The Gnarly Green Root of Today’s Antisemitism
The hate, fear, and loathing in the headlines spring in part from America’s struggles dating back more than a century. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
You know the news hook: seething chaos at the border and the deplorable quality of people seeking admission and asylum. Yet, as bad as things are now, they will only get worse, the commentator laments:
The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses, … degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the greatest apprehension and alarm. They are beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.
This sentiment sounds so much like the evening news on Fox that you might guess its source to be right-wing podcaster Steve Bannon or MAGA House members Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Paul Gosar. Yet, contemporary as they appear, these lines were penned by Francis Amasa Walker — former head of the Office of Indian Affairs and superintendent of the census, then president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — for The Atlantic in June 1896.
Much like now, anxiety about what it was becoming had America on edge. The year 1890 marked the Census Bureau’s official closing of the American frontier, and the United States taking shape behind the closed frontier looked dark and menacing to the powerful and privileged, the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Cities were growing rapidly, Blacks from the South were streaming north to flee Jim Crow, and immigration from Southern Europe and the Russian Empire was shifting the country’s demographics. Incoming hordes of swarthy Catholics and, even worse, Jews threatened to swamp out “real” Americans who saw themselves as descendants of pioneer stock.
Teddy Roosevelt worried that the loss of the frontier threatened American manliness. Without that righteous struggle against fierce tribes and unforgiving nature, America would grow soft and flabby. His remedy was big-game hunting:
The chase is among the best of all national pastimes: it cultivates the vigorous manliness for lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can atone.
To address the American malaise Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club, an elite sportsmen’s lodge of rifle hunters dedicated to the pursuit of big game in challenging landscapes that needed to be preserved against immigrant-swollen cities.
Boone and Crockett was just one among a wave of new organizations focused on saving America’s shrinking wild: the first iteration of the Audubon Society, the Alpine Club of Williamstown, the White Mountain Club, the Rocky Mountain Club, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and the American Ornithological Union, among others. The Sierra Club, headed by first president John Muir, joined the movement in 1892. All were dedicated to protecting an America and its wilderness under assault.
Thanks to philanthropist Mary W. Harriman, a “scientific” campaign to protect America’s old-stock citizens and threatened wild places shifted into high gear after 1910. Even as she was helping support John Muir’s campaign to stop the Hetch Hetchy dam project in Yosemite National Park, she funded the founding and maintenance of the Eugenics Record Office. Yes, that eugenics, the “science” helping the “good” breed freely, keeping the “defective” from breeding at all, and giving white supremacy a fallacious evolutionary sheen.
Charles Davenport, the ERO’s leader, equated nationality with race and declared that it determined the civic value of various groups. Germans, Scandinavians, and Anglo-Saxons made good Americans because of their genetic predisposition to thrift, intelligence, and chastity. The Irish were cradle alcoholics, slow-witted, and sickly, while Italians tipped toward violence and revenge. As for Jews, their defective genes placed them on the “opposite extreme from the early English and more recent Scandinavian immigration.”
Eugenics caught on among Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans because it granted them pseudo-scientific solace as the people selected by evolutionary genetics to reign and rule. It played, too, into their dread of an apocalypse brought on by an immigrant flood from Southern and Eastern Europe determined to outbreed and push them aside. The political vocabulary of the time called this race suicide, the equivalent of today’s great replacement theory.
The antisemitism and racism implicit in eugenics appealed to its supporters not as an atavistic impulse to bigotry and hate so much as beneficent, enlightened science brought to bear on the hard facts of social reality. This was a time when one could believe simultaneously in social reform to improve the human condition and in an inherited racial hierarchy whose rightness had been verified by science. The Progressive Era held both ideas to be true at the same time, and eugenicists saw themselves as enlightened men and women eliminating threats to racial purity, American cities, and the environment.
That mix succeeded politically, leading to the Immigration Act of 1924, which shut off immigration from Asia and imposed low, strict quotas on newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe.
The same impulses against Jews and immigrants are very much alive today, although the narrative’s details have shifted. In the eugenicist run-up to 1924, Jews swelled the immigrant horde threatening to replace old-line Americans. These days the far right — think the Charlottesville proto-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and their MAGA allies — blames money from Jewish billionaire George Soros for funding caravans of dangerous and undesirable immigrants crossing Mexico to invade the U.S.
That claim is false, but the facts don’t matter. Today, just like back then, the point is the hate. And it’s still working.
Autographed Cast out of Eden Available Online
Thanks to the generosity of fellow writer Matthew Kerns and his DimeLibrary.com website, you can order a signed copy of the book for mail delivery. Complete details here.
The California Sun Podcast Features Cast out of Eden
Host Jeff Schechtman asks me about the book and probes how it sheds light on John Muir’s long-ignored legacy toward Native Californians. Listen here (no paywall!).