Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration (review)

The two most useful chapters of this edited collection are both by the editor herself, Vanessa B. Beasley, because her introduction frames the central question and her afterword provides helpful summaries of all the other pieces in the collection. Unlike Beasley's two essays, the ten other pieces were prepared for an annual conference on presidential rhetoric hosted at Texas A&M in 2001. One piece, by Michael Novak, seems to be the keynote address, as it's the first of the collection, and yet it's obviously the least thematically connected to the rest of the volume. It begins with an extensive meditation about the greatness of the American presidency and it ends with a sober warning about the dangers of leftist intellectuals in American public life. It's an odd piece, and one might just as well skip it.

In any case, at the outset, Beasley describes a paradox that many scholars have long noted: leading politicians and other influential leaders have often embraced images of immigrants as pioneers and noble strivers, and yet they have also displayed intense xenophobia and hostility to many different kinds of newcomers. Presidents and presidential candidates have been prone to these contradictions, welcoming and celebratory in some contexts, racist and nativist in others. This collection of essays examines their words (and their policies) in some detail. As Beasley describes it, "This book asks what has happened when such concerns have collided with the situated, pragmatic realm of political communication in general and presidential rhetoric in particular. To explore this question via case studies, the authors in this volume have examined select moments in U.S. immigration history by paying special attention to the interplay between immigration history and presidential discourse, broadly conceived" (3–4).

Almost all of the essays are well written and interesting, although some cover material already discussed elsewhere, often by the authors themselves. Roger Daniels provides a summary of the Chinese Exclusion period, for example, and he is certainly one of the leading experts of that period. But much of his essay doesn't deal directly with presidential rhetoric per se, even though he does illuminate how both Roosevelts dealt politically with the aftermath of Asian exclusion. The first President Roosevelt extended the Chinese Exclusion principle to other Asians, even though he publicly suggested that the Japanese were different; the second Roosevelt pleaded for Congress to repeal Chinese Exclusion, largely for foreign policy reasons. Daniels's essay is useful for students unfamiliar with his work, but he and other scholars have provided much more extensive histories of this period in other books and articles.

A few other essays also tend to summarize familiar material. Craig R. Smith's essay on the Alien and Sedition Acts, as well as the subsequent implosion of the Federalists after 1799, covers a period of American history that has been thoroughly examined. The Federalist attack on free speech, their willingness to squash legitimate political dissent, and then the rise of Thomas Jefferson as a staunch critic of Hamiltonian elitism, as presidential candidate, and as president—these are all topics that have received extensive scholarly attention elsewhere. Smith himself has published a book on these topics, set in that era.

In the same way, Charles Stewart's essay on religion and tolerance in the nineteenth century covers much of what has already been explored in this field. The first half of his essay deals with how the early American presidents referred to "God" in a pluralist religious context, the second half deals with emergent concerns about Mormons and Catholics in the late nineteenth century. Mostly, presidents tended to avoid addressing religious controversies directly, according to Stewart: they were "strangely silent during the last third of the century when a great many immigrants (particularly Eastern and Southern Europeans and Jews) did not look or act like immigrants of previous times. Rampant prejudice in American society was a non-issue in presidential addresses" (84...