American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [191]
The new national origins plan lowered the overall immigration ceiling to 150,000 per year and granted immigrants from the United Kingdom almost half of the yearly quota. The big losers were the Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, who saw their previous quotas cut by more than half. Ironically, although quotas were originally designed to bar southern and eastern Europeans, quotas for Italians, Greeks, and Russians all went up from the previous ones based on the 1890 Census, but their numbers were still pitifully low. Now, only 307 Greeks and 5,802 Italians would be allowed in each year.
On the surface, the quotas possessed a scientific precision that lent the endeavor the air of authenticity. Unlike the 1921 or 1924 quotas, the national origins plan would not be instituted without a fight. German-Americans, ten years removed from the harrowing effects of the war, began to speak up, as did Irish-Americans. One of those voices was a familiar one.
Edward F. McSweeney had resurrected his professional career and reputation after the imbroglio that led to his departure from Ellis Island in 1902 and the criminal charges for attempting to steal government documents. Now a respected citizen of Massachusetts, McSweeney served as chairman of the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission. The former union man and government official used his new post to call for a home-grown national history of the United States, untainted by what he felt was a creeping British bias in some histories. Anglo-Americans, argued McSweeney, were the real hyphenated Americans who overemphasized the contributions of the English to the exclusion of other groups. “What America needs most,” he argued, “is the Americanization of most self-appointed Americanizers.”
More substantively, McSweeney’s group commissioned a number of books to counter overly pro-British histories, creating something called the Racial Contribution Series, whose monographs detailed the contributions of various racial, ethnic, and religious communities. One product of the series was W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk, for which McSweeney wrote the introduction.
Foreshadowing a trend that would blossom decades later, ethnic groups were beginning to lay claim to their own Americanness, evolving into staunch patriots and defenders of a distinctly American history as they became more assimilated, while more established ethnic groups would often succumb to more critical attitudes toward American history and nationalism. McSweeney’s work with the Knights of Columbus was a way to fight Anglo-Saxonism and immigration restrictionists with patriotic fervor.
To a pro-immigration Anglophobe like McSweeney, the whole national origins plan smelled fishy. In his mind, it was an un-American fraud perpetrated by Anglo-Americans. The data on national origins, in McSweeney’s words, were an “impudent imposition . . . fabricated for a sinister purpose and are in truth discrimination.”
Despite McSweeney’s efforts, the National Origins Act went into effect in 1929. However, McSweeney never lived to see the implementation of a plan he believed violated America’s traditional attitude of judging immigrants as individuals, not by their ethnic, religious, or national background.
In the late afternoon of November 16, 1928, McSweeney was driving home in Framingham, Massachusetts, when his car stalled at a railroad crossing in the face of an oncoming train. McSweeney’s car was demolished by the train, which dragged it some sixty feet. Suffering serious head trauma and many broken bones, McSweeney was rushed to