Instead Of a Sequel, or How I Lost My Subject

John Higham. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955; paperback edition, with a new afterword, 1988. xii + 447 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $16.95.

Published in 1955, Strangers in the Land was my first book. Memories of Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous career of anti-Communist fear-mongering were still vivid. Southern defiance of a Supreme Court order to integrate the public schools was producing an ideological clash as dangerous as any the country had faced since the Civil War. ¹ It was a good time to be uncovering and examining critically the nationalist hysterias of the past. I had chosen those of the early twentieth century, directed against immigrants and foreign ideas, for they seemed significantly yet obscurely connected with the hobgoblins of my own day. Aided by the paperback revolution, my book took off on a long and happy life of college-classroom assignments.

Amid the approval that my study of nativism seemed to elicit from its many readers, I had to wonder from time to time what had become of my subject. Where indeed were the nativists, that they permitted this unflattering portrait of themselves to go unrebuked? Colleagues sometimes urged me to write a sequel. At least until recently, I never felt that I understood what had happened well enough even to try. What, for example, could I say about the McCarthyites who raged against Ivy Leaguers as carriers of alien ideas but showed not a trace of concern about what foreign people might be bringing in?

My story had been a dramatic one, in which a great upheaval in American thought, feeling, and policy had transpired. So I left it to stand--unsatisfactorily--as a study of a distinct period from the 1880s to the 1920s. The decades that followed revealed an America that was becoming far more cosmopolitan and less racially arrogant than it had been earlier. From the 1930s to the 1980s the question of the stranger never assumed any strong shape or clear significance. Yet the underlying issues were surely far from dead. Complacency seemed inappropriate.

Now an acrid odor of the 1920s is again in the air. It rises from vast fortunes accumulating around new technology; from a grasping individualism eroding traditional constraints on the market; from a reckless hedonism in popular culture and a resurgent religious conservatism mobilizing against it; from a profound distrust of the state, a reviving isolationism, a baffled concern over illegal immigration, and a deadlock in race relations. Nonetheless, the twenties have not returned. Much has changed. On issues of race, national identity, and nativism I am persuaded that changes in American society and culture are far more significant than continuities.

May the same be said of the point of view I bring to these questions? Have I too changed? Perhaps not so much. Although Strangers in the Land is an artifact of the early 1950s, I believe I am the same kind of historian I was then. Critics will doubtless disagree. For them I have fallen behind in the feverish pursuit of theory and prescription of relevance. If so, that is surely congruent with my own sense of inner continuity. It is true that I have come gradually to a view of exclusionary impulses in American life that is more qualified than what I had in my youth. In my own mind this personal development arises less from new insights than from a desire to correct old ones by taking account of changes around me.

Since Strangers in the Land is the starting point for this belated reconsideration, I need to review the basic concepts that guided me then, and to ask what may still be useful for interpreting the experience of recent years. These questions will entail some further reflection on what has become obsolete in the argument that Strangers advances, and what has been neither useful...