Racial politics of the USA before 1945

After the Civil War racial issues continued to dominate American politics at all levels.

Almost all workers' unions prevented blacks from becoming members. Unions would often go on strikes over management attempts to employ blacks, and racial clashes between workers of different races were common.

World War II

The army prevented racial mixing. While stationed in England during the war, white and black American troops were shooting each other over attempts by the nonwhites to date English women. An American army order stipulated that white and black soldiers be given passes on different evenings to stop racial incidents. Strict racial segregation was maintained in the US Army throughout the war, ironic given the war against Nazism.

112,000 Japanese people on the West Coast were detained and sent to “War Relocation Camps”, many of them US citizens.

The American government heavily used racial stereotypes in war propaganda, with Japanese racial features portrayed in exaggerated ways which would have shamed any Nazi propagandist.

Segregation

The massive influx of blacks started the downward spiral for which Detroit is famous today, but in 1943 the city was majority white and strictly segregated.

To protest against segregation gangs of blacks invaded a white residential suburb, they looted the stores and attacked white people at random. Only federal troops suppressed the unrest and more than 1800 blacks were arrested.

• A 1920 Mississippi law made it a crime to advocate or publish “arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes”.

• All states had segregated schools and all states prohibited mixed-race marriages.

The policy of segregation was implemented at the highest level as well. When Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913, he ordered the racial segregation of all federal facilities in the American capital.

It is often thought that large-scale black riots started in America during the “civil rights” era of the 1960s. The facts are substantially different. Serious disturbances occurred in the north and the south from the late 19th century onward, often sparked by real or imaginary racial incidents. This was an indication of the underlying racial tensions which required the smallest excuse to erupt into violence.

In 1917 a black army battalion went amok in Houston and used their government-issued firearms to shoot white civilians. Two blacks and eleven whites were killed. Over sixty black soldiers were tried and convicted of murder, and thirteen were hanged.

Asian immigration

Large numbers of Chinese laborers were imported into California during the last quarter of the 19th century by railroad-building companies. The Chinese worked for considerably less pay than other laborers, and this caused an upsurge in unemployment among the white population.

White workers organized under the Workingmen’s Party of California in 1877. Racial disturbances took place between whites and Chinese, and support for the Workingmen’s Party forced the legislature of California to pass a law which restricted Chinese immigration.

In 1880 the US Congress limited Chinese immigration into America and in 1882 banned all Chinese immigration for ten years.

Japanese immigrants had also been lured to California, but their innate sense of racial pride created an unexpected problem for the state authorities: they objected to not being segregated from other Asians.

From 1906 Japanese and Korean students had to attend a Chinese school. The Japanese government lodged an official complaint, and the incident took on such proportions that it landed on the desk of President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1913 the California legislature passed the Alien Land Law, in terms of which “all aliens ineligible for citizenship” were denied the right to acquire land or long leaseholds on property. This prevented all Asian immigrants from acquiring property. Finally, a 1924 act passed in California halted Asian immigration entirely.

Immigration Act of 1924

America became the world’s center for racial science and thought. The chief racial theorists at the time were Madison Grant (1865–1937) and T. Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950). Grant wrote two of the most influential works of American racialism: «The Passing of the Great Race» (1916), and «The Conquest of a Continent» (1933). In these books, Grant expounded on racial anthropology and the need for eugenics, or racial improvement by selective breeding.

In «The Passing of the Great Race» Grant called for a halt to nonwhite immigration into the United States. The book was an international bestseller. American president Warren G. Harding publicly praised eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard’s book, «The Rising Tide of Color», at a public speech on October 26, 1922.

Grant and Stoddard’s works sparked a wave of research into race in America. By 1921, at least eight other major works had been published. All were overnight successes which proposed eugenics and a ban on nonwhite immigration.

By the mid-1920s, twenty-four states had passed laws encouraging sterilization of those who were retarded, insane, or had criminal records.

A huge wave of immigrants to the United States occurred between the 1840s and the 1920s. During this era, approximately 37 million immigrants arrived in America. US Census Bureau figures show that about 6 million Germans, 4.5 million Irish, 4.75 million Italians, 4.2 million British, 4.1 million Austro–Hungarians, 2.3 million Scandinavians, and 3.3 million Russians and Balts entered America.

From 1880 onward, millions of people from Eastern and Southern Europe joined the flood of immigrants who entered America. This included millions of Eastern European Jews and Southern Europeans, who were of different stock from the original settlers in America who had all come from northwestern Europe. This influx greatly alarmed people such as Grant, Stoddard, and Laughlin, who used their considerable influence to pressure the US Congress into passing America’s first major immigration law.

The resultant Immigration Act of 1924 limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890. This had the practical effect of limiting to a trickle those immigrants not from northwestern Europe.

For example, from 1900 to 1924, at least 200,000 Italians entered the United States each year. The 1924 Act halted this influx and set an annual quota for Italians at less than 3,845. This contrasted with the number of immigrants allowed in from Germany (51,227), Britain (34,007), Ireland (28,567), and Sweden (9,561).

Eugenics

Madison Grant set up the American Eugenics Society along with Harry Laughlin, the US Congress’s eugenics advisor. This organization acted as the American host for two of the three World Eugenics Congresses held from 1912 to 1932.

The first World Eugenics Congress was held in London in 1912, where one of its sponsors was Winston Churchill.

The second World Eugenics Congress was held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1921 and attracted more than three hundred delegates from all over the world. The guest list included future American President Herbert Hoover, and the scientific genius Alexander Graham Bell, who was the eugenics congress’s honorary president.

The third World Eugenics Congress was held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1932. Prominent attendees included Dr. J. Harvey-Kellogg and Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin.

Grant’s second major work, «The Conquest of a Continent», appeared in 1933. The book detailed the racial makeup of the United States and warned that racial integration would cause America to disappear. The book became the focus of a boycott organized mainly by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. This occurred despite Grant making no specific remarks about Jews in the book. By this time the Nazi Party had won power in Germany, and the American racialist movement was held responsible for preparing the scientific background to their racial policies. The propaganda mills were turned against Grant as much as they were turned against the Nazis.

In addition, the Jewish anthropologist, Franz Boaz, launched a well-supported campaign against eugenics and racial thought. Although much of Boaz’s work was later exposed as a hoax (for example, his claims that skull shapes of immigrants to America changed after a generation or two was an outright lie), his influence set the tone for many present-day sociological teachings.

The (((media)))’s propaganda, which linked Grant’s work to the Nazis, scared prominent public figures away from supporting eugenics in America. As a result, eugenics was successfully suppressed in America by the end of the Second World War.