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Francis Walker provided the intellectual explanation for this phenomenon, blaming immigrants and the supposed degrading conditions they brought to America for the declining Protestant birth rates.

Prescott Hall picked up the idea as just one rationale for immigration

restriction. (Hall and his wife were childless.) At the dawn of the twentieth century, old-stock Americans saw grave national consequences in

the declining birth rates among native-born white women and a seeming softening of the dwindling Anglo-Saxon stock, as exhibited by a

prevalence of neurasthenics.

In response, the boisterous governor of New York in 1899 advocated what he termed “the strenuous life.” Theodore Roosevelt was

from an old Dutch New York family on his father’s side, but he had

a message for the Boston Brahmins and other native-born Americans. “If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world,” he warned. The words were as pertinent to a nation beginning to enlarge its role in the world as it was a warning to Anglo-Saxons who risked being overtaken by more vigorous immigrant groups. “New England of the future will belong, and ought to belong, to the descendants of the immigrants of yesterday and today,” Roosevelt would predict in 1914, “because the descendants of the Pu

ritans have lacked the courage to live.”

Despite his problems, Prescott Hall embodied a different form of

the strenuous life. Through ill health and melancholy, Hall fought with

his pen, badgering public officials and newspapermen, ever relentless in

seeking to restrict immigration from undesirable groups. Rather than

completely retreating into gloom or going into exile, Hall remained

to fight his imperfect fight. As the years went by, Hall found history

steadily drifting away from him. He grew increasingly bitter as his ideas

lost whatever sliver of youthful sympathy they once had for the American ideal of immigration.

Yet Hall’s lifelong battle against immigration exhibited a simple

irony. The IRL stood as defenders of Anglo-Saxon values, of which

democracy was at the forefront, yet its members chose to eschew democratic politics and organizing. The people could not be trusted. As

Walker believed, they were too easily swayed by sentiment to face up

to the tough task of limiting immigration.

In fact, Hall embodied the last gasp of the old New England Federalist tradition. He opposed abstract universals in favor of what he termed

“Nordic concreteness.” To Hall, America’s founding fathers used the

universalist ideals of the Declaration of Independence to institute a

type of aristocracy. By the early twentieth century, Hall saw that ideal

in tatters. To remedy that, he argued for limiting voting rights to those

Americans who paid a certain level of taxes, possessed a certain level

of education, or owned a business of a certain size.

So it was no surprise that instead of working through political means, the IRL opted for an elite approach. A precursor to the

modern think tank, the IRL focused on social science research, which

it published in pamphlets and distributed to journalists, politicians, businessmen, and other community leaders. Between 1894 and 1897, in the wake of the typhus and cholera scares and the continuing debates regarding Ellis Island, the league printed some 140,000 copies of its pamphlets, with titles such as “Immigration: Its Effects upon the United States, Reasons for Further Restriction.” The IRL bragged that over five hundred newspapers nationwide were receiving its pamphlets and some were even reprinting part or all of these reports as editori

als.

Yet the organization would never approach a mass movement. After

two years in existence, its membership totaled only 670 and IRL meetings rarely consisted of more than twelve members. No doubt embarrassed by