A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

by Timothy Egan

The law’s quota system was based on the census of 1890, before most southern European and Polish Catholics, and Jewish refugees from pogroms in the East, had crossed the Atlantic. As it happened, the best way to build a wall was to turn back the clock. America would be replenished with people who looked like the ethnic face of Indiana—a blueprint for a bloodstream. The effect was immediate and dramatic. In 1921, nearly a quarter million Italians had fled their country for the United States. By 1925, that number fell by 90 percent. About 200,000 Russian Jews arrived on American shores in 1921. A year after passage of the Immigration Act, only 7,000 were let into the country. Greeks went from 46,000 in one year to a few hundred. Left behind in Poland were 3.5 million Jews who would be targeted with mass execution in little more than a decade. Also among those denied entry because of restrictions on Jews was the family of Anne Frank.