• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Although the Know-Nothing Party fizzled soon after the 1856 elections, hostility toward immigrants and spates of nativist violence recurred in America through the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond. Favorite targets in the West were the Chinese, more than 200,000 of whom had crossed the Pacific between 1850 and 1880, before the Exclusion Act. As with the Irish-Catholics and German immigrants, the Chinese were resented as competitors for jobs, housing, and other resources in California, Colorado, and other areas of the West where they had settled. The Chinese were also feared and loathed because of their otherness. Officially sanctioning popular sentiments, state legislation banned them from mining jobs, barred them from public schools, and even prohibited them from testifying in court against whites.

Once a group is officially depersonalized and painted as a menace, grassroots violence often follows. In 1871 a mob attacked Chinatown in Los Angeles, burning and looting homes and businesses and killing some twenty Chinese men and boys. Other violence against Chinese in California followed, especially as economic conditions deteriorated nationwide and jobs became scarce after the Panic of 1873. In 1876, a group of angry citizens who counted themselves as members of the nativist Order of Caucasians attacked Chinese woodcutters in Truckee, California, setting their cabin afire as they slept and firing on them when they ran outside to fight the blaze. In 1885, at a Rock Springs, Wyoming, coal mine, a group of striking union miners of Welsh and Swedish descent attacked and burned the homes of Chinese miners who had been brought in as replacement workers, killing twenty-eight. Such attacks on Chinese seldom led to successful prosecutions, even when it was well known who the perpetrators were. Chinese witnesses, of course, weren’t allowed to give evidence in court.

As new waves of immigrants crossed the Atlantic during the 1880s and 1890s, xenophobic reactions and episodes of violence against ethnic minorities increased elsewhere in the country as well. The issue for those on the attack wasn’t simply the volume of new arrivals, but who the latest newcomers were and where they came from. The traditional view of the prototypical American at the time was someone of northern and western European descent, reflecting the origins of the large majority of immigrants up until the 1880s. But in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, the numbers coming from southern and eastern Europe mushroomed, spurred by poverty, privation, persecution, and other political, economic, and social conditions. In the same period, the totals from Ireland, Germany, and Great Britain trailed off dramatically. Of the 3.22 million people who came to the United States during the 1890s, more than half were from Italy and eastern Europe. If the Irish felt unwelcome when their influx peaked during the 1840s and 1850s, well, at least they typically were fair-skinned and spoke English. On the other hand, the Italians, the Jews from Russia, the Slavs, Magyars, Greeks, Portuguese, and other groups whose immigration tallies increased during the period were considered by many Americans of more traditional ethnic extraction to be beyond the pale—fundamentally different and occupying a lower niche on the scale of human development.

These attitudes were widely held, openly expressed in educated, respectable circles, and given currency by individuals considered part of the intelligentsia. Francis Amasa Walker, a renowned economist at the time, portrayed the new strain of immigrants as “beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle of existence.” A group of young Harvard graduates founded the Immigration Restriction League, which zealously lobbied Congress to regulate immigration based on ethnic origin and to institute literacy tests for immigrants. In 1896, Congress passed such a bill, sponsored by the powerful Massachusetts