John Higham and Immigration History

LEONARD DINNERSTEIN AND DAVID M. REIMERS

JOHN HIGHAM BURST onto the intellectual scene in 1955 with the publication of Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860¨1925, a tale of a nation that held out the possibilities of assimilation and equality for all white men. Unfortunately, he argued, as David Hollinger has so aptly observed, they lost their way after the Civil War as the "tension between the nation and its demographic parts splintered the country."2 No longer did WASPS believe that all white immigrants could be assimilated into our society and, gradually, we began not only to castigate foreigners but by the 1920s, to exclude them as well. Higham regarded the Immigration Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924 as indications that the principles which guided the United States in the past had been subverted by Americans who were unwilling to share their largesse or values with non-Protestants.