Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
Yet two responders were decidedly less sympathetic. Prescott Hall and G. Loring Briggs used the forum to push for a literacy bill for all immigrants. Both men were affiliated with a new organization based in Boston dedicated to stemming the tide of immigration. Each took pains to deny any prejudice toward Italians specifically. Briggs wrote that “anyone who states that Italian immigration is necessarily a menace to this country simply because it is Italian is governed by narrow-minded prejudice, which is certainly unbecoming to an American.” However, both Briggs and Hall noted that a majority of Italian immigrants were illiterate and therefore unfit for American citizenship.
Arguments over the suitability of Jewish and Italian immigrants continued throughout the 1890s. The party affiliations of Ellis Island’s workforce may have changed, but the debate over immigration continued, as would the eternal, yet elusive, desire for that proper sieve that would neatly sort out immigrants—good from bad, desirable from undesirable, wheat from chaff.
In this debate, Bostonians like Prescott Hall would continue to lobby for stricter regulation of immigrants. For them, immigration was personal.
Let us welcome all immigrants who are sound mentally and physically and intelligent, and let us protect the country from those who tend to lower the average of health and intelligence.
BOST ON—THE “HUB OF THE UNIVERSE,” THE “ATHENS of America”—was America’s most important city up to the midnineteenth century. At least it appeared that way to most Bostonians. This was John Winthrop’s City on a Hill that became the cradle of the Revolution and incubator of American democracy. By the 1800s, the Puritan drive for perfection had morphed into the crusade for more temporal reforms: William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionism, Dorothea Dix’s work with the mentally ill, and Julia Ward Howe’s work with the blind.
Boston had helped create and nourish America’s first truly homegrown literature and culture, with Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, and Whittier. Its historians—Parkman, Adams, and Bancroft—wrote the first drafts of American history. Its magazines—
The Atlantic
and the
North American Review
—shaped the nation’s elite opinion. And then there was Harvard University across the river in Cambridge.
Boston had long stood at the apex of Anglo-American culture. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, that culture’s foundations seemed on shaky ground. The 1880 Census showed that 63 percent of Bostonians were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. By 1877, Catholics accounted for more than three-quarters of all births in New England. Irish Catholics had already taken over the city’s police and fire departments. Catholic parents increasingly abandoned the public schools for parochial schools. In 1884, Bostonians elected Hugh O’Brien as the city’s first Irish Catholic mayor, and by 1890 Irish politicians had taken office in sixty-eight Massachusetts towns and cities.
It is no surprise that much of the agitation for immigration restriction should find its origin in New England. Francis A. Walker, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Chandler all hailed from Yankee stock. When discussing the “masses of peasantry” from Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia in the 1890s, Walker expressed the combination of dismay, disdain, and deep pessimism that characterized New England’s Anglo-Saxon mind.
These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us.
Perhaps the best expression of the insecure New England mind-set was Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s 1895 poem “The Unguarded Gates.” A native of New Hampshire and former editor of
The Atlantic
, Aldrich was more William Chandler than Henry Cabot Lodge, though he stood second to no one in his defense of the Boston Brahmin tradition. Aldrich described his poem as “misanthropic.”
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.