As many as 40 percent of current Americans can trace their ancestry to Ellis Island, a place that Jay Dolmage asks us to consider as a “rhetorical space.” Dolmage argues that the policies and practices at Ellis Island created new and influential ways of seeing the body and categorizing deviations. The labels of disability and race then applied to immigrant bodies still permeate contemporary culture. In this chapter, Dolmage argues that Ellis Island served as a testing ground for American eugenics and the imbrication of race, sex, and disability.
Immigrants were routinely subjected to cursory medical inspections or a “six-second physical” designed to quickly label some as “likely to become a public charge.” Having a “poor physique” meant that they would be unproductive citizens. Undesirable bodies were shaded with attributions of disability; and disabled bodies were “raced” as nonwhite, or as disqualified white. Race and disability rhetorically reinforced one another to differentiate and create a hierarchy of bodies under the gaze of immigration officials. As a focal point for Americans intent on controlling immigration and the country’s genetic makeup, Ellis Island manufactured a new rhetoric around visible differentiations of race and visibility.
From these visible differences, officials developed conclusions about interior inferiorities—whether they be moral, biological, or mental—that led to the rhetoric of feeblemindedness. Whether intentional or not, Ellis Island promoted the reading of bodies to determine all kinds of social fitness. Terms like “moron” that originated on the island permeated national discourse, allowing the nation to eventually dispatch with Ellis Island inspectors and enlist us all in enforcing exclusions. Ellis Island is remembered in triumphant narratives about becoming American, but the legacy of the island also includes countless mechanisms for oppressing Americans marked by race and disability.
I’m going to ask you to come with me on a short trip. We’ll travel to New York City, approaching from the west, over the southern tip of Manhattan and out across New York Bay to Ellis Island, the way-station for millions of new Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. During our visit to Ellis Island for this essay, I will examine what the Ellis Island experience entailed, paying attention specifically to the ways that Ellis Island policed and limited immigration in the early twentieth century, leading up to the highly restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s. This tour will concentrate on the ways that Ellis Island rhetorically constructed disability, and contingently race. Today, you can go on a tour of the grounds, and you can learn about the success stories of plucky migrants, on the cusp of freedom and opportunity. You can buy a mug and a T-shirt. But, in the past, if you were traveling to Ellis Island from the other direction, your experience of the island might have been quite different. It is estimated that 40 percent of the current American population can trace their ancestry through Ellis Island.1 More than 22 million people entered the country through this immigration station. In the years of peak immigration, from the late 1800s until the clampdown on immigration in the 1920s, you might have arrived as one of thousands of steerage passengers on an ocean liner from Europe. Were you of eastern European, southern European, African, or Jewish heritage, you would have been subject to a restrictive squeeze not unlike the cramping you felt in your boat’s close quarters as you came across the Atlantic.2 As you were processed through Ellis Island, you became part of an indelible marking, your body was interrogated, written across, and read into.
In this essay I will examine Ellis Island from a rhetorical perspective—rhetoric defined here as a framework for exploring “the relationship of discourse and power, a rhetoric…being a set of rules that privilege particular power relations” (Berlin, 12). I define rhetoric as the function and circulation of power in language, and I will use this definition to guide my inquiry here. Further, I will look at Ellis Island as what Roxanne Mountford calls a “rhetorical space.” Mountford urges us to consider “the effect of physical spaces on communicative event[s]”; the ways that “rhetorical spaces carry the residue of history upon them, but also, perhaps, something else: a physical representation of relationships and ideas” (42). She argues that space “carries with it the sediment of cultural tradition, of the social imaginary” (63). Richard Marback elaborates, claiming that a given space can be seen as a “nexus of cultural, historical, and material conditions” of oppression, and can become a “physical representation of…injustice” (8). Thus, in revisiting Ellis Island, rhetorical analysis will allow me to pay attention not just to how power structures and travels through proliferating discourses of ability, ethnicity, racialization, and citizenship, but also how this charging and circulation imbricates, and is proscribed by, the space of Ellis Island.
Richard Marback has written that any island is a “special rhetorical space” (1). Ato Quayson, in his study of Robben Island in South Africa, also argues that, in looking at this island as a space for the detention of society’s unwanted, we should “take both the totality of its history and the rhetoricity of its space seriously as points for productive cross-fertilization” (175). Robben Island housed a hospital for leprosy, a hospital for the chronically sick, a lunatic asylum, and became a sequestered colony. I will show that Ellis Island, like Robben, was a space where, in Quayson’s words, “stipulations of undesirability placed in close and volatile proximity ideas of illness, deformity, insanity, and criminality, sometimes interweaving the various terms and leaving none of them stable.” The legacy of both of these islands echoes today as “denominations of bodily difference…have been [repeatedly] incorporated into racial and other hierarchies” (176). Foucault has suggested that our epoch’s primary spatial concern has been “knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking and classification of human elements should be adopted.” This has led us to create what he calls “heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed” (1986, 25, italics added). These spaces are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (ibid.). Unlike the postmodern notion of the heterotopia as an ideal in which “nothing is left out of the grand mix,” a heterotopia of deviation divides and isolates difference, suggesting that this situation (of purifying by extraction) is ideal for the “normals” in mainstream society, yet also creating a dystopian space for the minoritized (Siebers, 32; see also Vattimo; Hetherington). Ellis Island was just such a space.
Interestingly, the word heterotopia was first used (and is still used) in a biological and pathological sense to refer to abnormal anatomy—a displacement, a missing or extra element, a tumor that appears out of place, an alien growth (see OED; Hetherington, 42). The social processing that Ellis Island engendered was all about identifying and sometimes manufacturing abnormal bodies: these elements are out of place; these bodies are disordered. Ellis Island created a physical space in which abnormality could be arrested or deposited. But it also created powerful social practices of stigmatization. A heterotopia of deviation was placed at the edge of North America, and alienation was placed upon racial groups and individuals. At Ellis Island, the categories of defect and disability that adhere today were strongly grounded if not created, as was the diagnostic gaze that allowed for the nebulous application of the stigma of disability as we know it today.3 The space of Ellis Island circumscribed certain patterns of movement and practices of visualizing the body. The product was, often, the spectacle of Otherness. And all who passed through Ellis Island also became subject to—and then possessor and executor of—a certain gaze and a certain bodily attitude. Ellis Island functioned as a heterotopic space. And not simply so—always in a tangle of definitions and as a repository of bad science and overlapping oppressions.
I will examine Ellis Island in the early twentieth century as a “special rhetorical space,” a heterotopia for the invention of new categories of deviation. And I will suggest that Ellis Island floats into every aspect of contemporary American society. As Robert Chang has argued, “The border is not just a peripheral phenomenon. …To be an immigrant is to be marked [always] by the border.” Further, “it is through its flexible operation that the border helps to construct and contain the nation and the national community” (27). Ellis Island has been rhetorically used, internalized, incorporated, embodied.
Ellis Island was designed to process the immigrant body—through an industrialized choreography, through a regime of vision, and through layers of anti-immigration discourse. Ellis Island became the key laboratory and operating theater for American eugenics, the scientific racism that can be seen to define a unique era of Western history, the effects of which can still be felt today. I will argue that Ellis Island, as a rhetorical space, can be seen as a nexus—and a special point of origin—for eugenics and the rhetorical construction of disability and race in the early twentieth century. Importantly, constructions of class, sex, and sexuality were also always part of this racializing and normalizing process.4 Race and disability are always imbricated with gender, sex, sexuality, and class. And, as Eithne Luibheid suggests, “Immigration scholarship virtually ignores the connections among heteronormativity, sexuality, and immigration” (2004, 227). It is not my intention to further this occlusion here. Indeed, the categories of “defect” used to sort bodies at Ellis Island always also referenced gender, sex, and sexuality norms, and were also always classed. But because these intersections and transsections deserve dedicated and extensive analysis, I may elide explicit discussion of the vectors of gender, sex, sexuality, and class in this essay, but not in the larger project of which this is one part. This essay lays out the foundation upon which further analysis of these constructions can develop footings.
As I begin, I will provide a legend for the key concepts of this exploration—beginning with a definition of eugenics. Charles Davenport, perhaps the eugenics movement’s greatest proponent, defined the movement as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding” (1911, 1). Disability Studies scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder define eugenics as “the hegemonic formation of exclusionary practices based on scientific formulas of deviancy” (73). And Nancy Ordover notes that in the early twentieth century “eugenics gave racism and nationalism substance by bringing to bear the rationalizing technologies of the day” (6). Looking at Ellis Island, then, allows me to recognize the development and use of these rationalizing technologies in a specific rhetorical space, as well as the discursive currents that surrounded and buttressed the island; the flow of relationships and ideas, the sediments of cultural tradition, and the social imaginary swirling around Ellis Island between 1890 and 1925. Ellis Island was a genetic experiment. This genetic experiment has, in many ways, created the frame for how we now see both race and disability.
Building on my definitions of rhetoric and rhetorical space, the idea of the “rhetorical construction” of disability develops out of the social and the postmodern models of disability, both put forward in the field of disability studies—I’ll define these ideas next. The social model of disability posits that disability is purely social, an oppression stacked upon people on top of their impairments, which are real. The view is that, as Michael Oliver writes, “Disablement is nothing to do with the body, impairment is nothing less than a description of the body” (34). Adrienne Asch qualifies that, “saying that disability is socially constructed does not imply that the characteristics are not real or do not have describable effects on physiological or cognitive functions that persist in many environments” (18). Bodies and spaces are undeniably material, yet they are also undeniably rhetorical. The point is to draw attention to the fictive and oppressive cultural meanings of disability, without diminishing the lived experience of disability. Yet so-called postmodern disability studies contradicts this social model by suggesting that the strict separation of impairment and disability is a chimera (see Tremain). Judith Butler’s definition of a “partial” social construction of the body, from her introduction to Bodies That Matter, nicely distills this idea: “To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body” (5). Following this, I suggest that we can see the “formation” of disability as being both material and rhetorical—characterized in vital ways by my definition of rhetoric as the “circulation and function of power in language.” To see bodies as rhetorically constructed rather than socially constructed is to focus more closely on the power dynamics of the process of construction itself, rather than on its products, however transient. In the history and the geography that I chart, we will see how rhetorically invested the creation of disability has been—shaped by material spaces and corporeal experiences, and also by languages and grammars. This move to see disability rhetorically justifies a focus on the architectures and discourses surrounding bodies. A rhetorical perspective suggests that these spaces and discourses must be seen as formed by bodies and as, in part, forming bodies. I refer to rhetoric here and throughout the essay in a capacious sense—not as the duplicitous or obscurant art that we often see rhetoric as, but as the investigation of how meaning is made and negotiated, focusing not on reified products and transcendent truths, but on the power dynamics involved in the effort to make meaning. This rhetorical perspective disallows the canonization of any one definition of disability, yet allows me to challenge the accrued negative meanings as well as the social structures that have circumscribed the experience of disability. Finally, this rhetorical method asks each of us to examine critically the spaces and discourses that shape any body.
As I hope to show, this rhetorical perspective then also interacts with a critical perspective on race—allowing me to examine the ways that race is (at least partially) constructed through spaces and discourses. To say that race and disability are rhetorically constructed, importantly, is not to deny either concept materially or ontologically—but rather to bring into focus their shifting cultural meanings. Further, in aligning race and disability in this analysis, I am seeking to understand their rhetorical connections, not to conflate or compare, and never to deny the particularity and complexity of either race or disability. Yet these constructions of race and disability overlap, I will show, throughout the history of American eugenics. Their entwined narrative is best examined, I will also show, through the structures, practices, bodies, and discourses that make Ellis Island such a compelling rhetorical space.
Cursory medical inspections most strongly characterized the experience of Ellis Island for the arriving alien. In the years of peak immigration, as immigrants landed at Ellis Island they were almost immediately paraded up a set of steep stairs, some immigrants still carrying all of their possessions in their arms, afraid to leave them unattended in the baggage room. Here the inspection began. Immigration agents positioned themselves so that they could view individual bodies from several angles, and so that they could pick out deficient bodies as they labored up the stairs and into the registry room. As Victor Safford, a medical doctor and officer at Ellis Island in this peak period, wrote in his memoir, “A man’s posture, a movement of his head or the appearance of his ears…may disclose more than could be detected by puttering around a man’s chest with a stethoscope for a week, [thus] an attempt was made to utilize this general scheme” at Ellis Island (247). The “scheme” allowed for views of each immigrant “systematically both in rest and in motion at a distance of about twenty or twenty-five feet”; carrying his or her bags, hopefully, because “carrying baggage makes lameness from any cause more noticeable”; and creating a situation wherein each immigrant “while under inspection [would] make two right hand turns” to help “to bring out imperfections in muscular coordination” (Safford, 247–49). Officers would also stamp cards, and then hand the cards to immigrants. Because the immigrant was curious about what the stamp said, this was an opportunity for further inspection: “The way he held [the card] showed if his vision was defective” (Safford, 247–49).
The inspection process, facilitated by the space of the Ellis Island immigration station, looked like the choreographic and architectural brainchild of Jeremy Bentham and Henry Ford—a panopticon and an assembly line.5 Indeed, Safford used the automobile metaphor at great length in describing Ellis Island inspections, and justifying the use and the efficacy of the glancing appraisal employed by inspectors to recognize defective bodies, what Emmanuelle Birn calls “snapshot diagnosis” (281). Safford wrote that “it is no more difficult a task to detect poorly built or broken down human beings than to recognize a cheap or defective automobile” (244). This metaphor both equates the functioning of the body to that of the machine, as it argues for the efficiency of the assembly line: “One can see on glancing at an automobile at rest that the paint is damaged or a headlight broken…[likewise] defects, derangements, and symptoms of disease which would not be disclosed by a so-called ‘careful physical examination’ are often easily recognizable watching a person twenty-five feet away” and in action (Safford, 245). Thus only cursory physical examinations—known as the six-second physical—were imposed upon newly-arriving immigrants, and the agents were trained to notice, immediately, inferior stock. These practices effectively “turned entry into the U.S. into a passage partially defined by a medical vocabulary and pathology of health” (Markel and Minna-Stern, 1315).6 This medical lexicon was repeatedly imprinted upon the immigrant, and this printing was done hastily, efficiently, mechanically.
In the beginning at Ellis Island, pre-w1900, there were few categories of physical (and perceived mental) defect that would warrant marking aliens out for further inspection and possible rejection. The first capacious terminology was the category of “LPC” or “likely to become a public charge,” introduced in 1891. Inspectors could use their judgment to determine whether an immigrant looked like he or she could work for a living. William Williams, the Ellis Island commissioner at the time, wrote in his annual report that he hoped that this category would allow inspectors to weed out the “worst” immigrants (n.p). Yet by 1904, the commissioner was suggesting that the LPC terminology be expanded, as it was difficult to prove that someone would become a public charge, particularly once individual cases made it to boards of inquiry on the island, and family members, church representatives, or others were willing to vouch for immigrants. This shows that perhaps the calculus of exclusion was never purely economic, as the LPC label might suggest—there needed to be other ways to exclude the genetically “threatening.” And in this period, we begin to see the ways that eugenic ideas of bodily “fitness” begin to structure the rhetoric of Ellis administrators. In 1904, Commissioner Williams called for the use of categories for exclusion such as “poor physique” or “low vitality,” with one’s appearance itself warranting rejection, without having to be mediated through an overt economic consideration. A body with a “poor physique” was defined as “ill proportioned, with defective circulatory system and poorly developed relaxed muscular system and flabby muscles…frail…a slender build, whose physical proportions with respect to chest and weight fall below the minimum requirements of the naval service, who are deficient in muscular development” (“Definitions of Various Terms”). In 1905, F. P. Sargent, commissioner general of the Bureau of Immigration, notified inspection officers and boards of special inquiry that
“poor physique” means afflicted with a body but illy adapted not only to the work necessary to earn his bread, but is also poorly able to withstand the onslaught of disease…undersized, poorly developed…physically degenerate, and as such not likely to become a desirable citizen, but also very likely to transmit his undesirable qualities to his offspring. … Of all causes for rejection, outside of dangerous, loathsome, or contagious diseases, or for mental disease, that of “poor physique” should receive the most weight, for, in admitting such aliens, not only do we increase the number of public charges by their inability to gain their bread…but we admit likewise progenitors to this country whose offspring will reproduce, often in an exaggerated degree, the physical degeneracy of their parents.
(n.p.)
This type of starkly eugenic language came to characterize much of Ellis Island policy. And, clearly, very little about these definitions could be reliably sensed, visually. Yet this was no impediment to their implementation.
The classification of “poor physique” would expand when, in 1907, the category of “feebleminded” was also officially adopted. Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna-Stern show that “poor physique” became a “favorite wastebasket” label of nativist groups, and was highly diagnosed during inspections in the 1910s (1319). They also reveal “the fluid nature of exclusionary labels themselves. If one label failed to work in rejecting the most objectionable, a new one was soon created, whether of contagion, mental disorder, chronic disability, or physique” (1327). The category of the “feebleminded” soon became the new wastebasket. As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder show, “‘feeblemindedness’ became the primary category that allowed eugenics to consolidate a host of defective types under a shared heading” (79). Importantly, as Anna Stubblefield has shown, “White elites deployed the concept of feeble-mindedness to link the different versions of white impurity” (163). As well, the insinuation of mental disability was conflated with a semiotics of exterior markers. In the heterotopia of deviation created at Ellis Island, undesirable bodies were shaded with attributions of disability; and disabled bodies were “raced” as nonwhite, or as disqualified whites.
Further aiding in the flexible application of stigma, as Safford’s description suggests, these cursory inspections were largely a matter of intuition, a kind of magical medical view—in his words, “From long experience physicians sometimes acquire[d] a most remarkable intuitive power” (245). As Samuel Grubbs wrote, recalling his work as an officer, “I wanted to acquire this magical intuition but found there were few rules. Even the keenist [sic] of these medical detectives did not know just why they suspected at a glance a handicap which later might require a week to prove” (quoted in Fairchild, 91). Regardless of the provenance of the process, suspect bodies were identified and sorted out from the stream of immigrants; these individuals were marked with chalk codes, letters written on the lapels of their jackets, inscrutable to those immigrants who had been inscribed.7 Thelma Matje, an immigrant who arrived in August 1912, wrote of her experience that, “on disembarking upon our arrival at Ellis Island we were herded through the portals of this haven for the lost and destitute souls and tagged with more labels on our clothing than a pedigreed dog” (n.p.).
The marked were removed for further mental and physical examination. I won’t look in great detail at the further testing and examination that took place beyond the initial inspection here. Instead, I’ll suggest that, though line officers could not deport immigrants, their inspections and markings had an indelible rhetorical effect. This effect reached three distinct audiences:
Those immigrants who were not marked, and yet learned something about the danger of difference, gained a self-consciousness of their own possible defects, and were empowered and encouraged to diagnose others.
Those who were marked and were thus in danger of rejection.
The medical doctors themselves, who would later inspect the immigrants in greater detail.8
As Safford writes, the cursory inspection processes may actually have had greater power than the detailed inspections that followed upon detainment. For instance, he suggests that “if after taking into an examination room a person regarding whom suspicion has been aroused” due to the snapshot diagnosis “appears normal,” then “the medical officer knows the passenger should not be released without looking further” (248). Without alleging that defect was manufactured by this process, clearly Safford and other officers strongly believed in the power of the medical glance. And the power of the glance was transferred to every immigrant who passed through this space.
Ellis Island, then, can be seen as a rhetorical space in which Foucault’s history of “punishment” reaches a sort of climax. Ellis Island both provided a classical “spectacle”—the body publicly inscribed—and it inculcated new forms of self- and other-surveillance (see Discipline and Punish, 32–69).9 The alien body could be publicly stigmatized and displayed, or removed to the back rooms at Ellis Island for further medical inspection, or passed along, yet always formatively imbued with the spirit of the investigation and the power of the gaze. Each of these acts carried significant rhetorical power, structuring the “heterotopia of deviation.” Foucault wrote that the classical use of the spectacle to discipline and punish was “a manifestation of the strongest power over the body” of the condemned, whose punishment “made the crime explode into its truth.” Yet he suggests that through modernity, “the ideal point of penality would [evolve to become] an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation” (1979, 227). While Ellis Island centered many spectacles, it also diffused innumerable investigations and unlimited surveillance into the nation.10
As Terry and Urla write, “The scopic regimes associated with looking for semantic markings of deviance position the expert simultaneously as objective scientist, informed interpreter, and voyeur” (11).11 This might describe the role of the Ellis Island line inspector. When other immigrants also became privy to this gaze, they were granted the same diagnostic power, and this access to Other bodies, combined with access to these mechanisms of Othering, was a formative American experience. Through this processing and marking, and through the possibility of detainment, Ellis Island made a spectacle of inspection and exclusion, made the focus on defect the initiation rite for hopeful immigrants.12 When H. G. Wells visited Ellis Island in 1906, he commented on the “wholesale and multitudinous quality of that place and its work” (43). He left with an overwhelming impression that Ellis Island was a “dirty spectacle of hopeless failure” (44). His impressions summarize the ways that Ellis Island manufactured and focused an exclusionary gaze. And his feelings perhaps understate the general impression of the immigrant, as Wells was just a visitor, and a welcome visitor at that.13 Of course, the dominant cultural memory of Ellis Island celebrates the process as a rite of passage, arrival as celebratory. I am arguing against this whitewashed narrative in this essay, even as I would acknowledge that hope and triumph also always circulated in this space—as did subversion. For all of the interpellative power of this gaze, one would expect that there was also resistance to its power.
Throughout history, as Aristide Zolberg shows, American immigration policy has always had a double logic: “boldly inclusive” and “brutally exclusive” (2006a, 432). He argues that the United States has never been laissez-faire about immigration (2). That is, immigration has always been a matter of keen public and political concern—as the public has shaped immigration, so has it shaped the public. Yet, starting in the late 1800s, the stakes were raised. Immigration debates became a rhetorical arena through which one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas of our civilization took form: eugenics. The Immigration Restriction League (IRL) began in 1894, and was to have a remarkable influence on the political, intellectual, and business leadership of the country, and on the U.S. public. The immigrant was reframed as a menace, as a possible strain on resources, and as an undesirable undercurrent in the national gene pool. Eugenics, the “science” of positively advocating for particular forms of human regeneration, coupled with the negative restriction of the propagation of certain classes and ethnicities, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, was the modus operandi of North American national health and immigration policy. Eugenics was “anointed guardian of national health and character,” as Nancy Ordover has shown, “constructing immigrants as both contaminated and contaminators” (xiv). IRL cofounder Prescott F. Hall, in his article “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics,” wrote at the time that “immigration restriction is a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both diluting and supplanting good stocks. … The superior races, more self-limiting than the others, with the benefits of more space and nourishment will tend to still higher levels” (126). Robert De Courcey Ward, another cofounder (with Hall) of the IRL, wrote at the time of the ways that America would map out its eugenic future: “A policy of national eugenics, for the United States as for every other nation, means the prevention of the breeding of the unfit native. For us it means, in addition, the prevention of the immigration of the unfit alien” (1912, 38). Ellis Island was a key reference point for this new mapping of America.
The rhetoric employed by the IRL and other proponents of eugenics held that certain races and ethnicities were characterized by embodied deviance. Such uses of disability as a mode of derogation grafted onto Other bodies might be seen as one of the primary corporeal grammars available to us. Douglas Baynton has shown that “the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them” (33).14 The disabled body becomes a loose, flexible, and magnetic symbol easily layered over insinuations of deficiency of all colors, shapes, and locations. In this negative sense, disability functions rhetorically. Eugenic rhetoric, seeking to identify inferior genes, necessarily constructed deviant phenotypes, creating investigatory techniques, a visual shorthand for identifying and marking out undesirable elements. At Ellis Island, through the inspection process, a medical and a penological gaze were incorporated, in the service of both identifying some bodies for detention and rejection, and in the process, through a logic of negation, constructing the U.S. citizen. As Matthew Frye-Jacobson shows, for anyone who arrived at Ellis Island before 1924, “Race was the prevailing idiom for discussing citizenship and the relative merits of a given people” (9). Within this racial idiom, disability was the accent applied to differentiate and hierarchize. Race and disability rhetorically reinforced each other and worked together to stigmatize. Markel and Minna Stern summarize this propensity: “In an era in which differences of skin color and physical characteristics were becoming increasingly medicalized, it is not surprising that exclusionary labels of disease and disability became an essential aspect” of immigration restriction (1328). Frye-Jacobson adds that the categories of the physically and mentally defective were created and used in service of racism, as a means of darkening a group of ethnic others with the stigma of disability. Frye-Jacobson writes that the “scientific probabilities for such conditions [of mental and physical defect] were themselves determined by a calculus of race” (69). The use of disability as a darkening mark applied to the singular body of an arriving immigrant later allowed for the accent of disability to be applied to entire (designated) racial groups. The probability of exclusion was determined by an exponential interaction of race and disability. As Anna Stubblefield has shown, “[disability and] ability [were] constructed as the touchstone in a way that linked race to class and gender and created the tangled mess that we are still untangling today” (179).
Racialized immigration restriction officially began with the Page Law of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, through which the nation effectively halted Chinese immigration. From this point on, restriction tightened as quickly as the immigration machine itself expanded. Roger Daniels argues that, although Chinese exclusion is often seen as a small matter, affecting only Chinese Americans, it is “now apparent that [this exclusion] became the pivot upon which all American immigration policy turned, the hinge upon which the ‘golden door’ of immigration began its swing towards a nearly closed position” (Daniels and Graham, 8). This exclusion also characterizes the enduring fusion of racism and attributions of disability. The February 28, 1877, “Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration” to the U.S. Congress found that “there is not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese to furnish motive power for self-government. …Upon the point of morals, there is no Aryan or European who is not far superior” (159). This synthesis of race classification and attributions of inferiority would set a powerful precedent for future prejudice, prejudice that would become medicalized, industrialized, and bureaucratized through Ellis Island.15 Between 1891 and 1906, the immigration bureaucracy in the United States grew by 4200 percent (Daniels and Graham, 15).16 This explosion would be matched by an unprecedented “production of racial knowledge” (Ngai, 7). As this knowledge grew, its flaws would also multiply, as racial knowledge tangled with emerging eugenic ideas about bodily fitness, confusion between race, ethnicity, and nationality, and the bad science that Ellis Island allowed.
A major aspect of this proliferation of flawed racial knowledge was the Dillingham Immigration Commission’s “Dictionary of Races or Peoples.” The atmosphere of eugenic panic in the United States in this period led to the creation of this special commission, made up of eugenics proponents such as Henry Cabot Lodge, to investigate immigration. The commission presented this famous (and huge) document as part of an even larger report to Congress in 1911. The goal of the “Dictionary” was to classify races, and it did so according to physical and linguistic difference from the Caucasian norm. The “Dictionary” presented as part of the 1911 Dillingham Report relied on “ethnical factors” and “racial classification” to identify immigrant groups, signaling a shift from the old system of classification based on country of birth or nativity. The commission focused on color (white, black, yellow, red, and brown); on head measurements; and on not just language but also perceptions of literacy. This “Dictionary” both borrowed from and slightly evolved from the key preceding ethnological text, William Z. Ripley’s 1899 The Races of Europe, which divided Europe into Alpines, Nordics, and Mediterraneans, basing these divisions on physiognomy, somatotype, and skin color, as well as social and cultural distinctions, and rooting all divergence in heredity. The key innovation of the “Dictionary” was its subcategorization: moving beyond the five primary colors of ethnology to create hierarchies within ethnic groups.
The “Dictionary” was built out of an informal “list of races or peoples” that Ellis Island officials had been keeping for years, and using to compile a crude count of immigrants for statistical purposes (Weil, 370). But the “Dictionary” signals a shift in that it makes a concerted effort to create divisions that might be useful beyond counting and broadly classifying newcomers—the text repeatedly strives for further divisions and discriminations. For instance, under the entry for “Negro, Negroid, African, Black, Ethiopian or Austafrican,” the “Dictionary” begins by describing “that grand division of mankind distinguished by its black color” (100). The document’s authors concede that “in a simple classification for immigration purposes it is preferable to include all of the above under the term ‘Negroes.’ They are alike in inhabiting hot countries and in belonging to the lowest division of mankind from an evolutionary standpoint” (ibid.). Yet the “Dictionary” offers ever more qualified and subtle categorizations when considering the “bewildering confusion in terms used to indicate the different mixture of white and dark races” (101). As a huge group of Others, “Negroes” seemingly required minimal taxonomy. Yet when the challenge was to differentiate within many shades of black and white, the project of generating “racial knowledge” gained momentum—at stake was exposure to the “lowest division of mankind,” from a eugenic perspective. As Thomas Guglielmo, David Theo Goldberg, Anna Stubblefield, Matthew Frye-Jacobson, Jennifer Guglielmo, and others have shown, this “new” racial “knowledge” manufactured shades of nonwhiteness, using darkness to symbolize genetic inferiority and using the implication of genetic inferiority to rescind whiteness. A result was that “black color” and “dark races” came to be loaded rhetorical terms and tools, facilitated in their usage by eugenic constructions of disability.
As Patrick Weil has argued, the “Dictionary” was used primarily “for the purpose of demonstrating the inferior capacity of certain races and peoples, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe” and Africa. Notably, the influence of the document “on the future course of immigration policy was enormous” (373). Just as the bureaucracy of immigration was multiplying, so too were the powers given to immigration officials to differentiate between individuals. There were now many more ways to be racially abnormal.
Roger Daniels shows that the Dillingham Report “popularized, if it did not invent, the category of ‘old’ and ‘new’ immigrants” with new immigrants being “both different from and inferior to” old (pre-1880) immigrants (1997, 62). And Foucault suggested that the proliferation of categorization that the “Dictionary” engendered also typifies a “new racism”: “a racism against the abnormal, against individuals who, as carriers of stigmata, or any defect whatsoever” allows them to be detected and seen as a danger. This, in his words, “is an internal racism that permits the screening of every individual within a given society” (1999, 317). This “new” racism always interacts with the “old” racism of identifying differences between larger ethnic groups. As Martin Pernick points out, there are historical bases for this shift—movements more gradual and diffuse than Foucault suggests, yet still recognizable. Pernick writes that early twentieth-century eugenic rhetoric helped to convert ethnicity into race—linking race to the idea of “heredity as immutable” (56). For instance, people of the Jewish religion from varying backgrounds and geographies became Jews; then they also became, as Ellis Island doctor J. G. Wilson wrote in 1908, “a highly inbred and psychopathically inclined race,” whose defects are “almost entirely due to heredity” (493). Jewish ethnicity may have been characterized by the religious and cultural habits that made a “people” unique. The Jewish “race” would be classified by genetic characteristics that mark a group as defective. Race became a “project in which human bodies and social structures [were] represented and organized” (Chang, 29). This was both a project (noun) in that it was the result of concerted and organized rhetorical action on the part of groups like the IRL, and it was a projection of the nation’s fear of difference onto the bodies of immigrants.17 Robert Chang suggests that immigrants became racialized as they entered Ellis Island. Chang calls this new racism “nativistic racism” because racism and nativism became “mutually constitutive” (30).18 Ellis Island was a key part of this process, conveniently extracting (or manufacturing) from the stream of newcomers a range of dark, disabled, sexually ambiguous others who, when marked out, allowed a white, Western European, heteronormative, normal, able (and wholly fictional) American body to rise out of the negative space. The “new racism” at Ellis Island gave this process prominent grammars of race and ethnicity, with the accent of defect and disability. Foucault argued that these two types of racism—old and new—were most fully “grafted” by Nazism. Yet Ellis Island was perhaps the place where these forces were first successfully grafted and used. Of course, immigrants carried race and racisms across the Atlantic with them, and disability was not created immediately or solely upon their arrival; but the Ellis Island rhetorical space was constitutive of both race and disability in important (though never monolithic) ways.
As Foucault has noted, medicine constructs bodies by “limiting and filtering” what we see through classification systems, and then transcribing difference into language (1973, 135). This might proceed according to what Foucault called “the nomination of the visible,” wherein the definition and coherence of difference is located in the skin and skull (132). Recall the inspection process itself. But also recall that the language used to attribute defectiveness to Chinese immigrants referred to brain capacity, based on skull measurements.19 The situated practices of Ellis Island were enabled by texts like the “Dictionary,” just as the situated practices of Ellis Island provided the pseudoscientific basis for such texts to be created—rhetorical discourse and rhetorical space were mutually constitutive. Ellis Island manufactured both newly nominal and newly visible difference. The island, as a “heterotopia of deviation” and as a “special rhetorical space,” processed the aforementioned “new racism.” In this new cartography, Ellis Island functioned to filter and remap the bodies of immigrants.20 To figure out who was American, one had to scientifically create, locate, mark, and showcase the expulsion of he and she who were not.21 Thus Ellis Island, as a rhetorical space, was a conduit or centrifuge through which race and defect could be redefined. Ellis Island offered a page—not a blank page, but an available surface—upon which racial Others could be newly mapped, always located offshore from an American ideal.22
Kevin Hetherington writes of heterotopias that “they exist only in relation” (43). A heterotopia is established based upon its opposition to other sites, not based on an Otherness derived solely from itself. Ellis Island perfectly exemplifies this relation—its rhetorical purpose was always to establish the normalcy of the American mainland, the white mainstream. Looked at in and of itself, Ellis was just an island. But viewed from a foothold in North America—then, and now—it is something much different, something capable of setting terms through which difference is established and mandated.
When, in 1907, the term “feebleminded” was adopted as a class for exclusion at Ellis Island, eugenicists and immigration restrictionists found a broad brush for the application of derogation and the attribution of deviance. Feeblemindedness was classified as “an awkward mentality which is beyond much hope of improvement. …Appearance, stigmata, and physical signs may confirm such diagnosis” (Knox 1914, 80). This term had been used in America since the 1850s, when state asylums emerged. Anyone deemed unproductive or otherwise “backward” could be excluded from society and housed in these asylums or “idiot schools” (Kline, 15). Then, as at Ellis Island, the term “feebleminded” was useful for its flexibility. The term took on greater meaning in the early twentieth century, when it was charged with eugenic rhetoric. Undesirable people were now not just to be kept out of sight—they needed to be kept out of the genetic pool as well. “Feeblemindedness” was often interpreted as a purely statistical—and use fully tautological—category. The Eugenical News, in 1916, stated that the lowest 3 percent of the community at large “determined by definitely standardized mental tests, are to be called feeble-minded” (39). The authors admitted that “objections may be urged against such a standard based on the “community at large,” which would differ from area to area and time to time. But “incidentally, the new method solves the problem of estimating the proportion of feeble-minded in the population. It is three per cent by definition” (ibid.). Of course, this is perhaps the strongest evidence of the bad science of eugenics, as it is also clear evidence of the subjective nature of this eugenic project: the goal was not to diagnose clearly and scientifically or to understand feeblemindedness, it was to exclude a certain quotient of the population.23
Howard Knox, arguably the most powerful man at Ellis Island and the number-one surgeon at Ellis Island from 1912 to 1916, in the textbook he created for his officers on the mental testing of aliens, wrote that “fortunately the term ‘feeble-mindedness’ is regarded by most alienists as a sort of waste basket for many forms and degrees of weak-mindedness, and since it is incorporated in the law as a mandatorially [sic] excludable defect, it is especially suited to the needs of the examiners who for the sake of conservatism and certain fairness include many imbeciles under the term” (1914, 125). Knox’s motivations of course were always eugenic: “Fortunately,” he wrote, “the laws are such that feebleminded aliens may be certified and deported before they have had an opportunity to contaminate the blood of the nation or to commit any crime” (122).
Ellis Island, and eugenics writ large, projected suggestions of interior (mental, moral, biological) inferiority onto the surface of the body and into gesture and bearing.24 Officers (and then every immigrant) became well versed in this symbology—this rhetoric. Howard Knox wrote that “in the higher and more refined grades of deficiency, the most important element in the diagnosis is the ‘human test’ or the ability of one human being to take the mental measurement of another by conversing and associating with him. This intuitive ability can be very highly developed in persons of a strong and pleasing personality and good physique” (1914, 127).25 The better looking you are, the better you will be able to pick out inferiors. The conflation of perceived mental or physical disability with differences of ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality gels in the development of each of these snapshot glances, and also frames how we look at ourselves and one another. Whether or not this outcome was desired, Ellis Island helped to strengthen or validate this propensity for body-reading in everyone.26 This “human test” became a form of interpellation at Ellis Island—the idea that one can size up a “defective” is one of the most pervasive social attitudes about disability. Knox even developed a visual manual for Ellis Island inspectors, showing the supposed facial characteristics of different forms of feeblemindedness.
When Ellis Island surgeon E. H. Mullan later wrote about the mental inspection process for Public Health Reports, he emphasized the ways that the mental and the physical overlapped, and the ways that “feeble-mindedness” might be a way to enforce racial typing and exclusion as well.27 Mullan wrote that “the physical details in the medical inspection of immigrants have been dwelt on at some length, and necessarily so, because a sizing up of the mentality is not complete without considering them. Speech, pupil symptoms, goiters, palsies, atrophies, scars, skin lesions, gaits, and other physical signs, all have their meaning in mental medicine. …Knowledge of racial characteristics in physique, costume and behavior are important in this primary sifting process” (733). Mullan went on to echo Knox, and reinforce the idea that any good American should be able to co-identify racial, mental, and physical deficiency, suggesting that “experience enables the inspecting officer to tell at a glance the race of an alien. …Those who have inspected immigrants know that almost every race has its own type of reaction during the line inspection. On the line if an Englishman reacts to questions in the manner of an Irishman, his lack of mental balance would be suspected. The converse is also true. If the Italian responded to questions as the Russian Finn responds, the former would in all probability be suffering with a depressive psychosis” (ibid.). Clearly, those who trespassed racial categories and stereotypes could be quickly and easily disciplined. The ability to view racial trespass as deficiency was meant to be made innate within the American citizen. This mandate interacted with a very active rhetorical push to identify and stigmatize racial trespass within the country, closely policing the color line through antimiscegenation laws, for instance, and attributing a perceived wayward genetic stream within the country to mixed blood.
The invention of the term “moron” then became another important move for immigration restriction. This term was invented by Henry Goddard in 1910, and the classification was key to research he performed on immigrants at Ellis Island beginning in 1913—the term should be seen as, in part, a product of this rhetorical space.28 As Anna Stubblefield has argued, Goddard’s invention of this term as a “signifier of tainted whiteness” was the “most important contribution to the concept of feeble-mindedness as a signifier of a racial taint,” through the diagnosis of the menace of alien races, but also as a way to divide out the impure elements of the white race (173, 162). The moron was seen as, in the words of Goddard’s contemporary, Margaret Sanger, “the mental defective who is glib and plausible, bright looking and attractive.” This person “may not merely lower the whole level of intelligence in a school or in a society, but may … increase and multiply until he dominates and gives the prevailing ‘color’—culturally speaking—to an entire community” (210). The “moron,” designated as a high-functioning feebleminded individual, yet capable of “passing” as normal, being attractive to normals, highly sexualized and thus an even greater menace to the gene pool, was a threat that created the need for greater diligence and surveillance, and inspection and worry, in the whole population and on the borders. This desire to detect, detain, and deport the confusing border creatures, and thus somehow protect the supposedly clear delineation of an untainted norm, was achieved through linguistic and symbolic finesse. “Feeblemindedness” became a useful categorical wastebasket. The “moron” upped the stakes.
Feeblemindedness and the classification “moron,” as wastebasket terms, incorporated many biases into bodily signs. As June Dwyer has written of immigration law in this period, despite the specificity of the catalogue of restrictions that each new law introduced, “generalizing phrases” such as feeblemindedness, “moral turpitude,” and “psychopathic inferiority” “were easily read as catch-all terms and invited blanket condemnation.” “It was quite easy, for those who were so inclined, to elide…specific restrictions into manifestations of a root condition: the mental and physical inferiority of the immigrant body” (3). That is, the flexibility of terms allowed any noticeably foreign body to be made inferior.
Importantly, while the location of defect in the face of the immigrant was still the dominant visual trope of immigration restriction, the moron needed to be less detectable to be more menacing. As Goddard wrote, what “we are struggling very hard to overcome in the popular mind…is the idea that these defective children [‘morons’] show their defect in their faces. The real fact…is that the most dangerous children in a community are those that look entirely normal” (2). By creating a category of “defective” that eludes visual investigation, the inspection process could reach further into the bodies of immigrants, and the sweep of exclusion could be even further extended. This move also allowed for a further combination of the disciplining power of the spectacle, and the disciplining power of diffuse surveillance. The invention of the “moron,” while originating in the special rhetorical space of Ellis Island, had the power to float into the consciousness of the nation. In this way, this microhistory shows clearly how the disciplinary shift from spectacle to surveillance also results in a proliferation of discourses, architectures, and choreographies, the tangle of which is best investigated rhetorically. As I will show in the following, final section, the discourses of power and surveillance engendered by the invention of terms like “moron” allowed the nation eventually to dispatch with Ellis Island inspectors altogether, and enlist us all in enforcing exclusions.
As Francis Galton wrote in his 1909 Essays in Eugenics, “The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study. Then let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly foresee” (43). The spectacle of the denial or detainment of aliens at Ellis Island, and the inculcated, incorporated practices of Other-assessment, of marking the alien as defective and the assumedly defective as alien, allowed eugenics to march from Ellis Island into the heart of the nation, and indeed to lead to unprecedented practical applications. Interestingly, as eugenic sentiment flowered, as the national immigration bureaucracy grew by 4200 percent, as the classifications within and between races multiplied, Ellis Island itself was also growing physically. Originally it had an area of 3.3 acres. In 1892, it was expanded to 11.07 acres; in 1896, 14.2; in 1898, 15.52; in 1906, 20.27; in 1924, 24.37; it now has an area of 27.5 acres (Moreno, 127). Ellis Island expanded geographically as it expanded ideologically and, conversely, constricted access to the American frontier just a few miles away. Garbage and landfill from New York was added to the island to increase its size, as was soil from the construction of the new New York subway system. The garbage metaphor seems almost too apt: not just because many saw immigrants as the waste of other countries, but because the rhetorical growth of pseudosciences and racisms were matched by a physical growth that was equally odorous.29 Another irony: this island, the end of the line for the immigrant, a cul-de-sac for many, was also built out of the dirt that was cleared away to make mass subway transit possible in New York City.
In 1921, President Warren G. Harding passed the first immigration quota law, the Johnson-Reed Act, intended to be temporary. This law limited immigration numerically by nation. When such quotas were first proposed in 1919, census data for 1910 were used to set thresholds—immigration was then capped at 3 percent of the total of any nation’s residents in the United States, according to this census. In effect, the immigration service was able to turn back the clock, to arrest the growth of the country and to call time-out, hearkening back to the years before the waves of southern and eastern Europeans and Jews began to arrive in large numbers. The quota law adopted in 1921 went back even further, using the 1890 census numbers (with the cap again at 3 percent), essentially rewinding 30 years of American immigration, in an attempt to reverse the melting of certain races into the American pot.30 The 1921 quota law was so restrictive that Italians reached their monthly quota the second day after it passed, and thousands more Italians were stranded at Ellis Island or in ships in New York harbor waiting for the next month’s allotment.31 The final quota law, the National Origins Act, was passed in 1924. The “per centum” number was lowered to 2 percent, and again based on the 1890 census. As eugenics proponent Charles Davenport stated in a lecture on American Immigration Policy, the 1924 act “now added the eugenic principle in selection and new legislation was enacted which was directed toward retaining in our population a prevalence of that high quality which it had from the beginning” (2). Essentially, any group tainted by the possibility of genetic inferiority was to be excluded.32
With President Harding’s passage of this National Origins Act in 1924, the door essentially shut. As Roger Daniels wrote, with this act, Congress “wrote the assumptions of the Immigration Restriction League and other nativist [and eugenicist] groups into the statute book of the United States” (2004, 55). The eugenic message was clear. Prescott Hall, writing on behalf of the IRL in 1920, simply stated that America must “exclude the black, the brown, and the yellow altogether. As to the white, favor the immigration of Nordic and nordicized stock.” “We need to become and to remain a strong, self-reliant, united country, with the only unity that counts, viz, that of race” (1920–21, 6). And this is essentially what the Johnson-Reed Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924 did. These developments were celebrated by eugenicists on both sides of the ocean—from Henry Laughlin to Adolf Hitler.
President Harding’s own rise to power was fueled by the immigration restriction rooted at Ellis Island, and he relied on some of the same rhetorical tools that restrictionists had made useful. In his famous 1920 speech on “Readjustment,” Harding used (or perhaps even invented) the term “normalcy” to describe an idealized state, attainable once America was again at peace and had closed its doors to foreigners (see Murray). While many believed this was a lexical mistake, the word perhaps nicely summed up a new system of making-normal. Of particular note is Harding’s strong push for “not submergence in internationality but sustainment [sic] in triumphant nationality” (n.p.). He was referring here both to the end of war overseas and the end of the stream of immigration. He promised to close the gates, and he did just that. As Roger Daniels points out, his speech “served as a stimulus for congressional action on immigration restriction” (Daniels and Graham, 18).33 The rhetoric of an idealized American “normalcy” is what allowed Harding and others to paint the international world as irrational, crooked, impaired, while the new America would be straight and sure on its feet. The traditional concept of the norm, defined by Canguilhem as “a polemical concept which negatively qualifies” also applies to Harding’s “normalcy”—he does not have to say what America will be, only to qualify what it will not be. In such cases, “the abnormal, while logically second, is existentially first” (243).34 The Jew, the Asian with “insufficient brain capacity,” the black, the brown and the yellow, the “tainted” white, and all other conveniently unfit or enfeebled aliens, are the ground against which some fiction of the “normal” American comes into relief.
What is remarkable about the “normalcy” that Ellis Island spawned in the United States was not that racist and eugenic sentiments and policies were new, but that now the mechanisms for marking out difference, and thus fortifying the “normal” position only ever in contrast, were multiplied. While the National Origins Act was blunt and finite, the bodily attitudes interpellated at Ellis Island were nuanced and profligate. Post-1924, eugenics became a widespread projection of Ellis Island across the entire country. The rhetoric surrounding the Ellis Island process and spectacle helped to inculcate “normalcy” into the American everyday, to bury systems of downward comparison and stigmatization into the citizen’s psyche. When Harding used the term “normalcy” in his presidential campaign of 1920, he solidified an ongoing rhetorical reality: America had defined and would continue to define itself most successfully by what it rejected, not by what it was.
Within a year of the 1924 act, the Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island, Henry Curran, reported proudly, though ridiculously, that “all immigrants now look exactly like Americans” (n.p.). The dangerous hope and the seeming lack of logic in a statement such as this nicely sums up the frantic play for “normalcy” and the tragic comedy of this drama.35 To say that “all immigrants now look like Americans” simply reveals that, all along, the idea of American-ness had been an opportunistic projection. Restrictionists shifted more emphasis to the deportation of new Americans within the country, communists, and other threats, and the eugenic focus shifted to the lower classes within America, maintaining racial and ethnic prejudice that had been defined and applied at Ellis Island.36
One specific relocation for Ellis Island as a rhetorical space has been the U.S.–Mexico border. The U.S.–Mexico border patrol was founded on May 28, 1924—three days after the passage of the National Origins Act. As Kyle Lytle Hernandez has shown, the patrol, to this day, allows for “perseverance of racially differentiated systems of coercive force…racial profiling [by the border patrol is] a wormhole of racial domination; a practice in which past articulations of white supremacy live in the present” (13). In this way, Ellis Island lives on in current American anti-immigration rhetoric.
Further, as Gary Gerstle has shown, it was no coincidence that “the kind of eugenics-inflected revulsion against ‘mongrelization’ that informed Congressional immigration debates” leading up to the 1921 and 1924 crackdowns “also triggered an expansion of and hardening of state anti-miscegenation laws,” including the 1924 Virginia law, which “powerfully strengthened the nation’s substantial body of racially and eugenically-based marriage laws” (114). On March 20, 1924, the Virginia legislature passed two closely related eugenics laws: SB 219, entitled “The Racial Integrity Act [1]” and SB 281, “An act to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases,” referred to as “The Sterilization Act.” The alien “feebleminded” became larger targets within the country as eugenic sterilization became widespread. By 1932, 30 states had sterilization statutes on the books, thanks in large part to the rhetoric of immigration restriction. In the United States, there were 70,000 total known sterilizations between 1907 and end of World War II.37 Eugenic anti-immigrant rhetoric reached into the bodies of those racialized others made alien within the country. The “integrity” of racial groups could be qualified and policed in multiple, overlapping ways. For instance, sterilization was always explicitly linked to class, and black Americans were specifically targeted for sterilization when they could also be labeled as mentally defective, because they were then seen as more likely to be sexually promiscuous and to thus breed interracially (Holloway, 56).38 Ellis Island’s rhetorical “success” allowed Americans to pick up the border, so to speak, and lay it down across the bodies of thousands of Others within the country.39
Perhaps most notably, U.S. immigration restriction efforts shifted from “filtering” arriving bodies to detecting and deporting within the country. The raids on Mexican workers in the Southwest in the 1950s (and that continue today) are one notable example of this new emphasis. But these raids were preceded (and in some ways, anticipated and allowed) by the “Palmer Raids” between 1918 and 1921, exemplified by the “Red Raids” of 1920, during which 3000 suspected communists were detained and deported, many of these bodies held at Ellis Island (see “500 Reds”).40 During the “Tong Wars” of the later 1920s, many more Chinese immigrants were removed from New York to Ellis Island for eventual deportation (see “More Tong Wars”). Ellis Island became a space, like Guantánamo Bay Prison today, where suspect bodies could be held indefinitely, all rights and protections countermanded in this “special rhetorical space.” The aggressiveness of current ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) efforts clearly relies on similar suspensions of legal protections and rights, and no longer relies on the fixity of the physical border to apply these powers. In fact, ICE detention centers can be seen as contemporary Ellis Islands, towed onto the mainland.
Daniel J. Tichenor has argued that, following the 1924 clampdown, immigration restriction also gained more “remote control” (117).41 This was allowed not just because American restrictionists began to have more control over the ways immigration was restricted in other countries, before an immigrant even made it to Ellis Island, but also because of the rhetorical power of the “new racial and ethnic map” drawn at Ellis Island (Ngai, 3).42 As Mae Ngai has argued, post-1924, there was a new “global racial and national hierarchy,” as this new map articulated an unprecedented “production of racial knowledge” and a “new sense of territoriality, which was marked by unprecedented awareness and state surveillance” of borders (7, 3). Snyder and Mitchell reveal the ways that the eugenics movement created new connections across the Atlantic. In the evolving relationship between the United States and Europe, commonality across the Atlantic “was marked not in the likeness of their valued citizens, but rather in the existence of a common social disease with the biologically stigmatized. … Racialized and disabled others were catapulted to the status of transatlantic pariahs” (129). Clearly, we can see similar influences in current transnational “exports” of American norms, and in the ways that race and ability continue to strongly inflect immigration control internationally. Further, a clear line can be drawn from Ellis Island and the rhetoric of immigration restrictionists and American eugenicists in this period, across the Atlantic, to Germany and the Nazi T4 program.43 Nazi doctors named American eugenicists as their ideological mentors at Nuremberg. The chalk marks at Ellis Island might be seen as a precursor to the armbands and the tattooing of the Nazi regime.44 In 1936, Nazis gave a medal to Harry Laughlin, IRL founder. He was recognized by Hitler for his “model eugenic law” (Carlson, 12). Hitler also praised the eugenic provenance of the 1924 American Immigration Restriction Act in Mein Kampf.
The attitudes incubated or accelerated at Ellis Island led to the eugenic “racial knowledge” that can be seen clearly in a text such as the “Dictionary of Races or Peoples.” There was a new catalogue of races, ordered by deviancy.45 The use of terms such as “moron” and “feebleminded,” applied nimbly for eugenic purposes, created the rhetorical potential for opportunistic disablement and incorporated a look and a lexicon of eugenics into the American psyche. As mentioned, the island was gradually expanded with landfill, subterranean mazes connecting every building. Ellis Island was also constantly regenerating and redoubling its rhetorical powers, connecting forms of discrimination and derogation. Its ideological spread was vast.46
As a “heterotopia of deviation” and a “special rhetorical space,” Ellis Island helped to invent—and rhetorically construct—disability as we know it today. This construction continues to inflect our understandings of race, “normalcy,” and difference, continues to electrify and transport our borders, continues to exist as a bodily attitude, continues to shade and shadow how we look at others and ourselves. The stories of Ellis Island write and map for us much broader narratives and cultural geographies. We see not just the ways that spaces and discourses work together to impose social order, creating spaces in which deviation is sequestered; we also see how spaces and discourses in part create deviation and difference. Recall the original use of the word heterotopia to refer to abnormal anatomy—a displacement, a missing or extra element, a tumor that appears out of place, an alien growth. Ellis Island was both a eugenically “hopeful” experiment wherein threats to American purity could be isolated and arrested, and it inculcated an act of diagnosis, the discursive and rhetorical and spatial terms through which any “abnormal” anatomy might be marked. Recall also that the heterotopia only ever exists “in relation.” Hopefully, retelling these stories and remapping this space also demands that we develop a new relation to the history of Ellis Island and to immigration that reevaluates the rhetorical uses of difference. I suggested, at the beginning of this essay, that we all take a trip to Ellis Island. But Ellis Island visits us, too. We might recognize the ways that the chalk marks can be read on all of our bodies, the ways that Ellis Island travels with each of us wherever we go. As we recognize the ghosts and ruins of this space elsewhere, as we view its regeneration and persistence, we can make an effort to challenge its spectacles and interpellations, and to imagine the resistance and subversion it might have engendered and might still. Finally, in viewing this island as a rhetorically constructed space in which the key grammars were derogation and exclusion, we might also recognize the possible power of any rhetorical or cartographic construction for reimagining the individual, social, and political body more carefully and critically.
I would like to thank the archivists at Ellis Island, particularly Jeffrey Dosik, George Tselos, and Doug Tarr, for invaluable research assistance. I would also like to thank West Virginia University for a Senate Summer Research Grant to support this project in 2007. Finally, I would like to thank the wonderful Faculty Research Group of the WVU Department of English: Jonathan Burton, Ryan Claycomb, Pat Conner, John Ernest, Lara Farina, Marilyn Francus, Michael Germana, Donald Hall, Tim Sweet, Lisa Weihman, and Scott Wible.
1. Of course, another way to state this statistic is to say that 60 percent of Americans cannot and do not trace ancestry through the Island—which calls into question the myth of Ellis Island’s seminal status. Yet in this essay I hope to suggest that the island had a powerful rhetorical effect even on those who never stepped there, even as there have always been many other spaces and stories and histories of origin, arrival, or lineage that have also exerted rhetorical influence over the formation of the American body.
2. You wouldn’t have been arriving from China, after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the legislative move that became a precedent for much of this “squeeze,” and for later legislation that would close U.S. doors to immigrants.
3. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, whose work is heavily indebted to Foucault, also put forward the idea of “cultural locations of disability”—locations “in which disabled people find themselves deposited, often against their will” (3). These locations are revealed to be “sites of violence, restriction, confinement, and absence of liberty” (x). As you will see, Ellis Island became a place in which disability, and people who were seen as disabled, could be detained or deposited. Importantly, you will see the ways that “formulas of abnormality develop and serve to discount entire populations as biologically inferior” rooted to specific sites of enforcement like Ellis Island, capable of great rhetorical influence (3). But understanding disability as not fixed, but rather as culturally located, we can also see that the formulas can be rhetorically challenged and the spaces can be renovated and reimagined.
4. For instance, questions about sexual preferences and histories were part of almost every medical inspection at Ellis Island. The 1917 Immigration Act listed “abnormal sex instincts” as a “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” (29). As Jennifer Terry has written, “Eugenic doctrine of the first half of the twentieth century placed both racial and sexual purity at the top of its agenda. …White phobia about miscegenation and racial passing paralleled a growing sex panic that inverts and perverts were everywhere, but difficult to detect visually hence, an apparatus for identifying and isolating them could be justified as a matter of social hygiene” (138). Ellis Island offered just such an apparatus.
5. Henry Ford’s Model T assembly lines began to produce cars in 1914. The appeal of mechanized industry was huge in this period, and the idea of mechanization had import even outside the automobile plant—it became a cultural logic. Christina Cogdell, in an interesting book on the confluence between eugenics and American modern architecture and design, goes a step further, drawing attention to “the interconnectedness of streamline design with eugenic ideology,” in particular through the analogy of digestion (ix). Ellis Island works as an excellent application of this metaphorical alliance: eugenicists wanted the nation, and thus its immigration, to “run like an unobstructed colon” (Cogdell, 132). Ellis Island could not be constipated, as “constipation was seen as stunting national evolutionary advancement” (133). Thus the spectacle of expulsion and a steady diet of restriction at the island could be seen as healthy.
6. As Ellis Island expanded, it grew in the direction of this lexicon of pathology, and expanded the island’s use as a massive “laboratory and operating theater.” The huge Contagious Disease Hospital built on the island centered around “an autopsy amphitheater that enabled visiting physicians and medical students to study the pathology of exotic diseases” (Conway, 9). Immigrants who had died on the trip overseas or while at Ellis Island could be exhibited, their “exotic” bodies used to develop new medical knowledge. This amphitheater is itself an analogue to the architecture of the entire island—a means of dispassionately focusing on bodies in order to alienate, Other, and exoticize difference. The hospital functioned not just as a place to heal and inoculate but also as a space for framing defect.
7. As Mullan describes in his mental inspection guide, “Should the immigrant appear stupid and inattentive to such an extent that mental defect is suspected, an X is made on his coat at the anterior aspect of his right shoulder. Should definite signs of mental disease be observed, a circle would be used. In like manner, a chalk mark is placed…in all cases where physical deformity or disease is suspected” (740). Some of the other code letters were “L” for lameness, “Pg” for pregnancy, and “H” for heart.
8. In an article in Pearson’s Magazine in 1910, Mary Grace Quackenbos also suggested that the steamship lines were involved in this mechanical process of alienation. She writes that the majority of undesirable immigrants were transported to the United States via the “superior power of a vast and intricate ‘machine.’ In its main outlines this ‘machine’ may be likened to an enormous dredging apparatus stretching forth gigantic cranes to every port of Europe, catching up and heaving back loads of emigrants collected from every corner of the Eastern Hemisphere by the tireless efforts of no less than fifty steamship agents and their canvassers. The fuel which energizes this colossal structure is an equally colossal greed for yearly dividends, and the combined intellects controlling [these companies]…may be said to represent the engineer. The pivot upon which the entire mechanism turns is fraud and evasion of the U.S. Immigration Law.” She concludes that, finally, all immigrants are “tarnished by the corroding influence of the ‘machine’” and suggests that this influence will always affect their ability to become good citizens (737).
9. Mae Ngai also suggests that the alien has always been a “kind of specter” (7). I find the metaphorical interaction between the spectacle and the specter interesting here—the spectacle being the hypervisible text, the specter being the ghostly presence. Through the spectacles of Ellis Island, it seems that specters of racialized and disabled otherness were given rhetorical power. In this way, Ellis Island continues to ghost our understandings of citizenship, the body, race, normalcy, and so on.
10. As Eithne Luibheid asserts, the examination process at Ellis Island “individuated” each person examined and “tied [her or him] in to [a] wider network of surveillance,” placing “immigrants within lifelong networks of surveillance and disciplinary relations” (2002, xii; xvii).
11. Often the Public Health Service stationed its newest doctors to work as inspectors at Ellis Island as an extension of their training, thus initiating these doctors through the Ellis Island diagnostic process. Many inspectors were also former immigrants themselves, who had come through Ellis Island and then returned to work there. Thus while the inspection process may have inculcated an ableist and “racist” scopic regime, many inspectors may also have seen Ellis Island more positively, as a gateway to opportunities they hoped to share with other immigrants.
12. Alexandra Minna Stern has shown that such techniques were expanded for use at the border of Texas and Mexico in the first decade of the century (at El Paso, Naco, Nogales, Douglas, Tucson, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Rio Grande, Brownsville, and Hidalgo). At stations on this border, every immigrant was stripped, their clothing “chemically scoured,” their hair clipped and burned, they were showered with kerosene and water, and then subjected to a medical exam and psychological profile (Minna Stern, 63). Ostensibly this process was used because of the threat of typhus. But these processing stations, called “sanitation plants,” were later “enlarged and further equipped…despite the disappearance of any typhus threat” (65). This spectacular rendering allowed for the “pathologization of Mexicans” and the “association of immigrants with disease” to expand “into new racial and metaphorical terrain” (67). The embodied rhetorical effects of these plants and their processing then “contributed to the culture of segregation, suspicion, and violence that took shape in the Southwest and California in the first half of the twentieth century” (70). There is some evidence that similar showers were used on ships traveling to Ellis Island. Emmie Kremer, an immigrant reflecting on his Ellis Island experience in 1986, wrote that “third class passengers had to go through a disinfecting shower” on a boat coming from Germany in 1926. “I believe about two years later or so, they did away with that process,” he wrote (Kremer, n.p.). In the space of Ellis Island, the space of the ship, and the space of the U.S.–Mexico border, initiation through inspection and inoculation served key rhetorical purposes.
13. Amy Fairchild argues that examination of arriving immigrants on the inspection line and in more intensive exams following detention was “chiefly a spectacle” (99). Her work shows just how powerful the Ellis Island process was, rhetorically, specifically in influencing the first group I identified in my previous list: “Those immigrants who were not marked and yet learned something about the danger of difference gained a self-consciousness of their own possible defects, and were empowered and encouraged to diagnose others.”
14. It is worthwhile to quote Baynton at greater length here to clarify this point. He suggests that “disability has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled people themselves, but it has also done so for women and minority groups.” For instance, “opponents of political and social equality for women cited their supposed physical, intellectual, and psychological flaws, deficits, and deviations from the male norm” (Baynton, 33). In similar ways, “disability was a significant factor in the three great citizenship debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: women’s suffrage, African American freedom and civil rights, and the restriction of immigration. When categories of citizenship were questioned, challenged, and disrupted, disability was called on to clarify and define who deserved, and who was deservedly excluded from, citizenship” (ibid.).
15. Of course the American Naturalization Act of 1870 was a precedent for, yet also consonant and contemporaneous with, the sentiment of this document—limiting American citizenship to “white persons and persons of African descent” and thus excluding the Chinese specifically, even as it extended citizenship rights to African Americans, overwriting the 1790 act, which limited citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.”
16. Unlike any other federal bureaucracy before it, these officials were tasked not to serve as advocates or service-providers, but to protect America from certain constituents (Daniels and Graham, 15).
17. As Catherine Kudlick has written, every Ellis Island rejection “reinforced the ideal of a healthy nation” (61). This reinforcement of course was repeatedly unsuccessful, as any desire for normalcy goes unrequited. As David Gerber adds, “When we see normality asserted in regards to the body and the mind, we are usually seeing anxious and aggressive projections of boundary-drawing that are meaningful in understanding a society’s felt need and points of stress” (50).
18. Chang’s definition of “nativistic racism” emerges from the work of Étienne Balibar and of Omi and Winant, the latter developing the idea of “racial formation,” the former the concept of this new “differentialist racism” (quoted in Chang, 30). Lisa Lowe also cites Omi and Winant in her book Immigrant Acts, and she similarly suggests that racialization happens “along the legal access of definitions of citizenship” (11).
19. Martha Gardner also suggests that the “Dictionary” “argued for a link between sexual deviance and visible racial-ethnic otherness” (66). Through this “Dictionary,” “immigration officials…defined moral deviance as a visible procedure long before federal courts would confirm the visual common sense of racialized and sexualized identities” (51, italics added).
20. James Tyner argues that “the idea that bodies belong to specific places is a peculiar construct of…the last few decades of the nineteenth century” (23). This was “a period of knowledge production that centered on embodied spaces” and “the disciplining of bodies through space” (24). Indeed, the connection of a given body with a “naturalized” ethnicized space was a relatively new concept. This was one of the main functions of the “Dictionary,” linking bodies to geographical regions—spaces were given bodies, but bodies were given spaces, too.
21. Mitchell and Snyder suggest that the “commonality” of the majority “was marked not in the likeness of their valued citizens, but rather in the existence of a common social disease with the biologically stigmatized. In this way racialized and disabled others were catapulted to the status of transatlantic pariahs” (Mitchell and Snyder, 129). To be American was to be not the racialized, disabled alien. As Étienne Balibar writes, “The racial-cultural identity of ‘true nationals’ remains invisible, but it can be inferred (and is ensured) a contrario by the alleged, quasi-hallucinatory visibility of the ‘false nationals.’… In other words, it remains constantly in doubt and in danger; the fact that the ‘false’ is too visible will never guarantee that the ‘true’ is visible enough” (1991, 60). We might also look at Žižek’s Lacanian reading of the ethnic Other: “In the perceived deficiency of the Other, each perceives—without knowing it—the falsity of his/her own subject position. The deficiency of the Other is just an objectification of the distortion of our own point of view” (196). In these ways, the American subject requires a deviant Other, and creates him or her from the rhetorical material of his or her own panic about normalcy and belonging.
22. The heterotopia of deviation and the special rhetorical space come together at Ellis Island as what Gareth Hoskins calls a “racialized landscape,” “where racial categories frame a discourse of national identity” and where race was a “geographical project,” “a social category constructed to consolidate claims to space by alienating others from it” (96, 109, paraphrasing Mitchell, 230).
23. As I will explore further, this quotient approach to exclusion would soon carry over to the enterprise of immigration legislation—when the doors to Ellis Island closed in 1921, the “quota” for immigration by nation would also be capped at 3 percent. This would later be lowered to 2 percent in 1924.
24. This became what Mitchell and Snyder call a “corporeal regime,” in which “the body must be made to bear witness to an otherwise internal deviance” (141). Such a regime is, in their words, “essentially a discursive order grafted onto the body to visually articulate morals and laws,” calling for an “over-reliance on readings of the symbology of the body” (142).
25. Knox continues, further explaining the construction of the norm only ever in reference to “positive cases”: “It must be based on the experience of having seen and examined many positive and also normal cases and the examiner must be a broad-minded, big-souled man keenly alive to the frailties and shortcomings of the human race in general, including himself” (1914, 127).
26. The inculcation of an investigatory gaze worked its way across the Atlantic as well: by 1907, “about ten times as many people were refused transportation for medical reasons as were barred upon arrival at U.S. ports” (“Annual Report of the Commissioner General,” 62, 83).
27. The faces in Knox’s “Manual” are seemingly all “white.” The vision that this text trained for would allow these “feebleminded” faces and bodies to be effectively “colored” as exceptions to the genetic superiority of Western European “white” stock.
28. Steven Gelb argues that it is important also to recognize the discourses that preceded Goddard’s invention of this term. As Gelb writes:
Henry H. Goddard first coined the term moron and applied it to mature persons who scored between eight and twelve years of mental age on the 1908 Binet-Simon test. His contemporaries argued that Goddard had actually discovered a milder type of deficiency than had been identified before, and this claim is still widely accepted. However, that belief is erroneous because it ignores the development of ideas about mild states of mental deficiency in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which defined and shaped Goddard’s work in 1910. This mythology sanitizes the modern construct by distancing it from earlier, scientifically discredited paradigms—including faculty and religious psychologies, phrenology, degeneracy theory, and criminal anthropology—in which its roots are planted.
(360)
Gelb’s argument is that many have seen Goddard’s coining of the term “moron” as the beginning of a modern and more valid paradigm of mental testing and classification, and he suggests we recognize the full pseudoscientific history as a way to challenge the validity of all later testing and classification.
29. Vice President Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1921 that America had become a “dumping ground,” explaining his eugenic view that “the Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides” (14). Coolidge wrote this in an article entitled “Whose Country Is This?” for Good Housekeeping magazine in 1921.
30. The final quota law of 1924 also took the added step of barring all Japanese immigrants, even though the quota would have limited their immigration to just 200 persons a year. This move was intended as a slap in the face and was rightly interpreted as an insult by the Japanese government (see Daniels 2002).
31. The Johnson amendment eventually let them in—basically allowing entry for those who were on the seas when the law passed. Still, ships would wait in the harbor and race to Ellis Island at midnight of each new month. See “Six Big Liners in Thrilling Race to Land Aliens,” New York Evening World, September 1, 1921.
32. Restrictionist Robert De Courcey Ward, writing in Scientific Monthly, celebrated the idea that although this act “contains no specific provisions looking towards a more rigid exclusion of eugenically undesirable aliens, it will accomplish a better selection than has hitherto been possible” through the “distinct improvement in the mental and physical conditions of our immigrants” (538). Eugenic principles had been largely camouflaged. The quota law also acted against the socially constructed category of “new immigrants,” genetically distinct from “old immigrants” pre-1880 (see Daniels 1997, 61).
33. It helped that the House was “dominated by radical anti-immigration forces” (Debating, 18). For instance, Albert Johnson, chair of the House Committee on Immigration in 1924, made specific reference to the danger of incoming “abnormally twisted” and “unassimilable” Jews: “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits” (quoted in Daniels and Graham, 20).
34. For more from the field of Disability Studies on the concept of normalcy, see Lennard J. Davis, “Constructing Normalcy.”
35. This reference to “normalcy” pertains to a subject position around which this rhetoric of difference swivels. Disability Studies scholars use the term “normate” to designate the unexamined and privileged subject position of the supposedly (or temporarily) able-bodied individual and the ways in which our culture valorizes that position. As with the concepts of whiteness or of heteronormativity, the normate occupies a supposedly preordained, unproblematic, and unexamined central position. In Disability Studies, this concept has come to symbolize how norms are used to control bodies—normalcy, as a social construct, acts upon people with disabilities. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson defines the normate as “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). A normate culture, then, continuously reinscribes the centrality, naturality, neutrality, and unquestionability of this normate position. Such cultures demand normalcy and enforce norms, marking out and marginalizing those bodies and minds that do not conform. Norms circulate, have cultural ubiquity, and ensure their own systemic enforcement.
36. The rhetoric of “normalcy” and the impetus for immigration restriction also gained important momentum from the Red Scare between 1917 and 1920.
37. At this time, Margaret Sanger wrote that “every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. …Moreover, when we realize that each feebleminded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded” (n.p.).
38. As Holloway writes, the “class bias in sterilization” was always “openly articulated” (55). She also explains that many whites believed that “mentally unfit African Americans were especially likely to be sexually promiscuous and engage in inter-racial sex…[thus] this population was more likely to pollute the white races and should be sterilized” (56).
39. Étienne Balibar has written about the ways that physical borders have become “inner borders.” That is, to establish “national normality,” the mode of discrimination between the national and the alien “is internalized by individuals” (2002, 78). These inner borders allow for “some borders [to be] no longer situated at the borders at all” and reside instead “wherever selective controls are to be found” (89).
40. Ellis Island continued to be the space that many East Coast political dissidents (such as C. L. R. James) were “removed to” before deportation, from the 1920s through the 1960s. It is also interesting to note that the overwhelming emphasis of much anticommunist rhetoric was put upon the foreign-ness of possible dissidents, seen as what Woodrow Wilson called “hyphenated Americans.”
41. Aristide Zolberg suggests that “remote control amounted to a projection of the country of destination’s borders into the world at large” (2006b, 224). Matthew Coleman has written about this phenomenon more abstractly, by suggesting that there has been a historical shift from the “geopolitics of containment,” characterized by hard borders, to a “geopolitics of engagement,” which “reaches inward to ‘local’ spaces and at once outward to ‘regional’ spaces beyond the state” (610).
42. One example of this “remote control” was that American restrictionists began to experiment with the use of field workers at American consuls overseas. These workers examined would-be immigrants in their own countries. As Henry Laughlin wrote, in a personal letter in 1923, “We have demonstrated that in friendly countries the American Consul can, without giving international offence, make first-hand studies in the field, of the would-be immigrants. The minute of any objection to the field-studies appears, the Consul and his workers simply withdraw to the American consulate, and announce that if the would-be immigrant desires to have his passport vised [sic], he must provide the information concerning his own ‘case history’ and ‘family pedigree.’ Because of the immigrants’ desire to come to the United States, they smooth the way for perfecting these field studies, and give their consent to medical examinations. In the future, doubtless the cost of these examinations would be placed upon the immigrant, so that ready and prompt co-operation means less expense than hesitancy or non-cooperation” (1923, 3). He continues: “I do not expect the field studies to be as perfect as they could be made if the Law were established, [but the Consul can get information] which under no circumstances could be secured at Ellis Island” (4). Laughlin’s trip abroad had been made possible by an honorary appointment by the secretary of labor, designating Laughlin as “United States Immigration Agent to Europe.”
43. “Aktion T4” was a Nazi eugenic program that systematically killed between 200,000 to 250,000 people with intellectual or physical disabilities between 1939 and 1941 in Germany.
44. In 1927, Charles Davenport of the American Eugenics Society was in contact with Professor Eugen Fischer of the newly formed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. He made a note to send to Fischer “all publications of the Eugenics Record Office so far as they are available. The Institut was opened two weeks ago and is almost without a library. We want to work in close cooperation with them” (Davenport 1927, n.p.). The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, it has now been recognized, was the key location for German eugenic science and racial hygiene—undertaking mass sterilizations and performing experiments on skulls and body parts received from Auschwitz in order to “establish” the genetic inferiority of those killed.
45. This racial knowledge was highly flawed of course, and in this way it was defective knowledge—yet it is defective also because the terms by which each race was differentiated from Caucasian or white normalcy was always through perceived defect. Only through defect did difference come into view. The alien, always somewhat spectral, always convenient for the projection of the nation’s own insecurities, was also useful for his or her key role in the spectacle of inspection and exclusion—warning every citizen that they too were being watched, that their humanity might also be qualified.
46. The American Eugenics Society, for instance, began to reach out to American intellectuals to insinuate eugenic rhetoric into American higher education. Henry Laughlin, reporting on the activities of the society in 1922, wrote that university “teachers of biology, sociology and psychologyare finding it profitable to include in their practical laboratory work, provisions for building up, by the research method, authentic family histories with special reference to the descent and recombination of natural physical and mental qualities. … The average University student is able to compile a valuable biological record of the family within a few months.” This record “centers about the student himself, and, thus, when analyzed, throws light upon the origin of his natural capacities and limitations, and upon his potentiality as a parent in passing on particular traits” (1922, 3).
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