Twenty-twenty is a year marked by division, polarization, and (perhaps most of all) damaging and dangerous rhetoric. One of the most concerning trends in recent years had been the rise of 19th-century style nativist rhetoric and sentiment. This project seeks to better understand and illuminate that rhetoric, as well as track the beginnings and iterations of nativism. Nativism, or the favoring of native inhabitants over immigrants, began not with Donald Trump or David Duke, but far earlier, deeply and perversely tied to the nation's two and a half centuries as both a cultural melting pot and hub of racism and xenophobia.
This project explores the rhetoric of nativism, and specifically the threads of nineteenth-century nativism in contemporary political discourse. To do so, we created a sentence-level database of speeches and writings from 19th-century thinkers and political figures. The database focuses on three major nativist movements: the Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s and 1850s, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the latter half of the century, and the Chinese exclusion movement in the final few decades of the 1800s. We then trained a neural network on this database to see whether it could learn to recognize nativist rhetoric, and test whether the model would pick up more modern (20th - 21st century) nativism. We applied the model to speeches from all U.S. presidents between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump, finding that our model could in fact detect nativist remarks in these speeches with some degree of accuracy. We are then able to use the model as a tool to better understand how those speeches approach immigration, or (in the future) quickly locate nativist passages in large datasets.
For access to the database, please contact [email protected]. A list of all analyzed speeches can be found at data_labeling/label/speeches/.