Considering History: How Individual Ideas and Policies Built America’s Most Exclusionary Era

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has proposed or enacted a wide range of anti-immigrant policies and plans. A State Department cable identified 36 new countries (the majority in Africa and the Caribbean) that might be subject to an expanded travel ban. In response to the protests in Los Angeles, Trump posted about his plans for the “remigration” of immigrants with the goal that “America will be for Americans again.” And amidst another flurry of arrests around the country, agents also apprehended elected officials, including California Senator Alex Padilla and New York Comptroller (and mayoral candidate) Brad Lander, who were challenging these policies.

I believe that it’s vital to see these policies and practices as pointedly interconnected. And the first few decades of the 20^th century offer an exemplary case study in how such individual ideas and policies built on one another to produce America’s most exclusionary era.

Those early 20^th century policies did not rise out of the blue, but were built on a series of earlier actions, many of which I’ve written about in this column. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its even more discriminatory aftermaths, such as the 1892 Geary Act, targeted the existing Chinese American community. The 1890s Immigration Restriction League used overtly anti-Semitic arguments to call for further such exclusions. And the 1907-08 so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement” severely restricted Japanese immigration.

A pair of 1917 federal laws show how restrictive immigration policies continued into the early 20^th century. The Immigration Act of 1917, the most comprehensive federal immigration law to date, sought to extend earlier exclusionary policies toward many more immigrant communities. It did so most overtly through the creation of the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” an area encompassing virtually all of Asia from which no immigrants were legally allowed. But it also for the first time featured federal restrictions that affected European immigrants, most clearly in the form of a literacy test that sought to prohibit illiterate arrivals from any nation, but also through barring other discriminatory categories of arrivals including the “mentally defective.”

Also passed by Congress in 1917 was the Espionage Act, the first of a pair of interconnected laws that would also include the 1918 Sedition Act. Those laws might not seem directly linked to anti-immigrant narratives, but when he made the case for them in his December 1915 State of the Union address to Congress, President Woodrow Wilson argued for precisely such a link: “There are citizens of the United States…born under other flags but welcome under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.…I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment.” And in practice these laws were consistently used to target immigrant communities, such as with the new policy of ideological deportations that historian Julia Rose Kraut traces in her book Threat of Dissent.

As America moved into the 1920s, the first two fully comprehensive federal immigration laws — the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 — used extreme quotas (such as only 100 legal arrivals per year from sizeable countries like Greece and Turkey) to extend discriminatory immigration restrictions. And they did so with the goal of excluding all non-Anglo people from the national community, as illustrated by these lines from Senator Ellison DuRant Smith’s speech supporting the 1924 law:

Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock….It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries, but a country to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power.”

Paralleling that speech and those white supremacist ideas, and making them an even more potent presence on the national landscape, was the 1920s resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (generally known as the Second Klan). Reorganized as a fraternal organization in response to the 1915 blockbuster film Birth of a Nation, by 1924-5 this second Klan claimed between 4 and 5 million members, and it played a significant role at the 1924 national conventions of both major political parties. Unlike its first, Reconstruction-era iteration, which had focused on targeting African Americans in former Confederate states, the 1920s Klan was truly national in its reach, attacked a wide range of immigrant and native-born communities including Catholics and Jews as well as African Americans, and explicitly wed itself to patriotic narratives and definitions of American identity through its ubiquitous “Americanism” pageants for the 4^th of July.

Two extensive 1930s programs that sought to deport millions of Americans, many of them citizens or legal residents, reveal just how defining these exclusionary ideas and policies had become by that decade. “Repatriation drives” between 1926 and 1936 deported up to 2 million people to Mexico, with roughly 60 percent of those deportees likely American citizens. And two interconnected Acts targeted Filipino Americans: 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act created an underhanded means of defining Filipino Americans as “aliens” despite the islands being a U.S. territory at the time; and the 1935 Filipino Repatriation Act sought to “repatriate” all Filipino Americans back to the islands. Both of these programs targeted longstanding American communities who were already fully part of the United States, truly illustrating the national reach of the white supremacist narratives advanced by Senator Smith and the Klan.

By the end of the 1930s, the world would be plunged into the global crisis that was the Second World War. A pair of federal responses to that unfolding crisis show the results of these evolving national narratives of exclusion: the June 1939 refusal to accept the nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis; and the February 1942 Executive Order that created the policy of Japanese incarceration, which saw hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned in camps. Exclusion inevitably produces dehumanizing ideas and policies, at home and abroad, that violate our national ideals.