IT WAS A MOMENT of crisis in this new land, so they had come to the place that felt most like home. On March 2, 1924, thirty minutes before the appointed hour of three p.m., more than one thousand people were already crammed into the assembly hall of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. The crowd was so large, it flowed through the corridor and out the front doors of the imposing white stone building onto the sidewalks of Eastern Parkway, the grandest boulevard not only in Brooklyn but in all of America.
The center, just one year old, had quickly become the heart of Jewish life in Brooklyn and a draw for Jewish residents from miles around. The neighborhood of Brownsville, just to the east, had grown so Jewish that it was beginning to earn the nickname the “Jerusalem of America.” Many had recently moved to Brooklyn from the Lower East Side, crossing the river in search of more space after the construction of the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. Others were new arrivals from eastern Europe, people who had landed in Brooklyn straight from Ellis Island as part of the biggest influx of immigrants the country had seen since its founding.
Between 1905 and 1914, nearly 10 million immigrants had entered the country, more than any ten-year stretch before. The deluge had paused during World War I, but then quickly picked up again. By 1921, so many ships were arriving at Ellis Island that officials diverted some to Boston to handle the load. More noticeable than their numbers, though, was the appearance of these “new immigrants,” as some called them disdainfully. They looked different from the Germans, Scandinavians, British, and Irish who had come before. These more recent arrivals spoke Italian, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. And unlike earlier immigrants, they were more likely to settle in cities to find work rather than head to rural parts of the country to tend farms.
In Europe, Jews had become used to being pushed to the margins, often unable to participate in mainstream cultural and political life. In times of upheaval, the simple fact of being Jewish could cost them their lives. But when they arrived in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, they found a place where they could carve out a more fluid identity. With no church or royal family dictating that they didn’t belong, American Jews had embraced their new homeland as a place for reinvention and refuge.
But now all that was in jeopardy.
Word had spread to Brooklyn that lawmakers in Washington were considering a bill that would cut off the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The legislation would effectively erect a wall between Europe and America, where none had existed before; and it symbolized the growing power of a dark force spreading across the country.
The Ku Klux Klan, its iconography dormant for more than a quarter century, was again on the rise, this time with a virulent anti-immigrant core and millions of members gathering not in the shadows but in broad daylight, marching down city streets. The Saturday Evening Post, one of the most widely circulated publications in the country, ran regular articles warning middle-class American readers that the new immigrants were racially inferior, impossible to assimilate, and a threat to stability and democracy itself. “An ostrich could assimilate a croquet ball or a cobble stone with about the ease that America assimilated her newcomers from Central and Southeastern Europe,” warned journalist Kenneth Roberts in his book Why Europe Leaves Home, a compilation of his pieces in the Post.
It was one thing for these ideas to be discussed in the pages of books and magazines. It was another for policy makers to adopt them and translate them into legislation on a national level. And so a deep fear had moved immigrants and their children to gather in the Brooklyn Jewish Center that chilly Sunday afternoon. What if, after all the trouble of reaching America, finding work, raising families, and trying to fit in, they had adopted a country that did not really want them?
When Fiorello H. La Guardia strode to the front of the room, he was difficult to see. Just five-foot-two, the Republican congressman, nicknamed “Little Flower,” was a fearless politician representing East Harlem who would go on to be elected mayor of New York three times in a row. La Guardia identified with immigrants. His own parents were from Italy (his mother was also Jewish), and during law school, he had earned extra money working as a translator at Ellis Island, using his knowledge of Italian, German, Yiddish, French, and several Croatian dialects.
“It is proper that you are here to protest against a measure that if it came up in Congress tomorrow would pass by an overwhelming vote,” said La Guardia in his high-pitched voice, gesturing dramatically with his hands. “The mathematics of the bill disclose the intentional discrimination against the Jews and the Italians.” La Guardia explained to the crowd that Congress was considering new quotas designed to keep out people who prayed and dressed like them. Up until then, there had been no numerical caps on who could enter the country. The proposed limits would be calculated based on the number of foreign-born Americans in 1890: only 2 percent from each nationality present that year would now be allowed to enter annually. Jewish immigration was projected to drop from about 80,000 per year to less than 4,000, La Guardia warned. Italian immigration would plummet from 45,000 to 3,000. The year 1890 had been chosen carefully, since it predated the recent wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
After La Guardia finished, another local lawmaker rose to address the crowd. Blue-eyed and already balding rapidly at thirty-five, Emanuel Celler, or Mannie, as he was known, had grown up just north of the Jewish Center in a modest frame house. Being back home in Brooklyn that weekend was a welcome relief from his new life in Washington, where he had spent the last year as a miserable freshman in the House of Representatives. He missed his family. Soon after his election, he and his wife Stella received the painful news that their baby daughter Judy had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. While Stella stayed in Brooklyn, Celler’s new job in Washington gave him little solace. “A freshman congressman is a lost soul. He cannot find his way, literally and metaphorically,” Celler remembered years later. “He has to learn his way about on the floor of the House and in committee. He doesn’t know the rules and nobody bothers explaining them. Only back home among his friends and his visitors is he flattered by the sound of ‘Mr. Congressman.’”
It was a humble beginning for a man who would go on to become one of the most effective and accomplished liberal lawmakers in the history of Congress, serving his district for nearly fifty years, the fifth-longest stretch ever in the House of Representatives. His uncompromising values, his long tenure—which began with President Warren G. Harding and ended with President Richard Nixon—and his position as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from 1949 to 1973, with only one short break, would produce a stunning portfolio of transformative legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which established an orderly succession process should the president die or become ill.
But the issue that Celler held closest to his heart was immigration. At the Brooklyn Jewish Center, he railed against a much more powerful man. Labor Secretary James J. Davis, a Welsh immigrant who had risen from total poverty to serve in three consecutive presidential cabinets, had turned into a prominent opponent of immigration. In response to the labor secretary’s argument that newer immigrants had lower rates of naturalization, Celler pointed out that English immigrants on average took longer to apply for citizenship. Accusing the labor secretary of promoting anti-immigrant propaganda, Celler called Davis “the stumbling block in our path for immigration progress.”
As the meeting drew to a close, four hours after it began, those in the room agreed to a resolution condemning the immigration bill. They vowed to deliver their message personally to President Coolidge and both houses of Congress.
It was not until reading the next day’s copy of The Brooklyn Eagle that those who attended the protest would realize: while they were inside, another two thousand people had tried to join them. All were turned away for lack of space.
CELLER AND HIS PARENTS had been born in the United States, but he never forgot that the same was not true for his grandparents. According to a favorite family story, his mother’s parents met in New York Harbor, just as they were arriving by ship from Germany, part of a wave of immigrants driven away by the failed revolutions of 1848. As the vessel approached the city, it sank, sending Celler’s grandmother into the water. Another passenger jumped in to save her. It was the man who would become her husband, Celler’s grandfather.
The Cellers did not rise to nearly the same social heights as some other German Jewish families in New York—families like the Loebs or the Lehmans, who within a generation established themselves in the American elite. But they were better off than many of their Jewish neighbors who had arrived after them from eastern Europe. These Jews were often looked down upon by their more acculturated German cousins (so much so that some scholars believe the slur “kikes” was most likely coined by German Jews mocking the names of the newer immigrants). Growing up in Brooklyn, Mannie himself never felt superior to the more recent immigrants, who were his neighbors and whose children often looked up to him since he was born in America.
Mannie could not speak the language of his grandparents, though he absorbed the rhythms of their religion. Every Friday the family ate Sabbath dinner together and sang music, with Mannie’s father Henry playing the piano and Mannie on the fiddle. During the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the family went to a nearby synagogue. Mannie, his siblings, and his parents occupied two stories above his father’s business, purifying whiskey through a process known as rectification. The income was enough that the Cellers owned their house. Still, they were not so wealthy that Mannie’s mother Josephine felt comfortable allowing two rooms to sit empty and not collect rent. Henry and Josephine poured their hopes into their third child, Mannie, the most studious of their four children—leading Mannie to later wonder whether his two sisters and his brother ever resented him.
When Mannie was attending college at Columbia University, the family’s fortunes turned: Henry lost money in bad investments and loans to friends that were never paid back. Soon after, both his parents died, and Mannie became the head of the Celler household. On Saturdays, he worked for a local haberdashery. On weeknights, he delivered wine in his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, even taking some Italian classes to more easily chat with immigrant customers. Then he would stay up late studying for school. Celler dutifully fulfilled his mother’s dream that he become a lawyer, graduating from Columbia Law School in 1912.
He was practicing law and happily married to his high-school sweetheart, Stella, raising a five-year-old daughter, Jane, when he decided to run for Congress almost on a whim. Though his father had dabbled in Democratic Party politics in Brooklyn, making the occasional speech at a club meeting, and Celler even remembered his father once hoisting him on his shoulders to watch the fiery politician William Jennings Bryan speak in a crowded auditorium, politics weren’t an obvious venue for Celler’s talents. He was shy like his mother, and never made friends as easily as his father. But at thirty-four, with a successful law practice already under his belt, Celler felt it was time for something more—something that would prove his parents’ instincts right that their brightest child was meant for bigger things.
In 1922 no one expected a Democrat running for office in Brooklyn to win. The tenth congressional district, where Celler decided to run, had never before elected a Democrat. Indeed, any Democrat would need to get creative to attract voters in Brooklyn. Dr. William L. Love, another Democratic candidate on the ticket in Brooklyn that year, became known as “the minstrel campaigner” because he sang songs rather than giving campaign speeches. Celler’s primary pitch to voters was that he opposed the Volstead Act, the 1919 law banning alcohol. This was an especially popular stance with immigrants who not only enjoyed their wine and beer but resented the constant presence of police in their communities cracking down on alcohol sales and consumption. Early in Celler’s campaign he showed off a brash banner illustrated with a giant foaming glass of beer, which read, “Eventually, why not now?” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that the “daring” signage won him “both praise and condemnation.” Celler canvassed his neighborhood for votes, just like his old wine-selling days, traveling around in the back of a pickup truck, occasionally setting off fireworks. When crowds arrived, “you’d get up and harangue them,” he recalled. On November 7, 1922, Celler won his race by 3,111 votes. Immigrant voters were the core of Celler’s support, and he would never forget it. Soon after the election, when asked by a reporter to identify his district, Celler, sitting in his office, gestured to a colorful map of Europe hanging on the wall behind him and said, “There’s my district—all of Europe.”
He made a habit of keeping the front door of his house in Brooklyn open every Sunday so that people could walk in and tell him their troubles. Now, a year into his term, the people of that district were asking for his help.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE the meeting at the Jewish Center, The New York Times had run an extensive survey of the country’s last century of immigration penned by Labor Secretary Davis, an enthusiast for fraternal societies and “a most amiable man,” remembered Herbert Hoover, the third president who retained him. Hoover commented in his memoir, “If all the members of all the organizations to which he belonged had voted for him, he could have been elected to anything, any time, anywhere.”
Like many other Americans, Davis was growing skeptical of immigrants. In the New York Times piece, he used dubious data to warn of dire consequences if limits were not imposed. He doubted “whether such vast throngs could be assimilated and Americanized or would eventually submerge and absorb the American people, as the old Roman civilization was completely submerged by the hordes which once migrated into that fair land for peaceful purposes.” In response, Celler wrote in a letter to the editor that the figures cited by the labor secretary were “as useless as a candle in a skull.”
A certain amount of delusion is demanded for an immigrant to become a leading voice against immigration—a blindness of one’s own modest origins. But it can also be born of the grueling experience of arriving in a new country, and a belief that only some can handle the pressure.
A native of Wales, Davis left his hometown when he was eight years old with his mother and five young siblings to join his father, an ironworker, in Pittsburgh. The family was penniless when they arrived. When Davis was eleven, he left school and secured his first regular job, working in a nail factory earning fifty cents a day. His task was to pick out defective nails—work he believed taught him something about human nature. “Men are like nails,” he would say later, “some have the hold-fast will in their heads. Others have not. They were marred in the making. They must be thrown aside and not used in building the state, or the state will fall.” At twelve, Davis started apprenticing at the local iron mill. He learned to stoke the fires in which the metals were melted down, his palms and fingers scorching from the heat until they became “hardened like goat hoofs” and his skin took on “a coat of tan” that would last his entire life. “I lusted for labor, I worked and I liked it.” Davis took pride in his work ethic, ascribing it to his Welsh roots. He was not as impressed with other immigrants, particularly those who came after him. “I have always been a doer and a builder, it was in my blood and the blood of my tribe, as it is born in the blood of beavers. . . . The people that came to this country in the early days were of the beaver type and they built up America because it was in their nature to build. Then the rat-people began coming here, to house under the roof that others built,” Davis would later recall. “A civilization rises when the beaver-men outnumber the rat-men. When the rat-men get the upper hand the civilization falls.”
In his twenties, Davis developed a taste for leadership after persuading a group of workers not to strike. Later, he led the Loyal Order of Moose fraternal society as it recruited more than half a million new members and provided a social safety net for its working-class members, supporting widows if their husbands died doing their dangerous jobs, and opening schools for orphans. It was ambitious enough for the newly elected president of the United States to take notice.
Warren G. Harding, who promised in his 1920 campaign a return to “normalcy,” wanted a labor secretary who would be more sympathetic to business interests, and in Davis he found one. The Labor Department was still a young institution, having been created in 1913 in the waning hours of William Howard Taft’s presidency, just before Woodrow Wilson took office. Organized labor had clamored for decades to have a permanent voice in the government. Under Wilson, the department stayed true to the original vision to improve the welfare of working people, and it played a major role during World War I, mobilizing millions of workers to support the fighting. But under Davis’s control, it tamped down its pro-labor zeal, so much so that Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded Harding when he died in 1923, once said that Davis, despite his title, was good at “keeping labor quiet.”
As secretary, Davis turned his attention to the lesser-known corners of the department. From the beginning, the Labor Department had been a hodgepodge comprising four bureaus formerly under the short-lived Department of Commerce and Labor: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collected economic data; the Children’s Bureau, tasked with overseeing the welfare of young people; and the bureaus of Immigration and Naturalization. Immigration was under the department’s purview because, historically, the country accepted newcomers primarily to put them to work. With more immigrants pouring into the country after the war, though, Davis felt that more scrutiny should be placed on who was allowed to enter. It was time to separate the “beaver-men” from the “rat-men.”
Davis viewed the country’s system of immigration as a mess. People were showing up at Ellis Island without passports or visas. Indeed, a worldwide standard for passports was only just emerging as countries tried to regulate their borders more rigorously. “We have let the alien newcomer roam about the country pretty much without guidance,” Davis said at an international convention of his beloved Loyal Order of Moose. “We need to know the whereabouts of these people.” Davis declared that he wanted the Labor Department to begin registering immigrants wherever they were, every year, a sign that the days of coming and going easily across the border were ending.
To Celler, this kind of proposal sounded dangerously corruptible. At a large formal dinner at the swanky Astor Hotel in Times Square on December 20, 1923, Davis gave a speech asking Congress to pass a bill that would require alien registration. Celler, among the guests, was furious. As the dinner guests began to leave after midnight, Celler jumped up and demanded everyone’s attention. “Don’t be fooled by the impassioned words of Mr. Davis,” he said to the stunned crowd, who had been led to believe the evening’s speeches were over. “I am sorry he has left the room so that I could not say it in his presence, but as a member of Congress I want to say right here and now that I will oppose any such registration bill,” which he called “an evil espionage system” and would lead to “perjury, chicanery and graft.”
MANY FOUND IT HARD to trace where things had gone wrong. Not long ago President Teddy Roosevelt had raved about a new play in Washington that celebrated immigrants. The 1908 show, called The Melting Pot and written by the British-Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill, told the story of a Russian Jew escaping a pogrom who lands in New York and tries to compose a symphony about America. In a fevered speech, he tells his love interest, another Russian immigrant, what he admires so much about his adopted country:
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the crucible with you all! God is making the American.
The maudlin writing caused critics to savage the play. The New York Times called it an “appeal to claptrap patriotism,” and “insecure as a work of art and unconvincing as a human document.” But the public loved it, and the president himself was a fan. At the play’s premiere at the Columbia Theatre in downtown Washington, Roosevelt was a noisy member of the audience, leaning forward in his box seat every time he heard a line he enjoyed to say loudly, “That’s all right!” At the end of the second act he led the room in applause.
Three years later Roosevelt wrote Zangwill that his play had made a lasting impression:
That particular play I shall always count among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life. It has been in my mind continuously, and on my lips very often, during the last three years. It not merely dealt with the “melting pot,” with the fusing of all foreign nationalities into an American nationality, but it also dealt with the great ideals which it is just as essential for the native born as for the foreign born to realize and uphold if the new nationality is to represent a real addition to the sum total of human achievement.
Roosevelt, who was always trying to locate the source of America’s spirit, recognized The Melting Pot as a powerful work of nationalist mythmaking. The “melting pot” remains a central metaphor for assimilation today, largely because of the play that popularized it. According to Zangwill’s vision, the country was not just an experiment in democracy. It was creating a new and superior race of people free from the “blood hatreds and rivalries” of the Old World. The metaphor made perfect sense to Roosevelt, himself descended from Dutch, Scottish, English, and Irish immigrants. He envisioned a process of Americanization that would take generations of intermarriage to play out, with Germans, Scandinavians, and all the other European races blended together into one.
On October 12, 1915, in a speech that would make front-page news the next day and become famous, Roosevelt gave a full-throated rendition of the melting pot to 2,500 members of the New York chapter of the Knights of Columbus at Carnegie Hall. It was a celebration for Columbus Day, a holiday that held enormous importance for both Italian and Irish immigrants, who often suffered discrimination for being Catholic and counted the popular explorer as one of their own. The former president’s subject that day was “Americanism”:
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans.
Roosevelt revealed in his speech the darker side of the melting pot analogy. As long as an immigrant held up certain civic ideals—and a total devotion to this country—anyone could be part of the American project. But to prove that loyalty, they must leave behind all traces of their former culture.
Still, the crowd, cheering itself hoarse, loved the speech. Many immigrants embraced the rush to assimilate and prove they were good enough for America. In a florid hit autobiography from 1912 called The Promised Land, immigrant Mary Antin described her conversion—from a young Jewish girl in the Russian Empire to an American girl in Boston—as nothing short of a “second birth.” Eager to slough off her former life in Europe, Antin wrote that it was “painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness.”
As more immigrants entered the country, there grew a greater urgency to create programs that would Americanize them. The brilliant industrialist and carmaker Henry Ford offered free English classes to immigrant employees after it became clear that many of them didn’t understand the language. The first phrase the students learned was “I am a good American.” They were encouraged to value thriftiness and cleanliness. At the end of the Ford English School program, students participated in a graduation ceremony in which they turned into Americans before the audience’s eyes. Dressed in costumes marking their countries of origin, they walked up a set of stairs and stepped down into a giant cauldron prop labeled “American Melting Pot.” When they emerged, they all wore identical dark suits and waved American flags. The transformation was complete.
But not everyone believed that the melting pot analogy served immigrants well. The scholar Horace Kallen, a German-born son of an orthodox rabbi who would go on to help found The New School for Social Research in New York, was one of the first to express doubt. Kallen himself was secular and would later marry a gentile. But he also unabashedly embraced his Jewish heritage. In 1906, soon after arriving at Harvard for college and then at graduate school, he founded a Jewish student group called the Menorah Society. Perhaps inspired by his childhood in a polyglot corner of the German empire called Silesia, Kallen believed in the beauty of a pluralist society, one where many cultures could live side by side.
In 1915, alarmed by the Americanization craze and works like Antin’s, Kallen wrote articles in two consecutive issues of The Nation entitled “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot.” He argued that the Americanization campaigns violated the democratic ideal of freedom by forcing people to abandon their cultures and conform to an Anglo-Saxon mold. Rather than imagining a melting pot, Kallen wrote, Americans should think of their country as a symphony, in which “every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality,” but together they formed a harmonious whole. As Kallen put it, the only question to ask was this: “What do Americans will to make of the United States—a unison, singing the old British theme ‘America,’ the America of the New England School? or a harmony, in which that theme shall be dominant, perhaps, among others, but one among many, not the only one?”
In another essay a year later, entitled “A Meaning of Americanism,” Kallen explained why pluralism was so important: “Democracy involves, not the elimination of differences, but the perfection and conservation of differences. It aims, through Union, not at uniformity, but at variety, at a one out of many, as the dollars say in Latin, and a many in one.”
Kallen’s ideas were unorthodox. When the Nation pieces and his other essays were assembled into a 1924 book called Culture and Democracy in the United States, in which he coined the term cultural pluralism, there was barely a ripple of response. But he perceived correctly that the most dangerous flaw in the melting pot analogy was that it established the hegemony of an elite Protestant culture—one that everyone was under pressure to embrace. Those who refused to accept it risked being considered disloyal and un-American. Even worse, many of the people demanding Americanization were business owners enriching themselves from the work of immigrants, even as they required the newcomers conform to their capitalist values.
A democracy built on cultural submission was not truly tolerant. Nor was it stable. In time, the melting pot would crack.
NOT A SINGLE WORLD WAR I BATTLE was fought on American soil, but it would leave a gash in the country’s psyche. The United States entered the fray in April 1917 after watching Europe bleed itself out in the trenches of northern France and Belgium for nearly three years. For the first time, the country was voluntarily entangling itself in Europe’s affairs, on President Woodrow Wilson’s belief that the Allied cause was morally righteous and would bring peace. America’s entry into the war proved critical to the Allies’ victory, but when European empires entered a new cycle of rivalry and retribution at the war’s end, Americans were left wondering what 116,000 countrymen had died for. Even worse for the nation, when the massive industrial effort powering the war ended, the economy sank into a depression. Unemployment began to climb in 1920, reaching nearly 12 percent—a level that has only been matched subsequently during the Great Depression.
Nationalist fervor had powered the country through the war. Now it was curdling into disappointment and rage. Americans looked around and saw growing income inequality, corporate monopolies, and corruption in their cities. Many feared a revolution akin to the 1918 uprising in Russia. Suspicion intensified against political radicals, who law enforcement began rounding up and even deporting. The spirit of the age preceding the war, the Progressive era, had been marked by boundless optimism—a belief that with the right policy solutions, no problem was insurmountable for America. Now hope appeared to be in short supply, and it seemed obvious that among the people to blame were the ones who had arrived most recently. As Kallen observed in 1924, “What this war did was to turn the anxiety about property into one about people.”
Henry Ford, who had only a few years earlier been celebrating the power of Americanization, began a virulent anti-Jewish campaign. Just before the economy crashed in 1920, the automaker magnate had taken out a badly timed loan from Wall Street, and sales plummeted. He became increasingly bitter and blamed the country’s problems on an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers. In 1918 he had purchased a small weekly publication from his hometown, The Dearborn Independent. A year later he began distributing copies at Ford dealerships across the country, making it one of the most-read publications of its time with a peak circulation of 900,000; beginning in the spring of 1920, customers shopping for a new car who idly picked up a copy would have found nonstop invective against Jews. On the front page week after week, under the heading, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” articles in The Dearborn Independent argued that Jews operated a global conspiracy to achieve social and economic power. The newspaper derived much of its information from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document created by the Russian secret service that purportedly showed Jewish leaders planning to sow chaos around the world before stepping in to seize power. Far from being considered a quack, Ford was a widely respected folk hero beloved by rural Americans who saw him as one of their own because of his Michigan farming roots. His name was often floated as a potential presidential candidate. Now Ford was spreading some of the most vile and anti-Semitic propaganda ever produced.
The 1920s are usually remembered for the Jazz Age and women in glittery flapper dresses, dancing the Charleston. But it was also a decade defined by escalating racial paranoia and violence.
On May 31, 1921, a white mob began a two-day rampage through a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, burning down homes and businesses, and leaving up to three hundred dead. The attack came two years after a “Red Summer” of race riots that engulfed cities across the country, including Chicago and Washington, D.C.
From the Upper East Side of Manhattan, writer Madison Grant warned that the end of whiteness could be near. Grant’s best-selling book The Passing of the Great Race insisted that differences between races of people must be acknowledged and confronted. “We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss,” wrote Grant. “If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed, or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”
The nervousness around the pollution of the white race extended to the elite halls of higher education, where administrators were growing concerned about how many Jews were being admitted. In 1922 Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell proposed a 15 percent quota; the current student body was more than 20 percent Jewish. Lowell explained, “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”
This was also the decade in which the Ku Klux Klan reemerged as a powerful national force, beginning in the South but eventually enjoying its greatest popularity above the Mason-Dixon line, in the Midwest and the North. In 1923, at the group’s peak, there were roughly 200,000 members in New York alone, with strongholds on Long Island and in the state’s southern and far western counties.
The Klan, in its original incarnation, was a violent response to the South’s loss in the Civil War. Founded by veterans of the Confederacy, the first KKK tried to restore white supremacy in the South by terrorizing freed slaves and white Republicans. The second iteration, in addition to being anti-black, had a much wider array of targets, with a list of villains that included Jews, Catholics, and immigrants, all of whom the Klan accused of undermining the nation and introducing moral rot. These Klansmen acted as vigilantes enforcing social codes, going so far as to conduct antiliquor raids to enforce Prohibition, one of the group’s highest priorities. They made common cause with evangelicals worried about the sin they saw seeping into society, from women’s bathing suits to dance halls to movies. The Klan believed that Jews, through the power they held over Hollywood, department stores, and the media, were encouraging women to wear too much makeup and clothes that were too sexual. “Jew Movies urging sex vice,” went one complaint. Members of the Klan believed that cities were places of moral temptation because they were home to large Jewish and immigrant populations. By 1915, one out of four New Yorkers was Jewish, and cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston also boasted large Jewish populations.
As for Catholics, the KKK viewed them as potentially disloyal Americans whose primary allegiance was not to their country but to the Vatican. Klan members were especially suspicious of Catholic schools, where they believed children were being indoctrinated into a foreign cult. In this respect the Klan was clearly descended from the late nineteenth-century nativist group, the American Protective Association, which had insisted that Catholics were arriving in the country as part of a plot to take over the government.
The founder of this new KKK, William J. Simmons, was an Atlanta physician who drew his inspiration from two events that captured the nation’s attention. The first was the release of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie, The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the original KKK and mesmerized audiences with the director’s wildly innovative cinematic techniques. The movie was a hit and famously received a screening at the White House before President Woodrow Wilson.
Simmons’s other touchstone was a lurid crime in Atlanta that transfixed the country. Mary Phagan was a thirteen-year-old worker at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, where she ran a machine that inserted rubber erasers into the tops of pencils. On April 26, 1913, Phagan went to the factory to pick up her pay. Early the next morning, around three-thirty a.m., a night watchman found her body in the basement, lying beaten and bloody, partially undressed, in a pile of trash. She had been strangled by a cord. Police soon settled on their prime suspect: Leo Frank, the Brooklyn-raised superintendent of the factory and a member of a well-to-do German-Jewish family. Despite flimsy evidence against him, Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. Frantic Jewish supporters in the North raised funds to fight the conviction in court; New York Times owner Adolph Ochs even tried to build support for Frank with sympathetic coverage in his newspaper. But this only served to whip up anti-Semitism among Georgians, who viewed interest from the North as unwanted meddling by outsiders in the state’s affairs.
The murder especially touched a nerve among the white working class in Atlanta, who counted Phagan, the daughter of a poor farmer, as one of their own. Phagan symbolized the exploitation of child laborers in Atlanta’s new booming factories, where the managers and owners seemed to get rich but never the workers. To these local white workers, Frank was not just a murder suspect. He was a wealthy Jewish outsider peddling corrupt northern industrialization and defiling young white women.
The situation exploded when the governor of Georgia, John Slaton, suddenly announced he was reducing Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment. The decision set off mayhem in Georgia, as men bearing guns stalked the governor’s home, and a group of 150 men who called themselves the “Knights of Mary Phagan” appeared at the girl’s grave in Marietta to vow vengeance. Furious about Slaton’s decision, some of the most elite members of Marietta society, including a clergyman and a former sheriff, devised an elaborate plot to abduct Frank.
On August 16, 1915, Frank was sitting in a prison in Milledgeville when a mob of roughly twenty-five men arrived. Armed with rifles and pistols, they quickly overpowered the guards on duty and led Frank out of the prison and into the backseat of a car. After driving him more than one hundred miles to Marietta, they lynched him from a large oak tree. A few months later Simmons invited some of the lynchers to convene at the top of Stone Mountain to burn a cross, much as they had seen in The Birth of a Nation, to welcome the resurrection of the KKK.
The group started modestly but took off once Simmons hired two public relations professionals, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, who gave the Klan a more polished, profit-driven ethos. By 1924, the group had reached a membership of roughly 4 million Americans and set up headquarters in Washington, D.C., as money poured in through dues and sales of Klan life insurance and gear, including the group’s infamous robes and pointed hats. Some meetings were secret, but many others occurred in the open, during the day, at fairgrounds and public parks, where the Klan put on a family-friendly face. These large, carnival-like events were open to everyone, with rides and raffles that drew people from miles around. Often the meetings would end in parades with bands and floats. And of course, in the evening, there were enormous cross burnings that would wow the crowds.
But the Klan was not interested only in making a spectacle. It had a political agenda that it pushed by electing its own members to office and supporting lawmakers who backed their nativist platform. At its peak, the Klan counted among its members sixteen senators, dozens of congressmen, and eleven governors. Lawmakers were divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, so the Klan had a foothold regardless of which party was in power in Washington. But in 1919, when Republicans took control of Congress, the Klan scored perhaps its biggest political coup yet, on the issue it cared about most. It had found a perfect partner in the new chair of the House Immigration Committee.
ALBERT JOHNSON had been waiting and planning for this moment for years. A representative for the timber-rich corner of southwestern Washington, Johnson entered politics because of two great passions: his hatred of organized labor and his hatred of Japanese immigrants.
Johnson was born in Springfield, Illinois—as a law student, his father had worked at Abraham Lincoln’s law firm Lincoln and Herndon—and then raised in Hiawatha, Kansas. Before he entered politics, he was a journalist who moved where the jobs were, wandering up and down the East Coast. When he landed at The Washington Post, he worked as a reporter and then as a late-night news editor, who made sure the publication covered developments from the front of the Spanish-American War after all his colleagues had left for the day. In the fall of 1898, the publisher of the Tacoma News traveled to Washington in search of an editor to run his publication and asked the Post’s managing editor for recommendations. The editor at the Post thought of his industrious night editor, and soon Johnson was headed to the Pacific Northwest, a place he had never visited.
He was entering a cauldron of racial and economic resentment, where arguments were frequently settled in the streets with stones, bricks, and clubs. To a journalist coming straight from a desk job in Washington, D.C., it must have resembled anarchy. White residents seethed at immigrant laborers from China, Japan, and India, whom they viewed as cheaper competition for lumber, mining, and railway jobs. On the night of September 4, 1907, in Bellingham, Washington, more than a hundred miles up the Pacific Coast from Tacoma near the border with Canada, hundreds of white men attacked the town’s South Asian migrant workers in their homes and at work, shouting “Drive out the Hindus,” even though the men were largely Sikh. The immigrant community soon left town.
Living in the Pacific Northwest brought Johnson into closer contact with people from Asia than ever before. In his home, he employed several young Japanese students as servants. When one became ill, Johnson helped him return home to Japan. The student’s father, a wealthy banker in Tokyo, sent a letter thanking him for his help. But rather than feeling closer to the family, Johnson was dismissive. He suspected the student “was engaged on a mission for his government when he sought employment in my residence. It is quite possible, that his purpose was to find out how serious I was in my opposition to Asiatic immigration.”
In 1909 Johnson moved to the lumber town of Hoquiam to become publisher of the daily newspaper Grays Harbor Washingtonian. Johnson soon become known locally as a powerful voice against the local efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, one of the most radical political organizations in American history. Unlike the older, more established American Federation of Labor, which was only interested in organizing better-paid, skilled workers, the IWW sought to organize everyone—in particular immigrants—with the stated goal of overthrowing capitalism. To Johnson’s dismay, the IWW was making inroads locally, attracting workers who wanted an eight-hour day, better pay, and safer working conditions. In 1912 they went on strike, effectively shutting down the center of the Pacific Northwest logging industry. Johnson led an armed movement in Hoquiam to fight back and recall the mayor who had released the IWW strikers from prison.
Local businessmen had already encouraged him to run for Congress. Now Johnson’s campaign took on a greater urgency as he viewed immigrants as subversive elements in American society bent on sowing labor unrest. It was time to return to Washington, D.C.—this time as a Republican lawmaker—to address problems he viewed as existential threats to the country. As he wrote in Grays Harbor Washingtonian on July 5, 1912, “The greatest menace to the republic today is the open door it affords to the ignorant hordes from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose lawlessness flourishes and civilization is ebbing into barbarism.”
That fall, he narrowly won a seat in the House, even though his party lost both the White House and Congress. He then secured a spot on the House Immigration Committee, where at first he wielded little power as a member of the minority party. But he studied the subject closely and made friends with Democrats on the committee. Five years later in 1919, when his party swept into power again, he was ready.
As chairman of the House Immigration Committee, Johnson held one of the most powerful jobs for determining who could enter the country. Committee chairs controlled every aspect of legislation in their chosen subjects: which bills received priority, which were blocked, and when and how bills reached the floor for a full vote. Johnson went straight to work, as there did not seem to be any time to waste. Anti-immigrant activists had sounded warnings that the end of World War I would bring a rush of unwanted arrivals from Europe. Now it appeared those fears were coming to pass. For Jews in eastern Europe, Armistice Day on November 11, 1918, did not bring an end to the war. Conflicts over territory broke out in the region between Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish forces, accompanied by a wave of pogroms. Jewish families fled, and during the fiscal year 1920–21, immigration to the United States from central and eastern Europe reached 119,000—not as high as the prewar numbers but high enough that lawmakers demanded “emergency” legislation to suspend all immigration. Johnson, who hardly needed evidence to act, also cited a State Department document claiming that America was receiving “abnormally twisted” and “unassimilable” Jews who were “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.”
But placing limits on immigration had never been easy in Washington, as one man in the Senate could attest better than anyone. Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, nearing the twilight of his long political career, had been trying since the 1890s to curb immigration. Born into one of the most prominent families in America, Lodge was counted among the Brahmins, a caste of Bostonians who proudly traced their lineage to the earliest English colonists. One of his closest friends was Teddy Roosevelt, with whom he wrote a book called Hero Tales from American History, a celebration of their idols, leaders like George Washington and Daniel Boone who demonstrated that a country was only as good as the character of its individual men. Unlike his charming friend Teddy, Lodge was an argumentative snob, prone to ruining polite dinner conversation by picking fights with other guests at the table and goading them into verbal combat. Lodge was the ultimate Harvard man, having collected three degrees from the university, including the school’s first-ever Ph.D. in political science. Lodge was so enamored of his English roots that he wrote his dissertation on Anglo-Saxon law. He subscribed to the idea, popular at the time, that the Saxon tribe members from northern Germany who settled in England during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a particular gift for freedom and self-government. And he believed that America’s greatness as a nation relied on maintaining its essential Anglo-Saxon racial character.
As a prominent member of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), Lodge was among a group of Harvard alumni in Boston who lobbied relentlessly to block immigrants. Their primary vehicle—a literacy test—passed both chambers of Congress in 1896, 1913, and 1915, only to be vetoed by a president each time. First Grover Cleveland, then William Howard Taft, and finally Woodrow Wilson felt the law was too extreme. As Wilson, a segregationist who was hardly the most enlightened man in America on race, wrote in his veto message to Congress:
This bill embodies a radical departure from the traditional and long-established policy of this country, a policy in which our people have conceived the very character of their Government to be expressed, the very mission and spirit of the Nation. . . . It seeks to all but close entirely the gates of asylum which have always been open to those who could find nowhere else the right and opportunity of constitutional agitation for what they conceived to be the natural and inalienable rights of men. . . .
Restrictions like these, adopted earlier in our history as a Nation, would very materially have altered the course and cooled the humane ardors of our politics.
Earlier in his career, Wilson had written unflattering things about immigrants, saying that the men coming from southern and eastern Europe had “neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.” When he campaigned for president in 1912, he had to explain these remarks to win over immigrant voters, who were becoming a larger part of the American electorate. But his decision to veto the literacy bill five years later was not born primarily of political calculation. As the son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson imagined America as a divine spiritual project with “God sifting the nations of the world to plant the choicest seed in America.” When European immigrants sailed across an ocean to reach America’s shores, Wilson could see that they were moved by a deep faith in the promise of the New World. To block them would be to abandon the essential spirit of the country.
He also recognized that for more than a hundred years since America’s founding, there had been barely any federal restrictions on white immigration. As a young country, America could not afford to turn people away; there was simply too much land to fill, too much work to be done. Until a central port of entry was established at Ellis Island in 1892, immigrants simply arrived at whichever state-run port on the coast they desired. Even after Congress passed a handful of laws in the late nineteenth century to block immigrants who had certain diseases or were deemed morally degenerate (prostitutes, criminals, and polygamists), barely anyone was stopped at Ellis Island. Between 1880 and World War I, roughly 25 million people entered the country, and only 1 percent of the arrivals were turned back.
But in 1917 the nationalism spun up by the war created an opening for action. Banding together with the country’s most prominent labor group, the American Federation of Labor, which feared that immigrants were driving down wages, Lodge and the IRL made another pass at enacting a literacy test. The proposed law required any immigrant over the age of sixteen to be able to read English or another language, which could include Hebrew or Yiddish. In addition, the law would expand the government’s power to deport unwanted immigrants. Under an 1891 law, Congress allowed the removal of immigrants who within a year of their arrival became hospitalized, imprisoned, or public charges—with the steamship company that transported them bearing the costs of a return. The new proposal would extend the window to five years and empowered officials to remove a larger category of people, including those suspected of supporting anarchism or communism—a nod to fears of Bolshevism spreading.
The lawmakers also turned their attention to Asia. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first immigration law in the United States to discriminate based on race and class, blocked Chinese laborers from entering the country, exempting students, teachers, merchants, and diplomats. Now Congress extended those restrictions to an awkwardly shaped area called the Asiatic Barred Zone, demarcated by various latitudes and longitudes to create an area stretching from the Bosporus strait of Istanbul, through the Middle East and the Gulf, Afghanistan, India, and Southeast Asia.
The 1917 Immigration Act was the most stringent general immigration law the country had ever passed, and when it reached Wilson’s desk, he once again issued a veto. This time, though, Congress—which was controlled by his own party—overrode him. The Democrats dared to cross Wilson because he had barely won reelection the year before, winning only 49.26 percent of the popular vote, in one of the closest presidential races in American history. “The League is now all powerful in Washington,” bragged the IRL. “No bill as to immigration can be passed if we object, while any bill we favor has a good chance of passage.”
The celebration was short-lived, however, because the literacy test failed to significantly stem the number of immigrants entering the country, who were more educated than the Harvard graduate Lodge had guessed.
In 1921 Prescott F. Hall, co-founder executive secretary of the IRL, issued a call to arms. He sneered at the “melting pot” as “the falsest of all shibboleths.” The war, he claimed, had revealed that “you can not make bad stock into good by changing its meridian, any more than you can . . . make a mongrel into a fine dog by teaching it tricks.” Hall warned that America needed “to become and to remain a strong, self-reliant, united country, with the only unity that counts, viz., that of race. What, then, shall we do? Exclude the black, the brown and the yellow altogether; as to the white, favor the immigration of Nordic and Nordicized stocks.”
Hall’s reference to the “Nordic” signaled the rise of a new racist force, one that would outstrip every anti-immigrant effort that had come before. Johnson’s bill to halt all immigration, even for just a year, would fail in the Senate. But he would get something much more elaborate and sinister instead: a new law based not on mere prejudice but on science.