Except for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, immigration laws were not restrictive until the 1920s. Because of the incredible growth of manufacturing during the last third of the 19th century, millions of people from Europe (but also other parts of the world) were welcomed as workers into the USA with few restrictions in the decades 1880-1920. In 1880, the population of the USA was approximately 50 million, and in 1920, the population was 106 million. So, during that 40 year period, our population grew by 56 million, which included an incredible 25 million immigrants plus their children and grandchildren. Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, which included the words, “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” was added to the Statue of Liberty in 1903.
As migrants from Europe moved into jobs in the East, many in the East continued to move westward. With the Westward movement during the 19th century, there were great opportunities for vast numbers of people to become landowners, but in the new, industrialized sectors of the East, there were many fewer opportunities to become managers and capitalist owners. In the agricultural sector, we had large landowners and small landowners, large cattle ranches and small cattle ranches. However, within the ranch subculture, we had cowboys who took care of the horses and cattle but did not own the land or the animals. The Westward movement was less stratified than the industrialized East.
Many of the millions of immigrants became farmers, but the lion’s share became wage employees of the factories that were being built in the eastern part of the U.S. “If the third generation (the grandchildren of immigrants) are included, then more than two-thirds of workers in the manufacturing sector were of recent immigrant stock.”
The manufacturing sector in the late 19th century was populated with many leftist-minded immigrants. Many arrived believing that they, as workers, were in a class struggle with an elite class (the nobility) that had enjoyed rights and powers that they had been excluded from for centuries. The new immigrants did not connect with that sense of individualism that had marked our culture until 1880.
The ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – which was an ideal for free individuals — began to succumb to socialist groupthink, and the idea that man is first and foremost a social animal and that his or her membership in society (understand “society” to imply “class”) reveals his or her true commitments and identity.
John Dewey with his prodigious writings and his socialistic commitments became the leader who revamped our education system beginning in the late 1890s and continuing on into the 1920s and up to this very day. Classical and Christian educational goals were sacrificed in the interest of producing cooperative workers for the future, people who were not individualistic in outlook, but collectivistic.
Woodrow Wilson’s support for the Federal Reserve and the income tax, the Republicans understood that we were moving in the wrong direction and that there was a link between the vast tide of immigration for forty years and the legislation being supported by the Dems as well as the fact that a socialist, Eugene Debs, ran for President three times by1920.
New immigration laws were passed in the 1920s whereby immigration was limited to 2% of a nationality that was in the USA as of the 1890 census. The Congress, controlled by Republicans, realized that this flood of immigration was producing a widespread acceptance of a wrongheaded and un-American understanding of the body politic.
Despite the Federal Reserve, which was created to prevent the regular depressions brought on by banking collapses in the 19th century, our banking system collapsed in 1930. The New Deal was initiated after FDR was elected President in 1932. He greatly expanded the role of the federal government with a long list of created “alphabet agencies” some of which exist to this day. Nevertheless, high unemployment continued until we began ramping up our military readiness as World War II loomed on the horizon.
But during this Rooseveltian second phase of leftist commitment (Wilson was the first phase), we see that certain leftist professors in Germany, called the Frankfurt School, emigrated to the USA during the 1930s. They were Marxists who opposed the political and economic philosophy and dictates of Hitler whose “fascism” was just as totalitarian as the governance envisioned by the communists. They included such luminaries as Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Eric Fromm, and Theodore Adorno. The arrival of these brilliant communists ushered in the infection of American education with communist ideas and ideals.
Since that time higher education in the USA has increasingly bought into the Frankfurt School vision where it now is dominant in many of our most prestigious schools. Law and order now exists to protect the rights and legitimacy of the intellectual Left. Bourgeois capitalism allied and aligned with and supported by Judeo-Christian morality is now considered out-of-date and even wretchedly elitist by many of our top thinkers. This is the essence of why they despise — yes, have utter contempt for — Trump and his followers.
Trump represents a return to pre-Wilsonian ideals of individualism and bourgeois initiative, a pro-life and Judeo-Christian world where the unborn, considered as an individual, also has rights, especially the right to life. It is a relational world where the individual is defined by his or her gifts and behavior, not by his or her group identity.
Identity politics is replaced by real identity based on the search for self, not on the search to be in the so-called right group that will express who I am. Pres. Trump and his supporters numbering close to 80 million persons are rejecting the post-Deweyan and post-Frankfurt School mindset with a more God-centered and individualistic mindset. Family values as traditionally understood are still in jeopardy, but may see a renaissance. This return is needed and will be refreshing.
Jeffrey Ludwig is a prolific online writer, and the author of four books available on amazon.com. He is a Harvard Master Teacher, and served as Editor of the International Trade Alert, a leading export-import publication, and was listed four times in Who’s Who Among America’s High School Teachers. He pastors a small Bible-believing church.
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Jesus Christ is King
