Re: Is Anders Behring Breivik Like Timothy McVeigh—Or Baruch Goldstein?
From: Ronald Kyser [Email him]
In reminding us of the 2009 massacre in Binghamton, Peter Brimelow unfortunately repeats a common spelling error—the name comes from “Bingham's Town”, [Bingham+ton] not “Bing Crosby’s' Estate Out On the Island”. [Bing+Hampton] James Fulford made a correction at the time, though that too contained an error. Bingham wasn't the city's founder—and there's an Asian immigration story in that, as well.
William Bingham was the richest man in America, but he never set foot in the Susquehanna Valley of which he owned so much. When his beloved wife died at 34 in 1801, he went to live with their daughter and son-in-law in England. (You could be a mother-in-law at 34 in those days—legitimately.) The true founder of Binghamton was Joshua Whitney, Jr., Bingham's land agent, who carried on the work begun by his father and his uncle William.
What got these Whitneys so fired up about owning and selling real estate? No doubt from the adolescent Joshua Sr. and William having seen their father Thomas gunned down by his landlord's men in 1766. Thomas was a Connecticut native who married a Massachusetts girl, and they settled on what he thought was the eastern side of those future states' boundary with New York. (Today's Hillsdale, a stone's throw from Peter.)
Sadly for Thomas, he was actually inside the private county of one Robert Livingston, the scion of a Scottish settler who really, REALLY assimilated to Dutch society. (And didn't care for illegal immigrants.) Joshua and William learned their lesson and, after serving with the Albany militia at nearby Saratoga, packed up their wagons, bypassing Mr. Cooper's famous settlement to start one of their own.
Researching this incident a few years ago, I found that the best source was a rare volume called Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775. The only available copy was in Australia. The owner answered me from Italy, and instructed her Kiwi assistant to send it to me. But even more amazing than that multicontinental exchange was the author's name: Sung Bok Kim.
It turns out that young Sung Bok was so impressed with 18th-century American history that he translated The Federalist Papers into Korean, apparently the first to do so. He then came to study at the source, eventually getting his PhD from Michigan State. His advisor suggested the thesis topic which became Landlord and Tenant, because no one had done an in-depth study of a colonial manor thus far. Literally, a job no American would do! (Or at least had done.)
Now, after decades at the State University of New York at Albany, Dr. Kim may be as batty as Ward Churchill. But, if these quotes from a FaceBook Tribute group are genuine, he sounds like our kind of nut:
[Sung Bok Kim is my hero, Facebook.com]
Or immigrant.
If you prefer your Asian imports to be more like Sung Bok Kim than Jiverly Wong, note this fact: Dr. Kim entered under the laws of 1962. Which we're trying to restore.
Cheers, Ron Kyser
(P.S. Oops—that's a letter-and-a-half, isn't it? Sorry. Thos. and Wm. Whitney are my direct ancestors, which I didn't know when riding the visitors' bench at high-school baseball games in Binghamton.)
Kyser claims—and we believe him—that he has read every word of each VDARE.COM columnist since the website first hit the Internet. His previous letters are archived here
[Peter Brimelow writes: (1) Aaargh! Sorry about that. But I’m posting this letter on VDARE.com’s home page because I think it’s important. (2) We will be drawing this letter to the attention of our Marcus Epstein, whose Korean grandparents also arrived under the pre-1965 law! (3) Ron Kyser wrote me a similarly erudite letter about his genealogical connection to Sweet Betsy From Pike, the folk song which I quoted concluded my November 15 2003 speech to the John Randolph Club that was the alleged cause of the Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC to VDARE.com) naming VDARE.com a “Hate Group” (and, of course, our naming the SPLC a “Treason Group”). I can’t find it now, but will post when I can. The point: America is more than just an idea—it is a nation, with an organic, a.k.a. ethnic, history.]
