At the time, the world was reeling from geopolitical instability and economic recession. Terrorists calling themselves anarchists were using bombs against their antagonists in the United States. Foreigners—Jews, Catholics, Christian Orthodox from eastern and southern Europe, and East and South Asians from Japan, China, and India—were thought to be polluting America with their religions, cultures, and radical ideologies. That these immigrants formed a large portion of the population—similar to now—heightened fear of their presence and its effects.

The Republican Party, back in power in 1921 after an eight year absence, resolved to—and did—close America’s gates to immigrants from the world beyond the western hemisphere. The GOP had the support of the southern wing of the Democratic Party, in which nativist sentiments also were running strong. The Ku Klux Klan was revitalized in both South and North, drawing millions of members and placing Jews, Catholics, and African-Americans in its crosshairs. When Irish-American Catholic Al Smith ran for president as a Democrat in 1928, he was mercilessly attacked for his alleged subservience to the Pope.

The charges leveled at eastern and southern European Jewish and Catholic immigrants were every bit as harsh as those directed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at Mexicans and Muslims today. The European immigrants of yesteryear were accused of being prone to violence, of having no regard for the traditions of liberty and democracy that Americans held dear, of being made of inferior racial stock, and of being incapable of becoming good Americans.

In 1924, Republican Congressman Fred S. Purnell of Indiana stated on the floor of the House of Representatives that “there is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and the stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World.”

Purnell and his supporters won big, yet, the attacks on the racial and moral character of the newcomers roused millions from political quiescence. New immigrants and their children began to declare that America was their home, too, and that they would build a country free of intolerance. They naturalized and registered to vote in large numbers. They chose congressmen, senators, and governors from the Democratic Party’s northern wing, in immigrant-rich states such as New York and Illinois, as their tribunes. While their vote totals were not large enough in 1928 to save Al Smith from defeat, they became a critical part of the coalition that swept New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt into the White House in 1932 and three times thereafter, making the Democratic party and liberalism the dominant forces in American life for 40 years.

Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 challenged the liberal dominance that New Dealers and the new immigrants had forged, but only Ronald Reagan’s triumph in 1980 upended it. By then, the Republican Party had spent two generations in the political wilderness. The descendants of the new immigrants counted themselves, and were counted by others—including Reagan—as the best of Americans. In the process of making a home for themselves in the United States, these groups transformed America from an Anglo-Saxon outpost to a cosmopolitan Judeo-Christian civilization. That change may appear limited by today’s standards; but those fighting for it then faced opposition as fierce as a campaign to turn America into an Abrahamic-Christian civilization would confront today.

Once again, America is divided between those who think that the virtue of an older and narrow America should be restored and those who believe that newcomers can enrich America with their work and creativity. Trump leads the restorationist camp. He has denounced Mexican immigrants as rapists. He has pledged to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He has declared that a well-qualified judge of Mexican descent, whose family has been here since the 1920s, is incapable of rendering an impartial ruling in a case involving the alleged misdeeds of Trump University. Trump also wants to outlaw Muslim immigration, much as his predecessors in the 1920s banned eastern European Jews and Italians for being mortal threats, both ideological and physical, to the American way of life.

Irish-American Catholic and Democrat Al Smith (left) lost his 1928 presidential bid, but a surge of immigrant support helped sweep Franklin Delano Roosevelt (right) into the White House in 1932.

One day, Trump may be remembered for giving today’s immigrants the motivation to bust into the political process, to be counted as Americans, and to define an America that they can call their own. His poll numbers among Latinos are barely in double digits at a time when it has become virtually impossible to win a presidential election on the basis of the non-Hispanic white vote. We don’t know how large the Latino mobilization will be on election day, although nearly three quarters of Latinos report being “highly interested” in the outcome, a rise of nearly 50 percent over the equivalent figure in 2012.

The GOP establishment is deeply concerned about the party’s unpopularity with Latinos, and what it means for its long-term prospects as a governing party. That’s why it commissioned a post-mortem of the 2012 presidential election that called for Republicans to embrace a different tone, and a different set of policies, to woo America’s fastest-growing demographic. But Trump has a very different agenda, and his politics of racial resentment may yet deliver a razor-thin, backward-looking victory in 2016. And yet, the example of the 1920s and 1930s demonstrates the long-term risk entailed in arousing the long-term ire of tens of millions of actual or potential voters.

That Trump has provoked such ire became startlingly clear in the Democratic National Convention speech given recently by Muslim-American immigrant Khizr Khan. After extolling America for the blessings it had bestowed on him, his wife, and his three sons, Khan rebuked Trump for not knowing the Constitution and for sacrificing “nothing and no one” to defend American ideals. Khan spoke of his son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who had given his life fighting for America in Iraq. “If it was up to Donald Trump,” Khizr observed, Humayun “never would have been” allowed to immigrate to the United States or to serve in its military. Khizr implored “every patriot American, all Muslim immigrants, and all [other] immigrants … to honor the sacrifice of my son, and on election day take the time to get out and vote.”

Consciously or not, Khan was standing on the shoulders of the immigrant generation of the 1920s and 1930s. That generation and their descendants showed an unexpected capacity for political mobilization, and for using the political power they thereby acquired to punish the purveyors of anti-immigrant bias. Their example reminds us how immigrants battling for their rights is one of the best ways to deepen their attachment to America; and that American democracy can deliver on its promise: namely, to give voice to the “tired and poor yearning to breathe free,” and to allow them a hand in shaping the politics and culture of their land.

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Nonetheless, conservatives and Republicans in Congress have seized on the report as only the latest evidence of overall liberal media bias against their cause. Sen. John Thune, the Republican chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, has demanded answers from Facebook and, no doubt, will invite Mark Zuckerberg and/or his minions to explain themselves.

But the deeper issue is undeniably real: Facebook is the dominant member of a small number of giant entities—corporate and governmental—that are gaining control over the flow of news, freedom of expression, and a lot more in our digital lives. Yet the conservatives who dominate the Republican Congress and big-business groups have done their best to thwart policies that would encourage the kind of competition we need to challenge that increasingly centralized control.

Almost no one wants to address the fact that Facebook is becoming a monopoly in the antitrust sense of the word. No, it doesn’t control all conversation. But Facebook is by far the most widely used venue for these conversations, and its power grows daily. Along with Google, it dominates online advertising; Facebook especially does so on mobile devices, which are the way many people connect to the Internet. If you offer news and information online, you have almost no choice but to play on Facebook’s field, because so much of your audience is there. (In some parts of the world, Facebook essentially is the Internet, because mobile devices are pretty much the sole means of online access and in some cases the company has made deals with local telecommunications companies and/or governments.)

Facebook has been buying everything that presents even a whiff of competition: Instagram, WhatsApp, Occulus, among others. This is smart—no one can dispute that Zuckerberg and the others on his team are brilliant technologists and strategists—but it’s also a red flag. As Zuckerberg famously said several years ago, he wants Facebook to be “like electricity” in terms of ubiquity and people’s needs. Well, electricity is a utility. And we regulate utilities.

Monopolies and cozy oligopolies never turn out well in the long run for anyone but the monopolists or cartel members. They end up controlling markets and do their best to thwart genuine competition. It’s their nature.

Which is why capitalism, plainly the best system when it’s working right, needs rules to promote competition. It’s why we have antitrust laws and other processes, including regulation, designed to blunt the dominant companies’ normal predations. Yes, the dominant players tend to capture the regulators, but that’s a failure of function, not of pro-competition theory.

Yet Republicans in general think the government should play little to no role in promoting competition. They consider antitrust inquiry and enforcement to be counterproductive, at best—except, of course, when a powerful constituent (a corporation, usually) is in danger from predatory behavior.

That attitude accounts for the GOP’s cheerleading for corporate dominance of Internet access. Republicans in general are fine with the idea that one or two companies (say the leading cable provider and another telecom) should control access in most communities, and utterly opposed to a remedy—what we call network neutrality—to ensure that people at the edges of networks, not dominant Internet service providers, should decide what information they want and at what priority.

I don’t want the government to tell Facebook what it can publish, and don’t look forward to much more than posturing from Thune and his compatriots. But I do want the government to start paying extremely close attention to the way the company is becoming a monopoly, and what it means for freedom of expression when a single company has so much power over what people say online. I want government to use antitrust and other pro-competition laws to ensure that Facebook doesn’t abuse its dominance in a business sense. I want government(s) to promote open technology and communications, and fierce competition at every level. Kudos to Zuckerberg for making Facebook so appealing to millions of users; that’s an amazing achievement. But we can’t allow Facebook to leverage that success to block the emergence of alternatives to its service, or use its market power to influence or alter the content of publications and others trying to communicate with Facebook users.

We all need to wake up to the potential threat Facebook poses to freedom of expression. Once you are in its enclosed online space, it is the corporation’s terms of service, not the First Amendment, that determines what you can say. If it decides to downplay speech it doesn’t like, Facebook has the right to do so.

So I’m glad that conservatives are concerned, even if the allegations prove overblown. (On Tuesday, Facebook modified its outright denial from Monday to a “we’re looking into it” stance; stay tuned.) I’d be even happier if conservatives realized that government does have a role in promoting genuine competition—and that we’re in uncharted information-freedom territory under the new control freaks of Silicon Valley.

The post Why It’s So Funny That Republicans Are Upset With Facebook for “Censoring” News appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Conservatism took root among the white, educated women who landed in the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys with their professional or corporate spouses after World War II. As these men and women’s fortunes rose with the postwar economic boom, many of them connected with the new conservative intellectuals on the coasts who denounced welfare liberalism. They excitedly read the National Review after its release in 1955 and listened to the radio addresses of the libertarian Christian preacher, James Fifield, who spun individualist ideals from the Bible during broadcasts from his downtown Los Angeles ministry.

Though not necessarily more passionate about their conservatism than the men, the excitement of the women of the ’50s came from how they viewed their role as community volunteers. These were women who could not serenely carry on with their everyday business because they believed communists were taking over the country before their very eyes–and it was their duty to help stop them. They began opening bookstores in their communities to teach the public, as they saw it, about how the big government and political “subversives” threatened freedom. The metropolitan region sprouted, by my count, 36 different conservative bookstores to disseminate the volumes of literature that these women had been circulating amongst themselves for years.

Poor Richard’s Book Shop, the first, opened its doors at Hollywood and Vine in May 1960. Operating out of a family-run insurance agency, owners Frank and Florence Ranuzzi built a thriving walk-in and mail-order business. Frank ran the agency while Florence ran the non-profit bookstore. Shelves displayed thin paperback guides to communist history, philosophy, and tactics that walked readers through Marx, Hegel, Lenin, Chinese “brainwashing” techniques, and front groups. Ex-spy memoirs proved so popular as to constitute their own genre. Shoppers could choose from titles like Witness by the famous Alger Hiss antagonist Whittaker Chambers and The Big Decision by Matt Cvetic, who infiltrated a Pittsburgh unit of the Communist Party for the FBI.

Poor Richard’s became a political headquarters for the conservative movement, where the Ranuzzis and their friends produced bumper stickers, printed leaflets, and organized protests. Florence Ranuzzi also presided over lively discussions, which, according to her daughter, gave Poor Richard’s the feeling of a conservative “salon.” Men, women, and teenagers would drop in on Saturdays to sit around a big captain’s table and hear Ranuzzi give talks about communism.

There were other bookstore hotbeds. The South Pasadena Americanism Center opened shortly after Poor Richard’s in 1961. Founder Jane Crosby, a leader of the John Birch Society, envisioned the non-profit store as an outlet for the knowledge and materials that she and her friends had been acquiring through their studies of communism over the years. “We have been lending books back and forth between ourselves so we can become informed,” she explained to the Los Angeles Herald Express. “Now we want to come out from behind the bushes and get right out on the main street.”

Crosby and her team of housewives developed the atmosphere of the South Pasadena Americanism Center with care. Shelves of books stood amidst a robust patriotic décor of gold-toned walls and curtains dotted with liberty bells. The visitor could scan literature by category: Education, American Principles, Economics, United Nations, Communist Techniques–making it easy to locate Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit, or Verna M. Hall’s Christian History of the Constitution. The John Birch Society’s American Opinion Magazine could be purchased as well. The furniture encouraged customers to do more than buy. With a big round oak table and comfortable rocking chair, the Americanism Center made it easy for shoppers to sit, read, and talk with salespeople about the materials.

Just as coffeehouses and student unions served as the public spaces of the new left, patriotic bookstores became nerve centers of the emerging Los Angeles right. Although men and women shopped in these stores, women ran most of these establishments. To many curious Southern Californians who wandered in, these proprietors represented their most direct human encounters with the conservative movement. The women volunteers not only stocked the shelves and worked the register but also made reading suggestions and answered questions both in person and over the phone. Their friendly demeanor contrasted sharply with the tone represented in much of the material they sold.

The Americanism Center, like Poor Richard’s, functioned as a political community center. People could register to vote there, and the events calendar announced lectures, luncheons, workshops, and meetings. On the counter sat petitions for patrons to sign and postings of groups and political candidates in need of phone-callers and envelope-stuffers. Conservatives in Los Angeles also came to rely on the South Pasadena store as a support center and hotline–all they had to do was dial through to the red, white, and blue phone at SY.9-1776.

In 1962, one concerned woman called because she realized that a tennis ball she purchased at Bullock’s was made in Czechoslovakia. The Americanism Center volunteer she spoke with assisted her by sending along a copy of the Shopper’s Guide to Communist Imports. Another caller reported that her conservative views had recently cost her a job she had held for 17 years. She was desperate for work and hoping that someone at the center might help find an employer friendlier to her political outlook. In 1963, the popular anti-communist lecturer Florence Fowler Lyons called from Presbyterian Hospital, where an ambulance had taken her. She just needed to talk … after collapsing with grief upon the death of her cat.

What happened to the bookstores and these women? They failed to last into the 1970s, primarily for the same reason that most non-profits and “movement” bookstores do–they rely on the time, energy, and money of a small group of people who cannot sustain the energy and momentum. Times also changed. When the immediate threat of communism lost its potency, the housewives moved on to other causes.

But the L.A. women and their bookstores left a mark. Today, conservative booksellers, driven more by ideology than profits, thrive online. And Republicans now produce candidates–like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann–who resemble the old booksellers in perspective, style–and fervor.

Buy the book: Skylight, Amazon, Powell’s.

Michelle Nickerson is assistant professor of history at Loyola University, Chicago and author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, from which this article is adapted. She speaks to the Huntington-USC Institute on California & the West at the Huntington Library on September 7 at 12 p.m.

*Photo courtesy of Michelle Nickerson.

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