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.