ABSTRACT
From 1865 to 1900 no fewer than thirteen and a half million foreigners entered the United States. The pace at which they arrived was even greater after the turn of the century, when almost nine million immigrants passed through the ports of entry from 1900 through 1910. The concentration of new Americans was even greater in some of the small industrial cities, where almost all the inhabitants had been recruited abroad to staff the mills. Nativist sentiment frequently had religious overtones, with Roman Catholicism being depicted as part of an international conspiracy to subvert the free institutions of America. Moreover, nativist sentiment was not absent among Roman Catholics. The Protestant approach to the newcomers to the American scene was motivated by a varying mixture of religious concern, humanitarian sentiment, patriotic fervor, and anti-Catholic feeling that interpreted the incoming tide as part of a carefully laid plot to capture the United States for the Pope.
