On Strangers in the Land

An oldie but a goodie, probably the classic on xenophobia and nativism in the United States.

Higham puts forth a dichotomy between nativism and democracy that shifts like a pendulum between the decades just before the American Civil War to the passing of the first immigration restriction laws in 1924. In doing so, he argues that nativism comes at times with increased national consciousness (and nationalism), such as the schisms between the Whigs and Democrats that ended the second party system. The Civil War brought nativists (who were predominantly from the north) and immigrants together, effectively quashing the nativism of the 1850s. Then, nativism was on the decline thanks to a new sense of national “togetherness” in the north, only to spiral downwards again after 1893, with the coming of the Depression. Of course, this ignores proceedings in the west, where settlers were increasingly nativistic, going so far as to push for Chinese exclusion.

With the lessening of the depression in 1897-98, nativism weakened as well, although it stayed powerful in the academic offices of racist figures like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. There was a period of decreasing nativism (although fingers were frequently pointed at Jews and Italians for causing problems in the United States), until the First World War, when immigrants came under an intensified magnifying glass, effectively destroying German America (they were forced to assimilate if they wanted to avoid incarceration or deportation). This was exacerbated by the immediate aftermath of the war, when immigrants were scapegoated for labor unrest and pro-Soviet sentiment, effectively launching the First Red Scare. Yet, at the same time, many industrial capitalists argued that immigrants had little to do with the unrest, and most American Bolshevism was dyed red, white, and blue. The KKK’s re-emergence also put immigrants under increasing scrutiny, culminating in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act.

One interesting conceptual direction that Higham takes is to divide nativism into different categories, with different categories having different prominence at different times, sometimes overlapping. These three categories are anti-Catholic nativism (especially towards Irish and Italians), anti-radical nativism (often pointed towards Italians, eastern Europeans, and Jews), and racial nativism (much like anti-radical nativism, although including the Irish in earlier years). He comes back to these many times throughout the text, which is ultimately an engaging and thoughtful piece of work.