On the streets of early twentieth-century New York, the bodies of foreigners and natives collided daily, whether they wanted to or not.
Over a century and a half had passed since Linnaeus failed to entice a foreigner to draw close enough for him to touch. Since then Europeans had captured and shipped over 12 million people from Africa into the Americas to serve as their slaves, treating them as the subhuman entities that Linnaeus had described. African Americans had started trickling out of the slave-owning cities and towns of the U.S. South nearly as soon as their forced migration across the Atlantic ended. But after slavery was abolished, that trickle grew into a stream and then a river.
Over five hundred thousand African Americans fled the South in the first decade of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, over nine hundred thousand blacks migrated out of the South; in the 1930s, nearly five hundred thousand did. Ultimately over 6 million would flee the South. Their migration transformed the country. Chicago, which began the twentieth century with a population that was less than 2 percent black, would become one-third black by 1970; Detroit’s black population swelled from 1.4 percent to 44 percent.
At the same time, people from1 Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and elsewhere streamed into the country to seek cheap farmland or factory jobs, to pan for gold, and to escape bloody revolutions. Between 1880 and 1930, over 27 million entered the United States. Every week steamships pulled into New York City’s ports to disgorge tens of thousands fleeing famine, poverty, and persecution in Ireland, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere. Over the course of the 1870s, about 3 million migrants arrived in the city; over just three years in the 1880s, another 3 million came. In 1890 a special station had had to be built, at Ellis Island, just to process them all.
The newcomers took jobs peddling2 used clothes or shad and clams, or they toiled as shoemakers and dockworkers, sewing their bedraggled children into their winter clothes for the season, and retiring to the city’s windowless tenements and immigrant boardinghouses by night. In the city’s filthy, polyglot streets and dance halls, African Americans newly arrived from the South and immigrants from across the Atlantic rubbed shoulders, creating a new mongrel culture replete with its own dance forms, such as tap dancing, a combination of Irish jig dancing and African American shuffling.
The lifestyle of the old New York elites3 who lived in stately homes in southern Manhattan and picnicked on Bunker Hill in the summer vanished. Developers tore down grand old houses to make way for tenement buildings. The cultural and demographic dominance of families like those of Henry Fairfield Osborn and Madison Grant, whose ancestors had settled the city when it was just a sleepy port town, eroded. By the turn of the twentieth century, immigrants and their progeny outnumbered people whose parents had both been born in the country. Of the 1.8 million people who lived in New York City, 1.4 million had at least one parent born outside the country.
Osborn and Grant belonged4 to an elite circle of educated, aristocratic New Yorkers. The son of a railroad tycoon, broad-shouldered Osborn kept a neat mustache and had deep-set, penetrating eyes. He’d trained at Princeton as a geologist and paleontologist and punctuated his life in the city with elaborate trips to remote locales. One of his paleontological expeditions had famously led to his naming and description of Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. His friend Grant traced his aristocratic heritage back to seventeenth-century Huguenots and Puritan settlers and favored big-game hunts with buddies such as Theodore Roosevelt. As a wildlife enthusiast, Grant would eventually help establish Glacier and Denali National Parks. He’d even have a species of caribou, Rangifer tarandus granti, named after him.
The transformation of the city undoubtedly rankled Grant and Osborn on a number of levels. But the two friends prided themselves on being “scientific men,” people with either a stake or credentials in the increasingly prestigious and male-dominated world of scientific inquiry. It was the biological implications of immigration that would shock them into action.
Grant and Osborn wielded outsized influence over how early twentieth-century Americans understood biological science. Besides being “scientific men,” they were science popularizers. Grant helped found the Bronx Zoo and belonged to a number of influential scientific and conservation societies. Osborn presided over the American Museum of Natural History. He was world-renowned for his displays—murals, dioramas, and mounted skeletons—that lured millions into the museum’s cavernous exhibit halls.
Like other scientific men of the early twentieth century, both Grant and Osborn recognized the biological challenge posed by people of African, Irish, Polish, Russian, and Italian descent who crowded into New York City’s tenements and slums.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, leading scientists had upgraded Linnaeus’s theory of human subspecies, though based on a mix of secondhand gossip, folklore, and fabricated body parts, into scientific truth. In 1850 one of the era’s most influential scientists, the Harvard University zoologist Louis Agassiz—he founded Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, where streets and schools have been named after him—proclaimed as much. “Viewed zoologically,”5 he’d told fellow members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the several races of men … are well marked and distinct.” Agassiz and other scientists had disseminated Linnaeus’s myth of human subspecies in textbooks such as the 1853 best seller, Types of Mankind, and in photographic collections that depicted the various human subspecies much as pictorial charts depicted different animal species. Agassiz himself had commissioned several collections of images of disrobed bodies of enslaved Africans in South Carolina and workers in Brazil, which he presented as visual archives of the world’s “pure racial types.”6
Naturalists had become so convinced7 of the reality of human subspecies that a whole new field of inquiry—“racial science”—had sprung up to refer to their biology. Just as herpetologists detailed the biology of reptiles and entomologists that of insects, race scientists detailed the biology of human subspecies or races. Aware that skin color could be subjective as a biological borderline between the races, race scientists searched for other biological markers that could be used to distinguish human subspecies from one another, just as different patterns on butterfly wings could be used to distinguish a monarch butterfly from a viceroy. They said that each subspecies had a distinctive “cephalic index,” that is, the ratio of a skull’s maximum length to its maximum breadth, multiplied by one hundred. They said that each had a specific “sitting height index,” which could be calculated by dividing the median sitting height by median stature. According to their data, the measure averaged to 50.5 in Africans, and 53.0 in Americans. In 1900, when scientists discovered that human blood consisted of different varieties of blood cell types, they speculated that these distinctions would be found to be specific to human subspecies.
The political and economic value8 of their research was clear: scientific proof of a racial hierarchy justified the race-segregated economy at home and colonial conquests overseas. But race scientists struggled with an onslaught of messy contradictions in their data. As later scientists would confirm, thanks to our common ancestry and our border-crossing tendencies, the differences between human populations are superficial and fleeting. Through trade, capture, and conquest, people from different cultures and continents continuously collided, melding cultures and sharing genes, blurring the distinctions between us. Race scientists hunted for borders that were fuzzy at best. Even the cephalic index, which they considered the most authoritative measure of the human subspecies distinction, failed on a number of fronts. People from Turkey, England, and Hawaii, for example, often had identical cephalic indices, although according to race science they hailed from different races. People from isolated populations didn’t have more homogenous cephalic indices than those from more mixed populations, although according to race science, they should have.
These anomalous results simply hardened race scientists’ resolve to gather yet more data and devise yet more standards to pin down the biological border between peoples that they felt certain existed. They didn’t force a course correction. Neither did the counterarguments of the scientist who would ultimately revolutionize biology.
Charles Darwin had purposely omitted9 any mention of human evolution in his Origin of Species, which appeared in 1859. Like Linnaeus, he felt trepidatious about spelling out how his ideas reflected on human society for fear of the political firestorms that might erupt. His theory of evolution had not found a particularly receptive audience. The year after his paper on evolution was read at the Linnean Society of London, the president of the society said that the previous year had included no revolutionary discoveries. Agassiz dubbed the book a “scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its methods, and mischievous in its tendency.”
For Darwin, differences between peoples10 were nothing like the differences between zoological species, as Agassiz had said. Any child could tell the difference between a dog and a cat, he pointed out, but they would have to be instructed in order to perceive the minute differences attributed to race. If human subspecies distinctions were as biologically significant as Agassiz and others claimed, Darwin said, they’d be more like the tail of a tiger or the patterns on a butterfly wing: biologically fixed in each subspecies. They weren’t. Finally, true subspecies don’t inadvertently fuse when sharing the same territory, something that happened with human “subspecies” all the time, as especially evident in Brazil, Chile, Polynesia, and elsewhere. Like Buffon, Darwin felt that the minor differences between peoples derived from easily mutable adaptations to local conditions, like diet and climate. Such differences, he thought, could become exaggerated by local sexual preferences.
But as the race scientists grew more confident,11 Darwin grew less so. Writing became a struggle. He suffered “hysterical crying” and “dying sensations,” as his biographers put it. The longer he delayed publishing his ideas on human diversity, the worse it got: race science grew more powerful and his own ideas about a single human family more subversive. Worse, Darwin’s efforts to acquire data from the East India Company and from various army surgeons in the British colonies, which would undermine the human subspecies theory, failed.
By the time he published The Descent of Man12 in 1871, presenting his arguments against the concept of human subspecies, over a decade had passed since the release of Origin of Species. It was, by then, too late. Darwin’s influence on the scientific establishment had fallen into seemingly terminal decline. Leading nineteenth-century scientists had judged his ideas marginal and irrelevant. Darwin was an “ignoramus,” the German physician Rudolf Virchow said. “The man is clearly crazy,” Josiah Clark Nott, prominent yellow fever researcher and founder of the University of Alabama medical school, added. One attack on his ideas had been titled “At the Deathbed of Darwinism.”
Darwin’s Origin of Species would be resurrected, decades later. But the famous biologist’s views on the nonexistence of human subspecies faded into obscurity. His biographers would call Descent of Man “Darwin’s greatest unread book.”13
And so science popularizers such as Osborn and Grant14 justifiably showcased the findings of race science as established fact, not contested theory. At the Museum of Natural History, curators set up a “Hall of the Age of Man,” such that visitors could physically walk the path of evolutionary progress. It ended with a display on the biological divisions in humans, and the hierarchical evolutionary relationships between different peoples, called “Races of Man.” At the Bronx Zoo, Grant assembled more visceral exhibits based on the insights of race science, such as Linnaeus’s characterization of Homo sapiens afer as only partly human. In one, his curators caged a man from Congo named Ota Benga in the monkey house. From the other side of the bars, zoo visitors could watch Benga cavort with an orangutan and examine, confusedly, a pair of canvas shoes. With every chortle from a bemused visitor, our shared history as a single migratory species, and the superficiality of our differences, sank below the horizon.
Besides disseminating the insights of race science, Grant and Osborn also worked to promote new ideas about biological inheritance. Social reformers at the time advocated for improvements in sanitation, nutrition, education, and health care, which they said would uplift the strength and intelligence of the population. The latest findings about biological inheritance, Grant and Osborn felt, suggested otherwise. They also deepened scientific concern about the biological perils of migration.
Expert opinion about inherited traits remained unsettled through most of the nineteenth century. The so-called blending hypothesis posited that the qualities of each parent “blended” in the offspring, like chocolate milk swirling into plain. That certainly happened, but at the same time, it couldn’t be the whole picture. When traits blend, the tall mother and diminutive father produce a brood of medium-height children. But if blending were the sole process in inheritance, after a sufficient number of generations, there’d be no short or tall people left at all, which was clearly not the case. Others believed that the qualities passed on from one generation to the next could be altered during an individual’s lifetime. Buffon’s protégé, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, posited that giraffes could evolve long necks simply by spending much of their time stretching to reach the leaves of the treetops.
In 1899 the embryologist August Weismann refuted both theories by methodically removing the tails of five generations of white mice.
If the qualities of the parents are blended in the offspring, as the blending hypothesis suggested, or if environmental conditions had any effect on the traits they passed from one generation to the next, as Lamarck and others argued, then he’d see some inherited effect of the ritualistic tail-chopping. Over the course of several generations, the tailless mice’s offspring would be born with no tails, say, or at least with shortened ones. But they hadn’t been. Each subsequent generation developed normal tails, with no blending or environmental effect at all.
Not long afterward a few botanists in Europe published papers resurrecting some obscure experiments conducted decades earlier by an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel. Mendel had conducted tens of thousands of experiments in pea plants, carefully recording how traits such as whether peas were wrinkled or smooth traveled through the generations. He, too, had found that rather than blending with other traits or varying according to environmental conditions, traits marched unchanged from generation to generation, expressing themselves based on a single, intrinsic, and immutable factor: whether the trait was “dominant” or “recessive.”
Mendel’s work appeared to validate the rigid process suggested by Weismann’s results. A new theory was born, “Weismannism,” according to which inherited traits advanced through the generations like stones passing through a gullet, impervious to external conditions or the influence of other traits.
Weismann’s experiments did not,15 by themselves, prove anything about the complex ways inherited traits changed as they passed through the generations nor about the effects of environment on the process. In fact, inherited traits and the genes that shaped them mix, match, recombine, and reassort in all kinds of multifarious ways, and a wide range of environmental effects influence the way they express themselves in our bodies, as geneticists would later learn. And Mendel’s experiments, while shedding light on one form of inheritance, was only a tiny part of the overall picture. Genes did all sorts of different things and expressed themselves in all sorts of different ways besides the simple mechanism he’d discovered.
Nevertheless, scientists were able to collect data supporting the idea that Weismannism functioned in people, too.
In humans only a few traits follow the Mendelian pattern, such as eye color; an enzyme deficiency called alkaptonuria, which blackens the color of urine; and to some extent, hair and skin color. That’s not to say that complex traits such as academic achievement or athletic prowess or economic wealth are not passed down from generation to generation. They are, but through cultural and economic processes, not biological ones. Because scientists did not distinguish between traits passed down socially and those passed down biologically, they claimed they could detect a Weismannist process in a range of complex traits as well. They had a simple method: scientists would pick a trait, figure out who had it, and then track its progress through the generations, either in real time or using genealogical records.
Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, for example, studied one thousand “eminent” men and their relatives, finding that the trait of “eminence” passed down through the generations, exactly as the trait of wrinkledness had passed through Mendel’s pea plants. The zoologist Charles Davenport, who wrote an influential textbook on the topic, claimed through his studies of genealogy that traits of “quickness and activity in movement,” “fluency in conversation,” and the ability to learn new languages clustered in certain families, as did traits such as being able to “whistle a tune or sing a song without any apparent effort,” which he took as proof that these, too, passed down through the generations biologically.
Weismannism electrified the scientific community. The old ideas, while incomplete, had properly cast inheritance as a mysterious, mutable process, almost impossible to fully control. Weismannism suggested that scientists could not only decipher the inheritance process but master it and thereby shape the fate of the nation.
Weismannism meant that intelligence, moral strength, musicality, and other socially beneficial qualities did not have to be carefully nurtured with good nutrition or enlightened education or moral instruction, as the social reformers said. It simply had to be endowed as a biological gift to future generations, like a strong nose or a weak chin. So long as those with the best traits had the most children, society would be assured of a brilliant, beautiful, morally upstanding populace.
Galton spearheaded a new movement to urge policy makers to reorient programs of social betterment based on the new science of inheritance. He called it “eugenics,” for eu, or “good,” with genesis. Instead of devoting resources to improving schools and nutrition, eugenicists said, policy makers should instead focus on who had sex with whom. Osborn and Grant agreed, founding the Galton Society to spread the eugenic gospel in the United States.
At the time, nobody knew what the mysterious matter that traveled through the generations consisted of. It would be years before scientists fingered DNA as the source of biological inheritance and began to comprehend the multifarious ways it functioned in the body and in relation to the environment. People like Osborn and Grant knew only that an enigmatic material, which they called, variously, “Mendelian factors” or “germplasm,” endured. Osborn called it “the most stable form of matter16 which has thus far been discovered.”
Twice a year Osborn and Grant donned their tuxedoes and white ties and headed to gatherings of the exclusive Half-Moon Club, where they quaffed gin with fellow members and listened to guest speakers talk about their latest conquests in the world of scientific exploration.
At one such gathering, they heard the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and race theorist William Z. Ripley deliver a lecture called “The Migration of Races.”
In it, he spelled out the implications of Weismannism and race science on societies experiencing mass immigration from distant continents such as their own. It wasn’t just that the newcomers would overwhelm society with their numbers. Immigrant bodies carried inside them microscopic time bombs. If their germplasm entered into the population, they’d permanently contaminate it with their inferior traits.
Scientific concerns about sexual relations17 between biologically distinct peoples had first spiked in the years after the Civil War. Presuming that the bonds of slavery had stymied relations between European Americans and the forced migrants from Africa they’d enslaved (they hadn’t, though few would openly acknowledge it), scientists worried that the abolition of slavery might allow people of African and European descent to mix more freely. The crossing of biologically distinct subspecies, the Harvard University biologist Edward Murray East wrote, would “break apart those compatible physical and mental qualities which have established a smoothly operating whole in each race by hundreds of generations of natural selection.” Anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial sex and marriage, which had been passed in the 1860s, protected the nation from such an outcome. But no such laws protected the country’s more advanced subspecies from the more primitive ones arriving daily on steamships from Russia, Poland, and elsewhere.
Ripley wasn’t the only one raising the alarm. Leading eugenicists such as the Harvard zoologist Charles Davenport, founder of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; his managing director, Harry Laughlin; and top public health experts agreed.
The precise outcome of racial hybridization18 remained unclear. If people from tall races crossed with people from short races, some eugenicists worried, they could bear tall offspring with too-puny organs, or short offspring with grotesquely large organs. Their pairings might result in savage offspring who reverted to the ancient primitive type of one parent, like a domesticated plant that reverted back to wild type, losing the more evolved racial attributes of the other parent.
Americans could “rapidly become darker in pigmentation,19 smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art,” Davenport warned. They could become “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.”
Whatever the biological outcome, the hybrids would spell “absolute ruin”20 for American society, the physician Walter Ashby Plecker warned in an address to the American Public Health Association. His colleagues agreed, publishing a transcript of his remarks in the American Journal of Public Health.
As a big-game hunter, Grant had witnessed with sorrow the decline of the country’s majestic large mammals. As he and Osborn absorbed the biological implications of immigration, they saw a similar process of displacement unfolding against their own kind.
“Miscegenation,” Grant wrote,21 “is the first step toward extinction.” Immigrants, by contaminating the nation with their inferior germplasm, would breed superior human subspecies into oblivion. As the genteel members of the Half-Moon Club furrowed their brows in their grand-palazzo-style clubhouse, outside on the streets of New York, the newcomers birthed a nation of hybrid monsters.
Most Americans in the years leading up to the First World War generally accepted that certain peoples—foreigners such as Asians and Africans, those deemed “feeble-minded”—were backward and undesirable and had to be kept at arm’s length.
Congress had closed U.S. borders22 to people from China and to anyone judged to be suffering from lunacy or idiocy back in 1882. Dozens of states across the country prohibited “feeble-minded” people from getting married, for fear that their “feeble-minded” offspring would contaminate the populace. Some states even legalized their forced sterilization. “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind,” President Theodore Roosevelt had written in a 1913 letter to Davenport. At the Bronx Zoo, crowds regularly gathered around the cage of Ota Benga, “most of the time roaring with laughter,” as the New York Times reported.
But the finer points of race science and Weismannism escaped them. They sensed little biological danger emanating from the people from Mexico who easily traveled across the border into the United States, nor, for the most part, from people from Europe, who enjoyed nearly open access into the country as well.
While scientific elites detailed the biological menace23 of migration, popular culture embraced it. Hundreds of thousands cheered as workers erected the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor in 1886, with the refugee advocate Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” inscribed on a plaque at her feet. Across the city, so-called settlement houses strove to assimilate the newcomers, providing cooking classes, debating societies, and sewing instruction to help them shed their native customs and adopt American habits (eating creamed codfish and corn mush, for example, rather than the typical Mediterranean fare of meat, vegetables, and pasta, which late nineteenth-century American experts considered “overstimulating” and indigestible).
The 1908 musical The Melting Pot extolled immigrant assimilation. In the play, the main character, a Jewish refugee from Russia, falls in love with and marries a Christian refugee. He proclaims the United States as a nation of hybridization and amalgamation. “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!” he declares.
Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to—these are fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.
President Roosevelt attended on opening night24 along with his cabinet secretaries. “Roosevelt watched the play enthusiastically,” the Times reported, “at certain points shouting out at certain lines, ‘That’s all right!’ while leaning forward in his box, and being the first to lead the applause at the end of the second act.”
The positive economic and cultural impact of the new immigrants—and their ability to deliver winning votes in elections—impressed politicians far more than any potential biological impact they posed. For most pre–World War I American politicians, “the more the merrier,”25 as one contemporary put it.
Plus, an early twentieth-century study commissioned by Congress—to this day, the largest study of immigration ever conducted in the United States—had discovered none of the biological hazards that so worried Osborn and Grant and the rest of the scientific establishment. A nine-member bipartisan commission had used all the latest social science techniques to look at how immigration influenced everything from crime rates and education to public health. The commission collected statistics on regional demands for labor and the proportion of foreign-born people in penal and charitable institutions. They investigated the conditions on immigrant ships, sending undercover investigators to report on the quality of the food. They analyzed how immigrants were received in U.S. communities. Did they join trade unions? How did unions accept them? Did their presence affect employment rates for native-born workers? What were their wages compared to those of other workers? What types of jobs did they take? Did they cause more accidents than native workers? Did their kids enroll in school? Could they speak English? What was the nature of their criminal tendencies? Their medical status? How often did they go insane? The crusading anthropologist Franz Boas—a prominent critic of race science—had even wrangled a few thousand dollars from the commission to measure the body dimensions of thousands of immigrant schoolchildren, to search for clues as to how the process of migration might have altered the shape of their bodies themselves.
The commission produced over twenty thousand pages of reports issued in forty-one volumes. Not only did the commissioners find no biohazards (or any other kind of hazard) associated with immigration, they suggested that scientists’ depiction of foreign bodies as unalterably defective, the basis for their warnings about the biohazards of immigration, was mistaken.
Boas’s study found that26 far from being permanently fixed by their unchanging germplasm, the body dimensions of immigrants and their children started to undergo a process of change as soon as they arrived in the United States. Exposure to new diets and environments transformed them physically, just as The Melting Pot had suggested.
While not specifically designed to test the hypotheses of Weismannism and race science, all the commission’s findings, in one way or another, flew directly in the face of its predictions. Grant privately scoffed27 at Boas’s “silly” results. Most likely the immigrant children’s harlot mothers had been having clandestine affairs with “real” Americans, endowing them with novel germplasm, he figured rudely. But the truth was, the commission had looked hard and found none of the effects that he, Osborn, and other top scientists fretted over.
Grant had hoped that the commission’s findings would lead to laws to “keep out a great mass of worthless Jews28 and Syrians who are flooding our cities,” as he put it. Instead, the report went nowhere, fizzling out in just a single piece of legislation that President William Howard Taft promptly vetoed.
The biohazard of immigration finally started to attract public attention as the country headed into the First World War.
In 1916 Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, in which he set out his ideas about the deep biological and historical origins of the racial hierarchy, and the dangers of upsetting it through migration. It slowly grew into a best seller. Roosevelt claimed to be so excited about the book, he would not just read it, he said, but “study it.”29 Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists quoted the book in their articles, arguing, as Kenneth Roberts did in the Saturday Evening Post, that immigration would turn the American population into “a hybrid race of people as worthless30 and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and southeastern Europe.” Hundreds of other books, aimed at general audiences, described the science behind the inferiority of non-European races.
At universities across the country,31 scientists taught courses on the biology of heredity. Between 1914 and 1928, the number of universities teaching eugenics jumped from 44 to 376, including top ones such as Harvard, Columbia, and Brown. At public events, popular-science-education groups such as the American Eugenics Society organized “Better Babies” contests and “Fitter Families for Future Firesides” competitions to raise awareness about the wonders of good germplasm. Filmgoers and readers absorbed Weismannism’s central premises through human dramas and revisionist history. The Hollywood movie The Black Stork, for example, depicted the tale of a couple with mismatched germplasm who disregard warnings against having children, sorrowfully bear a “defective” child, and allow him to die.
Anti-German propaganda and anxieties32 about Communists in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution stoked Americans’ anxieties about foreigners. New social science research on immigrants purported to reveal their biological backwardness as well. Administering newly developed intelligence tests on immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1917 showed that 83 percent of Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians, and 87 percent of Russians were “feeble-minded.” A survey of the national origins of inmates of psychiatric institutions found that recent immigrants were disproportionately represented, comprising 13 percent of the general population but 19 percent of the insane population. “Insane aliens stream in steadily,” the New York Times headlined its story on the findings. “One alien out of every 50 becomes a lunatic,” Harper’s Weekly claimed, while “the ratio among native Americans is one in 450.” During the war, officials administered intelligence tests to nearly 2 million military recruits. They found that 89 percent of black soldiers qualified as “morons,” and the intelligence of foreign-born peoples descended steadily from west to east, with English and Dutch people scoring the highest, and Russian, Italians, and Polish the lowest.
Methodological biases accounted for the findings,33 though few noticed at the time. The intelligence test was supposed to measure intellectual ability but in fact demanded answers to questions only people of a certain class and culture would know: the author of Robinson Crusoe, the Union commander at Mobile Bay, the product advertised by a character called Velvet Joe, what a first-class batting average was. (One of the test’s administrators, Carl Brigham, went on to develop the first SAT.) Anyone on the margins of mainstream middle-class culture was destined to fail.
At Ellis Island, officials administered34 the culturally biased test to newcomers who spoke little English, faced a frightening and confusing entry process, and had just endured arduous, days-long journeys under harsh conditions. All were exhausted, which would have impaired their capacity to ace any kind of test, even if it hadn’t been biased against them. Similarly, the study on immigrants in insane asylums hadn’t corrected for age distribution. The fact that the immigrant population, as a whole, skewed younger than the native-born one, explained their disproportionate representation entirely.
Even as flawed research piled up showcasing the biological inferiority of immigrants, the most urgent threat they posed to the nation—the catastrophe of racial hybridization—remained mostly theoretical.
Conflicting evidence had emerged. Subspecies theory predicted that hybrids35 would be less fertile than pure types, or even sterile like mules, but studies on the progeny of mixed-race couples suggested just the opposite. Boas’s study of 577 Native American women found that they produced 5.9 children on average, while the 141 mixed-race women he studied averaged 7.9 children. Even the German anthropologist Eugen Fischer, whose research would later form the scientific basis for the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Laws, noted that the racial hybrids he’d studied—the children of Boer colonists and “Hottentots” in southwestern Africa—seemed perfectly fertile. The Swedish physician Herman Lundborg scrutinized photographs and measured the faces of the progeny of Lapps, Finns, and Swedes. He found, to his surprise, that the hybrids seemed taller, stronger, and more graceful than their pure-race ancestors. Boas found that mixed-race children grew taller than nonmixed children.
Still, innuendo and speculation36 about hybridization abounded. Many scientists felt certain that so-called mulattoes, people born to one black and one white parent, showed signs of dysfunctionality. They had “irregular dentations,” Davenport claimed. They were a “nuisance to others,” he wrote, because they had inherited ambition from their biologically superior white parents but “intellectual inadequacy” from their black ones. Mulattoes had no sagittal sutures in their skulls, preventing lateral expansion, the president of the Philadelphia County Medical Society asserted. Look at Haiti, other scientists said, where a 1791 revolution against French colonial rule had led to what Davenport’s colleague Harry Laughlin called a “reversion to African barbarism.” The lurid gossip they’d heard about the island, of cannibalism and worse, probably stemmed from its large mulatto population, they said.
Research on the pressing question presented a range of practical difficulties. It wasn’t as if scientists could cross different races of peoples the way they crossed different breeds of rabbits and dogs and then evaluate their fitness. They had to rely on data from mixed-race couplings that transpired naturally in society. First, they had to find mixed-race people. Given the social disdain directed at them, that wasn’t easy. Boas had resorted to sending grad students such as the anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston to stand on street corners in Harlem with a pair of calipers in her hand in the hopes of flagging down a passing “mulatto” to measure.
Reconstructing a hybrid’s racial history all the way back to “pure” race ancestors posed another challenge. Few subjects knew their ancestors’ history, and even if they did, they didn’t care to share it. Records such as those kept by churches were similarly unreliable, often listing as parents people other than biological fathers.
Finally, detecting the physical degeneration of hybrid bodies required finesse. In mixed-race experiments in rabbits, say, scientists could evaluate the fitness of hybrids by counting the number of babies they produced, or noting whether their ears stood upright or drooped. But detecting the physical degeneration of racial hybrids required taking dozens of detailed measurements. It wasn’t as if the hybrid products of migration were obviously monstrous. Detecting their monstrosity required paying attention to detail.
Researchers aspired to conduct studies in places where distinct human subspecies mixed openly with no social stigma. The best place, many race scientists agreed, were Pacific islands such as Hawaii. The United States had annexed the lush volcanic islands of Hawaii in 1898. Over the course of the following decades, waves of migrants from the United States, Japan, China, and elsewhere had transformed the local population. White people married Hawaiian people, who married Chinese people, who in turn married Japanese people. Their mixed-race children married other mixed-race children. The promiscuously hybridizing Pacific Islands provided “a kind of laboratory,” the Times noted, “in which nature may be watched as she performs the miracle of welding alien types.” There was no social stigma about it; census records and death certificates tracked the whole process. “Possibly no equal area in the world presents more interesting racial aspects,” the public health statistician Frederick Hoffman enthused.
Osborn’s Museum of Natural History often sponsored scientific expeditions. It sent explorers to the North Pole, to uncharted regions of Siberia, to Outer Mongolia, and to the jungles of equatorial Africa. With the biology of race mixing being one of the most pressing scientific and political issues facing the nation, the museum sponsored a new expedition to produce a definitive study on the subject. In 1920 it sent Louis Sullivan, a PhD student from Columbia University, to Hawaii to conduct the necessary studies.
Osborn was in the midst of organizing37 an important international scientific conference on Weismannism and race science, during which he hoped to sway public opinion against immigration once and for all. The biology of racial hybridization would be high on the agenda. With any luck, Sullivan would produce definitive results in time for him to make the case.
In late September 1921, leading scientists from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere descended on New York City for the Second International Congress of Eugenics. The entire fourth floor of the American Museum of Natural History had been cleared out for the gathering. The inventor and scientist Alexander Graham Bell attended, as did one of Darwin’s sons, Major Leonard Darwin, president of the Royal Geographical Society, among other scientific luminaries of the day.
During his opening address, Osborn explained the political aims of the conference. Hundreds of papers and exhibits would showcase the latest findings in race science and Weismannism and demonstrate the scientific urgency of ending immigration and race mixing, he explained. “We are engaged in a serious struggle,”38 he told the assembled attendees, “to maintain our historic … institutions through barring the entrance to those who are unfit.”
Over one hundred exhibits were displayed in the museum’s exhibit hall. There were enlarged maps from Madison Grant’s best-selling book and a ghoulish display featuring plaster casts of fetuses that claimed to show that African American fetuses had smaller brains than white ones. Another one contrasted enlarged photographs of the brains of criminals and those of the “feeble-minded.” Charts showcased the fecundity of immigrants.
The Census Bureau provided several diagrams39 intended to underline certain points about race and migration, such as a chart comparing the number of white people and the number of nonwhite people in insane asylums. Davenport offered ten pedigree charts on the “Inheritance of Genius and Talent in American families,” featuring the Perry family of naval officers, the Jefferson family of actors, the Agassiz family of scientists, and others, and a display of sixty-one photographs of the “racial types” among recent immigrants at Ellis Island called “Carriers of the Germ-Plasm of the Future American Population.”
For a week, the gathered attendees40 listened to lectures. Major Leonard Darwin argued that “the inborn qualities of civilized communities are deteriorating.” Scientists from Cold Spring Harbor explained how musical, literary, and artistic skills were inherited biologically; others opined on whether it was possible to breed geniuses, why redheaded people “dislike one another,” and why tall men choose short wives and short men choose tall wives. Scientists explained why superior intelligence was five times more common in children of parents with superior social status, and how “democratically minded persons” mouthing “benevolent platitudes” resisted these scientific facts of nature.
But the most critical scientific question at the congress concerned the fundamental biological problem posed by immigration—the biology of race mixing. The attendees eagerly awaited results from Hawaii, where Sullivan felt certain he was on to something.
“I’m head over heels in the Polynesian problem,”41 Sullivan had written to his sponsors. Soon, he hoped, he’d discover “the ultimate solution of race relationships.” He’d measured nearly eleven thousand Hawaiians and analyzed more than three hundred skulls. He’d measured the body parts of mixed-race children. He’d sampled their blood. He’d taken hair samples. He shot photographs of his research subjects, clothed, and then when Osborn demanded that he needed them to be posed naked for his exhibit, unclothed. Race mixing “from the standpoint of the Whites or Chinese,” he wrote confidently in private correspondence, “is a failure of course.” But to figure it out for sure, he’d need more time to sift through the mountains of data, scribbled on index cards, overwhelming in volume, and yet stubbornly cryptic. While Sullivan couldn’t attend the conference, he’d sent photographs, face casts, and charts, which curators assembled into a display on the “race problem in Hawaii,” along with statistics and photographs contrasting “pure” Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese people with the “mixtures” they’d sired.
A colleague appeared at the conference42 to present some preliminary evidence from Hawaii, reassuring the audience that Sullivan’s “authoritative account” was forthcoming. In the meantime, conference speakers presented a mix of mostly inconclusive studies on racial hybridization. A scientist from the Carnegie Institution presented his work on mixed-race mice, which had found that the hybrid mice exhibited greater strength and adeptness at mazes than their pure-race parents. Another speaker, delivering a paper on intermarriage, pointed out that countries with more racially hybridized populations such as the United States and England demonstrated a higher stage of “mental evolution,” as he put it, than those with less racially hybrid populations, such as countries in Central Asia and Africa.
Osborn’s favorite, though, was that of the Norwegian biologist Jon Alfred Mjøen, who reported on his study of racial hybrids in humans and rodents. Osborn praised Mjøen’s paper as a “splendid contribution.” Mjøen had mated several different breeds of rabbits, then mated their hybrid offspring to each other, and so on for five generations, producing a population of degenerated, infertile, sickly rabbits. Mortality rose from 11 percent in the first generation to 38 percent by the fifth generation, he told conference attendees, by which time the rabbits were so impaired that they wouldn’t mate and some of them had one upright ear and one pendant ear.
The rabbits had been damaged by being isolated in a small group and mated with their own relatives for five generations. But Mjøen interpreted the contours of their bodies—their strangely divergent ears, for example—as the effects of racial hybridization. And those were just the most obvious of the ill effects he suspected lurked deeper within their furry bodies. “Why should only the ears be affected?” he asked his audience. “We ought to be suspicious in regard to every organ: heart, lungs, kidneys, bones. In fact, we must be suspicious in regard to the whole organism of the hybrid, when we see this most striking disharmony.”
Mjøen claimed to have found similar results in humans. Like Linnaeus years earlier, he studied Laplanders, more specifically Lapp-Norwegian hybrid people, whom he evaluated for physical and mental deficiencies. Most of the hybrids, he found, exhibited what he called the “M.B. type,” which stood for “Mang-Lende balance,” or “want of balance.” They were good-natured and willing but unbalanced and unreliable, he decided, with the main symptoms of their hybridized condition being stealing, lying, and drinking. To illustrate his point, he displayed a photograph of three boys, sitting on a rumpled blanket in front of a wooden shack, whom he described as mentally degenerated racial hybrids. To modern eyes, it is obviously and crudely doctored, though Mjøen did not present it as such.
Mjøen admitted that his research provided no definitive proof of the danger of racial hybridization. That would have to wait for Sullivan’s results. But given the apparent risks of racial hybridization, he told his listeners, prudent policy makers should aim to “nourish and develop a strong and healthy race instinct,”43 even in the absence of definitive proof. Language instruction and other assimilation services aimed at immigrants should be shut down, for they built bridges between the races, the results of which “we will deplore and regret when it is too late.”
When the week came to a close,44 the conference attendees departed, spending Sunday on a special excursion to the Bronx Zoo. Afterward Osborn arranged for the conference’s exhibits to be sent to Washington, D.C., to be displayed in the halls of the Capitol.
Meanwhile Grant, Osborn, and other scientists who’d participated in the conference formed a new organization to distill the latest scientific findings into concrete policy. With Grant as their chair, they penned a new immigration law that one of their allies, Representative Albert Johnson, would introduce into Congress.
As chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Johnson had been instrumental in raising awareness of the biology of migration among his fellow lawmakers. He’d appointed Davenport’s colleague Harry Laughlin as an “expert eugenics agent” to the committee, arranging for him to testify about how “queer, alien, mongrelized people” had to be kept out of the country, and calling his testimony, which was published in pamphlet form, “one of the most valuable documents ever put out by a Committee of Congress.” By the time Johnson introduced the immigration bill drafted by Grant’s committee in late 1923, he felt certain that scientific questions about immigration had “been settled in the minds of members of the House and Senate,” as he wrote in his private correspondence. Grant agreed. “You have the country behind you and a most popular cause,” Grant assured Johnson.
He had the newly installed president behind him, too. Calvin Coolidge had ascended to the presidency just months earlier, after the unexpected death of President Warren Harding. In a 1921 Good Housekeeping article, Coolidge had written about “biological laws” that “tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.”
When debate on the bill opened, it was clear that the political establishment’s views on the value of assimilating newcomers had shifted dramatically since the heady days of The Melting Pot. In the months leading up to the vote, Grant’s book was selling so fast, it had to be reprinted every six months.
The blood of America, one member of Congress proclaimed, had to be “kept pure.”
“We are a different race,” another added.
The immigrants “will vitiate our population.”
Of the foreign-born people already in the country, nearly half were “inferior or very inferior” according to intelligence tests, a congressmember pointed out. “We can readily see the effect on the American people of this steady incursion of individuals of low mental capacity.” Contaminated by inferior foreign biomatter, future generations would be permanently diminished.
Dismissing the complaints of steamship companies, immigration advocates, and a sprinkling of pro-immigrant congressmembers—such as one who eloquently dubbed Grant’s ideas about superior races “senseless jargon,” “pompous jumble,” and “dogmatic piffle”—the bill passed with large majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Laws that temporarily and partially restricted immigration45 had already been passed into law during the 1914–18 war. The bill that Grant and Osborn’s committee wrote would expand and make permanent those restrictions, war or no war. President Coolidge readily signed the bill. “America,” he proclaimed, “must be kept American.”
Sullivan never finished his “authoritative” study of race mixing. He fell ill with tuberculosis and had to abandon the study. He died in 1925. The American Museum of Natural History sent the Harvard anthropologist Harry Shapiro to carry on his unfinished work.
If anyone could complete the research, Shapiro could. His focus was ruthless. Once, when Shapiro heard of a recently buried skull in a cemetery, he secreted off to the site at night, stealing it and hiding it in his laundry. Another time, when he’d heard of a burial ground high in the Tahitian mountains, he and a colleague set off on a treacherous grave-digging excursion to secretly dig them up; they gingerly descended the steep, jungled slope with their axes in hand and their knapsacks heavy with stolen skulls on their backs. “I had the continuous impression of being ready to go headlong at any moment,” he recalled. “When we finally reached bottom I could hardly see through my glasses,” which were coated with a film of dirt and sweat. The researchers triumphantly sent the bones to the museum, celebrating their success that night with a steak dinner.
And yet as his research progressed,46 Shapiro’s faith in the study’s fundamental premises wavered. His task was to find evidence of the dangers of migration’s most common result, miscegenation. And yet somehow he felt drawn to his subjects, not just by scientific curiosity but also by passion and desire. He lived in local Hawaiians’ houses and accepted their gifts of shells, baskets, and food, their friendly kisses and handshakes. He admired their “liquid eyes” and “soft, languorous expression[s].” At some point, Shapiro starting having sex with his subjects.
His confusion deepening, Shapiro decided to leave Hawaii and delve into the question elsewhere. Pitcairn Island, he believed, was an even better research site for race-mixing studies than Hawaii. In 1789 nine English mutineers of the Royal Navy vessel Bounty had settled the island with a group of Polynesian women, creating a hybrid population out of two racially distinct groups. But Pitcairn, a tiny speck in the vast Pacific, was not easy to get to. Shapiro attempted to reach it in 1923, traveling on a ship bound from Panama to New Zealand in hopes of jumping off board when the boat neared Pitcairn. But as the ship approached the island, a tropical storm forced the captain to alter course, foiling Shapiro’s plan to lower himself onto a smaller boat and secretly row to shore.
Shapiro finally arrived in Pitcairn in 1934. Here he hoped he’d find “definite indications” of the degeneration caused by racial hybridity. With the two parent races of the Pitcairn Islanders so distinctive, he expected to find a wide range of diverse effects in their hybrid descendants: changes in their health status, the diseases they suffered, their height, their skin, and their fertility.
But when he met the islanders, they were not monsters. He found them to be “more like a group of Englishmen dockworkers,” he wrote, “with ugly knobby hands and feet rough and calloused by labor.” He took detailed measurements of their height, the length and width of their heads, the distance between their nasal septa and the nasal routes, and the thickness of their lips. He noted the color of their eyes, hair, and skin. But even with dozens of measurements, he could find no evidence that the Pitcairn Islanders had developed into anything other than normal humans. They were physically robust, suffered few diseases, exhibited generally average intelligence, and bore plenty of healthy babies.
“The Pitcairn Islanders,” he reported, “show no ill effects of several generations of intermarriage. They are taller, and at least in some respects appear to be better developed physically, than either the English or the Polynesian races.”
The only thing wrong with them he could find was their bad teeth.47
Other researchers’ studies on racial hybridization similarly fizzled. Davenport published his study on race mixing in Jamaica in 1929. He hadn’t been able to find much difference between black and white people and their mixed-race offspring there. “Physically there is little to choose48 between the three groups,” he admitted. The most dire effect he could find in the hybrids was intelligence he personally deemed “mediocre,” and the fact that a few of them had “the long legs of the Negro and the short arms of the white,” which he claimed put them “at a disadvantage in picking up things off the ground.” (Even that claim was exaggerated, as a colleague found later when he reanalyzed Davenport’s data: the arms of the mixed-race subjects could reach—at most—one centimeter less than those of their pure-race parents.)
Shapiro returned to the United States a changed man. He’d spent much of his career attempting to document the dangerous biological effects of hybridization. He realized he’d been chasing a mirage.
When he wrote up his notes on his transformative trip to Pitcairn into a book, he devoted just a sliver of his attention to the biological effects of racial hybridization, focusing instead on the novel cultural traditions that the migrant peoples and the natives had forged. He went on to conduct a groundbreaking study that showed how migration—not fixed characteristics of race or subspecies—influenced our bodies. In the study, he compared Japanese migrants to Hawaii, their Hawaiian-born children, and their nonmigrating relatives in Japan. Just as Boas had found decades earlier, the landscapes into which they’d migrated had shaped their bodies: the Japanese migrants’ children were taller than those of their nonmigrating relatives in Japan. Their shared “race” had nothing to do with it.
“Man emerges as a dynamic organism,”49 Shapiro wrote, “which under certain circumstances is capable of very substantial changes within a single generation.” Shaped by a long history of migration, the human body was not rigidly constrained to any one place or type, subspecies or race, dictated robotically by germplasm or anything else.
By the mid-1930s Shapiro had renounced the scientific presumptions that had driven a generation of scientists, federal immigration policy, and his own years of research. The mixing of peoples from different places posed no peril. Just the opposite: by injecting change and innovation into cultural practices, migration was “an integral factor in the history of human civilization,”50 as one of his biographers put it. But by the time race-mixing biology imploded, it was too late.
Convinced of the biological hazard posed by immigration, Congress had passed the immigration law penned by Grant’s eugenics committee. Under the Johnson-Reed Act, strict new quotas protected the nation from those whom scientists deemed racial inferiors. Under the act’s terms, over 80 percent of the annual quota of immigrants would be reserved for people from western and northern Europe. The vast majority of nonwhite immigrants and people from eastern and southern Europe would be barred entry. A newly formed Border Patrol force would enforce the rules at the border.
The flow of immigrants into the United States51 plunged from over 800,000 in 1921 to 280,000 in 1929 and fewer than 100,000 a year after that. The spigot tightened, the flow of newcomers slowed to a trickle. The Ellis Island immigration station shut down in 1954. Its services were no longer needed. The era of nearly open borders with Europe was over.
Word of the newly emerged Fortress America and the scientific principles on which it was based traveled across the globe. A pro-Nazi publishing company in Germany published Grant’s book in 1925. Adolf Hitler read it while stuck in a Bavarian jail. “The book is my bible,”52 he told Grant in a letter, as he started to envision his own program of ridding the nation of those deemed outsiders.
When his genocidal regime forced masses of Jews and other unwelcome outsiders to flee the country, the United States did not waver from its commitment to closed borders. “We must ignore the tears of sobbing sentimentalists53 and internationalists,” a member of the House Committee on Immigration said, and “permanently close, lock and bar the gates of our country to new immigration waves and then throw the keys away.” In polls conducted in the late 1930s, two-thirds of Americans said they agreed.
In February 1939 a bipartisan bill granting twenty thousand Jewish children asylum from the Nazi regime was introduced into Congress. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pointedly took no stand; his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, didn’t either. Anti-immigrant congressmembers killed the bill. Twenty thousand “charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults,” one advocate, the wife of the U.S. immigration commissioner, testified.
A few months later an ocean liner54 carrying more than nine hundred terrified asylum seekers from Germany arrived in Miami. U.S. officials refused to let the ship dock, calling the Coast Guard in as reinforcements. For days, the ship circled off Florida’s coast, its passengers sobbing on the balconies, until the captain finally steered it back across the Atlantic to war-torn Europe. Some of the ship’s passengers made their way to Britain. Most ended up in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, where they soon faced Nazi occupation. Over 250 died in the Holocaust.