Review by Ian Keogh
The 14th amendment to the US constitution guarantees US citizenship to any baby born in the United States. In 1898 a Supreme Court ruling confirmed this applied to all babies, irrespective of whether the parents were immigrants, illegal or otherwise. It’s a ruling that continues to anger Americans of a right wing persuasion, and according to the information supplied by Lawrence Goldstone a current Supreme Court judge has suggested it should be overturned.
Born in the USA is a wide-ranging social history of the USA from the pre-Civil War days onwards. It lays out who qualifies to be a US citizen, and the often fractious progress enabling it, so also a history of American racism, while also touching on the rights of women and workers. It amounts to white privileged Americans ensuring the restriction of wealth via political control, a process that continues to this day, irrespective of almost every US citizen being able to trace their ancestry to an immigrant.
As the USA expanded in the mid-19th century Chinese workers were widespread, resulting in a bill specifically banning Chinese immigrants. It represents a recurring thread of the USA wanting cheap labour, then demonising immigrants for political purposes. Goldstone doesn’t shy away from offensive terminology used in the 19th century, some of it shockingly from elected officials as they squirm around definitions to continue persecution. That even includes Presidents, while fraudulent eugenicists recur, always ready to claim some nationalities as inferior.
Dealing with a succession of historical moments means artist James Otis Smith doesn’t deliver panel to panel continuity, but montages, and individual illustrations connected by the word balloons. He keeps the art simple, which is best for the sometimes torturous progression of history, often using symbolic illustrations such as churches or guns to represent an idea. Clarity is the priority, and Smith distils complication to easily understood art.
Because Goldstone’s spotlight ranges so far and wide, there’s a feeling some subjects are included to highlight injustice and corruption rather than tying into any central thesis. While San Francisco’s history is important in context, much of what’s related could be more concise, yet that’s a compromised complaint when what’s revealed off-subject is fascinating. Who knew Japan might have gone to war with the USA in the 20th century’s first decade over 93 school children persecuted in San Francisco?
The narrator is an American whose parents are from a Central or South American country. As that’s a starting point and Goldstone is otherwise so wide-ranging, it’s surprising that there’s little mention of how the USA’s policies over the years have contributed significantly to the poverty of people below their Southern borders. That impacts directly on the perceived problem of immigrants from the South.
For anyone wanting the betterment of humanity Born in the USA will make depressing reading in explaining how a succession of scoundrels, racists and elitists shaped a nation, its cities and stalled any kind of progress on equality for so long. Still, a better understanding arms people with intelligence and Goldstone and Smith’s tour of iniquity ranks high on that score.
