Anger: An American History By STACY SCHIFF

Anger: An American History
By STACY SCHIFF  
New York Times DEC. 18, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/opinion/sunday/anger-an-american-history.html?_r=0
WHERE, many have asked these last weeks, do the rhetorical fireballs — the raging suspicion and rabid xenophobia — come from? Barring people from our shores, Paul Ryan reminds us, is “not what this country stands for.” Emma Lazarus would have agreed. But while the demonizing may sound un-American, it happens also to be ur-American.
Well before Japanese internment camps, before the Know-Nothing Party, before the Alien and Sedition Acts, New England drew its identity from threats to public safety. We manned the nation’s watchtowers before we were even a nation.
From that earlier set of founding fathers — the men who settled 17th century Massachusetts — came the first dark words about dark powers. No matter that they sailed to these shores in search of religious freedom. Once established, they pulled up the gangplank behind them. The city on a hill was an exclusively Puritan sanctuary. The sense of exceptionalism — “we are surely the Lord’s firstborn in this wilderness,” the Massachusetts minister William Stoughton observed in an influential 1668 address — bound itself up from the start with prejudice. If you are the pure, someone else needs to be impure.http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/opinion/sunday/anger-an-american-history.html?_r=1