Nativism was a critic’s label, not a self-chosen identity.
Evidence
Nativism has been hard for historians to define. The word 1s distinctively American, a product of a specific chain of events in eastern American cities in the late 1830’s and early 1840’s. Yet it has a penumbra of meaning so broad and indefinite that sometimes it seems to refer to a perennial human experience. Does nativism consist only of the particular complex of attitudes dominant in the anti-foreign crusade of the mid-nineteenth century? Or does it extend to every occasion when native inhabitants of a country turn their faces or raise their hands against strangers in their midst? … Not the nativists themselves, apparently, but rather their critics attached the label to them. When anti-foreign parties arose in New York and other cities after 1835 and evolved gradually into the powerful “Know-Nothing” agitation of the 1850’s, opponents denounced the movement as bigoted nativism. Its champions, however, preferred another designation. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 22
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines nativism as an imposed label with distinctively American origins, broad penumbra of meaning.
- XREF: connects to: Ideological labels function as group identities, not coherent philosophies.