But they did not build this house: The attitude of Evangelical Protestantism towards immigration to the United States, 1800--1924

This dissertation will examine the attitude of American Evangelical Protestantism towards immigration to the United States from its inception until the Immigration Act of 1924. It will also take into consideration the effect that the Roman Catholic Church had upon the evangelist's thinking on the subject of immigration. The examination will include the formation of the evangelist's ideas during the American antebellum period when evangelism became a primary part of the Protestant ethos.The dissertation's chapters will outline the effect that this basically non-Protestant immigration had on American: cities, politics, and education. It will also deal with the evangelist's chief adversary, the Irish and their control of the American Catholic Church as well as their control of politics in the large urban areas of the Northeast. Chapter four will take the reader through one of the evangelist's primary organizations for recognizing and combating its problems, the Evangelical Alliance. A chapter also treats with an evangelical success the enactment of a law against alcohol, a problem that the evangelists believed was primarily fostered by the Irish and German immigrants. Finally, the conclusion, which is split into two parts, one giving the necessity for immigration restriction from the viewpoint of the nativist, and the other from the viewpoint of the evangelist, a necessity which has been proven by the words of the evangelists themselves in their writings, speeches, and sermons.