Ok folks I need to clear something up.
Throughout the ongoing debates, the national media and the Democratic candidates have been referring to President Trump as a white nationalist.
That is flat out wrong.
At a rally in Houston back in October of 2018, Trump said, “A globalist is a person who wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring so much about our country. We can’t have that… I’m a nationalist.”
Well, here is the ugly truth.
Almost every American is a “nationalist” of one kind or another. So is almost every Russian, Chinese, or North Korean.
Don’t get mad. I am not accusing you of any sort of bias, racism, or other unpleasant views. I am merely trying to emphasize, again, how overly simplistic some labels can be.
Upon hearing Trump claim to be a Nationalist, the national media and the Democrats claimed he was a “white nationalist.” Others called him a “White Supremacist”. Those terms mean two different things, though they are in the same family.
A “supremacist” believes a particular race (or sex, or other genetic or cultural characteristic) is naturally superior to others.
Because you must know what the characteristic is that is believed to be “supreme,” an adjective has to be attached. Thus there are “white supremacists,” “Muslim supremacists,” “male supremacists” (also sometimes known as “misogynists”), etc.
Racial and cultural groups can also have their own internal divisions, as in Sunnis who believe themselves “supreme” in relation to Shiites, and vice versa.
A “nationalist,” though, is at heart merely someone who strongly believes in the interest of one’s own nation, however “nation” might be defined. President Trump is a “nationalist,” as are most liberals, populists, and everyone to the right and left.
But adding an adjective to indicate what “their” nation is, can turn “nationalism” into a polarizing term.
A “white nationalist” generally wants a nation of white people. Whether that means creating a separate nation of just white people or pushing those who are not white out of their current nation depends on which branch of “white nationalism” is talking.
While many “white nationalists” are also “white supremacists” because they believe white people are inherently superior to other races, the terms are really not interchangeable.
As Merriam-Webster explains, “white nationalist is defined as ‘one of a group of militant whites who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation,’ while white supremacist is ‘a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.’”
“White nationalists” first appeared around 1925, Merriam Webster says, though there were certainly “nationalist” movements focusing on “whites” long before them, including national policies restricting immigration as well as voting and other “nationalist” activities.
“Nationalism” shows up frequently in politics and ideology. “Nationalist China” was a common nickname for China before Mao, and later for Taiwan, and many nations have “nationalist” policies.
They all look to focus on specific policies or traits, and so are by their nature restrictive, but not all are seeking to restrict individuals based on racial or other characteristics.
Words and labels are often thrown about in emotional situations, but journalists need to take the high road and not fuel the rhetoric. It’s easy to resort to labels.
Now why is this clarification this morning so important?
Well, as the race for president heats up, both sides are now throwing these terms around and applying them to every issue on the table.
Immigration, mass shootings, foreign policy, you name it.
Now if you want to see a true example of white supremacy, let’s look at a little history.
Adolph Hitler and Nazism
It is hard to believe, but Hitler formulated most of his ideas on the writing of two men. Charles Darwin and Madison Grant.
Now we are familiar with Dawin’s survival of the fittest theories and it is easy to see how Hitler used Darwin’s thoughts to fit his agenda. But who in the world is Madison Grant?
What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful group of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century.
They included wealthy tycoons, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.
Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood named Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.
Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril and helped push legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s.
His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him.
Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications.
When Nazism reflected back Grant’s vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash as: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America.
Madison Grant came from old money. Born in Manhattan seven months after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, he attended Yale and then Columbia Law School.
He was an outdoorsman and a conservationist, knowledgeable about wildlife and interested in the dangers of extinction, expertise that he soon became intent on applying to humanity.
When he opened a law practice on Wall Street in the early 1890s, the wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe was nearing its height. “As he was jostled by Greek ragpickers, Armenian shoe shiners, and Jewish fish vendors, it was distressingly obvious to him that the new arrivals did not know this nation’s history or understand its republican form of government,” Spiro writes in his biography.
Jews troubled Grant the most. “The man of the old stock,” he later wrote in The Passing of the Great Race, is being “driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.” But as the title of his 1916 work indicated, Grant’s fear of dispossession ran wide and deep:
These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.
0Grant blended Nordic promotion with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly cover for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe.
But it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history.
He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers.
In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:
“The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew”.
What Grant’s work lacked in scientific rigor, it made up for in packaging.
Americans’ idealism blinded them, he argued, to the reality that newcomers from the Mediterranean and eastern Europe—to say nothing of anyone from Asia or Africa—could never hope to possess the genetic potential innate in the nation’s original Nordic inhabitants, which was the source of the nation’s greatness.
His thesis found eager converts among the American elite, thanks in no small part to his extensive social connections. The New York Times and The Nation were among the many media outlets that echoed Grant’s reasoning.
Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”
President Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “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,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.
The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.
Endorsing Grant’s idea that true Americans are of Nordic stock, Coolidge also took up his idea that intermarriage between whites of different “races,” not just between whites and nonwhites, degrades that stock.
Perhaps the most important of Grant’s elite admirers were to be found among members of Congress.
Reconstruction struggles; U.S. expansion in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii; high levels of immigration—each had raised the specter of white people losing political power and influence to nonwhite people, or to the wrong kind of white people.
On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way.
The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred.
The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.
A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South.
The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Grant found a congressional ally and champion in Albert Johnson, a Republican representative from Washington. A nativist and union buster, he contacted Grant after reading The Passing of the Great Race. The duo embarked on an ambitious restrictionist agenda.
As the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races.
In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants.
When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro wrote.
Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.”
His appointment helped ensure that Grant’s concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.
Johnson found an ally in Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, who sponsored the 1924 bill in the Senate.
A Princeton-educated lawyer, he feared that America was going the way of Rome, where the “inpouring of captives and alien slaves” had caused the empire to sink “into an impotency which made her the prey of every barbarian invader.”
This was almost verbatim Grant, whose portrait of Rome’s fall culminated in the lowly immigrants “gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their former masters.” (His plotline helped him preserve the notion that fair-haired and -skinned people are responsible for all the world’s great achievements: Rome’s original inhabitants were Nordic, but contemporary Italians were descendants of Roman slave races and therefore inferior.)
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the total flimsiness of race science.
In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands.
In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:
What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.
The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
As the Immigration Act of 1924 neared passage, some in the restrictionist camp played up Grant’s signature Nordic theme more stridently than others.
Addison Smith, a Republican congressman from Idaho, proudly invoked the Scandinavian, English, Irish, and other northern-European immigrants of his district, highlighting that among them were no “ ‘slackers’ of the type to be found in the cities of the East. We have ample room, but no space for such parasites.”
“A fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” exists between the races, President Harding publicly declared. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.”
Once passage of the act was assured, Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.”
Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.”
“It was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933.
Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races.
Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission.
Some of the American eugenicists (scientists who proposed ways to improve human beings, especially by selective breeding) whose work helped pave the way for the racist immigration laws of the 1920s received recognition in Germany.
The Nazis gave Laughlin an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who had written the introduction to The Passing of the Great Race, received one from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in 1934.
Leon Whitney, another of Grant’s fellow travelers, evidently received a personal thank-you letter from Hitler after sending the führer a copy of his 1934 book, The Case for Sterilization.
Grant’s final project, Spiro writes, was an effort to organize a hunting expedition with Hermann Goering, the commander in chief of the Nazi air force who went on to become Hitler’s chosen successor.
Grant died in May 1937, before the outing was to take place.
America has always grappled with, in the words of the immigration historian John Higham, two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism.
According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
People of both political persuasions like to tell a too-simple story about the course of this battle: World War II showed Americans the evil of racism, which was vanquished in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act brought nonwhites into the American Society for good.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 forever banished the racial definition of American identity embodied in the 1924 immigration bill, forged by Johnson and Reed in their crusade to save Nordic Americans from “race suicide.”
The truth is that the rivalry never ended, and Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.
The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension.
They saw allegiance to the American creed of “All men are created equal” as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it.
Their valor helped defeat first the Nazis, and then the American laws that the Nazis had so admired. What the Nazis saw as a weakness turned out to be a strength, and it destroyed them.
So folks, there you have a little history. Hopefully, now that I have explained true white supremacy, and our ugly past history in dealing with it, you can see why I get so upset when the media and politicians throw that term around and then try to convince us it is the same thing as being a nationalist.
Is Trump a white supremacist? Absolutely not.
So let me ask you. Are you a Nationalist? If so, you as well should be terribly offended by those who would lump you in with the followers of white supremacy & white nationalism.