Risking civil war at home: The "Ground Zero Mosque" and lessons from Randolph Bourne
As the construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque” goes forward, the conclusion of legal wrangling has not soothed tempers. Last month, the pundit Juan Williams explained to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that “when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.” Williams was subsequently fired by National Public Radio, igniting a back-and-forth about whether his comments were “bigoted.” A week earlier, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar had walked off “The View” as O’Reilly decried the building of a mosque so near the site where “Muslims killed us on 9/11.”And a week before that, Christiane Amanpour hosted a town hall meeting titled “Holy War: Should Americans Fear Islam?” No downtown façade could cause such conflict, and no television special will settle it. To understand recent anxieties about Islam’s place in American life, we must lift our gaze from the streets of Manhattan and re-examine U.S. commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and across the Muslim world.
Almost a century ago, the American essayist Randolph Bourne warned that one of the unavoidable consequences of our nation’s diversity is that when we wage war on a foreign foe, we risk civil war at home. Published in the Atlantic Monthly prior to the United States’ entrance into WWI, Bourne’s prophetic essay, “Transnational America,” argued that if his country joined the war, it would be declaring war on itself, uprooting the lives of millions of ethnically German citizens and bathing the nation in hate and mistrust. On the other hand, if the United States remained neutral and cultivated domestic peace, it would show the world the possibility of multi-ethnic harmony. Bourne’s ultimatum was two-sided: while peace at home inspires peace abroad, war abroad breeds domestic division.
America has been at war for almost a decade, and the violence has already cost many nations so much. Yet we are only beginning to pay the wages of war at home. A land of immigrants, America contains within its borders all possible fault-lines of global conflict. Because at our best we are inviting, at our worst, we can always find representatives of our overseas enemies right around the corner, whether they are German, Japanese, or Muslim Americans.
Bourne’s ultimatum went unheeded and his prophecy was confirmed. As American warships sailed east in the winter of 1918, witch-hunts, raids, and show trials began on the home-front. Rioters destroyed German language newspapers and printing presses. Public libraries held book-burnings. Local governments forced hundreds of German-American schools to shut down for good. In Montana, a traveling salesman was sentenced to seven to twenty years for calling new government regulations a “big joke.” On April 4, 1918, a mob lynched the German-American Robert Prager, an Illinois miner, for making “disloyal remarks.” Intrepid German immigrants settled much of the interior of our nation. Between 1917 and 1919, their memory was effaced from the landscape, as thousands of streets and towns were renamed. Most ethnic Germans stopped speaking German altogether. An entire culture was erased.
The formal end of war could not quell the violence it had unleashed. As anti-German attacks ebbed, the infamous Palmer Raids began. Named for Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, these government assaults on foreign-born union organizers, striking coal-workers, and night-school teachers grew out of the rage at “hyphenated Americans” that President Woodrow Wilson had stoked during the war. To kill foreigners abroad, the American people had to be taught to fear them at home. Bourne did not live to see the full unfolding of his prophecy. He died shortly after the Armistice, a victim of the 1918 flu pandemic that had thrived on the mass movement of troops across continents and oceans.
Today our country finds itself once again embroiled abroad and sick at home. It is true that we live in an age of unequal sacrifice, an age where the “casualty gap” between rich and poor prevents most Americans from feeling the brutality of the wars they endorse. It is a scandal that the majority of us can engage in the virtual reality of peace no matter how many bullets are fired, drone-strikes are authorized, buildings bombed. And yet, a virtual peace will never feel truly real. In a fight that affects so few Americans directly, the way we suffer for the violence we deliver abroad is through internal disunity, endless fear, and a useless, wasting rage.
Almost ten years after 9/11, the wounds of that violent day seem to gape ever wider. Salt does not heal wounds and war does not bring peace. An analysis of the furor over the “Ground Zero Mosque” cannot merely trace the lines of battle. It must ask why there are battle-lines at all, why there are war-cries echoing through the glass valley of downtown Manhattan. The answer is obvious but difficult to hear: we have brought our war home. Bourne’s ultimatum is as true today as it was 94 years ago. If we want peace at home, we must pursue it abroad.
Jeremy Kessler is a freelance writer and a graduate student in law and literature at Yale University.
