Editing Henry Cabot Lodge (section)

===Immigration===
[[File:Henry Cabot Lodge by James E. Purdy, 1902, gelatin silver print, from the National Portrait Gallery - NPG-NPG 82 60Lodge-000001.jpg|thumb|right|''[[Carte de visite]]'' by [[James E. Purdy]], 1902]]

Lodge was a vocal proponent of immigration restrictions, for a number of reasons. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, significant numbers of immigrants, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe, were migrating to industrial centers in the United States. Lodge argued that unskilled foreign labor was undermining the standard of living for American workers, and that a mass influx of uneducated immigrants would result in social conflict and national decline. In a May 1891 article on Italian immigration, Lodge expressed his concern that immigration by "the races who have peopled the United States" was declining, while "the immigration of people removed from us in race and blood" was on the rise.<ref>Lodge (1891), p. 611</ref> He considered northern Italians superior candidates for immigration to southern Italians, not only because they tended to be better educated, had a higher standard of living, and had a "higher capacity for skilled work",<ref name="puleo"/> but because they were more "Teutonic" than their southern counterparts, whose immigration he sought to restrict.<ref name="puleo">{{cite book|last1=Puleo|first1=Stephen|title=The Boston Italians|date=2007|publisher=Beacon Press|location=Boston|isbn=9780807050361|pages=[https://archive.org/details/bostonitaliansst00stev/page/n103 82]–83|url=https://archive.org/details/bostonitaliansst00stev|url-access=registration|access-date=February 11, 2016}}</ref><ref name="puleo2">{{cite book|last1=Puleo|first1=Stephen|title=Dark Tide: The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 |date=2010 |publisher=Beacon Press|location=Boston|isbn=9780807096673|page=34|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yWtJGLG0aEcC&pg=PA34}}</ref>

Lodge was a supporter of "100% Americanism", a common theme in the nativist movement of the era. In an address to the New England Society of Brooklyn in 1888, Lodge stated:

<blockquote>Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and honorable duty. But let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans ... If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Lodge |first1=Henry Cabot |title=Speeches |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |date=1892 |page=[https://archive.org/details/speeches00lodggoog/page/n60 46] |url=https://archive.org/details/speeches00lodggoog |access-date=2016-10-18 }}</ref></blockquote>

He did not believe, however, that all races were equally capable or worthy of being assimilated. In ''The Great Peril of Unrestricted Immigration'', he wrote that "you can take a Hindoo and give him the highest education the world can afford ... but you cannot make him an Englishman" and cautioned against the mixing of "higher" and "lower" races:

<blockquote>On the moral qualities of the English-speaking race, therefore, rest our history, our victories, and all our future. There is only one way in which you can lower those qualities or weaken those characteristics, and that is by breeding them out. If a lower race mixes with a higher in sufficient numbers, history teaches us that the lower race will prevail.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Lodge|first1=Henry Cabot|editor1-last=Frink|editor1-first=Henry Allyn|title=The New Century Speaker for School and College|date=1898|publisher=Ginn|pages=177–179|chapter=The Great Peril of Unrestricted Immigration|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4pYAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA177|access-date=2016-02-11|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171019070943/https://books.google.com/books?id=4pYAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA177|archive-date=2017-10-19|url-status=live}}</ref></blockquote>

As the public voice of the [[Immigration Restriction League]], Lodge argued in support of literacy tests for incoming immigrants. The tests would be designed to exclude members of those races he deemed "most alien to the body of the American people".<ref>{{cite book |last1=O'Connor |first1=Thomas H. |author-link=Thomas H. O'Connor |title=The Boston Irish: A Political History |publisher=Back Bay Books |date=1995 |isbn=0-316-62661-9 |page=[https://archive.org/details/bostonirishpolit00ocon_0/page/156 156] |url=https://archive.org/details/bostonirishpolit00ocon_0/page/156 }}</ref> He proposed that the United States should temporarily shut out all further entries, particularly persons of low education or skill, to more efficiently assimilate the millions who had already come. From 1907 to 1911, he served on the [[Dillingham Commission]], a joint congressional committee established to study the era's immigration patterns and make recommendations to Congress based on its findings. The commission's recommendations led to the [[Immigration Act of 1917]].