As promised, the second Trump administration has rapidly rolled out a slew of insurance policies and govt orders that the president says are all aimed toward “Making America Nice Once more.” This takes on totally different varieties, together with Elon Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity rapidly laying off thousands of workers at numerous federal companies, and President Donald Trump pausing all funding for Ukraine.
Trump says that, amongst others, there are three teams which can be making America not-great: immigrants, people with disabilities, and people who find themselves dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion insurance policies.
These administration efforts started at a time when many People expressed an general rising sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the country and politics. Simply 19% of People stated in December 2024 that they assume the nation is heading in the right direction.
This attitude is putting not solely as a result of it’s so darkish, however as a result of it strongly resembles how People felt throughout a pivotal decade 100 years in the past, when individuals’s dissatisfaction with the state of the nation led to a sequence of discriminatory, hateful insurance policies by the federal authorities.
It’s a interval of American historical past that I believe gives one thing of a mirror of the present political state of affairs within the U.S.
Associated Press
The Roaring ‘20s?
Within the Nineteen Twenties, the economy was good, the U.S. had won World War I, and a terrible pandemic ended.
However many People didn’t see it that method.
They entered the Nineteen Twenties with a rising sense of paranoia and a sense that that they had been robbed of one thing. Successful World Struggle I had come at a horrible value. Greater than 116,000 American soldiers died and twice that quantity got here residence wounded.
Because the conflict got here to an in depth, the U.S. – and the world – was within the throes of the flu pandemic that finally claimed tens of millions of lives, including about 675,000 within the U.S.
Different People had been involved in regards to the doable rise of communism within the U.S., in addition to the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based insurance policies on the federal and state stage that focused nonwhite immigrants and disabled individuals.
Among the many most vital outcomes of that political second was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration coverage that, amongst different modifications, prohibited immigration from Asia.
One other pivotal motion was the Supreme Courtroom’s 1927 Buck v. Bell determination, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the proper to sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals.
Discrimination towards marginalized teams
The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a serious shift in American immigration coverage, primarily based on the concern of one thing that former President Theodore Roosevelt and others referred to as “race suicide.”
The regulation launched inflexible restrictions conserving individuals overseas who weren’t from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration quotas that it established would proceed to be enforced into the Sixties.
The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this law had been profitable as a result of they supported their effort by presenting proof that confirmed purportedly scientific proof that the majority individuals on this planet had been biologically inferior to a gaggle they referred to as the Nordic Race – which means individuals from Northern Europe – and their American descendants, who shaped a gaggle they referred to as the “American Race.”
By limiting immigration from all different teams, these legislators believed they had been counterbalancing a crushing interval the place war and pandemic had killed off what they noticed because the nation’s finest individuals.
Completely different teams preyed on People’ grief in regards to the conflict and pandemic and directed it towards minority teams.
Bettmann/Contributor
From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers with its perception that white individuals had been superior to all others, and that Black people should remain enslaved. On the identical time, a gaggle of scientists, docs and psychologists discovered huge success in persuading the general public that there have been scientific explanation why hatred and discrimination wanted to be integrated into American authorities.
Their proof was one thing called eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that people had to make use of superior expertise and drugs to get individuals with good traits to breed whereas stopping these with unhealthy traits from having the chance to take action.
Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist primarily based at a analysis laboratory in Chilly Spring Harbor, New York, was one in every of this motion’s most vocal representatives.
Laughlin worked for several different eugenics analysis organizations, and this helped him turn into profitable at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public coverage. He then gained a spot as an professional eugenics adviser to Congress within the early Nineteen Twenties. Along with his place, Laughlin then offered the pseudoscientific knowledge that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they wanted to justify passing the measure.
M.E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany
A push for sterilization
In Laughlin’s influential 1922 guide “Eugenic Sterilization in the United States,” he detailed a street map for passing a regulation that might permit governments to sterilize disabled individuals.
After a lot loss of life throughout World Struggle I and the influenza pandemic, Laughlin discovered fertile floor for making a case that the U.S. wanted to cease individuals who is perhaps considered “feeble-minded” from passing down inferior traits.
Within the mid-Nineteen Twenties, Laughlin and his allies pressed a courtroom case towards a teenage girl whom the state of Virginia had deemed an imbecile and incarcerated at a large Virginia establishment for the feeble-minded. This woman, Carrie Buck, was incarcerated after she gave beginning to a baby in 1924 who was conceived because of rape. If Buck, who was 18 years outdated on the time, had any hope of being launched, the officers who ran the establishment demanded she be sterilized first.
All throughout the nation, states had begun legalizing compelled sterilization. Now, this case of Buck v. Bell made its option to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom. In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued the courtroom’s ruling, which had just one dissent. In it, he wrote that “three generations of imbeciles is sufficient” and prolonged the scope of a earlier ruling that allowed the federal government to compel individuals to get vaccinated to incorporate compelled sterilization of disabled individuals.
Buck was forcibly sterilized in October 1927, shortly after the courtroom’s ruling.
Whereas it’s unquestionable that sterilization and different discriminatory insurance policies found common cause with Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi motion – which used the eugenic concepts of sterilization and mass extermination – they continued, largely unchallenged, right here within the U.S.
Some individuals, including myself, argue that the spirit of those discriminatory insurance policies nonetheless exists within the U.S. at the moment.
A well-recognized story
Following stalemated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan within the 2000s and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the American economy has been growing.
However sensing a grave decline, some white People have turned their sights on individuals with disabilities, immigrants, transgender and nonbinary individuals, and folks of shade because the supply of their issues.
Trump often encourages this type of considering. In January 2025, he blamed an air collision that occurred over the Potomac River and killed 67 people on disabled Federal Aviation Administration workers, implying that they didn’t possess the intelligence to do their jobs.
Trump falsely stated the Jan. 1, 2025, New Orleans terror assault was caused by illegal immigration, despite the fact that a Texas-born man drove a automobile right into a crowd of individuals, killing 14.
At a coverage stage, Trump’s administration has made important modifications to the immigration system, together with taking steps to remove legal protections for 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants within the U.S. And he has launched an unprecedented challenge to birthright citizenship.
There are limits to what historical past can say in regards to the present state of affairs. However these similarities with the early Nineteen Twenties counsel that, opposite to many claims in regards to the unprecedented nature of the present occasions, the nation has been right here earlier than.
