immigration restriction, 1888-1924: reading the emergent

Thomas Judge HIST E-599 Article

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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.


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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


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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).


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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).


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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).


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.


27

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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.

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Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916.

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Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 1955.

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immigration restriction, 1888-1924: reading the emergent

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