American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [54]
before a federal commission in 1899. He claimed that five thousand
individuals who were not members received the League’s materials and
“for all practical purposes might be considered members,” even if they
did not pay dues.
The IRL’s strength was not the size of its membership, which was
perhaps too plebeian a yardstick, but rather its quality. The membership of the IRL consisted of a who’s who of Boston Brahmins. As
the years went by, prominent national figures added their names to
its roster, including novelist (and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt)
Owen Wister and publisher Henry Holt. Academia also added intellectual sheen to the group, notably in the form of Harvard president A.
Lawrence Lowell, the presidents of Bowdoin College, Georgia School
of Technology, and Stanford University, and University of Wisconsin
professors John R. Commons and Edward A. Ross.
The IRL worked closely with Henry Cabot Lodge, who had moved
over to the U.S. Senate by 1893 and would soon take over as chair of
its immigration committee from Senator William Chandler. The IRL
would provide specialized knowledge to opinion makers and lawmakers, giving a patina of intellectual respectability to the drive to limit
immigration. This would lead Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine to tell its
readers that it was not “professional alarmists who are taking up the
vital question of immigration and call for a halt; it is students of social
science . . . who toll a warning bell.”
As with Senator Chandler—who was not associated with the
IRL—it might be easy to pigeonhole the Immigration Restriction
League as a nativist organization and leave it at that. However, anti-immigrant feelings easily coexisted with more liberal ideals. Many of the Boston families associated with the IRL had been staunch abolitionists two generations earlier. At the end of the century, with the nation embroiled in a guerrilla war in the Philippines, many of those associated with the IRL, such as Ward, Joseph Lee, and Robert Treat Paine Jr., became vocal opponents of American imperialism.
The founding of the Immigration Restriction League was part of a national wave of reform during the 1890s, with organizations forming to push for temperance, ban prostitution, and protect the environment and consumers. Immigration regulation, rather than an aberration, was part of a national movement that turned its back on the laissez-faire philosophy of government and sought to transform American society and control the social changes roiling the country in the late 1800s. Two prominent patrician members of the IRL were better known for their support of other Progressive reforms. Joseph Lee earned his fame as the “father of America’s playgrounds,” while Robert Woods was a leader in Boston’s settlement house movement.
The descendants—and beneficiaries—of Boston’s merchant elite were now turning their collective backs on capitalism. The young founders of the IRL, according to one historian, were now “contemptuous of industrial profiteering.” Francis Walker, the economist and son of a wealthy manufacturer, led the way in criticizing the excesses of big business. Immigration restrictionists carped at steamship companies and railroads, which made money off the immigration trade. One anti-immigrant writer could have been speaking for the Boston patricians when she asked: “Why should the American people suffer in this way through the selfish and unpatriotic greed of the steamship companies who are in league with the immigrants?”
The IRL’s constitution laid out its main objectives: “to advocate and work for the further judicious restriction or stricter regulation of immigration. . . . It is not an object of this League to advocate the exclusion of laborers or other immigrants of such character and standards as fit them to become citizens.” Its early advocacy was pointedly free of ethnic prejudice, as Ward wrote that the League did not believe that immigrants should be excluded “on the ground of race, religion, or creed.