Pat Buchanan blasts Bush's SMU speech.

[pampango]

George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man’s papers are to be housed.

“What’s interesting about our country, if you study history, is that there are some ‘isms’ that occasionally pop up. One is isolationism and its evil twin protectionism and its evil triplet nativism. So if you study the ’20s, for example, there was an American-first policy that said, ‘Who cares what happens in Europe?’ … And there was an immigration policy that I think during this period argued we had too many Jews and too many Italians, therefore we should have no immigrants. And my point is that we’ve been through this kind of period of isolationism, protectionism and nativism. I’m a little concerned that we may be going through the same period. I hope that these ‘isms’ pass.”

First, “America First” was the antiwar movement begun in 1940 and backed by the young John F. Kennedy and his brother Joe, Gerald Ford and ex-president Herbert Hoover. It had nothing to do with the 1920s. (From wiki: The America First Committee launched a petition aimed at enforcing the 1939 Neutrality Act and forcing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to keep his pledge to keep America out of the war. They strongly distrusted Roosevelt, arguing that he was lying to the American people. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee)

As for “protectionism,” Harding did approve the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922, doubling rates to 38 percent. (wiki: The 1920 election put the Republicans in control of Congress and the White House. Special interests began to petition an amenable Congress for trade protection. ... Congress displayed a pro-business attitude in passing the tariff and in promoting foreign trade through providing huge loans to Europe, which in turn bought more American goods. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordney%E2%80%93McCumber_Tariff) But he also slashed Woodrow Wilson’s income tax rates by two-thirds, back to 25 percent. Compare this economic triumph with the fruits of W’s free-trade policy that wiped out 6 million U.S. manufacturing jobs, one of every three we had, and put America in hock to China. The protectionism Bush calls “evil” was the policy of 12 Republican presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Coolidge, who made the GOP America’s Party and converted this country into the industrial marvel of mankind. Is Bush oblivious to this? Did someone at Phillips Academy, Yale or Harvard Business School tell him Lincoln, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were free-traders?

As for “nativism,” the term dates to the mid-19th century and had to do with hostility to Catholics and Irish, not Italians and Jews. The 1924 Immigration Act, to end the Great Wave of the previous 30 years from Southern and Eastern Europe, did seek to preserve the ethnic character of the country. (wiki: The law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who were immigrating in large numbers starting in the 1890s, as well as prohibiting the immigration of East Asians and Asian Indians. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Immigration_Act) Yet, after 40 years of that moratorium, the Melting Pot having done its work, America was more united and socially at peace in the Eisenhower-JFK era than she has been before or since.
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Didn't know that Harding doubled the tariffs and cut the income tax rates by 2/3 from what they were under Woodrow Wilson (75% to 25%). Some things change (repubs' position on tariffs); some things remain the same (their love of tax cuts and restricting immigration-then targeting Catholics and Irish, now Hispanics and Muslims).