Immigrants and Refugees as Contaminants: It Didn’t Start with Trump

Time and again, the United States has been on the wrong side of history when it comes to admission of refugees in times of war or genocide. For several years in a row in the mid-1930s, American consular officials turned away Jewish people who were fleeing from Nazism, even when sizable portions of the German quota were going unused. The full horrors of the Holocaust would not become known till the end of the war, but it was common knowledge from the start that it was not safe to be Jewish in Nazi Germany and that Jewish people were fleeing for their lives. Because Hitler was not letting refugees bring their financial assets with them, many were turned away based on the LPC clause: “likely to become a public charge.” In American public opinion, yes, the hardships of the Great Depression played a part in opposing admission of Jewish refugees, but so did anti-Semitism.

But that is just one instance. There are others. In the early 1920s, both Armenians and Greeks in areas controlled by Turkey were trying to escape and having America’s golden door slammed in their faces. For both of those groups, the popular discourse was not just about the need for limits on numbers; it was about the undesirability of the people themselves.

Consider a note that President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes sent to Congress in 1921, at a time when genocidal massacres in Turkey had not ended. Interestingly, just a couple of years earlier, Hughes had given a speech at a very pro-Armenian gathering, calling for Armenia to be an independent nation and for Armenians not to have to be ruled by the Turks, causing many Armenians to imagine that they had him for an ally. Now, though, his tune was different. It was scarcely an exaggeration, he told Congress, “that every Armenian family which has enough money to get away, or is not impregnated with Bolshevism, will ultimately endeavor to enter America,” alongside Russians and Georgians fleeing from Soviet rule. “Our restriction on immigration should be so rigid that it would be impossible for most of these people to enter the United States. Reference is especially made to Armenians, Jews, Persians and Russians, all of which have been so driven hither and thither that they cannot be regarded as desirable populations for any country.”

Do you get it?  Hughes was saying that they were undesirable people because of what had been done to them. I urge readers to pause over that for a moment. But Hugues’s pernicious assessment wasn’t the only strike against Armenians that Congress would hear about. Lothrop Stoddard, author of books that played up the racialist theories that were popular back then, told a House committee in December of 1922 that the Armenians could be classified as Levantines, “the result of an extraordinary racial mixture which has been going on for at least 2,500 years.” They were, he continued, very largely a parasitic population, living by their wits, by unproductive means of labor, by petty trading, by graft, and by similar equivocal methods. He artfully blamed the Levantines for the fall of the Roman Empire, as but one example of their “very baneful influence on whatever country they have entered.” Asked about the Armenians’ being Christians, Stoddard told the committee that the Armenian church, by virtue of having missed vital ecclesiastical councils (probably thinking of Chalcedon) and kept itself separate from the main institutional bodies since the sixth century, practiced a backward and schismatic version of the faith. (Truth be told, the differences between the Armenian Apostolic, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches–what those early councils were all about–are matters of the most abject hair-splitting issues of theology, though then again 1920s bigots were frequently no fans of Roman Catholicism either.)

Even more famous at the time was Madison Grant, whose book The Passing of the Great Race was a best-seller and coming out in wave after wave of reprints. It might come as a surprise for persons today who think of the word “race” as referring to the difference between black and white to learn that in Madison Grant’s world, the white EUropean population itself could be divided into races: the superior northwesterern European Nordic race and the inferior southern European Mediterranean and eastern European Alpine races. Americans of Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian stock had the most desirable traits, but the country was committing “race suicide” by being so generous in the admission of Italians, Greeks, Russian Jews, etc. Grant’s thinking was reflected in the restrictive quotas that Congress passed in 1924, and in fact Grant helped draft the bill.

Oh, and you want to know who else was spouting racial theories along these lines? The Ku Klux Klan. In the first half of the 1920s, the KKK enjoyed a revival. As had been the case with the original Klan of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, the new Klan was well represented in the rural South and was involved in lynchings of African Americans, this being part of a long stretch that was truly the nadir of any hope of black civil rights. But unlike the earlier Klan, this one was also a significant presence in cities–in the North as well as the South. It numbered somewhere between one and two million members. Its targets were not just persons of color, but also Catholics and Jews–in other words, anyone who did not conform, both racially and culturally, to their vision of Protestant white America. (They were not, of course, the first people to claim to be Christians and have strange ideas about what Christian love meant.)

Listing what groups the Klan was against only tells part of the story, though before leaving that list we should certainly note that it also included liberal intellectuals. The Klan’s positive vision of the country also bears examining, and a 1926 article in the North American Review by Klan leader Hiram W. Evans provides quite a window into that. After reviewing the popular myths about America’s western frontier having made the world’s fittest race (the Anglo-Saxons) even fitter and railing about how all these southern and eastern European immigrants were contaminating the stock, he wrote, “We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership” (all of which, in his thinking, made the Klan the truest of Americans). “We are demanding…a return of power into the hands of the…entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock.” It was all about defending America against “the peaceful invasion of the immigrant” and “a steady flood of alien ideas being spread over the country, always carefully disguised as American.”  Significantly, he clearly did not seem worried about whether some Americans might take exception to calling the ideas he was espousing “American.”

Incidentally, we haven’t forgotten, have we, that this decade was also called the “Roaring Twenties” and the “Jazz Age”? There’s actually a connection. A lot of the same people who feared cultural and racial contamination from letting in immigrants and refugees were the ones who thought that the young generation had no morals and no manners, who decried how young women were wearing skirts that exposed their knees and young men and women were engaging in those evil, lascivious activities called petting parties. They blamed much of it on the Reds, and Henry Ford of course blamed it on the Jews (and was quite a prolific author of anti-Jewish hate), but it was never far removed from the more generalized fear of immigrants, or at least those who weren’t from northwestern Europe.  Ironically, a lot of first-generation immigrant elders at the time felt that mainstream America was corrupting the immigrant young and undermining their traditional old-world values.

None of what I’m saying should be construed as implying that I have any easy answers to offer about what immigration policy should be.  The point is merely this: for all the boasts of our being a nation of immigrants, for all the celebration of “give me your tired, your poor,” there has always been a streak of irrational paranoia where immigrants and refugees were concerned, and the message sent out has been, on a number of occasions, “I’d rather see you die in your own country than run the risk of contaminating my culture here,” with the people who think like that showing themselves to represent a culture that arguably needs all the shaking-up it can get.

There’s more to be said about the history of cultural concerns about immigration, especially where the verb assimilate is concerned; I’ll be taking that up in some future posts.