Nativism

During the first decades of the 20th century, nativism— what historian John Higham defined as “an intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i. e., “un-American”) connections”—became a significant force in American culture. Often associated with opposition to immigration, nativism resulted from fears that the core cultural, social, and racial elements that composed the American national character were under attack. Such fears were nothing new in American history, but a number of factors combined to fuel several virulent outbreaks of nativist sentiment. More immigrants were coming to the United States than ever before. Six million arrived during the years from 1900 to 1910 alone, and more were coming from southeastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. These new immigrants were perceived as being more culturally and racially different from “native-born” Americans than earlier groups from northern and western Europe. As the United States experienced the economic and social turmoil that accompanied rapid industrial expansion, the foreign-born frequently were blamed for the problems facing the country. They also were perceived as a source of dangerous “radical” sentiments that led to further strikes and labor unrest. Fears of immigrants increased again during World War I, when these potentially disloyal Americans were urged to prove that they were “100 percent” Americans rather than hyphenated German-Americans or Irish-Americans.

Nativists’ fears of the “foreign” elements within the United States manifested in a number of ways. Some sought to encourage immigrants to “Americanize” themselves as quickly as possible once in the United States, abandoning their old language and customs for American ones. Although some social scientists, such as Horace Kal-len, argued that it was wrong to force immigrants to abandon their culture, Americanization programs achieved a wide range of acceptance in the United States at this time. These attempts to create a homogeneous American culture and impose it on immigrants took place in all areas of life, including efforts to insure English-only instruction in public schools, settlement houses that sought to teach immigrant women English and American customs, and workplace education programs that glorified the “melting pot” and “100 percent Americanism.” Nativist organizations formed to push for programs such as these and to try to enforce conformity among the immigrant population, including the revived Ku Klux Klan, which engaged in anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-African American activities during these years.

Not all nativists believed that immigrants could be fully “Americanized.” They were particularly suspicious of immigrants from southeastern Europe and Asia. Many of the southeastern European immigrants belonged to the Catholic Church or practiced Judaism, religions that Protestant nativists had long distrusted and feared. Many working-class activists involved in labor protests were also immigrants from that part of the world. Particularly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, immigrants from eastern Europe were perceived as a source of radical and “unAmerican” ideas. Finally, both southeastern Europeans and Asians were seen as racially different from the Anglo-Saxon “race” from which the majority white population supposedly was descended. This had been true of Asians since the mid-19th century, but increasingly, southeastern Europeans also were seen as biologically different and thus impossible to assimilate.

The nativist response was to press for laws restricting immigration, particularly from those parts of the world. Their earliest successes came in barring Asian immigrants. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act greatly restricted the ability of Chinese immigrants to gain access to the United States. In 1907, Japanese immigration was largely barred when the Japanese government agreed not to allow its citizens to move to the United States in the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which was extended further by the provision for an Asiatic Barred Zone in the Expatriation Act of 1907. Asians already in the United States found that they were ineligible for citizenship and faced segregation and organized discrimination in many areas of life, such as the movement to prevent Japanese-Americans from owning farmland in California.

Other laws targeted immigrants more generally. The Expatriation Act revoked the citizenship of any American woman who married a foreign man, exhibiting both a desire to discourage immigration and also to prevent American women from falling into the hands of un-American men. The idea of accepting only those immigrants who met certain standards for health and education became increasingly popular with nativists, and the Immigration Act of 1917 instituted both literacy tests and health standards for immigration. World War I served as the context for further revision of the immigration laws as nativists played on fears of foreign-born radicals subverting the war effort. Nativ-ist sentiment, combined with a concerted effort to silence domestic opposition to American participation in the war, fueled both the Red Scare of 1919-20 and the wave of deportations that followed it.

Attempts to bar undesirable immigration peaked in the early 1920s, as both immigration and labor unrest increased again in the wake of World War I. The Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924 were aimed specifically at reducing the number of “racially different” immigrants arriving. These laws assigned each country an immigration quota with the result that the old immigrants from northwestern Europe received larger quotas than the new immigrants from southeastern Europe and Asia. These laws effectively ended immigration from areas outside of northwestern Europe and the Americas, which were exempted.

As the numbers of immigrants arriving in the United States dropped dramatically, nativist sentiment began to decline. It was harder to argue that there was an organized foreign threat to the American national character in the absence of large numbers of foreigners. However, the immigration laws created at this time remained the basis for American immigration policy until they were revised in the 1965 Immigration Act during the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

See also Anarchist Immigration Act; race and racial conflict.

Further reading: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Dale T. Knobel, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).

—Kristen Anderson