Ask most anyone to sum up the 1920’s in American history, and you’ll get a wide variety of answers. Talkies, Jazz, Prohibition, Al Capone and organized crime, flapper dresses, Art Deco architecture, F. Scott Fitzgerald, bootleg moonshine in a speakeasy. What you probably won’t get, is a nationwide surge of racism masquerading as immigration reform.
New Nativism became the predominant ideology of the 1920’s and renewed many nationalist sentiments about the declining American ethos in the wake of windfall immigration in the wake of The Great War. Both the immigration act of 1917 and the Immigration act of 1924 served to set the precedent for white ethnocentricity, and racial discrimination against immigrants for decades to come.
The sentiments expressed in these acts are largely echoed today, as the election of the current administration’s president was built on many of the racist rhetorical notions that served as foundational evidence for the passage of those immigration policies.
From a campaign trail interview in 2016, then presidential hopeful Donald Trump was quoted as saying
They’re sending people that have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people[1]
Which sounds an awful lot like a modernized version of the opening of John Box’s Immigration Restriction of 1928, wherein he writes:
Every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased, and degraded people of Europe or Asia demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped at the border….[2]
Seeing the past repeated so clearly is a reason why understanding the past in its entirety, not just through the rose gold glow of nostalgia, is important now more than ever; so as not to repeat the egregious mistakes of our ancestors.
It is clear that the Immigration Acts of 1920’s were based on racial stereotypes rooted in anthropological pseudoscience and with their passage, disproportionately affected Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, even as European immigrants were the intended targets for these new reforms; igniting a new hotbed of racial hostility that would continue for decades after.
Before we understand the passage of the Immigration acts, we must understand the rising anti-immigrant attitudes that the public expressed, long before policies ever came to a vote.
Franz Boas, widely regarded as the father of Anthropology in America, began a series of studies in 1908, determined to “confirm scientifically the existence of physical and mental deficiencies of recent immigrants”[3]. These studies and subsequent others by highly regarded professors and institutions like Columbia University, used the pseudoscience of phrenology (under the umbrella of anthropology)to explain the perceived detrimental effects immigrants and the poor have on the economics, values and morals of society at large. For a man who would pioneer the theory of cultural relativism, who would publish his ethnography Race, Language and Culture some thirty two years later, and stress in that publication:
“the idea that there is no necessary correlation between race, language, and culture that one’s physical appearance does not determine ones culture or ability to learn any language”[4]
It is saddening to see that he was not so wise in his youth. Going so far as to proclaiming that “Southern and eastern Europeans experienced a decline in mental abilities due to diminished head size”[5]. These kinds of broad spectrum racial declarations “based in science” gave a platform for white, protestant Americans to cavalcade their support of Federal policy to limit the “American racial stock from further degradation or change through mongrelization”.[6] That quote from John Box in the Immigrant Restriction policy of 1924 highlights the pro-white, anti-immigrant feelings of many Americans in the 1920’s.
Feelings that raged at an all-time high with the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian Immigrants wrongly convicted and executed in conjunction with a robbery and murder in Braintree Massachusetts[7]. While there was no direct evidence that linked the two to the actual crime, the court of public opinion had sentenced them to death for their anarchist sympathies and pro-violent, overthrow-of-capitalist attitudes[8].
Negative attitudes around European immigrants in postwar America had gained huge momentum, and while Sacco and Vanzetti may have been the spark that lit the blaze, it would be immigrants of color that would pay the harshest penalties of the immigration reforms to come
The hallmark of immigration reform throughout the history of the United States, has always centered on the division and “theft” of labor. From the earliest British colonies work being undercut by indentured servants, to the antebellum plantation south expanding their networks of slavery through westward expansion and robbing the common man of a job; the outcry has seemingly been that some underpaid workforce has always stolen the opportunities for labor of the hardworking common man. Yet these underpaid workforces have always been the backbone of our society, despite repeated efforts to figuratively (and in many cases literally) demonize them as quintessentially un-American. Without indentured servants, our fledgling colonies would have failed much like the mysterious Roanoke. Without enslaved African peoples, our nation would not have built an agricultural empire and had the capital to pay off its earliest war debts to remain an independent nation. Without Mexican immigrants and Free Blacks, we would not have won the Civil war and stayed united. Without Chinese and Japanese immigrants, our entire system of mining and railroads would never have been built, halting the progress of the American Industrial Revolution.
Yet “To keep out… this blend of low-grade Spaniard, peonized Indian, and Negro slave mixes with Negroes, mulattoes, and other mongrels… is another essential part of the Nation’s immigration policy”[9], becomes our sentiment whenever we look for a scapegoat to our nation’s problems. Ernesto Galarza, a Mexican scholar responding to the immigration policies of 1924 says:
“I would ask for recognition of the Mexican’s contribution to the agricultural and industrial expansion of western United States…. From Denver to Los Angeles and from the Imperial Valley to Portland, it is said, an empire has been created largely by the brawn of the humble Mexican, who laid the rails and topped the beets and poured the cubic miles of cement”[10]
The first broad spectrum official anti-immigration act passed in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act[11]. Passed in May of 1882, the Chinese became the first illegal immigrants in the United States. Afterwards the country began passing other acts, such as: The Immigration Act of 1882[12], The Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903[13], The Immigration Act of 1907, The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 (which banned the Japanese)[14], The Literacy Act of 1917, The Dillingham-Hardwicke Act of 1918, The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921[15], and The National Origins Act of 1924[16].
These acts, one by one focused on different racialized sectors of the populace, each in turn seen as some lower form of humanoid in comparison to the White, Protestant, American working male. These groups, each in their own way, are responsible for the foundations of the American empire, yet are exploited by the Capitalist ruling classes greed and their workarounds to paying higher wages for domestic labor, and vilified by the propaganda of that class to divert the anger and rage of the domestic working class off of them, and onto the poorest immigrants. While President Coolidge declared “American must be kept American”[17] upon signing the National Origins Act, his vilification of Eastern Europeans merely reduced their ability to come to America. Whereas for Mexicans, it forcefully repatriated many of them, unable to obtain visas necessary to stay, when they had originally crossed without needing them[18].
This act would govern American immigration policy until it was replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Decades of anti-color sentiment would inform policy decisions and cultural attitudes, creating a racially hostile environment for non white persons in America till beyond the second World War.
Phrenology would serve as the basis for the justification of the racism of Euro-colonial attitudes in an America none too eager to join in a war it had no part in, and its scientific platitudes, alongside the increasing fields of anthropology, would inform broad schools of thought about the nature of savages, slaves and the perceived inferiority of immigrant cultures.
Disproportionately this took a toll on Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, even as racism against Blacks and Jews was perpetuated by the populist revival of the Klu Klux Klan, and Eastern Europeans populaces were directly targeted by the language of federal immigration acts.
It seems that no matter how many strides we take in society, we seem to be running in place, experiencing the same problems that have plagued us since the beginning.
As Freud once spoke about the narcissism of small differences, racism has always had roots in American culture, and it’s likely that it always might have some part to play in our culture. Even as we find “scientific” reasoning to justify our prejudices, and pass laws attempting to disguise our hatred of the other as functions for the best of society, we still cause disproportionate harm to the most marginalized peoples among us.
The New Nativism and immigration restrictions of the 1920’s that contributed to the rise of racism in America directly influenced the immigration acts of the 1920’s. As they were based on racial stereotypes rooted in anthropological pseudoscience that disproportionately affected Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, even as European immigrants became the targets for these new reforms.
It is not enough to be “not racist”, we must be actively anti-racist. Challenging our preconceived notions about racial stereotypes, groups and cultures. And actively standing in opposition of rhetoric and propaganda that falsely isolates intersections of American people as somehow being “un-American” for their skin color, religious beliefs, or ancestral culture.
In Text Citations
- Mark, Michelle., April 5, 2018
- Box, John., 1928
- Lund, John M., December 1994.
- Brown, Nina., 2020.
- Lund, December 1994
- Box, John., 1928
- Corbett, P. Scott, 2017
- Corbett, P. Scott, 2017
- Box, John., 1928
- Galarza, Ernesto, 1929.
- The American Yawp, 2019The American Yawp, 2019
- The American Yawp, 2019
- The American Yawp, 2019
- Corbett, P. Scott, 2017
- Corbett, P. Scott, 2017
- Corbett, P. Scott ,2017
- Box, John., 1928.
Supporting Materials
- Locke, Joseph, and Ben Wright. The American Yawp, 2019. http://www.americanyawp.com/.
- Corbett, P. Scott, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd J. Pfannestiel, and Paul S. Vickery. U.S. History. Houston, TX: OpenStax, Rice University, 2017.
- Mark, Michelle. “Trump Just Referred to One of His Most Infamous Campaign Comments: Calling Mexicans ‘Rapists’,” April 5, 2018. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-mexicans-rapists-remark-reference-2018-4?op=1.
- Box, John. “Immigration Restriction.” Digital History, 1928. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3.
- Lund, John M. “Boundaries of Restriction: The Dillingham Commission.” UVM History Review vol. 6 Dec. 1994: Lund, December 1994. https://www.uvm.edu/~hag/histreview/vol6/lund.html.
- Brown, Nina, Thomas McIlwraith, and Laura Tubelle de Gonzalez. Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. 2nd ed. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, 2020.
- Galarza, Ernesto. “Immigration Restriction.” Digital History, 1929. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3.
- “Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.” Digital History, 1924. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3.
