Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the rise of late-nineteenth-century nativism and identify the specific organizations through which it operated, including the American Protective Association, the Immigration Restriction League, and the eugenics movement.
• Explain the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as the first federal statute to restrict immigration on the basis of nationality, and trace its extension across the next six decades.
• Describe how the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 worked diplomatically and how it differed from formal exclusion legislation.
• Compare the nativist response with the sympathetic response that produced the settlement house movement at Hull House and Henry Street, and account for what each response provided to the immigrant communities of the period.
• Account for the double role of urban political machines such as Tammany Hall, which both exploited and assisted immigrant voters in exchange for loyal ballots and tolerated graft.
• Use Skill 5.B to draw connections between Gilded Age responses to immigration and the longer arc of federal immigration policy that would lead to the literacy test of 1917 and the national-origins quotas of 1924.

The Gilded Age waves of immigration produced an answering wave of organized response from the receiving society. Those responses ran along two parallel tracks. One track sought to restrict the new arrivals through federal legislation, secret nativist orders, literacy tests, eugenic theories of national fitness, and outright violence in the streets of Pacific-coast cities. The other track sought to incorporate the new arrivals through settlement houses, public-school programs, the patronage networks of urban political machines, and the literary and civic traditions that defended an open immigration policy. Both tracks were active across the same neighborhoods at the same time. This is the key concept that organizes Topic 6.9. Public debates over assimilation and Americanization grew alongside the expansion of immigrant communities and ethnic neighborhoods (KC-6.2.I.C), and those debates carried weight in national politics through the close of Period 6 and well past it.

The first federal restriction came in 1882. The Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years, denied naturalized citizenship to any Chinese person already in the country, and required Chinese residents to carry certificates of identification. Congress had been pushed toward the law by labor pressure on the Pacific Coast, where the Workingmen's Party of California under Denis Kearney had spent the late 1870s blaming Chinese workers for falling wages and unemployment. Earlier federal action had already pointed in the same direction: the Page Act of 1875 had barred Chinese women suspected of being brought for prostitution and the Fifteen Passenger Bill of 1879 had been vetoed only on technical grounds. The 1882 law was the first federal statute in American history to bar a national group on the face of the statute. Congress renewed it for ten years with the Geary Act in 1892, made the renewal permanent in 1902, and did not formally repeal it until the Magnuson Act of 1943. The law set a precedent the Supreme Court honored. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) the Court upheld federal authority to exclude foreign nationals as an inherent attribute of national sovereignty. The doctrine the case established still governs federal immigration law today.

The Pacific Coast was where exclusion was most often enforced with force. Anti-Chinese mob violence had a long Gilded Age history before the 1882 law and continued after it. In September 1885 white miners at the Union Pacific coal works in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, attacked the Chinese mining camp, killed at least twenty-eight workers, wounded many more, and burned the company houses. In November 1885 a mob in Tacoma, Washington Territory, marched the entire Chinese population of the city to the railroad depot at gunpoint, loaded them onto a southbound train, and burned what they had left behind; the press called it "the Tacoma method." In February 1886 a similar expulsion was attempted in Seattle and stopped only by the arrival of federal troops on the order of President Grover Cleveland. These were not isolated outbursts. They were the violent enforcement arm of the same nativist program that the Chinese Exclusion Act had legalized.

By the late 1880s the nativist program had also turned eastward and inward. The American Protective Association, founded in Clinton, Iowa, in 1887 by Henry F. Bowers, was a secret fraternal order built around Anglo-Protestant resentment of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and the Habsburg lands. Members swore oaths to refuse employment to Catholics, to refuse to vote for Catholic candidates, and to keep Catholic teachers out of the public schools. The organization claimed roughly two and a half million members at its mid-1890s peak. It drew on a long tradition of American anti-Catholicism that ran back through the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s, but it expressed that tradition in the new language of organized fraternal politics. The Panic of 1893 redirected nativist energy toward economic restriction, and the Association faded. Its work, however, continued in a quieter and more academically respectable form.

The Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1894 by three young Harvard graduates including Prescott Hall, Robert DeCourcy Ward, and Charles Warren, was the long-running successor to the Association's project. The League advocated a literacy test as the most acceptable form of restriction, on the theory that southern and eastern Europeans would fail it in larger proportions than the older immigrant nationalities of northern and western Europe. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts carried the League's literacy-test proposal in Congress. President Grover Cleveland vetoed it in 1897, President William Howard Taft vetoed it in 1913, and President Woodrow Wilson vetoed it in 1915 and again in 1917. Congress finally overrode the second Wilson veto and passed the Immigration Act of 1917. The act required adult immigrants to read a passage in any language and added a barred-zone clause that excluded almost all immigration from Asia outside Japan and the Philippines. The literacy test was the bridge between the Gilded Age nativist movement and the formal national-origins quotas the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 would later impose.

Running through these legislative campaigns was an emerging biological theory. The eugenics movement, popularized in the United States by Charles Davenport at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory and later by Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), gave nativism a scientific vocabulary. Eugenicists argued that the new immigration was lowering the average hereditary fitness of the American population. The argument carried weight inside major American universities, the United States Public Health Service, and the immigration inspection regime at Ellis Island, where the Public Health Service developed a battery of medical and intelligence tests by the early 1910s. The eugenicists supplied the intellectual scaffolding that the literacy test and the 1924 quotas would rest on.

Japan presented a different problem. After the Chinese Exclusion Act closed the Pacific gate in 1882, Japanese laborers moved into the agricultural and railroad jobs the Chinese had filled, and by 1907 roughly one hundred thousand Japanese-born residents lived on the West Coast. In October 1906 the San Francisco Board of Education ordered Japanese students into segregated Asian schools, and the order produced a public diplomatic incident with Tokyo. President Theodore Roosevelt responded with a diplomatic compromise rather than a statute. Through a series of notes exchanged with the Japanese government during 1907 and 1908, Tokyo agreed to stop issuing passports for laborers bound for the continental United States; San Francisco agreed to rescind its school order. The arrangement, known as the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, slowed Japanese labor immigration without the public humiliation of an exclusion statute. The agreement preserved the symbolic equality of the two nations on paper while accomplishing in practice what the Chinese Exclusion Act had accomplished by force of law.

The receiving society did not respond only with restriction. The settlement house movement built a sympathetic alternative inside the same immigrant neighborhoods that the nativists wanted to close. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on the Near West Side of Chicago in September 1889 in a former mansion at 800 South Halsted Street. By 1900 Hull House had grown into a thirteen-building complex serving an estimated two thousand neighbors a week with English classes, kindergarten and day-nursery programs, public-health clinics, an art gallery, a labor museum, and a coffeehouse. Addams and her collaborators produced Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), the first major statistical and ethnographic study of an immigrant urban district in American sociological literature. Lillian Wald opened the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of New York in 1893 and built it into the model for what became the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and, beyond that, the modern American public-health profession. Hull House and Henry Street together trained the first professional generation of American social workers, lobbied successfully for tenement-house reform, child-labor restriction, juvenile-court legislation, and the protective labor laws that would become the substance of Progressive-era reform after 1900. The settlement workers were the people who took the immigrant question seriously without taking the nativist answer.

The third response operated through ward politics. Urban political machines such as Tammany Hall in New York, the Cox machine in Cincinnati, the Pendergast machine in Kansas City, and the Lomasney organization in Boston ran patronage networks that traded jobs, naturalization assistance, holiday baskets, and intervention with the police for loyal ballots on election day. Tammany was the largest and the longest lived. Founded as the Society of Saint Tammany in 1789, the organization had been the leading Democratic Party machine in New York since the 1820s and had survived the Tweed Ring scandal of the early 1870s, which had landed William Magear Tweed in the Ludlow Street Jail. By the 1890s, under Richard Croker and later Charles Francis Murphy, Tammany had perfected the trade. Naturalization papers were filed for newly arrived immigrants by the thousand at the New York Court of Common Pleas; ward bosses paid the filing fees, escorted new citizens to the polls, and remembered the favor at election time. The exchange was both exploitative and useful at once. Machine bosses skimmed contracts and bond issues; they also delivered services that neither charity nor state government provided in the 1880s and 1890s. Civil-service reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt at the New York Police Department fought the machines on principle. The immigrant voters in the wards judged the machines by the practical results.

A fourth response ran in the literary and civic register. Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic Jewish poet from a New York family that had been in North America since the colonial era, wrote her sonnet The New Colossus in November 1883 to be auctioned at a fundraising portfolio for the Statue of Liberty pedestal. The sonnet was forgotten for two decades after Lazarus's death in 1887 and was rediscovered by her friend Georgina Schuyler, who arranged for a bronze plaque bearing the sonnet to be installed inside the pedestal of the statue in 1903. By the early twentieth century the closing lines had become the most quoted lines about American immigration in the language. The sonnet supplied the symbolic counterweight that nativists had to argue against for the rest of the century. The Statue of Liberty itself, dedicated in 1886, became, partly because of Lazarus's poem, the figure under which Ellis Island would receive twelve million immigrants between 1892 and 1924.

Three Key Concept claims hold the lesson together. First, public debates over assimilation grew alongside the expansion of immigrant communities (KC-6.2.I.C). Second, social commentators advanced theories later described as Social Darwinism and eugenic science to defend exclusion as a natural law (KC-6.3.I.A). Third, long-standing partisan loyalties were challenged by reformers who pushed for civil-service reform and by third-party movements responding to economic dislocation (KC-6.3.II.B.i), and the immigrant question ran through both the reform and the partisan side of that argument. The reasoning process for the topic is Comparison, the recommended skill is 5.B, and the underlying theme is MIG. The lesson asks students to set restrictionist and incorporationist responses side by side, account for what each response produced for the immigrant communities of the period, and weigh which set of responses had the longer reach into twentieth-century federal immigration policy.

Five sources, drawn from the canonical Topic 6.9 set, sample the legal, organizational, sympathetic, and literary registers of the period at once.

1. (Comparison) Set the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 next to the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. Identify two similarities in what each measure was designed to accomplish, and two important differences in how each one operated. Which form of restriction had the greater long-term effect on the federal immigration apparatus, and on what evidence?
2. (Causation) Account for the rise of the American Protective Association in 1887 and the Immigration Restriction League in 1894. What economic, religious, and political conditions of the late 1880s and early 1890s produced these organizations, and why did the second one outlast the first?
3. (Comparison) Compare the settlement house movement at Hull House and Henry Street with the urban political machine at Tammany Hall as responses to Gilded Age immigration. What did each one provide to the immigrant communities of the period, and what did each one demand in return?
4. (Continuity and Change) Trace the line from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through the literacy test of 1917 and the national-origins quotas of 1924. What are the continuities of restriction across that arc, and what shifts mark each step? At what point does federal immigration policy become recognizably modern?
5. (Argumentation) Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus in 1883, the year after the Chinese Exclusion Act. The sonnet is now the most quoted defense of an open American immigration policy in the language. Account for the gap between the symbolic claim made on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and the legislative record Congress was building at the same time. Which document do you think gives the more accurate portrait of late-nineteenth-century America?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.