3,062 words
Joseph Ford Cotto, 1st Baron Cotto, GCCCR (DBA)
What Happened to America? How — and Why — the American Dream Became a Nightmare
Independently Published, 2024
Tinker with the demographic fabric, and you meddle with the legacy of generations to come. — Baron Joseph Ford Cotto, p. 141
It’s no secret that American society has plunged into a place of despair. Nothing works right, and progress is non-existent. How did this happen? Baron Joseph Ford Cotto has written an excellent book which sheds light on this situation. Our current society-wide malaise stems from several historical shocks inflicted upon American society that affected the demographics of the Anglo-Saxon and related peoples who constitute the country’s core population.
American society was founded by English colonists who set up settlements in Jamestown, Plymouth, and other places in the seventeenth century. Cotto writes:
. . . [T]he composition of the early settlers carried paramount significance. Fortunately, America’s genesis unfolded under auspicious circumstances. Along the Atlantic seaboard, the initial colonies shared a common bond, despite subtle differences. Though initially sundered by Dutch and Swedish footholds, the predominantly English settlers quickly forged bonds, transcending national divergences. Contrast this with the potential discord had true adversaries like the French or Spanish intruded – ferocious colonial wars might have marred the landscape. Yet, fate dictated otherwise, as the French settled in the distant north, while the Spaniards remained in the remote south.
This early unity laid the groundwork for an embryonic America — where English speech, institutions, and ideals predominated. The Anglo-Saxon imprint ran deep, relegating other cultural elements to the periphery. Despite subsequent migrations, the Anglo-Saxon mold remained intact — a guiding light steering America through the ebbs and flows of history. (pp. 14-15)
Colonial America was squarely in the fold of the British Empire and the wider Anglo-Saxon world. After the French and Indian War, however, political attitudes changed. Mild controversies over tax policies and a more serious political disagreement over land settlement on the western frontier led to a violent rebellion that is usually called the Revolutionary War in the United States. The bloodshed started on April 19, 1775 in two small villages outside of Boston.
It is unfortunate that the colonists ended up blaming the political disputes on King George III. The British King didn’t even have the authority to direct traffic in London, much less come up with a solution to the clashing interests of the colonial governments, Parliament, and the British bureaucratic class that set the stage for war. If the colonists had had a better read on the domestic political situation in Great Britain, the bloodshed might have been averted.
George Washington’s army crossing the Delaware River. The political logic that led to the War of Independence also led to the US Civil War.
The Revolutionary War upended the Anglo-Saxon world. Cotto writes:
The Revolution wasn’t merely a war against a foreign power but a deeply divisive conflict among brethren. Communities were torn apart, families divided, and allegiances tested. The presence of Loyalist strongholds, particularly in New York and the South, intensified the animosity between Patriots and Loyalists, transforming the conflict into a brutal struggle for survival. (p. 30)
The United States thus emerged as a sovereign and independent political entity with an origin myth that included violence, revolution, and secession. The myth of the American Revolution set the metapolitical foundations for the bloody Civil War that followed in the next century.
The expelled Loyalists fled to Britain, the West Indies, and Ontario. For the most part, they were people of the highest human caliber — and the United States lost them. Had the Loyalists remained, America would have had an additional million-and-a-half highly-competent Anglo-Americans in 1920.
The newly-independent United States also emerged from the war bankrupt and scarred, although for a time it remained mostly free of foreign military entanglements. America also had very little immigration, and that immigration tended to originate from only a few sources in Northern Europe. Thus, new immigrants immediately fit into society and caused little disruption.
Due in no small part to this lack of immigration-fueled domestic discord, American arts, sciences, and literature flourished. Institutions such as the Smithsonian grew from a collection of American scientific societies that were formed in 1816. Old-sock Americans were free to settle the frontier with no foreign competition. The Founding Fathers reserved the western areas for their posterity in particular by avoiding settlement schemes made up of immigrants from abroad.
Ordinary American frontiersmen traveling up the Missouri River.
The immigration crisis of the 1840s
In 1808, Congress enacted one of the wisest pieces of legislation in its history. Congress banned the further importation of slaves directly from sub-Saharan Africa or any other place. This averted turning a large part of the United States into an Africanized plantation with a possible endpoint of becoming a larger version of Haiti. But there were problems with white immigration as well. The Naturalization Act of 1790, which only allowed immigrants who were free white persons of good moral character to be naturalized, cast too wide a net. This was not recognized as a problem until the 1840s. Immigration came from Great Britian, Ulster, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Another key group were French Protestants, commonly called Huguenots. These groups quickly joined the existing population and there was no alienation or ethnic agitation. However, the Americans of the early nineteenth century didn’t recognize the racial dynamics that were at play in Europe which made the assimilation of immigrants either easy or impossible.
Cotto makes use of the older racial classifications of the peoples of Europe. In this model, Europeans are divided into three sub-races. In the north there are Nordics, in the center of Europe are Alpines, and in Southern Europe and North Africa there are Mediterraneans. All of these sub-races are interrelated to a degree, and all are native Europeans. Most Europeans have Indo-European ancestors and speak an Indo-European language. But there are differences between the groups. Most significantly, the old-stock Americans were Nordics.
Immigrants easily assimilated into American culture, especially provided they were Nordics.
Modern DNA findings show that northern Europe has a population with more western Hunter-Gatherer DNA, while southern Europe has more Early Farmer DNA. These correspond to the Nordic and Mediterranean sub-races as they were defined in the late nineteenth century.
Ireland consists of Nordics who are genetically similar, if not identical to, the original, mostly English colonists of North America in almost every way, including a common language and a common Norman upper class. Additionally, the Irish — technically, the Protestant Scots-Irish who lived in Ulster — had been coming to America since the seventeenth century. In the 1840s, however, the Catholic Irish began to arrive, and they had historical grievances against Anglo-Protestants. Those grievances manifested in ugly ways in mid-nineteenth century America.
America’s intellectual leaders could have defused the situation quickly, but their hearts and minds were completely absorbed by the question of slavery. During the Civil War, immigration lessened considerably, and thus the American elite continued to put off dealing with the problem. Today, the descendants of the Catholic Irish have nearly completely assimilated into the American mainstream, but the process was slow and uncertain. It probably took up to the day of President Kennedy’s assassination for the Irish to truly assimilate.
An abolitionist speaker: The slavery question consumed the American intellectual class. The other issues related to the question of protecting the American nation were put off until the First World War.
Irish Catholic immigration straddles what Cotto calls Old Immigration and New Immigration. One the one hand, the Irish were white and Nordic, while on the other they were alienated from their Anglo-Protestant American neighbors. The Irish also mastered grievance politics, which further poisoned an already frayed national narrative. Furthermore, every immigrant group with an axe to grind followed the trail blazed by the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century.
The other immigrant group was the Germans, many of whom were revolutionaries from the failed uprising in 1848. On the whole, the Germans assimilated quickly, but some Germans supported malignant Leftist ideas such as Marxism. After the Civil War, some Germans led and participated in anarchist riots in various places.
The post-bellum North
Politics in America were very ugly prior to the Civil War, but the war continued to mutate the ugliness during and after the conflict as well. In Congress, the anti-war “Copperheads” used every battlefield setback against Lincoln and his Republicans to score cheap political points. Some of the Copperheads were of immigrant stock. The fight with the Copperheads in the Congress made the Republicans bitterly hostile to any compromise. Cotto writes:
The 1864 Congress was dominated by fiercely, if not fanatically, partisan Union- Republicans and a minority of subversive Democrats. The disdain for cowardly Northern “Copperheads” fueled further animosity toward the Southern Confederates, however unfairly. (p. 64)
The Reconstruction policy of the Radical Republicans was a disaster. Sub-Saharans were promoted well beyond their respective capacities by the occupation authorities. Northern “Carpetbaggers” who worked in various government jobs in the South used their position to defraud the former Confederates. The South was plunged into poverty. Sub-Saharan crime exploded, while at the same time many of the ex-slaves died in miserable conditions.
The bitterness that stemmed from Reconstruction was worse than the bitterness caused by the war itself. The conflict’s Anglo-Southern survivors withdrew from national life. For decades after the conflict — perhaps even up to the present — the Anglo-Southern political elite focused on regional concerns even when such regional concerns were in fact national, such as white resistance to integration. It was only after the Civil War that the South voted as a bloc, further warping American domestic politics. The top Anglo-Southern leader to emerge after the Civil War was the disappointing Woodrow Wilson.
Norwegian settlers were Old Immigrants who assimilated into American culture with little trouble. (Source: Wikipedia)
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
Perhaps the North was even more mangled by the Civil War than the South. Northern society had gone into battle with exhortations from hymn-singing abolitionist minsters ringing in their ears. The Union soldiers returned weary and cynical. The Northern-controlled government became the slave of crony capitalists. The industrialists who had won the war formed corporations, trusts, and monopolies while squeezing the Anglo-American middle class. These capitalists likewise pushed for immigration in order to lower labor costs.
Throughout this time Old Immigrants continued to arrive, but the Old Immigrants were accompanied by New Immigrants who were very different. On the West Coast, arriving New Immigrants were often from China, and the Chinese threatened to swamp the Anglo-American whites there. In the states of the American Northeast, the New Immigrants were from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and Western Asia. There, the New Immigrants clustered in tenements and slums. Although most of them were white, they were not easy to assimilate. A process of driving out the natives developed, and Anglo-American intellectuals such as Edward Alsworth Ross described the situation well after it became evident. Native Anglos in places that had many immigrants had fewer children so they could afford to educate their children such that they could move up the social ladder and thus avoid competition with the New Immigrants. The dignity of labor was also debased as the lower-rung jobs became sorted by ethnicity.
One phenomenon that was a consequence of the New Immigrants’ arrival and their capture of so many of the blue-collar jobs was the rise of the “Hobo.” A Hobo was an itinerant worker of old-stock American heritage who went from place to place by train doing odd jobs. Because so many Americans identified with the Hobos due to their ethnicity, their lifestyle became a cultural touchstone. Many movies include positive references to Hobos. At the same time, the culture creators averted their eyes from the overcrowded immigrant tenements that were emerging simultaneously with the Hobos. Even when these slums are referenced an any cultural work, it is from an outsider’s viewpoint.
Hobos were old-stock American laborers who rode trains from place to place to work odd jobs. They were a response to the New Immigrants.
Most Anglo-Americans didn’t recognize the immigration problem in the late nineteenth century. Many were completely isolated in heavily Nordic and old-stock states such as Iowa and Missouri. As a result, domestic politics was even further poisoned. The New Immigrants clustered in key districts and elected their own as officials. Various industries also pushed for immigration, especially steamship companies. Many Anglo-American liberals were funded by industrialists to keep down any nativist resistance.
Immigration restrictions did slowly materialize, however. Chinese immigration was eventually banned after a bitter fight, and the US government established centers such as Ellis Island in New York to weed out undesirable immigrants. Nonetheless, reform was successfully resisted by powerful interests from the 1880s until the First World War.
The repercussions of the armageddon in France & Flanders
Cotto writes:
[In 1914,] unchecked optimism colored America’s attitude towards mass immigration and the alien elements it brought. Americans viewed these burgeoning immigrant communities with a mix of annoyance and amused tolerance, confident that the old-time way of life would effortlessly assimilate them, or at least their children. Popular faith in the American melting pot was unshakeable — or so millions upon millions thought.
Then came World War I — a lightning bolt that jolted America from its complacency. Suddenly, Americans were confronted with hard realities. The war stripped away the facade of unity, revealing fissures of alienism and hyphenism that had long lain dormant. It shattered widespread illusions and laid bare the unsettling truth: America was not the homogeneous nation most imagined, but a patchwork of conflicting identities and loyalties. (p. 148)
Immigrant groups pressured the Wilson administration at the 1919 Paris Peace Talks to favor particular European peoples. This made a just settlement in Europe nearly impossible and helped bring about the Second World War. Meanwhile, as Americans awoke to the danger, the New Immigrants acted upon their alienation. Cotto writes:
The rise of left-wing revolutionary radicalism, primarily driven by aliens, was a stark manifestation of this growing hostility. While this extreme form of radicalism found little support among native-born Americans, it resonated deeply with elements of the new immigrant population, becoming the driving force behind the “Red” movement in America. (p. 151)
The old-stock American liberals who had previously supported immigration shifted toward restrictions due to the First World War. One such liberal, Frances Kellor, wrote:
We now know that we are not in a position to participate disinterestedly and courageously in the international adjustments that will take place at the close of the war . . . We face the fact that America is not first in the hearts of every resident. (p. 149)
Americans responded to the problem late, but wisely. Prescott F. Hall, a Harvard lawyer, began work on the legal framework for a rational immigration policy. This included visa requirements. US consulates abroad became the first line of defense. Potential immigrants had to obtain a visa from a consulate before travelling to the States. Potential immigrants who were Bolshevik sympathizers, for example, were stopped by US officials abroad.
Eventually, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the 1924 Immigration Act, which reduced immigration overall while favoring newcomers from Northern Europe. Cotto writes:
The Immigration Act of 1924 marked a pivotal moment in American legislative history. Until the Social Revolution of the 1960s, it was rivaled only by the prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade. Just as banning slave imports safeguarded America from becoming another Haiti, immigration reform averted a potential catastrophe posed by a flood of lowgrade aliens that threatened to undermine the nation’s very foundations. (p. 155)
The immigration reforms that came after the First World War turned things around. Immigrant slums vanished. Working conditions improved. Productivity increased. Wages rose. The Great Depression slowed improvements a bit, but in the long run it was merely an aberration. The Hobos disappeared into memories.
The martyr’s unnecessary cause
President Kennedy’s legacy is bolstered by the fact that he was killed before the drawbacks of his policies became apparent. The wounds inflicted upon America by Kennedy include “civil rights,” the Vietnam War, and most importantly, immigration.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here.
During his career, John F. Kennedy supported relaxing immigration restrictions. Eventually his ideas were manifested in the 1965 Immigration Act. This act is a disaster, exceeding in negative outcomes all other pieces of poor US legislation combined. The act was passed under a deceptive cover, and the resistance to it was incoherent. The act opened immigration to America from the entire world, and it has proven to be a genocidal attack on American whites.
Admittedly, the 1965 Immigration Act was passed after Kennedy’s death. Furthermore, Kennedy’s own book on immigration, A Nation of Immigrants, was ghostwritten by ethnonationalist Jews. But Kennedy nevertheless put his name on the book, and argued for more immigration as a Senator. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was not wrong in framing the immigration issue as a martyr’s cause. In the Foreword to A Nation of Immigrants, Kennedy’s brother Robert offered a fountain of praise for his slain brother, and “painted an idyllic portrait of immigration reform, conveniently glossing over the inherent risks and formidable challenges it posed to American society” (p. 185).
Kennedy’s call for immigration was nothing less than an ethnic attack right out of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it was totally unnecessary. Kennedy’s family and America First valor is unquestionable. JFK’s father argued for isolationism in the late 1930s and suffered greatly for his heroic stance. Kennedy’s older brother perished in the Second World War, and Kennedy himself was killed because he was effectively fighting against the Communists. Kennedy’s backwards-looking grievance-mongering is therefore akin to that of the modern Scottish nationalists who seek to fight with the English over trivial issues while pushing transsexual perversion and mass Third World immigration into Scotland. More pointedly, Kennedy’s grievance-mongering was similar to that of the American colonists in 1775 claiming that King George III was a “secret Catholic,” as though the political dispute over how to pay off the debt incurred during the French and Indian War was a repeat of the dispute between King James II and his treacherous sister Mary, the wife of William of Orange.
Baron Cotto doesn’t end the book on a high note. America is in deep trouble. The cumulative effects of greed, shortsightedness, and vindictiveness that started with the American Revolution have metastasized. Cotto hopes that by reflecting on the mistakes of the past, “America may find new life, transformed by the passage of time and the wisdom gained from past failures” (p. 214).
See also: “The Florida BIOPIC War” & “When Florida Was French”