One factor has been the recent invasion of the smaller western and southern towns by Jewish retail merchants. These are disliked and opposed by their native American competitors for purely commercial reasons.
These facts seem to me erroneous; there have always been Jewish merchants and peddlers throughout the country, and they have always had Christian competitors; probably they have merely been a point of vantage for the aroused prejudices of the group. Dr. Mecklin says:
[82]The Klan insists, in the published statements of its ideals, upon complete religious toleration while in actual practise it encourages boycotts of Catholic and Jew in business and social relations. [83]The eternal quarrel of the Klan with the Jew and the Negro is that mental and physical differences seem to have conspired to place them in groups entirely to themselves.... The Negro is granted a place in American society only upon his willingness to accept a subordinate position. The Jew is tolerated largely because native Americanism cannot help itself. The Jew is disliked because of the amazing tenacity with which he resists absolute Americanization, a dislike that is not unmingled with fear; the Negro is disliked, because he is considered essentially an alien and unassimilable element in society.
4.
The Klan has now passed the zenith of its aggressiveness and its influence. The campaign of exposure, while it made thousands of members, also made thousands of enemies and robbed the Klan of the secrecy which was so essential an element of its strength. Many of its members lost interest, others were positively estranged by certain methods and ideals of the organization. The trials for murder at Mer Rouge, La., brought the Klan into bad odor generally. Most important of all, the Klan went into politics, and in this followed exactly the cycle of the Know-Nothings and A. P. A.’s—secrecy, growth, propaganda, politics, enemies, decline. In 1924 the Klan was an element in the national conventions of the two major parties. The Republicans considered planks opposing and favoring the organization and finally took no action. The Democrats had to take up the issue because of the movement to nominate as their presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York, and a professing Catholic. While Mr. Smith had political supporters in his own state of every religious denomination, still the entire strength of the Klan was thrown against him. At the same time, the many Irish Catholics belonging to the Democratic party resented the attempt of the Klan to dictate the nomination and introduced a resolution attacking the Klan by name. The conflict of that convention is now historic, and resulted in thoroughly disorganizing the Democratic party for the ensuing campaign.
Finally, the passage of the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924 robbed the Klan of its chief reason for existence, its most potent argument. Immigration was abruptly cut down. Not only that, but its national origin was totally altered so as to favor the peoples of northern and western Europe, and to keep out the Italian Catholics and Russian Jews. It is no longer possible to stimulate fear or hatred on such a large scale again, now that immigration is no longer a large factor in American life, and the group integration is once more proceeding at its accustomed rate.
5.
The anti-immigration movement must not be regarded as a result of the Klan but as a parallel phenomenon, with the same motives and philosophy. The original political theory and economic situation, by which all immigrants were welcomed into the United States to help build up the country and to become full Americans has been slowly altering. The first law of limitation, passed in 1882, and followed up by later amendments, merely excluded convicts, persons affected with contagious diseases, persons likely to become public charges, and similar individuals for individual reasons. Other legislation of economic trend excluded Chinese and later Japanese laborers, and contract labor. In 1917 the demand to limit the numbers of common labor, voiced by the American Federation of Labor, met the desire to limit numbers and to select racial groups, and the literacy test was embodied in the law, excluding all who could not read or write in any language. But this was satisfactory to neither the friends nor foes of immigration; it was merely a temporary device.
In May 1921 a temporary law was passed limiting the number of each nation to enter the United States annually to 3% of natives of that nation residing here in 1910. This limited the total immigration at once from the 1,285,349 of 1907, the peak year, to a total of 357,803. This total is in addition to immigrants from Canada, Mexico, Newfoundland, Cuba and Central and South America; it does not deduct the emigrants who often amount to as many or more than those entering the country. It is simply a means of cutting down numbers and altering proportions. It is directly a result of Klan preachments, of Nordic theories, of the reaction of the native, gentile, Protestant American to the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the nation, and to the need of revising his mental stereotypes of the United States. He must grow to think of his nation as a nation of many elements, many beliefs, many backgrounds, most of them different from his own—to him America is a Protestant country, a white man’s country, a gentile country, and he intends that it shall remain so.
Therefore the permanent immigration bill enacted in May, 1924, changed the percentage from three to two, and the date on which the quota is to be estimated from 1910 to 1890. The result of this double change is to alter radically the racial and national composition of the immigration stream and hence the total character of the United States. As Chairman Albert Johnson of the House Committee on Immigration, after whom the bill was named, phrased its double purpose: