The Guarded Gate

Eliot had always been an advocate for open gates and an avowed foe of the Immigration Restriction League. His support for various ethnic minorities had been consistent and vocal. But Eliot’s confidence in at least one of immigration’s by-products had wavered. “The fact is,” he would say in a speech a few years later, “and it is perfectly plain, that there has been no assimilation in the United States; and more than that, it isn’t desirable that there should be any assimilation or amalgamation of races in the United States.” One couldn’t be much more eugenic than that.

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FEW INDIVIDUALS IN the history of American higher education would exert more influence over a longer period than Carl Campbell Brigham, who would introduce his Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1926. But in the fall of 1921, just weeks after Osborn’s congress concluded, Brigham embarked on an exploration of intelligence testing that became nearly as influential in the swelling immigration debate, cementing into place notions of ethnic difference that had been ripening for years.

Psychologist, teacher, bon vivant, Brigham was quick of mind and wit, and swift in his rise to eminence. In 1917, just beginning his career at twenty-six, he met Robert M. Yerkes and was soon enlisted in Yerkes’s effort to classify the intelligence of every soldier in the U.S. Army. Commissioned a lieutenant, he administered some of the Alpha tests himself at Fort Dix. After the war’s end, he soon became engaged in the effort, arising directly from his work with Yerkes, that would first bring his name and his work to widespread attention.

Brigham was as Princetonian as they come: BA, MA, PhD, and eventually faculty member for more than twenty years. His pedigree was pure as well; according to a colleague he was “a New Englander of New Englanders.” His ancestors included passengers on the Mayflower and, ten years later, the Arbella, the ship that brought John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to the New World. Something of a rakehell in his early undergraduate years, by the time he received his bachelor’s degree he had won recognition as the “most learned” member of his class. But in many respects, he never took himself too seriously. One could encounter characteristic Brigham in his Princeton office, where he’d sit at his desk with a rope tied around his ankle, its other end attached to a wheeled filing cabinet across the room. When he needed something in the cabinet, he’d give the rope a tug, and when he was finished, he’d kick the cabinet away.

In August 1921 Brigham read America: A Family Matter, by the New York lawyer Charles Winthrop Gould. The book, published by Scribner the previous year, took the assertions of The Passing of the Great Race and amplified them to such a degree one would almost think Madison Grant—one of Gould’s closest friends—had written it himself. (From Gould’s page 164: “Americans, the Philistines are upon us. Burst the fetters of our unseemly thralldom. Bar out all intruders. Repeal our naturalization laws. Deafen your ears to the clamor of demagogues.”) Like Grant, Gould was wealthy, productive, and assured. When Carl Brigham wrote to Gould to say America: A Family Matter could “do a great deal to save while it is possible the country for which our ancestors worked so hard and suffered so much and to which we are so attached,” the letter initiated a personal and professional relationship between the seventy-three-year-old Gould and the thirty-one-year-old Brigham that would last for the remainder of the older man’s life—and, financially, beyond it.

Like Brigham’s, Charles W. Gould’s blood ran deep in the American past. He was a Winthrop and he was a Saltonstall (a family just as rooted in colonial New England as the Winthrops), and to such roots he attributed virtues unreachable by others. (He insisted that the southern Italians, for instance, had for two thousand years “never produced an outstanding able man.”) Widowed at thirty-five, Gould remained single the rest of his life, devoted instead to his law practice, his widely admired collection of art and artifacts, and, enduringly, his “ardent enthusiasm” (as a friend described it) “for the Nordic type.” Gould himself put it differently: he considered the immigrant stream corrupting the nation “revolting.”

Charles Gould’s place on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (alongside Elihu Root and J. P. Morgan, among other members) suggested his stature among the gilded elites of Manhattan. So did his home, located in one of the most prized locations in all of New York, the Washington Square of Henry James. Gould’s house was part of “The Row,” a collection of Greek Revival gems strung along the square’s northern side. Ionic columns framed its front door. The outstanding feature of its back garden was a full-size squash court. Inside the house, a skylight spilled the sun onto an exquisite, sinuous staircase that led to three floors of museum-quality terra cottas from Greece, porcelains from China, Japanese pottery, ancient Egyptian glass. One objet no longer in the house was a bas-relief portrait of Gould’s late wife he had commissioned from Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1893, portraying her in the dress she wore at their wedding in 1880; he had donated it to the Met in 1915. Apart from his board membership at the museum and a few other engagements, Gould lived mostly as a hermit, wrapped in a cocoon of memory, regret, and resentment.

The house was a dignified setting for the black-tie dinner Gould convened on an October Wednesday in 1921. Charles Davenport, who had praised Gould’s book in his address to the Eugenics Congress three weeks earlier, couldn’t make it. But Madison Grant, Robert Yerkes, Columbia sociologist Franklin Giddings, and, critically, Carl Brigham, could. Drink was plentiful (“notwithstanding the Volstead Act,” Gould confided), the conversation lively. “Though a recluse,” the host later told Davenport, “I greatly enjoy the company of brilliant men.” On the evening of their dinner, the brilliant men jointly commissioned Brigham, by far the youngest among them, to dive into the ocean of data Robert Yerkes had collected from 1.7 million American servicemen, analyze it with a lens specifically focused on ethnicity and race, and emerge with a book that could make the test’s findings as persuasive as they knew they could be. Gould agreed to finance the project himself.

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WHILE BRIGHAM AND HIS BACKERS were discussing the Yerkes data in the benign calm of Washington Square, torrents of racial and ethnic mistrust soaked the fabric of American life. Black soldiers who had risked their lives in the trenches of the Marne found lynching unabated in the South. In the North they became unwitting pawns in arguments over immigration policy. With the postwar migration of rural blacks to the industrial North, this fertile new source of cheap labor obviated the need for the imported kind, and the industrial interests who had supported open immigration no longer found it quite as compelling a cause. For Italian Americans, domestic threats became acute. Vigilante mobs attacked an Italian immigrant community in southern Illinois. Relentless newspaper coverage of the six-week-long Sacco-Vanzetti trial served as a daily advertisement for presumed Italian criminality and radicalism. In parts of the West, Armenians, classified as Asians, were barred from owning property. In New England, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, responding to both alumni pressure and his own predilections, tried to impose a hard quota on the admission of Jews.^IV In Baltimore, biologist Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University—since his appearance at the first Eugenics Congress in London, in 1912, he had become one of the nation’s leading interpreters of biological statistics—told a friend that discrimination against Jews “is a necessary move in the struggle for existence on the part of the rest of us. . . . The real question seems to me to come to this. Whose world is this to be, ours, or the Jews’?”

The anti-immigrant campaign and the anti-radical campaign merged almost immediately after the end of the war. Billy Ireland cartoon, 1919.

Although specific ethnic insults that Pearl or Lowell—or, for that matter, Joe Lee—might utter in private were rarely said in public, the ethnic vocabulary of eugenics had become normalized and circumspection wasn’t necessary. Bloodless euphemisms rooted in The Passing of the Great Race provided apparent anthropological authority to replace the coarser language of prejudice. “Mediterraneans” was an evasive way of saying “Italians” or “Greeks” or anything else so precise as to cause specific, nationality-based offense. By 1924 the very word “Nordic,” which had had extremely limited use in the American conversation before Madison Grant emblazoned it on his banner, appeared in print more than 150 times as frequently as it had a decade earlier.^V Years later the Harlem poet Langston Hughes, cringing at the memory of the jungle-themed exotica put on display in uptown clubs—black dancers in palm frond skirts, shirtless men pounding conga drums—remembered the degrading spectacles as “show nights for the Nordics.”

The exalting language of eugenic science was convenient, and it was effective. Lothrop Stoddard declared that “science is our polestar. It is alike our guide for the present and our hope for the future.” Margaret Sanger joined Stoddard on the bookshelves with The Pivot of Civilization, where she cited Yerkes’s army study and its assertions that 47.3 percent of drafted men “are morons.”^VI Raymond Pearl insisted that an experienced animal breeder could produce a “vastly superior” human population within “a couple generations.” Kenneth Roberts continued to sound eugenic alarms in the Saturday Evening Post and amplified his arguments in his 1922 book, Why Europe Leaves Home, where he alerted readers to “the almost invariable breeding out of the Nordics by the Alpines and Mediterraneans.” Newspapers reported the call to action issued by Dr. Arthur M. Sweeney, of the University of Minnesota Medical School, who said the nation’s threatened racial degradation had to be confronted with the same armaments used to combat “bubonic plague, typhus or cholera,” namely “the perfect weapons formed for us by science.”

More surprising voices joined the chorus. Editor/columnist William Allen White, the widely admired voice of prairie progressivism, issued a desperate warning in the pages of Collier’s: “the low breeds of Europe” had formed a “moron majority” that had already overrun American cities. “Another civilization has invaded these shores,” he added, predicting a future where one would no longer find “the land of the Pilgrim’s Pride” but one seized by invaders. The National Research Council, the most highly credentialed collection of scientists in the country, was moved to appoint a committee charged with measuring the comparative racial value of different ethnic groups, its findings expressly intended to serve as a basis for legislation.

One of the more bizarre manifestations of the anti-immigration movement’s unchecked turn toward eugenic arguments went on display in Washington, DC, in April 1922. Albert Johnson had called hearings on a bill to extend his 1921 legislation another two years, until a permanent quota system could be established. A standing-room-only crowd jostled itself into place behind a rank of newsreel cameras in the House Caucus Room as Johnson’s star witness took the stand: the retired vaudeville diva Lillian Russell, former consort of financial buccaneer Diamond Jim Brady. “She was a golden beauty who stampeded men’s senses,” a friend wrote, and on this day Johnson and his headline-hungry colleagues were ready to be dazzled. Russell’s appearances on behalf of Warren G. Harding’s election campaign in 1920—in one frenetic three-and-a-half-week stretch, she had given speeches in fifteen states—had led the president to reward her with an assignment as a “special investigator” to look into the immigration question. After a grand tour of European cities (she had a special liking for clothes shopping in the French capital, a practice she called “the Paris cure”), Russell issued her report.

“If congressmen should go abroad they could see the facts as I saw them,” she told the panel. “One particular fact is that no good immigration is coming our way.” She believed that America was on the ruinous path of ancient Rome, which had been destroyed by “alien infiltration,” and recommended a complete halt to all immigration for five years. The newspapers ate it up. Lobbyist James Patten told his IRL colleagues that “all the movies”—the newsreels—were featuring her report.

The extension of the 1921 Act galloped through Senate approval on a voice vote. Two weeks later the House of Representatives was more meticulous in its determination to record the moment. After Albert Johnson saw to the deletion of a refugee exemption approved by the Senate, his colleagues approved the final version 258–26.

The bill that Warren Harding signed in May 1922 was another placeholder. Johnson and his allies, hoping to craft a permanent measure that would protect emigration from Great Britain and Scandinavia while sifting out the verminous hordes from Europe’s south and east, had bought themselves two more years to come up with something definitive. The only substantive addition to the 1921 legislation changed the rules for immigration from Latin America, which had remained untouched by the first Emergency Act because western ranchers and farmers valued their migrant workers too highly to hamper their free passage across the southern border. But an unexpected problem had arisen. According to the IRL, an amendment was needed to stop eastern and southern Europeans from “colonizing” Cuba, Mexico, and any other quota-free Latin countries that might be used as a base for subsequent unrestricted immigration to the United States. Brazil, for instance, had taken in eight thousand Italian immigrants in 1920; immediately after the 1921 law went into effect, the annual number leapt toward thirty thousand, any of whom might consider the country a convenient way station on the road to America. The solution contained in the extension legislation blocked immigrants entering the United States from any Western Hemisphere nation unless they had already lived there for at least five years. For Mexican farmworkers (and their seasonal American employers), it was a meaningless hurdle. For Europeans trying an end run around the quotas, it was an enormous one.

In the aftermath of the extension act’s passage, Louis Marshall’s mood was bleak. “Chauvinistic nationalism is rampant,” he told a colleague. “The hatred of everything that is foreign has become an obsession.”

I. Luxembourg’s quota was so small because Luxembourg was so small. On the other hand, the entire continent of Africa was allotted just 122 spaces. When the minister from Liberia learned that his nation’s quota was exactly one half of one person, the New Republic breathed a sigh of caustic relief: “he luckily obtained a ruling” allowing admission of his candidate “without amputation.”

II. Warburg was not particularly agreeable in 1923, when he called Osborn’s preface to a new edition of The Passing of the Great Race “scandalous” and “shameful,” and demanded that a committee of the board investigate the matter. The committee found “there was no need for anyone to feel offended,” and a compliant Warburg remained on the board another ten years, when he was succeeded by his son.

III. Bateson believed “alliances between pure and applied science are as dangerous as those of spiders, in which the fertilizing partner is apt to be absorbed.”

IV. Lowell, who had seen Jewish enrollment more than triple in his fourteen years as president, told one alumnus, “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles”; he also pointed to the fate of Columbia, which he felt had become similarly unattractive to non-Jews (Jews composed one-quarter of Columbia’s entering class in 1918). Angry reactions led the Harvard Board of Overseers to reject Lowell’s quota plan, but the admissions office simply put a quota into effect without acknowledging that it existed.

V. This datum, courtesy of Google’s extraordinary (and extraordinarily fascinating) Ngram Viewer, would be put on steroids by the rise of Adolf Hitler; “Nordic” reached its peak frequency in 1941.

VI. Sanger’s admiration for Stoddard went beyond ideology. When New York police attempted to block her from taking the stage to address a birth control meeting in November 1921, she would recall, “Lothrop Stoddard, the author, tall and strong, seized me and literally tossed me up to the platform.” Stoddard grabbed a fistful of flowers, thrust them into her hands, and shouted to the crowd, “Here’s Mrs. Sanger!”