In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson issued a series of proclamations restricting or voiding the rights of German-Americans after the United States declared war on Germany. The government seized over 500 million dollars in property from German-Americans and placed thousands in internment camps.
Fourteen states banned the teaching of the German language. Orchestra conductors were arrested for playing German music (try having an orchestra without playing Beethoven or Wagner), failing to play the Star Spangled Banner, or playing it with insufficient enthusiasm. Mobs of people accused Germans of being spies and carried out their own sentences. German-Americans who did not buy government bonds were tarred and feathered. In Illinois hundreds of men, singing the Star Spangled Banner, grabbed a coal miner named Robert Prager, they forced him to walk barefoot on broken glass and hung him to a tree. Eleven were charged but were acquitted of murder.
We have a book in our store called The Web, which makes chilling reading. Copies were given out at the end of the war to members of the American Protective League. It proudly describes the efforts of this vigilante group that went around harassing any family with German ancestry, interrogating, detaining, raiding, all with the assent of the government but without any centralized control or accountability. In Cincinnati alone, the group visited over 14,000 homes. Gleefully, they describe the troves of evidence gathered, and the expectation that it would lead to mass arrests after the war, punishing criminals for doing vile things like questioning the war or being pacifist or belonging to a labor union.
Note that all of these people were “legal” immigrants, or children of legal immigrants, simply because there was no law against immigration before 1924, unless you were Asian. None of your grandparents or great grandparents had work visas, green cards, or even passports. So when Wilson described “Enemy Aliens” he was talking about any and all German-Americans.
In The Web, Emerson Hough gushes over the actions of the APL members in facing the “racial war” as he saw it, against the enemy within. So, in the US we are not and never have been immune to the allure of picking out a scapegoat to carry all of our disappointments. It has happened over and over again.
So the fear today is not unique. Except maybe in that there is no catastrophe. The economy is strong, crime is low, and people are calling in bomb threats against schools in Springfield. Eventually, the economy actually will contract, as it always eventually does. Or it could be a storm or a flood or a famine or a war. What then? Out with the machetes and pitchforks?
The US could be the living breathing repudiation of ethno-nationalism. Remember when people used to say the words “melting pot” with pride? Will we ever reach for that height?
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