Being conversant with Italian-American history, I had heard of the Immigration Bill that in 1924 had cut off Italian immigration to the U.S. almost overnight. I had also heard of the ‘Know Nothings’ and of Madison Grant’s infamous screed, The Passing of the Great Race. But before reading Daniel Okrent’s superb study of these matters in The Guarded Gate, (Scribners: 2019), I had never guessed at the depth of the racial loathing and hatred, the panicked white supremacy that operated in the years leading up to 1924. Now, however, with this book, I and everyone else can see the long history of the movement that even now has been given new life by the presidency of Donald Trump. And see that much as Trump would like us to think of his movement as unprecedented, it has a long and sordid history in these United States, including the manipulation of so-called ‘science’ to serve racial bias.
Okrent begins his story with a series of Boston Brahmins—chiefly Senator Henry Cabot Lodge—who were all horrified at the ‘race-mixing’ that was threatening to dilute the alleged purity of America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. As early as 1891, Lodge introduced a law that would demand a literacy test of all immigrants to “sift the chaff from the wheat” (52). But his literacy provision failed, at least partly due to resistance from the steamship companies; they were doing a banner business shipping immigrants to America (it cost them $1.70 to ship an immigrant whom they charged $22.50 in fare, a handsome profit when they could squeeze 2000 of these wretched souls into steerage.) But Lodge’s failure wasn’t the end of it by a long shot. Such great icons as Teddy Roosevelt was also worried that whites were being out-reproduced by these immigrant hordes, and harangued Anglos to do their ‘reproductive duty’ (have lots of kids) rather than commit what he called ‘race suicide.’ And then came one Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote a tome called The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), in which he popularized the term that would shortly become lethal—“Aryan.” He wrote, “Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right…the lords of the world” (90). He added that not only Dante, but Marco Polo, St. Francis of Assisi and Galileo were also Germanic. In that same year, William Z. Ripley in his The Races of Europe added his scholarly heft to this nonsense by categorizing Europeans into three basic groups he called ‘races’: Teutonic (tall, blond, blue-eyed), Alpines (shorter and darker), and Mediterraneans (slim and darker still). As to those Mediterraneans (such as the more than 2 million Italians who would immigrate by 1910), a Washington Post editorial writer would say in 1906 that 90% of them were “the degenerate spawn of Asiatics” who had invaded the Mediterranean years before, and were now coming to America to “cut throats, throw dynamite, and conduct labor riots and assassination” (99). Prior to that, in 1894, three Harvard graduates, Prescott Hall, Joe Lee, and Robert Ward, all Boston Brahmins, had formed the Immigration Restriction League (IRL). Taking their credo from Francis Galton and the American biologist Raymond Pierce, they subscribed to the “new science of eugenics”—a ‘science’ devoted to selectively breeding better men to “elevate the race by producing higher types” (117). Hall’s publication, Eugenics, Ethics and Immigration made their main case: eugenics should be applied to immigration because “wars and pestilences no longer eliminate the unfit as formerly” (118). Such a pity we no longer have those helpful plagues to weed out the unfit!
When Charles Davenport took over the Cold Spring Harbor research facility, and managed to convince Mary Averell Harriman (the richest woman in America) to fund his institute, eugenics was well on its way to becoming mainstream ‘science’ in America. Davenport quickly opened the Eugenics Records Office, with the uncredentialled Harry Laughlin in charge. Laughlin proceeded to compile mountains of data on the genetic histories of the unfit—imbeciles, epileptics, the insane and the criminal—all assembled in a Trait Book to allegedly study inherited characteristics that should be eliminated. It was useless material, based on the erroneous idea that complex traits like memory or shiftlessness were determined by a single unit character or gene (science at this point had no good idea what the gene was). Still, this and other eugenics work played right into the hands of lawmakers seeking a basis for limiting immigration. Nations like England, Australia, and Canada soon imposed immigration restrictions, and in America, restrictions based on certain categories like anarchists, epileptics, polygamists, and lunatics were soon in place along with restrictions on people with syphilis or even ‘poor physique.’ Davenport himself was moving closer to a position favoring marriage restrictions (indeed, the 1907 Expatriation Act had mandated that any American woman who married a foreign national automatically lost her American citizenship thereby):
“Unless conditions change of themselves or are radically changed, the population of the U.S. will, on account of the great influx of blood from South-eastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality and less given to burglary, drunkenness and vagrancy than were the original English settlers!” (147).
In short, Davenport feared that battalions of short, musical rapists (e.g. Italians) were poised to invade the United States and intermarry, displacing those good drunken Anglos. Nor was he alone; by 1912, seven American states had enacted laws calling for the involuntary sterilization of some wards of the state, particularly those convicted of sex crimes.
In 1913, Lodge tried the literacy test again but the legislation failed when President Taft vetoed it. But the momentum to restrict immigration picked up new steam when sociologist Edward Ross wrote in his book, The Old World and the New, that the Mediterranean people were “morally below the races of northern Europe” and furthermore that immigrants from southern Italy, especially Neapolitans, were “a degenerate class…infected with spiritual hookworm,” and displaying “a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins…and backless heads” (188). He concluded by noting that these immigrants promised “an unthinkable future: a mingled, degraded America” (189). But despite these warnings, literacy test legislation failed once again in February 1915, when President Wilson vetoed the bill and the House sustained his veto.
However, the most serious challenge to immigration from southern and eastern Europe was about to emerge. Madison Grant, famous for his conservation work as a protector of California’s redwoods, was also the creator of the Bronx zoo. This made him a savior of trees and animals, but when it came to actual people, real immigrants, he went off the rails. He it was who conjoined the two toxic elements of his time, eugenics and xenophobia, to produce the most toxic amalgam of all—scientific racism. He described what he called Nordics: “a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats” who dominated other races by right. As to the Mediterraneans, they might be great artists, but since Italy’s Nordic invaders had “absorbed the science, art, and literature of Rome,” it was they, not the Italians, who could be given credit for “the splendid century that we call the Renaissance.” Indeed, all that was of value in Italy, according to Grant, was due to those Nordic invaders: “Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci were all of Nordic type” (211). He even said that “Columbus, from his portraits and busts, whether authentic or not, was clearly Nordic” (208). The arrogance and stupidity of this drivel is breathtaking. And yet The Passing of the Great Race was published by Scribner’s, with the great Max Perkins as its editor, and touted as a pathbreaking book by an author it called a “scientist, savant, traveler, and trained observer exceptionally qualified for this work.” The Nation magazine praised Passing as embodying the “truths of racial evolution which as a whole is unanswerable.” Not all were fooled, however. The great Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas wrote a review in the New Republic titled “Inventing a Great Race” that pilloried Grant’s book as one built on “fallacies,” which it was. Its concept of heredity was “faulty,” wrote Boas, its evidence “haphazard” and its opinions “dangerous”—as the world was soon to learn. Nonetheless, with Grant’s book as support, the literacy test for immigrants was reintroduced in1916, and vetoed again by President Wilson; but this time Congress overrode the veto, and passed the literacy test in February of 1917.
World War I intervened, but even that horror was used to support the need for eugenics-based immigration restrictions. Edward Ross, in preparing his eugenics text, lamented the war as an “immeasurable calamity that has befallen the white race,” because it had killed off “more than 2 million British and German soldiers” (230), the flower of Nordic manhood. And Grant assured his readers that the barbarous conduct of modern Germany was due not to Nordics but to a population that had been polluted by Alpine or Asiatic blood. Later, Lothrop Stoddard in his book The Rising Tide of Color, described World War I as “the white civil war” that threatened “race suicide” and “mongrelization.” The intelligence testing that was introduced during the war was likewise used to support restrictions. Testing immigrants at Ellis Island, Henry Goddard concluded that “the intelligence of the average ‘third class’ (steerage) immigrant is low, perhaps of the moron grade” (239). And it is dismaying to note that Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, fully supported the eugenics movement. In a 1921 piece for Birth Control Review, she wrote: “the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of Eugenics” i.e. to breed a race of thoroughbreds (244-45).
By this time, eugenics was in full flower in America. Harry Laughlin, of the Eugenics Records Office, made a report to the Breeders Association about the ways to cut off the supply of human defectives and degenerates that included sterilization, a system of matings, polygamy, and euthanasia. His report’s central conclusion: “Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not solely to the individual (i.e. immigrant) who carries it” (274). Sounds a bit like some of the more rabid right-to-lifers of our own day.
By 1921, the movement to control ‘bad’ immigration was too strong to be stopped. In May of that year, President Harding signed an Emergency Immigration Act into law. It set immigration quotas for individual nations—based on the number of immigrants from that country already in the U.S. in 1910. No more than 3 per cent of those already here were allowed. This immediately cut immigration from Poland by 70 per cent, from Yugoslavia by 74 per cent, and from Italy by 82 per cent. By contrast, Great Britain’s quota numbered 77,342, but due to a lack of those seeking to immigrate, 35,00 slots were left unfilled. And still the restriction bandwagon rolled on. At the Second International Conference of Eugenics hosted by Fairfield Osborne on Sept. 22, 1921 at New York’s Natural History Museum (with Madison Grant as co-chair), Count Vacher de Lapouge, author of The Aryan and His Social Role, intoned, “America, I solemnly declare that it depends on you to save civilization and to produce a race of demigods!” (303). Not long after, President Harding signed a two-year extension of the 1921 Emergency Immigration Act. And still the hits kept coming, almost too numerous to mention. The NY Times Book Review featured a review of Charles Gould’s book, America: a Family Matter, with the title, “Failure of the Melting Pot;” and the redoubtable Harry Laughlin provided “data” for a Congressional hearing which asserte that Romanians were 41 per cent more likely than average Americans to be criminal; that Italians were 57 per cent more likely to be insane; and that Russian and Polish immigrants were twice as likely to be tubercular. Whereupon Kenneth Roberts, editor of The Saturday Evening Post, warned: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southeastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in return” (319). Shortly thereafter, Secretary of Labor James Davis told an audience in Pittsburgh that 6,346,856 immigrants were “inferior or very inferior” (320).
With the heat against immigrants at the boiling point, new and stricter plans began to emerge. One John Trevor (a wealthy zealot) presented his National Origins quota plan. Quotas would be based on all immigrants with roots in in a given country. But Roy Garis of Vanderbilt University went him one better. In his plan, quotas were to be based not on the 1910 but on the 1890 census because—as the Saturday Evening Post put it—that was the year “Nordic immigration was still strong and the low-grade stuff hadn’t begun to come to us in volume” (320). For Italians, this meant that quotas were drastically reduced—from an allotment of 222,496 before the 1921 quotas to 45,159 in 1921, to 3,912 per year with the new law. Senator David Reed was quite satisfied; “I think” he said “the American people want us to discriminate” (331). But not everyone was so pleased. Herbert Jennings, professor of zoology and genetics told his colleagues that the true aim of these measures was “Nordic propaganda.” And Emanuel Celler, then a 34-year-old congressman from Brooklyn, called Laughlin’s study “a vicious report redolent with downright and deliberate fallacies” while Madison Grant’s work was “dogmatic piffle.” He condemned the restrictionists’ intent as “the rankest kind of discrimination…set up against Catholic and Jewish Europe” (340). But Celler’s was a lone voice. When the final vote was taken, the House passed the new bill 308-62; the Senate vote was equally decisive, voting 69-9 in favor. With that, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 became the law of the land, and in 1925, a mere 2,662 immigrants from Italy were allowed to enter the United States.
The eugenics movement had not only contributed its vicious creed to the immigration debate. It had more direct effects as well. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s sterilization law, with Justice Holmes writing with the majority his infamous opinion that “three generations of imbeciles is enough” (350). Due to that opinion, at least 60,000 people were sterilized by 1970. But the worm was beginning to turn. Saner minds were beginning to attack eugenics. H. L. Mencken in The American Mercury attacked eugenics as “a mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical sociology, economics, anthropology, and politics, full of emotional appeals to class prejudice, solemnly put forth as science” (351). And especially after Hitler came to power in Germany and praised America and its eugenicists as having inspired him, it became a little embarrassing to carry the eugenics banner. This was especially true after the 1946 Nuremburg Doctor’s trial, where several Nazi defendants actually used the Buck v. Bell decision in their defense, as well as Grant’s Passing of the Great Race and the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Nor did they just use the excuse that they were following orders; they said they were following Americans (392). Even so, Charles Davenport never publicly disavowed his ‘scientific racism;’ neither did Fairfield Osborne or Madison Grant or Harry Laughlin. But eventually, all were, one way or the other, publicly disgraced, as well they might be.
As for the infamous law they helped to pass, it too was revoked, this time by another Johnson. In October 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, at the Statue of Liberty, signed into law a new Immigration and Nationality Act. Written by the same Emanuel Celler who had vainly protested the 1924 bill, it abolished national quotas—too late for many, but a victory for fairness and equity in immigration nonetheless. At least for a time.
Lawrence DiStasi
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