American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [52]
Yet a new generation of Bostonians chose not to give up the fight. At just twenty-five years old, Prescott Farnsworth Hall formed
the Immigration Restriction League (IRL) in Boston in 1894 with his
friends Charles Warren and Robert DeC. Ward. All three were members of Harvard’s class of 1889 and possessed impeccable Brahmin credentials. Warren was descended from a famous colonial Boston family.
Ward was a Brahmin Saltonstall on his mother’s side; his father was a
wealthy Boston merchant. Hall’s father was also a wealthy merchant.
Warren and Hall were lawyers and Ward was beginning his career as a
professor of climatology at Harvard.
Both pride and insecurity fueled the three young Bostonians—
a prideful defense of Anglo-Saxon traditions mixed with insecurity
brought about by the Brahmins’ increasing loss of influence. Members
of the IRL were driven by a fear that American democracy, founded by
Anglo-Saxon settlers using Anglo-Saxon law and government, could
perish under the avalanche of exotic immigrants.
Prescott Hall, who would become one of the most passionate and
active keepers of the Anglo-Saxon flame, articulated this fear best when
he asked: “Is there, indeed, a danger that the race which has made our
country great will pass away, and that the ideals and institutions which it
has cherished will also pass?” To Hall, the warning signs were ominous.
Decades of Irish and German immigration had produced vast alterations in the nation’s fabric, such that in “many places the Continental
Sunday, with its games and sports, its theatrical and musical performances, and its open bars, is taking the place of the Puritan Sabbath.” The IRL raised specific questions about American society and democracy. Was America great because of the hard work of successive
waves of immigrants coming to the nation’s shores looking for opportunity? Or, as Hall and his colleagues were suggesting, was its greatness
a by-product of its Anglo-Saxon settlers?
Hall, who would be the driving force behind the IRL for over
twenty-five years, looked more like an earnest country parson than a
fire-breathing activist. Physically unprepossessing, Hall had trouble filling out his topcoat. His mild appearance and soft, elongated features
were matched by a sentimental personality. Hall’s wife noted that her
husband possessed a “loving and a lovable nature. He hated moral prigs
with a cordial hatred.”
According to one description, Hall was a “gaunt, sunken-eyed
figure” who suffered from insomnia and ill health for most of his life.
His mother was forty-five years old when Prescott was born, and an
invalid for most of her life. She raised her son in a protective cocoon.
Hall’s wife later described how her husband, as a child, “grew up a frail
little hothouse plant, for he was never allowed to romp, to climb, and
to be reckless as other boys were.” One historian described Hall as “an
unstable New Englander, contemplative, subject to depressions.” The deep depressions from which Hall suffered were not unusual
for his era and social class. In fin de siècle America, well before the
age of Prozac, doctors diagnosed an epidemic of what was then called
neurasthenia. Many contemporary social critics and physicians noted
a general “lowering of the mental nerve” among the northern urban
middle class, who seemed increasingly plagued by self-doubt, paralysis
of will, insomnia, and other neuroses.
Insecurity and melancholy went hand in hand with these New Englanders’ fears of being displaced, in terms of absolute numbers as well
as political power and cultural influence. By the late 1800s, Boston
Brahmin society was in decline. An increase in divorces and suicides
and a decrease in birth rates among native-born Protestants—especially
when compared with large Irish Catholic families—only added to the
sense of loss and pessimism. The new immigration from eastern and
southern Europe provided the double whammy to the Brahmin psyche,
reinforcing whatever gloom and insecurity was caused by their loss of
control