Commentary: MAGA's praise of 'real Americans' has a dark history

We’ve heard a great deal about so-called “real Americans” in this presidential campaign.

It was a theme of this summer’s Republican National Convention, where speakers like Hulk Hogan and UFC CEO Dana White used the phrase to praise Donald Trump and his supporters. And more recently, the former president and his running mate, JD Vance, have focused on those they deem not to be real Americans, including Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who they’ve falsely described as “illegal aliens” (and baselessly accused of eating American pets).

Trump has leaned on this type of rhetoric since he first emerged on the political stage spouting spurious claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. And after enduring it for years, it’s hard for many to muster a sense of shock.

Yet perhaps we should react more strongly, given where this language originated. The Trump campaign didn’t invent the idea of a “real American,” much less the slander that goes along with it. Instead, credit for that dubious deed goes to a group no normal politician would claim as an intellectual influence: the Ku Klux Klan.

It's a truism that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, but this was especially the case in the early 20th century. Between 1900 and 1914, close to a million newcomers arrived in places like Ellis Island. This meant that each year, one immigrant arrived for every 100 Americans — a high number relative to historical averages (and much higher than the current annual statistic: roughly one new immigrant arrives for every 200 Americans).

Most of the new arrivals came from places that hadn’t sent many migrants in the past: the shtetls of eastern Europe, poor farming villages in Italy and Greece and other areas distant from Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany — all sources of earlier waves. Most of the newcomers were Catholics, Jews and other faiths distant from Protestantism.

Their arrival occasioned considerable handwringing among native-born Americans, who feared that these foreigners would overrun the nation’s White, Anglo-Saxon population. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, fretted that his fellow WASPs were on the verge of committing “race suicide.” Still, Roosevelt believed, as he noted in a speech in 1917, that if someone was loyal to the United States, “then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.”

Members of the Ku Klux Klan thought otherwise. This secret society, born in the wake of the Civil War, played a central role in destroying Reconstruction and disenfranchising African Americans through lynchings and other terrorist tactics. Although the group receded from public view in the 1880s, it experienced a major revival in the 1920s in response to the record levels of immigration.

This new Klan still dressed in hoods and burned crosses, and it certainly didn’t hide its ugly past. A typical appeal to “every real American” had the Klan bragging of its “valiant service in behalf of White supremacy.” Still, though old-fashioned racism remained a bedrock belief for Klan members, it was the group’s new anti-immigrant stance that fueled its explosive growth in states as far afield as Indiana, California and Oregon.

With Klan 2.0 no longer a Southern thing, it welcomed anyone in the U.S. who qualified as a “real American” — meaning “no foreign connections, either religiously or politically.” The Klan’s national magazine, the American Standard, thus called upon “every patriot, every real American in the nation, to unite with us in our nation-wide campaign to get every white, Gentile, native-born Protestant of the nations to the polls in November…”

The hate group likewise argued for the deportation of Jews, Catholics and others it viewed as irredeemably alien. As the American Standard put it, the Klan wanted “all orientalism, alienism, un-Americanism driven forever from our shores, and sent to the place of its origins.” Long before Trump declared that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” the Klan advocated the deportation of “anti-Christian Jewry from the United States entirely, thus withdrawing the poison from the American body politic.”

The Klan anticipated our present moment in other ways as well. Outside of its imagined community of “real Americans,” the group argued that while immigrants might be “residents of America … mentally they are alien. This is because they think, work, and play in terms of alien tongues, alien customs, and alien standards. Consequently, they are aliens, not Americans, whether they possess citizenship papers or not.” It’s a sentiment Vance channeled last week when he insisted on describing Haitians in Ohio “illegal aliens,” despite their legal right to be there.

The rhetoric of the “real American” has always done more than insult and degrade; it can also become a means of intimidation. In the 1920s, for example, it was wielded to wage economic warfare against immigrants. As the historian Linda Gordon noted in her history of the Klan, the group pressured native-born shopkeepers to place placards that read “Real American” in their windows to facilitate boycotts of businesses owned by immigrants.

Nonetheless, these efforts provoked, as they have in our own time, efforts to reclaim a more expansive definition of the term. Jews, Catholics and others sympathetic to immigrants pushed back, claiming that they, not the Klan, were the “real Americans.” As one rabbi declared in a speech attacking the Klan: “We want no terrorism in America. We want law and order. This is the standpoint of the Jews as well as every real American citizen.”

So, too, in the year 2024. Anyone who claims the “real American” label as a way of denying legitimacy to those whose families arrived here more recently deserves denunciation. And political defeat in November.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”

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