What follows is the text of a post I originally published in June of 2015. I put it up then to provide some historical perspective on the subject of immigration. The need for historical perspective has gotten, if anything, more essential today. Spoiler alert: This is brought to you by a descendant of people who were among those referred to in the cited news article below as “low-grade aliens.”

“This country has taken a step in the right direction to preserve the strain of the pioneer stock that founded this nation and has brought it to its present standard of Americanism.”

That sentence is from an editorial that appeared in the San Diego Union on May 24, 1921. The editorial, entitled “Saving the Race,” praised the passage a few days previously of a bill restricting immigration to “three percent of the existing alien population.” This was the beginning of a quota system of immigration restriction that would be U. S. government policy for the next four decades, but at that point in time it was considered “experimental,” in the words of the editorial. And it was an experiment that the editorial writer obviously approved of.

Citing the research of one Prescott F. Hall, who was described as “a high authority on the subject of the sterilizing effect of incoming low-grade aliens,” the Union bemoaned alleged higher birthrates of “foreign” over “native-born” mothers. But it also claimed that “native-born people who migrate to regions in which the pioneer stock is still dominant show little or no lessening of their former fruitfulness. The real American strain is still paramount west of the Mississippi. It is, therefore, the policy of the West to keep its stock as free as possible from alloy of the American ‘melting pot’ now seething in the great cities along the Atlantic seaboard.”

“San Diego is connected with other parts of the United States by the lines of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Length of the line from San Diego to San Francisco, six hundred and fifty miles, including the branch line to San Bernardino.”

So reads the beginning of a section on “Telegraphic Communication” in the book Information Relative to the City of San Diego, published in 1874 out of the offices of The San Diego Union on behalf of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce.

The first telegraphic message transmitted out of San Diego had taken place just a few years previously, on August 19, 1870. According to William Smythe’s 1908 History of San Diego, the coming of the telegraph was the result of Western Union representatives who came to San Diego and “raised by canvass a subscription of $8,000, the amount of the subsidy required.”

That was a lot of money in those days. Which may explain why the main contributors to that Western Union subsidy represented some of the city’s business heavyweights. The original subscribers, according to Information Relative, were “twenty three individuals and firms,” of whom “[the] largest givers were [Alonzo] Horton, [Ephraim W.] Morse, San Diego Union and J. S. Mannasse & Co.”

The book also reported that the Western Union office, located at Fifth and D Streets, “furnishes the Coast and eastern cities with daily reports of steamship movements, exports and imports; with other valuable statistics and information, amounting to thirty-six thousand words in the year 1873.”

Western Union at that point in time was in the process of merging with several major rivals to become what one study of the industry called “the first major industrial monopoly, with over 90% of the market share and dominance in every state.”

Big Data, indeed!

In addition to the aforementioned books, another source for this post was the website of the Economic History Association, https://eh.net/eha/ .

Get Updates Automatically-Become A Follower of the San Diego History Seeker

You can get weekly updates of San Diego History Seeker automatically in your email by clicking on the “Follow” button in the lower right corner of the blog page. You’ll then get an email asking you to confirm. Once you confirm you’ll be an active follower.