America's history of immigration restrictionism

Andro

Sep 01, 2025

“It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to think of anything other than the immigration question, as everything points back to it. An uneasy sense for the need for drastic action dominates my thoughts every day.” – Bleppsama, @IchbinHussite, 08.27.2025

As tiresome and overwrought as it may seem, it is imperative in our time that we reassess, refresh, and re-present our arguments and approach to the matter of immigration. The readership of J’accuse will be familiar with the American Immigration Restriction League and its influence on the Immigration Act of 1924. Much ink has been spilled on the external, historical reasons for this cohort’s political loss, i.e., why the WASP declined. I intend here to actually read some of the immigration restrictionists before their cause became a mainstream political movement. This will be a quotation-heavy piece focused on the intellectual and academic climate which gave rise to these policies. As such it focuses on the thinkers most close in time to the founding of the League. Do not expect Stoddard or Grant, Rep. Albert Johnson or Sen. David Reed here, although the implications to their own thought and practice will become clear.

What will be gleaned from the reader includes:

1) The explicit historical idea of “Lockean liberalism but exclusively for 130 IQ Anglos”.
2) Assessments of fecundity and marriage in light of immigration; 3) the myopia of maximal racial supremacism.
4) The risks of aligning with “labor” in pursuit of the restrictionist goal.
5) The seeds of the contemporary meritocratic conception of “America as an idea”.

The goal is not to denigrate the restrictionists, but to see where they themselves went wrong and to identify (and ideally course correct) similar problems in today’s immigration discourse on the right. A historical examination of these authors will reveal, beyond their substantive ideas, striking parallels in their arguments to ones we encounter today. Another enduring tension will show itself between the economic prowess necessary for imperial ambition and the irreducible values of the “highest type” in a strong population.

The Appeal to Educated Democracy

It would serve us well to begin with one of the preeminent members of the restrictionist movement in America, Prescott Hall, who penned one major work in his life titled Immigration and its Effects Upon the United States (1906) wherein he provided a myriad of data regarding the changing constitution of the American population and the associated economic and social maladies. One peculiar argument concerns the proper conditions for democracy. I take the liberty of quoting at length from the prescient Hall:

“A democracy, to be a success—and we are trying it here on a hitherto unprecedented scale—depends on the intelligence of the average citizen. Wherever civic intelligence and initiative are low, democracy becomes impossible, and an oligarchy or an empire takes its place. The United States has had to suffer and is still suffering untold miseries from the reckless introduction for purposes of material gain of an alien people, to wit, the African negro… The more ignorant Italians, the Slavic races, the Syrians and other Asiatics, the Russian Hebrews,—all have come from lands where democracy is unknown, and where law is represented to the people by soldiers, tax collectors, and gendarmerie.”^[1]

The ideal of democracy as Hall sees it rests in the proper self-governance of the average man, but the question is unanswered in this excerpt as to how that is attained. To properly situate ourselves within the thought of the restrictionists, and therefore the Teutonists and later Nordicists, we must understand their conception of democratic development, which is embodied by a naturalist outlook. In essence, genetically predisposed peoples thrived and were enhanced by geographic favorability:

“We find that our democratic theories and forms of government were fashioned by but one of the many races and peoples which have come within their practical operation, and that race, the so-called Anglo-Saxon, developed them out of its own island experience unhampered by inroads of alien stock. When once thus established in England and further developed in America we find that other races and peoples, accustomed to despotism and even savagery, and wholly unused to self-government, have been thrust into the delicate fabric. Like a practical people, as we pride ourselves, we have begun actually to despotize our institutions in order to control these dissident elements, though still optimistically holding that we retain the original democracy.^[2]

A ”delicate fabric” indeed. John Commons, a labor leader, progressive professor, and an author frequently cited by Hall, enriches the causality behind Hall’s assessment and further adds that the “Anglo-Saxon” himself has degenerated such that his government has become despotic and overbearing. It ought to be clear to the reader that the concept of “democracy” as described by Hall and Commons no longer exists and that the “despotization” described by the latter is, in fact, closer to the present model of contemporary American government, where law is primarily represented by our modern gendarmerie and where any semblance of self-governance is in truth a fearful quietude. American police forces of the 19^th century were modeled on British municipal policing, “Peelian principles”, exemplified by local accountability and limited militarization. Such police forces were swiftly thwarted by political machines like Tammany Hall. Modern police, by contrast, are tied to federal funding through Department of Homeland Security programs and deploy military surplus equipment via the 1033 program of the Defense Logistics Agency under the Pentagon.

What the restrictionists did not argue, however, was that this delicate fabric was merely a function of democracy or self-governance. In other words, it was not only corrupted by illegitimate manipulation of its formal structure. In Edmund James, the first president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, we find the ruination of cultural ways contributing to the decline of the old American democracy:

“Let large foreign elements be introduced, the homogeneousness disappears, a class grows up to which the old watchwords have no significance, with whom the ancient precedents have no weight. A new constitution becomes necessary, if free institutions are to be preserved.”^[3]

In sum, the threat posed by immigration to democracy involved its electoral form (John Fiske also notes the decline of the character of the New England town hall^[4]), police power, and the cultural folkways that underpinned and animated both of those aspects.

The urge to maintain free institutions seems valuable, but is the requisite new constitution worth it? A double-edged sword in contemporary immigration discourse is the outsized (albeit popular) attention placed on the criminality of migrants. Hall, Commons, and James each implicitly acknowledge that any successful assimilation of an immigrant population would be characterized by its ability to self-police and adjust themselves in accordance with “Anglo-Saxon” institutions of government. Immigrants of the Ellis Island and Great Migration generations clearly failed to live up to this standard and it would be pollyannish to say the jury is still out on the Hart-Cellar generation. In our day, as in theirs, the restriction of immigration is thus normally paired with the development of an aggressive police force which can at least maintain the function of urban institutions and economic activity. Now, beyond the capacity of urban policing units, ICE’s funding and deployment are sorely needed since the country is scarcely recognizable and the Biden-era influx has brought rapid, severe change to suburban areas.

Still, the long term risk, one that must be weighed and considered, is our own “despotization” in the process of reaffirming free institutions, our degeneration. This is not to say that “Heritage Americans”—that all too popular phrase, popularized in “our sphere” by one “Indian Bronson”— were docile, simple people, but that their criminal behavior, including the Whiskey Rebellion, was either directed to the construction of the national constitution or posed no deep threat. By contrast immigrant criminality served to subordinate and replace the American constitution (in both senses). A people which endures repeated processes of despotization, however, also inherently loses itself. Nothing can remain pure over time, but the enhanced development of a police state will, at best, stem the tide of immigration. Inevitably it contributes to our inability to practice self-government (well represented by the cultural worship of black people in White America, including its “self-expression” in forms like country music) and coincidentally our pacification and domestication.

A secondary strain under the topic of democracy is the intellectual struggle presented by reason’s eternal call for a kind of universality. Hall’s aspirational concept of America demonstrates this well:

“We may go further, and say it is our duty toward the world, not only to preserve in this country the conditions necessary to successful democracy, but to develop here the finest race of men and the highest civilization.”^[5]

A democracy of the aristocratic race! A pleasant notion, one sure to attract many of the online right today, but also one easily manipulable and distorted for ulterior motives. As we turn our attention to Francis Amasa Walker and his changing views on the descendants of Irish immigrants, we must keep in mind that the democratic form, however constituted and even with the strongest policy of restriction, is destined to cannibalize its highest types. One ought to note also that, though the joke is traditionally “liberalism” and not “democracy” for “130 IQ Anglos”, liberalism’s intimacy with aspirational democracy as presented by Hall was difficult to disentangle even among the rear guard action of the restrictionists.

The Challenge of Illusory Assimilation

By the 1880s the urban centers and suburban areas of dear New England were already affected significantly by immigration. Parts of the British diplomatic team to America, expecting a paradise of Anglo-Saxon living, were startled by the amount of change that had occurred. James Bryce, eventual ambassador to America, in 1888 observed: “and thus that which was the most purely English part of America is now becoming one of the least English, since the cities also are full of Irish, Jews, Slavs, and [French] Canadians.”^[6] Moreover, Horace Wadlin, in his capacity as a member of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, pointed out that Boston proper was but a third native in origin: “we have become a country somewhat alien in sympathies”.^[7] No kidding.

We have seen how the restrictionists thought immigrants willfully influenced the political institutions of the country, and now we ought to turn to the internal reaction among Anglo-Saxons. How were they changing their own behaviors in accordance with the presence of a new population? Degeneration is the short and simple answer.

Francis Walker, third president of MIT and superintendent of the 1870 US Census, took special care to report on the fecundity of the English population with observations that can be heard in current discourse about “White Americans” generally:

"Social forces and tendencies, not heretofore felt or at least not heretofore recognized, in our national life" were "beginning to affect powerfully the reproductive capabilities of our people.”^[8]

Likewise Nathaniel Shaler noted that the Anglo-Saxon American was “losing that breeding power" for which he was previously distinguished.^[9] TFR discourse is riddled with all sorts of specious arguments, many related to feminism and technology, but Walker and Shaler saw that the material conditions of day-to-day life brought by immigrant labor—much sought after at that time by industrialists and the wise academic economists—had disincentivized the Anglo-Saxon, naturally suited to open space and humane activity:

[Not desiring] "to engage in the lowest kind of day labor", [Americans] "shrank from the industrial competition… even more unwilling to bring sons and daughters into the world to enter into that competition."^[10]

More, Walker saw that immigrant labor was not economical, contrary to what most academics and industrialists had predicted:

“Far from being indispensable to American industry, the supply of half-taught peasant labor had encouraged only the early, coarse types of manufacture and had probably prevented the growth of finer, precise work.”^[11]

We see further parallels with modern social health arguments when Walker warns, after looking into the Census of 1880, that the immigrants were contributing to declining marriage rates among the native Americans, with many putting off marriage well into their thirties and even a “close restraint put upon reproduction within the married state."^[12] In light of this it is perhaps unsurprising that Walker provided an early voice to the concept of “race suicide” later popularized by sociologists like Edward Alsworth Ross and eugenics advocates such as Harry Haiselden.

Regarding religion, Phillips Brooks, Episcopalian clergyman and “our Bishop” to the Boston brahmins (presently also the namesake of the primary public service organization at Harvard University), found his church’s attendance at risk due to the increased presence of the new immigrants—mostly the Irish and Germans. Brooks prayed for the new Americans born from the “strange meeting of the races”. He would preach a decade later, that, with the country “swarming with the disturbed elements of all the world”, America was “yet not too much for faith” meaning here not merely that the immigrants brought alien faiths (e.g., Catholicism & Judaism) but that their sheer presence had depressed Anglo-Saxon turnout and religiosity.^[13] It is helpful to acknowledge here, again, how the American constitution was very much experienced as a whole which exceeded the sum of its parts. Today the sheer presence of immigrants is understudied with respect to questions of national social welfare, among the haughty “social scientists” especially.

By 1892, however, Walker had mellowed his attack on the Irish, beginning to notice that the Irish had developed into hardworking, assimilable peoples. His evidence of such improvement? The Irish newcomers had begun to dress their wives and children for church.^[14] More importantly Walker had changed his tone due to his newfound belief that America had been strengthened by the “strain of these immigrants”^[15] Let us not bother ourselves demonstrating the weakness of the “sartorial” evidence, but focus on the second claim, one that has a kind of rhetorical and argumentative rhythm with vulgar Nietzscheanism—all struggle and change is good, Nietzscheanism.

Successive generations of assimilation are, in truth, a genetic, cultural, political, and economic mixture. No human system is capable of perfectly preserving itself across types and their respective ways. While terms and concepts can survive for centuries, the practical modes of organization which those terms denote are concrete and material. While the mixing of types of people can promote good qualities over the vast span of human history, the migratory method which America undertakes serves to eradicate all such positive qualities—its successive generations of laborers-cum-land owners chipping away at the same “free institutions” which incline many to import them in the first place.

The restrictionist concept of assimilation will be explored in greater depth in the final subsection of this essay, but ideally my exhortations can limit just how much of the “melting pot” notion is ascribed to Israel Zangwill. In the face of a notion as pessimistic as “race suicide”, it is soothing to resort to a concept such as Walker’s. Today the presence of the “hardworking, religious” Hispanic population possesses the conceptual potential to incite similar self-protective psychological manipulations. While Walker’s idea was rejected during the high period of restrictionism and scientific racism, alternative methods for rationalizing the “other” and “mixture” would prove more salient in the long run.

Copes and Fool’s Errands

Now we will discuss Jewish immigration into America. A book no one has heard of today, not even among the right wing Zioskeptics, is James Kendall Hosmer’s The Story of the Jews, which contains important information from a Teutonist on how they viewed the presence of an alien ethnicity which had proven its ability in the economic and intellectual spheres. Hosmer relates fears that are now often seen with respect to Asians as well as Jews:

“In some parts of the world the idea seems to be gaining ground that we are all to be pushed to the wall by the all-conquering Israelite; that the money power is falling into his hands, and political power is following; that he is, in fact, seizing upon the best places in every direction; that the time is at hand when the Jew, with all his haughty pride of race, is to grasp the headship of the world; that, holding himself apart more arrogantly than ever, he will suffer no contact between himself and those whom he has brought under, except where his scornful foot is pressed upon the Gentile neck.”^[16]

This dynamic is crucial to understand as it analyzes the threat to American “democracy” through a competent, even governable, minority. The development of America’s gentile immigrant ethnicities (e.g., the Irish, Italians, Slavs, etc.) has made it such that the arguments found in Hall and Commons, while applicable then, are out of date by new standards of measurement. The Jewish situation, as presented by Hosmer however, implored the restrictionist to invent justifications for his continued existence and hegemony in the face of an ethnicity who apparently (even if mistakenly) surpasses his own capabilities by nature. This introduces the question of what a group prides itself on, especially when outmatched on the surface. Hosmer was not shortsighted on where the Anglo-Saxon and the Jew differed, but the challenge the Jew presents incites Hosmer to put them on a plane of “competition”:

“But dismissing these melancholy pictures, let us inquire for a moment what we need to fear from the Hebrews. Someone has defined the type of shrewdness to be: ‘A Jewish Yorkshireman of Scottish extraction with a Yankee education.’ Such a combination would indeed be likely to bring to pass a very sharp result. We are to notice that if the Jew is to be taken as the Alpha of shrewdness, the American is at the same time the Omega. The two ends balance each other, and I for one have too much faith in my compatriots to expect ever to hear it said that the American end of the tilting board has gone up. In the competitions of American life it is diamond cut diamond; it is hard to say whether Jew or Yankee will show most nicks as marks of the grinding power of the other. Take your real down-Easter that has been honed for a few generations on the New England granite. Can Abraham or Jacob or Moses show a finer edge? We may hope that in any competition upon this lowest plane the American will be able to hold his own. Would that we might be as sure that we shall match them in those higher spheres in which Hebrew genius, wherever the jesses have been thrown off, has soared with such imperial sweep!”^[17]

Quite high praise for the Jewish folk. However, more insidious, is that Hosmer’s framing encourages the Anglo-Saxon to judge himself on the basis of the perceived advantages of Jewish people. For all of Hosmer’s chest thumping about the Yankee, the “imperial sweep” of the “Hebrew genius” left its mark upon the country. Much of that sweep was engendered by foul play and I encourage readers to look into Gus Russo’s Supermob to learn more. Regardless of that history many Jewish people took pride in supplanting the “Anglo Saxon” or the “White American”, much like Indians. The White American is often encouraged to feel less intelligent as a result. The “race conscious” White American thereby prides himself on the values of tradition and justice—the values of the “homeland”. Much need not be said about the inefficacy, and the altogether ordinary nature, of such values.

What deserves more attention is that the comparative plane’s adherence to material reality, while the necessary reflective basis, also delimits the definitions for greatness and thus the necessity of preservation, proper acculturation, and rational selection. To speak more concretely, ideal comparison is suffocated in relying on material outcomes. As a result, Hosmer’s conclusion is already baked into the approach. Yes, the “Jewish Yorkshireman of Scottish extraction with a Yankee education” very well could be something, but overextending what racial “prowess” and “supremacy” entails also leaves one vulnerable to shifting material landscapes and ideal drift.

Most of the restrictionists thought Jewish people to be physically frail—denoted by Hosmer as the “lowest plane” of comparison—but did the forms of legal and verbal “intelligence” which Hosmer associates with Jewish people truly constitute the “highest plane”? In periods of existential and political insecurity, hollow hope produces false competitions that depend on favorable, but decaying, distributions of economic and legal power to justify itself. For a modern example, many will adduce the demography of financial, consulting, and legal hierarchies in the United States to defend the position of “White Americans” from the increased presence of Asians in elite spaces. Say what one will about the “intangibles” necessary for business, but the economy is such that there is no categorical reason such management positions will not eventually reflect the demography of the young elite. Appeals to “inventiveness” are more apt than “growth”, but in the game of political positioning, neither ultimately matters.

In a summative line that captures the ethos of the H1B debate from Christmas 2024: Samuel B. Capen was vexed to find that "our young men .. . of American ancestry read novels" while the Irish American boys studied "history, biography and constitutional law" in the city libraries.^[18] Asian Century posting… but about the Irish. These insecurities run the gamut of history.

Relatedly, calls have increased among the youth of the right to take up civil service, rather than pursuits in business and technology, with the aim of setting the country aright. While I wholeheartedly cheer this attitude on, it must be done correctly. Again we can look to the early restrictionists to witness a similar persuasion. Arthur Richmond Marsh, eventual president of the New York Stock Exchange, asked during the Class Day Oration at Harvard in 1883 “why should we complain that men are Socialists, Communists, Nihilists, Irish Leaguers? Why should we wonder at strikes and riots, murders and the destruction of property?”^[19]

The critical point here was that the Ivy League’s shallow materialism (Curtis Guild during the 1881 Class Day derided "the money-getting selfish side of our nature", and he commented in the same speech on the “swarms of ignorant peasants” coming from abroad^[20]) flowed down to the impoverished, including the immigrant labor class. By reorienting for public virtue, it was believed that the immigrant classes would, likewise, be elevated in their desires and urges. While there is not a precise parallel to our contemporary condition, this argumentative structure strips agency from the lower born, preferring to see them as the product of the elite’s vice. No such illusions could possibly be held today. It is necessary to conceive of the call to public service on its own terms, entirely distinct from those of economic gain, innovation, or popular uplifting. See my previous J’accuse article on the nature of political labor for further recommendation.

A Poor Choice of Bedfellows

undefined — *Seal of the Knights of Labor*

Populism and immigration restriction seem, especially in our time, to go hand in hand. The argument goes that immigration is a tool of the employer class to decrease wages while maintaining, or even expanding, economic output. Following the economic crisis of 1873 this line of argument was amplified, Hall writes:

“Industrial enterprises, especially in the mining regions, developed rapidly; and this in turn caused a growth in the ranks of organized labor. Conflicts arose between employers and employees, and the former attempted to resist the demands of the latter by importing from Europe large numbers of laborers under contract to work for lower wages than the labor unions asked.”^[21]

Much of this section, as juxtaposed with the preceding ones and the following, will concern itself more with affairs after the creation of the Immigration Restriction League. The relationship between organized labor and immigration restriction was tight around the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924, but we see that the intellectual influences from the Northeast were quoted, including Prescott Hall, in “The Railroad Trainmen”, a publication by and for the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, a railroad employee labor organization.^[22]

Likewise shortly after the official founding of the Immigration Restriction League, which was quite small (only a couple hundred members, primarily from the Boston brahmin class), subordinate leagues sprouted up in Manhattan and Brooklyn which were led by organized labor.^[23] The throughline for the uneasiness of this relationship, however, lie in the diverse and ultimately conflicting motives: economic and racio-cultural.

Hall noticed how machinery had made skilled labor irrelevant: “The introduction of machinery has, to a large extent, done away with the necessity for any considerable skill on the part of operatives, as well as actually diminished the number of operatives required for a given output.”^[24] It was with great anxiety, therefore, that the League sought out union support, tactfully reassuring them that only "the horde of illiterate, unskilled laborers… almost entirely in the cities of the Atlantic States" was "a menace to the labor as well as the national interests."^[25] The “national interest” line was kept purposefully vague at times, but the economic concern of the elite restrictionists was always with the “finer type of manufacture” and not the working man as he was.

Francis Walker, who was also the first president of the American Economic Association (now run by Lawrence Katz), agreed with progressives that the laissez faire economic system, while a medium of “aristocratic economics” also required its “abandonment… as a principle of universal application."^[26] Every class, he acknowledged, ought to protect itself, agreeing with the labor unions that "the masses of the people" were "the only proper and safe guardians of their own interests.”^[27] Walker, however, was turned against the laborer when he observed that during strikes of skilled workers in the 1880s, "the fortunate portion of the working population” were motivated more by “ambition… [than] misery.”^[28] The next part requires extensive quotation from Barbara Miller Solomon’s Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition, from which most of this essay’s primary sources were discovered:

“Uncomprehending, [Walker] blamed the seeming irresponsibilities of the present unions upon the millions of immigrants, ‘bred under other institutions.’ How ‘different’ they were from the law-abiding, reasonable, native employees, who appreciated their employers' factory and market problems. ‘Nor in vain have our people for generations been endowed with the franchise and invited to the discussion and decision of public questions.’ Indeed, the very formation of trade unions was ‘alien’ to old Yankees. They had inherited the English pioneers' ability to assert themselves individually in economic as well as political action. Had vast numbers of foreigners not migrated to America, Walker doubted that labor organizations would ever have had much influence in the United States. And even worse than the trade unions, the terrifying Knights of Labor had arisen to destroy the master class entirely. He urged his colleagues to ‘assert themselves against those who come into our land to trouble it.’"^[29]

Walker found himself at a conclusion, albeit not a practical, political one, that most Teutonists could have discovered had they not been holed up in academic institutions: that labor unions are 1) corrupting, and 2) of an alien nature to the Yankee stock. John Graham Brooks, an advocate for the working poor and not a core restrictionist, was also concerned with the difference between relieving the downtrodden and organized labor’s true goals: "the interests of Mr. Haywood's 'man in the gutter'" were not the "interests of the 'eight dollar a day man.'"^[30]

The modern “White American”, so removed from the psyche of the Yankee restrictionist, might be capable of understanding the perverse nature of labor unions, but he would be unable to fully disaggregate it from himself. In the short run the alliance between labor and restriction proved successful. It even garnered the support of Samuel Gompers, then head of the American Federation of Labor, who was himself a Jewish immigrant. In the long run, however, the inherent volatility, internal division, and ultimate lack of interest in the League’s racio-cultural project was born out. Perhaps they should have listened to Thomas Bailey Aldrich when he asserted "these brutes" were "the spawn and natural result of the French Revolution."^[31] Others of the New England elite met organized labor with a harsher hand, even dismantling the formal structure of Quincy, MA: “When the members of the Irish labor union, the Knights of Labor, gained control of the town meeting in 1887, the assembly promptly voted the town out of existence. Quincy had become a commonplace municipality.”^[32]

The Immigration Act’s passing in 1924 was certainly a product of populist, anti-immigrant sentiment meeting a segment of the scientific and cultural elite willing to curtail immigration on eugenic grounds, and future restriction policy in America can certainly ride a similar wave; however, populist motives must be seen for what they are. Even if a true American proletariat has not existed for a long while, when push comes to shove, a Neal J Clark or a MartyrMade will always prefer the hardworking Hispanic to the “effete, philosophy major” with sympathies for “Europa”. Populism, once the expression of organized labor, is always prepared to discard whatever intellectual pretenses and cohorts sponsor them when the time is right.

A Perverse Meritocracy

Prior to the foundation of the Immigration Restriction League, a group which included Albert Bushnell Hart, Davis Dewey, Edwin D. Mead, and John Fiske gathered to form the “Committee on Studies” within the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Good Citizenship. These five men were all favorable to the restrictionist cause as the situation worsened and they deemed it their mission to instill among the foreigners a proper education with the goal of assimilation. For them this meant civic lectures on America, the Anglo-Saxon form of the rule of law, and a thorough history of the founding fathers.^[33] One anecdote which summarizes the success of their pursuit: Reverend Edward Porter was tasked by Mead to guide Irish and Italian youth around the city of Boston, informing the boys of the history and tradition of Boston’s landmarks such as Bunker Hill, the burial grounds of the Mather family, and North Church. Alas, Mead determined the failures of the tour were the result of the “ancestral” nature of the history and the youth’s “hard and unpromising material.”^[34]

In a similar educative spirit, restrictionist and statistician at Columbia University Richmond Mayo-Smith defined the American character with a fixation on civic education:

“(1) The free political constitution and the ability to govern ourselves in the ordinary affairs of life, which we have inherited from England and so surprisingly developed in our own history; (2) The social morality of the Puritan settlers of New England, which the spirit of equality and the absence of privileged classes have enabled us to maintain; (3) The economic well-being of the mass of the community, which affords our working classes a degree of comfort distinguishing them sharply from the artisans and peasants of Europe; (4) Certain social habits which are distinctively American or at least present in greater degree among our people than elsewhere in the world. Such are love of law and order, ready acquiescence in the will of the majority, a generally humane spirit displaying itself in respect for women and care for children and helpless persons, a willingness to help others, a sense of humor, a good nature and a kindly manner, a national patriotism and confidence in the future of the country.”^[35]

While Smith acknowledged the descendants of the slaves to be wholly incapable of living up to this standard, he acknowledged that the “immigrants since 1790 and their descendants” could.^[36] In fact, Smith goes onto say that the descendants, knowing nothing else, “are as truly American in thought and feeling as any descendant of the Puritan fathers… Economic well-being and the practice of free institutions are the most powerful agents of civilization.”^[37]Further from Worthington C. Ford:

“To shut out immigration would be to cut off one of the chief factors of our greatness… This has been in every way an advantage to the nation, for it has furnished it with a sturdy population, only the young and vigorous, as a rule, emigrating from their homes; it has produced a race that is pre-eminent for its vigor, and this may be attributed in part to the blending of many nations, and in part to the free institutions by which we are governed.”^[38]

And, to put a bow on it, Prescott Hall’s optimistic view of the Chinese and Japanese:

“On the other hand, there is testimony to the neatness and cleanliness of the Japanese, their desire to learn, their freedom from crime, and their desire faithfully to obey the laws,—facts which must have considerable influence in their favor, especially as it is the better class of Japanese who are known in the central and eastern portions of the country. Probably a good deal which has been said in favor of the Japanese could also be said in favor of the higher grades of the Chinese.”^[39^]

All excerpts, quoted at length and multiply to demonstrate both the sensibility and conviction of the restrictionists, acknowledge the mutability of certain “Puritan” or “Anglo-Saxon” qualities. It would be absurd and foolish for me to outright denounce these positive characterizations of the Anglo-Saxon and it would be counterproductive to recommend the complete abandonment of such qualities of good governance, for they are the preconditions of what makes him great, though they do not distinguish him fully. Fiske saw that this fact of mutability and the civilizational impact of “free institutions” would beckon forth a kind of universalization of Anglo-Saxon ideas and modes of self-governance. What he missed, as is so glaring in the accompanying excerpt, is the detachment of idea from biological matter:

“The work which the English race began when it colonized North America is destined to go on until every land on the earth’s surface that is not already the seat of an old civilization shall become English in its language, in its political habits and traditions, and to a predominant extent in the blood of its people. The day is at hand when four-fifths of the human race will trace its pedigree to English forefathers, as four-fifths of the white people in the United States trace pedigree today.”^[40]

Any true fight against what is called “legal migration” today, what might be better understood as the distributed mingling of peoples world over through bureaucratic means, can only achieve its underlying significance when the empowered and tactful among us recognize the following. American ethnogenesis has always been the problematic at hand. The question remains whether it has already occurred or has yet to be born, whether it is still morphing, evolving, and shaping itself. The type that must be safeguarded throughout this violent, nevertheless a sating and flattening process, cannot be defended on his productive civilization alone. This type evinces itself in ways that are never primarily material. His metaphysical plane and artistic distinction is not only defined by his facility in drawing tourists to his museums and ancient cities. His plastic faculty is merely a particular representation of his liveliness as the being who approximates and reworks the boundaries of human existence.

Such propositions and images will always fall deaf on democratic ears, and it can only be pursued politically in an environment where such a yearning for and brief grasp on the type is overwhelming. The greatest slight one could make about our own age is the explicit apathy shown towards the preservation and accomplishment of this type. The hatred and viciousness shown towards it has become, at best, implicit in our time. May we harken back, in some respects, to what Nathaniel Shaler wrote in an 1890 edition of the Atlantic: “to maintain the savage virility of their forbears in the bloodless, overeducated youth often produced in modern civilization.”^[41]

Conclusion

Sometimes history is simply a matter of a path not taken as opposed to being the inevitable product of the great inertial weights that “systems” impose upon us. Still, the question remains open for the preservation of a “higher type” how to overcome yet maintain the needs of both industry and free institutions? If Walker’s premonitions about the stunting of American industry, at the hands of the preponderance of the coarse type of manufacture, was unsuccessful, how does one expect non-economic responses to fair? Lacking either a philosophical-spiritual or economic answer, restriction is poised to be merely a temporary bulwark, one to be overcome after another wave of “assimilation” has made it such that a once immigrant population can practically exert authority and sway over the immense capital of the United States.

Another parallel argument about power in our day, which this study ought to defuse, is the notion that American power consistently flows from elite institutions or people. The Immigration Restriction League’s leadership and membership, along with the adherents to Teutonism, were the presidents of America’s major universities, founders and editors-in-chief of relevant academic journals, contributors to “The Atlantic Monthly”, Episcopalian clergy, both inherited elite and middle class strivers, and artists of various stripes. What part of the apotheosized “Cathedral” is missing? None. For every Charles Beard, Herbert Croly, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt you can name I can name ten social and educational equals who lost at the hands of political machines and labor movements. “High culture”, reverence for establishment science, and journalistic prestige played no significant role in this matter; both sides could claim these vectors of the Cathedral.

An additional note on this point is that the project of immigration never operates solely as the spontaneous, distributed will of a large population. Hall observed that the many migrants from Europe, Russia, and the Near East, while occasionally assisted by family members already in America, were more impacted by the role that “free associations” played. To list a handful: the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the Jewish Board of Guardians, the Self-Help Emigration Society, the Prisoners’ Aid Society, and the Munich Society for Assisting Discharged Convicts. The NGO, 501(c)3 craze is nothing new. More could be written about this subject.

Let us not end on such a negative note. Rather let us leave off with two civic-minded, uplifting excerpts. Herbert Baxter Adams saw the mission of fellow Teutonist-minded scholars at elite American universities as “not so much to make historians as to make citizens and good leaders for the State and the Nation.”^[42] Likewise, may it at least be said of us what the Boston Daily Advertiser hoped Henry Cabot Lodge’s arrival into political affairs portended: “young men, zealous for reform, have been found to make some of the best municipal officers.”^[43]

Appendix

I’ve attached below, for those interested, the reading list from the syllabus for “History 13: Constitutional and Political History of the United States, 1789-1861” which Albert Bushnell Hart taught while at Harvard and was described as a “must take” despite it being a voluntary elective under Norton’s new system for collegiate curriculum. The full syllabus can be accessed here through HathiTrust where one can find topics such as the comparison of races and immigration.

Bibliography

Alexander Viets Griswold Allen, “Phillips Brooks’s Sermons in 1874 & Brooks to Robert Monachie,” in Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, II&III (1891)

Arthur Richmond Marsh, Baccalaureate Sermon, and Oration and Poem (Harvard University Press, 1883)

Barbara Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1956)

Chauncey Jeddie Hawkins, Samuel Billings Capen: His Life and Work (The Pilgrim Pres, 1914)

Curtis Guild, Baccalaureate Sermon, and Oration and Poem (Harvard University Press, 1881)

Edmund Janes James, “Emigration and Immigration,” Cyclopaedia of Political Science II (1883)

Edwin Doak Mead, “The Old South Historical Work,” Education, no. VII (1886)

Francis Amasa Walker, “Occupations and Mortality of Our Foreign Population,” Discussions in Economics and StatisticsII (n.d.)

Francis Amasa Walker, “Our Population in 1900,” The Atlantic Monthly, no. XXXII (1873)

Francis Amasa Walker, “The Growth of the United States,” Century XXIV (1882)

Francis Amasa Walker, “The Manual Laboring Class,” The American Economic Association, no. III (1888)

“Speech Concerning Immigration,” Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, directed by Francis Amasa Walker, aired December 27, 1888

Francis Amasa Walker, “Immigration and Degradation,” Forum XI (1891)

Francis Amasa Walker, “Immigration,” Yale Review I (1892)

Herbert Baxter Adams, “History at Amherst and Columbia Colleges,” Education, no. VII (1886)

Horace Wadlin, Boston Daily Advertiser, December 15, 1891

James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (John D. Morris and Company, 1886), https://archive.org/details/americancoma00bryc/page/n9/mode/2up

James Kendall Hosmer, The Jews in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Times (T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), https://archive.org/details/jewsinancientmed00hosm/page/n7/mode/2up

John Fiske, American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History (Houghton Mifflin Company, n.d.), https://archive.org/details/americanpolitica00fisk/page/n9/mode/2up

John Graham Brooks, “The Shadow of Anarchy,” Survey, no. XXVIII (1912)

John Rogers Commons, “Racial Composition of the American People,” The Chautauquan 38 (February 1903): 33–43

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, “The Summer’s Journey of a Naturalist (Part 1),” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1873, https://archive.is/ucJXT

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, “The Use and Limits of Academic Culture,” The Atlantic Monthly, no. LXVI (1890)

Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Immigration and Its Effects upon the United States (Henry Holt & Company, 1906)

Richmond Mayo-Smith, Emigration and Immigration: A Study in Social Science (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), https://books.google.com.vc/books?id=EzZJAAAAIAAJ&printsec=copyright#v=onepage&q&f=false

Thomas Bailey Aldrich “Correspondence between Thomas Bailey Aldrich and George Woodberry,” to George Woodberry, May 14, 1892

Worthington Chauncey Ford, The American Citizen’s Manual (The Knickerbocker Press, 1887), https://books.google.com/books?id=JJKbeoasBmcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

“Committee on Readings in American History,” unpublished manuscript, Brochure of the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Good Citizenship, n.d.

“Twenty Reasons Why Immigration Should Be Further Restricted Now,” Immigration Restriction League Publications, no. 4 (1894)

“Some Industrial Aspects of Immigration,” Boston Commonwealth, no. XXXV (1895)

“For Brooklyn’s Workers,” New York Press, May 26, 1895.

^[1] Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Immigration and Its Effects upon The United States (New York City, NY: Henry Holt & Company, 1906), 176, 183.

^[2] John R. Commons, in Chautauquan, vol. 38, p. 34, (Sept. 1903):

^[3] Edmund J. James, "Emigration and Immigration," Cyclopaedia of Political Science (edited by John J. Lalor, Chicago, 1883), II, 90.

^[4] John Fiske, American Political Ideas, pp. 23-24, 26.

^[5] Hall, Immigration, pp. 321.

^[6] James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London, 1888), II, 706.

^[7] Horace G. Wadlin quoted in Boston Daily Advertiser, December 15, 1891

^[8] Walker, "Our Population in 1900," Atlantic Monthly, XXXII (1873), 492-495

^[9] Shaler, "Journey of a Naturalist," p. 713

^[10] Walker, "Immigration and Degradation," Forum, XI (1891), 640.

^[11] Walker, "Occupations and Mortality of Our Foreign Population, 1870," Discussions in Economics and Statistics (edited by Davis R. Dewey, New York, 1899), II, 216-217.

^[12] Walker, "The Growth of the United States," Century, XXIV (1882), 920-926.

^[13] Brooks' sermons in 1874 quoted in Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, III, 415, and II, 236; Brooks to Robert Monachie, July 6, 1888, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Brooks, II, 396, and III, 273

^[14] Walker, "Immigration," Yale Review, I (1892), 131-132.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Hosmer, The Story of the Jews (New York, 1885), pp. 355-356.

^[17] Ibid, 366-367.

^[18] Chauncey J. Hawkins, Samuel Billings Capen, p. 104.

^[19] Arthur Richmond Marsh, "Class Day Oration" (1883), Baccalaureate Sermons, Class-Day Orations and Poems (Cambridge, 1879-1890).

^[20] Curtis Guild, "Class Day Oration" (1881). Ibid.

^[21] Hall, Immigration, pp. 212.

^[22] The Railroad Trainman, Feb. 1905

^[23] “For Brooklyn’s Workers“, New York Press, 26 May 1895.

^[24] Hall, Immigration, pp. 126.

^[25] Twenty Reasons Why Immigration Should Be Further Restricted Now," IRL, Publications, No. 4 (1894). Hall, "Some Industrial Aspects of Immigration," Boston Commonwealth, XXXV (1895), 3

^[26] Walker, "Speech December 27, 1888 at the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association”.

^[27] "The Manual Laboring Class," The American Economic Association, Publications, IV (1889), 27, and III (1888), 11.

^[28] Walker, "The Manual Laboring Class," The American Economic Association, Publications, III (1888), 14, 19-20, 22-23

^[29] Barbara Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 74 citing: Walker "The Knights of Labor," Discussions in Economics and Statistics, II, 325-326, 334-335. Walker, "What Shall We Tell the Working Classes," ibid., II, 311. See Davis R. Dewey statement, ibid., II, 300, for evidence of Walker's views in 1887.

^[30] J. G. Brooks, "The Shadow of Anarchy," Survey, XXVIII (1912), 81-82.

^[31] Aldrich to George Woodberry, May 14, 1892, Woodberry Collection.

^[32] Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, pp. 29.

^[33] "Committee on Readings in American History," Brochure of the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Good Citizenship

^[34] Edwin D. Mead, "The Old South Historical Work," Education, VII (1886), 259-260, 262

^[35] R. M. Smith, Emigration and Immigration (New York, 1890), pp. 5, 41.

^[36] Ibid, 64.

^[37] Ibid, 66.

^[38] Worthington C. Ford, The American Citizens Manual (New York, 1883), Part II, 124-125.

^[39] Hall, Immigration, pp. 60.

^[40] John Fiske, American Political Ideas (New York, 1885), p. 143.

^[41] Shaler, "The Use and Limits of Academic Culture," Atlantic Monthly, LXVI.

^[42] Herbert Baxter Adams, "History at Amherst and Columbia Colleges," Education, VII (1886),

^[43] Boston Daily Advertiser, September 13, 1882, November 14, 1884.

J’accuse