American Passage Page 12

  Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them presses a wild motley throng . . . Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws. In street and alley what strange tongues are loud, Accents of menace alien to our air, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!

  Aldrich ends his poem with the popular historical allusion to the invasion of the barbarians and the fall of Rome.

  Not all of the voices coming out of Boston opposed immigration. In 1896, Congressman John F. Fitzgerald gave a rousing, hour-long July Fourth address at historic Faneuil Hall. Mixed in with traditional patriotic sentiments, the thirty-three-year-old, second-generation IrishAmerican defended “the down-trodden and oppressed of every land,” who come to America “to mould in their own fashion the way to fortune and to favor in this, the land of their adoption.” For Fitzgerald, the nation’s strength and economic power was intimately tied to immigrants, and he spoke up for the foreigner and against any new restrictions on immigration, including the literacy test.

  As the Fitzgeralds of Boston and other Irish Catholics rose to prominence, the Brahmins could see their power and influence waning. Boston had long ago ceded its dominance in trade to New York, with the hub of culture and communications to follow. “As Brahmins ceased to be the undisputed arbiters of the public good,” wrote one historian, “they became less confident of the Americanization of the newcomers.” Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, advised his brother to start writing their epitaphs, for the more he witnessed “the formation of the new society, I am more and more impressed with my own helplessness to deal with it.” The intellectual arguments of the Brahmins carried progressively less weight, especially regarding immigration. Francis Walker noted:

  For myself, strongly as I feel the evils of the existing situation [immigration], I have little hope of their early correction by law. On one or two occasions, when I have been called to speak in public upon this theme, I have seen how much more taking is the appeal to sentiment than the address to reason, in this matter; how great is the controversial advantage of him who speaks in favor of the complete freedom of entrance which has characterized our career thus far; how strong is the instinctive dislike of an American audience for any schemes of restriction or exclusion, in the face of the clearest considerations of expediency and even of national safety. On this issue, Walker, like Adams, seemed to be signaling defeat.

  Yet a new generation of Bostonians chose not to give up the fight. At just twenty-five years old, Prescott Farnsworth Hall formed

  the Immigration Restriction League (IRL) in Boston in 1894 with his

  friends Charles Warren and Robert DeC. Ward. All three were members of Harvard’s class of 1889 and possessed impeccable Brahmin credentials. Warren was descended from a famous colonial Boston family.

  Ward was a Brahmin Saltonstall on his mother’s side; his father was a

  wealthy Boston merchant. Hall’s father was also a wealthy merchant.

  Warren and Hall were lawyers and Ward was beginning his career as a

  professor of climatology at Harvard.

  Both pride and insecurity fueled the three young Bostonians—

  a prideful defense of Anglo-Saxon traditions mixed with insecurity

  brought about by the Brahmins’ increasing loss of influence. Members

  of the IRL were driven by a fear that American democracy, founded by

  Anglo-Saxon settlers using Anglo-Saxon law and government, could

  perish under the avalanche of exotic immigrants.

  Prescott Hall, who would become one of the most passionate and

  active keepers of the Anglo-Saxon flame, articulated this fear best when

  he asked: “Is there, indeed, a danger that the race which has made our

  country great will pass away, and that the ideals and institutions which it

  has cherished will also pass?” To Hall, the warning signs were ominous.

  Decades of Irish and German immigration had produced vast alterations in the nation’s fabric, such that in “many places the Continental

  Sunday, with its games and sports, its theatrical and musical performances, and its open bars, is taking the place of the Puritan Sabbath.” The IRL raised specific questions about American society and democracy. Was America great because of the hard work of successive

  waves of immigrants coming to the nation’s shores looking for opportunity? Or, as Hall and his colleagues were suggesting, was its greatness

  a by-product of its Anglo-Saxon settlers?

  Hall, who would be the driving force behind the IRL for over

  twenty-five years, looked more like an earnest country parson than a

  fire-breathing activist. Physically unprepossessing, Hall had trouble filling out his topcoat. His mild appearance and soft, elongated features

  were matched by a sentimental personality. Hall’s wife noted that her

  husband possessed a “loving and a lovable nature. He hated moral prigs

  with a cordial hatred.”

  According to one description, Hall was a “gaunt, sunken-eyed

  figure” who suffered from insomnia and ill health for most of his life.

  His mother was forty-five years old when Prescott was born, and an

  invalid for most of her life. She raised her son in a protective cocoon.

  Hall’s wife later described how her husband, as a child, “grew up a frail

  little hothouse plant, for he was never allowed to romp, to climb, and

  to be reckless as other boys were.” One historian described Hall as “an

  unstable New Englander, contemplative, subject to depressions.” The deep depressions from which Hall suffered were not unusual

  for his era and social class. In fin de siècle America, well before the

  age of Prozac, doctors diagnosed an epidemic of what was then called

  neurasthenia. Many contemporary social critics and physicians noted

  a general “lowering of the mental nerve” among the northern urban

  middle class, who seemed increasingly plagued by self-doubt, paralysis

  of will, insomnia, and other neuroses.

  Insecurity and melancholy went hand in hand with these New Englanders’ fears of being displaced, in terms of absolute numbers as well

  as political power and cultural influence. By the late 1800s, Boston

  Brahmin society was in decline. An increase in divorces and suicides

  and a decrease in birth rates among native-born Protestants—especially

  when compared with large Irish Catholic families—only added to the

  sense of loss and pessimism. The new immigration from eastern and

  southern Europe provided the double whammy to the Brahmin psyche,

  reinforcing whatever gloom and insecurity was caused by their loss of

  control to the Irish.

  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 so few members, Hall tried to fudge the issue in his testimony

  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.” Yet they were unhappy with the current immigration laws. Even with the opening of Ellis Island and the expansion of excludable categories, the IRL thought the quality of immigrants was deteriorating. It demanded radical changes in the nation’s immigration laws. However, the organization stayed away from calling for an end to immigration or

  from singling out any specific ethnicity or nationality for exclusion. Among its proposals, the IRL lobbied for increasing the head tax

  from $1.00 per immigrant to at least $10, and possibly as high as $50; a

  consular certificate for each immigrant, acknowledging his or her character and desirability; and a mandate that every immigrant had to read

  and write in his or her
own language. However, the IRL thought an

  education test in English would be unfair.

  For a young man not yet thirty, holding no political office, and with

  no past accomplishments beyond his Harvard degree, Prescott Hall

  managed to receive a good deal of attention and deference from newspapers and government officials. Just a few months after the founding

  of the IRL, he received a written assurance from the superintendent

  of immigration, Herman Stump, that he was “determined to restrict

  immigration to the most desirable classes. You will observe this by the

  great number of those now arriving who are detained for special examination.”

  Like so many other Americans with an interest in immigration,

  Prescott Hall and the rest of the Immigration Restriction League saw

  Ellis Island as the focus of debate. The young reformers were allowed

  to visit Ellis Island on at least three occasions in 1895 and 1896, where

  they were given near carte blanche to conduct their own unofficial investigations. In April 1895, Hall visited Ellis Island and deemed its operation greatly improved over previous years, although he still saw too

  many illiterate, unskilled workers, especially Italians, during his visit.

  “As nearly as I could judge in the case of the Italians whom I saw at

  Ellis Island,” Hall told the Boston Herald, “there was in general a close

  connection between illiteracy and a general undesirability.” In mid-December 1895, Charles Warren and Robert Treat Paine Jr.

  visited Ellis Island, bringing pamphlets in English and other languages.

  Once there, the young Bostonians were granted remarkable access as

  they handed out their pamphlets to immigrants who had already told

  officials they could read. According to Warren and Paine, 9 to 10 percent of those claiming to be literate were lying. Over three days, the

  two men examined immigrants from six separate ships, most hailing