This America by Jill Lepore

Author:Jill Lepore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

· XI ·

NATIONS AND ORIGINS

AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO END, announced an eight-column headline in the New York Times. NORDIC VICTORY IS SEEN IN DRASTIC REDUCTIONS, declared the Los Angeles Times. In 1924, Congress passed a two-part Immigration Act, banning immigration from anywhere in Asia, vastly restricting immigration from Europe, and sorting out European immigrants by their “national origins.” Less eugenically desirable southern and eastern Europeans—Italians, Hungarians, and Jews—were all but barred entry.

The same year, in the Indian Citizenship Act, Congress granted citizenship to all native peoples in the United States, by fiat. The Indian Rights Association—an advocacy organization made up of white people—had lobbied for the act. Not all native peoples wanted it. The Onondaga protested the act as forced nationalization. Pueblo peoples had earlier asked to be excluded from laws that granted citizenship to men who had served in the First World War. Porfirio Mirabel of Taos told a House committee: “All that I ask the Government of the United States is that we want to be left alone and not to be made citizens.”

Under the terms of both 1924 acts—the Immigration Act and the Indian Citizenship Act—becoming an American was not so much a matter of choice and consent but a matter of racial decree. Both acts were influenced by eugenicist tracts, especially Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), and relied as well on a report prepared for Congress in 1911 that included a “Dictionary of Races or Peoples,” which divided the world’s peoples into “the white, black, yellow, brown, and red races,” classing all but the first together as the “colored” or “dark” races. Many native people, asked to effectively become white by renouncing native nationhood and becoming U.S. citizens, refused.

The regime, nevertheless, proceeded. After 1924, immigrants to the United States were admitted on a system that established quotas based on national origin. Determining, on no basis whatsoever, that 75 percent of the population of the United States was descended from the eugenically preferable “Nordic,” or northern European, stock, 75 percent of new immigrants had to be “Nordic,” too. (This arrangement, which was less of a calculation that an act of imagination, specifically excluded from its computation all “descendants of slave immigrants,” lest the proposed quota system “open the country to an African invasion.”) The next year, in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, who had read the first German edition of The Passing of the Great Race, applauded Americans’ efforts at restricting immigration by “simply excluding certain races from naturalization.”

Mexican immigrants stood as an exception to the 1924 act’s quota regime. Especially after Mexico adopted a new constitution in 1917, its American consulate undertook to discourage the 1.5 million Mexicans who had emigrated into the United States between 1890 and 1929 from becoming Americans. Consular offices in California attempted to cultivate Mexican patriotism in hopes that migrant workers would return to Mexico. Meanwhile,

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