American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [20]
Daily newspapers, middle-class magazines, and highbrow intellectual journals devoted increasing space to immigration. The North American Review, the voice of conservative, Northern, native-born Protestants, published two lengthy articles in the early 1880s that detailed how many immigrants were coming and where they were coming from. The articles displayed a marked ambivalence. Immigrants brought great material benefits to the United States, but it was “inevitable, however, that much moral and physical evil will be brought hither by the multitudes who come.”
Newspapers throughout the country chimed in. The Ohio State Journal asked, “What statesman will be wise enough to sift the hundreds of thousands of emigrants crowding over from Europe and say which . . . should be admitted and which, in the exercise of the sacred right of self-protection, should be excluded?” Such a statesman would be needed since, according to the Philadelphia Telegraph, “ a large percentage of the foreigners to whom we have given welcome are unworthy of it,” because they were “often idle, vicious socialists and anarchists, social pests and incendiaries.”
There were fears that America was becoming a dumping ground for Europe’s unwanted peasants. The Chicago Times warned that the “presence among us of a large body of socialists, anarchists, nihilists, lunatics, pordioseros [beggars], and other social dregs from the old world is a danger that threatens the destruction of our national edifice by the erosion of its moral foundations.” The New York Times wondered how long would “the people of this country submit cheerfully to this burden shifted to their shoulders from the Old World?”
A more benign view of immigration still continued to be heard. The Boston Pilot reminded its largely Irish Catholic readers that calls for restriction were an “unsavory reminder of the dark days” of the nativist Know-Nothings. The Milwaukee Journal, with its large German readership, saw immigration as “natural in its movements as the flow of the tides. It is a movement to restore the human equilibrium of the globe.” The paper’s laissez-faire prescriptions rejected government interference, calling it “un-American” and arguing that natural forces would slow or increase immigration based on market forces and social conditions.
Immigration was “giving us the best blood in the world,” according to the Milwaukee Journal, alluding to the benefits of an expanded gene pool. “American humanity in the end promises to be an advance on all other humanity that has yet appeared on the planet.” Americans were a “composite people,” according to the St. Louis Republican. “Our Americanism is continually changing. It is not today what it was a generation ago, and it will not be a generation hence what it is to-day.”
Others used genetic theory for darker purposes. Senator Justin Morrill argued that the effects of new immigrants were “more dangerous to the individuality and deep-seated stamina of the American people. . . . I refer to those whose inherent deficiencies and iniquities are thoroughbred, and who are as incapable of evolution, whether in this generation or the next.” Morrill, a well-respected Vermont Republican, argued that Americans “must not be coerced to support the weak, vile, and hungry outcasts from hospitals, prisons, and poor-houses, landed here not only to stay themselves but to transmit hereditary taints to the third and fourth generation.”
It took Episcopal bishop and poet A. Cleveland Coxe to bring this theory to its logical conclusion. Coxe called the new immigrants “invaders” who “come with weapons of fatal import to our civilization and to our race.” America was under attack from “hordes of barbarians,” for which, Coxe warned, historically minded Americans, there was ample precedent. Past invasions made Spain “a mongrel race,