“America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States by Dale T. Knobel (review)

192 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'etudes amencaines was so strongly egalitarian. The way to test that conclusion, however, is not through assertion but through a more catholic conceptualization of the Pennsylvania experience in the context of an acknowledgment of the varieties of so-called traditional societies. On the one hand, then, this book falls a little short of exemplifying the kind of path-breaking historical theorizing and writing that Professor Rappaport hopes to encourage. But on the other, it is a fine study of Pennsylvania and a challenging essay on its place on the spectrum within the ongoing modernization debate. Alan Tully University of British Columbia Dale T. Knobel. "Americafor the Americans": The Nativist Movement in the United States. New York: Twayne, 1996. Pp. xxviii + 348 and bibliographic essay. Interest in nativism, or anti-immigrant sentiment, has increased dramatically in recent years. A decade ago, the word only appeared in the most scholarly publications. Now, in contrast, rarely a week goes by in which the term is not used in some major popular journal or newspaper. Americans' increasing concern with immigration and the debate concerning its costs and benefits to the United States are undoubtedly behind this renewed awareness of antiimmigrant sentiment. As the American immigration debate continues, it is appropriate that scholars contribute to the discussion. Yet while economists, sociologists, and other social scientists are often asked to add their perspectives , the historical background to these questions is rarely provided. That is why Dale Knobel's "America for the Americans": The Nativist Movement in the United States is particularly timely. Knobel traces the story of American nativism from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the triumph of the immigration restriction movement in the 1920s, demonstrating that nativism is not a new phenomenon but one that has been present in the United States virtually since its founding. In addition, unlike some older studies which describe nativism as a fleeting movement that appears only occasionally in American history, Knobel documents its persistence in decades such as the 1870s when its presence is not readily apparent. Book Reviews 193 The strength of Knobel's study lies in his analysis of nativist fraternalism. He focuses in particular on the Order of United Americans (OUA), a fraternal order founded in New York City in the 1840s which included among its founding members James Harper of Harper and Brothers publishing fame and a president of the New York Stock Exchange. The OUA promoted a strain of nativism that was heavily imbued with patriotic nationalism. It was the OUA, for example, that began the practice of celebrating Washington's birthday. But the OUA was also stridently antiCatholic . Catholic immigrants posed a threat to the United States, said the OUA, because Catholic emphasis on submitting to authority would undermine the republican values essential to the perpetuation of democracy and individual liberty. Knobel's analysis of the OUA reflects his close reading of its publications and a thorough and sophisticated understanding of its members ' worldview. Yet while the OUA is only one small facet of American nativism, Knobel makes them the focus of his book. He justifies this, at least implicitly, by writing that he is limiting his analysis to nativism as a "social movement" (his book is part of the Twayne series "Social Movements Past and Present 11 ). Yet even with this somewhat artificial distinction, his overwhelming attention to the OUA seems illogical. The Know Nothing party, after all, was a movement as well, and it had at least ten times as many members as the OUA, yet Knobel devotes to it only a fraction of the space allotted to the OUA and its ideas. Even when discussing the Know Nothings, Knobel tends to base his analysis upon OUA sources, ignoring the hundreds of Know Nothing newspapers and manuscript collections unrelated to the OUA. Other facets of nativism are left out altogether. Anti-Chinese and antiJapanese sentiment, so virulent and omnipresent in the decades after the Civil War, are not discussed at all because, according to Knobel, nativism was a movement to protect America's "national character," and Asians 11 have rarely been considered a 'national' threat 11 (xxv). Yet the...