Why Did the Restrictionist Movement Arise?

The dominant scholarly interpretation of the fin de siècle movement to restrict immigration is that it was a product of nineteenth-century racism. Emerging in the 1990s, this view has become hegemonic, as suggested by the Journal of American Ethnic History’s Winter 2017 special issue, “The Racial Turn in Immigration and Ethnic History.” Matthew Jacobson discovers racism as early as the Know Nothing movement before the Civil War—by the late nineteenth century, Americans recognized “innate, biological differences” among European groups. He cites Lodge’s restrictionist efforts as rooted in a “eugenic standpoint” in which new immigrants were no longer considered white. Erika Lee argues that Chinese exclusion led Lodge and his colleagues to embrace “racial ideas that marked southern and eastern Europeans as . . . a threat to the nation.” Aristide Zolberg asserts that “explicitly racialist arguments on behalf of restriction” emerged as the prime motivation in U.S. policy, linking Lodge directly to that conviction. David Fitzgerald and David Cook-Martin contend that in the United States “scientific racism played a dominant role in forming the literacy test.” So too, Daniel Tichenor finds “southern and eastern Europeans . . . distinguished in biological, evolutionary terms” and considers eugenics well established in American intellectual circles before 1900. Thomas Leonard maintains that the progressive social scientists “at the forefront” of the movement in the 1880s and 1890s believed in the “hereditary inferiority” of immigrants.^{Footnote 2}

Academic opinions are a dubious source for policy in democratic societies. Even if they were formidable, making racism a major factor distorts biological theory before the advent of Mendelian genetics. Ethnocentrism was common, but belief in the controlling influence of heredity was rare. The late nineteenth century lacked a biological theory sufficient to characterize European ethnic groups as racially distinct. Scientific racism and eugenics had as yet no purchase in the United States. As George Stocking’s careful studies demonstrate, Neo-Lamarckianism dominated thinking among American social scientists. The inheritance of acquired characteristics made culture dominant over biology: race was more the product of cultural characteristics than their cause.^{Footnote 3}

Lodge’s supposed racism is said to have emerged from his affection for a “Teutonic” historical theory that glorified Anglo-Saxon traditions. According to Barbara Miller Solomon, that theory led Lodge to conclude that “the essence of the immigration problem was racial.” Leonard judges Lodge by this measuring stick: in the 1880s, “Anglo-Saxonism . . . implied that the capacity for democratic government was hereditary, a race trait unique to the Anglo-Saxon people.” Indeed, Lodge “joined the anti-immigrant cause in the name of preserving Anglo-Saxon race integrity.”^{Footnote 4} Richmond Mayo-Smith, Francis Walker, John Fiske, Henry Adams, and other academics did at times argue that ancient Anglo-Saxon customs lay at the root of the admirable institutions found in the United States. Yet elitist Teutonism was widely discredited by scholars in the 1890s; Mayo-Smith himself heaped contempt upon it. Most critically, it was not a racial theory, but a cultural one, a triumphantly assimilationist proposition. Academics like Fiske and popularizers like Josiah Strong proclaimed that the English-speaking peoples would absorb, assimilate, and dominate all other groups.^{Footnote 5} Historians intent on race as an explanation must ignore an ardent American belief in the power of the nation to assimilate foreigners, a conviction extending to the academics featured in most texts.

Stocking concludes that “American social scientists did not for the most part attribute to race a major role as an independent causal variable in the explanation of social phenomena.” Racial heredity “was itself ultimately the implicitly Lamarckian product of social and environmental forces.” “The men who established the social sciences as academic disciplines in the United States at the turn of the century were for the most part environmentalists . . . reacting against biological determinism.”^{Footnote 6} The potential for a biological racism existed within Lamarckianism, as Lodge’s career will attest, but hereditary arguments were rare. Mayo-Smith expressed the inadequacy and confusion of racial thinking and the dominance of environmentalism in his 1894 essays, “The Assimilation of Nationalities in the United States”: “Anthropologists have as yet reached no satisfactory definition of race, tribe or people.” Mayo-Smith rejected the notion of pure races, discounted hereditary traits in the rapid process of assimilation of immigrants in the United States, and stressed that the primary force had been “the social environment.”^{Footnote 7} As Jeanne Pettit remarks, “In the 1890s, no language existed to demarcate European ‘races.’” William Ripley’s Races of Europe, published in 1899, provided that language, but Ripley himself had no clear understanding of the processes of inheritance and resisted using race as an explanatory factor.^{Footnote 8} Mendelian genetics and eugenics lay ahead, in a different period, for another generation.

The lack of a coherent theory of biological inferiority before the twentieth century should caution against assigning racism a primary role in the restrictionist movement. Even had such been available, it begs the question. Could an elite ideological belief have inspired a movement made up of voters from a wide variety of ethnic and class backgrounds? If that seems unlikely, what might explain the vast appeal of immigration restriction in the late nineteenth century and the avid interest of politicians in espousing it?

From Promotion to Restriction: The Republican Party

In the 1850s, the Republican Party was the refuge for hundreds of thousands of nativists appalled by Catholic Irish immigration but still more offended by the slave South. The party continued to be, as ethnocultural political history has demonstrated, the affiliation chosen by most Northern Protestants, whether of native or foreign origin. As Lodge’s fellow Senator George F. Hoar remarked, “The Methodist denomination” was “always large in Massachusetts and powerful in her Republican councils.”^{Footnote 9} Pressured by pietistic constituencies, local Republican organizations regularly, and often disastrously, took up liquor, language, and public school positions that went down poorly with nineteenth-century immigrants. Still, by the 1860s, the national party had broken free from blatant anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic views. In Charles Sumner’s words, it would not be a party that “interferes with religious belief, and founds a discrimination on the accident of birth.”^{Footnote 10} Success with largely Protestant Scandinavian, Canadian, German, and British origin voters proved the utility of rejecting unqualified nativism. The party depended on ethnic votes for success and readily incorporated immigrant origin men into its party machinery.^{Footnote 11}

As befit a party seeking immigrants’ votes, and one in which employers reliant on immigrant workers played a critical role, the party began as an avid promoter of immigration. The 1864 “Act to Encourage Immigration” responded to President Lincoln’s 1863 message to Congress. Party stalwart Senator John Sherman presented the Report of the Committee on Agriculture. It lauded the contribution of European immigrants to the nation’s economy and celebrated a population that had blended European nationalities: “we are all immigrants.” The senator urged land policies benefiting immigrants, political rights for aliens, their exemption from military service, and an Immigration Bureau that would encourage foreigners to emigrate.^{Footnote 12}

While neither the 1864 Act, nor any other, exhibited the level of promotion seen in other host countries, it had a striking feature. It specifically “validated labor contracts made by immigrants before arrival”: “Emigrants [could] pledge the wages of their labor,” to pay for their transportation and other costs. A Commissioner of Immigration would oversee contracts and prosecute emigrants who failed to fulfill them, a bracing stance for the party of free labor.^{Footnote 13} Quietly repealed in 1868 in Congress, states maintained contract labor statutes. The party’s 1868 and 1872 platforms called for immigration to be “fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.”^{Footnote 14} The 1873 Ohio platform made the Republican position clear: “We cordially welcome to our shores the oppressed of all countries, and remembering with pleasure that adopted fellow citizens have always proved loyal to the Republic, we favor such modifications of the naturalization laws as to materially shorten the time before voting.”^{Footnote 15}

Such advocacy did not endure. Contract labor undercut American wages, the criterion the party professed that it protected with its main domestic policy, the tariff. Workers’ opposition to immigration became evident, often veiled by rhetoric targeting contract labor only. State platforms began to eliminate the plank. Republican congressmen strongly condemned contract labor in 1884 congressional debates, and voted for the putatively prohibitive Alien Contract Labor Law in 1885. Calling on the antislavery tradition they had ignored in 1864, the 1884 national platform repudiated contract labor: “The Republican Party, having its birth in a hatred of slave labor, and in a desire that all men may be free and equal, is unalterably opposed to placing our workingmen in competition with any form of servile labor, whether at home or abroad. In this spirit, we denounce the importation of contract labor.”

According to James L. Huston, retreat from the aggressive promotion of immigration meant that “by the 1870s . . . the Republicans rested all their hopes for a contented working class upon the operation of a high tariff wall.”^{Footnote 16} Protectionism was a near religious principle in the party, but its only devout congregants were businessmen. Republicans on the stump tried, with fading success, to persuade working-class voters that tariff walls protected jobs and high wages. Without the tariff, as the 1883 Ohio platform attested, “American workingmen [would have] to accept the unremunerative wages which are paid their foreign rivals.”^{Footnote 17} Workers in protected industries did support specific duties, but they also viewed tariffs as taxes that increased the price of goods they bought. A letter sent in 1878 to Senator Hoar by an officer of the Compton Iron Works reveals the Republican conundrum: it conveyed “a remonstrance from the Workmen in my employ against the increase of duty on tea & coffee, & also against the reduction of duties on articles manufactured in which their labor is interested.”^{Footnote 18}

As the tariff became increasingly difficult to defend, Republicans experimented with alternative labor-friendly positions. The one they came most earnestly to promote was restriction of immigration. It spoke more directly than the tariff to the American worker’s fundamental desire to reduce wage competition. Still, Republicans could not attack resident immigrants or their children who voted. A politically viable restrictionist policy needed to discriminate among foreigners. Congressional debate on contract labor exposed the ethnic rift upon which a useful political strategy might be built. In 1883, John Jarrett, born in Wales and president of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, testified that “demoralized” foreigners, “Hungarians, Poles, Italians, Bohemians,” had begun to fill the steel mills.^{Footnote 19} Martin Foran, the chief advocate of anticontract labor legislation in the House, son of Irish immigrants, and once president of the cooper’s union, represented a working-class district in Cleveland. Foran described new arrivals in equally harsh terms: “American capitalists and corporations have imported and shipped into this country, as so many cattle, large numbers of degraded, ignorant, brutal Italians and Hungarian laborers.”^{Footnote 20}

While union leaders such as these, many foreign born, would come to be a principal force in restrictionism, it was the mass of workers, not the few in unions, who mattered in elections.^{Footnote 21} Surveys taken by state bureaus of labor in the 1880s and 1890s resolve debate about where the working class stood on restriction. In the 1885–86 report of the Wisconsin Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, Commissioner Frank A. Flower—a prominent Republican in the state—remarked on the “practical unanimity of the sentiment in Wisconsin in favor of restricting, suspending for a time, or totally prohibiting immigration from foreign countries.”^{Footnote 22} In the report for 1887–88, when the bureau asked workers whether immigration injured their trade, 60 percent of respondents reported that it did. Labor-market wage competition lay at the core of these responses. A carpenter remarked: “Stop immigration. Enforce the school laws; stop child labor in shops and factories.”^{Footnote 23} An 1895 Michigan survey of 1,250 teamsters found that 62 percent thought their occupation was directly injured by immigration. More than 90 percent called for reduction or an outright end of “foreign immigration.”^{Footnote 24}

Remarkably, opposition to immigration barely declined in responses confined to workers of immigrant origin. But these were respondents from long-settled immigrant-origin communities. In three Kansas samples, taken in 1895, 1896, and 1897, fewer than 20 percent of respondents were foreign born, but nearly half had a foreign-born parent, and nearly all reported origins in Ireland, Germany, and Scotland. In 1897, only 45 men had been born in Germany, but 162 had a mother born there. In the survey of Michigan drivers, the near 30 percent of foreign birth were principally Canadian, German, or Irish. In March 1887, The Nation remarked on Flower’s survey, noting that Wisconsin had abolished a state board that had promoted immigration: “Such unanimity in the reversal of a long-established policy would be striking in any State, but it is peculiarly impressive in Wisconsin, which has more foreign-born than native voters. . . . Evidently a change in the American attitude towards immigration has begun.”^{Footnote 25}

The division among those of immigrant origin was equally visible in the foreign-language press. On April 18, 1896, the Norwegian Scandinaven supported a Republican candidate who favored the restriction of immigration, rejecting the notion that “adopted citizens are indiscriminately opposed to any restriction of immigration.” Across decades, the Swedish paper Svenska Tribunen-Nybeter favored laws that would “limit the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and . . . encourage immigration from northwestern Europe.” The Norwegian paper Scandia argued that the “great immigration from Southern European countries” was a “menace to the U. S. A.”^{Footnote 26} German-American and Irish-American organizations at times opposed restriction, but there is little evidence these positions reflected the opinion of German and Irish Americans. Radnicka Straza, a Croatian paper, adamantly opposed to restriction, found it ironic that “the greatest enemies of immigration are immigrants themselves or sons of immigrants.” Even German papers consistently opposed to restriction, such as the German Abendpost, admitted in 1915 that the “German-American element” regarded “the fate of the [restriction] bill with complacency,” since it would not affect them. On the eve of the great 1896 debate, the Washington Post commented on the “hearty support” given restriction legislation by “adopted citizens.”^{Footnote 27}

Foreign-origin witnesses were equally frank in congressional testimony. In 1890, while some German societies opposed any change in immigration law, editors representing “a very large majority of the German press of this country” saw the merits of the literacy test. Paul Wolff, correspondent for the Staats-Zeitung, strongly endorsed the “educational test,” precisely because it would not affect Germans but would keep out Italians and Poles. Emil Praetorius, editor of the St. Louis Westliche Post, observed that “the only thing that we, in the German-American Press, are looking favorably upon is this test of intelligence (sic),” given that it would not affect Germans but would bar the new immigrants. Leaders of Czech and other older immigrant-origin communities also described new immigrants as inferior. While not all concurred, contempt for Hungarians, Italians, and Jews was tangible in the remarks of foreign-origin witnesses favoring the literacy test.^{Footnote 28}

The same ethnic differentiation explains the support given by immigrant-origin politicians. In Minnesota, Swedish-born John Lind, Republican representative (and governor as a Democrat) favored restriction. Knute Nelson, a Norwegian-born governor and senator, built his career on the tendencies of Scandinavians in his state to vote Republican and the eagerness of Republican Party officials to cement that relationship through his political career.^{Footnote 29} Nelson’s first term as senator coincided with the literacy bill of 1896, which he supported.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Ethnic Divisions, and the Working-Class Vote in Massachusetts

Reviewing Lodge’s career in 1906, H. W. Boynton remarked that the senator from Massachusetts “has made of himself not an eminent statesman, but a prominent ‘practical’ politician.”^{Footnote 30} Lodge’s state was solidly Republican after the Civil War, but the party’s future rested on its capacity to capture immigrant-origin, working-class voters. His senatorial colleague Hoar presciently recognized that retaining sovereignty required that there be no “threatening shadow of a solid alien vote.” Hoar warned Lodge that, unless his strategy was followed, “we are gone, and the grand chapter of the old Massachusetts history is closed.” Republican manufacturers should establish papers to influence French Canadian and Irish voters; the party should give “no cause for jealousy or opposition to the Catholic clergy,” and should voice mild support for Irish rights in Ireland. Hoar’s objective was to “break this compact foreign vote.”^{Footnote 31} Attentive to this advice, Lodge directed the successful Republican campaign in 1883 against Democratic governor Benjamin Butler, a man “quite popular with the poorer class of foreign immigrants who gathered in manufacturing towns and cities like Lowell.”^{Footnote 32} Celebrating Republican victory, Governor-elect George D. Robinson gave credit to voters “born in other countries, or of other parentage than American,” [who] cast their lot with us.”^{Footnote 33}

Stiffer challenges were yet to come, as Hoar foresaw. Samples of the United States Census profile the ethnic constituencies that Massachusetts politicians faced.^{Footnote 34} In 1880, there were about 500,000 males age twenty-one and older in the Commonwealth. More than half, 276,000, were native born with native-born parents, largely stout Republicans. There were 171,000 foreign born, and 53,000 native born with at least one foreign-born parent. That census did not ask citizenship status, but in 1870, 36 percent of foreign-born men in Massachusetts had naturalized.^{Footnote 35} Presuming an increase to 40 percent by 1880, the total electorate was 397,400. Foreign-origin voters thus made up 31 percent. The most adamantly Democratic group, the Irish, counted no more than 55,000 voters in the first generation and 36,000 in the second—even if Irish naturalization reached 50 percent, Irish-origin voters represented only about 17 percent of the electorate in 1880.

Other ethnic groups in the state included Scandinavian, English-Canadian, and British-born voters and their children. Ethnocultural political theory and archival evidence from the papers of Hoar and Lodge indicate that these groups supported the Republican Party.^{Footnote 36} On September 23, 1887, Joseph McCready, editor of the American Protestant and the British American, called Hoar’s attention to “the British-American movement.” McCready claimed that British-origin immigrants were “becoming American citizens by hundreds in all parts of state and particularly in the large cities.”^{Footnote 37} E. B. Glasgow reported to Hoar that “citizens of Swedish, British and French origin” should lead to “a large increase in the Republican vote.”^{Footnote 38} In the same year, W. W. Thomas wrote the senator (with considerable exaggeration) on a “tide of Swedish immigration” arriving in New England, adding “a fresh, sound element of good Northern blood . . . to Mass. & to your own good city.”^{Footnote 39} Writing Mr. Doering in 1892, Lodge remarked: “I fully appreciate the good character and quality of the Scandinavian vote in this country and I know that it is a vote almost always cast for the Republican party.” He urged that those in Massachusetts “become citizens without delay.”^{Footnote 40} If these largely Protestant groups are combined, they made up about 10 percent of the potential electorate in 1880, making Republican success quite likely.

Still, as Hoar had foreseen, by 1900 the share of immigrant-origin voters in Massachusetts had grown to more than half the electorate. Moreover, in contrast to other states, Massachusetts’ districts afforded urban and immigrant voting districts largely proportional power in elections.^{Footnote 41} In 1900, the potential electorate in the Commonwealth had reached 661,365. Of these, 167,000 were naturalized foreigners and 168,000 were native born with at least one foreign parent, making the foreign-origin vote 51 percent of the electorate. Those of Irish origin, with a 75 percent naturalization rate among the foreign born, made up nearly 30 percent of all potential voters. French Canadians rose to only 4 percent and other foreign-origin groups, largely from the new sources in Southern and Eastern Europe, constituted less than 3 percent. But these did not comprise all immigrant-origin voters. Ethnic groups likely to vote Republican constituted 122,246 or 18 percent of the electorate, providing the margin Republicans needed.

Immigrant-origin voters in Massachusetts were quite likely to be working-class voters. The party, and Lodge himself, needed to win a constituency that might vote on class as well as ethnic lines. For all his patrician ways, Lodge began his political career running for a seat in the General Court in the heavily industrialized 10th Massachusetts House district. In his first successful campaign in 1879, the other two men elected from the district were “workers in the Lynn shoe shops.”^{Footnote 42} Lodge later competed in the 6th Congressional district, which included the shoemaking center of Lynn, the working-class suburbs of Boston, and various factory towns. In 1886, he defeated H. B. Lovering, formerly mayor of Lynn. Lovering was popular with working-class voters, but, in this election, as George H. Breed, a Lynn politician, remarked, “Men in the shops, as a rule voted against him.”^{Footnote 43} Lodge, standing “on the steps of the factory in Lynn facing the great crowd in the square,” offered his constituents the Civil War pension, an effective tool with Northern working men, and conventionally ballyhooed the tariff as the guarantee of good wages in protected industries.^{Footnote 44}

The tariff nonetheless sparked continual negative reaction among working-class voters. What might inspire them to vote Republican? Campaigning in working-class districts had once required celebrating immigration. In 1882, Lodge applauded the arrival “in ever-increasing numbers, [of] the best elements, both mentally and physically, of the laboring population of Europe.”^{Footnote 45} He soon had a different view. By 1888, immigration restriction appeared in his speeches. Openly advocating a general reduction, he easily won three more terms in this district before entering the Senate in 1893. Lodge linked the new policy to the protectionist warhorse. From the stance that tariffs kept out goods made with cheap labor, it was but a step to argue that cheap labor might “come on two legs down the gang-plank of an emigrant ship.” On August 28, 1888, under the heading “The Tariff Question,” he explicitly endorsed “a movement toward restricting immigration by excluding its undesirable elements.”^{Footnote 46} The language he used became standard copy, reflecting the self-conscious attempt by Lodge and other Republicans to defend the tariff while presenting a more direct appeal. In the December 15, 1888, issue of the Lynn newspaper, The Laster, Lodge laid out the argument to a working-class readership:

He argued that “immigration should not only not be stimulated, but that it should be restricted. . . . Cheap labor can come packed up in the manufactured article as well as in the human form. If it is well to exclude the one it is wise to exclude the other.”^{Footnote 48} In a political speech in Everett, Massachusetts, in October 1890, he received sustained applause for his insistence that “we must have laws on the same line as the protective tariff to restrict and sift the immigration that comes to this country. . . . Bear it in mind when you go to vote on the fourth of November . . . that the protective principle is just as applicable in one case as it is in the other.”^{Footnote 49}

Other major Republicans shifted at the same time and for the same reasons. Lodge’s close friend in the House, the great tariff advocate and future president, William McKinley, had turned to a restrictionist strategy even before Lodge. In a speech given in his working-class district in Canton, Ohio, on October 18, 1887, McKinley reported that “on the subject of foreign immigration the Republican party of Ohio is fearless and outspoken. . . . Iowa, Pennsylvania, and New York have all pronounced against indiscriminate immigration.”^{Footnote 50} In 1887, the state platform committee, upon which McKinley sat, laid a plank that broke completely with past policy of the Republican Party:

Historians have repeatedly confused McKinley’s pro-labor gestures as expressions of an ethnic pluralism designed to bring new immigrant constituencies to the party.^{Footnote 51} In fact, he proved his labor credentials by calling for bars against new immigration. His shift, like that of Lodge and other Republicans, grew out of the need to win elections in districts dominated by working-class voters.^{Footnote 52} Benjamin Harrison’s letter of acceptance of the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1888 similarly called for limitation of immigration to protect American wages, closing connecting this policy “with the subject of the tariff.”^{Footnote 53}

In 1888, the Republican-dominated House appointed a “Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration.” By 1889, there were standing committees in both houses. In the 52nd Congress (1891–93), “a flood of petitions call[ed] almost unanimously for restriction of immigration.” Hutchinson estimates these at more than five hundred, submitted by labor organizations, patriotic or nativist societies, and agricultural leagues.^{Footnote 54} A survey of the “English-American press” in 1888 by the German-language newspaper Illinois Staats-Zeitung found most Republican papers supported the reduction of immigration.^{Footnote 55} In 1889, Republican senator William E. Chandler of New Hampshire, chair of the Senate committee, argued forcefully for restriction; in 1892, he introduced a bill calling for a one-year suspension of immigration.^{Footnote 56} The simultaneity of these conversions reveals that an ascendant faction of the Republican Party had begun to view immigration restriction as a useful strategy to gain working-class votes, well before the depression years of the mid-1890s.

Ethnic Divisions and the Indispensable Tool

It was nonetheless risky to be broadly anti-immigrant in front of men and women proud of their immigrant origins, hostile to nativism directed toward their kind, and in contact with kith and kin who might want to emigrate. Indiscriminate exclusion offended persons from earlier immigration streams, an affront Republicans eager to expand support among working-class voters could ill afford. Restriction lacked a device that could distinguish efficiently between those of immigrant origin who could vote and those who could not. The answer lay in the divisions revealed in contract labor debates and worker surveys, and vividly expressed in the foreign-language press.

The economist and progressive reformer Edward W. Bemis provided the indispensable tool to effect this political strategy. In 1887–88, he proposed: “Admit no single person over sixteen, and no man over that age who cannot read and write in his own language.” Bemis saw that a literacy test would not much affect “Swedes, Germans, English, Scotch, and most of the Irish . . . and we do not want to exclude them” but would vastly reduce “the Italian, Hungarian, and Polish emigration.” Like other progressive reformers, and like Lodge and McKinley, Bemis devoted most of his attention to the positive effect of restriction on American workers’ wages. Unskilled laborers in the new immigration lowered the American “standard of living and wages” and caused an “incalculable injury to our wage-earners.”^{Footnote 57}

Lodge quickly adopted Bemis’s approach, one that let him appeal to certain workers by offering to exclude others. In “The Restriction of Immigration,” in the January 1891 issue of The North American Review, he called for a “definite test which will discriminate against illiteracy if we desire any intelligent restriction or sifting of the total mass of immigration.” A literacy test would be “a help to our workingmen, who are more directly interested in this great question than any one else can possibly be.”^{Footnote 58} In the 1890 hearings before the Joint Congressional Committee on Immigration, the “educational test” made its way into congressional debate, and in 1893 the House Select Committee recommended the exclusion of those who could not read or write in their own language.^{Footnote 59}

Aversion to immigration had begun among workers competing for wages, but the literacy test had the further merit of appealing to the middle class. Bemis had argued that the new immigrants were “ignorant of our institutions” and “conceptions of government.”^{Footnote 60} Bemis’s comments reflected widespread unease over the civic consequences of mass immigration, perhaps best reflected in the rapid shift of Protestant congregations from approval of immigration to outright opposition. On July 10, 1884, The Congregationalist reminded its readers that “‘we are all immigrants or their descendants. . . . Every responsible immigrant should be admitted here.’” Seven years later, the editors argued for “Guarding the Doors”: “This country is coming to be overburdened with multitudes who are in no sense patriotic, who are ignorant and clannish . . . [who find] their way into our asylums, poorhouses and prisons . . . [and who are often] unfit to be American citizens.”^{Footnote 61} In 1887, the editors of The Nation expressed these anxieties forthrightly, lamenting the arrival of:

The literacy test thus also responded to a political opportunity embedded in middle-class anxiety. Lodge’s speeches began to add to its working-class themes the threat illiterate immigrants posed not simply to wages but to civic institutions, a motif already taken up by McKinley.^{Footnote 63} In his 1891 article, like Bemis, Mayo-Smith, Francis Walker, and other prominent restrictionists, Lodge advanced a theory of political capital, fixed on the undercapitalization of certain immigrant groups for citizenship, an argument appealing to a middle class anxious about the visible effects of mass immigration. Lodge, conveniently forgetting the Know Nothing era, and repressing his true sentiments about the Irish, lamented the decline of “community of race or language” that had “facilitated the work of assimilation” of previous immigrants. References to the dangers southern and eastern Europeans posed to “free government” soon joined his original emphasis upon costs for the American workingman:

These two arguments are entwined in his cynical response to the lynching of Italian immigrants by a mob in New Orleans in March 1891. Lodge recognized the political value of an atrocity he had condemned when African Americans were its targets. He transformed its victims into agents of corruption, members of the Mafia, “mere birds of passage . . . which [regard] as home a foreign country, instead of that in which they live and earn money. They have no interest or stake in the country, and they never become American citizens.” Lodge specifically distanced himself from race: undesirable traits “come not from race peculiarities, but from the quality of certain classes of immigrants of all races.”^{Footnote 65} The “maintenance of good wages among American workingmen” was essential, but so was “the quality of its people.”^{Footnote 66} In an 1891 newspaper interview, Lodge tiptoed gingerly around the tariff, arguing that it ought to be supplemented “by proper restriction of immigration,” by “adding to the excluded classes those who are unable to read and write their own or the English language, in the hope that thus the standard of American living and the quality of American citizenship may be preserved.”^{Footnote 67}

Representative Lodge’s dual message of the literacy test—better wages, better citizens—proved immediately popular and received sustained applause in his public addresses. He pushed the Massachusetts party toward immigration restriction, sponsoring the formation in 1890 of a new “Republican Club for Young Men,” made up of Lodge’s associates. The club made immigration restriction a primary objective. As senator and chief leader of the party in Massachusetts after 1893, he promoted commitment to “protecting the quality of our citizenship and the wages of our workingmen by a proper restriction of immigration.”^{Footnote 68}

That public concern and political opportunity had arisen before the depression of 1893–96 is manifest in leading Republican politicians’ attention to restriction. Still, that economic collapse, and ensuing rising unemployment, strengthened Lodge’s hand. As the depression deepened, the utility he found in highlighting immigration restriction waxed. By 1893, he cited a “strong public sentiment in favor” of “the great decision before us.”^{Footnote 69} The Massachusetts party platform of 1891 had openly supported immigration restriction and, in 1896, a plank called for “rigid enforcement of existing laws in restriction of immigration, and their extension by adding to the excluded classes those who are unable to read and write their own or the English language, in the hope that thus the standard of American living and the quality of American citizenship may be preserved.”^{Footnote 70} The Boston-based Immigration Restriction League, formed in 1894, chose the literacy test as the best device to reduce immigration, and to reduce it most from the countries whose inhabitants they did not favor. The language they used mirrored the language that Lodge had begun to employ in the early 1890s.^{Footnote 71}

Lodge’s correspondence in this period expresses no belief in innate racial differences. He maintained, in line with Republican rhetoric and his congressional efforts for African Americans, that “it is this discrimination against a man on account of his color which is repugnant to justice and honesty.” His letters point to labor competition and the poor prospects for citizenship among new immigrants: pauperism, criminality, return migration, and illiteracy. Counsel to fellow party members emphasized the political opportunity before them. Writing Bernard O’Kane on May 1, 1892, Lodge remarked that he is “utterly opposed to any discrimination on the ground of race or religion” and “heartily in favor of honest and thrifty immigrants coming here and becoming American citizens.” He repeated his themes that dangerous and “undesirable” immigration “is certain to affect . . . the quality of our citizenship and I know that” it will injure “the wages of our workingmen.” Professing his admiration for the “intellectual powers” of Italians, whose artistic achievement often exceeded that “of any country,” he reserved judgment on their capacity to assimilate as good citizens. ^{Footnote 72}

The Republican shift toward restriction was complete by the mid-1890s, when the depression muted the opposition of employers in the party. Massachusetts Lt. Governor Roger Wolcott managed adroitly to attack anti-Catholic bigotry, denouncing the introduction of “bitter feelings of race and religious animosity” into elections, while simultaneously calling for “wise and careful legislation” to keep out unworthy immigrants.^{Footnote 73} Republican state delegations to the 1896 national convention brought demands for restrictionist legislation. Massachusetts, where Lodge was chairman of the Committee on Resolutions, stipulated that “immigration should be restricted, and the Republican Party should pledge itself to pass at once a law to exclude at least the totally ignorant and illiterate.”^{Footnote 74}

The 1896 national platform called for the literacy test, and the party nominee, McKinley, long an advocate of restriction, pointed to the “declaration of the platform touching foreign immigration [as] one of peculiar importance at this time, when our own laboring people are in such great distress.” McKinley had declared that “we want no immigrants who do not seek our shores to become citizens.”^{Footnote 75} He put Terence Powderly, the son of Irish immigrants, a union leader, and well-known restrictionist, on his campaign team, and appointed him Commissioner General of Immigration after his election. The currency question swept all before it and McKinley rarely mentioned immigration in his campaign, but the issue arose regularly at local events. Contemporaries credited the Republican position with contributing to McKinley’s resounding majority of the working-class vote, though this was more surely won on the silver issue. Lodge reported from the campaign trail that McKinley was receiving the avid support of immigrants and their children, a claim borne out by his resounding victory in working-class districts in American cities.^{Footnote 76} While workers had other reasons to fear Bryan and his populist program (also averse to immigration), they had inspired the Republican Party’s position on immigration and it was one they approved.

Toward the Hereditarian View: 1896

The battle was joined in Congress in 1896. House Report No. 1079, from the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, cited “public sentiment” against “certain classes” of immigrants and noted the high levels of illiteracy in countries like Italy and Poland.^{Footnote 77} Lodge and other restrictionists entered bills based on the literacy test in the House and the Senate. Lodge had done so before without much effect, but the bill he put forth in the Senate in late 1895, as chair of the Committee on Immigration, had more likelihood of success.^{Footnote 78} He argued that “there can be no doubt that there is a general and very earnest desire among the people of the United States to restrict, by proper measures, foreign immigration.”^{Footnote 79}

As would be the case in subsequent congressional bills, voting reflected considerable popular support for restriction.^{Footnote 80} In early 1897, the Senate passed the bill 52 to 10, though with 27 abstentions. The House, arguably closer to the American public’s wishes, approved the literacy test by overwhelming margins (e.g., by 195 to 26 on May 20, 1896, and 217 to 36 on the 1897 conference report); the Senate vote on the conference report was a narrow 34 to 31. The House easily overrode Cleveland’s March 3, 1897, veto on March 3, voting 194 to 37; Democrat representatives split or abstained, Populists voted to override, and the Republican votes were also near unanimously in favor. Ayes included those of members from heavily immigrant-origin states like Illinois, Ohio, South Dakota, and New Jersey. As Lodge recognized, Cleveland was nonetheless emboldened to veto the bill since he “sees it cannot pass the Senate by two-thirds.”^{Footnote 81} The narrow Senate approval of the conference bill made an override unlikely and the bill died.

Lodge’s celebrated speech advocating the literacy test, given in Congress on March 16, 1896, stood on the two foundations that he and other Republicans had set down: wage effects and political character. He argued that the literacy test efficiently addressed the problems new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe presented the nation. He and his supporters in Congress repeatedly voiced the threat for American workingmen: “This low, unskilled labor is the most deadly enemy of the American wage earner, and does more than anything else toward lowering his wages.” His speech displayed in fully realized form the political strategy that had guided Republicans to a restrictionist position: the literacy test would affect “lightly, or not at all” the “English-speaking emigrants, or Germans, Scandinavians, and French.” The appeal to the middle class was also the standard one, linking illiteracy to declining standards of living, the congestion and degradation of American cities, criminality, and pauperism. The deficiency of political capital in the new immigrants was manifest in their tendency to return to Europe.^{Footnote 82}

What was new in his argument was that Lodge took a decided step toward a racial view, employing a Neo-Lamarckian proposition that acquired cultural traits might have permanence akin to that of biological traits. He relied on a French pseudoscientific gadfly, Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon’s Lois Psychologiques de l’Évolution des Peuples maintained that a people or race possessed “une constitution mentale aussi fixe que ses caractéres anatomiques” [a mental constitution almost as fixed as its anatomical characteristics]. ^{Footnote 83}

As Stocking recognizes, Lodge’s use of Le Bon indicates a shift toward an essentialist view of race.^{Footnote 84} Centuries of association gave persons of kindred background “an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments . . . an unconscious inheritance,” an inheritance another American Neo-Lamarckian, Lester Frank Ward, called an enduring transmission of culture. Thomas Carlyle served in Lodge’s speech to celebrate an amalgam in England of Germans and Normans and Celts, a fusion that facilitated Lodge’s uneasy embrace of the Irish as a kindred people in the United States.^{Footnote 85}

The idea that acquired characteristics might, through long historical experience, find permanent roots in “artificial races” resonated with the Teutonic historical school of which Lodge was an avid member. But it stepped beyond it, arguing that it was unlikely that even so capacious a group as the Anglo-Saxons might absorb others. The result was an abandonment of triumphant assimilation and its replacement with a fear of contagion and degradation. While assimilation might still occur, its probability had become remote in the face of mass immigration of persons distant from those ethnic groups long associated with the nation. Lodge introduced the notion—drawn from Le Bon—that racial mixing tended to favor the traits of the inferior group rather than the superior one, a radical turn from muscular Teutonism. “In other words, there is a limit to the capacity of any race for assimilating and elevating an inferior race; and when you begin to pour in unlimited numbers people of alien or lower races of less social efficiency and less moral force, you are running the most frightful risk that a people can run.” The “kindred races” now present in the United States were gravely endangered by immigrants whose “traditions and inheritances, whose thoughts and whose beliefs are wholly alien to ours and with whom we have never assimilated or even been associated in the past.”^{Footnote 86}

Lodge claimed no brief for mental superiority: the core challenge “does not rest upon the intellect,” but “above all, upon [the new immigrants’] moral characteristics,” likely to be unequal to “the moral qualities of the English speaking race.” That genius lay in discipline and will power, Anglo-Saxon attributes Lodge was pleased to find that Le Bon celebrated. Poles and Italians, peoples enmeshed in near unchangeable and quite different cultures, would pass their deficient moral characteristics on to their descendants, and they onto theirs. It was the civic nationalist’s duty to deny them entry into the body politic.^{Footnote 87}

An argument based in immutable distinctions is just being born in this grand oration, but the political strategy that lay at the heart of the restrictionist movement was mature. Lodge and other Republicans brought it to bear on its intended audience. In October 1898, the senator spoke directly to operatives in the great textile center of Lawrence, Massachusetts. He and the Republican congressman from the Lawrence district, William S. Knox, had been asked to answer provocative questions about the immigration bill vetoed by Cleveland in 1896. They did so in front of a working-class audience by no means made up of stalwart Republicans. As recounted in newspaper coverage, Lodge replied to a question about the bill:

Lodge’s mention of Cleveland’s veto evoked applause, but the senator’s next line, saying that a new restrictionist bill had now passed the Senate and should soon pass the House, was greeted with “Prolonged applause and cheers.”^{Footnote 88} William Lloyd Garrison [Jr.]’s bitter attacks on Lodge that same year captured the electoral opportunity Lodge and other Republicans had seen and exploited: