The High Tide of Immigration - A National Menace
by Louis Dalrymple
in Judge magazine, Aug 1903
Eugenics became a U.S programme to improve the genetic quality of humans. Since the early proponents believed that only through selective breeding could humans direct their own evolution, I’d been very interested in eugenics’ effect on forced sterilisation. Now examine the movement’s impact on immigration into America.
Between 1850-1930, the US accepted c5 million Germans, 3.5 million British, 4.5 million Irish and 2.8 million Eastern European Jews. In fact 1.3 million migrants passed through Ellis Island in 1907 alone. Americans believed a] in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, as opposed to Asian, African or Eastern European citizens. And they believed b] that the US had rarely suffered from crime or disease before those Undesirable Migrants arrived. The famous melting-pot concept was fake!
In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, then renewed it twice. By excluding all Chinese labourers from entering the U.S, this Exclusion Act largely achieved its goal.
The Immigration Restriction League was the first American body officially promoting eugenics. Created by Harvard University graduates in 1894, the League sought to bar inferior races from entering America, diluting the superior American racial stock. Social and sexual involvement with less evolved races would pose a biological threat to real Americans.
The Immigration Restriction League was the first American body officially promoting eugenics. Created by Harvard University graduates in 1894, the League sought to bar inferior races from entering America, diluting the superior American racial stock. Social and sexual involvement with less evolved races would pose a biological threat to real Americans.
The American Breeder’s Association/ABA (1906) was the first eugenic body in the US, led by Charles Davenport. It was formed to investigate and report on heredity, to emphasise the value of superior blood and the menace of inferior blood. The American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality, from 1909 on, investigated infant mortality in terms of eugenics. They pushed for government intervention, to promote the health of future citizens. The American Breeder’s Association established a Committee on Immigration Legislation committee in 1911.
As a result, eugenicists wanted to build a wall around the U.S high enough to keep out polluting peoples. The true, old-stock Americans were seen to be an endangered species!
Immigrants outside an Ellis Island building, c1900.
Smithsonian Institute, National Archives
The Restriction League lobbied for a literacy test for immigrants, since literacy rates were low among inferior races. By using intelligence testing, eugenicists asserted that middleclass status was a marker of superior status, indicative of genetic fitness. This reaffirmed the existing class and racial hierarchies; those deemed unfit were largely of the lower classes i.e dirty migrants.
At first Davenport favoured restriction of feeble-minded immigrants and sterilisation as primary methods. But soon he was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by Madison Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race. Combining dodgy history, anthropology and genetic theory, Grant’s work persuaded Davenport that pure American blood was threatened by entire ethnic groups. The Passing of the Great Race savagely denigrated the peoples of eastern and southern Europe while exalting the Nordics of N.W Europe.
Davenport also founded The Eugenics Record Office, supported by psychologists Henry Goddard & Harry Laughlin. Founded in Cold Spring Harbour NY in 1911, using corporate money from the Harriman rail roads, Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Institution, they collected family pedigrees! Harriman money was given to local charities, in order to find immigrants from specific ethnic groups to deport, confine or sterilise.
Immigrant children examined by city health officer at Ellis Island
during Typhus Scare. New York, 1911.
Compare this to Australia, the nation that warmly embraced the obnoxious White Australia Policy in 1913. Many Australians clearly had negative attitudes to those not of British extraction, incl Indigenous Australians.
Before WW1 a network of scientists and reformers actively promoted eugenic legislation and projects. c19 million people attended the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. This Exposition extolled this rapidly progressing nation, featuring new developments in science, agriculture, manufacturing, technology, health care and race betterment.
There WERE some scientific critics, most focusing on eugenicists’ methodology, which defined every human characteristic as genetic, never environmental. Yet there were 376 separate courses the US’s leading universities which included eugenics in the curriculum.
Even feminists advocated reforms eg National Federation of Women’s Clubs; Woman’s Christian Temperance Union; National League of Women Voters. Birth control heroine Margaret Sanger believed birth control could prevent unwanted babies from being born into a miserable life. Eugenicists recognised the political and social influence of women in the Deep South between 1915-20, and used it.
And migrants already in the country could be targeted. Since poverty was associated with prostitution and mental idiocy, women of the lower classes, immigrants or women of colour were the first to be deemed promiscuous. These women were sterilised or were confined.
Conclusion
In the early C20th, the U.S accepted many Southern and Eastern European immigrants, the people most loathed by Protestant, white old-time Americans. So restrictions on immigration passed during the 1920s were clearly motivated by eugenics’ more racist goals. But once migration to the U.S largely ceased in 1924, rubbishy migrants could no longer be blamed for crime and disease in the US.
You might like to read The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law, by Daniel Okrent, 2019