Novel immigrant groups had no nativist tradition, so raw hostility escalated freely

Evidence

Unlike the older Catholic population, the southern and eastern Europeans who had begun to arrive in considerable numbers during the 1880’s lived in the American imagination only in the form of a few vague, ethnic stereotypes. They occupied, in other words, no distinctive place, either separately or collectively, in the traditions of American nationalism. In the 1890’s, for the first time, they became a significant factor in the growth of nativism. An initial distrust, compounded largely out of their culture and appearance, swelled into a pressing sense of menace, into hatred, and into violence. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 516

Categorization

• XREF: The absence of an established tradition for a group is precisely what lets a manufactured enemy image form from scratch — bears on the reader’s question of how enemy beliefs fabricate. — connects to: Anti-immigrant hostility resurfaced first among humanitarian reformers, not conservatives. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 209