Sources for America’s History: Printed Page 438
17-5 | | Pointing Out the Irony of Nativist Policies |
JOSEPH KEPPLER, Looking Backward (1893) |
By the 1890s, America had become a nation of immigrants, and for the next two decades the wave of European immigrants washing ashore drove its industrial development and changed its demographic mix. Many industrialists welcomed the cheap labor immigrants brought, while urban political machines manipulated newcomers for partisan gains. Increasing immigration, however, raised alarms from native-born whites who caricatured many immigrants as radicals and culturally inferior, just the sort who might destroy American customs and institutions. In this cartoon, published in Puck, an American magazine of political satire, artist and editor Joseph Keppler comments on America’s immigration policies.
READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Analyze and evaluate the point of view Keppler expresses in his cartoon. What do the shadows behind the elegantly dressed gentlemen represent?
How would you compare Keppler’s cartoon with the Chinese Exclusion Act for evidence of the diversity of opinion on the immigrant question in the latter nineteenth century?