American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [51]
It is no surprise that much of the agitation for immigration restriction should find its origin in New England. Francis A. Walker, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Chandler all hailed from Yankee stock. When discussing the “masses of peasantry” from Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia in the 1890s, Walker expressed the combination of dismay, disdain, and deep pessimism that characterized New England’s Anglo-Saxon mind.
These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us.
Perhaps the best expression of the insecure New England mind-set was Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s 1895 poem “The Unguarded Gates.” A native of New Hampshire and former editor of The Atlantic, Aldrich was more William Chandler than Henry Cabot Lodge, though he stood second to no one in his defense of the Boston Brahmin tradition. Aldrich described his poem as “misanthropic.”
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them presses a wild motley throng . . . Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws. In street and alley what strange tongues are loud, Accents of menace alien to our air, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
Aldrich ends his poem with the popular historical allusion to the invasion of the barbarians and the fall of Rome.
Not all of the voices coming out of Boston opposed immigration. In 1896, Congressman John F. Fitzgerald gave a rousing, hour-long July Fourth address at historic Faneuil Hall. Mixed in with traditional patriotic sentiments, the thirty-three-year-old, second-generation IrishAmerican defended “the down-trodden and oppressed of every land,” who come to America “to mould in their own fashion the way to fortune and to favor in this, the land of their adoption.” For Fitzgerald, the nation’s strength and economic power was intimately tied to immigrants, and he spoke up for the foreigner and against any new restrictions on immigration, including the literacy test.
As the Fitzgeralds of Boston and other Irish Catholics rose to prominence, the Brahmins could see their power and influence waning. Boston had long ago ceded its dominance in trade to New York, with the hub of culture and communications to follow. “As Brahmins ceased to be the undisputed arbiters of the public good,” wrote one historian, “they became less confident of the Americanization of the newcomers.” Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, advised his brother to start writing their epitaphs, for the more he witnessed “the formation of the new society, I am more and more impressed with my own helplessness to deal with it.” The intellectual arguments of the Brahmins carried progressively less weight, especially regarding immigration. Francis Walker noted:
For myself, strongly as I feel the evils of the existing situation [immigration], I have little hope of their early correction by law. On one or two occasions, when I have been called to speak in public upon this theme, I have seen how much more taking is the appeal to sentiment than the address to reason, in this matter; how great is the controversial advantage of him who speaks in favor of the complete freedom of entrance which has characterized our career thus far; how strong is the instinctive dislike of an American audience for any schemes of restriction or exclusion, in the face of the clearest considerations of expediency and even of national safety. On this issue, Walker, like Adams, seemed to