Nativism

Prior to the Civil War the influx of large numbers of Roman Catholic immigrants, primarily from Ireland but also from Germany, aroused fears that produced an organized nativ-ist, or anti-immigrant, movement in the United States. Nativists argued that the newcomers (who tended to join the Democratic Party) corrupted politics by selling their votes and robbed native workers of their jobs by working for low wages, but at the core of this xenophobia was anti-Catholicism. The nativists organized the American Know-Nothing Party, which upon the demise of the Whig Party in 1854 showed surprising strength on the state level, but antislavery quickly eclipsed anti-Catholicism and the American Know-Nothing Party disappeared.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the pace of immigration quickened, and by the 1880s it had become more cosmopolitan. (Chinese and Japanese laborers, for example, were attracted to California.) Between 1880 and 1924 almost 27 million immigrants came to the United States, but unlike earlier arrivals, most of them were from southern and eastern Europe. This “new” immigration was accompanied by a revival of nativism that stressed the old fears: anti-Catholicism, widespread unemployment, and wage reductions. However, this wave of nativism latched on to a new, apparently scientific justification for xenophobia. Nativists such as Madison Grant and others popularized a pseudo-Darwinian belief that the new immigrants were mentally and physically inferior and would corrupt America’s superior northern European stock. Arguments were also made that the newcomers would promote radical or un-American ideas, were prone to crime and poverty, and posed a threat to traditional American customs and values.

Nativist groups such as the American Protective Association (APA) and the Immigration Restriction League (which advocated a literacy test for immigrants) sprang up throughout the United States. They used antiCatholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Asian rhetoric to promote a backlash against the newcomers. Later, in the 1920s, members of the revived Ku Klux Klan often resorted to violence and intimidation to dissuade immigrants from settling in certain communities. In that decade, nativists successfully called on the federal government to rethink its open-door immigration policies and adopt immigration restrictions that would limit the number of immigrants from each country allowed to enter the United States.

Further reading: Thomas J. Curran, Xenophobia and Immigration, 1820-1930 (Boston: Twayne, 1975); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955).

—Phillip Papas