Karen Tumulty on U.S. Nativism (The Washington Post, December 7, 2025)
Columnist Karen Tumulty compares U.S. nativism of the 1920s with that of today in her Washington Post column of December 7, 2025, discussing themes we also covered in our "America First" series. If you have a Washington Post subscription, you can read her column here.
She quotes President Woodrow Wilson's State of the Union address to Congress on December 7, 1915 — almost a year and a half before the United States entered World War I: "There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” We discuss this period in Episode 101.
She also offers this headline from The New York Times of April 27, 1924, in the wake of the 1924 passage of the Johnson-Reed Act: “AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO END: Effects of New Immigration Legislation Described by Senate Sponsor of Bill — Chief Aim, He States, Is to Preserve Racial Type as It Exists Here Today.” Until its repeal in 1965, the act restricted immigration in an attempt to preserve the ethnic balance in the United States reported by the 1890 Census. We discuss this period in Episode 102.
