Republicans Are Trying to Redefine Who’s an American
The year 1965 looms large in US history for two significant pieces of legislation, the Voting Rights Act and the Hart-Celler Immigration Act. Both are under attack.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Photographer: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
Using specific dates to define entire eras is often a gimmick, a way of compressing wild and unwieldy life into a neatly artificial package. But some days, or years, just massively overproduce, leaving behind a nation, or world, transformed. As a quote typically attributed to Vladimir Lenin has it, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
For the reactionaries who drive Republican politics today, one year looms like Godzilla over a darkening conservative skyline: 1965. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs had a jabberwocky hit song in “Wooly Bully,” and President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Hart-Celler Immigration Act and the Voting Rights Act.