As promised, the second Trump administration has shortly rolled out a slew of insurance policies and govt orders that the president says are all aimed toward “Making America Great Again.” This takes on totally different varieties, together with Elon Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity shortly shedding hundreds of staff at numerous federal businesses, and President Donald Trump pausing all funding for Ukraine.
Trump says that, amongst others, there are three teams which can be making America not-great: immigrants, folks with disabilities, and people who find themselves dedicated to variety, fairness and inclusion insurance policies.
These administration efforts started at a time when many People expressed an total rising sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the nation and politics. Simply 19% of People stated in December 2024 that they assume the nation is on target.
This angle is putting not solely as a result of it’s so darkish, however as a result of it strongly resembles how People felt throughout a pivotal decade 100 years in the past, when folks’s dissatisfaction with the state of the nation led to a collection of discriminatory, hateful insurance policies by the federal authorities.
It’s a interval of American historical past that I believe presents one thing of a mirror of the present political state of affairs within the U.S.
A registry room is seen at Ellis Island in New York Harbor in 1924.
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The Roaring ‘20s?
Within the Nineteen Twenties, the economic system was good, the U.S. had received World Conflict I, and a horrible pandemic ended.
However many People didn’t see it that approach.
They entered the Nineteen Twenties with a rising sense of paranoia and a sense that that they had been robbed of one thing. Profitable World Conflict I had come at a horrible price. Greater than 116,000 American troopers died and twice that quantity got here house wounded.
Because the warfare got here to an in depth, the U.S. – and the world – was within the throes of the flu pandemic that in the end claimed tens of thousands and thousands of lives, together with about 675,000 within the U.S.
Different People had been involved concerning the doable rise of communism within the U.S., in addition to the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based insurance policies on the federal and state degree that focused nonwhite immigrants and disabled folks.
Among the many most important outcomes of that political second was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration coverage that, amongst different modifications, prohibited immigration from Asia.
One other pivotal motion was the Supreme Courtroom’s 1927 Buck v. Bell choice, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the suitable to sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled folks.
Discrimination in opposition to marginalized teams
The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a significant shift in American immigration coverage, primarily based on the worry of one thing that former President Theodore Roosevelt and others referred to as “race suicide.”
The legislation launched inflexible restrictions conserving folks in a foreign country who weren’t from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration quotas that it established would proceed to be enforced into the Nineteen Sixties.
The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this legislation had been profitable as a result of they supported their effort by presenting proof that confirmed purportedly scientific proof that the majority folks on the earth had been biologically inferior to a bunch they referred to as the Nordic Race – which means folks from Northern Europe – and their American descendants, who shaped a bunch they referred to as the “American Race.”
By limiting immigration from all different teams, these legislators believed they had been counterbalancing a crushing interval the place warfare and pandemic had killed off what they noticed because the nation’s greatest folks.
Totally different teams preyed on People’ grief concerning the warfare and pandemic and directed it in opposition to minority teams.
Ku Klux Klan members parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on Aug. 8, 1925.
Bettmann/Contributor
From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted thousands and thousands of followers with its perception that white folks had been superior to all others, and that Black folks ought to stay enslaved. On the similar time, a bunch of scientists, medical doctors and psychologists discovered monumental success in persuading the general public that there have been scientific the reason why hatred and discrimination wanted to be included into American authorities.
Their proof was one thing referred to as eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that people had to make use of superior expertise and medication to get folks with good traits to breed whereas stopping these with dangerous traits from having the chance to take action.
Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist primarily based at a analysis laboratory in Chilly Spring Harbor, New York, was certainly one of this motion’s most vocal representatives.
Laughlin labored for a number of totally different eugenics analysis organizations, and this helped him grow to be profitable at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public coverage. He then gained a spot as an professional eugenics adviser to Congress within the early Nineteen Twenties. Together with his place, Laughlin then offered the pseudoscientific information that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they wanted to justify passing the measure.
Carrie Buck, left, pictured together with her mom, Emma, was the primary girl involuntarily sterilized beneath Virginia legislation within the Nineteen Twenties.
M.E. Grenander Particular Collections and Archives, College at Albany
A push for sterilization
In Laughlin’s influential 1922 ebook “Eugenic Sterilization in the United States,” he detailed a highway map for passing a legislation that might permit governments to sterilize disabled folks.
After a lot loss of life throughout World Conflict I and the influenza pandemic, Laughlin discovered fertile floor for making a case that the U.S. wanted to cease individuals who is perhaps thought of “feeble-minded” from passing down inferior traits.
Within the mid-Nineteen Twenties, Laughlin and his allies pressed a courtroom case in opposition to a teenage girl whom the state of Virginia had deemed an imbecile and incarcerated at a large Virginia establishment for the feeble-minded. This girl, Carrie Buck, was incarcerated after she gave delivery to a toddler in 1924 who was conceived on account of rape. If Buck, who was 18 years previous on the time, had any hope of being launched, the officers who ran the establishment demanded she be sterilized first.
All throughout the nation, states had begun legalizing pressured sterilization. Now, this case of Buck v. Bell made its approach to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom. In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued the courtroom’s ruling, which had just one dissent. In it, he wrote that “three generations of imbeciles is enough” and prolonged the scope of a earlier ruling that allowed the federal government to compel folks to get vaccinated to incorporate pressured sterilization of disabled folks.
Buck was forcibly sterilized in October 1927, shortly after the courtroom’s ruling.
Whereas it’s unquestionable that sterilization and different discriminatory insurance policies discovered widespread trigger with Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi motion – which used the eugenic concepts of sterilization and mass extermination – they persevered, largely unchallenged, right here within the U.S.
Some folks, together with myself, argue that the spirit of those discriminatory insurance policies nonetheless exists within the U.S. as we speak.
A well-known story
However sensing a grave decline, some white People have turned their sights on folks with disabilities, immigrants, transgender and nonbinary folks, and folks of shade because the supply of their issues.
Trump frequently encourages this sort of pondering. In January 2025, he blamed an air collision that occurred over the Potomac River and killed 67 folks on disabled Federal Aviation Administration workers, implying that they didn’t possess the intelligence to do their jobs.
Trump falsely stated the Jan. 1, 2025, New Orleans terror assault was attributable to unlawful immigration, although a Texas-born man drove a automotive right into a crowd of individuals, killing 14.
At a coverage degree, Trump’s administration has made vital modifications to the immigration system, together with taking steps to take away authorized protections for 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants within the U.S. And he has launched an unprecedented problem to birthright citizenship.
There are limits to what historical past can say concerning the present state of affairs. However these similarities with the early Nineteen Twenties counsel that, opposite to many claims concerning the unprecedented nature of the present instances, the nation has been right here earlier than.