Nativism requires domestic cleavage and agitation, not mere hardship or influx

Evidence

1877 would surely have killed such sympathies and desires. Actually, the campaign to stimulate European immigration slackened during the depression without by any means dying out. Hard times contributed powerfully to an exclusionist movement against the Chinese but did not substantially affect the status of the European. Iwo other conditions sustained the reign of confidence when the economy sagged. Of utmost significance was the survival in public opinion of a general, undaunted indifference to America’s accumulating social problems. Uhis complacent mood contrasted sharply with the spirit of ferment, unrest, and reform in the Know-Nothing era. ‘Then the slavery crisis had brought to a head a multitude of discontents and dissatisfactions with the status quo. Reformers balked in their purposes had turned upon Catholics and foreigners as the “real” obstacles to progress; frightened conservatives had found in alien influence the “true” explanation of social discord.” Now, however, there was no domestic cleavage deep enough to produce comparable anxieties and no nation-wide agitation to awaken the sleeping conscience of society. Untroubled by doubts of the success of their own institutions, Americans saw little reason to fear the influence of foreigners upon them. Confidence in the country’s economic vitality extended, by and large, to its whole social order. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Directly addresses the reader’s core question: solidarity-with-enemy is driven by manufactured domestic anxiety (per the reader’s theory), and economic depression alone — without a domestic cleavage to politicize it — does not generate nativism. Connects to the moral-panics literature and manufactured-enemy theories the reader is testing. — connects to: Objective social problems alone do not generate nativism without organized agitation — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 110
• SEED: Angle: ‘The Great Depression of 1873 produced no European nativism while a similar downturn later produced the Chinese Exclusion Act — what makes an enemy category politically available at one moment and not another?’ This isolates the manufacturing variable the reader is hunting.
• QUESTION: Higham contrasts 1850s (slavery crisis → nativism) with 1870s (depression, no cleavage → no nativism). Worth chasing: is the key variable presence of a moralizing reform movement that needs a scapegoat, rather than objective threat? This is testable across the reader’s other cases.

Broader Connections

• Objective social problems alone do not generate nativism without organized agitation #corroborates (0.95) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 110