White Nationalism - United States of America

United States of America

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103) provided the first rules to be followed by the U.S. government in granting national citizenship. This law limited naturalization to immigrants who were "free white persons" of "good moral character," possibly making the U.S. the first explicitly race-based nation in history. Major changes to this racial requirement for U.S. citizenship did not occur until the years following the Civil War. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to grant citizenship to Blacks born within the United States, but it specifically excluded untaxed Indians. However, citizenship for other non-Whites born in the United States was not settled until 1898 with United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, which concluded with an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This racial definition of American citizenship has had consequences for perceptions of American identity.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, racial definitions of the American nation were still common, resulting in race-specific immigration restrictions, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. This particular brand of American nativism allowed even more recent European newcomers, such as the Irish, to unite with founding stock White Americans to halt non-European immigration. Groups such as the Asiatic Exclusion League, formed on 14 May 1905 in San Francisco, California by 67 labor unions and supported by labor leaders (and European immigrants) Patrick Henry McCarthy of the Building Trades Council of San Francisco, Andrew Furuseth and Walter McCarthy of the Sailor's Union, attempted to influence legislation restricting Asian immigration.

Following the defeat of the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan came into being as an insurgent group with the goal of maintaining the Southern racial system throughout the Reconstruction Era. Although the first appearance of the Klan was focused on maintaining the Antebellum South, its second incarnation in the 1915-1940's period was much more oriented towards white nationalism and American nativism with slogans such as "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and "America for Americans" where "Americans" were understood to be White and Protestant. The 1915 film Birth of a Nation is an example of an allegorical invocation of white nationalism during this time and its positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan is considered to be one of the factors in the emergence of the second Klan. This second Klan was founded in Atlanta, Georgia in 1915 and starting in 1921 it adopted a modern business system of recruiting. The organization grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions of urban industrialization and vastly increased immigration, its membership grew most rapidly in cities and spread out of the South to the Midwest and West. The second KKK called for strict morality and better enforcement of prohibition. Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti-Catholicism and nativism. Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses and carried out other violent activities. The violent episodes were generally in the South.

The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.

Starting in the 1960s, white nationalism grew in the United States as the conservative movement developed in mainstream society. Samuel P. Huntington argues that it developed as a reaction to a perceived decline in the essence of American identity as European, Anglo-Protestant and English-speaking.

The slogan "white power" was coined by American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who used the term in a debate with Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther Party after Carmichael issued a call for "black power". Rockwell advocated a return to White control of all American institutions and violently opposed any minority advancement into White society. However, Rockwell was never an advocate for a separatist white nation-state.