Nativism abandoned ideological conversion for permanent racial exclusion once radical threat dissolved

Evidence

This is not to say that foreigners no longer seemed a national menace after the early months of 1920. The sense of danger was still vivid; the 100 per center’s thirst for conformity remained unslaked. But his conception of the foreign peril changed so profoundly that Americanization became wholly irrelevant to 1t. From fear of a radical danger, nationalists reverted in 1920 and thereafter to a racial bias. Radicalism, and the hyphenism that preceded it, had been ideological infections; presumably one might set up ideological defenses against them. But the racial danger was in the blood. Why try to educate men inherently incapable of receiving American ideals? Why try to change people who are biologically unchangeable? Why, the influential Saturday Evening Post now asked, try to make Americans out of those who will always be Americanski? * Why, indeed, put much faith in ideals at all? — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1580

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is central to reader’s thesis: does the enemy category shift form when the threat recedes? Here it shifts to race after ideological threat collapses — but note reader wants evidence racialization is transitional, and this passage suggests biological framing emerged as a MORE permanent-seeming form.
• XREF: Directly evidenced the reader’s research question: manufacturing external enemies, threat disappearance, and category migration from ideological to racial. — connects to: Racial nativism supplanted anti-Catholicism because it fit the new immigrant threat — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 567; Modern conservatism abandoned explicit white supremacy for color-blind individualism — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 299; Successful anti-racist movements trigger renewed, subtler forms of racial exclusion, not elimination — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1915 (+18 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern conservatism abandoned explicit white supremacy for color-blind individualism #corroborates (0.85) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 299
• Successful anti-racist movements trigger renewed, subtler forms of racial exclusion, not elimination #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1915
• Antiracialism abandons the category of race while leaving racist conditions intact #expands (0.75)
• Eliminating slavery and legal segregation removed ideological underpinnings of categorical racism #contradicts (0.72)
• The end of formal racial subordination eliminated the structural basis for blatant biological racism #contradicts (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3420