The American Future

by Simon Schama

  Seven years later, in 1894, the Immigration Restriction League was duly founded to combat the irresponsible, sentimental universalism (as it saw it) of those who looked upon the torch of Liberty in New York Harbor and wiped a tear from their eye. The men who created the league were dry-eyed when it came to the fate of the tempest-tost. If they were not sentimentalists, they were also not street shouters like Dennis Kearney, or labor tub-thumpers like Terence Powderly. They were from the cream of the eastern patriciate; those who flattered themselves as belonging to its intellectual as well as social aristocracy, and a disgraceful number of them were professors. Not any professors either, but the founding fathers of the social sciences in the United States: statisticians, eugenicists, biologists, economists, and ecologists. Sometimes, like Madison Grant, the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916), they were a combination of all those scientific endeavors, for Grant published his apprehensions about the vanishing moose and caribou before declaring that white America was committing “race suicide” by allowing the biologically degraded to take so many jobs that those in a more exalted tier had no option but to limit the size of their families.

  They were not, then, xenophobic crackpots, the restrictionists. Princeton and Yale were prominent among their alma maters. Their most strenuous mind, arguably, was Francis A. Walker, the dean of American statisticians and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And the league was itself born upstream on the Charles in the sacred halls of Harvard by three graduates whose names are purest Brahmin: Prescott Farnsworth Hall (who would serve as secretary of a national organization of immigration restriction societies into the 1920s when their policy had become law), Robert DeCourcy Ward (the first professor of meteorology at Harvard), and Charles Warren, whose name still adorns the graduate center for American history at that university. The aim stated in their constitution was “to arouse public opinion to the necessity of a further exclusion of elements undesirable for citizenship or injurious to our national character.” They used the already formidable network of Harvard alumni to spread the word; to reach powerful politicians like the Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his close friend and fellow alumnus Theodore Roosevelt. With over five million immigrants arriving between 1880 and 1890, they believed the American future at stake. The nation’s virtues had been inherited from “sturdy” (a word they liked to repeat) stock of the English, Scots, and (even) Irish along with a decent Nordic smattering of Scandinavians and Germans. That inbred pedigree of resolute will, toughness, and beauty, the product of generations of trial, was now under siege from the polluting under-races pouring through New York from southern and eastern Europe: Italians, “Slavs” (Poles, Ruthenians, Lithuanians), Hungarians and Rumanians, Armenians and Syrians and most abominable of all, “the Hebrews.”

  From their faculty houses and gentleman’s clubs (no Hebrews need apply), the professors and the patricians could smell the reek of cooking onions and grimy underthings; they could see the dirt-clogged nails of the sweat workers in the tenement garment shops, and they trembled for America as they pressed their lawn handkerchiefs to their noses. They were all well traveled. They all adored Europe; but it was the Europe of Michelangelo, of countless Hotel Bristols, not the chicken-gizzard slums and the greasy brothels. Now the very worst of Europe was invading the American shore, dispatching its diseased madmen, tubercular paupers, and sinister agitators. Only they who understood, as they kept on saying, the scientific basis of the threat stood between America and death by subhuman infestation.

  Eighteen ninety-three was the perfect year to begin the campaign that would culminate in the establishment of the Immigration Restriction League. The country was in the midst of another of its economic meltdowns: failing banks; massive unemployment. In an attempt at rallying the national spirit, the Columbian Exposition had opened in Chicago, and had proven an electric-lit wonder. But even there the lecture delivered by the Wisconsin professor of history Frederick Jackson Turner, attributing the triumphant expansion of democracy to the moving continental frontier, had a valedictory ring to it when Turner declared that frontier closed. Ideological claustrophobia bred paranoia. Now that the invasion of the Inferior Races had penetrated the interior of the United States, there was nowhere to flee (except to their elegant summer homes in Maine and Long Island). Had they managed to shut the door on the Chinese in the West only to succumb to what the Times called “the Chinese of the eastern cities”? Lengthening unemployment lines and a fierce scramble for jobs recruited the forces of organized labor to the cause of restriction. In the rural South and parts of the Midwest, the sense of a capitalist plot to swamp America with what the populist politician Tom Watson called “the scum of creation,” at the same time as they upheld the gold standard to make credit harder for regular folks, aggravated the resentment. It was, after all, the United States Chamber of Commerce and manufacturers’ associations who were resisting immigration restrictions in the name of cheaper labor costs. In the meantime honest white workers were left to cope as best they could.

  In June 1896, MIT’s Francis Walker published his own arguments for restriction in the Atlantic Monthly. The fact that he had earned respect as Civil War soldier, commissioner of Indian affairs (presiding of course over the golden age of their liquidation in the 1870s), and as the founder of national associations of both economists and statisticians, meant that Walker’s adherence to the restrictionist cause gave it priceless intellectual respectability. In the article he acknowledged that America had been built on the open hospitality of the Founding Fathers, but that did not necessarily mean their word should be law forever. They had cleared forests with abandon; now it was thought prudent to conserve them. So while our “fathers were right…yet the patriotic American may properly shrink in terror in contemplation of the vast hordes of ignorant and brutalised peasants who throng to our shores.” Immigration had once been a test of will and fiber; now it was “pipeline immigration” run by unscrupulous agents in central and eastern Europe who locked their victims in boxcars, disgorged them on Ellis Island, and then drove them to the coal face in Pennsylvania and the Appalachians. To those who said “they do the jobs we do not wish to perform,” Walker wondered whether that was a good thing seeing as there had been no jobs the generation of Andrew Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson had thought beneath them. If the Irish now liked Italians doing the menial work once allotted to them, perhaps if Baron Hirsch sent two million Jews (the fear of Jews was always counted in millions), Italians could stand aside from work they judged demeaning, but at what cost to the republic? Walker, who when he chose to turn it on could wax Gothic in his lurid, comic-book horrors, summoned up what America would become if nothing was done: a nocturnal vision of “police driving from the garbage dumps the miserable beings who try to burrow in those unutterable depths of filth and slime in order that they sleep there. Was it in cement like this that the foundations of our republic were laid?”

  The restrictionists knew how to seem reasonable, demanding at the beginning a literacy test. Was it not common sense to require immigrants to be able to read fifty or so words in any language? (This usually meant the official language of their nation of origin, which would have barred the Jews of the Pale of Settlement who for the most part knew only Hebrew and Yiddish; or Czechs of the Habsburg Empire who didn’t care to speak German.) But pressure mounted on Congress, which heard Henry Cabot Lodge’s speeches on the subject, and a law went through both houses only for President Cleveland (in his second term) to veto it and to do so with an eloquent restatement of the classic Crèvecoeur–Paine case for the uniqueness of the American experiment. Perhaps he remembered that rainy day in October 1886. Such a law, the president said, would be “a radical departure from our national policy relating to immigrants. Heretofore we have welcomed all who come here from other lands except those whose moral or physical condition…threatened danger to our national welfare and safety. We have encouraged those coming from foreign countries to cast their lot w
ith us and join in the development of our vast domain, securing in return a share in the blessings of citizenship.” In repudiation of the restrictionist case that immigration meant economic damage, Cleveland went on, “This country’s stupendous growth, largely due to the assimilation of millions of sturdy adopted patriotic citizens, attests the success of this generous and free-handed policy.” Similar proposals would be brought to the desks of Presidents Taft and Wilson, and each would apply the veto once more.

  A war was looming, in the ranks of social scientists as well as in Serbia and Belgium. In 1914 Edward Alsworth Ross, another of social science’s most revered patriarchs, fired from Stanford in 1900 by Leland’s widow for injudicious remarks about silver-backed currency and support for Asian exclusion, published The Old World in the New. Ross’s book, the most influential in the whole debate before Madison Grant’s racist bible, is the familiar litany of evils said to have been brought by the “inferior races” of the new immigration. And like many in the genre, under the guise of science it actually drove home its fears in deranged hyperbole. With Polish women producing seven children in fourteen years, “the Middle Ages” had been brought to America. The Hebrew mind was calculating and “combinative,” fit for anticipating stock prices, in contrast to “the free poetic fancy of the Celts.” The most eugenically minded chapter spoke of how the “blood now being injected into the veins of our people is sub-common.” Look at the crowd coming down the gangplank, Ross wrote, and you will see “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality [who] clearly belong in skins in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.” (Many of the restrictionists were associated with the natural history and zoological societies and designed their displays.) “Ugliness,” Ross goes on, is both symptom and eugenic threat for “in every face there was something wrong: lips thick, mouths coarse, upper lip too long, chin poorly formed, bridge of nose hollowed…there were sugarloaf heads; moon faces, slit mouths, lantern jaws, goose bills that one might imagine a malicious djinn amused himself by casting human beings from a set of skew molds discarded by the Creator.” This was the sort of stuff that would get a hearty roar of approval from Nazis like Alfred Rosenberg, not to mention his Leader.

  But the dominant social-science paradigm did not go completely uncontested. The great Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas, the grandchild of Orthodox Jews as both his admirers and demonizers like to recall, devoted a life to attacking the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer; the pseudo-biology of racial norms. Cultures, Boas argued, were certainly different but not to be arranged in some sort of hierarchy of mental and physical capacity. At the end of his The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas hoped that his work might “teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilizations different from our own and that we should learn to look on foreign races with greater sympathy.”

  The presumptuousness of American university presidents and the grandest of their faculty to speak for their institutions seems only to have provoked dissenters to articulate a challenging view. Boas was determined to act as a “public intellectual” so as to deny Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, a restrictionist, the right to speak for the college. And there were some sons of Mother Harvard—and students of the philosophers George Santayana and the pragmatist William James—who begged to differ with their president Lowell, another Boston Brahmin crusader for the superior race. In the wake of attacks in the press on “hyphenated Americans” in 1915, Horace Kallen published an article in the Nation giving a subtler view of immigrant adjustment to American life. Kallen believed that following the initial urge to assimilate, immigrants often revisited their cultural traditions and language without any sense that they were compromising American allegiance, a step that Kallen called “dissimilation.” His particular target was his colleague at the University of Wisconsin where they both taught: Edward Alsworth Ross. Why, he wondered, was Ross so attached to the white-bread insipidity of one version of American identity, and why so terrified of “difference”—the first time, I think, that that word was used to validate cultural character. Kallen proposed replacing the obligation of homogeneity by “harmony” which he then extended to seeing America as an “orchestra of mankind,” each section with its own tone and musical texture; yet each a part of a miraculously bound whole.

  It is too soon to say whether the founders of American cultural pluralism—the likes of Boas, Kallen, and Randolph Bourne, who in 1916 praised what the new immigrants had brought to America’s stagnation—have won the war. Perhaps it will always be too soon. Ross’s descendants like Samuel P. Huntingdon of Harvard, exercised about a war of civilizations fought out on the Rio Grande border, are still very much with us. And it was the restrictionists who won the immediate battle where it mattered, in the halls of authority and power. University presidents Lowell and Butler managed to establish quotas for Columbia and Harvard (Yale and Princeton were no better) that sharply reduced the numbers of Jews admitted after World War I, and a more serious quota system was instituted at the same time based on a ranking of ethnic and cultural desirability. It was that policy that shut the door on immigrants who desperately needed Crèvecoeur’s refuge and instead perished in their millions in the camps of the Final Solution. But Madison Grant sleeps in his tomb in Sleepy Hollow, New York, along with the patriots of the American Revolution.

  It was not until 1965 that Lyndon Johnson, building somewhat on the head of steam supplied by Kennedy’s purported authorship of A Nation of Immigrants, succeeded in abolishing the quota system. But what helped more than the assassinated president’s Irish pride was a different tradition of understanding the immigrant experience, one that had proceeded alongside all the noisy jeremiads about the damage they were doing to the cultural and social essence of the national character. That work was empirical and practical rather than common-room grandstanding, and it was done by an entirely different class of social workers from people like Madison Grant and Edward Ross. Is it surprising that the professors and the patricians holding their noses at the tenements were all men, but those who actually went into them—who listened to the stories, mopped sickly brows, and who actually bothered to travel to the remote regions in Ruthenia and Poland where the immigrants came from—were women?

  And what women! The most often celebrated has been Jane Addams, who founded the first of the city settlement houses, Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago. But it was her brilliant and tireless protégée Grace Abbott who, three years after Edward Ross’s farrago of paranoid myths masquerading as social science had been published, wrote the first sympathetic work on The Immigrant and the Community. Nineteen seveenteen was the year in which the United States entered the World War, and both of the parties had whipped up a froth of patriotic fury, Democrats disgruntled with Wilson’s internationalism called for “America First,” while Republicans trying to outbid them demanded “Undiluted Americanism.” If there must be a way, immigrants might constitute a fifth column especially if they were mere “hyphenated Americans.” Grace Abbott wanted to refute, systematically and statistically, each of the truisms recycled by Ross about the new immigration, and she showed conclusively, for example, that born Americans convicted of crimes constituted a much higher proportion of the population than the foreign-born. In northeast America, where immigrants were principally concentrated, white natives receiving poor assistance were also a higher proportion than among the “new immigrants.”

  But what gives Grace Abbott’s book its enduring value is not its counterpunch at a pseudo-sociology; rather it is its narrative power: the portrait of the immigrant experience itself, seen through the many life histories to which the author had sympathetically listened. Moving through her pages are her own hours spent in the tramcars and sweatshops, the police courts, the ward boss saloons, and the huckster “immigrant banks.” The Immigrant and the Community is, at the same time, the story of the tribulations and endurance of Polish girls without a word of English thrown into farm labor or domestic service, of the Italian ra
ilroad worker, of the Jewish seamstress; a handbook for their survival and a prescription to public authorities about how to help these multitudes make it in America. Abbott was no longer interested in debating restrictions. She assumed she and her more liberal kind had, for the time being, lost the argument; that there would be strict criteria of admission in place; but she wanted to do everything in her power to bring the immigrants who passed muster into the stream of American life. Like Kallen, she understood American life not as some imaginary and dull homogeneity, but as a rich adjacency of cultural neighborhoods. That, Grace Abbott supposed, was America’s unique glory.

  But then Grace Abbott was raised to independent thinking. Her father, a Civil War hero, became a reform-minded governor of Nebraska; her mother was an ardent early feminist and suffragist. Her older sister Edith was a recruit to Jane Addams’s Hull House who went on to be dean of the University of Chicago’s School of Civics and Philanthropy (later Social Service Administration). Edith’s success in Chicago called Grace there too, in pursuit of a doctorate. Once acquired, she knew exactly what she wanted: to be of use in the uproar of the great metropolis. She moved into Hull House, was spotted as exceptional by Addams, and in 1908 became the first director of the Immigrants Protective League, which she ran alongside the equally remarkable Kentuckian Sophonisba Breckinridge.

  It was as though Grace figured out, early, what had been wrong with all the grand theorizing about immigrants and American life: that it had been done by people who had never gone near them, who had no clue where Ruthenia was or what it was, and who would have reached for the smelling salts at the mere suggestion that publicly paid interpreters would be a good idea to help the immigrants in their resettlement. Instead of some lordly overview, Abbott simply went along, as far as she could, for the ride. What she noticed right away was the extraordinary number of unmarried and unaccompanied girls and young women. Between 1909 and 1914 there were a half a million of them aged between fourteen and twenty-nine; 84,000 Polish girls alone, 23,000 from Galician Ruthenia, 65,000 Russian and Polish Jewish girls; all most obviously at the mercy of an entire industry waiting to exploit, cheat, and indebt them in any way it could. Grace listened to stories of girls who had been sent to uncles, who took them in for a night or two in the district around the stockyards, perhaps found them poor lodgings, and then left them to sink or swim. Some who had expected to be met at the railway station never were, and stood with their pathetic little bag without any English on the platform until they were approached by a local vulture who would slip their arm in his and take them off to a saloon. Many were cheated even before they got on the train at the port of entry as steamboat companies who supplied the onward journey rail tickets made a killing from absurdly circuitous journeys; taking passengers, for example, from New York to Chicago via Norfolk, Virginia.