Racial propaganda

SIGNIFICANCE: Racial propaganda is the attempt to shape or control other people’s opinions or actions using particular ethnic stereotypes, images, or prejudices. It has had a major impact on many significant aspects of civil life and public policy: elections, immigration, criminal justice, civil disorder, welfare, public education, and public health.

Most people associate racial propaganda with racist hate groups, but artists, writers, professionals, scientists, and pseudoscientists have all contributed to racial propagandizing. Propagandists use the media of the day to convey their message. Handbills and pamphlets were popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Radio and television provided new forums for propaganda: talk shows, advertisements, news shows, and political campaigns. Cable and the Internet have expanded the opportunities for hate groups and other less overt racial propagandists to disseminate their messages.

Throughout US history, crime, poverty, disease, and unemployment—the social problems that came with industrialization, urbanization, and the rise and fall of the business cycle—were blamed on immigrants. Americans found it hard to believe that the problems swirling around them could come from their own society or people. They tried to solve these social problems by limiting immigration. These anti-immigrant movements produced propaganda supporting the racial superiority of White “native” Americans and the inferiority of immigrant groups. Handbills, broadsides, and editorial cartoons in the illustrated papers and magazines of the day were common sources of racial propaganda.

Anti-Irish Propaganda

The first major flurry of anti-immigrant propaganda was directed against the Irish, whose mass migration to the United States followed the great potato famine of the 1840s. The poverty and squalor found in Irish American neighborhoods led Americans to view Irish people as less than human. Irish American stereotypes in cartoons of the era depicted Irish people as monkeylike. It is sometimes hard to tell the difference between caricatures of Irish Americans and of African Americans; both were depicted as apelike.

The anti-Irish propaganda also contained a strong strain of anti-Catholicism, fueled in part by fears that Catholics would be more loyal to the Pope than to the American government. Catholicism or “Papism” was reputed to promote ignorance and discourage any education beyond church teachings. Thomas Nast, the most famous cartoonist of the nineteenth century, is known for his attacks on political corruption, but he also drew many anti-Catholic and anti-Irish cartoons. His most inflammatory image showed schoolchildren being threatened by crocodiles who were really bishops, their miters forming the crocodiles’ jaws.

The Know-Nothing Party

The anti-immigrant feelings in the mid-nineteenth century found institutional support in the American Party, known as the Know-Nothing party for its practice of refusing to answer questions about its platform. Know-Nothing broadsides and tracts blamed immigrants for the anti-immigrant riots (and most other problems). Know-Nothings pledged to vote only for American candidates who supported stopping immigration. The Know-Nothings proved extremely popular with the American public and might have even captured the White House if the Civil War had not distracted attention away from the immigration issue.

Anti-Italian Propaganda

New waves of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generated new waves of anti-immigrant sentiment. As with Irish people, the poverty and different cultural practices of the Italian, Chinese, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants made them easily identifiable and easy to blame for the social problems other Americans faced.

Italian American stereotypes portrayed Italian people as mafiosi and anarchists, and blamed them for both crime and labor troubles. Cartoonists portrayed Italian people as shifty-eyed and always armed with knives or guns. Rats were the favored animal used to depict them. The labor troubles of the day were often blamed on Italian people, who had a history of labor and fraternal organizations. Italian people were often portrayed as not being White, further adding to the belief that they were inferior.

Anti-Asian Propaganda

Chinese immigration in the 1860s quickly triggered Americans’ xenophobia. Chinatowns in US cities were feared by liberals and conservatives alike. The culture, language, and religion of the Chinese immigrants were so far from the European roots of Americans that the immigrants were widely feared and despised. Reformer Jacob Riis, known for his sympathy for European immigrants, wrote of the Chinese immigrant in 1890:

He is by nature as clean as the cat, which he resembles in his traits of cruel cunning and savage fury when aroused. . . . I may be accused of inciting persecution of an unoffending people. Far from it. Granted, that the Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population, that they serve no useful purpose here . . . yet to this it is a sufficient answer that they are here, and that, having let them in, we must make the best of it.

Anti-Asian propaganda became prominent again during World War II, specifically aimed at Japanese people. Working to drive home that Japanese people were the enemy, propagandists portrayed Japanese people as weak, feeble, and even as animals to drive home the idea of their inhumanity. Apes and rats were both used to portray Japanese people.

Anti-Semitic Propaganda

One does not find much anti-Semitic propaganda before the 1870s, but once Eastern European Jewish people began immigrating, Jewish people were the focus of all sorts of stereotypical images and claims. Jewish people were believed to control pornography and prostitution in the large East Coast cities, and conspiracy theories often placed Jewish people at the center of plans to corrupt the American way of life. In the early twentieth century, a document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared, claiming to be Jewish people's plan for taking over the world. It is unclear who actually produced this book, but it was not Jewish people. This book continues to figure in conspiracy theories.

After the horrors of the Holocaust became known following World War II, anti-Semitic propaganda became less visible and less mainstream, although it lived on in the publications of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Semitism was also evident in African American publications and folklore that blamed slavery on Jewish people and Jewish bankers. In the 1980s, a variety of right-wing populist groups known variously as survivalists, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and militia popularized conspiracy theories in which the State of Israel and “Jewish bankers” were responsible for all of the problems that were facing White Americans. Some groups also began to deny the Holocaust had taken place, saying it was nothing more than Jewish propaganda.

Anti-Latino Propaganda

In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, Latinos became the main group targeted by nativist campaigns to limit immigration. Conservative politicians and talk-radio shows played up the image of illegal aliens who sneak into the United States to take jobs away from Americans and bring in illegal drugs. These propaganda campaigns were used to tighten the border with Mexico, limit Latino immigration, cut off welfare to immigrants (both legal and illegal), and draft English-only legislation designed to make English the official language of the United States. Propaganda in the twenty-first century claiming undocumented Latino immigrants were rapists and criminals circled in the highest government offices of the United States and was repeated several times by President Donald Trump.

Anti-African American Propaganda

Anti-African American propaganda has existed since the birth of the nation. Southern states actively promoted African American stereotypes such as the “Sambo” image of ignorant and inferior Black people to justify slavery and White dominance. Alternatively, Black people were portrayed as savages to justify the brutal treatment and the severe punishments handed out for defying White authority: Nat Turner’s rebellion provided ample evidence for propagandists of the danger of treating slaves too leniently. The end of slavery was supported by many northern White Americans, but ending slavery was not the same as providing equality, and most White people were not in favor of equality. Antiabolitionist propaganda capitalized on the ambivalence that White Americans felt toward the idea of equality for African Americans. The fear of race mixing, for example, was exploited in Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, an 1860s booklet published by antiabolitionist forces.

The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the end of the Civil War (1865) did not end the propagandizing. Reconstruction became the new ideological battleground. Populist politicians and southern Democrats became the leading political propagandists, promoting racial segregation. More violent racial propaganda came from underground organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Jim Crow laws handed southern segregationists a political victory that quieted propagandizing until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s disturbed the status quo and led to a new round of racial propaganda. Hate groups thrived, turning their attention to affirmative action and other programs that attempted to remedy the inequities of earlier eras.

In Times of War

Nations always wage massive propaganda campaigns in times of war, both to generate solidarity at home and support from the international community. In US history, wartime propaganda has often adopted a strongly racial tone. In World War I, newspapers, magazines, military training materials, and government advertising posters featured images of the German “Hun,” with monocle and spiked helmet. World War II produced images of slant-eyed and buck-teethed Japanese. These latter images were recycled with slight variation during the Korean conflict and the Vietnam War. Arab and Islamic terrorists became a popular scapegoat in the 1980s and 1990s, with the Iran hostage crisis and Operation Desert Storm. The rise of Islamophobia became especially pronounced following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the start of the US-led War on Terror. In the eyes of some, racial propaganda reached a crescendo with the election of President Trump in 2016, as he campaigned on an anti-immigration platform and promised to protect America from terrorism by banning Muslims from entering the country. His re-election campaign in 2024 shifted rhetoric to attack undocumented immigrants, using racial propoganda to incite fear.

Bibliography

Atkins, Stephen E. Holocaust Denial as an International Movement. Westport: Praeger, 2009.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Kamalipour, Yahya R. War, Media, and Propaganda: A Global Perspective. Lanham: Rowman, 2004.

LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan. US Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport: Greenwood P, 1999.

“Racism in Anti-Japanese Propaganda.” Hampton Roads Naval Museum, www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/museums/hrnm/Education/EducationWebsiteRebuild/AntiJapanesePropaganda/AntiJapanesePropagandaInfoSheet/Anti-Japanese%20Propaganda%20info.pdf. Accessed 13 Dec. 2024.

Swenson, Ali, and Ayanna Alexander. “Trump’s Attacks on Prosecutors Echo Long History of Racist Language.” PBS, 22 Aug. 2023, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trumps-attacks-on-prosecutors-echo-long-history-of-racist-language. Accessed 13 Dec. 2024.

Wood, Forrest G. Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.