"the great body of our people instinctively recognizes it"

The Republican YouTube debate was an astonishment. Not a single second on the economy, which may well be on the verge of collapse, with the middle class potentially more vulnerable than its been at any point since the 1920s. And yet, as my colleague Bill Scher points out, twenty-three minutes of ranting about the dusky hordes invading our shores. Is a great American political party really going to base its entire presidential appeal on scapegoating the Other?

Question answers itself, I guess.

It's a dangerous road to travel. Once our nation gets caught in the grip of this, we may find it very hard to stop. We've already seen one conservative presidential candidate stand up and proclaim that, in choosing a cabinet, religious bigotry trumps the Constitution.

I've been spending a lot of time using the Proquest Historical Newspapers research tool, preparing the footnotes for my forthcoming book, and, looking for something else, I stumbled upon the article I reproduce below from the Los Angeles Times on February 20, 1923. The headline: "Citizenship Is Refused Hindu." The Times let a little editorializing creep into their news copy: they were thrilled at the outcome. This is our heritage, folks. Never forget. Never again. Read it and weep:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19--Considerable enlightenment was thrown by the Supreme Court in a decision today upon the meaning of the words, "free white persons," as used in the naturalization laws.

The decision was in a case brought by Bhagat Singh Thind, a Hindu of high caste of full Indian blood, born in Punjab, India, who was granted a certificate of citizenship by the United States District Court for Oregon, over the protest of the government. The court today denied his right to citizenship.

Having decided recently in the Ozawa case that a Japanese was not entitled to naturalization because the term, "free white persons" was synonymous with Caucasian, the court indicated today that it had intended to leave the question to be dealt with in doubtful and different cases, by the "process of judicial inclusion and exclusion."

"Caucasian is a conventional words of much flexibility," the court stated, "as a study of the literature dealing with racial questions will disclose, and while it and the words, "white persons," are treated as synonymous for the purposes of the Ozawa case, they are not of identical meaning."

The words "white persons" are words of "common speech and not of scientific origin," the court continued, and the substitution for them of the word Caucasian would only substitute one perplexity for another. The word Caucasian has, however, by common usage acquired a popular meaning, which is of much narrower scrope, the court said, than its scientific application.

"It is in the popular sense of the word, therefore, that we employ it as an aid to the construction of the statute," the court stated, "for it would be obviously illogical to convert words of scientific terminology when neither the latter nor the science for whose purpose they were coined was within the contemplation of the framers of the statute..... The words of the statute are to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, from whose vocabulary they were taken."

The words "free white persons" are to be interpreted, the courts said, as synonymous with "Caucasian" only so far as that word is popularly understood. Whatever may be the speculations of the ethnologist as to what races it includes, it does not, the court held, include the body of men to whom the Hindu belonged.

Declaring that it "was far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority," the court stated that it was merely suggesting racial differences, which in the case of a Hindu "is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognizes it and reject the thought of assimilation."

The decision of Congress in the act of February, 1917, to exclude from admission into this country all natives of Asia within designated limits of lattitude and longitude, including the whole of India, constituted conclusive evidence, in the court's opinion, of the "Congressional attitude of opposition to Asiatic immigration generally." This, the court found was "persuasive of a similar attitude toward Asiatic naturalization as well, since it is not likely that Congress would be willing to accept as citizens a class of persons whom it rejects as immigrants."

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