The Washington Post called for banning European immigrants after 1920 terrorist attack

History repeats itself? Following the terrorist attacks in Brussels Tuesday morning, Donald Trump called for the closure of U.S. borders "until we figure out what is going on."

"We have to be very, very careful who comes into our country," he said.

Trump isn't the first to suggest closing America's borders in the face of terrorism. Following the 1920 Wall Street bombing in New York — which killed 38 people and seriously wounded 143 — The Washington Post ran a vitriolic editorial claiming that the "alien scum from the cesspools and sewers of the Old World" were polluting "the clear spring of American democracy."

"The doors at Ellis Island stand wide open to fresh hordes of warped and half-crazed deserters from Europe. What folly is this which prompts so ill an appreciation of a great sociological fact?" the editorial reads.

.@washingtonpost editorial after 1920 Wall Street terrorist bomb, urging end of non-Northern European immigration pic.twitter.com/DgDu5UT4LJ

— Michael Clemens (@m_clem) March 22, 2016

It's a hair-raising reminder of how far we've come — or haven't.