Alexis De Tocqueville's It Didn T Happen Here

Most of the encounters occurred against members of the lower class by the local police and the state militia. The lower class tended to be made up almost entirely of factory workers and immigrants. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks cite a poignant, relevant statistic in their book It Didn’t Happen Here, “The United States Immigration Commission reported in 1911 that barely one-fifth of wage earners had native white parents, while almost three-fifths were of immigrant origin.” The labor conflicts of the late 19th century and 20th century may seem solely economic at a glance, but that approach only scratches the surface. Xenophobia, the fear of socialism and American exceptionalism are what provide the scaffolding for this economic divide and the government's role in it. In 1835 Alexis De Tocqueville wrote the book Democracy in America, De Tocqueville’s book brought to light the concept of American Exceptionalism. While Alexis De Tocqueville

The notion that the American status quo is superior to alternative ways of life is the force that validates the oppression towards the other. Scholar Andrew Delbanco reveals the hypocrisy that drives the exceptionalism of early Americans in writing “From outside their (the puritan) perspective we can see more clearly the hypocrisy of their coming to New England seeking religious freedom and then, in short order, banishing or hanging those they deemed heretics.” The trend of “banishing or hanging heretics” can be linked to the ideology of the 1880’s through the 1950’s by simply replacing the word heretics with deviant. As the deviant of the 1880’s through the 1950’s were the immigrants, the poor and the