Contact with foreigners plus environmental explanation of poverty dissolved nativist belief

Evidence

Under the impact of the progressive movement, the settlements’ attitude toward the foreign-born gradually spread to the ranks of professional social workers. Until the end of the nineteenth century, social work had been largely synonymous with charity, and for the most part its practitioners had loudly bewailed the immigrant flood that was swamping their resources. But now a philosophy of alleviation was giving way to one of prevention and social action. Welfare agencies, like municipal reformers and progressives generally, were discovering economic roots to the problems they faced. Instead of attributing poverty to moral weakness or to “hereditary pauperism,” social workers turned toward the environment and toward its reconstruction. … After 1910 very few social workers who had intimate contact with foreign groups favored a further restriction of immigration. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 700

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on reader’s question of whether ‘rational/moral correction’ against threat-hardened belief backfires — this case shows correction working when it relocates cause from the out-group’s character to the environment. — connects to: Knowing another culture needs uncoercive contact and interpretive self-consciousness — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the…, 328; Divergent beliefs about poverty’s cause coexist with identical mobility. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 138; Confidence in ordinary people’s capacity tended to counteract nativism before 1910 — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 682 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Boas refuted race-thinking by grounding immigrant differences in environment #corroborates (0.90) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 725
• Confidence in ordinary people’s capacity tended to counteract nativism before 1910 #corroborates (0.80) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 682
• Divergent beliefs about poverty’s cause coexist with identical mobility. #corroborates (0.78) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 138
• Knowing another culture needs uncoercive contact and interpretive self-consciousness #expands (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 328