Made In America - Bill Bryson [98]
When several Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans for associating with blacks, President Theodore Roosevelt made appropriate lamentations in public, but remarked in a letter to his sister that he thought it was really ‘rather a good thing’ and added derogatory comments about the tiresomeness of ‘various dago diplomats’ who had protested to him about the lynchings.40 Even Margaret Sanger, the esteemed birth-control activist, was motivated not by a desire to give women more control over their destiny but merely by the wish to reduce the lower orders through the new science of eugenics. ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control,’ she wrote.41 Never before nor since have intolerance and prejudice been more visible, fashionable or universal among all levels of American society.
In 1907, to give vent to the growing concerns that America was being swept to oblivion by a tide of rabble, Congress established a panel called the Dillingham Commission. Its forty-two-volume report concluded essentially that immigration before 1880 had been no bad thing – the immigrants, primarily from northern Europe, were (by implication) industrious, decent, trustworthy, and largely Protestant, and as a result had assimilated well – while immigration after 1880 had been marked by the entrance into America of uneducated, unsophisticated, largely shiftless and certainly non-Protestant masses from southern and eastern Europe. It maintained that the Germans and Scandinavians had bought farms and become productive members of American society, while the second wave merely soaked up charity and acted as a drug on industrial earnings.
As evidence the commission pointed out that 77 per cent of arrested suspects in New York were foreign born, as were 86 per cent of those on some form of relief.42 And the poor were not just overwhelmingly, but almost unanimously, of immigrant stock. When the commission investigators examined housing conditions in New York, they could not find a single case of a white native American living in a tenement. The commission concluded that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe had increased overall unemployment and depressed wages.
In fact, all evidence points in the opposite direction. It was because America had a base of low-wage, adaptable, unskilled labour that it was able to become an industrial powerhouse.43 For over half a century American business had freely exploited its foreign-born workers, paying them appalling wages, dismissing them wholesale if they agitated for better pay or conditions, and replacing them with new supplies of compliant immigrants when necessary, and now it was blaming them for being poor and alienated. It failed to note that those who turned to crime or sought relief were only a small part of the immigrant whole, and that most were in fact loyal, productive, law-abiding citizens.
Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just towards immigrants but towards any kind of anti-establishment behaviour. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal, among much else, to make critical remarks about government expenditure or even the YMCA.44 So low did standards of civil liberty fall that police not only routinely arrested people suspected of sedition, but even those who came to visit them in jail.
In 1917, in an effort to weed out unfit immigrants, a literacy test of sorts was introduced. An aspiring immigrant had to show that he was capable of reading at least thirty words – though, oddly, these words did