Reply #51: "...lowering wages for 'American' workers and accepting filthy living conditions..." [View All]

[Cerridwen]

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Early 19th century anti-immigrant racism found its fullest expression in the platform of the American or Know-Nothing Party, which rose and fell almost entirely within a two-year span, from 1854 to 1856. The Know-Nothings formed in response to the continued immigration of Germans and the sudden rise of Irish immigration after the potato famine in the late 1840s. About 2.3 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1830 and 1850, the largest group coming from Ireland. The Know-Nothings promised to stop what they called as a cultural and racial invasion by the Catholic Irish, who, because of their religion, supposedly owed first allegiance to the Pope. In addition to seeing them as disloyal citizens, Know-Nothings saw the Irish as promiscuous drunks, a potent charge at a time when the Prohibition movement emerged as a political force.

Know-Nothings accused the Irish of lowering wages for "American" workers and accepting filthy living conditions. The Know-Nothing and the broader anti-immigrant movements in the 1840s and 1850s sought to end legal immigration, ban Catholics from holding elective office, diminish the voting strength of new Americans by extending the period of naturalization from five to 21 years, and supported the use of the Protestant King James Bible in the public schools.

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Such numbers lead Theodore Roosevelt in warn in an 1906 address to Congress that the fast reproduction of these new immigrants, and the low birth rate among Anglo women, raised the specter of "race suicide." Roosevelt charged that white women who did not have children represented criminals "against the race." To many Anglos, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe seemed culturally backwards, ignorant, and bizarre in appearance.

"These people are not Americans," the journal Public Opinion declared. "They are the very scum and offal of Europe." As a Midwestern coal miner complained, "Italians and Hungarians is spolin’ this ‘yere country for white men."

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Hoping to preserve the nation’s "racial stock," nativists passed a series of immigration restrictions between the 1880s and the 1920s. The Congress banned Chinese immigration n the 1880s and excluded laborers from most Asian countries in a 1917 immigration law. The Immigration Restriction League successfully lobbied for the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which set immigration quotas at 2 percent of nationals from a particular country present in the United States in 1890, a move drastically reducing the immigration quotas permitted Southern and Eastern Europeans. The Italian quota, for instance, fell from 42,000 to about 4,000 and the Polish quota from 31,000 to 6.000. This act barred the door to America for Jews who attempted to flee the Holocaust. America’s 1924 immigration restriction law doomed many Jews to Hitler’s gas chambers, though the total number who might otherwise have found safety in the United States remains a mystery.



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