NATIVISM, AMERICAN

Described by its historian (J. Higham, 4) as "intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e. "un-American") connections." Major nativistic traditions in the United States include anti-Catholicism, antiradicalism, and the cult of Anglo-Saxon superiority; its major historical contribution has been the restriction of immigration.

Historical Beginnings. The ideological elements in U.S. nativism, which account in part for its anti-Catholic tradition, include the Protestant origins of 12 of the colonies; Protestant hostility to early Catholic rulers in Maryland; and the secularist ideology animating revolutionary leaders, most of whom regarded Catholicism as outmoded European obscurantism. Antiradicalism was stimulated by conservative horror at European upheavals, especially the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1870 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the resultant desire to preserve the United States from similar disturbances. Belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority was heightened by fear of loss of power through the growth of immigrant political strength.

The economic and social aspects of nativism include ethnic rivalries; resentment of immigrant competition for labor rewards; anxiety of older immigrants to increase their standing as Americans by discrimination against newer groups; business fear of unionization, countered by business benefits from immigrant labor; and political expediency, directly through exploitation of popular causes or through readiness to employ any weapon for the destruction of dangerous antagonists, and indirectly, by fabricating nativist issues to divert attention from real and disruptive questions (as the Know-Nothing uproar was used to distract the public from the slavery controversy; see know-nothingism).

Sectionally, nativism assumed different forms. Easterners in a comparatively rigid social structure both opposed the rise of alien elements and feared immigrant conquest of the cities. The prewar South feared European subversion of American institutions, notably slavery, by English abolitionists and by Catholics who might be expected to obey the renewed papal condemnation of slavery by Gregory XVI. J. L. Chapman's Americanism versus Romanism (1856) is typical of the latter nativist school. The immigrant was welcomed in the West and post–Civil War South, particularly where communities were rapidly expanding or not fully formed, but as the frontier situation disappeared, competition bred hostility. Frustrated agrarian crusaders tended to seek a simple cause for their failure and found in Catholic, Jew, or immigrant a convenient scapegoat as their fears focused on an alien, depraved Europe and the seemingly foreign-dominated East [see, e.g., C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson (1938)]. Orientals offering cheap labor inspired Pacific coast nativist riots, leading to a 10-year Chinese exclusion act (1882, reenacted 1894, made permanent 1904), the effective commencement of immigration exclusion.

Major Periods of Prevalence. Increasing tensions with revolutionary France, including the expectation of war, led to the imposition of security measures by the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. These included the Naturalization Act, extending the prenaturalization period from five to 14 years (the old system was restored in 1802); the Alien Act, authorizing the president to expel aliens merely on suspicion of treasonable inclinations or belief in their being a threat to the public safety (this expired in 1802); and the Alien Enemies Act, empowering the president in wartime to imprison or deport enemy subjects. Aimed at Pres. John Adams's Francophile Jeffersonian critics, many of whom were of alien origin, the acts endangered Irish exiles in particular, since their forcible return to British dominions could result in their destruction for United Irishmen affiliations. Although the main struggle and prosecutions took place under the Sedition Act, the Federalist regime remained strongly hostile to Irish radicals, and its minister to London, Rufus King, sought to prevent their coming to the United States. The identification of John Adams with restrictionist measures was the more tragic in view of his previous history of friendship for Irish patriotic aspirations (see his Novanglus ), but the violent, incendiary tones of the journalists of the day, coupled with his fear of a Paris-style uprising, led him to become one of the champions of alien repression.

1830 to 1860. The swift economic and territorial expansion of the United States brought with it a certain rootlessness and the craving for simple moral solutions. The intellectual simplicity of the religious revivalism that swayed Jacksonian America made for a firmness of moral standard, but it also carried the seeds of intolerance toward faiths alien to itself. The same spirit looked for clear-cut issues in the problems of the day and led to a rapid growth of American conspiracy consciousness that continued for more than a century. The secrecy of Masonic proceedings and of the Catholic confessional became prime targets for the conspiracy seeker, and the anti-Catholicism of the revivalist preachers exacerbated the tendency to see in the Church an anti-American men-

ace. Thus the mob burning of the Ursuline Convent at Charlestown, Mass., on Aug. 11, 1834, was the sequel to three violently anti-Catholic sermons delivered in Boston the previous day by the Presbyterian clergyman Lyman beecher.

Anti-Masonry first emerged following the unaccountable disappearance of William Morgan (September 1826), a renegade Mason who proposed to publish the secrets of the order. Anti-Masonry forces organized a political party in New York State (1830) and contested the next presidential election under the banner of William Wirt, who carried only Vermont. Ambitious politicians (W. H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, Thaddeus Stevens) used the party in their own interest and abruptly deserted it when voters lost interest in the issue. After 1836 the party disappeared. The European origins of Masonry were among the aspects of the order under attack, but it was chiefly its role as precursor of nativistic parties that won anti-Masonry its significance in U.S. history.

Even movements of purely American origin, such as Mormonism, suffered persecution at the hands of their neighbors for divergence from the American religious norm and for economic discrimination against "Gentiles" during these years, but the most bitter hostility was reserved for Catholicism. The 1830s saw the emergence of a stream of anti-Catholic propaganda in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and books. These included pleas for curbing Catholic immigration, opposition to Catholic schools and officeholders [e.g., "Brutus" (Samuel F. B. Morse), "Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States" (1834)], and organs avowedly seeking the conversion of Catholics, of which the American Protestant Vindicator (1834–42), edited by Rev. W. C. Brown-lee proclaimed itself the champion. Brownlee and his followers maintained they could save the "wretchedly deluded votaries" of Catholicism only by a zealous exposure of the alleged iniquities of that religion. Such exposés wasted little space on purely doctrinal controversy, but were devoted to revelations of plots hatched in Austria and elsewhere for the enslavement or mass murder of American Protestants by immigrant Catholic hordes, agitation against Catholic schools then becoming popular among many non-Catholics, and allegations respecting the sexual morals of nuns and clerics.

Some anti-Catholic crusaders sought to the best of their ability to keep such charges as they made within the realm of the verifiable, but in popularity and number they were far outstripped by the myth-makers. A craving for pornography without attendant guilt feelings was satisfied by a perusal of many anti-Catholic tracts that in their efforts to attract an audience were an easy prey to the temptation for bawdy improvisation on the themes of convent and confessional, as exploited by priests for purposes of sexual outlet. The most celebrated of these publications, the Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836) and its sequel, both allegedly the work of an ex-inmate, Maria Monk, branded the institution in question as a nest of debauchery, infanticide, murder, and rape, all described in detail and profusely illustrated. Actually, Maria Monk was an impostor of apparently deranged mind, whose persuasively written work was probably the offspring of overzealous Protestant ministers into whose hands she fell. Her charges were extensively examined and refuted by public-spirited Protestant writers, notably Col. William L. Stone, no friend to Catholicism. But the book, even after the lapse of Maria Monk into drunkenness, prostitution, and theft (she died in prison in 1849), was reprinted many times for dissemination in anti-Catholic crusades.

Clashes between Protestant and Catholic mobs fanned the flames, as did the American renewal of Orange-Catholic hostility originating in Ireland. Catholic protests against reading the King James Bible in public school, and demands for public aid to parochial schools also added fuel to the controversy. Chief areas of anti-Catholic sentiment in this phase were New York City and Philadelphia, Pa., where in the summer of 1844, 20 died and 100 were injured in Orange-Catholic riots. The Irish Great Famine (1845–52) sent 1,250,000 starving Irish immigrants to the United States between 1845 and 1855. Since their destitution prevented migration to the West, they choked the Eastern cities, radically and suddenly altering them. Native American opinion, while philanthropically disposed to assist the impoverished in Ireland, was dismayed at the hitherto unparalleled experience of a pauper immigration on such a scale, and as the political bosses sought to make capital from the new arrivals, anger mounted. The Native American party (founded 1845) and its successor (the Know-Nothing, or American, party of the 1850s) called for drastic changes in naturalization laws. Know-Nothingism reached its greatest strength in 1855, but it split on the slavery issue, with the Southern forces left in control. Former President Millard Fillmore, the party candidate in 1856, carried Maryland alone, after which the party declined. The Civil War, in which many immigrants distinguished themselves, destroyed nativism for a time; war hysteria was turned against "Copperheads."

The nativistic character of Know-Nothingism was revealingly illustrated by the fact that the Know-Nothings specifically exempted Louisiana Catholic Creoles (some of whom joined the party) from charges of participation in the Catholic conspiracy against the United States. Because the Creoles, unlike Maryland Catholics, had maintained a separate identity in the face of Catholic immigration, their "American-ness"—of which, on the slavery issue, they gave proof—was therefore unquestioned. On the other hand, descendants of English or Irish colonial settlers attracted suspicion because they permitted themselves to be the summit of a Catholic social ladder of which the pauper Irish immigrants were the base.

1886 to 1896. Increased immigration, intensification of the labor-capital struggle, and concern over the strength of Catholic political bosses contributed to a renewal of nativism in the late 1880s. Antiradicalism and anti-Catholicism joined in protest against Cardinal James Gibbons's championship of the knights of labor, which, led by the Catholic Terence V. Powderly, reached its zenith in membership in 1886. The Haymarket bomb-throwing in Chicago, Ill. (May 1, 1886), unleashed a tide of antilabor sentiment not restricted to the anarchists associated with the incident. Foreign-born leadership in labor and socialist and anarchist movements became the focus of protest, while the american protective association (APA) revived the anti-Catholic issue, utilizing the old methods of propaganda and issues of attack as well as enmity to the Knights of Labor. The APA declined after 1896. Meanwhile, labor unions themselves were swinging toward immigration restriction in their opposition to the challenge of foreign labor. In 1897 the American Federation of Labor (AFL) officially endorsed the demand for a literacy test, thereby joining hands with Boston intellectuals banded together in the Immigration Restriction League, whose most vociferous spokesperson in Congress was Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. Pres. Grover Cleveland's veto of a bill embodying the literacy provision (February 1897) frustrated their efforts, and nativism suffered a setback following the return of prosperity and the redirectioning of nationalism by the Spanish-American War and its attendant climate of expansionism.

1905 to 1930. Nativism in the late 19th and early 20th century was marked by a more sophisticated intellectual racism than the earlier crude glorification of the Anglo-Saxon. Social Darwinism was adapted to assign to the immigrant the role of unfittest in his native country; eugenics was employed to assail "degenerate breedingstocks"; and anthropology, classifying the races under Nordic (fair longhead), Alpine (roundhead), etc., rather than national categories, was pressed into service as part of the nativist's intellectual equipment. Glorification of the Nordic race and lamentation for the corruption introduced by immigrants of "inferior" racial origin were the themes of Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916) that, largely ignored at first publication, became widely influential after the war. Such ideas, filtered through to the political world, led to a new departure in nativist attitudes as they were renewed; henceforth hostility was turned chiefly against the Mediterranean peoples, who had been immigrating in substantially increasing numbers in recent years. Ironically, those most bitterly assailed as factors liable to cause degeneration of the American people included Southeast European Jews, Southern Italians, and Greeks, whose ancestors had laid the foundations of western Judeo-Christian civilization.

Anti-Catholicism was kept alive, notably in the South, by such journals as Tom Watson's Magazine and the Menace (whose circulation reached a peak of 1,500,000 in 1915). Aggressive nationalism mounted during the war years against the hitherto largely unassailed German-Americans, and later against pacifists, socialists, anarchists, and radicals of all kinds. In the high tide of retreat from internationalism after the war, the great red scare of 1919 [see Robert K. Murray, Red Scare (1955)] included both a widespread deportation of Soviet sympathizers by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and violent physical assaults on left-wing groups, notably the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), by such nativist elements as the American Legion. In 1920, writes Higham (p. 263), "while the redemption of the alien ebbed … , the old drive for the rejection of the immigrant passed all previous bounds."

Anti-Semitism, supplanting anti-Catholicism in the nativist response to the radical challenge, found expression in the widely disseminated and fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which laid the Bolshevist successes in Russia at the door of the Jews. The Dearborn Independent (1919–27) was perhaps the spearhead of the anti-Jewish attack. The revived ku klux klan, however, was undiscriminating in its nativism; African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and the foreign-born of all kinds came literally under its lash. The new motion picture industry gave assistance to the Klan by a production glorifying its predecessor of Reconstruction days based on Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905) and entitled Birth of a Nation (released 1915). The anti-Catholic aspect of the Klan first came to prominence in 1920 and flourished thereafter. Its power flowed far beyond the South to the Middle West and Far West, and membership at its apogee reached five million (Indiana and Oregon being areas of outstanding strength). Scandals tore it asunder after 1925; in its heyday the outrages charged against it, including murder, had come to an impressive figure.

This national fever of xenophobia received congressional acknowledgment in the revival of immigration restriction. The AFL, its nativism aggravated by reaction to the IWW challenge, continued to agitate in this cause. Congressmen who enjoyed labor support tried to catch the immigrant vote as well, but rural nativist forces, led by the anti-IWW, anti-Japanese Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington, demanded suspension of immigration. A compromise measure, restricting immigrants to three percent of each nationality in the population according to the 1910 census, became law (May 19, 1921). Thus was born the quota system, a feature of all subsequent restrictionist legislation. The literacy test had been embodied in legislation passed over Pres. Woodrow Wilson's veto in 1917.

The quota was altered to two percent of the 1890 census for each nationality group, and the maximum quota halved from 357,000 (1924); the maximum quota was further reduced to 150,000 a year with apportionment by nationality on the basis of the national population situation in 1920 (a provision of the 1924 law, but not actually effected until 1929). Satiated by this revolutionary alteration in U.S. immigration policy, nativism (or 100 percent Americanism, as it called itself) waned in this postwar phase. The nomination of Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York by the Democrats for the 1928 presidential election rekindled some of the flames, but without significant effect; the administration candidate, Herbert Hoover, was invincible regardless of his opponent. Smith's nomination was in itself testimony to nativism's losses.

After 1930. Sporadic outbreaks of nativism accompanied the Depression years, notably as an American accompaniment to the rise of European Fascism. The anti-Semitic campaigns of Rev. Charles E. coughlin, whose radio addresses led his superiors to silence him, had their Protestant equivalent in the diatribes of Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith, former follower of Louisiana demagogue Huey Long. An undercurrent of racism was kept alive by the agitators in the South, notably Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi. Publisher William Randolph Hearst, Elizabeth Dilling, and others sought to foment a second red scare in 1934–35, and the sensitive area of education once more became the focus of witch-hunts against alleged seduction of the innocent [see Walter Metzger, Academic Freedom in the Age of the University (1955)]. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union recorded the greatest "variety and number of serious violations of civil liberties" since the war. Seven state legislatures enacted teachers' oath statutes, but this was a measure of the failure to fulfill nativist promise, as far more had been debated. The crusade, fascist in character, identifying mild liberals with Communists, proved immediately ugly but ultimately it was somewhat harmless.

World War II destroyed anti-Semitism as a political force in American life, but brought with it much injustice to Japanese Americans, interned for the duration. In a Supreme Court decision [Korematsu v. U.S. (1944)] Japanese exclusion from the West Coast was upheld. The burden of proof of loyalty was thrust upon the unfortunate Japanese Americans, although the court, in Ex parte Endo (1944), denied that a person of proved loyalty could be detained. Many innocent Americans of Japanese extraction suffered socially, as well as from the danger of internment. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, an instrument of nativism by definition, was given permanent status in 1945.

With the advent of the Cold War, nativism obtained a fresh lease on life. The Communist ideology of America's chief antagonist, the U.S.S.R., offered easy rewards to the superpatriot who chose to confine himself to fighting the Cold War at home. The third red scare shook America to its foundations and culminated in the McCarthy hearings. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin attracted perhaps the greatest body of support and opprobrium for his exploitation of the disloyalty issue; the better entrenched Sen. Patrick McCarran of Nevada employed the scare for the preparation of nativist legislation that would outlast it. The Internal Security (McCarran) Act of 1951 forced Communists and Communist-front bodies to register as agents of a foreign power, dedicated to overthrow the U.S. government by violence, thus rendering them liable to imprisonment under the Alien Registration (Smith) Act of 1940. The Smith and McCarran Acts tightened control on aliens, the latter measure excluding from the United States any member or foreign member of a totalitarian organization (in practice this has not been employed against Fascists). The McCarran-Walter Act (1952) codified existing immigration laws, increasing their rigidity; screening measures were introduced to weed out subversives. Both McCarran bills became law over presidential veto.

The destruction of many innocent reputations through congressional investigation and the demoralization of the diplomatic and military arms of government through the same process ultimately brought about McCarthy's overthrow (1954). The ensuing revulsion and McCarran's death (1953) ended the most violent phase of latter-day nativism. Many political and social legacies remained, however, and small Fascist organizations (e.g., the John Birch Society) continued to manifest extreme nativism. Anti-Catholic propaganda declined during the Cold War, except among a small, though much publicized, minority. The most celebrated of these was Paul Blanshard, who sought to identify the Kremlin with the Vatican in the public mind. Blanshard's liberal origins, combined with the antilibertarian aspects of Catholicism cited by him, placed an attractive gloss on what was merely a reassertion of the old charge that Catholicism was un-American; his works fostered a suspicion of Catholics among liberals of shallow mind. Blanshard avoided the usual charges of clerical immorality and Catholic conspiracy for the mass murder of Protestants; this concession to modern standards of objectivity was not imitated by the anti-Catholicism evoked by the Democratic nomination for the presidency of another Catholic, John F. Kennedy. Although nativism may have accounted for some votes against Kennedy, his election and subsequent assassination probably destroyed anti-Catholicism as a force in American life. By the national character of his appeal, in life and after death, Kennedy offered proof of what nativists had so long denied, namely, that a descendant of pauper, "undesirable" immigrants could prove himself a representative and patriotic American.

Effects on the United States. The nativism written on the statute books since 1921 did much to isolate the United States from currents of world opinion and the realities of foreign situations, a particularly perilous contribution in terms of the country's international responsibilities. It constituted a denial of the freedom and receptivity of American society, two traits whereby the United States came to enjoy her role as a leader in the spread of democracy and liberty. It fostered a negative nationalism, founded on hatred, that continued to corrode a true patriotism; it became an ally of the cause of discrimination against, and segregation of, African American citizens. By making conformity a virtue, nativism immeasurably eroded the force of one of the traditions that had built America—a constant readiness to respond to the challenge of the unknown.

Effects on Catholicism in the United States. Although few Catholics were driven from their faith by nativist outbreaks, a heavily nativist climate probably had more corrosive effects, notably in the South and parts of the West where Catholics lacked numbers to give one another moral reassurance. The Catholic response to nativist attack at times lacked wisdom, but seldom courage. It also had less pleasant features. Thus Catholics failed to unite with other minority groups under attack, e.g., African Americans and Jews, but rather tended, especially in the 20th century, to welcome the turning aside of nativist wrath in other directions. Intergroup hostility among immigrants themselves abetted this tendency. Ultimately, it is to be feared that nativism fostered in American Catholicism an intense zeal to cleanse itself of the un-American stigma at all costs. During the slavery crisis, Catholics, regardless of Gregory XVI's teachings, temporized on the slavery issue and strongly denounced the un-Americanism of the abolitionists. A century later, Catholics had so readily identified themselves with the prevailing impulse to conform to the American attitude, that, for instance, "the American Church," in Richard Hofstadter's phrase, "absorbed little of the impressive scholarship of German Catholicism or the questioning intellectualism of the French Church" [Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), 138]. Moreover, the Protestant nativist, who clamored for further restriction of immigration and saw in every liberal academic a Communist incendiary, found allies among the Catholics, who had formerly been targets for his most bitter bigotry. The tragedy lies in the fact that nativism, taken at its word, was confounded with truly American patriotism even by its former victims.

Bibliography: r. a. billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860 (New York 1938). c. j. barry et al., "Symposium on Nativism" in American Catholic Historical Review 44 (Washington 1958) 137–164. o. handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston 1957). m. a. jones, American Immigration (Chicago 1960). m. l. hansen, The Immigrant in American History (Cambridge, Mass. 1940). m. a. ray, American Opinion of Roman Catholicism in the 18th Century (New York 1936). j. higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J. 1955).

[o. d. edwards]