“If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control,” said one leading commentator, Madison Grant, “and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo.” Thus was born America’s “nativism” movement, whose progeny would include the modern version of the Ku Klux Klan.
