Made In America - Bill Bryson [97]
As time went on, however, the terms grew uglier and more barbed, and tended to duster around harsh mono- or disyllables that were not so much spoken as spat: chink, kike, dago, polack, spic, hebe. Many of these had been floating around in English long before they became common in America. Polack was current in Elizabethan England and can be found in Hamlet. Chink appears to have been coined in Australia. Sheeny, a term of uncertain provenance, arose in the East End of London, where it was first noted in 1824. Kike, however, is an Americanism first recorded in 1917. It is thought to come from the -ki terminations on names like Levinski. Bohunk, probably a blend of Bohemian and Hungarian, is also of American origin and dates from the early 1900s. Spic, for Latin Americans, is said by Mencken to derive from ‘no spik Inglis’. Wop, from guappo, a Neapolitan expression for a dandy or fop, was brought from Italy but took on its unseemly, more generalized shadings in the New World. (The idea that wop is short for ‘without passport’ is simply untrue.)
Geographical precision has never been a hallmark of terms of abuse. Guinea began, accurately, as a term to describe an African in the late eighteenth century, then attached itself to Italians in the 1880s. Dago originated as a shortening of Diego and was at first applied to Spaniards before becoming associated with Italians, Greeks, Mexicans and anyone else suspiciously foreign and swarthy in the 1880s, as did greaser (dating from as far back as 1836) and the more recent grease-ball. Many others have mercifully fallen by the wayside, notably skibby for a Japanese (possibly, if somewhat mysteriously, from sukebei, ’lewdness’), and the even more obscure gu-gu for a Filipino, both once very common on the west coast.
Until the closing years of the nineteenth century America preserved most of its official racist animus for blacks and Indians, but in 1882 it added a new category when Chinese were expressly denied entry to the United States, and those already in the country were forbidden the rights and protections of citizenship. In 1907 the exclusion was extended to the Japanese. Throughout the early decades of this century, Orientals were compelled to attend segregated schools, and barred from owning property, providing landlords with considerable scope for abuse.36 Into the 1950s, the immigration quotas for Asian countries were niggardly, to say the least: 185 for Japan, 105 for China, 100 each for Korea and the Philippines.
But beginning in the 1890s, as the flood of immigrants from the poorer parts of Europe turned into a deluge, racism became more sweeping, more rabid and less focused. Anti-immigrant fraternities like the American Protective Association and the Immigration Restriction League sprang up and found large followings, and books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (which argued ‘scientifically’ that unrestricted immigration was leading to the dilution and degeneration of the national character) became best-sellers. William J. H. Traynor of the American Protective Association spoke for the mood of America when he argued against giving the vote to ‘every ignorant Dago and Pole, Hun and Slav’ and all the other ‘criminal riffraff of Europe’ that washed up on American shores.37 Such sentiments appealed not only to the masses but extended even to people of considerable eminence. The Immigration Restriction League numbered among its supporters the heads of Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, the University of Chicago and the Wharton School of Finance.38
Even Woodrow Wilson, who many would