Nativism is the political position of preserving status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants. It is characterized by opposition to immigration based on fears that the immigrants will distort or spoil existing cultural values. In the context of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the "native" of nativism refers to those descended from the inhabitants of the original thirteen colonies. Nativism held sway in mid-nineteenth-century politics because of the large inflows of immigrants from cultures that were somewhat different from the existing American culture. Nativists objected primarily to Irish Roman Catholics because of their loyalty to the Pope, and also because of their supposed rejection of republicanism as an American ideal.
Nativist Movements
Nativist movements included the Know-Nothing or American Party of the 1850s, the Immigration Restriction League of the 1890s, and the anti-Asian movements in the West, the latter of which resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Labor unions were strong supporters of Chinese exclusion and limits on immigration, mostly because of fears that they would lower wages and make it harder to organize unions.
The Immigration Restriction League
The Immigration Restriction League was founded in 1894 by people who opposed the influx of "undesirable immigrants" that were coming from southern and eastern Europe. The League was founded in Boston and had branches in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. It felt that these immigrants were threatening what they saw as the American way of life and the high wage scale. They worried that immigration brought in poverty and organized crime at a time of high unemployment.
The League used books, pamphlets, meetings, and numerous newspaper and journal articles to disseminate information and sound the alarm about the dangers of the immigrant flood tide. The League also had political allies that used their power in Congress to gain support for the League's intentions.
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a U.S. federal law signed by Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, following revisions made in 1880 to the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. Those revisions allowed the United States to suspend Chinese immigration, a ban that was intended to last 10 years.
The first significant Chinese immigration to America began with the California Gold Rush of 1848 to 1855, and continued with subsequent large labor projects, such as the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad. During the early stages of the gold rush, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were tolerated, if not well received. As gold became harder to find and competition increased, animosity toward the Chinese and other foreigners increased. After being forcibly driven from the mines, most Chinese settled in enclaves in cities (mainly in San Francisco), and took up low-end wage labor such as restaurant work and laundry just to earn enough to live. With the post Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor leader Denis Kearney and his Workingmen's Party as well as by California Governor John Bigler, both of whom blamed Chinese "coolies" for depressed wage levels.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was one of the most significant restrictions on free immigration in U.S. history. The Act excluded Chinese "skilled and unskilled laborers employed in mining" from entering the country for 10 years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. Many Chinese were relentlessly beaten just because of their race. The few Chinese nonlaborers who wished to immigrate had to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were qualified to immigrate, which tended to be difficult to prove.
The Act also affected Asians who had already settled in the United States. Any Chinese who left the United States had to obtain certifications for reentry, and the Act made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship. After the Act's passage, Chinese men in the United States had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives, or of starting families in their new homes.
The Sand-Lot Incident
The San Francisco riot of 1877, also called the "Sand-Lot Incident," was a two day pogrom waged against Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, California, by the city's majority white population from the evening of July 23 through the night of July 24, 1877. The ethnic violence that swept Chinatown resulted in death and destruction.
The riot was inspired by Denis Kearney, who founded the Workingmen's Party of California. The party took particular aim against Chinese immigrant labor and the Central Pacific Railroad, which employed them. Its famous slogan was, "The Chinese must go!" Kearney's attacks against the Chinese were of a particularly virulent and openly racist nature, and found considerable support among white Californians of the time. This sentiment led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
A meeting was called for the evening of July 23, 1877, by the Workingmen's Party of the United States to agitate on behalf of the needs of the labor movement and those of unemployed workers in particular. Nearly 8,000 people turned up for the socialist meeting at the so-called "sand-lots" in front of City Hall. Several representatives of the Workingmen's Party addressed the throng on the labor question, but none of them so much as mentioned the city's Chinese population, let alone attempted to lay blame upon them as the cause of the unemployment problem.
Historian Selig Perlman recounts the origin of the riot which followed:
Everything was orderly until an anti-coolie procession pushed its way into the audience and insisted that the speakers say something about the Chinese. This was refused and thereupon the crowd which had gathered on the outskirts of the meeting attacked a passing Chinaman and started the cry, 'On to Chinatown.'
Mayhem ensued, resulting in a two-day riot that claimed four lives and inflicted more than $100,000 worth of property damage upon the city's Chinese immigrant population. Twenty Chinese-owned laundries were destroyed in the violence, and San Francisco's Chinese Methodist Mission suffered smashed glass when the mob pelted it with rocks.
The ethnic violence was only halted on the night of July 24 through the combined efforts of police, the state militia, and as many as 1,000 members of a citizens' vigilance committee, each armed with a hickory pickaxe handle.
The American Party
The Nativists went public in 1854 when they formed the "American Party," which was especially hostile to the immigration of Irish Catholics, and campaigned for laws to require a longer wait time between immigration and naturalization (the laws never passed). It was at this time that the term "nativist" first appeared, in the sense that opponents denounced them as "bigoted nativists." Former President Millard Fillmore ran on the American Party ticket for the Presidency in 1856. The American Party also included many ex-Whigs who ignored nativism, and included (in the South) a few Catholics whose families had long lived in America. Conversely, much of the opposition to Catholics came from Protestant Irish immigrants and German Lutheran immigrants who were not native at all.
The American Party often is associated with xenophobia and anti-Catholic sentiments. In Charlestown, Massachusetts, a nativist mob attacked and burned down a Catholic convent in 1834. No one was injured in the incident. In the 1840s, small scale riots between Catholics and nativists took place in several American cities. In Philadelphia in 1844, for example, a series of nativist assaults on Catholic churches and community centers resulted in the loss of lives and the professionalization of the police force. In Louisville, Kentucky, election-day rioters in 1855 killed at least 22 people in attacks on German and Irish Catholics in what became known as "Bloody Monday." Nativist sentiments experienced a revival in the 1890s, led by Protestant Irish immigrants hostile to Catholic immigration.
The Bennett Law
The Bennett Law caused a political uproar in Wisconsin in 1890, as the state government passed a law that threatened to close down hundreds of German-language elementary schools. Catholic and Lutheran Germans rallied to defeat the incumbent Republican governor, William D. Hoard, the leader of the nativists. Hoard attacked German-American culture and religion:
"We must fight alienism and selfish ecclesiasticism... The parents, the pastors and the church have entered into a conspiracy to darken the understanding of the children, who are denied by cupidity and bigotry the privilege of even the free schools of the state."
The Germans were incensed at the blatant attack not only on their language and culture but also on their religion. The parochial schools were set up and funded by the parents in order to inculcate the community's religious values. Furthermore, the idea that the state could intervene in family life and tell children how to speak was intolerable. The law was repealed in 1891, but Democrats used the memories to carry Wisconsin and Illinois in the 1892 U.S. presidential election.