The Mire We're In

If you haven't already read it, the final installment of Kenneth Payne's review of how Rhode Island reached its current state of political mire. One key thing to remember, as wrangling over budgets and state government action continues:

The General Assembly's powers are plenary and unlimited, except as those powers are restricted by the U.S. and the Rhode Island constitutions. As the historian and lawyer Patrick T. Conley put it in 1999, the executive and legislative branches are "neither separate nor equal."

Sometimes one gets the impression that the only reason dead voters let the Republicans win the governor's seat is to secure a scapegoat.

Evolving Corruption

Part 2 of Kenneth Payne's series on the evolution of political corruption in Rhode Island is worth a read (emphasis added):

The forms of government were familiar. For those in control, the system worked. The Yankee establishment held the reins of power.

The State House was an expression of that power — political and economic. Rhode Island was urbanizing, industrializing and generating wealth. Cities were burgeoning with immigrants. Together Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket held more than half of the people in Rhode Island. Yet in 1901, political power was consolidated and effectively placed beyond popular control. ...

Three sections at the end of Chapter 809 became infamous and merit a full reading. While their tone is matter of fact and lawyerly, their effect was a stark fixing of undemocratic power.

It might be interesting also to keep an eye on the Projo's advice columns for submissions by despairing readers of Payne's series.

Reopening the Dorr

I'm disappointed to see that the Providence Journal is apparently not printing Kenneth Payne's series on Rhode Island's political history online. It's worth a look, if you've access to Sunday's paper. This paragraph, in particular, caught my attention:

Rhode Island government in 1900 was still colored by the dark shadows of the Dorr War, the brief, armed insurrection in 1842 that had sought to win greater fairness in the Rhode Island political system, including by extending manhood suffrage and by reapportioning the House of Representatives. After the Dorr War, Rhode Island electors approved a constitution that replaced the old Royal Charter of 1663. But the new "Law and Order" Constitution was not a liberal extension of political rights; it preserved the existing system of dominance by property-owning and native, mostly Protestant, men.

Being a non-native, I've had no reason to become acquainted with the biography of Thomas Dorr, but at first blush, it appears that we moderns would do well to resume his cause.

Anachronistic History: Ruth Simmons on George Washington

In a ProJo story about the annual reading of George Washington's Letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Brown University President Ruth Simmons is quoted thusly:

She touched upon the moral contradictions underlying the noble desires of past leaders who were eager to uphold freedom, despite an indifference to the injustice of slavery.

“We all know that these lofty and compelling ideals were largely omitted from discourse when it came to Africans and Native Americans.… In failing to apprehend the corrosive evil of slavery and the immoral inequities that it was to create for generations of descendants, Washington compromised his legacy as a moral leader,” she said.

This is simplistic. Historians agree that Washington's views on slavery certainly evolved from his early manhood up until he freed many of his slaves in his last will. For Simmons to opine that he "fail[ed] to apprehend the corrosive evil of slavery and the immoral inequities that it was to create for generations of descendants" betrays a blindered view of history. The fact is, Washington was hardly indifferent and fully recognized the evils of slavery.

In a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette on May 10, 1786, Washington wrote:

The benevolence of your heart my Dr. Marqs. is so conspicuous upon all occasions, that I never wonder at any fresh proofs of it; but your late purchase of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view of emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. Would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country; but I despair of seeing it. Some petitions were presented to the Assembly, at its last Session, for the abolition of slavery, but they could scarcely obtain a reading. To set them afloat at once would, I really believe, be productive of much inconvenience and mischief; but by degrees it certainly might, and assuredly ought to be effected; and that too by Legislative authority.

In September of that year, he wrote to John Mercer:

I never mean (unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.

He wrote to Charles Pinckney on March 17, 1792:

I must say that I lament the decision of your legislature upon the question of importing Slaves after March 1793. I was in hopes that motives of policy, as well as other good reasons supported by the direful effects of Slavery which at this moment are presented, would have operated to produce a total prohibition of the importation of Slaves whenever the question came to be agitated in any State that might be interested in the measure.

Or Lawrence Lewis, in August of 1797, that:

I wish from my soul that the Legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery...

Yet, amidst this, he very clearly did equivocate with regards to his own slaves. For instance, in his letter to Tobias Lear on April 12, 1791, concerning the anti-slavery laws in Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, as the capital then, would be Washington's home and he was concerned with how to maintain his own slaves without having them freed (As they would be if in Pennsylvania for over 6 months). And he went to secretive ends to assure his hold on them:

...in case it shall be found that any of my Slaves may, or any for them shall attempt their freedom at the expiration of six months, it is my wish and desire that you would send the whole, or such part of them as Mrs. Washington may not chuse to keep, home, for although I do not think they would be benefitted by the change, yet the idea of freedom might be too great a temptation for them to resist. At any rate it might, if they conceived they had a right to it, make them insolent in a State of Slavery. As all except Hercules and Paris are dower negroes, it behoves me to prevent the emancipation of them, otherwise I shall not only loose the use of them, but may have them to pay for. If upon taking good advise it is found expedient to send them back to Virginia, I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public; and none I think would so effectually do this, as Mrs. Washington coming to Virginia next month (towards the middle or latter end of it, as she seemed to have a wish to do) if she can accomplish it by any convenient and agreeable means, with the assistance of the Stage Horses &c. This would naturally bring her maid and Austin, and Hercules under the idea of coming home to Cook whilst we remained there might be sent on in the Stage. Whether there is occasion for this or not according to the result of your enquiries, or issue the thing as it may, I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself and Mrs. Washington . From the following expression in your letter "that those who were of age might follow the example of his (the Attorney's people) after a residence of six months", it would seem that none could apply before the end of May, and that the non age of Christopher, Richmond and Oney is a bar to them.

Clearly, Washington wasn't above subverting his ideals the closer the issue of slavery got to home. However, he also recognized the evils of slavery even if his actions failed to align with this recognition. One common defense of Washington's actions is encapsulated at the MountVernon.org website:

Washington did not lead a public fight against slavery, however, because he believed it would tear the new nation apart. Abolition had many opponents, especially in the South. Washington seems to have feared that if he took such a public stand, the southern states would withdraw from the Union (something they would do seventy years later, leading to the Civil War). He had worked too hard to build the country to risk tearing it apart.

Historian Dorothy Twohig elaborates:

For Washington, as for most of the other founders, when the fate of the new republic was balanced against his own essentially conservative opposition to slavery, there was really no contest. And there was a widely held, if convenient, feeling among many opponents of slavery that if left alone, the institution would wither by itself. Ironically, the clause of the Constitution barring the importation of slaves after 1808 fostered this salve to the antislavery conscience by imparting the feeling that at least some progress had been made.

Further, Twohig explains that Washington, essentially an aristocrat, was nervous about the emotionalism of many abolitionists (particularly Quakers). To that end, she observes:

...given his accurate conception of his own great and pivotal role in the infant country and his fears for the survival of the Republic itself, it is far from likely that he was ever sorely tempted to open as a national issue the Pandora's box that the Constitutional Convention appeared to contemporaries to have closed for the next twenty years.

It is a tragedy that neither he nor the other Founders took action sooner, but their primary concern was with safeguarding a nascent nation, even if that meant sacrificing the central American ideals of freedom and liberty in the process.

However, it is last will and testament that probably indicates his final, and true, feelings on the matter of slavery.

Washington once told a visiting Englishman that slavery was neither a crime nor an absurdity, noting that the U.S. government did not assure liberty to madmen. "Until the mind of the slave has been educated to understand freedom, the gift of freedom would only assure its abuse," Washington explained.

His will, drafted a year later, said otherwise. He wrote that he wished he could free all the slaves at Mt. Vernon, but couldn't because some belonged to his wife's heirs, and he didn't want to divide families. Unless Martha or her heirs freed the Custis slaves as well, families would be broken up. [Henry] Wiencek [author of The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White] believes George was trying to persuade Martha to use her influence on her heirs to free the Custis slaves--but she did not. Washington also stipulated that the freed children be taught reading, writing and a trade.

"His will was a rebuke to his family, to his class, and to the country. He was well ahead of people of his time and place," Wiencek said. "This is George Washington's true legacy. He'd said the slaves weren't ready for freedom, but at last he said they must have it because of their humanity."

Yet, as historian Dennis Pogue comments:

Washington's will swiftly gained the public attention envisioned by its author, appearing in print almost immediately, with no less than 13 editions published in 10 different cities in 1800 alone. And yet, if Washington hoped that the decision to free his slaves would compel large numbers of his countrymen to follow his lead, he was sadly mistaken.

His final act, though noble, didn't inspire the sort of change that he foresaw. He tried--if only fitfully and sometimes half-heartedly--to end slavery. He could have done more. Yet, Simmons' critique that Washington "fail[ed] to apprehend the corrosive evil of slavery" is clearly wrong. He knew it was immoral and that its existence ran counter to the claims of the American Revolution, but he felt his hands were tied by the practical politics of the day. Further, it is unfair of Simmons to expect that Washington could have had the Delphic vision to see "the immoral inequities that [slavery] was to create for generations of descendants." Like the other Founders, Washington believed that slavery would wither away. He was clearly wrong. Nonetheless, he recognized that to succeed, slaves (or former slaves) needed to be educated and prepared for a life of freedom before actually being set free.

Ultimately, Washington's failure was one that became more obvious as time went on. He and the other Founders kept the nascent Republic together by acceding to the political practicalities of the day. This meant acquiescing temporarily--as they truly believed--over the issue of slavery. Retrospectively, it is indeed a failure to uphold the American ideals of freedom and liberty for all.

Perhaps Simmons was trying to say that the failure to deal properly with the slavery issue shows that Washington and the other Founders weren't really as great as we should have hoped. Such an argument is hardly new, especially in academic circles. But Simmons has taken a now-common recognition of the acute failure of the Founders with regards to slavery--a critique that is deserved, if in context--and applied a layer of hyperbole that that results in skewing the perspective too much the other way. It is both undeserved and innaccurate. Washington's writings indicate he was at times rueful, at times hypocritical, and at times idealistic about the issue of slavery and its eventual end. Such conflicting thoughts and actions made him all the more human and make it all the more remarkable that he was able to do what he did.

A Firsthand Report on the President's Visit

Will Ricci, East Providence Republican City Committee Treasurer, National Federation of Republican Assemblies Regional Vice-President, and most importantly, frequent Anchor Rising commenter was able to attend today’s Presidential visit to the Naval War College in Newport. Will sends along his impressions, observations, and a photograph from the event...

Will Ricci: I had the opportunity to attend the President's address at the Naval War College earlier today as a guest of the Governor, with a handful of other local Republicans. The audience was heavily populated with Navy officers, with a great many guests from other countries. I was seated less than 50 feet away (about ten rows) directly in front of the President's podium. The program began a little late at about 11:15 am.

There was a funny moment right at the beginning, when the unseen announcer said, “Please welcome the President… of the Naval War College, Rear Adm. Jacob Shuford”. Everyone broke out in laughter. The admiral made some brief remarks and then quickly introduced the President, who then appeared on stage with Gov. Carcieri to the sounds of Hail to the Chief. After a long standing ovation, everyone was seated. Gov. Carcieri then delivered some welcoming remarks behind the Presidential podium (he looked comfortable there), and then the President dove right into his speech.

The speech was heavily focused on terrorism, with an emphasis on what's going on in Iraq right now. Much of it had to do with sharing information that the mainstream media doesn't like to cover, such as that we're winning! I won't go heavily into the substance of the speech, as I assume the local media will cover that ad infinitum. The President showed some very interesting maps and diagrams on the monitors behind him demonstrating the progress that we've made, both before and during the surge. All I can tell you is that he had the audience at his full attention for the entire speech, which lasted about an hour, and that he covered a considerable amount of detail. He was not using a teleprompter, and used his notes only sparingly. It made me feel pretty good that he had such a clear understanding of what is at stake in Iraq and elsewhere. He didn't make any gaffes or other "Bushisms." He came off as human, genuine, and very engaged.

After the speech ended, I think he surprised everyone by asking the audience for questions. They weren't planted questions. He stayed for about another 15 minutes or so and answered all sorts of questions ranging from relations with Great Britain and Columbia, to ongoing diplomatic efforts with North Korea, and the use of naval forces around the world in the future. He made an effort to single out Venezuela and Cuba as places of interest in this hemisphere, and made a comment which I think the media might pick up on regarding Fidel Castro. I believe it started with "when the Lord calls Fidel ... away" (not home). It got a few approving nods.

PS As for protestors, unless they were hiding, there were virtually none. We saw ONE protestor at the main gate coming in, and I believe three outside when we left. It was paltry in any case.

UPDATE II: Obligatory Buddy Cianci Post

Following up on previous updates, no word yet on what Buddy had for lunch...

UPDATE I: Obligatory Buddy Cianci Post

Just an update to Andrew's Buddy Cianci Post.....Update complete.

Obligatory Buddy Cianci Post

No text. The title says it all.

Elaborating on MacKay's Immigration History

Scott MacKay's immigration piece in the Sunday ProJo was a good piece of historical writing. However, and inevitably, it will be used by some as proof for their arguments in the contemporary illegal immigrant debate. Namely that the U.S. has "historically" allowed all immigrants, whether illegal or not.

My first thought after reading the piece was that, while historically accurate, it doesn't necessarily reflect the situation that confronts us now. To be fair, though, this was only the first in a series (at least according to the ProJo), so I don't want to take MacKay to task when I don't know what else is forthcoming. However, I do suspect that there is an attempt to link the past with the present rather too directly--and some of MacKay's writing has the air of polemic rather than reporting.

Perhaps the issue that stirs the passions the most is that the primary difference between the immigrants of then and now is that the U.S. did not have the current social welfare apparatus in place. As such, the tax dollars of American citizens didn't go to support the immigrants of yesteryear. Instead, the immigrants worked hard for what they got. Were the conditions deplorable? Yes. Did they face racism and xenophobia? Yes. But to conflate then with now is simply not accurate.

MacKay writes about how French-Canadians were resistant to be assimilated into the U.S. culture and society. That is entirely true and I deal extensively with it below. He seems to be emphasizing this for the sake of invoking compassion for today's immigrants--and by doing so he conflates the legal/illegal distinction--but there is another way to look at it. Instead of using it as an excuse for today's immigrants, the difficulties encountered by the French Canadians as they attempted to cling to la survivance can also be used as an object lesson.

I don't think anyone will argue that chances are that the quicker an individual can acclimate to our culture and learn our language, the quicker he can succeed. That does not mean that Americans should denigrate or dismiss the various cultures of the immigrants--and we must keep in mind that there are waves of immigrants, which can obscure any acute progress in cultural education that is being made--but it does mean that we shouldn't let our compassion or forbearance be taken for granted. Today's immigrants should learn the "American way" as soon as possible and be encouraged to do so. That does not mean that they will be or should be somehow forced to forget their own culture.

Another point is that there was no such thing as "illegal immigration" until the U.S. passed laws saying so. MacKay deals with this, and although he certainly ascribes nefarious motives for the passage of the these laws, they were passed in reaction to a specific problem. Americans believed that too many people were coming in, too fast. Regardless of the ofttimes despicable reasoning behind the original passage of these laws, they are still the law and most Americans want to keep it that way.

By limiting immigration, the laws--if properly enforced--would actually reduce the current level of acrimony. They help to throttle back on the "incursion" of "the other" (to use a favorite academic term)--they make the waves smaller--and make it easier for those immigrants who enter the country legally to assimilate into the U.S. If these laws weren't so popular amongst Americans--including legal immigrants--then I don't think that some illegal immigration apologists would so consistently conflate the difference between illegal and legal immigration.

Overall, I find it interesting that much of this recounting of history is deemed pertinent because it apparently supports the argument that goes something like this: we've always had these immigration problems in the U.S. so why is it such a big deal now? What's missing from MacKay's accurate re-telling of history is any sense of learning from the lessons of the past. (Though, as I indicated, perhaps that will be present in the next story). Since when have progressives taken to premising their arguments upon the notion of "that's the way it's always been..." to argue for what it should be now? Usually they take what they know of history and try to identify a better way of dealing with the problems that were encountered. In this case, it seems like they're really just saying that everything is fine, let's move on.

In the extended portion of this post, I've tried to elaborate a bit on some of the unsaid implications in MacKay's piece by calling upon my own research into French-Canadian immigration during the post-Civil War era. To do this, I've excerpted liberally from a 4-part series on the topic that I've posted at Spinning Clio. (For important background--and full sources--see these posts on French-Canadian immigration before the Civil War and French-Canadian involvement in the Civil War, portions of which are included in this post).

Congratulations for braving an especially long post. Let's proceed.

I'll excerpt from MacKay's discussion of post-Civil War French-Canadian immigration and add my own elaborations as I go. Let's start with MacKay:

After the Civil War, Rhode Island’s economy swelled. Immigrants swarmed into the state from around the world. Waiting for them here was the brutal energy of unfettered capitalism: factory jobs producing woolens and cotton, forging metals and machine tools and crafting jewelry.

French-Canadians from Quebec, where the farm-based economy could no longer support the growing population, were recruited to work in textile factories. Mill owners sent recruiters to Quebec, promising a “better life” in the mills of New England. Many settled in Woonsocket, Pawtucket, Warren and West Warwick. No one was much concerned about their citizenship status.

MacKay is right that the French Canadian famers (habitants) in Quebec were suffering and this was because they had a growing population and not enough (poor) land. Even before the Civil War, French-Canadians had been in search of sources of supplementary income and turned to work as farmhands throughout rural northern New England as well as in the lumber camps of Maine or in the Vermont brickworks. The close proximity of northern New England to their homeland enabled them to more easily maintain their family and community ties.

In southern New England, especially Massachusetts, the small factories had begun to evolve into huge enterprises, especially the textile industry. Even before the Civil War, the booming textile economy fattened the wallets of the factory owners, it also did the same for the wallets of the American and Irish factory workers. The modernization of the factory processes also resulted in the creation of repetitive jobs that could be filled by unskilled labor. These jobs were unsatisfying to many American and Irish workers who left the factory floor for supervisory jobs or left the factory altogether.

Immigrants were an attractive source of labor as they were willing to work for less than American workers. Temporary employment in the mills of New England soon became an attractive way to earn supplemental income for the habitants. They went to America, leaving their families behind, and hoped to make enough money to pay off debts and get the farm back home or a new one in the U.S. up and running. The French Canadian habitant usually hoped to one day return to his agrarian way of life. There is an obvious parallel to many of the immigrants (legal and not) that live and work in the U.S. today. To continue with MacKay:

“One of the big misconceptions about immigrants is that they started speaking English the minute they walked off the boat,” says [URI professor and Rhode Island historian Scott] Molloy.

French-Canadians hewed fiercely to their ethnic identity and tried to preserve their language, religion and church schools. The leaders of the Franco-American community fought with Irish bishops and, sometimes, with Protestant political figures.

Usually one or two family members made the journey to New England to work and assess the situation. When they discovered the plethora of job opportunities and the money that could be earned, they summoned the rest of the family to follow. This became known as l’émigration en chaîne, or emigration based on familial or communal connections. One of the results of l’émigration en chaîne was the migration of many people from the same parish or region in Canada to a particular New England town or industrial region. This helped to lessen the emotional and cultural loss associated with immigration. As an example, it was discovered that Woonsocket, Rhode Island was the destination of twenty-one of the fifty-one families that had left St. Prosper parish in Champlain County between 1879 and 1892. In essence, the “petit Canada” in Woonsocket could have just as accurately been called “petit Prosper.”

While this exodus of French Canadian manpower continued to bleed Canada, many in Canada took notice and some began to warn of dire consequences. Included in this was the cultivation of a myth, la vocation de la terr, or the idea that, according to God, Canadians were supposed to be farmers. While many French Canadians heeded these warnings, the migration southward continued, but this ideal was present in the minds of many habitants who abandoned their mill jobs each summer and returned to Canada with the hope reestablishing the profitability of their abandoned farm.

Regardless of the societal pressures, French Canadian immigration to the U.S. increased towards the end of the Civil War. It is a measure of the degree of economic desperation felt at home by the French Canadians that they were willing to jump cultural, social and political hurdles to migrate to a country immersed in the middle of a civil war. Thousands throughout Quebec contracted fievre des Etats-Unis and rushed across the border. By the end of the Civil War, the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, modernized in the 1850’s and made more efficient by the war, was ready to run at full speed. French Canadianswere willing to work and willing to uproot their families for a chance at the seemingly endless opportunities available in America. So when MacKay writes:

Life in the mills wasn’t easy; 12-hours days were the norm, amid the mind-dulling noise of a power loom. Factories were freezing in winter and sweatshops in summer.

Keep in perspective that 12 hour days in a factory in which an entire family could earn cash was nothing compared to relying on poor crop yields from hardscrabble farming. And the point about the entire family is important. According to MacKay

The nasty secret behind Rhode Island’s flourishing textile economy was the state’s shameful record of child labor. Small hands and tiny fingers worked in the mills, creating lives of luxury for factory owners. By the dawn of the 20th century, Rhode Island relied on child labor to a greater degree than any other state in the industrial Northeast.

Mill owners had the General Assembly in thrall and legislators refused to enact laws banning child labor.

Children quit school to work in factories and lost limbs in machinery. It was the price of supporting immigrant families.

This may be hard to believe as we look back from the 21st century, but the French Canadians realized that the jobs they were doing in the textile factories required no real skill and that almost anyone, including children, could find work. Child labor was not taboo in French Canadian society and their Roman Catholic faith encouraged large families. These two facts combined to make factory work extremely attractive as the habitants realized that the more children they had, the more they could earn. Many habitants sent for their entire families with this in mind. While we are more enlightened and protective of children now, the fact is that many immigrants saw nothing wrong with putting their kids to work. It's a little anachronistic to project our own sensibilities--right though they may be--back into 19th century this way.

In 1865, the great French Canadian migration truly began and most French Canadians settled in the “petit Canadas” of New England factory towns. Their willingness to migrate to these “petit Canadas”, despite the filth and poorly kept housing that characterized these neighborhoods, led to a reputation of being an ignorant and unclean people.

Darkness, foul odors, lack of space and air, shabby surroundings, all these were universal characteristics of tenement life, to which the French Canadians had no exclusive claim, but their quarters were repeatedly singled out as among the worst or most ill-kept in New England. {Iris Saunders Podea, “Quebec to ‘Little Canada’: The Coming of the French Canadians to New England in the Nineteenth Century," The New England Quarterly, Vol.23, No.3 (1950)}

The reasons for living in these ghettos were many. Economic factors were the primary reason as it was simply cheaper to pack a family into a small row house, which was often owned by their employer. Settlement in “petit Canadas” allowed them to be close to their work and also allowed them to settle in a neighborhood that closely resembled the parish that they had left. The surroundings may have been alien to them, but the familiar people and sense of community provided a cocoon that insulated them and helped them cope with the monumental differences between American society and that of their heritage.

Protecting their heritage--la survivance--was both a noble ideal and a stumbling block to the full acceptance by Americans of French Canadian immigrants. When the French Canadians arrived in the United States, the prospect of them staying or going back to Canada was often an open question for both themselves and Americans. At first, they didn’t seem inclined to make the U.S. a permanent home. They sought jobs in the U.S. because of poor economic conditions in Canada and hoped to earn a few hundred dollars in the mills and return to their farms to continue to aspire to the ideal of la vocation de la terr. Those who did not return to Canada immediately did send money home, which seemed to indicate the transient nature of their stay in America.

Unlike European immigrants, the French Canadians in New England were geographically close to their homeland and the maintenance of family and communal bonds was facilitated through visits, reading newspapers from Canada and by sending their children to be educated in the land of their heritage. This open, dual loyalty puzzled many Americans, especially when contrasted with the attitudes of the majority of other immigrant groups. To many Americans, the French Canadian people appeared willing to reap the rewards of the economic boom while at the same time unwilling to participate in American society as a whole. This dichotomy led to much resentment, and it was the French Canadian attitude towards religion, education, and language that led to the most suspicion.

The Catholic French Canadians took their faith to Puritanical New England and faced many obstacles as they attempted to practice their religion. It is true that there were already Roman Catholic parishes throughout New England, but most of these had been established by the English speaking Irish who had been established firmly in New England prior to the arrival of the French Canadians. The Irish viewed the French Canadians with jealousy and suspicion, an attitude at least partially developed from the fact that the Irish were overwhelmingly pro-union and had seen French Canadian strike breakers brought in by mill owners time after time.

Misunderstandings between the two groups were exacerbated by the additional problem of the language barrier, which proved especially difficult because Irish priests often led the mixed parishes of Irish and French Canadians and there were internal clashes between the two groups. A natural desire to establish their own, French speaking parishes was eventually realized. Hand in hand with the establishment of the churches was that of the parochial schools, which usually taught in both French and English. This was in contrast to the public schools, which made little or no effort to provide for non-English speaking children. It was primarily for this reason that public schools were rejected by the majority of French Canadians in favor of the parochial schools. Besides serving the spiritual and educational needs of the French Canadian community respectively, the French Roman Catholic Church and parochial school also provided for the maintenance of la survivance.

The French Canadians initially stayed away from politics or involvement in local government. Neither political party had ever catered to them, chiefly due to the language barrier and probably because of some racial or religious prejudice. As a practical matter, many politicians probably did not want to waste their effort attempting to appeal to a group that primarily consisted of transient workers who made no attempt to speak the language or showed any inclination of making America their permanent home.

Eventually, French Canadian leaders came to realize that self-segregation and their apparent unwillingness to becoming participants in American society was detrimental to their reputation. They determined that naturalization of the French Canadian people was the most effective method they could use to gain acceptance. Initial interest in naturalization was less than overwhelming, but leaders held numerous National Conventions of French Canadians in the United States to promote naturalization and these meetings also unified them in their efforts to overcome the stereotypes held by other Americans.

These efforts to more fully integrate the French Canadian people into America were hindered by the increasing influx of French Canadians from Canada. While headway was being made to naturalize those already in the U.S., there was a significant amount of time spent indoctrinating and orienting the successive waves of French Canadians coming across the border. The stream of rural habitants arriving in the United States also reaffirmed a negative stereotype. To the jaundiced eye of many Americans, the French Canadians seemed to repeatedly commit the same infractions against accepted American social practices. No discrimination between the recent French Canadian immigrants and those of the second or third generation was made.

The post-War increase in the number of rural French Canadian immigrants in the United States did not go unnoticed. Many American newspapers reported complaints concerning the influx and these complaints were supplemented by exaggerated estimates of the number of French Canadians that had arrived in America. In April of 1870, the New York Times reported that there were estimated to be 500,000 French Canadians in the United States. Recent scholarship puts the actual figure at closer to 100,000 in all of New England, which had the largest concentration of French Canadians in the United States. Given this last, it is scarcely believable that an additional 400,000 French Canadians lived in the Midwest or West.

The initial trickle of French Canadians who had endured discrimination, bigotry and mistrust in America showed their friends, families and communities that the rewards of working in America were well worth the trouble. Immediately after the Civil War, the trickle became a stream and by 1870 the stream became a river. The push of economic uncertainty north of the border combined with the pull of ever-growing thirst for manpower by the factories and mills south of the border proved irresistible.

For the next thirty years the immigration of French Canadians to the U.S. reached new levels. Included in this wave were a great many of the intellectual and professional classes who contributed greatly to the social and cultural welfare of the French Canadians in New England. By the second or third generation, the Franco-Americans who were the progeny of the original, unskilled habitants were being brought up bilingual and better able to participate in American society. Undoubtedly, the constant pressure from other Americans to conform to the generally accepted precepts of American life also influenced the behavior of the Franco-Americans. In the end, their willingness to accept American society as their own led to the full integration of the French Canadian people into America, though many would regret that la survivance had been sacrificed in the process.

Rhode Island's Greatest Soldier

I had the opportunity to review a very fine book on Nathanael Greene for Sunday's edition of the NY Post. The review is here. Rhode Island must of course atone for Ambrose Burnside. Fortunately for Rhode Islanders, whenever anyone makes fun of Burnside, they can point out that, second only to Washington, Greene was the soldier most responsible for
American success in the War of Independence.