During the months Carl Brigham spent beavering away on the mammoth hoard of data served up by the army intelligence tests, several others drew their own conclusions from the 890 pages of test results that the National Academy of Sciences had released. The Atlantic Monthly published a lengthy analysis that led to a frightful verdict: the blood of “inferior” immigrants was destined “to mingle with and deteriorate the best we have.” An editorial in the Missionary Survey, official publication of the Presbyterian Church, made the case that the test results—“proven accurate by experience”—demonstrated that open immigration was “introducing hundreds of thousands of morons and feeble-minded into our population.” Popular lecturer Albert Wiggam announced that “the army mental tests have shown there are, roughly, forty-five million people in this country who haven’t any sense.” In The Revolt Against Civilization, Lothrop Stoddard invoked the results of the army tests to show that “the intelligence level [of immigrants] from northern Europe is far above that of the south and east European countries.” Such was the firmness of Stoddard’s conviction that the army tests proved northern European superiority that, two years later, Max Perkins advised Stoddard to get in touch with Hans F. K. Günther, who was on his way to becoming the notorious “race pope” of Nazi ideology, to help promote the German edition.
Brigham’s views were not far from Stoddard’s. But he carried with him a scholarly authority that no one else had yet brought to consideration of the inferiority of certain immigrant groups. He worked on his book about the army data with Yerkes, the test’s progenitor, all but perched on his shoulder. Yerkes complained that his army work had been “inexpertly popularized,” and he was eager for Brigham to exalt it with an academic treatment. He checked in regularly with editorial suggestions and offered to write the book’s introduction. Critically, he persuaded Brigham that it was a tactical mistake to analyze the test results by specific nationality and pointed him instead to more concise (and convenient) racial categories, namely Nordic-Alpine-Mediterranean. The results of his work, Brigham told Yerkes when he finished his first draft, were irrefutable, but that would not render them immune from vigorous assault. He said he approached publication with conviction, but also with trepidation. “I am not afraid to say anything that is true, no matter how ugly the facts may be, and am perfectly willing to stake whatever position I have on the outcome,” Brigham told Yerkes. “If [my] Conclusions are published approximately as they stand,” he added with rueful humor, “I shall invest everything that I can scrape together on short-term life insurance in the hope of leaving an estate.”
Yerkes was glad that Brigham was so certain of his results and so willing to stand behind them. “I predict that your book . . . will make a great stir in the psychological world and far beyond that in the political and sociological,” he told Brigham. Yerkes helped initiate the stirring by leaning on Brigham’s prospective publisher, Princeton University Press, to rush the book into print “because of its importance in connection with practical immigration problems that are to be considered by Congress during the next few months.” In the meantime he congratulated the recently affianced Brigham—he was delighted to learn, he wrote, that “you are engaged to a Nordic lady!”
As Brigham’s A Study in American Intelligence approached its publication date, another straight-faced inquiry into southern and eastern European deficiency took center stage, courtesy of Harry Laughlin. The energetic Laughlin had had a busy year. He oversaw publication of a compendium of the exhibits from the Second International Congress. He completed his work on Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, in which he laid out the model sterilization law that to one degree or another would make its frightful effect felt in thirty states.I And in November he presented the conclusions of a study Albert Johnson had asked him to undertake when Laughlin first signed on as an advisor to the House Immigration Committee in 1920. In his Analysis of the Metal and Dross in America’s Modern Melting Pot, Laughlin provided exactly what Johnson wanted.
On Sunday, November 12, 1922, the New York Times Book Review showcased its take on Laughlin’s subject under the unsubtle banner headline FAILURE OF THE MELTING POT. The book under review was America: A Family Matter by Charles W. Gould—the same book that had led Carl Brigham to Gould’s door. Oddly, the book had been published a full two years before the Times’ editors got around to it and then proceeded to promote it with such apparent enthusiasm. Congress’s impending debate on a permanent immigration law had ripened the moment. Laughlin was scheduled to address Albert Johnson’s committee just nine days later.
The book’s thesis was tidily summarized by the author’s assertion that “the moment we begin to consider the mess of pottage for which we are exchanging our birthright, it becomes revolting.” Book review ethics regarding conflict of interest were rather loose in those days: the author of the Times critique, who referred to Gould as “a gentleman of the old stock,” was his close friend Madison Grant. Grant’s review was very positive about the book, very negative about immigrants, and awash with the sort of anthropological/historical abracadabra that was his metaphorical calling card. Laughlin’s credentials were much more substantive, much more imposing: his Princeton PhD (even if earned for his work on onion roots), his affiliation with the Carnegie Institution, and his numbers—columns of numbers, pages of numbers, mountains of numbers. Gould and Grant relied on analogy, assertion, and principles rooted in Gobineau and other nineteenth-century race theorists. Laughlin’s very different approach was reified in a quotation from Lord Kelvin that he kept in his personal files. It was a statement he might well have recited as a daily devotional: “When you measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it, but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”
When Laughlin appeared before the Johnson committee on November 21, he began with a cordial nod to Grant, Gould, and the other amateur scholars riding the eugenic express by dressing the walls of Johnson’s hearing room with maps Grant had commissioned for The Passing of the Great Race. It made for a grand visual effect. But as Laughlin knew they would be, Johnson and his committee were far more interested in his charts and tables and statistical arcana, which he offered as proof that certain unsurprising ethnic groups were eugenically inferior and therefore dangerous. Laughlin’s methodology was simple: he had undertaken an extensive study of the resident populations of 445 public institutions for the “socially inadequate,” and then determined whether particular ethnicities—Laughlin knew them only as “races”—were overrepresented relative to their presence in the population at large. To illustrate: if, for unserious instance, 5 percent of the American people were flat-footed but 10 percent of those studied were flat-footed, this would prove that the flat of feet were twice as likely to be institutionalized as the average American.
Laughlin had more crucial criteria in mind, and, category by category, he ticked off the results: Romanians were 41 percent more likely than the average American to be criminal. Italians were 57 percent more likely to be insane. Immigrants from Russia and Poland were more than twice as likely to be tubercular. And so on, a roll call of eye-popping statistics that culminated in the apparent evidence that there was nothing quite so terrible as a Serbian, who was six times more likely to be “inadequate” (in any category) than someone of any other ethnic strain—and thus that much more likely to be carrying the perilous genes that would, said Laughlin, “dilute the bloodstream of America.”
Three building blocks undergirded Laughlin’s imposing statistical construction. He used Daniel Folkmar’s dubious 1911 Dictionary of Races to sort the institutional population by ethnicity (“. . . Albanian . . . Herzegovinian . . . Russian . . . Jew . . . Welsh . . . Polish”—apparently for clarity’s sake, Folkmar appended to that last one a parenthesized “Polack”). He used the categories of individuals barred from entry under the 1917 Immigration Act (“. . . blind . . . deformed . . . epileptic . . . insane . . . potentially insane”) to classify them by specific deficiency. And the various and increasingly inscrutable mathematical formulae he offered the committee couldn’t help but produce appropriate awe. By Lord Kelvin’s standards, Laughlin’s 133 pages of flyspeck numbers and accompanying commentary indicated that he didn’t merely know “something”; on this subject he knew everything. As the hearing neared its conclusion, Albert Johnson, newspaperman turned politician, said, “I have examined Doctor Laughlin’s data and charts and find that they are both biologically and statistically thorough, and apparently sound.” He also said, “Facts of this nature are the basis upon which the American people must develop their permanent immigration policy.”
Johnson wasn’t the only satisfied observer. Immigration Restriction League lobbyist James Patten’s report to his Boston associates said “Laughlin made a wonderful presentation today . . . a corking study of the alien inmates of public institutions. It will be very helpful.” Charles Gould called it “a magnificent piece of work.” Using Laughlin’s report as bait, Charles Davenport solicited funds to support an expansion of the Eugenics Record Office’s work—specifically, to “preserve in the population a high proportion of the excellent Nordic traits by a proper selection of immigrants.” Kenneth Roberts told the many millions of readers of the Saturday Evening Post that “the findings of Doctor Laughlin of the Carnegie Institution confirm what all students of immigration have known for some time.” The essence of that knowledge, Roberts concluded, was simple: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southeastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in return.” The Department of Labor was impressed, too: several months later a department document referred to Laughlin as “one of the world’s best known scientists.”
When Carl Brigham completed his work just a few weeks after Laughlin’s bravura appearance before the House Immigration Committee, the men who had made it possible looked toward the public debut of his findings with the giddy anticipation of expectant parents. Late on a December evening in 1922, following dinner at the Union League Club, a sort of after-party at Charles Gould’s house on Washington Square brought together a roster of restriction heavyweights. This time Grant, Brigham, and the host were joined by Albert Johnson, Fairfield Osborn, James Patten, and Francis Kinnicutt, an enthusiastic restrictionist whose father was Edith Wharton’s friend and her husband’s personal physician. The evening’s centerpiece was an advance proof of Brigham’s just-completed Study of American Intelligence. The talk went on for hours. Spirits were high.
From the restrictionist perspective, Brigham’s Study could have justified fireworks and parades. Given the circumstances of its birth and the backgrounds and predilections of its sponsors, it was hardly surprising that it revealed that Nordics were more intelligent than Alpines, who were more intelligent than Mediterraneans, who were more intelligent—but not much more intelligent—than black people. In the lily-white academic world of 1923, where this sort of arrant racism was almost endemic, Brigham could further argue that European immigration had accounted for two million newcomers who were “below the average negro,” thus managing in one sentence to deprecate millions of Americans, both newly arrived and long established. An assertion like this, coming ex cathedra from a member of the Princeton faculty, in a book issued by the university’s own publishing division, had headline value.
Brigham’s analyses of the army tests, based on fanciful allocations of particular national groupings (he somehow determined, for instance, that Italians were 5 percent Nordic, 25 percent Alpine, and 75 percent Mediterranean) led him to a series of conclusions that, first, “indicate clearly the intellectual superiority of the Nordic race group.” And from there he slipped smoothly into the hoary language of the restriction movement, now amplified by his own research: “There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.” “According to all evidence available, American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive.” And, in the book’s final paragraph, “The steps that should be taken to preserve or increase our present intellectual capacity must of course be dictated by science and not by political expediency.” Supported as his argument was by the book’s eighty-four mathematical tables, fifteen charts, and enough jargon-clotted prose to numb a professional statistician, who dared argue?
Brigham was unashamedly grateful to his sponsors. He could not do justice to Madison Grant, he wrote, because his “entire book should be read to appreciate the soundness of Mr. Grant’s position and the compelling force of his arguments.” Regarding Charles Gould—“a clear, vigorous, fearless thinker on problems of race characteristics, amalgamation of peoples, and immigration”—Brigham was forthright: Gould “has sponsored this book throughout, has read and re-read all of the manuscript at every stage of its preparation, and is mainly responsible for its contents.”
A few years later Gould would be similarly large-hearted about Brigham. “I do not think we have made a mistake in that charming fellow,” he told Robert Yerkes. And when the childless Gould died in 1931, he would leave a handsome slice of his fortune to the man whose work had helped tighten the final screws on the scientific case for nationality-based immigration restriction.
In the weeks and months following completion of Brigham’s book and the dissemination of Laughlin’s bedazzling report—to Albert Johnson’s mind “one of the most valuable documents ever put out by a committee of Congress”—the nation hurtled toward an ever-narrower definition of who deserved to be considered American. The year before, Congress had already decided that any American woman “who marries an alien ineligible to citizenship”—that is, an Asian not born in the United States—would have her own citizenship revoked. Then came the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the Bhagat Singh Thind case, determining that Thind was not white “in accordance with the understanding of the common man.” Two months later Secretary of Labor James Davis warned President Harding that nearly half of the fourteen million immigrants who had arrived in the preceding three decades did not even reach “low average intelligence.” Two weeks after that, Davis opted for greater precision, telling an audience in Pittsburgh that the army tests had determined that exactly 6,346,856 immigrants were “inferior or very inferior.”
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, the progressive activist Raymond G. Fuller declared Brigham’s book “a sane and sober presentation of certain menacing aspects of our immigration problem.” In the American Economic Review, Dartmouth professor Charles Leonard Stone hailed the “unusual clarity” of Brigham’s findings. Newspapers credentialized Brigham’s work in their headlines (INTELLIGENCE LEVEL IN U.S. DECLINING SAYS PRINCETON PROFESSOR). David Starr Jordan, a decade removed from his Stanford presidency but still up to his elbows in the eugenics movement, drew on Brigham to declare that unwanted immigrants were “biologically incapable of rising either now or through their descendants above the mentality of a 12-year-old child.” At an anti-immigration rally in New York, Congressman William N. Vaile of Colorado (a member of the House Committee on Immigration) spoke of “unmeltable globs of foreign material” and cited Brigham as he declared that “out of every hundred drafted men born in Poland, only twelve had the average intelligence of the native born white drafted soldier.” It was clear, Vaile insisted, that the nation was facing a “racial threat.”
But perhaps no one got behind Brigham’s analysis more fervently than Fairfield Osborn. Among the aristocratic grandees of Boston and New York who had been steering the anti-immigration movement for nearly three decades, Osborn’s scientific credentials were unmatched. And only such prominence could have allowed Osborn to appraise the army tests and Brigham’s analyses in quite the fashion that he did at the National Immigration Conference, held in New York as 1923 drew to its close. Under the auspices of the National Industrial Conference Board, some three thousand delegates gathered in the Hotel Astor ballroom to address the pending expiration of the Emergency Immigration Act. Manufacturers, labor leaders, steamship operators; federal officials, social service workers, representatives of foreign governments; “individuals,” said the New York Times, “prominent in the fields of industry, commerce and government”—they all knew that permanent immigration legislation was coming soon, and they had come to the conference to stake out their positions. Osborn told the delegates his intent was to appraise the issue “in cold-blooded scientific language.” He couldn’t have gotten much more cold-blooded than this: if the army tests “served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence of different races who are coming to us,” he said, “I believe those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life.” Italics seem appropriate; it’s hard to imagine Osborn delivering such a statement without appropriate dramatic effects.
As it happened, the very title of Osborn’s speech was nearly as chilling as his dismissive reference to the slaughter of World War I: “The Approach to the Immigration Problem through Science.” But neither was as disturbing as a reference to the army tests that appeared elsewhere in the early 1920s, maintaining that the tests had proved that “the Nordic race marches in the vanguard of mankind.” So wrote Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, the authors of the definitive German eugenics text, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene (Human Heredity and Race Hygiene). When Congress began debating the new immigration legislation in 1924, the book’s second edition was useful jailhouse reading for a thirty-five-year-old inmate in Landsberg Prison in Bavaria, Adolf Hitler.
AS JOHN B. TREVOR JR. would remember it, despair drove him into the immigration wars. At a meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce in 1921, he sat by as members debated the Emergency Immigration Act. The forty-two-year-old lawyer was mildly surprised when William G. Willcox, a former president of the New York City Board of Education, spoke against it, less so when the German Jewish community leader Cyrus Sulzberger did. True discouragement set in only when Trevor realized, as he later recalled, that “it was hopeless to really expect businessmen to put the interest of their country first.” He determined to travel to Washington, where he knew no one of any political significance, to see what he might be able to accomplish on his own. It was the beginning of a volunteer career in the anti-immigration movement that would last his entire life and eventually earn for Trevor the title “America’s alien-baiter No. 1.”
It was only partly surprising that Trevor made the trip to Washington with so little connection to the capital’s establishment. It was true that he had two Harvard degrees, came from a fabulously wealthy family, and was a natural-born part of the nation’s ruling elite. But it was truer still that he was indelibly a New Yorker, and had never felt any particular need to engage in the distant business of national politics. His clubs, his boards (including the almost obligatory American Museum of Natural History), his exalted social world were not just knit into the fabric of upper-class New York—they were the fabric itself. One of his intimates was John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had been a friend since childhood. One of his wife’s nearest and dearest was Eleanor Roosevelt.
Trevor could never have supported a complete halt to immigration. When he was in his early twenties, only two of the ten household servants who lived on the third floor of Glenview, the twenty-six-room family home presiding over the Hudson River from a bluff in Yonkers, were American citizens. Almost needless to say, the servants were English, Irish, Swedish—the kind of immigrants who might someday melt without notice into the native population without spoiling the broth. When Trevor and his wife returned from their yearlong honeymoon abroad, they moved into a brand-new limestone mansion in the Beaux-Arts style on the east side of Manhattan, across the street from Andrew Carnegie’s enormous chateau and closer to Trevor’s downtown law office (which happened to be next door to the office of his friend Madison Grant).
As disengaged as his social and professional life might have been from the immigrant chaos of lower Manhattan, Trevor nonetheless knew the crowded polyglot streets from previous experience and intense observation. As an army captain during World War I, he was in charge of military intelligence for New York, which mostly meant—at least in his view—identifying and pursuing anarchists and other radical elements on the Lower East Side. Trevor’s neighborhood-by-neighborhood “Ethnic Map of New York City,” which he created while he was in the army, could have been looked at as sociology—or, as he intended it, as a warning: he said his map identified the neighborhoods likeliest to breed armed rebellion. Trevor’s xenophobia was ecumenical. Before concerns arose about eastern and southern Europeans evading the quota by passing through Latin America, he said it was “just as objectionable” to allow the immigration of “Mexicans and Brazilians, who by the way, are rotten with various diseases not necessary to enumerate, as it is to have the Greeks and Italians (south) pour in on us.” As for the Jews, he told Albert Johnson that simply thinking about new waves of Polish Jews coming to the United States gave him “convulsive shivers.”
Once Trevor immersed himself in the restriction movement, shivers gave way to action, and a combination of intellect and energy propelled him to the front lines. He belonged there. In the three-decade history of the restriction movement, leadership had been handed off from northeastern Protestant aristocrat to northeastern Protestant aristocrat. Henry Cabot Lodge ran the first leg of the race, abetted by Joe Lee, Prescott Hall, Robert Ward, and the other men of the Immigration Restriction League. Madison Grant picked up the baton and then handed it off to Charles Gould. John Trevor would take the anchor leg of the relay. Abetting the team’s efforts throughout was the scientific auxiliary: Charles Davenport, Fairfield Osborn, Carl Brigham. Of all the essential players who were not actually writing laws, only Harry Laughlin, the teetotaling schoolteacher from small-town Missouri, hadn’t emerged from patrician roots (although he did claim James Madison as a relative).
These men were all enmeshed in a sturdy web of colleges, clubs, museum boards, and the other familiar way stations that defined the well-cushioned life of the era. When Trevor was in Boston, he’d meet with Lee and Ward at the Union Club. In New York, when the IRL’s James Patten was in town, the preferred venue (when it wasn’t Charles Gould’s house) was the Union League, sometimes the Century Association. Harvard and Yale and Princeton (and occasionally Columbia) shaped their shared values; various museums and zoos and other quasi-public institutions (which they often treated as if they were their own private assets) were the arenas of their civic engagement. They saw their preeminence in every province of their lives as their birthright, and the immigrants who peopled their nightmares were challenging their claim to it. Testifying before Congress in 1924, Trevor was direct: the new immigrants, he said, “cannot point during a period of seven centuries since Magna Charta to any conception of successful government other than a paternal autocracy.” He did not add that his own conception of successful government, like that of so many of the restrictionists, was oligarchy.
Like Harry Laughlin, Albert Johnson was ethnically acceptable but in other ways a mismatch in the world of the eastern restrictionists. The very fact that he’d engaged in the rough-and-tumble of northwestern politics for more than a decade was something of a disqualifier (Lodge, by contrast, had risen from the cobbled streets of Beacon Hill to the U.S. Senate before senators were elected by popular vote). Grant hinted to a relative that Johnson’s palm needed the occasional greasing to relieve a constant itch for cash, and Trevor thought Johnson drank too much. On at least one occasion during the early years of Prohibition, Johnson concluded a committee meeting by reaching for the bottle of whiskey he kept hidden on a bookshelf behind two volumes of the Dillingham Commission report and offering a toast to his committee’s work. Apart from liquor and possibly a little bribery, flattery offered another path to Johnson. Grant engineered his membership in the Galton Society and played a role in Johnson’s improbable election as president of the Eugenics Research Association, the supposedly scholarly institution Charles Davenport had started ten years earlier that had since veered toward immigration restriction. At the time of Johnson’s election, Davenport had not even met him.
As Johnson initiated the Immigration Committee’s work on permanent legislation in December 1923, Grant was nowhere to be seen. Crippled by arthritis, he no longer visited Washington, saving his traveling energy for trips to Dr. Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek and to various spas and resort hotels in Florida, California, and Colorado. Joe Lee engaged with Johnson almost exclusively through Patten, the IRL lobbyist, whom he continued to pay out of his own pocket and who obliged Lee by sending him daily reports on the progress of restriction legislation. Johnson’s private secretary would remember that Kenneth Roberts “practically camped in our offices” while the new legislation was being drafted. But when Lothrop Stoddard was invited to testify formally before Johnson’s committee, Roberts turned peevish: Stoddard, he told his diary, was “still the same conceited ass.”
John Trevor’s involvement in drafting the permanent immigration legislation was different in both scale and function. From the moment he first showed Johnson his “ethnic map” in 1921, he became an intimate part of the legislative process, and also of Johnson’s thinking process, introducing him to such anti-Semitic literature as Cecile Tormay’s unhinged assault on Hungarian Jews, An Outlaw’s Diary (it was so “intensely interesting,” Johnson reported back to Trevor, that he’d read passages aloud to his companions in the train’s smoking compartment on a trip west). Trevor often sat in on the unofficial executive sessions of Johnson’s House Committee on Immigration—unofficial because two of its members, Adolph Sabath of Chicago and Isaac Siegel of New York (both of them antirestriction Jews) were not invited. Johnson and Trevor wrote to each other constantly, spoke even more often (Johnson was impressed that Trevor could afford so many long-distance calls), and collaborated on draft after draft of what would become the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. Many of Trevor’s suggestions were helpful; one in particular was crucial.
“I spent thirty minutes with the President yesterday on Immigration matters,” Johnson wrote to Trevor in February 1924, “and came away from the White House feeling considerably encouraged.” Warren Harding, who had died the previous summer, had long been a supporter of immigration restriction. Calvin Coolidge, who as vice president had introduced “racial considerations” and “biological laws” into the official conversation, was if anything even more committed to slamming the doors. Shortly after Coolidge’s ascension, Joe Lee told Robert Ward with easy Bostonian familiarity that “Calvin” was “solidly with us.” Large majorities in both the Senate and the House were on board, and there was no question that permanent restriction legislation would soon pass and the president would sign it. Only the details remained to be determined.
Trevor’s momentous contribution was a feat of legislative imagination that others would claim as their own but that clearly originated with him. Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania was among those who insisted this new idea was his, but the weight of the evidence is entirely on Trevor’s side. Reed may not have conceived the novel plan, but he did explain its motivation succinctly. The 1921 law, he said, was “entirely unfair to the native-born American” because “he was ignored in the ascertainment of the quotas.”
This was undeniable. The 1921 quotas were arrived at by dividing up the immigrant population into distinct percentages: for simplicity’s sake, assume that 50 percent of immigrants already in the United States were from country A, 40 percent from Country B, and 10 percent from Country C; if so, then A would be allowed 50 percent of all new immigration, and so on. But what of Reed’s absent “native-born”? Where were they in that calculation? If one were only counting immigrants, the native-born were, as an associate said (with Reed’s endorsement), “buncoed” and “rooked” and “trimmed out of their fair share.”
Trevor had the solution. Under his scheme, which became known as the National Origins plan, everybody counted. A commission working under the authority of the secretaries of state, labor, and commerce would determine what percentage of all Americans, not just immigrants, belonged to each national grouping. It wasn’t a question of how many people the census revealed as having been born in, say, Great Britain; it was what percentage of the entire population could trace their roots to Great Britain. Your family has been in the United States since your forefathers arrived on the Mayflower? Check—British. They came in the first few decades after the American Revolution? Check—more than likely British, maybe German. A bit later, possibly Irish. Said David Reed, “75 percent of us who are now here owe our origin to immigrants” from northwestern Europe—and thus 75 percent of all new immigration slots should be reserved for northwestern Europeans. In painstaking detail (even if with questionable sourcing), Trevor compiled a report that presumed to project the final numbers for forty separate nationality groups with unembarrassed precision (an associate somehow determined that the U.S. population included 44,689,278 descendants of “the old Colonial white stock”). “If I do say so myself,” Trevor would write many years later, the National Origins plan was “really a tour de force.”
The prospective change in the ethnic allocations of European immigration quotas was radical. Based as they were on the 1910 census, the 1921 quotas had allotted 44 percent of entry visas to southern and eastern Europe. The National Origins plan, according to Trevor’s enthusiastic computations, would reduce that number not to 22 percent (as David Reed had calculated it), but to 12 percent. As Trevor remembered it, his scheme was anointed when Frank Kinnicutt told him that Henry Cabot Lodge wished to see him. Lodge was seventy-three. His health was failing. After more than three decades in the restriction vanguard—Trevor was thirteen when Lodge first addressed the issue in Congress—he had heard every argument, considered every plan. Now he examined Trevor’s scheme and declared that he’d been looking for something like this for years—something that was, he said, “an answer to all the charges of discrimination” against the benighted hordes of eastern and southern Europe. Lodge and Trevor believed—or affected to believe—that the numbers were impartial.
Who, though, could wait for a cabinet-level commission to do the difficult work of computing the actual origins of ninety-five million white Americans?II As it would turn out, those numbers, and the permanent quotas derived from them, were not finalized until 1928. But as David Reed—patrician, Princetonian, archconservative—prepared to bring the new legislation to the Senate floor, he had a solution in hand.
It had first been proposed in an article that appeared in the cultivated pages of Scribner’s Magazine by a little-known economics professor at Vanderbilt University named Roy L. Garis. Even though the Garis article appeared in a rival magazine, editor George Horace Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post was more pleased than envious. Garis’s was “a very cagy suggestion,” Lorimer told Kenneth Roberts. Cagy, perhaps; audacious, unquestionably. Until the complex computations of the National Origins scheme could be completed, it would be fine to rely on declarations of nationality enumerated in the census to determine quotas. But, Garis argued, the quotas should be based not on the census of 1920, or even the 1910 numbers that had been used for the Emergency Act of 1921, but on the census of 1890—as Lorimer put it, “that being a year Nordic immigration was still strong and low-grade stuff hadn’t begun to come to us in volume.”
Never mind that Garis supported his argument with fanciful “facts” that Lillian Russell had uncovered on her “special mission.” Never mind as well that even so fervent a restrictionist as John Burnett, the Alabaman who had preceded Albert Johnson as chairman of the House Immigration Committee, had in 1918 argued that even using the census of 1910 as any kind of measuring rod in the immigration debate would be unfair because it was already so dated. What Garis suggested and Reed brought to the Senate floor was a set of statistics compiled thirty-four years earlier. Opponents pointed out that the 1920 census numbers were both available and appropriate; that the 1910 numbers, already in use, might be a reasonable compromise; that the 1900 numbers . . . actually, no one even suggested the possibility of 1900, already twenty-four years distant in the rearview mirror.
To Garis, Lorimer, and Reed, such concerns were irrelevant; they loved the math. By using 1890 as the base year—before the sudden torrent of immigrants from Italy and Poland and Russia and all the other places spewing forth what Kenneth Roberts called “hordes of the most undesirable people in Europe”—they would get exactly what they wanted. In the last year before the 1921 quotas were put in place, 222,496 Italians passed through the gates. In the first post-quota year, that number had been sliced to 42,159. But if that was brutal, then Roy Garis’s numerical guillotine was barbarous: only 3,912 Italians a year—barely 1.7 percent of the pre-quota figure—would be allowed to find the brighter future they sought in America’s once welcoming arms.
In the House, a nearly apoplectic Adolph Sabath, whose Bohemian accent had still not moderated in his seventeen years representing the heavily ethnic west side of Chicago, was outraged; relying on the 1890 census, he said, was “deliberately discriminatory.” Albert Johnson was unmoved; Sabath, he wearily confided to a friend, was elected “to represent districts located in Europe.” Over on the Senate side of the Capitol, David Reed simply shrugged. “I think most of us are reconciled to the idea of discrimination,” he said at one hearing. “I think the American people want us to discriminate.” All he was looking for, he said, was “which is the more plausible, the more reasonable, and the more defensible method of attaining that end.” To Reed, the Garis plan was plausibility itself. To use the 1910 census, he maintained, would be “a great discrimination against us, the American born.” In truth, for many restrictionists only one other plan could have been more plausible, more reasonable, more defensible. “Dear Cabot,” Joe Lee wrote to Lodge with cousinly familiarity, “I don’t know why we shouldn’t discriminate, but if it is a sin, I think the proper thing would be to suspend all immigration.”
During the early skirmishes surrounding the 1924 Immigration Act, the restrictionists who had brought science into the discussion were peacocks in full display. Madison Grant told the readers of the North American Review that the nation had undergone “a great change of public opinion” about the “jumbled-up mass of undigested race material” that had threatened the nation’s future. Harry Laughlin was introduced to an audience of British eugenicists as “the great American watchdog whose job it is to protect the blood of the American people from contamination and degeneracy.” The New York Times granted nearly a full column on its editorial page to what the paper called PROFESSOR OSBORN’S POSITION ON THE IMMIGRATION QUESTION (Osborn’s own title was “Lo, the Poor Nordic!”). His statement, in the form of a letter to the editor, was less a “position” than it was a sonorous hymn to the once threatened race that might now be pulled back from the brink of extinction. Nordic virtue was so apparent to Osborn that he found it in the most unlikely (and useful) places, drafting into the clan every southern or eastern European luminary worth claiming. By a miraculous combination of presumed genetics, wishful thinking, and a direct lift from a letter he’d received from Grant, Osborn annexed to his tribe a surprising set of Nordics: Giotto and Donatello, Kościuszko and Pulaski, Lafayette and Napoleon, Rodin and Racine and Richelieu. Using Grant’s exact words, Osborn, man of science, repeated his friend’s dazzling claim that “Columbus, from his portraits and from his busts, authentic or not, was clearly of Nordic ancestry.”
How could he write such a sentence and not be embarrassed by its appearance in the Times? By this point, the scientific racists were so impervious to challenge that they had ceased to be concerned about the reliability of their assertions. More crucially, neither could they be embarrassed, or chagrined, or even put on notice by the growing number of intellectually powerful attacks on Brigham, Laughlin, the Yerkes test scores, and the entire eugenic interpretation of ethnicity.
Over a period of months, the negative reviews of Brigham’s book in the scholarly press outweighed the positive. He was criticized for relying on the general information portion of the tests—those questions about where cars were built, or who appeared in tooth powder advertisements. (His feeble attempt at a preemptive response in the book: “the intelligent person has a broader range of general information than an unintelligent person.”) His likening the intelligence of “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” immigrants to the American Negro was ludicrous without taking into consideration the relative educational opportunities for either group; how else could one explain that northern blacks had scored higher on the army tests than whites from Mississippi, Arkansas, and Kentucky? Several critics pounced on his most outlandish assertion, one that he had devised to forestall charges of ethnic prejudice: that because recent immigrants scored worse on the tests than earlier arrivals had, the newcomers were a provably worse cut of humanity than those relatively fine folk who had come to the United States ten or twenty years earlier.
Brigham blamed this decline on his conviction that European countries were exporting “lower and lower representatives of each race”—that they were, by implication, selecting their worst and shipping them to America. But he had made the most elementary of errors, failing to recognize that someone who had taken the test after living in the United States for two decades would inevitably perform better than someone assessed after only five years in the country. His response to this charge was less a defense than an inadvertent guilty plea: “If the tests used included some mysterious type of situation that was ‘typically American,’ we are indeed fortunate, for this is America.” Therefore, Brigham concluded, “inability to respond to a ‘typically American’ situation is obviously an undesirable trait.” Responding in Science magazine, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, sociologist Kimball Young dismissed Brigham’s very premise as the product of “an antiquated, outworn and mythological race hypothesis.”
Harry Laughlin’s science fared even worse than Brigham’s. Among the many critics of his Metal and Dross in America’s Modern Melting Pot report, none was more thorough, more pointed, or more damning than the man whose judgment, Laughlin acknowledged, had to be taken “most seriously,” Herbert Spencer Jennings.
Jennings may have been preordained by his first and middle names to engage with the social and sociological implications of science (it was a family calling: his physician father’s admiration for the great theorists of mid-nineteenth-century England led him to name Herbert’s brother after Darwin). Jennings came by his authority through his outstanding and original scholarly work as zoologist, psychologist, and geneticist. Laughlin had additional reason to respect him: Jennings had trained at Harvard under Charles Davenport, who had nudged him toward experimental biology; he’d even rented a room in Davenport’s Cambridge house. The two men remained close, and Jennings’s interest in eugenics—at least in its earliest American phase—was genuine. When he was honored by his admiring colleagues in 1921, Davenport was the main speaker.
Jennings’s pedigree was impeccable, his ethics unimpeachable, his reputation formidable. And when the editor of the The Survey asked him to write about Laughlin’s report, he was well inclined toward it, telling the editor that from what he’d already seen, Laughlin “presents a pretty strong case.” Combined with Brigham’s data, he explained, “it will furnish strong arguments for restrictive legislation.” But six months later, after intensive study of Laughlin’s methods, his data, and his conclusions, Jennings was not simply unpersuaded. He was appalled.
Even before his review appeared in print, a distressed Jennings sent a detailed critique to the Eugenics Committee of the United States of America. He was a member of its advisory council, yet he had little reason to hope that the organization would withdraw its support for Laughlin’s findings. The gilt-edged ECUSA had emerged from the Second International Congress held at Osborn’s museum in 1921 to become the public face of the eugenics movement. It also had yoked itself to restriction when its leaders appointed Laughlin, Robert Ward, and Madison Grant to a committee specifically charged with garnering support for the pending immigration legislation.
Jennings’s article in The Survey—“ ‘Undesirable Aliens’: A Biologist’s Examination of the Evidence Before Congress”—appeared in December 1923. It was unrelenting, as was his subsequent appearance before Johnson’s committee the following March. He made the obvious point that Laughlin, by confining his study of the “socially inadequate” to public institutions, had failed to count equally deficient individuals who were in private institutions—almost certainly people from families with means, who were far less likely to be foreign-born. Laughlin had also completely ignored (as someone weaned on the Eugenics Record Office’s Trait Book would) any environmental influences at all—not just poverty and lack of education, but the burden, Jennings wrote, of living “under the heavy handicap of ignorance of the language, customs and laws” of a new country. Most egregiously, Laughlin had lumped together all nine of the disabilities he had studied into one overall number to show a ranking of genetic virtue that put native-born Americans in first place. It was a statistical manipulation that had sailed past Johnson and his committee. According to Laughlin’s own data, immigrants from Great Britain, for instance, were more prone to feeblemindedness than those from Italy, Romania, or the Balkans—but that was a finding far removed from Laughlin’s bottom line. Only when all nine of the report’s listed deficiencies were combined on a single numerical scale were people of British origins shown to be genetically sounder than Scandinavians, who topped the French. Then came the long list of nations who were below the immigrant median: Italy. Russia and Poland. Greece. Bulgaria. And, finally, the woebegone Serbia.III
Taking dead aim at Laughlin’s statistical manipulations, Jennings noted that individually, “in five of the nine categories—in feeblemindedness, epilepsy, deafness, blindness and deformity—the foreign born are superior to the natives born of native parents.” The reason was almost comically obvious: for more than a decade, existing immigration laws had specifically barred individuals in each of those categories from entry. Even eugenicists, it seemed, would have to acknowledge that laws already in place were doing a decent job of genetic culling—by judging the qualities and characteristics of the individual, and not of his or her ethnicity.
But no such acknowledgment was forthcoming. When the officers of the ECUSA ignored Jennings’s private entreaty, he suggested to a colleague that the group’s “unscientific procedures” were an embarrassment and that the true aim of the organization—its letterhead still sparkling with impressive names—was “Nordic propaganda.” Increasingly frustrated by the yawns that greeted him when he engaged the ECUSA and when he testified before Johnson’s committee, Jennings took to the pages of Science magazine, where he recapitulated his argument and conclusively labeled Laughlin’s central findings “illegitimate and incorrect.” Albert Johnson and his committee could not have been as unmoved by the criticism if they had stuffed their ears with cotton, placed blindfolds over their eyes, and shut down the brain lobes that processed logic, reason, and evidence. “Don’t worry about criticism, Doctor Laughlin,” Johnson told him at the end of Laughlin’s return engagement before the House Committee. “You have developed a valuable research [sic] and demonstrated a most startling state of affairs. We shall pursue these biological studies further.”
In December 1923, less than half a year into his unexpected presidency, Calvin Coolidge delivered his first Annual Message to Congress. “America must be kept American,” he said. “For this purpose it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.”
Over the next five months, on and off, Congress debated the permanent Immigration Act, a.k.a. the Immigration Restriction Act, a.k.a. the Johnson-Reed Act—by any name the most comprehensive barrier to immigration in the nation’s history, both then and ever since. Total immigration would be restricted to 155,000 a year. Nation-by-nation quotas were set at 2 percent of the United States’ foreign-born (or derived) population from any given country, as enumerated in the census of 1890. During hearings conducted by his committee, Johnson treated antirestriction witnesses with the easy cordiality of a man playing an unbeatable hand. The opposition never had a chance.
One of the primary reasons for Johnson’s confidence was his perception of division in the American Jewish community, for three decades the restrictionists’ most potent foe. On one side stood Louis Marshall and his allies, who did not cede an inch. Assaulting theories and expertise paraded by Grant (“not a real scientist, after all”), Marshall dismissed the anthropological arguments with slicing irony: if the Nordics were under so dire a threat, how superior could they possibly be? “I wondered why this fabled race was so frail and fragile. If it did disappear, it is not very complimentary to the Nordic to say he permitted himself to be wiped out by inferior races.” Then again, Marshall mused, there was another possible reason: “If [the Nordic race] never existed, of course, it could easily disappear.”
But not all Jewish leaders who came to testify shared the absolute conviction of Marshall’s determined resistance. The threat of brutal quotas led several to temporize. Some even displayed an unseemly acceptance of certain aspects of Grant’s racial theories. Both Joshua Kantrowitz of B’nai Brith and William Edlin, editor of one of the leading Yiddish dailies, said they would bar the immigration of Japanese and Chinese. Edlin threw in Hindus—at the time a catchall term for South Asians, Hindu or not—as well. Judge Bernard Rosenblatt, a stalwart of the American Zionist movement, offered an argument that could have come straight from Charles Gould or Prescott Hall: “When you talk about the races that built America you are talking about the races of Europe, the white races,” he said. He argued that the Jews were among “the races that can be assimilated,” and therefore merited the committee’s approval.IV Rosenblatt acknowledged that restriction creates “a sense of injustice”—but if those restricted were “the Asiatic,” he testified, it would be entirely acceptable. During debate on the House floor, even Fiorello La Guardia of New York, who represented what might have been the most polyglot district in the nation, added his endorsement of Asian exclusion. Adolph Sabath, who had voiced his support for “Asiatic and Mongolian” restriction a decade earlier, was crippled either by his uneasy grasp of English or by an oxymoronic logic: “To discriminate is our right,” he declared, “but when we discriminate we ought to discriminate fairly.”
The bill’s opponents, most of them representing urban districts in the North, did their best during the final floor debates. Representative Charles A. Mooney of Ohio criticized the “fifth-rate extension lecturers,” newspaper editorialists, and magazine editors who promoted Nordic theory “with scientific exactness.” He also quoted Franz Boas to demolish both the exactness and the science. (Boas had continued to fight the eugenicists in the press and in academic journals, and by offering advice and counsel to congressional antirestrictionists.) John J. O’Connor of New York called Laughlin’s Metal and Dross report “the greatest joke book that has been published during this session of Congress,” and urged members to take notice of the first five letters of Laughlin’s surname. James A. Gallivan of Massachusetts said that the Nordics were “the ancestors of every American who is identified with the Ku Klux Klan,” and took a specific swing at the IRL—“the corpse of the Loyal Coalition in the city of Boston lift[ing] itself from its bankrupt grave.” (Gallivan dodged a real swing when the archrestrictionist Elton Watkins of Oregon threw a punch at him on the House floor.) When La Guardia asked J. Will Taylor of Tennessee for literacy statistics in his state and in Kentucky, Taylor—who had earlier called immigrants “scum” and “offal”—had no room to retreat. So he exited the discussion with a leap toward the preposterous: “We have no illiteracy in Tennessee and Kentucky.”
But La Guardia fared less well in a similar tangle with an Appalachian restrictionist a few days later, their exchange and the House’s reaction a sharp summary of the mood of the day. Once again comparing the literacy of the immigrants in New York to rural Kentuckians, La Guardia provoked Representative John Marshall Robsion to rise in fury. Robsion’s defense of his constituents included hosannas to the quality of their schools, their devotion to “the old-time religion,” and their fortunate freedom from the “black hand organizations” and “Tong wars” that presumably terrorized La Guardia’s multiethnic Manhattan district. He finally moved from defense of Kentuckians who “suckle their Americanism and their patriotism from their mother’s breasts” to game-clinching offense: “I resent the gentleman’s insolent, infamous, contemptible slander against a great, honest, industrious, law-abiding, liberty-loving, God-fearing patriotic people.” The chamber exploded in applause. The chair denied La Guardia’s request for permission to respond. The debate moved on. According to one eyewitness, “The House had had its thrill.”
In truth, it had many. When the bill’s supporters had control of the floor, the debate was infused with the language of scientific racism. “The primary reason for the restriction of the alien stream,” said Representative Robert E. Lee Allen of West Virginia, “is the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America.” John N. Tillman of Arkansas declared America “orientalized, Europeanized, Africanized, and mongrelized” by immigration, and concluded his oration by rolling out Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “Unguarded Gates,” now in its thirty-second year on the restrictionist hit parade. Robert L. Bacon of New York was succinct: How could one argue with “scientific results”?
It was all a hyperinflated display of presumed expertise on the part of men who were not experts, preaching the lessons of a science that was not science, justifying prejudices too ugly to be acknowledged. During the Senate debate, one member invoked a fatalistic explanation of how “scientific legislation” often emerged from the marriage of science and politics: “Scientific legislation,” it had been said, was “legislation where the legislator pretended to do one thing while he is in reality trying to do another.”
Of all the restrictionists’ political opponents, none had been more forthright in identifying the true motives behind the Johnson-Reed bill than Emanuel Celler, a thirty-four-year-old freshman congressman from Brooklyn. The American-born son of prosperous Jewish parents, a graduate of Columbia and its law school, Celler comported himself with a steely dignity and confronted the bill’s proponents with the focus, the language, and the intent of a prosecutor. It was Celler who solicited Herbert Jennings’s testimony before the Johnson committee, and during floor debate he read some of Boas’s work into the record. He assaulted the restrictionists’ reliance on the army tests and the Laughlin study, which he called “a vicious report . . . redolent with downright and deliberate fallacies.” He dismissed Madison Grant’s work as “dogmatic piffle.” And—critically—he did not euphemize when attacking the restrictionists’ obvious intent: to affect, he said, “the rankest kind of discrimination . . . set up against Catholic and Jewish Europe.”
Few listened. If even Samuel Gompers was lifting the eugenic banner, accusations of discrimination were rendered moot. The labor leader, himself Jewish, had always been an opponent of unchecked immigration but had long relied on economic arguments rather than racial ones. But in an article titled “America Must Not Be Overwhelmed,” published as Congress debated the Johnson-Reed bill, Gompers announced his belief that “THE PERSISTENCE OF RACIAL CHARACTERISTICS”—both “mental and moral”—could render the process of Americanization futile. The capitals, and the italics, were his.
In the end, the final version of the bill passed with ease: 308–62 in the House, 69–9 in the Senate. (Like previous legislation, it included a set of exemptions for certain professionals, family members, and the like.) But months earlier, Albert Johnson had been annoyed by some parliamentary obstacles thrown in his path by the opposition, and he had briefly dropped his mask of affable confidence. In a lengthy and contentious conversation with a correspondent from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “he seemed much agitated and aroused,” the reporter wrote. Among other things, Johnson said this: “If the Jewish people combine to defeat the immigration bill as reported by the Committee, their children will regret it.”
There had never been even the slightest chance that the Jews—and the Italians and Greeks and Bulgarians, the Romanians and Poles and all the other groups targeted by the quota act—could defeat the bill. And for their children, their fate sealed by the obstinacy of law and the weight of history, that turned out to be far more regrettable than they, or Johnson, or anyone else involved in this saga could possibly have imagined.
I. In essence, Laughlin’s model law and its variations granted the state the right to sterilize, for specifically eugenic purposes, people regarded as genetically inferior who were living under the supervision of the state in prisons, almshouses, mental asylums, and similar public institutions.
II. Such was the racial tenor of the times that the proposed legislation specifically excluded from the computation “descendants of slave immigrants,” which is to say virtually all American blacks. The IRL did not mince words; including descendants of slaves would “open the country to an African invasion.” Another feature of the National Origins scheme: forty years of discrimination against Asian immigrants had left them and their progeny composing a scant 0.2 percent of the population.
III. Laughlin and his sponsor had ready explanations for the relative absence of American blacks in state institutions. Johnson believed that their living conditions “are so low that dependence does not show itself.” At the time, that was a relatively plausible, if cruel, explanation. Laughlin’s, however, was ridiculous: “the dependent or inadequate Negro is taken care of by the plantation.”
IV. To some eugenicists and immigration restrictionists, this was a reasonable argument, even if they took it to unreasonable ends: the chief medical officer of the Public Health Service told Prescott Hall in 1912 that “intermarriage can solve the problem to the ultimate satisfaction of both Jew and Gentile,” and that “in the process of extermination [the Jew] will bequeath a rich legacy to the people with whom he intermarries.” Even Harry Laughlin believed that “three per cent Jews in the United States evenly distributed would not leave a serious imprint of their qualities on the American stock.”