History

decried.  “The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.” The issue girding identity politics in Roosevelt’s time was foreign immigration.  Immigrants had been washing over America’s shores by the millions for 35 years when TR gave his speech at a Knights of Columbus meeting in New York City, to an audience comprised mostly of Irish immigrants no less.  But identity politics in American history go back much further than that. Historians, though they don’t necessarily use the term in this context, are keenly aware that Andrew Jackson’s rise to the presidency came as he rode a wave of unprecedented identity politics.  Although their candidate was a wealthy land speculator who owned a cotton plantation nearly two square miles in size and over 150 slaves, Jackson’s campaign presented him as an every man.  They starkly contrasted him against and even mocked the well-heeled, blue blood elitism of his main rival, John Quincy Adams.

Charles Rangel used to be my Congressman. I was born and raised in the Bronx and attended John F. Kennedy High School, which is located in the borough’s southwestern corner, a neighborhood called Marble Hill.  Once 1970.  Powell himself was a living monument, a larger than life character who had outmaneuvered Tammany Hall to become the first African American to represent New York State in Congress, and only the second in America since the end of Reconstruction (1877).  When Rangel bested him, it was in the shadow of a corruption scandal.  Once an important trailblazer, Powell had devolved into a slacker who spent most of his time in the Caribbean, and an embezzler who, among other things, funneled Congressional money to his third wife through a no-show job while she was living in Puerto Rico.  In light of such scandals, the House voted not to seat Powell in 1969.  He sued and eventually won in the United States Supreme Court; Powell might be a crook, the Court ruled in Powell v. McCormack, but Congress had no right to refuse seating a duly elected official.