BRITAIN, BEFORE ITS ABOLITION:
Earlier: Fenway Park Video Shows the America We Lost:
“After receiving almost 10 million views, the video was so flooded with pointed comments that Fenway had to lock it. The message was clear: The America in the video exposed the unmistakable decline of our current nation. Millions of viewers saw it and immediately understood why.”
Predictably, the first instinct of critics on the left was to cry racism over these heartfelt reactions to a lost America. It is true that the crowds in the footage were overwhelmingly white. Therefore, the argument goes, any longing that scene stirs in people must be rooted in racism and xenophobia, rather than a recognition of the defects of our current cultural reality.
This is a lazy, intellectually dishonest dodge. Race is not the point; assimilation is. The people in that 1950s footage were, in many cases, themselves first- or second-generation Americans—Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, among others. They were people whose parents or grandparents had arrived here through Ellis Island. They did not come to recreate the old country on American soil, transforming it. They came to become American—to transform themselves. They learned the language, embraced the civic norms, cheered on the same teams as their neighbors, and played by the same unwritten rules that made public spaces safe and orderly. Baseball was not merely entertainment. It was a sacrament of a shared American identity.
That unifying force is precisely what is missing today. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu—who was booed loudly along with Governor Maura Healey on the field at Opening Day—recently declared that “you cannot talk about any achievement that the city of Boston has had … without talking about the Somali community that has lifted our city up.” The Fenway video is a devastating rebuttal to her. There are no Somalis visible in those 1950s stands—nor could there have been, given the timeline.
Boston was already a thriving, safe city then—long before the mass migration waves of recent decades. Wu’s historically inaccurate boast is not just pandering, but a symptom of our so-called elites’ refusal to acknowledge that America’s greatness was built by those who bought into its culture, not by those who were imported to transform it.
Make America this again:
(Classical allusion in headline.)
