by John Marini
The Immigration Act of 1924 was the culmination of nearly a half century of effort on behalf of a view that celebrated the rational state as the embodiment of the moral will of a people. That will had come to be defined by blood, race, class, or culture. The scholarship in the defense of racial superiority had been generated in the empirical research of the new social and biological sciences. Many of those social science departments had established their legitimacy within the newly established research universities, and the research generated by social science would become important in bolstering the movement to restrict immigration on the basis of race.
The restrictionists had many influential supporters among the elites and the intellectual classes, as well as among labor unions. The labor unions opposed unrestricted immigration because they believed that it had caused a surplus of cheap labor, which kept down the wages of native American workers. The intellectuals, on the other hand, were in favor of restricting immigration because they thought it necessary that the economy and society should be brought under state control. In their view, it was the business interests that profited from unlimited immigration. Frank Julian Warne, the former secretary of the New York State Immigration Commission, insisted that mass immigration had made it easier for government to neglect the social and economic welfare of American citizens. Warne maintained that “factory laws, women and children in industry, workingmen’s insurance, and widows’ pensions … would in all probability have been established … several decades earlier if there had been no European immigration of the magnitude of the past three decades.”52
In the view of many of the Progressive intellectuals, free immigration had made it possible to ignore the social ills brought about by unrestricted capitalism. As Tichenor has written, “the decentralized, self-regulating society that prevailed for much of American history was, in the view of the Progressive Era restrictionists, a luxury of the past.”53 Joseph Lee, a civic reformer, noted the difference in the meaning of liberty: “In political life, liberty meant until recently the minimum of control necessary to secure equal opportunity.… We have begun to realize the control of man over nature, and to see that the highest results come from the collective effort consciously directed to an end. These considerations have a direct bearing upon the question of immigration regulation.”54 In the new view, the responsibility for the social welfare of its members rests solely with the government of the state.
In 1916, the newly established Progressive publication, The New Republic, made this clear in an editorial: “Freedom of migration from one country to another appears to be one of the elements of nineteenth century liberalism that is fated to disappear. The responsibility of the state for the welfare of its individual members is progressively increasing. The democracy of today cannot permit … social ills to be aggravated by excessive immigration.”55 Of course, on practical grounds, every nation, including one based upon a social compact, must limit immigration to prevent social ills, or for many other reasons as well. But the Progressive rejection of the old liberalism was based upon a repudiation of the social compact in which private individuals and civil and economic associations, and not the state, determined the meaning of freedom and the welfare of the individuals.
In addition, many specialists in the social sciences, bolstered by the intelligence testing done in World War I, were quick to interpret the data as evidence for excluding certain races. This debate reached its peak after the Great War. In 1923, Henry Fairfield Osborn spoke enthusiastically about the results of intelligence testing carried out by the Army: “I believe those tests were worth what the war [World War I] cost, even in human life, if they served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence in different races who are coming to us, in a way which no one can say is the result of prejudice.… We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us.”56 It is clear that social scientists such as Osborn could no longer understand the meaning of equality as a political principle. It was not possible for them to see what it is that men have in common by nature. Therefore, they had come to believe that the differences between blacks and whites were as fundamental politically as those between men and animals.
When Walter Lippmann questioned some of the interpretations of the psychologists, he was ridiculed by many social scientists, including Lewis Terman, who had published the Stanford-Binet scale of intelligence in 1916. Indeed, Dr. William McDougall, professor of psychology at Harvard, insisted that because of Lippmann’s failure to accept the scientific explanation of the testing results, he was “denying also the theory of organic evolution, and he should come out openly on the side of Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan. For the theory of the heredity of mental qualities is a corollary of the theory of organic evolution.”57
The denial of the principle of equality was stated most openly by Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, eugenics consultant to the House Judiciary Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He noted, “We in this country have been so imbued with the idea of democracy, or the equality of all men, that we have left out of consideration the matter of blood or natural born hereditary mental and moral differences. No man who breeds pedigreed plants and animals can afford to neglect this thing.”58 In the same vein, Prescott Hall, writing in the Journal of Heredity, urged a worldwide application of Darwinian principles. Hall contended that “eugenics among individuals is encouraging propagation of the fit, and limiting or preventing the multiplication of the unfit. World eugenics is doing precisely the same thing as to races considered as wholes. Immigration restriction is a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both diluting and supplanting good stock.”59
Immigration policy in America had gone from one based on an understanding of the natural rights of men to one based on historical and biological science. As Abba Schwartz has noted, “The National Origins provisions of the immigration law of 1924 marked the actual turning point from immigration control based on the asylum idea … [to one] definitely in favor of the biological basis.”60 The regime of civil and religious liberty had often provided asylum to those who had been persecuted because of religious belief. Religion, although a problem when allied with despotic governments, had also helped shape the kind of character necessary in a regime that required self-restraint and self-government. The authority of biology had come to determine the most important factor in establishing the capacity for citizenship. It is no small part of the tragedy of the period that by the time Hitler had come to power in the decade of the 1930s, the Immigration Act of 1924 made it nearly impossible for Jews to find an asylum in America.
The problem posed by unrestricted immigration would become a fundamental preoccupation of the nation after World War I. The Immigration Act of 1924, as a result of national or group quotas, seemed to have legitimized the view that the creation of a racial hierarchy to determine immigration policy was the primary motivation for the legislation. But that perception is not altogether accurate. There were numerous prudential reasons for restricting immigration; racial quotas would become only the most publicized reason for doing so. The war itself had temporarily resolved the problem; very little immigration had been possible during it. The war had fanned the flames of hostility against foreigners. Not surprisingly, however, because they were the enemy in that war, resentment against the foreign-born was directed first against a superior race, the Germans. As Tichenor has noted, “rallies held by the German-American Alliance in support of peace with Germany dismayed the American public in 1915–16, accentuating native fears about the loyalties of the country’s large foreign-born population.”61
That fear prompted suspicions about the character and reliability of nearly all foreign-born populations. By the end of the war, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had complicated the problem of immigration in a way that made it easier to defend restrictions based on race. Americans had begun to fear that a flood of refugees from Eastern Europe would include radicals and c
ommunist agitators. The racial theories seemed to support the view that southern and eastern Europeans lacked the proper intelligence and character for citizenship. Predictably, after the war, however, the hostility against the Germans would subside. But the racial theories would emerge once again to be used in support of the animus against the southern and eastern Europeans. Thus, in the early 1920s, there had been a flood of popular and academic books that decried the mixing of the races. In addition, the eugenics movement would gain an unprecedented respectability, not only in the social sciences but in the government, the courts, and the public at large.
In the aftermath of World War I, there was nearly universal agreement that some restrictions on immigration were necessary. Indeed, there was considerable public support for a ban on all immigration, in which case quotas would have been unnecessary. But there was little political support for closing the borders. In the absence of unrestricted immigration, it was necessary to determine who should be given preference in terms of immigration into the United States. The Quota Act of 1921, known as the Dillingham Act, was the first to establish immigration quotas based on the country of origin. Immigration would be limited to 3 percent of each European nationality living in the United States, with the total number of immigrants restricted to 355,000 per year.62
The practical problem of establishing quotas revolved around the necessity of determining an accurate way of distinguishing American citizens and establishing their country of origin. That was not an easy task. As Mae M. Ngai has noted,
The census of 1790, the nation’s first, did not include information about national origin or ancestry. The census did not differentiate the foreign-born until 1850 and did not identify the places of birth of parents of the native-born until 1890. Immigration was unrecorded before 1820 and not classified according to origin until 1899, when it was arranged, not by politically defined nation-states, but according to a taxonomy called “races and peoples.”63
Thus, it was difficult to determine the country of origin for purposes of establishing quotas before the census of 1900. Moreover, many of the immigrants had come into the United States in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The new immigrants wanted the most recent census for the purpose of determining the numbers of each nationality living in the country. In the Dillingham Act, it was decided that the 1910 census would be used to establish that number for purposes of establishing quotas. This decision was not unnecessarily divisive and it appeared that most could live with those restrictions based on that census.
The problem arose when it came time to reauthorize the Dillingham Act. By 1924, the demand for racial quotas had gained momentum in Congress, and particularly in the House. When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1919, Albert Johnson (R-WA) took over the Immigration Committee. He had a long association with the Immigration Restriction League (IRL). Beginning in the 1890s, the IRL had attempted to lobby Congress using social science expertise to buttress the case for immigration restriction. Subsequently, Johnson hired Harry Laughlin to serve as the committee’s expert on eugenics. Experts had long argued for “the proper eugenic selection of the incoming alien millions.” They insisted that this could be done “not by killing off the less fit, but by preventing them from coming into the State, either by being born into it or by migration.”64 With Johnson in charge, the House committee went to great lengths to limit the quotas of those races thought to be inferior.
The provision of the Immigration Act of 1924 that caused the greatest outcry was the change that would require that the 1890 census—rather than the 1910 census—be used to determine national quotas. It was based on the assumption that those Americans who had arrived before 1890, largely of the Nordic and Alpine races, were to be preferred to the later immigrants. In terms of actual numbers, the act did not result in significantly reducing the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The restrictions on the total number of immigrants allowed in the Dillingham Act had already done that. The number of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were very small. The damage that was done resulted from the fact the new law appeared to establish a rank among citizens that would be based upon racial group characteristics. Moreover, there was no quota for immigrants from the Western hemisphere. Thus, immigrants from Mexico and Latin America were not affected.
Significant elements of both political parties and most elites had supported immigration policies based on racial superiority. But the Republican Party—perhaps because it dominated electoral politics during the 1920s—came to be viewed as the party most responsible for defending a new kind of inequality. Subsequently, the party of Lincoln would have great difficulty in reestablishing itself as the defender of the principle of equality. As a result, many of those constituencies that had supported the Republican Party, including blacks and Jews who had voted in support of the Republicans in the election of 1920, would abandon the party.
Moreover, the newer immigrants who had come to America after the 1880s settled largely in the big cities and urban areas. They were assimilated by the Democratic Party machines that had dominated politics and elections in those cities. Although most of the ethnic immigrants voted for Democrats in local elections, many of them voted for Republicans nationally, beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the early part of the twentieth century. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson had to repudiate much of his academic writing on race in order to lure some of the new immigrants away from the Republican Party. By the end of the 1920s, those immigrants and their children were no longer competitive for the Republican Party and would not be for nearly a half century. Ironically, it was FDR’s Democratic Party, which was committed to the establishment of a new administrative state, that would make its appeal on the basis of equality and equal citizenship. Roosevelt insisted, however, that it was the government of the modern state, and not the principles of the social compact, that would determine the meaning of equality and equal citizenship. Although many in Congress had worked to mobilize constituencies on the ground of race, there were many others who had argued for immigration restriction in a way that was compatible with an understanding of equality and character, too, as necessary for good citizenship. Although President Warren G. Harding and Vice President Calvin Coolidge were in favor of immigration restrictions, their rhetoric was far different from that coming out of Congress. Indeed, when Coolidge became president he appeared to handle the problem in a prudential manner. First, Coolidge defended immigration restrictions on the practical ground that “we should have no more aliens to cope with … than our institutions are able to handle.”65 Furthermore, his defense of those restrictions was not intended to polarize the nation by categorizing American citizens in terms of race. Therefore, he insisted that “restrictive immigration is not an offensive but a purely defensive action.… We must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America is kept American.”66 America must be understood not in terms of race but in terms of an idea.
The perpetuation of the social compact is, of course, in the hands of all who are a part of it. Therefore, Coolidge was determined to prevent immigrants from any nation who would undermine that compact from becoming American citizens. He maintained that “there is no room in our midst for those whose direct purpose is political, social, or economic mischief, and whose presence jeopardizes the physical or moral health of the community.” In the final analysis, Coolidge understood the problem of immigration in the same way as the American Founders, on moral grounds. Therefore, he insisted that “American institutions rest solely on good citizenship and were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship.”67 Coolidge’s rhetoric did not appear to give support to those who would attempt to understand America in terms of class or racial groups.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was defended on the ground that the old national or group criteria, which had established th
e foundation for the 1924 and 1952 immigration acts, would be replaced by individual criteria. Senator Edward Kennedy noted that “favoritism based on nationality will disappear. Favoritism based on individual worth and qualifications will take its place.”68 President Lyndon Johnson also criticized the national origins quota system because
the ability of new immigrants to come to America depended upon the country of their birth. Only three countries were allowed to supply seventy percent of all the immigrants.… This system violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.69
Johnson did not say what that faith was.
Both Kennedy and Johnson had denied that immigration policy should be based on nationality or race. Rather, Johnson insisted that the new immigrants should be admitted on the basis of their skills. “Those who can contribute most to this country—to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit—will be the first that are admitted to this land.”70 Kennedy and Johnson may have believed that the neutral category of skill, unrelated to character, is the way in which the immigration policy would consider the capacity of individuals as opposed to groups. But both Kennedy and Johnson were well aware that as citizens of the administrative state, the new immigrants would be important as members of ethnic and racial groups. Thus, they must have known that the new immigrants, shaped by the expectations created by government, and not those of a free society, could become important constituencies for the perpetuation of the Democratic Party. Moreover, in denying any moral basis for determining the character of prospective citizens, they were promoting a policy that would encourage immigrants who would seek benefits from, or become dependent upon, the administrative state.