Just three months after the publication of The Passing of the Great Race, the literacy test—so long in gestation, so central to the restriction cause—at last became law. Madison Grant was quick to take credit. “I am told that my book played a very important part in the final passage,” he wrote to Charles Davenport. He could even say he predicted the bill’s enactment, after a fashion: in Passing’s last chapter, Grant had declared that as soon as the “facts” of ethnic differences were “appreciated by lawmakers . . . a readjustment [of law] based on racial values” was inevitable. But the “readjustment” that arrived in 1917 had little to do with Grant. His greatest impact would play out over time, in restrictive stratagems as yet unimagined. In 1917 the winds of war were powerful enough to place the literacy test in the law books with hardly any help at all.
As the United States stood poised to send its young men into battle against European foes, some form of restriction appeared inevitable. Two years earlier, shortly after Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the literacy test had been sustained, Louis Brandeis—not yet on the Supreme Court—told an audience of Jewish professional men celebrating the test’s defeat that it would return. “We are celebrating not a victory, but an escape. The danger remains,” Brandeis said. Invoking Macbeth, he warned his audience that “we have ‘scorched the snake, not killed it.’ ” It did not take long for the snake to reappear, abetted to some degree by the chief scorcher when Wilson embarked on a war-driven assault on “hyphenated Americans.” The 128 Americans who died in the U-boat attack on the Lusitania in May 1915 were neutrals, yet they had been slaughtered by German torpedoes. That December, some sixteen months before the United States entered the war, the president used his annual message to Congress to assault those immigrants “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life” and called for “such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy” to be “crushed out.” Wilson directed his calculated rage at people of German extraction, including American citizens who had been “welcomed under our generous naturalization laws.”
Wilson’s reelection campaign the following year would wave a virtual flag of neutrality emblazoned with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” But reports of cruel atrocities against civilian populations continued to filter back from the war, aggravating American suspicion of unfamiliar Europeans. The armies of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire—more than three million men gathered in polyglot legions of Slovaks and Czechs, Slovenes and Romanians, Bosnians and Croats and Serbs—stood shoulder to shoulder with the Germans. The roar of nationalistic popular opinion drowned out the pleas of immigration advocates. Restriction sentiment was rampant.
When the literacy test was reintroduced in Congress in early 1916 as part of a larger immigration bill, the House passed it overwhelmingly; the Senate expressed its own resounding support after the November election. Somewhat surprisingly, given the way Wilson’s administration had been whipping up native antipathy toward Americans of questionable loyalty, on January 29, 1917, the president again slapped down the bill with a veto. Less surprisingly, given the historical moment—the U.S. declaration of war against Germany and Austria was just weeks away—“a heretofore subservient legislature” (said Madison Grant) declared itself master, and on February 5 overrode Wilson’s veto. Charles Warren, the IRL cofounder whose career had taken him to Washington several years earlier, recorded the event in his diary. With the judicious discretion of a presidential appointee (Warren was an assistant attorney general under Wilson), he wrote only this: “Immigration Illiteracy bill passed over President’s veto after 24 years of work by Immigration Restriction League.”
The new law gave Lodge and his allies both less and more than they had sought. The difficulty of the test had been softened, and it no longer applied to individuals under sixteen, nor to women accompanied by a literate husband or adult son. However, the new law scooped up any number of other provisions the restrictionists had been discussing for years. It extended the prohibition of Chinese immigration to virtually all South and East Asians.I It codified some thirty classes of excluded undesirables, adding members of revolutionary organizations and those suffering from “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” to the old list of epileptics, lunatics, and the tubercular. The measure also granted the federal government broad authority to deport alien radicals who had somehow made it into the country, even if they’d acquired their radical beliefs long after their arrival.
Altogether, the Immigration Act of 1917 appeared to be a restrictionist’s dream. Lodge seemed at last content. After twenty-four years’ service, he resigned his seat on the Immigration Committee, completing the longest continuous tenure on a committee in Senate history. He soon turned his attention to a bigger fight, namely World War I, which he saw as an opportunity to display American might and to crush a European foe. He engaged in a literal fight as well, when an antiwar protester accosted him in his Capitol office and Lodge punched him in the jaw.
Lodge was a sedentary sixty-seven-year-old; his vanquished foe was a thirty-six-year-old minor league baseball player. Even in victory—the Senate approved the declaration of war two days later—Lodge was no more understanding of opposing views than he had been during all the years he had been on the losing side of the literacy test battle. In the last phases of debate on the 1917 law, a pro-immigration congressman had urged the bill’s proponents to consider the virtues immigrants brought to America and even dared to argue that “the old New England Yankee stock can thank God today that a new infusion of immigrant blood is saving it from itself.” Lodge, of course, couldn’t possibly see it that way. The new law, in his view, provided a last chance to preserve the New England he so cherished. Years earlier he had declared that the people of New England had been “set apart from the rest of mankind for a particular work in the world.” Years later a political foe saw it differently: the world of Henry Cabot Lodge, he said, was “a museum of wax figures which were not to be touched.”
At long last routed by the restrictionists, the pro-immigration lobby could at least find some solace in one critical section of the 1917 law: refugees from political and religious persecution were given a waiver. They didn’t have to pass the literacy test.
As czarist actions against the millions of Jews trapped in the vast Russian Empire escalated in the previous decade, several organizations had managed to squeeze a special exemption for political and religious refugees into most immigration legislation that made its way to a congressional vote. But when House and Senate conferees reconciled their separate versions, the refugee exemption was invariably tossed out. Wilson said its absence from the 1914 bill was one of two reasons, along with the literacy test, that provoked his veto. But when he vetoed the 1917 Immigration Act, the literacy test was the only offender; for the first time the refugee exemption had made it into the final measure, and when Congress overrode the president’s veto, this single, ameliorating provision gave the antirestrictionists an unexpected consolation prize.
If one individual could be credited with carrying the refugee exemption into the law books, it was New York lawyer Louis Marshall. President of the American Jewish Committee from 1912 until his death in 1929, Marshall had led the refugee exemption campaign from its onset, and its success planted him firmly at the head of the pro-immigration movement. Considering his origins, Marshall was a somewhat improbable leader for the various Schiffs and Sulzbergers and others who had lined up in opposition to the restriction campaign. Unlike nearly all of the German Jewish grandees, Marshall was born poor. His father had arrived from Germany with ninety-five cents in his pocket and had settled in upstate New York only after finding work on an Erie Railroad construction gang. The son—dazzlingly intelligent, uncommonly ambitious, equally industrious—rose quickly from his inauspicious roots. Marshall graduated from Syracuse High School fluent in three languages and literate in two more (Latin and Greek). He soon apprenticed himself to a local law firm and in time found his way to New York City, where he succeeded as a corporate lawyer, widely respected and handsomely compensated. A lifelong Republican who found the populist branch of the Democratic Party “dangerously disorderly,” Marshall was equally suspicious of Republican progressives, whose ideas he considered “half-baked.” He knew Theodore Roosevelt (although he didn’t much care for him), was nearly appointed to the Supreme Court by William Howard Taft, and would come to know Warren G. Harding well enough to “dash off” (Marshall’s term) notes to the president when the mood struck.
A Louis Marshall note was an awe-inspiring thing, simultaneously revealing the intricate workings of a first-class mind and the bloated pomposity of an enervating bore. If Marshall could say it in five words, he’d use ten, or fifty. Ricocheting in tone between the unblushingly grandiloquent and the impenetrably pedantic, notes and letters and position papers flowed in ever-rising floods from his office in downtown Manhattan, his home on East Seventy-Second Street, and his grand Adirondack retreat. He could coin a phrase—he used “affirmative action” as early as 1913—and he could smother one in gibberish. Responding to a professor of economics who had challenged the pro-immigration position, Marshall wrote that the professor’s argument “presents to my mind an irrefragable reason against the provision in the present law regarding the examination of intending immigrants overseas.” He disapproved of the term “melting pot,” explaining at length why he preferred “electrolytic powers” as the proper metallurgical metaphor for the process of assimilation. One of Marshall’s “dashed off” notes to Harding ran to nearly a thousand words. More formal letters could surpass ten thousand.
Marshall’s conservative brand of Republicanism was thoroughgoing. He was an adamant supporter of states’ rights, fought a constitutional amendment outlawing child labor, considered referendum “a most vicious principle,” and loathed rent regulations, which he called “dangerous invasions of private individual rights.” Where he diverged from his usual political allies was on the immigration issue and anything else that affected the status and condition of Jews, both in Europe and the United States. Departing substantially from the attitudes of uptown friends who wished to help the eastern European Jews so long as they could be kept at arm’s length, and from his own early reluctance to welcome the newcomers, Marshall came to adopt a motto he invoked repeatedly: “Nothing Jewish is alien to me.” He proved this daily, in his work and in his private life. His mother could recite Ivanhoe in German; Marshall made a point of learning Yiddish.
It was in 1913 that Marshall won his first converts to the refugee cause, when he persuaded Representative John L. Burnett, the Alabaman who chaired the House Immigration Committee, and Senator William Dillingham, the Vermonter who had led the immigration commission, that the plight of the Russian Jews merited special consideration. But it was Marshall’s unrelenting bombardment of Congress with long-winded letters, massive legal briefs, and position papers baroque in detail and wearisome in length that inserted the refugee exemption into the veto-proof 1917 bill, in the statutory language Marshall had provided. One comparatively ecumenical prorefugee group had based its campaign in part on the patriotic assertion that “the rights of political asylum” were rooted in the American Revolution. On the other hand, Marshall acknowledged, some senators believed the exemption had specifically been intended to “give a preference to Russian Jews.” As immigration laws tightened in the years ahead, it was a preference that, to the most zealous restrictionists, would become first an irritant, and then a provocation.
The executive committee of the Immigration Restriction League met in Boston four days after the 1917 Immigration Act became law, both literacy test and refugee exemption intact. If league members were concerned about the refugee exemption, it apparently didn’t trouble them overmuch. Prescott Hall gave his colleagues a brief and Hallishly dutiful account of the previous month’s events in Washington. In his official minutes of the meeting, though, he displayed what was for him an improvisatory flair: he recorded the sentence about the veto override in red ink.
James Patten was more effusive. “I have been a mere agent in your hands,” he told Joe Lee—either modestly, obsequiously, or both—“trying to help you do something which you patriots [believed] ought to be done for the good of your country and your fellow man.” In the Journal of Heredity, the official publication of the American Genetic Association, Robert Ward offered his thoughts to the community he had been reaching toward for years: “The new law,” he wrote, “is, in its essentials, a eugenic measure.” He also called it “perhaps the most comprehensive and satisfactory [law] ever passed by Congress.”
Perhaps it was—but that was not enough for Lee. Less than a week after the override, the man who had been the IRL’s chief benefactor almost since its creation told a friend that the overall price tag had reached more than $100,000—roughly $2 million in 2019 dollars—but the law’s enactment was “worth at least a thousand million to the country.” Still, at the moment of greatest triumph for the league and its increasingly broad collection of allies, he had a suggestion for another member of the executive committee, Richards Bradley: “Now is the chance for some of those schemes you thought we ought to try instead of the literacy test.” As in his life as a civic reformer, Lee did not rest on his victories; he sought to compound them.
The league desired new schemes because, after more than twenty years of unstinting commitment and effort, its leaders had come to recognize the literacy test’s central irony: it encouraged the education of the immigrants they wished to keep out. Such irony made them sour. In a letter he sent out to the full IRL membership on behalf of the executive committee, Prescott Hall acknowledged the legislative victory but underscored the sinister prospect lurking within it: “It is probable,” he wrote, “that primary schools will be presently established in many parts of Europe . . . so that the reading test, while improving the quality of immigration, is likely to diminish in value as a means of restriction as time goes on.”
It was quite a statement: Hall was unembarrassed to admit that the literacy test was not about literacy at all, and the IRL had known it all along. As far back as 1902, league officials had worried that the test could boomerang. Charles E. Edgerton, who had preceded Patten as the IRL’s Washington representative, warned Hall that “with the increase of popular education in Europe, races which would now be excluded [by the test] would be admitted after a few years.” Minutes of a 1914 executive committee meeting included the baleful news that the Italian government was “spending millions on their schools in the past month in view of the pending bill.” At the same moment that Joe Lee was establishing the Boston school system’s commitment to immigrant education—he had just secured sight and hearing tests for the city’s schoolchildren—the organization he funded regarded improved education in Europe as a threat. They may have been inconsistent, but the literacy test advocates were not necessarily wrong. Over the several decades of the “new immigration,” illiteracy rates in Italy alone dropped from nearly 70 percent to roughly 23 percent.
One month after the veto override, it was no surprise to find Harry Laughlin and the Eugenical News acknowledging that the literacy test was not a “pure” solution and calling on Congress to take more definitive action. The same month, the IRL had in hand the first draft of a bill that would limit not only the presumed quality of immigrants but their very numbers. Shortly thereafter Hall sent William Dillingham a plan setting specific numerical standards—quotas—for “different racial groups.” Immigrants from northwestern Europe would not be constrained by any limit, but the annual total allowed into the United States from eastern and southern Europe would be slashed by 70 percent.
Thus began the next phase of the restrictionists’ legislative strategy. As it happened, it was Dillingham himself who had first put forth a rough quota idea in 1911. Three years later the Dillingham Commission’s leading academic expert, economist Jeremiah W. Jenks, raised the notion with Joe Lee and began to push the IRL in the direction of a quota plan. For support he turned to Rev. Ernest M. Stires, rector of St. Thomas’s, the loftiest of Manhattan’s high Episcopal churches, its congregation a plush collection of Vanderbilts and other prominent families. Stires said he was convinced that he could arrange “an avalanche” of letters and telegrams directed to Washington “from hundreds of Episcopalian churches” summoning support for a quota law. Jenks thought it an excellent idea; he believed it might “counteract very decidedly the very active propaganda being made against restriction by two other groups or religious bodies.” This was undoubtedly a reference to Jews, of course, and to Catholics, who the next year would see a pontifical council inscribe responsibility for the welfare of immigrants into the Code of Canon Law.
By May 1918 the IRL had produced a Numerical Limitation Bill that would make eastern and southern Europe’s rise to literacy irrelevant—a bill designed in part, said an IRL document, to counteract “the spread of elementary education in the backward countries of Europe and western Asia.” The bill would cap immigration from every country at a fixed percentage of people from those nations already in the United States, whether the descendants of, say, Italians (who had been arriving since roughly 1880) or the English (who had had a head start of two and a half centuries to multiply their numbers). “Hebrews of all countries” would be “regarded as a single race or people.” Another internal IRL document explained that the bill would “discriminate in favor of immigrants from northern and western Europe.” House committee chairman John Burnett assured Hall that a “numerical plan” of some sort was the best path forward.
All this activity demonstrated the brimming confidence that lifted the IRL and its allies after so many years of frustration. Restriction advocate Henry Pratt Fairchild—socialist as well as sociologist—hailed the IRL in an academic article as “the most influential agency” in the passage of the literacy test. Hall went even further. He told Lee, “The League is now all powerful at Washington. . . . No bill as to immigration can be passed if we object, while any bill we favor has a good chance of passage.”
It was precisely this eventuality that had earlier led the leaders of one antirestriction organization to anticipate the passage of the literacy test with a darkening gloom. It was not difficult “to understand that the Test is a disguise,” their statement read. “Its advocates care little about Literacy or Illiteracy. What they desire is an entering wedge for later and more drastic legislation.” The result, the writers predicted, would be “a carnival of exclusion.”
* * *
FOR MADISON GRANT and various other paladins of the new scientific racism, World War I posed two problems. First, there was the matter of its dysgenic aspects, so persistently stressed by David Starr Jordan in the years before the conflict began. Edward A. Ross, preparing his introduction to the first widely adopted eugenics textbook, wrote of the war, “Owing to this immeasurable calamity that has befallen the white race, the question of eugenics has ceased to be merely academic.” More than two million British and German soldiers—deadly enemies, racial kinfolk—had died. Implicitly accepting Grant’s version of ethnic history, Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce declared that the Germans bore “the mark of Cain” for murdering their British brothers.
The second problem the war created for the scientific racists was linguistic in nature. For all the pleasure and pride the enactment of the literacy test brought Madison Grant, the war compelled him to further sanitize his increasingly famous book by deleting the slightest hint of admiration for anything German. Just as The Passing of the Great Race had miraculously transformed William Z. Ripley’s Teutonics into Nordics in 1916, a new edition two years later expressed a startling discovery about the now hated German hordes. Echoing ideas championed by William S. Sadler, a Chicago physician who may have been the only person ever to train with both J. H. Kellogg and Sigmund Freud, Grant assured readers that the barbarity of modern Germany was an expression of a population that was not Nordic at all or even Teutonic, but “very largely Alpine.” Most of the Nordics, he argued, had been killed off in wars long past. In a newspaper interview, Grant’s friend Fairfield Osborn, who had written a new preface to the 1918 edition of Passing, was even more emphatic: modern Germany had been corrupted by “barbaric blood” of “Asiatic ancestry.”
Grant also sustained a personal blow delivered by his old friend Theodore Roosevelt. The former president exploded in rage at Grant’s suggestion that New Englanders and southerners were the best among America’s soldiers. As the war fueled his own broad (if bellicose) brand of patriotism, Roosevelt had recently placed the country’s heterogeneous populace in the generous category of what he considered “a new and separate nationality.” Roosevelt told Grant that the best American soldiers “exactly represent the melting pot idea,” and specifically cited a decorated half-Jewish soldier from Cincinnati he had met: the young man was “exactly like any Yale, Harvard or Princeton boy of the oldest Colonial stock.” With his usual Rooseveltian vigor and directness, he also said that a Grant friend who believed in the superiority of “native Americans” was “an addle-pated ass.”II
However much Grant had been injured by this last, stinging communication from a man he perhaps admired more than any other, he could find abundant solace in the new persona that Passing’s reception had established for him: recognized scholar. The San Francisco Chronicle called him “a thoroughly qualified ethnologist.” The National Research Council, which had been authorized by President Wilson to coordinate scientific activity during the war, named him to its select Anthropology Committee. Charles Davenport invited Grant to join the Eugenics Record Office’s Board of Scientific Advisors. As the years progressed Grant gained not only wider recognition but the silvery glow of a scholar’s credentials as well. In 1920 the Saturday Evening Post lauded “authorities of Mr. Madison Grant’s standing.” By 1922, in the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he had become “Dr. Madison Grant.” And so it would continue over the years, as “Dr. Grant” became a “distinguished zoologist” and eventually, in a respectable academic book published nearly a century after Passing, “sociologist Madison Grant.”
In 1918 Grant joined with Davenport, Osborn, and Ellsworth Huntington, who taught economics and geography at Yale, to found the Galton Society. Its purpose was the study of “racial anthropology” by a scholarly membership (in Grant’s words) “confined to native Americans who are anthropologically, socially, and politically sound.” The four founders agreed that the best way to pursue their studies was by asserting exclusive responsibility for determining which candidates for membership met their exacting criteria: no one could join the Galton Society, they decided, without the personal approval of its charter members. Grant’s intimate association with the members of the society (there were rarely more than twenty-five of them) did more to provide him access to credentialed scientists than any appellation or attribution ever could. Whatever their political views, Davenport and Osborn were both notable scholars in their respective fields, and though Huntington was mostly a popularizer, he did have a PhD from Yale and a seat on its faculty.
Over the years the founders of the Galton Society would welcome a constellation of American scientists into their fellowship. They included such long-familiar habitués of eugenicist circles as David Starr Jordan, now retired from Stanford, and the polymathic Yale economist Irving Fisher, who had replaced Franz Boas on the American Breeders Association’s immigration subcommittee when Boas had refused to endorse the recommendations of Prescott Hall and Robert Ward. They were joined by the comparative psychologist Robert M. Yerkes, whose name is memorialized at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta; paleontologist John C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington for nearly two decades; and Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham, the father of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Every one of them was an expert in his field (if not in the field of racial anthropology). Every one of them would become a critically important figure, either as enabler or advocate, in the spread of scientific racism and its application to the immigration issue.
After its initial meeting at Osborn’s imposing mansion on Madison Avenue, the Galton Society moved its activities across Central Park to Osborn’s westside domain: the fifth-floor sanctum of the American Museum of Natural History reverentially known as the Osborn Library. Located at the end of a long corridor lined floor to lofty ceiling by cabinets packed with zoological, botanical, geological, and paleontological specimens, overlooking Central Park to the south and east, and ringed on three sides by a balcony suspended over glass-fronted cherry bookcases—the library could have been a movie set for a meeting of distinguished scholars. Only one object betrayed the specific interests of this particular group: the portrait of Francis Galton, commissioned by Grant, that Osborn had hung on the wall.
In a sense, the society’s monthly meetings were daytime, business-dress versions of the Half Moon Club’s gatherings, with its substantially overlapping membership, the same proudly declared exclusivity, the same glossy veneer of scholarship. Members of what Jonathan Spiro has called the “interlocking directorate” of scientific racism and immigration restriction recognized little distinction between the social mode and the ideological one. Perhaps the only meaningful difference between the Half Moon Club and the Galton Society was the fact that for the latter, race was the stated subject not just every so often, but always.
That was fine with the Galton Society’s host. Renowned as a paleontologist, respected as director of what was fast becoming the world’s foremost natural history museum, Fairfield Osborn often deprecated anthropology’s claim to scientific respectability; he once characterized the entire discipline as merely “the gossip of the natives.” But he made an exception for the Galton Society’s racial anthropology. This was demonstrated most clearly at another meeting, when Osborn offered a declaration that could have been the group’s credo. “I am convinced,” he said, that the “spiritual, physical, moral and intellectual structure” of individuals is based on “racial characteristics.”
* * *
AROUND THE TIME that Mary Harriman, writing in her diary, recorded her acquisition of “another charming Copley” (her taste in paintings, as in most things, was both refined and conventional), she made note of her annual Christmas party in the Arden village church for the estate’s workers and their families. All told, she wrote, 65 men, 25 women, and 188 children received “their Xmas handshake, gloves, and candy from me.”
The seigneurial nature of Harriman’s relationship to her employees and their families provided a convenient opportunity for her explorations of the byways of eugenics. There were three schools on the property’s seventy square miles, and Harriman had all the students at one of them take a Binet-Simon intelligence test. One child, she reported, was normal. Another was abnormally bright. All the others, she found, were deficient. Her conclusion: “One need not go to Virginia to find very many poor whites, I am sorry to say.”
The testing vogue permeating the eugenics movement owed much of its spread to Henry Goddard, who had begun to make his mark even before publication of The Kallikak Family. The very first issue of the Eugenics Record Office Bulletin was a reprint of a Goddard piece on heredity. By the second issue, in 1911, Goddard was contributing to a discussion of “Methods of Collecting, Charting and Analyzing Data.” By this point, he had tested some two thousand children—the entire school population of a single New Jersey town—and used the results to adapt the Binet-Simon intelligence scale for American use. The next year saw publication of his Kallikak book and the year after that a testing project in the New York City public school system, which led Goddard to announce that fifteen thousand of the city’s students were feebleminded. That captured attention. But it was another series of tests Goddard was conducting at the same time, on Ellis Island, that would deliver to the anti-immigration movement a very large helping of the essential nutrient it so desperately craved: scientific evidence.
The historical case against Henry Goddard has by and large ended in a mistrial—or perhaps it hasn’t even ended. But there is no question that much of his work was severely flawed. The Kallikak Family, in particular, was soiled by shoddy techniques and corrupted by his, and Elizabeth Kite’s, built-in prejudices. And just as the arresting example of Martin Kallikak’s good descendants and his bad ones seduced those who wished to believe the book’s lessons, so did Goddard’s work on Ellis Island provide fresh ammunition for restrictionists who had picked up the eugenic flag.
Goddard had been invited to Ellis Island by the Public Health Service to determine if he could devise a method of identifying mentally deficient immigrants that was more reliable than the eyeball test in use at the time (basically, does this man look normal?). In 1913 as many as 5,600 immigrants came through Ellis Island on a single day.III They disembarked from the barges that had collected them shipside in New York Harbor, then waited in long, snaking lines and cramped holding pens for their turn to be examined by medical staff. The Ellis Island doctors were there not to cure ailments—tuberculosis and trachoma were prime suspects—but to diagnose them and thus deny entry to the afflicted. The “ever-changing stream of humanity,” wrote one of the examining physicians, provided “a fascinating realm for study of the great questions of economics and eugenics.” The same doctor couldn’t help but note the “changing and deteriorating character” of the immigrants he saw. This, he said, made restriction both “justifiable and necessary.”
Goddard, it was assumed (by Charles Davenport, who admired his work greatly, as well as by the Public Health Service), would find a way to make mental defects as discernible as physical ailments. No one assumed this with more confidence than Goddard himself. In most respects a gentle and modest man beloved both by colleagues and by foes—“the dearest man on earth,” one of his critics acknowledged—Goddard could become vainglorious when the virtues of the Binet-Simon intelligence test were challenged. Convinced of the test’s “supreme merit,” he could dismiss criticism with a sigh that was nearly a smirk: anyone who doubted its value or accuracy, he once said, could “only arouse a smile and a feeling akin to that which the physician would have for one who might launch a tirade against the value of the clinical thermometer.”
Goddard had no thermometer, no stethoscope, not even the frightening buttonhooks Ellis Island’s medical examiners employed to turn up immigrants’ eyelids in the search for trachoma. He relied only on testers he had trained and on Binet protocols he had adapted. His version of the intelligence test—recognizing shapes, memorizing rows of numbers, and the like—was largely language independent and thus appropriate for the throngs arriving day after day, ship after ship, from country after country.
The Goddard study was the first credentialed testing effort specifically intended to evaluate the intelligence of the new immigrants. The thousands of index cards haphazardly collected by the young women of the Eugenics Record Office, Goddard’s loose investigations into the presumably Mendelian fate of the two Kallikak families—all this work, however deficient by scholarly standards, nonetheless provided ballast to a eugenic theory of individual heredity. It did little, however, to address the influence of heredity on the nature of entire ethnic or racial groups. The sociological observations of Edward A. Ross may have carried the weight of his impressive academic credentials, but not even the most zealous restrictionist could truly make the case that his work was based on anything more substantial than Ross’s rhetorical gifts. Madison Grant’s manic charge through all of human history may have had the appearance of science and may have been accepted as such by those who dearly wished to believe it; over time it would definitely form the faux-intellectual foundation for the restriction argument. But the necessary accessories of science—the certifying minutiae of equations, statistics, facts—did not exist. Despite the success the restriction movement finally achieved with the literacy test, it still had to contend with a contrary (but persuasive) characterization of immigrants that could have been applied to all who had crossed the Atlantic (or Pacific) since the first English colonists arrived in the last decades of the sixteenth century. “Beaten men from beaten races” had been a useful trope, but the counterargument, best summarized by the outstanding immigration historian Alan M. Kraut, still lingered: “Weak, beaten men and women do not undertake transoceanic journeys to far-off lands, unless they are herded aboard ship at gunpoint.” Far from being inferior, the immigrants, in this view, had special qualities of enterprise or ambition, or at the very least hardiness.
Even scientists revered by the eugenics movement had been expressing versions of this argument since the 1860s. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself said he considered “the wonderful progress of the United States . . . the result of natural selection.” Ten or twelve generations of “the more energetic, restless and courageous men from all parts of Europe,” he explained, summoned exceptional inner resources to move “to that great country, and there have succeeded best.” Francis Galton believed that “exiles are on the whole men of exceptional and energetic natures.” Another man of science put it this way: “The most active, ambitious and courageous blood migrates. It migrated to America and has made her what she has become,” he wrote in 1911. “Weaker minds were left behind.”
The author of this last observation, put to paper before he was seduced by the notion of a race-based eugenics, was Charles Davenport. Then science marched forward.
Henry Goddard’s Ellis Island testers selected something less than 200 immigrants from the hundreds of thousands who waited in the endless lines that season. (“Something less” will have to do, for in various contexts Goddard placed the number at 191, or 177, or “about 165.”) Some candidates for testing were rejected because they were obviously intelligent, others because they were so apparently defective. “Apparently” did not mean “definitely”: staff physician Howard Knox tested a man Goddard’s colleagues had dismissed as mentally deficient because of his peculiar head shape (“simian reversion type with stigmata including malformation of helix”). Then Knox discovered that the man was fluent in three languages.
Something about the aftermath of Goddard’s Ellis Island adventures suggested that he wasn’t fully confident about his findings. In 1914 he published a book arguing that feeblemindedness was a leading cause of crime and indicating that it was a heritable “unit character,” but he made no mention of the Ellis Island studies he had completed the previous year. In 1915 he published an analysis of a young man named Jean Gianini, who had killed his schoolteacher, but did not raise the question of whether Gianini was an immigrant (Goddard did, however, assert that he was an imbecile, and “we know also that he is a masturbator”). At Davenport’s suggestion Paul Popenoe, editor of the American Breeders Magazine, twice offered to publish Goddard’s immigrant study, and twice Goddard declined. It was not until the end of 1916, more than three years after he had concluded his work on Ellis Island, that he revealed any of the results of his investigations, when he discussed them at a professional meeting. He did not actually publish them until September 1917, seven months after the literacy test was enacted.
Still, immigration restrictionists who had picked up the cause of scientific racism and no longer believed the literacy test an adequate barrier could not have dreamed of better results—which is to say, more shocking, more damning, and more fully aligned with their arguments. “One can hardly escape the conviction,” wrote Goddard, “that the intelligence of the average ‘third class’ [i.e., steerage] immigrant is low, perhaps of moron grade.” How low? His initial results indicated that 83 percent of the Jews were either “morons” (mental age eight to twelve) or “imbeciles” (mental age three to seven). Italians came in at 79 percent, Hungarians at 80. Rattled by what seemed to be highly unlikely results, Goddard put them through an additional statistical screen and managed to conclude that his calculations were off by a factor of two—it was really only 40 percent, all told, who could be considered feebleminded. Yet more alarming, if less noticed (it was buried among the tables and charts that trailed behind Goddard’s narrative), was a column of numbers showing that only six of the nearly two hundred who were tested could be considered “normal.”
Such results defied logic, but they were good enough for the restrictionists. Editors of The Survey—the leading social work journal of the day, funded in part by Joe Lee—claimed that the 40 percent figure was sufficient to prove that if a visitor to Ellis Island selected one person at random from “the great mass of ‘average immigrants,’ ” then “you would very likely have found that your choice was feebleminded.” It was as simple as that.
Except that it wasn’t. What The Survey and other Goddard boosters failed to acknowledge was the suffocating blanket of qualifications and caveats Goddard used to cushion his bombshell. He and his colleagues were “inadequately prepared for the task,” he wrote. It was a study “not of immigrants in general but of six small highly selected groups.” The results, “meager as they were,” could be considered “so difficult of acceptance that they can hardly stand by themselves as valid.” He acknowledged that “persons who have never had a pen or a pencil in their hands, as was true of many of the immigrants,” would understandably have trouble copying an image, as the test required. Asking someone who has never had to work with numbers to repeat a string of six digits, he added, was like asking an American to repeat six words in Greek; it was, consequently, “not a fair test.” The entire study, its author cautioned, “makes no attempt to determine the percentage of feeble-minded immigrants in general or even of the [ethnic] groups named.” It was a study, essentially, of testing techniques, not a conveyance of meaningful results.
Even more crucial than Goddard’s doubts about his methodology was the gist of his conclusion. He noted that most of the immigrants came from impoverished environments. He pointed out that immigration from Italy and eastern Europe had been going on for years, yet the United States had seen no perceptible increase in the proportion of the feebleminded of foreign ancestry. If indeed the immigrants were mentally deficient, he said, “we have two practical questions: first, is it hereditary defect or; second, apparent defect due to deprivation. If the latter, as seems likely, little fear may be felt for the children.” Or, presumably, for the precious American bloodstream. About this, The Survey and others promoting the results of Goddard’s testing were silent.
THE RESTRICTION MOVEMENT’S ABILITY to proceed without the slightest caution arose not solely from the prejudices that swelled the breasts of its leaders. They were buoyed as well by victory (on the literacy test), by a wave of patriotic hypernationalism (the Wilson administration’s demonization of “hyphenated Americans”), and most of all by the ongoing rise of eugenic consciousness in American life. According to a federal study, the number of articles on eugenics appearing in the popular press had tripled between 1909 and 1914 alone, capturing more space, wrote John Higham, “than on the three questions of slums, tenements, and living standards combined.” Publishers of a popular sex manual (pro-abstinence, anti-spooning, and very concerned about the inevitable palsy and deafness brought about through “self-pollution”) elevated its appeal by promising “Scientific Knowledge of the Law of Sex Life and Heredity or EUGENICS.” In a speech to his colleagues titled “Jewish Eugenics,” Max Reichler, a young New York rabbi, said the Talmud idealized “a race in body and in spirit, pure and undefiled, devoid of any admixture of inferior human protoplasm.” Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. offered an unwitting preview of the majority opinion he would write twelve years later in Buck v. Bell authorizing involuntary sterilization of inmates in state institutions. Social improvement, Holmes wrote in 1915, could come only through “trying to build a race. That would be my starting point for an ideal for the law.” (The great advocate of individual liberty also asked an associate, “Doesn’t the squashy sentimentality of a big minority of our people make you puke?”) Movie theaters played a film called The Black Stork, “a eugenic love story.”
At the same time, eugenic ideas continued to spread through the academic world. At Boston University, eugenics education was provided by the School of Theology. At the University of Oregon, the course catalog explained that the class in eugenics addressed not just “positive” eugenics but “negative measures for race improvement” as well. MIT’s course explored “recent experimental advances in the study of biometrics, heredity and eugenics.” The Harvard version was taught by a sternly skeptical geneticist, but a faculty colleague, Dr. Dudley A. Sargent, expressed his conviction that young people might well choose their mates by how well they dance with each other. When two people find a common bond on the dance floor, he said, “they should either announce their engagement forthwith, or break away. There are such things as rhythmic affinities.” An ironic and (no doubt unintended) double meaning crept into the description of the eugenics course at Colorado Agricultural College. It was “offered to women students in the upper classes.”
In many classrooms, eugenics and immigration met in the pages of Applied Eugenics, by Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson. Johnson, of the University of Pittsburgh, was a biologist of modest academic accomplishment who had trained at Cold Spring Harbor (he was the researcher who had been held rapt by the enormous mass of hibernating beetles imported from eastern Washington). Popenoe, the thirty-year-old editor of the American Breeders Association’s magazine, was a resourceful and ambitious young man who decades later would create and preside over the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column in the Ladies’ Home Journal—according to the publisher, “the most popular, most enduring women’s magazine feature in the world.” Popenoe’s interest in finding marital means to accomplish eugenics ends was long a preoccupation: in 1924 he wrote a paper titled “An Examination of Eugenic Celibate Motherhood.” (Don’t ask.)
Applied Eugenics quickly became the leading textbook in its field, racing through four printings in six years. The book was helped along by Edward A. Ross, whose introduction lent the authors both his academic credibility and his feverish, race-inflamed ideology: “The fear of racial decline [today] provides the eugenist with a far stronger leverage than did the hope of accelerating racial progress.” Like Ross, the authors were committed progressives. They argued for the eugenic virtue of outlawing child labor, which would take away the poor’s incentive to breed. They supported the idea of inheritance taxes. Popenoe and Johnson even extended a generous hand to immigrants, expressing the belief that “some of these ignorant stocks [from eastern and southern Europe], in another generation and with decent surroundings, will furnish excellent citizens.” Then, in the very next sentence, the hand struck with the force of a punch to the gut: “But taken as a whole [these] fecund stocks”—beset by “illiteracy, squalor and tuberculosis, their high death-rates, their economic straits”—could not be considered decent “eugenic material.”
Published expressions of support for eugenics and opposition to immigration reached their zenith—or, perhaps more accurately, their nadir—in The Right to Be Well Born by William Earl Dodge Stokes, the extremely dissolute heir to three extremely large fortunes. Professionally, Stokes developed real estate on the West Side of Manhattan; personally, according to a family history, his interests were seducing young women and breeding horses. His book, which he said he wrote in “the spare hours of my vacation” at his stud farm in Kentucky, was chatty, unsupported by evidence (he bragged that he hadn’t read Mendel because he preferred to remain “unbiased by other views”), and deranged. He pointed out that in the horse breeding business, “unfit” horses are rendered impotent, and money isn’t wasted on sanitariums “to keep them alive at public expense.” He praised Charles Davenport, Mary Harriman, and David Starr Jordan; quoted from Eugenics Record Office reports; and described a dreamed-of eugenic paradise, where a “working girl” would choose a husband not by how nicely he dances or how well he dresses, but by going to a Public Records Hall to learn where a potential mate ranks on a eugenic scale of A to F. Wrote Stokes, “If the males of laboring classes were compelled to have their own Registry, like the Clysdales [sic], Percherons, and other heavy draft Registries, and submit to a microscopic examination of their life germs . . .”—presumably, their genes—“there would be no need for labor agitators . . . to bring on strikes and such things.” Even better, “honest labor” would no longer “be assessed to pay for hired assassins to kill judges who render decisions that are not satisfactory to the laboring unions, or to pay attorneys to defend them or witnesses to prove alibis. These are all little things,” Stokes acknowledged, “but they count up to quite a sum at the end.”
Among his other vacation-inspired musings on “the rotten, foreign, diseased blood” pouring into the country was Stokes’s appraisal of Jews, whom he called “this admirable race”—admirable, apparently, because they marry within their group to preserve their “money-getting qualities.” A few years later Stokes told Charles Davenport that he had proof that Abraham Lincoln was the son of “a Jew from Portugal with Mother a Scotch Jewess,” and that a lock of Lincoln’s hair also showed evidence that he was “Oriental.” Davenport generally kept Stokes at arm’s length but was always polite to him, accepted periodic donations from him, and at times even joined him for dinner. When The Right to Be Well Born was published, the ERO’s Eugenical News pronounced it “full of good ideas.”
A more substantial and much more influential recruit to the eugenic cause in this period of its blossoming growth was Margaret Sanger. A century after she first engaged with the subject, Sanger’s connection to eugenics is still hotly contested, chiefly in the ceaseless debate over abortion. Twenty-first-century opponents of abortion rights assail the founder of the American family planning movement (who invented the term “birth control” in 1915) for having a wild-eyed commitment to the eugenic sterilization of the undesirable, and they condemn her specifically for what some claim was her engagement in a campaign to “exterminate the Negro population.” Sanger’s defenders note, correctly, that this hideous phrase, placed in the context in which she wrote it, had an altogether different meaning,IV and that Martin Luther King himself praised “her courage and vision.”
Nevertheless, there is no question that Sanger not only advocated the eugenics cause, she actively promoted many of its basic precepts and welcomed alliances with its most visible proponents. She told Madison Grant she would find it a “great pleasure” if he agreed to speak at her American Birth Control Conference. She told Harry Laughlin that the two movements—eugenics and birth control—“should be and are the right and left hand of one body.” She welcomed Applied Eugenics coauthor Roswell Johnson and other academic eugenicists to her board. She endorsed the position of a California biologist who contended that birth control was “the solution to the Japanese problem” on the West Coast and, wrote historian Linda Gordon, she “put together statistics about immigrants, their high birth rates, low literacy rates, and so forth, in a manner certain to stimulate racist fears.”
One especially resonant statement often attributed to Sanger (“More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control”) wasn’t uttered or written by her at all; the editors of American Medicine coined it in a lengthy editorial that was later reprinted in Birth Control Review. But Sanger’s own words provide ample evidence of her affirmative support for eugenics. In a 1921 essay in Birth Control Review she wrote that “the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.” The following year, under the title “The Cruelty of Charity,” she attacked the idea of providing medical and nursing care to poor families, all but summoning the ghost of Herbert Spencer to make her point: “Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty.” In 1926, declaring herself “glad to say that the United States Government has already taken certain steps to control the quality of our population through the drastic immigration laws,” she sounded like Henry Cabot Lodge. Expressing her concern for “the bloodstream of the race,” she sounded like Fairfield Osborn. In her autobiography, published in 1938, Sanger took on the voice of Edward A. Ross (whose support she had eagerly sought), lamenting the fact that immigration laws had not barred “defective” individuals before 1907: “Had these precautions been taken earlier,” she wrote, “our institutions would not now be crowded with moronic mothers, daughters, and granddaughters.” And one of the slogans she eventually adopted for the American Birth Control League—“To breed a race of thoroughbreds”—could have come straight from the febrile fantasies of W. E. D. Stokes.
There are two explanations, equally plausible, for Sanger’s engagement with the eugenicists. First, a review of her associations during her career suggests that she was strategically promiscuous, her commitment to her own cause so single-minded that she would ally herself with anyone, or any group, that might support it. The second explanation is embedded within the reality that eugenic theory itself was inherently dependent on birth control—that is, on the planning and limitation of reproduction. In the years when eugenics loomed large in American political and intellectual life, the two explanations could coexist very happily.
* * *
THE BRUTAL EUROPEAN COMBAT that raged through 1917 and nearly all of 1918 was, Edward A. Ross acknowledged, “an immeasurable calamity.” But Ross managed to find the bright side: “Rooted prejudices have been leveled like the forests of Picardy under gun fire.” What Madison Grant had called “mutual butchery and mutual destruction between Nordics” now provided eugenicists with an urgent argument: only they could save the race.
The most important attempt to seize opportunity from the war and make use of it to promote eugenicist ideas—and, in time, their ethnic implications—was engineered by Robert Yerkes. Building a career at Harvard, where Charles Davenport had been one of his teachers, Yerkes had become an acknowledged expert in psychobiological research and the study of animal behavior. It could be said that some of the greatest triumphs of twentieth-century scientific exploration were made possible by an event, wrote Yerkes, that “at the time of its occurrence, seemed to be an unimportant incident in the course of my scientific work—the presentation of a pair of dancing mice to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.” The book about his experience with the mice and their offspring, The Dancing Mouse, helped establish the study of laboratory mice as an experimental standard throughout the universe of behavioral science.
When the book was published, Yerkes was a thirty-one-year-old junior instructor in comparative psychology. By forty-one, he was president of the American Psychological Association. He was also an advisor to the Eugenics Record Office and a member (along with Davenport and Mary Harriman) of the eugenics branch of the National Committee on Prisons. Soon he would receive an invitation that would place him at the precise intersection of eugenics and immigration restriction: membership in the Galton Society. Then the army came calling.
Unlike the surprise gift of the dancing mice, the research opportunity that World War I presented to Yerkes did not strike him as an “unimportant incident.” He had seen the possibilities as the United States moved toward war, arguing that intelligence testing could help the army with the worthy task of identifying officer candidates. This gave him the chance, as historian James W. Reed has written, “to demonstrate that psychology possessed valuable technology for social management.” It was a precise expression of the progressive ideal: science in the service of society. Said the archprogressive Joe Lee around this time, “I am a believer in science.” It was a belief both genuine and, now, convenient.
As the military ramped up mobilization once war had been declared, so did Yerkes. Picking up the raveled ends of H. H. Goddard’s confused Ellis Island research, Yerkes knit them into coherence not by studying the presumed intelligence of another couple hundred subjects, but by turning his attention to a rather larger pool: nearly 1.73 million army recruits, all made available to Yerkes and his colleagues by the U.S. government. Within weeks commissioned a major, he traveled to New Jersey to plan a program with Goddard, Lewis Terman, and other testing specialists. Two hundred psychologists were put through the necessary training at Fort Oglethorpe in northern Georgia, then dispatched to conduct tests at thirty-five army bases. Some higher officers were annoyed (one general called the testers “pests”), and many others became convinced that the point of the entire testing effort was not to serve the military but to advance the testers’ own interests. They were not entirely wrong.
“Theoretically,” Yerkes once said, “man is just as measurable as a bar of steel.” Given the way his results would be put to use, his use of “theoretically” was disingenuous; by this time, promoters of eugenics like Yerkes had moved miles past mere theory. The military recruits who took his tests—one (called the Beta test) for the illiterate, based on the sort of shapes-and-numbers exercises Goddard had used at Ellis Island, the second (Alpha) for those who could read—were his new dancing mice, and a cruel choreography placed them at stage center in the immigration debate.
The Alpha test consisted of 212 questions divided into eight sections: synonyms/antonyms, arithmetical reasoning, analogies, and the like. It’s difficult to imagine a plausible argument that it was an indicator of innate intelligence to know, for instance, whether “altruistic” and “egotistic” had the same meaning or opposite ones. Or whether it measured anything remotely meaningful to ask, say, a Polish immigrant who’d been in the country for just a few years to make a coherent sentence out of the scrambled words “External deceptive appearances are.”V But no fair person could possibly have believed that the multiple-choice questions in the general information section of the Alpha test were a valid measure of anything at all—anything, that is, except the ease with which one could make a genuinely intelligent person who was unfamiliar with American culture appear to be a dolt. Two or three examples should suffice—but, as with salted peanuts, you can’t stop with just a couple:
1. The Overland car is made in . . .
Buffalo |
Detroit |
Flint |
Toledo |
2. The Wyandotte is a kind of . . .
horse |
fowl |
cattle |
granite |
3. Bud Fisher is famous as an . . .
actor |
author |
baseball player |
comic artist |
4. Velvet Joe appears in advertisements of . . .
tooth powder |
dry goods |
tobacco |
soup |
5. Marguerite Clark is known as a . . .
suffragist |
singer |
movie actress |
writer |
Could this possibly have been taken seriously? Viewed today, the unfairness of these questions is mind-boggling. But it should have been so in 1918. If this test indicated innate intelligence back then—intelligence independent of one’s educational, economic, and cultural background—presumably it would do so today. This wasn’t an intelligence test; it was a current events quiz.VI
In asserting the scientific validity of such tests, were Yerkes and company naifs, or fools, or scoundrels? The answer had to wait a few years—after the National Academy of Sciences published the results of the army testing in an 890-page doorstop crammed with statistics, charts, tables, formulas, and other impediments to comprehension, and after a few wealthy immigration restrictionists sponsored a project to sift the results by “race.” The answer would then become obvious: scoundrels.
Decades later, the tests that Goddard and Yerkes conducted are universally regarded as worthless. Charles Davenport’s reputation among scholars, on the other hand, depends to some extent on what discipline they practice. Botanists and zoologists recognize his substantial contributions to their field. Geneticists acknowledge the early studies but condemn the four-decade infatuation with eugenics that followed. Historians hold a variety of views, but one that crops up again and again was expressed most firmly by Elazar Barkan in The Retreat of Scientific Racism, published in 1993. Barkan proclaimed Davenport “the most prominent racist among American scientists.”
This conclusion isn’t really accurate. Davenport abetted the scientific racism movement, and he benefitted personally from his connection with it. But for him racism was nowhere near the impelling engine that it was for so many of his fellow travelers in the xenophobe universe. Even when he addressed the “selection of immigrants” in his “Eugenics as a Religion” speech in Battle Creek, he confined himself to the selection of individuals, not ethnic groups. As late as 1918, both his correspondence and his published work is free of anything resembling the racialized invective of Henry Cabot Lodge, Joe Lee, or Prescott Hall, much less Madison Grant or Edward A. Ross. He indulged in occasional ethnic stereotyping, particularly about Jews—“though we love them, they nauseate us” because of their “individualism”—but his language was no more caustic than the expressions of normative anti-Semitism uttered by Eleanor Roosevelt. The noted anthropologist—and eugenicist—Harry L. Shapiro, the son of immigrant Polish Jews, remembered Davenport as “a very nice fellow” who was “temperate” on racial issues, nothing like the committed scientific racists. When his daughter Millia married a Jew, Davenport expressed only “surprise.” In 1919 one ERO class of eight researchers included four named Teitelbaum, Silverberg, Klein, and Silver; it seems probable that at least some of them would have been unlikely to sign on to the work of an institution burdened by a reputation for anti-Semitism—or, for that matter, recruited by a director who allowed anti-Semitism to shape his environment or his actions.VII
But Davenport’s fixation on the eccentric data that the ERO collected and his zealous efforts to fit this mountain of dross into tidy eugenic compartments led him to prowl distant precincts of respectable science. From his study of “wayward girls,” he somehow determined not that women became prostitutes for economic reasons or because they were forced into it by predators; instead, he was convinced that erotic tendencies were inherited. Had his name not been on its title page, his Naval Officers: Their Heredity and Development (where, through the study of biographies and pedigrees, he made the discovery that ethnic groups with “sea lust” were genetically impelled to live near seacoasts) could easily have been dismissed as a clumsy parody of Galtonian thinking and techniques. Naval Officers revealed two unexceptional truths: sons often pursue the careers of their fathers, and scientists can fall in love with their own theories. In Davenport’s case, in the years immediately after World War I, his ideas were put to a critical test.
In 1918 Mary Harriman decided to cede financial responsibility for the Eugenics Record Office, which since its inception had been dependent on her largess. The houses the staff lived in, the laboratories they worked in, the acres upon acres of orchard and sheep meadow dotted with tents set aside for summer trainees—all this she turned over to the Carnegie Institution of Washington. It wasn’t that she had ceased to believe in Davenport or his work. She declared her abiding support by supplementing the gift with a $300,000 endowment, which more than doubled her investment up to that point (in 2019 dollars, her total commitment surpassed $12 million). At sixty-seven, she was simply taking another step in a general process of divestment. If she could sign over the deed to Arden and its thousands of acres to her twenty-four-year-old son Averell, as she had done a few years before, she could certainly step away from continuing financial responsibility for the ERO.
The Carnegie Institution was the obvious choice to assume control. Davenport had continued his directorship of the institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor even as he and Harry Laughlin built up the adjacent ERO. But however much Harriman’s magnanimity was appreciated by the illustrious Carnegie trustees (among them Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root), the institution’s president, geophysicist Robert S. Woodward, proved skeptical of eugenics. Woodward came from the world of hard science, and some of Davenport’s proposed areas of study were softer than a feather.
Almost from the moment the Carnegie Institution acquired the ERO, the office’s future—which Davenport saw as his own future—appeared to be in peril. The war was barely over when Davenport told Woodward he wished to travel to Europe with zoologist Clarence Cook Little to discern the “attitude of the remaining population [in the Balkans and Poland] toward remaining at home, or on the contrary, migrating to America.” Woodward didn’t thrill to the idea of two biologists conducting survey research (in which they had no meaningful experience) in languages and lands utterly unfamiliar to them. He turned them down flat. He also told Davenport he considered eugenics “a peculiarly dangerous” subject. He worried about “the best interests” of the institution. Woodward particularly criticized the Eugenical News as a “semi-popular, almost juvenile journal,” filled with “objectionable features” that were ripe for ridicule. “I do not mean to discourage amateurism or dilettantism,” Woodward said. “The only thing on which I insist is that neither is for us.”
Davenport was rocked by Woodward’s assault. A quarter century later, a colleague remembered how Davenport usually responded to external judgment: “High praise was eagerly received; adverse criticism tore down his defenses and allowed the specter of inferiority to stare him in the face.” In this instance he defended himself by invoking what was, for him, the highest authority: the ERO, he said, wanted only to “give the word ‘eugenics’ a connotation as high as . . . Galton himself could have wished.” That was probably little solace to Woodward, who continued to challenge Davenport right up to the date of his own retirement at age seventy-one in late 1920.
But Woodward’s successor, John C. Merriam, looked upon eugenic studies with the benign gaze of a doting grandparent. He was a respected paleontologist, best known for his excavations in the La Brea Tar Pits, which had brought the Ice Age into view in twentieth-century Los Angeles. He was also an intimate friend and associate of Madison Grant and a fellow member of the Boone & Crockett Club, the Half Moon, and the Galton Society. The two men worked side by side as cofounders (with Fairfield Osborn) of the Save-the-Redwoods League. Merriam was also one of the close associates to whom Grant sent his manuscripts for prepublication comment and criticism. Merriam told his friend he approved a second revision of The Passing of the Great Race “most heartily.”
Davenport could only delight in the prospect of a new boss with such associations, attributes, and attitudes. The most propitious augury for Davenport’s future, and the future of the Eugenics Record Office, was specific to their work: Merriam’s belief in eugenics, as he would later declare, was “unequivocal.” And it freed Davenport to continue his labors in the eugenics cause, with the Carnegie Institution’s backing, for the rest of his professional life.
As adamant as Merriam, though ideologically his opposite, was Franz Boas, still the leading scientific voice countering the eugenicist chorus through the late 1910s. But World War I dented Boas’s authority. Whether he was indeed pro-German during the early years of the war is an unresolved historical question. That he opposed U.S. entry into the war is certain. Even though he had been an American citizen for nearly three decades, his atavistic attachment to the culture that shaped him was still profound. So was his iron independence: when Columbia undergraduates were asked to report any evidence of their professors’ disloyalty during the war, Boas read his students a thorough statement of his ideas and almost dared them to forward them to the university trustees.
The real damage to Boas’s standing came a year after the armistice, when he published a statement denouncing anthropologists who, while ostensibly conducting fieldwork, had in fact been government agents. Boas said they had “prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies.” The vehemence of his accusations provided cover for action by his foes. Attacked by Fairfield Osborn, among others, Boas was censured by the American Anthropological Association, stripped of his role in the association’s governance, and forced out of his advisory position with the National Research Council.
Though the circumstances were singular, the action against Boas was not, tied as it was to the rising rage against foreign influences of all sorts. It was a storm whipping out of control, propelled across the nation by an intensifying fear of radicalism. A labor market saturated by hundreds of thousands of returning veterans, and simultaneously contracting because of the end of government spending on ships, munitions, food, uniforms, medicines, flags, drums, fifes, and all the other accessories of war, induced a police strike in Boston, a general strike in Seattle, and terror bombings in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and other cities. Housing and job shortages provoked violent race riots across the country as disgruntled whites took out their rage on African Americans. Thousands of radicals (and suspected radicals) were rounded up in the “Red Raids” of 1919 and 1920. Hundreds were deported. Henry Cabot Lodge, finally recognizing the inadequacy of his literacy test, told Prescott Hall that new anti-immigration legislation was “of great importance,” necessary “to prevent a flood of Bolsheviki” entering the country. Madison Grant, looking ahead, predicted the collapse of the Russian Revolution, which would precipitate a “great massacre of Jews, and I suppose we will get the overflow unless we can stop it.” One congressman, a former newspaperman from Grays Harbor, Washington, named Albert Johnson, claimed the Soviet Union was smuggling one hundred Bolshevik agents into the United States from Mexico every day. People engaged in the restriction movement had reason to pay attention to Johnson: earlier the same year he had become chairman of the House Committee on Immigration.
Even more than in the news columns, changing views could be measured in the nation’s editorial pages, and Prescott Hall, ailing and housebound in Boston, found sufficient energy to do the measuring. In Washington three daily newspapers, he reported, had all moved from a pro-immigration position to the restriction camp. So had the Boston Globe, the Detroit Free Press, and the Chicago Tribune. In New York the Herald jumped sides, as did the Times. It was time to “shut the gates,” the Times editorialized in the summer of 1919, because “there are already too many Bolsheviki and bourgeois-exterminators here now.” A year after that, the Times bought not only Lodge’s arguments, but even Madison Grant’s. The “latest gospel of the historians,” the paper said, is that “the determining factor in human affairs is race.”
In late 1920 Grant wrote to Charles Davenport, a frequent correspondent since the founding of the Galton Society. Grant was preparing to visit Washington to meet with Albert Johnson of the Immigration Committee, and he hoped Davenport could provide him with some talking points. At the time, Davenport had nearly completed his conversion to scientific racism. His uneasy relationship with Robert Woodward at the Carnegie Institution had unnerved him; at the same time, his engagement with Grant and the other “racial anthropologists” in the Galton Society had pulled him toward their views. Unreservedly zealous in his promotion of eugenic ideas, he eagerly sought alliances of convenience; anxious and fretful by nature, he required—and found—comfort in the certitudes of true believers. A few months before Grant told him about his planned meeting with Johnson, Davenport was still teetering. “Can we build a wall high enough around this country, so as to keep out these cheaper races,” he’d asked Grant, “or will it only be a feeble dam which will make the flood all the worse when it breaks?” In the next sentence, he implicitly denied the very existence of “cheaper races,” arguing for “better selection” of immigrants of all races. By the evidence, he was confused. Davenport advised Grant before his meeting with Johnson to stress the need to know “the facts” about immigrants and their genetic background.
Facts in genetic matters remained elusive in 1920, decades before science cracked the code of the human genome. But “facts” gathered by Davenport’s methods were readily available, and no matter how irrelevant or misconstrued or flimsy they were, they could make for a sturdy edifice when presented by a credentialed expert brandishing seemingly authoritative data.
Soon Davenport would indicate how the facts would carry the day, at a 1921 scientific conference commemorating the American eugenics movement’s full merger with the immigration restriction crusade. “People do not have heated discussions on the multiplication table,” Davenport told the assembled experts. “They will not dispute quantitative findings in any science.” For the eugenicists and the immigration restrictionists, the quantitative findings were almost ready for their moment.
I. It is a measure of the general attitudes toward Asians that they were actually barred from citizenship through naturalization, at the time a privilege afforded only to whites (through the Nationality Act of 1790) and blacks (through the Nationality Act of 1870, a product of Reconstruction). The principle, later upheld by the Supreme Court, was so embedded in law and practice that in 1907, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt’s attorney general could say that “under no construction of the law can natives of British India be regarded as white persons,” and thus they were ineligible for naturalization. The previous year he had made a similar declaration about the ineligibility of the Japanese.
II. After the former president died in his sleep just seven days later, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said that “Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
III. By this point nearly 70 percent of all immigrants were entering the country at Ellis Island; the remaining 30 percent were processed at eighty-one other immigration stations on the nation’s borders and coasts.
IV. Those who label Sanger a racist cite a letter she wrote to a colleague in 1939 in which she said, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” On its own the phrase can suggest that she and her allies had exactly that goal in mind and wished to keep it secret. However, the anti-Sangerites who quote it often fail to note that they have cut the sentence in half and have avoided any reference to the context. Sanger and her organization were starting an effort to bring birth control clinics to black areas in the South, and she hoped that local pastors would help them distinguish their effort from the contemporaneous movement for involuntary (and frequently racist) sterilization. Her full statement reads, “The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation, as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
V. At Fort Devens in Massachusetts, Yerkes’s associates produced a separate test strictly to determine literacy. Among the series of yes/no questions were some so baffling they almost seem to be Zen koans: “Are intervals of repose appreciated?” “Are scythes always swung by swarthy men?” “Are textile manufacturers valueless?”
VI. Correct answers: Toledo, fowl, comic artist, tobacco, movie actress.
VII. The most frequently cited evidence supporting Barkan’s position is a sardonic (and offensive) comment Davenport included in a 1925 letter to Grant: “Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island but we have no place to drive the Jews to. Also they burned the witches but it seems to be against the mores to burn any considerable part of our population. Meanwhile we have somewhat diminished the immigration of these people.” The comment is certainly repugnant, especially considering the literal burning that lay ahead in the flames of the Holocaust, but it is impossible to read this letter and believe that Davenport was being in any way literal.
