“Some latter-day writers deplore the enormous immigration to our shores as making us a heterogeneous instead of homogenous people; but as a matter of fact we are less heterogenous at the present day than we were at the outbreak of the revolution. Our blood was as much mixed a century ago as it is now.”
–Theodore Roosevelt, in his speech
“The Winning of the West: The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples

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Beginning in the 1880s, the United States saw an explosion in what was called “new immigration”. Fueled by better economic prospects or fleeing political or religious persecution, these “new” immigrants came not from northwestern Europe, but southern and eastern Europe, as well as Asia. The Italian, Chinaman, the Polack, the Jew–many came with little or nothing, moving into the poorest quarters of America’s bourgeoning metropolises. As the number of “new immigrants” rose, so did xenophobic sentiment in the nation’s “old stock”. The new immigrants were thought to have “neither the mental capacity nor the stability of character” of the former immigrants (Ross 96), and everything from social Darwinism to disease pathology to the rewriting of histories was employed to prove that these were a filthy, feeble-minded, and even inherently criminal peoples.

If Nordic blood was the blood most pure, then what would result from its contamination by the blood of lesser races? Americans of “old stock” were called upon to reproduce themselves with vigor and in great quantities. Theodore Roosevelt declared in a review in 1911 that “[t]he race cannot go ahead, it will not keep its numbers even, unless the average man and woman who are married and who are capable of having children have a family of four.” (Roosevelt 341). Anything less, many said, would cause “racial death” or “race suicide”. The language of xenophobia showed up in scientific journals and public health tracts. It appeared in political speeches and public policies. The art of the day was not exempt. Hints of this xenophobic hysteria, some subtle, some overt, permeate America’s literature of the time. With history, politics, and art so inextricably linked, to ignore these hints would be to misunderstand the nature of these works.

Priscilla Wald discusses the factors involved in the transformation of Irish immigrant Mary Mallon, a domestic cook, into what science and media alike called “Typhoid Mary”, a human vector for disease. In her essay “‘Typhoid Mary’ and the Science of Social Control”, Wald notes that even the “enlightened” activist Sara Josephine Baker, describes the Irish as generally “incredibly shiftless, altogether charming in their abject helplessness, wholly lacking in any ambition and dirty to an unbelievable degree, ” and, as a matter of fact, “the Irish and the Russian Jews vied for the distinction of living in the most lurid squalor. The Irish did it . . . out of a mixture of discouragement and apparent shiftlessness.” (Wald 195)

The cold, scientific, and rather harsh narration in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is often studied as a component of Crane’s naturalist mode of writing. Alfred Kazin, in his introduction to the novel, praises Crane for being the first American writer from an established protestant society to “recognize the humor that could be extracted from people so marginal, bawdy, and extreme.” (Maggie vii).

Eventually they entered a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. . . . Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels (Maggie, 5).

Crane describes Maggie’s mother as having “massive shoulders heav[ing] with anger”; her first action in the novel is to shake her son “until he rattled” and drag him to an “unholy sink” to clean him off (Maggie 7). Wald tells us that Dr. George A. Soper, upon investigating Mary Mallon’s social life and living conditions, described her rooms as “a place of dirt and disorder. It was not improved by the presence of a large dog of which Mary was said to be very fond.” He reports that acquaintances said she “walked more like a man than a woman and that her mind had a distinctly masculine character.” (Wald 195). “Soper’s portrait corresponds neither to that of [Sara] Baker, who describes Mallon . . . as ‘a clean, neat, obviously self-respecting woman with a firm mouth and her hair done in a tight knot at the back of her head,’” nor to the photographs of Mallon from this period (Wald, 196). Published well into the new immigration wave, Maggie precedes the Mallon case by some 14 years. But the novel’s descriptions of the mother’s masculinized “massive” and “heav[ing]” shoulders and the “gruesome doorways” and “unholy” sink mirror Soper’s take on Mary Mallon’s person and living quarters.

In the case of the Typhoid epidemic, it was both socially convenient and politically savvy to associate filth and disease–disease that would infect the “native” white-middle-to-upper-class population if left unchecked–with the new immigrant and migrant populations. Wald articulates how “[t]he polluted fluid of the immigrant body became the polluted fluid of the body politic,” the threat of national disaster, articulated in the language of nativism, appears consistent in the typhoid literature of the period (192).

Debates that surrounded this healthy carrier of typhoid “attest to the increasing acceptance of a concept of personhood forged through a social language of responsibility and a medicalized language of national identity.” (193) These ideas of immigrant as disease-carrier would only have been bolstered by a noted work of “naturalist” fiction using the same language as Baker would use to describe Irish immigrants: “shiftless . . . helpless. . . wholly lacking in ambition and dirty to an unbelievable degree”.

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