American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [50]
Despite the impolite tone of the question, most of the responses were positive, if somewhat condescending. Unitarian minister Christopher Eliot compared Italian immigrants to “untrained children,” yet argued that Americans “have less to fear than most people think,” as long as native-born Americans helped assimilate, train, and “protect them from their own ignorance and inexperience.”
The head of Boston’s Central Labor Union, John F. O’Sullivan, argued against any “further attempt at restriction of immigration of any kind, unless it be the restriction of laborers under contract, criminals (other than political) and paupers or those likely to become public charges.” Naturally enough, O’Sullivan thought that all Italians needed was to learn to support labor unions.
Yet two responders were decidedly less sympathetic. Prescott Hall and G. Loring Briggs used the forum to push for a literacy bill for all immigrants. Both men were affiliated with a new organization based in Boston dedicated to stemming the tide of immigration. Each took pains to deny any prejudice toward Italians specifically. Briggs wrote that “anyone who states that Italian immigration is necessarily a menace to this country simply because it is Italian is governed by narrow-minded prejudice, which is certainly unbecoming to an American.” However, both Briggs and Hall noted that a majority of Italian immigrants were illiterate and therefore unfit for American citizenship.
Arguments over the suitability of Jewish and Italian immigrants continued throughout the 1890s. The party affiliations of Ellis Island’s workforce may have changed, but the debate over immigration continued, as would the eternal, yet elusive, desire for that proper sieve that would neatly sort out immigrants—good from bad, desirable from undesirable, wheat from chaff.
In this debate, Bostonians like Prescott Hall would continue to lobby for stricter regulation of immigrants. For them, immigration was personal.
Chapter 5
Brahmins
Let us welcome all immigrants who are sound mentally and physically and intelligent, and let us protect the country from those who tend to lower the average of health and intelligence.
—Prescott Hall, 1907
The Puritan is passed; the Anglo-Saxon is a joke; a newer and better America is here.
—James Michael Curley, 1916
BOST ON—THE “HUB OF THE UNIVERSE,” THE “ATHENS of America”—was America’s most important city up to the midnineteenth century. At least it appeared that way to most Bostonians. This was John Winthrop’s City on a Hill that became the cradle of the Revolution and incubator of American democracy. By the 1800s, the Puritan drive for perfection had morphed into the crusade for more temporal reforms: William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionism, Dorothea Dix’s work with the mentally ill, and Julia Ward Howe’s work with the blind.
Boston had helped create and nourish America’s first truly homegrown literature and culture, with Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, and Whittier. Its historians—Parkman, Adams, and Bancroft—wrote the first drafts of American history. Its magazines—The Atlantic and the North American Review—shaped the nation’s elite opinion. And then there was Harvard University across the river in Cambridge.
Boston had long stood at the apex of Anglo-American culture. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, that culture’s foundations seemed on shaky ground. The 1880 Census showed that 63 percent of Bostonians were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. By 1877, Catholics accounted for more than three-quarters of all births in New England. Irish Catholics had already taken over the city’s police and fire departments. Catholic parents