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ADAM ROME
nature wars, culture wars:
IMMIGRATION
AND ENVIRONMENTAL REFORM IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
ABSTRACT
In the decades around 1900, native-born Americans and immigrants fought a variety of battles about environmental issues. Those battles had important consequences. The critique of immigrants also reveals that native-born Americans had more complicated views about nature than environmental historians have acknowledged. Though a back-to-nature impulse was a defining characteristic of the Progressive Era, the complaints about immigrants make clear that some forms of closeness to nature made many Americans deeply uncomfortable.
| IN A NOVEL PUBLISHED IN 1903, the social reformer Vida Scudder imagined a debate at a Boston settlement house about whether the patriotic song "America" meant anything to the new immigrants in American cities. The discussion focused at first on a political question. Did those born in Italy, Hungary, Poland, or Russia understand the meaning of "liberty" and "freedom"? But the debate quickly took a different tack. Did immigrants appreciate the splendors of American nature? Not at all, answered several guests. "What do they know about mountain sides, and rocks and rills?" a lawyer asked. "They never saw a rill, except in the gutter." The settlement-house residents unhesitatingly stood up for the city's newcomers. One told about taking a Jewish girl to the top of a nearby hill, where the view evoked a joyous exclamation from the young immigrant: "Ain't this grand? I admire scenery, it adds so." To one blue-blooded guest, however, that story only illustrated the gap between the nature-feeling of immigrants and long-established residents of New England. The summer before, she recalled, she had been atop a New Hampshire mountain when the mist lifted at sunrise, and she was overwhelmed by the "azure glory" of the world below. "We looked from Monadnock and Wachusett across Lake Winnepesaukee, to the great peaks of Washington and Lafayette, then to the Green Mountains and the far Adirondacks, across the Connecticut River Valley," she continued. "Six states were in sight. The very names were sacred. Presently some one started 'America,' and every voice joined in. 'From every mountain side let Freedom ring.' The poem did not sound unreal then, I assure you. I for one, as I looked over that fair land, thanked God for my heritage and for my forefathers."1 |
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When Scudder's novel appeared, the United States was struggling to come to terms with the greatest influx of population in the nation's history. From 1880 until 1924, when immigration was restricted, almost 25 million people came to the United States from other nations. The largest share came from southern, central, and eastern Europe—regions that had provided few immigrants before. The so-called "new" immigrants quickly became subjects of controversy. As historians long have recognized, much of the debate about immigration focused on politics, social mores, and economics. But Scudder's imagined scene makes a point that scholars largely have missed: Many native-born Americans also were concerned about the ways the new immigrants related to nature.2 |
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That concern came from several quarters. Some of the critics were conservationists, some were social reformers, and some were nativists. Their specific concerns varied. Yet all asserted that the environmental attitudes and habits of the new immigrants were uncivilized. In practice, that argument was twofold. The critics charged that immigrants had too little appreciation of nature's beauty—the contention of the nay-sayers in Scudder's novel. The critics also made a subtler charge: Unlike civilized people, the new immigrants made no effort to distance themselves from the messiness of nature. |
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