The atlantic TruePDF april 2019

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BY GRAEME WOOD His critics shuddered when he was appointed national security adviser But he may be our best hope for saving the world from Donald Trump’s impulses 64 How Much Immigration Is Too Much? B Y D AV I D F R U M We need to make hard decisions now about what will truly benefit current and future Americans 54 The Fertility Doctor’s Secret BY SARAH ZHANG Donald Cline must have thought no one would ever know Then DNA testing came along 76 Witness to the Counterrevolution BY WILLIAM J BURNS An American diplomat looks back on a relationship gone bad Matt White and his mother, Liz, who was a patient of Donald Cline’s in the early 1980s, when he was Indianapolis’s go-to fertility specialist At the time, she kept her fertility struggles private; only years later did she realize that her best friend had also gone to Cline P h o t o g r a p h b y A LY S S A S C H U K A R T H E AT L A N T I C A P R I L CONTENTS Dispatches 10 Departments SKETCH TECHNOLOGY How AI Will Rewire Us 21 Songs of Ice and Fire B Y N I C H O L A S A C H R I S TA K I S B Y S P E N C E R KO R N H A B E R For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship Ramin Djawadi’s score for Game of Thrones helped make the show a hit—and made an unlikely star of the composer The Conversation 96 The Big Question What was the best sequel in history? ST U DY O F ST U D I E S 23 Bad Dreams Are Good B Y B E N H E A LY How your night life prepares you for tomorrow BUSINESS 24 Underemployment Chic BY GILLIAN B WHITE Uniqlo has become the unofficial clothier of urban Millennials Can it catch on with the rest of America? CRIMINAL TENDENCIES B I G I N … I TA LY 13 Music for the Migrant Crisis BY R AC H A E L A L L E N A fiercely anti-immigrant country falls for a Tunisian Italian rapper On the Cover 26 Why Americans Don’t Cheat on Their Taxes BY RENE CHUN The weirdly hopeful story of how the U.S came to be a leader in tax compliance POLITICS 14 Get Off My Lawn BY J A M E S FA L LOW S How a small group of activists (our correspondent among them) got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital A P R I L T H E AT L A N T I C Illustration by Elias Klingén VOL 323–NO 04 19 The Culture File 33 Poetry 38 The Heart Has Reasons BOOKS B Y J O H N S KOY L E S The Art of Leaving Things Out BY RUTH FRANKLIN Amy Hempel has never embraced the term minimalism, but her best stories show how rich spareness can be Essay THE OMNIVORE BOOKS 28 Killing With Kindness 36 The Curated Self, Circa 1820 BY JA M E S PA R K E R A literary celebrity with a dark secret, Letitia Elizabeth Landon sought public exposure while remaining an elusive mystery Ellen DeGeneres, daytime superstar, is itching to try something new But America needs the old Ellen more than ever before 84 White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots BY ADAM SERWER Few now remember Madison Grant, who a century ago helped promote the doctrine that whites were in danger of extinction Today, an excavation of the man and the mission is overdue BY NICHOL AS DAMES BOOKS 30 Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris BY GARY GREENBERG The quest to understand the biology of mental illness has so far failed, but you wouldn’t know it from practitioners’ claims T H E AT L A N T I C A P R I L R E S P O N S E S & R E V E R B E R AT I O N S that queer was the primary name assigned by society to homosexuals before gay came into popular parlance in the later 1960s And queer was not descriptive in a positive way It was ugly, hateful, pejorative, demeaning, and diminishing It is not the right word with which to be labeled, if one must be labeled Julian Balfour ASHEVILLE, N.C I don’t personally identify as queer, but because I had a couple of decades when gay was the overall descriptor whether one identified as such or not, I’m fine with queer being the primary descriptor for the next couple The word has long since been taken away from the haters and used as a term of empowerment rather than degradation Jim Longo NEW YORK, N.Y • T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N Don’t Call Me LGBTQ In the January/February issue, Jonathan Rauch made the case for adopting one overarching designation for sexual minorities He proposed using a single letter: Q What a relief to read something about the absurdity of the “alphabet soup” designation for gay people I totally agree with Jonathan Rauch that it has become a symbol “for the excesses of identity politics,” which have fueled animosity and intolerance toward homosexuals I’m amazed that anyone A P R I L 20 T H E would add more letters to this train wreck You will never promote more tolerance and peace in the world by diminishing individuals into ever more exclusive and reductive parts Large, broad categories are much more efficient and easy to understand AT L A N T I C Patricia McAnulty EUGENE, ORE No, a thousand times, no! Jonathan Rauch makes a valid point about the awkwardness of LGBTQ as a term to represent sexual minorities, but to substitute simply Q would be a huge error While Rauch mentions the baggage of the word queer (which Q would inevitably reference), he gives no sense of the fact Here in rural Virginia there have always been plenty of Q people But no one uses LGBTQ or queer, and they won’t use Q The entire project of requiring names or labels is unworkable with rural people—and with working-class people generally, wherever they live It is primarily a project of academic elites, cultural elites, and self-interested parties in national or state “identity” organizations Edward Strickler SCOTTSVILLE, VA The thesis of this article appears to be something akin to: Inclusion has become too confusing for us old-timers, and the straight white males of our country are inclined to resent the community the more it grows So how about we just roll back decades of progress because it would make the powers that be happy? Straight white males in America have never had to fight for their civil liberties; they have been endowed with such rights since the conception of the country The entire pursuit of civil rights in this country has been a game of catch-up; women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities aren’t pursuing “special rights”—the pursuit has always been one for equal rights So when Rauch posits that the LGBT+ community should contract to include only the “queer” classification, he is effectively suggesting that a nuanced and complex community should strip its members of each of their respective, hard-fought identities so as to appease the very community that would so willingly dismiss and oppress the LGBT+ community altogether referenced acronym (LGBT; or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) assumes gender and sexuality to be binary and static, which science overwhelmingly indicates is false As nonbinary gender identities and fluid sexual identities continue to emerge—especially among young people—there is even more reason to drop any acronym and use a term that is, as Rauch describes, “simple and inclusive, and carries minimal baggage.” Second, I challenge Rauch’s use of the phrase sexual minorities in reference to LGBT people—transgender people are not inherently sexual minorities A more representative phrase would be sexual and gender minorities Samuel Allen WASHINGTON, D.C Phoebe Solomon IRVINE, CALIF I was thrilled to read Jonathan Rauch’s compelling piece I agree emphatically with his sentiment, one that I have had myself for years (I research queer people and provide therapy to queer individuals and couples) The critique he makes of the ever-increasing LGBTQ initialism, with the continued exclusion of at least one group (often more), is spot-on, especially as the quantity and diversity of sexual and gender identities continue to grow I would just like to draw attention to two shortcomings I noted while reading Rauch’s article First, an additional critique of the acronym that was omitted is that each of the four identities subsumed within the most ubiquitously Why Are We So Angry? Charles Duhigg wrote about the untold story of how we all got so mad at one another—and how anger might actually be useful (January/February) I write to correct the misuse of my words by Charles Duhigg By omitting the role hope plays in turning anger into a constructive force, Duhigg twisted my words to support his argument—which contradicts my views and those of the farm-worker movement I served He repeatedly purged from my comments all references to hope, which I consistently connected to anger Anger, especially when linked with fear, easily turns into the kind of hate we see far too often Duhigg makes it seem as though organizers are simply “stoking” people’s anger, devoid of any capacity for agency or understanding Managing the tension between anger and hope is what organizers Similarly, he misrepresents the movement, taking words like defiant, outrage, and revolution out of context The songs on Chavez’s 28-day march to Sacramento during Lent were spiritual, not defiant; the banners read PEREGRINACIÓN, PENITENCIA, REVOLUCIÓN (“Pilgrimage, penance, revolution”), rather than simply “Celebrating revolution.” To describe Cesar Chavez as “an embodiment of all the progress that righteous anger can achieve” misses the essence of his work Duhigg does a deep disservice to the movement and what it can teach Its greatness was in linking anger to hope and love We know a lot about anger these days We need a deeper understanding of what it takes, in the words of Langston Hughes, to realize the America “that never has been yet—and yet must be.” Marshall Ganz CAMBRIDGE, MASS Charles Duhigg replies: While I was reporting for my article about anger, Marshall Ganz was a helpful source in understanding the role emotion played in the labor movement led by Cesar Chavez, a movement Ganz witnessed Because the subject of my story was anger and its function in society, I focused on how Chavez used anger to organize and mobilize his followers But I also emphasized Chavez’s commitment to nonviolence and belief in selfdetermination, and described the measures he took—including a 25-day fast—to inspire his followers to stand up for their rights without succumbing to acts of retribution against the people who had exploited them While I appreciate that Ganz would have preferred I emphasize the feelings of hope Chavez inspired, I did not twist Ganz’s words or misrepresent our conversation My account of Chavez’s movement, drawn from my discussions with Ganz—as well as from numerous other sources—offers an accurate assessment of the role moral outrage played in advancing Chavez’s cause It also makes very clear how combustible anger can be, and the remarkable work Chavez undertook to channel his followers’ righteous discontent into an effective, nonviolent movement for justice Some, like Ganz, may believe a focus on anger is inappropriate But to minimize the role of anger is to fundamentally misdiagnose how movements like Chavez’s have found followers and effected change We should seek to understand anger’s nature, rather than downplay its role in the past and present, so we can channel its power to good, and avoid its dangerous pitfalls EDITORIAL OFFICES & CORRESPONDENCE The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column Correspondence should be sent to: Editorial Department, The Atlantic, 600 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20037 Receipt of unsolicited manuscripts will be acknowledged if accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope Manuscripts will not be returned Emailed manuscripts can be sent to: submissions@theatlantic.com CUSTOMER SERVICE & REPRINTS Please direct all subscription queries and orders to: 800-234-2411 International callers: 515-237-3670 For expedited customer service, please call between 3:30 and 11:30 p.m ET, Tuesday through Friday You may also write to: Atlantic Customer Care, P.O Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564 Reprint requests (100+) should be made to The YGS Group, 717-399-1900 A discount rate is available for students and educators Please visit theatlantic.com/subscribe/academic ADVERTISING OFFICES The Atlantic, 60 Madison Avenue, Suite 800, New York, NY 10010, 646-539-6700 T H E AT L A N T I C A P R I L high appetite for risk In 2016, a year after I left government, he saw an oppor tunity for a more direct challenge to the West—an attack on the integrity of its democracies H O L O S T R U S S I A ? It’s an old argument, and it misses the point Russia was never ours to lose Russians lost trust and confidence in themselves after the Cold War, and only they could remake their state and their economy In the 1990s, the country was in the midst of three simultaneous historical transformations: the collapse of Communism and the transition to a market economy and democracy; the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the security it had provided to historically insecure Russia; and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, and with it an empire built over several centuries None of that could be resolved in a single generation, let alone a few years And none of it could be fixed by outsiders; greater American involvement would not have been tolerated The sense of loss and indignity that came with defeat in the Cold War was unavoidable, no matter how many times we and the Russians had told each other that the outcome had no losers, only winners From that humiliation, and from the disorder of Yeltsin’s Russia, grew the deep distrust and smoldering aggressiveness of Putin’s The pattern in U.S.-Russian relations has sometimes hinted at historical immutability, as if we were bound to rivalry and unending suspicion That view might contain a kernel of truth; history matters, and is difficult to escape But the whole truth is more complicated, and more prosaic We each had our illusions America thought that Moscow would eventually get accustomed to being our junior partner, and grudgingly accommodate NATO expansion even up to its border with Ukraine And Russia always assumed the worst about American motives, and believed that its own corrupt political order and unreformed economy were a sustainable basis for real geopolitical power We tended to feed each other’s pathologies Too often, we talked past each other Today, of course, the American relationship with Moscow is more bizarre, and more troubled, than at any point since the end of the Cold War In Helsinki last summer, President Donald Trump stood alongside Putin, absolved him of election interference, and publicly doubted the conclusions of America’s intelligence and law-enforcement services Trump’s narcissism, breathtaking disregard for history, and unilateral diplomatic disarmament are a depressing trifecta at a moment when Russia poses threats that were unimaginable a quarter century ago He seems oblivious to the reality that “getting along” with rivals like Putin is not the aim of diplomacy, which is all about advancing tangible interests Managing relations with Russia will be a long game, conducted within a relatively narrow band of possibilities Navigating such a great-power rivalry requires tactful diplomacy—maneuvering in the gray area between peace and war; demonstrating a grasp of the limits of the possible; building leverage; exploring common ground where we can find it; and pushing back firmly and persistently where we can’t The path ahead with Russia will get rockier before it gets easier We ought to traverse it without illusions, mindful of Russia’s interests and sensibilities, unapologetic about our values, and confident in our own enduring strengths We should not give in to Putin—or give up on the Russia beyond him William J Burns is the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former deputy secretary of state This article is adapted from his new book, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal T H E AT L A N T I C A P R I L 83 E S S AY White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots A century ago, the idea that whites were in danger of extinction was the consensus among a cadre of elites in the United States Few now remember Madison Grant, who helped promote the doctrine—in a book that Hitler called his “bible.” As “white genocide” rhetoric finds new outlets, an excavation of the man and the mission is overdue By ADAM SERWER Illustration by Edel Rodriguez 84 A P R I L 20 T H E AT L A N T I C R OBERT BOWERS wanted everyone to know why he did it “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social-media network Gab shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27 and gunning down 11 worshippers He “wanted all Jews to die,” he declared while he was being treated for his wounds Invoking the specter of white Americans facing “genocide,” he singled out HIAS, a Jewish American refugee-support group, and accused it of bringing “invaders in that kill our people.” Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announcing that Bowers would face federal charges, was unequivocal in his condemnation: “These alleged crimes are incomprehensibly evil and utterly repugnant to the values of this nation.” The pogrom in Pittsburgh, occurring just days before the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, seemed fundamentally un-American to many Sessions’s denunciation spoke to the reality that most Jews have found a welcome home in the United States His message also echoed what has become an insistent refrain in the Donald Trump era Americans want to believe that the surge in white-supremacist violence and recruitment—the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us”; the hate crimes whose perpetrators invoke the president’s name as a battle cry—has no roots in U.S soil, that it is racist zealotry with a foreign pedigree and marginal allure Warnings from conservative pundits on Fox News about the existential threat facing a country overrun by immigrants meet with a similar response “Massive demographic changes,” Laura Ingraham has proclaimed, mean that “the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” in much of the country: Surely this kind of rhetoric reflects mere ignorance Or it’s just a symptom of partisan anxiety about what those changes may portend for Republicans’ electoral prospects As for the views and utterances of someone like Congressman Steve King (“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”), such sentiments are treated as outlandish extremism, best ignored as much as possible The concept of “white genocide”— extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite 86 A P R I L 20 T H E AT L A N T I C interlopers— may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth History, though, tells a different story King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization— how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt “That language” has an American past in need of excavation Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective— the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood with a very impressive mustache, Madison Grant He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide” (the term genocide hadn’t yet been coined in Grant’s day) In an introduction to the 2013 edition of another of Grant’s works, the white nationalist Richard Spencer warns that “one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogeneous and ‘assimilated,’ nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.” This language is vintage Grant Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology M ADISON GRANT CAME from old money Born in Manhattan seven months after Robert E Lee surrendered to Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox, he attended Yale and then Columbia Law School He was an outdoorsman and a conservationist, knowledgeable about wildlife and interested in the dangers of extinction, expertise that he soon became intent on applying to humanity When he opened a law practice on Wall Street in the early 1890s, the wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe was nearing its height “As he was jostled by Greek ragpickers, Armenian bootblacks, and Jewish carp vendors, it was distressingly obvious to him that the new arrivals did not know this nation’s history or understand its republican form of government,” Spiro writes in his biography Jews troubled Grant the most “The man of the old stock,” he later wrote in The Passing of the Great Race, is being “driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.” But as the title of his 1916 work indicated, Grant’s fear of dispossession ran wide and deep: These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races In 1899, William Z Ripley, an economist, The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people In 1901 the sociologist Edward A Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide But it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers, subscribing to a belief that has proved durable The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.” In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration: The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew What Grant’s work lacked in scientific rigor, it made up for in canny packaging He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe Americans’ gauzy idealism blinded them, he argued, to the reality that newcomers from the Mediterranean and eastern Europe— to say nothing of anyone from Asia or Africa— could never hope to possess the genetic potential innate in the nation’s original Nordic inhabitants, which was the source of the nation’s greatness Grant gleefully challenged foundational ideas: 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 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 His thesis found eager converts among the American elite, thanks in no small part to his extensive social connections The New York Times and The Nation were among the many media outlets that echoed Grant’s reasoning Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine Poetry that Matters Verses to interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and celebrate our ideals “Richard Blanco’s contributions to poetry and the arts have already paved a path forward for future generations.” —President Barack Obama “Will open readers’ eyes wide to the true human stories about immigration.” —Booklist, starred review “Dominique Christina has the courage to use her imagination, and her empathy, to conceive of an alternative world.” —Cornel West Find more at beacon.org/poetry Igniting Hearts and Minds What It Means to Be Human—and Animal By the Bestselling Author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived A NEW EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY “I loved this book An outstandingly clear and witty account.” —Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm “Rutherford is a master storyteller A completely new perspective on who we are and how we came to be.”—Hannah Fry, author of Hello World “A smooth, expert, and often startling history that emphasizes that no behavior separates us from other animals, but we remain an utterly unique species.” —Kirkus Reviews “This delightful and charming book will change the way you see yourself and your place in the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes “A kind of intellectual enema, exposing the popular myths about human exceptionalism.” —New Scientist THE EXPERIMENT 㤲 NEW YORK Available wherever books are sold fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.” In a major speech in Alabama in 1921, President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World- Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.” Harding’s vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping The Nordics propagate themselves successfully With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law Endorsing Grant’s idea that true Americans are of Nordic stock, Coolidge also took up his idea that intermarriage between whites of different “races,” not just between whites and nonwhites, degrades that stock P ERHAPS THE MOST important of Grant’s elite admirers were to be found among members of Congress Reconstruction struggles; U.S expansion in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii; high levels of immigration— each had raised the specter of white people losing political power and influence to nonwhite people, or to the wrong kind of white people On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S came from oldmoney elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion As the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races Act of 1882 Grant found a congressional ally and champion in Albert Johnson, a Republican representative from Washington A nativist and union buster, he contacted Grant after reading The Passing of the Great Race The duo embarked on an ambitious restrictionist agenda In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924 Johnson found a patrician ally in Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, who sponsored the 1924 bill in the Senate A Princeton-educated lawyer, he feared that America was going the way of Rome, where the “inpouring of captives and alien slaves” had caused the empire to sink “into an impotency which made her the prey of every barbarian inva der.” This was almost verbatim Grant, whose portrait of Rome’s fall culminated in the lowly immigrants “gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their former masters.” (His plotline helped him preserve the notion that fair-haired and -skinned people are responsible for all the world’s great achievements: Rome’s original inhabitants were Nordic, but contemporary Italians were descendants of Roman slave races and therefore inferior.) Grant’s slippery pseudoscience also met with significant resistance The anthropologist Franz Boas, himself of German Jewish descent, led the way in poking holes in Grantian notions of Nordic superiority, writing in The New Republic in 1917 that “the supposed scientific data on which the author’s conclusions are based are dogmatic assumptions which cannot endure criticism.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being New from Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote: What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is As the Immigration Act of 1924 neared passage, some in the restrictionist camp played up Grant’s signature Nordic theme more stridently than others Addison Smith, a Republican congressman from Idaho, proudly invoked the Scandinavian, English, Irish, and other northernEuropean immigrants of his district, highlighting that among them were no DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Chris S Duvall A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading ROBERT CHRISTGAU Visa Lottery Chronicles CHARLES PIOT with KODJO NICOLAS BATEMA Fixer Theory in Forms VISA LOTTERY CHRONICLES Deported Americans The African Roots of Marijuana LIFE AFTER DEPORTATION TO MEXICO BETH C CALDWELL Book Reports The Fixer The DEPORTED AMERICANS “ ‘slackers’ of the type to be found in the cities of the East We have ample room, but no space for such parasites.” Johnson was prepared to be coy in the face of opposition from other legislators—mostly those from districts with large numbers of non-northern European immigrants— who railed against the Nordic-race doctrine “The fact that it is camouflaged in a maze of statistics,” protested Representative Meyer Jacobstein, a Democrat from New York, “will not protect this Nation from the evil consequences of such an unscientific, un-American, and wicked philosophy.” On the House floor in April 1924, Johnson cagily—but only temporarily— distanced himself from Grant “As regards the charge … that this committee has started out deliberately to establish a blond race … let me say that such a charge is all in your eye Your committee is not the author of any of these books on the so-called Nordic race,” he declared “I insist, my friends, there is neither malice nor hatred in this bill.” Once passage of the act was assured, however, motives no longer needed Life after Deportation to Mexico BETH C CALDWELL The African Roots of Marijuana Charles Piot with Kodjo Nicolas Batema CHRIS S DUVALL THE ROBERT ROMARE CHRISTGAU BEARDEN READER hush BOOK REPORTS Hush Media and Sonic Self-Control MACK HAGOOD Sign, Storage, Transmission The Romare Bearden Reader ROBERT G O'MEALLY, editor Media and Sonic Self-Control mack hagood ROBERT G O’MEALLY / EDITOR A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading dukeupress.edu T H E AT L A N T I C A P R I L 89 Yard Cleanup is EASY with a DR® CHIPPER SHREDDER! • Chip big branches up to 5" in diameter Yard & Garden Waste • Shred yard & garden waste up to 1.5" thick Branches Golden Gate Bridge; Yosemite Valley; Visit California with Caravan Tours 19C96X â 2019 Powerful engines spin massive flywheels to reduce everything FAST Check out the full DR® lineup including towable models! 9-Day Tour $1695 SF to LA with Yosemite & Wine Country See the best of California on a fully guided tour with Caravan Includes two nights at a national park lodge in Yosemite Caravan is the #1 in value Your Caravan tour of California is fully guided and includes all activities with a great itinerary Visit San Francisco, Yosemite, Sonoma, Monterey, Hollywood, Santa Barbara, Big Sur & more Join the smart shoppers and experienced travelers Enjoy a well-earned, worry-free vacation Call now for choice dates Happy Travels! 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