Apocalyptic fear of class upheaval drove Josiah Strong’s first modern anti-immigrant indictment.

Evidence

A restless Congregational clergyman sounded the great opening blast. Josiah Strong stood in the vanguard of the small company of religious thinkers who were bringing an ethical, evangelical imperative to the pattern of reform. Among the pioneering appeals to a new Christian conscience, Strong’s Our Country was the most apocalyptic. Published in 1885, this tremendously popular appeal for support of home missions radiated a sense of imminent crisis. … He cast his anti-foreign complaints in a traditional mold, accusing the immigrants of crime and immorality, of corrupting municipal government, of furnishing recruits for Catholicism and socialism. But what made the words urgent and significant was a conviction that in each of these respects the foreign influx was hastening the onset of a terrible upheaval in American society. Although he neither hated immigrants as such nor preached the complete failure of assimilation, he delivered the first sweeping indictment of immigrant influence since the 1850’s. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 229