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Reviewed by:
  • Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy
  • Justin Nordstrom
Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. By Desmond King (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. 400pp.).

Over a decade ago, a talented group of historians began looking intently at the category of race as a cultural construction, rather than a set of predetermined biological characteristics, and the influences that a flexible understanding of race could have on the study of America’s social, political, and cultural history. Led by Matthew Frye Jacobson, Noel Ignatiev, George Lipsitz, Michael Rogin, and several others, these writers looked beyond a static black/white dichotomy of race to explore the complex hierarchical models of ethnicity developed by generations of American politicians and social analysts. In this latest study, Desmond King joins that discussion, providing unprecedented insight into some of the Gilded Age’s most crucial pieces of legislation, and demonstrates critical [End Page 519] links between America’s policy toward external European immigrants and the internal segregationist and racist status quo, suggesting that the same attitudes and behaviors that shaped resentment and restriction of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also substantiated Jim Crow and Asian exclusion acts. Negotiating this link is the most unique and ambitious feature of King’s book, which also provides an effective overview of turn-of-the-century immigration themes.

King begins this volume by surveying the various approaches American policy makers have used in coming to terms with their nation’s increasing pluralism. In his first two chapters, King introduces popular models for understanding immigrants’ place within American society—such as the “Melting Pot” ideal, “Americanization” techniques, attention to “cultural pluralism,” and “whiteness” concepts. Each of these approaches, King insists, relied in varying degrees on instilling submission to the dominant White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture. Building on Gary Gerstle’s studies of immigrant communities, King sees “Americanization,” or the transition from European to American culture, as both transformative and coercive. This was particularly true as the United States moved from a practice of welcoming nearly all would-be European immigrants in the nineteenth century to a highly selective regime of quotas designed to preserve America’s British cultural “inheritance” in subsequent decades.

In his third and successive chapters, King examines gradual attempts to document, condemn, and, ultimately, curtail European immigration to the United States. King sheds light on important developments in immigration policy, such as the Dillingham Commission of 1907, which first applied the influential labels of “old” immigrants (to refer to eighteenth and nineteenth century immigrants, largely from England and northern Europe) and “new” immigrants (referring to late nineteenth and twentieth-century immigrants from southern and eastern Europe), praising the former while condemning the later group. In subsequent chapters, King examines the importance of public school education, wartime patriotism, settlement house movements, and other “reform” efforts, demonstrating a shift in attitudes toward immigrants from a philanthropic approach to a pseudo scientific, eugenic model of inferiority. In so doing, King musters an impressive array of sources and introduces a diverse cast of characters, including lawmakers, philanthropic agencies, YMCA groups, educators, journalists, and scientists to demonstrate the range of responses to European immigration.

Ultimately, King characterizes twentieth-century immigration as an exercise in “Anglo conformity” in which the dominant WASP culture sought to shape the behavior and values of European “outsiders” (p. 85). Perhaps the most provocative aspect of King’s study is his insightful look at the development, spread, and application of eugenic arguments, and how they shaped a finely-tuned hierarchy of European ethnicities. Applying pseudo-scientific arguments to bolster their claims of WASP hegemony, early eugenicists pressured lawmakers to enact measures to preserve America’s racial demographics. Warning that rampant immigration would undo the achievements of “settler” races from northern Europe, Congress launched a series of increasingly rigid immigration restriction measures in the 1920s, culminating in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and its further intensification in 1929. This legislation used census data to develop strict quotas aimed at preserving America’s presumed WASP heritage from being overrun by [End Page 520] less desirable races. In later chapters, King turns his attention from immigration...

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