And If a Stranger Sojourn: Immigration, Race, and the Religious Imaginaries of American Anticommunism

This paper explores emerging conceptions of communism as it became identified not merely as an economic or political doctrine but an irreligious philosophy especially attractive to “inferior” (nonwhite) races, according to the logic of white supremacy: Jews, Black Americans, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Asians. Looking at popular eugenicist writings from the highest halls of intellect (Madison Grant) to the more vulgar authors (Lothrop Stoddard) and finally into the hands of the rising second Ku Klux Klan, this presentation highlights the religious worlds of these racist authors and their consumers. While histories of nativism and racist thinking tend to portray anti-immigration animus as ticking off different boxes (anti-Asian, anti-Black, and-Semitic, and so on), this paper reframes these logics of prejudice by looking at interwar nativism as a comprehensive if dynamic worldview, with different races and ethnicities assigned different but interrelated roles in a racial cosmic drama. From the Red Summer and birth of the NAACP through the Immigration Act of 1924, opponents of communism voiced fears that the Bolshevik Revolution was spreading into the United States through radical unassimilable immigrants who then stirred up the racial and religious order at home.