John Higham — Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925

28 published claims from this book.

• Anti-Catholic and anti-radical nativism shared the root charge of foreign disloyalty.
• Anti-Catholic, anti-radical, and Anglo-Saxon patterns predated later nativist surges
• Anti-Catholicism predated and is not identical to racial nativism
• Anti-foreign opinion is shaped by politics, economics, and social organization
• Congress nearly granted Mennonites exclusive land blocks to win their settlement
• Economic appetite, not prior precedent, drove postwar America’s welcoming of immigrants
• English national identity partly formed against an imagined Catholic fifth column
• Failed idealism converts reformers into concealment-driven operators
• Gilded Age Americans priced each immigrant at $800 to $1,500 of national wealth
• Immigration can revive declining civilizations only with selective and assimilationist policies
• International conflict generates nativism only when the minority links to the enemy power
• Isolated baymen harbored hostile ethnic stereotypes of New Yorkers
• Nativism is a distinctively American term coined in 1830s-40s cities
• Nativism mirrors national anxieties and defines tolerance boundaries
• Nativism requires domestic cleavage and agitation, not mere hardship or influx
• Nativism rises and falls with broader nationalist sentiment
• Nativism targets internal minorities for their foreign connections
• Nativist fear of minorities surged only during major crises before the Civil War
• Nativists framed Catholic immigrants as a papal plot to subvert American institutions
• Objective social problems alone do not generate nativism without organized agitation
• Perceived incompatibility with national liberty, not doctrine, fed Protestant nativism
• Postwar prosperity and labor hunger smothered nativism for two decades
• Racialization technologies are deployed on internal class others before foreign enemies
• Railroads and speculators actively manufactured the immigrant influx through paid European propaganda
• Religious anti-Catholic feeling only becomes nativistic when Catholics seem foreign agents
• The idea of racial mixing fear grew from classical decline narratives
• The main nativist association collapsed financially and organizationally in the Civil War
• War against a common external enemy dissolved organized nativism by uniting rival groups