A Tale of Two Legacies

Some People Call John Tanton a Hero. Others Think He’s a Racist.

By Patrick Sullivan | Jan. 21, 2017

Petoskey resident John Tanton represents different things to different people.

In his hometown, he’s a celebrated conservationist, a co-founder of the Little Traverse Conservancy who has spent his life dedicated to environmental causes. Case in point, he his wife Mary Lou made a contribution last year to preserve 236 acres of rolling hardwoods.

Around the country, the now-retired ophthalmologist is considered the father of the kind of hardline immigration policy that helped sweep Donald Trump into office, a legacy that’s made him a hero to some and branded him a racist to others.

Tanton is a complicated man. For him, a commitment to the environment and his stringent, once-fringe beliefs on immigration serve the same end — his belief that nature should be preserved and population should be controlled.

 
CONSERVATION AND IMMIGRATION

Tanton, 82, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and is no longer involved in the immigration movement he created. He gave his last interview on immigration a decade ago.

That doesn’t mean he’s not still active. In the most recent Little Traverse Conservancy newsletter, an article about the Tanton Family Working Forest Reserve — a property formerly known as Christmas Mountain he helped purchase for preservation — describes him visiting the tract in August and noticing the need for a management plan for the dead and dying beech and ash trees.

The article, written by former Petoskey News-Review reporter Tamara Stevens, opens  with this sentence: “Emmet County would not look the way it does today if Dr. John and Mary Lou Tanton had not moved to Petoskey in 1964.”

Here is a different take on Tanton, from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) website: “John Tanton is the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement. He created a network of organizations — the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA — that have profoundly shaped the immigration debate in the United States.”

The website quotes papers Tanton donated to the University of Michigan library in which he talks about the importance of preserving a white, Eurocentric majority in the United States. It labels the Petoskey-based publication launched by Tanton, The Social Contract Press, a hate organization.

 
“HE IS NOT A RACIST”

These characterizations of Tanton and the organizations he founded are unfair, the product of a smear campaign, said K. C. McAlpin, executive director of US Inc., the Petoskey-based organization founded by Tanton in 1981 that publishes The Social Contract.

McAlpin contends the SPLC decided to join the immigration debate and oppose immigration controls and then launched an opportunistic and disingenuous campaign against Tanton.

McAlpin said he doesn’t believe it’s racist to strive for the preservation of a white majority. Just like most other countries, he explained, the United States should strive to maintain its identity.

“Israel is a good example,” he said. “Israel has the right to preserve its basic demographic makeup, but any time one race butts up against another and begins to supplant it, there’s trouble and pushback.

“Cultures want to maintain their cultural balance,” he elaborated. “It’s the same with European countries. They have the right to determine their own demographic balances. Say the United States suddenly experienced a massive wave of immigration from China that threatened to overtake the culture: There would be justifiable rebellion.”

McAlpin asked, “Is it racist to say we’re not going to change our basic European-dominated makeup? For me, it’s a completely legitimate concern to preserve a country’s culture. I don’t want my kids and grandkids to speak Mandarin Chinese. I’m not in favor of that. You can call me a racist if you want to, but I don’t believe that position is racist.”

He concluded, “The truth is, John Tanton has worked with and collaborated perfectly smoothly with people from every background, race, religion and identity. I mean, he is not a racist.”

 
AN EVOLUTION OF AN ARGUMENT

How does someone begin as a devout environmentalist and end up decades later in the middle of a culture war?

The son of an immigrant from Candada, Tanton was born and raised in Detroit until age 11, when his family moved to a farm near Sebewaing, in the Thumb region of Michigan. After medical school, Tanton moved to Petoskey and worked for decades as an eye surgeon.

His interest in preserving the environment led him to become concerned about population growth. In addition to helping found the Little Traverse Conservancy 45 years ago, he formed a local chapter of the Audubon Club. He and his wife also founded Petoskey’s office of Planned Parenthood, and Tanton became the state chair of the Sierra Club’s population committee. That led to a position on the national board of Zero Population Growth, now called Population Connection, where he served as president between 1975 and 1977.

The country’s birthrate was in decline at the time, so Tanton turned his attention to immigration. Early on, he realized he was entering dangerous waters. In the 1975 essay that launched his movement, “International Migration: An Obstacle to Obtaining World Stability,” he wrote about how racism made people afraid to talk about immigration.

He called that conundrum “the seamy history surrounding past efforts to limit immigration” and noted that people who wanted to control immigration “were marked by xenophobia and racism” that “gave rise to the likes of the Know-Nothing political party and the Ku Klux Klan.” 

Tanton also wrote, “The subject was often highly emotional and divisive. Any person who attempts discussion of immigration policy will soon learn, as has the author, that the situation is unchanged in this regard.”

He concluded, “It turns out that immigration is one of the most sensitive topics in the American political life, and it’s also very difficult to graft new concerns onto old organizations, so it [influencing immigration policy via Zero Population Growth] just didn’t work.”

This conclusion led Tanton to found FAIR, which opened in Washington, D.C. in 1979.

Tanton’s critics say he diverged from his original position and ultimately aligned himself with racists and white supremacists, but McAlpin disagrees. To that end, US Inc. produced a video last summer that tries to explain how environmentalism and concern for the economy led Tanton to his position on immigration.

A PICTURE ON A WALL

FAIR set out to explore how many immigrants should be admitted to the country, who should get in, and how immigration law should be enforced. The goal, Tanton said in the video, was to stabilize the population.

“People who work on this sort of thing are often called anti-immigrant or anti-immigration. And that would only be appropriate if you would call a person who went on a diet anti-food,” Tanton said.

In the video, Tanton acknowledged that his position had earned him some enemies and caused him to be labeled a racist, nativist, xenophobe and jingoist. He said he didn’t let it get to him.

“I look at these charges as motions for cloture, a motion to shut off debate,” Tanton said. “So you have to have a thick skin. And most people don’t have a thick skin.”

Indeed, Tanton wore his battle scars from these skirmishes with pride — he framed the  cover of the 2002 issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report magazine labeling him the anti-immigration movement’s puppeteer and hung it in his office.

Five years later, the SLPC went further, slapping the “hate organization” label on Tanton's publication and, for a time, relegating Tanton and his ideas to the far-right fringe.

The memory still gets McAlpin’s blood boiling. He said that 2002 copy of the SPLC magazine still hangs in Tanton’s office, but he also said the SPLC attacks on Tanton are “garbage.”

“The SPLC basically lists any organization that believes our immigration laws should be enforced as a hate organization,” McAlpin said. “We believe in a generous immigration policy; we just don’t believe it needs to be at the level it is today.”

 
A BIG SHIFT IN THE COUNTRY

Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project and author of the cover article that Tanton hung on his office wall, agrees that demographic changes made immigration a pivotal issue in the 2016 campaign.

She explained, “The country is going through a big shift, from our [current] majority white population to sometime in the 2040s when the white population will no longer be the majority.” She added that this reality caused an anti-immigrant surge that Trump adopted and indeed took to another level “as he barreled into the presidency.”

Beirich said this movement has been cooking for years and that it is Tanton’s creation, since his organizations pushed for strict immigration laws that make it easier for police to target Hispanics in states across the country and derailed immigration reform proposed by President George W. Bush.

“Tanton is the guy behind all of this. He conceived of it. He wrote up plans,” she said. “He really is an evil genius, or a genius at least, depending on where you sit on this issue.”

Beirich said that, in her mind, there’s no question that Tanton and McAlpin are racists. She said she doesn’t understand why they don’t just own it, except that it might make it harder for their ideas to win mainstream acceptance.

“I think if your political position is that this country should be run by whites, you are a white supremacist,” Beirich said. “Everything about this is about white power and keeping whites in control of this country and keeping non-whites out.”

 
A WILD VARIETY OF LOCAL VIEWS

Rev. Wayne Dziekan, a Grayling-based Catholic priest who works with the migrant community across northern Michigan, said he believes it is absolutely racist to seek to maintain a white majority in the country.

“That’s ridiculous. I mean, by that definition, you’re using skin color to identity what ought to be the norm of the country,” Dziekan said. “How can that not be racism?”

The defense that Tanton worked with people across races and treated them kindly doesn’t absolve his racism, Dziekan said.

“It’s like saying, ‘Well, I will be nice to anybody as long as they don’t have power.’ That’s basically what he’s saying,” Dziekan concluded.

Richard Wiles, a retired teacher and local historian, said most people around Petoskey, himself included, don’t know much about Tanton’s stance on immigration, but they appreciate him as a force for conservation and stopping sprawl around Petoskey since the 1970s.

Wiles considers Tanton to be an amazing and brilliant man.

“I think of him as a leader in local northern Michigan environmentalism — a consciousness raiser long before anyone thought about saving our streams, wetlands or shoreline,” he said. 

Tom Bailey, executive director of the Little Traverse Conservancy, notes that Tanton was one of the original seven founding members of the nonprofit, the first independent land conservancy in the state.

“There’s never been a litmus test to support land conservation through the Little Traverse Conservancy,” he said. “I’ve never asked people about their politics or their economics or anything else. It really doesn’t have anything to do with land conservation.”