Strangers in the Land

by John Higham

Book Overview

Higham's work stands as the seminal work in the history of American nativism. The work is a careful, well-documented study of nationalism and ethnic prejudice, and chronicles the power and violence of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689700954
• ISBN13: 9780689700958
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Marcel Dekker
• Length: 431 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Best Treatment of a Complex Subject

This is a real first class history book- and I don't hand out that accolade lightly. Even though it was written half a century ago, it's hard to argue with any point in the entire text. The prose is measured and careful, but ultimately it is easy to see the bias against the Nativist movement on the part of the author. Is that a problem? Not for me, though I imagine the crazies in the contemporary anti-immigration group would froth at their collective mouths if they weren't a bunch of illiterate bumpkins. I jest, I jest- it is important to distinguish the advent of restrictive immigration policies- which is the END of this book- in comparing then vs. now. The bottom line is that when the legislation passed restricting immigration, the nativists effectively "won" and pro-immigration forces "lost" and so really this kind of "anti immigration" sentiment is the norm, rather then exception. You need to read this if you care about the debate over immigration policy in the United States.

There is no Gene for Bigotry...

... none that has been identified at least, but "nativism" does have some of the marks of what Richard Dawkins has called a "meme" - derived from the word 'memory' - a kind of evolutionary package of cultural 'knowledge'. Like genetic packages, cultural patterns are inherited and thus inherent, and like genes, 'memes' can be efficiently re-adapted to other functions than their originals. "Strangers in the Land" is a classic study of American Nativism from the Civil War to the 1920s. By no coincidence, the same era was the heyday of Jim Crow, of lynchings and ethnic cleansing directed against African-Americans. The hatred directed against Catholics by nativist movements merged eventually into the hatred of "blacks" in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the acme of Nativism. But this same era was also the heyday of American anti-Semitism, culminating in the exclusion acts passed by Congress against Eastern European Jews as well as Sicilian Catholics. That anti-Semitism - like it or not, Americans - played an enabling part of Hitler's unchallenged ascent to power and in the Holocaust, when America kept the door closed to Jewish escapees. And let's not forget that nativism and anti-immigrant bigotry lay at the core of the exclusion acts against Chinese and Japanese, who might have sought freedom and opportunity in "Beikoku" - "Beautiful Country", the name used in Japan then for America. In other words, as author Higham demonstrates, bigotry/nativism is a "pattern" - his use of that word seems to me to approach the idea of a meme - that can serve the cause of hatred and exclusion of any ethnic/racial/religious minority. And it's almost always evident that bigotry expressed toward one minority merely temporarily masks bigotry felt towards all "others." Today's nativist fear and loathing of "wetbacks" and "islamicists" contains all the memetic material needed for tomorrow's recrudescent anti-Semitism and societal persecution of.... ___________. [Put your own ethnicity in the blank.]

Classic History

Higham's work stands as the seminal work in the history of American nativism. The work is a careful, well-documented study of nationalism and ethnic prejudice, and chronicles the power and violence of these two ideas in American society from 1860 to 1925. He significantly moves beyond previous treatments of nativism, both in chronology and in interpretive sophistication. Higham defines nativism as a defensive type of nationalism or an intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of the group's foreign connections. By defining nativism as a set of attitudes or a state of mind, he sets the course for his book as tracing "trace an emotionally charged impulse" rather than "an actual social process or condition." As he argues that the ideological content of nativism remained consistent, he uses emotional intensity as a measure to trace in detail public opinion from the relative calm following the Civil War to the Johnson-Reed act of 1924 that severely limited European immigration. Strangers in the Land is, then, a history of public opinion, whose purpose is to show how nativism evolved in society and in action. Higham seeks to explain what could inflame xenophobia and who resisted it. He saw his work as part of a renewed interest in the study of nationalism following the national upheavals in the wake of the McCarthy hearings. Surely Higham's mentor at the University of Wisconsin, intellectual historian Merle Curti, influenced Higham's approach in seeking to examine the power of nationalism as an idea. Also influential was the intellectual climate of the 1950s with its of distrust of ideology and distain of prejudice. Higham admits being repelled by the nationalist delusions of the Cold War, again helping to explain why his study concentrates on seeking some explanation for the irrational and violent outbreaks. The book thus focuses on points of conflict, "antagonisms that belong within ideologies of passionate national consciousness." For example, Higham's explains the 100 percent American movement in terms of progressive ideals and the desire of Americans to shape immigrants into a particular ideal of "Americanness" through education and assimilation. This intellectual construct eventually gave way to the racial thinking to which Higham assigns much influence in the efforts to restrict immigration. Ideology is also central to his chapter on the history of the idea of racism in which he argues that Anglo-Saxon nationalism, literary naturalism and a nascent understanding of genetics combined to bring forth arguments for immigration restriction to preserve the racial purity of the American people. Thus, key for Higham's argument is the power of ideas in shaping individual behavior and thereby shaping history. This text is an absolute must-read for anyone seeking to understand American nativism and the darker side of nationalism