I’ve fallen into a pattern lately. Time and again, I find myself looking up from the reading I’ve been immersed in and calling over to my wife, “You’ll never believe what he said now.”
The phrases have jumped out at me, one after another. The vow to “drain that great swamp.” The prediction that “the race which has made our country great will pass away.” The promise to beat back the “invading hostile army” of “criminal immigrants” that are the “mentally or physically defective” dregs of their homelands and “not the stuff of which patriots are made.”
Maybe sentiments like these have also jumped out at you, in the news about immigration you’ve been consuming. The difference is that the writings on my reading list are more than a hundred years old.
These familiar themes about bans, borders, and walls — and especially about how the radical and dangerous new immigrants don’t measure up to the “quality” ones we used to get — weren’t crafted by Donald Trump or his Breitbart consigliere, Steve Bannon, sitting in Trump Tower channeling the grievances of the white working class. Instead, they are part of an immigration Ur-text painstakingly assembled, brick by nativist brick, in Boston, by three Brahmin intellectuals, beginning in 1894. That’s when the trio founded the Immigration Restriction League, the equivalent of a modern-day think tank, just five years after all three had graduated from Harvard.
Leading the group was Prescott Farnsworth Hall, a lawyer and Brookline homebody who was largely unknown, even in his day. But in the words of his contemporary Madison Grant, a prominent intellectual who hobnobbed with presidents and authored the influential book The Passing of the Great Race, Hall was the “guiding hand” who “saw with the vision of a prophet a full generation ahead of his countrymen.”
Pallid and gaunt, Hall didn’t like to stray far from his beloved backyard garden, where he could identify by name every plant and insect in residence. Just the sight of a cat with a mouse in its jaws, his wife once said, “distressed him unbearably.”
How this hypersensitive insomniac managed to create the underpinnings of a revolution in immigration policy is as surprising as it is remarkable. And now feels like the perfect time to understand his reasoning. After all, the argument he advanced in the horse-and-buggy age is being re-injected, sometimes practically word for word, into our Make America Great Again debate about immigration in the 21st century.