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Gilded Age Nativism

TRANSCRIPT: For most of the 19th century, Americans were fairly open to immigration. There was a sense among a lot of Americans that we had a great deal of land and not enough people to fill them up. Among American industrialists, there was this feeling that the immigrants that came in could provide incredibly cheap labor and help them expand their industries. But as each decade went by inevitably, there were some Americans that did not like the idea of new influxes of people coming here and changing the nature of our society. Those people we call nativists. Nativism is a feeling among native people that anybody who comes in is undesirable and apt to change the gene pool, culture and everything else about society. General reasons for nativism were that the workers coming in would compete for jobs and they would lower the pay scale for a lot of American workers. Others felt that this noble American gene pool, this Anglo-Saxon purity, would be diminished by those races coming in. Others felt that America had developed this ideal national identity, this American heritage, which had reached its perfection. It would now decline with the arrival of immigrants there. Others simply felt that the immigrants brought undesirable customs like drinking beer on a Sunday. Ultimately, many people simply felt that the immigrants pouring in brought religions that were undesirable - Judaism but most notably Catholicism. One sociologist, Edward Alsworth Ross, describes immigrants at that time as 'hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality.' I want to take a look at three episodes of nativism in the 19th century. The first one I want to look at is an anti-Irish nativism. During the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, over two million Irish Catholics poured into the United States fleeing the potato famine. Many nativists in America were worried about this huge influx. They saw the Irish as culturally inferior. They felt that they were subversive and linked to foreign influence. They saw the Irish as anti-American and that they were these supporters of a foreign Pope. As the Irish tried to find work, one shop after another began to put up these NINA signs or N-I-N-A which stood for No Irish Need Apply. Different groups rose up as well to create a political agenda both nationally and locally. One such group was the United American Mechanics which was sort of a white working class Protestant group of slightly better trained machinists who felt these Irish would put them out of a job. A much larger group was the Order of the Star Spangled Banner but they were known at their time as the Know Nothing Party. This political party admitted to having no agenda but in fact their one agenda was to remove immigration from America completely. Millard Fillmore who had served as president ended up actually running as the Know Nothing candidate in 1856 demonstrating that this was a fairly strong national movement. Moving to other coast of America, the west coast, we see a lot of anti-Chinese nativism. The Chinese had come in the 1840s and stayed all the way through the 1860s to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Once the railroad was built, many of the Chinese moved to San Francisco where they set up a great deal of these wonderful Chinese neighborhoods. The Chinese immigrants, due to local laws, could not gain citizenship. They couldn't vote or hold political office. They couldn't send their kids to school. There was a general anti-Chinese feeling among many of the lower class working men of California. One such leader was a fellow named Denis Kearney who was an Irishman that used to travel through San Francisco delivering these Sand Lot speeches. They were strongly anti Chinese speeches and always ended with the phrase "the Chinese must go." The Kearneyites ultimately formalized into what was called The Workingmen's Party of California. And due to this perhaps ironic Irish push towards nativism, they were able to get Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. A third and final group I want to look at are the Eastern Europeans. By the 1880s and 1890s, Eastern Europe began to send quite a few emigrants into the United States. The areas we are looking at are really Poland and Italy and a few others around that area. To address this one, a new group arose called the APA or the American Protective Association. This, as one might expect, was an anti-Catholic association. They essentially maintained the goals of restricting Catholic immigration, making the ability to speak English a prerequisite to American citizenship, removing Catholic teachers from public schools, banning Catholics from public offices and preventing public support of any religious schools. As a little side interest, they would have this traveling tour of so-called ex-priests and ex-nuns who would tell lurid tales of the monasteries from which they escaped. So, that's a look at three different groups the Irish, the Chinese and Eastern Europeans and the nativist response that many Americans had in store for them.

MLA Citation

"Transcript." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2017, americanhistory2.abc- clio.com/Topics/Display/1187769?cid=141&sid=1880405. Accessed 9 Jan. 2017.