by Adam Serwer
Grant’s slippery pseudoscience also met with significant resistance. The anthropologist Franz Boas, himself of German Jewish descent, led the way in poking holes in Grantian notions of Nordic superiority, writing in The New Republic in 1917 that “the supposed scientific data on which the author’s conclusions are based are dogmatic assumptions which cannot endure criticism.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the United States in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:
What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.
The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
As the Immigration Act of 1924 neared passage, some in the restrictionist camp played up Grant’s signature Nordic theme more stridently than others. Addison Smith, a Republican congressman from Idaho, proudly invoked the Scandinavian, English, Irish, and other Northern European immigrants of his district, highlighting that among them were no “ ‘slackers’ of the type to be found in the cities of the East. We have ample room, but no space for such parasites.” Johnson was prepared to be coy in the face of opposition from other legislators—mostly those from districts with large numbers of non–Northern European immigrants—who railed against the Nordic-race doctrine. “The fact that it is camouflaged in a maze of statistics,” protested Representative Meyer Jacobstein, a Democrat from New York, “will not protect this Nation from the evil consequences of such an unscientific, un-American, and wicked philosophy.”
On the House floor in April 1924, Johnson cagily—but only temporarily—distanced himself from Grant. “As regards the charge…that this committee has started out deliberately to establish a blond race…let me say that such a charge is all in your eye. Your committee is not the author of any of these books on the so-called Nordic race,” he declared. “I insist, my friends, there is neither malice nor hatred in this bill.”
Once passage of the act was assured, however, motives no longer needed disguising. Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land….We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”
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“It was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the United States “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission.
In part, this was spin, an attempt to legitimize fascism. But Grant and his fellow pioneers in racist pseudoscience did help the Nazis justify to their own populations, and to other countries’ governments, the mission they were on—as one of Grant’s key accomplices was proud to acknowledge. According to Spiro, Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounded “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”
He wasn’t, but some of the American eugenicists whose work helped pave the way for the racist immigration laws of the 1920s received recognition in Germany. The Nazis gave Laughlin an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who had written the introduction to The Passing of the Great Race, received one from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in 1934. Leon Whitney, another of Grant’s fellow travelers, evidently received a personal thank-you letter from Hitler after sending the führer a copy of his 1934 book, The Case for Sterilization. In 1939, even after World War II began, Spiro writes, Lothrop Stoddard, whom President Harding had praised in his 1921 diatribe against race-mixing, visited Nazi Germany and later wrote that the Third Reich was “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”
What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,” observes James Q. Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.” Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”
The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.” At the same time, Heinrich Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.
Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that “the view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period, and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.”
The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.
Grant’s final project, Spiro writes, was an effort to organize a hunting expedition with Hermann Göring, the commander in chief of the Nazi air force, who went on to become Hitler’s chosen successor. Grant died in May 1937, before the outing was to take place. A year and a half later, Kristallnacht signaled the official beginning of the Holocaust.
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America has always grappled with, in the words of the immigration historian John Higham, two “rival principles of national unity.” According to o
ne, the United States is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
People of both political persuasions like to tell a too-simple story about the course of this battle: World War II showed Americans the evil of racism, which was vanquished in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act brought nonwhites into the American polity for good. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 forever banished the racial definition of American identity embodied in the 1924 immigration bill, forged by Johnson and Reed in their crusade to save Nordic Americans from “race suicide.”
The truth is that the rivalry never ended, and Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy. As the Columbia historian Ira Katznelson writes in Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013), the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the United States didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.
The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it and demanded that their country live up to it. Their valor helped defeat first the Nazis and then the American laws that the Nazis had so admired. What the Nazis saw as a weakness turned out to be a strength, and it destroyed them.
Yet historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name. In the conflict between the Trump administration and its opponents, those rival American principles of exclusion and pluralism confront each other more starkly than they have since Grant’s own time. And the ideology that has gained ground under Trump may well not disappear when Trump does. Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—the highest reaches of government.
The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.
In the corridors of American power, Grant’s legacy is evident. Jeff Sessions heartily praised the 1924 immigration law during an interview with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chief. Bannon regularly invokes what has become a cult text among white nationalists, the 1973 dystopian French novel The Camp of the Saints, in which the “white world” is annihilated by mass immigration. Stephen Miller, a former Senate aide to Sessions and now among the president’s top policy advisers, spent years warning from his perch in Sessions’s office that immigration from Muslim countries was a greater threat than immigration from European countries. The president’s stated preference for Scandinavian immigrants over those from Latin America or Africa and his expressed disdain for the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship are Grantism paraphrased.
That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity. But to recognize the homegrown historical antecedents of today’s rhetoric is to call attention to certain disturbing assumptions that have come to define the current immigration debate in America—in particular, that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States. The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the United States has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy. When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows.
7
THE CRUELTY OF
THE STEPHEN MILLERS
This essay had been bouncing around inside my head since October 2016. I met more than a few people at Trump rallies who mentioned that their parents or grandparents had come to the United States “the right way” and that undocumented immigrants were unfairly jumping the line by entering the country illegally or by overstaying their visas.
A frequent liberal retort, that the United States has always been a nation of immigrants, was interesting to me, because it also has its flaws. Neither Native Americans nor most black Americans are immigrants: Native Americans were already here when European colonists arrived, and most black Americans’ ancestors didn’t have a choice about whether to come here. Even the West Indian immigrants who began arriving in large numbers in the 1940s were descendants of enslaved people brought to the West by European powers. Tejanos and others of Mexican descent lived in areas later annexed long before the United States claimed those territories and, with them, the right to treat those populations as they wished.
But, interestingly, both arguments were premised on a misunderstanding of how massive, byzantine, and, well, armed the current U.S. immigration system had become since the heyday of European immigration, and how it got that way. The right-wing narrative assumes that the “line” has remained the same from the late nineteenth century to today, while the left-wing version of the story, while acknowledging that today’s immigrants are no less filled with potential than their forebears, often fails to take into account how much lower the barriers were when their own ancestors arrived. The southern border has been militarized for so long that most Americans have forgotten how long it was open.
Over the course of the Trump years I wrote about the horrors of its immigration policy many times. In June 2018, in a piece titled “Family Separation Is the Logic of Trumpism,” I wrote about the history of the U.S. government separating families, dating back to slavery, and how deeply it marked even those who spent much of their lives as human chattel. Then as now, these separations follow a logic of dehumanization—of mistreatment based on whom the authorities see as less than a full human being. Such considerations have always shaped American immigration policy, beginning with the 1790 law allowing only free white persons to naturalize, passed two short years after the Constitution was ratified.
For this piece, I wanted to tell another part of that story—why many descendants of European immigrants believe that their ancestors fleeing poverty and injustice were fundamentally different and more deserving than Central American families coming for similar reasons today. Despite the bigoted and anti-Semitic pseudoscience that was the basis of the early-twentieth-century immigration restrictions against Eastern and Southern Europeans, white Americans were still much more forgiving of immigrants who looked like them. That reality complicates the future of American immigration policy—no matter who ends up in charge.
The Trump administration radicalized many of his opponents into observing how cruel his approach to immigration was, but
the history of cruelty in U.S. immigration policy is too complex and bipartisan to be set at the feet of the forty-fifth president alone. Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty legalizing three million undocumented immigrants, and Bill Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act is largely responsible for our contemporary system of immigration detention. Clinton deported more undocumented immigrants than did George W. Bush—and Bush, like Barack Obama, tried and failed to legalize the eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States. But Obama also deported more immigrants in his first term than Trump did in his, despite Obama’s 2012 decision to spare hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants, the “Dreamers,” from deportation.
President Joe Biden will be more lenient than the Trump administration, but it would be unusual if Biden represented a radical departure from the bipartisan tradition that existed prior to Trump. The politics and policy of immigration and America have always vacillated between cruel and forgiving, sometimes both at the same time. Who experiences that cruelty, and who is forgiven, has historically fallen along racial lines. The ever-evolving borders of racial identity are an intrinsic part of America’s history of immigration policy, and Trump made that history visible again with his expressed preference for white migrants and cruelty toward Muslim and Central American refugees.