vocal proponent of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons
Following American victory in the Spanish-American War, Lodge came to represent the imperialist faction of the US Senate, those who called for the annexation of the Philippines.
Lodge did not object to the United States
interfering in other nations' affairs, and was a proponent
of imperialism (see Lodge Committee for further explanation).
Immigration
Lodge was a vocal supporter of immigration restrictions because he
was concerned about the possible failure of American isolation, that is
the assimilation of immigrants with an alien culture. The public voice
of the Immigration Restriction League,
Lodge argued on behalf of literacy tests for incoming immigrants,
appealing to fears that unskilled foreign labor was undermining the
standard of living for American workers and that a mass influx of
uneducated immigrants would result in social conflict and national
decline. Lodge was alarmed that large numbers of immigrants, primarily
from Eastern and Southern Europe, were flooding into industrial
centers, where the poverty of their home countries was being
perpetuated and crime rates were rapidly rising. Lodge claimed that
these immigrants were "people whom it is very difficult to assimilate
and do not promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States." He felt that the United States should temporarily shut out all
further entries, particularly persons of low education or skill, in
order to more efficiently assimilate the millions who had come. From
1907 to 1911, he served on the Dillingham Commission,
a joint congressional committee established to study the era's
immigration patterns and make recommendations to Congress based on its
findings. The Commission's recommendations led to the Immigration Act of 1917.
Yet Lodge was no rampant xenophobe,
remarking once that "It [the U.S. flag] is the flag just as much of the
man who was naturalized yesterday as of the man whose people have been
here many generations."
Lodge, along with Theodore Roosevelt, was a supporter of "100% Americanism." In an address to the New England Society of Brooklyn in 1888, Lodge stated:
Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from
which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and
honorable duty. But let us have done with British-Americans and
Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be
Americans...If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so
without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something
else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.
He also said this, as quoted in the Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah, August 8, 1891:
Within the last decades the character of the immigration to this
country has changed materially. The immigration of the people who have
settled and built up the nation during the last 250 years, and who have
been, with trifling exceptions, kindred either in race or language or
both is declining while the immigration of people who are not kindred
either in race or language and who represent the most ignorant classes
and the lowest labor of Europe, is increasing with frightful rapidity.
The great mass of these ignorant immigrants come here at an age when
education is unlikely if not impossible and when the work of
Americanizing them is in consequence correspondingly difficult. They
also introduce an element of competition in the labor market which must
have a disastrous effect upon the rate of American wages. We pay but
little attention to this vast flood of immigrants. The law passed by
the last congress has improved the organization of the Immigration
Department, but it has done very little toward sifting those who come
to our shores.
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