"These Inner-City Rats...."
Rats, Race, and Republican Rhetoric
In a recent interview US Senator from Alabama Tommy Tuberville praised Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation policy and his promise to withdraw federal funding from cities that harbor undocumented immigrants. He said:
You can stop the federal funding. President Trump can do anything he wants when it comes to the federal. Again, these inner-city rats, they live off the federal government….And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers, that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.
These remarks are as American as apple pie, and, as I’ll show, as German as apple strudel. And it is extremely ominous language that should alarm us all. I’ll explain why.
The image of racialized immigrants as invasive rats that parasitize the hard-working people of their host nation goes back at least as far as the late nineteenth century in the United States.
During the latter decades of the 19th century, American nativists were primarily terrified of immigrants from China. This widespread anti-Chinese sentiment culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigration for ten years. Chinese people were regarded as inherently primitive, filthy, and criminal.
The anti-Chinese sentiment of the period was cleverly exploited by the advertisement for rat poison called Rough on Rats. The illustration above advertising the poison shows a Chinese man poised to devour a living rat, while holding a second one by it’s tail.
What’s going on here?
Picturing Chinese people as rats was a common racist trope during the 1880s. But the bold text “THEY MUST GO!” adds to the story. It’s a none-too-subtle call for the expulsion, or even murder, of Chinese people.
Twenty years later, we find a more expansive version of a similar racist and xenophobic theme in this cartoon from Judge magazine, published in 1903. The US is represented as a dumping-ground for racialized Europeans from “the slums of Europe” (reminiscent of Tuberman’s reference to “inner-city rats”). Although more than a century old, this is right up the ally of Donald Trump’s assertions that other countries (of the “shithole” variety) are emptying their prisons and mental hospitals and sending their former occupants to the US to kill and rape Americans.
The man depicted in the upper left-hand corner of the picture is William McKinley, who had been assassinated two years previously by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist and a child of Polish immigrants. The implication, which would not have been lost on American readers of the day, is that these foreigners invading their country are not just racially inferior. They are murderous enemies of the United States.
Fast-forward not to 1935, the third year of the Hitler regime in Germany and the year that the Nuremberg Laws, which made Jewish people non-citizens of Germany, were passed. The Nazi strategy for making Germany Judenrein—Jew free—was to encourage self-deportation by making life unbearable for German Jews. About half of the tiny German Jewish population managed to leave, mostly to other European countries and the United States.
The cartoon above was published that same year in the Atlanta Georgian. Although the image contains no specific allusion in to Jewish people, the immigrant rats are explicitly labeled as communists and criminals, a standard Nazi claim that was echoed by American White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. And here, the rats confess to have the explicit project of destroying the US from within. Nonetheless, the Immigration Department allows them to come right in. This is a message about so-called “open borders.” It should be uncannily familiar to Americans.
The cartoon above was published in the Austrian newspaper Das Kleine Blatt in 1939, a year after the annexation of Austria to Germany. The first frame shows Jewish rats being swept out of Germany, with the words “Germany for Germans” (nowadays, a slogan of the German, far-right Alternative für Deutschland party) at the top.
In the bottom frame we see the doors of the Demokratische Länder firmly shut. This is no doubt a reference to the 1938 Evian Conference, a meeting of delegates from thirty-two countries in Evian-les-Bains, France, to address the plight of Jewish refugees from Nazism. Of these, which included the United States and other major powers, the Dominican Republic was the only one that agreed to open their doors to Jewish refugees.
The notice reproduced above was printed in 1942 to target Soviet troops. The text reads, “Jews are like rats, they eat the goods of your people! Expel the Jews from the land, for this is the only way to put their senseless creed to an end.”
The claim that the dehumanized other is rapacious, greedy, and parasitic, exploiting good, wholesome, hard-working citizens is a very common one. If it sounds familiar that might be because it’s right there in Tuberville’s statement that “these inner-city rats, they live off the federal government….And it’s time we find these rats…that are living off the American taxpayers, that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.”
The notorious 1940 movie The Eternal Jew makes this point very forcefully. A review of it titled “The Eternal Jew: The film of a 2000-year rat migration,” published in Unser Wille und Weg, states:
Just like rats, the Jews 2000 years ago moved from the Middle East to Egypt, at that time a flourishing land. Even then they had all the criminal traits they display today, even then they were the enemies of hard-working, creative peoples. In large hordes they migrated from there to the “Promised Land,” flooded the entire Mediterranean region, broke into Spain, France, and Southern Germany, then followed the German colonists as they moved into the countries of the East. Along they way they remained eternal parasites, haggling and cheating. Poland above all became the enormous reservoir from which Jewry sent its agents to every leading nation of Europe and the world.
Most of the examples that I’ve given urge the expulsion of people dehumanized as rats. But of course, in the Nazi case, things went much further. Once it became clear that Jews could not simply be shipped east, or deported to Madagascar, their only option was extermination. We see the exterminationist turn in this poster from German-occupied Denmark, depicting a hideous creature with a Jewish man’s head and a rat’s body. The text simply reads, in Danish, “Rats. Destroy them.”
Rats and extermination go hand-in-hand. As early as 1927 (six years before Hitler cam to power), this front-page illustration from the Nazi rag Der Stürmer pictured a Nazi man destroying a swarm of Jewish rats that had been eating away at the mighty German oak.
In 1942, Japanese Americans were rounded up and put in concentration camps. Even though there was an active, pro-Nazi movement in the United States, the civil liberties of German-Americans remained unaffected. That’s important, because it illustrates the intimate relationship between mass violence, dehumanization, and racialization.
It was very common for allied propaganda to dehumanize the Japanese. It was rare-to-nonexistent for it to dehumanize Germans. The image below is of a 1943 poster produced by the Douglas Aircraft company picturing a Japanese rat killed in a trap.
And so it goes on, both here and abroad….
Tommy Tuberville’s comment should not be dismissed as idiosyncratic. They represent something far more ominous. The dehumanization of racialized migrants is rapidly becoming normalized.
It is tempting to close one’s eyes to the reality unfolding in front of us. It is difficult for most Americans to recognize the degree to which we have slipped, and continue to slip, into overt fascism.
This is not a time for evasion and wishful thinking. We need to face who we are and what we have done. What happens next is up to us.
Thanks, David, for this insightful piece. I’m sharing it with others who are also concerned about this rhetoric.