From Southern Secessionists to Russian Hackers

Echoes from the Woman's National Christian Temperance Convention, 1881

ART Collection/Alamy.com

As a dramatic wave of immigration once again challenges U.S. resources and U.S. identity, I’ve been exploring the 19^th century social and legal dynamics that pushed the country toward its first round of immigration restriction beginning in 1875.

Last week, I described a shift in postbellum Republican ideology toward immigration that accelerated in the 1880s, submerging the principle of racial equality in the face of new waves of immigration, especially from China.

In another post, I’ve explored links between Victorian moral reform movements and anti-immigration sentiment.

Victorian Morality, Racial Equality, and Immigration

I recently came across an address made at the Woman’s National Christian Temperance Convention in October 1881 that sounds both of these themes. The women of Hillsboro in Highland County, Ohio, helped instigate the national temperance movement in 1874, and the Republican paper Highland Weekly News reprinted speeches from their national convention at length on December 22 and 29, 1881.

The moral indignation no longer focused solely on the evils of drink, but on pluralism exacerbated by drink. Mrs. Mary T. Lathrop of Michigan (as she was identified) focused in her remarks on “the problem of womanhood in America, and the problem of civilization in America.” Women, she said, had been changed by two things: the liberation created by labor-saving devices of the industrial revolution, and the changes in experience and perspective caused by living and working through the Civil War.

But the bulk of her remarks focused on the deterioration of American civilization – and this new generation of women had the responsibility of preventing it:

But I said we face another problem – that of our great civilization. I look away to the Westward, and every time the waves curl up through the Golden Gate they fling on shore the olive-cheeked, long-queued, crooked-eyed Chinaman. They are setting up their joss houses, their washee houses, their strange customs, and are growing upon us every day. I look away to the Eastward, and through these doorways of emigration there are coming to us people of every tribe and nation and tongue, thousands in a day, a city in a week, an empire in a year; and, passing across the country, they are making a new United States in the new Northwest.

The new waves of immigrants only added to a strange and fractured society of Mormons, freedmen, and White southerners:

Then I look between the Chinaman of the Pacific coast and the European emigrants of the Northwest, to see another empire in the midst of our country – an empire of lust; an empire with another Bible, another church, another prophet than ours; an empire that has grown so rapidly we may well stop and ask the reason why. And that empire of lust that is an outrage to every decent husband and every loyal wife, has a representation in the Congress of the United States, and preaches both ways to the new citizen of this Republic.

I look Southward to see our freedmen coming up into a liberty they know little how to use, and waiting to be safely taken into our civilization. They stand already at the ballot box, and are as masterful there as the white men of the North. I look at the Southern people that have been alienated from us by years of sectional strife. So looking this nation over, I see that it our veins is blood hot and cold, blood fast and slow, and I ask myself the question, “Can we crystalize into unity and go down to the future with the rum shop in the centre?” The rum shop that destroys the home, the rum shop that takes away the sacredness of the Christian Sabbath; the rum shop that rolls its tide of vice, of temptation and ruin to our very doors; the rum shop that defies everything that is American and patriotic; the rum shop that does all this, and yet is the pivot on which swings more of our political destiny than any one thing besides, because striking at the very centre of power – viz., the free ballot box of this free land.

Reverberations

With a century and a half of distance, it’s easy to judge and dismiss Lathrop’s concerns, especially in light of rhetoric that many of us would now find offensive.

Today, we face another major immigration wave, and new cries of alarm. But are the threats we clash over today wholly different from those about which Lathrop worried?

Instead of alcohol, news media today often focus on the threat of drug trafficking or human trafficking, what President Trump called “bad hombres” threatening the country. Another alarm often sounded today is the “divide and conquer” threat, sometimes ascribed to nefarious and invisible Russian hackers.

We know, as Lathrop did, that a house divided against itself cannot stand. And we fear, as Lathrop did, the disintegration of society by vice, crime, and intoxication.

Threats of national disunity and industries of vice couldn’t be brushed off in 1881. They won’t be brushed off today, either. But perhaps, with hindsight and honest dialogue, we can avoid repeating the injustices of 1882.