Progressives and immigration

While the IRL and other progressive associations were similar in their

organizational approaches and the rationales for solving perceived problems, their stance towards new immigration varied significantly. By analyzing their reactions to urbanization, it can be disclosed how individuals’ agency and organizations’

reliance on different racial rationales could influence proposed policies. During the progressive era, the rapidly growing cities were a locus where reformers bundled their efforts to try to solve a multitude of what they perceived as society’s most pressing problems caused by rising immigration figures, migration from rural to urban areas and the incipient First Great Migration. Jacob Riis wrote in 1890 that

in the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are hot-beds of the epidemics […]; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year.⁴⁶

Sanitary and living conditions were indeed disastrous because municipal

administrations were often incapable of providing basic services and regulations for the growing urban centres. In their attempt to gain attention for these problems, however, Riis’s and muckraking journalists’ depictions of tenements or ‘slums’ as impenetrable jungle breeding disease and immorality reified stereotypes about immigrants. The immigrant and American inhabitants of ‘the slum’ alike epitomized developments in urban centres eluding state control which were assumed to threaten and destabilize the social and moral order, often described in racialized metaphors in the journalists’ “domestic travelogues”. Thus, progressive discourses on

urbanization and immigration should not be interpreted exclusively as a critique of policies and social conditions: they also described possible fields of political intervention to make society’s fringe areas accessible for state control.⁴⁷

46 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, 1890 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 23. Riis campaigned for improving living conditions in New York by means of lectures, exhibitions of photographs, and model

tenements: James B. Lane, Jacob A. Riis and the American City (London: Kennikat Press, 1974).

47 Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 123–87; David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (New York: Cambridge University Press,

As a reaction to accelerating urbanization, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald and other reformers created settlement houses to ameliorate living conditions. Building on European predecessors, progressives created these centres in major American cities, mostly in the Northeast; their number grew from six in 1891 to over four hundred in 1910.⁴⁸ Taking essential necessities such as improvement of sewer systems, waste disposal, medical services and hygienic condition as starting point, settlement houses provided communities with impulses to fight for political reform and municipal services. Reform attempts were not limited to the individual or community level, but soon spread to issues of state or federal legislation.⁴⁹ The social workers’ approach was two-fold: believing in positive environmentalism, they counted on the benign effect of altered conditions on individuals. These efforts, on the other hand, had to be augmented by educational endeavours to enable citizens to take care of themselves and their community. Problems were investigated and quantified by scientific means, remedies modelled and disseminated among the public to create political pressure. Accordingly, methods to ameliorate sanitary conditions and public health were not limited to new architectural designs, construction of public bathhouses or the provision of medical care. They also included educational efforts to disseminate knowledge about diseases and their

1989), pp. 46–93. For the metaphor of “domestic travelogues” and the link between imperialism and reform, see Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, pp. 121–27. For muckraking, see for example Robert Miraldi (ed.), The Muckrakers: Evangelical Crusaders (Westport: Praeger, 2000). For a similar interpretation of British urban reform, see Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003). For the claim that much of the progressive reform urge stemmed from the urban masses, see John D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: Norton, 1973).

48 For the transatlantic connections between American and European progressives, see James T.

Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870 - 1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909-1926 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

49 Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 3–25. For more recent accounts see Ruth H. Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Molly Ladd-Taylor, ‘Hull House Goes to

Washington: Women and the Children’s Bureau’, in Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era, ed. by Nancy S. Dye and Noralee Frankel (Lexington: University Press of

Kentucky, 1991), pp. 110–26; Rivka S. Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For the Social Center

movement, see Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), pp. 48–86.

transmission by visiting nurses, physicians and social workers.⁵⁰ The settlement movement evidently reveals one of progressivism’s central concepts: the effort to turn working-class Americans and immigrants into responsible, politically

empowered and productive citizens, thereby trying to reshape and remodel others after the middle class’s self-image. Thus, “the colonial metaphor of teaching the

‘native’ how to behave” took a new shape in urban centres, Leon Fink has argued.⁵¹ Many of the reformers involved in the settlements were women, attempting to overcome the era’s gender restrictions by applying their newly gained academic knowledge in society. At the same time, they reinstated gender stereotypes by turning to aspects of progressivism which emphasized education and self-sacrifice for the common weal.⁵² Most of the residents in the settlements were young upper- or middle-class idealists with a college education who acquired occupational experience in social work. In their approach to racial hierarchies, reformers were divided in coping with the various social conflicts in immigrant, working-class and black neighbourhoods. Many settlement houses reproduced the pattern of

segregation by establishing separate facilities for African Americans. Concerning reformers’ attitude towards immigrants, earlier historiographic writings have emphasized their inclusive work. Lissak, in contrast, has conclusively pointed out that even the most liberal and anti-restriction settlement workers believed in Anglo-Saxon superiority. At best, reformers’ concepts allowed for selected immigrant cultural contributions, their main effort aimed at elevating them to the American civilization’s reputedly superior level.⁵³ The settlement movement’s prominent figures’ attitudes towards immigrants were not only condescending, but could also include restrictionist positions, as the example of Robert A. Woods demonstrates.

Boston’s most prominent social worker did not only believe in the beneficial effect of segregating the chronic paupers, prostitutes and criminals from the ‘worthy’ poor,

50 Boyer, pp. 220–31; Daniel E. Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 2–15; Kraut, pp.

105–65; Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 69–128; John F. McClymer, War and Welfare: Social Engineering in America, 1890-1925 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980), 84: Contributions in American History, pp. 12–29; Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 91–

236.

51 Fink, p. 24. See also Ziegler-McPherson, pp. 6–19.

52 McClymer, pp. 12–29; McDonagh, pp. 162–69.

53 Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 33-39, 92-98, 128-130; Higham, Strangers, pp.

116–23; Lissak, Pluralism, pp. 25-47, 157-181; Stromquist, 150-152.

but also in a reasonable limitation of immigration due to the problems in

assimilating those already in the US. Consequently, Woods supported the IRL’s work and became a member of its executive committee in 1911.⁵⁴

A similar attitude was epitomized in Joseph Lee’s many reform activities.

Lee, a friend of Woods and one of the IRL’s most important officials, engaged in urban reform and earned other progressives’ respect as “father of the playground movement”.⁵⁵ According to Lee, supervised playgrounds could instill social skills and democratic values in disadvantaged children while simultaneously fostering “a quasi-military discipline” for boys in “hard, organized play” and “maternal

instincts” in girls. Playgrounds aimed at both American and immigrant children, teaching them leadership and responsibility, preventing juvenile delinquency and simultaneously institutionalizing community interaction.⁵⁶ While his vision of the playground incorporated the assimilation of immigrants, Lee was also an adamant restrictionist and believed in eugenics. In letters written in 1907 to representatives of the Russel Sage foundation, Lee argued that all efforts to “establish a democratic standard” were to be in vain if the arrival of the “weak and vicious” was not stopped since ‘racial differences’ were insurmountable. “[T]he largest and by far most important problem as to the causes of adverse social conditions”, Lee wrote, “is the problem of race selection”. In their “foolish American optimism”, reformers

assumed that “the laws of heredity were not made for the American and have no

54 Davis, pp. 91–92; Lissak, Pluralism, pp. 4–5; Solomon, pp. 140–43; Robert A. Woods, ‘The Total Drift’, in The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study, ed. by Robert A. Woods (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899), pp. 288–312 (pp. 291–96); Robert A. Woods, ‘Assimilation: A Two-Edged Sword’, in Americans in Process: A Settlement Study, ed. by Robert A. Woods (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1902), pp. 356–83 (pp. 370–72); IRL Records (338, 1027); IRL Records (fMS 1050-1052), Series II: record books of the IRL, Minutes of the meetings of the executive committee of the IRL, 1894-1920, 3 volumes, 6 October 1911 (hereafter: IRL Minutes).

55 Dinner for Joseph Lee, 1936, Lee Papers, I, B, Carton 5. One laudatory publication also called him the “godfather of the playground”: Lee Papers, I, C, Carton 9. Playgrounds have been mostly

analyzed as means of social control in the progressive era, as attempts to educate immigrant and working-class children after the middle-class reformers’ model, enforcing gender distinctions and ideas about citizenship: Boyer, pp. 242–51; Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981);

Cary Goodman, Choosing Sides: Playground and Street Life on the Lower East Side (New York:

Schocken Books, 1979). For more recent accounts that challenge these assumptions, see Ocean Howell, ‘Play Plays: Urban Land Politics and Playgrounds in the United States, 1900-1930’, Journal of Urban History, 34.6 (2008), 961–94; Sarah J. Peterson, ‘Voting for Play: The Democratic Potential of Progressive Era Playgrounds’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 3.2 (2004), 145–75.

Peterson, however, almost completely neglects Lee’s racial ideas that influenced his notions of citizenship and democracy.

56 Joseph Lee, Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy: with an Introduction by Jacob A. Riis (New York: Macmillan, 1902); Joseph Lee, ‘Play as an Antidote to Civilization’, The Playground, 5.4 (1911), 110–26; Joseph Lee, Play in Education (New York: Macmillan, 1915).

jurisdiction over him”. All efforts of urban reform, Lee concluded, were “like trying to pump out the vessel without stopping the leak” if immigration would not be restricted.⁵⁷

Other IRL members also interpreted urban problems as consequences of racial difference and recreations of the immigrants’ ‘normal environment’. In the League’s opinion, new immigrants could not be assimilated since they lived “in colonies by themselves, speaking their own language and keeping all their own customs, unaffected by the higher civilization around them”. These ideas and customs were reflected in “the morals and in the sanitary condition of our larger cities”; supposedly a racial trait rather than a result of inadequate municipal regulation.⁵⁸ Prescott Hall reminded readers that immigrants came from

the degraded, ignorant, lawless and pauper classes. […] These people go on living in much the same way as at home, they form oftentimes local foreign communities removed as far from American citizenship in their political and social habits as the language they speak is different from English.⁵⁹

In contrast to the settlement movement, the IRL thus regarded new immigrants as incapable of improvement or assimilation due to assumed differences in racial dispositions. In this logic, the situation in the cities could only be improved if immigration was restricted; the efforts of settlement workers would be meaningless if more new immigrants were to replace those that had been assimilated

successfully, as Ward regularly explained to social workers.⁶⁰ Both interpretations of urbanization thus believed in a stronger role of the federal state, restrictionists in regard of immigration regulation, settlement workers for improving living

conditions. Simultaneously, both sides’ aim to reform their fellow individuals was rooted in racial rationales: while settlement workers and liberal progressives acted upon precepts that led them to assume that immigrants only had to learn how to

57 Lee to Robert W. DeForest, 2 February 1907, Lee to John M. Glenn, 20 April 1907; Lee Papers. In these letters, Lee made the case for a scientific investigation of immigration to be conducted by the foundation. For the Sage foundation’s role in financing playgrounds, see Ruth Crocker, Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Roberta J. Park, ‘”Boys’ Clubs are Better than Policemen’s Clubs”: Endeavours by Philantrophists, Social Reformers, and Others to Prevent Juvenile Crime, the late 1800s to 1917’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 24.6 (2007), 749–75 (pp. 763–65).

58 IRL Records (1116, folder 2); IRL, The Present Aspect.

59 Hall, “To the Editor”, Brookline Chronicle, 28 March 1896.

60 Ward frequently addressed the Boston school of charity, later the Simmons School of Social Work, whose members he found “much interested in the further restriction of immigration”: IRL Minutes, 25 April 1905; see also 13 April 1908, 8 April 1909, 16 June 1911, 9 May 1912; Solomon, p. 140.

become American, the League aimed at remembering their fellow Anglo-Saxons of their responsibility to invest into the protection of the race. In order to have other citizens identify as Anglo-Saxons concerned with the racial composition of the country’s population, the League had to expound the asserted racial difference and the encompassing threats to the nation’s racial homogeneity in detail.

3.3 The IRL as progressive movement