“The Moral Aspects of Complex Problems”: New York City Electoral Campaigns against Vice and the Incorporation of Immigrants, 1890–1901” 1

THIS ESSAY ARGUES that the intersection between immigrant incorporation and the construction of municipal politics and citizenship is crucial to understanding either phenomenon in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New York City. In so doing, it demonstrates that what Elliott Barkan terms “translocalism” historically has included the multiple ways in which international migration and immigrant incorporation shape the cultures and politics of receiving nations and how the hybrid results in turn affect the experience of migration and incorporation. The essay also explores how the ethnic and racialized, national, and class relations that characterized the intersection between immigration and local politics were gendered and sexualized in complex ways. ²