immigration restriction, 1888-1924: reading the emergent
Post on 19-Oct-2021
2 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
1
Immigration Restriction, 1888-1924: Reading the Emergent National Belief System
Introduction
Immigration reform was a perennial theme in the US around the turn of the twentieth
century, alongside a surge of ‘new immigrants’ from Southern and Eastern Europe. A literacy
test was widely advocated at the end of the nineteenth century, coincident with this shift of
immigration sources. Yet by the time the literacy test became law in 1917, it was no longer
effective given educational advances in the targeted regions. Concerns also persisted that the test
discriminated against the disadvantaged and thus offended American democratic ideals. Public
opinion, increasingly swayed by the emerging eugenics vogue, had meanwhile grown to favor
more restrictive measures. By 1924 a national origins quota system was enacted, vastly reducing
the new immigrant flows whilst better comporting with the received political belief system.
To explain adoption of such paradigm-shifting immigration reforms after so long at the
center of national discourse, one must explore the evolving intellectual and cultural
environments attending passage of the literacy test and paving the way for quotas, in particular
the popular acceptance of a natural racial and ethnic hierarchy with underlying precepts from the
emerging social sciences and field of eugenics. Extending the historiographic analysis of Drew
Maciag1 on the relative decline of intellectual history within its academic discipline over the last
several decades, this article maintains that the 1924 adoption of ethnically-targeted immigration
quotas was precipitated by a shift in prevailing ‘beliefs’ about immigration and widespread
dissemination of negative underlying ‘attitudes’ rather than the mere force of ‘ideas’.
1 Drew Maciag, “When Ideas had Consequences: Or, Whatever Happened to Intellectual History?” Reviews in American History, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 741-751.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
2
Against this analytic framework and political backdrop, this article will examine key
writings and activism of prominent thinkers and change agents on immigration reform and
underlying issues during this period: Economist/fledgling social scientist Edward Bemis,
demographer/Census Superintendent/MIT President Francis Walker, attorney/proto-lobbyist
Prescott Hall; attorney/naturalist Madison Grant, climatologist/pamphleteer Charles Ward, and
attorney/political strategist John Trevor. In particular, we assess their respective ideas, beliefs,
and attitudes, how these built on each other and emphases changed over time, how historic actors
at once influenced and embodied evolving intellectual fashions, and why the long-touted literacy
test quickly yielded to the more restrictive yet more politically and culturally palatable national
origins quotas. In short, the literacy test proved difficult to adopt given institutionalized political
path dependency yet unstable because it offended engrained democratic values, while the
national origins system took wing because it drew support from the eugenics vogue and
embodied emergent post-war cultural and intellectual norms.
Institutional Background and Political Context
American political institutions inform the background and context of the immigration
restriction movement around the turn of the twentieth century. The Founding Fathers
bequeathed an inherently conservative system of constitutional government, including a
requirement that new laws achieve majorities in both Houses of Congress and Presidential
assent, or alternatively that both Houses override a Presidential majority with 2/3 super-
majorities. Such a governance structure rendered paradigm shifts especially difficult in such
domains as immigration policy, highly contested along political, economic, and even diplomatic
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
3
axes, thus imparting significant path dependency.2 Immigration reform around the turn of the
twentieth century provides a case example of this persistent stasis and of the intellectual and
cultural motors that eventually drove quantum change.
Throughout the period, the interest groups staked around immigration reform were
numerous, marked by murky politics and cross-cutting agendas. For example, ‘big business’
typically favored open immigration, though not during steep and extended economic depressions
such as in the mid-1890s. Main Street business interests would tend to prefer ‘reasonable
restrictions,’ especially after immigration flows increased with economic recovery. Yet this
reflex might be leavened by notions of paternalism and propriety, especially to distinguish self-
consciously genteel high town advocates from the crudely nativist Know-Nothings of the mid-
nineteenth century and their progeny. Moreover, Main Street restrictionists were necessarily
dispersed; they might rarely encounter new immigrants, much less slum conditions, and typically
lacked strong motivation or voice to mount the political stage. Labor unions looked after their
own diverse concerns and interests. Traditions of international solidarity among unions
including the ILGWU might suggest open gates, while others such as the AFL would favor the
literacy test and other exclusionary means to support the wages of their typically skilled
members.
Politicians had similarly diverse and often conflicted agendas. Some took up the
exclusionist rhetoric, while seeking not to alienate pro-immigration interests, especially among
assimilated ‘old immigrant’ constituents and laissez-faire business interests. Moreover, given
2 See, e.g., Gary Gerstle, “America’s Encounter with Immigrants,” in In Search of Progressive America, ed Michael Kazin et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), discussion on pp. 43-45.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
4
the overlap between immigration and foreign policy, even politicians strongly committed to
restriction might yield in the face of more pressing concerns. For example, Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge backed off the literacy test for would-be European immigrants as part of a package deal
with President Theodore Roosevelt and House Speaker Joe Cannon to achieve the 1907
Gentlemen’s Agreement restricting Japanese immigration.3 And even where substantial
Congressional majorities of both Houses could be assembled in support of the literacy test
(typically during lame duck sessions of Congress), presidential vetoes occurred four times and
remained a persistent concern. Legislators seeking to have it both ways might favor such
political kabuki. In the event, final passage of the literacy test in 1917 represented “the thirty-
second time that the test has passed one House or the other, the average of 14 record votes in the
House being 216 to 79, and of 10 record votes in the Senate, 53 to 15.”4 This delay was
consequential; from the first veto in 1897 to final enactment of the test, “17 million immigrants
from among the poorest nations came to the United States.”5 Although somewhat academic
during wartime given cessation of immigrant flows, the campaign to restrict immigration
resumed with vigor post-Armistice.
Theory and Framework
In addition to institutions, mental frameworks around immigration and related topics
warrant examination. Drew Maciag’s extensible historiographic analysis distinguishes ‘ideas’
from ‘beliefs,’ illuminating why the literacy test required almost thirty years from proposal to
3 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955), pp. 128-9. 4 Henry Pratt Fairchild, “The Literacy Test and its Making,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 31, No. 3 (May 1917), pg. 459) 5 Claudia Goldin, “The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921,” NBER Working Paper Series (April 1993), No. 4345, Abstract.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
5
adoption, how it proved a transitory legislative solution, and why the more draconian
immigration restrictions embodied in the 1924 Act passed Congress so readily. He also points
out how cultural history has largely subsumed intellectual history in the American academy, an
observation that helps clarify the ultimate driver of the national quotas solution: it commanded
broad public support at a visceral level, among intellectuals, activists, and the mass public alike.
Maciag’s observation that “[historiographic] paradigm shifts rarely occur without a struggle”6 is
likewise applicable to the immigration restriction debate, given both institutional hurdles to
achieve legislation and persistence of political beliefs favoring equal access to citizenship. But
once the struggle was joined, the paradigm could shift sharply, as exemplified by the near-
unanimous adoption of stringent national origins quotas within a few years following passage of
the long-mooted yet politically unstable literacy test.
Maciag’s general contention rings true: “While all ideas are useful mental concepts,
beliefs are conceptions about what is true. Beliefs are ideas that represent firm convictions:
especially those related to an intellectual, ideological, or religious worldview.”7 In that sense,
beliefs provide greater motive force and a stronger explanation of behavior than mere ideas.
While abstract ideas are largely the currency of elites, beliefs are held throughout society and
generally exert the greater influence on the formulation of reform agendas and political
strategies, even among elites. In an extension of Maciag’s framework, ‘belief systems’ are in
turn comprehensive, more or less consistent sets of inter-related beliefs around a significant
topic; while ‘attitudes’ correspondingly undergird beliefs and belief systems, often supplying the
implicit premises (or prejudices) that historical actors internalize as first principles.
6 Maciag, When Ideas Had Consequences, pg. 741. 7 ibid, pg. 741.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
6
The thinkers on immigration restriction assessed in this article purported to address the
topic in the realm of ideas, but they were largely trading in beliefs and operationalizing attitudes.
Deep convictions, pre-conceived solutions, and stereotyped reasoning feature in their work. For
example, as called out in a succession of veto messages by Presidents Cleveland (1897), Taft
(1913), and Wilson (sustained in 1916 and overridden in 1917), the literacy test was
fundamentally a gauge of educational opportunity rather than inherent intellectual much less
moral qualities. Yet a generation of intellectual advocates clung to the test despite its suspect
premise, even after educational advances among the new immigrants had rendered the test no
longer fit for purpose.8
The durability of the literacy test in the face of contrary evidence and a false premise
indicates that it was operating at the level of beliefs rather than ideas, and taken as an article of
faith. Such dissonance also helps explain why contemporary intellectuals strained to portray the
literacy test and subsequent national origins quotas as scientifically based, objective, and non-
discriminatory, emphasizing ‘evidence’ from the maturing social sciences and the emerging field
of eugenics. The literacy test ran contrary to American ideals including open access or at least
equal opportunity for citizenship, and in that sense offended embedded beliefs akin to a national
ethos. In contrast, though far more restrictive, the system of national origins quotas (essentially a
fanciful exercise to determine and perpetuate the existing ‘racial’ composition of the US) was
8 “During the last year in which [the literacy test] was the major statutory bar to immigration (July 1920-June 1921), more than 800,000 immigrants entered the country and 250,000 returned home. About 1.5 percent of the number of all entrants, nearly 14,000 persons, were excluded or deported on one ground or another. Only a tenth of these, a mere 1,450 persons, were kept out by the much heralded literacy test. Rising educational standards in Europe had pulled most of the teeth the law might once have had.” Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigration Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), pg. 46.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
7
perceived as unobjectionable since it merely sought to freeze the status quo of the ‘national
stock’, deemed a worthy object amidst the self-celebratory nationalism of the early 1920s.
Literature Review
This article’s approach is informed by general histories of US immigration policy, some
treating immigration policy as a means to construct a distinctive American polity and identity,9
others addressing key recurring aspects of the debate, especially racialized American nativism
reflecting a national frustration-aggression syndrome,10 and still other histories focused on
pivotal policy components, namely recommendation of the literacy test and outline of a possible
quota system by the 1907-10 Dillingham Commission, an archetypal progressive quango to
study European immigration.11
Efforts to restrict European immigration during the latter part of the period is intertwined
with the emerging field of eugenics. Historiographical and theoretical work by Jonathan Marks12
helps frame the relationship and show its significance. Although now largely dismissed as a
simplistic extension of biological tenets to human social endeavors, by the early 1920s eugenics
enjoyed broad acceptance in both elite and popular circles and played a powerful role in shaping
mental landscapes and attendant policies. Eugenics had both positive and negative aspects: to
encourage proliferation of ‘racial’ traits deemed positive from a biological and social
perspective, and alternatively to restrict suspect individuals and populations. Thus popularized,
9 Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 10 Zolberg criticizes Higham on account of this framework; see Zolberg, A Nation by Design, pp. 6-7. 11 Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 12 Jonathan Marks, “Historiography of Eugenics,” J. Hum. Genet. (1993), Vol. 52, pp. 650-652.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
8
biology can be readily extrapolated to society, politics, and history, e.g., (i) the premise that
culture is heritable, as is ethnic/racial suitability for political institutions including democracy (or
serfdom); (ii) perceived adverse trends in the national racial stock, as immigration sources shift
to Southern and Eastern Europe; (iii) reduced fare of steamship passage seen as reversing the
natural selection mechanism; and (iv) concerns that birthrates of immigrants exceed birthrates of
native stock Americans, and that ‘cross-breeding’ of ‘races’ would inevitably result in
submergence of the superior type and degradation of the national stock.
More topically relevant, Kenneth Ludmerer13 shows how eugenics (in its dual roles as
ostensible science and social touchstone) helped reshape post-World War I immigration policy.
He contextualizes that racial thinking had continuously featured in the national experience,
including perceptions of aboriginal natives, imported slaves, and more recently excluded Asians.
A racial hierarchy had thus long featured in American thought, with the new focus on gradations
among European ‘races’ including the Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic type atop the pinnacle. Genetics
and eugenics now gave the restrictionists a scientific cloak for their prejudices and wedge for
popular support for their legislative program. “It would seem from these events that if a
scientific theory is to be used successfully to promote a social or political cause, the science
involved cannot be divorced from the social and political sentiments of the day.14 Still,
Ludmerer’s 1920-24 timeframe is too compressed to explain such a momentous shift, skirting
over the pre-eugenics context from earlier phases of the restriction movement.
13 Kenneth L. Ludmerer, “Genetics, Eugenics, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1972), pp. 59-81. 14 Ludmerer, “Genetics, Eugenics, and the Immigration Restriction Act,” pg. 80.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
9
Like Higham, Ludmerer examines policy and policymakers through a psychological
prism. “Underneath these seemingly confident assertions of Anglo-Saxon superiority lay a great
anxiety.”15 Although would-be immigrants of the early 1920s may have served as convenient
scapegoats for national angst, the essentially Freudian psychic models of earlier scholars seem
less fruitful than a cognitive framework that explains quantum policy change based on gradual
shift of embedded beliefs and attitudes in the guise of ideas. Ludmerer also glosses over the two-
step approach of the 1924 Act: first, temporary quotas based on 2% of the immigrants born in
each European nation according to the 1890 census; second, a permanent system of national
origins quotas, intended to mirror the composite ‘national stock’ of the US regardless of when
the original forbears arrived. The 1924 Act deferred the second phase several years pending
further expert input. While the difference in composition of immigration between the two
systems might be minor, the totemic distinction of sustained continuity with core sentiments was
significant. Senator LeBaron Colt, chairman of the immigration committee, articulated the
foundational democratic principles that remained durable if under siege: "When you discriminate
markedly against any group you are raising racial antagonism, which is entirely un-American.”16
Ludmerer does not address the continuity and corrective afforded by the national origins system,
versus outright exclusion of ‘new immigrants’ sought by extremists or permanent quotas based
on a 1890 census in which the new immigrants would be artificially underrepresented. Nor does
Ludmerer adequately link legislative efforts in the 1920s with earlier promotion of the literacy
test or with the causal chain that pre-eugenic restrictionists had drawn between racial/ethnic
background and political capacity. Eugenics alone does not explain the 1924 Act.
15 ibid, pg. 60. 16 ibid, pg. 71.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
10
Nineteenth Century Immigration Restrictionists (Pre-Eugenics)
Amherst College graduate Edward Bemis is generally considered the first serious
proponent of the literacy test. Writing in the Andover Review in 1888, Bemis introduces themes
and styles of discourse that would prove central to immigration restriction debates for several
decades: hierarchies among European nationalities; specious sociological reasoning; stereotyped
and sensationalist accounts of degraded immigrants poised to swamp native Americans; need to
reconcile an exclusionist purpose with American principles of laissez-faire and ethnic neutrality;
and incipient isolationist tendencies.17 Fellow Amherst alumnus Francis Walker echoed these
themes in his 1899 article “Restriction of Immigration,” featuring more sophisticated
demographic analyses and forthrightly racialized views.18 In the context of Maciag’s framework,
both Bemis and Walker purport to operate at the level of ideas, but their stereotyped attitudes
towards the new immigrants and their racially informed political and social beliefs primarily
animate the discussions.
Reflecting his old settler origins, Bemis brings a patrician if not patronizing attitude to
immigration and related social issues. Thanks to the relative absence of immigration between
colonial settlement and about 1820, “the vigorous New England stock, descendants of the hardy
yeomanry and best elements of English life, [were able] to increase and take deep root in the land
before the influx of the millions of different modes of thought and life in the last fifty years.”19
Through their sheer numbers and degraded conditions, Bemis regards the influx as a threat to the
17 Edward A. Bemis, “Restriction of Immigration,” The Andover Review: A Religious and Theological Monthly (1884-1893) (March 1888) Vol. 9, pg. 51 (ProQuest pg. 251). 18 Francis A. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League, No. 33 (1899). 19 Bemis, “Restriction of Immigration,” pg. 251.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
11
American standard of living and way of life. Building on Bemis, Walker maintains that
immigration indeed functioned to suppress the fertility rate that prevailed among the native stock
until about 1830. “Immigration, during the period from 1830 to 1860, instead of constituting a
net re-enforcement to the population, simply resulted in a replacement of native by foreign
elements.”20 Walker’s authority as the nation’s pre-eminent statistician guaranteed his ‘ideas’ a
receptive audience, generating wide concern of the menace posed by ‘degraded races’ of Europe
accounting for the bulk of immigration as the twentieth century beckoned.
Walker’s atavistic rhetoric betrays his belief in a racial hierarchy, helping enlarge and
engage his audience. Although mid-nineteenth century immigration from Ireland and the
German lands launched the natives’ demographic decline, Walker regards the character of the
new immigrants as ever more racially degraded. Moreover, he asserts that while the cost and
other rigors of immigration formerly served as a natural selection mechanism, cheap steam
passage from Europe now facilitates immigration from the dregs along its fringes. “They are
beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for
existence…They have none of the ideas and aptitudes…such as those who are descended from
the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and chose chieftains.”21
Such pronouncements betray Walker’s belief that capacity for democracy is a racial inheritance,
a theme that Hall and Grant would develop further.
Again extending Bemis, Walker highlights immigration’s deleterious effects on the
native American character. Fecundity suffers as natives marshal capital for fewer offspring
better equipped to avoid contact with the immigrant rabble; in tandem, natives shrink from hard
20 Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” pg. 440. 21 ibid, pg. 447.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
12
manual labor, offending Walker’s old New England sensibilities. For Walker, the plethora of
immigrants to handle what natives have come to consider ‘menial tasks’ thus offends “all our
early history [when] Americans, from Governor Winthrop, through Jonathan Edwards, to Ralph
Waldo Emerson, had done every sort of work which was required for the comfort of their
families and for the upbuilding of the state, and had not been ashamed.”22
Both Bemis and Walker are prone to stereotype, breezily presenting ‘objective’ statistical
evidence while glossing over root causes. For example, Bemis relates that the foreign born are
disproportionately represented in insane asylums, poor houses, and prisons, but he does not
address whether that may be due to their greater stresses and privations relative to the native
born, more vigorous law enforcement in immigrant communities, or a combination of such
factors. If Bemis anticipated such basic counterarguments, he may have excluded them in appeal
to readers’ underlying attitudes and beliefs. In identifying immigrants with labor unrest, Bemis
likewise ignores ultimate causes. “Every one knows that it is our foreign born who indulge in
most of the mob violence in times of strikes and industrial depressions.”23 Among his
complaints regarding the political evils of immigration, Bemis notes the high concentrations of
immigrants in urban centers enabling corrupt bosses in power. He couples this grievance with
other pet concerns of his progressive/reformist caste: “In thousands and scores of thousands of
instances, controlled by the boodle and saloon element, these people stand in the way of needed
improvements in legislation and administration, and by their votes keep our worst men in
power.”24 Immigrants thus drizzled with demon rum are portrayed as anathema to good
government, omitting reference to immigrants’ greater ethnic acceptance of drink and a dearth of
22 ibid, pp. 442-3. 23 Bemis, “Restriction of Immigration,” pg. 252. 24 ibid, pg. 252.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
13
booty for them on the larger stages of state and national politics. Bemis thus betrays that his
‘ideas’ draw on attitudes of social propriety, rooted in an ethnic hierarchy and nourished by an
incipient belief in American exceptionalism.
Still, Bemis could not be termed a eugenicist, given that Gregor Mendel’s pioneering
genetics work was not rediscovered until 1900; moreover, Bemis’s arguments are not explicitly
biological. And despite his demographer’s focus on groups traits, Walker could not be so
characterized either. Still, Walker’s concern over high immigrant birth rates and their tendency
to suppress fecundity of old New England stock highlights the biological angst among native
elites at new century’s dawn. “What is proposed is…to exclude hundreds of thousands, the great
majority of whom would be subject to no individual objections.”25 The reason: a paternalistic
concern to protect “the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous
access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and
southern Europe.”26 Implicit in this view is a belief that old stock Americans enjoyed a sort of
tenure imparting trusteeship; thus they were entitled, indeed duty-bound, to bar new immigrants.
In contrast to Walker’s arguments based on political culture, the economic evils of
immigration are foremost for Bemis, particularly the throng’s depressing effect on wages and
standards of living throughout American society. But similar to Walker, Bemis does not lump
all immigrants together. Indeed, he favors the literacy test over other restrictive measures
because it would not weed out immigrants from the kindred incumbents likely to support his
program. “The Swedes, Germans, English, Scotch, and most of the Irish would not be left out to
25 Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” pg. 438. 26 ibid, pg. 438.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
14
any great extent, and we do not want to exclude them, but the Italians, Hungarian, and Polish
emigration would fall off fully fifty percent.”27
Yet Bemis betrays awareness that his ethnically targeted literacy test would rest
uncomfortably with American democratic ideals of impartial inclusion, a tension that would
persist almost forty more years. It would only be resolved with the 1924 adoption of national
origins quotas, meant to ensure that subsequent immigration flows would mimic the existing US
ethnic mix and thus align the restrictive purpose with the lofty ideals.
Comprehensive Eugenics-Based Programs
Writing in the new century, Prescott Hall (Boston Brahmin graduate of Harvard College
and Law School) and Madison Grant (New York City socialite graduate of Yale College and
Columbia Law School) each proffered comprehensive visions of the vital importance of
immigration restriction and underlying ‘racial hygiene’, Hall at the level of a legislative program
and Grant a veritable belief system. Barely ten years separated Hall’s 1906 monograph
Immigration and Its Effects Upon the United States28 and Grant’s 1916 manifesto The Passing of
the Great Race,29 but substantial shifts are evident in the content and style of their respective
arguments given the ensuing maturation of eugenics and arrival of millions of additional
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. In particular, while Hall operates primarily at
the level of ideas, though frequently betraying underlying attitudes and beliefs, Grant posits a
comprehensive and deterministic system of racialized beliefs in the guise of science. Both
cherish values of patrimonial stewardship; but for Hall this inheres in old New England forms of
27 Bemis, “Restriction of Immigration,” pg. 263. 28 Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Immigration and Its Effects Upon the United States (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1906). 29 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916).
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
15
democracy and egalitarianism, while Grant expresses a conservationist’s concern for the reduced
range and ultimate survivability of the Nordic race and its most exemplary Teutonic subtype. In
this regard, Hall is fundamentally conservative and backwards looking, while Grant sketches a
radical program of future racial renewal and attendant extirpation of charity, Christian religion,
and indeed democracy itself. Hall writes in the style of a legal brief, acknowledging
counterarguments without concealing his premises, while Grant delights in provocation and
aphorism. Hall focuses on an audience of policy makers and engaged citizens; Grant aims at
both likeminded members of his elite caste and more populist nativists down market. Hall and
Grant share the belief that private philanthropy, and especially public support for needy
immigrants, are counter-productive from a social Darwinist perspective. Both Hall’s focus on
policy elites and Grant’s popularization of a comprehensive race-based belief system help create
the atmosphere for the literacy test and especially the national origins quota system.
Hall’s book comprises policy arguments for the restriction of immigration, starting with
the literacy test perennially on the national agenda. He draws a distinction, common among
restrictionists, between old settlers arriving in colonial times and subsequent immigrants proper;
the former stamped their racial and institutional traits on the nascent country, forging its national
character, while until the late nineteenth century the latter were mostly drawn from kindred
ethnic stock and cultural experience, facilitating their ready assimilation. Moreover, the reduced
rigors of immigration mean it no longer performs Darwinian selection; instead, cheap steamship
transport has rendered selection adverse, and European nations offloads defective elements to
American shores.30 Following Bemis, Hall imbues the old settlers with a tenure of sorts, holding
them responsible to maintain the national heritage. “We are trustees for the future, and with us is
30 Hall, Immigration and Its Effects, pg. 29.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
16
the decision what races and what kinds of men shall inherit this country for years after we are
gone.”31 Thus, Hall objects that immigration policy fails to account for the race of both
incumbent and newcomer; eugenics prescribes the maintenance and improvement of the nation’s
racial stock. “Through our power to regulate immigration, we have a unique opportunity to
exercise artificial selection on an enormous scale.”32
Conversely, Grant both celebrates and excoriates “a native American aristocracy…[that]
up to this time supplied the leaders in thought and in the control of capital as well as of education
and of the religious ideals and altruistic bias of government.”33 Sadly, however, the native upper
classes sought short term benefits through the importation of cheap immigrant laborers and
domestic servants, prompting working class natives to shun such work while degrading the
nation’s racial stock. Combined with the perceived shortcomings of democracy, Grant
pronounces the results ruinous: “The immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and
killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword…[the native elite] intrusted the
government of his country and the maintenance of his ideals to races who have never yet
succeeded in governing themselves, much less anyone else.”34 In contrast to Hall’s generally
measured if elitist tone, Grant sounds a clarion call of the extinction looming over his caste, an
endangered species much like the American bison and other big game that he helped save from
extinction as trustee of the American Zoological Society and other preservationist groups.
Despite their shared background as Ivy League attorneys, Hall and Grant present sharply
contrasting styles of argument and programs of action. In his book (though less so in more
31 ibid, pg. 102. 32 ibid, pg. 100. 33 Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, pg. 14. 34 ibid, pg. 17.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
17
polemical pamphlets), Hall is rigorous on policy, organization, and communication. The
Immigration Restriction League that he co-founded represents an early prototype social media
and lobbying enterprise, churning out position papers, feeding copy to newspaper networks,
aggregating and redistributing their content, drafting legislation, and seeking to influence
legislators, regulators, and the educated public.35 Such activities suggest a measured tone, with
professional ethics similarly requiring disclosure of adverse precedent. Grant harbored no such
scruples, and indeed exaggerated the authority of eugenical ‘science’ to solidify his positions.
He makes sweeping assertions about what he terms the three European ‘species’ of Caucasians:
the Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean, all as established by cranial ratios, coupled with a
characteristic complexion, eye and hair color, and stature. Given Grant’s certitude in his racial
beliefs, but evident concern that some racial claims and inferences might appear implausible, he
issues a blanket qualification: “New data will in the future inevitably expand, and perhaps
change our ideas, but such facts as are now at hand, and the conclusions based thereon, are
provisionally set forth in the following chapters, and necessarily often in dogmatic form.”36
Higham puts it well: “Thus Grant was well supplied with scientific information yet free from a
scientist’s scruple in interpreting it”37.
Hall’s book is more balanced yet also brims with racialized claims, particularly at the
intersection of the new immigrants and leftist politics. “It has been pointed out that anarchy and
socialism are the result of a certain degeneracy of race, and that those who come to us from a
35 Within a year of its foundation, the Immigration Restriction League “reported that over five hundred daily newspapers were receiving its literature and that the great bulk of them were reprinting part of it, sometimes in the form of editorials.” Higham, Strangers in the Land, pg. 103. 36 Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, pg. 7. 37 Higham, Strangers in the Land, pg. 156.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
18
condition bordering upon serfdom are least capable of distinguishing between liberty and
anarchy.”38 Yet such pronouncements are leavened by genuine empathy for new immigrants and
concern about their exploitation. Thus, Hall rails against the padrone system by which laborers
are informally brought to the US through middlemen and hired out on projects as payback. But
his overarching concern remains immigration’s effects on native Americans, through downward
pressure on wages, increased unemployment, and especially fewer children given the need to
‘concentrate advantage’ so their higher education and working capital could spare them contact
with immigrants. Hall thus harvests themes that Bemis and Walker ploughed and planted.
While expressing racialized attitudes and beliefs, Hall maintains a laser focus on
restriction of immigration. Grant instead mentions immigration only in passing, as subordinate
to the deterministic role of race, and he even lumps immigrants with slaves for their deleterious
impact on the ruling classes. “The immigrant ditch digger and the railroad navvies were to our
fathers what their slaves were to the Romans, and the same transfer of political power from
master to servant is taking place today.”39 Unsurprisingly, Grant disdains democracy as contrary
to the natural hierarchy that would place genetic aristocrats in charge. “A high breeding rate and
democratic institutions” thus threaten to allow Alpine and Mediterranean types to submerge the
superior Nordics.40 Grant regards Christianity as facilitating racial decline dating back to Roman
times. “It was at the outset the religion of the slave, the meek, and the lowly…This bias in favor
of weaker elements greatly interfered with their elimination by natural
selection…Christianity…tended then, as it does now, to break down class and race distinctions.
38 Hall, Immigration and Its Effects, pg. 156. 39 Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, pg. 58. 40 ibid, pg. 103.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
19
Such distinctions are absolutely necessary to the maintenance of race purity.”41 He seeks to
desensitize if not shock his audience, playing primarily to their engrained attitudes and beliefs.
Grant similarly demonstrates sensitivity to presentation of his eugenical narrative, in
particular how it might achieve cultural and intellectual currency at large. Given “the correlation
of spiritual and moral traits with physical characters... the average novelist or playwright would
not fail to make his hero a tall, blond, honest, and somewhat stupid youth, or his villain a small,
dark, and exceptionally intelligent individual of warped moral character.”42 For Grant, even art
recapitulates eugenics. Correspondingly, eugenics increasingly seeps into the popular culture.
For example, from 1920 “the most widely read magazine in the United States, the Saturday
Evening Post, began to quote and urgently commend the doctrines of Madison Grant.”43
Concurrently, the Post chastised US Steel and other corporate opponents of immigration
restriction for putting narrow business interests ahead of the nation’s racial hygiene. The Post
also commissioned a series of articles by Kenneth Roberts, serialized as a popular 1922 book, to
sensationalize the racial risks that loom if post-war immigration from Europe were to resume
unimpeded, “concluding that a continuing deluge of Alpine, Mediterranean, and Semitic
immigrants would inevitably produce ‘a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the
good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.’”44 This amounts to
trickle-down eugenics.
Writing about 15 years earlier, Hall’s screed for the literacy test appears tame by
comparison, though clearly pointed in the same direction: “The hereditary tendencies of the
41 ibid, pg. 116. 42 ibid, pg. 120. 43 Higham, Strangers in the Land, pg. 265. 44 ibid, pg. 273).
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
20
peoples illiterate abroad, and especially of their uneducated classes, cannot be overcome in a
generation or two.”45 Although he purports to express ideas, Hall reveals racialized attitudes and
a core belief that biology trumps culture in determining social and political behavior.
Correctives and Variations of Eugenics; Cracking the Legislative Code
By 1913, eugenics had matured as both a scientifically credentialed field and a popular
lens on the perceived problems of excessive immigration and degradation of the ‘American
Race’. This confluence shows in writings of Robert DeCourcy Ward, Harvard College classmate
of Hall, fellow founding member of the Immigration Restriction League, and professor of
climatology at Harvard. Like Bemis, Walker, and especially his friend Hall, Ward
characteristically expresses his beliefs in terms of solemn duty to the national patrimony: “And
we, who are the trustees of the future inheritance of our race, have no right to permit any alien to
land on our shores whose blood will taint this race…[I]t is our duty to keep the American blood
as pure as we can.”46 Yet unlike even Hall, Ward does not generalize about the marginal
European ‘races’ seeking US entry, much less map a hierarchy of races. Instead, he advocates
stricter immigration laws and expanded administrative resources for excluded categories of unfit
aliens, informed by eugenics but applied without regard to national origins.
Ward’s eugenical concerns transcend immigration. He treats immigration as merely a
special case, simpler to address than the problem of suspect native breeding stock. Many of his
arguments apply equally to ‘defective’ natives and immigrants, and Ward appeals to historical
inheritance and perceived common sense alike. “’Men are commonly more careful of the breed
45 Hall, Immigration and its Effects, pg. 273. 46 Robert DeCourcy Ward, “The Crisis in our Immigration Policy,” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League No. 61 (1913).
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
21
of their horses and dogs than of their children.’ William Penn was right, more than two centuries
ago, when he wrote those words. They are as true today as they were then.”47 In short, Ward
believes that science shows how to optimize the national racial stock. Far from natural selection
of the fittest individuals, Ward surveys adverse selection of defectives, an offense against nature
itself. His premise (deep though unspoken belief) is that, given would-be immigrants’ political
disenfranchisement, a national eugenics program would best launch with restriction of defective
immigrants. Establishing the program would pave the way for like action respecting defective
natives. In that ominous respect, Ward is closer to the comprehensive racial hygiene that Grant
portends: “Beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending
gradually to types which might be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps
ultimately to worthless race types...”48
While neither Grant nor Ward develops the details or implications of a ‘rigorous’
eugenics policy applied nationwide (beyond Grant’s forthright advocacy of the segregation and
sterilization of ‘defectives’), Ward see application of eugenics to immigration policy as an
expedient, scientific, and morally correct response. For if fewer immigrants are allowed to enter
the US, fewer defective immigrants will necessarily enter. But, uniquely among the writers
surveyed, Ward also anticipates positive potential for the national stock via immigration. “By
selecting our immigrants, through proper legislation, we can pick out the best specimens of each
race to be our own fellow-citizens and to be the parents of our future children. The responsibility
47 ibid, pg. 1. 48 Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, pg. 36.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
22
which rests upon us in this matter is overwhelming. We can decide upon what merits – physical,
mental, moral – these incoming aliens will be selected.”49
Such discrimination by ‘trait and quality’ for the benefit of the national gene pool may
seems jarring. But in contrast to many contemporaries, Ward eschews exclusion based on
explicitly ‘racial’ attributes. In that sense Ward furnishes scientific corrective to Grant’s
polemics, and indeed a powerful counters argument to the outright cessation of immigration or
ban of particular ‘races’ sought by more reflexive restrictionists. Envisioning potential benefits
from limited infusions of ‘new but better immigrants,’ Ward reflects the continuing grip of older
democratic ideals and presages the 1924 Act’s national origins system.
Unifying these strands via legislation fell to John Trevor, a New York City-based
Harvard Law alumnus and World War I military intelligence officer who proved instrumental in
the quantum shift of immigration policy. Trevor is primarily known for his key role in
assembling and aligning the necessary elements to achieve the 1924 Act, substantially restricting
immigration and altering its recent ethnic mix while bowing to older American ideals. In
particular, Trevor forged personal relationships and political alliances with rougher-hewn
nativists exemplified by Washington Congressman Albert Johnson, Chairman of the House
Committee on Immigration; they liaised with ‘eugenics experts’ and popular figures like Grant to
undergird technical and popular support for the legislation.50 Most importantly, Trevor
conceptualized the national origins quota system that would align policy with the reconfigured
national belief system, finally enabling substantially reduced immigration overall and especially
from Southern and Eastern Europe.
49 Ward, “The Crisis in our Immigration Policy,” pg. 6. 50 See generally, Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 319-324.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
23
While regarded as a significant victory for the restrictionists, the literacy test enacted in
1917 exerted scant immediate impact, since US entry into World War I had already brought
immigration to a temporary halt. Moreover, given educational advances in the targeted countries
and numerous exemptions from the test, it would not be an effective sieve once normal flows
resumed.51 Ethnic/racial bias and willingness to speak of it openly had meanwhile permeated
discourse on the topic, given the spread of eugenics both as a ‘science’ and weariness with old
world cosmopolitanism. Not coincidentally, the 1917 law separately introduced an Asiatic
excluded zone rendering occupants of an entire continent ineligible for US citizenship.
The jingoism of the war years outlasted the war. In its aftermath, the legislative agenda
was too full to allow immediate comprehensive update of immigration laws. Political support
thus coalesced around temporary measures to restrict immigration. Senator Dillingham proffered
a novel system of numerical restrictions that built upon one of his 1911 Committee
recommendations, proposing that European immigration be allocated based on 5% of the
foreign-born of each nationality in the US as of the last available census, 1910.52 While Johnson
preferred outright suspension, he was able to negotiate the annual limit down to 3%. Temporary
numerical restrictions based on the most recent census available thus became law under new
President Harding.
Johnson and his allies segued to work on permanent quota-based measures, dropping to
2% of the foreign born of each nationality according to the 1890 census, thus also artificially
reducing the new immigrants’ quota allocations. “Johnson was especially pleased to enlist the
support of a leading eugenicist, Harry Laughlin…Laughlin gave the House Committee, and
51 Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, summarized in note 8. 52 ibid, pg. 310.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
24
through it the American people, an extensive education in the importance of basing immigration
policy on scientifically racial rather than economic considerations. “53 Despite such ‘scientific’
support for targeting the newer sources of immigration, some politicians and writers pointed to
the artificiality and offense to tradition from using an outdated census evidently chosen to
exclude the new immigrants.
On the counterattack, “Johnson’s unofficial adviser, Captain Trevor, supplied a brilliant
solution.”54 Trevor’s insight was that use of census data tied to the relative percentages of the
foreign born would systematically undercount old stock Americans in formulation of the new
quotas. While use of the 1890 census figures would yield approximately the same quotas as
Trevor’s preliminary national origins tables, the 1890 immigration figures would eventually
allow a disproportionate number of Southern and Eastern European immigrants to enter,
especially after accounting for the preferences and exemptions for family members.55
Conversely, use of the 1890 figures beyond a transitional period felt arbitrary and driven by a
suspect purpose.
Trevor had finally cracked the code, with his national origins system (to become
permanent in several years pending further expert input on implementation) enabling restriction
in an ostensibly neutral manner while operating to exclude the ‘new immigrants’, thus providing
the stable conceptual foundation that the literacy test had lacked. “In short, the national origins
system offered a final implementation of racial nationalism and an answer to all charges of
discrimination. It gave expression to the tribal mood, and comfort to the democratic
53 ibid, pp. 313-314. 54 ibid, pg. 319. 55 John B. Trevor, “An Analysis of the American Immigration Act of 1924,” New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1924), pg. 388.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
25
conscience.”56 Although more restrictive than the literacy test, quotas better comported with the
American democratic belief system.
Trevor characteristically presented the 1924 Act as recovery of ‘true’ American
principles after a century of errancy, rather than a break with tradition. Indeed, he cites Jefferson
as, in effect, a constitutional eugenicist. The new immigrants’ “principles, with their language,
they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number they will share with us in the
legislation. They will infuse it with their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a
heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass…May not our Government be more homogenous,
more peaceable, more durable?”57 By marrying the new restrictions with older sentiments,
Trevor helped solve the immigration ‘problem’ while salving the national conscience. The stage
was thus set for immigration policy for the roaring ‘twenties and well beyond.
Conclusion
The immigration restriction movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
demonstrates the pivotal significance of beliefs, as opposed to ideas, in occasioning seismic
political shifts under conditions of path dependency. Elite and popular perspectives fed upon the
maturing social sciences and emerging vogue of eugenics, ushering in a new era of immigration
after decades of policy stasis given the persistent American belief in equal access to citizenship
and institutional impediments such as the Congressional super-majorities required to surmount
presidential vetoes. As eugenics increasingly penetrated the national mindscape, overtly racial
arguments to restrict immigration were unashamedly voiced among intellectuals, popular
publications, and political leaders. Tellingly, the literacy test was part of a broader immigration
56 Higham, Strangers in the Land, pg. 323. 57 Trevor, “An Analysis of the American Immigration Act,” pg. 376 (quoting Jefferson).
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
26
overhaul passed over veto in 1917, when an ‘Asiatic barred zone’ was also adopted. After the
end of war and ‘return to normalcy’, the literacy test yielded to a system of national origins
quotas that substantially increased restriction of immigration, especially from the newer sources,
in a formulation that also bowed to the received American democratic belief system. The
facially neutral quota system thus reconciled old and emerging sentiments about the rubric of
American citizenship and the diverse sources of national identity.
Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article
27
References
Bemis, Edward A. “Restriction of Immigration.” The Andover Review: A Religious and Theological Monthly (1884-1893), March 1888: 9, 51 (ProQuest pg. 251).
Benton-Cohen, Katherine. Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigration Since 1882. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
Fairchild, Henry Pratt. “The Literacy Test and its Making.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 31, No. 3 (May 1917), pp. 447-460.
Gerstle, Gary. “America’s Encounter with Immigrants”. In In Search of Progressive America, edited by Michael Kazin, Frans Becker, and Menno Hurenkamp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, pp. 37-53.
Goldin, Claudia. “The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921”. NBER Working Paper Series, April 1993, No. 4345.
Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916.
Hall, Prescott Farnsworth. Immigration and Its Effects Upon the United States. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1906.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 1955.
Ludmerer, Kenneth L. “Genetics, Eugenics, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924”. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1972), pp. 59-81.
Maciag, Drew. “When Ideas had Consequences: Or, Whatever Happened to Intellectual History?” Reviews in American History, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 741-751.
Marks, Jonathan. “Historiography of Eugenics.” J. Hum. Genet. 52:650-652, 1993.
Trevor, John B. “An Analysis of the American Immigration Act of 1924.” New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924.
Walker, Francis A. “Restriction of Immigration.” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League No. 33, 1899.
Ward, Robert DeCourcy. “The Crisis in our Immigration Policy.” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League No. 61, 1913.
Zolberg, Aristide R. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
top related