In the decade that opened the twentieth century, the entire field of hereditary science that had been ripped apart by the discovery in 1900 of Mendel’s famous paper experienced a radical remaking. So did much of American life. Theodore Roosevelt declared the nation’s arrival as a world power by dispatching the U.S. Navy’s “Great White Fleet” on a two-year, globe-circling display of American might. In the South, segregation—and subjugation—based on race hardened into place. With the birth of the mass-produced Model T, the novelty of the automobile was supplanted by its rising ubiquity. For imperialists, southern racists, and prophets of the rising industrial state, the new century was filled with nothing but promise. For the anti-immigration movement, it had brought nothing but despair.
Not once had the restrictionists achieved a meaningful victory. Worse, from their point of view, the problem that had motivated both their anxieties and their actions—namely the preservation of the nation’s Anglo-Saxon character and composition—had spiraled into a crisis. Back in 1896, when Henry Cabot Lodge told the Senate that “the danger has begun,” even he may not have anticipated what lay ahead. Ships of a single transatlantic service, the Cunard Line, made thirty-five trips in 1901 just from Liverpool to Boston. Deepening poverty in Naples, Sicily, and neighboring areas sent more than 220,000 emigrants from Italian ports in a single year. The 1903 massacre that began on Easter Sunday in Kishinev, in present-day Moldova, initiated a savage new wave of pogroms that left several thousand Jews dead and sent tens of thousands more fleeing imperial Russia. Poles, Greeks, Hungarians, Slovaks—a freshening torrent rushed westward from the entire continent. All told, between 1900 and 1910, the 3.7 million European immigrants who had arrived in the 1890s were joined by an additional 7.6 million. And to those who would argue that the immigrants were a positive addition to the national welfare, restrictionists could cite a report issued by the immigrant-friendly United Hebrew Charities. The report warned that New York City alone was home to nearly 100,000 Jews who were “unable to supply themselves with the necessaries of life.”
American nativists were not isolated in their fear of this surging wave. In the United Kingdom, the prominent socialist Sidney Webb warned that the falling birthrate among the British would soon lead to “national deterioration” while their country “gradually [fell] to the Irish and the Jews”—and this was after Parliament’s adoption of the Aliens Act of 1905, which had already cut the number of Jewish immigrants allowed into the UK by more than two-thirds. New Zealand, the Cape Colony in southern Africa, and Australia all imposed literacy tests, the last of these an expression of what became popularly known as the “white Australia” policy. Canada tightened its immigration laws in 1906 and again in 1910. In 1906, writing about what he learned in a visit to America, H. G. Wells told his British compatriots that the immigration of that era was comparable to the slave trade (even if “different in spirit”) because it created “a practically illiterate industrial proletariat.”I
American politicians in both parties avoided committing the nation to new immigration policies similar to those imposed on the Chinese in 1882—that is, bans that were race-based or absolute. They instead whittled a complex series of restrictions based entirely on individual distinctions, each successive immigration bill enacted immediately before and during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency establishing new subcategories of the inadmissible. Anarchists, epileptics, polygamists, “lunatics,” people with “poor physique,” people beset by diseases contagious (trachoma, tuberculosis) or “loathsome” (syphilis, gonorrhea, leprosy), people deemed so incompetent and so impoverished they were “likely to become a public charge” (such individuals were inevitably referred to as “LPCs”)—all these were now excluded. But despite these and other similar disqualifications, between 1880 and the onset of World War I only a tiny number—fewer than 1 percent—of European immigrants were debarred from entry. And for the restrictionists, that wouldn’t do.
In the spring of 1911 Prescott Hall’s ingenuous letter requesting printed material on eugenics must have seemed inconsequential to Charles Davenport. His attention was fastened at the time on accelerating the development of his new eugenics operation in Cold Spring Harbor and also preparing for the publication of his first book on the subject, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. Both efforts were consonant with his belief that selective breeding could improve a population—selective breeding plus, as he had said in 1909, “extreme measures” that might include involuntary sterilization. The book is spattered with racial stereotyping, but Davenport did not believe that ethnicity was an especially meaningful factor in any eugenic program. “The fact is,” he wrote, “no race per se, whether Slovak, Ruthenian, Turk or Chinese, is dangerous and none undesirable.” What mattered, he maintained, was the genetic makeup—the “germ plasm,” as he called it—of the individual (which, half a century before the discovery of DNA, was unknowable with any precision). He even made the point that there was likely no such thing as a “pure” European of any sort, given the importation of slaves from Africa in the first millennium, and he endorsed the argument that even New England’s finest would meet “a pathetic and unedifying end” without the infusion of new, foreign blood. His engagement with some of the darkest eugenic ideas was soon to become a passionate romance, but he was not—or at least not yet—a racist.
Consequently, in those early days Davenport’s epistolary conversation with his old classmate was somewhat chilly, if polite. “Would you not agree,” he wrote to Hall, “that there might be good Greeks or Servians [sic] and undesirable Norwegians and English? Would you not agree also that there might be illiterates who would add desirable hereditary traits to the germ plasm of our country, and on the other hand there would be educated criminals?”
No, Hall did not agree, and he charged right through Davenport’s demurral. He did acknowledge that it might seem “ungracious” for the leaders of the Immigration Restriction League to believe that people who shared their ethnic background were superior to those of less favored parentage. But he did not tiptoe around the implications embedded in the preference. “I know the men who have worked with me for many years, giving a great deal of time with no compensation,” he said, “and I know that while they may be prejudiced, they are sincere.”
Sincere? If sincerity were adequate justification for bigotry, Hall deserved a medal for it. He had long been ready to apply eugenic principles to the immigration issue. At age twenty-five, less than a month after Hall and his two friends first discussed the formation of the IRL back in 1894, he wrote a letter to the Boston Herald that revealed the nature of his sincerity: the blunt assertion that southern and eastern Europeans were “physically different races . . . from those already here.” He went on to catalog “the dirt, the lowered standards of living, the ignorance and the race deterioration” among the immigrants, and began clipping articles about eugenics as early as 1897, when the word was barely known in the United States. At one point he wanted to bless the organization he had cofounded with a new name: the Eugenic Immigration League.
It’s hardly surprising that Hall and his comrades were readier than Davenport to accept the racial implications of eugenic theory. Davenport had discovered Galton only fourteen years earlier; the families of Hall, Lee, and most of the other members of the IRL had been calibrating, curating, and celebrating their bloodlines for centuries. Most of the men of the IRL were comfortable relying not on the claims of science but on what they knew intuitively. Lee, who as the perfect model of the progressive rationalist probably had more faith in science than most of his colleagues, felt no need to invoke it when discussing immigration. Phrases like “the comparative capacity of different races,” “race selection,” and “fitness of different races . . . for taking part in democracy” invaded his usually casual prose, as if they were contractual boilerplate, though supported neither by logic nor evidence—only by decades, even generations, of unchallenged use.
Davenport, though, was a scientist, and the eminence he had achieved was built on the foundation of data he relentlessly gathered in his research. If immigration was a eugenic issue in the first decade of the century, it was only so at the periphery of his consciousness. The human phenomena he was beginning to explore in the early days of the Eugenics Record Office were specific and focused: hereditary albinism, the causes of imbecility, the consequences of inbreeding among the Pennsylvania Amish. Only with data, he believed, could science leap the chasm separating mystery from knowledge. At one point he told Hall, who persisted in trying to push Davenport toward activism on the immigration issue, “As ever, I am pressed less by the need of more legislation than by the need of more facts.”
* * *
IT WAS IN 1911 that Charles Davenport began his blinkered transit from eugenic investigator to race partisan. In the same letter in which he had tried to persuade Prescott Hall that every nationality was composed of good and bad individuals, he proposed that the eugenics committee of the American Breeders Association form a subcommittee to analyze the family traits of recent immigrants. There is no evidence to suggest that at the time he felt the study would identify congenital deficiencies particular to any ethnic group. To Davenport and the ERO, the ABA’s work would simply provide yet more data for their swelling files. To Hall and the IRL, though, the immigration subcommittee would be far more fruitful: it would provide them with keys to the eugenic kingdom.
The year before, Hall’s IRL colleague Robert Ward, the Harvard climatologist whose scientific credentials were so useful to the organization he had helped found, had published an article extolling the “picked men and women” who had settled the American colonies. Appearing in the North American Review—where else?—and titled “National Eugenics in Relation to Immigration,” it mentioned Galton, invoked Darwin, and offered what in time would essentially become the credo of the joined forces of immigration restriction and eugenic progress. America had “a remarkably favorable opportunity for practicing eugenic principles in the selection of the fathers and mothers of future American children,” wrote Ward, “through our power to regulate alien immigration.”
Yet while Ward believed that “there are certain parts of Europe from which it would be better for the American race if no aliens at all were permitted,” Davenport was not yet ready to make such distinctions as he had demonstrated in Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, which was published the same year as Ward’s article. It was Davenport’s first venture aimed at the general public, and it forcefully—and repeatedly—expressed his belief that every ethnic or national group harbored both desirable and undesirable immigrants. For instance: when one judges the mass of immigrants as a group, he argued, “One is apt to lose sight of the potential importance to this nation of the individual.”
One couldn’t be clearer than that. But if the book represents Davenport’s relative broad-mindedness in the early days of the ERO, it even more reveals the sloppiness of his thinking on the specifics of human genetics, the field he had only recently plunged into with his singularly Davenportian zeal. He constructed his various arguments (mostly about mating in general; only one chapter out of nine concerns immigration) from a mix of scrupulous evidence, reasonable intuition, less reasonable guesswork, old wives’ tales, and outright class bias. Typical of his seemingly willful suspension of disbelief was the flabbergasting clause (which begs for the italics Davenport didn’t supply) that punctures this sentence: “The oft repeated story that Abraham Lincoln was descended on his mother’s side from Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia, whether it has any basis or not, illustrates the possibility of the origin of great traits through two obscure parents.” On the contrary, the statement only illustrates how his increasing enthusiasm for his eugenic mission led him to breach even the most forgiving scientific standards. Concerning immigration, the passage where he indulges most egregiously in stereotyping is particularly revealing: “Unless conditions change of themselves or are radically changed, the population of the United States 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.” The horror! Battalions of short, sober, musical rapists were poised on the American doorstep! But with proper evaluation and selection of individual immigrants, he calmly explained, “we may expect to see our population not harmed but improved by this mixture with a more mercurial people.”
Typical of his half-digested reasoning (and of his normative, caste-based prejudices) as this analysis might have been, Davenport’s notions about gathering the necessary information for the eugenic future were even more cockeyed. He closed the book with a plea for the collection and analysis of the pedigrees and traits of all twenty-four million American schoolchildren and their millions of parents, conducted by the nation’s 630,000 schoolteachers “through a series of visits on Saturday afternoon or during vacations,” and intended to produce “advice” for families “as to how their children should marry.” Even if such an unlikely undertaking—untrained investigators collecting unverifiable data about unquantifiable characteristics—were to ensue, the focus was on what could be learned about the individual, not the group.
It may have been inevitable that Davenport’s views on immigration would eventually converge with Hall’s and Ward’s when he appointed them—utter amateurs in genetic matters—to the Breeders Association’s immigration subcommittee. He also capitulated quickly when Hall argued that another member Davenport was planning to appoint, pro-immigration journalist Herbert F. Sherwood of the New-York Tribune, was “a paid agent” of the National Liberal Immigration League. But the scientist in Davenport made him dig in his heels in defense of another of his nominees, anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University.
Hall objected to Boas, heatedly. He said he was related to Emil Boas, the general manager of the Hamburg-American Line (he was not). He also insisted that he’d been given a “fat job” on the immigration commission Congress had created in 1907 “to please the steamship companies” (in fact, Boas’s work for the commission resulted in one of the most important anthropological studies of the early twentieth century). But Davenport valued him for his scholarly attainments. He also believed the committee’s work could be enhanced by someone who favored open immigration laws; scientific method almost demanded it.
Thomas F. Gossett once wrote that Franz Boas possibly “did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history.” “My ideas have developed because I am what I am,” Boas wrote late in his life, “and have lived where I have lived.” This statement, in tone and substance, was a concise reflection of both his personality and his philosophy. The personality—rigid, formal, austerely certain—allowed not an inch for doubt. The philosophy defined a potent counterforce to any racial interpretation of genetics: the individual was an independent organism shaped by his life circumstances. Genetic makeup (“I am what I am”) was a canvas; environmental influences (“I have lived where I have lived”) were the brush and the paint that gave the canvas life.
As a fifteen-year-old boy in northern Germany, Boas told his sister that “If I do not become really famous, I do not know what I will do. It would be terrible if I had to spend my life unknown and unregarded.” His ambitions were fully requited. Boas’s stature in his field was—and more than a century after he did his most famous work, remains—unmatched. At his death in 1942, his students—among them Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Melville Herskovits—were the outstanding figures in American anthropology.II To journalist Joseph Mitchell, writing in 1937, Boas was “unquestionably the greatest anthropologist in the world.” Boas himself was slightly more circumspect. “Actually,” he said in 1902, “it is very easy to be one of the first among anthropologists” in the United States.
Early in his career Boas made no effort to cloak his disregard for the prevailing race theories promoted by his American-born counterparts. In 1894, around the time the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, anthropologist Daniel G. Brinton, was busying himself comparing the cranial capacities of European whites, African blacks, and orangutans, Boas delivered a speech that shredded the underpinnings of race-based arguments. Uncharacteristically eloquent (Boas’s prose was usually as stiff and unapproachable as his person), the speech conclusively demonstrated that environmental factors played an enormous role in the development of individual talents and other characteristics, irrespective of race. Conclusively, that is, unless you chose not to listen, and it was not insignificant that Brinton (and others like him) were particularly deaf to Boas’s argument: a year later, Brinton insisted that anthropology could provide “a positive basis for legislation, politics, and education as applied to a given ethnic group.” In one way, at least, Brinton was right—politicians and pressure groups would use a perversion of anthropology for those purposes for the next three decades.
Boas was argumentative by nature. Throughout the early stages of his career he would repeatedly resign from prominent positions over matters of principle and loudly proceed to make those principles known. His face bore notable scars that he usually attributed to a clawing by a polar bear while doing fieldwork in the Arctic—but to family members and a few others, he insisted that the scars, including a particularly disfiguring one carved into the left side of his face from mouth to ear, came from duels he had initiated in response to anti-Semitic slurs as a university student in Germany. “Apocryphal or not,” wrote his protégé A. L. Kroeber, “the tale absolutely fits the character of the man as we later knew him in America.”
By the time Charles Davenport approached Boas about joining the Breeders Association immigration subcommittee, the two men had known each other for slightly more than a decade. Boas was interested enough in Davenport’s work to have traveled to Cold Spring Harbor with his daughter to visit with him. Davenport knew Boas’s work because it was impossible for someone tiptoeing into even the shallowest pools of anthropological study not to know what this revolutionary thinker and scholar had accomplished, particularly in the field of ethnology. His time among the Eskimos in the Arctic reaches of Baffin Island had established Boas in scientific circles; a period of intense and fruitful study of the Kwakiutl and other indigenous peoples in British Columbia, where Boas and colleagues confirmed the linkage between aboriginal groups in Asia and North America, would make him preeminent among anthropologists. Photographs of Boas posing as an aboriginal for the makers of dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History might suggest a playful nature; in fact, they only demonstrate his passionate quest for precision and truth.
Like Davenport—and Francis Galton—Boas was in thrall to data. The same obsessiveness applied in his private life as well. He worked seven days a week, usually including a stretch of four or five hours after dinner each night. His daughter remembered that his attention to his bank accounts was so meticulous that if his numbers were off by so much as a single cent, he could spend hours hunting for the missing penny. Hard and humorless, Boas did not suffer fools, unprepared students, journalists, or critics gladly, or even politely. He had no use for psychoanalysis, believing that each individual’s problems were his own to solve. His fundamental conservatism could be discerned from the title of one his doctoral theses: “That Contemporary Operetta Is Equally to Be Condemned on Grounds of Art and Morality.” One could infer from the frequency with which Boas exclaimed them that his favorite words were “Nonsense!” and “Preposterous!” His motto, one of his students said, was “icy enthusiasm.” Robert Lowie recalled how he dreaded encountering Boas on the Columbia campus, and Margaret Mead considered him “somewhat frightening.” Still, Lowie, Mead, and his other protégés cherished the demanding way Boas challenged them. If he sought acolytes, they would only be those he could harden in the crucible of his rigor.
At times, Boas’s professional investigations betrayed a tone deafness that left him open to criticism, both unfair and fair. A version of the former occurred shortly after he became a U.S. citizen in 1891, when he embarked on a study of schoolchildren in Worcester, Massachusetts, to determine growth rates among members of the city’s various ethnic groups. Even though Boas hired women to measure the girls, he was naive about the possible reactions to his work. The Worcester Daily Telegram let him know right away, declaring itself determined that he “would never lay a slimy finger on a single Worcester schoolchild.” (Despite the paper’s insistence that Boas’s project would leave “innocent youngsters . . . at the mercy of a perverted old lecher who would paw their tender bodies at will,” the school board approved his plans.) Six years later, when he asked Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary “to bring us a middle-aged Eskimo to stay [at the American Museum of Natural History] over the winter” because it would enable him to collect information of “the greatest scientific importance,” Boas’s fevered quest for data and evidence ended in tragedy. Peary brought back not one Eskimo but six and put them on display on his ship when it docked in New York Harbor (enticing more than twenty thousand people to pay twenty-five cents each for the chance to see them). Eight months after their relocation to the museum building on Central Park West, four of them were dead from pneumonia. Determined to continue his studies, Boas had the flesh stripped from their bones, which soon became part of the museum’s collection.
But the same monomania that Boas brought to the Worcester experiment and the Eskimo misadventure also defined his commitment to the one great cause of his life: the destruction of the “presumed hierarchy of racial types,” as historian George Stocking called it. By his own account, Boas was raised without religion, and thus, he said, “spared the struggle against religious dogma that besets the lives of so many young people.” Still, he was Jewish by inheritance and culture. His consciousness of anti-Semitism, both in Germany and the United States, certainly heightened his sensitivities, and his dedication to the rights of black Americans was thorough and persistent. Some critics have said that his studies of racial similarity and difference originated in an ideological opposition to any claim of ethnic superiority. This opposition, they argued, set him off on a search for the evidence he needed to discredit his adversaries’ opinions. The countervailing view maintains that it was not Boas’s ideology at all, but simply his intense observation and measurement of so many different peoples that first led him to a hypothesis—which, scholar that he was, he then insisted on confirming in the field. One such effort started in 1908, when he began a mammoth inquiry among New York immigrant children that produced evidence he believed would put an end to the idea that race was a definable and unchangeable reality.
The United States Immigration Commission that emerged from the ashes of the 1907 iteration of the literacy test bill, and under whose auspices Boas would conduct his investigation, was born of unlikely parentage. Uncle Joe Cannon, who had single-handedly demolished the literacy test’s chances, was the leader of the conservative Republican majority in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, few were as conservative as Henry Cabot Lodge, who had already invested sixteen years in the effort to enact the literacy test. Yet the commission, chaired by Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont—who, it was said, “wore the label ‘reactionary’ without protest”—turned out to be almost the very model of a Progressive Era inquiry. It spent more than three years gathering evidence, another year preparing its report. It employed a lengthy roster of recognized scientists and other experts. Its members traveled to Europe to conduct on-site inspections of potential immigrants, even visiting the impoverished towns and villages of southern Italy, where hundreds of thousands had begun their journey across the Atlantic. Historian Jill Lepore once wrote that the progressives of that era “could make a science out of licking envelopes if they set their mind to it.” This particular venture sought to prove its scientific validity by presenting its findings in a staggering forty-two volumes of testimony, statistics, research reports, and, finally, recommendations.
Two documents of enduring significance emerged from what Lodge hailed as “the most exhaustive inquiry into the subject [of immigration] which has ever been made.” One was the Dictionary of Races and Peoples compiled by Daniel Folkmar, an anthropologist of negligible stature and minuscule accomplishment. The book’s sources included Daniel Brinton (the anthropologist who had placed the African “midway between the orangutang [sic] and the European white”), the French eugenicist Georges Vacher de Lapouge (author of The Aryan and His Social Role, he believed in two white races, one “superior” and the other “inferior”), and Prescott Hall. Starting from a premise that stressed the stability of racial differences across the centuries, Folkmar somehow identified six hundred distinct racial and ethnic strains. His Dictionary presented its “findings” with a brief bibliography, not a single citation for any of its presumably factual content, virtually no supporting data—and, nonetheless, a straight face.
The other document that stood out was the commission’s Volume 38, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, by Franz Boas. Over a two-year period Boas and a team of thirteen assistants had taken exquisitely detailed physical measurements of 17,821 Jewish, Italian, Bohemian, and Scottish immigrants and their U.S.-born children. They focused on head shape—specifically, the so-called cephalic index, which expressed the shape of an individual skull as the ratio of its width to its length, and which most anthropologists considered, in Boas’s words, “one of the most stable and permanent characteristics of human races.” A number above 80—that is, head width at least 80 percent of head length—denoted round-headedness (the term of art was “brachycephalic”), while a number under 75 indicated long-headedness (“dolichocephalic”). Since the 1840s, craniometry—skull measurement—had been a central element of biological and anthropological research. (And at times an extreme element: one prominent European researcher, anthropologist Aurel von Török, somehow managed to make five thousand separate measurements on a single skull.) Before he entered the academic world, Boas had supported himself partly by selling skulls he had gathered in his fieldwork to other researchers. Scientists as distinguished as Thomas Huxley had measured skulls in their search for markers of evolutionary development, and philosopher Bertrand Russell considered it an “obvious fact” that “one can generally tell whether a man is a clever man or a fool by the shape of his head.” Craniometry inevitably seduced the leading eugenicists, starting with Galton, and most of the race theorists, notably William Z. Ripley, who had used it as a primary indicator of the distinctions between his three races of Europe.
Boas could hardly have picked a more potent weapon. European race supremacists like Vacher de Lapouge had based their arguments all but entirely on the presumed immutability of the cephalic index. And so did Boas—by disproving it. His analysis of those 17,821 skulls revealed that the longer a family had been in the United States, the more likely it was that the heads of their children would move toward the American mean. The characteristically round-headed eastern European Jews saw their children become ever more long-headed. Similarly, southern Italians generally had long heads, but the heads of their children born in the United States were measurably rounder. The impact of environmental influences (particularly nutrition) had negated the presumed dominance of inheritance. Nurture had triumphed over nature. Boas concluded that “there can be no stability in mental traits of the races, as is often assumed.” If even skull shape was mutable across generations, he maintained, so were all physical and mental traits. Those who sought to establish that physical characteristics of nationalities and ethnic groups were unchangeable were now obliged, he said, to bear the burden of proof. III
Boas was swamped with requests for copies of his report to the commissioners. He pleaded with Senator Dillingham to have the Government Printing Office go back to press. He said he was compelled to pay “exorbitant prices” to acquire copies from sellers of secondhand books. One he sent to Jacob Schiff. The banker had long been interested in Boas’s work and at times had supported it financially. When Schiff wrote to Boas to thank him for the book, he clearly hadn’t looked at it yet; he told Boas he was taking it with him on a trip to Alaska, “where I shall have time to carefully read it and no doubt shall get pleasure and instruction therefrom.” Had Schiff cracked the cover of Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, he would have immediately seen that instruction was unlikely and pleasure unimaginable. Boas had produced 575 mind-numbing pages consisting almost entirely of columns of numbers. His “unrelenting empiricism,” as one anthropologist called it, compelled him to present his evidence in all its deadening and repetitive detail. He believed he was providing proof, and he believed proof could not be ignored.
But then it was, at least by the Dillingham Commission. In their final report, the commissioners greeted Boas’s work with a barely suppressed yawn. Yes, his findings were “entirely unexpected” and possibly even “of great importance,” and maybe it would be a good idea for others to pursue the subject, but there really was nothing else to say about it. Not a word in the commission’s formal recommendations to Congress reflected anything that had emerged from Boas’s work. Folkmar’s Dictionary, on the other hand, had brought together what the commission called “reliable” data that was “useful in promoting a better understanding of the many different racial elements that are being added to the population of the United States through immigration.” With the enactment of the primary recommendation arising from its extensive labors, the commissioners believed, Folkmar’s “different racial elements” might be sorted out. Their recommended filtering mechanism, naturally, was the perfect proxy for ethnic discrimination: the literacy test.
The fact that the American Breeders Association’s committee on immigration was a subgroup of the organization’s eugenics wing was telling. Implicit in the committee’s very creation was the conviction that immigration would have an effect on any national eugenic program. When he invited Franz Boas to join the committee, Davenport knew that Boas’s exhaustive head-shape study had challenged this linkage. Having seen his findings ignored by the Dillingham Commission, Boas would reasonably have thought that he might instead be able to use his participation on this new committee to influence the nature-nurture debate. The Dillingham Commission, organized by politicians, had sought confirmation; this new committee, organized by a scientist of Davenport’s stature, would presumably seek evidence.
But apart from his advocacy for Boas’s inclusion, Davenport’s contribution to the committee he appointed bordered on the negligent. The men who commandeered the five-member committee virtually upon its creation—Robert Ward and Prescott Hall, who took it up as a nearly full-time endeavor—brought to its work scientific credentials that were alarmingly thin. Ward’s most recent book was a study of climate (based, he wrote, on “lecture notes which have been accumulating for the past ten years”). He had no credentials at all in genetics, biology, anthropology, sociology, or any other discipline that intersected with the committee’s brief. Hall’s “scientific” work consisted of credulous essays on séances, telepathy, and “astral projection.” Appalled by the shoddiness of their approach, Boas declined to attend their meetings or take part in drafting their eventual report.
For Ward and Hall, nothing could have pleased them more than Boas’s recusal. Their decision to hitch the Immigration Restriction League to the rising eugenics movement, prefigured four years earlier in Joe Lee’s living room on Mount Vernon Street, had now paid off. Davenport, the nation’s leading eugenicist, stood on the sidelines while the men of the IRL became the de facto spokesmen on immigration issues for the Breeders Association, the nation’s leading genetic organization (which in fact would soon change its name to the American Genetic Association). Shortly after Davenport proposed the creation of an immigration committee, Ward published an article defining, with Davenport’s approval, the committee’s stated goal: “securing laws which will [bring] only normal and superior heredity to our country.” The next month, Hall weighed in with “The Future of American Ideals,” an article that began by quoting the progenitor of scientific racism, Arthur de Gobineau, and drew shamelessly on Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s blatantly racist view on “race mixture.” Hall’s article explained that Jews—his preferred usage was “Hebrews”—were “an Asiatic race,” and that southern Italians were actually African because of the “negroid migration from Carthage.” He also likened unwanted immigrants to the gypsy moth and the sparrow, both of which “were not considered dangerous when first imported.”
Four months after the committee was formally convened, in the spring of 1912, Ward and Hall produced a draft report with little or no input from its three other members. James A. Field, an economist from the University of Chicago, was happy to endorse it, and the fourth member, Alexander E. Cance of Massachusetts Agricultural College, whose specialty was the promotion of farmers’ co-operatives, agreed to sign it even though he had never attended a committee meeting—nor, he admitted, had he given the report more than a cursory look.
The fifth member refused to sign. Boas was categorical. Hall was offended, if unsurprised (“very few Jews have any manners,” he’d told Field after Boas had failed to attend some early meetings). With four names attached and Boas’s dissent noted, the published report argued that even more dangerous than insane or feebleminded immigrants was “the much larger class of aliens” consisting of those whose heredity just didn’t measure up. Their admission to the United States, the report concluded, could only be to the “detriment of the public health and the eugenic future of the race.”
IN THE EARLY YEARS of the Eugenics Record Office, Charles Davenport stayed away from active involvement in applied science. “We scientists don’t perform any experiments in eugenics,” he said in January 1913. “The human race does plenty of that!” He and his wife were chatting with a reporter from the New York Times—amiably and with occasional drollery—about the work they were doing in Cold Spring Harbor. All the marrying and reproducing that had been going on for millennia, Davenport said, had produced many different human variants, but they likely shared a lot in common. “The fact remains,” he told his visitor, “that practically every Anglo-American could prove his descent from William the Conqueror.” Pause for effect. “And also from his jester.”
For the staff and the trainees, it was a marvelous time to be at the ERO. Its early strides brought out Davenport’s confident and generous aspect, sidelining (at least for a while) the dyspeptic and anxious side of his nature. From down the road in Oyster Bay, the retired Theodore Roosevelt sent Davenport an endorsement: “Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” Visits from such dignitaries as former cabinet member and current senator Elihu Root, accompanied by the incumbent secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, confirmed Davenport in his conviction that the ERO’s work was important. Davenport’s domain was well funded, well equipped, and increasingly well known. “To Cold Spring Harbor,” the Times would say, “all America’s streams of eugenic interest flow.” Davenport traveled frequently, delivering speeches, meeting with colleagues, spreading the word. When he was away, his wife was in charge. Strong and capable, she was respected in the field they both worked in, and at times was listed as the senior author of their jointly written academic papers. Three children brightened the Davenport home, and an eager staff mined the mountain of evidence that would someday give life to the Davenport dream. As Gertrude Davenport put it, there was nothing suspicious, scary, or even worth questioning about the eugenic quest: “A eugenist”—the term in use at the time—“is simply a sane, well-balanced person, who works, sanely, for the betterment of the race.”
Occasional diversions lightened the mood at the ERO, including presentations by the extracurricular Record Office Dramatic Club. The content of the club’s productions was not idly chosen. The main character of Acquired or Inherited?, directed by Harry Laughlin and cowritten by his wife, Pansy, was a widower “interested in Eugenics” whose niece was being courted by both an “indolent and wealthy” suitor and “an ambitious electrician”; another character was named “Hare Lip Peggy.” As “The Sad Fate of a Youthful Sponge” (“There was a little blastula no bigger than a germ . . .”) had been the theme song for the era of zoological inquiry in Cold Spring Harbor, a new ditty provided a soundtrack for the fieldworkers in the era of eugenics: “We are Eugenists so gay / And we have no time for play, / Serious we have to be / Working for posterity.” A further verse was somewhat less buoyant: “Trips we have in Plenty too / Where no merriment is due. / We inspect with might and main, / Habitats of the insane.” The lyrics didn’t really scan but they made their point: by studying “defectives” the ERO could secure the American future.
The defectives studied at the ERO were not defined by their ethnic origins. In the narrow universe occupied by Davenport and his followers, how could they have been? “There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants,” E. L. Doctorow wrote decades later on the opening page of his novel Ragtime, set in early-twentieth-century New York; neither group occupied even a corner of the comfortable mindset of the comfortable upper-middle-class family at the novel’s heart. That same psychic blindness prevailed in Davenport’s world on Long Island’s North Shore, where there were no Others of any kind. The industrialists and merchants and railroad princes—Dodges and Winthrops, Lovetts and Cravaths—amassing outsized country estates in Glen Cove and Oyster Bay were of course Anglo-American.IV So were the burghers in the nearby villages and the farmers in the outlying areas, and so were the staff in the Cold Spring Harbor labs and their young colleagues, fresh from Smith and Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe, who were training to be fieldworkers. Servants and laborers who came from different stock were present, including the occasional Italian gardener that Davenport’s brother William had sent out from his settlement house in Brooklyn. But servants and laborers were defined by their functionality, not their personhood.
Davenport may have watched the ABA immigration committee’s deliberations (such as they were) from a relative distance, but he could not help but be influenced by his deepening engagement with Hall and Ward. Despite his eccentric characterizations of various nationalities in Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, Davenport continued that America need only be concerned about individuals with questionable traits. He even argued that the assimilation of Italians, for instance, “will add many desirable elements to the American complex.” Yet in 1912, as the ABA committee was completing its report, Davenport told Hall that “modern studies of heredity have rendered the old idea of the melting pot, particularly the idea that traits will blend and disappear, quite untenable.” At Hall’s urging, Davenport also removed Boas from the future deliberations of the immigration committee and replaced him with the economist Irving Fisher. Fisher was arguably the most important economist in the United States, but his vociferous public commitment to immigration restriction was inversely proportional to his comprehension of basic genetics, which was nil. Shortly thereafter, Davenport declined to help Boas round up the relatively minimal funding he needed to finish the physical studies he had begun for the Dillingham Commission. He presented a much more congenial face to his new allies, at one point telling the New York Times that “the great families of Boston in the early part of the nineteenth century . . . constituted nearly pure strains of scholarship and social leadership respectively. And the characteristics of these strains are inheritable.”
Others in the eugenics camp similarly turned their attention to the immigration question. Willet M. Hays, the assistant agriculture secretary in the Roosevelt administration who had founded the American Breeders Association, declared that it was time for American consulates abroad to start determining the “genetic fitness” of immigrants in order to keep “defective blood” out of the country. Stanford president David Starr Jordan, who had been so instrumental in helping Davenport persuade Mary Harriman to underwrite the ERO, now lent his name to the IRL’s letterhead as a member of its National Committee and appeared on a list of college presidents declaring themselves in favor of “further restriction of immigration.” Jordan believed that the “steady influx of people of other breeds” was the “main cause for the deterioration” of American government. Harry Laughlin of the ERO, a fledgling just beginning to spread his wings, prepared a report for another ABA body that needed no more explanation than was apparent in its name: the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population.
Davenport himself revealed his evolving attitudes, perhaps unintentionally, in a 1914 letter to his social-worker brother. William Davenport had asked if Charles might find room for a laborer he knew from the Italian Settlement. Charles had always been polite when William made such requests, but now he exploded, in a four-page letter that veered from regret to rage and then settled in to something close to despair. “I am very blue, anyway, about the future of this country,” he told William. “I sometimes feel that the only thing is to leave the United States and go to a country like New Zealand or Australia which appreciate the importance of good blood. . . . Excuse me, my dear brother, this rambling letter. You see that the point is that, with very great regret on my part, it will be out of the question” to hire the young Italian. He seemed to be saying that enough—about William’s earnest good works, about immigration, about what he believed to be the dilution of the American gene pool—was more than enough.
Robert Ward could not have been surprised by Charles Davenport’s enlistment in the restrictionist cause. Saluting America’s leading eugenicist in an essay titled “The Crisis in Our Immigration Policy,” Ward was succinct: “The day of the sociologist is passing,” he wrote, “and the day of the biologist has come.” Not quite as succinct but far more ominous, and equally prescient, was something William Bateson had said back in 1905: “When power is discovered, man always turns to it. The science of heredity will soon provide power on a stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time not, perhaps, far distant, that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation.”
I. Wells was also confirmed in his faith in negative eugenics. It was “exceedingly abominable,” he wrote, “to make life convenient for the breeding [of the] feeble, ugly, inefficient” and others “born of unrestrained lusts.”
II. Another prize Boas student eventually gave up anthropology for other pursuits: novelist Zora Neale Hurston.
III. More than a century later, Boas’s findings faced a serious challenge. A detailed account of the controversy can be found on the website www.livinganthropologically.com, in Jason Antrosio’s article “Human Skulls: Anthropology on Head Shape Variation and Plasticity” (2011). The comments attached to Antrosio’s paper vividly illustrate the continuing contention over Boas’s work.
IV. The most notable exception was banker Otto Kahn—born Jewish in Germany but so deracinated (his children were christened in the Episcopal Church) that sociologist Dixon Wecter called him “the flyleaf between the Old and the New Testaments.” Kahn’s house in Cold Spring Harbor had 127 rooms, 50 baths, and a dining room that seated 200.