Congress passed a bill sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, with support from the Immigration Restriction League, requiring a literacy test for immigrants, though President Grover Cleveland later vetoed the bill in 1897.
The Immigration Restriction League (IRL) was an anti-immigration organization founded by a group of Harvard graduates in 1894. Members of the organization believed that immigration contributed to social problems such as urban crowding, poverty, crime, and labor unrest, and the IRL advocated a literacy requirement for immigrants as a way of limiting the entry of “new immigrants” from eastern Europe into the United States. In 1896, the IRL acheived passage of a Congressional literacy bill with the support of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of...
![Washington’s Farewell Address, Hartford, CT, [1800]. (GLC02557)](http://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/aggregate-208x148/content-images/02557.web_.jpg "Washington’s Farewell Address, published after his death, Hartford, CT, [1800]. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)")
Puritans believed that reading the Bible was important to achieving salvation and, therefore, teaching children to read was a priority in their colonial centers. The New England Primer, first published in Boston in 1690 and used by students through the nineteenth century, was seen as a means to advance literacy. With more than five million copies of the Primer sold, generations of children first learned their ABCs through this publication. The document image is an excerpt from the Primer...