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.The association threw its support behindefforts to eliminate the contract system and substitute public schools for thechurch-supported ones.In spite of the widespread hostility to Catholicism among non-Catholics,the appeal of the association was limited.The movement crested in the1890s and then fell apart.Other issues were more important to Americanvoters in the 1890s, and the APA found itself plagued by internal disputes.Republicans used the APA, but they discovered that it was not important po-litically.Anti-Catholicism took other forms after 1895.In addition to the religious prejudice directed at Catholics, hostility to-ward Jews grew in the late nineteenth century.Anti-Semitism was aggra-vated by the economic depressions that plagued Americans, on and off, from1873 through 1896.The German Jews, who arrived in the United States inthe middle of the nineteenth century, prospered despite the existing preju-dices because there were few, if any, economic barriers to those who were en-terprising.Their prosperity in the face of widespread unemployment and de-spair reinforced the old Shylock image of a cunning and avaricious Jewdemanding his pound of flesh.One southern patrician noted, for example, it is quite the fashion to caricature the Jew as exacting his interest down tothe last drachma. He then pointed out, perhaps half in envy and half in re-spect, that in the hardest of times the Jew  has money to lend if not to burnEthnic Conflict and Immigration Restriction 79and before he is ready to execute his will he owns the grocery store, themeat-market, the grog-shop, the planing-mill, the newspaper, the hotel andthe bank. The extremist fringe in the free-silver movement saw the Jew asthe archenemy foisting an international gold standard on beleaguered Amer-ican farmers who were fighting for silver,  the people s money.The presence of east European Jews, who started coming to the UnitedStates in the 1870s, aggravated existing anti-Semitic feelings; and as alreadynoted, all Jews faced growing social and economic discrimination.As Jewishimmigration from eastern Europe increased, anti-Semitism helped to kindlethe movement for immigration restriction.In 1906 a member of PresidentTheodore Roosevelt s immigration commission told an investigator that the movement toward restriction in all of its phases is directed against Jewishimmigration.Alongside religious antagonisms, immigrants also confronted economicconflicts.Many workers opposed immigrants on the grounds that they de-pressed wages and were potential strikebreakers.The Knights of Labor calledfor a ban on contract labor, as did a number of labor leaders.Organized labor,with a high proportion of foreign-born workers, was reluctant to supportgeneral immigration restriction, but labor leaders were becoming more crit-ical of immigration in the 1880s and in the economically depressed 1890s.In 1897 the American Federation of Labor (AFL), America s largest laborunion, finally supported a literacy test as a means of limiting immigration.Although employers needed workers for the nation s growing industries, attimes they were uneasy about immigration.Labor disturbances, fairly com-mon in the late nineteenth century, were frequently blamed on foreign agi-tators.In 1886 policemen broke up a peaceful protest meeting in Chicago.Be-fore the crowd could be dispersed, however, a bomb exploded, killing sevenpolicemen.Although no one knew who threw the explosive, the press blamedforeigners.One newspaper declared,  The enemy forces are not American[but] rag-tag and bob-tail cutthroats of Beelzebub from the Rhine, the Danube,the Vistula, and the Elbe. Another said the German anarchists accused ofthe crime were  long-haired, wild-eyed, bad-smelling, atheistic, reckless for-eign wretches, who never did an honest hour s work in their lives.Especially important in the growth of nativism was Americans awarenessof the increased immigration from southern and eastern Europe.These newimmigrants were considered undesirable, unassimilable, and hostile or in-different to American values.Stereotyped images of Slavs, Italians, and Jewspredominated.A retired superintendent who had worked in the Pennsylva-nia steel mills from the 1880s through the 1930s recalled,  Racism was verydistinct then.We all called them Huns, Dagos and Polacks. To the na-tivist, Italians suggested an image of crime and violence.As a Baltimore80 Ethnic Conflict and Immigration Restrictionnewspaper put it,  The disposition to assassinate in revenge for a fanciedwrong is a marked trait in the character of this impulsive and inexorablerace [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]