"...the backlash against immigration into the United States had been brewing for years, arrested briefly by the war, but finally burst free in the postwar depression (sometimes called the "Root Recession" for the alliterative messaging the administration's opponents could use to firmly place blame where it belonged, on the economic policies of President Root - but it was indeed a depression). What set the explosion of nativism in the postwar years apart from what preceded it, however, was how broad these sentiments were, the way they cut across partisan lines and extended to all manner of ethnic and religious groups, and how they were successful in coalescing into the Immigration Act of 1918, which placed the first country-of-origin restrictions and limitations into American immigration policy, limitations that would persist in some form (though with revisions and relaxations) for decades.
Immigration to the United States, as this book has argued in previous chapters, is inexorably linked with American identity, but so is nativism - every generation of Americans have found a new group that arrives that is thought to somehow threaten the extant native-borns' physical or economic security, often phrased in racial of cultural terms. Prominently, the first wave of such persons were the Irish who arrived in the great migrations after the Famine of the 1840s; the discrimination suffered by these Irishmen was fundamental to fostering an Irish community that, in time, would come to form a bedrock of the Democratic Party, particularly in New York, Chicago, and increasingly in Liberal strongholds like Boston or Philadelphia. Ironically, it was then the Irish in California who were the first adamant opponents of Chinese and, later, Korean and Japanese immigration to the West Coast, and back East, before long the Italians, the Poles, Serbs, Greeks, and Jews were the new scapegoats looked down upon as a great wave of new arrivals began to build steam in the early 1890s and crested right as the Great American War broke out. The end of the war also saw a massive refugee wave of freedmen from the Confederacy beginning in 1915; between that year and 1920, as many as one and a half million Negro men, women and children are thought to have fled across the Ohio, more than doubling the Negro population of the United States in the space of a few years, and over a million more concentrated themselves in western and central Kentucky, under American military administration.
American soldiers thus returned from the battlefield, having been rotated in and out of combat for two or three long years depending on their cohort, to often find their cities irrevocably changed. In the words of one famous anonymous soldier publishing an essay in the New York World, neighborhoods once "lily white with an Episcopalian Church at its center" were now "crawling" with Italians and Greeks, "stinking of the incense of their rituals." One "hears not a lick of English on the streets," and "these new townships, invariably overwhelmingly male, are inevitably dens of vice, drinking, gambling and lust for American women, who have had to defend their honor for years alone as their cities were overrun." These were certainly not uncommon sentiments.
The massive labor strikes of the Red Summer of 1917, which continued at a smaller scale well into autumn, further terrified the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, which suddenly saw its position at the top of the American social hierarchy irrevocably threatened. Even as tens of thousands of temporary laborers from the war years took their earnings from shuttered factories and went home - especially prevalent amongst Italians and French-Canadians - it seemed that a tipping point was close to being reached. The labor movement in 1917 was dependent on immigrants, and thus immigration quickly came for conservatives to be synonymous with political radicalism, with the end of Protestant majorities suddenly being equated to the abolition of the English language and mass nationalizations of American industries under socialist administration.
This was not a commonly held view, to be clear, but that this fringe paranoia was mainstreamed spoke to the upheavals of the time, and it was against this backdrop that the American Defense League, or ADL, was founded in October 1917 in Indianapolis. The most prominent anti-immigration organization previously had been the Immigration Restriction League, chaired and encouraged by none other than Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful Massachusetts Senator who was now the Secretary of State. The issue for the IRL had been that it was too fundamentally a project of upper-class WASPism; Lodge was a "Brahmin's Brahmin," referring to the Boston aristocracy from which he hailed, too wealthy and obsessed with his Mayflower heritage to ever press his project to a wider audience. Attempts to form an American subchapter to the powerful, well-organized and fiercely anti-Catholic Orange Order of Canada had always struggled due to the Order's association with the British Crown and specific fixations, but the ADL came close. The American Defense League viewed its mission as broader than simply attacking immigration - it was also intended to be an organization that would defend American interests at home against labor radicalism, against political corruption, and against "public vice," strongly supporting the banning of alcohol entirely rather than simply its sale across state lines as bills before Congress proposed [1], opposing the women's vote, and generally acting as a reactionary bulwark for middle and working class voters alarmed by rapidly changing cultural mores.
It was also hard to separate the ADL's activities from the place of its founding, Indianapolis. It was the city with the proportionately largest Negro population in the United States, narrowly ahead of Cincinnati (though numerically smaller), in a state which unlike other parts of the Midwest had been largely populated and settled by smallholder farmers from the pre-1861 American South, particularly Kentuckians and Tennesseans, and which had in the late 19th century attracted huge numbers of so-called "Southern Tories" who had opposed secession and migrated from the Appalachian hill country of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northern Alabama. These "Tories" had settled in large numbers in the Ohio Valley and its hinterland; they had been the men and women who had powered the mills, factories and depots of places like Columbus, Vincennes, Terre Haute, Lafayette, Kokomo, and Muncie, and formed the bedrock of Indianapolis' commercial and professional classes now in later generations. They had brought with them from the Appalachian Uplands a distinctive suspicion of outsiders, a set of racial views that were considerably harsher than even the prevailing attitudes of most Americans at the time, and though they had little affinity for the Confederacy as a whole, they had powered a certain populist cultural conservatism that was unique to Indiana and set it largely apart from most else of the Midwest save for swaths of western and southwestern Ohio, parts of southern Illinois, and southern Missouri.
Indiana was also, along with Ohio, the epicenter of the freedmen refugee crisis, with places like Evansville in 1917 representing large encampments of those who had been approved by the Army's rigorous strictures to cross the river. Indianapolis was thus set hard on edge, and a massive race riot engulfed the city's south side, home to not only a large Negro population but also its Italian community, on November 17, 1917, spurred on by the ADL and seeing six people left dead and dozens of encampments, businesses, and homes destroyed.
Within weeks of the ADL's revelation as an organization and its coordinated attacks on racial, ethnic and religious minorities - one of Indianapolis' oldest synagogues was destroyed just prior to the Christmas holiday - new chapters were springing up around the country, and very pointedly the Chinese Exclusion League of California, with the support of its patron Senator Phelan, voted to invite San Francisco's ADL chapter to join them as an observer. The nativist impulses in California were now finding new allies, and a sophisticated web of restrictionist organizations spread out across the country..." [2]
- The Yellow Peril
[1] More to come
[2] The ADL and its other ugly ilk will become more important in the 1920s, this is meant to record its starting point