Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland” who had “neither skill nor energy nor an initiative of quick intelligence” were coming in such huge numbers “as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”6 Complementing the image of Europe disgorging huge unwanted populations was the picture of an American gate that was open and unguarded. “Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,” warned Thomas Bailey Aldrich in a poem in the Atlantic Monthly in 1892, “and through them presses a wild, a motley throng” who “bring with them unknown gods and rites.” Appealing to the American goddess of liberty, he concluded, “O! Liberty! White Goddess! … Lift the downtrodden, but with the hand of steel / Stay those who to thy sacred portals come / To waste thy gifts of freedom.”7
The fears expressed by Wilson and Aldrich were echoed in editorial pages, labor union halls, and political rallies, and in pseudoscientific thinking about race and culture. A former dean of the Lawrence College of Science at Harvard, Nathaniel Shaler, explained patiently in a book about Jews, blacks, and other outsiders that Jews could “never become effectively reconciled with any Christian society.”8 Jews, said Shaler, will never make good Americans because “they are to our race a very unpleasant people … socially impossible.”9
Shaler did not call for a complete ban on immigration of Jews, only of “the degraded” among them, along with “such composite folk as the southern Italians and those from the lower Danube and the Balkan Peninsula.”10 Despite such commonly held attitudes, the tremendous growth of the American economy sustained the demand for cheap immigrant labor. Industrial interests, in particular, resisted restrictionist proposals, and in 1907 the National Association of Manufacturers called for a loosening of the existing minor controls on immigration. Immigrant-ethnic groups, already adapted to the American pattern of voluntary ethnic pluralism, mobilized against immigration restriction in 1907. The Ancient Order of the Hibernians, for example, signed an agreement with the largest ethnic organization in the nation, the German-American Alliance (more than a million and a half members) to oppose all immigration restriction.11 In 1907, the year of greatest immigration to the U.S., more immigrants were admitted lawfully (1,385,459) than in any single year before or since, the third year in a row in which more than a million immigrants had arrived. The sheer volume of immigration (the previous decade, 1891–1900, saw an annual average of 370,000) gave impetus to restriction.
The Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894 by five Boston-born-and-bred graduates of Harvard College who believed with utmost certainty that they were defending Americanism, brought back the Massachusetts idea once again. Americans had built a glorious city on the hill, now a representative self-governing republic. The descendants of those who had been there at the creation felt obliged to protect it from contamination. Grossly exaggerating the differences between the newcomers and older groups of immigrants, one professor of education at Stanford University saw the eastern and southern Europeans as “lacking in self reliance and initiative, and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order and government.” Their arrival, he asserted, had already tended “to corrupt our civic life.”12
The plea for immigration restriction met strong political opposition—from employers wanting more muscle, ethnics wanting more brothers and sisters, and a growing band of social workers and politicians wanting more clients. Minor restrictions and reforms led to the banning of prostitutes and convicts (1875), of lunatics and those likely to become public charges (1882), and of contract laborers (1885). When Congress, for the first time, placed all immigration under federal authority, steamship companies were obliged to carry back to Europe those passengers rejected by U.S. inspectors (1891). The 1891 act also provided for deporting aliens already in the U.S., stipulating that any alien who became a public charge “from causes existing prior to his landing” could be expelled within a year after arrival.
The principal legislative objective of the Immigration Restriction League was a literacy test, first proposed in 1887, requiring all male adult applicants for immigration to read and write their own language. The standoff between the pro- and anti-immigration forces was reflected in the schizophrenic immigration bill of 1907, which gave the secretary of commerce the power to admit immigrants in borderline cases if he deemed them needed for the work force, and which required immigrants to pay a head tax of four dollars, twice the amount prescribed before. The most important part of the legislation was the creation of an immigration commission, a tripartite body consisting of three U.S. senators, three members of the House of Representatives, and three appointed by the president, Theodore Roosevelt. Reporting three years later on December 5, 1910, the commission recommended, with only one dissent, a two-decades-old proposal of a reading and writing test “as the most feasible single method of restricting undesirable immigration,” a proposal that had passed the Congress in 1897 only to be vetoed by President Cleveland.13
With so many conflicting pressures, the political parties straddled the issue of immigration in the early 1900s. Both Republican and Democratic party platforms promised a continuation of the exclusion of Chinese labor but were uncertain about European immigration until 1912, when the Republicans pledged “the enactment of appropriate laws to give relief from the constantly growing evil of induced or undesirable immigration, which is inimical to the progress and welfare of the people of the United States.”14 The Democrats, increasingly dependent on ethnic-immigrant votes, did not join the growing call for restriction, though in their 1916 platform they took a swipe at German, Irish, and other ethnic anti-preparedness groups when they condemned “combinations of individuals in this country, of whatever nationality or descent, who agree and conspire together for the purpose of embarrassing or weakening our government or of improperly influencing or coercing our public representatives in dealing or negotiating with any foreign power.”15
As the United States reacted to the war among the European powers, a growing number of Americans became concerned about hyphenates whose affection for the old countries might make them something less than 100 percent loyal. The Prohibition party in 1916 said in classic civic culture terms, “We stand for Americanism. We believe this country was created for a great mission among the nations of the earth. We rejoice in the fact that it has offered asylum to the oppressed of other lands.… But he who loves another land more than this is not fit for citizenship here.”16 Growing mistrust of immigrants led in 1917 to the passage of the literacy test over Wilson’s veto.17 (Wilson, now a Democratic president dependent upon the political support of most of the ethnics, had changed his stance since 1901.)
With the entry of the U.S. into the First World War, immigration was drastically diminished, and restriction was no longer an immediate issue. The war unleashed a frenzy of antiforeign feeling, much of it directed against the Germans, who until that time had maintained a large network of German-language clubs, newspapers, and churches in the U.S. All “foreign” religions and cultures were attacked, especially by a revived Ku Klux Klan and particularly in the South, the Midwest, and the Far West, where many small-town and rural Protestant Americans saw the Klan as defending American purity against what was seen as the growing power of big-city Catholics and Jews. Examples of hysteria were legion. Tom Watson of Georgia campaigned successfully for a seat in the U.S. Senate, claiming that Wilson had become a tool of the Pope. The governor of Florida warned that the Pope planned to invade the Sunshine State and to transfer the Vatican there. Several itinerant preachers for the Klan warned against a Roman plot to destroy the only true Christian nation, and the Grand Dragon of the Klan in Oregon told its members that it must work actively to keep the country from a takeover by immigrants.18
The literacy test did not curb the large flow of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and in 1921 Congress, following another recommendation of the Immigration Commission (1907-1910), passed into law a provisional measure for strict quotas on each European nation. The act established an annual ceiling of 355,000 on European immigration and limited the number of immigrants of each nationality annually to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born persons of that nationality resident in the U.S. at the time of the 1910 census. This first quota act was extended for two years, but in 1924 came passage of what was heralded as a permanent solution to immigration problems, the Johnson-Reed Act, more commonly known as the National Origins Act. It