The racist ideology that white Americans are being replaced by immigrants—and the deadly violence that idea has led to—was home-grown in the United States and continues to be fueled by some of the most powerful figures today.
On rereading The Great Gatsby earlier this year, I came upon a passage that I had not noticed, or understood, when I first encountered this F. Scott Fitzgerald classic many years ago. In it, Tom Buchanan—an old-money socialite and notorious bully married to Nick Carraway's cousin Daisy—"violently" expresses his pessimism for the future. "If we don't look out," the white race is at risk of being "utterly submerged," he says....
Much of the early news coverage of the shooting described these views as "fringe"—aberrations that have crept out of the darkest corners of the Internet into the mainstream in recent years. But, as the Gatsby reference demonstrates, they are neither new, nor fringe. They are not the beliefs of a one-off "lone wolf." They are also not foreign ideas that have seeped into the American consciousness. These beliefs are part of a distinctly home-grown ideology, one that throughout the history of the United States has been promoted by some of the most powerful bureaucrats, senators, presidents, and journalists. It has, for much of this history, fueled a coordinated movement in pursuit of global white supremacy, churned out an unending cycle of violence, and shaped lasting policy.
This "Great Replacement Theory" was particularly in vogue when The Great Gatsby was written. The fact that Buchanan attributes it to a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard" is no accident of imagination. Some scholars guess that "Goddard" is a portmanteau clubbing together the last names of two extremely influential thinkers in the early-20th century: Madison Grant and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard.
Grant was born into a blue-blooded New York family. As a youth, he spent his time off from private school either at his family's estate in Long Island or traveling the world. As an adult, he graduated from Yale University and obtained a law degree from Columbia University. He wore many hats. Apart from running his own law practice in Manhattan, he was an anthropologist and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, a zoologist who served as chairman of the New York Zoological Society, and an environmentalist who apparently helped think up the concept of national parks. He was, of course, also a racist and eugenicist. In 1916, he authored The Passing of the Great Race, in which he claimed the superiority of the "Nordic" race and painted immigrants and Jewish people as "inferior" "social discards" overrunning his city....