“A nation of immigrants” is America’s most successful branding campaign. The flag is its logo, Emma Lazarus wrote the caption, and its most recognizable influencer, since 1886, is the Statue of Liberty.
For purchase: belonging. Under President Trump, the premium tier starts at $1 million, plus a $15,000 processing fee. In addition to cash, some look back at the nation’s history and say there are also certain official and unofficial requirements: hard work, English, service to the country and demonstrable morals — attendance at a Christian church preferred.
Others look to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and maintain that, from the boldface clauses down to the fine print, the Republic was not set up this way. Any kind of person should be able to see themselves in the United States.
Who is right? Christian nationalists argue that the country is Christian because it was forged at a time when just about everyone in charge was a different shade of Protestant, but in THOMAS JEFFERSON’S QUR’AN: Islam and the Founders (Vintage, paperback, $20), the religious studies scholar Denise A. Spellberg objects: Thomas Jefferson wrote, “All men are created equal,” and he meant it.
Jefferson had long been intrigued by other religions. In 1765, a time when all colonists were expected to tithe the Anglican Church, he ordered a Quran from London. He never commented on specific Quranic verses, but his bookshelf — he slipped the Quran in alongside his copies of the Old Testament — tells us something.
As does his foreign policy. After he took office, Jefferson addressed the Muslim rulers of North Africa in a shared monotheistic idiom. “My prayers that God will have you, great & good friend, in his holy keeping,” he wrote to the Bey of Tunis in 1806, after the war for Tripoli.
No such sentiments had stopped Virginia lawmakers, in the 1780s, from trying to sneak the words “Jesus Christ” into Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. But when the attempt “was rejected by a great majority,” Jefferson wrote, it proved the statute’s “mantle” covered “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”
Still, it’s true that, with the possible exception of a deist or two, all of our presidents have been Christians of one sort or another. And yet that doesn’t mean they haven’t considered other ways to be American: “I wish I had a little Jew in me,” Theodore Roosevelt once told a friend. In AMERICAN MACCABEE: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews (Princeton University Press, $35), the constitutional historian Andrew Porwancher shows how American Jewry helped to shape Roosevelt and his presidency all through the Progressive Era.
Porwancher finds, as he puts it, “two Theodore Roosevelts.” One Roosevelt tracked Jewish publications and deployed Jewish surrogates to shore up Jewish voters. As New York’s police commissioner in the 1890s, this Roosevelt encouraged the Lower East Side’s “brawny Jews” to join the force. Later, as president, when the Russian czar condoned the massacre of Jews in eastern Europe, Roosevelt placed a foreign-born Jew named Oscar Straus at the head of the department that housed the Bureau of Immigration, to “show Russia and some other countries what we think of the Jews in this country.”
Then there was the other Roosevelt who called a Jewish journalist a “circumcised skunk” and backed restrictions that endangered Jewish refugees, including a literacy test that would have disproportionately barred southern and eastern Europeans — roughly one in four Jewish arrivals.
One Roosevelt adored Israel Zangwill’s “The Melting Pot,” a play whose Jewish hero survives a pogrom and falls in love with the Christian daughter of the officer who murdered his family. The other admired Jews for remaining “loyal to their faith and their race traditions.”
The night before Roosevelt’s funeral in 1919, his body lay in the trophy room at Sagamore Hill. A man named Otto Raphael kept vigil. Raphael was a Russian Jewish immigrant who joined the New York police at Roosevelt’s urging, and became his boxing partner and lifelong friend. Porwancher calls Roosevelt “an imperfect leader of an imperfect nation,” and yet one who “fervently believed — when many others didn’t — that the likes of Otto Raphael made America a better place.”
That belief didn’t last forever. In ONE MIGHTY AND IRRESISTIBLE TIDE: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (Norton, paperback, $27.99), the New York Times journalist Jia Lynn Yang chronicles the strict immigration system that emerged in the 1920s — an attempt to engineer the country’s racial future — and the 40-year struggle to dismantle it.
In 1914 a man named Takao Ozawa, buoyed by Roosevelt’s favorable regard for the Japanese, walked into a Honolulu courthouse to prove his love for the United States and hopefully earn U.S. citizenship. “In name, Gen. Benedict Arnold was an American, but at heart he was a traitor,” Ozawa explained. “In name, I am not an American, but at heart I am a true American.”
Ozawa detailed his two decades of Americanness like a résumé: He graduated from a high school in Berkeley, Calif., attended church and raised children who spoke only English. He even argued that the 1906 Naturalization Act had widened the old 1790 class of “free white persons” to include his light complexion. The Supreme Court called him “well qualified” before denying him anyway.
Then the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, championed by the Ku Klux Klan, used migration quotas to restrict southern and eastern Europeans, and barred nearly all Asians. The Republican representative Albert Johnson defended the measure as preserving the “racial status quo,” and the Republican senator David A. Reed declared that America would no longer be “a haven” for the oppressed or “the melting pot.”
During World War II, it was “becoming an embarrassment,” Yang writes, to keep telling China, a wartime ally against Japan, that its people were unfit for citizenship, prompting Congress to repeal Chinese exclusion in 1943, though the reformed law granted China only 105 visas a year.
Eventually, after decades of agitation, Democrats like Lyndon Johnson were persuaded to see the quota system as Jim Crow by another name. The president staged its execution at the Statue of Liberty in 1965, a place where his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had stood some 30 years earlier and mused, “Perhaps Providence did prepare this American continent to be a place of the second chance.”
Of course, the struggle for second chances on this continent long precedes the United States. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning NATIVE NATIONS: A Millennium in North America (Random House, paperback, $25), the historian Kathleen DuVal tells the story of European migration from the Indigenous perspective, revealing a kind of immigration policy avant la lettre.
DuVal first clears away the premise that Europeans descended on tribal territory and quickly conquered it. “For more than 300 years after Europeans’ arrival,” DuVal writes, “most Native people believed that these newcomers were insignificant wanderers.”
DuVal resists the familiar catastrophes — the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee — and lingers in centuries of Native power, diplomacy and trade. In the 1800s, Kiowa riders on the Southern Plains decided who could move wagons across their country; in the 1700s, Quapaw leaders along the Mississippi accepted French presents and shifted sides when colonial schemes no longer suited them; and in the 1600s, Mohawk negotiators in the Hudson Valley controlled trade with the Dutch, influencing global markets.
Sometimes that influence reached all the way into the household. As Native families adopted, married and incorporated white captives, migrants and refugees — children and women among them — the newcomers adapted. Offered the chance to “return,” many of them didn’t leave. For these Europeans, DuVal suggests, becoming more like the Mohawk or Quapaw was just another way to be an American.
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