In 1924, the year before Hitler published the first volume of Mein Kampf, a Harvard-educated journalist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, Lothrop Stoddard, wrote a book called Racial Realities in Europe. In it, Stoddard declared that the melting-pot experiment was over. The United States had proven once and for all that racial heredity was what determines character. Just look at the accomplishments of people of “Nordic stock”: they’d drawn up the Constitution, won the West, and made America into the world’s most powerful nation. Liberals insisting on the country’s “hybrid” character were deluded. To make America great again, the best thing the country could do was to stop trying to “absorb these refractory aliens.”⁵⁸

Stoddard thought there was friend and foe, Self and Other; there were sanguine, law-abiding whites and—to use Linnaeus’s terminology—basan or phlegmatic savages. He closed his book with an exhortation: “Know thyself!”⁵⁹

Looking for a picture of Stoddard online—side-slicked black hair and waxed moustache—I found a meme posted on the Neo-Nazi website Stormfront less than three months before Trump’s election victory. It showed Stoddard’s face with the caption: “The September 11th attack would not have surprised this fellow.”

Comments below described him as a “scientist and idealist.” One commenter, “ForeverWhiteMan,” wrote, “He seems to have been very accurate.” Beneath ForeverWhiteMan’s post, his signature included a toll-free number to report “mexican [sic] illegals.”⁶⁰

I knew, of course, that this was only one drop in an angry, paranoid ocean. And maybe it was just a coincidence that the first person to post the Stoddard meme had joined Stormfront in December 2015, six months after Trump announced his candidacy. But seeing the dates—looking at that low-res image of Stoddard’s waxed moustache—I felt a familiar knot in my stomach.