Born November 2, 1938
Washington, D.C.
Presidential advisor, newspaper columnist, presidential candidate, anti-immigrant crusader
"Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common."
S ome Americans take pride in describing the United States as a nation of immigrants, and there is no doubt that since 1620 the character of the North American continent has been drastically changed as a result of people arriving from Europe, Africa, and Asia. But the celebration of the nation of immigrants has often been countered by a strong backlash against new arrivals. It happened in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the secretive Know Nothing Party, and it happened again at the end of the twentieth century with the repeated presidential aspirations of Pat Buchanan, a well-known conservative (supporting traditional values) newspaper columnist and presidential advisor.
Buchanan's efforts to achieve the White House, while never close to successful, illustrated a thread running through American politics, in which those born in the United States have blamed foreign sources for their own economic unhappiness. In the case of Buchanan, he blamed two main targets: inexpensive goods imported from Asia, which he has said creates worries about job security, and illegal immigration from Mexico, which he has vowed to stop by erecting a wall along the Mexican-American border. Buchanan's political positions have also emphasized the importance of religion in public life, a set of strict moral values, and an emphasis on minimizing government interference with business. In repeated campaigns for the presidency, Buchanan has demonstrated there is a small but steady core of Americans sympathetic to his viewpoint.
Early years
Patrick Joseph Buchanan was born in Washington, D.C., the son of a well-off insurance company executive who gave his sons boxing lessons as preparation for life. The Buchanan brothers led a rowdy existence that included occasional visits by the police department for disruptive behavior, fighting, and using their father's car without permission. While a senior attending Georgetown University in Washington, Buchanan was accused of assaulting the police officers who confronted him during a traffic stop. He was spared a jail sentence, but was forced to take a year off from Georgetown, which he spent working for his father. It was, perhaps, a measure of a combative personality that he later redirected into writing and politics.
After graduating from Georgetown, Buchanan went to Columbia University's School of Journalism, determined to redirect his forceful personality. Soon after graduating, he was hired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper to write editorials, a job Buchanan felt gave him a suitable outlet for his argumentative tendencies. Buchanan was one of the youngest members of the paper's editorial staff. His work was well regarded and he was soon promoted.
Buchanan's newspaper career started in 1962, at the beginning of one of the most controversial decades in modern American history. President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served 1961–63) was the first Roman Catholic to be elected to the White House and the first Democrat elected since 1948. Throughout the South, African Americans were campaigning for equal civil rights, using tactics of nonviolent marches and sit-ins led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968). The United States was just beginning a long, steady buildup of military forces in Vietnam. For the young editorial writer working for a conservative newspaper in St. Louis, many of these developments were highly distasteful. Buchanan authored many editorials highly critical of King's civil rights movement, while supporting a strong anticommunist foreign policy towards the Soviet Union (a country made up of fifteen republics, the largest of which was Russia, that in 1991 became independent states). Buchanan was influenced by J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), the long-time director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who strongly suspected that American communists sympathetic to the Soviet Union were influencing the civil rights movement.
Getting into politics
In 1966, Buchanan quit his job at the Post-Dispatch, frustrated that it would be years before he could expect to succeed his boss on the editorial page. Instead, he went to work for former vice president Richard Nixon (1913–1994), the unsuccessful Republican candidate for president in 1960 who was planning to run again in 1968. Buchanan got a job writing speeches for Nixon and his eventual vice presidential running mate, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew (1918–1996), during their successful 1968 campaign. After Nixon became president, he hired Buchanan to serve on his staff as a speech writer and to help plan a strategy for reelection in 1972.
Buchanan's political career thus became closely linked to one of the most controversial politicians ever to occupy the White House. Nixon was the only president to resign from office in the face of almost certain impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives. (To be impeached means to be accused of serious wrongdoing while in office. In Nixon's case, he was accused of involvement in planning a burglary at the headquarters of the opposition Democratic Party in June 1972, at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and then helping to cover up the burglary. His involvement and participation in the cover-up ran contrary to his oath of office, which required him as the president to uphold the law.)
Nixon resigned from office in 1974, to be succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford (1913–; served 1974–77). (In 1973, Ford had succeeded Agnew as vice president, after Agnew resigned in light of accusations of earlier wrongdoings as a Maryland government official.) Buchanan worked for President Ford briefly, but he decided to return to the Post-Dispatch when Ford decided not to appoint him to be the U.S. ambassador to South Africa. At the time, South Africa was going through a bloody struggle between the minority white rulers and the majority of black Africans pressing for a voice in government. As a vocal critic of the civil rights movement in the United States, Buchanan was not considered suited to represent the United States in a country whose government was widely regarded as racist.
A second career in journalism, and back to politics
Buchanan left the White House to start a second career in journalism, first as a syndicated newspaper columnist (in which his stories are printed in many papers across the country) and later as the host of television talk shows. Buchanan gained a reputation as one of the most conservative commentators on politics. He was the host of a long-running program on CNN called Crossfire (1982–95) and also of a program called Capital Gang (1988–92). Buchanan gained a reputation as a leading representative of highly conservative politics.
In 1985, Buchanan briefly interrupted his television journalism career to become director of communications for President Ronald Reagan (1911–; served 1981–89) for two years. His time working in the White House gave Buchanan a record of practical experience, as well as exposure on television as a journalist, which put him in a unique political position to run for office later.
Buchanan reentered the political scene in 1992, running against President George Bush (1924–; served 1989–93) for the Republican nomination as president. Buchanan never seriously challenged Bush, but in the New Hampshire primary election (held to choose candidates for the Republican party's annual convention and in 1992 held to make the renomination of Bush official), Buchanan won 37 percent of the vote. The result was widely regarded as symbolic of discontent by some conservative Republicans with the generally moderate policies of the first President Bush. The high percentage demonstrated the existence of a core of conservative voters sympathetic with Buchanan's viewpoint, as well.
Buchanan tried to gain the Republican nomination again in 1996, when his chief opponent was former U.S. senator Bob Dole (1923–) of Kansas. Buchanan failed to gain the nomination, but some Republican Party leaders were surprised at the depth of public support for his conservative views. In 2000, Buchanan abandoned his efforts to be nominated as a Republican and instead mounted a presidential campaign as the candidate of the Reform Party. He came in a distant fourth, with less than half a million votes (out of over 103 million votes cast). The number represented less than one half of one percent of the total votes cast.
Buchanan returned to journalism, where he appeared regularly on radio and television and in newspapers. He started a new magazine entitled The American Conservative in 2002.
Buchanan and immigration
In 2002, Buchanan published a book titled The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. In his book, Buchanan warned that white Americans would soon become a minority in the United States for the first time, due partly to illegal immigration from Mexico and other countries of Central America and partly to the fact that white women in the United States had relatively fewer babies than women of other races. In Buchanan's view, the relative decline of the number of Americans with European ancestors raised a danger to the civilization of the United States.
In his book, Buchanan declared that there was a great chasm, or division, in American society: "This chasm in our country is not one of income, ideology, or faith," he wrote, "but of ethnicity and loyalty." On the morning of September 11, 2001, four teams of terrorists seized control of civilian jet planes. Hijackers forced two of the planes into each of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, bringing the two skyscrapers crashing to the ground. A third team of terrorists intentionally flew their plane into the Pentagon, the building in Virginia that houses the headquarters of the U.S. military. The fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, brought down by passengers who realized the hijackers intended to hit a government building in Washington and forced the plane down before it could reach its target. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, Buchanan declared that "suddenly we awoke to the realization that among our millions of foreign-born, a third are here illegally, tens of thousands are loyal to regimes [governments] with which we could be at war, and some are trained terrorists sent here to murder Americans. For the first time since [U.S. general and future president] Andrew Jackson [1767–1845] drove the British out of Louisiana in 1815, a foreign enemy is inside the gates, and the American people are at risk in their own country."
Buchanan asserted in his book that "in 1960, only sixteen million Americans did not trace their ancestors to Europe. Today [he wrote in 2002], the number is eighty million. No nation has ever undergone so rapid and radical a transformation." In Buchanan's view, such a large inflow of immigrants threatened the cultural and political standards long established in the United States. Many of the newcomers, he asserted, had little interest in adapting to American ways; they were interested solely in achieving economic success while maintaining their traditional cultural habits and beliefs.
In the twenty-first century, he said, immigration from Mexico in particular has taken on a new aspect. While earlier immigrants from Europe planned to move to the United States permanently, immigrants from Mexico plan on working only temporarily in the United States. Moreover, some Mexicans view immigration as a form of la reconquista, ("reconquest" in English) to reverse the result of the 1848 war with Mexico. As a result of that war, the United States took control of Texas and other Mexican territory, including territory now occupied by California, New Mexico, and Arizona.
In Buchanan's opinion, large-scale immigration, especially from Mexico, threatens the very nature of the United States. "We are not descended from the same ancestors [as we once were]," Buchanan asserted. "We no longer speak the same language. We do not profess the same religion…. Common principles of government are not enough to hold us together…. Americans no longer agree on values, history or heroes."
Although Buchanan was dramatically rejected by voters in his presidential campaign of 2000, receiving less than one half of one percent of the votes cast, he did emerge as a spokesman for Americans who believe that cultural factors including religion are an essential element in defining what the term "American" should mean. His argument had many similarities to issues raised more than 150 years earlier, when some Protestants objected that the large-scale immigration of Catholics from Ireland (who may have included some of Buchanan's own ancestors) was fundamentally changing what they perceived as the essentially Protestant character of the United States.
Buchanan's concerns addressed a basic issue surrounding migration to the United States: at what stage should it be finished? If American society celebrates its past as a "nation of immigrants," should the celebration stop when the immigrants are found coming from places besides western Europe? Or has it always been part of the character of human beings to roam the earth to find better opportunities? In prehistoric times those opportunities came in the form of more plentiful herds of animals to hunt; in a modern industrial society, they come in the form of better-paying jobs. Whether immigration to the United States has an endpoint is a question to which there may not be a right or wrong answer.
—James L. Outman
For More Information
Books
Brown, Mary Elizabeth. Shapers of the Great Debate on Immigration: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Buchanan, Patrick J. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.
Castles, Stephen, and Mark J. Miller. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: Guilford Press, 1993.
Harris, Nigel. The New Untouchables: Immigration and the New World Worker. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995.
Miller, Mark J., ed. Strategies for Immigration Control: An International Comparison. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Periodicals Press, 1994.
Solomon, Barbara M. Ancestors and Immigrants; a Changing New England Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956. Reprint, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.
Periodicals
Jacoby, Tamar. "Too Many Immigrants?" Commentary (April 2002): p. 37.
Klinkner, Philip A. "The Base Camp of Christendom." The Nation (March 11, 2002): p. 25.
McNicoll, Geoffrey. "The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization" (book review). Population and Development Review (December 2002):p. 797.
Web Sites
Benedetto, Richard. "Profile of Patrick Buchanan." USA Today.http://cgi.usatoday.com/elect/ep/epr/eprbprof.htm (accessed on March 9, 2004).
Buchanan, Patrick J. "A City of Big Ideas and Tiny Minds." The American Cause.http://www.theamericancause.org/patacityofbigideas.htm (accessed on March 9, 2004).
The Official Pat Buchanan for President 2000 Archive.http://www.buchanan.org/ (accessed on March 1, 2004).
"One on One: Patrick Buchanan." Online NewsHour (October 28, 1999). http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/election/july-dec99/buchanan_10-28.html (accessed on March 9, 2004).
"Patrick Buchanan." Online NewsHour (September 12, 2000). http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/election/july-dec00/buchanan_9-12.html (accessed on March 9, 2004).
U.S. Immigration and Migration Reference Library
