Henry Pratt Fairchild (1880-1956, Ph.D. Yale University) spent the bulk of his academic career at New York University where he was on the faculty for 26 years, serving as Chairman of the Department of Sociology in the Graduate School. He conducted and published research on race, nationalism, and ethnic conflict; he also was involved with the founding of Planned Parenthood and served as President of the American Eugenics Society. In his book The Melting Pot Mistake (1926), Fairchild argued that the melting pot metaphor coined by Israel Zangwill in his 1909 play ‘The Melting-Pot’ was picturesque, but a fallacy that failed to account for the apparent disintegration of American society that had been in the making during the past 50 years of unbridled immigration. According to Fairchild, the group unity necessary for national cohesion and well-being was endangered because the differences of ‘groups’ are not ‘meltable,’ as “the primary basis of group unity is racial.”
In this article, I provide extended excerpts on Fairchild’s views on immigration and race, which have been totally debunked; yet, despite his bogus scientific analyses on race and culture, his writings were influential in political and policy debates among academics, politicians, and social reformers, and were useful in the promotion and passage of laws that severely restricted immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries and that authorized the sterilization of thousands of people who were considered to be inferior and who should be permanently prevented from passing their ‘bad genes’ to another generation. The work of Fairchild was not an outlier in its analysis of the danger posed by allowing non-white and other types of ‘alienage’ to enter the United States. The first two decades of the twentieth century produced a flurry of dystopian accounts of the dangers posed to a nation that needed to protect itself from the ‘alienage’ penetrating its gates before it was too late1. The bogus claims and fear mongering that were widespread in the early decades of the 20th century are eerily similar to discourses on immigrants and immigration in the United States today.
Race, Nationality and Scientific Racism
In a critical review of Henry Pratt Fairchild’s 1947 book Race And Nationality As Factors In American Life, published in Commentary magazine, May 1948, the eminent American historian Oscar Handlin summed up the book’s thesis:
Race and nationality both exist, but they are two different phenomena. Race is a purely biological division of mankind; nationality, a division based on culture. A nation is something else again, but strong nations are homogeneous in race and nationality, and are distinguished by uniformities of language, religion, and customs.
This summation applies equally to The Melting Pot Mistake; in both books, Fairchild spends a great deal of time explaining his understanding of race, racial characteristics and the connections between race and nationality. It is easy to dismiss Fairchild’s absurd and unscientific account of human evolution; as a professional academic sociologist who dabbled in natural history, Fairchild’s description of how races evolved, where they evolved, and their relative qualities is amateurish, given the scientific evidence in wide circulation even at the time of his writing. But in the popular imagination of the time, and among many prominent ‘race scientists’ and anti-immigrant zealots in positions of academic and political power and influence, Fairchild’s ideas and analyses were generally well-received and promoted. Fairchild, along with other prominent public intellectuals and professional academics, believed that ‘racial traits’ were unalterable facts about a person’s character which “he has no power to alter or dispose of a single one of them”. All a person can do, according to Fairchild, is “artificially conceal them (racial traits) or inhibit their display in his own person so far as that is possible, and his only hope for his offspring is to mate with a person of a different race”. In contrast to race traits, which are inborn, inherited, and unchangeable, nationality is acquired:
Nationality is a composite body of ideas and ideals, beliefs, traditions, customs, habits, standards, and morals infused with loyalty, devotion, allegiance, and affection.
For Fairchild, both race and nationality are “the two universal foundations of group unity”. Unfortunately, according to Fairchild, the ‘melting pot’ is a ‘light-hearted attempt to dismiss the ‘great problems’ the American people face. He claims that the primary human groups are characterized by two types of likeness: physical similarity or race unity, and cultural similarity or national unity. Fairchild, borrowing the term from Professor Giddings, calls this unity ‘consciousness of kind’. He claims that “it was natural that among members of each of these original groups there should be a feeling of sympathy, and a feeling of antipathy toward the out-group”; thus, it is simply ‘natural’ to dislike (or hate) members of the out-group: “Dislike of the ‘foreigner’ is a lingering feature of a primal sentiment in the masses of the most civilized peoples”, according to Fairchild. The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that a democratic pluralistic society, i.e., the United States, is unnatural, because it goes against human nature, as Fairchild understands that term. For Fairchild, “The strongest possible group unity exists when national solidarity and racial identity are combined. When racial sympathy supports national sympathy group harmony reaches its maximum…racial dissimilarity always constitutes an element of weakness in group life”. For Fairchild, and those who share his ‘scientific’ analysis of human nature, it isn’t that ‘Americans’ are racially prejudiced because of flaws in their character, or their ignorance of other cultures and ways of life, but rather that it is natural that they feel that way—real ‘Americans’ have a ‘natural’ antipathy toward ‘non-Americans’, and they need not make any apologies for their true and reasonable ‘nature’. He argues that democracy is threatened by a variety of racial allegiances because there is no assurance that questions will be decided upon their intrinsic merits, and for Fairchild, intrinsic merits means the values and beliefs of ‘true’ Americans, people of Nordic/Anglo-Saxon provenance.
To bolster his claim that antipathy towards ‘others’ in American society is not based on race prejudice, he cites a study by John B. Trevor titled ‘Japanese Exclusion: A Study of the Policy and the Law’ (1925), submitted to the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, United States House of Representatives. Trevor writes that the Immigration Act of 1924 wasn’t adopted in criticism of others, “but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America can be kept American”. America is for Americans, as defined by ‘racial scientists’ and their supporters. In commenting on a ‘racial clash’ between the Japanese and the Whites, Fairchild says this is “typical of the difficulties any democracy must face which contains diverse racial elements in its electorate or even in its general population”. He claims that judging people is an unconscious decision, “we like people or we do not like them…we seldom stop to ask why…We do not need to inquire as to the grounds upon which the group differentiation rests”. For Fairchild, introspection, open-mindedness, and personal experience are irrelevant for how people understand themselves and the world they inhabit when it comes to making (unconscious) judgments about fellow citizens.
For Fairchild, and millions of other Americans influenced by pseudo racial ‘science,’ when numbers of persons representing two or more different racial stocks are put in close contact, the results are predictable: “…qualities of race are carried in the germ plasm…[and] they remain constant and unchanged from generation to generation…and the only way they are modified is by putting them together in different combinations…the basic elements are never changed…No amount of intimate social association would have modified a single black or a single white toward the opposite type”.
Fairchild questions whether ‘racial amalgamation’, i.e., ‘racial’ intermarriage, would be good for anything. While he allows that “the crossing of races is not necessarily disastrous,” he emphasizes that “what is mixed is important; random crossing of breeds will not produce a better stock of humans. You will get a mongrel…’bad’ genes cancel out ‘good’ genes, and the offspring is therefore a primitive, generalized type—spoken of as a “reversion”, “atavism”, or “throwback”.
Continuing with the ‘mongrel’ metaphor, Fairchild writes that rather than the figure of the melting pot, a better one is the village pound. Even if the dogs in the pound are pure-breeds, once they inter-breed, it will result in a loss of specialization on all sides. There can be certain types of inter-breeding that result in positive outcomes, however; for example, “the combination of a large amount of Nordic with smaller proportions of Mediterranean and Alpine has certainly produced a type with outstanding characteristics; in the judgment of many persons (specifically those who are members of it) it is a type of peculiar excellence. This is the English type and it is the American type”. The English may be inter-bred, but breeding among the best racial types leads to superior stock, defined in a circular and backward-looking way, as the American stock: Q.E.D. The American type “is certainly a notable type, with a remarkable record of achievement in the past and promise of achievement for the future”.
Fairchild often uses a rhetorical ploy, which Oscar Handlin calls the ‘this is not to say’ tactic, in which the writer disarms his opponents by giving all the arguments against his own position, then blandly takes it anyway. Here is an example of this strategy; Fairchild argues that the new arrivals to America were sufficiently different in their basic elements to threaten the existing type with annihilation. He then writes that “it’s not ‘positively asserted’ that it would have been inferior to the present type, but it is almost certain that it would have been a much less specialized type, resembling much more closely a more primitive stage of human evolution.” Here is another example of the ‘this is not to say’ tactic in Fairchild’s book: he writes that the means by which the non-white races in the United States have been excluded leaves much to be desired. But bad means can often produce good results, and “there can be no doubt that the policy of keeping this as far as possible a white man’s country is fully justified”. In other words, slavery may have been an unfortunate episode in American history, but in the end, keeping America ‘as white as possible’ is a good thing. Junk science is often used to justify junk morality.
The Meaning of Assimilation
In chapter 7 of his book, Fairchild discusses the meaning of assimilation. He begins by making a distinction between nationality and population: “Nationality is a very different thing from population. Nationality is a spiritual reality, existing in the realm of the sentiments, emotions, and intellect”. At this point, we should be forewarned that for Fairchild, sentiments, emotions, and intellect are quintessential ‘racial’ qualities, difficult to suppress or overcome for the less-favorably endowed ‘non-American’ races. Fairchild does not disappoint in his frontal attack on the inability of immigrants to become full-fledged members of the American nation. Fairchild writes that before assimilation is complete, the immigrant “must have lost all traces or suggestion of his foreign origin…He must feel no sense of alienation with reference to his new compatriots nor they any sense of distinction from him, because of his origin…He must have become completely one with the receiving body”. This is certainly a tall order, one that, obviously, cannot be met. For Fairchild, “assimilation appears as a task of tremendous, almost insuperable, difficulty. In fact, it is doubtful whether…any adult immigrant to any country is ever completely assimilated”. Of course, such a ‘fact’ justifies the goal of complete cessation of immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries, a position that Fairchild supports. For Fairchild and those who endorse his argument, “there is one central standard, the existing national type, which is constantly preserved, and to which all the different types are made to conform”. This begs the question: what is the national type? Fairchild allows (‘this is not to say’) that there will be differences in personality among native and immigrant, but differences in foreign nationality must be submerged or erased. He warns that “the attempt to mix nationalities will result not in a new type of composite nationality but in the destruction of all nationality. The melting pot will not work for the greater part of the task of unification”. In the end, Fairchild is a racial determinist: race determines destiny, and that destiny is fixed and passed on in racial germ plasm. For Fairchild, “Racial discrimination is inherent in biological fact and in human nature…As long as racial feeling exists in the human heart, to ignore it in legislation and policy will be to promote, not peace, but international misunderstanding and war”.
As these ‘facts’ apply to the United States, Fairchild is unequivocal in his judgment on American identity and American exceptionalism:
There can be no doubt that the founders of America expected it and intended it to be a white man’s country…in the meaning that was current among intelligent people one hundred and fifty years ago…There can be no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come. An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice.
For Fairchild, America represents “…truth, beauty, goodness, morality, justice, propriety, efficiency, custom, order, and—home,” and to maintain those stellar qualities, it must remain a white man’s country.
Today, it is mainly white nationalists and neo-Nazis who openly and unapologetically express such overtly racist views. But Fairchild’s views were well within the mainstream of elite and popular opinion with regard to racial stereotyping of foreigners and their descendants of non-Nordic background, extending, of course, to the descendants of enslaved African people, Native Americans, and peoples incorporated into the United States through conquest, such as Mexican-Americans. In fact, leading book publishers, newspapers, magazines, university professors and administrators, artists, scientists, politicians and political leaders were often even more graphic and condemnatory in their writings on these topics than was Fairchild.
Keeping America a White Man’s Country
Here are some examples that reveal how leading editors, scholars (including scientists at elite universities), politicians, and university administrators thought about immigrants, often relying on the findings of leading scientific racism researchers to support their claims.
- The editor of the highly influential Saturday Evening Post magazine, George Horace Lorimer, became enthralled by the ideas of scientific racism, and became a crusader in the cause of immigration restrictionism. In a 1920 editorial in the magazine titled ‘Self-Preservation,’ Lorimer wrote: “the rank-and-file of these assimilated aliens still live mentally in the ghetto or as peasants on the great estates”. In the Spring of 1921, he wrote that “scientific writers had disproved “the rose-colored myth of the…magical melting pot”2, and that immigration should be limited to individuals from races that are biologically fit for assimilation, and that “race character is as fixed a fact as race color,’ and that immigrants were “infected stock” whose presence would have a “sterilizing effect” on “our fine old stock”3.
- In a signed column in Good Housekeeping magazine, soon to be sworn in as vice president of the United States Calvin Coolidge, explained that “it would be suicidal for us to let down the bars for the inflowing of cheap manhood…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…and the dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress”4.
- Harry H. Laughlin, Ph.D. in Science from Princeton University and leader of the American eugenics movement, called for the annual sterilization of “culls” (his term for the least desirable ten percent of the population) in his report to the Breeders Association. The report’s central conclusion was that “Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not solely to the individual who carries it”5. Laughlin’s work was critical to the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in Buck v. Bell (274 US 200 (1927)) that upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s law allowing state-enforced sterilization of ‘defective’ individuals living in state institutions.
- James Davis, Secretary of Labor in the Warren G. Harding administration, told an audience in Pittsburgh that the results of the army IQ tests developed by Carl Brigham and published in his Study of American Intelligence, published by Princeton University Press in 1923, had determined that exactly 6,346,856 immigrants were “inferior or very inferior”6.
- The former president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, used Brigham’s data to declare that unwanted immigrants were “biologically incapable of rising either now or through their descendants above the mentality of a 12-year-old child”7.
- Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Immigration Committee, appointed racial scientist Harry Laughlin as the committee’s official “expert eugenics agent”. His unscientific ‘findings’ presented to the committee were instrumental in promoting the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 that restricted immigration to 155,000 a year; quotas were set at 2% of the U.S. foreign-born (or derived) population from any given country as enumerated in the 1890 census. (It would not be until 1965 with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in the Lyndon Johnson administration that country-of-origin quotas were eliminated.) Albert Johnson made his own view quite clear: “We do not want Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Turk, Greek, Italian, or any other nationality until we can clean house”. Committee member J. Will Taylor of Tennessee described immigrants who threatened the nation’s unguarded gates as “a heterogeneous hodgepodge, polyglot aggregation of aliens, most of whom are the scum, the offal, and the excrescence of the earth”8. Similar comments were made by other Republican members of the committee, with no supporting evidence whatsoever—no health records or interviews with ‘aliens’ were provided. The officials reporting from Poland openly acknowledged the central assumption that preceded their investigation: “The unassimilability of these classes politically is a fact too often proved in the past to bear any argument”9.
- New York lawyer Charles Winthrop Gould, author of America: A Family Matter (1921), insisted that the southern Italians had for two thousand years “never produced an outstanding able man”. He considered the immigrant stream corrupting the nation “revolting”.
- Biologist Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University, one of the nation’s leading interpreters of biological statistics, told a friend that discrimination against Jews “is a necessary move in the struggle for existence on the part of the rest of us…The real question seems to come to this: Whose world is this to be, ours, or the Jews?”10
- The language of eugenic science was convenient and effective; even though eugenics was not based on sound science, the theories of prominent racial scientists in the United States were admired and validated by editors of the New York Times, U.S. Presidents11, prominent publishers, and praised by Nazis12.
- White supremacist and author of Rising Tide of Color Against the White World-Supremacy (1920), Lothrop Stoddard, declared that “science is our polestar. It is alike our guide for the present and our hope for the future”.
Franz Boas, German-American anthropologist called Stoddard’s book “vicious propaganda” and provided scientific evidence to counter claims by racial scientists that the cephalic index (a measurement of head width versus head length) was anything but immutable. His analysis of 17,821 skulls revealed that the longer a family had been in the United States, the more likely it was that the heads of their children would move toward the American mean. These changes were brought about by environmental influences (mainly nutrition). Boas concluded that “there can be no stability in mental traits of the races, as is often assumed”13. In fact, Boas argued, as skull shape was mutable across generations, so were all physical and mental traits.
His findings have been validated for all immigrant groups to the United States, and after decades of cultural promotion of scientific racism in the 20th century in the United States, the movement finally came to an end; the bankruptcy of scientific racism was documented in the scientific literature, and the reputations of its principal promoters were mostly in tatters. However, the ideas—and ideologies—that fueled scientific racism did not die out, and research designed to legitimize racial categories and demonstrate the connections between race and intelligence, as measured on standardized tests and other social indices, has continued to be published to the present day.
A good example is the 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by the Harvard University psychologist Richard J. Hernstein and political scientist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, in which the authors argue that there are stark differences between racial and ethnic groups, including differences in intelligence, a view that has been largely discredited by science. Funding for much of the research on which they relied was provided by the organization Pioneer Fund, described by many as white supremacist.14
The Beginnings of Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth Century
Reginald Horsman15 traces the collapse of Enlightenment theory in the United States that helped produce scientific theories of black and Indian inferiority16. In the early decades of the 19th century, there was considerable optimism that the newly formed American nation could live up to the standards necessary to sustain a republican democracy. Someone who expressed such optimism was Edward Everett (1794-1865), a distinguished American politician, orator, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senator, and Governor of Massachusetts, who avoided asserting the innate inferiority of other peoples. As early as 1824 he spoke of the importance of extending “one government, one language, and…one character, over so vast a space as the United States”17. Everett believed in one human race. Everett, along with James Barbour (1775-1842), U.S. Senator and Governor of Virginia, praised the American people as being particularly gifted in the arts of government; yet, both men believed that republicanism, good government, and education would transform other peoples, and both men emphasized America’s duties more than America’s wants18.
However, confronted with the reality of slavery and continental expansion that culminated in the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of Indian lands19, abstract dreams of universal improvement and cooperation were threatened and supplanted by theories based on ‘science’ that justified the superiority and domination of the white race over all other races and cultures. Between 1839 and 1859, the American school of ethnology, centered in Philadelphia, argued there were irreversible differences between races and eventually defended polygenesis, the theory that human races evolved independently. The ‘science’ of craniology flourished during this period. In 1839, Samuel George Morton, considered to be a founder of the American school of ethnology, published Crania Americana in which he argued that measured differences in the volume of human skulls equated with differences in intelligence, and based on his findings, Caucasians (his term) had the largest volume, while the American Indians had the lowest. These findings were welcomed by defenders of slavery and supporters of the dispossession of Indian territory.
During this period of the growth of scientific racism, the writings of amateurs were often given as much weight as ‘serious’ researchers, such as Morton. New York physician John H. Van Evrie (1814-1896) argued that “slavery was the most desirable thing in human affairs”. He believed that God had designed races to serve different purposes, and that slavery was the natural condition of black people, and white people were naturally fit to be masters. To abolish slavery would be cruel to black people who, when separated from the white man, were destined for extinction.
By the middle of the 19th century, the idea of distinct races with innately different capabilities was firmly engrained in American scientific thinking. As Horsman notes, “American science provided Americans with a confident explanation of why blacks were enslaved, why Indians were exterminated, and why white Americans were expanding their settlements rapidly over adjacent lands”20. By 1850, the science of man was of vital interest. Throughout America, scientific proofs of racial separation were widely disseminated, and the future of the American continents and the world was thought of in terms of white domination and the subordination or disappearance of other races21. George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), considered to be America’s first environmentalist, a philologist, linguist, lawyer, member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Vermont, distinguished diplomat in the administrations of Zachary Taylor and Abraham Lincoln, elected to the American Philosophical Society, expressed the view that other peoples were unfit to share in the representative government developed by the Germanic peoples. Many of the most sophisticated, highly educated, and politically progressive Americans were convinced of the superiority of their own kind, and scientific racism gave them confidence that their views on race did not make them racists at all.
Our contemporary scientific understanding of human genetics and the great variation that exists within and between all human groups has conclusively demonstrated that race is a social construct, not a biological reality22. Yet, despite these facts, the power of race as a social and political construct is alive and well because it justifies the maintenance of social hierarchies in which the ‘right’ racial/cultural types rule at the top of the social pyramid, while the other, ‘inferior’, racial/cultural types dwell at the bottom of the social pyramid. But not only are those deemed to be inferior placed at the bottom of the social pyramid, they are also at risk of being deported, or prevented from entering a country, or systematically exterminated, as in pogroms that targeted Jewish people in Russia and Eastern Europe, culminating in the genocide of Jews in the 1940s in Germany and German-occupied Europe, among many other cases of ethnic cleansing over the past centuries throughout the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and elsewhere.
In his review in Commentary magazine of Henry Pratt Fairchild’s 1947 book Race and Nationality as Factors in American Life, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin notes that Fairchild continued to ignore findings in the scientific literature that rendered his claims on the immutability of racial ‘germ plasma’ baseless, even embarrassing, given that twenty-one years had elapsed since the publication of The Melting Pot Mistake in 1926. When confronted with Franz Boas’ findings on changes in the cephalic index in immigrants in a single generation, Fairchild, writing in 1913, sidestepped these inconvenient facts with the hope that “they will be subjected to the most careful scrutiny by anthropologists qualified either to verify or correct them”. He remained unconvinced 34 years later, blaming the lack of verification or correction on the eminent reputation of Franz Boas that had dissuaded researchers from questioning his findings: “Boas’ very eminence and his high standing as a scholar have created a certain reluctance among his colleagues to launch a really destructive attack upon his edifice”. The explanation is nothing more than a slur against Boaz, a man whose role in debunking scientific racism was pivotal in the dismantling of the baseless claims of racial determinism and racial superiority that ultimately led to the destruction of much of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
America Comes Full Circle
In the recent U.S. presidential campaign, language used to describe immigrants (whether ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’) was very similar to the language used by academics and politicians one hundred years ago. Republican Party candidate for president, Donald J. Trump, said in an interview that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country:” “Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country,” Trump told the right-leaning news site The National Pulse in a video interview: “It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”23 In another speech, Trump asserted, again without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”24
Of course, this rhetoric was nothing new for Trump. In his first run for the presidency in 2015, then candidate Trump read the following statement to the assembled crowd: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said, adding the word “hell” for emphasis this time25. But all indications are that in his second term he plans to go further than the partial ban on Muslim immigrants that, in a revised form, was upheld by the Supreme Court (in a 5-4 decision). In his second term, Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration, including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled. Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis. He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year26. The same xenophobia and racial stereotyping that led to the lopsided passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 (308-62 in the House of Representatives, 69-9 in the United States Senate, signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge) is informing Donald Trump’s immigration policies nearly one hundred years later.
There will surely be legal challenges to some or all of these plans, but there is little doubt that Trump’s policies will create turmoil, chaos, uncertainty, and suffering for millions of people, many of whom have lived in the United States for most or all of their life. Their misfortune is that they are not the ‘right’ type of people; they are people who are easily demonized because of the color of their skin, their countries of origin, their economic status, their political views, and/or the religion they profess. Almost exactly one hundred years after the publication of The Melting Pot Mistake, America (and millions of the American electorate) has come full circle, apparently destined to once again shut its gates and expel those people who came to the United States seeking a better life. In summing up Henry Pratt Fairchild’s arguments on race and nationality, Oscar Handlin offers this assessment:
The whole is held together by confident assertions, confident because they rest upon an absolute lack of consequential thinking and upon a stolid refusal to regard the world of facts. Here is a logician who defines race in purely biological terms and who then shows that “the notion of race is almost as old as humanity” because all men have in-group feelings. Here is a scholar who has not changed his discussion of assimilation in thirty-five years, all the evidence from the experience of that generation to the contrary notwithstanding.
The comments of Oscar Handlin continue to have relevance in our contemporary world, in all societies, including in those most scientifically advanced. The values, methods, and goals that the best science embodies continue to be attacked and undermined by those people who eschew and repudiate the legitimate and hard-won findings of empirically-based scientific inquiry. Denial of the overwhelming evidence in support of evolutionary biology undermines the legitimacy of scientific inquiry more broadly, and leads to the types of unfounded and dangerous ideas and ideologies revealed in the Melting Pot Mistake. Those who deny the reality of global planetary warming, who deny the efficacy of vaccines developed by professional virologists to prevent the spread of communicable diseases, and who place religious beliefs above scientific inquiry and facts as the best guide for finding solutions to our most pressing social and environmental problems, will find that nature does not respond to hopes and prayers. The rejection—or marginalization—of science, facts, and reason threatens the very existence of our species and all forms of life on planet earth.
[Editor’s Note]
On Saturday, February 1, 2025 at 1:00 pm EST, ZNetwork is hosting a 1 hour online panel discussion with Zafiro Patiño, Aviva Chomsky, and Peter Bohmer that will focus on the critical and increasingly contentious topic of immigration.
The panel will highlight the key dangers for immigrants once Trump comes to power, the current mood in immigrant communities and how they’re preparing, and practical action that can be taken to resist what might happen. There will be time for some questions from the audience too.
Register here: https://actionnetwork.org/events/immigration-immigrants-in-a-fascist-us-panel-discussion

References
- The legendary editor of the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins, promoted and published the work of the leading scientific racists, including Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race; or, the Racial Basis of European History 1916) and Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color 1920; The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man 1922; Racial Realities in Europe 1924; and Social Classes in Post-War Europe 1925), among many other books by well-known American intellectuals and academics who advanced theories of scientific racism. ↩︎
- Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, Scribner, 2019, p. 268, 269. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 269. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 270. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 274. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 320. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 320. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 284. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 283. ↩︎
- Okrent, p. 309. Those words were substantially the same ones uttered by marchers in the Unite the Right Rally, August 11 and 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, when torch carrying white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us.” ↩︎
- “In a speech outdoors before more than a hundred thousand people, black and white, in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1921, President Warren G. Harding declared that blacks must have full economic and political rights, but that segregation was also essential to prevent “racial amalgamation,” and social equality was thus a dream that blacks must give up. Harding added: “Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on “The Rising Tide of Color” . . . must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.” (‘When W.E.B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist’, Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 19, 2019). ↩︎
- Nazi Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg was in awe of the work of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Rosenberg encouraged the United States to “proceed with youthful strength to set up the new idea of the racial state, such as some awakened Americans have already apprehended, like Grant and [Lothrop] Stoddard.” (Okrent, p. 361-2). Hitler cited passages of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; or, the Racial Basis of European History (1916) in speeches and writings and owned a copy of the original German edition at the time of his suicide in Berlin in 1945 (Ibid, p. 361). ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 155 ↩︎
- The nonprofit Pioneer Fund referenced here (which has recently been rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation) is not to be confused with the venture capital firm Pioneer Fund. ↩︎
- Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Harvard University Press, 1981. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 115. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 96. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 97. ↩︎
- Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ↩︎
- Horsman, p. 137. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 157. ↩︎
- “Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s genetic work earned him accolades from those hoping to break down the barriers of race. He found that people from the same population are as genetically diverse as people from two different groups, essentially showing that at the genetic level, there is no such thing as race. Reviewing Cavalli-Sforza’s 2000 book Genes, Peoples, and Languages in The New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond praised the Stanford researcher for “demolishing scientists’ attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races.” Amy Adams, Hanae Armitage, Stanford Medicine, News Center, September 10, 2018. ↩︎
- Kate Sullivan, CNN, ‘Trump’s anti-immigrant comments draw rebuke’. October 6, 2023. DOI November 7, 2024: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/06/politics/trump-anti-immigrant-comments/index.html ↩︎
- Anjali Huynh and Michael Gold, ‘Trump Says Some Migrants are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Blood Bath’ if he Loses’. The New York Times, March 16, 2024. ↩︎
- The Washington Post, December 7, 2015. ↩︎
- Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, ‘Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans.’ The New York Times, November 11, 2023. ↩︎
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate