Coming to America Pt. 3: 1880–1920 “New” Immigrants, New “Science”, and the Return of the KKK.
Ironically, in 1886 it is just as the Statue of Liberty is being erected as an iconic symbol of welcome to those “Tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” that the changing composition of immigrants begins to reignite nativist sentiments against the newly arriving immigrants. From 1850 to 1930, the Italian diaspora brings many immigrants from the southern region of Italy to the United States seeking a reprieve from extreme poverty. After 1880, over 2 million Jews immigrate from central and eastern Europe to America. Styled as distinct from prior immigrants, these “new” immigrants were predominately from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, which was a fact that made a huge difference at the time. Remember that prior immigrations waves had primarily been from Western and Northern European countries. The source countries of these new immigrants were seen as fundamentally different in religion, ethnicity, and cultural values , and Intellectuals of various disciplines from sociology to biology to history published treatises on these new immigrants’ cultural and racial inferiority.[1]
Well-practiced in urban life, education, and free-market capitalism, many Jewish immigrants swiftly prospered in American cities. Yet, the stereotype of Jews as rude, greedy, and secretive profiteers, wrecking the economy and conspiring to rule the world, flourished. Italian immigrants also faced significant persecution. Between 1890 and 1920, there were several documented lynchings of Italians, particularly in the South. In New Orleans, on March 14, 1891, eleven Italian-American immigrants were the victims of one of the largest mass lynchings in American history after a mob of 8,000 people led by New Orleans political and social elite broke into the Parish Prison. This incident brought America to the precipice of war with Italy. Yet, ironically, after this illegal breach of a government facility by the native populace, it’s the term mafia that is popularized in America, and the stereotype of Italians as violent mobsters or anarchists proliferates.
The Impact of the Haymarket Incident
Fear of the threat of immigrant violence featured prominently in public conversations about policy and contributed to the resurgence of nativism around the turn of the century. The political cartoons of the era reflect the proliferating concern that southern and eastern European immigration was bringing Bolshevism, anarchism, and other undesirable ideologies.
For many natives, these concerns were confirmed or fueled by the Haymarket Bombing. On May 4th, 1886, the Haymarket Bombing was committed by eight anarchists, mostly German immigrants. They threw a bomb into the crowd at a peaceful labor strike protesting for an 8-hour workday in Haymarket Square in Chicago. The bombing killed multiple police and civilians. In the wake of this incident, xenophobic pockets of the American public have their worst fears about the threat of immigration confirmed. The public cries out about the danger of foreign radicals grow louder.
Simultaneously, business interests that had previously been amongst the biggest supporters of immigration because of the cheap labor supply began to grow increasingly nervous about the effect of European immigrants coming from countries with radical labor movements and promoting labor strikes in the states. As a result, the Republican party begins to push for more stringent immigration.
By the 1890s, the nativist sentiment is in full force, and some familiar arguments are being made. While many people fear that immigrants are eroding Anglo-Saxon culture and values. The Haymarket Bombing confirms fears for much of the public that immigrants are additionally a violent threat to American lives.
Contemporarily, the Haymarket Bombing is a critical moment to talk about when we analyze national security concerning immigration policy. Those who voice concerns about immigration and its risks to national security frequently get rebuffed and labeled “xenophobic” or “racist.” Yet, it’s evident that there is some level of risk associated with immigration. Thus, a more productive discourse instead of dismissing these concerns as irrational or invalid might focus on degrees of risk rather than a disingenuous or ideological insistence that the risk is nonexistent. From the 1880s to 1920, a substantial migratory movement occurs with over 23.5 million people immigrating in this era. Concurrently, anarchism, a political ideology that in some iterations promotes violence as a means to political reform, is sweeping through European countries, particularly Italy. The point of discussing the Haymarket Bombing is not to argue that the risk of admitting immigrants to the country was a small one during this period. That would require a more in-depth analysis. This incident does cast some aspersions; however, on the idea that the world is significantly more dangerous today than it used to be and that immigration should be stemmed as a result. Instead, I would contend that this era of extensive immigration demonstrates that national security and immigration questions are ones with which America has always contended. Still, even amidst fears and pushes for a more restrictive immigration policy during this time, the political barriers to entry remained reasonably aligned with those immortal words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. However, the ground was beginning to shift.
What Facilitated the Resurgence of Nativism?
Several other factors prompted the resurgence in public concern about immigration in the late 19th & early 20th centuries. Rapid expansion in cities began to create problems of overcrowding. The perception of corrupt political machines catering to immigrant voters to retain political control embittered many natives. Around the late 19th century, the Western frontier also begins to close. By the end of the 19th century, the West is effectively won as railroads and settlements stretch across the country. While exemplifying the American policy of Manifest Destiny and industriousness, this domestication of western land also marked that America was no longer a place of endless land expansion. Another commonly cited reason for the resurgence of vitriolic nativism was that newer immigrants were considered slower or less willing to assimilate. Chinese immigrants, in particular, exemplified this lack of assimilation for many. In a land comprised of primarily European immigrants, undoubtedly, the culture, language, and customs of these Eastern immigrants appeared radically different than anything encountered before. This “otherness” permeated attitudes towards virtually all the new immigrants of this period. While almost all the early American immigrants had been Northern or Western European Protestants (except the Catholic Irish), the new wave of immigrants brought a cultural and religious divergence from earlier immigrants with more notable migrations of Slavs, Mediterranean peoples, Jews, Catholics, and Greek orthodox.
The Emergence of “Scientific” Xenophobia
None of these concerns or accusations against the new immigrants were all that fresh. As long as there has been immigration in the modern world, it appears that there have always been natives concerned with foreign migrants eroding native prosperity, culture, and political power. However, a new propeller for nativist immigration policy does emerge around the late 19th century. As there are advances in science, these more contemporary theories and methods of scientific inquiry like Darwinian evolution, germ theory, and IQ testing become implemented in the service of nativist ideology and draconian social engineering projects helmed by intellectuals.
Maxine Sellers states:
Arguments that immigrants caused cultural or moral contamination were old; arguments that they caused racial contamination were new, a product of the scientific age. By the late 19th century, widespread acceptance of the germ theory had led to concern that immigrants were a menace to public health. Restrictionists warned Congress that importation of Chinese labor into California introduced “frightful and nameless [sic] diseases and contagions” such as “Asian” cholera, “Chinese” syphilis, and leprosy. Throughout the nation, foreign-born servants were suspected of infecting the households of the comfortable. Although the faults of earlier immigrant groups had been attributed to their environment and had thus been thought correctable, the new physical and social sciences emphasized the hereditary (and therefore immutable) nature of the same defects.
A prime example of this problematic scientism was Clifford Kirkpatrick, an American sociologist known for his pioneering work in “racial psychology.” He published a book in 1926 titled Immigration and Intelligence, where he claimed to have found definitive hereditary intelligence differences between different nationalities. He claimed, “the conclusion seems to be that in general the representatives of the newer immigration, especially the Latins [Italians], have less intelligence than the Americans or those of the older immigrant stock.”[3] And while we might be inclined to write Kirkpatrick off as a virulent racist, this would be reductive. In a 1925 essay entitled Selective Immigration: The New Mercantilism, Kirkpatrick disparages the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 due to it being advanced due to “…passionate stupidity and prejudice.”[4] In this essay, Kirkpatrick attempts to model a new approach to immigration on an old economic concept called mercantilism. His argument essentially is that there are apparent hereditary factors in an individual’s IQ. He states, “…there is good evidence that the great differences which exist between men, in physical traits, intelligence and temperament are in large part due to heredity.” [5] Since this is the case, Kirkpatrick proclaims that it is evident that the right immigration policy for a nation hoping to continue to advance their civilization is a selective one, a “new mercantilism.” This phrase “new mercantilism” refers to mercantilist economic theory, which purported that national wealth (accumulation of gold/other precious metals) was accrued through the maximization of exports and the minimization of imports. Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory throughout the 15th to 18th centuries before being ushered out by economists and philosophers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and David Ricardo. Kirkpatrick, however, is effectively arguing that this theory ought to be revived and applied to the American immigration process. Utilizing scientific inquiry and assessment, the United States should seek to attract high IQ immigrants and minimize the emigration of high IQ individuals while minimizing the immigrations of those with lower IQs.
While it may seem that Kirkpatrick is setting up a perfect foundation for the application of actively racist or ethnocentrist immigration policy, I believe it’s more nuanced than that. He dismisses the “Nordic Myth” propagated by his contemporary Madison Grant, a leading progressive, as unfounded and poorly done anthropology. Yet, he remains agnostic as to whether fundamental intellectual differences do exist between races stating,
In general in view of the possibility of unfair sampling and of influence of cultural factors of the tests scores, the superiority of the Nordic intelligence must be regarded as unproven. Still it would be rash to deny that mental as well as physical differences may exist between races and yet if an acceptable standard be established, further investigation may justify ranking as to superiority and inferiority along specifically defined lines. Certainly the importance of innate traits does not diminish with the collapse of the claim of Nordic superiority…
In talking about the impact of scientism, I chose Kirkpatrick, as opposed to a more extreme ethno-nationalist like Madison Grant, because I think he is the better representation of the intellectual zeitgeist of this era. In the early 20th century, historian Bill Ong Hing highlights that the discourse around immigrants and immigration policy shifts from being founded on the racial hierarchy to being based on sociological and economic theories and research.[6] Many of these theories or studies were concerned with measuring and analyzing various topics like the impact of “low-skilled” or “low-IQ” immigrants on economic opportunity, immigrants’ ability to assimilate, and whether there were objective, measurable differences between different ethnic groups.
Grant is definitively and unapologetically a Nordic supremacist and nationalist zealot. As a result, his work is critiqued by some of his contemporaries as being a shoddy façade for blatant prejudice and bigotry. In contrast, Kirkpatrick is emblematic of this transition occurring in social science research during this period. Though some of his peers critique his work in racial psychology as having some methodological flaws and unsubstantiated claims, he’s not a fringe figure. He goes on to have a long and successful career. He is a notable academic concerned with using “science” to design a better immigration policy and a better society. He actively critiques arguments, like those made by Madison Grant, as being built on prejudices or unsubstantiated myths rather than utilizing proper metrics and methods of scientific inquiry. And for this reason, his work helps us make a couple more nuanced points about our perspective on the past and the relationship between science and ideology.
There is a propensity in much of our historical analysis to take extreme positions to represent an entire society during a given period. Presumably, this belief is how people arrive at the conclusion that everyone born before 1980 was/is racist or sexist and full of vitriolic hatred. Yet, we can learn from studying the emergence of scientism around the turn of the century because much of the discriminatory products of past ages are not purely a function of conscious hatred or fear. As often as not, these pseudo-scientific papers were produced by people that were unaware of how much the ideology of their time had infiltrated their scientific endeavors. Modern people like to treat science as a purely objective method that discovers truths independent of our beliefs. This perspective ignores that science is conducted within society and by individuals who hold pre-established beliefs or biases. The scientific method may be purely objective. The people that utilize it are not. We like to say that data speaks for itself, but this is nonsense. Knowledge is only formed when data are interpreted. And our interpretations are the products of a theoretical paradigm or ideology that cannot be wholly severed from the context it exists in. A social-scientific endeavor that does not scrutinize its methods and approach interpreting its results with caution runs a significant risk of devolving into scientism. And as evidenced by Kirkpatrick and the 20th century, scientism easily masquerades as science, sometimes for quite a long time, and with the effect of drastically altering the realities of the people conducting the studies and the people being studied.
The KKK Rides Again…in the City Parade?
While social science in this period may have been transitioning from blatant prejudice to a more refined scientism of race and ethnicity, this was not universally the case. For many political and social movements, good, old-fashioned bigotry would more than suffice for their goals. One of the most interesting of these syndicates was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), an organization that we commonly identify as a domestic terrorist group that executed campaigns of violence and torture specifically targeting African-Americans in post-Civil War America. Intriguingly, there were multiple resuscitations of the terrorist establishment throughout American history. In 1916, William Simmons, an Atlanta preacher, restructured and reinvigorated what is considered by most scholars as the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan into a national force of nativist rage. Before this, the KKK had mainly been concentrated in the south, and its activity had declined significantly since the Post-Civil War reconstruction era. But Simmons changed all that. The “Invisible Empire,” as he called it, proliferated, spreading throughout the Midwest and other parts of the country where anti-immigrant sentiment and fears of northbound migration of African-Americans primed masses of concerned citizens. Accepting only white protestants, Simmons’ “Invisible Empire” grew from 5,000 to 3 million members by 1923.
One of the notable shifts in this second iteration of the KKK was the mission evolved from the simple protection and reassertion of white supremacy in a Southern social hierarchy to an explicit assignment of protecting the Anglo-Saxon, protestant national identity. During this time, Catholics, Jews, Italians, and alleged “Bolsheviks” became common targets of specified campaigns of Klan violence.
If you ever have the time to study the KKK in this era, I would highly recommend it because it’s fascinating. The KKK during this time was wildly popular and possessed far better marketing and mainstream appeal than its earlier iteration. It had successfully rebranded itself to many, not primarily as an organization of hate and violence, but instead, it appealed to preserving “the Anglo-American way of life.” Its platform of maintaining Anglo-American supremacy and moral conservatism was attractive to many middle-class individuals concerned about the influx of foreigners. As a result, the KKK was a notable organization in many communities across the country. The KKK held community events like parades, picnics, and concerts in middle-class neighborhoods that were well attended. They sponsored baseball teams, beautiful baby contests, and father-son outings. They also had many women’s auxiliary clubs and clubs for children like the Junior Ku Klux Klan, the Tri-K Klub, and the Ku Klux Kiddies.
What Happens When Public Fears Drive Policy?
A unifying theme amongst native opposition to immigration during the 1880s-1920s, and one that remains prescient in the minds of many American citizens today, is a concern about foreign influence destabilizing and ultimately harming domestic life. Nativist concerns led to the first restrictive immigration policy in the United States, the Page Act of 1875, which choked off the immigration of Chinese women. The act technically banned the immigration of east Asian women accused of engaging in prostitution, but it was effectively applied to Asian women in general. Building on the Page Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of all Chinese laborers. This act remains the only law to have been implemented banning all members of a particular ethnicity or national group from immigrating to the United States. It would not be repealed until 1943.
Concerns about public health and social welfare influenced the passage of the Immigration Act of 1882, a separate piece of legislation barring the immigration of “idiots, lunatics, convicts, and those liable to become public charges.” It further established a mandatory health screening for all immigrants due to concerns about pandemic outbreaks. The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century saw many epidemics such as pox, scarlet fever, cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, the Spanish flu, and meningitis emerge and run rampant.
Labor interests also played a notable role in restricting the flow of immigration, which is unsurprising as unions have long been a force of populism and nativism in American politics due to concerns about immigrants driving down the wages of native labor. Even organized labor was not a monolith though. By 1909, 60 percent of men and 47 percent of women in the 20 largest industries in the United States were recent immigrants. As these recent immigrants joined and formed labor unions, they strengthened the domestic labor movement.[7]
Around this time, literacy laws get proposed to restrict the supply of low-wage labor coming into the country. In 1887, the economist Edward Bemis was one of the first people to suggest literacy tests as a requirement for immigration. Twenty-four years later, his proposals would continue to be supported by the Dillingham Commission’s report on immigration in 1911. Unions became the primary factions pushing for literacy tests being a requirement for immigration and requiring English language proficiency for citizenship since it remained in the interest of laborers to choke off the supply of labor.[8] The lobbying would succeed, and language proficiency became required for naturalization in 1906, with the requirement for immigrants to be literate in their native language becoming a requirement for entry after Woodrow Wilson’s veto was overridden in 1917.
While up to this point the unions’ populism tended to be balanced by industry’s need for labor, towards the end of this period, business began joining the unions in calling for restrictions as labor became less of a pressing need and it became apparent that immigration was serving to multiply and bolster the power and influence of labor factions.
So what allowed this to be a period of open immigration despite all this fear and opposition? It was, primarily, the early demand of domestic business interests for laborers combined with the growing political influence of immigrant communities. Over the decades, as this market demand began to conflict with concerns about immigrants instigating labor strikes and fears of shadowy anarchist immigrants plotting America’s downfall, the tide began to turn. A new era of immigration policy was about to dawn.
[1] Seller, Maxine. Historical Perspectives on American Immigration Policy: Case Studies and Current Implications. P. 151
[2] Hing, Bill Ong. “Defining America Through Immigration Policy” Temple University Press. 2004. P.58–61
[3] Commins, W.D. “The Mental Ability of Nationality Groups.” Journal of Educational Psychology. 1927. P. 211–212
[4] Clifford Kirkpatrick. 1925. “Selective Immigration: The New Mercantilism.” The Journal of Social Forces 3 (3): p. 497
[5] Ibid, 498
[6] Hing, Bill Ong. “Defining America Through Immigration Policy” Temple University Press. 2004. P.58–61[6] Hing,B.O. Defining America Through Immigration Policy. 2004. p.77
[7] Hing, B. Defining America through Immigration Policy. P. 52–53
[8] Note the United States has never had an official language at the federal level.
