English 67 percent
German 49 percent
Irish 26 percent
Russian 19 percent
Italian 14 percent
Polish 12 percent
Men from Italy, Poland and Russia scored consistently at or near the bottom among immigrants from Europe on various mental tests, with American blacks scoring at the bottom among soldiers as a whole, though scoring only marginally lower than these Southern and Eastern European immigrants on these tests.8 Among the civilian population, the same groups scored at or near the bottom in mental test scores, though in a slightly different order. Black children attending schools in Youngstown, Ohio, scored marginally higher on IQ tests than the children of Polish, Greek and other immigrants there.9 In Massachusetts, a larger proportion of black school children scored over 120 on the IQ tests than did their schoolmates who were children of Polish, Italian or Portuguese immigrants.10 During this era, Northern blacks had somewhat higher IQs than Southern blacks.11
Another curious fact, which received much less attention at the time, was that the Army tests in the First World War showed white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scoring lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania.12 However, the black population as a whole was overwhelmingly concentrated in the South at that time, which may explain why the Army tests showed blacks scoring below the immigrants that they scored above in civilian tests conducted where they both went to the same schools in the North.
Again, none of this was simply a matter of “perceptions,” “stereotypes,” or “prejudices.” Differences among racial, ethnic and regional groups were very real, sometimes very large and very consequential. What was at issue were the reasons for those differences. Moreover, the reasons for such differences that were acceptable to intellectuals changed radically over the generations, much as their support for the First World War and their later pacifism marked drastic changes on that subject.
During the early twentieth century, demonstrable differences among groups were largely attributed to heredity and, during the late twentieth century, these differences were largely— if not solely— attributed to environment, including an environment of discrimination. Nevertheless, the same general vision of society prevailed among those who called themselves Progressives at the beginning of the twentieth century and those who called themselves liberals later in that century, however disparate their views on race were between these two eras. Theirs was the vision of the anointed as surrogate decision-makers in both periods, along with such corollaries as an expanded role for government and an expanded role for judges to re-interpret the Constitution, so as to loosen its restrictions on the powers of government.
Progressive-era intellectuals took a largely negative view of the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as of American blacks in general. Because such a high proportion of the immigrants from Poland and Russia were Jews during this era, Carl Brigham— a leading authority on mental tests, and creator of the College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Test— asserted that the Army test results tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”13 H.H. Goddard, who had administered mental tests to immigrant children on Ellis Island, declared: “These people cannot deal with abstractions.”14 Another giant of the mental-testing profession, L.M. Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and creator of a decades-long study of people with IQs of 140 and above, likewise concluded from his study of racial minorities in the Southwest that children from such groups “cannot master abstractions.”15 It was widely accepted as more or less a matter of course during this era that blacks were incapable of mental performances comparable to whites, and the Army mental test results were taken as confirmation.
The Progressive era was also the heyday of eugenics, the attempt to prevent excessive breeding of the “wrong” kind of people— including, though not limited to, particular races. Eugenicists feared that people of lower mental capacity would reproduce on a larger scale than others, and thus over time bring about a decline in the average IQ in the nation.16 The New Republic lamented “the multiplication of the unfit, the production of a horde of unwanted souls.”17
In Britain, as in the United States, leaders and supporters of the eugenics movement included people on the left, such as John Maynard Keynes, who helped create the Cambridge Eugenics Society, as well as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, Sidney Webb and Julian Huxley. Sidney Webb said, “as a nation we are breeding largely from our inferior stocks.”18 But eugenics was by no means exclusively a movement on the left, nor one without opponents on the left. Supporters of eugenics also included conservatives, among them both Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.19
In America, among those to whom pioneer birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger took her message was the Ku Klux Klan. Madison Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race, expressing fears of a loss of hegemony by whites in general and Nordics in particular, was a landmark book of its era. It was not only a best seller in the United States, it was translated into French, Norwegian and— most fatefully— German. Hitler called it his “Bible.”20
Despite its international influence, The Passing of the Great Race offered extremely little evidence for its sweeping conclusions. The great bulk of the book was a historical account of Alpine, Mediterranean and Nordic peoples in Europe and of the Aryan languages. Yet most of Madison Grant’s sweeping conclusions and the policies he recommended were about America— about the “inferior races among our immigrants,”21 about the need for eugenics22 and for “laws against miscegenation.”23 He asserted that “Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within.”24 Yet, as Grant himself said, “the three main European races are the subject of this book,”25 which contained virtually no factual information about blacks, but only opaque pronouncements. Even Grant’s rankings of European groups are essentially pronouncements, with little or no empirical evidence or analysis, despite an abundance of miscellaneous and often arcane information.
What The Passing of the Great Race did have was a great display of erudition, or apparent erudition, using numerous technical terms unfamiliar to most people— “brachycephalic skulls,”26 “Armenoids,”27 “Paleolithic man,”28 the “Massagetæ,”29 “Zendavesta,”30 the “Aryan Tokharian language,”31 and the “Miocene” and “Pliocene” eras,32 as well as such statements as “The Upper Paleolithic embraces all the postglacial stages down to the Neolithic and includes the subdivisions of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian and Azilian.”33 But this all served as an impressive backdrop for unrelated conclusions.
Among Madison Grant’s conclusions were that “race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society.”34 He also deplored “a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life,” when that is used “to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.”35 He feared “the resurgence of the lower races at the expense of the Nordics”36 and the “prevailing lack of true race consciousness” among the latter.37 He saw the immigrants arriving in America as the “sweepings” of the “jails and asylums” of Europe.38 More generally, he said:
There exists to-day a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in its turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics.39
The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.40
We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for t
he oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss.41
That The Passing of the Great Race was taken seriously says much about the times. But Madison Grant was by no means a fringe crank or an ignorant redneck. He was born into a wealthy family in New York City and was educated at Yale and the Columbia University law school. He was a member of numerous exclusive social clubs. Politically, he was a Progressive and an activist on issues important to Progressives, such as conservation, endangered species, municipal reform and the creation of national parks, as well as being a driving force behind the creation of the world’s largest zoo in the Bronx.42 The Passing of the Great Race was recommended not only in a popular publication like The Saturday Evening Post but was also reviewed in Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.43 The maps for a later book of his were prepared with the help of the American Geographical Society.44
Madison Grant’s thesis elaborated themes introduced by others before him, such as Progressive sociologist Edward A. Ross, who coined the term “race suicide” to describe the demographic replacement of the existing American stock over time by immigrants with higher birthrates from Southern and Eastern Europe, those whom prominent economist Francis A. Walker had even earlier described as “beaten men from beaten races.”45
Professor Ross declared that “no one can doubt that races differ in intellectual ability”46 and lamented an “unanticipated result” of widespread access to medical advances— namely “the brightening of the survival prospect of the ignorant, the stupid, the careless and the very poor in comparison with those of the intelligent, the bright, the responsible and the thrifty.”47 Ross’ concerns were raised not only about people from different classes but also about the new and massive numbers of immigrants:
Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gang-plank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from pit’s mouth or mill gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best. You are struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent. are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Not that they suggest evil. They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed behind… To the practised eye, the physiognomy of certain groups unmistakably proclaims inferiority of type.48
According to Professor Ross, “the new immigrants are inferior in looks to the old immigrants,”49 apparently because the new immigrants were from Eastern and Southern Europe, unlike earlier immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. As Ross put it:
The fusing of American with German and Scandinavian immigrants was only a reblending of kindred stocks, for Angles, Jutes, Danes, and Normans were wrought of yore into the fiber of the English breed. But the human varieties being collected in this country by the naked action of economic forces are too dissimilar to blend without producing a good many faces of a “chaotic constitution.”50
Nor were the differences between the old immigrants and the new limited to intellect or physical appearance, according to Ross: “That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of northern Europe is as certain as any social fact.”51 Moreover, these differences were said to be due to people from Northern Europe surpassing people from Southern Europe “in innate ethical endowment.”52 Ross declared, “I see no reason why races may not differ as much in moral and intellectual traits as obviously they do in bodily traits.”53 Black Americans were mentioned in passing as “several millions of an inferior race.”54 To Ross, the survival of a superior race and culture depended on awareness of, and pride in, that superiority:
The superiority of a race cannot be preserved without pride of blood and an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races… Since the higher culture should be kept pure as well as the higher blood, that race is stronger which, down to the cultivator or the artisan, has a strong sense of its superiority.55
Francis A. Walker was a leading economist of the second half of the nineteenth century. He was not a Progressive, by any means, but his views on immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were views that later became dominant in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century. He proposed strict restrictions on immigration, not only quantitatively, but qualitatively. He proposed to measure quality by requiring each immigrant to post a $100 bond upon entering the country— a sum vastly more than most Jewish, Italian or other immigrants from Eastern Europe or Southern Europe had with them at that time. He said that the restrictions he proposed “would not prevent tens of thousands of thrifty Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, and men of other nationalities coming hither at their own charges, since great numbers of these people now bring more than that amount of money with them.”56 Such a requirement, he said, would “raise the average quality, socially and industrially, of the immigrants actually entering the country.”57
Walker saw a need to protect “the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe.”58 He pointed out that, in earlier times, immigrants “came almost exclusively from western or northern Europe” and “immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia together made up hardly more than one per cent of our immigration.” Now those proportions had changed completely, bringing “vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions.” He said: “They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”59
Without restrictions on immigration, Professor Walker declared that “every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe,” from places where “no breath of intellectual life has stirred for ages,” would be “decanted upon our shores.”60 Nor were the people of Eastern and Southern Europe the only ones dismissed as hopeless by Walker. The indigenous American Indians Walker dismissed as “savages,” who were “without forethought and without self-control, singularly susceptible to evil influences, with strong animal appetites and no intellectual tastes or aspirations to hold those appetites in check.”61
Another prominent contemporary economist, Richard T. Ely, one of the founders of the American Economic Association, was similarly dismissive of blacks, saying that they “are for the most part grown-up children, and should be treated as such.”62 Professor Ely was also concerned about classes that he considered inferior: “We must give to the most hopeless classes left behind in our social progress custodial care with the highest possible development and with segregation of sexes and confinement to prevent reproduction.”63
Richard T. Ely was not only a Progressive during the Progressive era, he espoused the kinds of ideas that defined the Progressive era, years before that era began. He rejected free market economics64 and saw government power as something to be applied “to the amelioration of the conditions under which people live or work.” Far from seeing government intervention as a reduction of freedom, he redefined freedom, so that the “regulation by the power of the state of these industrial and other social relations existing among men is a condition of freedom.” While state action might “lessen the amount of theoretical liberty” it would “increase control over nature in the individual, and promote the growth of practical liberty.”65
Like other Progressives, Richard T. Ely advocated the cause of conservation, of labor unions, and favored the “coercive philanthropy” of the state.66 He said, “I believe that such natural resources as forests and mineral wealth should belong to the people” and also believed that “highways or railroads as well as telegraph and parcels post” should also be owned by “the community.” He also favored “public ownership” of municipal utilities67 and declared that “labor unions should be legally encouraged in their efforts for shorter hours and higher wages” and that “inheritance and income taxes should be generally extended.”68 In short, in the course of his long lifetime Pr
ofessor Ely was a Progressive before, during and after the Progressive era.
Rejecting the economic analysis of free market wage rates by such leading economists of that era as Alfred Marshall in England and John Bates Clark in the United States, economists of a Progressive orientation advocated minimum wage laws, as a way of preventing “low-wage races” such as Chinese immigrants from lowering the standard of living of American workers. Professor John R. Commons, for example, said “The competition has no respect for the superior races,” so that “the race with lowest necessities displaces others.” Professor Arthur Holcombe of Harvard, and a president of the American Political Science Association, referred approvingly of Australia’s minimum wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese.”69
Eugenics, however, was not confined to trying to reduce the reproduction of particular races. Many of its advocates targeted also people of the sort whom Harvard economist Frank Taussig called “those saturated with alcohol or tainted with hereditary disease,” as well as “the irretrievable criminals and tramps.” If it was not feasible to “chloroform them once and for all,” Professor Taussig said, then “at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”70 In Sweden in later years, Nobel Prizewinning economist Gunnar Myrdal supported programs which sterilized 60,000 people from 1941 through 1975.71
Many academics, including some of great distinction, were supporters of eugenics during the Progressive era. Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, the leading American monetary economist of his day, was one of the founders of the American Eugenics Society. Professor Fisher advocated the prevention of the “breeding of the worst” by “isolation in public institutions and in some cases by surgical operation.”72 Professor Henry Rogers Seager of Columbia University, who would become sufficiently recognized to be selected as president of the American Economic Association, likewise said that “we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable,” even if that requires “isolation or sterilization.”73 Stanford University’s president David Starr Jordan declared that a nation’s “blood” was what “determines its history.”74 Eugenics outlasted the Progressive era. As late as 1928, there were 376 college courses devoted to eugenics.75
Intellectuals and Race Page 4
