Prewar nativism revival prepared groundwork for the war years’ greater passions

Evidence

In the decade from 1905 to 1915, while patrician nativists were building.a systematic ideology, popular nativism was struggling to recover the vitality it had had in the mid-nineties. From 1906, when the literacy test reappeared in Congress, to the beginning of American involvement in the First World War, the jaunty selfassurance with which America as a whole had greeted the twentieth century was slowly deteriorating. Xenophobia was steadily on the rise. Although we may take 1905 or 1906 as its starting point, resurgent nativism did not announce itself with the explosive force of a second Haymarket riot. Nor did it, in all probability, regain even at the end of the period the hysterical intensity of the 1890’s. Yet the prewar revival of nativism has major significance. It prepared the way for the greater passions of the war years, and it also set in motion trends that reached fulfillment once the war was over. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 949

Categorization

• QUESTION: For reader: xenophobia rising amid confidence and prosperity confirms threat-manufacture persists even without objective crisis.
• XREF: connects to: Nativist extremists also felt the war’s millennial optimism — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1616