Nativist Movement

Nativist Movement. Nativism, the fear and hatred of aliens, particularly religious or ethnic minorities or political radicals, emerged with the earliest settlements from Europe.The first victims were Catholics. Anti‐Catholicism, rampant in England before the era of American colonization, was rooted in imperial rivalries with Catholic Spain and France. It gained new life in America, particularly among the New England Puritans determined to build a church “purged of Romish corruptions.” Colonial Era school primers instructed children to “abhor that arrant Whore of Rome and all her Blasphemies.”

By the 1830s, as immigration from Ireland and Germany swelled the Catholic population, anti‐Catholicism increased. In 1834 a mob of “ordinary Americans”—teamsters, bricklayers, volunteer firemen—sacked and burned an Ursuline convent near Boston. Nativists feared, as expressed in the title of a work by Samuel F.B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States. They stigmatized Irish Catholic immigrants as an unassimilable horde of criminals, slum dwellers, lunatics, and drunkards. Anti‐Catholic publications proliferated, including the best‐seller Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures (1836), recounting the alleged immoral goings‐on in a Montreal, Canada, convent. Street battles between Catholics and Protestants in Philadelphia in 1845 over the issue of Catholicism in the schools left thirty dead and hundreds wounded.

With the Irish potato famine beginning in 1846, immigration to America mushroomed, and the Catholic population reached almost three million in the 1850s. Nativist secret societies such as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner spawned a political movement, the American party, nicknamed the Know‐Nothing party because members were instructed to respond “I know nothing” when asked about it. Swollen by recruits from mainstream parties fractured by the abolitionist and free‐soil issues in the 1850s, the American party briefly became the nation's second largest political organization. But it, too, like the Democratic and Whig parties, split over the issue of slavery.

After the Civil War, as “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe brought millions of Italian Catholics, Jews, Russians, and Slavs, nativism gained strength, particularly during the depression of the 1890s. The American Protective Association (APA), the largest of many nativist organizations, had 500,000 members nationwide. Nativism declined in the Progressive Era, but World War I and the postwar Red Scare revived it. In 1917–1918, APA members tracked and exposed opponents of the war. With the 1919 Palmer raids, organized by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the federal government itself became the instrument for protecting America from aliens, communists, and “un‐American” ideas. “Where Do the Reds Come From: Chiefly Imported and So Are Their Red Theories,” explained one magazine.

In the 1920s, a new organization with an old name, the Ku Klux Klan, recruited at least 2.5 million members to an anti‐Catholic, anti‐Semitic, anti‐alien, anti‐black crusade. Although nativism was the common bond, the Klan also stressed the defense of traditional values imperiled by the social changes of the 1920s. The farmers, blue‐collar workers, and day laborers who supported the Klan were in some places joined by lawyers, physicians, ministers, and prosperous businessmen. The Immigration Act of 1924, restricting immigration and establishing national quotas directed against southern and eastern Europe, culminated a long nativist campaign led by the Immigration Restriction League (founded in 1894).

Nativism faded after the 1920s. With Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal encompassing Catholics, Jews, and a variety of former immigrant subcultures, and with G.I.s of all ethnic groups fighting and dying in World War II, it became harder to assail any group of citizens as “un‐American.” (The wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans represented a final nativist assault, however.) In these years, too, leading social scientists repudiated the racist theories embraced by earlier generations of political and social elites. Postwar prosperity removed some of the economic anxieties on which nativism had fed. As discriminatory educational barriers fell and an ideology of pluralism and openness underlay the success ethic in America, nativism became increasingly unacceptable in academia, commerce, and the professions. Though a climate of repression pervaded the early Cold War Era, it targeted not religious or ethnic groups but political radicals. Indeed, it was an Irish‐American Catholic senator, Joseph McCarthy, who became the chief communist hunter of the 1950s, and his targets were often members of the native‐born elite.

Despite broadly supported efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to limit immigration and bar illegal aliens, old‐style nativism did not return. As ethnic and religious conflicts raged elsewhere in the post–Cold War world, the decline of nativism in the United States was striking. Indeed, by the 1990s, America was the world's preeminent example of a continent‐wide multiethnic, multireligious, multiracial democracy. Only fragmentary and extremist cells in the racist underground—the Aryan Nation, the tiny Klan chapters, and skinhead gangs—perpetuated the nativist rhetoric of the past.
See also Antebellum Era; Anti‐Catholic Movement; Anticommunism; Anti‐Semitism; Antislavery; Asian Americans; Depressions, Economic; German Americans; Immigration Law; Irish Americans; Political Parties; Protestantism; Puritanism; Race, Concept of; Racism.

Bibliography

John Higham , Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2d ed., 1963.
Ray Allen Billington , The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860, 1964.
Michael Barkun , Religion and the Racist Right, 1994.
David H. Bennett , The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement, 2d ed., 1995.

David Harry Bennett