American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [185]
What had caused this drastic change in immigration policy? America’s unhappy experience in World War I helped turn the nation inward and soured its citizens. By 1920, Europe meant destruction, disease, and pointless ethnic conflict, and Americans sought once again to use the Atlantic Ocean as a barrier to the wretched influence of decayed Europe.
The link between immigration and radicalism further poisoned American attitudes—formerly ambivalent, yet relatively open—toward immigration. The fear of alien radicals caused many in the business community, usually in the forefront of the pro-immigration lobby, to acquiesce to the new restrictive legislation.
A major backbone of pro-immigrant sentiment had been the German-American community, which never fully recovered from the suspicions brought on by the Great War. In 1910, there had been 634 German-language newspapers in the country; by 1920, that number was down to 276.
The National German-American Alliance, one of the largest German-American organizations in the country, had been a staunch supporter of immigration and opponent of restriction. The organization—and especially two of its leaders, Henry Weismann and Alphonse Koelble—had been a fierce critic of William Williams. The Great War destroyed the NGAA. By 1916, Weismann and Koelble were charged with trying to set up an office in Washington to lobby on behalf of the German government. By 1918, Congress voted to revoke the charter of the NGAA. The cumulative effect was that the strongest, loudest, and most fearless pro-immigration voice in the country was now eager to prove its“100 percent Americanism” and would never fully regain that voice.
The growing popularity of eugenics also contributed to the success of the quotas. After the war, Prescott Hall called immigration restriction “a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from diluting and supplanting good stocks.” A number of eugenicists linked their work to immigration restriction. Congressman Johnson, a leading proponent of quotas, was deeply influenced by eugenics. Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office, served as a researcher for the House Committee on Immigration. However, as Stephen Jay Gould has noted, “Restriction was in the air, and would have occurred without scientific backing.”
Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, a paean to Nordic supremacy, was originally published in 1916 and received little notice. The early 1920s, however, provided a more welcoming environment for his views. Grant noted how the Great War seemed to shift public attitudes toward immigrants, since “Americans were forced to the realization that their country, instead of being a homogeneous whole, was a jumbled-up mass of undigested racial material.” He also worried that immigration was affecting the national stature of Americans—literally. He complained that the Army had lowered its height requirement to allow the conscription of soldiers from “newly arrived races of small stature.”
The fact that many immigrants and their children fought in the U.S. military was surely a positive sign of assimilation. For Grant, assimilation was a false god. This was one of the few areas where he agreed with proto-multiculturalists like Randolph Bourne. Grant mocked the famous war propaganda poster with Miss Liberty paying homage to an honor roll of names from Du Bois to Smith to Levy to Chriczanevicz. “Americans All!” shouted the poster, an idea that Grant found difficult swallow.
“These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are