A new science of "race"

By the end of the nineteenth century racial stereotyping was becoming systematized, as different nationalities were ranked by their supposed "superior" and "inferior" qualities.  The Immigrant Commission, which authored a 41 volume report in 1911, assumed that "new" immigrants from southeastern Europe were inferior to "old" immigrants from western Europe. 

The "Bread and Roses" strike in the " Immigrant City " of Lawrence , Massachusetts in 1912 heightened suspicions of immigrants as a workforce.  Complaints spread that native-born workers were losing out to the unfair competition of "dumb, easily led, illiterate" southeastern Europeans.  The Italians in particular were said to be "violent" and "inclined to criminality."

Before long, racial stereotyping became a "science."  Madison Grant, a rich genealogist from New York who was a member of an old American family, was one of a number of influential lobbyists and writers who spearheaded a drive for immigration regulation based on a notion of a hierarchy of "races" in Europe .

Taking their cue from the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League, they applied distortions of Darwinian evolution, personal observations about "higher" and "lower" physical characteristics, the new theory of eugenics and the new I.Q. tests to different European immigrant groups.

Their message?  That "Nordics" or "Anglo-Saxons" were more advanced that "Alpines" and far superior to "Mediterraneans."  The proof?  Among other attributes, Nordics often possessed blue eyes which were obviously superior because, in Grant's words, "dark colored eyes are all but universal among wild mammals and entirely so among primates, man's nearest relatives."

Allowing in large numbers of dark-eyed Mediterraneans – those people from southeastern Europe – threatened the supposed "racial purity" of the Nordic stock which had largely peopled America in the  17^th and 18^th centuries.  These "new immigrants" tended to be violent and could not be assimilated.  If their entry was not immediately restricted, Grant wrote in his popular book, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the superior races in America would be submerged and the "unfit" would both survive and dominate. 

This passage from the book gives an idea of what passed for scientific argument:

"The new immigration...contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettoes.  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 them."

The Passing of the Great Race went through several printings and new editions, and was well received by Members of Congress.  It was influential in the decision to pass quotas restricting immigration from certain countries.