A hundred years ago, Muslims were furious over an immigration bill whose origins lay with advocacy by a headstrong and loudmouthed Republican in the White House. Posted on 08/23/2016 5:20:21 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
How America's Polygamy Ban Blocked Muslim Immigration
A hundred years ago, Muslims were furious over an immigration bill whose origins lay with advocacy by a headstrong and loudmouthed Republican in the White House.
The anti-immigration bill offended the Ottoman Empire, the rotting Caliphate of Islam soon to be defeated at the hands of America and the West, by banning the entry of “all polygamists, or persons who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy.”
This, as was pointed out at the time, would prohibit the entry of the “entire Mohammedan world” into the United States.
And indeed it would.
The battle had begun earlier when President Theodore Roosevelt had declared in his State of the Union address back in 1906 that Congress needed to have the power to “deal radically and efficiently with polygamy.” The Immigration Act of 1907, signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, had banned “polygamists, or persons who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy.”
It was the last part that was most significant because it made clear what had only been implied.
The Immigration Act of 1891 had merely banned polygamists. The newest law banned anyone who believed in the practice of polygamy. That group included every faithful believing Muslim.
The Ottoman Empire’s representatives argued that their immigrants believed in the practice of polygamy, but wouldn’t actually take more than one wife. This argument echoes the current contention that Muslim immigrants may believe in a Jihad against non-Muslims without actually engaging in terrorism. That type of argument proved far less convincing to Americans than it does today.
These amazing facts, uncovered by @rushetteny reveal part of the long controversial history of battles over Islamic migration into America.
Muslim immigration was still slight at the time and bans on polygamy had not been created to deliberately target them, but the Muslim practice of an act repulsive to most Americans even back then pitted their cries of discrimination and victimhood against the values of the nation. The Immigration Act of 1907 had been meant to select only those immigrants who would make good Americans.
And Muslims would not.
In his 1905 State of the Union address, President Theodore Roosevelt had spoken of the need “to keep out all immigrants who will not make good American citizens.”
Unlike modern presidents, Roosevelt did not view Islam as a force for good. Instead he had described Muslims as “enemies of civilization”, writing that, “The civilization of Europe, America and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization", praising Charles Martel and John Sobieski for throwing back the "Moslem conquerors" whose depredations had caused Christianity to have "practically vanished from the two continents."
While today even mentioning “Radical Islam” occasions hysterical protests from the media, Theodore Roosevelt spoke and wrote casually of “the murderous outbreak of Moslem brutality” and, with a great deal of foresight offered a description of reform movements in Egypt that could have been just as well applied to the Arab Spring, describing the "mass of practically unchained bigoted Moslems to whom the movement meant driving out the foreigner, plundering and slaying the local Christian."
In sharp contrast to Obama’s infamous Cairo speech, Roosevelt’s own speech in Cairo had denounced the murder of a Coptic Christian political leader by a Muslim and warned against such violent bigotry.
Muslims had protested outside his hotel, but Teddy hadn’t cared.
The effective implementation of the latest incarnation of the ban however had to wait a year for Roosevelt’s successor, President Taft. Early in his first term, the Ottoman Empire was already protesting because its Muslims had been banned from the country. One account claimed that 200 Muslims had been denied entry into the United States.
Despite these protests, Muslims continued to face deportations over polygamy charges even under President Woodrow Wilson. And polygamy, though not belief in it, remains a basis for deportation.
Though the law today is seldom enforced.
American concerns about the intersection of Muslim immigration and polygamy had predated Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson. The issue dated back even to the previous century. An 1897 edition of the Los Angeles Herald had wondered if Muslim polygamy existed in Los Angeles. “Certainly There is No Lack of Mohammedans Whose Religion Gives the Institution Its Full Sanction,” the paper had observed.
It noted that, “immigration officials are seriously considering whether believers in polygamy are legally admissible” and cited the cases of a number of Muslims where this very same issue had come up.
A New York Times story from 1897 records that, “the first-polygamists excluded under the existing immigration laws were six Mohammedans arrived on the steamship California.”
To their misfortune, the Mohammedans encountered not President Obama, but President Herman Stump of the immigration board of inquiry. Stump, an eccentric irascible figure, had known Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth and had been a wanted Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War.
In the twilight of his term, Stump had little patience and tolerance for either Islam or polygamy.
The Times story relates the laconic exchange between Stump and the Muslim migrants.
“You believe in the Koran?" asked President Stump.
"Thank Allah, yes," responded the men in chorus.
“The Koran teaches polygamy?" continued the Inspector through an interpreter.
"Blessed be Allah, it does!"
"Then you believe in polygamy?" asked Captain George Ellis.
"We do. We do! Blessed be Allah, we do," chorused the Arabs, salaaming toward the setting sun.
"That settles it," said President Stump. "You won't do."
President Stump’s brand of common sense has become keenly lacking in America today.
None of the laws in question permanently settled the issue. The rise of Islamist infiltration brought with it a cleverer Taquiya. The charade that Muslims could believe one thing and do another was dishonest on the one hand and condescending on the other. It was a willful deception in which Muslims pretended that they were not serious about their religion and Americans believed them because the beliefs at stake appeared so absurd and uncivilized that they thought that no one could truly believe them.
Theodore Roosevelt knew better. But by then he was no longer in office.
Unlike today’s talk of a ban on Muslim migration from terror states, laws were not being made to target Muslims. Yet Muslims were the likeliest group of foreigners to be affected by them. Even a hundred years ago, Islam was proving to be fundamentally in conflict with American values. Then, as now, there were two options. The first was to pretend that there was no conflict. The second was to avert it with a ban.
A century ago and more, the nation had leaders who were not willing to dwell in the twilight of illusions, but who grappled with problems when they saw them. They saw civilization as fragile and vulnerable. They understood that the failure to address a conflict would mean a loss to the “enemies of civilization”.
Debates over polygamy may seem quaint today, but yet the subject was a revealing one. Islamic polygamy was one example of the slavery so ubiquitous in Islam. The enslavement of people is at the heart of Islam. As we have seen with ISIS, Islamic violence is driven by the base need to enslave and oppress. Polygamy, like honor killings and FGM, is an expression of that fundamental impulse within the private social context of the home, but as Theodore Roosevelt and others understood, it would not stay there. If we understand that, then we can understand why these debates were not quaint at all.
American leaders of a century past could not reconcile themselves to Islamic polygamy. Yet our modern leaders have reconciled themselves to the Islamic mass murder of Americans.
Thus it always is. When you close your eyes to one evil, you come to accept them all.
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BFL. Is this where the whole gay marriage thing is going?
The country is full of Muslim polygamists and their multiple wives on welfare. One is listed as the wife, the others as sisters or cousins. Muslims lie.
Don’t forget that Utah Territory was denied State Utah until 1896 because Mormons were polygamists. It was not all just about muslims, although they love to take on the aggrieved role. Although, it might have been done with a wink and a nod, Utah had to outlaw the practice prior to Statehood.
Presumably, there were Mormon polygamists in Canada and Mexico who were hoping the law would not apply to them and they could walk back in. They just needed to await ubama’s so-called “executive amnesty” I guess.
Of course we can control who comes here.
Then the Armenian Genocide in 1915 ought to have put an end to all doubt as to the nature of Islam.
Destroy islam
I’ll take Mormon polygamists over Muslim polygamists any day.
Even with the prairie dresses, identical hairdos, Stepford wife blank stares, & cloned looks.
Better than burkas with mass murderer genes.
Excellent research.
Teddy Roosevelt may have been a “progressive”, but he was an American loving “progressive”.
ENFORCE THE LAW! “Though the law today is seldom enforced.”
LAW AND ORDER!
Here’s a no-brainer. Muzzards practice polygamy. They are streaming into this country. A democrat administration will allow them, illegally, to have 4 wives.
Unless this is blocked now, we’ll be paying for arabic-speaking day care centers for 10 million or so new “refugees”.
The 1890 Mormon Church manifesto only ended new marriages of the type, it did not dissolve existing marriages, particularly in their colonies in Alberta and Mexico where there was no civil law against it.
While the Canadian colonies stayed put and grew, many in the Mexican Colonies wanted to return to the United States for the obvious dangers of the Mexican Revolution. This presented them with a dilemma of which wife and family to abandon to conform to the U.S. law. In my friends case, the father was able to bring both wives and families back under the stipulation that they would live in separate houses. They basically lived that way until one wife died and the households were again combined, by which time most of the children were grown and gone anyway.
TR was savvy enough to understand that a law targeting Mormons (very unpopular at the time) would have little effect on them, but keep out the Mohammedans.
I have a challenge for those who claim that “Islam has contributed much to American History”.
Let them do actual research, starting with the Colonial Era, and list the “Muslim Contributions”
Here is a partial list right off the top of my head, without even looking:
1. The Slave Trade
2. The Barbary Pirates
3. One line of lyrics in the Marine Hymn (”To the shores of Tripoli”)
4. Thomas Jefferson owning a Koran so he could figure out why they do what they do.
5. The first International War the US had to fight after its Revolution.
6. Thomas Jefferson’s wise counsel against Islam
7. Slavery, resulting in a bitter Civil War
8. Silly-Looking Zuave uniforms on both sides of the above bitter conflict.
9. Teddy Roosevelt’s wise decision described in this article
10. Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Robert Kennedy “because, “The Palestinians”
11. 52 American Hostages in Iran
12. Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait, resulting in the First Gulf War
13. Attack on the World Trade Center 1993
14. The destruction of two American Embassies in Africa
15. The attack on the USS Cole
16. WTC and the Pentagon on 9/11/01
17. All the other stuff that came after that, too numerous to list
18. Benghazi 2012
19. Orlando 2016
20. ISIS
And that’s just off the top of my head. There’s more.
Yes, it's happening NOW...
Our borders are 'controlled' by liberal elites. Elites are welcoming a large third world servant class that will vote reliably democrat, keep wages down and stop blacks if they attempt to get off the liberal plantation.
It is suicidal to allow even one muslim into our country!
BAN all muslim immigration! Outlaw the muslim Brotherhood, and CLOSE all muslim Brotherhood mosques and organizations (e.g., CAIR, MSA, MAS).
Do everything else to make life very tough for muslims in the USA, so that they self-deport or convert to Christianity!!!!
ENOUGH is ENOUGH!!!!
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