As promised, the second Trump administration has quickly rolled out a
slew of policies and executive orders that the president says are all
aimed at “Making America Great Again.” This takes on different forms,
including Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency quickly laying off thousands of workers at various federal agencies, and President Donald Trump pausing all funding for Ukraine.
Trump says that, among others, there are three groups that are making America not-great: immigrants, people with disabilities, and people who are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
These administration efforts began at a time when many Americans expressed an overall rising sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the country and politics. Just 19% of Americans said in December 2024 that they think the country is heading in the right direction.
This perspective is striking not only because it is so dark, but
because it strongly resembles how Americans felt during a pivotal decade
100 years ago, when people’s dissatisfaction with the state of the
country led to a series of discriminatory, hateful policies by the
federal government.
It’s a period of American history that I think offers something of a mirror of the current political situation in the U.S.
The Roaring ‘20s?
In the 1920s, the economy was good, the U.S. had won World War I, and a terrible pandemic ended.
But many Americans did not see it that way.
They entered the 1920s with a growing sense of paranoia and a feeling
that they had been robbed of something. Winning World War I had come at
a terrible cost. More than 116,000 American soldiers died and twice that number came home wounded.
As the war came to a close, the U.S. – and the world – was in the throes of the flu pandemic that ultimately claimed tens of millions of lives, including about 675,000 in the U.S.
Other Americans were concerned about the possible rise of communism in the U.S., as well as the arrival of many immigrants.
This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based policies at
the federal and state level that targeted nonwhite immigrants and
disabled people.
Among the most significant results of that political moment was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration policy that, among other changes, prohibited immigration from Asia.
Another pivotal movement was the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell
decision, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the right to
sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled people.
Discrimination against marginalized groups
The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a major shift in American immigration
policy, based on the fear of something that former President Theodore
Roosevelt and others called “race suicide.”
The law introduced rigid restrictions keeping people out of the
country who were not from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration
quotas that it established would continue to be enforced into the 1960s.
The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this law
were successful because they supported their effort by presenting
evidence that showed purportedly scientific proof that almost all people
in the world were biologically inferior to a group they called the
Nordic Race – meaning people from Northern Europe – and their American
descendants, who formed a group they called the “American Race.”
By restricting immigration from all other groups, these legislators believed they were counterbalancing a crushing period where war and pandemic had killed off what they saw as the country’s best people.
Different groups preyed on Americans’ grief about the war and pandemic and directed it against minority groups.
From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers with its belief that white people were superior to all others, and that Black people should remain enslaved.
At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists
found enormous success in persuading the public that there were
scientific reasons why hatred and discrimination needed to be
incorporated into American government.
Their proof was something called eugenics,
a pseudoscience which argued that humans had to use advanced technology
and medicine to get people with good traits to reproduce while stopping
those with bad traits from having the opportunity to do so.
Harry Laughlin,
a eugenicist based at a research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New
York, was one of this movement’s most vocal representatives.
Laughlin worked for several different
eugenics research organizations, and this helped him become successful
at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public
policy. He then gained a spot as an expert eugenics adviser to Congress
in the early 1920s. With his position, Laughlin then provided the
pseudoscientific data that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the
claims they needed to justify passing the measure.
A push for sterilization
In Laughlin’s influential 1922 book “Eugenic Sterilization in the United States,” he detailed a road map for passing a law that would allow governments to sterilize disabled people.
After so much death during World War I and the influenza pandemic,
Laughlin found fertile ground for making a case that the U.S. needed to
stop people who might be considered “feeble-minded” from passing down inferior traits.
In the mid-1920s, Laughlin and his allies pressed a court case
against a teenage woman whom the state of Virginia had deemed an
imbecile and incarcerated at a massive Virginia institution for the
feeble-minded. This woman, Carrie Buck, was incarcerated
after she gave birth to a child in 1924 who was conceived as a result
of rape. If Buck, who was 18 years old at the time, had any hope of
being released, the officials who ran the institution demanded she be
sterilized first.
All across the country, states had begun legalizing forced sterilization. Now, this case of Buck v. Bell
made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr. issued the court’s ruling, which had only one dissent. In
it, he wrote that “three generations of imbeciles is enough” and
extended the scope of a previous ruling that allowed the government to
compel people to get vaccinated to include forced sterilization of
disabled people.
Buck was forcibly sterilized in October 1927, shortly after the court’s ruling.
While it is unquestionable that sterilization and other discriminatory policies found common cause
with Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi movement – which used the eugenic ideas
of sterilization and mass extermination – they persisted, largely
unchallenged, here in the U.S.
Some people, including myself, argue that the spirit of these discriminatory policies still exists in the U.S. today.
A familiar story
Following stalemated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the American economy has been growing.
But sensing a grave decline, some white Americans have turned their
sights on people with disabilities, immigrants, transgender and
nonbinary people, and people of color as the source of their problems.
Trump regularly encourages this kind of thinking. In January 2025, he blamed an air collision that occurred over the Potomac River and killed 67 people on disabled Federal Aviation Administration employees, implying that they did not possess the intelligence to do their jobs.
Trump falsely said the Jan. 1, 2025, New Orleans terror attack was caused by illegal immigration, even though a Texas-born man drove a car into a crowd of people, killing 14.
At a policy level, Trump’s administration has made significant changes to the immigration system, including taking steps to remove legal protections for 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. And he has launched an unprecedented challenge to birthright citizenship.
There are limits to what history can say about the current situation.
But these similarities with the early 1920s suggest that, contrary to
many claims about the unprecedented nature of the current times, the
country has been here before.
