Authors: Edwin Black
On February 17, 1924, just after Laughlin returned, Davis in his capacity as secretary oflabor also advocated Laughlin’s ideas in a special editorial in the
New York Times.
Davis declared that the program suggested by Laughlin must be enacted “so that America may not be a conglomeration of racial groups … but a homogenous race striving for the fulfillment of the ideals upon which this Government was founded.”
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On March 8, Laughlin again testified before Johnson’s immigration committee, this time presenting a massive table- and chart-bedecked report bearing the charged title “Europe as An Emigrant-Exporting Continent and the United States as an Immigrant-Receiving Nation.” True to form, Laughlin declared the existence of an “American Race.” He admitted that America was created by “a transplanted people,” but that the “nation was established by its founders. The pioneers ‘got in on the ground floor. ‘“ As such, this new American race “is a race of white people.” Therefore, he summarized, the nation’s racial character “is being modified to some degree by the changed racial character of the immigration of the last two generations.”
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His voluminous charts and reports displayed samplings of the twelve family pedigrees he had assembled in Europe, as well as abundant columns of immigrant data and U.S. population trends. In exhibit after exhibit, Laughlin piled racial ratio upon racial ratio and population percentage upon population percentage, offering copious scientific reinforcement of his conclusions. The majority of Johnson’s committee expressed complete support for both Laughlin and his research. At one point a congressman asked Laughlin to respond to denunciations of his work. “I decline to get into controversy with any heckler-critics,” he retorted, “…I shall answer criticisms by supplying more first-hand facts.” Johnson piped in, “Don’t worry about criticism, Dr. Laughlin, you have developed a valuable research and demonstrated a most startling state of affairs.”
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Johnson’s committee was also willing to lobby within other government agencies in support of Laughlin’s work. For example, when it became obvious that the State Department itself was now balking at releasing the confidential information that twenty-five consulates had submitted for Laughlin, immigration committee members bristled. “I think we ought to have a show-down on this,” snapped one congressman.
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The issue was finally decided some weeks later in a private meeting. On June 17, Carnegie president Merriam and Laughlin met at Washington’s elite Cosmos Club with Assistant Secretary of State Wilbur Carr, who headed up the consular service. Carnegie officials correctly believed that Carr had become “very favorably inclined toward cooperation with the Institution in this matter.” At their meeting, Merriam explained the ERO’s interest and Carr agreed to share the information, so long as Laughlin abided by a working understanding. Inasmuch as Laughlin held multiple government positions, any Carnegie Institution activities on the topic inside the United States would continue under the purview of the Department of Labor, the House Immigration Committee or any other domestic agency. But any overseas activity would need both general State Department approval and prior agreement by the ranking diplomat in the foreign locale. As part of the arrangement, Laughlin also agreed that any future demographic publications gleaned from consular data would be submitted in advance to the State Department “to prevent any possible embarrassment of the Federal Government. “
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Two days later, with the arrangement sealed, Secretary of Labor Davis delivered a formal, interdepartmental request directly to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes asking that the confidential consular data be made available to Laughlin. Laughlin was prepared to assemble a detailed, highly personal, multifolder case study of immigrant candidates and their ancestry. Folder D, section 2b, for example, catalogued the family’S “moral qualities.” With the new information, Laughlin could offer vivid examples of his new system of human “filtering.”
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The State Department sought to “prevent any possible embarrassment of the Federal Government” by Laughlin for the same reason the Carnegie Institution and Merriam expressed jitters. By this time Laughlin was more than a controversial pseudoscientist increasingly challenged by immigrant groups and others; he was in some quarters a complete laughingstock. And when Laughlin was excoriated in the popular press, all of eugenics and the Carnegie Institution itself were also opened to ridicule.
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Perhaps no better example of the ridicule directed at Laughlin at the time was a forty-seven-page lampoon written under the pseudonym Ezekiel Cheever, who in reality was probably either the irreverent
Baltimore Sun
commentator H. L. Mencken or one of his associates. Cheever’s booklet, a special edition of his
School Issues,
was billed on its cover as a “Special Extra Eugenics Number” in which Cheever “wickedly squeals on Doctor Harry H. Laughlin of the Carnegie Institution and other Members of the Eugenics Committee of the United States of America for feeding scientifically and biologically impure data to Honorable Members of the House of Representatives concerning the Immigration Problem.” In page after page of satirical jabs, Laughlin’s statistics were cited verbatim and then dismembered for their preposterousness.
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For example, Cheever deprecated Laughlin’s reliance on IQ testing to gauge feeblemindedness. “Undoubtedly, one of the greatest blunders made by scientific men in America the past fifty years,” he wrote, “was the premature publication of the results of the Army [intelligence] tests.” Mocking Laughlin’s scientific racism, Cheever titled one section “Nigger in the Wood-Pile,” which charged, “If the opinions advanced by Doctor Laughlin and based upon this same unscientific rubbish, are as unreliable as they appear when the rubbish is revealed in a true light, then it would seem that the Carnegie Institution of Washington must either disclaim any part of the job or confess that the job, despite Carnegie Institution’s part is a rotten one, provided Carnegie Institution does not wish to be regarded as on a par with the Palmer Institute of Chiropractic.”
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Cheever scolded “Honorable Albert Johnson, Chairman of the House’s Committee on Immigration and Naturalization and a member of the Eugenics Committee, [who] announced at the hearings: ‘I have examined Doctor Laughlin’s data and charts and find that they are both biologically and statistically thorough, and apparently sound.’ It is now in order for Congress to examine Honorable Albert Johnson and ascertain if as much can be said about him.”
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In a section titled “Naughty Germ Plasms,” referring to Laughlin’s race-based state institution surveys, Cheever jeered, “If the reader will examine the schedules sent out to cooperating institutions he will get a new and somewhat startling view as to what constitutes ‘the more serious crimes or felonies.’ Under adult types of crime there were listed: Drunkenness, Conducting business under an assumed name, Peddling without license, Begging, and Reckless driving. Among the serious crimes or felonies of the juvenile type he will find: Trespass, Unlawful use of automobiles, Begging, Truancy, Running away, Being a stubborn and disobedient child. If Doctor Laughlin can devise a means for locating germ plasms that are responsible for such heinous crimes, his fame will overshadow that of Pasteur.”
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Often, the booklet used Laughlin’s own words against him. Cheever quoted from one passage in Laughlin’s testimony that confessed, “At the beginning of this investigation there were in existence no careful or extended studies of this particular subject; the figures that were generally given were either guesswork or based upon very small samples of the population. “
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“Either Doctor Laughlin is exceedingly stupid,” scorned Cheever, “or else he is merely a statistical legerdemain [sleight of hand artist].”
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Extracts from Cheever’s booklet were syndicated in the
Baltimore Sun.
Other attacks followed. One severe assessment of his work by a reviewer named Jennings, writing in
Science Magazine,
caused eugenic circles particular distress because it appeared in a scholarly publication. “Can’t you get out some sort of reply to Jennings,” immigration guru Robert DeCourcy Ward wrote Laughlin. “He has been making a lot of trouble about your Melting Pot Report…. I hate to have that man talk and write without getting any real come-back from you.” Impervious as always, Laughlin shrugged off Jennings, and also dismissed Cheever as “more of a political attack trying to answer scientific data.”
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Davenport had no choice but to also deflect complaints arising from the steady stream of critical articles. Not a few of these were sent directly to the Carnegie Institution. Writing on Carnegie Institution letterhead, Davenport defensively replied to one man who had read Cheever’s pieces in the
Baltimore Sun,
asserting that Laughlin had been unduly libeled. Indeed, Davenport’s rebuttal likened the Cheever articles to the ridicule launched against Davenport himself years earlier by Galtonian eugenicists in England. He closed by saying that Cheever was so “out for blood” that he should be imprisoned.
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But no amount of public rebuke would dissuade Johnson, and that was all Laughlin cared about. Johnson continued to publish Laughlin’s testimony as though it were solid scientific truth. Using Laughlin’s biological data as a rationale, he pressed for new immigration quotas keyed to the national ancestral makeup reflected in the 1890 census. During April and May of 1924, the House and Senate passed the Immigration Act of 1924, and President Calvin Coolidge signed the sweeping measure into law on May 26. This legislation would radically reduce non-Nordic immigration, since the representation of Eastern and Southern Europeans was radically less in 1890 than it had been in 1910. The Italian quota, for example, would be slashed from 42,000 per year to just 4,000. Many called the new legislation the “National Origins Act” because it limited new immigration to a quota of just 2 percent of the “national origins” present in America according to the 1890 census.
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But tempestuous debate still surrounded the statistical validity of the 1890 census, and no one knew how reliable its reporting had been. Statisticians quarreled over just who was Irish or Gennan or Italian, and/or whose name sounded sufficiently Irish or Gennan or Italian to be counted as such. Quotas could not be established until the disputed 1890 percentages were settled. So the 1924 law charged the Census Bureau with the duty of studying the numbers and reporting their conclusions to a so-called “Quota Board,” which would be comprised of the three relevant cabinet secretaries: Davis of Labor, Herbert Hoover of Commerce, and Frank Kellogg of State. Quotas were to be announced by the president himself in 1927.
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Eugenicists tried mightily to influence the Quota Board’s deliberations. Just how the quotas were set would dictate the success or failure of this latest eugenic legislative crusade. A common rallying cry was expressed in A. P. Schultz’s raceological tome,
Rnce or Mongrel,
which proclaimed, “The principle that ‘all men are created equal’ is still considered the chief pillar of strength of the United States…. Only one objection can be raised against it, that it does not contain one iota of truth. “
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Constant pennutations and reevaluations of the demographic data were bandied back and forth throughout 1926. Politically-spun rhetoric masked true feelings. One senator, for example, staunchly announced he would not permit the new quotas to discriminate against Jews, Italians or Poles, but he concluded with the traditional eugenic view that any quota system must stop discriminating against Northwestern Europeans, that is, Nordics. As ethnic groups ramped up their pressure, however, some of the most stalwart quota crusaders began to falter.
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In the second half of 1926, the quota champion himself, Albert Johnson, came up for reelection. By now the immigrants in his district had come together in opposition to further restrictions. He began to equivocate. In August of 1926, Johnson gave a campaign speech opposing the “national origins” provisions because too many foreign elements would vote for repeal anyway. At one point he publicly declared in a conciliatory tone, “If the national origins amendment … is going to breed bad feeling in the United States … and result in friction at home, you may rest assured it will not be put into effect.” He added that his own “inside information” was that the quotas would never be instituted.
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Disheartened eugenicists sadly concluded that Johnson and his allies had completely succumbed to the influence of foreign groups.
Johnson’s inside information proved somewhat prophetic. On January 3, 1927, Secretaries Davis, Hoover and Kellogg delivered to President Coolidge country-by-country quota recommendations, accompanied by a carefully crafted cover letter declaring that they could come to no reliable consensus about the true percentages of national origins in 1890. “It may be stated,” the joint letter cautioned, “that the statistical and historical information available from which these computations were made is not entirely satisfactory.” On January 6, Congress requested the official letter and its recommendations. The White House delivered them the next day. Eugenicists assumed that although there was room for argument, some form of quotas would be enacted at once.
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But before the sun set that day, the White House delivered a replacement cover letter to the Senate. This one was similar, bearing the same January 3 date, again addressed to President Calvin Coolidge and again signed by all three cabinet secretaries. But the key phrase warned the President more forcefully: “Although this is the best information we have been able to secure, we wish to call attention to the reservations made by the committee and to state that, in our opinion, the statistical and historical information available raises grave doubts as to the whole value of these computations as a basis for the purposes intended. We therefore cannot assume responsibility for such conclusions under these circumstances.”
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