"This enemy hides in shadows and has no regard for human life. This is an enemy who preys on innocent and unsuspecting people, then runs for cover, but it won't be able to run for cover forever. This is an enemy that tries to hide, but it won't be able to hide forever." - George W. Bush, 09/12/2001

In his remarks the day after the WTC tragedy, George W. Bush spoke of the stealth of America's enemies, their ability to "hide in the shadows", the difficulty of identifying who the enemies are and yet the urgency of finding them and punishing them for their crimes. Hearing those words, one understands the desperate need to take action, to achieve accountability, to identify the enemy. But where is the enemy to be found? It is precisely this ambiguity about where these attacks came from that makes the current situation so disorienting and confusing. As so many have noted, this is a new kind of war, fought not between nations, but between groups which operate outside and beyond national borders.

Implicit in Bush's remarks is a concern that the enemy might well be in our own backyard, that these terrorists, although foreign born, were working in the United States, had "hidden in the shadows" within our own communities, even if their actions can be linked back to some international organization. In a context where the enemy is a specter, a ghost, a shadow, it is very easy to imagine enemies where they do not exist and especially easy to direct those suspicions towards strangers in our midst, people who come from other cultures, who have other values. The image of a shadow implies something else - something that is a part of us and yet separate, something that is neither black nor white, something that is hard to discern or define. Shadows are blurry and unclear.

Such fears can turn expressions of "national unity" into exercises of exclusion and historically, war has led many Americans to direct their hostility against immigrant communities. In the heat of the moment, Bush made no attempt to caution Americans from directing their anger towards immigrants or foreign visitors. Bush spoke that following day of "patriotic Arab-Americans" but this very phrase reminds us that previous generations have had great difficult deciding where immigrant's loyalties lay - with their mother countries which they have left behind or with their new homes in America.

In his classic study, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1971), John Higham describes how in other moments of war or national crisis, political leaders have sought to draw sharp lines between "100 per cent Americans" and "hypenated Americans" - a term we often think emerges from contemporary multiculturalism but actually can be traced back at least as far as 1915 when the Literary Digest discussed "the hyphenate issue." Nativism, in this case, refers to a fear of foreign influence on American culture, which often got translated into an anxiety about the presence of immigrants in the United States. For example, at the outbreak of WWI, Theodore Roosevelt denounced "alien sympathies," describing immigrants as having "poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life," as "creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy" who "must be crushed out." In another speech, Roosevelt tried to distinguish between "German-Americans who call themselves such" as opposed to "the Americans of German origins," asking citizens to decide, once and for all, where their loyalties lay. His criticisms, he suggested, were directed against "those who spiritually remain foreigners in whole or in part". A spokesman for the Iowa Council of Defense captured the spirit of this anti-immigrant fervor when he explained, "We are going to love every foreigner who really becomes an American, and all others are going to ship back home."

This desire to promote Americanism resulted in outbreaks of violence against German-Americans during the First World War, attacks on German-Americans and Japanese-Americans during the Second World War - not to mention the "zoot suit riots" which were directed against urban Hispanics in Los Angeles, and the investigation of non-native-born Americans as part of the rise of McCarthyism in the Cold War Era, and against Iranian-, Iraqi- and Arab-Americans in our most recent disputes. In each context, the image of enemy stealth led towards a fear of people within our own communities and as people sought to act on the beliefs being expressed by their governments, indiscriminate violence directed against people on the basis of their race or national origins.

Several discussions of the potential attacks on Arab-Americans reflect this history of nativist backlash:

• American Civil Liberties Union
• The American Prospect

Questions to Consider

• How can we maintain "national unity" within a multicultural society without fragmenting our own communities, turning one segment of the population against another?
• What steps should the government take to protect the safety, dignity, and freedom of non-native born citizens during a time of crisis or war?
• How might someone be both a "German-American" and an "American"? What does such language suggest about the complexity of our identities and affiliations? Are these categories necessarily opposed or is it possible for one to feel connected to several groups at once?
• Why is it dangerous to assume that all people from a country share that country's views and support all of its actions? Do you support all of the actions taken by your government? Do all Americans share the same views, values, and beliefs?
• Is it possible to be proud of your own national identity without that pride being directed antagonistically about people from other countries and backgrounds?
• How do we reconcile this history of "nativism" with the words carved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, for example, or other statements in American political history which stressed our status as a nation of immigrants, as a refuge for huddled masses of exiles, and as a place where "all men are created equal"?

Resources

• Ron Dorfman's "The Media and the New Nativism", first published in 1986, suggests the ways that older anxieties about "alien influences" still shape much media representations of immigration.
• One important example of the ways that the issue of immigrant loyalties played itself out during World War II was the Zoot Suit Riots which occurred in Los Angeles. These sites provide some basic background on this incident, which has been seen as a defining moment in the Hispanic community's struggle to define its own identity and its own place within American culture.
• This is a helpful classroom exercise designed to get students to reflect on the causes and consequences of the Zoot Suit Riots:
• The Zoot Suit Riots regained public visibility just a few years ago when the neo-Swing band, The Cherry Poppin' Daddies performed a top 40 song, "Zoot Suit Riots," which many felt trivialized the incident, turning it into party music. This interesting site was created by UCLA musicologist Charles Sharp in response to that controversy.

Back to definitions