Hibernian Chronicle: Closing the gate

But the tumultuous years following World War I created a reactionary political climate that increased the popularity of immigration restriction.
Ironically, while the law was born of a nativist spirit quite familiar to Irish Americans, its details revealed that the sons and daughters of Erin had by the early 1920s achieved a new level of acceptance in America.
Nativism (hostility toward foreigners) was hardly a new phenomenon in the early 20th century. Indeed, one finds incidents of nativism dating from the earliest days of colonial settlement. Not surprisingly, however, nativism soared in the mid-nineteenth century with the onset of unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from Germany and Ireland.
Irish immigrants faced the most virulent nativism in this period for a number of reasons. Most Irish were Catholics arriving in a self-consciously Protestant nation. Their loyalty to the Pope (instead of the President), declared nativists, made them unfit citizens in a republic.
Nativists also saw the Irish as a lazy and thriftless people who filled the nation’s slums and only added to the growing problem of poverty. Similarly, they associated the Irish with crime and disease, pointing out (correctly) that the Irish filled a disproportionate number of America’s jail cells and hospital beds. American workers also condemned the Irish as a threat to their jobs and wages.
Many nativists were caught up in the great temperance crusade of the mid-nineteenth century and denounced the Irish for their fondness for alcohol. In short, there were many reasons to hate the Irish.
Nativism in this period frequently exploded into full-scale violence. To cite but two examples, a nativist mob burned a Catholic convent in Charlestown near Boston in 1834 and twenty died in Philadelphia’s Bible Riots in 1844. By the mid-1850s nativism blossomed into a powerful political movement — known as the American Party, or Know Nothings, that was dedicated to ridding America of the “foreign menace.”
Anti-Irish sentiment persisted into the early 20th century, but in a substantially diminished form. Three factors explain this welcome development. First, by the turn of the century, Irish Americans were experiencing rapid upward mobility and were nearly equal to native-born Americans in terms occupational status.
Like their native-born counterparts, about two-thirds of Irish Americans worked in industry or transportation, and only fifteen percent worked as unskilled labor. Evidence also indicates that by 1900, the Irish had also broadened their hold on municipal jobs, continuing to dominate police and fire departments, but now also moving into jobs as clerks, engineers, and inspectors. The position of Irish American women workers likewise improved by 1900. Only nineteen percent of Irish American women labored as domestic servants. Highly educated, Irish American women instead moved into jobs as secretaries, stenographers, telephone operators, nurses, and teachers. None of these jobs paid high wages, but for women, they carried with them the intangible benefits of professionalism and respectability. Finally, through the growing network of Catholic colleges and expanding public education system, the Irish in America began to make significant inroads into the professions, especially law and medicine.
Second, anti-Irish nativism diminished in the face of a growing association of the Irish with American patriotism. During World War I, for example, Irish Americans were noted for their enthusiastic participation in the fighting. The “Rainbow Brigade” was commanded by Col. William “Wild Bill” Donovan who would go on to win a Medal of Honor. Its chaplain, Fr. Francis Duffy, likewise returned to the States a national hero. The song many Americans sang as a kind of war anthem, “Over There!”, was composed by famed Irish American song and dance man, George M. Cohan. Gone, it seemed, were the days when the Irish were seen as a sinister threat to America.
Third, the Irish reputation was helped by the onset of a wave of immigration from new regions, in particular eastern and southern Europe and Asia, that stoked anew American anxiety over the impact of foreigners on their country. Not only did the newcomers come from different parts of the globe, they also came in unprecedented numbers, some 25 million between 1880 and 1924. Soon the very same nativist arguments once used against the Irish (religion, poverty, disease, crime, race, and jobs) were applied to Russian Jews, Italians, Greek, Poles, and the Chinese. The Irish reputation rose, in part, by default.
Nativism in this period, however, reached levels unseen in the mid-nineteenth century. The two years following the end of World War I were some of the most tumultuous in American history. The largest strike wave in the nation’s history saw some four million workers walk off their jobs in 1919. Race riots broke out in Chicago, East St. Louis, Tulsa and many other cities. A series of unexplained bombings hit targets from Wall Street to Los Angeles, leaving scores dead. Driven by these events, as well as news of the Russian Revolution, a wave of anti-radical hysteria (the so-called Red Scare) swept the nation. In all these troubling developments Americans increasingly saw one common thread: foreigners.
Nativists seized the moment and easily pushed through Congress the Immigration Restriction Act, which Harding signed on May 19, 1921. It sharply reduced the total number of immigrants admitted from some 800,000 in 1920 to an annual average of less than 300,000. More significant, however, was the quota system devised to allocate those 300,000 spots. Using an explicitly racist calculus designed to keep America’s ethnic composition at roughly the levels revealed in the 1910 census, lawmakers assigned each country a quota. Preferred countries like England received large quotas, while nations like Russia, the principal source of Jewish immigration, received tiny quotas.
Congress rewrote the law in 1924 making it even more restrictive. As a result, overall immigration dropped from 800,000 in 1920 to 165,000 in 1925. More importantly, many immigrant groups deemed “undesirable” saw their numbers plummet sharply. Italians, for example, who had averaged 158,000 arrivals per year before restriction, were deemed undesirable and thus received an annual quota of just 5,802. Russia saw its number cut to 2,248. For Greeks the numbers were slashed from an average of 17,600 arrivals per year to a quota of just 307.
And the Irish? In a word, their rising fortunes and improved reputation had gained form them the coveted status of “preferred” immigrants. In the 1924 version of the law, the Irish Free State received an annual quota of 28,567 (later reduced in 1929, along with most other groups, to 17,853). Ireland received such a high quota despite the fact that it sent an average of just 22,000 per year in the 1920s and a scant 1,300 per year in the 1930s. The Irish, at least in the eyes of the quota makers, were finally welcome to apply.
Of course, anti-Irish and especially anti-Catholic sentiment had not been banished entirely from the land. Al Smith’s bitterly contested presidential campaign in 1928 revealed a shocking degree of bigotry across the heartland. Still, it was a far cry from the days of the Know Nothings and thirty-two years later John F. Kennedy would put the matter to rest once and for all.

Learn more at www.edwardtodonnell.com/irish.htm

HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK

May 23, 1922: “Abie’s Irish Rose,” a play about an unlikely Irish-Jewish romance, opens in New York. Panned by the critics, it sets a Broadway record with 2,377 performances.

May 24, 1798: Uprising of the United Irishmen begins.

HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES:

May 22, 1901: Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin is born in Boston.

May 23, 1928: Singer Rosemary Clooney is born in Maysville, KY