Sometimes the gestures of history are a little too perfect, as if conceived by a particularly unimaginative writer of cheap melodrama. One such nod in the direction of the improbable was initiated on May 14, 1930, when Ernst Rüdin sailed from New York back to Germany after visiting his friend Charles Davenport in Cold Spring Harbor. Exactly nine years later to the day, the ship that took Rüdin home—the SS St. Louis—prepared to sail from Hamburg on a westbound trip that would become known as the “Voyage of the Damned.” (By then Hitler had granted Rüdin his medal for “racial-hygienic” contributions.) The manifest of the St. Louis listed more than 900 refugees from Nazi terror. When it reached U.S. waters, the ship was forced to turn away. The 27,300 slots in Germany’s immigration quota for the 1939 fiscal year had already been filled. The St. Louis returned to Europe. In Berlin, the U.S. consul general told Washington there were 125,000 “desperate people” trying to get to America. In Poland, Russia, and other eastern nations with far more Jews than Germany, and far smaller quotas, the situation would become even more dire.
Newspapers and newsreel cameras reported the story of the St. Louis—tragic, ongoing, often lurid—but the American public offered no wreaths of welcome to the pitiable refugees. The previous year a Fortune magazine poll showed two-thirds of the American public unwilling to accept any more refugees at all, and among those of larger spirit who were willing to take in any escapees from Nazi brutality, half insisted on an impossible proviso: they were prepared to open a humanitarian crack in the door only if it didn’t require raising the quotas. In January 1939, two months after the widely reported Kristallnacht pogrom, another poll asked whether the United States should accept the immigration of ten thousand Jewish children. Sixty percent were opposed. It was a question not asked idly: a pending bill that would have relaxed the quota specifically for twenty thousand German Jewish children died in the Senate. One of those who led the opposition to the measure was John Trevor, who said he wanted “to protect the youth of America from this foreign invasion.” Laura Delano Houghteling was rather more direct: “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults,” she said. Houghteling was Franklin Roosevelt’s first cousin; her husband was U.S. commissioner of immigration. Retired Major General George van Horn Moseley was more precisely eugenic than Houghteling: any refugees who did make it to the United States must be sterilized, he said, for “only in that way can we properly protect our future.” The editors of Time had their finger on a barely stirring pulse. Americans showed “no inclination to do anything for the world’s refugees,” the magazine said, “except read about them.”
Whether the American people connected Nazi race policies to the eugenic arguments they had been hearing for two decades was unknowable. This was not the case, however, among American organizations and institutions connected with eugenicists. Beginning shortly after Hitler’s ascension and through the rest of the 1930s, members of one organization after another seemed suddenly to wake from a nightmare they had helped to script. For many, each report of another Nazi law, another Hitler speech, was almost an accusation of complicity. John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s top lieutenant, Raymond B. Fosdick, withdrew from the American Eugenics Society, and by the next year had begun to extricate the Rockefeller Foundation from eugenic projects it had bankrolled. The Eugenics Research Association, whose past presidents included Madison Grant, Albert Johnson, and Clarence Campbell, soon began a radical transformation, remaking itself into an organization that eschewed racial explanations for individual traits. Even the Immigration Restriction League dialed back its race-baiting, in 1934 publishing an anti-immigration tract headed PROBLEM IS ECONOMICAL, NOT RACIAL—a retreat to the disingenuous prolabor pose so unconvincingly struck by Henry Cabot Lodge four decades before. Hollywood showed that it sensed a change in the American attitude toward eugenics with the 1936 release of College Holiday, a broad send-up of eugenic mating programs treated with exactly the gravity one might expect from the headliners in its cast: Jack Benny, George Burns, and Gracie Allen.
The American Museum of Natural History, for so long a sort of home stadium for the eugenics movement, began to turn away from its eugenic history when William Gregory broke with his boss and his associates in 1935. For years Gregory was the colleague Fairfield Osborn relied on more than any other, and for at least a time was his chosen successor. He had been a charter member of the Galton Society, and had replaced Charles Davenport as its chairman in 1930. In 1932 he told Madison Grant that critics of The Conquest of a Continent were “bitter partisans” who were “protesting piously” against Grant’s view of Jews. But Gregory, unlike Osborn or Grant, allowed himself to be awakened. Increasingly appalled by the plight of Jewish scientists in Germany, he was horrified as he watched the Eugenical News verge toward Nazism. Resigning from the chairmanship of the Galton Society in 1934, he told Grant that “I cannot approve of your attitude, as well as that of others in the Society, on anti-Semitism and Hittlerism [sic] in America.” He left the organization altogether the following year and named Osborn, his friend and mentor, as one of those who were “in sympathy with the Hitler government,” particularly “its anti-Jewish and pro-Aryan and eugenical” objectives.
Raymond Pearl tried to dissuade Gregory from resigning, insisting that political issues should not stand in the way of science. Gregory told a colleague, “To which the obvious answer is that I did not import the issue, I simply uncovered it.” But the uncovering was only temporary. From the 1960s at least until the last few years of the twentieth century, officials at the American Museum of Natural History conspired to hide the museum’s ugly connections to a disgraced movement. Researchers were denied access to pertinent archival materials, and when Fairfield Osborn’s papers were processed in the late 1990s, the cataloger was instructed not to use the word “eugenics” anywhere in the index to the vast collection.
The last fortress of American eugenics still standing was its birthplace, Charles Davenport’s enterprise in Cold Spring Harbor. When William Gregory turned against the Galton Society, he sent copies of his resignation letter to all of its charter members. One of these was John Merriam, the self-described “unequivocal” supporter of eugenics who was president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, still the chief backer of eugenic research in the United States through its sponsorship of the ERO. Merriam and Madison Grant were close friends and, as cofounders with Osborn of the Save-the-Redwoods League, closer colleagues. Merriam’s support for Davenport’s research had been constant, even if he at times questioned its scientific merit. Occasionally Merriam worried about the uncomfortable melding of politics and science that showed up in Harry Laughlin’s work and the “superficiality” of some of Davenport’s inquiries. In 1929 he even convened an advisory committee to monitor the ERO. But Merriam didn’t act until after Davenport’s retirement in 1934, just as the Nazis’ eugenic steamroller struck Merriam and the Carnegie board with embarrassing impact. Merriam reconstituted the 1929 committee, this time to determine the ERO’s very future.
The scholars on the committee were unanimous, both in their analysis of the ERO’s work and in their recommendations for its future. They found the office’s hundreds of thousands of eugenic records, which were the very core of its operations, to be “unsatisfactory for the study of human genetics.” The competence of those who had gathered the information (fieldworkers, college students in genetics classes, “casually interested individuals”) was at best questionable. Many of the traits the records purported to identify—such characteristics as “loyalty,” “sense of humor,” “self-respect”—were unmeasurable. Davenport and Laughlin’s treasured mountain of data, secure in its fireproof vault in Cold Spring Harbor, they declared useless.
The committee’s forward-looking recommendations were equally blunt. The Eugenics Record Office had to divorce itself “from all forms of propaganda and the urging or sponsoring of programs for social reform or race betterment such as sterilization, birth-control, inculcation of national consciousness, restriction of immigration, etc.” It needed to sever its by now nominal relationship with the Eugenical News immediately. Until the Carnegie board could come to a final determination of the ERO’s future, all the activities that had marked its quarter century of cultural, political, and scientific significance should cease. And given the word’s connotations in Nazi Germany, the term “eugenics” should be henceforth avoided.
Harry Laughlin, desperate to maintain both his job and what was left of his benighted crusade, turned to Madison Grant, urging him to intervene on his behalf with Grant’s old friend Merriam. For all his fantasies of racial purification, Grant knew he and his allies were on the run. He was willing to do what he could, he told Laughlin, but warned him that “any intervention by me might easily prejudice your case.”
The Eugenics Record Office did not meet its absolute end until 1940, after Merriam had retired and was replaced by Vannevar Bush, midway through his passage from the academy (dean of the school of engineering at MIT) to government service (presiding over the birth of the atomic bomb as head of the Manhattan Project). By then the office was under the leadership of a new director, Carnegie botanist Albert F. Blakeslee. It was also operating under a new name: the Genetics Record Office. Even the retired Davenport considered the renaming decision “entirely wise,” for the connotation of the word “eugenics,” he said—with either intentional irony or timid understatement—“has changed in the 29 years since our office was started.” Blakeslee wanted to rid the Carnegie Institution of any trace of what had come before, especially the archives of the odious Eugenical News. He offered them to the former Eugenics Research Association, now scrubbing its own ignoble history by renaming itself the Association for Research in Human Heredity. The ARHH turned him down flat. Its president believed that the News and its sponsors were “thoroughly unscientific.” He said that when “Madison Grant and others with similar views” reigned, they promoted discreditable views on race and social class. His organization wanted nothing to do with them or their work.
The ARHH president who determined to rid his organization of any connection to the eugenics movement’s past was Frederick Osborn, nephew of Fairfield. The group’s organizing meeting was suggestively convened in the office of American Museum of Natural History anthropologist Harry Shapiro. In Cold Spring Harbor the study of genetics continued, but on a path radically different from the one first marked out by Davenport and Laughlin. Unlike the Museum of Natural History, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (as it renamed itself after separating from the Carnegie Institution) hid nothing. It sponsored the publication of books revealing its eugenic past and maintained websites that delved deeply, honestly, and uncomfortably into eugenic history and the laboratory’s role in it.
The individuals who had welded together the scientific racists and the immigration restrictionists generally faded into a kind of oblivion, most of them known today only to scholars, or to twenty-first-century xenophobes longing for the old days. (Long out of copyright, The Passing of the Great Race was available in at least eight different editions in 2018, and both the book and its author were invoked with reverence on racist websites.) First to go was Frederick Osborn’s uncle Fairfield. Osborn had been nudged from his throne at the American Museum of Natural History in 1933. His imperial ways had already marked him as a relic, and his racialized eugenics had rendered him both an irritant and an embarrassment. Back in 1908, when Osborn was appointed head of the museum, Franz Boas congratulated him for “the unequalled opportunity this gives you to advance the interests of science in this country”; as the years passed and his engagement with scientific racism deepened, Osborn’s scholarly reputation was so severely damaged that University of California ethnologist Robert Lowie, who had spent two decades on the staff of the AMNH, refused to sign a seventieth-birthday tribute. Osborn’s endorsement of Madison Grant’s work, wrote Lowie, “puts him beyond the pale as a representative of science.” Osborn could dismiss Lowie’s attitude, believing that his negative view of Grant arose from a “biased spirit.” But when William Gregory resigned from the Galton Society, Osborn could not ignore it. “To err is human, to forgive divine,” he wrote to Gregory, seeking absolution. The abashed tone of his letter was as uncharacteristic as if he had been writing in Inuit. Pleading was not Osborn’s style, but he had by his own actions put himself in a place where he had no choice. “If I have ever erred in anything I have said about Germany,” he told Gregory, “I hope you will forgive me.”
Osborn continued to rattle around in the south tower of the ungainly old museum, worked on his monumental study of prehistoric elephants, and then died in his castle on the Hudson in October 1935, at seventy-eight. One front-page obituary called him “the successor to Darwin and Huxley.” The lavish three-column piece in the New York Times devoted only one sentence to immigration and one more to eugenics. But the Eugenical News got straight to the point: “As lover of his country and his race his ideals will long influence the applications of eugenics here and abroad.”
In 1971 Princeton’s Osborn Clubhouse, which had served as a semiprivate lair for the college’s athletes since its eponymous benefactor founded it in 1892, was renamed and repurposed: it became the university’s Third World Center, dedicated to “providing a social, cultural, and political environment that was responsive to issues of ethnic and racial diversity.” For a suitable memorial, twenty-first-century Osbornites would instead have to visit the Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, where the caribou once named Rangifer tarandus osborni stands in proud display—directly opposite the caribou once known as Rangifer tarandus granti. Later research determined that the two species, almost like the men they were named for, were one and the same.
Both Madison Grant and Joe Lee died in the summer of 1937. The historically resonant synchronicity of their famous surnames was a neat coincidence but in no way a representation of their relationship, for throughout the long immigration restriction wars they were always on the same side. But apart from their wealth and their determination to stop immigration from eastern and southern European countries, they had little in common. Lee once went so far as to say that relative to the typical American businessman, he was a Bolshevik. Grant blamed the detestable French Revolution for “the dogma of the brotherhood of man,” and used the term “democratic institutions” as an insult.
Although it’s not clear whether the two men ever met, they certainly knew each other by reputation. As early as 1916, Lee was aware of the potency of Grant’s zeal. Having failed to excite presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes’s interest in the perils of immigration, Lee suggested to a colleague that it was time to unleash Grant on Hughes, as if no other weapon could be as effective. Eight years later, after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, Grant praised Lee for financing the Immigration Restriction League “throughout the long period of Egyptian night.” The closest they may have come to each other physically may have been in Lee’s bedroom in the old house on Mount Vernon Street, where an inscribed copy of The Passing of the Great Race enjoyed pride of place on his bookshelf, just a few volumes away from Lee’s copy of Das Kapital.
In 1933, writing for his Harvard fiftieth reunion class report, Lee proudly acknowledged his decades of financial support for the IRL and noted the league’s legislative success. He also expressed the hope that similar restrictions would be applied to Latin America; then, once “the birth of the chocolate races has been put in low, [the] generally American brand of citizen may last for quite a while.” Four years later, eulogizing his father in a family publication, Joseph Lee Jr. commemorated his determination “to uplift the psalm of our democratic faith until the poorest immigrant . . . heard the song and found his voice in it.” His college friend Richards Bradley, who had been by his side in the IRL for more than three decades, said Lee blamed “racial prejudice,” among other dark impulses, for provoking immigration. Not long after Lee’s death, when it became clear to Bradley and others that no one was willing to replace him as the IRL’s primary benefactor, the league ceased to exist.I
Any lingering memories of Joe Lee’s key role in four decades of increasingly xenophobic lobbying and propaganda disappeared as well. The Boston papers eulogized him as if he had been the city’s most valuable citizen (which, in many ways, he was). The New York Times treated him as a national figure: in neither his lengthy obituary (JOSEPH LEE, EXPERT IN RECREATION, DIES), nor an editorial page encomium to his various good works, was immigration even mentioned.
Irony was a common mode of expression for Joe Lee, and his family provided a large helping of it after his death. In 1947 his granddaughter Margaret Colt traveled to Italy with a postwar international aid organization—exactly the sort of undertaking Joe would have endorsed. He likely would have been less sanguine about what came next, when she met and married a handsome, charming Neapolitan named Vincenzo Vicedomini. He moved to the United States with his wife, shortened his name to Enzo Domini, sent three kids to college (Boston University and Babson College, not Harvard), and from his base in gritty Danbury, Connecticut, made a success in the food importing business. The same sort of thing happened in the family of Lee’s friend and IRL comrade Richards Bradley, who did not live to see his granddaughter (Oberlin, not Radcliffe) marry an attorney named Lionel Epstein (whose parents came to the United States from Russia and Lithuania), nor to see her pass along her husband’s surname to his great-grandchildren. The irony isn’t that Lee and Bradley had been proven wrong; it’s that they were proven right. Exactly what the anti-immigration movement feared came true: a few generations of adaptation, cross-cultural fertilization, and intermarriage had taken their country away from them. They even lost their claim to the term “native American.”
The Times treated Madison Grant with nearly the same gentle, forgiving (or forgetting) tone it had afforded Lee. The headline would have thrilled him: MADISON GRANT, 71, ZOOLOGIST, IS DEAD. The obituary, as well as three other brief articles—one about his will, two about his funeral (the first previewing it, the second reporting on it)—stuck to the theme of the headline. He founded the zoo, he saved the redwoods, he “discovered many mammals while exploring the American frontier.” Any reader thrown off stride by the “zoologist” label trumpeted in the headline would likely have been equally nonplussed by one of the subheads in the piece: “Authority on Anthropology.” Deep within the detailed account of his life, one lone paragraph addressed Grant’s engagement with both the immigration restriction crusade and the eugenics movement.
The Times’ careful tiptoe around the uglier aspects of Grant’s public and private activities may not have been an accident. Unsettled by the deafening inattention paid to his last book, The Conquest of a Continent, Grant had turned in his final years toward shaping the story of his life. He asked Charles Davenport to confirm his role in the founding of the Galton Society. He lobbied hard to get an honorary degree from Yale, and Harry Laughlin initiated a futile letter-writing campaign on his behalf. He solicited an advance obituary from a particularly florid hunting companion (“We shall, like the Norsemen of old, carry him with us to the halls of Valhalla. . . . Like Ulysses of old, he wandered far, but came home to die. . . . He brought with him his mighty bow, and if you want to see where his magic arrows struck, read the Congressional Record”). One imagines he liked it.
Near the end, unable to walk or even to stand, his wanderings truly at their end, alone but for his manservants and his brother, Grant realized that he would have to forgo an event that could have brought together his paired passions—reverence for the natural world and devotion to scientific racism—in a perfect, life-defining union. In his last months he served as one of the American organizers of a three-week extravaganza in Berlin called the International Hunting Exposition, scheduled for the fall of 1937. One of his counterparts in the host country, who invited Grant to join his personal hunting party at the event, was the Reichsjagermeister, or Reich Master of the Hunt: Hitler’s reliable deputy, Hermann Göring.
Like Galton, like Laughlin, like Gould, like Prescott Hall—like many members of the eugenic chorus so concerned about the genetic future, the never married Madison Grant had no children. He consequently did not leave behind descendants who might marry Italians or Jews.
Harry Laughlin’s exit from the stage had already begun by the time he accepted his honorary degree from the Nazis. As the Carnegie Institution’s support for eugenic study evaporated in the late 1930s, he was left with nothing but his ties to men like John Trevor and the enduring prejudices they shared. Around the time he started to suffer frequent epileptic seizures—not the most convenient affliction for a eugenicist—Carnegie officials raised the question of retirement. But when Laughlin published the Trevor-financed Immigration and Conquest in 1939, calling for an absolute bar on immigration from “alien races [who] tend to resist assimilation in the United States,” he assured the end of his Carnegie affiliation. After Vannevar Bush received a copy of the book from Laughlin, with its references to “race decay,” “low-grade aliens,” and “alien race-loyalty,” he told him he couldn’t simultaneously work for the institution and play a public role in political debate, and really, Dr. Laughlin, we know how much you care for the future of our country, so how could we possibly expect you to give up that part of your life?
The Carnegie Institution sent Laughlin on his way with an accelerated pension (he was only fifty-nine), a letter of appreciation, a pair of field glasses, and a sigh of relief. A boxcar full of his papers followed him home to Kirksville. He built an ugly faux-colonial home across from the campus of the Missouri Normal School and spent the last three years of his life in his garden—and at the post office, sending out copies of Conquest by Immigration to scores of college and university libraries across the country.
On Charles Davenport’s seventy-fifth birthday, in 1940, Laughlin sent his earliest mentor greetings that evoked their sunny years together in Cold Spring Harbor. His wife, Pansy, Laughlin wrote, had always made Davenport a box of fudge for his birthday just like the one accompanying his letter, and “placed it on your desk as evidence of our regards and best wishes from the Laughlins.” By this point Davenport, too, had been pushed out by the Carnegie Institution. Though he had retired six years earlier, he had retained office space, some staff assistance, and a financial relationship that had enabled external supporters of his research to route their money through Carnegie accounts. When his time came, Davenport did not object. “The attitude of the Institution is entirely understandable,” he told the Carnegie officer who informed him that the four-decade connection was over. It is likely he did not know that more than a year earlier another Carnegie official had suggested that Davenport “should be ‘bought off’ by means of a small grant.”
But such knowledge could not have blunted Davenport’s perpetual optimism. The same birthday mail that brought Pansy Laughlin’s fudge to his home also brought other felicitations that no doubt pleased him even more. It was true that some came from racists (one said he was devoting himself solely “to working along lines that you have pointed out”). Many more, though, came from men whose respect he had somehow retained despite his embrace of a science they believed to be dangerous or bogus or both, such as Herbert Jennings and the geneticist Leslie C. Dunn, who had been the most forceful member of the advisory committee that had effectively shut down the ERO. And, meaningfully for a man who had been—and still is—accused of anti-Semitism, many came from such prominent Jewish anthropologists as Melville Herskovits and Ashley Montagu. And from a friend and colleague who had known Davenport for more than three decades, Franz Boas.II
The year before, Davenport had reflected on his life in his Harvard Class of 1889 fiftieth reunion book. “The machine that goes by my name has almost uniformly worked well and persistently,” Davenport wrote. “It has been capable of great thrills and has found especial pleasure in creating and giving the initial impulse to more or less novel undertakings that have had a train of consequences.”
“A train of consequences.” In truth, to Davenport the train that mattered was a phantom. He was expressing the truism that scientific study yields real-world impact, yet failing to acknowledge the ruinous impact of his own work. In the same month when he was trying vainly to enable the immigration of the Austrian Jewish biologist Hans Przibram (who would die five years later in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt), Davenport recounted the history of the Eugenics Record Office in a letter to Vannevar Bush. Without the example of the ERO, he said, there would have been no Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. “The work of the Record office,” he told Bush, “is, therefore, not to be measured merely by its own publications but also by the influence that it has exerted on research in the subject elsewhere.”
Even now, Davenport could not acknowledge any connection between the research conducted by Eugen Fischer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the plight of his friend Przibram, or between Ernst Rüdin’s career as a eugenicist and his rise to such stature in Germany that Hitler would honor him for his contributions to Nazi racial policies. For all his success as a biologist, Davenport was unable to see that his endless effort to explain and to promote and to exalt a eugenic view of the human species had been not only misdirected, but weaponized.
In his last years Davenport’s uncanny vigor did not falter. Some of his late work was a reversion to the sort of science he had pursued before he was kidnapped by the promises of eugenics: differences in facial features, for instance, and the mathematical analysis of growth curves. He was ubiquitous in the village of Cold Spring Harbor, serving as a volunteer air warden in the early years of World War II and founding a local whaling museum. He did stay in touch with those studying human genetics and behavior, and in 1942, two years before his death at seventy-seven, he told a colleague he looked forward to a forthcoming conference on individuality. The meeting, he believed, would provide an opportunity to address the effects of heredity versus those of environment—what Francis Galton in 1874 had called “nature and nurture.” The two factors “are intimately mingled in bringing about human differences,” Davenport wrote, and this important truth “is not generally known by the public.” He did not add that his entire life’s work had been directed toward the glorification of heredity at the expense of environment—and, worse, a version of heredity disproven, discredited, and disastrous.
Lothrop Stoddard died in 1950, eleven years after the high point of his career. That occurred when he traveled to Germany as a reporter and met with many Nazi luminaries, including Heinrich Himmler (“he laughed easily”), Eugen Fischer and his coauthor Fritz Lenz (“outstanding authorities”), and Hitler himself (“a firm handshake and a pleasant smile”). In 1945, thirteen years after Washington voters sent Albert Johnson into an unwanted retirement, the former congressman did some computations and figured that the two laws he had brought into being—the 1921 Emergency Act and the 1924 act that bore his name—had kept eighteen million Europeans from American shores; he met his end in a veterans’ hospital in 1957. Upon John Trevor’s death in 1956, John D. Rockefeller Jr. extolled—privately—“the soundness of his judgment.” Trevor’s cause did not die with him. When legislation aimed at undoing the Johnson-Reed Act was introduced in Congress nine years later, his son John B. Jr. testified against it, warning that any “conglomeration of racial and ethnic elements” would lead to “a serious cultural decline.”
* * *
ONE OTHER DEATH concludes this bleak tale of eugenics, immigration, racism, and the corrupting potential of scientific authority. In 1936 Yehoshua Rotenberg, a struggling merchant in the town of Połaniec, in southwestern Poland, wrote to his older brother, whom he had not seen since 1920. That was when Hersh Rotenberg had departed for the United States and begun his new life. Yehoshua remembered it “as if it’s been less than a year.”
In the intervening years Hersh—now Harry—became a solid citizen in Batavia, New York, near Rochester. At first he worked for a cousin in the furniture business who had preceded him to Batavia; in time he set out on his own, raised a family, and prospered. In Poland things did not proceed as well for Yehoshua. He had five children and a small business, but worried constantly about threats to the Jews of Plontch (as his town was known in Yiddish). “Anti-Semitism is growing by leaps and bounds,” he wrote to Harry in 1938. “Young Jews want to emigrate,” he said, “but unfortunately the world is completely closed to them.” He also said, “More than once, it has occurred to me that we made a mistake in not leaving.”
Harry saved his brother’s letters, and they read today like footprints left in new concrete just as it is about to dry. Specifics are vague, but the outline remains clear. Hitler hovered nearer and nearer. Across the border in Romania, Jews who had obtained Romanian citizenship just after World War I were compelled to reapply. Jewish businesses in Plontch endured a boycott. Yehoshua’s financial circumstances worsened. “It is just like the sorrows of Job,” he wrote in 1938. “Everyone wants to leave. There is nothing here.”
Though Harry’s responses are lost, his efforts on behalf of his brother’s family can be inferred from Yehoshua’s letters. He consulted lawyers. He traveled to Toronto, perhaps trying to see if it might be easier for his brother to enter Canada. He tried to enlist the support of a U.S. senator. He prepared the necessary papers indicating his ability and willingness to sponsor Yehoshua’s family financially, and sent them to Poland. Yehoshua filed the papers with the American consulate.
In April 1939, Yehoshua told Harry, “I know you are eager to know what has happened with the papers you sent. It is not a simple matter.” The U.S. consulate, he said, “is inundated.” Two months later, American officials informed him that it would take two to three years for the Rotenberg family to secure visas. There were more than 3.5 million Jews in Poland in 1939. Under the National Origins law, the 1939 quota for the entire nation allowed only 6,524 Poles, Jews and non-Jews alike, to enter the United States legally. Writing from Berlin, the American consul general, dismayed by the iron inflexibility of the system, told another official that “we can only be sympathetic and kind; in most cases little practical help can be given.” Writing from Plontch, Yehoshua Rotenberg told his brother, “America pities and sends wishes to the Jews.” He had hoped for better.
In 1941 Harry received a postcard from his brother. “May God help us and we will rejoice together. I am writing so little, because it isn’t possible to write a long letter.” That was the year the Germans arrived in Plontch. Soon the town’s Jews, and several hundred others rounded up from neighboring shtetls, were confined to a ghetto. In September 1942 the SS knocked on Yehoshua Rotenberg’s door. A witness said they took him to the bridge over the Vistula River and shot him. What became of his wife and five children is not known.
I. Its last paid operative, lobbyist James Patten, did not want for replacement clients. Appearing before a Senate committee in 1939 to oppose the measure that would have allowed twenty thousand Jewish children into the country, Patten presented himself as a representative of the Sons of America, the Patriotic Civic American Alliance, the American Citizenship Foundation, and the General Board of Patriotic Societies.
II. Boas’s regard for Davenport was such that in a will he drafted in 1924 he instructed his executors to leave all his anthropometric data in Davenport’s care. Eight years older than Davenport, Boas died in 1942 during a luncheon at the Columbia Faculty Club. Discussing race and racism with some colleagues, he collapsed in midsentence, fell over backward in his chair, and expired.