“W
e are quitting at
two,” a Northern
Michigan doctor
named John Tan-
ton told the Alpena News in 1975, refer-
ring to his two daughters.
Moving to Petoskey, Mich., in 1964
after a medical residency at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, Tanton had long
established himself as a committed —
and sometimes eccentric — pillar of the
local community. Decades before Roe v.
Wade legalized abortion and when birth
control was considered taboo, Tanton’s
wife Mary Lou had been heavily involved
in Ann Arbor Planned Parenthood; the
couple established the first Planned Par-
enthood clinic in Northern Michigan and
expanded access to family planning ser-
vices in the regional clinics. However,
this was not out of some dedication to
liberal politics.
John was also a deeply-committed
conservationist,
heavily
involved
in
nationwide
grassroots
environmental
groups. Heavily influenced by the 1968
book, “The Population Bomb,” which
warned that exponential population
growth would devastate the environment
and food security, to Tanton the goals of
environmentalism and access to birth
control were fundamentally intertwined.
As was the thinking of many other edu-
cated minds of the time, environmental
preservation meant population control
could not be a taboo subject. Around this
era, the post-Baby Boom birth rate had
tapered off and the immigration restric-
tions of the early 20th century rolled
back; population growth in the United
States had come to be driven by immigra-
tion.
“Even back in high school, my idea was
that man’s role was not to multiply and
subdue the earth,” Tanton recounted in a
1989 interview. “But to exist in easy part-
nership with it and to study the natural
world.”
This vision of environmental preser-
vation and population control, combined
with a zeal for activism, would ultimate-
ly manifest itself in Tanton — himself
the son of a Canadian immigrant — as a
fervor for restricting immigration into
the U.S. In the decade that followed the
opening newspaper quote, Tanton would
become one of the preeminent national
voices to limit American immigration,
both illegal and legal, and his life’s work
has made him one of the most consequen-
tial figures in shaping the modern anti-
immigration movement in this country.
Despite living half a country away from
Capitol Hill, Tanton helped establish the
Federation for American Immigration
Reform and a myriad of other advocacy
groups in the late 1970s and 1980s that
would shift the national conversation
against both legal and illegal immigra-
tion in two subsequent generations.
Largely avoiding the public spot-
light and attempting to cast himself as
a gentleman doctor, Tanton’s detractors
— including the Southern Poverty Law
Center — have labeled him as a white
nationalist, though he himself takes
offense to the label.
In 2007, pushing the age of 73, he
donated 25 boxes filled with his corre-
spondence — dating back from the late
1960s up until the early years of the new
millennium — to the University of Michi-
gan’s Bentley Historical Library. The
first 14 boxes are accessible to the public.
The remainder are sealed until 2035 per
Tanton’s request and primarily contain
documents related to FAIR and the later
years of his life.
In our present political moment, immi-
gration has become perhaps the most
bitterly polarizing issue in U.S. politics.
A New York real estate developer has
ascended to the White House on over-
tones of racial revanchism and draconian
crackdowns on immigration, and many of
the current administration’s strict immi-
gration agenda originate from groups
tied to the Michigan doctor.
Contemporary liberals tend to attri-
bute the anti-immigration politics of the
present to an ignorance of America’s his-
tory as a nation of immigrants. Indeed, it
is one of the oldest ironies of this coun-
try that the descendents of immigrants
— such as Tanton — would reject subse-
quent generations of arrivals as unable to
join the country, be it the Irish and Ital-
ian Catholics or Eastern European Jews
on the East Coast, or the Chinese on the
West Coast.
The Tanton of the 1970s was well
aware of this tragic irony in his writings
and explicitly warned against repeating
the mistakes of the past. Nevertheless,
by the 1990s he had evolved to associate
with some of the nation’s most influen-
tial white nationalists. An extension of
his decades-held beliefs would ultimate-
ly consume his political philosophy with
the idea of preserving a homogenous
American civilization against the per-
ceived threat of immigrants and diver-
sity. As his public persona and private
writings descended into white national-
ism, it remains to be seen how much of
this transformation reflected a genuine
ideological evolution to embrace bigot-
ry rather than from prejudices that had
been hidden behind his public motives,
much like his advocacy for birth control.
I
n 1956, Tanton — then a senior
at Michigan State University —
arrived in Chicago alongside 11
other Rhodes Scholarship finalists to
compete for roughly half-a-dozen awards
to study in Oxford, England that had
been set aside for Midwesterners.
Having spent his adolescence on a farm
in the rural “thumb” of Michigan and in a
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 // The Statement
5B
John Tanton, the nativist next door
by Brian Kuang, Managing Statement Editor
Courtesy of the Bently Historical Library
“In the decade that followed the opening newspaper
quote, Tanton would become one of the preeminent
national voices to limit American immigration, both
illegal and legal, and his life’s work has made him
one of the most consequential figures in shaping the
modern anti-immigration movement in this country.”
How a Petoskey doctor shaped modern white nationalist movements
continued ON THE NATIVIST, Page 6B