Book Reviews -- the Ambivalent Welcome: Print Media, Public Opinion and Immigration by Rita J. Simon and Susan H. Alexander

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Believers in the jolly old Melting Pot image of a welcoming and democratic United States will find it painful to wade through the carefully documented book by Rita J. Simon and Susan H. Alexander. It illustrates how unwelcoming the American press has been of those huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

In 1920, for example, novelist Kenneth Roberts told Saturday Evening Post readers (a generation after Emma Lazarus' poem was carved onto the base of the Statue of Liberty) that newly-arrived Italian, Polish, Czech, and Hebrew immigrants were mere refuse. Another Post writer referred to them with a shorter, harsher word: "scum."

It is well known that a nativist thread has …