As promised, the second Trump administration quickly deployed a series of policies and decrees which, according to the president, all aim to “make America again large”. This takes different forms, including quickly the Ministry of Elon Musk government efficiency dismiss thousands of workers in various federal organizations, and President Donald Trump stops Any funding for Ukraine.
Trump says that, among others, there are three groups that make America either: immigrants,, disabledand the people who engage in Diversity, equity and inclusion politicians.
These administrative efforts began at a time when many Americans expressed a global feeling of dissatisfaction with state of the country and politics. Only 19% of Americans said in December 2024 that they thought the country is go in the right direction.
This perspective is striking not only because it is so dark, but because it strongly resembles what the Americans feel in a decade pivot 100 years ago, when people’s dissatisfaction with the state of the country led to a series of discriminatory and hateful policies of the federal government.
It is a period of American history which, I think, offers something of a mirror of the current political situation in the United States
Associated Press
The 1920s Roaring?
In the 1920s, the The economy was goodThe United States had won the First World Warand a Terrible pandemic finished.
But many Americans have not seen it this way.
They entered the 1920s with a growing feeling of paranoia and the feeling that they had been deprived of something. Winning the First World War, I came at a terrible cost. More than 116,000 American soldiers died And twice this issue returned home.
While war was coming to an end, the United States – and the world – were prey to the flu pandemic which finally claimed Tens of millions of lives,, including around 675,000 in the United States
Other Americans were concerned about the possible rise in communism in the United States, as well as the Arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement policies based on hatred at the federal and state level that targeted non -white immigrants and disabled people.
Among the most significant results of this political moment, there was the 1924 Johnson-Reed ActA restrictive immigration policy which, among other changes, prohibits the immigration of Asia.
Another Pivot movement was 1927 of the Supreme Court Buck v. Bell Decision, which said that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize people with intellectually and developmental disabilities.
Discrimination against marginalized groups
The Johnson-Reed act caused a major change in American immigration policy, based on the fear of something that former president Theodore Roosevelt and others called “racial suicide. “”
The law has introduced rigid restrictions by preventing the people of the country who were not from northern and western Europe. The immigration quotas he established would continue to be applied in the 1960s.
THE Americans of politicians who put pressure for this law have succeeded because they supported their efforts by presenting evidence that showed allegedly scientific evidence that almost all people in the world were biologically lower than 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 thought they were contradicting an overwhelming period when The war and the pandemic had killed What they saw as the best people in the country.
Different groups attacked the sorrow of the Americans about the war and the pandemic and led him against the minority groups.
Bettmann / Contributor
From Maine to California, a KLUX KLAN KLAN revised attracted millions of followers with his conviction that the whites were superior to all the others, and that Blacks should be reduced to slavery. At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists was a huge success in the persuasion of the public that there were scientific reasons for which hatred and discrimination had to be integrated into the American government.
Their proof was something called EugenismPseudoscience that argued that humans had to use advanced technology and medicine to bring people with good traits to reproduce while preventing those who have bad features of having the opportunity to do so.
Harry LaughlinA eugenician based in a research laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was one of the most vocal representatives of this movement.
Laughlin worked for several different Eugenic research organizations, which helped him succeed in creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public policy. He then acquired a place as an eugenic advisor expert in the congress in the early 1920s. With his position, Laughlin then provided the pseudoscientific data that gave supporters of Johnson-Rend the affirmations they needed to justify the success of the measure.
Me Grenander Collections and Special Archives, University of Albany
A thrust for sterilization
In the influential book of Laughlin of 1922 “Eugenic sterilization in the United States“, He detailed a roadmap to adopt a law that would allow governments to sterilize disabled people.
After so much death during the First World War and the pandemic of influenza, Laughlin found a fertile ground for having practiced that the United States had to stop the people who could be considered “weak -minded” to transmit lower lines.
In the mid -1920s, Laughlin and her allies urged a judicial case against a teenager that the state of Virginia had considered a fool and imprisoned in a massive institution of Virginia for the weakness of mind. This woman, Carrie Buck, was incarcerated After giving birth to a child in 1924 who was designed as a result of rape. If Buck, who was 18 at the time, had the hope of being released, officials who directed the institution demanded that it be sterilized first.
Throughout the country, states had started to legalize forced sterilization. Now this case of Buck v. Bell made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1927, judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. rendered the court decision, which had only one dissent. In this document, he wrote that “three generations of Imbeciles are sufficient” and extended the scope of a previous decision which allowed the government to force people to be vaccinated to include the forced sterilization of disabled people.
Buck was forced sterilized in October 1927Shortly after the court decision.
Although it is indisputable that sterilization and other discriminatory policies found a common cause With the Nazi Street Nazi Movement of Adolf Hitler – which used eugenic ideas for sterilization and mass extermination – they have persisted, largely undisputed, here in the United States
Some people, including myselfmaintains that the spirit of these discriminatory policies still exists in the United States today.
A familiar story
After improbable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the The American economy has increased.
But feeling a serious decline, some white Americans have shot disabled, immigrants, transgender and non -binary people, and people of color as a source of their problems.
Trump regularly encourages this kind of thought. In January 2025, he blame an aerial collision which occurred on the Potomac river and killed 67 people On employees of the Federal Adviation Disabled Administration, which implies that they did not have the information to do their job.
Trump falsely said that on January 1, 2025, the terrorist attack in New Orleans was caused by illegal immigrationEven if a man born in Texas led a car to a crowd of people, kill 14.
In terms of policy, 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 United States and he launched a challenge to the citizenship of the right of birth.
There are limits to what history can say about the current situation. But these similarities with the early 1920s suggest that, unlike numerous claims on the unprecedented nature of the current era, the country was here before.