By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become increasingly difficult to deny the existence of a wage-earning class, even in the United States, or to pretend that every wage earner was a potential artisan, shopkeeper, or capitalist. The glaring contradiction between the prevailing ideology and the emergence of a proletarian class nevertheless required the fiction that wage labor was merely a temporary condition, a single step on the ladder of advancement most individuals could expect to climb, as Horatio Alger explained, with a little luck and plenty of pluck. In the Gilded Age, Algerism, with an overlay of social Darwinism, established itself as the dominant ideology of American politics, and many Americans cling to it even today. Failure to advance, according to the mythology of opportunity, argues moral incapacity on the part of individuals or, in a version even more implausible, on the part of disadvantaged ethnic and racial minorities.

Even when Americans finally came to accept the wage system as an indispensable feature of capitalism, they continued to comfort themselves with the thought that no one had to occupy the condition of a wage earner indefinitely—that each successive wave of immigrants, starting at the bottom, would eventually climb the ladder of success into the proprietary class. When the "new immigration" of the I880s and I890s cast doubt on this agreeable assumption, that became an argument for imposing severe restrictions on immigration from the Orient and from southern and eastern Europe. Permanent status as wage workers—the newcomers' probable fate—could simply not be reconciled with the American dream as conventionally understood. ^*

Those who for this very reason urged a reinterpretation of the "prom-

____________________

*

Racial arguments, of course, also figured prominently in the movement to restrict immigration. But the appeal of these arguments cannot be understood without their supporting context. The new immigrants, according to advocates of exclusion, lacked the qualities that would enable them to become property owners.

-206-