COMMENTARY: Stormy seas for our ship of state

(RNS) When a ship tosses about during a gale, passengers rely on the captain to navigate safely through the dangerous water. America is currently in an economic, political and cultural storm. While the 310 million people aboard our national ship of state expect our leaders to plot a successful course, we are also responsible for […]

(RNS) When a ship tosses about during a gale, passengers rely on the captain to navigate safely through the dangerous water.

America is currently in an economic, political and cultural storm. While the 310 million people aboard our national ship of state expect our leaders to plot a successful course, we are also responsible for the wellbeing of those around us, especially those vulnerable passengers who are “different.”

It is neither a new image, nor a new problem. In the 17th century, Baptist minister Roger Williams, a strong champion of religious liberty and the founder of Rhode Island, wrote:


“It hath fallen out sometimes, that both papists and Protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked on one ship; upon which supposal I affirm, that all the liberty of conscience, that ever I pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges — that none of the papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks, be forced to come to the ship’s prayers of worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any.”

As a nation, we have frequently failed to follow Williams’ teachings by engaging in religious, racial, and ethnic bigotry. And we’re still doing it — publicly attacking immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, gays, and Asians among others.

It’s as ugly now as it was then.

Anti-Catholicism has been a poisonous element of our society for centuries; historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. called it “the deepest bias in the history of the American people.” Throughout the mid-1800s, American “nativists,” alarmed at the growing number of Irish Catholics, physically assaulted the new immigrants and destroyed Catholic churches. It wasn’t much better for masses of arriving Catholic Italians.

In 1886, workers in Seattle rounded up every Chinese person they could find and forced the frightened Asians to the harbor, where ships were waiting to deport them. The territorial governor declared martial law, shots were fired and a riot broke out when police attempted to escort the Chinese back to their homes.

Congress paid the Chinese government more than $250,000 in damages, but not one cent went to the victims. (110 years later, in 1997, Chinese-American Gary Locke was elected the governor of Washington state; he currently serves as U.S. Secretary of Commerce.)

Many Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe could not write English, and American officials asked them to sign entry documents with the letter “X.” Many refused because it reminded them of Christian crosses, a symbol used by anti-Semitic attackers for centuries.


Instead, the newcomers opted for a circle, a “kikel” in Yiddish. The shorter version quickly became an ugly slur: Jews were called “kikes,” a derisive insult I remember hearing many times as a youngster.

In the midst of World War II, John Rankin, an anti-Semitic congressman from Mississippi, wrote a letter to a Jewish critic: “If Jews of your type don’t quit sponsoring and fraternizing with the negro race you are going to arouse so much opposition to all of you … There are just a few of you New York Jew `kikes’ … socializing with the negroes for selfish and political reasons …You had better stop and think.”

Writer Henry Adams, a grandson and great-grandson of two U.S. presidents, was similarly filled with bigotry. “I detest (the Jews), and everything connected with them,” he wrote, “and I live only and solely with the hope of seeing their demise, with all their accursed Judaism.”

In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential order forcibly relocated more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans — two thirds of them citizens — into internment camps until the end of World War II. It took 46 years for the government to apologize and offer financial compensation to the internees.

Today’s paroxysm of prejudice is another ugly chapter in our history.

To take Williams’ ship metaphor a little further, only by acknowledging that shameful past can we move through today’s storms of hatred toward mutual respect and understanding. If we don’t, our ship can sink.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the forthcoming “Christians & Jews, Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future.”)


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