Individual-case review by one liberal nearly halted mass deportation

Evidence

Post, a seventy-one-year-old liberal with sad eyes and a scholarly Vandyke beard, had been a crotchety reformer ever since he read Tom Paine as a child. He was a leading single-taxer, a Swedenborgian, and a defender of academic freedom. With the ardor of another Voltaire he undertook a meticulous review of each of the cases at hand. Wherever evidence of party membership seemed faulty or wherever the government lacked proof that the man knew what he was doing when he joined the party, Post canceled the deportation order and freed the immigrant. When Secretary Wilson returned to office, he upheld Post’s policy, and by July 2,202 prospective deportees had been set loose. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1385

Categorization

• CANDY: A Voltaire-reading single-taxer Swedenborgian who freed 2,202 deportees by reviewing each file individually is a memorable character detail.
• QUESTION: Post is exactly the test of whether careful rational correction works against threat-hardened belief — it largely worked here, but public hysteria was already beginning to break. Was the timing coincidence or cause?
• XREF: connects to: Political dissidence plus Muslim identity turned a trivial immigration error into a deportation case — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 890; Deportation expanded from enforcing immigration rules to an ideological loyalty test — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1316

Broader Connections

• Political dissidence plus Muslim identity turned a trivial immigration error into a deportation case #expands (0.80) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 890
• Deportation expanded from enforcing immigration rules to an ideological loyalty test #expands (0.75) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1316