The 2020s in the US bear little resemblance to the 1920s. The Harding-Coolidge era—commonly known as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties—was marked by deep racism, reminding one of the Ku Klux Klan, eugenics, and a highly restrictive immigration bill.
The Rising Tide of Color, which warned about ‘the threat against white world-supremacy’, was so influential that its author Lothrop Stoddard even gets a mention in The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel from 1925. Tom, a character in the novel, says, “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.” His white supremacist views were widely shared back then.
The US, thankfully, has come a long, long way over the last century. It is nevertheless striking how the past hostility towards immigration, especially immigration from the ‘wrong’ countries, has found echoes in the present. And it’s happening not just in America.
Western democracies have been so unsettled that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently vowed to end the “failed experiment in open borders”, even though his nation saw a 50 percent drop in net migration last year.
“Every area of the immigration system—work, family, and study—will be tightened up so we have more control,” he declared.
That sums up what’s already happening in the US, which is led by a party that’s aligned with the Conservatives rather than Starmer’s Labour Party. These days, populism appeals to both sides of the Left-Right divide.