ABSTRACT
As the ethnically polygot post-Civil War American society took shape from the late 1860s onward, a system of intergroup regulation emerged among the culturally dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) that was premised on the ethnic denigration of non-WASP groups. Some historians like John Higham have characterized this WASP-initiated mode of ethnic denigration as “nativism,” and other observers have labeled it just plain “bigotry.”1 By asserting WASP cultural superiority, nativism also asserted the inferiority of non-WASP ethnic newcomers. It was fashioned by the dominant host WASP community to regulate and checkmate the status positioning of non-WASP groups who were needed to provide a manufacturing labor force in America’s rapidly industrializing system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nativism also performed another function as well; it was used to create an unequal social pecking order that favored WASPS over non-WASP ethnic groups.
