After the Great War: Nativism

AFTER THE GREAT WAR: NATIVISM

Fear and Resentment

In the shaky peacetime economy that followed the Great War in Europe, Americans, especially organized labor, feared economic competition from immigrants, who willingly worked for low wages. White Protestants resented the flood of Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe into the United States. Prohibitionists condemned the drinking habits of most immigrants. Many Americans distrusted foreigners in general, perceiving them as stereotypical anarchists bent on importing communism and destroying Americans' freedom. Although the United States already restricted Asian immigration, it had always had an open-door policy in regard to the European immigrants. In the 1920s, Americans' anxieties about foreigners resulted in the first European-immigration laws, designed to keep potential troublemakers out of the country.

Immigration Restrictions

Congress readily accommodated constituents who clamored for immigration restrictions. In 1921 Republican senators Hiram Johnson of California and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts led congressional passage of an emergency immigration restriction act that established a limit of 355,000 European immigrants per year. Each nation was given a quota equal to 3 percent of the foreign-born persons from that country in the United States at the time of the 1910 census. This first restriction on European immigration represented a dramatic departure from the nineteenth-century ideal of the United States as an asylum for downtrodden Europeans.

The Quest for Racial Homogeneity

The 1921 restriction legislation was only a temporary measure, and its passage did not quell the fervor for immigration restriction. After the economy rebounded from the postwar slump, business, seeking a ready supply of cheap labor, returned to its customary posture of supporting unrestricted immigration, but anti-immigrant sentiment continued to prevail. No longer fueled by economic concerns, the political debate became driven by ethnic theories about racial homogeneity. Racial theorists posited that the greatness of the United States flowed from its racially and culturally homogeneous Anglo-Saxon founders. Thus, they argued, the influx of allegedly inferior alien races and cultures since the 1890s threatened national unity and even the future existence of the nation. As restrictionists linked racial homogeneity with the preservation of American democracy, congressional debate soon reflected the broad popularity of these ideas, which rejected the traditional "melting pot" theory—the belief that the many ethnic groups who came to America soon shed their old traditions and became part of a homogenous national culture.

National Origins Act

The debate culminated in 1924 when Congress passed the National Origins Act, lowering the European-immigration quota. The act permanently capped annual European immigration at 150,000 and based each nation's quota at 2 percent of the foreign-born persons from that country in the United States at the time of the 1890 census, a change directed at southern and eastern Europeans, who had begun arriving in large numbers after that date. Congress also banned Asian immigration outright. In endorsing the concept of racial homogeneity, Congress rejected the established principle of judging individual initiative and ability rather than accepting national stereotypes.

Source:

Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924—1952 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).