ABSTRACT
The idealized rendering of American social history suggests that the newcomers achieved this remarkable transition to middle-class status via the Horatio Alger route. In the course of American history, millions of newcomers have entered the nation's mainstream. The assimilation process was relatively simple and the newcomers blended into the mainstream without disrupting the dominant American way of life. Periodically, violent methods were used to control the newcomers, political movements constituted to oppose them, philosophical ideologies devised to dehumanize them, and legislation enacted to exclude them. Fear of the newcomer gradually evolved into discriminatory and retaliatory movements such as nativism—ideologies that favored the native inhabitants of the United States as against the newcomers. Social scientist also refer to dominant groups, those diverse groups— both middle and upper class—belonging to the mainstream of American society in the era under investigation. Increasingly some members of the elite groups of American society promoted the notion of the innate superiority of Anglo-Saxon over other "races."
