American Passage (32 page)

Two members of the committee were Immigration Restriction League (IRL) officials Prescott Hall and Robert DeC. Ward. For the past two decades, these men had tried to convince their fellow Americans of the threat that immigrants posed. Although they never advocated closing the nation’s gates, they continually lobbied for tougher inspection of immigrants and the exclusion of those they deemed undesirable. They had hoped the literacy test would be the vehicle that would keep out many undesirable immigrants, but they had been thwarted in their attempts for twenty years.

Now many IRL members took up the banner of eugenics. Ward hoped that immigration officials could practice “eugenic principles in the selection of the fathers and mothers of future American children.” It was feebleminded immigrants more than the insane, Ward believed, who posed the greatest threat to the Republic. “The latter are to a considerable extent segregated and thus prevented from breeding,” he wrote, “but the former are far oftener at liberty, and are thus usually free to breed as they will.”

For Prescott Hall, the ability to sort populations by their genetic stock was a beneficial result of the spread of science. The rise of science and the decline of religion, Hall noted approvingly, “turned men’s gaze in large part from the next world to this.” With a heady mixture of Darwin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Nietzsche, Hall spoke of the new “Christ ideal” rooted not in religious faith but in “human perfection.” He praised the “superman, working in a strenuous life to produce a better world here and now.”

One answer for Hall was birth control. Both the restriction of immigration and the use of birth control should, in his words, be applied both to “defective and delinquent stocks of all races,” as well as “less desirable races.” Why, he asked, was science so devoted to using its new knowledge to breeding animals and plants, but not humans?

As to whether humans were affected more by their environment than by their genes, Hall sided with nature. “You cannot make bad stock into good by changing its meridian, any more than you can turn a cart horse into a hunter by putting it into a fine stable, or make a mongrel into a fine dog by teaching it tricks,” he argued. Hall held out little hope that life in America would have any effect on the intelligence of immigrants. He approvingly quoted eugenicist Karl Pearson, that one “cannot change the leopard’s spots and you cannot change bad stock to good; you may dilute it, possibly spread it over a large area, spoiling good stock, but until it ceases to multiply it will not cease to be.”

At the intersection of eugenics and immigration restriction was the dark pessimism of native-born Anglo-Saxons that their culture would be washed away in a tide of southern and eastern Europeans. Some asked whether the Anglo-Saxon would go the way of the American Indian and the buffalo: to extinction.

Progressive sociologist Edward A. Ross was one of those asking that question. In 1913, Ross gave a lecture on immigration in which he prophesized that when “the blood of the old pioneering breed has faded out of the motley, polyglot, polychrome, caste-riven population that will crowd this Continent to a Chinese density, let there be reared a commemorative monument bearing these words: ‘To the American Pioneering Breed, The Victim of too much Humanitarianism and too little Common Sense.’ ”

One late afternoon, Ross planted himself in New York’s Union Square as garment workers left their jobs and headed back to their tenement homes. At six feet, four inches tall, the patrician academic from Wisconsin must have towered over the diverse, multi-ethnic crowd milling about Union Square. Ross took a quick scan of 368 individuals as they passed him and reported that only 38 “had the type of face one would find at a county fair in the West or the South.”

Ross proudly noted that a trained eye could see that the physiognomy of many ethnic groups painted them as decidedly inferior. So just what kind of faces did Ross see in Union Square and in immigrant enclaves across the country? One was what he called the “Caliban type,” defined by men who were “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality” and who “clearly belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.” These were men, Ross confidently proclaimed, who were the “descendants of those
who always stayed behind
.”

Whatever Ross’s descriptions lacked in historical or scientific accuracy, they were not lacking in vivid language. When he saw foreignborn men, Ross was struck by their “narrow and sloping foreheads” and asymmetrical faces. The women were no better. He found them largely unattractive, with every face betraying some fatal flaw—“lips thick, mouth coarse, upper lip too long, cheekbones too high, chin poorly formed, the bridge of the nose hollowed, the base of the nose tilted or else the whole face prognathous.” It seemed that almost every foreign face Ross encountered betrayed a deep inferiority that bordered on the subhuman. “There were so many sugar-loaf heads, moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern jaws, and goose-bill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator,” he wrote. That these men and women were contributing their genes to the American melting pot was enough to make men like Ross despondent.

A leading academic, Ross was also a Progressive, yet so many of his observations seemed rooted more in prejudice than in social science. To Ross, Jews were small, weak, and “exceedingly sensitive to pain.” Slavs were “immune to certain kinds of dirt,” while Mediterranean types were skilled at “nimble lying.”

Ross predicted that these new immigrants would cause “a mysterious slackening in social progress” and an overall decline in national intelligence. All of this inferior genetic material floating in the American gene pool would create an increasingly sluggish people, in contrast to the hearty and independent Anglo-Saxon settlers. Crime, drunkenness, sexual immorality, and venereal disease would rise, while “intelligence, self-restraint, refinement, orderliness and efficiency” would decline.

These descriptions placed immigrants on the evolutionary scale far behind the vigorous Anglo-Saxons who settled America. Such stereotypes could take a tragicomic twist, as when a member of the Ellis Island medical staff, Howard Knox, told a meeting of the Eugenics Research Association at Columbia University that a recently deported thirty-nine-year-old Finnish immigrant closely resembled the “missing link” that scientists have searched for to explain the evolutionary gap between apes and humans.

To Knox, this immigrant resembled a man from the early Stone Age, with a low, receding forehead, long, shaggy eyebrows, thick, protruding lips, a massive jaw, long arms, teeth angled outward, and each finger resembling a thumb. The man’s profession—a linesman for the telephone company—seemed to prove Knox’s thesis, “since he may have inherited the characteristics of his ancestors who perhaps often found it necessary to climb to the tree tops to escape some giant animal of their time.” He further explained that while he had never found a man with a tail, he held out hope that he would find such a creature at Ellis Island.

Amidst such pressing concerns for the future of American genetic stock, Henry Goddard offered his services to officials at Ellis Island, where he found a willing ally in William Williams. During his second term as commissioner, Williams was even more convinced that too many undesirable immigrants were entering the country. He was concerned that mentally defective immigrants would “start vicious strains which lead to misery and loss in future generations and influence unfavorably the character and lives of hundreds of persons.” Robert DeC. Ward praised Williams for doing “more than anyone else to keep the blood of our race pure.”

Williams complained to his superiors in Washington that under the current law “many families of poor stock are admissible who practically never rise out of a certain narrow border-land between independence and dependence.” As part of his work, he sent an inspector to report on some three dozen Italian and Jewish children in New York City deemed feebleminded by local schools and hospitals. The longer the families had been in America, Williams argued, the worse off they were. These families, he wrote, came from classes that “have been going down hill for some time” due to “bad living conditions, in-breeding, over-breeding, the strain of persecution.”

Neither Congress nor President William Howard Taft seemed willing to secure extra funding to weed out mentally defective immigrants, so Williams was forced to look in another direction, and Goddard offered a scientific method that would aid doctors in doing so. In 1910, Goddard and his colleague Edward Johnstone visited Ellis Island. The two men came away disappointed, discouraged, and overwhelmed, both by the enormity of the daily immigrant tide they saw on that one day—some five thousand immigrants—as well as the lack of proper facilities. Goddard felt there was little he could contribute to the effort to weed out mental defectives in such an environment.

So discouraged was Goddard that he did not return again to Ellis Island until the spring of 1912, when Williams invited him back to perform some experiments. Goddard came on a Saturday when no immigrants arrived, but there were a few still on the island preparing to leave for the mainland. Goddard picked out one young man and gave him the Binet test. He tested at a mental age of eight years old, an obvious defective to Goddard.

Williams seemed pleased enough with the results to invite the psychologist back the following week. This time Goddard brought two female assistants with him and set out to construct an experiment. One woman would stand on the inspection line and pick out immigrants for further testing, while the second assistant would sit in a room and administer the Binet tests to those selected. Based solely on observation, Goddard’s assistant picked out nine individuals who appeared to be mentally deficient, as well as three more who appeared normal. The twelve were then tested, and Goddard reported that all nine suspected of being mentally deficient had tested so, while the three in the control group had tested normal.

Believing this was proof of the scientific validity of intelligence testing, Goddard requested a return engagement in the fall of 1912. For one week, Goddard and his female assistants administered Binet tests. In one experiment, Goddard’s assistants selected eleven immigrants whom they believed were mentally defective, while Public Health Service doctors pulled out thirty-three. All were given the Binet tests. Goddard reported that fewer than half of those chosen by the medical staff qualified as mentally defective, while his own assistants proved correct in nine out of the eleven cases.

Confident of its ability to pick out mentally defective immigrants, Goddard’s team moved to another experiment. Working with Ellis Island medical officials, both groups stood in an inspection line of some 1,260 incoming immigrants. Goddard’s assistants picked out 83 suspected mental defectives, while the medical inspectors picked out only 18. Extrapolating from his earlier experiment, Goddard argued that his assistants would have excluded some 72 immigrants, while the medical inspectors would only have caught 8. Goddard believed he had now scientifically proved what William Williams, Prescott Hall, and others believed—that mentally inferior immigrants were slipping past inadequate inspection at Ellis Island.

Goddard magnanimously said that he did not mean to disparage the quality and professionalism of the Ellis Island medical staff. They simply were not specialists, he argued, and his staff showed just what experts in psychology could provide. All that was needed was better training of the medical staff at immigration stations, something on the order of a year or two medical residency at an institution like the Vineland School. With such training, he wrote, officials could then “pick out with marvelous accuracy every case of mental defect in all those who are above the infant age.” Women, he said, were best fit for the job because they possessed a keener sense of observation.

Goddard’s test did not go completely without a hitch. He was concerned that most of the immigrants did not speak English, forcing his assistants to rely on interpreters to administer the tests. How could you be sure, Goddard worried, that the interpreters were correctly translating both the questions and the immigrants’ responses? However, he did not ask whether cultural biases could subvert the results of the tests. Were intelligence tests conceived for use with French schoolchildren suitable instruments to measure the intelligence of peasants from southern and eastern Europe?

Nevertheless, Goddard carried on with his experiments, raising more funds to send another group of testers to Ellis Island in the spring of 1913 for two and a half months. What came from this round of testing was one of the most infamous and misunderstood psychological studies of the twentieth century.

Goddard’s staff chose a total of 191 immigrants—Jews, Italians, Russians, and Hungarians—for a battery of five intelligence tests. To arrive at this group, Goddard first weeded out those of obvious low intelligence, as well as those who clearly appeared intellectually suitable for admission. What was left was a group that Goddard defined as borderline feebleminded, who may or may not be qualified for admission.

Although Goddard’s staff conducted the test in 1913, the results were not presented publicly until a 1916 conference and not published until 1917. Why did Goddard, whose professional goal was to get intelligence tests accepted by the general public, take so long to report his results?

One reason is that the results shocked even Goddard. They showed that 83 percent of Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, and 79 percent of Italians tested were clearly feebleminded. Worse still, Goddard’s team could only pinpoint six individuals whose measured level of intelligence was without a doubt acceptable for admission. The remaining subjects possessed a level of intelligence that would make their legal admission to the United States unlikely.

The results, wrote Goddard, “are so surprising and difficult of acceptance that they can hardly stand by themselves as valid.” Unlike Edward Ross, Goddard did not set out to prove the inferiority of immigrants. He wondered whether the tests were too hard and began omitting certain questions from the test. After rejiggering the results, Goddard lowered his estimate of those clearly feebleminded to almost 40 percent.