At one time, America’s cities were run by political gangs, like Tammany Hall in New York. They were the natural, urban reaction to the more aristocratic Sons of Cincinnati and other Masonic-related organizations whose members, of the Revolutionary War’s officer class, owned most of the land and businesses in America.
In order to gain power for the urban political machines, immigrants were brought in to provide the endless demand for cheap labor. First, the Scotch-Irish came. Unwilling to be patsies to government, their independence drove them through the cities and into the hills. They settled Appalachia and beyond, refusing to be organized in the desired urban mobs.
Irish Catholics were more cooperative. In a nation run by an anti-Catholics power structure that was largely Protestant and Masonic, they naturally gravitated to the cities, where their growing numbers, faithful bishops, priests, nuns, parochial school systems, social support, and Catholic hospitals provided umbrellas that sheltered them as they grew.
Their heritage is still visible, as are the remains of the Italian Catholics who took over as the Irish prospered and moved to the suburbs, the country, and growing oblivion. Many of the Irish Catholics have become so acclimatized that they’ve become Protestants and may be only a generation or so away from disappearing.
They were followed by endless waves of Polish, Slavic, Slavish (the difference was once thought to be important), Hungarian, Croatian, and other largely Catholic peoples, along with a few Greek Orthodox. They moved into the cities and provided cheap labor for the booming industries that fed the insatiably demand for new and better modes of transport, agriculture, and construction.
The Culture of Hate saw the urban islands of Catholics as a disruption to funding. “We’ve got to get rid of them. Catholic schools are keeping us from funding the public schools. Their hospitals take funding away from our public hospitals. They’ve got their own little empire, their own cheaper, more efficient alternatives to big government, in every American City. If we don’t put them out of business, we might have to work for a living.”
The Culture of Hate leveled two major attacks at the Catholic establishment. First, they took advantage of the newly invented mechanical cotton picker. In just half a decade, the mechanization of cotton picking left millions of Southerners utterly unemployed and destitute. “It’s our duty to provide housing for these poor, newly unemployed people.” announced pious Northerners, whose carpetbaggers had barely finished looting the post-Civil War South. As a result, huge “projects” were built in Northern cities, justified by the newly exalted “city planners” of Bauhaus fame. These enlightened devotees of bigger government added a front in their war against individual freedom in Europe to attack the Catholic islands of freedom in urban America.
Catholic neighborhoods were intentionally shattered. Property in nice, solid, stabile neighborhoods was condemned and huge, high-rise apartments took their place. Residents were heavily subsidized and thought they were being helped. Stores and shopping areas were destroyed in the process. Every step “forward” was ensured to provide profits to those who’d helped waged the war on Catholic, urban America. Constructions unions, appraisers, mortgagors, and every other finger in the pie got plenty of plums.
That same war was soon expanded to the inner rings of suburbs. Though it’s politically incorrect to remember and repeat the conversations that took place, older Americans can remember them: “We’ll destroy the inner cities with urban renewal, and move the dislocated Negroes into some carefully selected suburbs, especially where there’s lots of Catholics. We’ll buy a couple of houses on a few key blocks, and move big, fatherless, dislocated families into them. The rest of the people will sell out, at ever declining prices. Better yet, they’ll have to mortgage new houses farther away! We’ll squeeze ’em for years!” The process was called “block-busting”. With it, whole sections of cities, and many smaller municipalities that had the misfortune to be near cities that had people they wanted to relocate, were destroyed, often in only two or three years.
A second prong of the attack on America’s cities began in the nineteen fifties. Wide ribbons of concrete between rows of barbed wire-topped cyclone fencing, was made to slash through and divide whatever neighborhoods hadn’t already been destroyed by the newly constructed slums. The new highways further undermined the Catholic parishes, schools, hospitals, and social structures. At the same time, more distant suburbs could be built, all filled with houses that were purchased with expensive mortgages and taxed to provide for the huge increase in public education. The GOG (Guild of Government) looked as if it was winning.
Nearly all of those used in this process were utterly unaware that they were being used. To this day, gullible souls still believe what they were told during those heady days, “You have a right to participate in the American dream, and we’re going to help.”
