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

Abstract

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.