Stephen Miller misses no opportunity to exult in racism and xenophobia. Friday’s Common Dreams headline gets right to the point regarding Miller’s most recent offense: “’Horrible Racist’ Stephen Miller Slammed for Using Classic TV Christmas Special to Bash Immigrants.”

Apparently Miller spent Christmas day watching a 1967 holiday special called “Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras” and, being the miserable misanthrope that he is, the show—featuring Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, two very famous children of first-generation Italian Americans—prompted him to wax nostalgic about a world in which America was Great and there was no mass immigration. Everything that Miller says or does deserves outrage, and his X post was no exception. One form the justified outrage has taken recently crossed my Facebook feed:

The Sinatra video that has gone viral is a clip from a 10-minute film short that premiered in November, 1945 called “The House I Live In.” It’s a powerful film, featuring a young and very charismatic Sinatra both speaking and singing against bigotry and for toleration and cultural pluralism.

The film begins with Sinatra, playing himself, in the studio recording a love song. He then takes a break, goes outside, and encounters a group of boys on an unnamed American city street who are very much modeled on Hollywood’s 1940s “Dead End Kids.” He finds them taunting a young, somewhat different-looking boy who is pretty clearly Jewish, and stops to interrupt the taunting and to engage them in conversation about the meaning of “America.”

When the boys inform him that they are bullying the (Jewish) boy because “we don’t like his religion,” Sinatra teases them: “You must be a bunch of those Nazi werewolves I’ve been reading about.” When one of the boys incredulously suggests he is “screwy” to think this, Sinatra replies: “Not me, I’m an American.” When the boys insist that they too are Americans, and one of them volunteers that his father had indeed been wounded in the war, Sinatra points out that the dad had probably needed a blood transfusion, and then points to the excluded boy: “Maybe his pop’s blood saved your dad’s life.”

Sinatra then delivers a monologue:

He then tells them a story about how, after Pearl Harbor, American airmen had inspired the entire country by bravely bombing a Japanese battleship: “They sank it, and every American threw his head back and felt much better. The pilot of that ship was named Colin Kelly, an American and a Presbyterian. And you know who dropped the bombs? Meyer Levin, an American and a Jew. You think maybe they should have called the bombing off because they had different religions?”

Sinatra then heads back to the recording studio. But before entering, he stops to sing for the boys the song he is recording inside, “The House I Live In.” Here are the lyrics:

Sinatra then smiles, returns to the studio, and the boys walk off together, inviting the Jewish kid to join them, while the music of “America the Beautiful” plays in the background.

The film is very powerful and uplifting. It is emblematic of the spirit of American liberalism in the immediate aftermath of WWII, a spirit perhaps symbolized by the stardom of Sinatra, the child of working-class Italian immigrants who grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. Critics of Miller, and of President Donald Trump, are right to invoke the film, and to evoke the idealism of Rooseveltian liberalism, as a reproach to MAGA xenophobia.

At the same time, there are at least three important ways that the film exemplifies the limits of Rooseveltian idealism and the depth of the forms of illiberalism repudiated in the very lyrics of “The House That I Live In”—forms of illiberalism with which we are still reckoning today.

The first relates to the political circumstances surrounding the song itself.........

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