination against them. You might cite that many were recent immigrants, but even the third generation American Jews of 1950 were much less successful than modern American Jews.
Yeah, you’ve really exhausted all the plausible hypotheses there, Doug.
Of course every group discriminates to some extent against other groups. But its very easy to demonstrate that among all sub-groups of whites, Jews suffered the most (economically) from discrimination in early-to-mid 20th century. Like others have said intra-white discrimination was rampant circa 1925: Scotch-Irish against Norwegians, Dutch against Italians, WASPs against Jews, Jews against WASPs, etc. By the standard of then, intra-white discrimination is non-existent in modern-day America.
So the relative change in status of an ethnic group between 1925 and today is a very strong indicator of how much discrimination impacted them in the past. (I've excluded non-whites, because modern affirmative action policies still clearly discriminate (either positively or negative) on those groups). Clearly Italians and Norwegians on net suffered from 1925 discrimination, as those groups are both much more relatively successful today than in the past.
But Jews by far have changed the most in relative standing in the past century of American history. If WASPs suffered as much from Jewish discrimination as Jews did from WASP discrimination, then why has the virtual elimination of both been much better for Jews than WASPs? There's very few plausible alternatives for why Jews are so much more successful today than in the past, besides disproportionate discrimination against them. You might cite that many were recent immigrants, but even the third generation American Jews of 1950 were much less successful than modern American Jews.
“But its very easy to demonstrate that among all sub-groups of whites, Jews suffered the most (economically) from discrimination in early-to-mid 20th century.”
An academic study a half century ago came to the conclusion that German Jews in America were the biggest economic beneficiaries of the clannishness of the era. The 1968 Commentary review by Marshall Sklare of Birmingham’s “Our Crowd” begins with a discussion of how profitable this endogamous clannishness had been to the German Jews of Wall Street:
“Ten years ago, Barry E. Supple, an economic historian then teaching at Harvard, published a scholarly article which demonstrated that in the 19th century a significant share of American investment banking was concentrated in Jewish hands. In reviewing the history of such banking houses as Kuhn, Loeb; J & W Seligman; Goldman, Sachs; and Lehman Brothers, Supple drew attention to the fact that it was not only common for the children and relatives of the partners of a given firm to marry each other, but that marital alliances frequently occurred among, as well as within, the different Jewish banking houses.
“Indeed, Supple’s careful analysis showed that the role of marriage in business went even further than this. The scions of banking families would marry the offspring of the owners of large German-Jewish companies in a variety of fields, and these companies—some of them later to become the country’s leading department stores and mail-order firms—would then raise capital through the banking houses with whom they had formed family connections. …
“The Jewish firms had no monopoly over corporate financing, for Gentile houses—led by Drexel, Morgan—controlled a substantial share of the banking business. The Gentile houses, however, lacked the network of kinship ties which Supple uncovered in his patient genealogical probing. … it was his intention to show that the Jewish firms, and not their Gentile counterparts, constituted the “ideal type” of business combination prior to the rise of the mammoth corporation. He was particularly impressed by the tightly knit social network created by the Jewish firms around family, temple, city clubs, and philanthropic organizations; and he viewed their clannishness as “a valid and often necessary means of creating an identity of interests and attitude most conducive to business activity and development.”
http://takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_the_golf_nazi_steve_sailer/print#ixzz3adV2pJI5
Some of the surviving partnerships also weathered the financial crisis better than the big, publicly traded investment banks, probably because they weren't as leveraged. I don't know how many are still independent though.
discovered this on the Drudge report. FUNNY: ‘I LOVE LUCY’ RERUN DOUBLES ‘MAD MEN’ FINALE…
http://www.showbiz411.com/2015/05/19/i-love-lucy-was-sunday-nights-number-1-scripted-show-nearly-twice-as-many-viewers-as-mad-men-finale
Sunday night: Two reruns of “I Love Lucy” from the 1950s, scored the highest total viewers of all scripted shows that night.
“Lucy” had 6.4 million total viewers. That’s almost twice the very high “Mad Men” score of 3.3 million viewers on Sunday.
That would be especially impressive if one of the Lucy episodes was the one where she makes the commercial for Vitameatavegamin.
Better:
An academic study a half century ago came to the conclusion that German Jews in America were the biggest economic beneficiaries of the clannishness of the era. The 1968 Commentary review by Marshall Sklare of Birmingham’s “Our Crowd” begins with a discussion of how profitable this endogamous clannishness had been to the German Jews of Wall Street:
"Ten years ago, Barry E. Supple, an economic historian then teaching at Harvard, published a scholarly article which demonstrated that in the 19th century a significant share of American investment banking was concentrated in Jewish hands. In reviewing the history of such banking houses as Kuhn, Loeb; J & W Seligman; Goldman, Sachs; and Lehman Brothers, Supple drew attention to the fact that it was not only common for the children and relatives of the partners of a given firm to marry each other, but that marital alliances frequently occurred among, as well as within, the different Jewish banking houses.
"Indeed, Supple’s careful analysis showed that the role of marriage in business went even further than this. The scions of banking families would marry the offspring of the owners of large German-Jewish companies in a variety of fields, and these companies—some of them later to become the country’s leading department stores and mail-order firms—would then raise capital through the banking houses with whom they had formed family connections. …
"The Jewish firms had no monopoly over corporate financing, for Gentile houses—led by Drexel, Morgan—controlled a substantial share of the banking business. The Gentile houses, however, lacked the network of kinship ties which Supple uncovered in his patient genealogical probing. … it was his intention to show that the Jewish firms, and not their Gentile counterparts, constituted the “ideal type” of business combination prior to the rise of the mammoth corporation. He was particularly impressed by the tightly knit social network created by the Jewish firms around family, temple, city clubs, and philanthropic organizations; and he viewed their clannishness as “a valid and often necessary means of creating an identity of interests and attitude most conducive to business activity and development.”
http://takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_the_golf_nazi_steve_sailer/print#ixzz3adV2pJI5
A lot of treasured family memories among Jewish families with roots in Eastern Europe about when grandpa got blackballed by the Century Country Club and was discriminated against by that big investment bank that wouldn’t hire him because he was kind of rude and crude are actually memories of ancestors being snubbed by German Jews. They’ve just been ret-conned over the decades into anti-gentilic memories.
Well, a good teacher does both – teach a man to fish and all that – although most of what they’ll be discovering (and hopefully inventing) is outer, not inner.
” even though creator Matthew Weiner insists that it has never been a Jewish show.”
There is a reason why its not a Jewish show…but some jewishnes was in it.
A show only and about Jews wouldnt have any broad appeal or viewership.
But if you notice in almost every popular TV show there is some little dropping or reference or nugget about Jews.
They ‘insert ‘ some Jewishness here and there but they know Jewishness itself could never be the basis for a widely watched series…it just wouldnt interest the majority of TV viewers.
For identity Jews like Weiner, and there are a lot of his type, knowing this just really further pisses them off and keeps them resenting it.
If they want to make a show all about Jews it has to be about Moses or the holocaust–and even there the nazis share the stage—and are taller, handsome and have spiffy uniforms….lol
- The final episode of Newhart was watched by 29.5 million viewers.
- The final episdoe of Seinfeld was watched by 76.3 million viewers.
Mad Men's 3.3 million viewers would put it in the record books ... if it had hit that in Sweden or New Zealand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts
Yeah, but those are cable figures, for which you pay. AMC’s Mad Men, The Walking Dead etc, don’t need such high ratings because they get a lot of money from being paid channels, as opposed to the national channels surviving on advertising. That’s why the best new shows are on these kinds of networks, because they can take a chance on high cost, off beat concepts. At least that’s how I think it works, I’m not American.
That 3.3 million should be quite alright from AMC’s perspective.
Of course every group discriminates to some extent against other groups. But its very easy to demonstrate that among all sub-groups of whites, Jews suffered the most (economically) from discrimination in early-to-mid 20th century. Like others have said intra-white discrimination was rampant circa 1925: Scotch-Irish against Norwegians, Dutch against Italians, WASPs against Jews, Jews against WASPs, etc. By the standard of then, intra-white discrimination is non-existent in modern-day America.
So the relative change in status of an ethnic group between 1925 and today is a very strong indicator of how much discrimination impacted them in the past. (I've excluded non-whites, because modern affirmative action policies still clearly discriminate (either positively or negative) on those groups). Clearly Italians and Norwegians on net suffered from 1925 discrimination, as those groups are both much more relatively successful today than in the past.
But Jews by far have changed the most in relative standing in the past century of American history. If WASPs suffered as much from Jewish discrimination as Jews did from WASP discrimination, then why has the virtual elimination of both been much better for Jews than WASPs? There's very few plausible alternatives for why Jews are so much more successful today than in the past, besides disproportionate discrimination against them. You might cite that many were recent immigrants, but even the third generation American Jews of 1950 were much less successful than modern American Jews.
“If WASPs suffered as much from Jewish discrimination as Jews did from WASP discrimination, then why has the virtual elimination of both been much better for Jews than WASPs?”
You did not demonstrate that either or both were eliminated. Hence your conclusion that Jews suffered more than WASPs from discrimination is weakened. But don’t let me rain on your adversity parade. I don’t want to come between a man and his deserved allotment of suffering.
That 3.3 million should be quite alright from AMC's perspective.
It’s still very interesting because it indicates how fragmented mass culture is now. It’s very good news, considering how they use and abuse their influence.
An academic study a half century ago came to the conclusion that German Jews in America were the biggest economic beneficiaries of the clannishness of the era. The 1968 Commentary review by Marshall Sklare of Birmingham’s “Our Crowd” begins with a discussion of how profitable this endogamous clannishness had been to the German Jews of Wall Street:
"Ten years ago, Barry E. Supple, an economic historian then teaching at Harvard, published a scholarly article which demonstrated that in the 19th century a significant share of American investment banking was concentrated in Jewish hands. In reviewing the history of such banking houses as Kuhn, Loeb; J & W Seligman; Goldman, Sachs; and Lehman Brothers, Supple drew attention to the fact that it was not only common for the children and relatives of the partners of a given firm to marry each other, but that marital alliances frequently occurred among, as well as within, the different Jewish banking houses.
"Indeed, Supple’s careful analysis showed that the role of marriage in business went even further than this. The scions of banking families would marry the offspring of the owners of large German-Jewish companies in a variety of fields, and these companies—some of them later to become the country’s leading department stores and mail-order firms—would then raise capital through the banking houses with whom they had formed family connections. …
"The Jewish firms had no monopoly over corporate financing, for Gentile houses—led by Drexel, Morgan—controlled a substantial share of the banking business. The Gentile houses, however, lacked the network of kinship ties which Supple uncovered in his patient genealogical probing. … it was his intention to show that the Jewish firms, and not their Gentile counterparts, constituted the “ideal type” of business combination prior to the rise of the mammoth corporation. He was particularly impressed by the tightly knit social network created by the Jewish firms around family, temple, city clubs, and philanthropic organizations; and he viewed their clannishness as “a valid and often necessary means of creating an identity of interests and attitude most conducive to business activity and development.”
http://takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_the_golf_nazi_steve_sailer/print#ixzz3adV2pJI5
Bill Ouchi could add a book after Theory Z and The M-Form Society, like J School or H is for Havurah, Salomon’s Spawn or the Red Shield of Courage.
That 3.3 million should be quite alright from AMC's perspective.
The Walking Dead regularly gets 4x that number of viewers for regular season episodes. I’m sure their budget is smaller.
Jews did the same thing, and still do: e.g., Birthright free trips to Israel are carefully designed to incubate romance among Jews and only among Jews.
Most Jewish young people don’t go on Birthright Israel trips. I didn’t go when I was of the target age, and lack of money had nothing to do with it as my parents would have happily shelled out if asked. Thinking more about it, I know only one person, a rabbi’s son, who did go on a Birthright trip.
“Since trips began in the winter of 1999, more than 400,000 young people from 64 countries have participated in the program.[3][4] About 80% of participants are from the United States and Canada. The number of participants has not grown beyond 40,000 a year due to budgetary constraints.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel
I’d guess 25% to 50% of American Jewish youth go on a Birthright trip to Israel. It’s not insignificant.
Didn't work for me, though -- I had a couple of fairly disastrous attempts at dating 5'8"-5'9" girls, then ended up going out with several 5' 3" cuties; the last one is now Mrs Calvinist.
It’s not fair. Most tall girls won’t date short guys. If tall guys poach the short girls, there’s no one left for us.
An academic study a half century ago came to the conclusion that German Jews in America were the biggest economic beneficiaries of the clannishness of the era. The 1968 Commentary review by Marshall Sklare of Birmingham’s “Our Crowd” begins with a discussion of how profitable this endogamous clannishness had been to the German Jews of Wall Street:
"Ten years ago, Barry E. Supple, an economic historian then teaching at Harvard, published a scholarly article which demonstrated that in the 19th century a significant share of American investment banking was concentrated in Jewish hands. In reviewing the history of such banking houses as Kuhn, Loeb; J & W Seligman; Goldman, Sachs; and Lehman Brothers, Supple drew attention to the fact that it was not only common for the children and relatives of the partners of a given firm to marry each other, but that marital alliances frequently occurred among, as well as within, the different Jewish banking houses.
"Indeed, Supple’s careful analysis showed that the role of marriage in business went even further than this. The scions of banking families would marry the offspring of the owners of large German-Jewish companies in a variety of fields, and these companies—some of them later to become the country’s leading department stores and mail-order firms—would then raise capital through the banking houses with whom they had formed family connections. …
"The Jewish firms had no monopoly over corporate financing, for Gentile houses—led by Drexel, Morgan—controlled a substantial share of the banking business. The Gentile houses, however, lacked the network of kinship ties which Supple uncovered in his patient genealogical probing. … it was his intention to show that the Jewish firms, and not their Gentile counterparts, constituted the “ideal type” of business combination prior to the rise of the mammoth corporation. He was particularly impressed by the tightly knit social network created by the Jewish firms around family, temple, city clubs, and philanthropic organizations; and he viewed their clannishness as “a valid and often necessary means of creating an identity of interests and attitude most conducive to business activity and development.”
http://takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_the_golf_nazi_steve_sailer/print#ixzz3adV2pJI5
There were a number of successful regional investment banking partnerships with roots going back a century or more, such as Janney Montgomery Scott, Sterne Agee & Leach, etc. I suspect kinship ties played roles in their histories too. There was also an economic synergy for local communities, where the wealthy invested in public offerings by the local investment banks, which in turn financed the expansion of local businesses, hospitals, etc.
Some of the surviving partnerships also weathered the financial crisis better than the big, publicly traded investment banks, probably because they weren’t as leveraged. I don’t know how many are still independent though.
Oh yeah, sure. All those white Rhodesians killed and raped by ZANU PF definitely deserved it. Same with the Koreans shop owners attacked by black American rioters. How about the Arab Christians despised by their cousin-f'n Muslim countrymen? The noble Tutsis hacked to death by stupid, brutish Hutus? The ethnic Chinese porgrom'd by neanderthal-like Indonesians.
Give me a break, throughout human history interracial hatred and violence rarely has about zero correlation to who deserved it. In fact usually just the opposite, the smartest, wealthiest and and hardest-working groups are brought down a peg by the masses of envious losers. This is particularly true for extreme, genocidal violence. Racism driven by derision usually is much more minor. An underclass minority can easily be controlled and segregated. Racism driven by resentment is much more likely to result in extermination.
The majority genuinely fears the power, wealth, influence and intelligence of the superior sub-group. A half-measure is as likely to blow back at you. Jim Crow doesn't work, its all or nothing. The more noble and successful the group, the bigger the target they are.
Tutsis have had their own go at the Hutus. Look up Burundi, 1972.
If your definition of colorism includes hunting pygmies for meat, then yes it did exist.
That 3.3 million should be quite alright from AMC’s perspective.
Good lord. Of course it’s not about AMC’s audience. Can you really think that’s what the point was?
It’s about the size of the audience. Mad Men dominates the elite media–every major news and entertainment outlet has from 1-3 bloggers responsible for blogging an analysis of each episode, because it drives traffic of other obsessed commenters. So they’ve got a substantial portion of their cycles dedicated to a show with an audience so small it can’t match I Love Lucy reruns. I grant you, it’s a rich audience. But it shows the utter lack of proportion–no one in these circles seems to grasp how small their group is.
There was a time when the elites enjoyed their exclusive art, wallowed in the fact that few watched it. Now they just ignore the fact that no one else is interested, confusing themselves with the world.
As I said earlier, this is the behavior of people who like to think themselves considerably superior to middle aged housewives watching General Hospital, and yet so similar.
And to whoever said everything’s a soap opera–wrong. Everything’s a melodrama, strictly speaking. But a soap opera is subset of a melodrama in which the continuous demand for conflict or tragedy takes priority over consistency of plot and character.
Walking Dead, another AMC show, averaged 11 million viewers each week, trouncing Mad Men. yet the show is rarely discussed. Sunday's finale hit another ratings record for AMC's zombie drama. The 90-minute closer delivered 15.8 million viewers and an incredible 8.2 rating among adults 18-49.
The hypocrisy is thick. Jewish exclusivity is just part of being Jewish. WASP exclusivity is a crime.
whereas even if you were a millionaire’s daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
Trenchant. Well-done.
Among the sort of American Jews to whom intermarriage is anathema, there is intense social pressure to make a lot of money. Those who fail at this are openly looked down upon. In the high end of these kinds of circles, making a lot of money means making way more money than a typical upper middle class professional who would be considered affluent by the broader society’s standards. It often means making money from a high powered executive level career, or as a surgeon/medical director or as a business owner, plus earning good returns on invested, inherited money, plus earning rent on property.
Poor white Protestants might have been treated poorly because they were poor, but as soon as you struck gold in your mine or whatever, you could buy a house in Newport and no one needed to know about how poor your ancestors had been. If anything, rags to riches tales were admired so someone like Carnegie who was a (white Protestant) immigrant who had been born in a one room weaver's cottage was all the more admired for it and allowed to join the highest social circles, whereas even if you were a millionaire's daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
Sephardic descendants of Truro were admitted into the Union and Knickerbocker clubs, so that isn’t true. It was those scruffy, pushy Eastern European ones they didn’t want. But then, neither did Emma Lazarus.
Hell, the Jews of Rhode Island were allowed to marry their nieces, and still are today. That’s quite a concession!
Have you ever considered that the differing treatments of Colonial Sephardim, German Ashkenazim, and Eastern Ashkenazim might have some connection to the differing attitudes and behaviors of those groups?
Though you only have to go back a half-generation before Weiner to a time when Fairfax was still a good school.
It could have been even more nightmarish for him than that: his parents could have sent him to Daniel Murphy, a Catholic boy’s high school at the Western edges of Hancock Park.
Back in the late 1970s, it had a fair contingent of non-Catholics who lived there, and a few of them were Jews.
If any of them are reading Sailer, they might let us know what it was like.
Daniel Murphy, by the way, is now called Yeshiva Aharon Yaakov-Ohr Eliyahu.
Poor white Protestants might have been treated poorly because they were poor, but as soon as you struck gold in your mine or whatever, you could buy a house in Newport and no one needed to know about how poor your ancestors had been. If anything, rags to riches tales were admired so someone like Carnegie who was a (white Protestant) immigrant who had been born in a one room weaver's cottage was all the more admired for it and allowed to join the highest social circles, whereas even if you were a millionaire's daughter and had been to the finest finishing schools and your family had been here since the time of the Revolution, if you were Jewish you were persona non grata in WASP society.
From http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/rhode.html
To me, Zweig's story sounds like classic sour grapes - "those grapes were sour anyway", says the wolf who can't reach them.
Nonsense.
The Habsburg Empire was a paradise for Jews, and had it not gone down in 1918 would have remained so.
Types like you don’t like it precisely because the Jews within it were happy and, often, rich. What you probably most dislike is that many were converting to Christianity – like the family of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, you will not be pleased to learn (if indeed you have ever heard of him) is buried in a Catholic cemetery in Cambridge.
Good lord. Of course it's not about AMC's audience. Can you really think that's what the point was?
It's about the size of the audience. Mad Men dominates the elite media--every major news and entertainment outlet has from 1-3 bloggers responsible for blogging an analysis of each episode, because it drives traffic of other obsessed commenters. So they've got a substantial portion of their cycles dedicated to a show with an audience so small it can't match I Love Lucy reruns. I grant you, it's a rich audience. But it shows the utter lack of proportion--no one in these circles seems to grasp how small their group is.
There was a time when the elites enjoyed their exclusive art, wallowed in the fact that few watched it. Now they just ignore the fact that no one else is interested, confusing themselves with the world.
As I said earlier, this is the behavior of people who like to think themselves considerably superior to middle aged housewives watching General Hospital, and yet so similar.
And to whoever said everything's a soap opera--wrong. Everything's a melodrama, strictly speaking. But a soap opera is subset of a melodrama in which the continuous demand for conflict or tragedy takes priority over consistency of plot and character.
so true.
Walking Dead, another AMC show, averaged 11 million viewers each week, trouncing Mad Men. yet the show is rarely discussed. Sunday’s finale hit another ratings record for AMC’s zombie drama. The 90-minute closer delivered 15.8 million viewers and an incredible 8.2 rating among adults 18-49.
There's no point in arguing who was discriminated against the worst ( it was the blacks by far) but I guess in the modern world people compete for discrimination Pokemon points. I'd say that the Jews and the Italians, arriving at the same time, got treated roughly the same. The successful (Democrat) strategy has been for all (formerly) discriminated groups to unite against those who discriminated against them rather than arguing who was more oppressed.
Discrimination against Jews was not unique but that doesn't mean it wasn't real either or that now that it's (largely) over it should go down the memory hole. After what happened in Germany, Jews realized what was really at stake - what started out as being snubbed at the country club ended with gas chambers, so no vestige of racism, however harmless or even rational, could be allowed to remain - that fire had to be completely doused. This accounts for the fervor with which any public display of even mild racism gets stamped out nowadays.
Only because his sentence was commuted as a result of ethnopoliticking behind closed doors after he was duly convicted and sentenced to death on the basis of overwhelming evidence of his guilt.
The Habsburg Empire was a paradise for Jews, and had it not gone down in 1918 would have remained so.
Types like you don't like it precisely because the Jews within it were happy and, often, rich. What you probably most dislike is that many were converting to Christianity - like the family of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, you will not be pleased to learn (if indeed you have ever heard of him) is buried in a Catholic cemetery in Cambridge.
Polish Galicia was part of the Habsburg Empire and contained hundreds of thousands of poor unhappy Jews. As for conversion, the elite Jewish families, of whom the Wittgensteins were among the wealthiest, could expect some degree of acceptance into elite non-Jewish society after conversion though it might never be complete (consider the experience of the Mendelssohn family in Germany). There were still some benefits to conversion for less exalted Jews, but not as many.
Of course every group discriminates to some extent against other groups. But its very easy to demonstrate that among all sub-groups of whites, Jews suffered the most (economically) from discrimination in early-to-mid 20th century. Like others have said intra-white discrimination was rampant circa 1925: Scotch-Irish against Norwegians, Dutch against Italians, WASPs against Jews, Jews against WASPs, etc. By the standard of then, intra-white discrimination is non-existent in modern-day America.
So the relative change in status of an ethnic group between 1925 and today is a very strong indicator of how much discrimination impacted them in the past. (I've excluded non-whites, because modern affirmative action policies still clearly discriminate (either positively or negative) on those groups). Clearly Italians and Norwegians on net suffered from 1925 discrimination, as those groups are both much more relatively successful today than in the past.
But Jews by far have changed the most in relative standing in the past century of American history. If WASPs suffered as much from Jewish discrimination as Jews did from WASP discrimination, then why has the virtual elimination of both been much better for Jews than WASPs? There's very few plausible alternatives for why Jews are so much more successful today than in the past, besides disproportionate discrimination against them. You might cite that many were recent immigrants, but even the third generation American Jews of 1950 were much less successful than modern American Jews.
Once you achieve top status, gains increase exponentially. Jewish success today shows that they finally beat Wasps for socio- economic domination and that they are now the dominant ethnic group in America. I can’t believe having to explain the obvious.
I’m half-Jewish (but don’t look it) and I can say that there is considerable resentment and weirdness toward half-Jews in the American Jewish world…of a certain kind. High-class Jews, German Jews don’t care; more enlightened Ashkenazis don’t care. But what I’d call the “community center” Jew, the parochial, provincial Jew, the insecure snob (and this makes up at least half the Jewish community in the USA), they do care quite a bit. They’re bigots for the same reason low-class and provincial people are bigots in general, although with them it’s intensified by a long tradition of Jewish Talmudic bigotry. Of course the provincial orthodox Jews are the worst (but there are urbane orthodox who are not like this).
The Birthright thing though Steve, maybe that is part of the intention (is it?) but then it’s not very useful from your point of view because I took the Birthright trip as a half-Jew (free trip to Israel, why not) and nobody questioned me about it or singled me out. You can take that trip as a 1/4 Jew I believe, so if they’re doing it to preserve purity of blood, they’re not doing it well. Nobody from my group got married to anyone else. There was one “badboy” alpha Persian Jew from LA that got some blowjobs from some of the homely Jewish girls who were in the group, but he certainly didn’t marry them. As for marrying an Israeli because of this trip, that’s even more far-fetched. It’s possible some of the girls hooked up with the specops soldiers who joined our group for part of the time, but how exactly would that lead to marriage? The point of the trip is to dispose American Jews well towards Israel, so when they come back to the US they speak up on its behalf. Even so there were two liberal nasty Jews in my group (boy and girl, bf and gf) who made it a point at the end of the trip to “speak out” against oppression of the Palestinians.
To go back to the main point, there is certainly a very kind of low-class parochial resentment of half-Jews who in general tend (or tended) to be drawn from the upper IQ levels both of Jewish and gentile populations. Plus of course the fact that many don’t look Jewish at all, which adds to the irksome phenomenon. We are “enhanced” variety, so the more “modest” Ashkenazi, who has nothing but the identity of victimhood to latch on to, has considerable resentment.
You decry someone as "nasty" because they speak out, courageously, against oppression. That's so strong of you.
The Birthright thing though Steve, maybe that is part of the intention (is it?) but then it's not very useful from your point of view because I took the Birthright trip as a half-Jew (free trip to Israel, why not) and nobody questioned me about it or singled me out. You can take that trip as a 1/4 Jew I believe, so if they're doing it to preserve purity of blood, they're not doing it well. Nobody from my group got married to anyone else. There was one "badboy" alpha Persian Jew from LA that got some blowjobs from some of the homely Jewish girls who were in the group, but he certainly didn't marry them. As for marrying an Israeli because of this trip, that's even more far-fetched. It's possible some of the girls hooked up with the specops soldiers who joined our group for part of the time, but how exactly would that lead to marriage? The point of the trip is to dispose American Jews well towards Israel, so when they come back to the US they speak up on its behalf. Even so there were two liberal nasty Jews in my group (boy and girl, bf and gf) who made it a point at the end of the trip to "speak out" against oppression of the Palestinians.
To go back to the main point, there is certainly a very kind of low-class parochial resentment of half-Jews who in general tend (or tended) to be drawn from the upper IQ levels both of Jewish and gentile populations. Plus of course the fact that many don't look Jewish at all, which adds to the irksome phenomenon. We are "enhanced" variety, so the more "modest" Ashkenazi, who has nothing but the identity of victimhood to latch on to, has considerable resentment.
Even so there were two liberal nasty Jews in my group (boy and girl, bf and gf) who made it a point at the end of the trip to “speak out” against oppression of the Palestinians.
You decry someone as “nasty” because they speak out, courageously, against oppression. That’s so strong of you.
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