My task for this retrospective was to discuss John Higham's treatment of region in Strangers in the Land, with particular reference to the American West. My analysis looks especially at race and imperialism. These choices reflect in part the interests and approaches of John Higham, but also the general direction of the field of western history in the twenty-first century.

Higham began his book in 1948 and wanted to see “the interplay” between nationalism and what he called “ethnic prejudice.” He focused on nativism as the nexus between these two ideas, but he soon realized that there were “several nativisms.”Footnote ¹ Higham's organizational structure, with its sequential patterns of distinct nativisms, drew him much praise for its elegance, but also criticism for its unrealistic precision and seeming lack of nuance.Footnote ²

I do believe, however, that Strangers did incorporate nuance and contingency. Higham saw specific variants of nativism in the South and West. These variations were not his primary interest, but neither did he ignore them, as some critics have charged.Footnote ³ Although I am a scholar of race, region, and gender—and thus focus on things that Higham in various ways neglected—in this essay I am largely his defender—at least, that is, in what he had to say in Strangers in the Land. At the end of Higham's lifetime, he witnessed—and despaired about—multicultural approaches to American history, which he saw as an attack on his liberal nationalism. I make no defense of his later sallies against multiculturalism.Footnote ⁴

With regard to the American West, I notice three important historiographical trends that Higham presaged in Strangers in the Land. The first is the importance of Asian immigration in the history of immigration law. The second is the history of race as an invented and protean category. The third is the role of imperialism in shaping race and immigration policy and attitudes.

What Higham Did Not Do with Respect to Region

Concerning what Strangers did not do: I am far more interested in what Higham's book has continued to offer, but the omissions are important; and some Higham and others recognized right away.

First, Higham failed to look at the full role that the American West played as a proving ground for racist federal policy. Even in 1956, Henry May noted in his review in Pacific Historical Review that the book's readers “may [have] wish[ed] that Higham had told us still more than he does about western nativism.” May also pointed out that “the long race war with the Indians” should have been “consistently born in mind.”Footnote ⁵

Second, Higham (mostly) failed to consider Mexican Americans. In the opening pages of the book, Higham consciously set out that he was writing a history of reaction to European newcomers. The Mexican immigrants of the early twentieth century were not in fact “strangers in the land.” Most came from border states of Mexico, and the vast majority—about 90 percent—immigrated to the Southwest, a region that had once been part of their own country.Footnote ⁶ In an essay first published in 1986, then revised in 2004, immigration history textbook authors Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimers forcefully criticized Higham's neglect of Mexicans and Asians. “While the research was broad,” they wrote, “it was not always deep; Higham paid almost no attention to Mexicans and Asians in the West.”Footnote ⁷ The former claim—that he paid little attention to Mexicans—is true; the latter, about Asians, is not. Higham did mention the emergence of Mexicans in the nativist quota debates of the 1920s, after their numbers tripled from 1910 to 1920.Footnote ⁸

What Strangers Did Do

Higham's book had other omissions, as all books do. The rest of this essay comments on what Higham did do, however, because I believe the breadth of his accomplishments was quite stunning.

Specifically, I believe that Higham did acknowledge regional differences in Strangers in the Land and that Strangers did so—in the case of the West, at least—with particular reference to Japanese immigration. First, Higham acknowledged anti-Asian activism as an essential ingredient of American nativism. He forecast the future re-centering of immigration history to the American West and Pacific Rim when he noted that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 “laid the foundations for federal immigration restriction.”Footnote ⁹ Such insights have animated the work of Erika Lee, Mae Ngai, and others, who have drawn upon the West's experience in order to reframe and redirect immigration history. Higham was prescient, but he later admitted that he had not emphasized this theme or explored it deeply.Footnote ¹⁰ Although his book says that it begins in the 1860s, the meat of Higham's narrative begins in the 1890s. Higham briefly discusses the Workingmen's Party and anti-Chinese campaigns in California, but in the end his interests lay in the period after Chinese exclusion.

He did a much more thorough job covering anti-Japanese sentiment.Footnote ¹¹ The Japanese appear in multiple places in the book. They are central to a discussion of the passage of the Immigration Act of 1907, which lingered in conference committee for eight months until an international crisis brewed with Japan over the segregation of Japanese schoolchildren in San Francisco schools. Theodore Roosevelt and others rammed the law through with a provision allowing the president to ban entrants with Japanese passports.Footnote ¹² Here, Higham's emphasis on nationalism fed nicely into a regional concern, because the Pacific Coast's anti-Japanese agitation became a national and international issue.

Higham returns to the issue of Japanese immigration in later passages as well, including in his discussion of the post-World War I period.Footnote ¹³ In one of many passages that, it seems to me, presaged later work, Higham notes that the “Japanese question precipitated the racial anxieties which infected attitudes toward Mediterranean and eastern European peoples.”Footnote ¹⁴ Did this way of formulating the matter betray his failure to acknowledge more lasting racial inequalities for some groups? Yes, but, in his defense, it demonstrated Higham's understanding of race discrimination's contingency and contagion.

Finally, Higham discussed in some detail the Asiatic exclusions of the 1921 laws and their nuances—including the question of whether the Japanese should be a special case.Footnote ¹⁵ He also pointed out that by this time the House Immigration Committee was dominated by southern and western members who virtually guaranteed that restrictions would be serious and far-reaching.

This brings me to my second point. As his analysis of the House Immigration Committee indicates, Higham's coverage of anti-Japanese sentiment reflects the fact that he was sensitive to regional differences. Higham found some overarching regional differences, with changes over time. In the 1880s, for example, what he identified as the “new nativism” was still rare “west of the Mississippi and south of the Mason and Dixon line.” He noted that southerners still “clamored for” immigrants with little opposition. His analysis of anti-Catholicism also took into account regional nuance—and he challenged the stereotype of the nineteenth-century South as xenophobic: “The Catholic issue failed to arouse interest there.”Footnote ¹⁶ He argued that not until the 1890s did the West became “almost unanimously” in favor of restriction. By that time, as he points out, the Midwest has become a hotbed of anti-Catholicism, best evidenced in its reputation as the home of the American Protective Association.Footnote ¹⁷

For a long time, as Higham notes, the South and West wanted to attract—not restrict—immigration. Higham discusses the immigration bureaus run by southern states before 1907.Footnote ¹⁸ He he goes on to say, though, that true “white supremacy,” which was “brewed in the South and Far West,” melded with the East Coast's “Anglo-Saxon nationalism” to create “modern racism” around 1910.Footnote ¹⁹

Higham's demonstration of regional difference is particularly strong in his coverage of political history, as indicated by his analysis of the House Immigration Committee. Higham used congressional debates and votes to show a decisive shift among southern and western members of Congress from hostility to restriction measures to almost unanimous support by 1907. Here again, he anticipated the history of race and whiteness by pointing out that some southerners thought newcomers' “whiteness was easily open to question.” He even addressed the newcomers' “in-betweenness,” a term later associated with Robert Orsi, James Barrett, and David Roediger and one that has become inextricably tied—for better or worse—with the historiography of whiteness but for which Higham should also receive credit.Footnote ²⁰

As this last point makes clear, Higham pointed toward the history of race in a variety of ways. Matthew Jacobson has noted this as well about Strangers in the Land.Footnote ²¹ Higham approached the history of race in a way that highlights regional difference and especially the centrality of the American West to this story.Footnote ²² Higham states early in his book, “It is significant that the very concept of race had not yet attained its later fixity and definiteness” in the mid-nineteenth century. “Racial nationalism,” he went on, “having arisen out of political and literary speculation, not out of scientific inquiry, displayed a characteristic vagueness.”Footnote ²³

Much of the enduring interest of Strangers in the Land, therefore, comes from Higham's perception of the flexible character of racial thought and his acknowledgement of regional variation. His comparison between the reception of the Chinese and the Japanese and that of eastern and southern Europeans failed to account for how race discrimination clung more voraciously to non-Europeans. Still, his comparative approach also showed the centrality of the American West to the history of immigration and nativism more generally.

Finally, Higham saw the linkages between racism and nativism on one side and imperialism on the other, thereby anticipating transnational history as well as post-colonial approaches. Higham discussed the relationship between immigration and “a grandiose vision of global conquest” in the 1890s.Footnote ²⁴ This relationship was central to Higham's claim that his book is as much about nationalism as it is about nativism. He argued that “the jingo spirit jeopardized immigrant minorities very directly by creating a new sense of insecurity.”Footnote ²⁵ Higham's later, unpublished work on Hawaii also reveals his interest in these themes.Footnote ²⁶ Here, again, he saw regional distinction. By the turn of the century, “the Anglo-Saxon idea of American nationality was so widely popularized that the racial egoisms of South and West could easily permeate a nationalism ideologically adopted to receive them” (emphasis added).Footnote ²⁷

This leads to my one major critique of Higham's discussion of region. Perhaps it will not be a surprising one coming from a westerner about an easterner. Higham's analysis too often paints southerners and westerners as rubes and northeasterners as intellectual snobs. Granted, none of them comes out looking good, but I think it is a mistake to substitute region for class. For example, Higham contrasts “the sophisticated theories of the patrician East” with the “popular nativisms of the West and South.” He refers to the “primitive race-feelings emanating from the South and Far West” and uses Tom Watson of Georgia and Cole Blease of South Carolina to stand for the early-twentieth-century South.Footnote ²⁸ No hint of what African Americans thought about immigrants, and nothing, on the other hand, about elite westerners or southerners either.

One problem with his elite East and rube West dichotomy is that it assumes that the elitists had no “primitive race-feelings.” However, to call on Higham's contemporary Richard Hofstadter for a moment, what could be more primitive than status anxiety—the idea that someone might replace you and render you obsolete? For all the erudite gloss of scientific racism emanating from Harvard, it's not clear it was any less “primitive” than the “crude hatreds” of westerners.Footnote ²⁹

But—silly assumptions about westerners and easterners still abound, and they are hardly a reason to discount Higham's still-remarkable book.