6.9 Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age

Nativism is favoring native-born Americans over immigrants and wanting to limit immigration. It had appeared before, as with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s (4.6), and it grew again as new immigrants arrived.

Nativists argued that immigrants took jobs and drove down wages, were loyal to the Pope or to radical politics, brought crime and disease, and could never fit into American society. Groups like the anti-Catholic American Protective Association (1887) and the Immigration Restriction League (1894) spread these ideas. The League pushed a literacy test for immigrants, which President Cleveland vetoed in 1897 (it passed in 1917).

On the West Coast, Chinese immigrants faced the harshest hostility. White workers, led in California by Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party with its slogan 'The Chinese must go!', blamed them for low wages. Mobs attacked Chinese communities, as in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers from immigrating for ten years and barred Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens. It was the first major federal law to exclude a group by nationality. It was renewed by the Geary Act (1892), made permanent in 1902 and not repealed until 1943.

Chinese Americans fought back in court. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court ruled that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment, confirming birthright citizenship.

Social Darwinism applied a distorted version of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to human societies. English writer Herbert Spencer coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest', and Yale professor William Graham Sumner argued that the rich had earned their position and government should not help the poor.

These ideas were used to defend laissez-faire, oppose reforms and justify racial hierarchy, imperialism and immigration restriction. Social Darwinism is not real science, but it was influential, so be ready to explain how people used it.

Settlement houses were community centers in poor immigrant neighborhoods, run by mostly middle-class, college-educated reformers, many of them young women, who lived there. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889, and Lillian Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York in 1893.

Settlement houses offered English classes, kindergartens, health care, job training and clubs. Workers there also gathered data and lobbied for laws on child labor, sanitation and factory safety, which made settlement work a training ground for Progressive reform (7.4).

Americanization meant teaching immigrants English, civics and 'American' habits. Some programs respected immigrant cultures; others pressured people to abandon them. Many immigrants chose their own blend, keeping their religion and language at home while their children grew up speaking English.