Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

Teddy Roosevelt was a standout, but Krieger had no shortage of material to work with from a long line of U.S. presidents. Both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln had expressed hopes that all people of African descent living in the United States would one day be shipped overseas. “The two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government,” asserted Jefferson, who lived in fear of a slave revolt. Krieger could also point to American presidents of more recent vintage. Woodrow Wilson in 1913 had resegregated the federal workforce by law, purging Black Americans from the best and best-paying government jobs. Calvin Coolidge in 1924 had signed into law radical restrictions on immigration, but not before publishing a stinging little essay in Good Housekeeping magazine titled “Whose Country Is This?” Immigration restrictions, Coolidge wrote under the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, were a necessary first step in walling off white America from “the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless or the improvident.” These types, he implied, could be identified by nationality and skin color. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. The unassimilated alien child menaces our children.”