Recently, while doing research about America in the 1930s and 40s, I came across something startling. For some time I’ve been interested in nationalism, particularly national exceptionalism, and found a periodical published during this time period called “The Torch of Israel,” which was dedicated to the idea that America is “…the modern land of Israel.” 

This concept of national exceptionalism that considered America as the new Israel was an idea brought over initially by the Puritans who settled in New England.  But this piece was from the 1930s with isolationism as its core message. The cover of the June 1932 issue featured a picture of George Washington accompanied by the slogan, “KEEP OUT of Foreign Entanglements.”

There is much here to talk about, much that has resonance in our own times.  But what struck me that day was a large announcement featured on the bottom of the page of a later issue from October 1935:  “Are you an American, or are you an Internationalist? Internationalism is a mongrel creed which means mischief, it is the chief contention of Soviet Russia and Soviet Russia is against God and Good Government. Well, if you are an American, Read an American Magazine published in America by Americans and For Americans. The enemy is within our gates, the despoiler is at our door. The American Home, the American School, the dear old American Flag are in danger as never before. Will you defend the distinctly American possessions? If you are willing to do this, help the cause which stands for PURE AMERICANISM, THE TORCH OF ISRAEL by subscribing…We stand for the Bible—for Israel—for Israel’s God.”

Of course the questions are: who or what is Israel, and who or what is America? (As it turns out, “The Torch of Israel” was fiercely Protestant, anti-Catholic and anti-Immigration at a time when there was pressure to admit Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, but quotas kept them out.)

I cannot help but hear an anticipation of the toxic kind of nationalism we are now witnessing.  There’s nothing wrong with love of your country, but toxic nationalism is something else.  Note in the publication’s announcement the opposition between “an American” and “an Internationalist”—the then-current term for the Jews, taken from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1905), an anti-Semitic fraudulent text purporting to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders planning world domination.

In the 1920s, Henry Ford published an English version of the Protocols as “The International Jew,” which spread the idea that the Jews were an international conspiracy ambitious to take over the world.  The Protocols has never gone out of print, its virulent seemingly unstoppable. The coded term we hear now is not “internationalist” but “globalist,” and it has been levelled against George Soros and others by white Protestant supremacists, like Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr, who is charged with sending pipe bombs in October 2018 to Soros, the Clintons, the Obamas, and others he blamed for supporting liberal causes that were destroying “pure America.”  (It is no accident that Jews, Blacks, liberals and the media were all grouped together as a threat to America by Sayoc).  In “The Torch of Israel,” too, we see the fear of the immigrant, the dislike of those who come to America who are not “American” (that is, people of color, which included Jews, Asians, Middle Easterners, but also Eastern and Southern Europeans from Italy, Spain and other Catholic countries).  In Congress’ 1924 discriminatory immigration act, racism and religion were intertwined, inseparable—as if those who constituted “America” were necessarily white and Protestant. 

These are the identical assumptions of our 21st century white supremacists and nativists, who fear that their country is being made impure by demographic changes and immigration. I believe it’s not just a matter of race, but religion. While President Trump’s efforts to close the borders to refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries may well have started as an attempt to fight terrorism, it is hard to escape concluding that both racial and religious prejudices have played a role. Same goes for the obsession with having a firm border along Mexico to keep out “bad guys,” presumed to be embedded with children and families. Who comes to America from the south through Mexico? Latin Americans, who are Roman Catholic.

Many of those who are so eager to keep out refugees from the Middle East and from South America want to keep America “pure” as well as “safe,” and they see the swelling numbers of blacks, Arabic Muslims, and Hispanics here as destroying America’s identity, making it impure—that is, not white and Protestant. And for the anti-Semitic extremists, the threat comes from Jews too, who despite (or because) of their successes in America, are not really considered white. Remember the lie that George Soros was financing the caravan coming through Mexico? For some conservatives, it’s not just disturbing but frightening that America and the nation are changing. The sense of danger, the hysteria, the fear that we hear now (we are told that we are in a “crisis,” that we have a “national emergency”); the demonization of liberals and “globalists” as well as immigrants-- sounds all too much like the 1930s to me.

The world may have changed, but the current state of affairs sounds all too frighteningly familiar.

When I listened to President Trump’s State of the Union speech on the evening of February 5, 2019, I wondered if he, like many presidents before him, would bring up the idea that America is “a light to the nations.” And sure enough, right at the end, he did by stating, “We must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America's destiny -- that one Nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world! Thank you. God Bless You, God Bless America, and good night!”

I’ve long been fascinated by the endurance of this image of America, of America a shining light to the nations of the world. The image was given durable form in the Statue of Liberty with her torch, welcoming the refugees, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  Many American presidents have invoked the image, Ronald Reagan famously, but also John F. Kennedy and more recently Barack Obama, though their notions of what makes (or could make) America exceptional have differed (a topic for another day, perhaps). Some uses of this phrase are boastful, a way of patting ourselves on the back.  Others are aspirational, setting out an ideal we must strive to make reality. But all suggest that America is special, with a unique God-given destiny.

The same day that Trump was going to give his Presidential speech, I’d been teaching John Milton’s “Areopagitica” to my students at Barnard College. Published in 1644 when Milton was trying to persuade England’s Parliament not to enact an ordinance restricting what books could be printed, “Areopagitica” is from a different time and a different country, but it is a foundational text in America.  Arguing for freedom of the press, liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state, Milton’s influence on America’s founding fathers was profound.  We see it in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which enshrined religious liberty and a free press. 

My students were excited by Milton’s notion of the book as a living thing (“Books are not absolutely dead things”), but also by his insistence that each of us needs to actively read and judge for ourselves. Though good and evil (truth and falsehood) may be “nearly inseparable,” Milton says, it is our duty (indeed, we are called by God) to distinguish between them, difficult though that might be. My class of smart, young women and men was struck by how powerful Milton’s words are and remarked on how what he had written more than 350 years ago is still relevant. Milton would be appalled, were he still alive, by a president who calls the media “the enemy of the people,” as well as by slogans like “Fake News” and “Alternate Facts.” These labels don’t just undermine the credibility (and thus freedom) of the press. They deny that there is such a thing as “truth,” that there is a distinction between “truth” and “lies” (intentional untruths, passed off as truths). Without that distinction, there can be no rule of law or justice.

Then we came to a passage towards the end of “Areopagitica” that I read aloud. Here, Milton suddenly praised England as a nation, chosen by God, to spread the light of the Reformation: “…The favor and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe?...Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, …God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of reformation itself. What does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?” 

Milton the patriot appropriated the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the restored Israel in the end times to imagine a glorious identity for England. It was England, not biblical Israel, that was God’s special nation, a light to the world. But what about those “dark” nations? For Milton, they were Catholic countries that did not yet have what he saw as the “light” of Protestantism. Suddenly, one of my students exclaimed, “That’s the Manifest Destiny ideology of nineteenth-century America!”  Suddenly, we not only saw the thread connecting past and present, seventeenth-century England and nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America, but we could begin to talk about the troubling aspects of exceptionalism, of what was originally intended as a hopeful vision.  

I went home and waited for the President’s address, and there at the end it was—America’s destiny. I thought about the dissonance between this final vision of a hopeful America, a light to the world, and the plea of at the center of the speech for a strong wall, to keep undesirable “caravans” of immigrants out, immigrants who are not “white.” I wonder if those immigrants are, especially for those who want to build the border wall, the contemporary counterpart of Milton’s darkened European continent?