Racial nativism stayed regionally weak where progressive environmental optimism prevailed.

Evidence

Yet one should not overemphasize the strength of this nationwide trend. Although racial nativism tugged at men everywhere in the United States, during the prewar years it never established a really firm grip on public opinion outside of the South and the West Coast. Those were its strongholds; the aroused and pervasive race-feeling of those areas touched the East and Midwest only to a limited degree. A spirit of confidence, sustained by the triumphant march of progressive reform, remained widespread throughout the era, and in the Northeast the regnant values of progressivism tended to inhibit racial anxieties. As long as northeastern progressives took to heart their optimistic faith in environmental reform, they held the Anglo-Saxon tradition in check. But this was not true of the South or of the Far West. There, without anguish and with no apparent sense of inconsistency, reformthinking accommodated itself to race-thinking; progressivism was for white men only. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1037

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences reader’s hypothesis that ideological/faith commitments predict geography of bias — progressive reformism checked racial thought in the Northeast but coexisted with it in South/West, a regional divergence relevant to whether professed conviction predicts bias. — connects to: Progressive environmentalism blunted the force of Anglo-Saxon racial nativism — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 884