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Wrong, readsettlers.org
The mythology of the white masses holds that those early settlers were the poor of England, convicts and workers, who came to North Amerika in search of "freedom" or "a better way of life". Factually, that's all nonsense.
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A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian. Most were youth from the lower-middle classes; Gentlemen & Professionals 1%; Yeomen & Husbandmen 48%; Artisans & Tradesmen 29%. The typical age was 22-24 years. In other words, the sons and daughters of the middle class, with experience at agriculture and craft skills, were the ones who thought they had a practical chance in Amerika.
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It was this alone that drew so many Europeans to colonial North Amerika: the dream in the settler mind of each man becoming a petty lord of his own land. Thus, the tradition of individualism and egalitarianism in Amerika was rooted in the poisoned concept of equal privileges for a new nation of European conquerors.
Edit: this seemed to confound a lot of people, so maybe a bit more explanation. When people say that immigrants to the US were looking for "a better way of life" it suggests that they are fleeing a life of hardship and poverty. This is wrong when talking about the "early" white settler immigrants to the US, a period which still spans a couple centuries. And the later, white working class immigrants still looked for ways to profit off slavery and genocide, the "better life" for them was built on stolen land and labor. It's nothing like the current immigrants to the US which the GOP loudly and the Dems quietly look to oppress.
your text seems to agree 100% with one of the examples in the original posts text: ”[…] immigrants who […] simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants“.
could you elaborate why you think it is wrong?
They cannot really comprehend the glaring "OR"s in the sentence.
understood them fine, still disingenuos phrasing. "Better life" for one was from middle class to slaveowner and for the other giving up their homes because of US backed wars and trying to find a chance at a peaceful life
thank you for the clarification.
You think people immigrated to America to escape US backed wars 100 years before The United States was founded as a country? Excuse me, but, WHAT? Do you expect this word salad to be effective propaganda?
They didnt flee persecution. Also the "better life" was built on the back of slaves, which seems a bit disingenous phrasing.
Edit I guess the point is that the people coming to steal land and genocide peoples aren't like the immigrants today, its a false equivalence
Edit2 also the first line literally disagrees with that
What about the Irish?
The entire comment is unmitigated bullshit. Think about it; it uses the years 1654-85 as a representative sample of European immigrants to North America, but that's absurd because we know for a fact that mass immigration from Europe didn't really start until the 19th century so it can't be even remotely true that most white Americans are descendants of the immigrants they use in their sample. It's shoddy and intellectually dishonest scholarship that's obviously and almost comically pushing an agenda. As such it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Everything they've said is blatant propaganda word salad that they're regurgitating completely out of context.
Read the book its very good
The problem isn't the immigrants themselves that are coming to steal land or kill people, it's their children. One that comes to mind is Donald Trump whose mother was an immigrant.
So, one part of what the original post is wrong according to your source. Not the whole thing.
No, the whole thing is wrong because its a false equivalence. "Better life" meant different things for the white settlers and the current immigrants.
Why is that relevant?
Because that's what makes it wrong. If "better life" for one is profiting off slavery and genocide and for the other its "chance at a peaceful life" then comparing them whitewashes the formers intention.
Edit: it also seems to elude everyone that literally the first line in my source goes against the "seeking a better life" line, so I don't know why people think my source doesn't cover that
They didnt flee persecution.
Some surely did. Among those who definitely did not flee persecution were the Pilgrims, those flew from not being able to persecute.
"some" sure, but definitely not "almost all" as the post says.
OP's post says "or".
I know? I don't really understand what you're trying to say here, if it is "OPs post is not just talking about people being persecuted but also about people looking for a better life" then I hope my edit to my original comment answers that
When people say that immigrants to the US were looking for "a better way of life" it suggests that they are fleeing a life of hardship and poverty. This is wrong when talking about the "early" white settler immigrants to the US, a period which still spans a couple centuries. And the later, white working class immigrants still looked for ways to profit off slavery and genocide, the "better life" for them was built on stolen land and labor. It's nothing like the current immigrants to the US which the GOP loudly and the Dems quietly look to oppress.
I would also draw your attention to the first line of the quote in my original comment which explicitly calls out this "seeking a better life" fable, which is only true for the white settlers ("almost" all of them) if we consider a life furthering slavery and genocide to be better than what they had at home.
At any rate the goals of the white immigrants were exploitative while the goals of the current immigrants is to escape exploitation and putting them as equal is dishonest at best.
If I misunderstood what appears to be a throwaway comment please elaborate
I would also draw your attention to the first line of the quote in my original comment which explicitly calls out this “seeking a better life” fable, which is only true for the white settlers (“almost” all of them) if we consider a life furthering slavery and genocide to be better than what they had at home.
This is reductive. The American civil war and therefore slavery ended with 1865 -- yes I know apartheid after that, but people emigrating back then surely didn't do it with the idea of "I can become a slave-lord there". In Germany, Bismarck introduced mandatory public healthcare 1883, one of the reasons was to slow immigration to the US: While in the US there was opportunity, there also wasn't any kind of safety net whatsoever. (The other big reason was to cut political ground from under the social democrats's feet, as well as to bring mutual insurances workers had founded under state control -- he was, after all, Prussian).
So immigration from Germany was still an issue large enough for the empire to address it directly while slavery was already abolished. And the type of people this legislation addressed was squarely workers: People earning under 2000 Goldmark a year (about 17000 Euro now). Some pre-83 versions even only applied to miners, then steel workers, then it got expanded to all workers.
Another tidbit would be immigrants from North Germany in particular: While enforcement could certainly have been better any Hanse ship was generally forbidden to engage in slave trade, and people got dispossessed for so much as transporting slave chains. The whole idea of slavery just didn't vibe with North German republicanism which had the motto "Neither master nor serf be" even while the free cities were still oligopolies. People took great pleasure and pride from passing laws such as forbidding nobles from living in the city, or going after their debts and actually putting them in prison until they paid up (by selling their land): Elsewhere, as a noble, you were above the law. Socio-economic differences were stark but a liberal notion of equality was universal (or, in the still feudal parts, desired) and any immigrant would've taken that with them to the US. They also didn't tend to immigrate to the south, this is conflating North German and Scandinavian immigrants but a map of Lutheranism in the US should give an impression.
I am unable to dissect everything going on with your comment, I urge you to read the book for yourself. The profiting off slavery didn't stop with slavery, it is core to the wealth of the US empire which attracted the european immigrants who were looking to be part of an economy which at its motor had slavery for centuries and, after that, the continued oppression and segregation of it's non-white communities. The distinction is between chattel and wage-slavery where the working class was divided along racial lines. These immigrants came with the goal of taking the jobs of non-white people, tying their fortune to the continued oppression of non-white people. Again, please read the book it's plain as day. To quote another section:
What was the essence of the ideology of white labor? Petit-bourgeois annexationism. … But, typically, their petit-bourgeois vision saw for themselves a special, better kind of wage-slavery. The ideology of white labor held that as loyal citizens of the Empire even wage-slaves had a right to special privileges (such as “white man’s wages”), beginning with the right to monopolize the labor market.
We must cut sharply through the liberal camouflage concealing this question. It is insufficient - and therefore misleading - to say that European workers wished to “discriminate against” or “exclude” or were “prejudiced against” colored workers. It was the labor of Afrikan and Indian workers that created the economy of the original Amerika; likewise, the economy of the Southwest was distilled from the toil of the Indian/Mexicano workers, and that of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest was built by Mexicano and Chinese labor. Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn’t built, and ‘annex’, so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.
And that last line is meant literally, it's about the riots and lynchings these immigrants took part in in order to take the jobs that had traditionally be held by non-white workers. Talking about the chinese workers who had built the railroad for example:
The time-distance across the continent was now cut to two weeks, and cheap railroad tickets brought a flood of European workers to the West. There was, of course, an established settler traditon of terrorism towards Chinese. The Shasta Republican complained in its Dec. 12, 1856 issue that: "Hundreds of Chinamen have been slaughtered in cold blood in the last 5 years...the murder of Chinamen was of almost daily occurrence." Now the new legions of immigrant European workers demanded a qualitative increase in the terroristic assaults, and the 1870's and 1880's were decades of mass bloodshed.
The issue was very clear-cut - jobs. By 1870, some 42% of the whites in California were European immigrants. With their dreams of finding gold boulders lying in the streams having faded before reality, these new crowds of Europeans demanded the jobs that Chinese labor had created. More than demanded, they were determined to "annex", to seize by force of conquest, all that Chinese workers had in the West. In imitation of the bourgeoisie they went about plundering with bullets and fire. In mining camps and towns from Colorado to Washington, Chinese communities came under attack. Many Chinese were shot down, beaten, their homes and stores set afire and gutted. In Los Angeles Chinese were burned alive by the European vigilantes, who also shot and tortured many others.
That you would paint the rise of the liberal capitalist class as something to be cheered on by the oppressed and as the beginning of an end to racism beggars belief, it were the workers fleeing capitalism in europe that formed the vanguard of the oppression against the non-white workers. The book goes into great detail about the workers that europe was bleeding, which forced it's capitalist class to make the concessions you mentioned. They indeed brought the ideas of liberalism with them into the US, its just that these ideas of "equality" never were about solidarity among workers across the present racial lines.
With their dreams of finding gold boulders lying in the streams having faded before reality, these new crowds of Europeans demanded the jobs that Chinese labor had created.
Note how that's not precisely not about what those people thought when they left Europe? They were American, at that point.
Don't make the mistake of confusing why people left, and what they thought they would do in America, with what US material conditions drove them to do. This is precisely what OP's post is addressing: That you should remember that people came in search of a better life, and that the conditions the American bourgeois in general (now represented by the GOP) instituted in the country made finding that better life impossible.
Also back then most Europeans weren't even considered "white", pretty much every group not from England went through an erm "Hispanic phase" -- I'll of course grant that Germans weren't terribly affected by this, but ask the Irish or Italians. The racial card has always been used by the American bourgeois to divide and conquer as they please and I'd caution against playing into that narrative by deepening grudges. If you have to choose between class consciousness and identity politics, be a good Marxist and choose class consciousness.
I don't know how we're reading the same sentence and arrive at opposite conclusions. Even if you were right about the goldrush in indian land not being a motivating factor for droves of immigrants I think my larger point, how incomparable the motivation for white immigrants and the currently oppressed immigrants is, still stands by the actions the europeans undertook upon arrival. This is not about dividing people into racist groups, but clearly talking about the racial divide that was drawn up by the capitalist class. Not talking about the deep racism in the european immigrant movement, regardless of their class status, in fear of "deepening grudges" is revisionist.
1654-85? Really? And you honestly think that timeframe gives a representative sample of European immigrants to North America? Really? That's the stupidest thing I've read all day. Mass immigration didn't even start until the 19th century for fucks sake, nearly 200 years later. Sometimes Lemmy really sucks ass.
What do you think is more likely: that I think 48% yeomen and husbandmen is a good representation of all of the immigrants to the USA or that you misunderstood my comment?
I feel like neither, the commenter is pointing out that 40 years nearly 400 years ago is missing a big chunk of immigration to North America.
Right, well, that is a rather small portion of what is an entire book on the subject matter which goes into a lot more depth on the other 360 years as well. But the commenter seems to imply (rather obviously in my opinion) that all I'm basing my statement on is this quote and not the entirety of the book which I linked. There actually is a lot more said about the "later" settlers, that is the european proletariat brought in to replace the non-white workers, but since it's a lot more detailed I couldn't remember a succinct quote.
As for the context in which I made my original comment, the tweet talks about how "almost all of us descended from people fleeing persecution or trying to find a better life", to which the passage I quoted does say:
The mythology of the white masses holds that those early settlers were the poor of England, convicts and workers, who came to North Amerika in search of “freedom” or “a better way of life”. Factually, that’s all nonsense.
This is the mythology the tweet in the post is referencing and hence my comment on it. The rest was to provide context on what the "early" settlers demographic looked like.
I reread your comment and I feel bad for over extrapolating that quote, I thought it was more of an article type analysis then I visited the site and it’s really a whole book on the subject. IT appears quite thorough
Can I ask why so many words like “amerika” or “klass” are spelt with a k?
If people thought it was "just" an article a lot of the responses start to make sense lol
I don't know why the spelling with "k" is chosen unfortunately.
Wtf is a Yeomen Husbandmen? Some sort of gay Beowolf? Maybe something to do with Kanye?
Husbandry. The art of matching up young people into blessed relationships.
A Yeoman was a type of anime cosplay popular at the time.
seriously tho LMGTFY:
In general, a husbandman is someone who manages a farm, particularly in terms of the crops and livestock. The term has been around since the Middle Ages and was commonly used in England. On the other hand, a yeoman is someone who owns and cultivates a small farm. The term originated in feudal England and was used to describe a social class between the gentry and the laborers.
Small land-holder. Not a titled lord, but also not a peasant per se.
Being of middle-class standing doesn't invalidate that they were seeking adventure, opportunity, or freedom. What a strange conclusion to arrive at.
What kind of adventure though? Freedom to do what exactly? What they were seeking is a bit different from what the current immigrants are seeking dont you think?
Edit it does invalidate the narrative that the early settlers were impoverished or convicted people fleeing an oppressive feudal england, which the tweet seems to suggest.
There were those too. Just because 45% of the people arriving were middle class, doesn't mean that nobody was poor. There were people who would commit to 7 years of indebted servitude in the new world to cover the cost of their move. Nobody does that if they have any money. Additionally, you're viewing things from a modern perspective. Middle class did not mean what it means today, and life under English rule was not as it is today. The Irish specifically came here to escape oppression, and then found more here. They didn't escape their oppression here until centuries later, but even then, they still found the Americas to be the lesser of the two oppressive environments.
Whats the "45% were middle class" referring to? Also I didn't say nobody coming into the US was poor, my main gripe is with the "Almost all of us", as if the white immigrants benefitting from slavery and genocide were a small part. As for what the white laborers were up to, we only need to read a bit further in the book I'm urging everyone here to read:
What was the essence of the ideology of white labor? Petit-bourgeois annexationism. ... To this new layer of European labor was denied the gross privileges of the settler bourgeoisie, who annexed whole nations. Even the particular privileges that so comforted the earlier Euro-Amerikan farmers and artisans - most particularly that of "annexing" individual plots of land every time their Empire advanced - were denied these European wage-slaves. But, typically, their petit-bourgeois vision saw for themselves a special, better kind of wage-slavery. The ideology of white labor held that as loyal citizens of the Empire even wage-slaves had a right to special privileges (such as "white man's wages"), beginning with the right to monopolize the labor market.
We must cut sharply through the liberal camouflage concealing this question. It is insufficient - and therefore misleading - to say that European workers wished to "discriminate against" or "exclude" or were "prejudiced against" colored workers. It was the labor of Afrikan and Indian workers that created the economy of the original Amerika; likewise, the economy of the Southwest was distilled from the toil of the Indian/Mexicano workers, and that of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest was built by Mexicano and Chinese labor. Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn't built, and 'annex', so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.
If you want to actually know about the irish and other immigrant workers and don't like to read that much I would recommend Chapter 4.5 "Contradictions of white labor" where this passage is from, but again the whole book is superb.
Found the troll. 🤦🏽♂️
