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By Root 1004 0

of newcomers who had already arrived. The massive influx of Europe's “poorest and least fortunate”—almost a million Italians, Poles, Russians, Finns, Jews, Germans, Czechs, and Hungarians annually between 1900 and 1914—had created enormous social strains in America.20 The relatively closed-door interwar years provided a respite, allowing these immigrant communities to be absorbed and assimilated. This was a lucky thing, because so many of the sons of these new Americans would be called on to fight and die in the war that relaunched America, this time irrevocably, onto the world stage.

If World War I left the great European powers considerably weakened, World War II dealt the decisive blow. The world that emerged in 1945 was no longer Europe-centered. When the carnage and rubble were cleared, the United States stood as a world superpower, with the shattered nations of Europe dependent on its might and wealth.

Horrific in so many ways, the war triggered an unprecedented economic boom in the United States. Shaking off the Great Depression, U.S. industry between 1940 and 1944 exploded, expanding at a higher rate than ever before or since. By the war's end, the United States was the world's greatest exporter of goods and accounted for more than half of the world's total manufacturing output. It had gold reserves of $20 billion (roughly two-thirds of the world's total) and boasted a higher standard of living and per capita productivity than any other country. Under the Marshall Plan, the United States provided Europe with $13 billion, helping to get the ravaged economies of West Germany, Italy, and France back on their feet.

At the same time, the United States became the preeminent military power of the Western world. By the war's end, America had mobilized an astonishing 12.5 million service personnel. Its naval forces, with 1,200 warships and a devastating submarine fleet, had replaced the British Royal Navy as the world's most powerful. Its bombers commanded the air, with a thousand long-range B-29s that had obliterated Japanese cities. Most fatefully, the United States alone had the atomic bomb, which had turned Nagasaki and Hiroshima into infernos unlike anything the world had ever seen.

Tolerance played a critical role in every dimension of the United States’ rise to superpower status. Again, the sheer manpower advantage possessed by the United States resulted directly from the country's open immigration policies before 1920. In 1816, America's population was just 8.5 million, compared to Russia's 51.2 million. By 1950, the United States’ population was more than 150 million, while Russia's was around 109 million. Even more crucially, immigrants were also directly responsible for the revolutionary technological breakthroughs that catapulted the United States to military preeminence.21

In 1930s Europe, Nazi intolerance caused the loss of incalculable scientific talent. The list of brilliant physicists and mathematicians who fled Hitler is astounding, including Edward Teller, known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb;” the aeronautical genius Theodore von Karman; John von Neumann, a child prodigy and the cocreator of game theory; Lise Meitner, after whom Element 109, meitnerium, is named; Leo Szilard, conceiver of the nuclear chain reaction; Enrico Fermi, builder of the first experimental nuclear reactor; the Nobel Prize-winning physicists Hans Bethe and Eugene Wigner; Niels Bohr; and of course Albert Einstein. With the exception of Meitner and Bohr, every one of these scientists emigrated to the United States.

The immigration to the United States of these refugee scientists, most of whom were Jewish, represented the single greatest “influx of ability of which there is any record.” Up until the 1930s, Germany and Hungary were home to some of the world's leading physicists. Practically overnight, their departure turned America into “the world's dominant force in pure science.” Einstein, whose property was confiscated by the Nazis in 1933, explained that he would “only live in a land where there reigns political freedom,