Nativism in Virginia, 1900-1915

by Patrick Reed

Preface

    Although Southerners had not physically participated in the nativist uprisings which had erupted in every other section during the 1890s, and while many in the region had actively campaigned to bring in outsiders "to fill our vacant lands and help develop our bountiful resources," southerners had developed strongly nativistic attitudes toward certain groups of foreigners by 1900. Even among the railroad operators, industrialists, and state and local government officials, those with the most to gain from an increase in population, an increasingly rigid set of' qualifications came to be applied to the type of immigrant sought. From the earliest concerted efforts in the late 1880s, southerners were nearly unanimous in withholding their invitation to settlement in the South from "aliens unfamiliar with our customs and ignorant of our laws and system of justice." As they witnessed the growing labor problems in the North, Southerners also began to exclude Europe’s "pauper laboring classes" from a part in the southern version of "the American Dream." And slowly, as southerners came into contact with small numbers of recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and as they became acquainted with the sophisticated racial theories popular in the East, xenophobes in the region began to rely on such criteria as national origin and racial background in analyzing an immigrant's acceptability. In short, only the lack of a significant foreign target kept the immigrant-poor South from actively joining the nativist crusade before 1900.

    Although John Higham and Roland T. Berthoff, the leading historians of American nativism, were guilty of underestimating the intensity of xenophobia in the South before the turn of' the century, there is no reason to question Higham's evaluation of the South by 1915 as "the nativist section par excellence." Southern Senators and Representatives were leaders or among the most consistent supporters of the movement to halt unrestricted immigration into the United States. Regional newspapers and periodicals were likewise consistent in their support for restriction, and southern xenophobes expressed anti-radical as well as religiously and racially motivated -fears in their post-1915 outbursts. While the apparent shift of Southerners from passive to active, in fact rabid, nativism over the two decades between the mid-1890s and 1915 can be ascribed in part to the increasing exposure of southerners to the alien cultures of the "new" immigrants, this cannot fully explain the movement of the South to the forefront of the nationwide anti-foreign crusade. By l915 the South still had relatively, few foreign inhabitants, and in some of the region's most nativist areas, foreigners were practically unknown. Other factors, perhaps the crisis of a world war, the continuing economic frustration of southern farmers, the growth of a militant rural fundamentalism, the intensification of racial antipathy, or the social instability caused by the emergence of a diversified industrial economy might also have been influential in propelling the South into its position of prominence in the movement. It is to be hoped that an examination of southern attitudes, with emphasis on those of Virginians, toward immigration and restrictions and of the treatment given Virginia's and the South's small ethnic and religious minority groups between 1900 and 1915, will offer clues to the relative importance of these other influences.

    The nationwide economic depression of the 1890s had thrown cold water on the hopes of many southerners for rapid industrial development. In 1896 the leading organ of' southern industrial, progress, the Manufacturers' Record of Baltimore, urged postponement of regional immigration efforts for a few years, at which time the depression … will be changed to buoyancy and hopelessness."l The prediction of' the Record proved correct, for soon after the turn of the century, the world-wide demand for southern cotton suddenly increased, causing a corresponding rise in the need for agricultural labor. From all parts of the South there were complaints that black field labor was no longer adequate because "the educated blacks leave the farms … and turn to other occupations. Many of the best Negro laborers have been carried north as strike breakers."12 And of the black worker left behind, it was said that, he was "in productive capacity much inferior to his slave grandfather of 1860."3 Some Southerners openly hoped that immigrant farm workers would no only supplement black labor, but that it would speed the exodus of blacks from the region and "solve" the southern race problem. Meanwhile, expansion of' southern railroads and in the mining and textile industries further magnified the South’s labor shortage. Thus, the rising demand for southern agricultural products coupled with the hopes for economic diversification through industrialization led southerners to begin their most earnest efforts to attract newcomers into the region.

    One method adopted by the proponents of' increased. population was the regional. convention approach. A series of' interstate conferences had been held amid grandiloquent publicity efforts between 1888 and 1894, but without exception these had later been branded failures. Yet southern industrialists and state and local government officials insisted on issuing the call for more of these fruitless gatherings after 1900. Delegates from most southern states gathered at Chattanooga and again in Washington, D. C. in 1905, at Nashville, Kentucky, in 1906, and in Tampa in 1908, with every meeting as unsuccessful as the previous one. Typical was the disillusionment of' the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which, after expressing great confidence in the representatives to the Southern Quarantine and Immigration

    Conference at Chattanooga, frankly admitted that "As to what type of' foreigner the South should especially seek to attract, and what practical means should be taken to secure him, ... nothing of any practical consequence was accomplished."4 The Manufacturers’ Record soon became an outspoken critic of the conferences, calling them "annual exhibitions of tomfoolery," and citing as their only achievements "promises and hot air.... The task can only be embarrassed if its end be not frustrated, by the wind-jamming and resoluting on a 'Southern' conference … seizing upon immigration as upon any other subjects in the public mind as a pretext for a gathering representative of little beside ability to pay one’s round-trip fare to the meeting place and having in its outcome absolutely no weight with men of affairs in the South."5

    But while the immigration conferences were criticized for their lack of tangible results, they do permit in some cases a clear view of the type of immigrants these "progressive" Southerners would accept. Rowland T. Berthoff found that "the dominant note at several southern immigration conventions and in much of the state publicity," between 1904 and 1907 was that "Northerners would adapt much more easily than foreigners." The delegates to the Tampa conference endorsed a stringent restriction policy, a southern representative at the meeting in Washington objected to the continued immigration of "the dregs of Southern Europe," and convention members in Nashville in 1906 expressed a strong preference for immigrants from England, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, and an equally strong disinclination to invite immigrants from Italy.6

    This overwhelming preference for native Americans and immigrants from northern and western Europe by the immigration conferences was echoed by voices from every part of the South in the early 1900s. The Manufacturers' Record rioted in 1905 that "while unopposed to foreigners, the South naturally prefers for its new citizens American-born or individuals who have lived long enough in the United States to have been filled with the spirit of the country, and of the foreigners freshly arrived those belonging to the stocks of Northern Europe which have contributed so much to the progress and prosperity of the rest of the land."7 The South Carolina legislature limited its invitation those settlers to the "white citizens of' the United States, citizens of Scotland, Switzerland, France, and other foreigners of Saxon origin," and the state’s commissioner of' immigration, the Honorable J. C. Watson, singled out England as "a splendid source of' supply for good middle class people, I might say of our own flesh and blood, certainly of' our own language. North Carolina narrowed its immigration efforts to Canada "and other nations of Teutonic, Celtic or Saxon origin," while Alabama wanted only those from "English speaking and Germanic countries, France and the Scandinavian countries, and Belgium."9 In a canvass of southern public officials by Robert deCourcey Ward of the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League, 100 percent were found to "prefer native Americans and northern Europeans who are skilled workmen with money, and who come with their families intending permanent settlement."10 Emily Fogg Meade, writing for the Atlantic Quarterly in 1905, found that in the case of some immigrant groups, economic well-being was not a necessary stipulation. "Irish, "Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians no matter how poor," she wrote, have always been welcome."11

    Southern industrialists, who were undoubtedly most aware of the need for more labor in the South, likewise shared the preference for certain immigrant types. In 1905 the Manufacturers' Record conducted a survey of' regional manufacturers, finding, that a consensus desired first of' all "individuals from other parts of the country or from the North of Europe … and the general demand is for Irish, Germans, Swedes and Norwegians…. The marked inclination for men of Northern Europe," the Record continued, "is due to a desire to have those that can assimilate with Americans and not be likely to become a permanent laboring class."

    Statements from individual industrialists from all over the South confirmed this conclusion. Frank Y. Anderson of' the Alabama Great Southern Railroad wrote that he had "never catered to foreign immigration, believing it far better to locate people on our lands from the North and West acquainted with our language, laws and customs, and hence better fitted for citizenship and to assimilate with our people."13 J. A. Robinson, operator of an Easley, South Carolina, oil .mill, agreed that no immigrants were wanted "if we call get along otherwise…. Immigration added to our Negro population would be more than we could bear. We would be overrun with tramps."14 The owners of Birmingham's steel mills favored the hiring of immigrants only from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and France, while W. J. Lodge, owner of a South Pittsburgh, Tennessee, foundry, felt that "immigrants from Northern Europe would be better men for our mining and manufacturing interests."15 J. B. Blades, treasurer of a North Carolina lumber company, desired "the people from Northern Europe, who can assimilate with our people and become a part of them,"and competitors in Mississippi and Louisiana respectively agreed that "What the saw-mills of the South need are Norwegians, Swedes and Germans, as they make the most proficient saw-mill men," "Danes, Norwegians, Scandinavians and Germans are much preferred in manufacturing districts."16

    The opinions of Virginia’s government officials and industrialists in no way contradicted those of their fellow southerners. G. W. Koiner, who acted as the state' s Commissioner of' Agriculture and Immigration during the early years of the 1900s, sought exclusively native Americans and northern Europeans. In 1905 Koiner recommended the sending of immigration agents to "England, Scotland and Ireland, and possibly Germany," and in 1906 he was reported "interested in inducing a movement to Virginia of thrifty Scotch, English and Scandinavian farmers" and in circulating brochures printed in English, Norwegian, Danish and German.17 The following year Koiner addressed a special appeal to Britishers, pointing out that "lands in Virginia could be "bought for much less than the people of Scotland and Northern England paid in annual rent."18 The editors of the Manufacturers’ Record paid tribute to Commissioner Koiner’s efforts, noting "that the plans ignore the riff-raff which some European countries would gladly be rid of."19

    Statements in the Virginia press clearly supported the contention of Thomas S. Wheelwright, Vice President of the Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works in Richmond, that "the best remedy [for labor shortages] is to import good Germans and Scandinavians."20 The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot had a special word of praise for immigrants from Norway, who "are among the most thrifty and enlightened people of the world," while the Richmond Times-Dispatch argued that if immigrants could not be induced "into the South from the Western and Northwestern States, and from Northern Europe," the state should abandon its efforts: "It should be these or nothing."21 Several years later, the Virginian-Pilot argued that "One experienced farmer from the States beyond the Mississippi would be worth a dozen raw recruits from Europe," a principle with which the Manufacturers Record heartily agreed.22 In 1914 the Times-Dispatch, which had always paid special tribute to the state’s German-Americans, saw hidden benefits in the possible defeat of Germany in the current European war "That country’s ruin would drive to our shores German immigrants," the Dispatch explained. "The Germans would make us good citizens, and we could readily assimilate all of that nationality who might come."23

    Yet despite the overwhelming preference for native Americans and immigrants from northern Europe, a number of southern voices in the early years of the twentieth century advocated welcoming a much less homogeneous type of immigrant. Several South Carolina factory owners reported that their Polish workers "have proved to be satisfactory, both as workmen and as citizens."24 Mr. Hugh MacRae, who organized a number of immigrant colonies in the vicinity of Wilmington, N. C., found a group of Poles, numbering "more than two hundred, … are making good … and … they expect to become thoroughly Americanized and to keep in progress with this great country in which they have cast their lot." 25 F. B. Gordon, President of the Georgia Industrial Association, argued that "there is abundant evidence of the desirability of immigration from some sections of Southern Europe," and another industrialist praised "the natural aptitude of the Hungarian [and] Pole for handling machinery." 26 The Manufacturers' Record even noticed in 1905 "a growing inclination" among manufacturers in the South "for Chinese or Japanese."27 North Carolina Governor Robert C. Glenn called for the repeal of the Chinese exclusion act, and railroad contractors in Georgia and Alabama, the board reported, encouraged the importation of "the Chinese and Japanese, who make good laborers, and will come as such without any notions as to permanent citizenship."28

    A number of Virginians echoed the favorable evaluation of these less homogeneous immigrants. Large numbers of Italians, Magyars and Slovaks were brought into the state to work on the expanding railroads and in the coal fields. In fact, the over 2000 foreigners in the mines by 1907 received much of the credit for making possible the rapid development of the state’s mining industry. Also winning praise were several small immigrant farming colonies, the most successful of which was a community of 300 Bohemian farmers near Petersburg, Virginia. Although they had met with open hostility in the early years of settlement, by 1900 these Czechoslovakians had established good credit with local businessmen and had received grudging praise from native Virginians "for their hard work, honesty, and thrift."29 Most magnanimous was F, H. LaBaume, Agricultural and industrial Agent for the Norfolk and Western Railway in Norfolk, who criticized "prominent southern business men [who] do not want the so-called scum of European civilization, namely the Italian, the Pole and the’unspeakable Huns’. I only wish that it were within my power to take about 500,000 of these dark-haired races of Southern Europe and sprinkle them round among the hills and valleys and other inaccessible spots in the South.... I don't care how ignorant the parents are, how little acquainted with our American ways if they are non-criminal and able-bodied and willing to work, then we can assimilate them, and even if we cannot change their sentiment and their method of living materially, their children will grow up imbued with a desire for better things and a determination to accomplish them."30

     At least one Virginia source was also willing to welcome a limited number of Orientals to the state. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, which in 1899 had explained that immigration of Chinese had been halted in 1882 "not only because it furnished a cheap and degrading labor in unfair competition with … our decent citizens, but because it adulterated, debased, defiled and poisoned our population and threatened to pollute the very sources of our citizenship," by 1905 was calling for a modification of the exclusion act "so as to allow Chinese of good character to come into the country just as do other immigrants."31 The Pilot added that while few Chinese wanted to emigrate to America, "Those who come are, in the main, peaceful and industrious. They are far and away more desirable emigrants than the hordes that yearly pour into the country through Castle Garden."32

    But while a number of southerners seemed willing to open their gates to eastern European and even Asiatic labor in the name of economic progress, the majority of natives in the region remained much more selective. An unidentified southern Governor reportedly said in 1905, "I am certain that we do not want, and we should insist that we do not get, people from … the southern and eastern parts of Europe."33 The Secretary of the Louisiana Board of Immigration, Justin F. Denechard, reported that employers in his state had not been pleased with "Servians, Croatians, Austrians and Dalmatians," who "are a roving people and never stay long in one place."34 Another source, although itself sympathetic to eastern European immigrants, acknowledged that other southerners looked on "Austro-Hungarians, Poles, Italians, and Russian Jews" as "beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence."35 Congressman Charles R. Thomas from North Carolina declared in 1906 that "the class of immigration that has been coming into the country in recent years from the races of southern Europe, and from Turkey, and Asia, some of it the very scum and riff-raff of European and Asiatic countries, is not desirable."36 The Washington Post agreed that the South should "take a good look at the fruits of Italian and Slav immigration in other parts of the country before trying it by wholesale for ourselves…. Why imperil the certainty of a splendid and sound development by adventure in strange fields with sinister and abhorrent instruments?"37

    Many Virginians shared this distrust of immigrants from central Europe and Asia. A foundry owner in Graham’s Forge, Virginia, reported dissatisfaction with his Hungarian employees, as "they stay only a few days, and seem to prefer to get into the larger towns or cities, and are not adapted to our work."38 Dane E. Rianhard, Secretary of the Virginia Portland Cement Company in Fordwick, Virginia, found his Russian and Hungarian employees "unsatisfactory," and F. M. Masters, agent for the New River Mineral Company in Ivanhoe, Virginia, agreed that "To ‘swap’ the negroes for" this class of European labor "would be a bad job."39 Despite the praise given them for their industry, the Czechoslovakians near Petersburg continued to find themselves socially isolated from the native community, and when Czechs attempted to teach in the local schools or run for local political office, they were sharply criticized. The immigrants were also held in contempt for their occasional dealings with blacks; they were supposed "to have eaten with them and to have shaken their hands, even to have called them ‘Mister'."40

    Eastern Europeans in western Virginia coal fields found themselves similarly segregated from native whites, and even from other immigrant groups, and wages and living conditions for the foreigners were described as being quite inferior to those of' natives. Since jobs were plentiful, and since the newcomers actually freed American-born workers for the easier, better-paying jobs, natives displayed little open hostility.41 But as early as 1899, at least one Virginia voice was outspokenly critical: "The Virginian-Pilot knows it is not only heresy, but rank blasphemy, to cross-question any enterprise or capital that graciously comes upon us. [But] what will it all profit Virginia and her people, with a horde of wild and pauper Hungarians, Italians and other proletarians, of the most objectionable sort imported to work ... at pauper wages? And then to degrade the State by an element worse than the barbarous Africans that first came to Virginia in Dutch ships arid afterward in Yankee bottoms."42 In 1905 the Pilot continued its harangue against immigration of this element: "There is every reason to believe that if the South is flooded, as it can easily be, with Poles, Hungarians and Sicilians, the result would be disastrous both to its agricultural and manufacturing industries." Later that year the paper added, "There is no reason … the admitting to this country annually a horde of Russian refugees, poverty stricken Italians and Hungarian malcontents."43

    The reaction against the introduction of Oriental labor in the South was equally vehement. One outside observer accused southern employers who advocated such schemes of seeking a class of laborers "more docile and more servile either the negro or the European."44 Walter L. Fleming, a leading publicist of' southern industrialization plans, found it "certain ... that the South will not tolerate the introduction of large numbers of Chinese or Japanese for fear of possible race complications."45 Robert DeCourcey Ward's survey of southern state government officials disclosed that 90 to 100% "protest against the immigration of Asiatic," and the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, despite its temporary support for moderation of the Chinese exclusion law, viewed the Japanese as a possible threat to western civilization.45 In the midst of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, the Pilot warned "those who have been disposed to be too tearfully sympathetic with the Japanese because of their inferiority in numbers" that "Russia was fighting the battles of' the West as against the East, of the Caucacians as against the Mongols."47 The Pilot also questioned the wisdom of taking over Hawaii, where "there is a danger of a Japanese influx that will necessitate some such legislature [sic] as the Chinese Exclusion act…. The Japanese are anything but a desirable element and without either the morals or the inclination to become respectable American citizens." Later in 1905, when Japanese immigrants in the Hawaiian islands had organized a strike against their American employers, the Pilot held the incident forth as "a sample of what may be expected if the Yellows shall be allowed to land in this country in any considerable numbers."48 In short, the editors of the Virginian-Pilot saw saw "the yellow peril" as "a very real and substantial thing."49

    While there was a great deal of controversy over the acceptability of immigrants from several central European countries and from the Far East, about no other immigrant group was there more debate than the Italians. To a host of southern publicists after 1900, "the solution" to southern economic stagnation seemed "to be to induce Italians to come in as farm laborers" and to work in southern mines and factories.50 Italians received bountiful praise for their adaptability as field hands, and were seen by a few hopeful southerners as a possible replacement for blacks as agricultural workers. Alfred Holt Stone wrote in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 11905 that "the Italian works more constantly than the negro, and after one or two years’ experience, cultivates more intelligently." Even more important, the Italians were reported free from the "shiftlessness and improvidence … that apparently have always been a curse to the [black] race."51 Restrictionist Robert DeCourcey Ward admitted that "in many parts of the Southern country where Italians have settled they are praised as industrious, thrifty, frugal, good citizens and as having increased land values," and a colony of Italians near Wilmington, North Carolina, was described as "peaceful, law abiding people, the sturdiest sort of pioneers."52 The Manufacturers’ Record likewise saluted "the several thousand Italian immigrants to the South" who "have found congenial homes and profitable occupation, especially in the country where they are supplanting the negro upon sugar plantations and in the cotton fields."53

    The reaction of' the great majority of southerners, however, was far less favorable toward the newcomers from Italy. Numerous outbreaks of violence against them had occurred in the 1890s, and more followed after 1900. In 1901 three Italians were shot in Erwin, Mississippi, and in 1907 native whites upset about the Italian children in their schools in Sumrall, Mississippi, beat up several Italians, including a paraplegic, and most of the Italians fled the vicinity. The Nashville immigration conference in 1906 specifically excluded Italians from its invitation to southern settlement, and the Clarksville, Georgia, Advertiser did not "want ignorant, vicious Italians."54 The survey of immigration preference conducted by the Manufacturers’ Record in 1905 disclosed that "Italians seem to be the less favored of the foreigners. They are regarded as likely to foment much trouble upon the slightest provocation … and that certain classes of them, if care not be taken. Would be worse in the South than the native negro."55 The responses of individual industrialists were more specific. A. J. McLaughlin, President of an Alabama naval stores firm, angrily replied, "for God’s sake send your Italians to the coal mines of Pennsylvania or some other hot place. We are not in sympathy with the padrone or mafia systems. We love the flag and would die to protect it. We do not want it cursed with cutthroats and anarchy."56 A Georgia railroad contractor was "not favorably disposed to the Italian laborer [as] he shirks his work on all possible occasions and requires constant watching and driving."57 Birmingham steel mill owners would hire Italians "only in desperation," and a number of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana contractors and lumber executives agreed that the Italians could never "be made a good citizens" and that "the importation of this class of people to any great extent would fill our country up with a very inferior class of people."58 Another typical reaction was that of a North Carolina lumber executive, who "had rather see less manufacturing and a slower growth of the country than [have Italian labor] introduced."59

    Even though the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot felt in 1905 that "the better class of Italian peasant laborers … would undoubtedly prove a valuable factor in the upbuilding of the South," its editors warned "that the Italian immigrants of today comes [sic] from Southern Italy instead of Northern Italy, and is anything but a desirable inhabitant…. If a flood of such immigrants were dumped into the agricultural South it is extremely doubtful that they would not prove more troublesome than have the negroes."60 The Pilot also doubted that native southern farmers would "take kindly to the Italians. They know what to do with the peaceful, commonplace old negro … but of the Italian, with his Mafia and other secret societies full of crime and blood, he knows little and cares less. It is probable, therefore, that he will take stock in the Italian … only as a matter of absolute necessity."61

    Other Virginians saw little future for Italian immigrants in southern industries. Operators of the newly-opened coal mines in the western part of the state rated them as the "least desirable of all foreigners for this work…. [The] chief objection to them is laziness, which coupled with the habit of stinting themselves in food, render them the poorest of labor. Their small stature and natural lack of strength, limited patronage of the commissaries, and unsurpassed clannishness, which causes a whole gang to leave when one is mistreated, are other undesirable traits. A common reply of a contractor when asked his preference of race is, ‘Any except the Italians'."62 A Fordwick, Virginia, cement company officer reported that "About 1/3 of our total labor here was Italian for a year and a half. They did not compare favorably with either the negro or white labor, and when we started the piece-rate work in our quarry they would not work on that basis and we got rid of all of them."63 A Richmond iron works executive described his company’s experience "with the Latin races" as "very unsatisfactory," and an Ivanhoe, Virginia, mineral company agent added that "Italians will never prove a success, in my opinion…. They are undesirable in country districts away from strong police supervision."64 When a group of discharged Italian laborers threatened to destroy a Portsmouth dock under construction, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot took the opportunity to "question … the wisdom of the new movement to fill the South with such laborers. Shiftless as the negro often is, we are persuaded on the whole, that it would be better for the South to depend upon negro labor than to import that class of Italians, who are a little too much given to the use of the stiletto and dynamite, and also too much given to the organization of secret societies."55

    As one would expect, blacks can hardly be described as enthusiastic about the movement to replace them with agricultural laborers from Italy. Although their opinions were seldom asked, there are indications that at least some blacks recognized foreign workers as a threat to their already weak grasp on the southern economic ladder. Blacks near Petersburg, Virginia, for example, found that they could not compete with Czechoslovakian farmers in the area, who had converted the sale of produce into a custom trade with local whites.66 Blacks on an Arkansas plantation were said to despise a group of Italian fellow workers "for their strange ways and industry. The two groups avoided contact and were also kept apart by the operators."67 Following a race riot in Atlanta, blacks found they faced increasing discrimination as there "were heard frequent demands that only whites be employed in certain occupations," even be they foreigners.68 As early as 1894, Booker T. Washington had expressed blacks’ concern in a speech before southern business leaders: "If those of the white race look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are’ … among 8,000,000 negroes, whose habits you know, whose loyalty and love you have tested."69 In 1911 Washington added a warning that large scale immigration from southern Europe would result in "a racial problem in the South more difficult and more dangerous than that which is caused by the presence of the Negro."70

    Yet while some southerners undoubtedly did hope to displace blacks with foreign workers, or at least to supplement black labor in order to keep the Negro in the cotton fields, "where he belongs,"71 as Robert DeCourcey Ward concluded, "the larger, although the least aggressive portion of the Southern population prefers the negro to the alien white as a tenant, laborer, or domestic servant."72 Or as Walter L. Fleming noted, "The South is advised to hold fast to the docile, tractable negro, who works for low wages, never organizes, never strikes, seldom buys land, and who is well suited to the climate."73 In light of this widespread sentiment, it is not surprising that Fleming found most blacks taking "slight interest in the matter, feeling that they are safe against white immigration for the future as they have been in the past."74

    If blacks displayed little fear of displacement by foreign labor, it was with good reason, for by 1907 efforts to encourage immigration into the South had met with very little success. Some southerners attempted to explain their failure as the result of the presence of large numbers of blacks in the region, "about whom [foreigners] have heard so much that was not good," while others saw it as a result of prejudice and vicious propaganda against the South by northern and western immigration agents.75 But less sympathetic observers recognized other factors, as had the British Consul in New Orleans back in 1873, who said that to southerners, "a laborer is a laborer; … whether he be French or German, Italian or Norwegian, British or Chinese, he is to be housed, fed, and treated just as the black race used to be."76 In 1905 the South Carolina Commissioner of Immigration echoed the same sentiment, charging that "the cry was, on the one hand, for only the highest type of immigrant; and on the other, to secure him at the scale of wages paid the negro."77 The New York Journal of Commerce cited "stories about the treatment of negroes, the condition of poor whites, the uncertainty of legal protection, social prejudice, political intolerance, and the lack of adequate school facilities."78 Reverend Vaclav Vanek, Superintendent of the Baltimore Immigrant Home, disclosed that "in some parts of the South I have found a tendency among the people to judge the immigrant according to the standard of the shiftless negro and white mountaineer rather than on his own merits."79 F. H. LaBaume recommended as a means of encouraging immigration "the inculcation among our native population of a spirit of helpfulness, encouragement and hospitality to the stranger instead of the spirit of suspicion, hostility and discouragement which now prevails to a large extent."80 But regardless of the reason for their failure, most southerners realized the futility of their efforts and abandoned the movement.

    Other factors curtailed immigration efforts still further in 1907. An economic recession temporarily ended hopes for immediate industrial expansion, and a tightening of the contract labor law made obsolete the plans of a number of southern states to subsidize the immigration of laborers recruited in Europe.81 It also seems likely that the increasing, though still limited, exposure of southerners to the alien cultures of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe affected southern attitudes about the desirability of such foreigners, for gradually the region was moving to the forefront in the nationwide effort to restrict immigration.

    This graduate change in southern attitudes toward immigration can be most clearly seen in the reaction of southerners to plans for the distribution of aliens from the densely populated urban areas of the North and East to the underpopulated and undeveloped areas of' the South. In 1904 the Manufacturers' Record disclosed and endorsed a plan by the Greater Georgia Association calling for "a rational distribution of the incomes according to conditions and localities best suited to make them self-sustaining citizens. Under this plan immigrants from the Piedmont section of Europe would be encouraged to try their fortunes in the Piedmont region of this country, and on that basis the Southeastern States would receive a very desirable class of people, and in large numbers."82 The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot also endorsed a plan for the diversion of immigration to the South in 1904, urging the government to act promptly on the suggestion, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch eagerly welcomed a proposal by the North German Lloyd Steamship Company to bring immigrants from Europe directly to southern ports.83

    Yet as early as 1904 there were signs of growing suspicion from southerners that such plans might not have the best interests of the South at heart. At a Birmingham meeting of southern railway immigration agents in November 1904, a plan by the U. S. Commissioner General of Immigration F. P. Sargeant for the distribution of newly arrived immigrants was discussed. Because the plan would necessitate a certain amount of government control over the dispersal of newcomers, the agents expressed fear that the proposal "would be employed primarily for the purpose of relieving the congested cities of the North with slight regard for the needs of the South."84 To a suggestion in 1905 by the New York Times that "immigration which would be undesirable here might be a real benefit to the South," and to the plan of the North German Lloyd line to bring immigrants directly to the South, already approved by the Times-Dispatch, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot replied, "No; if the South is going in for immigrants it should send agents over to the other side to look the stock over."85 The Times-Dispatch also recognized the danger in 1905, warning that the South "can expect no disinterested help form the large cities of the North and East, who would naturally wish to unload upon an outside district the least desirable of their alien population."86 The Manufacturers’ Record added its admonition in the same year, urging southerners to be wary of northern efforts "to prevent a further congestion of the undesirable classes in "Eastern cities and to relieve the existing congestion by persuading the South that any kind of labor is better than a shortage of labor."87

    As northerners devised formalized proposals for alien distribution in the following years, southern organs became much more specific and vehement in their criticisms. The Record, for example, reacted immediately to a suggestion by a U. S. Department of Justice official to turn "the stream of immigration from Italy and Austria-Hungary … toward the Southern States. Urging southerners to refrain "from participating in any immigration movement … in which transportation companies, foreign Governments, the Federation of Labor and the National Government should have representation."88 The following year the Record warned of northern schemes "to hoodwink the South into unquestioning acceptance of a horde of aliens" through bogus social, educational, and philanthropic organizations, and it even supported the closing of the immigration port at New Orleans. "When we consider the character and quality of perhaps 99 per cent. Of the immigration that has come into New Orleans form Europe during the past decade we think there can be no doubt that we should be very much better off without it."89

    To a great extent the growing indifference toward or opposition to large scale immigration in the South can be traced to a mounting fear of the effects a class of alien labor might have on southern social and political institutions. Amid the demands for imported labor by many southern industrialists there began to appear warnings, as the Manufacturers’ Record offered in 1905, that "The arrivals of today … are representatives largely of races alien to American ideas, the depressed and degenerate … and the attempt … to assimilate them is fraught with danger to the American social and political system."90 The 1905 immigration conference at Birmingham urged the South to "think twice before it allows its capitalists and its railroads to flood the country with ‘cheap’ and ignorant alien laborers…. Such an importation … would bring in its wake … many vast and complex problems which the South has not yet had to face."91 Emily Fogg Meade, a promoter of Italian immigration, realized that most southerners felt "the influx of large numbers of unskilled laborers intensifies the struggle for existence among the laboring class, the more so because these new people do not seek the farms, but crowd into the large cities, complicating the problems that confront municipal administrators."92 Walter Fleming, another New South publicist, also admitted "that heavy immigration will result in political changes and re-alignment," and North Carolina Congressman Charles R. Thomas warned in 1906 "that the class of immigration that has been coming into the country in recent years … is against the interests of American labor, and that it will, if allowed to continue, eventually affect and influence our American institutions."93

    Even though southern labor remained weakly organized in the early years of the twentieth century, the Georgia Federation of Labor issued in 1907 a strong objection to the "flooding of the South and Georgia with a population composed of the scum of Europe, a people in no wise in sympathy with the spirit of our institutions and form of government, and whose presence in our midst will foment race troubles and tend to destroy the cherished ideals of every loyal Southerner, putting us on a plane with the Northeast, with its tenements crowded with unassimilated pauper labor."94 To Mississippi Senator John Sharp Williams, the objection to the immigrant from central or southern Europe was not his race, but his ignorance, for "the ignorant man, whatever his race, coming to a country where he is not governed but becomes a part of the governing force, is dangerous."95 And by 1913 the Manufacturers’ Record felt that further immigration schemes "may be absolutely neglected … to the advantage of the South." The editors felt that immigrants since 1900 had not been "of a character to benefit this country, but were largely the material sure to increase the social, political and moral menace of the East Side of New York or to swell the numbers susceptible to the influence of the anarchy of such bodies as the Industrial Workers of the World."96

    Within the state of Virginia, it was the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot which most feared disruption of national and state social and political institutions by continued unrestricted immigration. In 1904 the Pilot attacked the plans of Virginia’s Immigration Commissioner to establish colonies of aliens in the state, which it saw as "un-American in principle and dangerous in practice…. [They} are in every sense of the word public evils – hot beds of anarchy, breeders of lawlessness and crime."97 The following month the paper called for a revision of immigration laws "to prevent Europe’s criminal and worthless element from making an asylum of our country, poisoning our institutions, and generally rendering life and property unsafe."98 The Pilot disagreed with President Theodore Roosevelt’s belief that Americans had a duty "to labor for the uplifting" of the country’s immigrants, a group described by the Pilot as a "vast horde … who come to [America] ignorant of its laws, unacquainted with its ideals, at variance with its fundamental principles and hopelessly warped and misshapen by an existence in an environment totally different from that in which the Americans dwell."99 The paper continued its efforts on behalf of restriction in 1908, arguing that "with the hardened criminals of the old world maintaining schools of murder …, with socialists proclaiming the right to steal the first law of nature …, with the anarchists banded together, and making war; with the bomb and any other weapon available against all law and all constituted authority …, it is time to cease prating about keeping the door open for the ‘oppressed and down-trodden of every nation’."100 Both Governor Claude A. Swanson and his successor William Hodges Mann voiced their agreement with the Pilot, preferring no immigrants to "persons whose principles are a menace to civilization and presence a curse to society."101

    While the great majority of southerners were turning against the idea of imported foreign labor, a few southern voices continued to seek immigrants for unoccupied southern farm land. Wilbur McCoy, immigration agent for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company, saw "the solution to the labor question in the South … in securing the farmer of small means," and F. H. LaBaume of the Norfolk and Western Railway agreed that "the only way to secure permanent and lasting prosperity is to fill up the waste places in your back country, … then the prosperity of the towns and cities will follow in natural sequence."102 Virginia Commissioner of Immigration G. W. Koiner expressly stated in 1906 that the state wanted "a good class of farmers, dairymen, chicken-raisers, fruit-growers, etc.," not laborers.103 Even industrialists showed a willingness to debar alien labor as they "discovered the eagerness of native white farmers to become factory hands."104 President F. B. Gordon of the Georgia Industrial Association, for example, reported that "the majority of [our executive] committee recognizes the trouble that might ensue from the introduction of a few aliens among the native mill help now employed, yet [the committee] would gladly aid any movement looking to the bringing in of more farm laborers, as the supply of native help would thus be increased."105

    Regardless of the scattered continuing efforts to attract newcomers into the South, the immigration movement was finished for all practical purposes. Expressions of distrust of, contempt for, and superiority to foreigners became more frequent and more harsh in the following years. Some of the southern reaction clearly resulted from fears for their racial homogeneity. As Rowland T. Berthoff noted, "the long history of uneasy relations between whites and Negroes made ‘racial’ distinctions axiomatic."106 The Manufacturers’ Record did not hesitate to point out in 1905 that "the arrivals of today … are … in some instances, not unmixed with the blood of distinctly inferior peoples," and Joshua W. Caldwell, a prominent Tennessee lawyer who took pride in the fact that "There is no part of the globe except the kingdom of England which is so thoroughly and essentially Anglo-Saxon as the South," argued that "the Southern American, with his English, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, Huguenot ancestry, has enough diversity, … and there is no reason why we should hybridize ourselves."107 The Virginia General Assembly, in a 1908 joint resolution, requested the state’s representatives in Washington "to oppose in every possible manner the influx into Virginia of immigrants from Southern Europe … with no characteristics to make them, with us, a homogeneous people, believing as we do, that upon Anglo-Saxon supremacy depend the future welfare and prosperity of this Commonwealth."108 Most succinct of all was the Manufacturers’ Record, which declared that "the South will have human sewage under no consideration."109

    A convenient means of gauging southern nativism is the degree to which southern Congressmen supported the literacy requirement for immigrants, a major tactic by which restrictionists hoped to exclude undesirable immigrants. In 1897 southern Senators and Representatives had voted 61 to 33 in favor of the literacy test, but as John Higham pointed out, "in January 1898, southern Senators voted 15 to 3 against the literacy test, supplying more than half the opposition to it."110 This inconsistency most likely resulted from the efforts, still then in progress, to attract immigration into the economically-deprived region. But as the 1900s unfolded and opposition to indiscriminate immigration mounted in the South, southern Congressmen were increasingly petitioned to support the literacy requirement. For example, in 1912 the one hundred Virginia chapters, "representing over 5,000 citizens of the old Virginia," of the Patriotic Order Sons of America, a nativist organization with members in ten southern states and twelve others in the West and Midwest, voiced its support for the measure.111 In the vote on the literacy test in 1913, Virginia’s representatives in Washington unanimously (10-0) supported the measure, and only five southern Congressmen and two southern Senators voted against the bill.112 Virginia, and the South in general, was clearly well on its way to becoming "the nativist section par excellence."

    While examples of anti-radical and racial nativism in the South are easily accessible to the historian in the discussions of immigration into the region, evidence of religious nativism is much more difficult to find. As was the case with other aliens, religious minority groups were rare in the region. Even during the serious nativist outbursts of the 1890s, the anti-Catholic American Protective Association made little headway in the South. Not only were there too few Catholics in the region to frighten southerners into reaction, but the organization was closely identified with the national Republican Party, certainly a hindrance in the Solid South. Jewish congregations were likewise too scattered to attract organized opposition, although they were the targets of occasional religiously motivated abuse.113

    A small group of "free thinkers" among the Czechoslovakian community near Petersburg, Virginia, however, did receive a great deal of criticism. One native Protestant congregation undertook to save these "bohemian unbelievers" who were "trying to destroy belief in God." A local minister circulated a tract within the immigrant community, the text of which was "the Fool Hath Said in his Heart, There is no God," and the native citizens were urged to pray fervently for the "heathens."114 Of still greater concern to southerners, though, were the region’s black congregations, with their fervent revivalism. The Richmond Dispatch expressed its distrust in 1890: "The negro churches so-called, are the most fertile source of Republican doctrine in the South. They are the well-springs, indeed of the most dangerous political teaching in this section."115

    Because of their unparalleled financial success, southern Jews in many parts of the South had acquired by the mid-1890s a stereotyped image as economic parasites, who "will not sit down and labor like other people – they create nothing and are mere consumers …, preferring to live by their wit in dealing, and acting as if they had a home no where."116 Or as University of Virginia President W. W. Thornton remarked in 1890, "Jews certainly care less for what is embraced in the term culture than Christians who are equally well off…. All intelligent Christians deplore the fact that the historical evidences for Christianity have so little weight with [the Jewish] people."117 It was only with great difficulty that many Jews were able to escape such characterizations and criticisms and win the respect of the community as individuals.

    During the years of effort to attract newcomers into the region, many organs of southern progress heaped praise upon the South’s Jewish immigrants. The Richmond Whig, for example, argued that "a sober, steadier, and more industrious and law abiding class of population ... does not exist," and a Georgia newspaper saw their presence "as an"auspicious sign," for "where there are no Jews, there is no money to be made."118 Yet while some southerners welcomed them into the region as an economic asset, and while southern Jews remained too few in number to pose a serious threat to southern homogeneity, many southerners discovered a more subtle means of expressing their distrust – they began to erect barriers of social discrimination against their small Jewish population.

    The social experience of Jews in the South contrasts significantly with those of other ethnic groups, whose relatively slow economic advance modified their social expectations. By avoiding highly competitive markets, Jews moved up the economic ladder much more rapidly, and as their financial position improved, their social aspirations grew accordingly. Although for most of the 19^th century Jews had experienced little social ostracism, and while they retained their social equality in many less urbanized areas, as status rivalries became more intense in the 1880s and nineties, Jews found they faced increasing discrimination. Typical was the experience of poet Ludwig Lewisohn, who emigrated from Germany with his family to rural South Carolina in 1890, and from there moved to Charleston 1892. "Almost immediately," Lewisohn wrote in his later years, "there came to us in some impalpable way a sense of something we had never felt in [the rural area]:invisible barriers seemed to arise about us, … an iron isolation to be established." Despite his "passionate effort to leap the hurdle of his race and be accepted as a Gentile Southerner," Lewisohn found that he "was taunted with being a foreigner and a Jew," and that social isolation "was to mark all the long days and years … [he] spent in Charleston."119

    Even though such codes of social discrimination continued to be enforced, and even strengthened, in many parts of the South over the next two decades, rabid, religiously-motivated nativism was held in check in the region until 1913. A number of factors contributed to the temporary mitigation of anti-Jewish feeling. Of course, the most obvious of these was the paucity of Jews in the South. Although southern whites had determined to protect their racial purity against any alien challenge, German Jews constituted no serious threat, and immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe was still too insignificant to stimulate defensive measures. Furthermore, as John Higham pointed out in a comparison of southern attitudes with those on the West Coast, another area in which religious minorities found relative nondiscrimination, "Both the South and San Francisco fought for decades to uphold white supremacy in the face of a colored race…. For a long time this overriding preoccupation bound all white men together as partners and equals."120 A second important factor limiting anti-Semitism in the South "was the relatively stable character of the local Jewish community. Outstanding Jews achieved a notable and highly respected place in both public and private life before the status rivalries of the late nineteenth century crystallized."121 Therefore, the established Jewish congregations in southern communities were able, for a time, to absorb Jewish newcomers while maintaining the respect of non-Jewish society. Eventually, however, even the Jewish community began to lose its coherency, not to mention its honored position in native society.

    A final factor in the temporary repression of anti-Jewish sentiment was the care with which Jews avoided economic competition with native whites. Jewish merchants, many of whom had prospered by furnishing agricultural equipment on credit to southern farmers in the post-Civil War years, often expanded their businesses into soft goods retail stores in southern communities. That these establishments succeeded consistently resulted from the fact that they catered primarily to the local black community, for they allowed blacks to touch and try on merchandise without the obligation to purchase. While it seems such a practice might have caused resentment among whites, it actually minimized conflict by eliminating the Jewish merchant as a competitor for the trade of local whites. "Thus the Jew was performing a mercantile function in the community without being an economic ‘threat’ to the Gentile merchants."122

    As persecution of Jews in Poland and Russia increased in the early years of the twentieth century, southerners witnessed a significant influx of Jews from those countries into the region. Unlike their German predecessors, the newcomers were patently unfamiliar to native southerners, and as one contemporary noted, "The mere fact of difference is a persistent cause" of an awakening of anti-Jewish sentiment.123 Complicating the situation was the overwhelming entrance of the new arrivals into the mercantile trades, a movement which disrupted economic stability by forcing an expansion of Jewish businesses into the market for white customers, and a corresponding competition for black business by the non-Jewish merchants. Thus the recent immigrants not only disturbed native Gentiles by their strange appearance and customs and seemed to them an economic threat, they offered both an economic and social challenge to the more established Jewish community in the South as well.

    Southern Jews were beginning to realize that social acceptance was not simply a matter of race or religion, nor even of economic position. In a region conditioned by a respect for tradition, family background and position in the community were factors equal in importance to financial success. Therefore, those established Jews, who had won acceptance from the native middle class, sought to disassociate themselves from the new Jewish immigrants, often even forcing the latter to organize their own synagogue. Just as the Gentile community considered factors beyond wealth before opening its doors to social advancement, established Jews were anxious to prevent indiscriminate admission to their ranks. They realized that the more restrictions that could be maintained, the easier it would be to maintain their own social position in the future against still other groups seeking to enter the middle class.

    While many Jews were able to retain their position in "respectable" southern society, the specter of the newly arrived eastern Europeans helped to reinforce the old stereotyped Shylock image of Jews among many southern whites. As Wilbur J. Cash perceptively noted, in the tradition-conscious South, "where any difference has always stood out with great vividness, … it was perfectly natural that [the Jew] should … stand in the eyes of the people as a sort of evil harbinger and incarnation of all the menaces they feared and hated – external and internal, real and imaginary."124 Thus the very foreigness of the newcomers, the increasing economic competition and status anxieties prompted by their arrival, and the general sophistication of southern racial ideology (as race was certainly a criterion upon which eastern European Jews were judged in the South) combined to set the Jew apart in southern society. However, still other factors were necessary before anti-Jewish sentiments could be organized and concentrated in a serious anti-Semitic outburst.

    Certainly one of the most important factors in the movement toward violent anti-Semitism in the South was the continuing economic failure of the southern farmer. Since the Civil War, southern agrarians had been involved in a hopeless effort to escape debt and move up the economic ladder. The unrealistic and unfulfilled hopes of the Populist Era had only deepened their despair, and a return of falling prices and depression after 1907 led many to seek a means of venting their disappointment. As C. Vann Woodward explained, southern farmers, "frustrated in their age-long, and eternally losing struggle against a hostile industrial economy, … eagerly welcomed exciting crusades against more vulnerable antagonists: against anything strange, and therefore evil."125 An indication of the growing aversion of southern farmers to foreigners was the consistent endorsement of immigration restriction by agrarian organizations in the early 1900s. The Farmers’ National Congress proposed restriction in their conventions at Richmond in 1905 and at Raleigh in 1909, and in 1911 endorsed measures discriminating against southern and eastern Europeans. State branches of the Farmers’ Educational and Co-operative Union likewise opposed continuation of the "inducement, distribution, and diversion of the present alien influx from southern Europe and western Asia."126

    A second, related factor which contributed to the intensification of southern anti-Semitism was the growth of a militant rural fundamentalism. Despite H. L. Golden’s contention that in selected areas of the South native Protestants respected Jews for their Biblical heritage, at times even taking care of them "with a zeal and devotion otherwise bestowed only on the Confederate monument in the square," the more pervasive fundamentalist influence was hostile. The generalizations of Leonard Dinnerstein and Wilbur J. Cash were actually much more realistic. Dinnerstein argued that to fundamentalist, "anyone and anything that violated their own literal interpretation of the Bible became subject to assault."127 Cash added that fundamentalists demanded "absolute conformity to the ancient pattern under the pains and penalties of the most rigid intolerance."128 The southern myth which held the Jews responsible for "the murder of Christ" was popular long before Tom Watson appropriated the theme for his post-1913 anti-Semitic crusade.

    The more frequent exposure of native southerners to Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe and the increasing economic competition and status rivalries they caused, coupled with the stresses of agrarian and industrial discontent and the growing degree of religious intolerance, helped to create a highly unstable social situation, one which could easily be played into a crisis by a "talented bigot" such as Tom Watson. In any event, as Harry L. Golden cautioned, it is "in the social, economic, and political context that existed the 1913" that "the one anti-Semitic aberration in the history of the South has to be seen."129

    The occasion which prompted Watson’s anti-Semitic campaign was the murder of a young factory girl in Atlanta, a case in which the leading suspect was a Jew named Leo Frank. Although the evidence against Frank was purely circumstantial, stirred by Watson’s demands for revenge, southerners savagely demanded Frank’s executions. The little girl’s Baptist minister revealed the depths of southern prejudice in his recollection of the case: "[My] own feelings upon the arrest of the old Negro nightwatchman [another leading suspect], were to the effect that this one old Negro would be poor atonement for the life of this innocent girl. But when on the next day, the police arrested a Jew, and a Yankee Jew at that, all of the inborn prejudice against Jews rose up in a feeling of satisfaction, that here would be a victim worthy to pay for the crime."130 Not even the region’s leading newspapers questioned the shoddy evidence used to convict Frank.131 The issues of the specific case seemed to be lost in a mad scramble to find a suitable scapegoat for southern social and economic frustrations.

    Southern anti-Semites were further infuriated when Georgia Governor John M. Slaton, citing serious doubts about the prisoner’s guilt, commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Two months later a mob stormed the state prison, carried Frank across the state had lynched him within a few miles of his alleged victim’s home. Tom Watson, whose frantic diatribes were largely responsible for the hysteria in the case, continued his anti-Jewish crusade over the next few years. In 1915 Watson warned his working class and rural readers that "from all over the world, the children of Israel are flocking to this country, and plans are on foot to move them from Europe en masse … to empty upon our shores the very scum and dregs of the Parasite Race."132 Southern economic frustrations and racial attitudes had erupted into full-scale, violent anti-Semitism, and the stage was set for the foundation of the region’s most radically anti-Jewish organization.

    In the fall of 1915, just two months after the Frank lynching, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn. Combining evangelical piety with blatant racism, the Klan "activated the old folk myth of Jews as Christ killers and carnal sinners," and warned of an international Jewish plot to control America.138 Just as the most violent reaction to the Frank case had emigrated from rural areas, the strength of the Klan was focused there, with the cities seen as centers of moral corruption and Jewish influence. Although actual physical attacks upon Jews were rare, as John Higham notes, they "suffered largely from sporadic economic proscriptions. In southern … towns boycotts harassed long-established Jewish merchants; sometimes enterprising Klansmen launched their own proudly labeled ‘100 per cent American’ clothing stores."134 However, the Klan’s most frequent target was "the shadowy, imaginary Jew who lived far away in the big cities. Klansmen felt a little guilty and ashamed at picking on the Jews whom they had known as good neighbors all their lives."135

    But if southern Jews only occasionally suffered economically, and even more rarely physically, from the anti-Semitic ideology of rural southerners, a study of the social experience of the Jews of Richmond, Virginia, clearly reveals that they continued to experience the hostility which resulted from the status concerns of the urban middle class. The Richmond Times-Dispatch praised Jewish immigrants and characterized them as "industrious, enterprising, sober, faithful and law-abiding."136 The paper boasted that "A Jew born and reared in Virginia is a Virginian, and is treated as a Virginian. We recognize Judaism as a religion and not as a racial distinction. We have, in short, absorbed the Jews … and have made them part and parcel of the nation."137 And as David and Adele Bernstein found in their study of a "Slow Revolution in Richmond, Va.," Rabbi Edward N. Calish was continually recognized by Richmond’s elite as one of the city’s leading citizens. "Through him and through its respect for him," the Bernsteins continued, "all of Richmond that ‘counted’ showed how much it thought of the Richmond Jews. But neither Rabbi Calisch nor any other Jew was invited to join" the city’s leading social organizations. While "the well-born Jews did receive the outward forms of acceptance …, they would have been less than human if they did not, however unostentatiously, yearn for full social acceptance in the very circles which treated them civilly by distantly." Meanwhile, the Bernsteins discovered that Richmond’s leading Jewish citizens practiced, in turn, "a polite but firm form of exclusion of Jews whose ancestry was not so deeply rooted in the Old Dominion."138

    Although the racial and religious attacks on Jews by rural southerners undoubtedly helped to reinforce social isolation, John Higham concluded that in most areas, "Discrimination had been aimed at the social and economic Jew, not at Judaism."139 Underlining this theory of the independent development of the two forms of anti-Semitism is the fact that unlike social discrimination, which increased steadily between the 1870s and the 1920s, he racially and religiously motivated anti-Jewish attacks erupted and receded alternately. Furthermore, "the two hostilities had their strongest impact in different places." Ideological anti-Semitism "was most widespread and in many ways most intense in the small town culture of the South and West, where the local Jews were usually not regarded as foreigners or outsiders. A product of status rivalries in an urban middle class, discrimination rested on foundations much more tangible than the specters that sometimes haunted the rural imagination."140

    The years between 1900 and 1915 witnessed the emergence of the South as the most nativist, most defensively American section of the country. While the movement toward rabid xenophobia must be described as an intensification rather than as a reversal of past attitudes, for southerners were clearly armed with all the weapons of ideological and social nativism before 1900, the vocality and unanimity of southerners on the subject by 1915 can only be described as surprising. The rapid growth of nativism in the South, as we have seen, resulted from the combination of a racial intolerance, religious provincialism, and a consciousness of tradition that were uniquely southern, and a social instability that was compounded by an economic crisis. For the most part, these same factors were responsible for maintaining the South in its position of leadership in the nation’s most extreme nativistic crusade during the next decade.

Notes

1. Manufacturers’ Record, XXIX (1896), 307.

2. Walter L. Fleming, "Immigraton to the Southern States," Political Science Quarterly, XX (1905), 279.

3. Walter L. Fleming, "Immigration and the Negro Problem," The World To-Day, XII (1907), 96.

4. Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 9, 1905, 4; ibid., Novembr 12, 1905, 4.

5. Manufacturers’ Record, L (1906), 439-40; ibid., 278.

6. Rowland T. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes Toward Immigration, 1865-1914," Journal of Southern History, XVII (1951) 349-50, 355, 357-58.

7. Manufacturers' Record, XLVII (1905), 497.

8. Manufacturers’ Record, XLV (1904), 465; ibid., LI (1907), 551-52.

9. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 349.

10. Robert DeCourcey Ward, "Immigration and the South," Atlantic Monthly, XCVI (1905), 217.

11. Emily Fogg Meade, "Italian Immigration to the South," South Atlantic Quarterly, IV (1905), 217.

12. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 5.

13. Manufacturers’ Record, LII, Pt. 2 (1907), No. 18, 49-50.

14. Ibid., XLVIII (1905), 9.

15. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 350; Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 7.

16. Ibid., 10-11.

17. Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, December 17, 1905, 4; Manufacturers’ Record, LIV (1908), No. 13, 39; ibid., L (1906), 201.

18. Ibid., LII Pt. 1, (1907), 64.

19. Ibid., L (1906), 278.

20. Ibid., XLVIII (1905), 6.

21. Virginian-Pilot, June 13, 1905, 4; Times-Dispatch, November 5, 1905, 4.

22. Manufacturers’ Record, LXIV (1913), N. 5, 57-58.

23. Times-Dispatch, August 13, 1914, 4.

24. Fleming, "Immigration to the Southern States," 283.

25. Robert W. Vincent, "Successful Immigrants in the South," World’s Work, XVII (November 1908), 10911.

26. Manufacturers’ Record, XLV (1904), 465; ibid., XLVIII (1905), 5.

27. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 5.

28. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 331; Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 10.

29. Nels Anderson, "Petersburg, A Study of a Colony of Czechoslovakian Farmers in Virginia," in Edmund deS. Brunner, ed., Immigrant Farmers and Their Children (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1929), 210-12.

30. Manufacturers’ Record, LII, Pt. 2 (1908), No. 25, 82-83.

31. Virginian-Pilot, January 4, 1899, 4; ibid., June 24, 1905, 4.

32. Ibid., June 14, 1905, 4.

33. Ward, "Immigration and the South," 616.

34. Manufacturers’ Record, LX (1911), No. 1, 53.

35. Meade, "Italian Immigration to the South," 217.

36. Cong. Record, 59 Cong., 1 Sess., 2508 (February 13, 1906).

37. Ibid., 2509.

38. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 8.

39. Ibid., 12.

40. Anderson, "Petersburg," 209-12.

41. "Reports of the Immigration Commission," Senate Docs., 61 Cong., 2 Sess., LXIX (Serial No. 5668), (1909-10), 165-66.

42. Virginian-Pilot, October 7, 1899, 4.

43. Ibid., May 26, 1905, 4; ibid., August 10, 1905, 2.

44. Ward, "Immigration and the South," 614.

45. Fleming, "Immigration to the Southern States," 291.

46. Ward, "Immigration and the South," 616.

47. Virginian-Pilot, February 26, 1905, 4.

48. Ibid., March 18, 1905, 4; ibid., May 23, 1905, 4.

49. Ibid., April 18, 1905, 4.

50. Fleming, "Immigration to the Southern States," 291; Meade, "Italians Immigration to the South," 217.

51. Alfred Holt Stone, "The Italian Cotton Grower: The Negro’s Problem," South Atlantic Quarterly, IV (1905), 44.

52. Ward, "Immigration and the South," 612; Vincent, "Successful Immigrants in the South," 10911.

53. Manufacturers’ Record, XLV (1904), 465; see also ibid., LX (1911), No 1, 53.

54. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 344, 349-50, 353.

55. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 5.

56. Ibid., 11.

57. Ibid., 10.

58. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 350; Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 11.

59. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 11.

60. Virginian-Pilot, April 14, 1905, 4.

61. Ibid., February 9, 1905, 4.

62. "Reports of the Immigration Commission," Senate Docs., 61 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 633, XVIII (Serial No. 5679), 459.

63. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVIII (1905), 12.

64. Ibid., 7, 12.

65. Virginian-Pilot, November 5, 1904, 4.

66. Anderson, "Petersburg," 194.

67. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 348.

68. Fleming, "Immigration and the Negro Problem," 96-97.

69. Virginian-Pilot, September 24, 1894, 4.

70. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1865-1925 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 169.

71. Manufacturers’ Record, LI (1907), 40.

72. Ward, "Immigration and the South," 614.

73. Fleming, "Immigration to the Southern States," 294.

74. Fleming, "Immigration and the Negro Problem," 96-97.

75. Ibid.

76. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 331.

77. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 357-58.

78. Fleming, "Immigration to the Southern States," 296-97.

79. Manufacturers’ Record, LI (1907), 714.

80. Ibid., LII, Pt. 2 (1907), No. 18, 49-50.

81. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 341, 357-58.

82. Manufacturers’ Record, XLV (1904), 465.

83. Virginian-Pilot, December 7, 1904, 4; ibid., December 16, 1904, 4; Times-Dispatch, February 11, 1905, 4.

84. Fleming, "Immigration to the Southern States," 290.

85. Virginian-Pilot, February 17, 1905, 4.

86. Times-Dispatch, November 5, 1905, 4.

87. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVII (1905), 497.

88. Manufacturers’ Record, LIII, Pt. 1 (1908), No. 5, 41.

89. Ibid., LIV (1908), No 13, 39; ibid., LVI (1909), No. 4, 53-54.

90. Ibid., XLVII (1905), 497.

91. Ward, "Immigration and the South," 615.

92. Meade, "Italian Immigration to the South," 217.

93. Fleming, "Immigration to the Southern States," 296-97; Cong. Rec., 59 Cong., 1 Sess., 2508 (Febrary 13, 1906).

94. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 348.

95. Cong. Rec., 62 Cong., 2 Sess., 4974-75 (April 18, 1912).

96. Manufacturers’ Record, LXIV (1913), No. 5, 57-58.

97. Virginian-Pilot, December 7, 1904, 4.

98. Ibid., January 19, 1905, 4.

99. Virginian-Pilot, March 15, 1905, 4.

100. Ibid., March 5, 1908, 6.

101. Cong. Rec., 59 Cong., 1 Sess., 2507 (February 13, 1906); Manufacturers’ Record, LX (December 28, 1911), 47, 52. These are Swanson’s words.

102. Ibid., LII, Pt. 2 (1907), No. 18, 49-50; ibid., No. 25, 82-83.

103. Manufacturers’ Record, L (1906), 201.

104. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 334-35.

105. Manufacturers’ Record, XLIX (1906), 578-79.

106. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 343.

107. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVII (1905), 497; Joshua W. Caldwell, A Memorial Volume (Nashville: Brandon, 1909), 197-98.

108. Virginia Genera Assembly, House Journal, 1908, 428.

109. Manufacturers’ Record, XLVII (1905), 497.

110. Cong. Rec., 54 Cong., 2 Sess., 247 (December 17, 1896), 1677 (February 9, 1897); Higham, Strangers in the Land, 167.

111. Cong. Rec., 62 Cong., 2 Sess., 3535 (March 18, 1912). In 1909, when the organization’s ntonal president was F. W. Alexander of Oak Grove, Virginia, the Order had resolved, "since our worthy national president has so ably called attention to this important question, of such vital interest and consequence to every good American, … that we … urge upon Congress and reaffirm our belief in the enactment of a properly applied illiteracy test, and increased head tax, and such other measures as will restrict and sift our undesirable and less assimilative aliens." "Reports of the Immigration Commission," Senate Docs., 61 Cong., 3 Sess., No. 764, XLI (Serial No. 581), 324-25.

112. Cong. Rec., 62 Cong., 3 Sess., 864 (December 18, 1912), 3318 (February 18, 1913).

113. Beyond Tom Watson’s irresponsible characterizations of "the Roman Catholic Hierarchy" as "the Deadliest Menace to our Liberties and our Civilization" and occasional references in the southern press to "ecclesiastical plots," there is no evidence of serious or active anti-Catholicism in the South. Few if any southern Catholics suffered physically or socially from such attacks. On the other hand, in the early 1890s debt ridden farmers had attacked and destroyed the businesses of a gret many Jewish merchants in rural Louisiana and Mississippi. As suppliers of seed, tools and other farm necessities on credit, with the customer’s land the usual security, the Jewish entrepreneurs often accumulated hundreds of liens and mortgages. For lack of a better scapegoat, many southerners came to blame Jewish merchants for the failure of the southern agricultural system. But as Professor Thomas D. Clark concluded in a study of "The Post Civil War Economy in the South," though "merchants had committed countless sins againt real Southern agricultural progress, [chiefly by facilitating] the one-crop system of agriculture, … he was never an originator of anything [but only] the most direct means by which the lien laws were made to work as a source of credit and banking for his community…. Staple agriculture and the lien laws were chief offendes." Thomas D. Clark, "The Post-Civil War Economy in the South," in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, Jews in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1973), 167-68.

114. Anderson, "Petersburg," 198-99.

115. Richmond Dispatch, August 28, 1890, 2.

116. Leonrd Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, Jews in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1973), 9.

117. Ibid., 18.

118. E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1947), 203; Dinnerstein and Palsson, Jews in the South, 16-17.

119. Stanley F. Chyet, "Ludwig Lewisohn in Charleston (1892-1903)," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, LIV (March 1965), 299, 303.

120. John Higham, "Social Discrimination Against Jews in America," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, XL (1957), 25.

121. Ibid, 26.

122. Harry L. Golden, Jewish Roots in the Carolinas, A Pattern of American Philo-Semitism (Charlotte: The Carolina Press, 1955), 47. It is important to note that the Jewish merchant took care to limit his relationship with the black community to that of businessman and customer. Southern Jews were well aware that their own social position depended largely on their conformity to southern mores. In fact, Harry Golden concuded that "As the merchant prospered he identified himself mor and more with the white middle class, and eventually assumed the attitudes and often the prejudices of the white majority." Ibid.

123. Dinnerstein and Palsson, Jews in the South, 18.

124. Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 334.

125. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 418-19.

126. Berthoff, "Southern Attitudes," 346. The quotation is from a 1907 resolution of the South Carolina branch of the organization.

127. Leonard Dinnerstein, "Atlanta in the Progressive Era: A dreyfus Affair in Georgia," in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds., Jews in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1973), 178-79.

128. Cash, The Mind of the South, 338.

129. Harry L. Golden, "Jew and Gentile in the New South," Commentary, XX (1955), 407.

130. Dinnerstein, "Atlanta in the Progressive Era," 190.

131. Not even the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a newspaper which consistently praised the state’s Jewish citizens, raised doubts abot Frank’s guilt at the time of his arrest or trial, although following the lynching of Frank in 1915 the paper stated its belief "that Frank's conviction was the result of a prejudice against the prisoner." Times-Dispatch, August 25, 1915, 4.

132. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 186. The italics are Watson's.

133. Higham, "Social Discrimination Against Jews," 30.

134. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 286.

135. Higham, "Social Discrimination Against Jews," 30-31.

136. Times-Dispatch, October 15, 1905, 4.

137. Times-Dispatch, December 2, 1905, 4.

138. David and Adele Bernstein, "Slow Revolution in Richmond, Va.: A New Pattern in the Making," in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds., Jews in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1973), 255-56.

139. Higham, "Social Discrimination Against Jews," 30.

140. Ibid., 31-32.

Bibliographical Note

As a continuation of a study on the same topic for an earlier period, this paper makes occasional use of passages and information from the earlier work where those statements are still applicable. The author has also used protions of a paper on "Southern Anti-Semitism, 1890-1925". John Higham’s Strangers in the Land, the standard work on American nativism for the period 1860-1925, and Rowland T. Berthoff’s article on "Southern Attitudes Toward Immigration, 1865-1914" were invaluable as guides to general interpretaions and bibliography. Leonard Dinnerstein’s and Mary Dale Palsson’s recent collection of articles on Jews in the South provided valuable guidance for the section on southern anti-Semitism.

While immigration and restriction were by no means the most important or widely discussed issues facing Virginians and southerners in the early years of the twentieth century, the efforts of southern railroads, industrialists, and government officials to attract farm workers and industrial labor into the economically deprived region did provide the author with evidence on the type of immigrant desired. The Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and the Manufacturers’ Record, whose editor Richard Edmunds was a ntive Virginian, were all active proponents of southern economic progress and were helpful sources, but other state and regional newspapers failed to deal with the issue in any depth. Other valuable sources were Nels Anderson’s intensive study, based on personal interviews, of one of Virginia’s few foreign communities in Immigrant Farmers and Their Children, and the massive Dillingham Immigration Commission Reports, which shed some light on the few foreign industrial laborers in the state.

This study was updated and expanded in New Immigrants in the New South.

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