Progressive reform’s own momentum regenerated the anxieties it had first suppressed.

Evidence

In the last years of the prewar era, when reforms seemed more abundant and reformers more ebullient than ever, the specters of foreign revolution and of popish despotism once more grew visible on the American scene. They reappeared more slowly than Anglo-Saxon nativism, and neither of these older anti-foreign traditions won the general vogue race-thinking now enjoyed. But the seemingly unpropitious circumstances under which anti-radicalism and anti-Catholicism came to life make their renewal a subject of moment. Unlike racial nativism, which had started up from factors largely independent of the prevailing progressive faith, the anti-radical and anti-Catholic revivals after 1910 were direct outgrowths of the ongoing currents of social protest. In the end, the ferment of reform revived anxieties which it had initially helped to repress. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1044

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense paradox directly relevant to the reader’s central question: the very movement that repressed one enemy-category regenerated new ones from within itself.
• XREF: Connects to how reform or managed threats can self-replicate an external enemy when the old one dissolves. — connects to: Reform itself revived the xenophobias that confidence had repressed. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1044

Broader Connections

• Reform itself revived the xenophobias that confidence had repressed. #corroborates (0.95) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1044