Abstract 
 
 

 
Title of dissertation:  “POSSESSING A NATION”: CAPITALISM, LABOR, 

AND THE BUILDING OF THE U.S. GATEKEEPING 
STATE, 1865-1924 

 
Kyle Leland Pruitt, Doctor of Philosophy, 2025 

 
Dissertation Directed by:   Professor Julie Greene 
     Department of History  
 

 
 
 
 

Scholars have long sought to explain how and why the United States transformed from a 

nation with virtually “open doors'' for global immigration into a nation with a closed “gate.” 

While scholars of immigration differ on just how open the United States was prior to the Civil 

War, they generally agree that between the late nineteenth century and the early 1920s the 

federal government, which had traditionally encouraged immigration as an essential ingredient in 

the expansion of the nation’s economy, became a massive “gatekeeping” state, excluding most of 

the world’s population. Historians have analyzed why the building and guarding of a national 

gate became one of the federal government’s essential roles in the late nineteenth and early 

twentieth century. They have mostly focused on the important role played by racial and 

demographic arguments against immigration and immigrants. This interpretation alone does not 

fully explain why the United States, whose capitalist engine relied on the labor of tens of 

millions of immigrants, would close its doors during the nation’s rapid period of economic 

growth and expansion at the turn of the century.  



 

  

“Possessing a Nation” explains why the United States closed its borders to most of the 

world’s population, by reconstructing a five-decade long debate (1864 to 1924) among workers, 

capitalists, politicians, and immigrants over the boundaries of America’s volatile and expansive 

capitalist social order. It analyzes how the building of a gatekeeping state, and the transformation 

of the U.S. into an exclusionary nation, entailed the creation of a gatekeeping economy. I argue 

that the closing of the nation’s borders went hand in hand with the invention, by labor leaders, 

rank and file workers, and their allies, of a protected national economic order which privileged 

the position of white workers within a global labor and racial hierarchy and necessitated 

permanent federal protection. As I demonstrate, the carving out of a national political economy 

and working class from an international order took shape through the highly contested formation 

and implementation of federal immigration laws that established the legal, political and 

ideological framework of the U.S. gatekeeping state. These include the Alien Contract Labor 

Laws (1885 and 1890); Chinese Exclusion Acts (1882, 1888, 1894, 1902); Immigration Act 

(1891); Immigration Restriction Act (1917); Emergency Quota Act (1921); and the Johnson 

Reed Act (1924). The construction of a federal gate, and gatekeeping economy, was the outcome 

of a protracted class conflict over the racial and political boundaries of a domestic labor market 

and capitalist social order which was profoundly shaped by global immigration. Each of this 

project’s five archive-based chapters reconstructs how this conflict pitted shifting political 

formations of protectionist labor leaders, workers, and their elite partners against dynamic 

coalitions of business interests, immigrants, diplomats and pro-immigration politicians and 

intellectuals who advocated for a more open domestic economy. 

 

 
 



 

  

 
 

“POSSESSING A NATION”: CAPITALISM, LABOR, AND THE BUILDING OF THE U.S. 
GATEKEEPING STATE, 1865-1924 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Kyle Leland Pruitt 
 
 
 

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the 
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 

 
[2025] 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 

Advisory Committee: 
 

Professor Julie Greene, Chair 
Associate Professor David Freund 
Professor Madeline Hsu 
Associate Professor Colleen Woods 
Associate Professor Daniel Greene 



 

  

© 2025 Kyle Pruitt  
All rights reserved 

 



 

 i  

 

“The difference in living standards, say, between a French sans-cullotte and [a] Deccan farmer were relatively 
insignificant compared to the gulf that separated both from their ruling classes. By the end of Victoria’s reign 

(1901), however, the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been 
irrevocably divided. And the famed ‘prisoners of starvation,’ whom the Internationale urges to arise, were as much 

modern inventions of the late Victorian world as electric lights, Maxim guns and ‘scientific’ racism.” 
 

-Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 2001 
 
 
 

“No argument that can be made...can set so plainly before the American workingman the danger that threatens as 
the accompanying map sets forth. In what a small part of the earth is labor well regarded and well paid! In what a 

vast proportion of the earth is labor still unorganized, poorly paid and without consideration in the affairs of 
government!” 

 
-San Francisco Call, 1896 

 
 

 

Figure 1:  "The World of Work," San Francisco Call (September 30th, 1896).  

 

 

 



 

 ii  

 

 

 

 

To my mom and dad, I dedicate this dissertation. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

 iii  

Acknowledgements  
 

This project is the product of family, friends, archivists and fellow historians. As a young 

graduate student in seminar, monographs and articles appeared to me as the sole creation of the 

historian. Little did I know that every work of history is a work of the collective.  

First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Julie Greene for her patience, 

guidance, intellect, and comradery. Through her scholarship, Julie has helped make labor history 

a more radical, interesting, and inclusive field. I can also personally attest to the fact that she 

continues to nurture a generation of early-career labor historians--encouraging them and helping 

them open-up new lines of inquiry and research. I am proud to be one of the “greeniacs,” 

alongside my friends Jack Warner, Charlie Fanning, Alex Dunphy, and Debbie Goldman.  

I would like to deeply thank the members of my dissertation committee. David Freund 

and Colleen Woods have been wonderful mentors and friends throughout my entire time at 

UMD. I deeply look up to them as thinkers, writers, and educators. I would also like to sincerely 

thank Madeline Hsu for her expertise and her close and helpful reading of this dissertation. Dan 

Greene, a tireless organizer and amazing scholars helped me more clearly articulate what exactly 

I wanted this project to accomplish. The intellectual community in the Maryland history 

department was truly wonderful. Brian Sarginger, thank you for countless beers and talks. Rob 

Chiles, Rick Bell, Chris Bonner, David Sicilia, Antoine Borrut, Robyn Muncy, Holly Brewer, 

Leslie Rowland, Michael Ross—all took time out of their busy schedules to help me along. Phil 

and Marcia Soergel have brought Malaurie and I into their lives and for that I will always be 

grateful. 

So many historians have gone out of their way to inspire, educate, and guide me. These 

scholars have taught me that the history of labor, class, and working people is not some niche 



 

 iv  

sub-field of history—it is a tradition rooted not only in the academy, but in the ongoing struggle 

for equity, freedom, and justice. I hope this project can be a small testament to this belief. 

Elizabeth Ricketts and the late Irwin Marcus brought me into labor history at the Indiana 

University of Pennsylvania and pointed me in the right direction. My friend, Andy Hazelton, has 

guided me during every part of my graduate career despite having warned me of the perils of 

pursuing an academic life. The Eugene V. Debs Fellowship in Labor History at Indiana State 

provided me with a funded MA program and allowed me to work with amazing historians such 

as Richard Schneirov, Wesley Bishop, Lisa Phillips, Dan Clark, and Barbara Skinner. To Rich, 

thank you for teaching me to “always periodize,” and to always create a “useable past.”  

The Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) was and continues to be 

a source of inspiration for this project and for me as a scholar. Not enough can be said for 

LAWCHA and the people who make up its membership list. I would also like to thank the 

wonderful scholars in the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS) for providing 

intellectual and monetary support for “Possessing a Nation.” I came to immigration history later 

in my graduate career, and immigration historians like Hidetaka Hirota, Madeline Hsu, Hardeep 

Dhillon, Julian Lim, and Kevin Kenny have been incredibly helpful and welcoming. Hide has 

been immensely supportive of this project and kindly drew my attention to the incredible image 

of the “World of Work” that opens this dissertation.    

I would also like to thank the historians Dave Stein, Tim Barker, Gabe Winant, and Kurt 

Newman for their intellectual community and comradery.  

Thank you so much to Jodi Hall, the Graduate Coordinator at UMD. I would not have 

been able to do this without Jodi’s expertise, patience, and guidance. Gail Russell, too. Gail is 

both an amazing person and was always there to help a stressed-out TA. I would like to express 



 

 v  

my sincere gratitude to Ben Blake, the chief archivist of the AFL-CIO archive at the University 

of Maryland. My thanks also go to the archivists at the New York Public Library, Harvard 

University and to the countless archivist and technicians who make sources available digitally.  

To my Johns Hopkins friends, Jacob, Amrish, Laurence, Faisal, Mansour, Thomas, Ellie, 

Chloe, Magdalene, and Julia, you have given Malaurie and me a community during our time in 

Baltimore. I am so thankful to have met you all. 

I was given three families, the Pruitts, the Houghtons, and the Pilattes, who value history 

and those who pursue it. My cousins, aunts, and uncles have been there all along and have 

always kept faith in me. Aunt Anna and Uncle Bud, I can’t express how much your support has 

meant to me.  In so many ways, my mom and dad have supported my interest in history and 

academia since I was young. Mom, Dad, there are so many things I want to thank you for, but for 

now let me just say: “thanks for everything.” My French family, les Pilattes, je vous aime tous et 

je vous serai toujours reconnaissant pour votre amour, votre soutien et votre nourriture. 

Most importantly, I must thank my wife, Malaurie Pilatte. She’s read and helped edit 

every word of this dissertation, but ultimately all faults and inadequacies are my own. An 

amazing historian in her own right, this project was made possible not only by her patience and 

love, but also by her fierce brilliance. 

 
 

  



 

 vi  

Table of Contents  
 
“The World of Work”                        i 
 
Dedication                     ii 
 
Acknowledgements                   iii 
 
Table of Contents                   vi 
 
List of Illustrations                 vii 
 
Introduction                                    1 
 
Chapter 1. “We Promote Free Trade in Men”               33 
 
Chapter 2. “The Great American System”                     88 
 
Chapter 3. “Protecting the American Standard of Living”           148 
 
Chapter 4. “A Vital Need of our Nation”             190 
 
Chapter 5. “The Highest, Best Civilization in the World”           242 
 
Chapter 6. “Industrial Americanization”              296 
 
Conclusion                 351 
 
Bibliography                  357 
  



 

 vii  

List of Illustrations 
 
  
Figure 1:  "The World of Work”         i 

Figure 2: “The New Comet"          75  

Figure 3: "A Picture for Employers”         105 

Figure 4: "What Shall We Do With our Boys?”      106 

Figure 5: “Homestead Mills Protected by the McKinley Tariff    166 

Figure 6: "The Inevitable Result to the American Workingman…"    187 

Figure 7: "The American Gulliver and Chinese Lilliputians"    234 
 
Figure 8: "In the wake of the storm"        259 

Figure 9: "A Crying Need for General Repairs”       264 

Figure 10: "Problems of Immigration"       277 

Figure 11: “In the Name of Labor”        280 

Figure 12: "It's Up to You"         292 

Figure 13: Samuel Gompers pictured with President Woodrow Wilson…   319 

Figure 14: Samuel Gompers pictured with Frank Morrison in Washington D.C.  328 

 



 

 
 

1 

Introduction 
 

In 1882, Congress passed a law restricting the immigration of Chinese laborers to the 

United States. Three years later, lawmakers followed up with a statute prohibiting the 

immigration of European contract laborers. Yet, despite these laws, mass immigration from 

Europe as well as Asia helped transform the U.S. into a global industrial power. The volume of 

foreign workers coming to the United States only increased, and in turn became more and more 

significant for the country’s industrialization.1 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, 

Americans were engaged in an intense debate over whether the nation’s increasingly chaotic and 

unequal capitalist order needed this labor.  

In his 1907 book Races and Immigrants in America, the social scientist and industrial 

investigator John R. Commons made the case for restriction. He observed that “cheap” foreign 

labor had been a crucial ingredient in the development of U.S. capitalism. However, he argued 

that this same capitalist order, reliant on foreign labor, now threatened the nation’s white 

democracy. Most of the nation’s white, male, native-born citizens, he claimed, were subject to 

precarity, mechanization, and unemployment. Mass immigration had created a disloyal, militant, 

and racially heterogenous working class in which “cheaper races” were simply displacing their 

native born, citizen counterparts. These native-born workers, however, were not passive. Since 

the Civil War, Commons noted, “…a new force had come into American politics—the wage-

 
1 On the formation of a global labor market and its relationship to the development of national capitalist 

orders, see Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Jurgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History, (Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 2016); Kevin H. O’ Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution 
of a Nineteenth-century Atlantic Economy, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern 
World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism; Triumphant, 1789-1914. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of 
California Press, 2011); On mass immigration and capital accumulation in the United States, see David M. Gordon, 
et, al. Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States; Stanley 
Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); 
Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860-1885 (Harvard: Harvard University 
Press, 1957).  



 

 
 

2 

earner.” As a result, “The old policies” of open immigration and “cheap” foreign labor “were 

violently challenged.” This had begun with the exclusion of Chinese workers in 1882 and the 

restriction of European contract laborers in 1885.With these achievements, the “American wage-

earner…was able to set forward one supreme argument which our race problems are more and 

more showing to be sound: The future of American democracy is the future of the American 

wage-earner.” “To have an enlightened and patriotic citizenship,” Commons argued, “we must 

protect the wages and standard of living of those who constitute the bulk of the citizens.”2 

A 1907 Congressional commission tasked with investigating immigration expanded upon 

this argument. The so-called “Dillingham Commission” (1907-1912) published a report in 1912 

that found that the United States did suffer from “an oversupply of unskilled labor…”3 The 

Report did not stop there. It argued that the goal of federal immigration policy should not be to 

maximize profits by swelling the nation’s already large working class. Rather, the future 

development of the United States as an industrial and democratic nation necessitated the 

protection of the “standard of living” of its citizen wage earners from foreign competition. “The 

measure of the rational, healthy development of a country,” the Report determined, cannot 

simply be measured by “the extent of its investment of capital, its output of products, or its 

exports and imports…unless there is a corresponding economic opportunity afforded to the 

citizenry…” From this perspective, federal laws restricting foreign labor immigration were not a 

sacrifice for U.S. capitalism. On the contrary, these laws would help control American 

capitalism’s dangerous reliance on foreign labor and would help set the nation on a new 

 
2 John. R Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York, 1907). Commons’ book was based off 

of his investigative work for the U.S. Industrial Commission (1898-1902). See, Reports of the Industrial 
Commission on Immigration and on Education. Vol., 15. 57th Cong,. 1st sess., HOR Document 184. (Washington: 
GPO, 1901). 

3 United States Immigration Commission, Brief Statement of the Investigations of the Immigration 
Commission, with Conclusions and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, vol. 1 (Washington: GPO, 1911): 
45-47.  



 

 
 

3 

trajectory of development: one characterized not by the exploitation of a heterogenous, foreign-

born working class, but by the growing “standard of living” of a loyal class of citizen wage 

earners.   

The argument laid out by Commons and the Dillingham Commission constituted a 

dramatic departure from how Americans had traditionally conceptualized immigration, labor, 

capitalism, and federal power. During the late nineteenth century, many Americans believed that 

the immigration of free, white laborers would be an essential factor in the expansion and 

development of the United States. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, national 

immigration policy was organized around one major goal: the mobilization of foreign labor. By 

the 1920s, however, Congress eventually passed a series of laws, in the wake of the Dillingham 

Commission, that established a discriminatory system that regulated and restricted the movement 

of workers into the United States. By 1924, the United States had effectively built a wall around 

the nation’s industrial order and labor market, by excluding all immigration from Asia and 

greatly restricting immigration from Europe.4  

 

This dissertation explains why the United States closed itself off to the very global labor 

market that fueled its industrial ascendency and transformation. It reconstructs the highly 

contested formation and implementation of federal immigration laws that established the legal, 

political, and ideological framework of the U.S. gatekeeping state. To do so, it traces how and 

why Americans came to believe that their country no longer needed foreign labor, but an 

 
4 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 2004); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 
1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Erika Lee, “A Nation of Immigrants and a 
Gatekeeping Nation: American Immigration Law and Policy,” in A Companion to American Immigration (New 
York: Blackwell Publishing): Chapter 1.  



 

 
 

4 

“American working class.” It explores a five-decade long debate (1864 to 1924), among 

organized labor, capitalists, intellectuals, and politicians, over the boundaries of America’s 

volatile and expansive capitalist social order. It demonstrates that the construction of a federal 

gate was the outcome of a protracted class conflict over the racial and political boundaries of a 

domestic labor market and capitalist social order which was profoundly shaped by global 

immigration. The “Immigration Question” that Americans debated during the late nineteenth 

century entailed a larger problem: how a national and racially homogenous capitalist order could 

be constructed within a global capitalist order. How could capitalist development be made 

compatible with the hegemonic racial order and polity of the United States? Did the emerging 

industrial order, and the U.S. working class, necessitate federal protection from immigration, to 

preserve and harmonize America’s white democracy and capitalism? Could the United States 

remain both a white and capitalist nation within an increasingly integrated global capitalist 

order? “Possessing a Nation” explains how, over the course of the late nineteenth and early 

twentieth century, Americans came to conceptualize federal gatekeeping power as an answer to 

these questions. It argues that the closing of the nation’s borders went hand in hand with the 

legal, political, and ideological invention--by labor leaders, rank and file workers, and their 

allies--of a protected national labor market which privileged the position of white workers within 

a global labor and racial hierarchy and necessitated permanent federal protection. 5   

 
5 The historian Katherine Benton-Cohen has argued that it was social scientists, particularly those involved 

in the Dillingham Commission who first “invented” the idea that immigration was a “problem.” Katherine Benton-
Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy. (Cambridge: Harvard 
University Press, 2018). My interpretation differs from Benton-Cohen’s in two important respects. First, she 
identifies the Dillingham Commission (1907-1912) as the primary site within which immigration was rendered into 
a complex racial, political, and economic problem. This dissertation roots the invention of the immigration problem 
earlier, in the nineteenth century, and specifically links immigration to the labor problem. Secondly, the Dillingham 
Commission did not simply define immigration as a problem. It also identified American workers as the 
beneficiaries of immigration restriction.  



 

 
 

5 

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the material and political conditions 

underlying the nation’s relatively open national immigration system began to weaken. The 

transformation of the United States into a capitalist social order unleashed unprecedented 

dynamics of class conflict, proletarianization, and wealth inequality. These dynamics engendered 

what contemporaries referred to as “the labor problem.” Was the nation’s white, democratic 

polity compatible with capitalism? This transformation opened a space for mostly native-born 

organized workers, from California to the East coast, to link mass immigration to their own 

dispossession by capitalism and conceptualize immigration policy as an extension of their own 

contest with employers over the nation’s emerging capitalist order. In doing so, they launched a 

protracted debate over the racial and political boundaries of U.S. capitalist order and global 

capitalism. 

After 1865, trade unionists, labor leaders, and their political and intellectual supporters, 

mobilized to construct federal immigration policies that would privilege what they began to 

envision as homogenous nation of white, citizen workers. At the beginning, restrictionists’ 

efforts centered on two specific forms of immigration, the so-called Chinese “coolie” trade and 

the importation of European “contract laborers.” What began as an opposition to specific forms 

of immigration developed, over the course of several decades, into a more capacious nationalist 

critique of foreign labor in general. National labor organizations like the Knights of Labor, 

followed by the American Federation of Labor after 1886, became the vanguard of a broader 

cross-class movement for immigration restriction. With organized labor at its helm, this 

movement cooperated with, and gained recognition from, national policymakers, political 

economists, editorialists, and other elite Americans. The leaders of this coalition defined the 

“Immigration Problem” and the “Labor Problem” as one and the same. Engaging with the 



 

 
 

6 

question of immigration as inseparable from the broader problem of capitalism, class, and 

democracy opened the domestic labor question to a new set of urgent concerns: what were the 

consequences of immigration on processes of U.S. class formation and relations between labor 

and capital? What would be the role of the state in mediating between the domestic political 

economy and global capitalism? What were the territorial and racial boundaries of an 

“American” working class, and did this working class have a right to be protected by the state? 

In answering such questions, this coalition called for the construction of a new, restrictionist, 

federal immigration regime. In doing so, it forged a capacious labor gatekeeping ideology that 

linked the protection of a national labor market and “American” working class to the integrity of 

the nation and of American citizenship itself. More specifically, workers argued that, as 

American citizens, they were entitled to wages that would allow them to function as citizens, 

heads of household, and as consumers. A national high wage-earning class was, therefore, 

intrinsically different from foreign, “cheap” labor. Without federal intervention, “cheap” labor 

threatened the existence of this American citizen working class.  

Labor leaders and trade unionists became committed to gatekeeping as part of a broader 

and evolving struggle between their movement and capitalists, for control over the nation’s labor 

market, and for influence over its democratic polity and legislation. From their perspective, the 

battle over national immigration policy was a battle over the nation. Although productive 

property had been concentrated in the hands of U.S. employers, these workers believed that they 

had the right, as citizens and as workers, to possess this nation. As capitalism dispossessed white 

workers from the ownership of land and productive property during the late nineteenth century, 

these same workers began to conceptualize a capacious vision of an American nation—a national 

capitalist order and political community of white worker citizens--which white citizen workers, 



 

 
 

7 

and not U.S. capitalists, had a right, and obligation to construct and to protect from global 

competition. As such, they created and reified the political category of a national, “American 

working class,” that would bring this new national capitalist order and democratic polity into 

being through the political and legal construction of a federal gate and through opposition to 

domestic capitalists and supporters of immigration. Labor organizations from the Knights of 

Labor to the American Federation of Labor became the vanguard of a broader cross-class 

restrictionist movement. Trade unionists organized networks with pro-labor politicians, political 

economists, race scientists, and federal immigration officials, and assembled racist and 

nationalist definitions of labor, citizenship, and consumption. Over the course of the late 

nineteenth and early twentieth century, labor organizations and their leaders mobilized rank and 

file workers, lobbied Congress, and cooperated with prominent intellectuals. Their goal was to 

design, advocate for, and help enforce restrictionist federal immigration policies. They aimed to 

create a national labor market that would be limited to white, native-born workers.  

They came into conflict with shifting political formations of business interests, 

immigrants, diplomats and pro-immigration politicians and intellectuals, who advocated for a 

more open domestic economy. Ultimately, they were successful in constructing a set of federal 

policies that restricted, regulated, and policed the racial and class boundaries demarcating the 

national labor market and “American working class” from a global racial and labor hierarchy. 

These laws included the Alien Contract Labor Laws (1885 and 1890); Chinese Exclusion Acts 

(1882, 1888, 1894, 1902); Immigration Act (1891); Immigration Restriction Act (1917); 

Emergency Quota Act (1921); and the Johnson Reed Act (1924). By the 1920s national 

immigration policy had thus been re-organized around a new principle: the prioritization and 

protection of white, citizen workers and their “standard of living.”  



 

 
 

8 

I 

Scholars have long sought to explain how and why the United States transformed from a 

nation with virtually “open doors'' for global immigration into a nation with a closed “gate.”6 

They have mostly focused on the important role played by racial arguments against immigration 

and immigrants. In his classic study, John Higham showed that middle class and elite Americans 

who feared the disruptions to the nation’s political and social order caused by industrialization 

responded by turning against immigration and foreigners. Between the 1880s and 1920s, 

Americans forged explicitly racist and xenophobic arguments that justified the gradual exclusion 

of immigrants. More recently, scholars such as Erika Lee, Aristide Zolberg, and Mae Ngai have 

shown that anti-immigration movements were ultimately engaged in a project of racial nation-

building. Those actors who built and shaped the U.S. gatekeeping state, according to this 

argument, were not simply driven by fear, but by the desire to construct a new, exclusionary 

racial and national polity through racist federal laws that determined which populations were 

desirable and undesirable for the United States and regulated and restricted immigration 

accordingly.7 

“Possessing a Nation” contributes to, but differs from, this work. It illustrates the 

political-economic framework that undergirded the logic of race, citizenship, and nation and 

shaped the construction of a federal gatekeeping state between the Civil War and the 1920s. It 

 
6 Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick: The State 

University of New Jersey, 1955). 
7 David Fitzgerald and David Cook-Martin, Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist 

Immigration Policy in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by 
Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 
2008); Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, (New York: Basic Books, 
2019)’ Peter Schuck, “The Transformation of Immigration Law,” Columbia Law Review 84 (January, 1984); For an 
example of a study of immigration policy that focuses entirely on racism as the cause and structure of U.S. 
gatekeeping policy, see Reece Jones, White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from 
Chinese Exclusion to Border Wall; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants 
and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 



 

 
 

9 

explains how the debate over immigration, and the political and legal construction of a federal 

gatekeeping state and nation, were fundamentally shaped the dynamics of industrial conflict, 

class formation, and labor politics that characterized the United States between in that period. 

Labor historians have reconstructed the ways that the U.S. industrial working class and labor 

movement contested employers over issues related to the structure and shape of U.S. political 

economy. Scholars such as David Montgomery, Julie Greene, and Christopher Tomlins have 

showed how workers and labor organizations became increasingly involved in the shaping of 

national policy, first at the state, and then at the federal level.8 Over the course of these years, 

workers mobilized and contested employers over everything from working conditions, the 

legality of unions, control over production, the Eight-Hour Day and more. Historians have 

highlighted the ways in which organized workers framed their broader movement and political 

and industrial activity as a struggle for democracy and for economic citizenship. In doing so, 

they shaped how Americans conceptualized these political categories.9 Labor historians have 

grappled with the involvement of labor unions and organized workers in immigration restriction. 

However, for the most part, these scholars attribute the interest of organized workers in 

immigration restriction to relatively “narrow” concerns over wages and competition or simply to 

 
8 Herbert G. Gurman, “Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919,” in The 

American Historical Review 78:3 (June, 1973), pp. 531-599. Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: 
Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900. (Urbana and Champaigne: University of Illinois 
Press, 1989). Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America. (Chapel Hill: The University of North 
Carolina Press, 2000); Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American federation of Labor and Political 
Activism, 1881-1917. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); McCartin, Joseph A. Labors Great War: The 
Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, 
Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

9 David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy 
and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993); Richard 
Schneirov, Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction 
(Urbana Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative 
Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2014).  



 

 
 

10 

the racism of the white, native-born workers within the nation’s more conservative trade 

unions.10 

This dissertation puts forward a different explanation of why and how organized workers 

and labor unions embraced immigration restriction, and what this meant for the larger conflict 

between workers and capital over U.S. capitalism, marketplace, and federal policy. It argues that 

those workers and organizations that constituted the post-Civil War labor movement came to see 

the struggle over the racial and political boundaries of the U.S. wage labor market as integral to 

its contest with capital for control and influence over this market and over the nation’s 

democratic polity. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, labor 

organizations such as the National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor, and the American 

Federation of Labor turned national immigration policy into a terrain in which organized workers 

articulated broader claims on the national income, outlined a new racialized notion of economic 

citizenship, and articulated their own understanding of how U.S. capitalism should operate and 

whom it should privilege. 

Scholars of whiteness have shown that race was a fundamental factor in the formation of 

the U.S. labor movement and working class. David Roediger for instance, has argued that during 

the nineteenth century, white industrial workers came to believe they were entitled to higher 

wages, state protection and privileges, in virtue of their whiteness. 11 “Possessing a Nation” 

builds on this framework, but it argues that whiteness alone does not fully capture the breadth 

and complexity of the ideology that motivated the U.S. labor movements and its campaign for a 

 
10 A.T. Lane, Solidarity or Survival: American Labor and European Immigrants, 1830-1924, (New York 

and London: Greenwood Press, 1987); Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860-
1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American 
Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Vernon Briggs, 
Immigration and American Unionism, (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2001). 

11 David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Victoria 
Hattam, “Whiteness: Theorizing Race, Eliding Ethnicity,”  



 

 
 

11 

federal gatekeeping state. This dissertation shows how activists labor leaders, rank and file 

unionists, and other labor spokesmen transposed this logic of whiteness, privilege, and 

entitlement onto the level of the nation and the nation-state, and in so doing articulated a vision 

of an emerging national community of “American workers.” The American worker, as it was 

envisioned by organized workers during the late nineteenth century, was a raced and gendered 

subject. He was a native-born, white male citizen as well as a head of household. Crucial to this 

logic was a new conception of consumption. For the workers in this story, federal gatekeeping 

would also help alter the very dynamics of U.S. capitalism in the interest of the imagined 

national community of workers they claimed to represent. The labor movement, along with its 

partners, argued that the construction of a boundary around a national labor market would not 

only compel U.S. capitalists to employ native-born laborers at higher rates of wages, it would 

ultimately help bring a new capitalist order driven not by the exploitation of unskilled labor, but 

by the formation of a high-wage domestic market composed of native-born consumers and their 

families. The American worker and working class were not conceptualized as passive recipients 

of federal protection. On the contrary, the actors in this dissertation conceptualized the nation 

and the national industrial order as a form of property which they, as Americans, had a right to 

protect. They could determine who could and could not join that order. The privilege and duty to 

control and shape immigration policy was not simply about protecting “American” wages and 

jobs, but about controlling and shaping the very identity of the nation’s working class and labor 

market by determining who could and could not enter the United States.12 

 
12 My theory of the nation as property comes from Brenna Bhandar, “Possessive Nationalism: Race, Class 

and the Lifeworlds of Property,” in Viewpoint Magazine (February, 1 2018); Bhandar builds on whiteness 
scholarship, and in particular scholarship that conceptualizes whiteness as a form of property. Cheryl Harris, 
“Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106: 8 (1993): 1710–91. See also, George Lipsitz, “The Possessive 
Investment in Whiteness:  



 

 
 

12 

The ideology of nationalism and exclusion that the labor movement created was forged in 

and through a confrontation with the reality of global capitalism in the late nineteenth and early 

twentieth century.13 The vision of an American working class that motivated the labor movement 

was ultimately a fiction and a political invention. Its very existence, and its ability to participate 

in U.S. capitalism necessitated an activist state. An “American” working class was an 

impossibility so long as the United States was open to the labor of the world.14 The invention of 

the categories of “American worker,” and “American working class” by organized workers 

entailed the simultaneous and gradual invention of a map of the global labor hierarchy, divided 

into a ranking of racial/national populations of workers.15 In their writings, correspondence, and 

political activities, labor leaders and political economists conceptualized the position of 

American workers at the pinnacle of this unequal economic geography, but framed its position as 

ultimately threatened. In doing so, the workers in this story helped naturalize a deeply unequal 

global order in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and helped construct a massive 

state apparatus intended to reproduce the superior position of American workers within global 

capitalism.  

 
13 Historians of radicalism have accounted for the ways in which radicals conceptualized capitalism as a 

global formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was this global consciousness that motivated 
socialists to confront and challenge the narrow—embodied in the mainstream, U.S. labor movement. For recent 
examples of working-class radicalism and internationalism, see Lorenzo Costaguta, Workers of All Colors Unite: 
Race and Origins of American Socialism (Urbana Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2023); Kenyon Zimmer, 
Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Urbana Champagne: University of Illinois 
Press, 2015); Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, eds. Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the 
IWW. (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Jennifer Guglielmo. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and 
Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Ira Kipnis. The 
American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912. (New York and London: Haymarket Books, 2005). 

14 Maulana Karenga, “Du Bois and the Question of the Color Line: Race and Class in the Age of 
Globalization,” Socialism and Democracy, 17:1 (2003): 141-160.  

15 Working class nationalism as a political project and ideological formation has gained scholarly attention 
in recent years. See, Steven Parfitt, et., al. Working-Class Nationalism and Internationalism until 1945: Essays in 
Global Labor History, (New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2018); Maarten Van Ginderachter, The 
Everyday Nationalism of Workers: A Social History of Modern Belgium (Stanford: Sanford University Press, 2019); 
Jarod Roll, Poor Man’s Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850-1950 
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).  



 

 
 

13 

“Possessing a Nation” is a study of how this ideology was forged through the efforts to 

organize a broader movement for immigration restriction. It is not a study of how all industrial 

workers in the United States felt about immigration. Although this project does account for anti-

immigrant sentiment among rank-and-file workers within the broader labor movement, its main 

focuses is to explain how major labor organizations and relatively elite actors within the 

movement encouraged and channeled anti-immigration sentiment into a coherent political project 

and ideological critique of immigration, as well as a vision of national class formation, and labor 

politics. It explores how influential labor leaders and unions consolidated their own power and 

control over the mechanisms of the national labor movement, and marginalized opposition to 

immigration restriction.16 This dissertation also accounts for how these actors created cross-class 

coalitions between the labor movement, national electoral parties, mainstream academia and 

xenophobic organizations. For the most part, historians of U.S. xenophobia and immigration 

policy have conceptualized the labor movement as a junior partner to more elite anti-immigrant 

organizations. Elite and middle-class organizations and individuals, this scholarship suggests, 

were concerned with significant issues of race, citizenship, and nation building. Organized 

workers, on the other hand, were interested in narrower concerns of labor market competition 

and wages. “Possessing a Nation” argues instead that the labor movement played a pivotal role in 

shaping how Americans—from advocates of Chinese Exclusion on the West Coast, to the 

Immigration Restriction League (IRL) and eugenicists in Boston—conceptualized race, nation, 

and citizenship in relationship to immigration and immigration policy.  

 
16 This dissertation shows that the immigration issue shaped and was shaped by the labor movement’s 

broader vision of race, citizenship, and state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I draw from 
and contribute to the work of these scholars: Rosanne Currarino, “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and 
the Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America,” in The Journal of American History, 93:1 (June 2006): 17-36; 
Lawrence Glickman, “A Living Wage: American Workers Era AFL in its Time,” in Labor: Studies in Working-
Class History of the Americas 10:4 (Winter 2013): 61-87; Alice Kesseler-Harris: In Pursuit of Equity, Women, Men, 
and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).  



 

 
 

14 

The federal gate that workers helped build did, in fact, create a national labor market. A 

central argument of this dissertation is that the construction of a federal gatekeeping state was a 

major political, ideological, and legal achievement of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era labor 

movement. The labor movement played a real, tangible influence, not only in shaping official 

and unofficial opinion on immigration and immigration policy, but also in directly influencing 

the actual construction, passage, and enforcement of federal immigration law. The processes of 

debate, policy-formation, and legal invention that constituted national immigration policymaking 

was inseparable from what scholars have recently identified as the “political construction” of 

U.S. capitalism. There is a vast scholarship focusing on the ways that state institutions, actors, 

and laws played a direct role in shaping dynamics of market formation, class relations, and 

capital accumulation in the United States.17 For instance, scholars have shown that the federal 

government constructed a national financial and monetary system to mobilize capital, shape 

investment patterns, and mediate political conflict between and within classes and regions of the 

United States. On the other hand, scholarship on the U.S. state, law, and political economy has 

ignored federal immigration policy. For instance, scholars have written extensively about the role 

of the protective tariff. They have shown that it was an area of policy which federal 

policymakers and national political parties used to construct a national commodity market, 

 
17 The term “political construction of capitalism” is from Stefan Link and Noam Maggor, “The United 

States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting the Peculiarities of American History,” Past & Present 246:1 (2020): 269-
306. There is an established literature on the legal and political construction of U.S. capitalism: Martin Sklar, The 
United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1992); Richard Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-
1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Richard Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded 
Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873-1898,” in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive 
Era 5 (July, 2006), pp. 189-224; For a focus not necessary on law and politics, but on the ways in which U.S. 
capitalism was shaped through ideological and cultural conflict see: James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political 
Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). This work 
represented a departure from earlier scholarship which saw the development of capitalism in the United States not as 
a political and legal development but as a function of the evolution of markets. See Alfred Chandler, The Visible 
Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).  



 

 
 

15 

redistribute resources from the agricultural to the industrial sector, and tie American producers 

into a developmental project of economic nation building.18 Scholars have also shown how 

organized workers, in effect, helped construct the capitalist wage labor market of the late 

nineteenth and early twentieth century, but this literature ignores immigration policy, and, in 

doing so, ignores the global context in which this national labor market was contested and 

created. 19  

 

II 

The movement against Chinese immigration is typically characterized by historians as the 

first challenge to the federal government’s pro-immigration stance.20 The standard narrative is 

this: During the Civil War, Congress encouraged immigration as part of a broader strategy to 

mobilize land and labor for national development. In the wake of the War, the emergence of a 

capitalist order on the Pacific Coast disrupted the lives of workers of European descent and 

encouraged these workers to identify Chinese “coolie” immigration as an extension of the 

broader threat posed by capitalism to their livelihoods. What began as a sectional movement 

during the 1850s and 1860s, however, took on a national dimension in the following two 

decades. By the late 1870s, white Californians were joined by national policymakers, writers, 

and other Americans in arguing that Chinese “coolie” immigration and economic competition 

 
18 The literature on economic nationalism in the United States focusing exclusively on the tariff and not on 

immigration controls: Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (New York: Beacon 
Press, 1999); Bensel, Marc-William Palen, “The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890-1913,” Diplomatic 
History 39:1 (January 2015): 157-185; On the tariff and U.S. state formation, see Gautham Rao, National Duties: 
Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).  

19 On literature that discusses the political and legal construction of a wage labor market in the United 
States without accounting for immigration policy: Robert J. Steinfield, The Invention of Free Labor: The 
Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North 
Carolina Press, 1991); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the 
Age of Slave Emancipation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).  

20 Erika Lee, America for Americans, ch., 2.  



 

 
 

16 

constituted a threat not just to the West Coast and its workers, but to all white workers in the 

United States, and, by extension to the nation’s established racial and political order.21  

How and why did a sectional issue like Chinese immigration become conceptualized as a 

national problem that necessitated decisive federal action between the Civil War and the early 

1880s? Andrew Gyory identifies national politicians, lawmakers, and policymakers as the main 

engine behind the nationalization of the Chinese Question. Spokesmen of both the Democratic 

and Republican Party responded to an increasingly militant and disgruntled domestic wage-

earning class by adopting the issue of Chinese Exclusion to appeal to white, wage earners as 

American workers. Gyory argues that workers east of the Rocky Mountains were simply not as 

motivated as their Western counterparts to exclude Chinese immigration and did not endorse 

their fundamentally racist anti-capitalist critique of Chinese competition. Historian Beth Lew-

Williams has put forward a similar argument. Lawmakers and statesmen, she argues, feared the 

outbreak of violent and militant anti-Chinese pogroms across the U.S. West, and therefore 

advocated for the restriction of Chinese immigration as a solution to this problem. Overall, this 

literature suggests that the transformation of the Chinese problem into a national labor issue was 

driven by California exclusionists and national elites.22 

 
21 The classic work for the anti-Chinese movement is Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor 

and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Stacey Smith, 
Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle Over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Rudi Baltzell, “Free Labour, Capitalism, and the Anti-Slavery 
Origins of Chinese Exclusion in California in the 1870s,” in Past & Present 225 (November, 2014): 143-186; Iyko 
Day; Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University 
Press, 2018; for a more global history of Chinese exclusion, white labor politics, and economic competition, 
particularly in mining, see Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politic, (New York: 
W.W. Norton & Company, 2021). This dissertation helps explain how the movement against Chinese “cooliesm” 
became connected with the campaign by organized laborers on the East Coast to prohibit European contract labor 
immigration into a genuinely national movement against “foreign labor importation.” Although West Coast trade 
unions remained focused on Chinese immigration into the 1870s, national labor organizations that are the subject of 
this chapter, however, were deeply influenced by their West Coast counterparts. 

22 Andrew Gyory’s Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: The 
University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Stanford M. Lyman, “The ‘Chinese Question’ and American Labor 



 

 
 

17 

“Possessing a Nation” challenges this narrative. It argues that a small, but influential 

network of eastern trade union leaders, labor periodicals, and other labor spokesmen played a 

pivotal role in turning Chinese immigration into a national labor problem and in manufacturing 

the idea that Chinese Exclusion was desired by and would protect a national community of 

“American workers.” This group did so as part of its critique of an emerging capitalist wage 

system, as well as its confrontation with another form of labor immigration: European contract 

labor. During the second half of the 1860s, east coast labor leaders, including William Sylvis, 

Andrew Cameron, and Ira Steward began to criticize the attempts of American employers to 

recruit workers from abroad. They saw these attempts as inseparable from an emerging capitalist 

wage system which, they argued, threatened to “enslave” free laborers in the United States by 

subjecting them to their employers and to an increasingly competitive labor market for survival. 

Like the anti-Chinese movement on the West Coast, this movement was sectional, at first, and 

focused only on one specific form of labor immigration. However, with the completion of the 

trans-pacific railroad and the signing of the Burlingame Treaty (1868), as well as threats of 

Eastern employers to “import” Chinese “coolies,” eastern labor leaders and spokesman expanded 

their conception of the “labor importation” problem. They borrowed liberally from the racist 

discourse of anti-cooliesm created by their West Coast counterparts to describe “imported” 

European laborers and adopted the Reconstruction Era Republican party’s ideology of economic 

nationalism and free labor. In doing so, they forged a new racist, nationalist identity that 

discursively bound together all white workers in the United States into a national community of 

citizen wage-earners—a community subject to a common enemy: cheap “coolie labor,” 

immigration and a corrupt federal government that had enabled it.  It was this ideology, I show, 

 
Historians,” in New Politics 7, no:4 (2000); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the 
Making of the Alien in America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).  



 

 
 

18 

that helped forge a consensus for Chinese exclusion among national lawmakers specifically and, 

in time, helped lay the groundwork for the passage of Congress’ first law restricting European 

labor immigration.   

Between 1873 and 1885, a nation-wide industrial depression opened a political and 

ideological space for advocates of immigration restriction on the West Coast, and in an emerging 

eastern labor movement to forge a new official consensus on immigration policy, capitalism, and 

nation building at the level of national electoral politics.23 During this period, the unprecedented 

scale and intensity of unemployment, class conflict, and depression unleashed by 

industrialization compelled federal policy makers and national political parties to search for 

potential solutions to these problems. Anti-Chinese activists on the West Coast along with 

national labor organizations took advantage of this official interest in the “Labor Question,” and 

cooperated to argue for Chinese Exclusion in the name of all “American workers.”  This 

exclusionist coalition argued that domestic industrialization, coupled with the unrestricted 

operation of an international labor market linking the United States to China, transformed 

Chinese competition into an existential threat to the nation. Exclusionists argued that the 

importation of cheap labor intensified the capitalist processes of displacement, mass 

 
23 Historians who study the dynamics of labor politics, class conflict, and federal policy during the late 

nineteenth century have largely overcooked the intersection between issues of national immigration policy and 
national industrial and labor policy in the late nineteenth century. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of 
Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1987), Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor, 1881-1917, (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1998); Chris Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the 
Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Victorio 
Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton: 
Princeton University Press, 1993). One exception to this rule is Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants 
in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 
Mink acknowledges that opposition to Chinese and European immigration played a formative role in national labor 
politics and the formation of a national labor movement in this period. Mink, however, attributes the hostility to 
immigrants almost solely to the narrow craft unionists in the American trade unions which sought only to limit 
foreign competition. As this introduction discusses, opposition to foreign competition was not confined to the 
nation’s trade unions, nor was it motivated solely by the desire to limit foreign competition.  



 

 
 

19 

unemployment, and labor exploitation which were impoverishing the nation’s citizen workers. In 

doing so, trade union and labor leaders mobilized the opinion of rank-and-file industrial workers 

for exclusion and created the impression among federal policymakers, lawmakers, and elites that 

“American workers,” unanimously desired exclusion.24 This argument helped pave the way for 

the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It was endorsed not only by Democrats, but also by 

Republican politicians who saw Chinese Exclusion as a relatively conservative and nationalist 

solution to the national labor question, as well as a policy that could tie male, citizen workers 

into the nation’s industrial order. 25 

The Chinese Exclusion Act was limited only to Chinese workers. However, the Chinese 

Exclusion movement had created a broader vision of a protected working class and enclosed 

labor market that, after 1882, was weaponized by leaders of the Knights of Labor as well as the 

nation’s largest trade unions to prohibit the immigration of European contract laborers. The 

postbellum movement to exclude Chinese workers from the United States and the law that it 

gave rise to helped lay the groundwork for what eventually became the 1885 Alien Contract 

Labor Law.26 This dissertation shows that both acts were passed in the same moment and were 

 
24 Contrary to most accounts of organized labor’s arguments against Chinese immigration, Chinese workers 

were not simply used as a “scapegoat” to mystify the operation of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. 
Rather, anti-Chinese workers, labor leaders, and political economists in the 1870s conceptualized Chinese workers, 
and Chinese immigration as a constituent process by which white workers suffered proletarianization and 
exploitation. Chinese workers, in other words, were not seen as members of the same class as white workers, but as 
a racialized body of workers deployed by capitalists to further impoverish and exploit white workers. For this 
framework, I am indebted to two scholars: Rudi Baltzell, “Free Labour, Capitalism, and the Anti-Slavery Origins of 
Chinese Exclusion in California in the 1870s,” in Past & Present 225 (November, 2014): 143-186; Iyko Day; Alien 
Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press), 2018.  

25 Through the deployment of the tariff, Congress created a national commodity market that shielded 
American producers from foreign competition, redistributed wealth from agriculture to industry, and attempted to tie 
U.S. industrialists and industrial workers to a broader nationalist project. The tariff was not a separate issue from 
immigration policy. On the tariff an U.S. economic nationalism, see Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story 
of Economic Nationalism (New York: Beacon Press, 1999); Bensel, Marc-William Palen, “The Imperialism of 
Economic Nationalism, 1890-1913,” Diplomatic History 39:1 (January 2015): 157-185; On the tariff and U.S. state 
formation, see Gautham Rao, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2016).  

26 I follow Erika Lee’s argument that Chinese Exclusion created an elaborate ideological and legal 
framework that was extended to other groups of immigrations. Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, 



 

 
 

20 

motivated by the same logic. These acts marked a radical departure from the federal 

government’s Civil War era policy of encouraging foreign immigration. They helped reify and 

legitimize a potent set of ideas concerning economic nationalism, cheap labor, and federal power 

and established race and classed based category for exclusion and created a rudimentary system 

of enforcement.27  

 
 

III 
 

The advocates of the nation’s first restrictionist statutes hoped that these laws would help 

ameliorate the consequences of domestic industrialization by protecting “American workers” as 

consumers, as laborers, and as citizens. However, this goal was never realized. After 1886, mass 

unemployment continued, wealth inequality grew apace, and native-born workers were subject to 

increasingly rapid displacement by mechanization. Middle class and elite Americans began to 

call on the repressive apparatus of the state and the law to preclude all challenges to the nation’s 

emerging industrial order. Ironically, the failure of the first gatekeeping laws to solve the “Labor 

Question” did not undermine the logic of federal gatekeeping that had motivated the creation of 

the nation’s first restrictionist acts. The period between 1886 and 1892 was a high point for anti-

immigrant sentiment. The historiography of anti-immigration movements during these years 

 
Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924,” in Journal of American Ethnic History 21:3 (Spring, 2002): 
36-62. Two historians who have shifted priority from Chinese to European immigration in explaining the 
organizations of national immigration control, see Hidetaka Hiroata, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States 
and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); 
Matthew Lindsey, “Preserving the Exceptional Republic: Political Economy, Race, and the Federalization of 
Immigration Law,” Yale Journal of Law 181 (2005).  

27  Stacey Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle Over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and 
Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Rudi Baltzell, “Free Labour, Capitalism, 
and the Anti-Slavery Origins of Chinese Exclusion in California in the 1870s,” in Past & Present 225 (November, 
2014): 143-186; Iyko Day; Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, 
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; for a global history of Chinese exclusion, white labor politics, and economic 
competition, particularly in mining, see Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics; 
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1975); 



 

 
 

21 

focuses mostly on middle class and elite Americans and their growing fear of immigrant 

radicalism. This scholarship focuses on how Americans began to identify so-called “new” 

immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as a threat to the United States.28 “Possessing a 

Nation” explains the ways in which a new labor organization, the American Federation of Labor 

(AFL), helped shape this sentiment into an explicit demand for a stronger gatekeeping state that 

would defend “American workers” against the importation of European “coolie” from Southern 

and Eastern Europe.29  

After its founding in 1886, the AFL seized the reigns of the anti-immigration movement 

from earlier organizations like the Knights of Labor. Between 1886 and the early 1890s, the AFL 

mobilized constituent unions and rank and file workers to strengthen and expand the scope of the 

Alien Contract Labor Act. As part of their campaign, AFL leaders and spokesmen transformed 

the existing discourses of economic citizenship, consumption, and economic nationalism 

established by earlier restrictionist movements, into a broader vision of an American working 

class, labor market, and “standard of living,” protected by the federal government from global 

capitalism. That order would be organized not around the exploitation of a “cheap” and 

heterogeneous domestic proletariat, but rather around the growing rate of consumption of an 

 
28 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick: 

Rutgers University Press, 1962). For a more recent account, see Robert Zeidel, Robber Barons and Wretched 
Refuse, Ethnic and Class Dynamics during the Era of American Industrialization (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois 
Press, 2020): ch 3.  

29  This dissertation argues that the exclusionary AFL and its separation from an increasingly unskilled, 
foreign born working class made the AFL’s embrace of immigration restriction more likely, however these 
sociological factors do not explain the specific ideological and political motivations that drove the AFL’s 
commitment to immigration restriction. The AFL’s investment in federal gatekeeping was shaped by earlier 
movements for immigration restriction, the occupational, ethnic, and political structure of the trade union 
movement, and, most significantly, by the larger ideology, identity, and political outlook of the AFL. Gwendolyn 
Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University 
Press); Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor 1820-1924 (New Orleans: Quid Pro Books, 
1984); Vernon M. Briggs Jr, Immigration and American Unionism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 
2011).  



 

 
 

22 

exclusionary and homogenous national working class constituted by male, citizen worker-

consumers and their families.  

Although skilled, male, trade unionists played a prominent role in the labor radicalism of 

the 1880s, leaders and spokesmen of the Federation like Samuel Gompers, PJ McGuire, and 

George Gunton distanced their organization from the more radical and interethnic elements of 

the labor movement of the time. These spokesmen articulated a type of non-revolutionary 

critique of so-called “cheap labor” capitalism. This critique was not fundamentally opposed to 

capitalist social relations or to the private property but to the tendency of U.S. capitalism to drive 

male citizen workers into competition “cheaper” foreign workers, African American workers, 

women, and children. AFL leaders positioned the Federation as a self-consciously national labor 

movement that desired not to overthrow the U.S. industrial order, but to force “cheap” native-

born women and children out of the national labor market and to enclose this labor market from 

“cheap” foreign labor. They envisioned a stronger federal gate that would ensure a rising 

“American standard of living” for white male workers which, in turn would eventually help 

elevate inferior African American and foreign-born workers--making their competition less of a 

threat to white, native-born wages.30  The concept of an “American working class” that 

organized workers articulated during this period was a hierarchical one. Native-born skilled 

white workers, having the highest aspirations, standards of living were the vanguard of this labor 

movement and working class. Trade union leaders conceptualized African American workers 

and foreign born on the other hand, as inferior, probationary members of this national working 

class. Their membership was contingent on whether they desired and were able to “assimilate” to 

 
30 Rosanne Currarino, “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in 

Industrial America,” in The Journal of American History, 93:1 (June 2006): 17-36; Lawrence Glickman, A Living 
Wage: American Workers Era AFL in its Time,” in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 10:4 
(Winter 2013): 61-87. 



 

 
 

23 

the AFL’s nationalist conception of labor politics and the “American standard of living.” For 

trade union advocates of restriction, however, their assimilation would be impossible so long as 

the United States were open to the constant influx of “cheap labor” from abroad. 

The AFL made its case before the Congressional “Ford” Committee (1887-1889) 

investigation of European immigration and the supposed failures of the Alien Contract Labor 

Law. The Ford Committee concurred with the AFL that existing immigration laws had failed to 

protect American workers and their wages, and that immigrants from Southern and Eastern 

Europe constituted a new threat. Furthermore, the AFL had become recognized by lawmakers, 

policymakers, and social scientists as the legitimate representative of “American workers” on 

immigration policy. By this period, trade union representatives had become recognized as 

“experts” on questions related to immigration, wages, and capitalism. Organized workers became 

fixtures within a more permanent and institutionalized system of immigration policymaking that 

Congress created, with the establishment of permanent House and Senate Committees on 

immigration during the early 1890s.  

A growing number of commentators, intellectuals, editorialists, and even some business 

spokesmen became sympathetic to the AFL’s vision of a conservative national working class and 

labor movement. An emerging network of reform-minded university-trained thinkers associated 

with the American Economics Association (AEA) including Frances Walker, Richard Ely, 

Richard Mayo Smith, and John Commons, aligned their organization with the AFL on the issue 



 

 
 

24 

of federal gatekeeping, economic nationalism, and consumption. 3132 The AEA transformed the 

AFL’s critique of immigration and cheap labor capitalism into a more respectable and 

“scientific” theory of modern statecraft, industrial nation building, and racial competition. The 

AEA’s spokesman argued specifically that the protection of an “American standard of living” 

against foreign labor was an essential step towards the construction of a modern, industrial 

regulatory state that would protect a vulnerable national ethnic and racial social order from the 

consequences of unregulated capitalism. More specifically, this organization constructed the 

rationale of what contemporary and future historians identified as “race suicide” theory. If the 

United States continued to be reliant on cheap, foreign labor, AEA representatives argued, 

American workers would be displaced by economically and racially inferior foreign workers 

from Asia and from Southern and Eastern Europe—leading to the destruction of America’s white 

polity. Under these conditions, it was argued, it had become necessary for the federal 

government to protect an “American standard of living” from foreign competition, which would 

enable American workers and their families to reproduce themselves. The AEA helped 

crystallize the logic of a homogenous and exclusionary American working class constituted by 

white, male citizen consumers. The boundaries of this class were the boundaries of the nation 

enforced by the sovereign power of the state. The economic worth of the American worker was 

not only his whiteness, but also his ability to consume and reproduce along acceptable lines (i.e. 

to be a head of the household), and to be invested, materially and psychologically in American 

 
31 Julian Lim, “Immigration, Plenary Powers, and Sovereignty Talk: Then and Now,” The Journal of the 

Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19 (2020): 217-229; Sarah H. Cleaveland, “Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: 
Indians, Aliens, Territories, and the Nineteenth Century Origins of Plenary Power over Foreign Affairs,” Texas Law 
Review 81 (November 2002); Matthew Lindsay, “Immigration, Sovereignty, and the Constitution of Foreignness,” 
Connecticut Law Review 45:7143 (2013). 

32 William Novak, New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State, (Cambridge: Harvard 
University Press, 2022); Novak, “Law and the Social Control of American Capitalism,” in Emory Law Journal 60:2 
(2010): 377-404.  



 

 
 

25 

capitalism and political institutions. In return, these workers would be entitled to a rising 

“standard of living,” sufficient for them realize these aspirations.  

Ironically, it was the AEA and not the AFL that took up the call for a fundamental 

departure from the existing system of immigration restriction. By the 1890s, the AEA forged a 

new, more radical policy (the literacy test) designed to protect an “American standard of living” 

for an imaginary national working class. Although the AFL and the AEA did not directly 

cooperate for immigration restriction during the late 1880s and early 1890s, they both advocated 

for the passage of federal immigration laws in the early 1890s that considerably strengthened the 

existing immigration restriction system. Furthermore, the ideological alignment that occurred 

during these years laid the groundwork for the formation of a genuine cross-class political bloc 

between U.S. social scientists and trade unionists. This bloc became the core of restrictionism as 

a political and ideological project well into the twentieth century.  

 

IV 

The year 1893 is often denoted as a watershed moment for the immigration restriction 

movement. Scholars point to the founding of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), the 

nation’s first formal restrictionist interest group, in 1894. Erika Lee, for instance, claimed that 

the IRL “crafted and perfected a xenophobic message designed to influence policy.” The IRL’s 

message, it is argued, was fundamentally rooted in new scientific discourses of racism that 

distinguished so-called “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe as inferior and a 

threat to an American “Anglo-Saxon” racial and political order. Over time, the IRL helped steer 

the opinion of the public and lawmakers towards support for major laws restricting European 



 

 
 

26 

immigration during the first two decades of the twentieth century.33 Recently, historian Katherine 

Benton-Cohen has pushed back on this narrative. It was not the IRL, she insists, but the so-called 

“Dillingham Commission” that invented the idea that European immigration was a problem that 

the federal government should solve. Benton-Cohen argues that the immigration question, more 

specifically, was defined not as a problem of race, but as a problem of labor.34  

“Possessing a Nation” differs from these accounts in several ways. First, the distinction 

between immigration as a problem of “race” and as a problem of “labor” overlooks how 

Americans at the turn of the century conceptualized these categories. The ways in which 

Americans theorized foreignness, race, and national belonging by the late nineteenth century was 

fundamentally mediated and shaped by the logic of class and labor. This dissertation shows that 

the IRL as well as the Dillingham Commission’s understandings of the immigration problem was 

fundamentally influenced by political economy of race, labor, and nation articulated by earlier 

restrictionist movements discussed in this project. The IRL, for instance, counted among its 

members and spokesmen some of the same social scientists that had forged the AEA’s position 

on immigration and federal gatekeeping. At the same time, the Dillingham Commission’s 

conceptualization of the immigration labor problem was decisively influenced by labor 

spokesmen and pro-labor political economists during the early twentieth century. Thirdly, 

Benton-Cohen, as well as historians of the IRL, consider organized labor a junior partner among 

the restrictionist movement of the period. This dissertation shows that the increasingly influential 

and politically potent AFL of the 1890s and early twentieth century was a decisive actor in 

 
33 Lee, America for Americans, 113-117; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 68-77; Cite Jacobson Whiteness 

of a Different Color; Claudia Goldin, “The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890-
1921,” in Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap eds. The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political 
Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 223-258. 

34 Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem.  



 

 
 

27 

influencing the national debate on immigration, shaping and helping to pass major immigration 

laws, and enforcing federal gatekeeping policy.  

The AFL did not do so alone. Rather it was part of a cross-class network that had its roots 

in the 1880s but fully crystallized during the period of rapid development and growth, industrial 

restructuring, and imperial expansion that characterized the years between 1896 and the first 

decade of the twentieth century. The alignment between the AFL and the IRL was not automatic. 

During the depression between 1893 and 1896, the AFL briefly withdrew its interest in passing a 

law that would restrict Southern and Eastern European labor. The Federation did not enter the 

debate until the dramatic economic recovery between 1896 and 1904. During this period, 

productive capital became concentrated in the hands of massive corporations which were able, 

once and for all, to break the power of skilled workers over production, reorganize the 

productive process and mobilize machine production on an unprecedented scale. This new era 

made unskilled foreign labor even more significant for U.S. capitalism. Workers from Southern 

and Eastern Europe poured into factories, mines, and mills across the United States.35  

The consolidation of this corporate capitalist order intensified incentives for employers as 

well as organized labor to influence national immigration policy and to shape the dominant 

narrative about the racial, economic, and political significance of foreign labor for U.S. 

capitalism. The AFL did not fundamentally reject the new corporate order, but it did mobilize 

politically to shape the new conditions of mass production, mass consumption, and racial 

competition through influencing federal policy. This was a crucial period of development for the 

trade union movement. The AFL experienced rapid growth in its membership, cultivated its 

 
35 Historians of the corporate reconstruction of U.S. capitalism ignore immigration policy, Martin Sklar, 

The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, The Law, and Politics (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1988); James Livingston, “The Social Analysis of Economic History and Theory: 
Conjectures on Late Nineteenth Century American Development,” American Historical Review 92 (February 1987).  



 

 
 

28 

electoral influence, and expanded its capacity to lobby in Washington D.C. and coordinate the 

political activity of its affiliates. After 1897, AFL leaders mobilized rank and file opinion to 

support the IRL’s bill. The Federation conceptualized the expanding realm of federal 

immigration policymaking as a proxy war between organized labor and what they envisioned as 

a capitalist conspiracy to flood the United States with all forms of cheap labor. The AFL and the 

IRL conducted their own campaigns for their shared legislative goal, but they did communicate 

and coordinated at crucial political moments throughout these years. Their primary demand was 

the literacy test, but these organizations also pushed for other ways to stem the flow of foreign 

labor, such as increasingly the head tax on immigration and increasing funding for the Bureau of 

Immigration. Labor leaders were also interested in participating the enforcement of immigration 

laws. The labor movement’s growing influence was recognized by the appointment of William 

Mckinley of the former labor organizer Terence Powderly as the Commissioner General of 

Immigration. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the AFL cooperated closely with 

the Bureau of Immigration to ensure that existing immigration laws were enforced to the 

maximum. This influence reached its apex when the IRL and the AFL both lobbied to move the 

Bureau of Immigration to an independent Department of Labor. 

At the same time, the AFL and the IRL cultivated pro-restrictionist support within both 

national political parties, particularly from the economic nationalist wing of the Republican 

Party, and among pro-labor Democrats. Although the literacy test was not passed, immigration 

laws were passed by Congress in 1903, 1904, and 1907 that enacted stronger regulations on 

European immigration.36 The AFL and the IRL, along with their networks of pro-restrictionist 

 
36. The arena of federal investigation, by the early twentieth century, was not autonomous but was shaped 

by social forces. More specifically, organized labor had become a key player in federal industrial investigations. 
This was also the case for the Dillingham Committee. Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple. The State and Economic 
Knowledge: The American and British Experiences. Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson International Center for 



 

 
 

29 

social scientists created and circulated a significant volume of monographs, articles, and 

correspondence to shape public and official opinion on immigration and immigration policy. 

Both organizations adapted established nationalist and racist arguments against cheap foreign 

labor to the new conditions of mass production and mass production unleashed by corporate 

capitalism. They framed the immigration debate as a conflict pitting advocates of a more stable 

and racially homogenous national capitalist order from a U.S. capitalism that had become 

dangerously reliant on the exploitation of foreign labor. The latter, it was argued, was preventing 

American workers from sharing in the nation’s economic abundance by flooding the U.S. with 

cheap foreign labor to maximize domestic unemployment, by breaking American labor unions, 

and by keeping the working class fractured along racial and national lines. Figures like Samuel 

Gompers and Jeremiah Jenks of the Dillingham Commission, argued that the reliance of U.S. 

capitalism on cheap foreign labor exacerbated the nation’s cyclical depressions, hindered the 

mechanization of American capitalism, and would ultimately lead to the displacement of an 

American working class with a foreign-born proletariat. 37 The arena of federal investigation 

became a crucial venue in which the AFL and the IRL put forward this argument. Trade union 

spokesmen were joined by prominent individuals like John R. Commons and Henry Pratt 

 
Scholars, 2002; Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America, (Princeton and 
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002): 80-85. “Possessing a Nation,” reconstructs the ways in which the field of 
social investigation became a “nexus” in the national debate on immigration and immigration policy. Investigation 
linked together the restrictionist wing of the labor movement to restrictionist (and liberal immigration) policy 
makers, and prominent intellectuals (particularly those associated with academic social science and political 
economy). Social investigation functioned to render “legible” the integration of the U.S. industrial order into an 
emergent transatlantic labor market and the massive influx of proletarianized immigrants from Southern and Eastern 
Europe into U.S. political economy and social order. Unsurprisingly, this process of knowledge-formation became 
highly politicized because influence over the crafting future gatekeeping policy was at stake. 

37 Ultimately, this was a racist critique of American Fordism in the early twentieth century. On the ways in 
which U.S. Fordism exploited and reproduced racial hierarchies, Joshua Lam, Race: Fordism Factories and 
Mechanical Reproduction of Racial Identity in The Edinburgh Companion to Modenism and Technology 
(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2022); Hounshell, David A. (1984), From the American System to Mass 
Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, Baltimore, Maryland; 
Antonio, Robert J. and Bonanno, Alessandro. "A New Global Capitalism? From 'Americanism and Fordism' to 
'Americanization-globalization.'" American Studies 2000 41 (2–3): 33–77 



 

 
 

30 

Fairchild of the IRL during hearings held by House and Senate Commissions on Immigration as 

well as the U.S. Industrial Commission (1898-1902).38 

The AFL’s gatekeeping project did not only pertain to European immigration. For AFL 

representatives, affiliated unions, and organized workers on the West Coast, the task of 

defending and expanding the Chinese gate was part of the same project of combatting cheap 

foreign labor and expanding the trade union movement’s influence over the federal gatekeeping 

state. One crucial example of this was the AFL’s campaign to extend Chinese Exclusion after 

1898. The expansion of the United States beyond its continental boundaries raised crucial 

questions about whether Chinese exclusion would extend to the New Empire. Between 1898 and 

1902, the AFL mobilized outright to ensure that it did. It came into conflict with Chinese 

diplomats, pro-Chinese employers, as well as American exporters who feared they would lose 

access to Chinese foreign markets. The AFL successfully helped pass a new Chinese Exclusion 

Law in 1902, and again in 1904 and 1906 that effectively made Chinese Exclusion permanent 

and extended the Chinese gate to all U.S. territories. 

“Possessing a Nation” concludes this story by offering a new understanding of how 

World War I paved the way for the Immigration Acts of the early 1920s. Historians often argue 

that support for restriction expanded during and immediately after WW1 for two reasons. First, 

by encouraging anti-radicalism among American elites and second, by popularizing eugenical 

 
38 For example, Walter Weyl argued that the immigration question occupied a prominent place in the 

reconstruction of American democracy in the progressive era. He claimed that “the policy of democracy towards 
immigration is coming to be one of a checking of the rapidity of the flow, a selection of the best candidates for 
admission, and the quickest and most thorough possible preparation of the accepted immigrants for the duties of 
American citizenship.” Walter Weyl, The New Democracy. (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912). Weyl 
linked this vision directly to the changing political-economic conditions of the country. He insisted that mass 
European immigration was presenting a new problem of “industrial saturation.” Walter Weyl, “Immigration and 
Industrial Saturation,” in University Settlement Studies 1 (1904): 61-73. “Admitting that we actually need the 
immigrant in the number in which he arrives, that there is work for him and not enough laboring force without him, 
then it may or may not be economical to have him born and bred at some other nationals expense, but the solution 
begs the real question as to whether he is needed or is a surplus or waste product.” 



 

 
 

31 

reasoning for restriction.39 This dissertation stresses, instead, the ways in which the unique 

economic and political conditions unleashed by the war helped enhance the influence of the AFL 

within the federal government, and helped popularize its critique of immigration, and its vision 

of a racially exclusionary working class and labor market. Beginning in 1914, trade union 

spokesmen along with progressive labor reformers argued that the decline in immigration 

brought about by the war in Europe had proved restrictionists correct: U.S. capitalism, they 

argued, no longer needed mass immigration to thrive. More specifically, they argued that this 

new situation had led to a rising “American standard of living” that helped assimilate foreign 

born workers to the superior “American standard,” disincentivized radicalism, and forced 

employers to recognize the legitimate demands of their workers. Established restrictionist 

organizations like the IRL, but also by many (although not all) progressive reformers embraced 

this conceptualization, and advocated for and helped build the wartime federal government.  

Between 1914 and 1917, the AFL and the IRL worked with traditional Republican 

restrictionists and Southern Democrats, but also with a new and influential cadre of “Labor 

Democrats,” to pass the Immigration Act of 1917 which included the literacy test as well as the 

Asiatic Barred Zone. Despite this Act, following the war, pro-restrictionist voices from 

organized labor to Progressive reformers anticipated that mass immigration would inevitably 

return from Europe. Although an even more draconian immigration restriction statute seemed 

inevitable, at this point a new organization, the National Committee for Constructive 

 
39 Historians of immigration policy and politics of this period also fail to note the ways in which the AFL’s 

growing political influence and recognition was a significant factor both in the passage of the 1917 law, but also for 
the quota laws of 1921 and 1924. Tichenor, Lee, Zolberg; Historians of labor and the federal government during 
WWI have overlooked the significance of immigration policy for the labor movement; Melvyn Dubofsky, The State 
and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, ch. 3; Nelson 
Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris, eds., Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1993); David Montgomery, “Immigrants, Industrial Unions, and Social Reconstruction 
in the United States, 1916-1923," in Labour/ Le Travail, 13 (Spring, 1984): 101-113. 



 

 
 

32 

Immigration Legislation proposed a non-discriminatory Quota system that would eliminate 

Asian exclusion and establish a uniform quota for every nation on Earth. While the AFL’s 

prestige was in rapid decline after the War, the Federation used its remaining influence to 

cooperate with Asian Exclusionist organizations and politicians, as well as the IRL and an 

increasingly influential network of eugenicists to pressure Congress to ensure that the Quota 

system that did emerge would also entail full Asian exclusion, and would discriminate against 

the “cheaper” races of Southern and Eastern Europe. 

Ultimately, the vision of an enclosed national working class and labor market was 

realized with the passage of the Quota Acts in the 1920s. However, the great irony of the 

Johnson-Reed system is that, by closing off foreign labor from the United States, domestic jobs 

were opened up to native-born workers who had not been included in the vision of an “American 

working class” articulated by the AFL and its supporters: African American workers, as well as 

many unskilled first and second generation European immigrant laborers who were traditionally 

excluded from the labor movement.  

  



 

 
 

33 

Chapter One 
 

“We Promote Free Trade in Men” 
The Problem of Labor Importation in a “Free Labor” Nation, 1864-1872 

 
 “The importation...of...coolie labour in these united states [sic] is ruinous to the life 
principles of our republic, destroying the system of free labour which is the basis of 

a republican form of government…”   
National Labor Union 1870  

 
 

In his 1863 presidential address, Abraham Lincoln informed Congress that the ongoing 

war had created “a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture 

and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of precious metals.” The President recommended 

that Congress pass a law facilitating the migration of laborers from Europe. The immigration of 

foreign laborers, Lincoln argued, would not only benefit business interests in need of labor, but 

would also help build a new, democratic nation.40 One year later, the Republican-dominated 

Congress passed the Act to Encourage Immigration, which allowed U.S. employers to contract 

with foreign laborers and helped use federal funds to subsidize the immigration of European 

workers. The 1864 Act was one of a spate of laws passed by the federal government with the 

intention of mobilizing land and labor for the development of a national “free labor” political 

economy. The Homestead Act (1862), for instance, was intended to encourage the settlement of 

the West by independent settlers. For Lincoln and the wartime Republican Party, the promotion 

of immigration would help provide wage laborers for the nation’s small, but emerging industrial 

sector by ensuring that the freedom of employers and employees to enter contracts knew no 

territorial boundaries.41 

 
40 For Lincoln’s message to Congress, see U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on 

Foreign Emigration (to Accompany H.R. 411), 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1864; For the House of Representatives report, 
see US Congress, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, 
Volume 2, 61st Cong., 3d sess., 1911, Senate Doc. 747, 565; 7.  

41 The literature on “free labor” ideology in the mid-nineteenth century is extensive. However, this 
literature largely overlooks how free labor ideology shaped the way northerners conceptualized immigration and 



 

 
 

34 

The 1864 Act was passed with an overwhelming majority and was celebrated by 

Republican lawmakers and an emerging class of northern financiers, industrialists, and 

immigration recruiting companies. However, in immediate wake of the War, the statute, along 

with the broader system of labor recruitment it helped encourage, became a focal point in an 

emerging ideological conflict over the meaning of “free labor” within the nation’s emerging 

capitalist wage system. After 1865 and the end of the Civil War, trade union leaders, labor 

periodicals, and other labor spokesmen began to conceptualize the state-sanctioned ability of 

American employers to recruit workers from abroad as inseparable from the larger capitalist 

system which, they argued, threatened to “enslave” free, white laborers in the United States by 

subjecting them to their employers and to an increasingly competitive labor market.42 Between 

 
federal immigration policy in the decade following the Civil War. This chapter, on the other hand, argues that the 
postbellum debate over the meaning of “free labor” shaped, and was shaped by, the national debate over contract 
labor immigration and federal immigration policy in general. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The 
Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Amy Dru Stanley, 
From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation, (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1998); William Forbath, “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Labor in the 
Gilded Age,” Wisconsin Law Review 767 (1985): 767-817; Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and 
Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); James 
W. Fox Jr. “The Law of Many Faces: Antebellum Contract Law Background of Reconstruction-Era Freedom of 
Contract,” in The American Journal of Legal History 49:1 (January, 2007): 61-112; Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, 
Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).  

The historian Kevin Kenny has argued that the movement against European contract labor immigration was 
rooted in the discourse of free labor. He argues that policymakers, organized laborers, and lawmakers opposed 
European contract labor immigration because it resembled slavery. However, this chapter differs somewhat from 
Kenny’s argument. This chapter focuses on the ways in which opponents of European contract labor immigration 
saw this type of immigration not as a system of slave, or a slave trade, but as one part of a broader system of “wage 
slavery” that threatened to enslave white, native-born free laborers in the United States: Kevin Kenny, The Problem 
of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth Century, (New York: Blackstone 
Publishing, 2024): ch. 5.  

42 Labor historians of this period often note that the postbellum labor movement was concerned about 
contract labor immigration, but they have not analyzed the ways in which contract labor immigration, and labor 
immigration in general, became a central issue for the trade unions and organized laborers after the Civil War. Labor 
historians who do focus on immigration and the labor movement typically focus on the 1880s and thereafter, and/or 
concentrate mostly on the relationship between labor unions and Chinese immigration. See