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

257 published claims from this book.

• 1880s nativism attacked immigrants indiscriminately, not by ethnic type yet.
• A Catholic nomination in 1928 proved nativism’s structural retreat.
• A common enemy war dissolved organized anti-immigrant nativism.
• A legal-technical limit on federal power steered the Red Scare against foreigners
• A literacy test aimed to cut southern and eastern European immigration in half
• A lost local election triggered the founding of the A.P.A.
• A manufactured enemy works best against groups that reject the unifying cause
• A new nationalism rechanneled existing race feelings onto immigrant targets
• A real crime problem fixed a sensational Black Hand image on Italians
• A solidarity crusade collapses when its manufactured threat vanishes
• After the war ended, nativists transferred the enemy category from Germany to Bolshevism.
• Alien intrusion offers rootless middling groups a way to confront class discord.
• American nativism racialized over time rather than starting as racism
• Americanization advocates demanded continuous surveillance and registration of the population.
• Americanization leadership shifted its locus from progressive government to corporate power.
• Americans glorified liberty radiating outward more than receiving the oppressed
• An economist created the influential racial typology because professional anthropologists declined
• An elite handful drove the national literacy-test campaign
• Anti-Catholic and anti-radical nativism defined enemies first while racial nativism defined the in-group first
• Anti-Catholic and anti-radical nativism shared a cardinal loyalty assumption.
• Anti-Catholic and anti-radical nativism shared one core assumption of immigrant disloyalty
• Anti-Catholic nativism decayed as intellectuals found race a more respectable enemy frame.
• Anti-Catholic nativism required a specific religious crisis beyond general economic tension
• Anti-Catholic nativism resurged as an electoral force in 1914 after two quiet decades
• Anti-Catholic nativism softened into mild anticlericalism in the 1870s
• Anti-Catholic panic surged across the South and Midwest by 1920
• Anti-Catholic secret societies multiplied in the 1880s across scattered localities.
• Anti-Catholicism became nativist only when Catholics seemed foreign agents.
• Anti-Catholicism in the 1910s was displaced anti-monopoly resentment, not doctrine.
• Anti-Catholicism resurged from the left while anti-radicalism resurged from the right.
• Anti-Chinese violence far exceeded any anti-European nativism
• Anti-European nativism recycled emotions first aimed at nonwhite groups
• Anti-foreign fears persist in contained form instead of being eliminated
• Anti-immigrant hostility in the 1880s targeted culture, not subversiveness or unassimilability
• Anti-immigrant hostility resurfaced first among humanitarian reformers, not conservatives.
• Anti-immigrant solidarity collapsed almost instantly when the anarchist threat faded
• Anti-Japanese hysteria generalized into hostility toward European immigrants.
• Anti-Japanese nativism drew strength from a perceived international threat absent in anti-Chinese feeling.
• Anti-Jewish feeling in nineteenth-century America was status competition, not ideology
• Anti-radical elites dropped racial targets to attack labor as foreign
• Anti-radicalism evaporated when its labor-unrest basis faded
• Anti-Semitic exclusion disciplined Jewish parvenus for faults natives shared
• Anti-Semitic ideology fused contradictory charges into a single universalist enemy image
• Anti-Semitic nationalism emerged from wartime 100 per cent Americanism.
• Anti-Semitic nativism survived and grew once its anti-radical trigger faded
• Apocalyptic fear of class upheaval drove Josiah Strong’s first modern anti-immigrant indictment.
• Assimilationist confidence collapsed as its economic and security foundations failed
• Assimilative pressures drove immigrant leaders into compensatory ethnic nationalism.
• Authentic shared purpose produced genuine solidarity that softened attacks on minorities
• Boas refuted race-thinking by grounding immigrant differences in environment
• Bolshevism fears drove states to legislate nationalism coercively
• Both great ethnic upheavals peaked with immigration at its historical maximum.
• Broad but shallow public sentiment lets well-placed minorities block national policy change
• Broken labor solidarity channeled workers into anti-Catholic nativism.
• Businesses’ racial fears outweighed their labor needs by 1924.
• By 1924 racial restrictionism had fully displaced economic arguments for restriction
• Catholic parochial-funding demands triggered Protestant backlash that tightened church-state separation
• Catholics were cast as a fifth column in English national consciousness.
• Chinese exclusion in the 1880s supplied no precedent for European-immligrant restriction
• Civil War enlistment crushed prewar anti-immigrant nativism
• Civil War nationalism displaced nativism by supplying shared enmity and economic bonds.
• Civilizational and racial nativism differ in whether they define enemies or essence.
• Class cleavage, like sectional strife, triggered unifying nationalist nativism
• Class resentment, not antisemitism, originally focused the crowd on Leo Frank
• Coal operators imported strikebreakers to defeat unionized native workers
• Coercive Americanization backfired, driving minorities into their own defensive nationalisms
• Common law tradition barred no aliens from jobs until 1880s legislation
• Confidence in ordinary people’s capacity tended to counteract nativism before 1910
• Contact with foreigners plus environmental explanation of poverty dissolved nativist belief
• Control of immigrant press advertising let nativists dictate newspaper content
• Cosmopolitan and exclusionary nationalisms differ by future-orientation versus past-orientation
• Courts shifted from protecting aliens to endorsing state employment discrimination against them
• Crusading moral idealism, denied other outlets, turned inward against external change
• Darwinian thought shifted charity views of poverty from moral failing to heredity
• Darwinism converted racial pride into defensive anxiety about survival
• Darwinism prepared but did not directly cause racial nativism
• Deportation emerged as a sanction for aliens who resisted wartime assimilation.
• Deportation expanded from enforcing immigration rules to an ideological loyalty test
• Deportation transformed from administrative tool into weapon against radicals
• Depression converted immigrants from assets into scapegoats in business eyes
• Depression convinced many workers immigration threatened their livelihood
• Direct confrontation of red-hunters earned public respect as hysteria ebbed
• Disappointment shifted nativist targets to vaguer enemies
• Doubt about open mobility led Americans to scrutinize immigrants
• Each nativist wave permanently transforms American society rather than merely repeating
• Early hostility to new immigrants was cultural contempt, not nativism
• Economic depression abruptly shifted business framing of immigrants from asset to threat
• Economic distress was redirected into anti-Catholic conspiracy rather than class conflict.
• Economic grievance against merchant roles triggered anti-Semitic violence.
• Economic interest alone did not produce full nativist ideology
• Electoral courtship of immigrant voters dissolved the Republicans’ restrictionist role
• Elite restrictionists drove both the preparedness and anti-hyphenate movements
• Employers deliberately mixed immigrant nationalities to prevent worker solidarity
• Ethnic frictions and status rivalries shape prejudice more than ideology does
• Eugenics supplied scientific legitimacy but no racial typology to nativism
• European immigrants’ racial difference had to be intellectually manufactured
• Even 1880s restrictionists still believed assimilation would eventually succeed.
• Even labor unions conceded a racial framing of immigration restriction by 1924.
• Even severe Irish violence failed to revive nativism during the war.
• Failed assimilation attempts convert reformers into exclusionists
• Failed official coercion pushed nativism back toward racial and religious targets
• Farmers’ agrarian distress indirectly heightened urban anti-immigrant tension.
• Fear of Germany during World War One was repurposed into anti-Semitism against German Jews
• Fear-driven Americanization drew the most popular support but achieved the least
• Fear-driven nationalism roused nativists but failed to assimilate immigrants
• Frame-shifting immigration to central national problems lent anti-immigrant feeling intellectual respectability.
• Generalized anti-foreign attacks historically precede targeting a group as a unique racial menace
• Generic anti-foreign feelings rerouted onto new targets when old enemies failed
• Germans ranked above native whites in prestige before the war reversed it
• Groups reattached war-cultivated solidarity to new enemies after the old one vanished
• Immigrant-directed solidarity persisted into peacetime because its psychic satisfactions outlived the war
• Immigration restrictions climaxed a wartime cascade of anti-foreign statutes
• Imperial enthusiasm and progressive reform respectively fed and suppressed nativism
• Inclusive nationalism endured as minorities’ resistance to nativism despite defeats
• Individual-case review by one liberal nearly halted mass deportation
• Industrialists abandoned nativism once immigrant labor seemed docile
• Inter-racial fear could eclipse national loyalty even among nativist writers
• Internal crises drove intellectuals from loose antiforeignism to racial fixity
• Internal race-fear and external military threat fed each other on the West Coast
• Internal-structure threats are easier to dramatize than external military threats
• Irish assimilation dissolved the stereotype as economic and cultural distance closed
• Italian immigrants were lynched for alleged crimes without legal process.
• Italians were denied whiteness through the Dago epithet before racial-nativist ideology hardened
• Jewish distrust grew with assimilation while Irish distrust faded
• Jews uniquely led immigrant defense because they had intellectuals and wealthy elites
• Klan growth depended on a confluence of postwar anxieties, not primeval hatred alone
• Klan recruiters merged corruption skills with appeal to rural masses
• Klan redirected farmers’ economic fury into socially acceptable aggression
• Labor and capital blamed immigrants from opposite class directions in a dividing society
• Labor opposition targeted employer-controlled immigration, not immigrants themselves
• Labor upheaval reanimated dormant nativist traditions, with racial nativism last.
• Labor’s restriction case added a homogeneity argument to economics after the war
• Late-century immigrant resentment was primarily class hatred, not ethnic feeling
• Legal constraints shaped which group bore the postwar anti-radical attack
• Lodge imported Le Bon’s racial history wholesale into Senate restriction debates
• Manipulated statistics presented old-stock dominance as proportionate fairness.
• Manufactured external enemies alternately take domestic and foreign forms
• Mass support for assimilation came from fear of disloyalty, not from reform ideals.
• Mechanization and black migration ended industry’s reliance on European immigrant labor.
• Mendel and Weismann’s heredity science supplied nativism’s first new European underpinning since Darwin
• Militant restriction crusades failed for a decade despite widespread sentiment.
• Monopoly concentration and robber-baron arrogance widened class polarization in the early 1880s.
• Most Klan coercion in the twenties targeted fellow native white Protestants
• Municipal reform crusades adopted unabashed nativism against immigrant voters
• National confidence and optimism suppressed racial fear of European immigrants
• National consciousness deepened through schooling, press, railroads, and war.
• Native Americans restricted births to keep class standing, enabling biological replacement by immigrants
• Native birth-rate decline was a prudential Darwinian response to immigration
• Nativism abandoned ideological conversion for permanent racial exclusion once radical threat dissolved
• Nativism and jingoism are substitutable confidence-restoring strategies that competed for support
• Nativism can collapse even as the immigrant influx it fears soars
• Nativism is a distinct phenomenon, a defensive nationalism of perceived national crisis
• Nativism is nationalism in a defensive posture.
• Nativism persisted beyond its anti-radical phase and assumed evolving new forms
• Nativism surged in prosperity decades, defeating economic explanations
• Nativism was a critic’s label, not a self-chosen identity.
• Nativism was driven by internal anxieties, not by the immigrants themselves
• Nativism’s core aim shifted from voting restriction to immigration restriction
• Nativism’s core charges repeat for centuries and shift only toward racism
• Nativism’s first fulminant era ended without its prophets foreseeing it
• Nativism’s ideological enemies got remade as biologically fixed racial ones
• Nativism’s strongest support came from regions with fewest immigrants
• Nativism’s victory in 1924 threatened its own survival by removing its threat
• Nativist elites split immigrants into salvageable and vicious categories to justify coercion and expulsion.
• Nativist extremists also felt the war’s millennial optimism
• Nativist fears persist in stunted form rather than vanish when dormant
• Nativist ferment fell when the 1890s depression lifted
• Nativist ideas resurface faster because prior foundations persist submerged
• Nativist ideology outlived its emotional drive after 1924.
• Nativist intensity collapsed once restriction was legally secured
• Nativist menace arises only when faith in assimilation collapses
• Nativists had to dress racial discrimination in the language of equality.
• Nativists pursued naturalization restriction chiefly to curtail foreign-born political power.
• Nativists redefined discriminatory quotas as restoring racial fairness.
• Nineteenth-century race was a loose cultural term, not a fixed category.
• Nineteenth-century racial Anglo-Saxonism coexisted with assimilationist cosmopolitanism
• Novel immigrant groups had no nativist tradition, so raw hostility escalated freely
• Persistent ethnocentric judgments provide the subsoil in which nativism later grows
• Personal debt to Jewish-coded bankers seeded Ford’s anti-Semitic campaign
• Post-1960s ethnic tension persists without a revival of nativist ideology.
• Postwar anti-alien mob violence burned out entire immigrant districts
• Postwar IQ testing data grouped immigrant whites into inferior racial ranks
• Postwar patriotic societies framed assimilation as political and moral conformity.
• Pre-1900 America relied on voluntary assimilation, not forced homogeneity
• Pre-Civil War channels pre-shaped later American xenophobia
• Pre-Civil War race-thinking was vague and non-biological
• Pre-existing white-supremacy folkways, projected onto new immigrants, powered southern and western nativism
• Pre-twentieth-century American ethnic policy ran on either assimilationist faith or exclusion, never forced integration
• Prewar nativism revival prepared groundwork for the war years’ greater passions
• Private organizations directly funded federal education until 1919 made it illegal.
• Progressive environmentalism blunted the force of Anglo-Saxon racial nativism
• Progressive reform’s own momentum regenerated the anxieties it had first suppressed.
• Prosperity reversed anti-immigrant sentiment fastest where nativism was newest
• Protestant Irish immigrants supplied much of the hardest anti-Catholic nativist organizing.
• Protestant nativism reinvigorated where Catholicism clashed with American liberty ideals.
• Race-thinkers needed anthropology to classify Europeans into distinct hereditary types
• Racial and radical anti-foreign attacks coexisted, not supplanted one another
• Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien
• Racial ideology can be confident and tolerant when no threat feeds it
• Racial ideology grew from status anxiety, not empirical perception of threat
• Racial nationalism first energized expansionists, not nativists
• Racial nativism began as a defensive swing requiring no new intellectual input
• Racial nativism grew only when it fixed on an identifiable new immigrant type
• Racial nativism matured only when public confidence recovered
• Racial nativism receded while anti-Semitism surged in 1921 debate
• Racial nativism stayed regionally weak where progressive environmental optimism prevailed.
• Racial nativism supplanted anti-Catholicism because it fit the new immigrant threat
• Racial nativism’s collapse and successor nationalism’s decline remain unexplained.
• Racial nativists reframed discrimination as equal justice to justify the 1890 census base
• Racial restriction’s victory deflated the manufactured solidarity that had sustained it
• Rank-and-file animus outpaced official union nativist policy during depressions
• Reconstructed Klan fused racial and national loyalties rather than sectional white supremacy
• Reform could dismantle nativism’s political infrastructure without restricting immigration
• Reform itself revived the xenophobias that confidence had repressed.
• Reformers, not conservatives, first turned anxiety about urban crisis into anti-immigrant feeling.
• Republicans manufactured anti-Catholic issues to replace discredited Reconstruction themes
• Restriction’s success deflated nativism even though its fodder remained.
• Restrictionists saw even the 1890 census scheme as artificial and sought direct racial preservation
• Rival vote-seeking forced Roosevelt to appoint the first Jewish Cabinet member
• Rural anti-Semitism first achieved national organization through the 1920s Klan.
• Senate restriction passed almost unopposed, split only over severity.
• Southern and western race-feelings diffused nationwide to shape immigration views
• Southern congressmen framed southern European immigrants as racially impure
• Southern congressmen racialized southern Europeans by analogy to miscegenation with Blacks.
• Southern federal regulations did not stop state immigration promotion; popular opposition did.
• Status competition, not ancient ideology, drove daily anti-Jewish discrimination
• Suspended ethnic hatreds revived rather than being consumed by war
• Systematic racial nativism openly repudiated democratic and Christian values
• The 1921 quota law locked in racial composition as nationality limits
• The A.P.A. founder blamed personal setbacks on a Jesuit school conspiracy.
• The depression of 1893, not leadership, explains the anti-Catholic surge
• The international-Jew conspiracy framework predated the Protocols by decades
• The Klan’s moral crusade fractured communities and bred lawless opposition
• The Leo Frank case revived nationalistic and raced antisemitism in the U.S.
• The literacy test was a respectable cover for racial discrimination
• The new immigration became a target largely because prior enemy categories failed
• The new immigration was actually a gradual deepening reach into remoter European lands
• The old-new immigration distinction was read backward onto the eighties by later nativists
• The old-versus-new immigrant divide was more gradual and less sharp than later nativists claimed
• The order’s anti-Catholic and anti-radical stances all yielded to race fear
• The Red Scare made Jews concrete symbols of foreign radicalism.
• The removal of economic threat deflated nativism regardless of rising immigration
• The Statue of Liberty’s 1886 ceremony ignored its immigrant-refugee meaning.
• The unified immigrant-enemy category was engineered by intellectuals, not mass instinct.
• The word propaganda spread as elites discovered mass susceptibility
• Threat narratives flourished in official channels despite being wholly unfounded
• Three hundred seventy-six thousand immigrant steelworkers struck despite employers’ divide-and-rule tactics
• Total war’s demands bred intolerance of any divided loyalty in America
• Victorious nativists immediately moved to extend restrictions to new targets
• War converted Americanization from cosmopolitan sympathy into coercive nationalist conformity.
• War’s unity imperative itself restrains coercive anti-alien tactics that would breed resentment
• Wartime conformity demands persisted into peace and drove postwar xenophobia
• Wartime fear converted progressive Americanizers into defenders of the economic status quo.
• Weakening national identity reduces minorities’ capacity to affirm belonging
• When one manufactured enemy faded, nationalism simply found a new target form
• Workers believed foreigners were captive serfs though few actually were
• World War One erased belief in unrestricted immigration from American minds