“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Former President Donald Trump said to a supporter at a campaign rally in Minnesota. While the supporter most likely took it as a compliment, maybe even feeling proud of the pants he sported that day, Trump’s comment opened a window into the eugenic ideologies that dug their fangs into early 20th-century American colleges, marriages, schools, and, most importantly, immigration. Accompanying the country’s influx of new immigrants, fears snowballed across native-born Americans of the threats, especially violent, that immigrants supposedly imposed. As such, the rampant xenophobia helped to promulgate the eugenics movement across the states, laying its foothold in those who advocated for the preservation of America for white Anglo-Saxon Americans, who had been a majority since the Mayflower. During the Progressive era, a period of significant breakthrough in the study of genetics, anti-immigration advocates used eugenics to provide a scientific justification for their ultimate goal: save America from the genetically “inferior” –– Southern, Central, and Eastern European immigrants especially, a class that was burgeoning within the country.

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Among the tide of industrialization that swept the country in the late 1800s, coupled with the declining living conditions in European countries, foreigners desired immigration to the States more than ever before, building on fears among citizens –– fears that were already present, considering the period’s widespread economic instability. An illustration from 1874 depicted the sheer breadth of people who made the trip from Ireland to New York (See Appendix A). At this time, Ellis Island was filled to the brim with people willing to explore economic opportunities in America. The reason immigrants came to the US in the late 1890s stemmed from degraded conditions in Europe. One immigrant stated that “Hunger brought me . . . here [and] hunger is the cause of European immigration to this country.’” More people coming that were not economically well-off meant that jobs would be taken at a rapid rate, enriching native working-class fears. Moreover, as a consequence of the decreased gold in the National Treasury reserves, the Panic of 1893 ensued across the country. The decade of 1890 saw the worst unemployment rates, rivaled only by the Great Depression in the 1930s, with a rate of 10% or higher sustained for five or six years, fluctuations dependent on the historian. In urban centers, the effects were exacerbated –– the Governor of New York himself could not even tally the levels of unemployed in his city, likening the group to the size of an army: “How vast this army of unemployed is nobody can accurately estimate." Fear and uncertainty promulgated throughout America's cities, fostering a society more prone to find scapegoats for social problems – especially considering cities were home to a growing number of immigrants.

Not only was immigration increasing enormously in the late 1800s as compared to years before but also the diversity of the incoming peoples, which encouraged a rising trend of xenophobia and nativism amongst Americans and a society where the ideas of eugenics could proliferate. From 1800 to 1860, the prevailing groups of immigrants hailed from either Ireland, Germany, or Great Britain. These were later considered the “old immigrants” and revered by Madison Grant, the author of The Passing of the Great Race, as the “native stock.” In a diagram provided by Oregon University, the “old” immigrants are represented by the green and gray lines (See Appendix B). The country saw a massive uptick in immigrants from Central Europe and Italy especially, starting in 1860 but increasing exponentially from 1890 to 1910, in reference to the green and blue lines (See Appendix B). By 1910, the main groups of immigrants coming in were Central, Eastern European and Italian, creating a culture clash between the “old” immigrants of predominantly Irish and German ancestry and encouraging ostracizing movements against these immigrants. This ostracization was linked to the difference in status of the incoming immigrants and the rooted Americans, considering many of them came with nothing, seeking economic prosperity in the States. For Italian immigrants, this disconnect rang through, as a whopping 80% of them were from the impoverished south of Italy or from Sicily. Moreover, the culmination of tensions was on display in New Orleans in 1891 when 11 Italian-Americans were lynched after the murder of a New Orleans police officer. Many natives pinned the blame on the large Italian population within the city, leading to the government putting hundreds of Italians on trial––almost all were acquitted. Unhappy with the results, New Orleans citizens raided the prison many Italians were held in and murdered eleven, two of whom were on trial and the rest were either proven innocent or not tried yet. Meanwhile, newspapers across the country rushed to the perpetrators’ defense – the Pittsburgh Press’s headline gave them the title of “prominent citizens'' who were merely executing “the law of vengeance.” While undoubtedly contributing to the xenophobia circulating through a panic-induced anxious America, this event and the misconstrued views of Italian immigrants in such a large and influential a city as New Orleans proved how ideas of nativism were anything but fringe at this point. After this event, according to Italian-American studies professional Richard Gambino, “Americans debated whether all Italian-Americans were somehow all disposed to criminality by their genetic endowment or cultural inheritance.” Not only was America’s view on Italians a testament to how quickly society at this time came to scapegoating and generalizing a whole race based purely on fear and nothing substantial, but the supposed connection between criminality and genetics alluded to the premise of eugenics even before the movement was mainstream, proving that American society was more receptive to eugenic theories during a period of heightened xenophobia.

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Accompanying the extensive fear of the new strain of immigrants was the rise of the fear that the ‘pure American race’ – i.e. the Mayflower descendants of Northern Europe – was being tainted by said immigrants. Eugenicist Harry Laughlin and his team at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) spoke up on “race suicide,” or the idea that the country’s longstanding population – consisting of the “old” immigrants – was losing its foothold in America as a result of increased birthrates from immigrants coupled with reduced birthrates of the old stock (See Appendix C). Nativist literature like The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, vice president of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), drove up already rising fears of Southern and Central European immigrants. Grant classified the “old” class of immigrants, i.e. those descended from Mayflower passengers and Northern European countries, as the Nordic people, and the “new” class as Mediterranean and Alpine. Grant went into detail on his opinions of the latter classes of immigrants, describing them as “lowly refugees from persecution” and “social discards.” Grant also suggested that the status of the country where the immigrant migrated from, if not Nordic, negatively influenced their mental capacity: “These new immigrants were no longer exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the earlier ones who came of their own impulse to improve their social conditions” – as such, according to Grant, the new immigrants contained “the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled” from the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the “Polish Ghettos.” Grant reflected the findings of the Immigrant Commission and reinforced the claim – with no real scientific backing – that those of Mediterranean descent were bringing mental degeneracy to the previously well-kempt Nordic country. Moreover, Grant mentioned the resistance of a person to “improve their social conditions”  to suggest that Mediterranean and Alpine countries were inherently unable to function on the same levels as Nordic descendants, echoing eugenicists’ claims of degeneracy being directly linked to heredity.

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During a period of renowned interest in science, as was 1900, public health experts propped up the work of eugenicists, perpetuating the idea of racial superiority from a scientific point-of-view. In 1900, three scientists, Hugo DeVries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak, rediscovered Gregor Mendel’s laws of genetics, propelling knowledge on the modes of heredity to the forefront of American minds. Ideas that future generations are controlled by their parents, moreover, led to the ultimate question: how do we take advantage of these ideas to create an even better race? Doctors like John Harvey Kellogg sought to find answers to this question –– which, in Kellogg’s case, led him to establish the Race Betterment Foundation in 1906, its mission being to maintain the “purity of the gene pool.” As influential and trusted doctors such as Kellogg latched onto eugenics as a vehicle for eventual betterment of the human race, the door opened to anti-immigration to provide a route for the restriction of non-Nordic races. Grant, notably, drew influence from the reintroduction of these laws with regards to observing physical differences between races. In Passing of the Great Race, he stated:

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We now know, since the elaboration of the Mendelian Laws of Inheritance, that certain bodily characters, such as skull shape, stature, eye color, hair color and nose form, some of which are so-called 14 unit characters, are transmitted in accordance with fixed laws, and, further, that various characters which are normally correlated or linked together in pure races may, after a prolonged admixture of races, pass down separately and form what is known as disharmonic combinations.

Interestingly, both Kellogg and Grant suggested genetic “purity” as an important factor in securing so-called “race betterment.” The US Public Health Service (PHS), responsible for the examination of the multitude of immigrants at Ellis Island, certainly drew inspiration from these studies. Examiners in Ellis Island were encouraged to look out for certain facial expressions among immigrants (see Appendix D). This woman has all the facial expressions of a typical human being – to a PHS officer, however, her “firm mouth” suggested “combativeness.” Moreover, the PHS instructed examiners to make “close observation” of facial expressions in “normal and abnormal persons” –– whether they were “gloomy, sad, anxious, apprehensive…confused…arrogant…impatient.” Facial expressions were not – and have not since then been –– scientifically proven to be dependent on race. However, the influences of phony scientists led official health examiners at Ellis Island to be biased against a certain type of immigrant. Starting in 1914, the Surgeon General and other PHS officers publicly demonstrated support for eugenicists simultaneously through their participation in eugenic organizations and articles that stood behind eugenicists’ involvement in immigration restriction.  The notion of genetic superiority flowed into the minds of the most trusted medical professionals in the country. At a period when well-known press like The Washington Post were publishing ideas about a “science to make men and women better,” public backing from individuals with longstanding ties to immigration served to provide nativist Americans with a reassurance that their notions of xenophobia had a scientific stamp of approval.

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The dissemination of eugenics and America’s nativist inclination provided a breeding ground for beliefs of Nordic genetic superiority with regards to mental acuity. The United States Immigrant Commission, initiated in February 1907 and ending in 1910, was led by Republican Senator William Dillingham and inquired into the differences between Southern and Northern European immigration – the “old” versus the  “new” – and supposedly found that the new class of immigrants were “far less intelligent than the old,” describing them as nothing more than “unskilled laboring men” hailing from the “less enlightened and advanced countries of Europe,” and noting their slowness to “assimilate” into American society. On the other hand, the Commission viewed old immigrants as a cause of “little apprehension” within the country, hence deciding to pay “little attention” to such immigrants throughout its three-year search. The Commission compared the new Southern and Central European class of immigrants and the commission’s concern with their “low intelligences,” suggesting that the public had nothing to worry about American natives. Thus, this newfound data provided Americans with a government-issued proclamation that those of Northern European descent were inherently mentally superior.  The effects of the Commission on public opinion are evident from T. J. Woofter's survey of U.S. magazines. From 1907, when the Commission was founded, until 1914, Woofter found that "there occurred a marked change in public sentiment toward immigration" and concluded that the old restrictionist arguments based upon economics were giving way to a rationale based upon "the undesirability of certain racial elements." Importantly, society moved from a solely economic reasoning for disliking immigration to inclining toward race-based reasoning, paving the way for the proliferation of eugenics.

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This supposed linkage of intelligence to one’s genetic origin, moreover, proved to be the valuable intersection of thought for immigration restrictionists. The Binet-Simon intelligence test and the concept of “mental age,” conceived by a French psychologist aimed towards helping children struggling in school, was popularized by renowned eugenicist Henry Hebert Goddard. In line with the immigrant-fearing philosophy of the time, Goddard believed that anyone “incapable of adapting themselves to their environment and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly" should be considered mentally defective – a standard that most immigrants met. In 1912, Goddard scanned immigrants at Ellis Island using the Binet-Simon test and found that Russian, Italian, and Polish recruits had average mental ages of 11.34, 11.01, and 10.74, respectively, numbers which supposedly confirmed their “feeblemindedness.” From his tests, he concluded that the new wave of immigration “is of a decidedly different character from the early immigration .... We are getting the poorest of each race." Goddard’s use of the test that was meant for the use of children on groups of adults demonstrated his dedication to furthering the nativist cause. The language he used echoed the rationale Grant used to demean new immigrants, arguing that since they came from a poorer society, it would be hard to assimilate due to the genetics in that region. Moreover, Goddard succeeded in providing a scientific rationale for nativism with the findings on non-Nordic mental ages, likening these new immigrants to mere ten and eleven-year-old children.

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Eugenics as a scientific justification for xenophobia appealed greatly to anti-immigration lobbyists as well, a fact evident from the reliance on eugenics research to support major immigration legislation in the 1910s. Harvard graduate Prescott Hall was of Northern European descent and was one of the many upper-class Anglo-Saxon elites who believed the pure American stock was threatened by the new class of immigrants, prompting him to co-found the Immigration Restriction League (IRL) in 1894 along with fellow Harvard students Charles Warren and Robert DeCourcy Ward. In 1904, the League sent out surveys to states in order to gauge national interest in immigration restriction (See Appendix D). The overwhelming majority of states surveyed reported a distaste for immigrants in general, especially those who were “foreign-born, Southern or Eastern European” and the illiterate, proving how pervasive xenophobia and nativist ways of thinking were among the States. Observing the wide audience of states inclined to restrict Southern and Central European immigration, in 1911, Hall asked his former classmate Charles Davenport, founder of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) for assistance to use his eugenic data against these ethnicities to sway Congressional debate on anti-immigration legislation. Davenport recommended a survey to determine the national origins of "hereditary defectives" in American prisons, mental hospitals, and other charitable institutions. Davenport appointed ERO colleague Harry Laughlin to manage the League’s research program.  Laughlin’s research delved into the racial concentrations at psychiatric hospitals and institutions in efforts to suggest that certain groups were more likely to contribute to American social problems. Hall recognized that the realm of anti-immigration at this time revolved around the restriction of non-Anglo Saxon descendants and used the biased research from eugenicists to support his Congress lobbying for their restriction. These efforts proved successful for him, culminating in the 1917 Immigration Restriction Act. Conveniently passed after the appointment of Laughlin to assist anti-immigration lobbying efforts, the 1917 bill expanded the prohibition of admission into America of:

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All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons: persons who have had one or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers . . . persons afflicted with tuberculosis in any form or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; persons . . .  mentally or physically defective . . . persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude; polygamists . . . anarchists . . . prostitutes . . . persons who directly or indirectly procure or attempt to procure or import prostitutes . . . contract laborers . . . persons likely to become a public charge…any such children may, in the discretion of the Secretary of Labor, be admitted if in his opinion they are not likely to become a public charge and are otherwise eligible.

Although explicitly no eugenicist was the signee of this bill, the words they used demonstrated how deeply woven the eugenic goals of fighting “feeble-mindedness” were with anti-immigration sentiment – and proved to anti-immigration lobbyists, furthermore, how much they could benefit from the aid of eugenics.   Moreover, this bill, coming after years of lobbying from Hall and the IRL, was the first restrictionary bill that included a literacy test. This test, however, was struck down four separate times by Republican House Speaker Joe Cannon – in 1897, 1898, 1902, and 1906. Only after the Dillingham Commission started in 1907 did the country finally see a literacy test passed. As previously stated, the Commission’s main purpose was to gather more information on the new class of immigrants, and so they did –– effectively tying Southern and Eastern Europeans to criminality in the process. The fact that the literacy test only was passed after the Commission made their findings known illustrated the public opinion of the country and how it was geared towards eugenically-motivated rationale for anti-immigration.

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For those who believed that deportation was not enough of a punishment for mentally “defective” immigrants, sterilization provided a method of saving the pure American race from the new ones. Secretary of Labor James J. Davis was one potent example, a fierce eugenicist who sought to prevent “the complete checking of the degenerates and the bearer of degenerates.” “Endeavoring to stop [mentally deficient people coming into the country]” solely with deportation he wrote, “is like trying to prevent burglary with a penalty no severer than opening the front door of the burglarized residence, should the burglar be found within, escorting him to it, and saying ‘You have no right here; see that you don’t come in again.’” Importantly, he also sought for " Explicitly, Davis never used the words "eugenics" or "sterilization" as arguments for immigration limitation. His goals were clearly conveyed, however, when he vowed to the country to one day oversee the complete elimination of degenerates from society  –– in ways, he argued, that could not be completed through deportation alone, analogizing the act to telling a burglar to stop robbing the house: impossible and borderline foolish. Connecting to his aforementioned echoing of eugenics ideals, Davis insinuated the need for a stronger method of keeping out "undesirables," manifesting commonly during the peak of eugenics in sterilization laws.

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The 1924 Immigration Act was a culmination of pervasive eugenic influence and xenophobia. Notably, it expanded the quota system for immigration that was established in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 after World War 1. The 1921 Act restricted a number of immigrants from each country, depending on its population in America after the 1910 census. The 1924 Act was spearheaded by Senator Dillingham, the same person in charge of the Immigration Commission.  As a result, the implemented quotas targeted the new wave of Southern European immigrants – explicitly reading off the document itself, each ethnicity was given a quota based on its population in 1890. (See Appendix E). Notably, 1890 was a time right before the intense populating growth of Southern, Eastern, and Central Europeans in the United States. Congress endeavoring to restrict their immigration, therefore, is a testament to how eugenics had penetrated American immigration policy.

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Contemporary studies into the proliferation of eugenics still battle with the seemingly inane question: how did the smartest minds in America even believe such a ridiculous concept as “inherited degeneracy”? And how did it end up being taught at several of the most praised and prestigious universities across the country, including Harvard? A complex question, however, yields a simple answer: fear of those unlike ourselves. Many native-born Americans grew up solely around people like themselves, especially considering immigration from countries other than Ireland, Germany, and England did not hike up until 1890, and segregation in cities lasted up until the late 1960s. In a similar fashion, the new immigrants often occupied neighborhoods that contained people, shops, food, and language from their place of origin.Arizona State University (ASU)  Humanities expert Neal Lester explained this: “It’s easier to know people who look like us, who live in our communities geographically, who think like us, who dress like us, whose skin color looks like us, there’s a familiarity in that.”  Following Lester’s theory, native-born white people were conditioned to be afraid of those who did not follow the same customs, traditions, or even the same facial expressions as themselves (see Appendix D), leading to the development of prejudices  – or preconceived judgments – against groups that are not our own. Cartoonist Joseph Keppler illustrated the native-born prejudices against new immigrants well in his 1893 drawing, “Looking Backward” (See Appendix F). The American aristocrats of old stock were pictured blocking the port of entry into America from a scruffier-looking immigrant, clearly not on the same economic level as them. When the new immigrant wore clothes on the polar opposite of the economic spectrum, based on Lester’s theory, the minds of the aristocrats triggered preconceived judgments of criminality and poor mental acuity. According to ASU Psychology professor Steven Neuberg, “[Humans] live in groups, we depend on members of our groups, and so when we see people who give cues to suggest they aren’t members of our group, we are wary of them.” This line of reasoning resonated with xenophobic ideas in Passing of the Great Race, especially when Grant argued that the new wave of immigrants degraded American society because “Our jails, insane asylums and almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by [Mediterranean and Alpine immigrants].” Grant was a son of an elite surgeon in New York City –– it is evident that immigrants were not, as Neuberg put it, “members of [his] group,” and contributed to his wariness of the stark differences between how cultures act, especially in the prime location of immigration settlement. Suggesting this same idea as the Arizona researchers almost 100 years before, in 1925, Anthropologist Melville Herskovitz argued against the “Nordic myth,” saying, in an article he wrote for The Nation:

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All of us are used to doing things in the way we have always seen them done, hearing the syllables and seeing the gestures we have always heard and seen, and the person who speaks our language with an accent, or contravenes some of the ways of action to which we are accustomed, excites in us an emotion out of all proportion to the action which has aroused the feeling in us…people do become irritated when inbred patterns of behavior are not adhered to.

It is clear how immigration restriction rose to popularity amongst native-born people because native-born people lived in completely different cultures –– and eugenics served as a tool yielded by the proclaimed to wedge them farther apart.

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Certainly, the brains of Gregor Mendel himself could not foresee the amount of societal turbulence that his studies into heredity conveyed into America through eugenics. While initially launching off the established platform of immigration restrictionists, the phony theories of genetic superiority and inferiority popularized by some of the most intelligent scholars spread amongst a fear-ridden and anxious white native-born population of America. While the study of eugenics has since been discredited and renowned American genetic institutes have since apologized for funding this research, the idea of “America for Americans” has not entirely escaped our liberty-loving land. While Donald Trump may be the most outspoken about his immigrant anxiety, immigration has now been deemed the number one concern amongst voters by the likes of Time, The Wall Street Journal, PBS, and countless other reputable names in public press. A lot of the divisions between groups exist simply because, according to Lester, “people simply don’t know each other.” Thus, until we embrace understanding over fear, the shadows of eugenics will never fade from our societal fabric.