COMPARATIVE NATIVISM: THE UNITED STATES, CANADA AND AUSTRALIA, 1880s-1910s.

The United States, Canada and Australia in the period between 1880-1920, had similar political, legal and cultural systems, and so provide a natural test for the interactions of ethnicity, religion, nationalism and nativism. For example, Germans and other European immigrants were welcomed before 1914, but wartime patriotism pushed them out of the consensus. As a result, in the U.S. and Canada, they were forced to assimilate, and in Australia, they were deported. Increasingly, in Canada and Australia, nativism became a question of loyalty to the country or to the British Empire. The manifestation of this was Anglophones pushing the French in Canada to the wall because they were too traditionalistic and not sufficiently imperial and Irish Catholics who were loyal to their country and to Rome, but hostile to Britain. Drawing from these case studies, this paper posits that nativism can be better understood as a matter of defining the nation to which loyalty is due. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]