worldview that a culturally diversify-
ing America was leading to a civiliza-
tional clash.
“When the question came up of
whether we should broaden FAIR’s
bundle of issues — taking a look at cul-
tural division and bilingualism and the
changing composition of the American
population and what that might mean
— there was a great deal of resistance,
as you say, to getting into what seemed
like dangerous territory,” he said.
Despite the misgivings of some of his
fellow anti-immigration activists, Tan-
ton and his associates came to embrace
more divisive, high-profile tactics to
drive support to their issue. They came
to focus on the American Southwest,
the prime destination of migrants from
Latin America for generations, where
Tanton felt the cause of immigration
restriction to be the most salient.
“Because the problems of immigra-
tion had already become sufficiently
acute in areas like California, the polit-
ical system was already compromised
there,” he recounted in 1989, suggest-
ing that he didn’t believe the Hispanic
populations in the Southwest were
entitled to political representation over
white Americans. “Politicians could no
longer take stands for fear of back pres-
sure from the immigrant populations.”
The most provocative push by Tan-
ton was a direct advocacy campaign
to enshrine English as the official lan-
guage of the U.S., in a rebuke of the
bilingual English-Spanish society that
had been emerging in the Southwest
as a result of migration. With several
high-profile backers, including former
California Republican Sen. Ichiye Hay-
akawa — who was born in Canada and
was of Japanese descent — and former
CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite
he helped launch the advocacy group
U.S. English to accomplish this, initial-
ly by forcing ballot referendums on the
issue in states such as California and
Arizona.
It was this latest endeavor that final-
ly put Tanton — who didn’t care much
for public appearances — and the true
nature of his worldview into the pub-
lic’s eye.
In 1988, the Arizona Republic leaked
a memo written by Tanton to an inner
circle of his associates just days before
the vote on a divisive Arizona ballot
proposal to enshrine English as the
official language of the state. In the
memo, Tanton had made explicitly
racial arguments that large-scale His-
panic migration threatened the foun-
dations of American society.
California,
he
claimed,
would
become akin to the South African
apartheid by 2030 as a result of Latin
American immigration, and he sug-
gested Blacks and Hispanics would
form a permanent socioeconomic and
cultural underclass.
Furthermore, he insinuated that
Latin American immigrants would
bring an inherently corruptible civic
culture antithetical to American soci-
ety, and that they were of an inferior
intelligence.
The view of growing cultural, lin-
guistic and racial diversity as a threat
to the cohesion of American society is
consistent with many of Tanton’s other
private writings that are archived in
the Bentley Library around this era.
This political philosophy is hardly
unique to Tanton, and echo the writ-
ings of controversial political scientist
Charles Murray, among others.
Backlash would be swift, with many
of Tanton’s prominent allies — includ-
ing Cronkite — condemning him and
resigning from U.S. English. Tanton
yielded to public pressure and also
resigned from the group. In an inter-
view the following year, Tanton stated
that the contents of the memo reflected
his sincere beliefs, though they didn’t
reflect the talking points he would use
in public. He also stated that he regrets
resigning from U.S. English, insisting
that he had done no wrong.
“My memo was written for a group of
people who were already initiated into
immigration, population and language
issues,” he said. “It was not written for
people off the street who’d never heard
any of these ideas before and had no
background in them.”
Despite the Arizona Republic’s rev-
elations, the voters of Arizona would
go on to narrowly affirm the proposal
several days later, banning the state
government from offering services
in Spanish (outside of several nar-
row exceptions) by 12,000 votes out of
roughly 1.1 million cast.
T
he records available to the
public in the Bentley Library
dating to the early 1990s and
later are largely closed to the public, a
precondition of Tanton’s 2007 dona-
tion. Nonetheless, there are certain
aspects of his life that are public record
beyond this point. Remaining in Peto-
skey and continuing his medical prac-
tice, he would still remain active in his
network of anti-immigration advocacy
groups — including FAIR — though he
avoided the limelight.
A year after his donation to the
Bentley Library, the Southern Pov-
erty Law Center published a report
detailing extensive communications
between
Tanton
and
high-profile
white supremacists — including Jared
Taylor, Peter Brimelow and Kevin
MacDonald — throughout the 1990s. In
these communications Tanton regular-
ly expressed sympathy for their views
that immigration from non-Western
societies would undermine “Western
Civilization.”
“We’re very concerned that his ide-
ologies are at best sympathetic and at
worst fully supportive of white nation-
alists,” said Humza Kazmi, one of sev-
eral Virginia immigration attorneys
who has studied Tanton’s network.
Kazmi and his colleagues sued the
University of Michigan last Novem-
ber to release the entirety of Tanton’s
papers, arguing that the embargoed
documents will demonstrate the full
extent to which he embraced white
nationalism and influenced present-
day policymakers.
The University has resisted the law-
suit in court, arguing that it is con-
tractually bound to honor Tanton’s
donation agreement to withhold files
until 2035, as is the case with many
donors to the library. Currently, the
case is awaiting appeal by the plain-
tiffs.
How does one reconcile the racial
belief system shown in Tanton’s Ari-
zona Republic memo, and the Tanton
who warned that America’s history of
violent racism shouldn’t be repeated,
who initially shied away from “dema-
gogic” tactics in FAIR’s early years,
and who himself was the son of an
immigrant and expressed a fondness
for America’s melting pot history? Per-
haps he experienced a genuine ideolog-
ical evolution that lead him to embrace
a vision of racial exclusion and white
nationalism.
But another possibility is that he had
always held these views of racial hier-
archy, and he advocated for non-racial
immigration restrictionism as a ruse to
one day normalize his vision. After all,
he regularly expressed in his papers
that his overarching goal was to bring
immigration restriction into the politi-
cal mainstream without any social
stigma.
In his 1989 oral history, Tanton
envisioned “three stages in the immi-
gration debate.” The first, which he
dubbed the “Statue of Liberty phase,”
was where any discussion of limiting
immigration is viewed as inherently
anti-American. The second he dubbed
as the “‘Yes, but’ phase” where limited
discussion about immigration would
be possible in the political main-
stream.
“Then the third stage, which I think
we still have yet to move into, is one
in which it’s accepted as a legitimate
topic and you can discuss it without
being accused of things, or without
first excusing yourself for being con-
cerned about immigration policy,”
Tanton said in 1989.
In the present day, perhaps we are
on the cusp of entering Tanton’s third
stage of debate. Individuals with ties to
white supremacists have held official
positions in the current White House,
the President of the United States
has suggested there is moral equiva-
lency between Nazis and their oppo-
nents and prime time Fox News hosts
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham
regularly go on screeds against “demo-
graphic change” and diversity with no
professional repercussions. It is also a
legitimate question how much of the
current
administration’s
inhumane
immigration crackdown is driven by a
legitimate concern for border security,
and how much driven by racial animus
against non-white immigration.
As for Tanton, he has reached his
mid-80s but his wife told the Detroit
News in 2017 that he had contracted
advanced-stage Parkinson’s disease
and has been committed to a nursing
home. He reportedly has had a difficult
time understanding the news. FAIR
and other organizations he helped
shape continue to exist and are outspo-
ken advocates of the president’s immi-
gration agenda.
Was Tanton the architect of our
divisive political moment, or simply a
gadfly who held wildly diverging polit-
ical views that foreshadowed the divi-
sion that would come decades later?
The true extent of his role in shaping
the present will continue to be unclear,
until perhaps the remainder of the
Bentley archives open in 17 years. It
will be much longer before it will be
clear how the demographic identity of
our nation and what it means to be an
American will change.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018// The Statement
7B
“How does one reconcile the racial belief system
shown in Tanton’s Arizona Republic memo, and the Tan-
ton who warned that America’s history of violent rac-
ism shouldn’t be repeated, who initially shied away from
‘demagogic’ tactics in FAIR’s early years, and who him-
self was the son of an immigrant and expressed a fond-
ness for America’s melting pot history?”