In 1956, at the behest of the Anti-Defamation League, the young historian John Higham, who would go on to become one of the leading figures in American intellectual history, published Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. In it, he chronicled and explained the waxing and waning of anti-immigrant sentiment over the long arc of American history.
Tribalism
In a key chapter in the book, indeed its culmination, Higham coined the phrase, “the tribal twenties.” He described how, after decades of xenophobia, the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act came to happen. He recognized that the tribalism which had long been there, albeit episodically, began to coalesce during the war years, and gained vigor with the war’s end.
Higham got it right when he invoked the word “tribal” to describe the mood of America of that era, or at least, the mood of much of its white, Protestant, heavily small-town, non-immigrant, fading majority. Looking around them, they saw how the nation, which they believed they owned by virtue of having been there (at least, in an imagined way) at the beginning, seemed to be slipping out of their grasp. The America they considered authentic appeared to them on the cusp of decline.
Cities and the values of modernism
As they surveyed the state of the nation, cities seemed to be in the ascendancy. Indeed, the 1920 Census showed that for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in urban areas.
They understood these cities — New York at the apex, but the others as well — as synonymous with immigrants. These self-proclaimed custodians of the nation fretted deeply and expressed themselves loudly in words and deeds: Immigrants had arrived in the millions by steamships since the 1880s, mostly having come from Southern and Eastern Europe. These immigrants and their children were rapidly gaining ground. And as the “real,” “100% Americans” (a phrase invoked by Theodore Roosevelt) understood it, these Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews, Greeks and others, few Protestants among them, could not grasp the true nature of Americanism. And along with the Irish Catholics whose migration had been in progress since the 1850s, they therefore threatened the very core of the American way of life.
To these beleaguered Americans of the 1920s, the cities in which the immigrants were concentrated represented modernism, be it movies, jazz, loose sexual mores, free and new women in short skirts and androgynous hair styles. Bad enough with the cacophony of foreign languages that wafted through the streets, in their eyes, the cities fostered racial mixing, partly due to the great Black migration from the South, which gained headway during the war.
They saw the nation, which they believed they owned by virtue of having been there (at least, in an imagined way) at the beginning, slipping out of their grasp.
Curtailing immigration
From the fearful perspective of this tribe of Americans, to invoke Higham, this toxic combination of immigrants, cities, foreign ideas and the flaunting of conventional and values had to be reined in and stamped out. The passage in 1924 of the Johnson-Reed Act sought to accomplish that end by drastically cutting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. It established national origin quotas and set a ceiling on the number who could enter, as well as fully ended immigration from Asia.
Another efficacious way to nip the problem at its root was a concerted suppression of free speech, during what is often labeled the “first Red Scare.” There was a full-scale assault by the federal government on socialists, Communists, anarchists, labor unions and others who questioned the rightness of the capitalist system. The supporters of the 18th Amendment, passed in 1920, which prohibited alcohol production and consumption, imagined that Prohibition would likely change the immigrants’ behavior and transform them into sober and restrained Americans.
Sacco and Vanzetti, Mooney trials
The tribalism of the years during and following World War I can be perhaps best illustrated by two trials that gained global attention: that of Tom Mooney, a labor organizer, arrested and convicted on less than a shred of evidence for bombing a preparedness parade in San Francisco in 1916, for which he languished in prison for decades; and the 1927 case of Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, described as anarchists and then executed, again with the flimsiest of proof of guilt.
Ku Klux Klan
And on an organizational level, the birth and flowering of the second Ku Klux Klan — one of the largest social movements in American history — confirmed the fears of so many Americans. Unlike its namesake of the Reconstruction era, this one launched in 1915, existed far beyond the South, as it recruited members and successfully ran candidates for office in Oregon, Indiana, Maine, New York and elsewhere. And unlike its predecessor, it capitalized on the anxieties of the tribe that called itself American by targeting Catholics, first and foremost; immigrants as well, regardless of religion; Jews; and yes, it followed in the footsteps of the first Klan by visiting terror upon African Americans.
The Americans who flocked to the Klan, either by joining or just supporting it, and those who hailed immigration restriction as a positive step in the right direction applauded the suppression of radicals and radical publications, while loathing cities and what they represented. They functioned as a tribe that considered themselves under attack. Closing ranks, they did not want to cede their primacy to others, and marshalled their resources, political and cultural, to try to stem the tide.
We may have been lulled by the monumental progress initiated in the late 1960s, thinking that gains would and could not be rolled back. How wrong we were.
Who are the ‘strangers’?
Ironically, in his title, Higham referred to immigrants as the “strangers.” But, in fact, the native-born, white Protestant Americans also saw themselves as the real strangers in a land being taken away from them. They appear familiar to us from the vantage point of our very fraught times and can be seen as forerunners of today’s conservatives, written about by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in 2016 in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.
I truly fear today’s “strangers.” Not the families and individuals steaming to the United States from around the world seeking better lives, both in terms of physical safety and economic stability, but those who now define themselves as strangers — individuals sure that they will soon be replaced unless they act. Their actions and the government that abets them call into question all the pillars of our civil society, one which has benefited us.
My “us” here refers to Jews and Americans, writ large. The freedoms we enjoy, particularly those that had to be won, stand on the brink of extinction. As an historian, I wonder how the liberal Americans of a century ago saw the future. Certainly, they left troves of published and unpublished documents, mined by myself and my fellow historians. But I still do not know if they felt as doomsday as I, and so many of those with whom I associate with, feel about the daily unfolding of horrors around us. Did they, too, tremble when they picked up their daily newspaper? Did they fret over the future for themselves, their children and the society as a whole?
I am guessing that they faced their domestic strangers with less trepidation than we do, in as much as they probably saw the actions of the Klan — the xenophobes and the suppressors of civil liberties — as just continuations of what had been. We may have been lulled by the monumental progress initiated in the late 1960s, thinking that gains would and could not be rolled back. How wrong we were.
