Henry Pratt Fairchild (1880–1956) spent the bulk of his academic career at New York University where he was on the faculty for twenty-six years, serving as Chairman of the Department of Sociology in the Graduate School. He published research on race, nationalism, and ethnic conflict; he also was involved with the founding of Planned Parenthood and served as president of the American Eugenics Society. In his book The Melting-Pot Mistake (1926), Fairchild argued that the melting pot metaphor coined by Israel Zangwill in his 1909 play “The Melting-Pot” was picturesque, but it was a fallacy that failed to account for the apparent disintegration of American society that had been in the making during the past fifty years of unbridled immigration. According to Fairchild, the group unity necessary for national cohesion and well-being was endangered because the differences of ‘groups’ are not ‘meltable,’ as “the primary basis of group unity is racial.”For Fairchild, America represents “truth, beauty, goodness, morality, justice, propriety, efficiency, custom, order, and – home,” and to maintain those stellar qualities, it must remain a white man’s country. Today, it is mainly white nationalists and neo-Nazis who openly and unapologetically express such overtly racist views.

I have argued in this book that different versions of the American ‘story’ are possible. Some writers will offer a generous and optimistic telling of the story that depicts the rise of the nation from humble beginnings to becoming the most powerful and fairest nation that has ever existed, a nation committed to the highest ideals of an often ill-defined Americanism. Other writers have considered the shortcomings of the American experiment, exposing its manifest flaws and blatant violations of liberal values and basic human rights throughout history. Other stories might be considered utopian in their visions of an inclusive and harmonious nation that will finally overcome invidious differences in ethnicities and cultures to achieve a ‘transnational’ America. The choices of what is written about and how various characters and their actions are described and evaluated will vary; in the end, it’s left to the thoughtful reader to distinguish fact from fiction and substantiated conclusions from mere opinion in order to properly evaluate the merits of the author’s argument. Ignorance or denial of history and passive acceptance of propaganda as fact must be challenged wherever they appear, whether in political discourse or in books written by academics and influential public figures.

Over the nearly 250-year history of the United States, there have been many moments of political and social discord that have tested the strength and depth of the American character, and such crises have often led to positive social changes that have expanded the American community through passage of constitutional amendments and laws that expanded voting rights, defined and expanded citizenship, codified racial and gender equality, protected workers’ rights, increased economic opportunity, and provided greater access to equal educational opportunities, among many other advances. Yet, it is also the case that the American past never fully recedes from the body politic; there has been an ongoing tug-of-war between forces seeking to overturn social and economic progress and those forces working to solidify and expand rights that have often been rights in name only. What has occurred in the past is never excised from national memory and can reappear in virulent forms; the immigration-restrictionist policies and actions that characterized the darkest aspects of the Americanization movement in the early decades of the twentieth century have come full circle in the American presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Edward A. Ross (1866–1951), a prominent American sociologist, believed immigrants coming into the United States in the early twentieth century were members of the ‘lower races,’ barely human. Ross popularized the phrase ‘race suicide,’ the idea that the reproductive deficiency of Americans of Northwestern European origin would doom an America that would be overtaken by the “beaten men of beaten races” of Southeastern Europe. Ross grouped people according to racial categories that were based on his own subjective contemporaneous and historical analyses of ‘types’ he identifies, such as Hindus, Jews, Chinese, Mediterraneans, Japanese, Celtics, Teutons, and others. As was the case with many of his contemporaries in the academy, he understood his views to be ‘commonsense’ knowledge, not subject to any serious scrutiny or challenge. We can gain insight into the mindset of social scientists at the turn of the twentieth century by examining Ross’ methodology of categorizing and ranking human groups in order to better understand the bases upon which Ross confidently proclaimed that “there is at the present moment no people in the world that is, man for man, equal to the Americans in capacity and efficiency.”