Henry Goddard, a psychologist, was dispatched in 1912 to Ellis Island to sort out which incoming immigrants were afflicted with “feeblemindedness.” Goddard’s method of diagnosis was simple, Schrag writes: he would look at the immigrants and instantly be able to tell. By this measure, fully 82 percent of Russians and 76 percent of Jews turned out to be “morons.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were two of the most loathed ethnic groups at the time.

This attitude culminated in the 1916 book Passing of the Great Race, by the eugenicist Madison Grant. He denounced the flood of Polish Jewish immigrants—with their “dwarf stature, peculiar mentality, and ruthless concentration on self-interest.” The “swarms” of Jews were driving “native” (meaning white, in Grant’s view) Americans to retreat from public life and lowering their birth rates. He recommended state-mandated sterilization for “social failures,” “weaklings and defectives,” and “worthless race types.”99

The Passing of the Great Race was published in Germany in 1925, and at one point Grant was said to have received a letter from a fan who called his book “my Bible.”

The fan letter’s author? Adolf Hitler.100

The entire twentieth century practically frothed with hatred toward immigrants, as the political scientist Joel S. Fetzer describes in his book on public attitudes toward immigration.101 (This was, of course, on top of Americans’ well-documented exploitation and dislike of both native-born and enslaved people of color.) One news article described the lynching of Mexicans in the early 1920s to be “so common as to pass almost unnoticed.” On the now ultraliberal West Coast, there was a campaign to “Keep California White.”

In the 1930s, the Hitler-admiring Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin promoted anti-Semitism through his radio show and oddly named newsletter, Social Justice. Bands of his followers vandalized Jewish stores102 and advocated “liquidating”103 the Jews from America. Japanese Americans returning home from internment after World War II were met with signs that said “No Japs Welcome.”104

As late as the late 1970s and early ’80s, when my family and many other Russian Jews immigrated, many white Americans remained staunchly opposed to anyone who looked or sounded different. A campaign was launched to make English the official language of the U.S.105 In Detroit in 1982,106 two white auto workers beat a Chinese American man, twenty-seven-year-old Vincent Chin, to death with a baseball bat, erroneously believing him to be Japanese, and therefore, a competitor in the car industry.