The "Great Replacement Theory" Was Never "Fringe"

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.

It is this same decades-old belief that, four days ago, animated an 18-year-old white man to drive three hours to a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, and open fire. Ten people were killed and three hurt in the shooting on May 14—11 of them Black, by no coincidence.

In a 180-page screed posted online, the alleged gunman, Payton Gendron, justified his racist violence: The white race is "doomed," he wrote, because of declining white birth rates and the increase in immigrants and non-whites in the United States. Gendron's carefully planned violence was meant to put a dent in the inevitable "crisis" that he claimed is the "racial and cultural replacement of the European people."

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.

His book elevated outlandish ideas about race science and eugenics that had already been gaining steam. As Adam Serwer explains in The Atlantic, "The eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant's logic, infection meant obliteration."

Indeed, Grant was prominently featured in the publications of the day, including The Saturday Evening Post and The New York Times, and had many friends who amplified his ideas in Washington. In 1917, then ex-president Theodore Roosevelt praised The Passing of the Great Race as "a capital book" in Scribner's magazine; a few years later, in 1921, then vice president Calvin Coolidge echoed Grant's ideas in an article for Good Housekeeping. When it was later translated into German, Grant's book became Adolf Hitler's "bible."

Grant’s ideology bred other ideologues. His protégé, Stoddard, wrote his own version of a manifesto, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, the title of which closely mirrors the book Buchanan references in The Great Gatsby. Stoddard was also a member of the American Eugenics Society, and, as it was later revealed in a news exposé, the Ku Klux Klan. Stoddard was also obsessed with the idea that Jews had controlled the Bolshevik Revolution, transforming the prospect of racial replacement from a passive state ("race suicide") to an active, violent threat.

Later, Henry Ford was among the prominent Americans who amplified this same conspiracy theory in a widely circulated weekly pamphlet of The Dearborn Independent, along with translated English excerpts of anti-Semitic propaganda, called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The "Great Replacement Theory" influenced a number of laws in the early-20th century (including those on anti-miscegenation and segregation), but perhaps none as successfully as those controlling immigration. As immigration historian Reece Jones writes in The New York Times, the race-based exclusions of the era were an explicit attempt, as Roosevelt himself put it, to prevent "race suicide." The fear of this demographic death led the country to first limit the entry of Japanese immigrants, then people from the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and finally, anyone who wasn't a particular stock of white.

In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, a sweeping law that instituted quotas for immigration on the basis of national origin and barred immigrants outside of Western Europe from coming to the United States. The bureaucratic process detailed in the law, as historian Mae Ngai explains, was heavily shaped by the chair of the Senate Immigration Committee, David Reed of Pennsylvania, and the lobbyist John Bond Trevor, who was a colleague of Madison Grant.

In 1965, on the heels of the Civil Rights Act, these exclusionary quotas were abolished and a new system of colorblind numerical limits on immigration was put in place. Even then, lawmakers made robust efforts to appease nativists, making sure that family-based immigration would be one of the main pathways to citizenship so that the relatives of white Americans would be favored. In a debate on the legislation at the time, Massachusetts senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy, a Democrat, reassured his peers. "The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants," he said. "It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society."

He was wrong. The 1965 immigration overhaul had many unintended consequences, but it certainly did diversify the U.S. population. With that demographic change in America and other Western nations in the second half of the 20th century rose a new contingent of anti-immigrant crusaders who revived fears of the "great replacement." In the NYT, Dr. Kathleen Belew, the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, attributes the more recent popularity of the concept to two texts: The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail—a 1973 dystopian novel in which Europeans are violently replaced by people of color—and The Great Replacement by Renaud Camus, a French writer responsible for the pithy modern repackaging of the "Great Replacement Theory."

In America, the post-1960s crop of nativists built on the tactics inherited from their forefathers in the 1920s, focusing their rhetoric and policy on apolitical-seeming numbers instead of race. Key among them was John Tanton, an ophthalmologist from Michigan who advocated for immigration restrictions as a way of, among other things, controlling the effect of overpopulation on the environment. Tanton corresponded with Klan members and dabbled in eugenicist ideas. But his lasting legacy was the network of nativist groups he helped create, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA, which continue to lobby the government.These organizations bill themselves as advocates of immigration restrictions simply as a matter of good policy, even though their policy goals appear to stem from racial anxieties and yield racial consequences. For instance, Jones, the immigration historian, recently pointed out on Twitter that the logo of NumbersUSA is derived from a graph representing the "great replacement" that the group's founder included in his 1996 book, The Case Against Immigration.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform and Center for Immigration Studies, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed "hate groups," regularly testify as neutral subject-matter experts in Congress and are quoted as such in news coverage, as does NumbersUSA. They are quoted as such in news coverage. They were extremely active in shaping Trump-era immigration policy, which included some of the most sweeping restrictions since 1924. It is now also well known that Steven Miller, the chief architect of those restrictions, was a fan of The Camp of the Saints and Jeff Sessions had praised the 1924 race-based immigration ban that Grant and others helped enact.

Still, in 2022, some of its harshest border policies remain in place under the Biden administration. Miller's new organization continues to throw out misleading numbers supporting the narrative that the country is being overrun by immigrants (and that that is bad), a scenario that feeds into the fears of racial replacement. Of course, he has a lot of help. Fox News Host Tucker Carlson has promoted the theory in at least 400 of his episodes. The 4chan message board where Gendron posted contained 90,000 references to it. And dozens of politicians capitalize on it in their election or reelection campaigns. It's no surprise, then, that a third of Americans and around half of all Republicans believe it to be true.

The result of its mass appeal is coordinated violence—the explicit kind that happened in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Charlottesville, and Charleston; and the quietly bureaucratic kind that is perhaps less explicit, but that nevertheless has ruined innumerable lives.

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