STATISTICAL FACTS

Between 1820 and 1860 some 5 million immigrants came to the United States. Most of these were Irish, German and Scandanavian. The Germans in particular settled in the Midwest, many as farmers, millers and brewers. By 1860, more than 60% of the population of St. Louis was Irish and German. Half of the population of New York City, Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Detroit was Irish and German (see Enduring Vision, p. 401). Between 1860 and 1900, some 13.5 million immigrants arrived. From 1900 to 1930 another 19 million came. In 1905, 1906, 1907, 1910, 1913 and 1914, in each of those six years, more than 1 million people immigrated to the United States.

In 1914 the volume of immigration was temporarily shut off until 1919 because of World War I, and the European countries did not want potential soldiers and workers leaving. In 1914, there were 1,218,480 immigrants. In 1915 the number fell to 326,700. By 1918 the number had fallen as low as 110,618.

6. THE "OLD IMMIGRATION" VERSUS THE "NEW IMMIGRATION"

After about 1880 there was a shift in the source of the immigration. The immigrants before 1880 were coming mostly from northern Europe, from Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. These came to be called the old-stock immigrants. However by 1880 the flow from these countries began to decline, although there was always some immigration from this source. But the volume from Southern and Eastern Europe increased dramatically after 1880, and this were called the new immigration or the new stock immigrants. They were from Italy, Bohemia (Czech Republic), Slovakia, Serbia. Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Russia. This also included the Polish and Russian Jews. It included the Catholic Italians and Poles, and many Eastern Orthodox people.

7. THE IRISH IMMIGRATION

Between 1815 and 1844 somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million Irish people came to the United States (Enduring Vision, p. 403). But beginning about 1845 the Great Potato Famine swept Ireland. It was caused by a blight or disease that destroyed the potatoes. Of course the potato was a staple in the diet of the Irish peasantry and yeomen, who rented land from the landowners. The blight lasted until the 1850s. Historians suggest that 1 million Irish people died of starvation during the Famine. Entire families and whole villages perished. There were mass burials of the victims. As a consequence, between 1845 and 1855 1.8 million Irish people immigrated to the U.S. They were virtually forced to choose between starvation and immigration. This was not choice but cruel necessity. The deaths from the famine, and outmigration, together, reduced the population of Ireland in the 1850s by one-third. The Irish in the 1840s and 1850s became a critical segment of the working class in the Northeast, especially in the textile mills, digging canals, as dockworkers and teamsters. Also, whereas most of the German immigrants were men, half of the Irish immigrants were women. Oscar Handlin has written about the ordeal of the Irish in Boston's Immigrants. There was tremendous prejudice against the Irish. Stores posted signs that said "No dogs or Irish allowed." Advertisements for jobs said "No Irish need apply." The English were Protestants. The Irish were Catholics. The Irish were the first sizeable Catholic population to immigrate to the U.S. By the late 1860s, however, the Irish exerted political influence because of their numbers. By 1867 one Patrick Collins was elected to the Mass. state legislature from a ward in Boston. By 1876 Jim O'Donovan was an Irish American alderman in the city of Boston, and Hugh O'Brien became the first Irish American mayor of Boston soon thereafter.

There was, as I said, tremendous religious bigotry toward the Catholics. In 1844, in Philadelphia, there was a famous riot that left 18 people dead, 70 wounded, and two Catholic churches and a convent and several blocks of homes burned to the ground. (GO TO ARTICLE). St. Michael's church and St. Augustine's church, next to the Ben Franklin Bridge, were burned. St. Philip Neri church was saved. The so-called Kensington riot grew out of a controversy about reading the Protestant King James Bible in the public schools.

The Germans were tolerable to the Anglo-Saxons because they were northern Europeans and usually Protestant, though some WASPs disliked the fact that the germans drank so much beer and sometimes did not observe the sabbath. The Scandanavians settled extensively in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but were acceptable to the WASPs because they were farmers and they were Protestants (Lutherans).

9. "THE IMMIGRANT THREAT"

The immigrants came looking for jobs and economic opportunity. Most came to escape the poverty and lack of economic opportunity back home. Some just wanted enough money to buy some land back home. Employers generally welcomed the immigrants. But the WASP working class was ambivalent about immigrants. The working class saw these people as rivals and competitors who were taking their jobs. This gave rise to the perception of the immigrant threat: the belief that immigrants were taking jobs from Americans, and working for low wages and as strike-breakers. There was also growing concern that the immigrants were not assimilating. "If they were in America they should speak English," the nativists said. Why did they still speak these other languages and have those German and Italian and Russian-language newspapers? Why hadn't they converted to Protestantism, if they were Catholics, or to Christianity, if they were Jews?

9. GROWING DEMAND FOR IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION

The concern that immigrants threatened to jobs of native Americans, and that the immigrants were not assimilating, gave rise to the demand for immigration restriction. Two of the leading voices for immigration restriction were Henry Bowers, who founded the American protective Assoc. in the 1890s in the Midwest, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. Lodge founded the immigration Restriction League in 1892, and his power base was Massachusetts. Lodge, in fact, became the senator from Mass.

In 1897 Congress passed a bill for a literacy test for immigrants, and President Cleveland vetoed it. In 1913 Congress again passed the literacy test, and President Taft vetoed it. In 1915 Congress passed another literacy test, and President Wilson vetoed it. Again, in 1917, Congress passed a literacy test, and again, President Wilson vetoed it. But this time Congress overrode his veto. But the literacy test did not keep out enough people.

Between June 1920 and June 1921 800,000 immigrants entered the United Sattes. 65% were from Southern and Eastern Europe. To the advocates of immigration restriction, more drastic measures were needed. Congress now turned to actual numerical quotas, and an annual cap on the number of immigrants. And in 1924 Congress would restrict immigration even further.

II. THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM

One of the crucial factors that stimulated the effort to shut the doors of immigration was the rise of what is called pseudo-scientific racism. The spread of these ideas in America in the 1900s-- and especially the 19 Teens and 1920s-- is what turned the tide against immigration in 1921 and 1924.

1. GOBINEAU

The father of these ideas is Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. He wrote his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in 1855. He invented the Aryan myth, that an ancient people called the Aryans were responsible for all civilization in the world. The Aryans had established the civilization of Rome, Greece, Persia, China, Egypt, India-- even the Incas of Peru and the Aztec and Maya of Mexico and Central America. Gobineau argues that the Anglo-Saxons, Germans and the ancient Gauls of France were descended from the Aryans.
 

A) THE RACES ARE UNEQUAL

Gobineau believed there was a white race, a yellow race and a black race, and then various intermixtures between them. He insisted that the races were unequal, and the white race was superior. On p. 113 at the top he says that "the human groups to which the European nations and their descendants belong are the most beautiful." At the bottom of p. 113 he again asserts "I have no hesitation in regarding the white race as superior to all others in beauty...Thus the human groups are unequal in beauty; and this inequality is rational, logical, permanent and indestructible."

In the middle of the same page he says "Those who are most akin to us come nearest to beauty; such as the degenerate Aryan stocks of India and Persia, and those Semitic peoples who are least infected by contact with the black race."
 
 

On p. 134 he assures us that the races are unequal in intelligence as well. On p. 133 Gobineau declares "The savage races of today have always been savage, and they will continue to be so, until the day they disappear."

He contends "the civilizations that proceed from two completely foreign races can only touch on the surface. They never coalesce, and the one will always exclude the other (p. 133). He adds that there is an irreconcilable antagonism between the different races and cultures, and an innate repulsion." Likewise (p. 134) the European cannot hope to civilize the Negro.

B) THE WHITE RACE IS SUPERIOR

On p. 139 he says "The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength." On p. 137 he adds "the immense superiority of the white peoples in the whole field of the intellect is balanced by an inferiority of their sensations. In the world of the senses, the white man is far less gifted than the others, and so is less tempted and less absorbed by considerations of the body." And on p. 140 he asserts that "all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help."
 
 
 
 

C) RACE MIXTURE PRODUCES DEGENERATION

But Gobineau goes a step further even than this proclamation of white racial superiority. He goes on to assert that race mixture is bad, is dangerous, and produces degeneration. Race mixture produces a primitive throwback or regression (caveman). Race mixture leads to the destruction of the superior race. (He warns that in the case of intermixture in the tertiary and quarternary groups, the resulting mixture has great difficulty becoming stable. The original qualities are already weakened, and tend to disappear in confusion (p. 137). The result of indefinite intermixture would be something incomplete and barbarous (p. 138).
 
 

Gobineau warned that a society is great and brilliant only in so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it (p. 140-141). This is the warning to maintain race purity. He admits that intermixture may raise up the inferior races (p. 140), but at the great cost of degeneration. He said, "Unfortunately, the great have been lowered by the same process; and this is an evil that nothing can balance or repair" p. 139).

In Europe these themes would be echoed in Adolf Hitler, and in fact Hitler built upon the ideas of Gobineau.

Gobineau's ideas also spread to the United States.
 
 

III. A FORM OF RACISM:THEORIES OF THE ANGLO-SAXON AND NORDIC RACE

In America intellectuals began to propound Anglo-Saxonism or a Nordic race theory.

Before World War I the Anglo-Saxonists believed that Anglo-Saxons possessed a special gift for orderly self-government. They and the Teutonic peoples of Germany and northern Europe supposedly had a special gift for liberty. In contrast, other European peoples were unruly and prone either to despotism or to subjection to despotism. The other Europeans were either despotic tyrants, like the Russians, or the "beaten members of beaten races," like the Poles, Checks, Slovaks and Hungarians. Writers at the turn of the century were commenting upon anarchy as a blood disease (Higham, p. 138) and "liberty-loving Anglo-Saxons beset by socialistic foreigners" (Higham, p. 139)

In 1890 James Hosmer wrote a constitutional history of the Anglo-Saxon race, and wrote of immigration diluting Anglo-Saxon blood (Higham, p. 139).

A few years earlier Reverend Theodore Munger likewise portrayed the problem of foreign radicalism and the violence of Haymarket as a physiological problem (Higham, p. 138). Munger explained that immigration must be restricted so that the old stock would remain strong and not degenerate through intermixture with lesser strains (Higham, p. 138). Here Munger was invoking Gobineau's concept of race mixture producing degeneration, but he was applying it to other European immigrant groups. Munger is referring to the Anglo-Saxon race beset by other Europeans, not race-mixture between black and white.

Nathaniel Shaler, dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, held that American democracy rested upon the foundation of English racial heritage (Higham, p. 141). This reflected the view that culture was racial or resulted from biology. Shaler believed the immigrants, as peasants, lacked the English or Anglo-Saxon inborn instinct for freedom (Higham, p. 141). In 1894, however, Shaler discovered a distinction between the older immigrants from northern Europe and the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He concluded that these people were constitutionally or biologically or innately incapable of appreciating Anglo-Saxon liberty and being assimilated. This spread the image of the new immigrants as unassimilable aliens. No matter what you did with them, their racial background prohibited them from becoming like the Anglo-Saxons. This now emerged as an explanation for the seeming failure of the new immigrants to assimilate.
 
 
 
 

Francis Walker, president of MIT, added a new idea to Anglo-Saxonism in 1891 ("The Tide of Economic Thought" Publications of the American Economic Assoc.). He began with Darwin's idea of the survival of the fittest and the struggle for survival. He said that the fittest Europeans made it in Europe and stayed there. Now, he said, the Europeans who were least fit, and couldn't make it in Europe, were coming to America. He described them as "beaten men from beaten races." Further, he developed the birth rate hypothesis. He noted a decline in the birth rate of native born Americans relative to immigrants. He suggested that the immigrants lowered the standard of living by working for cheaper wages. As the native-born Americans had to compete with the immigrants, they seemingly preferred to reduce the size of their families rather than to endure a lower standard of living with many children. This was a choice of quality over quantity. But in having fewer children the immigrants would swamp the Anglo-Saxons (Higham, p. 142-143). .

Other people took this idea and ran with it. Now the immigrants began to be portrayed as a positive threat to the well-being of the Anglo-Saxons. Edward Ross (Higham, p. 147) suggested in 1901 that if immigration continued unabated, and the Anglo-Saxons produced fewer children while the immigrants poured in and had more children, the Anglo-Saxons would be committing race suicide. In time the immigrants would out-produce the Anglo-Saxons. This was simplified and popularized by Theodore Roosevelt, who warned American women against abortion because it was "race suicide." From 1905-1909 general magazines published more than 35 articles on the topic of the declining birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons and race suicide.

In the 1900s Americans learned of Mendel's discoveries about genetics. Thus reinforced the idea that traits are inherited and cannot be changed.

In 1899 William Ripley published The Races of Europe (Higham, p. 154). Ripley was an economist who taught at MIT and Columbia. He wrote that in Western Europe there were three races. Each could be distinguished by its physical characteristics. First, there was the northern race, which he called Teutonic. It was tall, blond and long-headed. Second, there was the Alpine race. It lived in a central zone in the region of Austria and the Alps. They were stocky and round-headed. Third, there was the southern or Mediterranean race. It was slender, dark and long-headed. Italians and Spaniards were of this southern or Mediterranean race. Of course to the east lived the Slavs. The importance of this tripartite analysis was that it divided the old Teutonic, northern Europeans from the Mediterranean southern Europeans. This conveniently divided the old stock immigrants from the new stock immigrants. Ripley also argued that when races mix, the combination may cause latent genes to be strengthened and there can be a throwback to more primitive types. This was called reversion. Thus, per Ripley, immigration and admixture threatened to damage the Anglo-Saxons through reversion. The problems and disorders in American society were the result of this reversion taking place.(Higham, p. 155).

The greatest publicist of the Anglo-Saxon race theories was Madison Grant, from an old New York family. In 1916 he published The Passing of the Great Race. He took up where Ripley had left off.. Grant believed that admixture in America was creating reversion, and producing a more ancient, lower type. Admixture produced a lowest common denominator and would drag the Anglo-Saxons down unless they awoke to the threat. Grant insisted that culture was racially determined. He said that the Alpines had always been a peasant people, and the cross between any one of the three European races and a Jew produces a Jew. He said that the Mediterraneans did have artistic and musical abilities, but the Nordic race of the north constituted the "white man par excellance." (Higham, p. 155-156). Grant used the term Nordic as Ripley had used Teutonic, following the example of the French scientist Joseph Deniker. Higham contends (p. 272) that it was Grant more than anyone else who in the Teens and Twenties taught Americans to think in terms of three European races, the Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean. And it was Grant who popularized the concept in America of a Nordic race, who taught Americans to identify themselves as Nordic, and taught them that any mixture of the Nordic with the others was "mongrelization." And the KKK took up his theories and it too adopted the term "mongrelization" to refer to race-mixing.

During World War I it became necessary to adjust the Teutonic and Nordic theory to separate the Anglo-Saxons from the Germans, since America was at war with none other than Teutonic, Nordic Germany. But Grant and the Anglo-saxonists were not to be deterred by inconvenient facts. In 1921 and 1923 Grant came out with new editions of his book. It sold 16,000 copies at that time, and was quite influential (Higham, p. 271). In 1916 Grant's book had not made much of a splash. But in the Twenties his ideas were reflected everywhere. His ideas were disseminated widely, although often the public did not realize he was the author of these views. Grant was a leading champion of the immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924.

Grant's chief disciple was Lothrop Stoddard. In 1920 he published the Rising Tide of Color. He warned that the yellow and brown races would overwhelm the white world. With Grant, he agreed that the Nordic race was ther salvation of the white race, and the immigration of so-called inferior white races would mongrelize the Nordics.

These authors urged the necessity of preserving the superiority of the old Anglo-Saxon stock over the foreigners, and their attitude was "America for the Americans." Of course, to them, the true Americans were the Anglo-Saxons.

Kenneth Roberts preached much the same line, warning in 1922 (Why Europe Leaves Home) and the years before that the continuing influx of Mediterranean and Alpine and Semitic immigrants would produce a hybrid race of useless people (Higham, p. 273). He wrote for the Saturday Evening Post.

Robert Yerkes, a distinguished scientist, was president of the American Psychological Assoc. During World War I he had assisted the Army in conducting IQ tests for soldiers. Yerkes concluded that northern Europeans scored almost as high as native-born whites, while the Latins and Slavs scored lower. Negroes also scored lower. To its credit, the Army was skeptical of the results and abandoned these tests as soon as the war ended. But about 1920 this data was presented as scientific proof of the intellectual inferiority of the southern and eastern Europeans (Higham, p. 275). In 1925 the College Entrance Examination Board began using a version of these tests, called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, to predict the performance of applicants to college.

Carl Brigham reinforced Yerkes' view in 1923 in his book entitled A Study of American Intelligence. He too proclaimed the intellectual superiority of the Nordic race to the Alpines, Mediterraneans and Negroes. (Higham, p. 276).

In the early twenties the Nordic race theory would reach the point of absurdity when Henry Fairfield Osborn tried to show that the Italian Christopher Columbus had actually been a Nordic.