By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
Throughout most of the 19th century, America was receptive and welcoming to immigrants. By 1900, more than a million people per year were coming into the United States. However, anti-immigrant sentiment began to rise in America in the first and second decade of the 20th century.
Radical Immigrants
One of the criticisms made of immigrants was that they were bringing in dangerous political ideas. For example, American anarchists were nearly all foreign-born Germans or Russians, and American Socialists also tended to be recent immigrants. Membership in the American Socialist Party was German and Russian and Finnish, so radicalism was one of the arguments made against immigrants.
Another was that many of them were Roman Catholics. There was a very long tradition of anti-Catholicism in American life; there was belief that it’s impossible for a person to be a good Catholic and a good American. The argument was that America was a republic and a democracy, but Catholicism was based on an absolute monarchy, with the pope in Rome as a king who demands the absolute obedience of his people, so one can’t be both.
American Catholics, the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, and the south Germans were all very eager to allay this criticism, but nevertheless it dogged Catholic immigrants continuously.
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The Idea of Eugenics
Other advocates of immigration restriction, or the nativists, said, the immigrants were ‘wretched refuse’, particularly after about 1900.
These were people who supported the idea of eugenics; that is, the idea that one could lend a hand to evolution by helping to generate a high-quality population by encouraging the reproduction of the most ‘fit’ (eugenicists, by that, meant usually the Anglo-Saxons) and by discouraging the reproduction of the ‘mentally inferior’ and excluding members of what they thought of as intellectually lesser groups, particularly southern Europeans.
The scientist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man, where he explores the history of this anti-immigrant sentiment, and the way in which early IQ tests were linked to attempts to establish statistically that Anglo-Saxons were intellectually superior to many of the immigrants.
Americans Smarter than Immigrants?
Gould shows that the early IQ tests were actually very culturally biased. Rather than testing actual intelligence, they were testing the knowledge that long-term Americans would have, and newcomers from Italy and Poland certainly would not have.
Nevertheless, IQ information, particularly the IQ tests that were given to all recruits at the time of the First World War, was one of the pieces of evidence that was used very effectively by immigration restriction advocates when legislation came before Congress in 1920 and 1921 to restrict immigrants.
Eventually laws, one passed in 1921 and another passed in 1924, made it far more difficult for immigrants to come from Europe unless they came from the Nordic countries; that is, England, Holland, North Germany, Denmark, or the Scandinavian countries.
Dilution of Ethnic Communities
The First World War made it very much more difficult for anybody to emigrate, so between 1914 and 1918, there was a lull. It picked up again briefly between 1918 and 1921, but then the legislation made it more difficult.
The result was that the ethnic communities, the ethnic enclaves in the cities, began to break up and become diluted. There were no more new generations coming in, so as one witnessed these communities between the 1920s and 1950s, their ethnic identification became progressively weaker, and their American identity became progressively stronger.
Until very often in the second and third generations, it’s no more than a vestigial interest, which is still commemorated in perhaps the family’s food habits and in its church-going practices, but is no more determinative of the kind of life the people live.
Assimilation: An Achievement for America?
America’s success in assimilating people from all over the world is one of the nation’s greatest achievements. It has made America different from many other parts of the world.
One of the things we have to be attentive to is the incredible success of the Americans bringing in people from all over the world, people who elsewhere had often been fiercely antagonistic but who, on American soil, were relatively far more harmonious. It’s certainly true that America’s got a history of racism and a history of ethnic antagonism, but has never had ethnic and racial civil wars in a way that is so dreadfully common in many other parts of the world.
Common Questions about Anti-immigrant Sentiment in America
There was a very long tradition of anti-Catholicism in American life; there was belief that it’s impossible for a person to be a good Catholic and a good American. The argument was that America’s a republic and a democracy, but Catholicism is based on an absolute monarchy, with the pope in Rome as a king who demands the absolute obedience of his people, so one can’t be both.
The idea of eugenics was that one could lend a hand to evolution by helping to generate a high-quality population by encouraging the reproduction of the most ‘fit’ and by discouraging the reproduction of the ‘mentally inferior’ and excluding members of what was thought of as intellectually lesser groups.
The scientist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man, where he explored the history of anti-immigrant sentiment, and the way in which early IQ tests were linked to attempts to establish statistically that Anglo-Saxons were intellectually superior to many of the immigrants. Gould showed that the early IQ tests were very culturally biased; rather than testing actual intelligence, they were testing the knowledge that long-term Americans would automatically have.
