Nativism in the 1920s

It is not necessary to go over in depth how nativist and xenophobic Trump and his supporters are. A simple Google search will provide ample evidence on how he launched his campaign by demonizing Mexican immigrants and bragging about how he would get Mexico to pay for a giant wall to keep them in. When that shtick got old he targeted Muslims, with a helpful assist from the ISIS attack in Paris, promising to keep them from entering the country. So we will turn to William Leuchtenburg for a description of nativism in the 1920s.

Despite prosperity, the United States in the postwar years felt deeply threatened from within. The American people suddenly had thrust upon them the responsibilities of war and the making of peace, and their contact with Europe and power politics was bitterly disillusioning. In a world of Bolshevik revolutions and Bela Kuns, of general strikes and Mussolini's march on Rome, there was danger that America, too, might be infected by the social diseases of the Old World. Yet the threat of foreign contagion was not as terrifying as the menace of change from within. In part the danger seemed to come from enclaves of the foreign-born, not yet adapted to American ways, in part from the rise of the metropolis, with values different from those of nineteenth-century America, in part from the new currents of moral relativism and cosmopolitanism. Not a little of the anxiety arose from the disturbing knowledge that Americans themselves no longer had their former confidence in democracy or religion. "They have," observed Andre Siegfried, "a vague uneasy fear of being overwhelmed from within, and of suddenly finding one day that they are no longer themselves." 

Political fundamentalism attempted to deny real divisions in the nation by coercing a sense of oneness. Celebration of the Constitution became a tribal rite; in the 1920s, Americans, as one English writer noted, were "a people who, of all the world, craved most for new things, yet were all but Chinese in their worship of their Constitution and their ancestors who devised it." Constitution-worship was a kind of magical nativism, a form of activity in which, as the anthropologist Ralph Linton writes, "The society's members feel that by behaving as the ancestors did they will, in some usually undefined way, help to recreate the total situation in which the ancestors lived." Efforts toward social change were condemned as un-American. "Individualism?" cried an American Legion commander in California. "Down with all Isms!" This resistance to change and this insistence on conformity intertwined with the desire of rural churchmen to turn back modernism in religion and compel morality by statute. In 1924, Protestant fundamentalists wove together both movements in a "Bible-Christ-and-Constitution Campaign,"while the Ku Klux Klan's warcry was "Back to the Constitution." 

Many felt hostile to anything foreign. Isolationism had its counterpart in a determination to curb immigration, to avoid alien contamination ad to preserve the old America ethnically before it was too late. In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, the drive for immigration restriction had foundered on presidential vetoes. Restrictionism could not overcome the industrialists' demand for cheap labor or, more important, America's confidence in its ability to absorb large numbers of foreign-born. World War I badly shook that confidence. The war revealed that the sympathies of millions of Americans were determined by their countries of origin, and the fight over the League of Nations reflected the animosities of Irish-Americans, German-Americans, and other "hyphenated Americans." In his defense of the Versailles Treaty, Wilson charged: "Hyphens are the knives that are being stuck into this document." By the end of the war years, many agreed with Walter Hines Page: "We Americans have got to ... hang our Irish agitators and shoot our hyphenates and bring up our children with reverence for English history and in the awe of English literature." 

The drive for immigration restriction after the war was based, to a far greater degree than before, on a pseudo-scientific racism. Men with little knowledge of either science or public affairs were accepted as experts on "race," although their writings revealed neither insight nor good judgment. In The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Madison Grant contended that race was the determinant of civilization and that only Aryans had built great cultures. "The man of the old stock," alleged Grant, "is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners, just as he is today being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals." Lothrop Stoddard in The Rising Tide of Color (1920) and Professor Edwin East of Harvard warned that white races were being engulfed by the more fertile colored races. Most influential of all were the widely read articles by Kenneth Roberts in the Saturday Evening Post. Roberts urged that the immigration laws be revised to admit fewer Polish Jews, who were "human parasites"; cautioned against Social Democrats, since "social democracy gives of a distinctly sour, bolshevistic odor"; and opposed unrestricted immigration, for it would inevitably produce "a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe."
In the first fifteen years of the century, an average of one million immigrants a year had entered the United States. Slowed to a trickle by the war, the stream of immigration became a swollen torrent after the armistace. From June, 1920, June, 1921, more than 800,000 persons poured into the country, 65 percent of them from southern and eastern Europe, and consuls in Europe reported that millions more were planning to leave. By February, 1921, Ellis Island was so jammed that immigration authorities  had to divert ships to Boston. Alarmed almost to the point of panic, Congress rushed through an emergency act to restrict immigration; it passed the House in a few hours without a record vote and was adopted by the Senate soon after by 78-1. 

Despite initial opposition, sentiment for a more lasting form of immigration restriction soon gained increasing strength. For a time, industrialists continued to set themselves against the movement. T. Coleman du Pont protested that critics of the immigrant were suffering from "sheer Red hysteria, nothing more;" while Judge Gary denounced the 1921 law as "one of the worst things that this country has ever done for itself economically." With the new prosperity of 1923 and increased mechanical efficiency, which reduced the need for mass labor, however, the chief obstacle to permanent immigration restriction was removed at the same time that industrialist, agitated by the Red Scare, grew increasingly nativist. So did unions, largely confined to skilled craftsmen, who for some time had wanted to limit new entrants into the labor market, thereby enhancing the market value of their members by reducing supply.
In 1924, Congress passed, over scant opposition, the National Origins Act, which drastically cut down the total of newcomers to be admitted each year and established quotas to be calculated on the basis of the proportion of descendants of each nationality resident in the United States at an earlier time. Under that proviso, the more "Nordic" lands of northern and western Europe got 85 percent of quotas. In addition, the law forbade all Oriental immigration--a gratuitous insult which was marked in Japan with a day of national mourning. "It is a sorry business," wrote Hughes, "and I am greatly depressed. It has undone the work of the Washington Conference and implanted the seeds of an antagonism which are sure to bear fruit in the future." 

The law, reflecting racist warnings about a threat to "Anglo-Saxon" stock, aimed at freezing the country ethnically by sharply restricting the "new" immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In the debate on the bill, Congressmen reviled the foreign-born of the great cities, particularly New York, to whom were attributed every evil of the day, "On the one side," asserted a Kansas congressman, "is beer, bolshevism[sic], unassimilating settlements and perhaps many flags--on the other side is constitutional government; one flag, stars and stripes." For three hundred years, English squires and cutthroats, French Huguenots, Spanish adventurers, pious subjects of German duchies, and, above all in recent years, peasants from Calabria to the Ukraine had come to American in search of gold, or land, or freedom, or something to which they could not put a name. Now it was over. One of the great folk movements in the history of man had come to an end.