“A Polyglot Boardinghouse”: The 1920s Debate Over Immigration

By turns eager and reluctant to embrace newcomers, Americans in the twentieth century followed no uniform course of action. In 1919, when sections of almost every major American city were teeming with men and women who spoke a multiplicity of languages, former president Theodore Roosevelt, wondered whether the United States had not become a “polyglot boardinghouse.”

I.

Debates about immigration and race have bedeviled the American national consciousness for more than two hundred years. Americans have yet to find a resolution. One line of argument has insisted that the United States is a “melting pot” in which the weary and careworn masses can jettison the past and fashion a new identity. According to this view, America is a redemptive community founded on the propositions that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The reassurance that anyone can become an American, and that everyone can take advantage of the economic opportunity and political freedom which America offers as gifts to the world, constituted until a few years ago the official ideology of the United States government. “Americans are united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals,” began the form letter presented to naturalized citizens during the administration of George W. Bush. The “grandest of these ideals,” the noble promise of American life, is “that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance.” Not united by blood and soil but drawn together by principles that “move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests, and teach us what it means to be citizens,” individuals the world over can find a home in the United States.[i]

Exposed to what the playwright Israel Zangwill described as “God’s Crucible,” differences in religion, culture, language, and history vanish, or at least cease to matter, in America. These dissimilarities do not produce a nation of strangers, with one people isolated from, or antagonistic toward, another. Rather, as the presidential letter suggests, diversity fortifies and enriches the United States. Zangwill’s play, The Melting Pot, which made its debut in 1908, offered a classic statement of the assimilationist position. The plot turns on intermarriage, which Zangwill envisioned as the best way to sweep aside the traditions and animosities of the Old World. In America, Zangwill wrote, people “must look forward.” They must disregard “the nightmare of religions and races” along with the inheritance of “hate and vengeance and blood.” Imagining that with this forgetfulness America “could melt up all racial differences and vendettas,” Zangwill made explicit the long-held assumption that unity rests, and has always rested, on historical and cultural amnesia. Assimilationists such as Zangwill consistently disparaged or ignored the emotional and spiritual costs of becoming American: the feelings of inferiority, and even the private loathing, that arose from indifference to, and perhaps contempt for, a previous life and a former self. [ii]

Alternately, Americans have conceived of themselves as a homogeneous people bound by a common history, language, culture, faith, and blood. This dogma characterized Africans, Asians, Hispanics, and even most Europeans as inferior to those of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Neither education nor discipline could transform these ignorant and backward peoples into useful, productive, and upright citizens of the Republic. As a consequence, they had to be excluded from the American polity or, at the very least, had to be governed by their cultural and biological superiors. The future of American liberty and the progress of mankind depended on it.

By turns eager and reluctant to embrace newcomers, Americans in the twentieth century followed no uniform course of action. As late as the 1920s, Europeans who were not citizens could vote in a number of states. Between 1894 and 1918 states throughout the Midwest gradually abolished this practice, but it continued in Arkansas until 1926. Meanwhile, legislation enacted in 1917 and 1918, such as the Immigration Act, proscribed illiterates, criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and other “undesirables” from entering the country. When Warren G. Harding became president in 1921, he expanded restrictions on immigration. The result was the Johnson, or Emergency Quota, Act. The Johnson Act decreed that total immigration could not exceed 357,000 persons a year. Congress apportioned quotas to every nation, essentially limiting entry to 3 percent of each nationality in the United States as reported in the census of 1910. In May, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed, or the National Origins, Act, which reduced quotas to 2 percent of each nationality present in the United States in 1890, virtually eliminating immigration from anywhere save northern and western Europe.[iii] “The United States is our land . . ..,” avowed Republican Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington, a co-sponsor of the bill. “We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.” The law, Johnson exalted, would prevent “a stream of alien blood . . . from entering America.” Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, spoke for those Americans “who are interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard–that is, the people who were born here.” Southern and eastern Europeans, Reed said, “arrive sick and starving and therefore less capable of contributing to the American economy, and unable to adapt to American culture.”[iv] The act reduced Italian immigration from 42,000 to 4,000 persons a year and Polish immigration from 31,000 to 6,000.

As with all complicated pieces of legislation, the Johnson-Reed Act was suffused with exceptions. Most notably, given the present furor over both legal and illegal immigration from Mexico and Central and South America, the law omitted Hispanics from the quota system at the insistence of western farmers who relied on their labor. During the Second World War, the Bracero Program further encouraged the temporary immigration of Mexicans to compensate for the shortage of agricultural workers. Yet, for more than forty years the Johnson-Reed Act defined the immigration policy of the United States. Not until passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (the Hart-Celler Act) in 1965 did Congress revise the quota system. Reformers at that time maintained that all persons should be granted humane treatment and judged as individuals rather than as members of particular national groups.

The chairman of the House Committee on Immigration, Johnson had enhanced his political influence by appealing to the anti-Japanese sentiments that many of his constituents harbored. To fashion his bill, he applied the popular racial theories of Madison Grant, who, in The Passing of the Great Race, had warned that unless the government excluded all “inferior” peoples, the physical, intellectual, and moral degenerates of Europe, Africa, and Asia would eradicate the Anglo-Saxons and wipe away their political and cultural achievements. As a preventive, Grant insisted that “the Laws of Nature require the obliteration of the unfit:”

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.[v]

Johnson intended his immigration bill to safeguard American racial purity, and thereby to ensure the survival and prosperity of the United States. He resolved to maintain the cultural dominance of the Nordic and Teutonic peoples at any and every cost.

Johnson embodied an unusual combination of pessimism and arrogance that, during the 1920s, marked a turning point in the history of the United States. His attitude revealed the loss of confidence, which emerged and grew in the aftermath of the First World War, that the nation could assimilate men and women of diverse social, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. Few white Americans doubted that Providence had reserved the United States exclusively for them and their descendants. At the same time, they lived in perpetual fear that this divine gift would somehow be wrested from them or that they would simply be overwhelmed by the alien multitudes and disappear. The American embrace of isolation, epitomized by the refusal to join the League of Nations or to participate in the World Court, suggested both a deepening antipathy to the rest of the world and a buoyant confidence that the United States was better off managing its own affairs.

II.

Race is an ideological construct, not a biological reality. Yet, the politics of race have long informed American thought, policy, and law regarding immigration. By the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, American resistance to mass immigration was already extensive and uncompromising. Americans did not wish to associate with or to understand foreigners. Such bigotry had emerged as early as the 1830s and by the 1840s it was commonplace, perhaps even more among the privileged than among the working class and poor. Immigration, it seemed, presented an existential threat to American society. During the 1920s, the economists John R. Commons and William Z. Ripley, along with the sociologist Edward A. Ross, advanced the notion that race was, in fact, a fixed and observable reality. Nature had ordered human beings into a rigorous hierarchy. Peoples of English and German descent occupied the vanguard. Those of Slavic, Mediterranean, Asian, and African origin were their natural inferiors and subordinates. Like Representative Johnson and Senator Reed, Commons, Ripley, Ross, and others provided a scientific rationale for chauvinism and intolerance.

Doing so was not their intention. Efforts to limit immigration followed the First World War and the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920.  During this moment of national hysteria, many Americans feared that alien provocateurs had instigated a wave of conspiracies designed to subvert the American way of life. Deporting those immigrants who had already come and preventing the entry of others seemed eminently prudent. But in the aftermath of the world war an individual did not have to be a bigot to regard all Europeans, including Anglo-Saxons, as unsuitable candidates for American citizenship. The war had satisfied Americans that Europeans were no longer capable of self-government—that among them ancient hostilities festered and grew without relief.  Those repressed hatreds might suddenly erupt to devour the United States as they had consumed Europe. The arrival of immigrants in greater numbers only made the prospect more likely.

The Progressive hope that education could acculturate immigrants faded after the war, or at least it proved unacceptably expensive. The arrival of more immigrants required more public schools, more teachers, more administrators and, because the laws had made education compulsory, more truant officers to enforce attendance. Transforming a diverse array of foreigners into reliable citizens placed an intolerable tax burden on the American people. In addition, along with unemployment, social scientific research demonstrated that truancy bred crime. It was no accident, Americans concluded, that leading figures in the criminal underworld were immigrants or their progeny.

These concerns, to say nothing of the exponential growth of large cities, provoked anxieties about the capacity of the United States to absorb the immigrant masses–a concern as troubling as was the announcement that the frontier had closed. The increase in population and the disappearance of the frontier, of which population growth was so obviously the cause, had ominous implications for the future welfare of the United States.

In his analysis of the problems attendant upon maintaining the Republic, Thomas Jefferson had recognized two sources of social and political corruption. The first derived from artificial and the second from natural causes. Catastrophe inevitably resulted from a degenerate political system that induced social inequality, an exodus from, and abandonment of, the land, urban squalor, and the production and consumption of luxury goods. By gaining independence from Great Britain and by undoing at least some of the Federalist programs, Jefferson thought that Americans had removed many of the potential sources of artificial decay and collapse. The natural causes remained and were, if anything, more serious and difficult to eradicate.

The pressure of population on a limited supply of land offered an example of a natural cause of social and political crisis. Jefferson worried that the United States would remain virtuous and independent “only as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America” and that the American people were not “piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe.” When American cities at last became overcrowded, Jefferson advised, the people and the government “will become corrupt as in Europe.”[vi] Although confident that such circumstances would not prevail for centuries, Jefferson remained consumed with the problem of land. His optimism about the American future betrayed the assumption that American boundaries to the north, south, and especially the west could be regularly and continually extended, always bringing into the country an ample supply of virgin land. Should that expansion ever be challenged or stopped by a formidable European power, such as Great Britain or France (Jefferson was less fearful of interference from Spain), what had heretofore been merely a theoretical problem might quickly become immediate and real. With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Jefferson hoped to postpone indefinitely the pressure that an expanding population would exert on a vast but finite supply of land.

The American Republic was in a race against time, and by the 1920s time seemed to be running out. For Jefferson, the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory had been of crucial importance because it pushed far into the future that dreaded day when the United States would become a densely populated society characterized by inequality, luxury, and decadence. Expansion across space rather than development over time, Jefferson thought, was the only effective antidote to population growth, urbanization, overcrowding, and the political, social, and moral corruption that accompanied these developments. Speaking in 1804, the prominent Jeffersonian Abraham Bishop of Connecticut observed that “the history of the world teaches that nations, like men, must decay. Ours will not forever escape the fate of others. Wealth, luxury, vice, aristocracies will attack us in our decline: these are evils of society, never to be courted, but to be put to as distant a day as possible. . .. We see in Louisiana an assurance of long life to our cause.” “By enlarging the empire of liberty,” Jefferson himself exulted in 1805, “we multiply its auxiliaries and provide new sources of renovation, should its principles, at any time, degenerate, in those portions of the country which gave them birth.”[vii]  In America there would always be an opportunity for men and women to begin life anew and, in the process, to revitalize the nation. With the arrival of immigrants, the rise of cities, and the spread of crime, increasing numbers of Americans during the 1920s began to wonder aloud whether, like the frontier, those magnificent possibilities had not already been foreclosed.

Generations of Americans equated race with nationality and believed that national character was hereditary and natural rather than historical and cultural. The characteristics they attributed to various “nationalities” and “races” were often facile to the point of absurdity. The Germans were intelligent but bellicose, the French democratic but libertine. The Russians were creative but brooding and radical. The Irish were whimsical but impulsive; they drank too much and worked too little. The English were the opposite: diligent and trustworthy but rigid and unfeeling. Preposterous and juvenile as these depictions may have been, many Americans took them seriously enough to distinguish what constituted the American character from all that was “un-American,” and to determine which groups ought to be permanently excluded from the United States.

In crafting American resistance to immigration, material considerations were secondary. Americans disliked and mistrusted foreigners and wished to prevent them from entering the country, not only to forestall economic competition. Immigrants who had earlier arrived despised newcomers who had come more recently. The racial and national categories by which Americans organized and differentiated peoples were standard mental and emotional equipment, even among those who were themselves immigrants. This democratic xenophobia became a national preoccupation, which culminated in the anti-immigrant legislation of 1921 and 1924. The principal fear was that immigrants would be unwilling or unable to become honest and responsible American citizens. Instead, they would forever remain a treacherous alien presence that could naught but contaminate what true Americans had worked so hard to purify.

Attitudes that had prevailed long before the First World War hardened into dogma once the conflict ended and Americans retreated into isolation. Describing the situation, the English socialist H.G, Wells warned against the “torrent of ignorance” that “pours into America by the millions to-day:”

Into the lower levels of the American community there pours perpetually a vast torrent of strangers, speaking alien tongues, inspired by alien traditions, for the most part illiterate peasants and working people. They come in at the bottom: that must be insisted upon. An enormous and ever-increasing proportion of the laboring classes, of all the lower class in America, is of recent European origin, is either of foreign birth or foreign parentage.

Few understood “the true dimensions of this invasion,” Wells lamented, an occurrence certain to transform the United States into a “polyglot slum:”

I doubt very much if America is going to assimilate all that she is taking in now; much more do I doubt that she will assimilate the still greater inflow of the coming years. I believe she is going to find infinite difficulties in that task. By “assimilate” I mean make intelligently co-operative citizens of these people. She will, I have no doubt whatever, impose upon them a bare use of the English language, and give them votes and certain patriotic persuasions, but I believe that if things go on as they are going the great mass of them will remain a very low lower class—will remain largely illiterate industrialized peasants. . .. And, frankly, I do not find the American nation has either in its schools—which are as backward in some States as they are forward in others—in its press, in its religious bodies or its general tone, any organized means or effectual influences for raising these huge masses of humanity to the requirements of an ideal modern civilization. [viii]

No native opponent of immigration during the 1920s could have given a more coherent or sober expression of the worst American fears.

In 1919, when sections of almost every major American city were teeming with men and women who spoke a multiplicity of languages, former president Theodore Roosevelt, echoing Wells’ description, wondered in a letter to Richard K. Hurd, the president of the anti-immigrant American Defense League, whether the United States had not become a “polyglot boardinghouse.”[ix] Roosevelt’s apprehensions were as unwarranted as those of Wells had been. This mass of supposedly ignorant, unthinking, deceitful, and rebellious foreigners whose presence so dismayed Roosevelt, Wells, and their contemporaries, quickly assimilated. They became respectable, God-fearing, law-abiding, loyal, industrious citizens, relentless in their pursuit of material gain, prudent in their outlook, behavior, and ideas, and mostly conservative in their politics.

Immigrants became American, or at least what they thought of as American, because they had no choice. Educated in the rituals and standards of citizenship, they conformed to the vague but robust doctrine of “Americanism” and sought, above all, to avoid being “un-American.” As often as not, they felt ashamed of their ancestors and their history. Having fled the suffering, humiliation, and injustice that were their lot in the Old World, they tried hard to forget where they had come from and who they had once been. As George Santayana observed “the unkempt, polyglot peoples . . . turn to the new world with the pathetic but manly purpose of beginning life on a new principle.” [x] In America, many found, or at least hoped to find, not only freedom but also a kind of salvation. Born again in this unspoiled land, they could begin life anew, as if the past had never taken place.[xi]

III.

Immigrants wanted to believe that men and women could be “born again” in America, that they could evade not only the ravages of time, but also the consequences of original sin and the strictures of the human condition. The two Red Scares illustrate the opportunity to achieve, and the ironies attendant upon, this secular redemption. During the Red Scare of 1919-1920, Americans focused their suspicion and anger on the immigrants themselves, whom they judged to be anti-American. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, the principal accusers and the most vociferous nationalists, including Senator Joseph McCarthy, were the children of immigrant parents. They directed their wrath not against other immigrants but against the descendents of old, elite American families, whom they envied and often despised, and whom they insisted had betrayed the country. The most enduring and significant consequences of these two episodes were the strident Americanism that had emerged among second- and third-generation immigrants and the growing influence that, in the thirty years between 1920 and 1950, they had come to exercise on American politics and society, despite the preponderance of immigrants and their descendants who also joined the infamous but negligible socialist and communist parties.

But in the 1920s it was the nativists who asserted themselves, doing everything in their power to control immigration and to intimidate ethnic minorities, Jews, Catholics, and blacks. To many living in the American heartland, the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act, and the anti-immigration laws seemed inadequate to protect the United States from an ethnic and cultural onslaught that promised to undo traditional values and mores. Besieged by political radicalism, organized crime, and demands for racial equality, growing numbers of white, Protestant, small-town, and rural Americans turned to such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan to restore ethnic, racial, and moral decorum. The Klan became a vital force both in local and national politics; membership reached an estimated four million by late 1924.[xii]

Edgar Young Clark and Elizabeth Tyler, who operated the Southern Publicity Association, directed this vigorous recruitment campaign. Having raised funds for the Red Cross and the YMCA during the war, Clark and Tyler demonstrated that bigotry could be just as lucrative. Although Klaverns existed from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, the Klan’s own internal audit revealed that forty percent of new members came from just three states—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—with another twenty-five percent concentrated in the southwest from Louisiana to Arizona. The rest of the Midwest accounted for eight percent of the membership, the Far West for six percent, and New England and the Mid-Atlantic states for three percent. Meanwhile, the states of the Deep South that had formed the Confederacy furnished sixteen percent.

The Klan reached the summit of its power at the Democratic Convention in 1924. Urban delegates from the Northeast wanted the party to condemn the Klan. Southern and Western delegates, led by William Jennings Bryan, impeded the effort, much to the dismay of progressive Democrats who heckled Bryan from the podium. The nomination of John W. Davis, a conservative lawyer from West Virginia, instead of the liberal stalwart Alfred E. Smith, the governor of New York, seemed to mark the triumph of the southern wing of the Democratic Party and, with it, the dominance of the Klan as a national organization.

But the Klan did not succeed merely because of its racist appeals, its ethnic hatreds, its religious fanaticism, or its encouragement of white supremacy. A genuinely populist movement, the KKK enabled members to voice their grievances against corrupt politicians, wealthy capitalists, and the political and economic exploitation that they inflicted on honest but impotent working people who felt themselves mocked, ignored, and forgotten by the elite. The Klan sought to establish an exclusive community—a clan—resting on a shared racial, ethnic, religious, and moral identity. It provided a vision of order, a way to make sense of and to navigate an increasingly complex and turbulent society. It reinstated timeless values and articulated a clear purpose, which had disappeared from the everyday lives of many Americans. The violence that the Klan incited against blacks, Jews, Catholics, and others was motivated less by sadism—although sadism there certainly was—than by a desperate and pitiable attempt to impose these standards by force.

As quickly as it had ascended, the Klan, by 1925, began a precipitous decline. The fall resulted from a series of self-inflicted wounds rather than the fury of public opinion reacting against the Klan’s brutality. Although Edgar Clark and Elizabeth Tyler gained financial control of the Klan in Georgia by 1922, ousting William J. Simmons, a former Methodist preacher and history professor at Lanier College, who had reconstituted the Klan in 1915, Tyler died in 1924 and Clark went to prison for committing mail fraud and violating the Mann Act.[xiii] A more damaging scandal involved the audacious Grand Wizard of Indiana, David Curtis Stephenson. When an Indianapolis jury convicted Stephenson of sexually assaulting and murdering his twenty-eight-year-old secretary, Marge Oberholtzer, it shattered the illusion that the Klan endorsed traditional morality and defended the honor of white Christian womanhood.[xiv] The guilty verdict in Stephenson’s trial, along with the indictments of other Klan officials in at least six states for financial malfeasance, bribery, and election fraud, alienated existing members and impeded the recruitment of new ones. Within four years, by 1929, membership had plummeted to 200,000.

Fractured and broken, the Klan withered. Meanwhile, the grievances that had engendered its resurgence festered and grew. The Klan did not occupy the margins of American social and political life during the 1920s. Nor were members, allegedly ignorant and vulnerable, duped into joining, although various membership drives, some of them netting as much as $40,000 a month for local Klaverns, resembled a massive pyramid scheme. The perspective that the Klan represented and the critique of the emerging pluralist society and mass culture that it leveled were embedded in the civic discourse of the 1920s. Despite the acts of political showmanship in which the Klan frequently engaged, and despite the violent tactics to which Klansmen often resorted, the Klan was far less an aberration or anomaly than it may at first seem to be. In important respects, the appeal of the Klan extended beyond those who formally joined, donned white sheets, attended Klonklaves, burned crosses, and participated in beatings or lynchings.

To varying degrees, a substantial number of ordinary citizens affirmed components of the white, Protestant world view that the Klan admired and disseminated. In preserving virtue, decency, righteousness, and the traditional American way of life, the Klan may at least have had some worthwhile attributes. To the extent that Americans thought so, even those who deplored racism and violence endowed the Klan with a modicum of legitimacy that it would not otherwise have possessed. To be sure, many were ambivalent about the Klan. But they did not unequivocally denounce it. Even when they did, ridicule and censure failed to affect its downfall. Members understood themselves to be the heroic champions of “One Hundred Percent Americanism,” whose reputations liberal critics had maligned with vicious propaganda. Only the unsullied virtue of the Klan, they maintained, stood between God-fearing, hardworking, law-abiding men and women and the foreigners, blacks, criminals, Catholics, and Jews who would destroy them, and who were actually responsible for all the problems that America faced. Many, perhaps most, white Americans during the 1920s, agreed. They forgave, albeit perhaps with some hesitancy, the excesses of the Klan in the abortive hope that the Klan might help to sustain a culture and society that were under siege. Few regarded the Klan as itself a source of social unrest and political instability; fewer still looked upon the Klan as the quintessence of evil.

IV.

At times, Klansmen themselves became the targets of violence from opponents of their activities. In Carnegie and Lilly, Pennsylvania, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and in Niles, Ohio, angry residents attacked Klansmen to interrupt their meetings or to prevent them from demonstrating.[xv] Others responded to intolerance, segregation, and prejudice with their own calls for ethnic isolation and racial purity. The black separatist movement under the leadership of Marcus Garvey, an immigrant to the United States who had retained his Jamaican citizenship, advocated black pride and solidarity in the face of implacable white racism. Garvey captivated audiences with lectures on the magnificence of the African past and the need for blacks in the United States to detach themselves from white norms, values, and institutions. He encouraged racial disentanglement with the same passion as did the leaders of the Klan and had, in fact, conferred with them about the merits and the prospects of a permanent separation of whites and blacks.

Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914. Within five years, by 1919, the UNIA through one of its subsidiaries, the Negro Factories Corporation, operated a chain of cooperative grocery stores, restaurants, and laundries, as well as a doll factory, a hotel, and a publishing house, which subsidized the Negro World, the most popular black newspaper in the United States during the early 1920s. In addition, the UNIA provided modest health insurance and death benefits to members and sponsored the Black Cross Nurses. Garvey intended the foundation of his business empire, the Black Star Steamship Company, to facilitate commerce between Africans and peoples of African descent throughout the world. He admired capitalism and exalted the value of hard work, thrift, and personal initiative as the means to economic success and psychological wellbeing.  The downtrodden black masses responded. By 1920, the UNIA boasted a membership of more than two million (Garvey estimated double that figure) and had 800 chapters on four continents.

Garvey sought to liberate blacks everywhere from racist oppression. Appealing mainly to the poor and disillusioned who were confined to urban ghettos, Garvey urged a return to Africa, the true and only homeland of black persons. Whites in the United States, he argued, were irredeemably racist. They would never change and could never be trusted. Racial prejudice was endemic.  Blacks’ only hope was to fashion “a distinct racial type of civilization” and “work out [their] salvation in [their] motherland.”  Speaking at the Second Annual Convention of the UNIA in 1921, Garvey declared:

Africa, by right of heritage, is the property of the African races, and those at home and those abroad are now sufficiently civilized to conduct the affairs of their own homeland. This convention believes in the right of Europe for the Europeans; Asia for the Asiatics; and Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad. We believe, further, that only a close and unselfish application of this principle will prevent threatening race wars that may cast another gloom over civilization and humanity. At this time humanity everywhere is determined to reach a common standard of nationhood. Hence 400,000,000 Negroes demand a place in the political sun of the world. [xvi]

To promote worldwide racial freedom and solidarity among blacks, the flag of the UNIA was red to commemorate the blood that must be shed in pursuit of liberty, black to mark the color of the “noble race to which we belong,” and green to represent the enduring hopes of black people and to show gratitude for the “luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland.” At the same time, ignoring the utopian character of his own grandiose “Back-to Africa” movement, Garvey denounced as utter fantasy the hopes for integration, which he thought only those blacks ashamed of their racial and cultural heritage could entertain.

Other black leaders, such as A. Philip Randolph and W.E.B. Du Bois, condemned Garvey with a fervor ordinarily reserved only for the Klan. Randolph mocked Garvey as “a supreme Negro Jamaican jackass.”[xvii] Embarked on his own program of Pan-African unity, Du Bois accused Garvey of being “either a lunatic or a traitor.” He initiated the “Garvey Must Go” crusade and was one among several prominent black spokesmen to recommend that the government investigate the business operations of the UNIA.  Acknowledging Garvey’s charisma and allure, Du Bois at the same time portrayed him as “dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious.”[xviii] Perhaps more than most, though, Du Bois appreciated the incongruity of Garvey’s movement.  Garvey promoted capitalism, which situated him within the conventions of American life and thought. But the emotional satisfaction that his movement proffered was in its rejection of American society and in its call for black separatism and black power. Du Bois acknowledged both Garvey’s insight and his dilemma, which, of course, was also Du Bois’s own. Writing in Century, Du Bois observed that “deep in the black man’s heart he knows that he needs more than homes and stores and churches.  He needs manhood—liberty, brotherhood, equality,” which whites in the United States systematically deny to him. “Which path will America choose?” Du Bois wondered.[xix]

Throughout the 1920s, Du Bois believed in America and had faith that justice ultimately would prevail for blacks and whites alike in a biracial democracy. Garvey did not. He dismissed even the possibility of reform. His objective, on the contrary, was not to change but to escape the white world and to bring about the union of all black persons. Blacks had to fend for themselves. If he was no progressive reformer, Garvey was also not a revolutionary. As Abram L. Harris noted, Garvey “did not plan the destruction of a government in the United States, but the construction of one in Africa.”[xx] Garvey agreed with the Klan that the United States was a white man’s country in which blacks had no place. Assimilation was a lost cause. Freedom and equality were possible only outside the United States, only when blacks reversed the Diaspora and again stood on African soil and breathed African air.   In 1927, the mathematician and sociologist Kelly Miller clarified the philosophical and emotional chasm that cut Garvey off from Du Bois and other moderate black activists and thinkers:

Their whole teaching is based upon equality of the races which they hope to enforce by appeal to the white man’s conscience, reason and aroused sense of righteousness. Mr. Garvey believes that the racial prejudice of the Anglo-Saxon is so deeply imbedded in acquired emotions, if not in natural instinct, that no amount of moral suasion or coercive force which the Negro can command, will have any sensible effect upon it. . .. He looks upon the struggle for racial equality as futile and hopeless.[xxi]

To Garvey, the image of the Melting Pot in which diverse peoples were amalgamated into one was for blacks a dangerous myth. To Garvey, the American Dream of a better life to be had by all was for blacks a vicious lie.

Garvey’s encouragement of black nationalism and black power also invited the scrutiny of J. Edgar Hoover, first as the head of intelligence at the Justice Department and later as director of the FBI. Hoover feared that Garvey was a nascent black messiah who would unite urban blacks into a commanding political movement that posed as great a risk to the peace and security of the United States as did the Communist Party. Dismayed that Garvey had not violated the law, Hoover, while still at the Department of Justice, initiated a criminal investigation of the UNIA in 1921. For two years, agents dissected the business records of the UNIA on a quest to uncover incriminating evidence. They found it in the haphazard bookkeeping and accounting practices of the Black Star Steamship Company. Convicted of mail fraud in 1923, Garvey received the maximum sentence: a one thousand fine and a five-year prison term. Upon his release in 1927, the government deported him as an undesirable alien.

Hoover devoted far more extensive resources and manpower to undermining Garvey and the UNIA than he ever did to infiltrating and breaking up the Klan. But like the Klan, Garvey’s influence remained long after his movement had disappeared. He was only one in a storied lineage of black leaders and thinkers—a lineage that extends backward in time to the nineteenth century—to put forth a nationalist program in opposition both to racism and to integration. Garvey resisted the assimilation of blacks into American life, refusing to adopt the culture or politics of the white, Protestant majority. At critical junctures, such as during the 1920s and again during the 1960s, the majority of poor and working-class blacks agreed, coming together, if but momentarily, in their embrace of a nationalist agenda. They spurned integration. They sought to develop autonomous economic, political, cultural, and religious institutions. They were reluctant to participate in coalitions of any kind with whites. They promoted armed self-defense and, if necessary, violent resistance.

Again, like members of the Klan, Garvey’s most devoted adherents seem not to have cared much about the practicality of his vision. Few believed that they would return to Africa; most probably did not want to do so. What mattered was the pride that Garvey instilled in them as black people. He provided a compensatory alternative to blacks for whom the promised land of northern cities had not materialized. Garvey pledged that they would not vanish; they would never become extinct, either through integration into white society or as the forgotten victims of racial genocide.

Garvey thus envisioned tribal nationalism as a means to preserve black identity, just as the Klan used its own version of tribal nationalism to nurture white identity. During the 1920s, blacks, whites, and numerous ethnic minorities savored both the inclusivity and the exclusivity of their clannish world views. They delighted in their homogeneity. Determined to preserve it at all costs, they did their utmost to keep out those who might disturb or imperil it. The culture and politics of separatism inhibited the advance of a truly national spirit and national character throughout the decade, seeming at times to reduce the United States itself to little more than a vivid abstraction. But in whatever form it took, separatism also offered a refuge. Born of mistrust, fear, anger, and hatred, separatism nonetheless afforded a powerful sense of emotional relief and comfort to those for whom life and the world were moving too fast and in too many strange and unsettling directions—a sense of relief and comfort on which whites, blacks, and immigrants, at one time or another, all came to depend.

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[i] Quoted in Mark G. Malvasi, “Good Fences,” Modern Age 52/2 (Spring 2010), 153.

[ii] Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot: A Drama in Four Acts (New York, 1909). See also Arthur Mann, “The Melting Pot,” in Uprooted Americans: Essays in Honor of Oscar Handlin, ed. by, Richard L. Bushman, et al. (Boston, 1979), 289-318.

[iii]  Johnson’s initial proposal was too extreme to pass the Senate. Senator Reed and John B. Trevor, a lawyer who served as a consultant for the House Committee on Immigration, devised a modified bill that fixed annual immigration at 150,000 persons and apportioned that number according to the national origins of the current population of the United States rather than the number of foreign-born specified in a particular census. Because the national origins of immigrants could not be determined quickly, senators agreed as an expedient to rely on the census of 1890 for three years.

[iv]  Quoted in James A. Monrone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT, 2003), 339 and A. James Rudin, “Hatred of Immigrants has a long history,” Washington Post (September 4, 2014).

[v] Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History (New York, 1916), 263.  Grant’s book was generally popular, going through eight editions or reissues by 1923, and well received. Reviews in Publishers Weekly (December 9, 1916), Science (October 25, 1918), 419, and Man (November 1920), 173 commended Grant’s ideas. So, too, did Adolf Hitler who, after becoming Chancellor of Germany, wrote to Grant to express his gratitude for a book that he regarded as “his Bible.” See Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York, 2003), 259. See also Charles C. Alexander, “Prophet of American Racism: Madison Grant and the Nordic Myth,” Phylon23/ 1 (1962), 73–90; Brian Regal, “Madison Grant, Maxwell Perkins, and Eugenics Publishing at Scribner’s,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 65/ 2 (Winter 2004), 317-42;Jonathan P. Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, VT, 2009).

[vi]  Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776-1826,Vol. I, 1776-1790, ed. by James Morton Smith (New York, 1995), 514.  See also Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX “Manufactures,” ed. by William Peden (New York, 1972), 164-65.

[vii] Abraham Bishop, Oration, in honor of the Election of President Jefferson, and the Peaceable Acquisition of Louisiana (Hartford, CT, 1804), 4;  Thomas Jefferson to the president and legislative council, the speaker and house of representatives of the territory of Indiana, December 28, 1805, in Adrienne Koch, The Great Collaboration (New York, 1950), 244-45.

[viii]  H.G. Wells, The Future of America: A Search After Realities (New York and London, 1906), 134, 135, 142, 145.

[ix]  Theodore Roosevelt to Richard K. Hurd, January 3, 1919, Library of Congress Manuscript Division; see also “Abolish Hyphen Roosevelt’s Last Words to Public,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, January 7, 1919, 4.

[x] George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York, 1967; originally published in 1921), 196.

[xi] When in 1980 President Jimmy Carter awarded the Hungarian-born Eugene Ormandy, principal conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Ormandy commented to reporters: “People always ask me where I was born. I was born at the age of twenty-one [in 1920] when I arrived in the United States.” Quoted in Os Guinness, A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future (Downers Grove, IL, 2012), 130.

[xii] See Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago, 2017), 5.

[xiii] Tyler and Clark did not act alone. They had the support of leading Klansmen concerned about the increasingly unpredictable behavior brought on by Simmons’s alcoholism. Simmons initially complied but subsequently recanted and sued. Amid considerable acrimony, he settled the law suit in February 1924. See Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture, 4-5; Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (New York, 1967), 12, 16;  Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Chicago, 2011), 17-18.

[xiv] See Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 145-46, 154; Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 206-207; Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture, 5; David Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1981), 171-72; Rory McVeigh,  The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan (Minneapolis, 2009), 187-89.  The most extensive treatments of Stephenson’s trial and conviction can be found in Richard Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross (Hamden, CT, 1991) and M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D.C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (Lafayette, IN, 1991).

[xv] William D. Jenkins, Steel Valley Klan: The Ku Klux Klan in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley (Kent, OH, 1990); John M. Craig, The Ku Klux Klan in Western Pennsylvania, 1921–1928 (Bethlehem, PA, 2014); Joseph S. Bilby and Harry Zielger, The Rise and Fall of the Klan in New Jersey (Charleston, SC, 2019).

[xvi] Marcus Garvey, “Address to the Second UNIA Convention” (1921).

[xvii]  A. Philip Randolph, “A Supreme Negro Jamaican Jackass,” Messenger 5 (January 1923), 561.

[xviii]  W.E. B. Du Bois, “Marcus Garvey,” Crisis 21 (December 1920), 60.

[xix]  W.E. B. Du Bois, “Back to Africa,” Century 105 (February 1923), 548.

[xx]  Abram L. Harris, “The Negro Problem as Viewed by Negro Leaders,” Current History 18 (June 1923), 416-17.

[xxi]  Kelly Miller, “After Marcus Garvey—What of the Negro?”Contemporary Review 131 (April 1927), 496-97.

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