Summing up the Know Nothings’ success and tactics, the scholar A. Charlee Carlson has argued that the party erected a vast conspiracy “along traditional lines” to turn Americans against the notion that the country welcomed the world’s destitute. “An evil force was threatening to subvert the values of the United States, its agents had been detected, and brave heroes were needed to crush the threat,” Carlson wrote. “The nativist version cast Catholics and immigrants as the villains and American voters as the heroes. The Know-Nothings were masterful at turning this basic plotline into a compelling drama.”
The invasion theme saturated much of the country’s anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the remainder of the 19th century. In the 1870s, for instance, California newspapers made a habit of running panicked headlines about a so-called “Chinese invasion.” Sinophobic media coverage continued at a steady clip for years, eventually feeding the nativist rage that led to deadly anti-Chinese pogroms like the three-day riots that killed four people in San Francisco in 1877.
Reece Jones, a geographer and author of several books about borders, documented the intense campaign of discrimination Chinese immigration during the second half of the 19th century in his 2021 book White Borders. After years of hysteria that framed Chinese immigration constituted an “invasion” and an effort to turn the West into a “Chinese colony,” Jones wrote, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from immigrating to the country for 10 years, becoming the first piece of legislation that openly cited race and nationality to restrict immigration.
Even as the 19th century came to an end, the invasion trope — and the state repression and anti-immigrant violence it fueled — proved remarkably resilient.
In the early 20th century, several popular books likened immigration to an invasion. Journalist and statistician Frank Julian Warne’s The Immigrant Invasion, published in 1913, blamed foreign-born newcomers for much of the country’s problems, reserving special ire for Slavs and Italians. In contrast to the supposed “invasions of other centuries and of other countries,” Warne argued, “the present-day immigration to the United States is not by organized armies coming to conquer by the sword.” He went on to later decry that “the foreign-born element has already entered into the racial strain of the native population.”
Three years later, the conservationist Madison Grant released The Passing of the Great Race: Or, a Racial Basis for European History, an exhaustive, pseudoscientific tome that, in part, frames the history of human movement as a series of invasions. In writing the book, Grant hoped to make the case against non-Nordic immigration to the United States. Grant’s Passing of the Great Race became a foundational text for white supremacists and eugenicists, years later even prompting German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to write the author a fawning letter describing the book as his “Bible.”
