When anti-immigration and anti-war were one

“Another nativist group drawing considerable attention was the Vindicator Association, an anti-immigration movement fostered by Senator Robert Reynolds, who became chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee in 1941.

“A conservative Democrat from North Carolina, Reynolds was a passionate isolationist and Anglophobe, one of the few Southerners in Congress holding those views. He had created the Vindicators, he said, to keep America out of war, stop all immigration for at least 10 years and ‘banish all isms but Americanism.’ Young people were encouraged to join the association’s ‘border patrol’ and catch ‘alien criminals,’ receiving $10 a head for each one they nabbed….

“Reynolds bristled at any suggestion that his association was anti-Semitic. ‘We’re just anti-alien,’ he told a reporter. ‘I want our own fine boys and lovely girls to have all the jobs in this wonderful country.'”

— From “Those Angry Days: Roosevelt , Lindbergh and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941” by Lynne Olson (2013)

 

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