Yeah, maybe I shouldn't single out Long Island. Especially the Italians and Irish. Apologies for the generalizations.
The cartoons of Nast and his many imitators made people smile as much as they inflamed their passions. Far more influential and sinister was the emergence at the turn of the century of the pseudoscience of eugenics, which argued that certain races, principally the "Nordics" of northern and western Europe, were more fit than others. This theory was used to justify sterilization of the feeble-minded and led to curtailed immigration of what were deemed racially inferior peoples from Asia and southern and eastern Europe.
If the eugenics movement had a national headquarters, it was New York. Two of its most prominent proponents, Charles B. Davenport and Madison Grant, lived in the city, and both played major roles in founding the Galton Society, the leading eugenics organization, and the Eugenics Record Office, a sort of racial purity think tank in Cold Harbor, Long Island, just over the Queens border.
May 7, 2006
City Lore
Bring Us Your Tired, Your Poor. Or Don't.
By EDWARD T. O'DONNELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/nyregion/thecityNO patch of earth is more closely associated with immigration and the ideals of tolerance than New York. The city has long been home not only to an astonishing array of peoples, religions and cultures, but also to symbols of the nation's immigrant heritage: the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Lower East Side. And the city has become home to a particularly vocal pro-immigrant community, as shown in rallies that attracted tens of thousands of people in recent weeks.
We have grown so accustomed to thinking of New York as a multicultural mecca, it seems inconceivable that for a century, the city was home to — and often the spawning grounds for — a vibrant, and often vicious, nativist tradition.
It was in the 1830's that New York first emerged as the center of the nativist movement, the practice of favoring native-born citizens over immigrants. Not surprisingly, the city's new role coincided with an explosion in immigration to the United States, to 599,125 in the 1830's from 143,439 in the 1820's.
Some anti-foreigner hostility was expressed with brickbats and fists, but the most potent weapon was the pen. Samuel F. B. Morse, of later telegraph fame, was among the first to sound the alarm. In 1834 he wrote a series of articles for The New York Observer — later published in a best-selling book titled "A Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States" — that in hysterical prose detailed an alleged papal plot to flood America with Roman Catholic immigrants and overthrow the republic.
"Up! Up! I beseech you!" Morse exhorted his countrymen. "Awake! To your posts! Let the tocsin sound from Maine to Louisiana." And first, he added, "shut your gates."
Morse's celebrity earned him the 1836 nomination for mayor of New York under the banner of the Native American Democratic Association, one of the country's first explicitly nativist political parties. Though he was trounced in the general election, New York's nativists quickly found a new hero.
Her name was Maria Monk. She claimed to be a former Catholic nun, and in 1836 she published in New York a book purporting to be an exposé of the looming Catholic menace, "The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal."
It told how Monk learned Catholicism's nefarious secrets only after she had entered the convent. Nuns, she said, had to submit to the lustful desires of priests, and the babies that resulted from these liaisons were strangled and buried in the convent basement.
According to this tale of woe, Monk eventually became pregnant and fled the convent to save her unborn child. A kindly Protestant minister rescued her and helped her publish the account of her experience so as to warn America of the menace in its midst. An investigation exposed Monk as a fraud, but the book nonetheless sold hundreds of thousands of copies over the next 15 years. Its publisher, James Harper, was elected mayor in 1844 as a candidate of the Nativist American Republican Party.
During these years, scores of secret anti-foreigner societies sprouted in the city. The most prominent organization, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, was dedicated to "the exclusion of all foreigners and Roman Catholics in particular" from political power. Founded in Manhattan in 1849, it blossomed into a national political movement whose followers were known as "Know Nothings" because of the requirement that they answer any questions about the organization by saying, "I know nothing."
The Civil War brought a new phase of nativism, again with New York at the forefront. In 1861, the nation's leading magazine of news and politics, Harper's Weekly, hired as an illustrator Thomas Nast, who would achieve fame as the nation's first major political cartoonist. Despite his own history as a German immigrant, he was also a mass producer of nativist imagery.
Nast's chief targets were the Irish and the two institutions they dominated, the Roman Catholic church and Tammany Hall. For a quarter of a century, his depictions of apelike Irishmen were regular features in Harper's, creating in the national mind an indelible image of the Irishman as a drunken, violent and corrupt fellow who would never become an upstanding citizen.
The cartoons of Nast and his many imitators made people smile as much as they inflamed their passions. Far more influential and sinister was the emergence at the turn of the century of the pseudoscience of eugenics, which argued that certain races, principally the "Nordics" of northern and western Europe, were more fit than others. This theory was used to justify sterilization of the feeble-minded and led to curtailed immigration of what were deemed racially inferior peoples from Asia and southern and eastern Europe.
If the eugenics movement had a national headquarters, it was New York. Two of its most prominent proponents, Charles B. Davenport and Madison Grant, lived in the city, and both played major roles in founding the Galton Society, the leading eugenics organization, and the Eugenics Record Office, a sort of racial purity think tank in Cold Harbor, Long Island, just over the Queens border.
Grant, who came from a prominent New York family, also wrote a hugely influential book titled "The Passing of the Great Race," in 1916. In the book he warned that America's once-sturdy Nordic racial stock was being destroyed by mass immigration of "a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken, and the mentally crippled of all the races drawn from the lower stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos."
FIVE years later, he helped bring the Second International Conference on Eugenics to the American Museum of Natural History, where 393 participants heard 96 papers on topics such as "Harmonic and Disharmonic Race Crossings." Also in 1921, Grant consulted on the congressional committee that produced the nativist movement's greatest triumph, the 1924 National Origins Act, which sharply curtailed immigration and set quotas for foreign nations based on racial desirability.
Quotas remained until 1965, but nativism never again enjoyed such credibility. The horrors of Nazi crimes committed in the name of racial purity, coupled with lower rates of immigration and postwar prosperity, led Americans to look more kindly on the nation's multicultural heritage. Nowhere was this shift more apparent than in New York, where the nativist tradition was replaced with a widely shared commitment to tolerance and diversity.
The Statue of Liberty was transformed from a symbol of republican values into one proclaiming immigration as a quest for freedom. Ellis Island was recreated as a museum to celebrate immigration. The iconic immigrant neighborhood, the Lower East Side, was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
This transformation should not surprise anyone, for the city has long been home to the multicultural ideal. Even at the height of the Know Nothing movement, Walt Whitman wrote rhapsodically of New York: "City of the world! (for all races are here; All the lands of the earth make contributions here)." Reformers like Jacob Riis portrayed immigrants as decent people trapped not by inferior genes but by inhumane conditions. And when Israel Zangwill's Broadway hit, "The Melting Pot," opened in 1909, its title became a catchphrase for multiculturalism for a century to come.
Edward T. O'Donnell is the author of the forthcoming "Land of Promise: The Story of the Irish in America," to be published by Simon & Schuster.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
