Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Hannan / Hicks From the Sticks / Immigration The Odd Story Behind ProEnglish, Eric Crafton's English Only Benefactor
Posted by Caleb Hannan on Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 4:28 PM
John Tanton, Eric Crafton's older brother. Spiritually speaking.
Other than Eric Crafton, John Tanton is the man most responsible for foisting English Only on Nashville. Tanton, a 74-year-old retired opthamologist, founded ProEnglish, the Arlington, Va. group that provided the lion's share of Crafton's funding. This week we tried to take a closer look at Crafton and his motivations, a similar approach to the one taken by Christopher Hayes of lefty-leaning mag In These Times.
Back in 2006, Hayes drove up to the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula to talk to Tanton, a man he'd identified as basically the progenitor of all this crazy English Only/anti-immigration talk:
Tanton may not make headlines, but even a casual dusting of today's anti-immigration movement reveals his fingerprints everywhere. Turn on Lou Dobbs and you'll see experts from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the nation's oldest and most influential immigration restriction group, which Tanton founded in 1979. Scan the newspapers and you'll find Republican lawmakers reporting a tidal wave of calls from members of NumbersUSA, which Tanton cofounded. Watch the committee hearings on C-SPAN and you'll hear anti-immigration talking points lifted straight from the Center for Immigration Studies, another Tanton creation. And on and on.
Hayes went up to Michigan expecting to meet some sort of firebrand. Tanton, however, turned out to be an entirely different animal. A much weirder, ideologically compromised animal who got into the race-baiting game because he was really, really afraid that, one day in the not so distant future, we'd all run out of food...
As Hayes discovered, Tanton's seemingly fringe beliefs got their start in an odd mishmash of environmental conservation (he was a committee chair for a Sierra Club chapter) and population control (he helped start northern Michigan's first Planned Parenthood clinic). He was heavily influenced by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb, which predicted catastrophic worldwide famine thanks to the exponential growth in population and incremental growth in food production.
So how did we end up where we are today?
In a nutshell, Tanton determined that immigrants were the primary actors in his apocalyptic nightmare (because they have more babies than non-immigrants), then realized that his numbers-based argument wouldn't carry water with the thousands of lunkheaded fundraisers he'd need to get out the message. So he found a subject with the emotional power to resonate with Real Amurricuns: xenophobia.
Crisscrossing the country, Tanton found little interest in his conservation-based arguments for reduced immigration, but kept hearing the same complaint. "'I tell you what pisses me off,'" Tanton recalls people saying. "'It's going into a ballot box and finding a ballot in a language I can't read.' So it became clear that the language question had a lot more emotional power than the immigration question."As a result of his anti-immigration beliefs, Tanton ended up taking money from a truckload of dubious groups, the kind of people who think eugenics hasn't gotten a fair shake. Oddly enough, some people, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, thought this was enough to label him a racist. Crazy, right?
Tanton tried to persuade FAIR to harness this "emotional power," but the board declined. So in 1983, Tanton sent out a fundraising letter on behalf of a new group he created called U.S. English. Typically, Tanton says, direct mail garners a contribution from around 1 percent of recipients. "The very first mailing we ever did for U.S. English got almost a 10 percent return," he says. "That's unheard of." John Tanton had discovered the power of the culture war.
Anyway, the entire article is worth your time, if only to better understand how easy it is for a superficially smart man to lose his way. Reminds us of someone we know.
Comments (2)
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I blogged about John Tanton back in August. He's well known as a racist and a bigot; his famous "WITAN memos" are alarming, to say the least.
John Tanton is also, as the Southern Poverty Law Center has discovered, a one-man nativist machine. The Tennessean did a story on this back in August but I don't remember any follow-up and I don't remember any other local media, including the TV news, ever pursuing it. God forbid we should eat into the 20 minutes of Lisa Spencer telling us what the weather was like today.
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