John Higham was an historian—literally, almost to the day he died—for he was still working, thinking, and writing history the night before he passed away in 2003. He died “in harness” at the age of eighty-two.Footnote ¹

His endurance as an historian and, even more, his constant, restless engagement with historical scholarship made him something of an anomaly in the historical profession. Though Strangers in the Land, first published in 1955, was his most well-known and probably best book, he remained an important historian for nearly a half-century, through several generations of historians and many upheavals of opinion, theory, practice, and focus in the historical profession. Certainly the study of the history of American immigration and nativism changed dramatically in his lifetime. As it did, several of our authors note, Higham remained vitally important to that study but stood less and less at its center.

He was an anomaly in other respects as well. He was a member of one of the rarest or, at least, best hidden of peoples in the twentieth century, white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) natives of New York City. He grew up then as an American insider, but an outsider in New York, where almost everyone else was a member of a racial, ethnic, or religious minority. Over time he would live elsewhere, but as Alan Kraut points out, that youth in the unmatched racial and ethnic diversity of the nation's metropolis seemed to have bred in him an enduring sensitivity to issues of both group difference and societal cohesion.

Maybe because of this anomalous positioning, from beginning life as a WASP in New York's rich ethnic and racial cacophony or ending it as an uneasy elder eminence amid his profession's intellectual upheaval, or more likely because he was an enormously bright, talented, and engaged scholar, he could not help a relentless intellectual sifting of his own ideas. John Higham worried about many things, but he fretted in particular about his own work. As Kraut argues, “Essential to John Higham's greatness as a scholar was his willingness over more than forty years to review his own work, to question his own assumptions and to revisit his arguments in essays and lectures.” Such self-criticism was so scrupulous that, as Kraut notes, “Of all the critics of Strangers in the Land, none was more vociferous over the years as the author himself.” In 1957, a mere two years after publishing Strangers and earning widespread acclaim for it, he appeared before the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA), brooding aloud about whether the central subject of the book, nativism, “now looks less adequate as a vehicle for studying the struggles of nationalists in America than my earlier report of it and other reports might indicate” (280). That would not be the last time he reexamined Strangers; he returned to it several times, most notably in books, articles, or comments in 1975, 1988, 1999, 2000, and 2002.

In some cases, as in the appearance before the ACHA, Higham took the lead in probing his own work. In others, he acknowledged concerns raised by others, such as the book's neglect of Mexican and Chinese immigrants and the movements mounted against both groups. Occasionally our authors suggest he was too hard on himself. Katherine Benton-Cohen agrees that Higham slighted the anti-Mexican and Chinese exclusion movements, for example, but contends that he did not ignore anti-Asian racism in Strangers. He took anti-Japanese movements on the West Coast very seriously, and they are critical to the book's narrative.

Nevertheless, the authors find several weaknesses in the book that Higham either did not recognize or passed over quickly. One of the most striking, as Deirdre Moloney convincingly argues, is the absence of a gendered perspective. Women rarely appear as actors in Strangers; Higham's narrative only briefly mentions women nativists and pays even less attention to women immigrants. As Moloney details, the omission of gender had widespread ramifications beyond the failure to account for women participating in controversies over immigration. As Moloney points out, recent scholarship has revealed how “definitions of nation and citizenship” were profoundly “gendered” at the turn of the century and fundamentally structured the discourses of immigration debates, restrictive legislation, and bureaucratic interpretations of those laws (271). Congress wrote immigration legislation in this era, and federal bureaucrats interpreted it in ways that had different effects on immigrant women than on foreign-born men. Not just the construction of women and femininity, but the construction of men and masculinity also figured prominently in the racist ideologies of the day. Higham himself wrote a seminal article on emerging masculine insecurities in the turn-of-the-century era, but he pays little attention to such insecurities in the emergence of anti-immigrant racism in Strangers.Footnote ²

Maddalena Marinari raises several important questions about the book's scope, though more to point to future research possibilities than to criticize Higham. Higham described European contributions to American racism at the turn of the century in Strangers, but his is really an American story. Marinari argues smartly that the future study of anti-immigrant movements would readily profit from a transnational perspective. Efforts to redefine citizenship and movements to exclude immigrants were common throughout Europe and in its settler societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marinari also suggests extending the discussion of nativism in time as well as space to investigate how “nativism changed after southern and eastern Europeans entered the American mainstream and after many of them wholeheartedly embraced the ‘up from the boot straps’ myth” (261).

Finally, though Higham's book focuses on nativists, he does discuss opponents of nativism as well. However, Marinari, Moloney, and Kraut all find too little attention in this or in his later work to the actions immigrants or ethnics made on their own behalf to counter nativist attacks. Kraut notes that even after acknowledging weaknesses in Strangers’ treatment of Jews and anti-Semitism, Higham still overlooked the effects of “Jewish efforts in the realms of education and community relations” on the eventual “alleviation of overt anti-Semitism” (279).

I would raise a question about the kind of cultural history that Higham wrote in Strangers. To an historian in the early 2000s, Higham's turn-of-the-twentieth-century American culture often seems much too genteel and narrow. He drew heavily, for example, on East Coast, middle-class journals that he called “general magazines,” such as the Atlantic Monthly or the North American Review, for evidence of nativism, but he made little or no attempt to explore “popular culture” sources: popular theater, vaudeville songs, cartoons, dime novels, sports reporting, or the emerging cinema.Footnote ³ Still, such popular culture powerfully expressed and shaped attitudes about ethnic and racial groups, especially among the working-class whites underrepresented in Strangers. Lyrics from Pat Rooney‘s popular vaudeville ditty “Is that Mr. Reilly?” reveal just how raw and vivid nativist expression in popular culture sources can be: “I'll have nothing but Irishmen on the police/Patrick's Day will be the Fourth of July/I'll get me a thousand infernal machines/To teach the Chinese how to die/I'll defend the working men's cause—manufacture the laws/New York would be swimming in wine/A hundred a day will be very small pay/When the White House and the Capitol are mine.”Footnote ⁴

Despite Higham's own incessant revisits to Strangers and the sharp questions raised in this forum concerning the book, the authors agree that Strangers in the Land remained a remarkably valuable history for over a half-century after its publication. It is, first of all, as Deirdre Moloney suggests, wonderfully written, in its “bold” phrasing and “deft irony.” For example, Higham could not resist the apocryphal story about a Bohemian immigrant woman who confessed to a canvassing patriot during World War I that her sons were not available to be Americanized because they were fighting in France (274). The language is also rich and active. Grand Army of the Republic spokesmen “splutter” in their attacks on immigrant radicals in the 1880s.Footnote ⁵ More important, perhaps, this is a book with actors, painted by Higham in swift, but telling, concrete strokes. They are humans, not disembodied: Homer Lea, “the leading theoretician of the Yellow Peril . . . a frail, wizened Californian who worshipped power and spent most of his life playing at war”; or Henry Cabot Lodge, “from his precise Van Dyke beard to his clipped Boston accent . . . the model of the patrician,” as well as the immigrants’ “most dangerous adversary.”Footnote ⁶

Still, Higham's Strangers has more than characters; it has movement. It is a story, a history, and like all good history, it is contingent. There are continuous themes in Strangers, but nativism, nonetheless, changes constantly in the book. Movements thrive and then shrivel; new targets emerge; the focus on older targets draws new supporters; new language is introduced or older language is revived and tweaked for new ages. Occasionally, Higham's explanations of these changes drift into the airy and vague: The “prevailing mood” shifts; “democratic morale” fails; “a democratic balance wheel operating deep inside the national culture” swings too and fro.Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, in important ways, ways that, characteristically, even Higham himself did not fully appreciate about his own work, the shifting tides of nativism in Strangers reflect outcomes of real ongoing conflicts.

Kraut and Marinari both discuss at length Higham's frequent and often insightful calls for historians to focus on the structure of America ethnic and racial relations to better understand the social sources of ethnic and racial attitudes. Higham urged historians in those instances to “study interactions [among groups], not just attitudes” and examine the resulting “cultural subsoil” of “habits, preferences, appearances and capacities that no historian had studied.”Footnote ⁸ Higham confessed that he had not explored such “structures” and “subsoils” in Strangers, but the book, nonetheless, reveals that he was aware of them. They appear, as Benton-Cohen suggests, in his understanding of critical regional shifts in nativist attitudes and movements. As she states, his treatment of region was flawed: he neither foregrounded region as much as he should have nor gave every region the attention it was due. Still, as Benton-Cohen contends, he did recognize that region was critical to understanding how nativism changed and why it waxed and waned over the turn-of-the-century era.

Benton-Cohen follows other commentators in criticizing Higham for his preoccupation with East Coast participants in the immigration restriction struggles.Footnote ⁹ New England Yankee patricians such as Lodge, products of their own peculiar cultural subsoil, are particularly important to Higham's narrative. They deserve attention; they launched the modern restriction movement and were its most consistent political and intellectual advocates for nearly forty years until it became law. Still, Higham, the intellectual historian, may have been more attentive to Lodge and his Ivy League friends because he took them more seriously than other nativists. However venomous their rhetoric, they aspired to be intellectuals and seemed to talk and act like ones. Conversely, as Benton-Cohen suggests, Higham often dismissed southerners and westerners in Strangers as “rubes” and “primitive” and passed over them quickly. That hardly means he was sympathetic to the Yankee patricians. Indeed, Higham's focus on Lodge and his anti-immigrant gang of Brahmins as embodiments of prejudice may have come naturally to a liberal scholar in the 1950s. Memories of old money, blue blood, intransigent resistance to the common men and women of the New Deal were still fresh then. Just a year after Strangers appeared, Barbara Solomon published Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition, which critically examined those same New England Yankee opponents of immigration.Footnote ¹⁰ Subsequent historians hardly ignored the Yankee elite's role in fostering anti-immigrant racism, but in the wake of “whiteness” investigations of the 1980–90s into the effects of racism on working-class solidarity, Terence Powderly, Samuel Gompers, and the American Federation of Labor attracted as much attention as Harvard Brahmins for their backing of immigration restriction.Footnote ¹¹ Higham recognized both labor's role and this “strange alliance of patricians with union labor,” but he focused more on the Harvard Club than organized plumbers or carpenters in the campaign to restrict immigration.Footnote ¹²

Nevertheless, neither the patricians of New England nor the union men of the Northeast and Midwest proved decisive in moving the country toward a broad restrictive law. The regional structures of their respective political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, were too entangled in conflicting interests and loyalties to be decisive instruments of immigration reform. If some New England or New York bluebloods and intellectuals saw hordes of the racially inferior at the docks, for example, powerful northeastern and midwestern businessmen saw cheap workers at the factory gates and thus complicated the role of their regions’ Republican Party in restricting immigrants. Higham was well aware of business's role, and subsequent historians have documented it extensively. Higham and historians since Strangers have also discussed organized labor's influence on the Democrats in this era in some detail. Still, he paid little attention, and more recent historians even less, to the other loyalties and interests that shaped the response of the Democrats in the Northeast or the industrial Midwest to the immigration restriction issue.Footnote ¹³

Irish, German, and other old-stock workers might have seen degraded economic competitors in the new immigrants, but despite union pressure, Democratic congressmen in the Northeast and urban Midwest often voted against acts to restrict European immigration.Footnote ¹⁴ Religion was one reason they resisted exclusion of European immigrants. Irish and other Catholic bishops were rarely sympathetic to the new immigrants among their flocks. They often despaired at what they perceived to be Italian immigrants’ religious indifference and Polish newcomers’ unruliness. Nevertheless, the Vatican superiors of the American bishops had a strong interest in the Catholics, particularly their fellow Italians, among the immigrants. Church officials insisted that literacy tests or other proposed bars to American immigration would unfairly penalize them.Footnote ¹⁵ Many old-stock Catholic leaders also saw Catholic numbers in the waves of immigrants—even if they were only Italian or Polish Catholic numbers—and recognized that open European immigration was producing powerful Catholic majorities in cities from Boston to Chicago.

Political calculation was another consideration for northern and eastern Democrats. Irish political bosses, scholars of urban politics have revealed, were hardly the beneficent friends of the new immigrants that the bosses themselves had pretended to be and many scholars later believed. Indeed, many of the machine men eyed the newcomers warily as troublesome, potential rivals. Still, the bosses seemed to recognize that promises to keep the gates open were cheap ways to bind the “newer races” to the Democrats, while sparing the machine men from having to dip into their troves of precious patronage jobs to try to win over the newcomers. Bosses and other Democratic politicians also realized that they risked losing the votes of the newer immigrants if they supported restriction.Footnote ¹⁶ Democratic senator James A. O'Gorman of New York made this clear in an attack on the literacy test on the Senate floor in 1914. “There is no demand in the Democratic party in the North for this restrictive policy,” Gorman claimed. If Democrats were to back it, he told his colleagues, they “will be unable to carry a single state north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi” in the next election and would estrange “thousands and hundreds of thousands who . . . will say that while the Republican Party was once the exclusive party, the Democratic party has taken its place.”Footnote ¹⁷

O'Gorman aimed his plea at fellow Democrats from the South—“my Southern friends”—and with good reason. As Higham depicts, by the first decade of the twentieth century, southerners had become stalwart advocates of immigration restriction. Westerners had as well. It had not always been thus, as Higham pointed out. Southerners had labored after Reconstruction to attract immigrants to displace newly freed black labor and help their region compete against the North for industrial development. Lightly populated western states too had long sought settlers from overseas. However, as Benton-Cohen notes, Higham identified a decisive shift against immigrants in these areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that suddenly made the restriction movement enormously powerful.

What may be as important as Higham's identification of this trend is how he did it. Though his book is a self-conscious intellectual and cultural history of nativism, Higham is attentive to politics, not just to the content of legislation offered or passed but to debates and votes in Congress. Benton-Cohen points out that by tracking those votes and debates, he measured the ebb and flow of nativist movements and, as importantly, identified their shifting regional sources. This attention to legislative politics and these important regional changes make clear, as Benton-Cohen also contends, the contingency in the evolution of nativist racism at the turn of the century. It saves Higham's book as well from the potential abstraction of an excessively intellectual and cultural history. Ideas and attitudes here are tied to power relations, even to the nitty gritty of partisan political conflict.

If Higham recognized the shifting attitudes of the West and South against immigration, he did not investigate thoroughly enough why the two regions became anti-immigrant bastions. Benton-Cohen and Moloney both note that Higham understood, as later historians like Matthew Jacobson would, that rising American imperialism had a powerful impact on the country's attitudes about race and immigration at this time and, in particular, on such attitudes in the decisive regions of the South and West. Higham did not seem to move much beyond that insight to a fuller exploration of the “cultural subsoils” of these regions to understand why the West and South turned to restriction when they did.

To his credit, Higham seemed to realize that failure upon completion of Strangers and almost immediately began to question his own work, most notably in that remarkable speech to the Catholic historians just two years later. As cited by Kraut, Higham was “nerved . . . by the reflection that historical inquiry does not advance so much by reversal and disavowal as it does by a widening of focus” (280). If John Higham had not fretted so much about Strangers, historians would not have the insights from speeches like that one. Still, he need not have worried so much; Strangers in the Land was a stunning and durable achievement that outlasted him and will probably outlast many more generations of historians as well.