THE INVADERS, inevitably perhaps, began to fear invasion. As their imperium fell into question, foreigners began streaming into the colonizers’ homelands. The same technical innovations that made for the highest rates of overseas immigration during the late nineteenth century made it feasible for the denizens of the Ganges or the Nile to make their way to the Thames and the Seine. The frenzy of imperial conquest coincided with this backflow of dark strangers. They had come with no armies, often as impoverished refugees, who walked long distances, then boarded trains, and streamed into the ports of the Western world. Once proudly liberal and tolerant nations began to be convulsed by a rash of fear, violence, and protest against these new immigrants.
European powers had swaggered into far-off lands, carrying progress as a promise and servitude as a threat. Having transported so many of their own subjects, in reality or imaginatively, into the bush, the desert, and the jungle, and having coexisted in sweaty proximity with so-called savages, they forged tight psychic links between their own identities and those half-humans they sought to rule. Thus, when in London and Paris these colonized immigrants appeared in the market or street, they generated alarm. Had these people come with revenge in their hearts? Would they remain a foreign outpost inside the nation? Could they be assimilated? If the challenge of maintaining one’s identity abroad was in not “going native,” an inverse threat now surfaced. Would these strangers seek to alter our homes, to alter us?
In the world’s foremost empire, the heirs of the Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution began to read in publications like The Athenaeum, The Nation, and the New Statesman reports of “xenophobia” by Westerners at home. The nation itself had been convulsed by the presence of “aliens,” a masked term that referred to East European Jews. Jews had a long, turbulent history in Great Britain. After being expelled from England in 1290, they were allowed to return and achieved something close to equality by the middle of the Victorian era; the rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew who converted to Anglicanism, marked a golden age, but also presaged a reaction as intense anti-Semitism followed in his wake. That hatred and bias worsened as refugees began to arrive from Russia.
Supporters of the Romanovs had formed ultranationalist groups that terrorized Jews, who were often referred to as a “foreign nation.” After the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, a rash of pogroms broke out in Russia. These were often festive, community-building affairs in which the hosts drank, feasted, and gazed on in amusement as Jews were tortured. Ludicrous fantasies of Jewish world domination, most infamously in the 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, encouraged vigilante violence. With no protection from the state, Russian Jews took what they could and left en masse, heading for seemingly tolerant havens like Great Britain and France.
Before 1880, Jews had made up only 0.4 percent of Britain’s population. The Russian terror resulted in the arrival of some 200,000 exiles, many of whom clustered in the East End of London. While this group of impoverished refugees hardly posed a threat to the greatest power on earth, their arrival provoked an outcry. Right-wing newspapers fulminated and waged a campaign, claiming again and again that there was an “Alien Immigrant Problem.” In 1901, the British Brothers’ League formed, a movement that mobilized working-class anger by portraying these arrivals as cheap, foreign labor. A Royal Commission was convened to look into this “problem,” and in 1903, its leading commissioner, Conservative Party member Major William Evans-Gordon, shared what he had learned after a fact-finding mission to Eastern Europe. In The Alien Immigrant, he protested—perhaps too much—that prejudice held no sway over him. Prior immigrants—Catholic or Calvinist—intermarried and became English. Here was the rub: the Hebrews would not. Just take a stroll along the East End, he suggested. It had become “a foreign colony.” The world’s most dominant colonizers had been colonized. The invaders, he warned, had been invaded.
Prime Minister Balfour agreed that the Jews could not assimilate, and so, Parliament passed restrictive legislation. The Aliens Act 1905 created new administrative structures for immigration registration and control. It was relatively ineffective but was rightly perceived by some as a breach in values, an indirect attack on Jews, and the harbinger of worse things to come. This prediction was borne out in 1914, with the passage of the more draconian Aliens Restriction Act. Incensed, Alfred Zimmern, an internationalist who later helped found the League of Nations, penned a jeremiad. Born to German-Jewish parents in Surrey, Zimmern attended Oxford and converted to Christianity; he uneasily began his essay by denying that his ancestry had anything to do with his outrage. He protested, also perhaps too much, that he was not writing as one connected to the Jewish community. Yet this was one of the most “immoral and hypocritical” pieces of legislation in memory, due to its being “purely and plainly anti-Semitic” as well as crudely anti-immigrant. Other liberals jumped in, denouncing the act as a hysterical furor and sheer intolerance. Critics pointed out that the inflated numbers of aliens the commission counted were puffed up on purpose. The numbers neglected the fact that most of these Russian Jewish migrants left; they were “trans-migrants” on their way to the United States, and when subtracted from the final tally, those added to the British population were minuscule. Data like that reinforced the conclusion that this was not an act of statecraft but simply xenophobic bias.
British Brothers’ League protest against alien immigrants, 1902
Alongside the liberals, a louder political community joined the fray. Revolutionary socialism had risen rapidly in Europe. For a decade after Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was published in 1867, there were but a few socialist agitators on street corners. However, by the first decade of the twentieth century, Labor and Socialist political parties had become commonplace. Once legal restrictions against them were lifted in 1890, the German Social Democratic Party shot forth and became a force. By 1900, French politics featured a number of Socialist and Workers parties, and in Great Britain, the British Labour Party had gathered enough support to compete with the Liberal Party.
For the followers of Marx, a different framework helped justify their support of immigrants. Socialists dreamed not of toleration and individual liberty, but rather of classless equality that crossed racial and ethnic lines. They had been sensitized to the ideological workings of nationalism, as well as the racial and ethnic scapegoating that masked economic exploitation. Early on in Britain, the cause of foreigners and Jews was taken up by parties like William Morris’s Socialist League. Joseph Finn, a one-time member of the Socialist League and a Jewish trade unionist living in the East End, argued in his 1895 pamphlet, A Voice from the Aliens, that such ideas about strangers only served to mask economic manipulation. Different immigrants and minorities around Europe were being targeted by the ruling class, precisely to divert attention. “Everywhere,” Finn wrote, “he is the scapegoat for others’ sins.” In reality, the suffering of the worker had nothing to do with these strangers. And so, when few were willing to do so, the British Labour Party stood up for Russian Jews and campaigned for mistreated Chinese workers.
However, the allegiance of the left with the cause of Jews in England came at a price. In the fevered minds of many liberals and conservatives, Karl Marx and his radical followers were Eastern European Jews, and these Jewish radicals were linked most distressingly with Anarchists. These long-bearded disrupters of the status quo seized Europe’s attention thanks to a string of dramatic terrorist bombings in Spain, France, and Britain. They included the 1894 plot to detonate the Greenwich Royal Observatory, fictionalized by Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent. For wobbly liberals in Great Britain, clamping down on “radical agitators” became a plausible way to support anti-immigrant measures without being openly anti-Semitic.
Across the English Channel, the world’s second-greatest colonial power also began to feel menaced by les étrangers, their word for strangers as well as foreigners. Along with the United States and Great Britain, France had become a favored destination for late-nineteenth-century immigrants. Initially, most newcomers arrived from Belgium, but when a wave arrived from Italy, so did trouble. On June 17, 1881, in the port city of Marseille, victorious French troops returned home after wresting control of Tunisia away from Italy. As festivities spilled out into the streets, someone claimed that derisive whistles had emanated from the Italian Club. A mob formed and commenced a “bear hunt.” Hundreds of French patriots went on a rampage against Italian immigrants; three died and more than twenty were gravely injured.
In Paris, the right-wing Paul Leroy-Beaulieu of the Collège de France defended the rioters. Between 1882 and 1889, some fifty-eight “bear hunts” took place. Meanwhile, nationalists like Leroy-Beaulieu commenced a campaign to make immigration itself a problem, a social ill that required remedies. His allies demanded that the government track all foreigners inside their borders. On October 2, 1888, a law doing so was fixed by decree. Henceforth, immigrants in France would be legally mandated to register with the police.
Anti-foreign Frenchmen soon turned their eager eyes toward the Jews. “Anti-Semitism” had a long history in France, having first been so named in 1860 by an Austrian who sought to account for Ernest Renan’s writings on Semitic peoples. As in Great Britain, the actual number of French Jews was tiny, only 60,000. Still, rage was periodically directed at them, most explosively during the 1894 trial of a Jewish French colonel accused of handing secrets to the Germans. Alfred Dreyfus’s trial for treason was a circus, and featured venomous accusations spit forth from newspapers like Edouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole. A long-standing hater of Jews in France, Drumont had five years earlier founded a militant group, the National Antisemitic League of France.
The Dreyfus affair fractured a France torn between right-wing nationalists like Drumont and liberal or leftist internationalists. After being convicted in 1896, Dreyfus’s innocence began to become more apparent and evidence of a cover-up emerged. An international outcry ensued, and the famed novelist Emile Zola penned his 1898 essay, “J’Accuse . . .!” It pointed a finger directly at government officials who refused to acknowledge new, exonerating facts. For his efforts, Zola was prosecuted and convicted of libel. He fled France. Nonetheless, the “Dreyfusards” had been mobilized.
Among them was Georges Clemenceau. The future prime minister was, at the time, the publisher of L’Aurore, the leftist newspaper that splashed Zola’s accusations onto its front page. However, Clemenceau was not new to such advocacy. In 1885, he denounced colonialism in the Chamber of Deputies and heaped scorn on racial rationales for oppression, reminding his countrymen that the Germans justified their victory over the French in these same “scientific” terms. Once he realized that Colonel Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted due to anti-Jewish bias, he spent the next eight years fighting for a full exoneration. In 1902, as the tide of public opinion turned, Clemenceau would be swept into office, thanks to his moral clarity and courage. In 1905, a coalition of pro-Dreyfusards headed by René Waldeck-Rousseau took over the French government.
Emile Zola’s 1898 letter, “J’Accuse . . .!”
Still, the terms of the debate over étrangers was harsh. If in Britain, even the British Brothers’ League tried to keep a fig leaf over their bias and deny the accusation that they had succumbed to anti-Jewish prejudice, little such effort was required in France. A radicalized group of officials and military men had learned hard lessons in the colonies and brought them home. Legions of administrators filtered back to their homelands having grown used to exerting total control over the population. Jurists in the colonies found the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” to be totally irrelevant. Soldiers, having broken taboos of violence against women and children, having imbibed the logic of incommensurate reprisals and collective punishment, looked at these foreigners and minorities in La Patrie through jaundiced eyes. Colonel Dreyfus’s lawyer, in his appeal, referred to the way that the brutal treatment of the colonized abroad had contributed to the rapid descent of liberal values at home. Foreign adventures, he implied, justified intolerance and helped to cause this anti-Semitic travesty of justice.
Others were unmoved, for an amoral logic of dehumanizing control had won them over. A former French naval officer in China and Japan named Léopold de Saussure was one. In 1899, the brother of the famed linguist published his doomsday work, Psychology of French Colonization in Its Relations with Indigenous Societies. If the French did not awaken from their Enlightenment slumber, he warned, their empire would crash. The soul of foreign races was fundamentally different. Integration was suicidal. Seven years later, Georges Leygues, the French minister of the colonies, warned of the same danger. Then, in 1910, after returning from Indochina, the French ambassador Jules Harmand joined this chorus. In his Domination and Colonization, Harmand mocked the silly evangelists who spoke of inalienable human rights. Humanitarianism was a “strange illness born of false idealism.” General Paul Azan similarly sought to disabuse his compatriots of their fluffy beliefs. Immigrants from the colonies and other lands—including that Asiatic group, the Jews—could not be afforded the same rights as Frenchmen.
The struggle over minorities and immigrants remained a rallying cry for both sides of France’s political divide. Liberals with an international focus heaped scorn on the right wing; their proposed legal restrictions, one student of international law wrote, were simply “xenophobic.” In 1902, the Frenchman Gaston Richard asserted that xenophobia was easily found in Paris. French Socialists themselves were initially torn: if impoverished foreign workers flooded the market, some worried about the effect on wages. Hadn’t Karl Marx himself warned that a “reserve army” of workers could undercut the local proletariat? Despite this concern, during their 1910 Copenhagen Congress, after much discussion, the Socialists of Europe reaffirmed their support of all immigrants as equal brothers of the global proletariat.
As the two largest Western empires struggled with minorities and immigration at home, it became clear that xenophobia described groups like the British Brothers’ League and the National Antisemitic League of France. Meanwhile, the port of destination for most of the world’s immigrants, the United States, had already been convulsed by reactionary forces. In the case of this young nation, immigration had in fact changed its ethnic composition. In 1860, the legal citizens of the country—read “white”—were 60 percent British and 35 percent German, but by 1914, after twenty million new arrivals in merely two decades, the melting pot contained descendants who were 11 percent British and 20 percent German, 30 percent Italian and Hispanic, and 34 percent Slavic. Xenophobic vitriol became focused especially on the Chinese, the so-called Yellow Peril. Anti-Chinese laws were enacted, especially in California, where legislation was so petty as to target the ponytails favored by Chinese men. Some argued that Asians were not of the same species, not Homo sapiens, and if allowed to intermarry, they would lead to an infertile hybrid. This conviction somehow coexisted with the claim that the Chinese were unusually fertile and reproduced at dangerous levels. In 1882, thanks to growing nativism, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. It halted any immigration from that country, the first American law to specifically target one ethnic group. Naturalization was also forbidden. The law, which would come to be seen as the epitome of xenophobia, was not repealed for six decades.
Anti-Chinese rally, United States, 1892
During the same period, the long-normalized violence that targeted African Americans continued. They had been subject to the largest forced migration ever recorded, some twelve million Africans brought in chains to the Americas. Their presence had powered economic growth, and made them objects of their owners’ moral depravity.
Meanwhile, the bigotry that Blacks encountered, even in Northern states, began to be openly decried by abolitionists. “Black-phobia,” Frederick Douglass wrote in 1850, “was our national epidemic.” Douglass parodied those suffering from “Colorphobia” and “Negrophobia,” drawing on analogies to cholera and hydrophobia. This illness, Douglass noted, confronted him as he walked the streets of New York and Rochester. It had ruined minds, making the afflicted shriek and recoil from phantasms of differing complexion. “Ridicule and indignation,” he advised, were the best weapons against such madness, until of course, slavery was abolished and equality prevailed.
Address given by an Imperial Wizard on “Klan Day” at the Texas State Fair, Dallas, 1923
After the great liberation came, with the end of the Civil War, “Red Shirt” bands in southern states morphed into the Ku Klux Klan, hooded symbols of anti-Black terror. Lynching became their weapon of choice. These ritual murders, like Russian pogroms, were often ghastly carnivals accompanied by food vendors, postcards, and prizes, which might be mementos cut from the dangling body. In 1892, 241 lynchings were recorded. Two-thirds of the victims were Black Americans; most of the rest were Italians and Chinese. Outrage abroad led to the federal government paying reparations to China and Italy.
As for African Americans, these forced exiles and perpetual strangers in their own land had no government to demand reparations for them. However, activists did rally. In 1898, a group called the National Afro-American Council formed to protest terrorist violence. The journalist Ida B. Wells mocked a civilization that would give schoolchildren a holiday to watch their elders incinerate a neighbor and distribute his ears, fingers, and toes as souvenirs, all because he was accused of misspeaking to a woman of another skin color. In 1909, Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others like Henry Moskowitz, Moorfield Storey, and Mary White Ovington, formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Ten years later, they sat at the center of three hundred branches, and from that base they began to raise legal challenges to racist laws. Their 1917 anti-lynching campaign featured a New York City protest attended by 10,000 people.
The tribulations of minorities and immigrants in Great Britain, France, and the United States, the supposed standard-bearers for liberalism, toleration, and individual rights, exposed the fact that xenophobia was hardly confined to “primitive” non-Westerners, but thrived in these Western democratic lands. In 1908, writing on the “race question,” the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce dared to wonder out loud: “Is it a ‘yellow peril,’ or ‘black peril,’ or perhaps, after all, is it not some form of ‘white peril,’ which threatens the future of humanity in this day of great struggles and complex issues?” Xenophobia shot to prominence as a way of comprehending the revolts of the Boxers and other colonized peoples, but it boomeranged and struck back in the metropoles. As one French critic of anti-immigration laws wrote in 1908, the same “xenophobia” diagnosed abroad had swept through the halls of justice in Paris. Lest any reader be confused by its shifting meanings, he asserted that xenophobia was an aversion to strangers that only existed in unadvanced civilizations … such as his own.
TABLE 3: XENOPHOBIA, CIRCA 1920
RACIAL XENOPHOBIA |
Xenophobia occurs when a Western emigrant is met by a reflexive hostility and fear based on the Easterner’s primitive race. |
XENOPHOBIC IMPERIALISM |
Xenophobia occurs when biased Western imperialists invade lands that they see filled with primitive Oriental and Eastern hosts. |
ANTI-IMMIGRANT XENOPHOBIA |
Xenophobia manifests as a form of intolerance. It occurs when residents in Western nations attack “foreign” minorities as well as immigrants, often refugees or denizens from that nation’s colonies. |
In 1923, the New York Times opined:
Xenophobia is a disease more dangerous to a free people than a physical plague. If a political Pasteur could tell the world how to isolate and destroy the germ which shows itself in the indiscriminate hatred of other nationals or other races, in self-conceit and intolerance, he would bring to mankind a blessing of which it is greatly in need at the present hour.
Inaugurated as a rare medical disorder and a prejudice between rival nations, popularized during imperial expansion as an explanation for rebellious “inferior” races, xenophobia now took root in this new context. It flipped from being a convenient accusation by Westerners against foreigners to the failure of the ethic of toleration among those Westerners themselves. In this manner, the term would be pressed into service to make sense of British and French anti-Semites, French haters of Italians, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Chinese Americans, and others who, while championing equality for themselves, seemed all too eager to deny it to others.
The fears raised by globalization were no longer a one-way street. They could not be limited to the colonized in far-off posts. As for the deeper source of this hostility, if it was not racial, no one seemed to know. One thing was clear: this was not a straightforward problem. Xenophobes routinely declared that foreigners—whether of Jewish, Chinese, Arab, or African descent—would never be able to assimilate, would always remain as an untrustworthy, foreign body. At the same time, many frantically warned that these aliens were rapidly stealing their way into the nation’s bloodstream, silently mixing so much that they would annihilate the nation from within. Which was it? Being irrational, it was both. As a lawyer from the Maghreb ordered an aperitif in Paris or a student from Gujarat strolled through Kensington in derby and cuffs, there was an uncanny reversal. We came to your home to take possession of your past and control your future, and now you have come to our home to do the same to us. The invaders began to feel invaded. No walls could protect them.