While researching the short story “Spinning,” I discovered yet another (egregious) example of history repeating itself. After the Civil War, when cotton once again flowed to the North, hundreds of thousands of French-Canadian immigrants came south across the order to work in the textile mills of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. By 1900, one-tenth of New Englanders spoke French. The immigrants clustered in communities dubbed “Little Canadas,” often over-crowded, company-owned tenements. Determined to maintain their culture, the Catholic “invaders” aroused suspicion among their Protestant neighbors and raised alarms throughout the nation. In 1881, The New York Times described them as “ignorant and unenterprising. They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.” There was fear that they planned to colonize the northeast corner of the continent and create “New France” under the control of the Roman Catholic faith. Groups like the Know Nothings and American Protective Association burned Catholic churches, assaulted priests, and attacked Catholic neighborhoods. The fear of French Canadians waned only when immigrants began to arrive from farther afield: Jews and non-Protestants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Today the perceived threat to the “American way of life” comes from south of the border, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The location of origin changes, but the reaction on U.S. shores doesn’t. To learn more about the immigrant experience and other topics in my writing — from historical to contemporary, serious to humorous, and realistic to absurdist — see NOVELS and SHORT STORIES.
