The Lying Stones of Marrakech (42 page)

But if the bosses broke a weak and unenforceable law in this instance, all other causes of death can be traced to managerial compliance with absurdly inadequate standards, largely kept so weak by active political resistance to legal regulation of work sites, buttressed by the argument of Social Darwinism. Fire hoses could not pump above the sixth floor, but no law prevented the massing of workers into crowded floors above. No statute required fire drills or other forms of training for safety. In other cases, weak regulations were risibly inadequate, easy to flaunt, and basically unenforced in any case. For example, by law, each worker required 250 cubic feet of air space—a good rule to prevent crowding. But companies had managed to circumvent the intent of this law, and maintain their traditional (and dangerous) density of workers, by moving into large loft buildings with high ceilings and substantial irrelevant space that could be included in calculating the 250-cubic-foot minimum.

When the Asch Building opened in 1900, an inspector for the Buildings Department informed the architect that a third staircase should be provided. But the architect sought and received a variance, arguing that the single fire escape could count as the missing staircase required by law for structures with more than ten thousand square feet per floor. Moreover, the single fire escape— which buckled and fell during the fire, as a result of poor maintenance and the weight of too many workers trying to escape—led only to a glass skylight in a closed courtyard. The building inspector had also complained about this arrangement, and the architect had promised to make the necessary alterations.
But no changes had been made, and the falling fire escape plunged right through the skylight, greatly increasing the death toll.

Two final quotations highlight the case for inadequate legal protection as a primary cause for the unconscionable death toll in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (Leon Stein's excellent book,
The Triangle Fire
, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962, served as my chief source for information about this event). Rose Safran, a survivor of the fire and supporter of the 1909 strike, said: “If the union had won we would have been safe. Two of our demands were for adequate fire escapes and for open doors from the factories to the street. But the bosses defeated us and we didn't get the open doors or the better fire escapes. So our friends are dead.” A building inspector who had actually written to the Triangle management just a few months before, asking for an appointment to discuss the initiation of fire drills, commented after the blaze: “There are only two or three factories in the city where fire drills are in use. In some of them where I have installed the system myself, the owners have discontinued it. The neglect of factory owners in the matter of safety of their employees is absolutely criminal. One man whom I advised to install a fire drill replied to me: ‘Let 'em burn. They're a lot of cattle, anyway.'”

The Triangle fire galvanized the workers' reform movement as never before. An empowered force, now irresistible, of labor organizers, social reformers, and liberal legislators pressed for stronger regulation under the theme of “never again.” Hundreds of laws passed as a direct result of this belated agitation. But nothing could wash the blood of 146 workers from the sidewalks of New York.

This tale of two work sites—of a desk situated where Huxley debated Wilberforce, and an office built on a floor that burned during the Triangle Shirtwaist fire—has no end, for the story illustrates a theme of human intellectual life that must always be with us, however imbued with an obvious and uncontroversial solution. Extremes must usually be regarded as untenable, even dangerous places on complex and subde continua. For the application of Darwinian theory to human history, Wilberforce's “none” marks an error of equal magnitude with the “all” of an extreme Social Darwinism. In a larger sense, the evolution of a species like
Homo sapiens
should fill us with notions of glory for our odd mental uniqueness, and of deep humility for our status as a tiny and accidental twig on such a sturdy and luxuriandy branching tree of life. Glory
and
humility! Since we can't abandon either feeling for a unitary stance in the middle, we had best make sure that both attitudes
always
walk together, hand in hand, and secure in the wisdom of Ruth's promise to Naomi: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.”

A
S A SETTING FOR AN INITIAL WELCOME TO A NEW
home, the international arrivals hall at Kennedy airport pales before the spaciousness, the open air, and the symbol of fellowship in New York's harbor. But the plaque that greets airborne immigrants of our time shares one feature with the great lady who graced the arrival of so many seaborne ancestors, including all my grandparents in their childhood. The plaque on Kennedy's wall and the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty bear the same inscription: Emma Lazarus's poem “The New Colossus”—but with one crucial difference. The Kennedy version reads:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door
.

One might be excused for supposing that the elision represents a large and necessary omission to fit the essence of a longer poem onto a smallish plaque. But only one line, easily accommodated, has been cut—and for a reason that can only reflect thoughtless (as opposed to merely ugly) censorship, therefore inviting a double indictment on independent charges of stupidity
and
cowardice. (As a member of the last public school generation trained by forced memorization of a holy historical canon, including the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to the Constitution, Mr. Emerson on the rude bridge that arched the flood, and Ms. Lazarus on the big lady with the lamp, I caught the deletion right away, and got sufficiently annoyed to write a
New York Times
op-ed piece a couple of years ago. Obviously, I am still seething, but at least I now have the perverse pleasure of using the story for my own benefit to introduce this essay.) I therefore restore the missing line (along with Emma Lazarus's rhyming scheme and syntax):

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Evidently, the transient wind of political correctness precludes such a phrase as “wretched refuse,” lest any visitor read the line too literally or personally. Did the authorities at our Port Authority ever learn about metaphor, and its prominence in poetry? Did they ever consider that Ms. Lazarus might be describing the disdain of a foreign elite toward immigrants whom we would welcome, nurture, and value?

This story embodies a double irony that prompted my retelling. We hide Emma Lazarus's line today because we misread her true intention, and because contemporary culture has so confused (and often even equated) inappropriate words with ugly deeds. But the authorities of an earlier generation invoked the false and literal meaning—the identification of most immigrants as wretched refuse—to accomplish a deletion of persons rather than words. The supposed genetic inferiority of most refugees (an innate wretchedness that American opportunity could never overcome) became an effective rallying cry for a movement that did succeed in imposing strong restrictions upon immigration, beginning in the 1920s. These laws, strictly enforced despite pleas for timely exception, immured thousands of Europeans who sought asylum because Hitler's racial laws had marked them for death, while our national quotas on immigration precluded any addition of their kind. These two stories of past exclusion and truncated present welcome surely illustrate the familiar historical dictum that significant events tend to repeat themselves with an ironic difference—the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

In 1925, Charles B. Davenport, one of America's foremost geneticists, wrote to his friend Madison Grant, the author of a best-selling book,
The Passing of the Great Race
, on the dilution of America's old (read northern European, not Indian) blood by recent immigration: “Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to.” Davenport faced a dilemma. He sought a genetic argument for innate Jewish undesirability, but conventional stereotypes precluded the usual claim for inherent stupidity. So Davenport opted for weakness in moral character rather than intellect. He wrote in his 1911 book,
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
—not, by the way, a political tract, but his generation's leading textbook in the developing science of genetics:

In earning capacity both male and female Hebrew immigrants rank high and the literacy is above the mean of all immigrants…. On the other hand, they show the greatest proportion of offenses against chastity and in connection with prostitution … The hordes of Jews that are now coming to us from Russia and the extreme southeast of Europe, with their intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest, represent the opposite extreme from the early English and the more recent Scandinavian immigration, with their ideals of community life in the open country, advancement by the sweat of the brow, and the uprearing of families in the fear of God and love of country.

The rediscovery and publication of Mendel's laws in 1900 initiated the modern study of genetics. Earlier theories of heredity had envisaged a “blending” or smooth mixture and dilution of traits by interbreeding with partners of different constitution, whereas Mendelism featured a “particulate” theory of inheritance, with traits coded by discrete and unchanging genes that need not be expressed in all offspring (especially if “recessive” to a “dominant” form of the gene carried on the other chromosome of a given pair), but that remain in the hereditary constitution, independent and undiluted, awaiting expression in some future generation.

In an understandable initial enthusiasm for this great discovery, early geneticists committed their most common and consistent error in trying to identify single genes as causes for nearly every human trait, from discrete bits of anatomy to complex facets of personality. The search for single genetic determinants seemed reasonable (and testable by analysis of pedigrees) for simple, discrete, and discontinuous characters and contrasts (like blue versus brown eyes). But
the notion that complex behaviors and temperaments might also emerge from a similar root in simple heredity of single genes never made much sense, for two major reasons: (1) a continuity in expression that precludes any easy definition of traits supposedly under analysis (I may know blue eyes when I see them, but where does a sanguine personality end and melancholia take over?); and (2) a virtual certainty that environments can substantially mold such characters, whatever their underlying genetic influence (my eyes may become blue whatever I eat, but my inherently good brain may end up residing in a stupid adult if poor nutrition starved my early growth, and crushing poverty denied me an education).

Nonetheless, most early human geneticists searched for “unit characters”—supposed traits that could be interpreted as the product of a single Mendelian factor—with abandon, even in complex, continuous, environmentally labile, and virtually undefinable features of personality or accomplishment in life. (These early analyses proceeded primarily by the tracing of pedigrees. I can envisage accurate data, and reliable results, for a family chart of eye color, but how could anyone trace the alleged gene for “optimism,” “feeble inhibition,” or “wanderlust”—not to mention such largely situational phenomena as “pauperism” or “communality”? Was Great-uncle George a jovial backslapper or a reclusive cuss?)

Whatever the dubious validity of such overextended attempts to reduce complex human behaviors to effects of single genes, this strategy certainly served the aims and purposes of the early twentieth century's most influential social crusade with an allegedly scientific foundation: the eugenics movement, with its stated aim of “improving” America's hereditary stock by preventing procreation among the supposedly unfit (called “negative eugenics”) and encouraging more breeding among those deemed superior in bloodline (“positive eugenics”). The abuses of this movement have been extensively documented in many excellent books covering such subjects as the hereditarian theory of mental testing, and the passage of legislation for involuntary sterilization and restriction of immigration from nations deemed inferior in hereditary stock.

Many early geneticists played an active role in the eugenics movement, but none more zealously than the aforementioned Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944), who received a Ph.D. in zoology at Harvard in 1892, taught at the University of Chicago, and then became head of the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where he also established and directed the Eugenics Record Office, beginning in
1910. This office, with mixed aims of supposedly scientific documentation and overt political advocacy, existed primarily to establish and compile detailed pedigrees in attempts to identify the hereditary basis of human traits. The hyperenthusiastic Davenport secured funding from several of America's leading (and in their own judgment, therefore eugenically blessed) families, particularly from Mrs. E. H. Harriman, the guardian angel and chief moneybags for the entire movement.

In his 1911 textbook, dedicated to Mrs. Harriman “in recognition of the generous assistance she has given to research in eugenics,” Davenport stressed the dependence of effective eugenics upon the new Mendelian “knowledge” that complex behavioral traits may be caused by single genes. Writing of the five thousand immigrants who passed through Ellis Island every day, Davenport stated:

Every one of these peasants, each item of that “riff-raff” of Europe, as it is sometimes carelessly called, will, if fecund, play a role for better or worse in the future history of this nation. Formerly, when we believed that factors blend, a characteristic in the germ plasm of a single individual among thousands seemed not worth considering: it would soon be lost in the melting pot. But now we know that unit characters do not blend; that after a score of generations the given characteristic may still appear, unaffected by repeated unions…. So the individual, as the bearer of a potentially immortal germ plasm with innumerable traits, becomes of the greatest interest.