The darkish parallels between Nineteen Twenties America and at the moment’s political local weather

As promised, the second Trump administration has shortly rolled out a slew of insurance policies and govt orders that the president says are all geared toward “Making America Nice Once more.” This takes on totally different kinds, together with Elon Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity shortly shedding hundreds of employees at numerous federal companies, and President Donald Trump pausing all funding for Ukraine.

Trump says that, amongst others, there are three teams which are making America not-great: immigrants, folks with disabilities, and people who find themselves dedicated to variety, fairness and inclusion insurance policies.

These administration efforts started at a time when many Individuals expressed an general rising sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the nation and politics. Simply 19% of Individuals stated in December 2024 that they assume the nation is on course.

This attitude is putting not solely as a result of it’s so darkish, however as a result of it strongly resembles how Individuals felt throughout a pivotal decade 100 years in the past, when folks’s dissatisfaction with the state of the nation led to a sequence of discriminatory, hateful insurance policies by the federal authorities.

It’s a interval of American historical past that I believe presents one thing of a mirror of the present political scenario within the U.S.

The Roaring ‘20s?

Within the Nineteen Twenties, the financial system was good, the U.S. had gained World Battle I, and a horrible pandemic ended.

However many Individuals didn’t see it that approach.

They entered the Nineteen Twenties with a rising sense of paranoia and a sense that they’d been robbed of one thing. Profitable World Battle I had come at a horrible value. Greater than 116,000 American troopers died and twice that quantity got here dwelling wounded.

Because the conflict got here to an in depth, the U.S. – and the world – was within the throes of the flu pandemic that finally claimed tens of thousands and thousands of lives, together with about 675,000 within the U.S.

Different Individuals had been involved concerning the potential rise of communism within the U.S., in addition to the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based insurance policies on the federal and state degree that focused nonwhite immigrants and disabled folks.

Among the many most vital outcomes of that political second was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration coverage that, amongst different adjustments, prohibited immigration from Asia.

One other pivotal motion was the Supreme Courtroom’s 1927 Buck v. Bell choice, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the appropriate to sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled folks.

Discrimination towards marginalized teams

The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a serious shift in American immigration coverage, primarily based on the worry of one thing that former President Theodore Roosevelt and others referred to as “race suicide.”

The legislation launched inflexible restrictions preserving folks in a foreign country who weren’t from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration quotas that it established would proceed to be enforced into the Nineteen Sixties.

The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this legislation had been profitable as a result of they supported their effort by presenting proof that confirmed purportedly scientific proof that the majority folks on this planet had been biologically inferior to a gaggle they referred to as the Nordic Race – that means folks from Northern Europe – and their American descendants, who fashioned a gaggle they referred to as the “American Race.”

By limiting immigration from all different teams, these legislators believed they had been counterbalancing a crushing interval the place conflict and pandemic had killed off what they noticed because the nation’s greatest folks.

Totally different teams preyed on Individuals’ grief concerning the conflict and pandemic and directed it towards minority teams.

From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted thousands and thousands of followers with its perception that white folks had been superior to all others, and that Black folks ought to stay enslaved. On the similar time, a gaggle of scientists, medical doctors and psychologists discovered monumental success in persuading the general public that there have been scientific the reason why hatred and discrimination wanted to be included into American authorities.

Their proof was one thing referred to as eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that people had to make use of superior know-how and drugs to get folks with good traits to breed whereas stopping these with dangerous traits from having the chance to take action.

Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist primarily based at a analysis laboratory in Chilly Spring Harbor, New York, was certainly one of this motion’s most vocal representatives.

Laughlin labored for a number of totally different eugenics analysis organizations, and this helped him change into profitable at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public coverage. He then gained a spot as an professional eugenics adviser to Congress within the early Nineteen Twenties. Together with his place, Laughlin then offered the pseudoscientific knowledge that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they wanted to justify passing the measure.

A push for sterilization

In Laughlin’s influential 1922 e-book “Eugenic Sterilization in the US,” he detailed a street map for passing a legislation that might enable governments to sterilize disabled folks.

After a lot dying throughout World Battle I and the influenza pandemic, Laughlin discovered fertile floor for making a case that the U.S. wanted to cease individuals who may be thought of “feeble-minded” from passing down inferior traits.

Within the mid-Nineteen Twenties, Laughlin and his allies pressed a courtroom case towards a teenage girl whom the state of Virginia had deemed an imbecile and incarcerated at an enormous Virginia establishment for the feeble-minded. This girl, Carrie Buck, was incarcerated after she gave beginning to a toddler in 1924 who was conceived on account of rape. If Buck, who was 18 years outdated on the time, had any hope of being launched, the officers who ran the establishment demanded she be sterilized first.

All throughout the nation, states had begun legalizing pressured sterilization. Now, this case of Buck v. Bell made its technique to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom. In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued the courtroom’s ruling, which had just one dissent. In it, he wrote that “three generations of imbeciles is sufficient” and prolonged the scope of a earlier ruling that allowed the federal government to compel folks to get vaccinated to incorporate pressured sterilization of disabled folks.

Buck was forcibly sterilized in October 1927, shortly after the courtroom’s ruling.

Whereas it’s unquestionable that sterilization and different discriminatory insurance policies discovered widespread trigger with Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi motion – which used the eugenic concepts of sterilization and mass extermination – they continued, largely unchallenged, right here within the U.S.

Some folks, together with myself, argue that the spirit of those discriminatory insurance policies nonetheless exists within the U.S. at the moment.

A well-recognized story

Following stalemated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan within the 2000s and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the American financial system has been rising.

However sensing a grave decline, some white Individuals have turned their sights on folks with disabilities, immigrants, transgender and nonbinary folks, and folks of colour because the supply of their issues.

Trump often encourages this type of pondering. In January 2025, he blamed an air collision that occurred over the Potomac River and killed 67 folks on disabled Federal Aviation Administration staff, implying that they didn’t possess the intelligence to do their jobs.

Trump falsely stated the Jan. 1, 2025, New Orleans terror assault was brought on by unlawful immigration, although a Texas-born man drove a automobile right into a crowd of individuals, killing 14.

At a coverage degree, Trump’s administration has made vital adjustments to the immigration system, together with taking steps to take away authorized protections for 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants within the U.S. And he has launched an unprecedented problem to birthright citizenship.

There are limits to what historical past can say concerning the present scenario. However these similarities with the early Nineteen Twenties recommend that, opposite to many claims concerning the unprecedented nature of the present occasions, the nation has been right here earlier than.