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.
“Wooly Bully” isn’t what bothers conservatives.
The Voting Rights Act and Hart-Celler profoundly altered the nation. As potent as each law was on its own terms, combined the two were monumental. In effect, one opened the door to nonwhite immigration, the other to nonwhite political power. For racial reactionaries, it’s a frightening combination, which is why supporters of the immigration bill tried to calm conservative fears during debate. The law would not “upset the ethnic mix of our society,” Sen. Edward Kennedy said.
It turned out that Kennedy was wrong. In 1960, whites constituted 88.6% of the U.S. population. By 2020, that number had fallen to 58.9%. In 1960, only 5% of the U.S. population was foreign-born. In 2020, it was 13.6%. On the 50th anniversary of the immigration act, in 2015, Pew Research Center reported that nearly 59 million immigrants had come to the U.S. since 1965.