Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  The demographics of immigration had changed considerably from the early days of the Republic. In the eighteenth century, and much of the nineteenth, large numbers of immigrants came from the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and Germany. The new waves of immigrants were predominantly from eastern, central, and southern Europe, with large numbers of Asians on the West Coast. Since 1896 Protestants had ceased to be the majority of immigrants, with Catholic, Jewish, Russian and Greek Orthodox, Hindus, and Muslims making up more than half of the new arrivals.

  An anti-immigrant backlash was forming. Many native-born Americans resented the immigrants’ customs and dress, languages, religions, and skin colors. They were disturbed that teeming immigrant neighborhoods, like New York’s Lower East Side and East Harlem, seemed to be bringing the Old World to America. Grant expressed these resentments in 1916 in The Passing of the Great Race, complaining that Nordics like him were being “elbowed out of . . . [their] own home”:

  The man of old stock . . . is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals.

  Along with this general dislike of foreigners and their un-American ways, immigration opponents had more specific concerns. Conservatives objected to the politics of the newcomers, many of whom were viewed as radical, or at least pro–labor union. Unions worried that immigrants would be a source of cheap labor, undermining wages and degrading working conditions. Protestant church leaders were troubled that the influx of Catholics and Jews was changing the nation’s religious character.

  There was also a new kind of objection, though it may have been an indirect expression of all the other anxieties: that the immigrants were of inferior genetic stock. This complaint was first raised by the Immigration Restriction League, a small group of Harvard alumni who met in Boston in 1894 to push for closing the nation’s borders, particularly to Italians and Jews. The league persuaded Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge to introduce a bill requiring a literacy test for immigrants. The bill passed Congress, only to be vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. In 1917, after sustained lobbying by the anti-immigration forces, the literacy requirement became law.

  The Immigration Restriction League directly injected eugenics into the debate. Its members, who communicated with newspapers across the country and spoke directly to elected officials, insisted that immigrants were bringing genetic defects with them. “The same arguments which induce us to segregate criminals and feebleminded and thus prevent their breeding apply to excluding from our borders individuals whose multiplying here is likely to lower the average of our people,” a leader of the league, Prescott F. Hall, argued. Hall helped to form a Committee on Immigration under the American Breeders’ Association’s Eugenic Section, and used it as another platform for raising his eugenic objections.

  These anti-immigration organizations spread the ideology that Grant had set out in The Passing of the Great Race. They argued that to protect American racial stock, it was necessary to drastically reduce the number of immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe. If there was to be immigration, they insisted, it should come from Nordic nations. Their arguments were buttressed by avowedly anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic organizations and publications. In Michigan, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent was demonizing Jews, arguing that they were parasitic and bent on world domination. The Ku Klux Klan, whose membership reached a record two and a half million in 1923, made fulminating against immigrants a new focus. It distributed literature such as The Menace of Modern Immigration and warned against the nefarious “Roman Catholic hierarchy” and “International Jew.”

  There were a few lonely voices raised against the eugenic turn the immigration debate was taking. Representatives of Jewish, Italian, and Slavic communities challenged how those groups were being described. Franz Boas, a respected Columbia University anthropologist, was a rare establishment figure who strongly defended immigrants. Boas, who was a member of the Breeders’ Association’s Committee on Immigration, dissented from a report calling on Congress to be guided by eugenic considerations in setting immigration policy—and resigned from the committee. Anyone who stood up in this manner risked reprisal. Madison Grant attacked Boas in a letter to a North Carolina senator as “a Jew” who represented “a large body of Jewish immigrants, who resent the suggestion that they do not belong to the White race.” Grant tried to use his influence at Columbia University, as a prominent alumnus of the law school, to get Boas fired from the Department of Anthropology.

  The forces demanding immigration restrictions found a powerful ally in Albert Johnson, the new chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Johnson, a Republican, represented a Tacoma, Washington, district that was seeing an increasing number of Japanese immigrants. The main reason Johnson had come to Congress, he said, was to bring about “a heavy reduction of immigration by any method possible.”

  The blond, blue-eyed Johnson, who traced his family back to the Revolutionary War, fully subscribed to the eugenic arguments against the current immigration system. He was looking for “scientific testimony” to help make a case for broad-based new immigration legislation that would not have to rely solely on xenophobia and bigotry. Johnson, who was an admirer of The Passing of the Great Race, met with Madison Grant to seek advice. Grant introduced Johnson to Laughlin and the work of the Eugenics Record Office.

  Johnson invited Laughlin to appear before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization as an expert adviser. On April 16 and 17, 1920, Laughlin testified on the subject of “biological aspects of immigration.” He opened with a simple assertion: “The character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities.” He went on to explain in detail how current immigration patterns were threatening “the hereditary physical, mental, and moral . . . traits” of the United States.

  Federal immigration policy had so far largely been based on economic factors, Laughlin said, but it was now “high time” for “the eugenical element” to “receive due consideration.” The “biological aspects of immigration” that Laughlin promised in the title of his testimony had several components. One key part was identifying prospective immigrants who had particular hereditary defects and excluding them before they could enter the country and debase the nation.

  Laughlin proposed a new program of eugenic screening. He argued that prospective immigrants should be examined in their hometowns, because only there would it be possible to get the necessary “eugenical facts,” including family history and information like whether a prospective immigrant “comes from an industrious or a shiftless family.” Laughlin testified that if the individual in question was a “potential parent”—that is, a “sexually fertile person”—he or she should only be admitted on a showing that their “family stock” contained “such physical, mental, and moral qualities as the American people desire to be possessed inherently by its future citizenry.”

  Laughlin also told congress that more attention should be paid to what nations immigrants were arriving from. He argued that non–northern European immigrants were a problem for the country. Laughlin said that because the United States’ “foundation stock is largely from northwestern Europe” it was easier for the country to assimilate immigrants from there than from other places. He also introduced data he had on the population of institutions for the criminally insane in New York State. “Careful studies have shown that the frequency of Insanity in our foreign population is 2.9 times greater than in those of native birth,” he informed the committee. Laughlin provided data purporting to show that the biggest problem lay in immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He testified that Italy furnished 23.1 percent of the inmates, and Russia and Poland 12.6 percent, while England and Wales supplied 5.5 percent, and Scandinavia just 1.8 per
cent.

  Johnson was so pleased with the testimony that he appointed Laughlin the official “Expert Eugenics Agent” for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. This newly created position gave Laughlin and his testimony greater stature in the immigration debate, and it also brought more practical benefits. As Expert Eugenics Agent, Laughlin could invoke federal authority when he wanted to collect data for his research. He also had access to the congressional franking privilege, which he could use to send out eugenics literature without paying postage. Laughlin returned Johnson’s warm feelings, calling his new benefactor “the great American watchdog whose job it is to protect the blood of the American people from contamination and degeneracy.”

  After Laughlin’s appearance, Congress began to adopt the “biological” approach to immigration that he advocated. It passed the Emergency Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, which for the first time imposed national immigration quotas. The total number of immigrants was scaled back, and the number from any country was capped at 3 percent of that nationality’s foreign-born population in the United States in 1910. Under this new quota system, fewer people would be admitted from countries like Italy, Russia, and Poland, whose nationals were a smaller percentage of the population in 1910. More would be let in from countries like England and Germany, which had been the main sources of older waves of immigration. The impact was dramatic. The number of immigrants from Europe fell from more than 650,000 in 1921 to 216,000 in 1922, with the sharpest declines coming from southern and eastern Europe.

  Laughlin testified twice more on immigration reform. In November 1922 he made a presentation titled “Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot,” a report that included work he did as the committee’s official Expert Eugenics Agent. Laughlin’s view of the melting pot was a grim one. Covering the committee room walls with charts and photographs, including ones of Ellis Island immigrants, he was more emphatic than he had been in his earlier testimony that the newer immigrant groups would dangerously degrade the nation’s gene pool. “Making all logical allowances for environmental conditions, which may be unfavorable to the immigrant, the recent immigrants, as a whole, present a higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do older stocks,” he told the committee.

  Laughlin’s “Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot” was enormously influential. At a critical moment, when Congress was considering making even more profound changes in the nation’s immigration policy, Laughlin supplied what purported to be irrefutable quantitative proof that the changes were necessary to protect the nation from a tide of hereditary defectives. Johnson, who played a major role in rounding up the votes for new immigration legislation, called it “one of the most valuable documents ever put out by a committee of Congress.”

  Laughlin’s data was deeply flawed. Despite his insistence that he had made “all logical allowances for environmental conditions,” much of the disparity he claimed to have found among different groups could be traced to environmental factors. It made little sense to compare Russian and British immigrants on measures like criminality or mental illness without taking into account the many nonbiological ways in which these groups differed. Russian immigrants in America had arrived more recently, were poorer, and were less likely to be able to speak English—all facts Laughlin was not interested in. The committee, however, accepted his testimony and sought more of it.

  In March 1924 Laughlin testified before Congress a third time. In his report, “Europe as an Emigrant-Exporting Continent and the United States as an Immigrant-Receiving Nation,” he went even further in arguing that immigrants from the “wrong” countries were dangerously eroding the nation’s intelligence. Laughlin had prepared a chart of nationalities ranked by intelligence, relying on U.S. Army testing. At the top he placed England and Scotland. At the bottom, Russia, Greece, Italy, Belgium, and Poland.

  Since his last visit, Laughlin’s rhetoric had become more vehement. “Immigration is an insidious invasion just as clearly as, and works more certainly in national conquest than” an “invading army,” he told the committee. If immigrants were closely related racially to the native stock and had “inborn talents” of a higher level, the immigration could work out well, he said. If, however, “the racial type is not assimilable, and the inborn traits of character are less ideal than those of the foundation stocks, then immigration works toward ultimate disaster.”

  Once again, there were serious problems with Laughlin’s data. The Russian, Polish, and Italian immigrants who scored relatively low on the U.S. Army tests were recent arrivals, with limited ability to speak English, while the groups that scored higher had been in the country far longer. Laughlin failed to mention this—or the fact that the scores of foreign-born test takers rose with their years of residence in the United States, suggesting that what was holding them back was language skills and knowledge about America, not any inherent lack of intelligence.

  The scientific community largely remained silent about Laughlin’s misrepresentations, but a few prominent scientists did speak out. Herbert Spencer Jennings, a geneticist from Johns Hopkins, reanalyzed the data and, writing in the Survey, the national social workers’ magazine, refuted Laughlin’s claim that “recent immigrants are inferior in their inherited qualities.” Joseph Gillman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, published a paper pointing out serious errors in the testimony. Laughlin “attempted to conceal his preconceptions in the elusiveness of technical statistical inaccuracies,” Gillman wrote.

  The great majority of members of both houses of Congress, however, eagerly embraced Laughlin’s eugenic arguments for immigration restrictions. Representative Robert Allen, a West Virginia Democrat, put the matter bluntly in a statement on the House floor. The “primary reason for the restriction of the alien stream,” he said, “is the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America.”

  Laughlin’s biological arguments buttressed the ordinary xenophobia and bigotry that were already rampant in Congress. The floor debates were filled with racial and ethnic disparagement and outright falsehoods. Senator J. Thomas “Cotton Tom” Heflin of Alabama, a notorious white supremacist, presented as fact the story of “the arrest of a negro in New York.” According to Heflin, the “negro” spoke Yiddish, the Irish policeman who arrested him spoke Yiddish, and the judge “also tried him in Yiddish.” Heflin warned his Senate colleagues: “We are coming to a pitiful pass in this great country when it is unpopular to speak the English language, the American language.”

  Representatives of districts with large immigrant populations did their best to hold back the “biological immigration” tide, but they were badly outnumbered. New York congressman Samuel Dickstein, a Jewish immigrant from what is now Lithuania, protested that members of Congress were “infected with the germ of the Nordic superior race theory.” Adolph Sabath, a Czech-Jewish immigrant who represented Chicago’s West Side, explained on the House floor why Congress was about to enact new restrictions on immigrants like him:

  They believe these people are inferior. They have been fed by misinformation; they have been fed by new dope, as I may term it, by unrelated statisticians, and by Professor Laughlin’s eugenic and anthropological false tests, until they themselves believe there is some foundation for the unjustifiable conclusions contained in the so-called Laughlin report.

  While Laughlin was delivering his scientifically couched pleas to Congress, the eugenics movement took its case directly to the public. A new edition of Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race was released in 1921, and hard-line eugenicists began whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment. Major magazines clamored for a eugenic approach to immigration policy. In 1921 Good Housekeeping published an article by Calvin Coolidge, the vice president–elect, titled “Whose Country Is This?” In it, Coolidge made an appeal for racial purity for the “Nordic” race. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” he wrote. “The Nordic
s propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.”

  The Saturday Evening Post, whose weekly circulation of over two million made it one of the nation’s most popular magazines, concurred. In a 1923 article, the journalistic voice of middle America, famous for its homespun Norman Rockwell covers, endorsed Laughlin’s biological approach to immigration. “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn,” the article insisted.

  After Laughlin’s final testimony, Congress adopted the Immigration Act of 1924, a far more severe restriction on immigration than the 1921 revision. The new law reduced the national immigration quotas from 3 percent to 2 percent, and it changed the base year for national quotas from 1910 to 1890. In 1890 there were few immigrants from eastern Europe or Italy, and this change ensured that going forward, there would again be few. The new formula would help the nation to remain, as one congressman said on the House floor, “the home of a great people: English-speaking—a white race with great ideals, the Christian religion, one race, one country, one destiny.”

  With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, the eugenicists had their long-sought victory. Representative Johnson called the new law “America’s Second Declaration of Independence.” Madison Grant hailed the Immigration Act as “one of the greatest steps forward in the history of this country,” and declared that the nation had “closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” The following year, in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler offered his own praise for the new immigration law. In contrast to Germany, whose borders he found disturbingly open, the United States was making an effort to impose reason on its immigration policies, Hitler said, by “simply excluding certain races from naturalization.”