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Immigration Primary Document Analysis With a partner, you will read & discuss a set of two primary
source documents which you will analyze—looking for the
reactions of native-born Americans to the new immigrants.
1. What were the reaction(s) of native-born Americans to the
new immigrants? Cite evidence from the documents.
2. What stereotypes were evident and how were they used to
demean your immigrant group or immigrants in general?
a. Anti-Irish (PC- Nast, St Patricks Day & PSD- Great Fear)
b. Voting (PC- Nast, Ignorant Vote & PC- What Weight
Can My Vote)
c. Anti-Immigration (PC- Immigrant Cartoon & PC-
Cheap Bunch of Soreheads)
d. Anti-Chinese (PC- Every Dog & PSD- Workingmen of
San Francisco)
e. Nativism & role of Education (PSD- Know Nothing
Platform & PSD- Hull House Days)
3. Exit Slip: What do the documents as a whole tell you about
the idea of Americanization and ethnic identity during this
period?
Immigration Primary Documents
Document Set A: Anti-Irish Immigrants
A1- Political Cartoon by Thomas Nast, “The Day We Celebrate: St.
Patrick’s Day, 1867,” Harper’s Weekly, April 6, 1867.
A2- Political Cartoon- “The Great Fear of the Period”
Document Set B: Voting Issues
B1- Political Cartoon by Thomas Nast, “Ignorant Vote,” Harper’s Weekly,
December 9, 1876, cover.
By 1876 Reconstruction-era Republican idealism was largely exhausted.
Republican state governments in the South, supported primarily by
African American votes, were charged with massive corruption, similar to
that charged against the Irish Catholic-backed Tammany Hall machine.
The charges were exaggerated, but Republican reformers, among them
Harper’s Weekly, blasted traditional Republican leaders for sustaining
corrupt governments and engaging in dishonest practices themselves. To
offset waning support for Reconstruction, Republicans resorted to anti-
Catholic, anti-Irish posturing, prejudices that were widely shared at the
time. This cartoon was published in the wake of the disputed election of
1876, in which both sides charged fraud. Nast compares the African
American Republican vote of the South to the Irish Catholic Democratic
vote of the North. Under such circumstances, winning elections is hardly
an honor, and neither Democrat nor Republican should claim special
virtue. Nast’s changing attitude toward former slaves paralleled that of
many Republicans as they shifted from the idealistic politics of the
Reconstruction era to the cynical politics of the Gilded Age.
B-2 Political Cartoon by Thomas Nast, “What Weight Can My Vote?,” The
Ram's Horn, 31 October 1896
Caption: AMERICAN CITIZEN: "What weight can my vote have against
this flood of ignorance, stupidity and fraud?"
Document Set C: Anti-Immigration
C1- Political Cartoon, “The Immigrant Stranger at our Gate”
Caption: EMIGRANT.--Can I come in? UNCLE SAM.--I 'spose you can;
there's no law to keep you out.
DURING four hundred and more years this continent has been the
melting pot for the population of the Eastern hemisphere. For three-
fourths of that time the yearly infusions of raw metal was so slight that it
was not hard to compound them with the native stock and preserve the
high character of American citizenship. But when alien immigration pours
its stream of half a million yearly, as has been frequently done during the
last decade, and when that stream is polluted with the moral sewage of
the old world, including its poverty, drunkenness, infidelity and disease, it
is well to put up the bars and save America, at least until she can purify
the atmosphere of contagion which foreign invasion has already
brought.
C2- Political Cartoon, “Cheap Bunch of Soreheads”
Caption: You’re a cheap bunch of soreheads, and you can’t land here.
Document Set D: Anti-Chinese Immigrants
D- Political Cartoon, “Every Dog (no distinction of color) has his day”
Caption: Red gentleman to yellow gentleman: Pale Face ‘fraid you
crowd him out, as he did me
D2- Primary Source Document- A speech to the workingmen of San
Francisco on August 16, 1888.
Workingmen of San Francisco
We have met here in San Francisco to-night to raise our voice to
you in warning of a great danger that seems to us imminent, and
threatens our almost utter destruction as a prosperous community; and
we beg of each and every citizen of the State, without distinction of
political party, depending on their own labor for the support of
themselves and families, to hear us and to take time to examine with
the utmost care the reasons and the facts we will give for believing a
great danger to be now confronting us….
The danger is, that while we have been sleeping in fancied
security, believing that the tide of Mongolian immigration to our State
had been checked and was in a fair way to be entirely stopped, our
opponents, the pro-China wealthy men of the land, have been wide-
awake and have succeeded in reviving the importation of this servile
slave-labor to almost its former proportions. So that, now, hundreds and
thousands of Mongolians are every week flocking into our State….
To-day every avenue to labor, of every sort, is crowded with
Chinese slave labor worse than it was eight years ago. The boot, shoe,
and cigar industries are almost entirely in their hands. In the
manufacture of men’s overalls and women’s and children’s underwear
they run over three thousand sewing machines night and day. They
monopolize nearly all the farming done to supply the market with all
sorts of vegetables. This state of things brings about a terrible
competition between our own people, who must live, if they live at all,
in accord with American civilization, and the labor of a people, who
live like what in fact they are, degraded serfs under masters who hold
them in slavery. We should all understand that this state of things
cannot be much longer endured.
Document Set E: Nativism & the Role of Education
E1- Primary Source Document: The Know Nothing Party Platform, 1850s
The Know-Nothing Platform
(1) Repeal of all Naturalization Laws.
(2) None but native Americans for
office.
(3) A pure American Common [public]
School system.
(4) War to the hilt, on political
Romanism.
(5) Opposition of the formation of
Military Companies, comprised of
Foreigners.
(6) The advocacy of a sound, healthy
and safe Nationality.
(7) Hostility to all Papal influences, when
brought to bear against the Republic.
(8) American Institutions & American
Sentiments.
(9) More stringent & effective Emigration
Laws.
(10) The amplest protection to
Protestant Interests.
(11) The doctrine of the revered
Washington.
(12) The sending back of all foreign
paupers.
(13) Formation of societies to protect
American interests.
(14) Eternal enmity to all who attempt to
carry out the principles of a foreign
Church or State.
(15) Our Country, our whole Country, and nothing but…
E2- Primary Source Document: Excerpt from Jane Addams’ book, Twenty
Years at Hull-House, 1910. This passage comes from a chapter called
"Immigrants and Their Children.”
[A]n Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking at the public school will
help her mother to connect the entire family with American food and
household habits. That the mother has never baked bread in Italy–only
mixed it in her own house and then taken it out to the village oven–
makes all the more valuable her daughter's understanding of the
complicated cooking stove. The same thing is true of the girl who learns
to sew in the public school, and more than anything else, perhaps, of
the girl who receives the first simple instruction in the care of little
children–that skillful care which every tenement-house baby requires if
he is to be pulled through his second summer….
Thus through civic instruction in the public schools, the Italian woman
slowly became urbanized in the sense in which the word was used by
her own Latin ancestors, and thus the habits of her entire family were
modified. The public schools in the immigrant colonies deserve all the
praise as Americanizing agencies which can be bestowed upon them,
and there is little doubt that the fast-changing curriculum in the
direction of the vacation-school experiments will react more directly
upon such households.