“Build that wall!” French-Canadian edition

You probably never heard of Carroll Wright, head of Massachusett’s Bureau of Statistics of Labor, but his immigrant-bashing is sadly all too familiar in this age of Trump. Apparently Mr. Wright is sick and tired of “those people” who set up their own newspapers, have weird religious beliefs, and don’t speak ENGLISH or even appear willing to assimilate. Feast your eyes on what he said in a published, state report:

“They care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational. They do not come to make a home among us, to dwell with us as citizens, and so become a part of us; but their purpose is to sojourn a few years as aliens…and, when they have gathered out of us what will satisfy their ends, to get them away to whence they came, and to bestow it there. They are a horde of industrial invaders, not a stream of stable settlers. Voting, with all that it implies, they care nothing about. Rarely does one of them become naturalized…”

OK, the old-fashioned English probably tipped you off: this is from an 1881 report (pg. 469) about the problem of French-Canadians immigrating south – not Mexicans traveling north, or Arab Muslims settling in New Jersey. Though rarely remembered now, almost a million French-speaking Canadians streamed south in the late 19th-early 20th century, a result of high birth rates and a poor economy in Quebec, and a booming economy in the US. Once in the states, they set up their own French-language schools, churches with French priests, and newspapers.

The French wave sparked anxiety in WASP America, and fear that these Catholic, non-English speaking foreigners were setting up parallel communities in the US, and were taking work from native-born Americans. While we primarily remember the KKK as a southern and midwestern organization that terrorized black Americans, in Maine the KKK was active in suppressing the French immigrant communities (including cross burning). The native WASP communities worked hard to turn these northern, Catholic immigrants into a separate race altogether. Carroll Wright infamously referred to them as “the Chinese of the Eastern United States”.

The French immigrant wave happened right here in Cheboygan, too. Flip through the local phone book and you’ll see the legacy of French-Canadian immigration in the family names: Lafleur, Bourgeois, Paquette, among many others. Many of them — I assume — came to work in the Cheboygan sawmills, and other industry of the period. It wasn’t that long ago, really. When I was growing up in the ’80’s, my elderly neighbor Aline Michelin recalled speaking French at home when she was a child — and still remembered enough to converse with visiting Quebecois. Down the street from me, French Cheboyganers set up their own Catholic church, St. Charles, even though a large Catholic church already existed less than a mile away on the East Side. And yet we consider these historically French families, who now pass as “white Americans”, the pillars of society in Cheboygan. They started speaking English and forgot how to pronounce even their own family names correctly! 

The French have the perfect phrase for this unfortunate cycle of immigrant-fear that plagues American politics every generation or so: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” (“The more things change, the more they stay the same way.”) Sounds better in French, by the way.