Content area
Full Text
Critical Perspective: Exchange
Research for this article was supported by the Massachusetts Historical Society's 2011 Twentieth-Century Fellowship. An early version was presented in the "Journeys" Invited Lecture Series of the Melbern G. Glasscock Humanities Center at Texas A&M University. I am indebted for contributions made by Walter Kamphoefner and Catherine O'Donnell, and by my immigration history students, in particular Carmel Dooling, Alexander Petrusak, Quinton Scribner, and Pete Van Cleave.
Epigraph: Garrison (son of the abolitionist) vilified John B. Fiske, indicting Lodge for the same crime. Garrison, "Condemns the Lodge Bill," Boston Herald, 17 January 1898, George F. Hoar Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (hereafter Hoar Papers, MHS).
"You are a historian, but today you are helping to make history that future historians will be forced to deplore."--William Lloyd Garrison (Jr.) 1898
In the late nineteenth century, campaigns against immigration from Europe emerged in nations long dependent on that region for settlers and workers. In the United States, the leading figure in the movement was Henry Cabot Lodge, a descendant of New England colonists and a Republican politician of extraordinary influence. Lodge receives considerable though narrow attention in the literature. Scholars fix upon his role in the seemingly abrupt ascendancy of the restrictionist idea in the mid-1890s. They claim that racism generated his and others' opposition to new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Scholarship dating from John Higham's Strangers in the Land has stressed an irrational, racialized nativism as the driving force in the movement.1
A reassessment of the Republican Party's position on immigration, as revealed in the political career of Lodge, demonstrates that racist nativism cannot satisfactorily explain the origins or success of anti-immigrant legislation. Lodge and his fellow Republican politicians surely possessed prejudices, but it was votes that remained their compass. The currency of politics--winning elections--is the place to begin thinking about the success of anti-immigrant movements in democratic states.
Lodge's Republican Party shifted from promoting immigration in the 1860s to opposing it in the 1880s in order to gain working-class votes. The selection of particular ethnicities for exclusion appeared well before a coherent racial ideology about white Europeans was at hand. The literacy test that targeted the new immigrants evolved not out of racial principles but political ones: its...