Not Fit for Our Society The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Anne G. Lipow Endowment Fund for Social Justice and Human Rights of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by Stephen M. Silberstein. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of William K. Coblentz as a member of the Literati Circle of the University of California Press Foundation. Not Fit for Our Society Nativism and Immigration Peter Schrag UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schrag, Peter. Not fit for our society : nativism and immigration / Peter Schrag.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-25978-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. 2. Emigration and immigration—Public opinion. 3. Emigration and immigration—Government policy. 4. Nativism. 5. Eugenics. I. Title. jv6121.s35 2010 304.8—dc22 2009042976 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% postconsumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) ( Permanence of Paper ). For Ben and Yeung This page intentionally left blank Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away. Governor John Winthrop at the examination of Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newton, 1637 This page intentionally left blank Sources and Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. A City upon a Hill 18 2. “This Visible Act of Ingurgitation” 41 3. “Science” Makes Its Case 77 4. Preserving the Race 108 5. The Great Awhitening 139 6. “They Keep Coming” 163 7. A Border without Lines 194 Epilogue 225 Notes 233 Index 275 Contents This page intentionally left blank xi This book originated in newspaper and magazine articles I’d been writ- ing over more than fifteen years on the increasingly intense controver- sies about immigration and American immigration policy and the many issues related to them. In the course of that work I was often surprised that the great volume of material on the history of American immigra- tion and its discontents, which is often so relevant to our contemporary debates, had been so consistently ignored in those debates—sometimes, it seemed, almost deliberately so. There is a vast amount of it, some going back to the earliest years of the Republic and in some cases to the colonial period—orders of colonial governors; the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence itself; records of congressional hearings and debates; papers and reports of the many groups that have sought to shape immigration policy; “sci- entific” studies and analyses on the various “races” coming to this coun- try or hoping to come; magazine and newspaper articles; speeches of political leaders; broadsides issued by lobbies and political parties. In addition, there is a rich trove of secondary sources that sheds light not only on our history but on the ideas and organizations at the forefront of today’s immigration fight. I’ve drawn freely from it, most of it cited in the notes at the end of the book. What could not be fully credited or attributed without cluttering Sources and Acknowledgments xii Sources and Acknowledgments the story with an excess of footnotes and textual distractions are many of the hundreds of journals, magazine articles, cartoons, broadsides, pho- tographs, and other documents I found so useful in the American Time Capsule and other collections of the Library of Congress; the volumi- nous material in the report of the U.S. Immigration Commission (the Dillingham Commission) and that of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (the Wickersham Commission); the reports of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization and other congressional documents; the historical statistics of the Census Bureau; the immigration documents of the Labor, Commerce, Justice and State departments and the Department of Homeland Security; the papers on eugenics and immigration policy in the Harry H. Laughlin collection of the Pickler Memorial Library at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, and in the Open Collections Program on immigration at the Harvard University Library; the image archive of the Eugenics Movement; the archives of the Eugenics Record Office at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia; the Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia Library; the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School; the Califor- nia State Archives in Sacramento and the Oregon State Archives in Salem; the electronic archives of the New York Times dating back to the 1850s as well as the archives of CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and other publica- tions and broadcasters of more recent vintage. I also relied on more secondary sources—books and journal articles— than I can possibly credit or, in some cases, even recall. Among the most important: Ray Allen Billington’s Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism; John Higham’s Strangers in a Strange Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925; Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth; Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought; Oscar Handlin’s Uprooted; Richard Alba and Victor Nee’s Remaking of the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration; Richard Hof- stadter’s Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. ; Matthew Frye Jacob- son’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race; Richard Roediger’s Working toward Whiteness: How American’s Immigrants Became White; Dowell Myers’s Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America; Mae M. Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Mod- ern America; Daniel J. Kevles’s In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity; and Edwin Black’s War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. Sources and Acknowledgments xiii I’m also grateful to many individuals and organizations—among them Steven Camorata of the Center for Immigration Studies; Douglas Rivlin of the National Immigration Forum; Angela Kelley of the Immi- gration Policy Center; Michael Fix of the Migration Policy Institute; Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center; Hans Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California; Professor Belinda Reyes of San Francisco State University; Professor Dowell Myers of the University of South- ern California; California state senator Gil Cedillo; James P. Smith of the Rand Corporation; Professor Jack Citrin, director of the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley; and Marian L. Smith of the Department of Homeland Security—for their help in research for this book and/or in my reporting on immigra- tion issues over a period of many years. In the course of my research, I also realized again how much I owed to my own teachers of American history and literature, among them Professors Henry Steele Commager and Leo Marx, and to my late friend and Amherst colleague John Wil- liam Ward. Last, but far from least, I’m especially indebted to Professor David Hollinger of the University of California at Berkeley; my longtime friends and former Sacramento Bee colleagues Claire Cooper and Mark Paul, the latter now of the New America Foundation, for their sympa- thetic and very helpful reading of an early draft of this book; to Naomi Schneider, my editor at the University of California Press; and, as ever, to Patricia Ternahan for all of the above and a great deal more. This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction It’s long been said that America is a nation of immigrants. But for closely connected reasons, it’s also been a nation of immigration restrictionists, among them some of the nation’s most honored founders. Indeed it would be nearly impossible to imagine the first without the second. And since we were to be “a city upon a hill,” a beacon of human perfection to the entire world, there were fundamental questions: Would America be able to refine all the imperfect material that landed on our shores, or would we have to determine what was not perfectible and shut it out? And what would happen when the once-unpopulated continent that badly required large numbers of settlers—unpopulated, that is, except for the Indians—began to fill up? Our contemporary immigration battles, and particularly the ideas and proposals of latter-day nativists and immigration restrictionists, resonate with the arguments of more than two centuries of that history. Often, as most of us should know, the immigrants who were demeaned by one generation were the parents and grandparents of the successes of the next generation. Perhaps, not paradoxically, many of them, or their children and grandchildren, later joined those who attacked and dispar- aged the next arrivals, or would-be arrivals, with the same vehemence that had been leveled against them or their forebears As a German-Jewish refugee from Hitler, I’m personally familiar with a slice of this story, having spent time on both sides of the nativ- ist divide. In the late 1930s my parents and I were on the short end of 2 Introduction the nation’s immigration quotas. We narrowly escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941 and arrived in the United States on a transit visa (to Mexico), later changed to a visitor’s visa. We didn’t formally immigrate until 1947. In the first years after our arrival, I and my friends in New York, several of us not yet citizens, endlessly lampooned people we called Japs, wops, and guineas; told jokes about fairies; assumed, often despite the protests of our anguished parents, that the Germany of our grandparents had always been a place of boors absolutely bereft of cul- ture. In wartime especially, denial or rejection of one’s heritage was the price one proudly paid for assimilation. Most Americans have long forgotten—if they ever knew—the his- tory of the sweeps and detention of immigrants of the early decades of the last century. Those sweeps were not terribly different from the heavy-handed federal, state and local raids of recent years to round up, deport, and too often imprison illegal immigrants, and sometimes legal residents and citizens along with them. But it’s also well to remember that nativism, xenophobia, and racism are hardly uniquely American phenomena. What makes them significant in America is that they run almost directly counter to the nation’s founding ideals. At least since the enshrinement of Enlightenment ideas of equality and inclusiveness in the founding documents of the new nation, to be a nativist in this country was to be in conflict with its fundamental tenets. This book grew out of more than two decades of writing about immi- gration and the bitter battles that have been waged over immigration law and policies since the mid-1980s. It seeks to trace the complex his- tory linking nearly three centuries of ideas, uncertainties, and conflicts about what America is, who belongs here, what the economy needs and doesn’t need—who, indeed, is an American or is fit to be one—to our contemporary controversies and ambivalence about immigration and its many related questions. In that multigenerational process, nativism, always an essential element in what one writer described as “the nation’s self-image of innocence and exceptionalism in a decadent world,” has had a long and, one might say with only a touch of irony, an honorable history, going back to the very beginnings of British settlement. 1 American exceptionalism echoes through colonial complaints about the estimated forty thousand British convicts sentenced to transpor- tation who were arriving on American shores in the eighteenth cen- tury—“the dregs, the excrescence of England.” All of the colonials, said Samuel Johnson, were “a race of convicts [who should] be content with anything we allow them short of hanging.” In the same era came Introduction 3 Benjamin Franklin’s warning (in 1751) that Pennsylvania was becoming “a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” 2 Later, Jefferson worried about immigrants from foreign monarchies who “will infuse into American legislation their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” 3 Although already fading into obscurity, one of the most vocal and paradigmatic of latter-day immigration restrictionists, Colorado Repub- lican Tom Tancredo, echoed much of that. Briefly a candidate for presi- dent in 2008 and, until shortly before his retirement from the House of Representatives that same year, leader of the Congressional Caucus on Immigration Reform—meaning immigrant exclusion—Tancredo liked to boast about his immigrant Sicilian grandfather. Tancredo forgot that his grandfather belonged to a generation widely regarded by the WASP establishment and many other Americans of the early 1900s, when he arrived, as genetically and culturally unassimilable—ill-educated, crime-prone, diseased. Yet Tancredo, like many of today’s immigration restrictionists, echoed the same animosities. “What we’re doing here in this immigration battle,” he said in one of the Republican presidential debates in 2007, “is testing our willingness to actually hold together as a nation or split apart into a lot of Balkanized pieces”—not so differ- ent from Jefferson’s “heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” 4 Like other contemporary restrictionists, Tancredo’s portrayal of Mexican immigrants was almost identical to the characterization of the Italians, Jews, and Slavs of a century before, and of the Irish and Germans before them, people not fit for our society. If Franklin’s and Jefferson’s opinions turned out be of little prac- tical consequence—Franklin later changed his mind; Jefferson in his purchase of Louisiana gobbled up a whole foreign (mostly French) cul- ture—the nineteenth century provided an endless chain of more sig- nificant examples. Among them, Know-Nothingism and the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic virulence that swept much of the nation in the 1850s, waned briefly during and after the Civil War, and then flourished again for more than half a century after 1870: “No Irish Need Apply” (later, “No Wops Need Apply”), “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” and then “The Chinese Must Go” and, as the ethnic Japanese on the West Coast were interned after Pearl Harbor, “Japs Keep Moving.” The magazine cartoonists’ pirates coming off the immigrant ships in the 1880s and 1890s were labeled “disease,” “socialism,” and “Mafia.” And always 4 Introduction there was the shadow of the Vatican, looming to take over American democracy and, more ominously, seducing the nation’s schoolchildren. In almost every generation, nativists portrayed new immigrants as not fit to become real Americans: they were too infected by Catholi- cism, monarchism, anarchism, Islam, criminal tendencies, defective genes, mongrel bloodlines, or some other alien virus to become free men and women in our democratic society. Again and again, the new immi- grants or their children and grandchildren proved them wrong. The list of great American scientists, engineers, writers, scholars, business and labor leaders, actors, and artists who were immigrants or their children, men and women on whom the nation’s greatness largely depended, is legion. Now add to that the story of Barack Obama—who was not just the nation’s first African American president, but also the first American president who was the son of a father who was not a citizen—and the argument becomes even less persuasive. Yet through each new wave of nativism and immigration restriction, the opponents of immigration, legal and illegal, tend to forget that history, just as Tancredo forgot that his Sicilian grandfather (who he says arrived as a “legal immigrant”) came at a time when—with the exception of the Chinese, most of whom were categorically excluded beginning in 1882—there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant. • • • The list of factors contributing to the surge of anger, xenophobia, and imperial ambition in the two generations after 1880 is almost end- less: the “closing” of the frontier and the western “safety-valve” in the 1890s; 5 industrial expansion and depression-driven cycles of economic fear; urban corruption and the rise of the big-city political machines. Mostly Democratic, they patronized new immigrants more interested in jobs, esteem, and protection—and were often more comfortable with their values of personal and clan loyalty than with the abstract WASP principles of good government and efficient management that fueled the Progressive movement and that most of the nation’s respectable small- town middle class grew up with. Many Progressives, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, joined moderate conservatives “in the cause of Americanizing the immi- grant by acquainting him with English and giving him education and civic instruction.” Still “the typical Progressive and the typical immigrant were immensely different, and the gulf between them was not usually Introduction 5 bridged with much success in the Progressive era.” 6 The Progressivism of academics like the sociologist John R. Commons and the influential labor economist Edward A. Ross, both close associates of Governor and later Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, and the ethnic and cultural beliefs of nativism grew from the same roots: good government was an Anglo-Saxon legacy. Along with their confident sense of racial superior- ity came the heightening fear, bordering on panic in some circles, of our own immigrant-infected racial degeneration. It resounded through Ross’s work, through Madison Grant’s influential Passing of the Great Race (1916), through the writings of Alexander Graham Bell and countless others in the first decades of the twentieth century, and in the hearings and debates of Congress. In the face of the inferior, low-skill, low-wage but high-fecundity classes from southern and eastern Europe, demoral- ized Anglo-Saxons would bring fewer children into the world to face that new competition. 7 Grant’s theme of racial extinction would later be picked up in books like Lothrop Stoddard’s very successful Rising Tide of Color (1920) and would continue to echo through books like Rich- ard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994. To this day, these ideas are circulated (and promoted and defended) by the Virginia-based self-described “racialist” American Renaissance online magazine, which offers reprints of Stoddard’s book for sale. 8 But probably the most representative, and perhaps the most influ- ential, voice for immigration restriction in the 1890s and the following decade was that of Representative (later Senator) Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, the paradigmatic Boston Brahmin, later leader of the isolationists who kept the United States out of the League of Nations in the 1920s. Lodge’s articles and speeches warning of the perils of the rising tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—many of them mere “birds of passage” who only came to make a little money and then return to the old country; many more bringing crime, disease, anarchism, and filth and competing with honest American workers— drove the debate and presaged many later arguments against immigra- tion. By 1926, in congressional testimony about restricting Mexican immigration, Lodge’s bird had become a pigeon—a “homer” who “like the pigeon . . . goes back to roost.” 9 The late Harvard political scien- tist Samuel Huntington’s restrictionist book, Who Are We? published in 2004, is shot through with Lodge-like fears. There were countless reasons for the old patricians to be worried— and they weren’t alone. The overcrowded tenements of the nation’s big cities were incubators of disease and violence that put ever more 6 Introduction burdens on schools, the police, charities, and social agencies. And so, in words and tones not so different from today’s, members of Congress and other national leaders heard increasingly loud warnings about the social strains and dangers the immigrants imposed. Similarly, check- ing the rising political participation of the new urban immigrants and the power of the big-city machines that challenged the Anglo-Saxon establishment’s authority—and in the view of a whole generation of muckraking reformers, corrupted democracy itself—was an obliga- tion that the reformers were certain couldn’t be escaped. The same fear had resonated through the Know-Nothings’ nativist platforms of the 1850s, which, in calls for tighter voter requirements in elections, continues to run through conservative American politics. 10 As John Higham characterized him in his seminal study, Strangers in the Land, the nativist, “whether he was trembling at a Catholic menace to Ameri- can liberty [or] fearing an invasion of pauper labor,” believed “that some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within.” 11 Higham, writing in the early 1960s, could just as well have been writing now. What’s striking is how many immigration restrictionists came, and still come, from a Progressive or conservationist background. Madison Grant was a trustee of New York’s American Museum of Natural His- tory and active in the American Bison Society and the Save the Red- woods League. David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, a respected ichthyologist and peace activist, along with a group of other leading scholars and clergymen, was deeply involved in the race bet- terment movement that aimed “To Create a New and Superior Race thru Euthenics, or Personal and Public Hygiene and Eugenics, or Race Hygiene . . . and create a race of human thoroughbreds such as the world has never seen.” 12 Like Hiram Johnson (the Progressive who became governor of California in 1910) and the McClatchy family (newspaper publishers in Sacramento and earnest backers of the initia- tive process, civil service, and municipal ownership of public utilities), many Progressives fiercely battled to forever exclude Asians from immi- gration and landownership. Why let Asiatics immigrate when the Con- stitution didn’t allow them to be naturalized? “Of all the races ineligible to citizenship under our law,” said V. S. McClatchy in Senate testimony in 1924, “the Japanese are the least assimilable and the most dangerous to this country.” 13 Again and again, as I hope this book will show, our history reflects the national ambivalence between the demand for more immigrants to