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In May of 1896, Richard Bartholdt,
a Republican from Missouri and a German immigrant, stood on the
floor of the House of Represen tatives and introduced a bill that
would set off months of debate in the Fifty-Fourth Congress. The
bill was H.R. 7864, which required all male immigrants between
the ages of sixteen and sixty to prove they were literate in either
English or some other language. While congressmen on all sides
of the issue made passionate arguments for and against this bill,
they nevertheless found some areas of agreement. The supporters
and opponents of restriction all regarded southern and eastern
European immigrants as racially different than those of northwestern
European descent.2
Further, all congressmen understood the purpose of the bill to
be as much about improving the United States citizenry racially
as intellectually.3 Richard Bartholdt clearly stated the
racial reasoning behind the literacy test when he introduced the
bill to the House. Reading the report of the House Immigration
and Naturalization Committee, he pointed out that the bill would
not affect "the immigration from Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia,
and other countries of Northern Europe, which countries as a rule
send us the most desirable classes of immigrants, while under
it the immigration from southern Europe, now looked upon as more
or less undesirable, will be consider ably restricted."4 Bartholdt provided a table
that showed immigrants from countries like Italy, Poland, Hungary
and Russia had much higher illiteracy rates than those from Great
Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia.5 Later, when he made the case for the bill, he said,
"call it race prejudice or any other name, but there is no denying
the fact that the Anglo-Saxon feels an aversion against the Latin
races."6
One of the main goals of the framers of the bill, then, was to
use the literacy test to keep out "undesirable" races, and
the racial fitness of immigrants became a driving force of the
ensuing Congressional debate.
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Yet congressmen described immigrants
in more than just racial terms. On the same day that Bartholdt
introduced the bill, John Corliss, a Republican representative
from Michigan, declared that the purpose of immigration restriction
legislation was "to preserve the human blood and manhood of the
American character by the exclusion of depraved human beings."7 Like many of his colleagues, Corliss believed that southeastern
European immigrants had inferior "blood" to those of northwestern
Europe. But he linked the "blood," or racial character of
Americans to their "manhood," arguing that immigrants posed
a direct threat to both the racial and gender foundations of the
nation. Corliss was not alone in grounding his racial arguments
in gender ideologies. Just beneath the surface of the literacy
test debate, congressmen debated a more fundamental question:
would southeastern European races enhance white American manhood
or lead to its degeneration?
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