The film assigns responsibility for the restriction drive and the 1920s culture of racism to Johnson-Reed’s signatory, Calvin Coolidge. “America must be kept American,” said Coolidge, who had become president on Harding’s sudden death. This line apparently suffices to damn Coolidge in the filmmakers’ eyes, though many of us, even if we express and understand the concept differently, share the sentiment. To buttress its anti-Coolidge case, the film juxtaposes footage of the president with footage of the Ku Klux Klan on the march, of the genuine racist Henry Ford, and of the Landsberg cell where Hitler worked on Mein Kampf. The association between the mild Coolidge and professional race-mongers is crafted so tightly that some in the press, reacting to the Burns film, twinned Coolidge with Ford. An MSNBC reporter claimed that “Henry Ford and President Calvin Coolidge were just a few of the well-known figures who espoused blatant antisemitism.”
In Coolidge’s case, some facts and background are missing. Congress backed Johnson-Reed so overwhelmingly (the vote in the Senate was 69–9) that any presidential veto would have been overridden. As for Japanese exclusion, Coolidge shared the concern about its impact on Japan’s future, even announcing publicly: “If the exclusion provision stood alone I should disapprove it.”