Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965

Unwanted

MADDALENA MARINARI

Unwanted

Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965

The University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

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Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marinari, Maddalena, author.

Title: Unwanted: Italian and Jewish mobilization against restrictive immigration laws, 1882–1965 / Maddalena Marinari.

Description: Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

[2019]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018055507| ISBN 9781469652924 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469652931 (pbk: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469652948 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | Immigrants—Political activity—United States—History—20th century. | Italians—Political activity—United States. | Jews—Political Activity—United States. | Emigration and immigration law—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC JV6455 .M35 2019 | DDC 325.73089/51—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055507

Cover illustration: Herbert Johnson, Make This Flood Control Permanent, 1928, graphite, ink, and ink wash on Bristol board, 15 ⅜ × 17 ¾". Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (gift of the artist).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations in the Text

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The Battle Begins: World War I and the End of Open Immigration from Europe

CHAPTER TWO

The Doors of America Are Worse Than Shut When They Are Half-Way Open: From the Literacy Test to the National Origins Quota System, 1920–1929

CHAPTER THREE

Almost as Inaccessible as Tibet: Mobilizing under Restriction before World War II

CHAPTER FOUR

International Migration and One World: Reframing the Debate on Immigration Reform in a New Era, 1945–1952

CHAPTER FIVE

A Thing of Shreds and Patches: Challenging Immigration Reform from Within, 1952–1960

CHAPTER SIX

Reform at Last: A Victory for Whom?

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

From the time I began working on this book to when it came out, it has become increasingly difficult to be an immigrant in the United States. Now more than ever, I realize how important it was for many of the people I discuss in this book to have a support network, a group of people that always had their backs. This book would not be in print today without the amazing mentors, wonderful friends, thoughtful colleagues, and engaged students who encouraged me and sustained me when what was happening in the twenty-first century made it difficult to work on my manuscript because it resembled too much the story at the center of this book. And I’ll always be grateful to my families in Italy and the United States for their unwavering support, good cheer, and delicious food as I researched and wrote this book. Most of all, I thank my husband for believing that this book would see the light of day from day one and my son who makes my life better each and every day. I dedicate this book to them and to all the migrants in the United States and around the world who, every day, try to make the most of living away from home.

Abbreviations in the Text

AICC

American Immigration and Citizenship Conference

AJC

American Jewish Committee¹

ACIM

American Committee on Italian Migration

ACNS

American Council for Nationalities Service

ACVA

American Council for Voluntary Agencies

ADL

Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith

HIAS

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society or Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society

IPL

Immigration Protective League

IRL

Immigration Restriction League

JACL

Japanese American Citizens League

NLIL

National Liberal Immigration League

NCIC

National Council on Immigration and Citizenship

NCWC

National Catholic Welfare Conference

OSIA

Order Sons of Italy in America

________

1. This is not to be confused with the American Jewish Congress, which is often abbreviated as AJC as well. In this book, AJC will refer exclusively to the American Jewish Committee. Whenever referred to, the congress is written in full.

Unwanted

Introduction

Today, not even the most ardent advocates for a more open immigration policy would argue that the United States should admit all those who want to enter the country. Policymakers and the majority of immigration reform advocates have accepted restriction as an integral element of U.S. immigration policy, but the normalization of this assumption has a long history. While we know a lot about the role that restrictionists and nativists have played in this story, Unwanted chronicles the little-known part that advocates of liberal immigration reform have played in upholding immigration restriction in the United States. Representing the two largest immigrant communities in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, Italian and Jewish reformers profoundly influenced the country’s immigration policy from 1882 to 1965 as they mobilized against immigration laws that marked them as undesirable. Strategic alliances among restrictionist legislators in Congress, a climate of anti-immigrant hysteria, and a fickle executive branch often left them with few options but to negotiate or accept a compromise to move past the status quo. With limited options, they often pushed for changes that favored some immigrant groups over others and penalized immigrants from communities with few financial resources and little social capital.

Italians and Eastern European Jews in the United States joined millions of migrants around the globe who, at the end of the nineteenth century, left their countries to escape stagnant economies, political unrest, or persecution to take advantage of the demand for unskilled labor in rapidly industrializing nations. Almost immediately after their arrival, they became the target of a vitriolic restrictionist campaign.¹ As Senator Matthew Neely of West Virginia put it in 1924, many Americans believed that they had a duty to defend themselves against the millions of physically, mentally, and morally inferior men and women scattered over Europe.² As the pressure to close the gates mounted, Italian and Jewish reform advocates joined other groups to oppose restrictive immigration laws, but their efforts collided with those of a powerful coalition of nativists in Congress who worked tirelessly to solidify a regime of immigration restriction to protect the racial status quo and strengthen their political influence. The result was immigration laws that bore the imprint of restrictionists and anti-restrictionists alike.

At the center of this story is a small and unusually successful group of self-selected Italian and Jewish leaders who took it upon themselves to oppose restrictive immigration laws that targeted immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. These activists were overwhelmingly professionals and business owners concerned with how the new immigration system affected their communities and, by extension, their role in U.S. society. The relationship between these self-appointed leaders and the communities they represented proved strained, however. While they needed each other to succeed in dismantling immigration restriction and survive the challenges posed by the new immigration system, they often were at odds with one another, particularly when it came to strategy. Many in their communities resented these leaders for their propensity to compromise. The immigration reform advocates, in turn, felt that the groups to which they belonged failed to appreciate the challenges they faced when they pushed for legislative changes. They often had to do so while navigating the constructed image that legislators, restrictionists, and many Americans had of them and their communities—demonstrating how groups become groups not only by virtue of internal identification as Italian or Jewish but also because of how outsiders identify and perceive them. For this reason, for example, German Jews already established in the United States understood that they had common cause with the newly arrived Eastern European Jews—whether or not the two groups would have self-identified as such, the broader American public saw them as one group.

During negotiations, Italian and Jewish immigration reform activists felt limited in their options as they often fell victim to stereotypes that Americans had of them. Jewish activists continually faced accusations of being organizers and protestors while Italians were often not taken seriously because many Americans considered them politically apathetic. In response, they vacillated between voicing the concerns of their communities and framing their push for immigration reform in broader terms even when, in reality, they were still prioritizing their own groups. This was, in part, in response to powerful legislators who controlled the political process, set the legislative agenda, and constrained the nature and extent of progress.

Unwanted builds on the flourishing scholarship on specific immigrant groups’ response to immigration restriction, the superb research on the history of U.S. immigration policy, and the recent literature on the intersection between the fight for civil liberties and immigrant inclusion during the first half of the twentieth century. A critical turning point in U.S. history, the passage of Asian exclusion dominates much of the literature on immigrant and ethnic group activists who mobilized against immigration restriction.³ This literature remains the model for analysis of the issue as we see more studies on the activism of other groups targeted for restriction.⁴ At the same time, scholars, whose work chronicles the history of U.S. immigration policy privilege national political officials and policy choices, delve into the waxing and waning of nativist and anti-immigrant movements as driving forces for immigration laws, or discuss lobbying groups in broad terms.⁵ Most recently, another group of scholars has reframed the fight for immigration reform within a broader push for inclusion and civil liberties that characterized the first half of the twentieth century to disentangle the intersection of citizenship, immigration, and belonging. Many of these works have also paid attention to the role that geopolitics play in immigration policy decisions.⁶

Unwanted integrates these three historiographical trends to bring to light the tension between inclusion and exclusion in much of the debate on immigration throughout the twentieth century and shifts the focus to the causes and consequences of these diametrically opposed approaches to immigration. The following chapters pay close attention to the political engagement of prominent European groups and their leaders to uncover how the struggle between restrictionists and anti-restrictionists shaped immigration restriction and the integration of these groups into mainstream U.S. society. Unwanted also traces the changing rationales and strategies these activists used to make a case for less discriminatory immigration laws. As they debated how to push for immigration reform, Italian and Jewish activists had to negotiate constantly for whom they were speaking, articulate why immigrant rights were civil rights and how they connected to both U.S. domestic and international priorities, and decide who their allies were to avoid alienating the legislators with whom they negotiated.

The interactions between Italian and Jewish advocates and restrictionist legislators show that interpreting the coalitions of western, southern, and eastern restrictionists in Congress within the context of immigration policy alone minimizes their actual significance. Many of the members of the restrictionist coalition shared a common desire to shape U.S. society and reinforce racial distinctions through the passage of restrictive immigration policies, but they also coveted the national influence conferred upon those heading congressional committees. They regarded immigration restriction as a means to find and hold on to their congressional leadership to influence other matters of national concern. Because of this complex set of motives, these coalitions were stronger and longer lasting than those created by immigration reform advocates representing different immigrant groups targeted for restriction. In the rare instances when immigration advocates from different ethnic groups came together, restrictionist legislators disrupted these alliances by playing off each group against the others because of their different reform priorities.

The restrictionist coalition in Congress began to weaken only when the executive branch embraced some of the reformers’ requests because they advanced U.S. foreign policy. After the outbreak of World War II, U.S. presidents began to frame civil rights policies, including immigration laws, within the context of the country’s foreign policy and U.S. international interests. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, for example, endorsed immigration reform because they understood that restricting European and Asian entry through a racist policy conflicted with Cold War claims of democratic superiority. The support of the executive represented a critical turning point in the fight to repeal discriminatory immigration laws, but the different agendas of legislators, the executive, and immigration advocacy groups profoundly reshaped the immigration bills under consideration. The final product often differed dramatically from what immigration reform activists had hoped or supported, but, for many of them, any change to the status quo represented a step in the right direction even when its impact would be uneven. As we will see, the debate over the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, more than any other piece of legislation that preceded it, encapsulated this complex set of dynamics.

At the heart of Italian Americans’ and American Jews’ different approaches to advancing changes in American immigration laws were their distinct patterns of migration and transnational identity. Eastern European Jews left Europe as entire families to escape religious persecution and discrimination to settle permanently in the United States. Some eventually returned to Europe, but the majority never went back and had no desire to maintain any ties with their homelands, which in turn had no interest in their fate. Eastern European Jews saw themselves more connected with the Jewish diaspora around the world.⁷ In the United States, they joined a more established and well-connected Jewish community of German origin that felt compelled to intervene in the debate over immigration restriction because the fate of their newly arrived coreligionists also affected their standing in U.S. society. In fact, the old and new Jewish communities often clashed over the best course of action, but together they reluctantly became the face of the opposition against the national origins quota system and promoted a vision of the U.S. as a tolerant, pluralistic, and egalitarian country that would finally provide the Jewish community with full inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society.

Many Italian immigrants were initially birds of passage who traveled back and forth between Europe and the United States and resisted permanent settlement. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, they arrived in the United States in search of better job opportunities, hoping to set aside enough money to return home, settle their debts, and start a new life. The majority of them eventually moved back to Italy permanently. Unlike their Jewish counterparts, Italian immigrants, even after they began to settle in the United States, retained strong ties with their country of origin, resisted naturalization, and did not join an already well-established community.⁸ Hardly apathetic, they had to build their social capital and a political machine from scratch.

Many of the differences in mobilization between the two groups stemmed from their distinct immigrant experience. Jewish immigrants’ lack of ties with their homelands and their history of persecution in Europe persuaded them of the importance of acquiring U.S. citizenship immediately, building global networks with other Jewish communities, and relying exclusively on their own resources to organize against restriction. They often framed their activism in the name of world Jewry, but their visibility frequently attracted accusations of Jewish conspiracy and disloyalty. During times of heightened anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s, these attacks stifled their efforts to advance a more radical immigration reform agenda. In contrast, Italian immigrants’ strong connection with their ancestral home and the Italian government’s efforts to nurture those ties hindered Italian American immigration reform advocates’ effectiveness in opposing immigration restriction for a long time. Until World War II, U.S. legislators did not trust Italian Americans and viewed their ties to Italy, as well as the Italian government’s interference in the debate over U.S. immigration policy, as further justification to restrict immigration from Italy. The negative perception of their connections with Italy only dissipated during World War II and with the rise of the Cold War, when Italian Americans’ transnational lives served U.S. interests abroad.

Despite their differences, Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates held a definite advantage over immigration reform advocates of color because they could naturalize, but their mobilization did not go unchallenged. They consciously took up the promise of inclusion that came with U.S. citizenship to reject the label of undesirability that immigration laws imposed on them and mobilized for immigration reform as a vehicle for integration.⁹ In the face of continuing obstruction and anti-immigrant hysteria, Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates moved toward the center as their campaign against immigration restriction took shape. Instead of pushing for the immediate repeal of the national origins system, each group settled for piecemeal reforms—namely family reunification, occupational skills, and refugee privileges—as strategies to bring their relatives and compatriots to the United States. These efforts and their legacies are at the heart of this book.

Appeals to American family values emerged as the main tool to challenge immigration restriction over the course of the twentieth century. Both groups understood that, despite their differences, congressional leaders of both parties accepted family reunification as a loophole in their restrictionist agenda. As the debate over immigration reform unfolded, Italian and Jewish leaders skillfully put family ties at the forefront of their efforts, hoping that the emphasis on family reunion would facilitate the arrival of more—if not all—immigrants who wanted to come to the United States. Even so, Italian and Jewish activists often found themselves at odds, a situation that weakened the collective efforts of all the groups fighting for immigration reform and that resulted in reforms having an uneven impact on different groups. In the face of strong and long-term congressional support of racially motivated nationality quotas, the immigrants’ concessions at times helped normalize the racist and xenophobic foundations that underlie U.S. immigration policy even today after the elimination of Asian exclusion and the abolition of the quota system.

What these activists did is only part of the story. This is not a traditional ethnic history of social movements. Rather, this book follows activists from two of the largest immigrant groups targeted for restriction at the beginning of the twentieth century to see how immigration policy changed during a period that historians usually consider the height of immigration restriction. By doing this, the traditional periodization of twentieth-century immigration history changes dramatically. Contrary to the traditional narrative of U.S. immigration history, there was not a complete closure in 1924 and a reopening of the gates in 1965. In actuality, U.S. immigration law has always been simultaneously open and closed since its initial federal articulations in the late nineteenth century. Italian and Jewish activists, along with antirestrictionists from other ethnic groups, repeatedly pushed for small changes to the country’s immigration policy that successfully brought in immigrants outside of the draconian immigration system in place. During these restrictive times then, immigration law remained pliable and porous enough for certain classes of immigrants to gain admission into the country based on economic, familial, and geopolitical considerations.¹⁰

Their success in challenging restriction, even if only with ad hoc legislation, also pushes us to reconsider the traditional periodization of immigration restriction in other ways. Rather than focus overwhelmingly on immigration laws and policies as our turning points in the history of the period, war emerges as the major driver of inclusion/exclusion. World War I, World War II, and the Cold War became pivotal turning points in the history of U.S. immigration policy. If restrictionists used the immigrant hysteria that reeled the country during World War I to push for the passage of the 1917, 1921, and 1924 acts, antirestrictionists used the U.S. geopolitical and foreign policy interests during World War II and the Cold War to push for changes to U.S. immigration policy that anticipated many of the dynamics of the post-1965 period. In this context, World War II, not 1965, becomes the critical turning point for U.S. immigration history in the twentieth century.¹¹

Restricting Unwanted Immigrants

Between 1871 and the outbreak of World War I, 12.9 million immigrants arrived in the United States from Asia and Europe in search of economic opportunities, social mobility, or safety.¹² By 1920, the three largest groups of immigrants in the United States were Italians (four million), eastern European Jews (two million, mostly from the Russian Empire), and Poles (one million). These numbers stood in stark contrast to the years preceding the mass migration of the turn of the twentieth century. Until then, only 11,725 Italians and 150,000 Jews, mostly from Germany, resided in the United States.¹³ Many Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded these new immigrants as nonwhite, biologically and culturally inferior, and unassimilable. Their calls for immigration restriction against Asian and European immigrants echoed a global push to restrict, exclude, deport, and segregate immigrants deemed undesirable, especially immigrants of color. Immigration laws emerged as a tool of social engineering and nation building.¹⁴ The restriction of Chinese immigration in 1882 opened the door to targeting other immigrants as well, but nativist lawmakers needed much longer to build a case against southern and eastern Europeans.¹⁵ New social theories, anxieties about modernization, and changes in the allocation of power in Congress helped restrictionists make their argument, but it took the anti-immigrant hysteria of World War I to persuade even Americans who had long supported immigration from Europe that restricting European immigrants had become necessary.

In an age that venerated experts, scholars like University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross, MIT president and former chief of the national census Francis Walker, and Harvard economists Richard Mayo-Smith and William Z. Ripley provided seemingly convincing social-scientific research on the benefits of immigration restriction. In The Old World in the New, Ross contended that the new immigrants perpetuated the corruption of the political machine and their moral and intellectual deficiencies diluted Americans’ superior Anglo-Saxon stock.¹⁶ Similarly, Walker claimed that southern and eastern Europeans were beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.¹⁷ Ripley’s influential The Races of Europe contended that southern and eastern Europeans were the darkest and most primitive of the three European races—Nordic, Teutonic, and Mediterranean—and lacked the intelligence and character to adapt to life in the United States.¹⁸ His colleague Mayo-Smith challenged the traditional assumption that U.S. economic progress depended on robust immigration from Europe and argued that immigration represented a privilege not a right of the individual.¹⁹

Building on these influential thinkers, a plethora of public intellectuals and government officials wrote and spoke about the danger that southern and eastern Europeans posed to American society, culture, and identity. In so doing, they helped normalize discussions about European restriction and popularized many of the eugenicist ideas about southern and eastern Europeans. In his Immigrant Invasion, Frank Julian Warne, who served as secretary to the New York State Immigration Commission and as a special expert on foreign-born population for the U.S. census, insisted that the new immigrants had been reduced to the qualities similar to those of an inferior race that favors despotism and oligarchy rather than democracy.²⁰ In the bestselling The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant, future vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, warned that the country was spiraling toward a racial abyss.²¹ Even future president Woodrow Wilson, in his popular 1902 textbook History of the American People, gave this view academic legitimacy.²² By 1914, many white, native-born Americans agreed with Bishop Charles Henry Brent of the Protestant Episcopal Church that the United States is in far greater danger from the quality of immigration that comes from Southern Europe than from any peril that could come by Japanese ownership of lands in California, or from Asiatic immigration.²³

Industrial strife, labor unrest, and the passing of the frontier adventure further fueled calls for restricting immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The bombing of Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886 during a national strike of the Knights of Labor for the eight-hour workday rekindled a barely dormant anti-immigrant frenzy. When authorities hastily arrested seven anarchists, six of whom were immigrants, many Americans quickly blamed all immigrants from Europe for the country’s rising rates of crime, immorality, corruption, religious extremism, and political radicalism. Americans’ anxieties about foreign radicalism also reawakened anti-Catholic sentiments and anti-Semitism across the country.²⁴

Yet that eugenicist attacks, social tensions, and industrial strife would translate into policy provisions was hardly a foregone conclusion. Americans had vehemently opposed earlier waves of Irish and German immigrants without their nativism leading to the passage of a federal immigration policy.²⁵ In fact, for quite some time, leaders of both parties resisted adopting a restrictionist platform and continued to court the new immigrants’ vote at least through the presidential election of 1912. Moreover, Western politicians still yearned for European settlers, and Southern politicians believed that steady European immigration could guarantee them white electoral supremacy. The longstanding tradition of an open-door policy and easy naturalization policies for European immigrants remained entrenched in the American imagination and represented one of the main obstacles to restrictionists’ ability to nationalize European restriction. Although the immigration acts of 1882, 1885, and 1891 introduced qualitative measures that targeted immigrants with disabilities or contagious diseases, people likely to become public charges, political radicals, and criminals, established political leaders of northern and western European descent remained frustrated that these acts failed to stem the arrival of 8.9 million European immigrants between 1881 and 1900.²⁶

The founding of the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League (IRL) in 1894 marked a turning point in how Americans reimagined European immigrants. A powerful and well-connected coterie of advocates skillfully harnessed the growing anti-immigrant hysteria to a nationwide campaign to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe.²⁷ Adopting the language of Progressivism and eugenics, the IRL presented immigration restriction as a vehicle to bring order to the United States, protect Americans, and weed out inferior immigrants.²⁸ The organization became the champion of economist Edward Bemis’s proposal of a literacy test to screen out undesirable immigrants. As political scientist John Hawks Noble suggested at the time, unlike Chinese exclusion, the test represented a less clumsy and offensive law than the indiscriminate exclusion of certain races as races.²⁹ Despite its obvious connection to the literacy tests used in the South to disenfranchise black voters, the decision to hide the race-based rationale underlying the test for immigrants was central to its appeal—a fact that did not go unnoticed by restrictionists in subsequent decades.³⁰

The organization’s crusade succeeded in part because it intersected with the Progressive movement’s larger push to wrest legislative power away from party leadership and transfer it to congressional committees that placed extraordinary weight on outside expertise in policymaking.³¹ Once the committee system took hold, IRL members emerged as experts on immigration policy, gained broader access to Congress, and influenced policy more directly. By the early 1890s, the IRL could count on the support of Senators Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) and William Chandler (R-NH) and Representative Samuel McCall (R-MA), all of whom sat on the newly created and powerful immigration committees and stood ready to collaborate with colleagues from Southern and Western states to bypass party leadership and bring immigration restriction to fruition. In 1896, Senator Lodge, as the new chair of the Senate Immigration Committee, sponsored the first bill proposing a literacy test. Lodge argued that uneducated immigrants from eastern and southern Europe threatened the American standard of living, destabilized American institutions, and posed a threat to the fabric of our race.³² Armed with scientific data and research provided by the IRL, Senator Lodge persuaded his colleagues to pass his bill.

It was only when the Senate and House immigration committees began the negotiations for a compromise bill that a coalition of advocates who opposed immigration restriction emerged. Although they lacked a unified agenda, their strength rested in their numbers. Alarmed that the literacy test cast aspersions on their own national groups, German and Irish Americans flooded Congress with letters of protest and criticized the bill widely in their newspapers. Advancing an argument that persists to this day, they contended that existing measures already regulated the immigration flow adequately. Politicians of Irish and German descent, who often hailed from congressional districts heavily populated with newcomers, quickly joined them. Although, in most cases, they only referred to European immigrants, liberal progressives argued that immigration restriction went against the American tradition of welcoming immigrants and questioned the test’s ability to determine the quality of incoming immigrants. A handful of academics, reporters, and settlement workers also joined the nascent antirestrictionist movement, but the most influential critics remained captains of industries in need of cheap labor and heads of steamship companies eager to continue their business transporting migrants. They warned that restriction would hinder economic growth. Sending countries in Europe cried foul as they regarded restriction of their nationals as an infringement of their national sovereignty, while U.S. Commissioner of Immigration Joseph Senner disputed the notion that southern and eastern Europeans were inferior to previous immigrants.³³ Together, these critics articulated many of the arguments against restriction that would form the backbone of the antirestrictionist camp until World War I, when key critics of European restriction in the business world, in politics, and in social welfare withdrew their support amid concerns of national security and heightened racial anxiety.

Soon, Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates added their voices to the opposition, but they remained on the margins of the debate until the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1897, the Socialist United Hebrew Trades organized a mass meeting at Cooper Union in New York City to urge President Cleveland to veto the Lodge bill. The protesters, including a large number of Italians, denounced the bill "as vicious, demagogic, and fatuous, and while it appeared to be in the interest of the working man,

[it]

was really in the interest of capital."³⁴ Penalized by their recent arrival and stunned by the acrimony of the attacks against them, eastern and southern European immigrants were marginalized as politicians of German and Irish descent claimed the antirestrictionist mantle in the 1890s. On less secure footing than other immigrants from Europe, Italian and Jewish immigrants focused on the practical consequences of restrictive immigration provisions instead. They prioritized clarifying what constituted excludable grounds upon arrival and pushed back against immigration authorities’ eugenicist assumptions about members of their groups. Jewish advocates objected to their categorization as Hebrew rather than by country of origin, while Italian advocacy groups objected to the distinction between northern and southern Italians as two distinct racial groups.³⁵

Despite the lack of cohesion among critics of restriction, they nonetheless succeeded in defeating the Lodge bill. Outgoing president Grover Cleveland vetoed the bill because of the Democratic Party’s recent appeals to recent European immigrants to court their vote, but the bill’s sponsors and their supporters remained optimistic that they could overturn Cleveland’s lame-duck veto.³⁶ Indeed, the House overturned it with a vote of 195 to 37, but Republican Senate leaders, wary of the influence of ethnic voters, balked and sent the bill back to the Immigration Committee. Among those who voted for passing the literacy test bill over the president’s veto, twenty-five legislators in the House and sixteen in the Senate hailed from southern and border states.³⁷ While Cleveland’s decision signaled that the executive branch continued to reject European restriction, politicians from the northeast took note of Southern and Western politicians’ vote to overturn the veto and regarded it as a positive sign for their efforts to build a broader coalition to push restriction of European immigration through Congress.

The IRL lost no time and set out to forge key alliances with organized labor, Southern conservatives, Western restrictionists, and social control Progressives around the passage of its literacy test proposal. Although the organization failed to recruit the Knights of Labor, it secured the endorsement of the American Federation of Labor, which embraced immigration restriction for decades even though, as a Yiddish newspaper noted, most of the members … are foreign-born, while its very president is the son of immigrants.³⁸ In the South, the IRL emphasized southern and eastern Europeans’ racial inferiority and the urban problems they would bring to the rural South to persuade Southern Democrats to reverse their earlier support of European immigration as a means of building a New South. By 1908, the strategy had worked. A Southern restrictionist explained to the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs that any effort on the part of Your Government or any Italian society in New York to send Italians to this state or any other Southern state will result in friction, possible and probable lynchings, as Italians are regarded and treated as negroes.³⁹ Using similar arguments, the IRL also successfully courted supporters of Asian exclusion on the West Coast.⁴⁰ Finally, the IRL recruited Progressive advocates of prohibition, social reform, and good government initiatives who equated social justice with social control through literacy requirements, voter registration, racial segregation, and sterilization of people with disabilities.⁴¹

Though the near passage of the Lodge bill had caught them by surprise, Jewish and Italian immigration reform advocates recognized the need to mobilize to confront the growing coalition pushing for a literacy test. Taking a page from their rivals, they too created their own lobbying organizations. Yet crafting a coherent agenda, settling on a unifying strategy within their communities, and finding common ground with potential allies proved much more difficult. As this book demonstrates, these challenges would haunt them through 1965.

Organization of the Book

This book is divided into two parts. The first three chapters focus on the rise and consolidation of a restrictive immigration system that left little room for critics of restriction to influence legislation. The first chapter examines Italian and Jewish immigrants’ efforts to oppose proposed restrictions on immigration from southern and eastern Europe from the passage of the 1882 Immigration Act, which imposed a head tax and excluded lunatics, idiots, convicts, and persons likely to become a public charge, to the adoption of a literacy test in 1917. During this critical period in the rise of the antirestrictionist movement, both groups created national organizations to negotiate with legislators in hopes of achieving more political influence. Moving to the fight against the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, chapter 2 offers an account of how Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates, sensing the inevitability of restriction, pragmatically decided to work to mitigate some of the more punitive features of the pending bill, a strategic choice that nonetheless failed. Chapter 3 then examines how Italians and Eastern Europeans adjusted to the new immigration regime that followed the passage of the 1924 act and how they worked to build the political clout to push for reform