Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism - 1860-1925. 1955.
Chapter 1 - Patterns in the Making
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people-a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.
-The Federalist
Nativism has been hard for historians to define. The word is distinctively American, a product of a specific chain of events in eastern American cities in the late 1830's and early 1840's. Yet it has a penumbra of meaning so broad and indefinite that sometimes it seems to refer to a perennial human experience. Does nativism consist only of the particular complex of attitudes dominant in the anti-foreign crusade of the mid-nineteenth century? Or does it extend to every occasion when native inhabitants of a country turn their faces or raise their hands against strangers in their midst?
From the Garden of Eden to 1984, no age or society seems wholly free from unfavorable opinions on outsiders. Understood in such general terms, nativism would include every type and level of antipathy toward aliens, their institutions, and their ideas. Its beginnings in American history would date from the first Indian resistance to white intruders. This view, by reducing nativism to little more than a general ethnocentric habit of mind, blurs its historical significance. On the other hand, confining nativism to the special sort of movement prominent for a couple of decades in the middle of the nineteenth century is too narrow; the inner spirit of that movement has taken quite different guises at other times and places. The spirit of American nativism appeared long before the
3
4 PATTERNS IN THE MAKING
word was coined about 1840 and had its deepest impact long after the word had largely dropped out of common parlance.
Not the nativists themselves, apparently, but rather their critics attached the label to them. When anti-foreign parties arose in New York and other cities after 1835 and evolved gradually into the powerful "Know-Nothing" agitation of the 1850's, opponents denounced the movement as bigoted nativism. Its champions, however, preferred another designation. At first they called their organizations Native American parties, then simply the American party. Their philosophy they described as Americanism. "The grand work of the American party," proclaimed one of the Know-Nothing journals in ~ "is the principle of nationality . . . we must do something to protect and vindicate it. If we do not it will be destroyed." 1
Here was the ideological core of nativism in every form. Whether the nativist was a workingman or a Protestant evangelist, a southern conservative or a northern reformer, he stood for a certain kind of nationalism. He believed-whether he was trembling at a Catholic menace to American liberty, fearing an invasion of pauper labor, or simply rioting against the great English actor William Macready-that some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within. Nativism, therefore, should be defined as intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., "un-American") connections. Specific nativistic antagonisms may, and do, vary widely in response to the changing character of minority irritants and the shifting conditions of the day; but through each separate hostility runs the connecting, energizing force of modern nationalism. While drawing on much broader cultural antipathies and ethnocentric judgments, nativism translates them into a zeal to destroy the enemies of a distinctively American way of life.
Continuous involvement in larger movements of American nationalism has meant that nativism usually rises and falls in some relation to other intense kinds of national feeling. The nationalist nexus has also meant that the nativist's most characteristic complaint runs against the loyalty of some foreign (or allegedly foreign) group. Seeing or suspecting a failure of assimilation, he fears disloyalty. Occasionally the charge of disloyalty may stand forth naked and unadorned, but usually it is colored and focused by a
PATTERNS IN THE MAKING 5
persistent conception about what is un-American. In other words, nativistic agitation had tended to follow certain stylized themes. Three of these themes stand out as main currents in American nativism, each with a separate history reaching back before the Civil War.
By far the oldest and-in early America-the most powerful of the anti-foreign traditions came out of the shock of the Reformation. Protestant hatred of Rome played so large a part in pre-Civil War nativist thinking that historians have sometimes regarded nativism and anti-Catholicism as more or less synonymous.2 This identification, by oversimplifying two complex ideas, does little justice to either. Many social and religious factors, some of them nativistic only in a very indirect sense, have contributed powerfully to anti-Catholic feeling. It has drawn heavily, for example, from the very beginning of the Reformation on a conception of popery as steeped in moral depravity. Generation after generation of Protestant zealots have repeated the apocalyptic references of the early religious reformers to the Whore of Babylon, the Scarlet Woman, the Man of Sin, to which they have added tales of lascivious priests and debauched nuns. On a rational level, too, the clash of faiths has cut deeply. One must expect some measure of tension to survive all adjustments between them, increasing or diminishing in proportion to the force with which Protestant and Catholic assert historic claims. Anti-Catholicism has become truly nativistic, however, and has reached maximum intensity, only when the Church's adherents seemed dangerously foreign agents in the national life.
Although modem nationalism was in its infancy in the sixteenth century, the Protestant revolt exhibited a vaguely patriotic tinge from the time Martin Luther first rallied the German princes against the Church of Rome. In England, particularly, hatred of Catholicism entered into an emerging national consciousness. The English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were struggling more or less continuously against rival Catholic powers or their own pro-Catholic monarchs. The Roman pontiff loomed in English eyes as the great foreign tyrant, menacing the nation and its constitution; his followers had the aspect of a fifth column. By 1679 Titus Oates could plunge the whole kingdom into hysteria with crazy charges of a subversive Catholic conspiracy.
6 PATTERNS IN THE MAKING
Carried across the Atlantic, the anti-Catholic heritage formed an important element in colonial loyalties and, with the rise of an American nationalism, affected that in turn. The tradition acquired a very real local significance in the New World, for the English colonies were wedged between two hostile Catholic empires, France and Spain. Consequently a militant Protestantism deeply colored the American national feeling stimulated by the French and Indian War. Then the American Revolution, accompanied by a growing religious toleration and secular democracy, largely suspended the wars of the godly.' But anti-Catholic xenophobia by no means disappeared. Although recessive, it remained an important counterpoise to more generous ideals of nationality.
For two principal reasons an undercurrent of Protestant nativism persisted into the new democratic America and revived in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. One reason lay in the character of American institutions. Catholic traditions continued to look dangerously un-American partly because they did not harmonize easily with the concept of individual freedom imbedded in the national culture. Americans regarded political liberty as their chief national attribute and supreme achievement. Observing the authoritarian organization of the Catholic Church and its customary association with feudal or monarchical governments, they were tempted to view American liberty and European popery as irreconcilable.
Secondly, a fresh Catholic challenge to American institutions emerged. The Catholic empires that had seemed to block national aspirations in the eighteenth century had given way; but in their place the nineteenth century brought a flood of Catholic immigrants. Nativists, charged with the Protestant evangelical fervor of the day, considered the immigrants minions of the Roman despot, dispatched here to subvert American institutions. (Indeed, the most excited patriots detected a vast European plot headed by the Pope.) Surely such creatures were unfit for citizenship. Anti-Catholic nativism, aiming at stiff naturalization laws and exclusion of Catholics and foreigners from public office, completely overshadowed every other nativist tradition.
By themselves, however, these factors were apparently not enough to make the "No-Popery" agitation a major force in national affairs. It became such only when sectional strife produced
PATTERNS IN THE MAKING 7
a general crisis in American society in the 1850's. With the old parties dissolving and the bonds of national unity strained to the breaking-point, the American party offered a way of championing national homogeneity. Its strength reached a climax in 1855, when it elected six governors on a platform that subordinated the foreign peril to a simple appeal for maintaining the Union by developing "a sentiment of profoundly intense American feeling." But the division between North and South, which nativists endeavored to submerge, soon submerged nativism. The anti-foreign crusade could not prevail against sectional forces which were themselves evolving into overriding loyalties. Northern nativists rallied to the northern nationalism of Abraham Lincoln; southern nativists submitted to a new southern nationalism.
A second nativist tradition, much less prominent in the 1850's than anti-Catholicism, went back a half-century before. From the 1790's, a fear of foreign radicals had lurked in the corners of the American mind. While agitated Protestants regarded the immigrant as yoked to religious despotism, timid conservatives sometimes found him prone to political revolution. Despite inconsistencies between the two charges against him of submissiveness to tyranny and abandonment to discontent, anti-Catholic and anti-radical nativism agreed in a cardinal assumption: the European's disloyalty strikes directly at republican freedom.
For a long time it was hard for Americans to view revolution in a very ominous light. Their own origins as a nation rested in it; their Declaration of Independence celebrated it. On the whole, American opinion applauded the liberal revolutions occurring in Europe and Latin America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Refugee radicals not infrequently received a hero's welcome in the home of the oppressed. Still, another attitude toward revolutionists was possible, even at an early date. In contrast to similar upheavals in other lands, the American Revolution had involved relatively little political or social transformation; its leaders aimed at perfecting an existing society, not at building a new one on its ruins.5 In retrospect, the spirit of '76 could appear even more sober than it was, and vastly different from the temper of foreign revolutions. And since the flexibility of American institutions has continued to discourage extreme dissent, America s most uncompromising radicals have in fact come from abroad. This persistent con-
8 PATTERNS IN THE MAKING
trast between a generally hopeful psychology of mobility in America and the more desperate politics born in class-ridden Europe has fostered the belief that violent and sweeping opposition to the status quo is characteristically European and profoundly un-American. Thus, anti-radical movements in America, like anti-Catholic ones, have had a singular propensity to assume a nationalistic form.
Anti-radical nativism crystallized at the end of the eighteenth century under the impact of the French Revolution. In 1798 the United States faced both an internal and an external crisis comparable in some ways to the sectional split of the 1850's. Internationally the country was heading toward war with revolutionary France. At home a "factious" opposition, brandishing French slogans, was organizing against the Federalist gentlemen who had unified the new nation. Sober Federalists quailed at the ardent sympathy the Jeffersonian party showed toward French democracy; for the intellectual ties between Jeffersonian and Jacobin simply confirmed a fundamental Federalist conviction that democracy was a subversive, revolutionary idea. Furthermore, the ruling gentlemen noted grimly the internal support their opponents received from English, French, and Irish immigrants. Pessimists at heart, the Federalists concluded that Europe's disorders might swiftly overwhelm the new world.6 In their hysterical determination to check foreign radicalism and native dissent, they proceeded to enact the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts.
By 1800 the war crisis had passed; and at home the triumph of Jeffersonian democracy largely dispelled both conservative pessimism and anti-radical nativism. The passing of Federalist gloom left the American people convinced of their invulnerability to the social ills of the Old World. For many decades confidence in the stability of American institutions and in their appeal to all mankind quieted nationalistic fears of revolution. But occasional doubts lingered in conservative circles. Perhaps people bred under oppression lack self-reliance and self-restraint; in America they may confuse equal rights with "voluptuous license." Perhaps a man discontented in his own country will have no settled principles or loyalty at all.7 The coming of the German Forty-Eighters rekindled the flickering suspicions. These refugees from revolution, among them the founders of a Marxist movement in America, brought a whole grab-bag of unorthodox ideas. Especially in the
PATTERNS IN THE MAKING 9
South, where German opposition to slavery caused alarm, and in the Midwest, where German settlement concentrated, the xenophobia of the 1850's included anxiety over the threat of immigrant radicals to American 8
The anti-radical and anti-Catholic traditions had, on the surface, a negative character that sets them apart from a third and more recent style of nativist thinking. The first two traditions declared what America was not, more clearly than what it was or should be; they aimed from the outset to define the nation's enemies rather than its essence. Racial nativism, on the other hand, began the other way around. Originally and basically, what may be called the Anglo-Saxon tradition characterized the in-group directly, the alien forces only by implication. The concept that the United States belongs in some special sense to the Anglo-Saxon ''race offered an interpretation of the source of national greatness. The idea crystallized in the early nineteenth century as a way of defining American nationality in a positive sense, not as a formula of attack on outsiders. Thus it affected American nationalism long before it became a factor in American nativism. Despite the inherently parochial bias involved in pointing to a single, limited source of nationhood, Anglo-Saxonism gave only the slightest inkling of its nativistic potentialities until the late nineteenth century.
By one of the manifold ironies of intellectual history, the Anglo-Saxon tradition began as a liberal doctrine: an idea that ended as a slogan for reaction arose as a call for freedom. By another irony, the Americans who attributed the uniqueness and distinction of their nation to the Anglo-Saxon race were simply echoing the prior claims of the English. Proud appeals to Anglo-Saxon origins and ancestors came into vogue in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries among the champions of Parliament. In opposition to royal absolutism, the Parliamentarians sought precedents and roots for English liberty in the ancient institutions and temperament of the country before the Norman conquest. Relying on Tacitus' vivid picture of the Germanic barbarians and on other early texts, the Parliamentarians traced England's freedom-loving heritage to the "Goths," a collective designation for Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and the other primitive tribes that invaded the Roman Empire.
Like the parallel exaltation of Frankish and Gallic forebears in
10 PATTERNS IN THE MAKING
France, the Gothic vogue had little nationalistic significance until inflated by the romantic ferment of the early nineteenth century. Romantic writers and scholars, rebelling against the uniformitarian outlook of the Enlightenment, loved the diversity and the organic inwardness of all forms of life; to them a nation fulfilled itself through the endogenous forces within its own language and history. Thus the romantics sought in the mists of an early medieval (or "Gothic") past the indestructible core not only of their political institutions but of their whole national charactery The circle of ancestral distinction tended to narrow to the Anglo-Saxons, who emerged as the finest offshoot of the Teutonic branch of the Goths; and Englishmen discovered that they owed their national genius to this supposedly unitary racial source.
In England the fountainhead of the new racial nationalism was Sharon Turner's very popular History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805), and in American thought the idea received its first considerable impetus from the appearance of a Philadelphia edition of Turner's two-volume work in 1841. As the tradition passed into American hands, it preserved its early libertarian emphasis. Although it now ministered to the national ego instead of implementing a constitutional controversy, this romantic cult still stressed, as the supreme Anglo-Saxon virtue, a gift for political freedom. In the Anglo-Saxons, or perhaps the Teutons, had been implanted a unique capacity for self-government and a special mission to spread its blessings.
In popular thought and emotion, this idea found an initial outlet not among nativists but among expansionists. Many an American, during the annexation of Texas and California, saw himself in the role of his conquering ancestors, executing a racial mandate to enlarge the area of freedom. The penny press roared that the Anglo-Saxon impulse would carry the American flag throughout the continent; whereas those who detested the expansionist movement, like James Russell Lowell, excoriated Anglo-Saxonism as a hypocritical mask for aggression.11 Nativists, on the other hand, touched on this idea only very rarely and very lightly. Horace Bushnell, as early as 1837, had cautioned the Americans to protect their noble Saxon blood against the miscellaneous tide of immigration, and in the 1850's there were occasional suggestions that a Celtic flood might swamp America's distinctive Anglo-Saxon
PATTERNS IN THE MAKING 11
traits.'2 But on the whole, racial nationalists proclaimed an unqualified confidence -in the American destiny. Sometimes they explicitly averred that the Anglo-Saxon would always retain predominance over all comers.'3
It is significant that the very concept of race had not yet attained its later fixity and definiteness. Racial nationalism, having arisen out of political and literary speculation, not out of scientific inquiry, displayed a characteristic vagueness. In the sense in which nationalists used the word, "race" often meant little more than national character. It usually suggested some sort of innate impulse, but, despite the growing biological interests of the nineteenth century, this was understood as an ongoing spirit more than a physiological actuality. At best a minor strain in American thought before the Civil War, Anglo-Saxon nationalism then lacked both the intellectual and emotional pungency essential to a serious, nativistic appeal.
In addition to the special curbs on race-thinking, every nativist tendency in pre-Civil War America operated under powerful limitations. Only during the two great crises of the 1790's and 1850's did fear of foreign minorities strike deeply in many native hearts. Even then, wider, more inclusive ideals of nationality were stubbornly defended and ultimately victorious. In general the American people maintained a cocksure faith in themselves, in their boundless opportunities for improvement and acquisition, and in the self-perpetuating strength of their principles of freedom.
Nevertheless some of the major ideological outlines of American nativism had been established. The anti-Catholic, anti-radical, and Anglo-Saxon traditions had opened channels through which a large part of the xenophobia of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would flow. The content and dynamics of that later story would come from social, economic, and intellectual changes unimagined in the days of the Know-Nothings. But the basic patterns were there.