Woodberry , Aldrich elaborates his motivations and intentions for "Unguarded Gates. I went home and wrote a misanthropic poem called "Unguarded Gates" …, in which I mildly protest against America becoming the cesspool of Europe. I'm much too late, however. I looked in on an anarchist meeting the other night, as I told you, and heard such things spoken by our "feller citizens" as made my cheek burn.
These brutes are the spawn and natural result of the French Revolution; they don't want any government at all, they "want the earth" like a man in a balloon and chaos.
My Americanism goes clean beyond yours. I believe in America for the Americans; …, and I hold that jail-birds, professional murderers, amateur lepers…, and human gorillas generally should be closely questioned at our Gates. Though Aldrich includes no Africans on his list of immigrant groups who have realized their dreams of freedom and equality in America, peoples of Africa still appear in the poem.
When his speaker notes that there is no slavery in the United States, he implies that African-Americans are to be included as American citizens, and this entails that future volu ntary Black African immigrants would have reason to expect the benefits of citizenship as long as they accept the values he has listed.
It is not clear in the poem or letter that Aldrich has given this aspect of his poem any thought. There he recalls fondly the African American barber, Sol Holmes, who was one of the few "exotics" in the Portsmouth, NH of his boyhood.
While the portrait he offers draws upon stereotypes -- e. Also missing from this text and the poem is any awareness of the true position of African Americans in the decade leading up to Plessy vs. Ferguson , the Supreme Court decision that established legal racial apartheid in the United States. Another people Aldrich mentions in the poem is Arabs, when he names the date-palm as a characteristic Arab tree, which marks one extreme in the various American climate.
This at least suggests that Arabs who come from where date palms grow would find a familiar landscape in America. There seems to be nothing in the poem to suggest that he meant to exclude either Africans or Arabs from America, even though they are not included on a list that is meant to suggest the variety of successful American immigrants, without naming every actual immigrant group. A reader may wonder about Aldrich's handling of Teutons.
They make a somewhat surprising second appearance at the end of the poem, when Aldrich compares the danger America faces from hostile immigrants to the catastrophe Rome experienced as the Goths and Vandals invaded and desecrated the empire. The Goths and Vandals were Teutonic peoples, and when the Vandals sacked Rome in the fifth century, their kingdom was based in North Africa.
Did Aldrich intend the ironies that arise from considering that the same Teutonic peoples who supposedly established the American institutions Aldrich admires were once the barbarians who overthrew the most successful empire in the western world? How does this idea comment upon his main argument? In his Woodberry letter, he uses a quite different comparison, asserting that the anarchists who inspired his poem want to bring about a French Revolution in America, which seems mad, given what the American system offers to anyone who understands its institutions and is willing to toil for his or her wage.
What Aldrich means in his comparison of the fall of Rome with his foretold decline of America seems unclear, but these complexities and ironies lend support to the view that Aldrich's main concern in the poem is that America find ways of filtering out individuals who cannot or will not make reasonable use of the gifts of freedom.
He published his poem, The Unguarded Gates in , ten years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act , the year after Congress passed a law creating a federal department coordinating immigration enforcement, and the year that the Ellis Island Immigration Station opened in New York Harbor. In street and alley what strange tongues are loud, Accents of menace alien to our air, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! Have a care Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn And trampled in the dust. O Liberty, white Goddess : While it would seem common sense to assume that Aldrich refers to the Statue of Liberty in this line, this allusion is problematic.
However, there were many other popular images of versions of the Roman goddess Libertas that were white or in which she was depicted as dressed in white. Perhaps the most familiar image in the 21st century is the logo for Columbia Motion Pictures.
Reasonably familiar to Aldrich and his contemporaries would have been the Enrico Causici statue of Liberty , now in the National Statuary Hall ; this depiction once stood behind the speaker's desk in the old chamber of the House of Representatives. Perhaps more familiar would have been Thomas Gast's painting that was widely distributed as a engraving. Conservative think-tanks and lobby groups such as the Immigration Restriction League built alliances with farmers, Southerners, and labour unions.
Influential Senators such as Henry Cabot Lodge started to lobby for new means of reducing immigration. What university degrees, skills, job prospects, and language skills are to conservative lawmakers today, the literacy test was for nativist reformers of the early twentieth century. At Ellis Island and at other inspection sites at American borders, immigrants were meant to prove that they could read and write. Restrictionists argued that the test was impartial, and that apart from testing a crucial skill for participation in American politics, it would also exclude the most undesirable, as illiteracy supposedly correlated with criminality, poverty, and dependence on state aid.
The real motivation, however, was another correlation — that illiteracy was the lowest among people from North-western Europe. Depending on the audience, restrictionists would openly address this racial dimension— the founder of the Immigration Restriction League, Prescott F. Henry Cabot Lodge.
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