Calvin Coolidge Quotes
America must be kept American
Calvin Coolidge, 1872-1933, 30th President of the United States (Republican, MA), Expression of concern over immigration, Quoted in Robert DeCourcy Ward, “Our New Immigration Policy”, Foreign Affairs, September 1923
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Most social and demographic changes many people fear will continue on a trend and assume the extrapolation will become reality. Few ever do, and the fears turn out to be just fears.
He was agreeing with the Right Wing racist Dutch politician Geert Wilders that one of the dangers of immigration of different races and ethnicities is that their children would not be capable or able to contribute to America or in his view make America Great Again as it has been diminished by all these immiogrant babies of the last few generations. There are very few areas of civilization where America is not greater today than ever before.
Much of Mexican assets and land was owned by foreigners—especially Americans.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. Essentially, this was code for anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. The immigrants that he described as not being “helpful” have made some of the greatest contributions to America. One element of the immigration debate that is illustrated by this quotation is whether the United State should be homogeneous or heterogeneous. It has been the latter and that has brought the best of cultures of the world to the United States which has constantly been shaped by its immigrants even as it shaped and assimilated the immigrants.
This quotation was a comment on the Donald Trump Ban on Muslim Travel to the US from 7 Islamic countries. Trump, when campaigning for the Presidency, was masterful in appealing to the nativist inclined people of both political parties. He had promised to ban all Muslims from entering the country. When he got elected, he issued an executive order banning Muslims from 7 countries from U.S. entry, There had been a substnatial number of Americans killed by Islamic Terrorists in 9-11 and other acts, and this was the rathional for the Muslim ban. However, of the Americans who had been killed or wounded by Muslim visitors, none of them had been killed by any from the 7 countries that were banned. Thousands had been killed by Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, Yet there was no ban on those coutnries. The problem did not exist in the countries that were banned. The Trump motive for this irrational Executive order has never been clear but many thought that he felt he had to look like he was keeping his campaign pledge, and since we did much business with the 3 nations from which the terrorists actually came, while the 7 counties he banned had little or no economic impact on the United States, Some critics ascribed the decision to the fact that Trump personally had substantial business ventures in all of the 3 countries that had produced and on many ways supported the terrorists, but he had no business interests in teh 7 countries upon which he placed the ban. Unlike otehr post 19th century Presidents, Trump refused to divest his ownership of his busineeses, and even refused to place them in a blind trust. A few days after the Executive Order was put into effect, a Federal Judge issues an injuunction to cease enforcing the order until the issue of unConstitutional religious discrimination could be heard. He ruled that there was irreparal harm and the Attorney General of Washinton State who filed the suit was likely to prevail.
Calvin Coolidge was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 30th president of the United States from 1923 to 1929. A Republican lawyer from New England, born in Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of Massachusetts. His response to the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight and gave him a reputation as a man of decisive action. The next year, he was elected the 29th vice president of the United States, and he succeeded to the presidency upon the sudden death of Warren G. Harding in 1923. Elected in his own right in 1924, he gained a reputation as a small-government conservative and also as a man who said very little and had a rather dry sense of humor.
