Faced Hostility : Immigrants: A History of Hard Times

On a visit to Ireland in June, 1963, President John F. Kennedy stood on the spot where Patrick Kennedy had embarked for America and said:

“When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. If he hadn’t left, I would be working at the Albatross Co. across the road.”

More recently, Virginia Ulrich, a San Diego housewife, sent letters to President Reagan and to her local assemblywoman, also on the subject of immigration. Her remarks had a different twist, however.

‘Invasion’ From Mexico

Citing the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees every state in the Republic protection from invasion by foreign powers, Ulrich demanded that the National Guard be called to duty and that a fortified wall be erected between California and Mexico to stop “an invasion (that) is now occurring and has been occurring for many years. . . . “

This week, as the country begins an extravagant celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, the nation’s leading symbol of immigration, the words of JFK and those of other like-minded men and women will be lauded and applauded. The stories of adaptation and assimilation and, finally, acceptance--the legend of an Irish Catholic boy becoming President of the United States--are, after all, the romantic view of America, as old and enduring as the Republic itself.

But there is another side of the immigration story that is not likely to be retold in the days ahead, the side that echoes the sentiments of the San Diego housewife. It is that immigrants themselves are not very popular with many Americans--and never have been.

Always Overwhelmed

The recent crush of immigration, much of it illegal, from Latin America and Asia may indeed seem to many like a foreign invasion, unique to the latter half of the 20th Century. But in many respects Americans have always been overwhelmed and, in some ways, threatened by the people who followed in their footsteps: Their foreign tongues have menaced the public schools. Their competitiveness has pushed natives out of some job markets. Their poverty--and their sheer numbers--have strained public services.

“Once,” said Oscar Handlin, a professor at Harvard, “I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”

In that context, the current debate on U.S. immigration policy is but a replay of previous debates. Who should be admitted? How many? Under what conditions? All are echoes from the past.

The outward expression, the actual reception of newcomers to our shores, has always been tinged with ambivalence: Will these newcomers ever adapt to our society? Or worse, will we be forced to adapt to them?

In the late 1890s, standing behind the bar of a small saloon he ran in Chicago’s poor Irish district, Mr. Martin Dooley, himself an immigrant, expressed the feelings of many Americans toward the “new” immigrants of his day:

“As a pilgrim father that missed th’ first boats, I must raise me claryon voice again’ th ‘ invasion iv this fair land be the’ paupers an’ arnychists iv effete Europe . . . .

“I got a gloryous rayciption as soon as I was towed off th’ rocks,” Mr. Dooley continued. “Th’ stars an’ sthripes whispered a welcome in th’ breeze an’ a shovel was thrust into me hand an’ I was pushed into a sthreet excyvatin’ as though I’d been born here. . . .

“But as I tell ye . . . ‘tis diff’rent now,” he concluded. “I don’t know why ‘tis diff’rent but ‘tis diff’rent. ‘Tis time we put our back again’ th’ open dure an’ keep out th’ savage horde.”

Attitude Was Real

Mr. Dooley was not, in fact, a real person. He was the beloved creation of Finley Peter Dunne, a Chicago newspaperman and one of America’s great humorists of the late 19th Century. However whimsically stated, his attitude toward immigration was quite real.

At the time Mr. Dooley was offering his barroom commentaries, the Statue of Liberty had been in place for less than 10 years. Nearly two-hundred years had passed, however, since the first English colonists had arrived on the Mayflower and were followed by waves of literally millions of immigrants from a host of countries.

Yet in Mr. Dooley’s world of the 1890s, a strong movement was already under way to close the doors to immigration.

Like so many other movements, it all began in California.

The year was 1882.

Up to that point, most immigrants had moved from East to West, from Ellis Island to New York City and outward beyond the Appalachians to Pittsburgh and Chicago. Finally, they made it as far as an American immigrant could go--the coast of California.

With the discovery of gold in 1848 and the building of railroads, newcomers started arriving in California from all over the world.

Among them were the Chinese.

Like many immigrants, the “coolies,” as they were known, were a boon to mine owners, railroad magnates and land barons. They worked long hours for cheap wages. So pleased were these American bosses with their Asian workers that contracts were sent out to encourage more laborers to come to the American West.

‘A Stange Lot’

But there were also “a strange lot,” according to Peter I. Rose, a professor at Smith College and a member of the graduate faculty at the University of Massachusetts.

“They wore pigtails (required at home to indicate their submission to Manchu rule, and since they saw themselves as sojourners, kept to allow their re-entry into China). They wore clothing that was comical to Western eyes. They ate food that others abhorred. They spoke an incomprehensible gibberish.”

And so, perhaps not surprisingly, the Chinese eventually became “convenient scapegoats” for all the ills of society, targets for all kinds of abuse, Rose wrote in a recent essay on Asian immigration. “Anti-Chinese rallies were staged in many Western towns--often ending in violent outbursts, the forced ‘deportation’ of unwanted aliens, and in some instances . . . brutal killing.”

Never in the history of the Republic, up to that point, had there been any federal laws restricting immigration, short of some state restrictions on the entrance of paupers and insane people.

To be sure, there were isolated acts of discrimination all over the country.

Newspaper Ads

Ads in newspapers from Boston to Chicago not only directed that “Irish Need Not Apply,” they also specified who should: “Wanted--a First-Rate Protestant Cook . . . ,” “Wanted--an Excellent Protestant Laundress; Scotch or Swedish Preferred. . . .”

There were even laws in some states specifically barring immigrants from certain jobs. At first it was the unskilled occupations they were likely to seek. Eventually restrictions also came to be placed on white-collar jobs. Attorneys were required by law to be American citizens. In New York, the same stipulation was made for private detectives. And in Michigan, barbers’ licenses could not be issued to aliens.

But in 1882, California went further than any American state had gone before. It persuaded Congress to keep out a whole race of people.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 denied entry to Chinese laborers for the ensuing 10 years.

It was the first general immigration law enacted by the United States, and it was followed by what Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in their book “Beyond the Melting Pot” call a “steady succession of more selective barriers.”

Tax on Newcomers

In the same year, Congress passed a bill imposing the first general tax on immigrants--50 cents a head--and excluding convicts, lunatics, idiots and other people likely to become public charges. In 1903, federal legislation banned the admission and authorized the deportation of foreign proponents of anarchism--a law, according to historian John Higham, that “penalized newcomers for their opinions for the first time since 1798.”

In 1907 a “gentleman’s agreement” with Japan halted the flow of Japanese laborers. In 1917, a federal law imposed a literacy test on immigrants and banned any immigration from an area known as the Asiatic Barred Zone, which included most of Asia and the Pacific islands.

In 1921, Congress passed the first legislation restricting the total number of immigrants who could enter this country. It also limited immigration from any country to 3% of the white people of that nationality who had lived in the United States in 1910. In 1924, Congress extended the so-called national-origins system and cut the total number of legal immigrants by more than half, beginning in 1929.

Based as they were on obviously outdated population figures, these later restrictions were designed, according to many historians, to prevent any further change in the racial and ethnic makeup of the country--in other words, to keep out, as much as possible, “men of color” and those who were not Christian, preferably all those who were not of the Protestant belief.

Wide Hostility

Certainly in the West, hostility was not reserved for the Chinese alone, even though they were the first and most dramatic subjects of violent discrimination.

Perhaps the most prominent and prestigious club in California, the Native Sons of the Golden West, was committed to what the late Carey McWilliams, a well-known commentator on California history and culture, called “the interesting proposition” that the “31st Star shall never become dim or yellow.” The Native Sons also had as its clearly stated philosophy that California should remain what “it has always been and God Himself intended it shall always be--the White Man’s Paradise.”

Which also meant, of course, that there was no room for another of the West’s most visible immigrants--the Mexican.

Unlike most other immigrant groups, the first American Latinos did not “come” to the United States of their own accord but were, in McWilliams words, “annexed here by conquest” when the United States won from Mexico in 1848 the land that is now Texas, California and other states.

Lynching as ‘Sport’

Seen alternately as docile and then hostile, the Mexican came to be thought of as a potentially dangerous criminal, a bandit. That, according to McWilliams, “gave a color of justification to the practice of lynching Mexicans.” It was an activity, he said, that in the 19th Century “soon degenerated from a form of vigilante punishment for crime to an outdoor sport in Southern California.”

By the turn of the century, waves of Mexicans had begun to pour over the border into California but, like blacks in the South, Latinos were seen as unfit to mingle with the white man, except to do his work.

In the West, as in the South, “White Trade Only” signs appeared in business establishments and segregation became a way of life.

When asked how many notches he had on his gun, King Fisher, a famous Texas gunman of the 19th Century, once replied: “Thirty-seven--not counting Mexicans.”

In “North From Mexico,” Carey McWilliams described this “casual phrase, with its drawling understatement,” as epitomizing “a large chapter in Anglo-Hispanic relations in the Southwest.”

In fact, in some ways it describes the entire history of immigration, for the “natives” have rarely, if ever, thought of the “newcomers” as ones who should be fully counted along with everyone else.

Certainly that was true of blacks, a race of people that does not even figure in most historical accounts of immigration. That, of course, is because black slaves were among the few immigrants who did not “voluntarily” come to the United States. And the black experiences of immigration, as almost every school child knows today, were not proud moments in American history.

Many Answers

Why, in a land populated almost entirely by immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants, did the newest newcomer continue to provoke such scorn? Scholars have written entire volumes seeking an answer to that question. But their only conclusion seems to be that the answer is different for different people in different regions at different times.

To a large measure, the distinctions had to do with with religion--ironically, one of the primary reasons many immigrants left their homelands for the New World.

In fact, many of the first immigrants were Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And, human nature being what it is, the WASPs, as they came to be known, were suspicious of those who followed in their footsteps but did not follow in their religious traditions.

Certainly the Jews were considered a suspicious lot.

Although often thought of as late-comers to America, the first Jews actually came in Colonial times and were of Spanish and Portuguese origin. In Newport, in the heart of the Puritan colony of Rhode Island, the oldest continuing Jewish congregation in America was established around 1660.

Fleeing Persecution

Mostly, however, they came in the late 19th and early 20th Century, at first from Germany and then from Eastern Europe, fleeing persecution after the assassination of the Czar of Russia, Alexander II, in 1881.

When they arrived in America, after being paraded along with hundreds of thousands of other immigrants past officials at Ellis Island, they were taunted and shunted off into their own ghettos. Later, however, the discrimination became more overt.

The most highly publicized incident of the late 19th Century involved what was then perhaps the country’s most luxurious hotel, a summer resort in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Having begun to lose business, the hotel’s owners, Stewart and Judge Hilton, believed the reason was that “Christian guests did not wish to share the hotel with Jews,” according to Stephen Birmingham, author of “Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York.”

For a time after the Hiltons turned away the eminent Jewish banker Joseph Seligman and his family one summer, there was a flurry of public indignation. But it was apparently short-lived, for other establishments quickly followed suit and advertised boldly, “Hebrews Need Not Apply.”

Before long, fraternities and schools also instituted restrictive policies against Jews. Harvard College established strict quotas, according to Higham, because the best New England families were beginning to worry that “the flood” of Jewish students qualifying for admission was threatening to turn Harvard into a “New Jerusalem.”

Fearful that they were smarter than everyone else and certain that they were loyal only to themselves and their kind, one of the icons of American society began to warn that the Jews were trying to take over the world. In the 1920s, Henry Ford distributed a series of wildly anti-Semitic articles through thousands of Ford dealerships across the country.

The Jews were not alone in being singled out, however. Hatred of Catholics was often even more intense.

In his book on Mexican immigration, McWilliams tells this anecdote: “Speaking of a Mexican (in the 1800s), a Protestant missionary is said to have remarked, ‘He was a Catholic, but clean and honest.’ ”

Not Much Credit

Many Americans, however, did not give Catholics that much credit.

Discrimination in jobs or housing was the least of their problems. There was a time in rural areas of the Midwest, for example, when farmers carried guns to protect themselves from the Polish Catholics, who were said to be plotting (perhaps in competition with the Jews) to take over the world.

In other parts of the country in the mid-19th Century, convents were attacked. At least one was burned to the ground, as were as many as 20 Catholic churches, according to historian David M. Potter, author of “The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861.”

And the list of atrocities, to say nothing of the unkindnesses, goes on.

There was even a concerted effort to keep Catholics out of political life in this country. The Irish Catholics, who seemed to have a penchant for politics, had the distinction of inspiring the creation of a political party.

Like many so-called “nativist” parties that sprang up in the 19th Century, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner was a secret society dedicated to keeping immigrants out of political life. Renamed the American Party in the 1850s, according to Potter, it adopted a “pledge by which members would promise to renounce all party allegiance and never to vote for any foreign-born or Roman Catholic candidate for office.”

Because members were also pledged to keep all information about the order secret and, when questioned, were to say, “I know nothing,” the organization became known as the Know Nothing Party.

By the turn of the 20th Century, “experts” had entered the picture and contributed to the nation’s disdain for immigrants. Nativism, which was a kind of dark and vain preference for the native-born over the foreign-born, was in full swing. Its notions had already had a tremendous impact on the American political system. While the Democratic Party had become known in the mid- to late 1800s as the Party of Rum and Romanism (in honor of its Irish and Catholic members), the Republican Party, despite its abolitionist traditions, was also becoming, according to various historical accounts, remarkably anti-immigrant in its views.

But the so-called experts lend an air of respectability to what otherwise might have been seen as an era of narrow-minded prejudice.

Measuring Heads

According to Handlin in his seminal work on immigration, “The Uprooted,” scholars and academicians of every stripe, but particularly biologists and a newly created form of scholar known as the sociologist, were comparing skin color, measuring heads, evaluating culture. Their conclusion was what everyone already “knew” or least suspected: The Nordic races were superior. Everyone else, all the way down to the black man, was, in Handlin’s words, “inherently inferior, did not need, or deserve, could not use or be trusted with, the rights of humans.”

In his book on immigration, Higham describes, for example, how the Italians were viewed in the late 19th Century. They acquired such a reputation as filthy beasts and bloodthirsty criminals, he said, that a penologist of the time wondered if the country could build prisons that the Italians would not prefer to their slum quarters.

In 1888, the American Economics Assn. offered a $150 prize for the best essay on “The Evil Effects of Unrestricted Immigration.”

It is probably safe to say that there were plenty of entrants, for one of the most common themes throughout U.S. history has been that the country is running out of room.

A full century earlier--in the late 1700s--a congressman had stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and warned his fellow lawmakers that while open immigration policy may have been fine when the country was new and unsettled, now it had reached maturity and was fully populated; it was time to stop further immigration.

Historians have generally found that when times were good, immigrants were welcome. When their arms and backs and legs were needed for labor, when their consumption of food and clothing and housing could help make the economy grow, they were encouraged to come and to bring their families and friends with them.

‘Men of Color’

It is no accident, historians say, that in the period of prosperity that began in the U.S. after World War II, immigration restrictions began to be relaxed. War brides and refugees were admitted first. Then, in 1965, in Lyndon B. Johnson’s era of the Great Society, the entire immigration policy of the United States shifted dramatically so that “men of color”--Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Latin Americans--had an almost equal chance with the everyone else to gain legal entry into the country. For the first time in the 20th Century, the United States was admitting immigrants on the basis of who wanted to come rather than on who had come before.

When times were reasonably good, Americans could look back, as John Kennedy did in 1963, and be proud that this was the land of immigration. But when times were bad and jobs and money was scarce--as they were, for example, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed--the newer the entrant into this country, the more he was resented.

Theodore H. White, one of the great modern commentators on the American past, told a story of being asked as a youngster to prepare an assignment on immigration: “Whether immigrants were good or bad for America.”

He had only to turn to his own father to answer both sides of the question, to see the ambivalence Americans have perhaps always felt about leaving the gates open to newcomers.

Closing of the Gates

The elder White was a strong labor man in the early 1900s. Labor supported the Immigration Act of 1924--the closing of the gates, as it was known--because unrestricted immigration meant oversupply of labor and oversupply of labor meant cheap wages. So the elder White opposed immigration. And yet, for reasons that were all too obvious, he was never easy with his decision.

“This was a conundrum for my father,” White wrote in his book, “In Search of History.” “He was against the capitalists and for the A.F. of L., but he was an immigrant himself, as were all our friends and neighbors. . . . “

Events outside the control of the immigrants often contributed to their difficulties in America.

Every time a hostile regime came to office in a foreign country and even indirectly threatened the United States, American nativists assumed that those Americans with foreign accents or foreign-sounding names were turn-coats, more loyal to their fatherlands than to their homeland.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, for example, the “true” Americans thought that Japanese-Americans would be traitors to the American cause. As a result, more than 100,000 Japanese, many of the American citizens, were sent all over the country to “relocation centers”--a euphemistic way of saying they were sent to prison.

In 1908, the Germans had been voted by the “experts” as the country’s best immigrants, better even than the English. But during World War I, hatred of the Germans became so intense that some American towns with German-sounding names changed their names. Some states even abolished German from the public-school curriculum, even though in some parts of the country the language was once so prevalent that German newspapers had thrived and bilingual schools had been established. Even sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage.”

If the history of immigration is the history of America, then part of the country’s history is that Americans have come to change their minds about certain immigrants.

Some of the most admired individuals in American history have been immigrants from some of the most despised groups.

Indeed, a list of famous immigrants and refugees reads like a who’s who of American life: John J. Audubon, Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein, Wernher von Braun, Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Gompers, Issac Bashevis Singer, Irving Berlin, Igor F. Stravinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ingrid Bergman, Frank Capra, John K. Galbraith, Greta Garbo, Samuel Goldwyn, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, An Wang.

And the list goes on.

Asian Turnabout

Nowhere, however, is the change in American attitudes toward a whole group of people more evident than with the Asians.

In an essay entitled “Asian Americans: From Pariahs to Paragons,” historian Peter Rose describes the recent favorable publicity that has been showered on the Chinese, the Japanese, even the “boat people” from Vietnam, both for their ingenuity in such areas as computer science and for their simple perseverance in adapting to American ways.

In recent years, he notes, “there have been a number of long feature stories in the national press about the winning ways of recent arrivals, people like Chi Luu, the 25-year-old boat person from Vietnam who graduated valedictorian from City College of New York and won a full scholarship for graduate study at MIT, and Lin Yann, the 12-year-old Cambodian refugee who placed second in a regional spelling bee in Chattanooga, Tenn.” (Linn Yann missed on enchilada. )

Yet, Rose reminds his readers, “No people who came to these shores of their own volition ever suffered as much discrimination or ostracism as did those from China and Japan.”

As in Mr. Dooley’s day, things are, of course, different now. To be sure, there are certain characteristics of the current wave of immigration that make it not quite like anything that has come before.

For one thing, the port of entry has changed. Once immigrants were herded, almost like cattle, through New York’s Ellis Island. Now they spill across the borders and fill the airports of the entire Southwest, especially California, with nowhere in particular to go except, if they are illegal and are caught, holding stations that are like prisons.

The number of different cultures that make up American immigration is probably larger today than ever before and is certainly extraordinary in its diversity. Los Angeles reports, for example, that in its public school system alone 104 languages are now spoken.

L.A. Experience

The size of some individual immigrant groups is now so large and is growing so fast that a fact is repeated again and again simply because it continues to astound most Americans: That is, the “minority” ethnic populations are now beginning to surpass what was once the traditional white majority. It has already happened in Los Angeles, where one in 10 people are of Asian extraction and nearly four in 10 are Latino.

What these changes portend for the future of the country, to say nothing of the future of California, no one can say for sure.

But Americans are clearly concerned. So much so that when a national poll recently asked a sample of Americans how they felt about further immigration, an overwhelming majority--66%--said they wanted it to decrease.

Lessons From Past

Many of today’s experts, which include special-interest groups and politicians as well as demographers and social scientists, believe that the public is justified in its concern. Yet a remarkable number of America’s historians are far more sanguine about the future of American immigration.

Describing the influx of certain Latino groups in recent years, Harvard’s Handlin noted, “The same things are said today of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans that were once said of Irish, Italians, Germans and Jews: ‘They’ll never adjust; they can’t learn the language; they won’t be absorbed.’ ”

Handlin’s conclusion: “Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past.”