The decade of the 1890s in the United States – as in Australia and South Africa – saw growing demands that the government further restrict immigration to exclude undesirable races. In the case of the United States it was the vast numbers who were entering the country that began to cause alarm as well as the changing complexion of immigrants. Italians, Hungarians, Poles and other allegedly ignorant and illiterate European peoples – ‘removed from us in race and blood’ – began to be targeted for exclusion.[29]
In 1790, the United States had restricted naturalised citizenship to ‘all free white persons who have or shall migrate into the United States’.[30] Clearly, the legislation was racially discriminatory, but as Jacobsen points out the law also proved to be radically ‘inclusive’:
What is too easily missed from our vantage point, however, is the staggering inclusivity of the 1790 naturalization law. It was this law’s unquestioned use of the word ‘white’ that allowed for the massive European migrations of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Famine Migration from Ireland, and ultimately including the 48ers from Germany, the Scandinavian pioneers, and then successive waves of East European Jews, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenians, Magyars, Ukrainians, Lithuanians – none of whom the framers [of the constitution] had ever envisioned swelling the polity of the new nation when they crafted its rules for naturalization.[31]
It was these groups on whom American immigration reformers focused in the 1890s, opening up in the process the categories of ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ for re-definition. Many southern and eastern Europeans began to be considered not quite white enough for Anglo-Saxon America.[32]
The Chinese had been excluded by name in United States legislation of 1882. Now on the east coast, especially in Massachusetts, attention was focused on other undesirable ‘races’ who allegedly threatened the American standard of living and system of government. In two articles in the North American Review, in 1891, Boston Anglo-Saxonist and Republican Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge made the point that ‘the immigration of those races which had thus far built up the United States, and which are related to each other either by blood or language or both was declining, while the immigration of races totally alien to them was increasing’.[33]
In the first article, in January, he used consular reports to show that immigration was ‘making its greatest relative increase from races most alien to the body of American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races’.[34] He pointed in particular to the rise in the number of Hungarian Slovacs who, according to the American consul in Budapest, had ‘so many items in common with the Chinese’ in that they were prey to drug addictions of various kinds (alcohol not opium) and their low standard of living was undermining the ‘white labourer’s wages’.[35] It was time, Lodge argued, to ‘discriminate against illiteracy’:
It is a truism to say that one of the greatest dangers to our free government is ignorance ... We spend millions annually in educating our children that they may be fit to be citizens and rulers of the Republic. We are ready to educate also the children who come to us from other countries; but it is not right to ask us to take annually a large body of persons who are totally illiterate ... We have the right to exclude illiterate persons from our immigration, and this test ... would in all probability shut out a large part of the undesirable portion of the present immigration.[36]
Lodge’s second article in May 1891 was prompted by the lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans and although he condemned the lawlessness of the mob, Lodge nevertheless considered there was reason for it. The local community had reason to believe the Italians were connected with the Mafia, ‘offspring of conditions and of ideas wholly alien to the people of the United States’, whose presence provided further evidence of ‘the utter carelessness with which we treat immigration in this country’. If new restriction measures were not soon introduced – including a test of immigrants’ ability to read and write – then ‘race antagonisms’ must surely increase.[37]
In 1894, Lodge joined other New Englanders, Prescott F. Hall, Robert DeCourcy Ward, Charles Warren and John Fiske in forming the Immigration Restriction League. As Jacobsen has observed, the ‘league crystallized around the issue of a literacy test for incoming aliens’ and ‘race was central to the league’s conception of literacy from the beginning’.[38] Literacy was fundamental to the citizen’s capacity for self-government and only Anglo-Saxons were blessed with that capacity. But arguably, just as important as the New Englanders’ ‘Anglo-Saxon complex’ was Lodge’s knowledge from State department reports that the groups he wanted to exclude – migrants from eastern and southern Europe – had very low levels of literacy.
The Immigration Restriction Bill, which required immigrants to show knowledge of reading and writing in their own language, for admission to the United States, was sponsored by Lodge in 1895 and passed in 1896. As Barbara Solomon has noted:
An educational basis of admission seemed reasonable; the Massachusetts State Constitution already contained such a reading and writing requirement for voting. Moreover, the bill had the strategic usefulness of not discriminating against any group by name, nationality, religion or race [but] would keep out ‘people we wish to exclude’.[39]
Its strategic value was immediately apparent to Joseph Chamberlain in the British Colonial Office, who was thinking about ways of preventing colonists in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and British Columbia from passing legislation that discriminated explicitly against Chinese and Indian British subjects or Britain’s Japanese allies.
In the event, the American Immigration Restriction Act of 1896 would be vetoed by President Grover Cleveland, but not before it was taken up by political leaders in Natal, who were looking for ways to stop the further immigration of Indians. In the United States, Lodge and others continued to press for immigration restriction based on a literacy test, with their political support increasingly coming from the South and the west coast, as agitation there against ‘Asiatics’ grew ever more strident. Twice more when immigration restriction legislation incorporating a literacy test was passed by Congress, it was vetoed by Presidents Taft and Wilson.