“Lustful priests.” “Dim-witted,” “dirty, disease-carrying Mexicans” who “multiply like rabbits.” The “filthy Chinese”—a “poor, miserable, dwarfish race of inferior beings.” The “childlike, barbaric, and otherwise inferior” American Indian. “Japs.” “Nips.” The “evil, money-hungry” Jewish “conspirators” who destroy everything that Christians hold sacred. The Muslims, a people marked by “arrogance and blood-thirsty cruelty,” who are “parasitic” and “live by unproductive labor, petty trading, and graft.” Wherever they have gone, they have “exercised a very baleful influence.”…The litany of abusive, defamatory slurs American observers have hurled against dreamers who enter the United States from every continent but Antarctica is mind-numbing. But the authors of American Intolerance do not content themselves with an exposition on the country's benighted past; they remind us that these slurs, prejudices, and exclusionary tactics have direct relevance for the contemporary era. The country has elected a president who, during his candidacy, advocated a wall at its southern border to keep out Mexicans, and laws to exclude Muslims. Bartholomew and Reumschüssel warn us about the moral panics that the irrational fear of aliens has stirred up in the American heart.

In societies around the world and very possibly throughout human history, people have become unduly distressed and concerned that, somewhere, certain categories of humanity are engaged in despicable acts. At times, under certain circumstances, this distress and concern intensifies, breaking out into more exaggerated and overt manifestations. For as long as societies have been reasonably diverse and heterogeneous, observers have noticed this interesting phenomenon, but these early observations produced no analytic traction or intellectual progeny—nor a distinctive designation to describe it—until Jock Young, in 1971, and Stanley Cohen, in 1972, coined a name for this state of affairs, constructed an explanation of how and why such outbreaks occur, and pointed out how they are linked to the larger social structure. Their formulations generated commentary and research that has been continuous since they launched it, and such analysis remains vigorous to this day. To quote Jason Ditton, the moral panic “has been far and away the most influential sociological concept to have been generated in the second half of the twentieth century.”1 Moral panic researchers have illuminated the sudden eruption of fear of pseudo-villainous agents who have ranged from semi-somnolent Chinese opium smokers to the gleeful horror-comic-book-reading children next door.

An essential element of the moral panic is that the concern about a particular threat be disproportional or exaggerated as compared with what a clearheaded, empirical, and factual investigation would tell us. The exaggerations may pertain to the gravity of the threat—the number of victims, the seriousness of the harm, the cost of the damage to the society—or it may even involve whether such a threat exists in the first place. No one questions the right of someone to run away from a screaming, knife-wielding maniac. But the actual menace posed by many supposed threats, objectively assessed, turns out to be minor or nonexistent. Hence, the moral panics researcher is forced to be a skeptic. Is this fear based on something material? If so, what is the risk? Where is the evidence and what does it say? For the student of moral panics, data counts; facts matter. Let's do some comparisons, these theorists insist. Did the Chinese opium smokers really entice white children to take up the habit, seduce and enslave our wives and daughters, and corrupt and bring down Western civilization? Was it really true that reading comic books turned our adolescent boys into juvenile delinquents? Let's check, then let's find out why such beliefs are plausible at certain times and places. Why this issue? Why this supposed threat? Why these targets?

The most classic panics entail mobilization. Protests, demonstrations, posses, meetings, speeches. They are typically characterized by violence, threats, denunciations, and heated arguments, the formation of political action groups, and social movements. There are laws, bills, prohibitions, arrests, and imprisonments. Articles about the presumed threat are published in newspapers and magazines, the social media, fiction of the day, and angry letters to editors. In the modern era, anxious tales are broadcast about the outrage and threat of the putative menace in television news reports, and in film. Governments often jump on the bandwagon and generate budget allocations to address the problem. Police stand alert to spot and take action against the accused miscreants. In short, what do the members of a society do when they learn of the threat supposedly facing them?

What about immigrants? What makes the arrival of foreign-born folk to our shores a matter of exaggerated concern? As historian Matt Jacobson writes in Whiteness of a Different Color, in 1891, anti-Italian riots erupted in New Orleans as eleven Italians were lynched following the outcome of a murder trial that had been rigged by the local Mafia.2 An editorial in the New York Times defended the lynching, declaring that the mob was made up of the city's “best element,” wielding the incident to suggest that the behavior of the Italian immigrants was racially determined, and questioning their fitness for citizenship.³ The editorial referred to “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians” who are ruled by “lawless passions” and distinguished by “cutthroat practices.” Rattlesnakes, the editorial concluded, “were as good citizens as they.” In the 1890s, when a journalist asked an American construction worker if Italians were white, “No, sir,” he replied, “an Italian is a Dago.” In a like fashion, political cartoons published in the nineteenth century depicted Irish immigrants as hot-tempered, savage, and threatening, and looking distinctly swarthy and “Negroid” in countenance. Signs appeared on establishment doors: “NO IRISH NEED APPLY!” To many long-established Yankees of impeccable WASP ancestry, the Irish were not quite white, but rather a species of being categorically and distinctly inferior to themselves and therefore deserving of no rights. And very possibly a threat to the rest of us. Drunkards. Criminals. Papists.

Inferior to the rest of us. A different species of being. A threat. For much of American history, the people who migrated from other lands generated a measure of fear, suspicion, and concern among a substantial number of vociferous native-born Americans, and, under certain conditions, these emotions erupted into virulent incidents. They aren't like us, these nativists claimed; they engage in wicked, unwholesome practices, and hold insidious beliefs. Keep them out. Are undocumented Mexican immigrants really “criminals, drug dealers, and rapists,” as presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed during his campaign? As any fact-checker will tell you, Mexican immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans; thus, Trump's statement turns out to be not only exaggerated but untrue—in fact, a lie. Do some illegal Mexican immigrants commit crime? Of course. Do some Muslims commit terrorist acts? We already know that “some” do. Members of all groups, in some measure, do as well.

As Bartholomew and Reumschüssel masterfully argue, in this, a land populated by immigrants and their descendants, immigrants have been demonized for almost two centuries. They are the “Other,” America's “folk devils,” a “suitable enemy”—in short, deviants. The case studies the authors investigate focus on the deviantization of historically successive immigrant categories. American Intolerance skillfully links the dehumanization that racism accomplishes with the stigmatization process of turning categories of humanity into deviants, not because of what they've done, but because of who they are. Here, we are in the territory of Erving Goffman's “tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion,” those shameful categorical blemishes that “can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family.”4 The philosopher David Livingston Smith covers this ground in his insightful volume, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. To that roster of “othering” actions we might also want to know why some of us exclude others from this country of ours. Yes, it's true that we dehumanize others, but there's a twist: We also fear that these others are all too human, and so we need mechanisms to reassure us that they are not quite so human.

And that's where Bartholomew and Reumschüssel guide us through America's long history of its “exaggerated fear” of immigrants. Catholic aliens are unworthy of citizenship because, zombie-like, they take orders from Rome. Because, within those closed-off church convent compounds, nuns and priests engage in unholy acts of depravity and perversion. Because they murder babies conceived in these unholy acts. The tribal stigma—that taint, the human stain—born by particular categories of humanity—Mexicans, Chinese, American Indians, Germans, Japanese, Jews, Muslims—those aliens whom nativists endeavored to exclude, seemed manifestly self-evident. Red-blooded, native-born citizens of the United States of America considered them unassimilable because they were incapable of becoming authentic Americans; if allowed to enter our country, they would menace our sacred way of life. Sneaky, dangerous, barbaric, brutish, un-Christian. Keep ’em out.

Exaggerated fear? Moral panic? During the historical apex of the scapegoating, the nativists did not think so—the categories they attempted to exclude were a foregone conclusion. Imagine the society we would live in today had these sentiments not gotten riled up, these bans not put in place. Perhaps even then, we wouldn't have become a cosmopolitan paradise, but at least Donald J. Trump would not have been elected president of the United States. American Intolerance admirably lays the groundwork for explaining why such a paradise was not to be.

Erich Goode
Sociology Professor Emeritus, Stony Brook University

Erich Goode is the author of several influential books in the field of sociology, including Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (2010), Drugs in American Society (2014), and The Handbook on Deviance (2015).