The History of White People (41 page)

A
S NOTED
, the U.S. Congress had already legislated immigration restriction, and it returned to the issue in 1920, led by Madison Grant’s colleague Harry H. Laughlin, head of the Eugenics Record Office’s research program, who served Congress as an official “expert eugenics agent.” Facing the prospect of renewed immigration, and following continual lobbying by Laughlin, Kenneth Roberts, and other race-minded restrictionists, Congress acted. The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 limited each country’s quota of immigrants to 3 percent of that country’s population in the United States in 1910. But with anti-immigrant sentiment running high, temporary measures seemed inadequate to address a permanent threat. Congress began holding hearings on further restricting immigration.

The only countertestimony came at the behest of New York’s liberal Jewish congressman Emanuel Celler, who represented a heavily immigrant district. And even that was rushed and qualified. Herbert S. Jennings, a biology professor at Johns Hopkins, had studied with Charles Davenport at Harvard and, as a graduate student, had even rented a room in Davenport’s house. Repeatedly postponed until November 1923, Jennings’s testimony on Laughlin’s materials showed that the region sending the most people into insane asylums was not any place in southern or eastern Europe; it was Ireland—now nestled within the Nordic fold.
³⁰

Paying Jennings no heed, the immigration committee passed its draconian measure. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, aimed particularly at Italians and Jews, limited immigration to 2 percent of the 1890 census, which had been taken before the great southern and eastern European increase. These quotas remained in force until 1965. Looking back, the commissioner general of immigration credited Roberts’s articles and books and the
Saturday Evening Post
’s coverage of the immigration issue as definitive in persuading Congress to curtail immigration.
³¹

I
N THE
early 1920s Americans at the summit of American politics and industry popularized the science of white alien races. In “Whose Country Is This?” (1921), Vice President Calvin Coolidge spoke to readers of
Good Housekeeping
—the most popular American women’s magazine in the era—warning that the United States must allow only the right sort of immigrant in, one with “a capacity for assimilation” to the America of the Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock, Harvard College. The wrong sort, who comes expressly to “tear down,” must be barred by limitations according to “racial tradition or a national experience.” Coolidge mixes up races, nationalities, and politics in a manner thoroughly characteristic of the times, inveighing against racial “deterioration” from the mixing of peoples of divergent races, that is, Italians and Jews: “we must face the situation unflinchingly…[not be] so sentimental…. There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons.”
³²
In October of the following year, President Warren G. Harding recommended Stoddard’s
Rising Tide of Color
by name in a speech, bolstering its esteem.

The
Saturday Evening Post
editor George Horace Lorimer had already been pushing the work of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard and publishing Kenneth Roberts’s reports on immigration as a national catastrophe. In 1924 Lorimer upped the ante with a series of articles on new immigrants from Europe by Stoddard, who wrapped himself in the mantle of science by importing entire hunks of Grant’s
Passing of the Great Race
, complete with Ripley’s photos of Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean racial types, cephalic indices, and Grant’s ridiculous maps of the European races, showing Germany with alternating Nordic and Alpine stripes. Stoddard located “the racial factor” as the root cause “of the world’s problems.”
³³
“Racial” as in Europeans and Japanese. Building on this published onslaught of Nordic chauvinism, real life added the specter of a newly invigorated Ku Klux Klan.

The original Ku Klux Klan, founded after the Civil War as an antiblack, anti-Republican militia, had withered during Reconstruction under federal antiterrorist prosecution. However, the hysteria of the First World War years gave it a new foundation in 1915 on Stone Mountain, Georgia. This new Klan of the 1920s cast a wider net than the old, no longer limiting its attacks to black people with political ambitions. In the 1920s its five million members—spread from Maine to Oregon and from Indiana to Florida—took out after “Katholics, Kikes, and Koloreds,” or, less poetically and more accurately, after Catholics, Jews, black people, foreigners, organized labor, and the odd loose woman.
³⁴
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 police and sheriff’s deputies joined Klansmen in a pogrom against African Americans, destroying homes, businesses, and lives in an attack hardly mourned as an assault on Americans. It was as though black Americans constituted some kind of alien race living outside the category of Americans. Thinking along Klan lines was just that widespread.

Klansmen came very close to taking over the Democratic Party in the ten-day-long Democratic presidential nominating convention in New York City in 1924. With Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, a Catholic grandson of immigrants, one of the two most likely nominees (the other was Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, the Georgian William McAdoo), anti-Catholic, pro-Klan delegates blocked the incorporation of an anti-Klan plank in the party platform.
*
McAdoo forces fought the anti-Klan plank with the support of William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate, a fight that included Bryan’s kneeling in prayer for unity on the convention floor.
³⁵
By the end, a
New York Times
editorial lamented, “The Southern States have lifted up their hand against Governor Smith not on personal but on religious grounds…. They are against him simply and solely because he is a Catholic, and because the Klan has made itself such a political power in their States that they dare not go against its command to exclude Catholics from public office in the United States.”
³⁶
The following year witnessed the spectacle of thousands of Klansmen in full hooded regalia marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

For Coolidge, Harding, and others of their ilk, race and nation equaled political ideology, with the right races and nations assimilating into middle-class, Anglo-Saxon America, and the alien races and nations kicking up sand in their demands for workers’ rights. Coolidge extended the peril across the generations: “The unassimilated alien child menaces our children” just as surely “as the alien industrial worker…menaces our industry.”
³⁷
From father to son and mother to daughter, alien races remained alien.

T
HE EARLY
1920s also witnessed the most brazen anti-Semitic publications, coming not from some weird fringe but from Henry Ford, the heroic symbol of American industry and an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
English Traits
.
³⁸
Ford embodied twentieth-century American technological progress as the “Flivver King,” who was mass-producing Model T automobiles for the great American middle class. By the end of 1913, his Dearborn, Michigan, assembly line had produced 500,000 cars.
³⁹
A self-proclaimed pacifist, Ford had attempted to end the war by sponsoring a hastily organized “peace ship” to Europe in 1915.
⁴⁰
By then he had also embraced a notion gaining credence in Europe, the belief that “the Jew” had caused the war. That conviction moved Ford to create a means of publicizing this idea in the form of a newspaper that came in every new Model T automobile.

Ford’s
Dearborn Independent
played a new role in American culture by spewing anti-Semitism and putting notoriously false documents into international circulation. In an era of mounting race talk, Henry Ford domesticated European anti-Semitism’s “the international Jew” in a manner worthy of Georges Vacher de Lapouge’s anthroposociology, even adding an English fillip. The ghostwriter of “Mr. Ford’s Own Page,” one W. J. Cameron, purveyed the beliefs of an obscure but persistent current in English and American religion, Anglo-Israelitsm. According to this sect, Anglo-Saxons were the real descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and England and the United States were the real Holy Land. This logic made Anglo-Saxons into the chosen people and “Modern Hebrews” into impostors. Jesus was not really Jewish; in fact, he was the Nordic ancestor of modern Germans, Scandinavians, and English people.
⁴¹
Ford’s own obsessions imagined the Jews less as impostors than as the international financiers he believed to be building up the labor unions he hated in order to reduce competition and raise prices. That this made no sense whatever did not give him pause.
⁴²

The
Dearborn Independent
ran its first series of anti-Semitic articles in 1920 and 1921. These pieces, collected in four volumes as
The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem
(1920–22), circulated internationally and, with German support, were translated into sixteen languages. The
Dearborn Independent
created additional mischief by publishing the fraudulent
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
. Originally published in Russia in 1917, this document was purported to be the minutes of a secret 1897 meeting of Jewish leaders planning to take over the world. The
Dearborn Independent
also gave an American twist to the European anthroposociological theory that the Jews had incited dumb Alpines into committing atrocities during the war. For Ford, the Jews were committing yet another crime by duping southern black people into migrating out of the South into his territory in the North.
⁴³
This new twist to the politics of race would soon bear fruit in the shape of changing definitions of race. For the time being, though, the “racial problem” still meant immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—white people.

R
acial science roared on for decades in the United States, and it might have continued much longer but for European events. Not until Nazi Germany awakened American geneticists and social scientists to the import of their scholarship did many realize that what called itself racial
science
was merely prejudice. The passing from the scene of key figures also vitiated hereditarianism. George Horace Lorimer, editor of the
Saturday Evening Post
, and Madison Grant, the eugenics mogul, both died in 1937. More important, figures with real scholarly bona fides started speaking up loud enough to be heard.

Not that dissent had been lacking entirely. The reassessment had begun quietly as early as the First World War, when a cadre of Columbia University geneticists resigned from the prime eugenics organization, still called the American Breeders’ Association. In 1921 Franz Boas had published an article in the
Yale Review
questioning the racial interpretation of Army IQ tests, and in 1922 Walter Lippmann in the
New Republic
had denounced mental testers’ claim to measure permanent, intrinsic intelligence. That kind of mental testing, he wrote, “has no more scientific foundation than a hundred other fads, vitamins and glands and amateur psychoanalysis and correspondence courses in will power, and it will pass with them into that limbo where phrenology and palmistry and characterology and the other Babu sciences are to be found.”
¹

But hard-minded IQ testers hung on, dismissing such objections as mere emotion and claiming that no Jewish critic could think objectively about racial matters.
²
As noted earlier, the Johns Hopkins professor Herbert Jennings’s scrutiny of the anti-immigration material of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee revealed that data used to discredit immigrants from southern or eastern Europe had been misinterpreted and that, among immigrants, the Irish (now considered good Nordic “old immigrants”) were most likely to land in institutions. This was not what the House committee wanted to hear, and it buried these findings. Jennings published his views in two journals with limited circulation: the
Survey
, the journal of social and charity workers, and
Science
, which, was aimed at academicians. “It is particularly in connection with racial questions in man that there has been a great throwing about of false biology,” he concluded quietly.
³

African American social scientists also attacked Carl Brigham’s classification of soldiers’ test scores by race and nation. Horace Mann Bond, director of the School of Education at Langston University, a predominately black institution in Oklahoma, was a doctoral student of the distinguished Chicago sociologist Robert Park. In 1924 Bond refuted Brigham’s reasoning in the
Crisis
, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (edited by W. E. B. Du Bois), by showing that test scores correlated with funding for education. The key to test scores, therefore, lay not in race but in state policy, that is, in the environment.
⁴
In
Opportunity
, the organ of the National Urban League, Bond added that if Brigham were correct that Nordics were smartest, then men from the South “with the purest racial stock of the so-called Nordic branch now existent in America” should have scored highest.
*
Instead, white southerners achieved a mental age of only twelve and a half, a year less than the overall national average.
⁵

Criticism of racial science continued with an article in the November 1927 issue of
American Mercury
by Raymond Pearl, a professor of biometry and vital statistics at Johns Hopkins. Pearl called eugenics “a mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical sociology, economics, anthropology, and politics, full of emotional appeals to class and race prejudices, solemnly put forth as science, and unfortunately accepted as such by the general public.”
⁶

Another change was in the air of academia. Earlier studies had taken for granted the factual existence of races (as in “races of Europe”). Therefore, studies of racial mental differences were considered interesting as scientific research topics that could be studied objectively. But by the late 1920s psychology and sociology had begun focusing on the subjective nature of racial differences in society. Soon race prejudice became a subject worth analyzing.
⁷

Here Robert Park, Bond’s dissertation adviser, pioneered. Park’s classic 1928 essay, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” emphatically separated race from culture. The migrant was to be seen as a person emancipated, enlightened, and even cosmopolitan. Recent immigrants to the United States were creating, not injuring, civilization. This migrant might be a man living “on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused.” But that was a good thing. Take as an example an emancipated Jew like the Berlin-born, South Carolina–raised novelist and critic Ludwig Lewisohn, who had published his autobiography
Up Stream: An American Chronicle
in 1922. For Park, Lewisohn bridged two cultures, offering the best example of “the processes of civilization and progress.”
⁸
Here notions of change and promise replaced the frozen biological determinism of eugenics. E. A. Ross, who had trashed immigrants before the war, could by 1936 write, “
Difference of race
means far less to me now than it once did.”
⁹
Even Vineland’s Henry H. Goddard was having second thoughts. Perhaps he had put too much faith in intelligence tests. In a 1927 article for
Scientific Monthly
he admitted that his feebleminded students who had tested badly should be allowed to live in the general population, even to have children.
¹⁰

N
O VOICE
for common sense spoke louder than that of Franz Boas, by the 1920s an elder statesman in his sixties who had been in the United States for forty years. When he arrived in 1887, anthropology had been dominated by Mayflower gentlemen in museums stockpiling ancient bones and artifacts. Boas had gone forward to train most mid-twentieth-century leaders of the field, many immigrant-descended Ph.D.s teaching in universities just at the point when anthropology was delivering new scientific truths about race. For Boas, scientific racism, especially the supposedly premier test of race, had never seemed sound. The unchanging cephalic index, he pointed out, could, in fact, change quite quickly as a person’s environment changed. It was culture that mattered, and culture changed by generation. Culture, race, and language were three independent—and equal—qualities. Boas never gave up on the idea of race, but he continually opposed racism.
¹¹
By the early 1920s Alfred L. Kroeber, a former Boas student, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, pointed out that northern blacks scored higher than southern whites on the Army IQ tests.
¹²
Another Boas student, Otto Klineberg (1899–1992), pressed the investigation in two important directions.

The son of immigrants to Canada, Klineberg held a B.A. in philosophy from McGill, an M.A. in psychology from Harvard, an M.D. from McGill, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. Having entered the Boas circle in 1926, Klineberg soon realized, as did the anthropologists, that human behavior could not be abstracted from its cultural context. Throughout a long life of international experience—in his research, in UNESCO, and through professorships in Brazil and France—Klineberg continued to study racial differences, prejudices, and discrimination.
¹³

After discovering disparities in test scores between northwestern Kwakiutl Indians who lived on the reservation and those who lived off it, Klineberg tested Carl C. Brigham’s correlations in
A Study of American Intelligence
(1924) between race and IQ in Europe. In Italy, France, and Germany in the mid-1920s, he found no differences in the performance of Mediterraneans, Alpines, and Nordics.
¹⁴
Returning to the United States in 1929, Klineberg was delighted to meet Brigham at a psychological meeting and eager to confront the older scholar: “I told him how pleased I was to meet him, since I had just completed research related to his study. His reaction rather took the wind out of my sails. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t stand by a word of that book.’”
¹⁵

Indeed, in 1930 Brigham published an article retreating from the claim that test scores represented “a single unitary thing” called “intelligence.”
*
Psychologists claiming to test “intelligence,” Brigham conceded, “have been guilty of a
naming fallacy
” (Brigham’s emphasis). Taking aim at his own book,
A Study of American Intelligence
, he called his methods “absurd,” adding that his and Yerkes’s methodology “with its entire hypothetical superstructure of racial differences collapses completely.” Looking back at his book, Brigham called it “one of the most pretentious of these comparative racial studies” and pronounced it “without foundation.”
¹⁶
But the restricted circulation of Brigham’s article meant that
A Study of American Intelligence
carried on as a racist authority for many more years.

Klineberg’s second major publication dealt another blow to racial science. Yerkes and the mental testers of the 1910s and 1920s had always claimed to test innate intelligence, not the influence of schooling or environment.
^†
Northern black men scored higher than southern black men, and the longer black men had lived outside the South, the higher their scores. When some northern black men scored higher than southern white men, what might that portend?
^‡

More and more anthropologists used Klineberg’s analysis to highlight the role of environment in intelligence and to weaken the biological determinism of racial science as applied also to non-blacks. Culture was gaining on race, sped along by German Nazi aggression. Then along came another student of Franz Boas.

T
HE
“F
IRST
Child” of her mother’s Vassar College class of 1885, Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948) was born in New York City to a life that promised upper-class ease. (See figure 24.1, Ruth Benedict.) Her father was a doctor, and both parents were Mayflower descendants. However, her father’s death when she was not quite two plunged her mother into financial distress and a long bereavement. Then a childhood bout of measles rendered Ruth partially deaf.

Fig. 24.1. Ruth Fulton Benedict.

Frequent moves followed in pursuit of paying employment for her mother, tantrums, and depressions blighted young Ruth Fulton’s childhood. Around 1900 the family ended up in Buffalo, where her mother worked as the city librarian, and Ruth and her younger sister, Margery, attended a tony Episcopal private school on scholarships. In the fall of 1905, thanks to the charity of strangers, the two sisters entered Vassar. One of the prestigious Seven Sisters eastern women’s colleges, Vassar prided itself on developing both brain and bosom.
¹⁷
Certainly Ruth had plenty of the former; she and her sister followed their mother into Phi Beta Kappa. An English major, she continued to write and publish poetry for several more decades.
*

After graduating in 1909, Ruth Fulton embarked on the obligatory upper-class European tour, which included three months in Germany, two of them in Dresden.
¹⁸
Returning to Buffalo, she joined the local Charity Organization Society as a “friendly visitor” to Polish and Italian families, teaching them “American behavior.” At twenty-four, realizing the arrogance and futility of this work, she joined her younger sister, now married to a minister, in Pasadena, California, and taught in girls’ high schools for two years.
¹⁹
Teaching, too, however, failed to fulfill her intellectually or emotionally. At this point, Stanley Rossiter Benedict, the brother of one of her Vassar classmates, was courting her aggressively. They married in 1914.