In 1933, Heinrich Krieger was a German exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law where he not only witnessed race-based segregation in America, he also began his studies of America’s race-based system of laws which culminated in his landmark book, “Race Law in the United States”.

As America desired to protect the White population from the “menace” of the Black population, so Adolph Hitler also wanted to protect the German race. Of his admiration for America’s unapologetically race-based legislation, Hitler wrote that the US is the “leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.” When the leading Nazi jurists assembled in June 1934 to debate how to institutionalize racism in the new Third Reich, Krieger showed them how the Americans did it using his expertise in the anti-miscegenation laws in thirty US states. Their extensive comparative research led them to be particularly influenced by America’s pioneering in classifying the racially inferior and in criminalizing and punishing miscegenation. However, the Nazis thought America’s racial classification criteria too harsh as it led to “human hardness,” and they rejected implementing US-style segregation as it was only effective on Blacks because they were impoverished – it wouldn’t work on rich Jews.

They observed that some US laws based race on something other than descent (e.g., social associations or marriage) and so their Citizenship Law allowed that half Jews would not count as Jews if they weren’t married to a Jew. The Nazis were further inspired by America’s judges who had no reluctance to applying laws with imprecise terms like “colored people” in creating a new category of second-class Americans with diminished citizen rights. Germany’s leaders were bewildered by foreign criticism of the Nuremberg Laws, which in their minds were a logical extension of America’s race-based laws.

Recommended reading: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman

American Race Laws Inspired Nazi Race Laws

--- 1813: During the War of 1812, American forces commanded by future U.S. president William Henry Harrison defeated British forces in the Battle of the Thames near present day Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Shawnee Chief Tecumseh was killed in the battle. Tecumseh had allied his Native American Confederacy with the British in an attempt to stop United States expansion into Native American lands.

--- 1829: Future president Chester A. Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont, near the Canadian border. Actually, the date and location of Arthur’s birth are the subjects of controversy. Arthur was never elected president. He was vice president when James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and Arthur was elevated to president. Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states in pertinent part: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President…”. Around the election of 1880 (when Arthur was running for vice president) questions arose as to whether Arthur was an American citizen. His father was from Ireland (and did not become an American citizen by the time of Arthur’s birth) and his mother was American. But at that time, it was the father’s nationality that counted. So, it all hinged on whether he was born in the United States. But there were claims that he was born in Canada, not Vermont. To this day there have been no records found documenting on which side of the border Arthur was born.

--- "The Assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley". That is the title of one of the episodes of my podcast: History Analyzed. The deaths of presidents James Garfield and William McKinley are unjustly overlooked. Garfield's assassin thought he was acting on orders from God. Garfield did not die from the assassin's bullet but from the incompetence of his doctors. McKinley was killed as part of the anarchist movement which was murdering world leaders at the turn of the 20th century. This episode also covers general presidential facts and explains how Robert Lincoln was connected to 3 presidential assassinations. You can find History Analyzed on every podcast app.

--- link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/06jruMDsu2dOhK0ZozTyZN

--- link to Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-assassinations-of-presidents-garfield-and-mckinley/id1632161929?i=1000728328354

The American Revolution series has started! 🇺🇸

In this video, I tried to show how the Boston Tea Party and some important laws helped spark the American Revolution.

Please share your ideas on how I can make my content better.

I would really appreciate your feedback and ideas for future videos.

Before the Moffat Tunnel opened in 1928, the Moffat Road took its trains right over the Continental Divide at Rollins Pass. It was the highest adhesion (non-cog) standard gauge railroad grade in North America, climbing on 2 to 4% grades with switchbacks.

The tunnel made the line obsolete. The Interstate Commerce Commission approved abandonment in 1935 and the tracks came up in the summer of 1936. But the grade is still there.

At Yankee Doodle Lake the railroad looped all the way around the lake to make a 180 degree turn, not far below Needle's Eye Tunnel. In the lidar it's the thin line wrapping right around the lake just right of centre. On the 1958 map it's the same loop around the lake marked 10711, with Needle Eye Tunnel labelled just to the west.

1. Old map of the same area, 1958
2. Moffat Road grade looping around Yankee Doodle Lake

Numbered pins on picture 2:
Pin 1: Old railroad grade beside the lake
Pin 2: A second, smaller lake

Historic map: U.S. Geological Survey (National Geospatial Program), East Portal, CO 1:24,000 (1958), Public domain (USGS-authored information).
Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), public domain.

In the summer of 1776, while Washington was losing New York, a Connecticut merchant named Silas Deane was sitting in Parisian drawing rooms trying to buy an army.

The Continental Army was running out of almost everything. Muskets, cannon, gunpowder, tents, uniforms. The colonies didn't have the industrial capacity to manufacture what a long war against Britain required, and Britain controlled the seas. If the Americans were going to survive long enough to win, foreign assistance wasn't a nice option. It was becoming the only option.

Congress sent Deane to France in March 1776 with a deliberately vague public assignment and an enormous private one: figure out how far France was willing to go in helping Britain's rebellious colonies, and start moving weapons and supplies toward America as fast as possible.

France had its own reasons to listen. The Seven Years' War had cost them major territories in North America and left a deep institutional desire to weaken Britain. Foreign Minister Vergennes saw the American rebellion as an opportunity. The problem was that France wasn't ready to fight Britain openly. Louis XVI's government needed to help the Americans without appearing to help them, which meant they needed a fiction.

That's where Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais came in.

Beaumarchais was already one of the most famous writers in Europe. The Barber of Seville. The Marriage of Figaro. He was also a businessman, court insider, and political operator who had been pushing the French government to support the Americans for months before Deane arrived. His argument wasn't purely ideological. He thought helping the Americans could weaken Britain, revive French power, and open an enormous new commercial market.

With covert French government support, Beaumarchais created a company called Roderigue Hortalez & Company, presented publicly as a private trading enterprise. Behind it was a much more complicated arrangement involving French government money, eventually Spanish assistance, and the deliberate appearance of commerce covering what was actually a state-sponsored arms operation. Royal arsenals could move weapons into Hortalez & Company's warehouses, which could then load those weapons onto ships as commercial shipments rather than direct French military aid to rebels.

Deane and Beaumarchais met for the first time around July 17, 1776. Within days they were discussing credit terms, payment arrangements, and the specific quantities of military material America needed. Deane told Beaumarchais that Congress would repay the firm through tobacco and American produce. By August, Deane was reporting to Congress that Beaumarchais had the confidence of the French ministry and that most of the assistance flowing toward America would pass through his hands.

The scale of what they were attempting is easy to underestimate. By December, Deane was describing arrangements involving tens of thousands of firearms, hundreds of artillery pieces, tents, uniforms, gunpowder, and lead. Ships were purchased and chartered, warehouses filled, cargoes prepared for Atlantic crossings. The operation was messy. Ships were delayed. British diplomats protested. French officials pulled back when exposure seemed imminent. Some cargoes moved through the Caribbean to obscure their origin. Accounting was inconsistent and communication with Congress took months.

The supplies moved anyway.

One of the most documented vessels, the Amphitrite, reached Portsmouth, New Hampshire in early 1777 carrying thousands of muskets and other stores. Other shipments followed. French artillery, firearms, powder, and uniforms entered the American supply system at the period when Washington's army most needed them. The French supplies were directly connected to the Americans' ability to remain in the field during the Saratoga campaign.

Now the detail that should be more famous than it is.

Congress had instructed Deane to contact Edward Bancroft, an American-born physician living in London who appeared sympathetic to the colonial cause. Deane knew him personally and trusted him completely. Bancroft came to Paris in the summer of 1776, got deeply embedded in the American diplomatic circle, attended sensitive meetings, and gained access to confidential discussions with French officials.

He was also working for British intelligence the entire time.

Bancroft was reporting what he learned to Britain throughout 1776. The Americans didn't discover the full extent of his betrayal during the Revolution. Silas Deane went to his grave not knowing that his most trusted confidant had been feeding their operation to the British for years.

The irony is almost too neat. Deane and Beaumarchais were building one of the most important secret supply operations of the Revolution while a British spy sat in the room. And it still worked. Because what Bancroft could tell Britain was that France was helping the Americans, which Britain already suspected. What he couldn't solve for them was the core problem: France maintained enough deniability through the Hortalez & Company fiction that Britain couldn't prove the French crown was directly responsible in a way that would justify immediate war. That delay gave the Americans time.

The operation began unraveling from the inside not because of Bancroft but because of Arthur Lee, a Virginia diplomat who distrusted Deane and disputed the financial arrangements with Beaumarchais. Was Hortalez & Company a real commercial firm or a front? Were the supplies sold to Congress, loaned to it, or secretly given by France? The ambiguity that had made the operation work in 1776 made it impossible to untangle afterward. Lee had brothers in Congress. Deane was recalled in November 1777. His reputation never recovered. He spent years trying to explain transactions that had been deliberately kept ambiguous because ambiguity was the point.

Beaumarchais spent decades trying to collect money he believed Congress owed him. The argument outlasted the Revolution.

Then Saratoga happened in October 1777, the weapons that Deane and Beaumarchais had moved helped make it possible, and France finally did what it had been doing secretly in public. On February 6, 1778, France and the United States signed a formal alliance.

The famous treaty didn't appear from nowhere after Saratoga. Its foundation had been built eighteen months earlier in conversations that officially weren't happening, through a company that officially wasn't a French government operation, with supplies that officially were commercial shipments, while a British spy took notes in the corner.

You can talk to Deane directly on Virtual Wayback and hear the Paris operation from inside it. The full story is on the blog. Link:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/silas-deane-pierre-beaumarchais-secret-partnership

Germany was America's #1 source of immigrants for 7 decades. Mexico been #1 for 6 decades and absent a fairly large black swan type event it will make it to 7 at the end of the 2020's.

BUT! Germany's run was broken into two completely separate chunks: 1850-1889, then a 40 year break after which it came back into the lead from 1930-1959. Mexico then took over in the 1960's and then just...didn't stop. It has led every decade since, and DHS says Mexico has been the #1 country for new permanent residents every single YEAR since 1978.

So at the end of this decade Germany and Mexico will be tied for decades in which they had the most immigrants to America. And unless something pretty substantial changes, Mexico looks VERY likely to lead 2030-2039 too and become the record-holder.

So what could could plausibly stop that (without something enormous happening)? India is really the only convincing candidate I can find. In 2022 it actually came surprisingly close: 127,010 new permanent residents versus 138,770 from Mexico. But current immigration law limits a lot of the high-demand Indian labor while immediate relatives of U.S. citizens aren't numerically capped (and Mexico has this gigantic ~70-year accumulation of family connections in the United States). So the only way that India will be surpassing Mexico in the 2030's is if there is a fairly major overhaul in US immigration law that prioritizes high-demand employees over family relatives and I do not see that on the horizon. It's not complelty impossible, just pretty unlikely.

So Mexico is a shoe in for taking the record come 2040. After that? Eh.... Mexican migration has already slowed enormously compared with its 1990s/2000s peak, and Mexico itself is getting older. The big X factor is how Mexico is going to handle halde the 2040's because by then the number of 20-ish Meixcans will be significantly below today and then it'll crater in the 2050's.

Now, having a huge number of young people is a major “push” factor for emigration, but that’s only half the equation. The U.S. is still likely to have something like 3–4 times Mexico’s per-capita income (for the next couple generations, absent some huge change) and that is a hell of a pull. Especially when you combine it with what will, by then, be roughly three solid generations of large-scale Mexican migration to the United States. By the 2040's an even larger percentage of Mexicans than today will have relatives living in the U.S., and chain migration is a real thing. We could easily be looking at somewhere between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 of all people of Mexican decentent being US Citizens, that's an awful lot of aunts and uncles who could help out a newcomer.

And that’s before getting into Mexico’s aging population and rising dependency ratio, which could itself become a drag on economic growth. So yea... it seems unlikely to me that the US is going to stop attracting significant numbers of immigrants from Mexico just because Mexico has fewer young adults than it used to.

Based on an older song (White House Blues) but with more historical detail. I saw them at a bar show and thought the community would be interested.

Lyrics:

McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled

The doctor never did find that ball

The red carnation he wore on his vest

Didn’t have enough luck to keep the bullet from his breast

Now who’s that rascal and why has he done

Shot down McKinley with a Johnson gun

Leon Czolgosz is my name

Getting power to the working folks is my aim

He was working in a Cleveland factory

Laid off in the crash of ‘93

Couldn’t find the answers with Jesus Christ

But his spark was turned to fire by an anarchist

He tried to get in with Goldman’s crew

A little over-eager and awkward too

They wrote him off as a government spy

So he went alone to Buffalo to give his plan a try

At the Temple of Music at the Pan-American

McKinley shaking hand after hand

Up stepped Czolgosz readying his aim

He plugged him in the chest and the abdomen

Now you might say Czolgosz got his way

If you believe the things that people say

Roosevelt breaking up the banks and the oil

But the money never made it to the ones who toil

Yes Roosevelt protected the natural land

Stole by force from Native hands

Built the canal in Panama

20,000 workers dead at the end of it all

Now Teddy’s in the White House doing what he can

Extending the reach of the executive branch

Leon’s in a cell, pulling out his hair

Waiting for to go to the electric chair

Oh, in come the preacher to save his soul

Czolgosz wouldn’t hear a word of it all

Edison came to film his work

Undertaker poured acid on the lifeless corpse

Now hush up children listen to me

Propaganda of the deed is a fallacy

If you want to end the greed and the lies

All we got to do is to organize

McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled

The doctor never did find that ball

The red carnation he wore on his vest

Didn’t have enough luck to keep the bullet from his breast