Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy

Inventing the Immigration Problem

THE DILLINGHAM COMMISSION AND ITS LEGACY

Katherine Benton-Cohen

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2018

Copyright © 2018 by Katherine Benton-Cohen

All rights reserved

Jacket design: Annamarie Why

Jacket photographs: Top: The nine original members of the Dillingham Commission and their chief aides. Bain News Service, 1907, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress. Bottom: Mrs. Bissie and family, Baltimore, Maryland, 1909. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, Library of Congress.

978-0-674-97644-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-674-98564-3 (EPUB)

978-0-674-98565-0 (MOBI)

978-0-674-98566-7 (PDF)

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for Humanities or any other organization.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Benton-Cohen, Katherine, author.

Title: Inventing the immigration problem : the Dillingham Commission and its legacy / Katherine Benton-Cohen.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017052663

Subjects: LCSH: United States. Immigration Commission (1907–1910)—Influence. | United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | United States—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. | Demographic surveys—United States. | United States—History—1901–1953.

Classification: LCC JV6483 .B48 2018 | DDC 325.7309/041—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052663

For Julius and Asher

Contents

Introduction

1

The Professor and the Commission

2

The Gentlemen’s Agreement

3

Hebrew or Jewish Is Simply a Religion

4

The Vanishing American Wage Earner

5

Women’s Power and Knowledge

6

The American Type

7

Not a Question of Too Many Immigrants

Epilogue

Dillingham Commission Members and Selected Staff

Dillingham Commission Reports

Notes

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index

Introduction

In April 1910, Henry Cabot Lodge wrote to a friend, I am now a member of the Immigration Commission, which has been carrying on the most exhaustive inquiry into the subject which has ever been made. The aristocratic senator shared his friend Theodore Roosevelt’s passion for imperialism abroad. But where Roosevelt had mixed feelings about immigrants, Lodge did not; he had been the legislative leader of the immigration restriction movement since his election to the House in 1887 and then to the Senate six years later.¹

Like his more famous colleague Lodge, Senator William P. Dillingham, the U.S. Immigration Commission’s chair, championed both imperialism and immigration restriction. The small-town aristocrat was a former Vermont governor who also shared Lodge’s rock-ribbed Republicanism and Puritan New England stock. Along with seven other men, Lodge and Dillingham would oversee the largest study of immigrants ever conducted in the United States—the so-called Dillingham Commission.

The Dillingham Commission’s work has shaped immigration policy ever since. It produced forty-one volumes of reports, summarized in a brief but potent set of recommendations that was far more restrictive than its own evidence supported.² Within a decade, almost all of these policy initiatives were implemented into law. They included a literacy test, a quota system that varied by nationality, the continued exclusion of Asians, and a panoply of new immigration rules. The commission’s reforms effectively ended mass immigration from 1924 until the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Between 1881 and 1924, approximately twenty-four million immigrants came to the United States; during the twenty-five years that followed, fewer newcomers arrived than in 1907 alone.³ Even though its overt racial biases have been eliminated, the architecture built by the commission still undergirds federal immigration policy.

The Dillingham Commission was a fact-finding body of unprecedented size and scale, one of the largest investigative projects ever undertaken by the federal government, even to this day. It had notoriety and a large budget. Both attracted social scientists and political activists of all stripes, even those who opposed its aims. Its range was broad and deep. It demonstrated the federal government’s capacity as a massive and growing knowledge-acquisition apparatus. The federal Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, which it vastly expanded, became a quintessential example of the administrative state. (In 2017, after many name changes, relocations, and splits, it inhabits the Department of Homeland Security.) The laws fashioned from the commission’s recommendations required elaborate record-keeping apparatuses, byzantine bureaucracy, internal courts, and broad administrative authority.⁴

The commission’s work reflected the circumstances and priorities of a particular moment in American history and American Progressivism, a moment characterized by mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy that fostered a newly robust notion of federal power both within and beyond the nation’s borders. The commission’s recommendations also marked a final turn from an immigration policy driven by the foreign-policy priorities of the executive branch to one dictated by legislators’ concerns about domestic labor politics.

In 1911, commission member Jeremiah Jenks repackaged its voluminous findings into a mainstream book, The Immigration Problem: A Study of American Immigration Conditions and Needs. The book’s title asserted the commission’s fundamental assumption: immigration was a problem, and it was the job of the federal government to fix it. The digest was reprinted in six editions through 1926 and received broad readership, and this idea of an immigration problem became the way Americans understood the commission’s work.⁵

The commission’s Progressive Era formulation of an immigration problem for federal power to solve has become so indelibly imprinted that its logic—immigration problem; federal government solution—now seems entirely natural. Consider, for example, the irony of President Donald Trump’s then-adviser Stephen Bannon’s 2017 call for a dramatic expansion of federal immigration enforcement and exclusion even as he demanded a deconstruction of the administrative state.⁶ But conceiving of immigration as a problem in America was an invention, and one deeply embedded in the way that both bureaucrats and elites saw the relationship between social science and public policy in the Progressive Era. Indeed, the word expert did not gain traction until the 1870s. It was, like the problem those experts determined to solve, a product of its era.⁷

As the United States continues to struggle with an immigration system that dissatisfies almost everyone, the Dillingham Commission deserves new attention. Its story shows that the federal government’s current role as an administrative leviathan in its enforcement of immigration was neither accidental nor inevitable. Americans have become so used to the narrative of mass migration as a public policy problem to be managed using federal bureaucratic power that hardly anyone—right, left, or center—questions it. Nor do we question why lawmakers ever saw fit to establish an immense governmental architecture to enforce immigration policy in the first place.⁸ The federal immigration problem is a product of a bygone era that casts a long shadow not just on the current immigration system but also on our collective imaginations.

The Dillingham Commission’s Progressive Era confidence in nonpartisan expertise, and its success in implementing its recommendations, appears quaint in the political polarization and gridlock of the twenty-first century. Many of the commission’s ideas—and certainly its language—are antiquated. Yet perhaps its most striking element is the unwavering faith its members and staff maintained in their own objectivity. The methods, conclusions—and above all, certitude—of the newly ascendant social sciences appear hubristic in our more critical and cynical age.

Yet even the commission’s assertions of objectivity produced inconsistent interpretations and contradictory data. The men and women of the Dillingham Commission were not of one voice. But its final recommendations were so brief, decisive, and restrictive—and so quickly successful—that the behind-the-scenes debates about the nature and impact of immigration in the United States were swiftly obscured. The commission’s recommendations called for restrictions based on quality and quantity to maintain economic opportunity and the well-being of our people.⁹ But much of the commission’s research sprawled in an erratic, lively, and internally contradictory mess, far beyond its specific goal and agenda, and it was largely ignored in the commission’s own stark recommendations for restriction.

The commission’s nine appointees and three hundred odd staff varied in their perspectives and priorities. Some favored restriction; others did not. A majority were conservative Republicans, some were Democrats, and a few were Socialists. One staffer helped found the Communist Party of America. But even as they varied in their policy and political perspectives, they came to a near-consensus about the need to establish new apparatus to exert federal power over millions of immigrants. The vast federal bureaucracy they envisioned has endured and swelled in the century since. Progressive Era experts called immigration a problem and created a framework for federal bureaucracy to solve it with a confident swagger that belied the contradictions of their own research footings.

This is the Dillingham Commission’s legacy to us.

The Commission and Its Critics

From February 1907 until its final reports were issued in early 1911, the Dillingham Commission investigated what it called the general effect, in a broad sense, of the new immigration movement upon the people, the industries, and the institutions of the United States. As authorized by Section 39 of the Immigration Act of 1907, the commission had nine appointed members. Three experts were chosen by President Theodore Roosevelt: California businessman William R. Wheeler and economists Jeremiah Jenks and Charles Neill. Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon chose three congressmen: John Burnett (D-AL), William Bennet (R-NY), and Benjamin Howell (R-NJ). Three senators (Dillingham, Lodge, and Asbury Latimer [D-SC]), were chosen by Vice President Charles Fairbanks in his capacity as the Senate president. A few people among the appointees and staff members were well known—Lodge, for example, and anthropologist Franz Boas—but most were unknown outside policy and academic circles. Many were academic economists. Women made up more than half of the commission’s workforce and authored several of the reports.¹⁰

The Dillingham Commission. The nine original members of the commission and their chief aides. None was an immigrant. Front row: Asbury Latimer, Henry Cabot Lodge, William P. Dillingham, Benjamin F. Howell, Charles P. Neill. Back row: William W. Husband, Jeremiah Jenks, Morton E. Crane, William S. Bennet, James Burnett, and William R. Wheeler.

The Dillingham Commission decided early on to focus on fieldwork and statistics in the social-science vein rather than use the traditional legislative strategy of holding hearings. It organized its tables and data around a comparison of recently arrived races (its term)—such as the Slovaks and Italians—with long-established ones such as the English and Germans. The final reports’ twenty-nine thousand pages explored topics that sprawled the full reaches of the Progressive Era mind. In addition to twenty reports on immigrants in American industries, thick with mind-numbing and undigested tabulations, the reports considered everything from the head size of new immigrants to conditions on transatlantic steamships to prostitution, debt peonage, crime, schools, agriculture, philanthropic societies, other countries’ immigration laws, and immigrant women’s fecundity. Even without reading the volumes, the American public could learn in widespread newspaper coverage—from Los Angeles to New York to Berea, Kentucky—about glove making in the Hudson Valley, sex peddling in Chicago and San Francisco, Japanese fruit farming in rural California and Washington, households and family wages across the Midwest and coal country, the smuggling of Chinese immigrants through California, Mexico, and Canada, and peonage investigations in southern lumber camps—to name just a few of the myriad topics. The commission’s first major project began in May 1907—a summer-long investigation of emigration ports and sending cities across Europe. Over the next three years, the commission and its staff visited or gathered data on all forty-six states and several territories, including Hawaii. By its conclusion, the commission—which had no limit on the time … or on the expense it may incur—had spent nearly a million dollars, a shockingly large figure in 1911.¹¹

The commission did not lack for media attention in its own time, or subsequently. In addition to the regional and national press coverage, in 1910 and 1911, the commission was the subject of special issues of the influential policy journal Survey, as well as many editorials by both participants and observers. Throughout the research, Boston’s Immigration Restriction League (IRL), a clubby group of Harvard alumni close to Lodge (who had four degrees from there), served as watchdog.

From the other side, in defense of immigrants, came the first extended analysis of the commission’s findings, even before the public laid eyes on it. With access to an advance copy, the American Jewish Committee (recently formed to combat restriction) hired Russian Jewish émigré and Harvard-trained economist Isaac Hourwich to analyze the reports. In 1912, Hourwich produced a thorough rebuttal of the statistical methods that the reports used to demonstrate that new immigrants were less successful than the old.¹²

The Dillingham Commission’s paradigm of old immigrants versus new immigrants has shaped the study of immigration ever since. Both categories referred to Europeans: old immigrants had come mostly from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia in the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast, the commission assumed the mostly Jewish, Italian, and Slavic new immigrants to be less assimilable and more alien. In its own words, the commission paid but little attention to the old immigrant class as a topic of policy. For decades, this so-called hoary distinction between old and new was axiomatic in histories of immigration. But the dichotomous model implicitly defined Asian and Mexican immigrants as other in ways that have continued to structure immigration policy and to produce a racial subtext about illegal aliens to the present day.¹³

The subsequent replication in historical literature of the old versus new immigrant paradigm—one of the great shibboleths of American immigration history, as one scholar put it—obscured the fact that the commission did in fact talk about other immigrants, especially Asians.¹⁴ Perhaps because Asian immigration was banned entirely, and because it was a regional issue, few scholars note that the Dillingham Commission was sufficiently interested in Chinese, Japanese, and what it called Hindoo (South Asian) immigrants to devote three volumes to the American West and Pacific Coast states.¹⁵ The commission owed its very existence to a compromise wrought by a diplomatic disagreement with Japan. In fact, two of Roosevelt’s three appointees—Cornell economist Jeremiah Jenks and San Francisco businessman William R. Wheeler—he considered to be Asia experts.

In contrast to its intense interest in Asia, the commission had almost no interest in Mexico or Mexican immigrants. Mexico’s president, Porfirio Díaz, was a close American ally, and before the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, the Mexican population in the United States was concentrated almost entirely in the American Southwest. From 1898 to 1910, Mexicans ranked just 28th of 39 immigrant groups. Arizona and New Mexico were still territories and were treated like overseas colonies. Five years before the Dillingham Commission, Lodge had opposed statehood for New Mexico because its people were of a different race, whose success, in his view, would only encourage Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and Alaskans to press for statehood.¹⁶

In any case, immigrants crossing the overland borders from Mexico and Canada were considered so unimportant—and minimal—that the federal government did not even count them until 1908. The U.S. census did not include them in preprinted lists of national origins. The old immigrant versus new immigrant template, based on far more numerous Europeans, distorted the commission’s understanding of Mexicans. A typical statistical table’s preface explained that the best method for understanding its data was to separate the foreign-born races … into two groups; the first to be known as the older immigrants, including the English, Irish, Scotch, French, and Germans, and the second group to be known as the more recent immigrants … except the Mexicans, who for obvious reasons should not be classified with either the recent or less recent immigrants of European origin. The reasons were so obvious they did not merit comment, at least for the commission’s members and analysts.¹⁷

Even the commission’s analysis of Europeans has continued to receive criticism. Following Isaac Hourwich’s 1912 response, more than a century of scholarship by historians and political scientists has mentioned—and usually condemned—the Dillingham Commission’s work. In 2011, the New York Times proclaimed, Forty-one volumes, all of it garbage. In a 2013 interview on National Public Radio, prominent sociologist Richard Alba called the reports overtly racist.¹⁸

The best analysis remains that of the great Harvard historian Oscar Handlin (himself the son of immigrants). In 1952, Handlin won the Pulitzer Prize for his influential book The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. It famously began, Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history. On the heels of the book’s success, Handlin produced a memorandum for Harry S Truman’s Presidential Commission on Immigration and Naturalization. Handlin argued that Congress should rescind the discriminatory national-origins quotas. He blamed their passage in part on the Dillingham Commission’s reports, which he described as neither impartial nor scientific. The Dillingham Commission, on whose basis Congress had passed the quota laws, had taken for granted the conclusions it aimed to prove—that the new immigration was essentially different from the old and less capable of being Americanized.¹⁹

Since Handlin’s time, the Dillingham Commission has made cameo appearances in many articles and chapters, usually as an example of nativism and racism. The commission is the subject of only one other book, an essential overview by Robert Zeidel. Zeidel calls for a rationalist and policy-oriented interpretation that moves beyond cultural arguments over racism and bias. Like Handlin before him, Zeidel focuses on the old and new immigrants. For many decades this approach seemed logical, but ignoring Mexicans and Asians is no longer tenable.²⁰

My approach draws on Hourwich, Handlin, and Zeidel, but also benefits from more recent thinking about immigration, state power, and politics. In the last few decades, many scholars have rethought the histories of race and citizenship in the United States. Instead of thinking about waves of European immigration, historians have focused on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as a turning point in immigration history. Nativism has drawn renewed attention, and recent debates about immigration have fueled investigation of past crisis moments. New interpretations have produced valuable insights about the fluid meaning of race, state power, and legal categories of citizenship and alienage. The Dillingham Commission, too, offers this new literature something fresh—an opportunity to explore how a discrete group of policy makers analyzed diverse groups’ comparative worth to their new homeland in a global context.

At least three new avenues of inquiry distinguish my treatment of the Dillingham Commission from earlier treatments. First, a vast scholarship on state power has accompanied the transnational turn in American historiography. Most historians too easily dismiss immigration policy as a domestic matter, as historian Donna Gabaccia puts it. The Dillingham Commission convened during an era of global migration. Its experts brought bureaucratic knowledge from studying or administering the economies, education systems, and immigration policies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Panama: these experiences colored how they saw immigrants. In addition to chairing the Senate Immigration Committee, Senator Dillingham served on the Committee on Territories. Henry Cabot Lodge chaired the Senate Philippines Committee and lent its conference room to the Dillingham Commission for its meetings. The commission made its own extended investigation abroad. Senator Dillingham’s chief of staff compiled a volume comparing U.S. immigration laws with other receiver nations, such as Canada and Argentina. In considering all these research avenues, this book transforms a topic and set of sources (the commission’s reports) familiar to historians of domestic immigration history into part of the story about how Americans thought about immigrants and the world.²¹

New scholarship on the nature of federal governance has also shaped my work. It would be impossible to explain the Dillingham Commission without reference to the twin emergence in the Progressive Era of modern social science and federal bureaucracy. In recent years, practitioners of American political development (or APD, to its subscribers) have focused on state-making and the escalation of federal power that governance—including that of immigration policy—required. Government commissions, a Progressive Era creation, are of special interest to historians of public policy and the state. President Theodore Roosevelt loved commissions. He created, among others, commissions to combat corruption on Ellis Island, to quell labor conflict in the anthracite coal industry, to repopulate rural America, to investigate the stockyard conditions described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and to begin the conservation movement. Economic commissions in particular became a kind of cottage industry of the Progressive Era.²² I count the Dillingham Commission among these, since its conclusions focused on the economic impact of new immigrants, and almost all of its major players were economists. Among them was Roosevelt’s first appointee, Cornell University professor Jeremiah Jenks, who served on and wrote several volumes for the very first federal economic commission, the U.S. Industrial Commission of 1898–1902.²³

A rare photograph of some members of the Dillingham Commission, their wives, and staff arriving by dinghy from the S.S. Canopic on their tour of Europe in the summer of 1907.

Other writers have scrutinized the worship of objectivity by reform politicians and social scientists of the era, and many have identified the nation’s first generation of women to earn university degrees as crucial to public policy in the early twentieth century. Scholars in Europe, especially, have theorized a history of the modern fact (especially in quantitative form) as something crafted and shaped by people, not simply observed or noted. Knowledge is a historical phenomenon, as one put it. The history of knowledge explores what people in the past understood by the idea of knowledge and what they defined or accepted as knowledge. More than forty years of women’s history scholarship now makes it possible to see the women who constituted the majority of the commission’s staff and helped produce this knowledge. Along with the men who hired and promoted them, they helped pioneer women’s federal employment.²⁴

Third, this book takes regional difference and politics seriously. Not since John Higham’s classic 1955 study of nativism, Strangers in the Land, have historians paid sustained attention to regional differences in attitudes about immigration policy. Before 1907, southern legislators—who desperately wanted new labor forces—mostly opposed immigration restriction. The American West, too, was generally more open to European immigration, even as it remained in the vanguard of anti-Asian agitation. The South’s outsized influence in Congress not only ensured it two permanent spots on the Dillingham Commission; it also meant that an enthusiasm for what was known as distribution policy—distributing immigrants away from the crowded eastern seaboard and industrial areas rather than restricting them from entry—permeated the commission’s work. Jewish organizations in Europe and the United States mobilized to send Jewish immigrants to underpopulated regions of the South and West. In 1887, Lodge claimed, True Americanism opposes the further use of Western lands to invite immigrants, but his views were not, even as one close friend put it, those of the average man.²⁵

On Race

This book relies on work on the history of race. Hundreds of studies approach race as the history of an idea in America, in the words of pioneering scholar Thomas F. Gossett. In 1963, Gossett posited that ideas about racial difference were not timeless; race theory, he argued, had up until fairly modern times no firm hold on European thought. Gossett pinpointed imperial Spain’s encounter with the New World as a turning point in racial division and theories. Thanks to Eric Hobsbawm, we understand the ensuing era of racial theory’s development as simultaneously—and not coincidentally—the age of nationalism. Gossett’s study of the early twentieth century did a great service by labeling Progressive Era social scientists for what they were: racists and eugenicists—even by the standards of the time.²⁶

Gossett, writing during the civil rights movement, seemed to falter, however, when it came to explaining the distinction between prejudice against new immigrants and that against African Americans, Latinos, and Asians. In 1900, the term race meant both more and less than it does today: more, because the idea that race was a hierarchy was stronger, but also less, because race was often used where today most people would say ethnicity (Italian race, Greek race, Irish race). In that usage, race meant something stronger than what ethnicity would come to mean, but much less than when it was affixed to black, white, or even Mexican (which belonged in an overlapping category between legal whiteness and social inferiority).

By the 1990s, the burgeoning field of whiteness studies offered new insights into the subtleties of racial thinking.²⁷ But being of the Irish race never equated to the legal and social inequalities of being African American, either before or after the Civil War. Still, thinking about immigrants both as legally white and as frequent victims of discrimination was an important innovation. Some historians have distinguished between race and color: a new immigrant from southern or eastern Europe—for example, an Italian—could be discriminated against on the basis of race but still benefit from being white.²⁸

The word race was both ubiquitous and contested in the Dillingham Commission’s era because ideas about science, heredity, and acquired characteristics were fluid and undergoing great passionate debate. Some people used it simply to refer to a group united by custom, geography, and appearance; others, to claim that one group was biologically inferior or superior to another. Some—influenced by scientific racism and, especially by the 1910s, eugenics—made claims about hereditary characteristics of body, intelligence, and morality that fueled the exclusion of southern and eastern Europeans with the quota laws in the 1920s. In 1907, eugenics was just starting to infiltrate the United States; its influence peaked by the 1920s.²⁹ A shorthand definition of eugenics might be the science of race improvement. In the words of Harvard climatologist and early enthusiast Robert DeCourcy Ward in 1910, Eugenics has to do with breeding human beings for the betterment of the human race. A more restrictive immigration policy, in Ward’s view, was essential to the prevention of the unfit in the United States.³⁰

To add to the confusion, although many scientists were busy disproving Lamarckian ideas about heritable characteristics (which argued that an acquired trait such as developed biceps or the effects of an infectious disease could be inherited by offspring), these ideas still had adherents, even as newer ideas about evolution and about a distinction between genetic and acquired characteristics were growing.

Unfortunately, adherents of all different kinds of theories used the same word—race—to delineate people. One observer might blame environment for, say, Bohemian iron miners’ poverty and ill health; another might blame their inherently inferior qualities as the cause of poor outcomes. Both could describe their subjects as belonging to the Bohemian race but mean very different things by it—biological deficits, or mere cultural tendencies that marked a lack of assimilation to American norms.

The lines between racial hierarchy, eugenics, social Darwinism, and racism blurred. Some eugenicists and social Darwinists embraced the idea of the survival of the fittest without seeing it in purely racial terms—some fine specimens might be Italians, others Anglo-Saxons, perhaps even a Jew or an Indian. When Theodore Roosevelt spoke of an American race, he often qualified it as an amalgam of the best ingredients. Among the thousand young men Roosevelt chose for his Rough Riders regiment from fifty thousand applicants, fifty were perfect specimens of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism in the form of Ivy League athletes. On the other hand, Roosevelt also chose an equal number of American Indians, a Jew, and an Italian. He chose no African Americans or Asians. This was racism, yes, but not the kind that saw some European races as eugenically inferior to others.

No accounting of the use of the term race would be complete without reference to the Dillingham Commission’s Dictionary of Races or Peoples. Originally intended as a field guide for the commission’s agents, the project was directed by a husband and wife team, Daniel and Elnora Folkmar, who had experience in both colonial administration and eugenics. On its very first page, the dictionary used ethnical (a term only two decades old that only rarely appeared in the commission’s volumes), race, and nation interchangeably. (A similar approach can be seen in the dictionary’s title.) But the dictionary was not completed until after most of the commission’s field reports, so its definitions had little meaningful impact on the commission’s employees. It did, however, attract a lot of attention—for example, a two-page illustrated feature in the New York Times promised the dictionary would offer a good deal of a revelation to the ordinary American citizen.³¹

The Dillingham Commission’s working definition of race was not overly fixed, made little recourse to science, and was less rigid than eugenicists might have defined it. The opening volume of the final reports specified that the Commission, like the Immigration bureau, uses the term ‘race’ in a broad sense, the distinction being largely a matter of language and geography, rather than one of color or physical characteristics, that defined more restricted racial classifications. For the purposes of the commission, such classification is obviously without value, and is rarely employed.³²

The way the commission used the word race—and tried to distance itself from any fixed definition of it—argues against the widespread and ahistorical assumption that eugenics was a prime mover for the commission. Many overviews of the period lump the commission’s work with the era immediately following, when eugenics was unquestionably ascendant. The result is an exaggeration of eugenics’ role in the commission’s assumptions and conclusions. While members of the commission (especially Lodge) and staff (Joseph A. Hill, Elnora Folkmar, Alexander Cance, and even Franz Boas) were interested in eugenics, a close search of the reports and the private papers of both the staff and their critics (such as the IRL) reveals a marked general absence of eugenic thinking. It was simply too early for eugenics to have emerged as the historical bête noire behind the commission’s conclusions. Some of the most prominent early eugenicists of the day even lamented the absence of racial explanations in the commission’s studies.³³

Immigration’s Laissez-Faire History

In the early twentieth century, as Gary Gerstle has argued, the American people struggled to reconcile a tradition of civic nationalism and racial nationalism—one built on equality and democracy, the other on inequalities.³⁴ Nowhere, I would argue, was the contestation of those two ideas more evident than in the Dillingham Commission’s work. Its most important architects, among them economists Jeremiah Jenks and W. Jett Lauck (who oversaw the industrial reports), believed passionately in civic ideals of republican democracy and saw the treatment, conditions, and behavior of new immigrants as challenging those ideals. The commission’s forty-one volumes represent its researchers’ objective attempts to reconcile these two implicit intellectual traditions. Those who were most concerned about immigrants at home as well as the American administration of colonial people overseas—like Jenks—thought the most about civics and democratic government.

Yet immigration restriction was a new and largely untested idea. Only in the years immediately preceding the Dillingham Commission’s work did large-scale federal restrictions on entry seem a feasible solution to the immigration problem, because they required an expansion of federal power and a reversal of a laissez-faire policy toward immigrants.

This point requires a brief detour into the history of immigration law. With only the rarest of exceptions, the United States—whose early colonial settlements had names such as New Amsterdam, New England, and New Sweden—had unquestioningly recruited, welcomed, and incorporated immigrants into the body politic. There were no numerical limits on immigrants, no federal inspections, no head taxes, no rules of entry. Even during the Know-Nothing nativism of the 1850s, when many Americans vilified the immigrant Irish, no federal laws forbade their entry. Legal residency—even voting—usually did not require citizenship. Naturalization, including that of the Irish, was done in local state courts, usually pro forma, and sometimes en masse. (Naturalization was federalized in 1906; a key sponsor of the law, Congressman Benjamin Howell, was appointed to the Dillingham Commission the following year.) The anti-Irish nativism of the 1850s did not yield federal restrictions (though some state and local barriers to the Irish existed), and it was targeted almost entirely at one group, even as Scandinavians and Germans (including Catholics) continued to arrive with little opposition. In 1864, when the North desperately needed more laborers, President Abraham Lincoln inserted a new plank into the Republican Party’s platform, stating that foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources, and increase of nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy. That year, Congress passed a bill to encourage immigration, the only one of its kind in American history.³⁵

Among those who arrived as contract laborers—a category presumed to be something less than free—were the Chinese, spurred on by treaties that encouraged them to come do western railroad work. A campaign for Chinese exclusion flared up in California and across the West in the 1870s (much of it instigated by Irish immigrants). It characterized the Chinese as distinct from other immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred only workers, became the first federal law to forbid immigrants on the basis of race and class. (An 1875 law banning prostitutes had targeted Chinese women in all but name.) It also marked the beginning of regional politics’ effect on national immigration policy. The Chinese continued to be considered, in immigration policy and in the increasingly racial thinking that undergirded it, a race apart. Yet even Chinese exclusion was passed initially as a temporary measure.

In the scholarship dominated by the old versus new framework of European immigration, this story has not gotten a full telling.³⁶ Mexican and Asian immigration occupied a peripheral place in these histories in part because, in a reverse echo of the policy makers of the early twentieth century, much of the formative literature was as interested in proving the successful assimilation of the new immigrants as it was in the topic of immigration itself. But Asians and Mexicans seemed less meltable: indeed, by the 1980s, calls for multiculturalism in the academy elicited a viscerally negative response from John Higham, once the foremost historian on nativism.³⁷

In addition to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress passed another formative immigration law the same year. The Immigration Act of 1882 marked the moment when the Federal government first took control of immigration from the piecemeal oversight of the states, in the words of IRL leader Prescott F. Hall. To keep out what Hall called the dependent, defective and delinquent classes, the law laid down the first federal restrictions on immigrants on the basis of health, poverty, and criminal background. It also instituted a small head tax to fund a newly created federal Bureau of Immigration. In practice, the law excluded few people, but it did effectively make immigration per se a federal matter for the first time. Even then, the Supreme Court first explicitly upheld the federal government’s right to regulate immigration only in 1889. The Bureau of Immigration, first housed under the Department of the Treasury, was not founded until 1891. The first federal port of entry, Ellis Island, opened in 1892—it is, quite literally, a monument to federal immigration policy. Before that, immigrants arrived at ports that belonged to the states.³⁸ Most important, until 1921, no numerical quota for immigrants existed anywhere in federal statute. Before Chinese exclusion, there was no such thing as an illegal alien.

After 1882, Congress passed a few laws regulating immigration (notably in 1885, 1891, and 1903). These laws were narrow and incremental, focusing on certain categories of bad immigrants (such as the Chinese, contract laborers, criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, polygamists, and people with certain diseases). For all the trepidation by immigrants about the medical inspections at Ellis Island, over 98 percent of them passed.³⁹ New laws regulated the quality of immigrants, not the quantity, and as Chinese exclusion shows, could be highly racialized. As Jewish lobbyists at the time explained, these statutes were regulatory, not restrictive.⁴⁰ They hardly constituted a comprehensive, numbers-based immigration policy, and the regulatory approach allowed opponents of immigration restriction to argue that everything was under control already.

In this era, opponents of restriction found strong support in the executive branch—regardless of the party of its inhabitant. Presidents did not like restrictive laws; they needed the votes of naturalized citizens and their children, and as a diplomatic matter, they did not want to anger foreign allies. In 1897, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, Congress passed a law requiring male immigrants to be able to read and write in their own language (the literacy test). President Grover Cleveland vetoed it. In his message to Congress, Cleveland called the restrictive measure a radical departure from our national policy relating to immigration, which encouraged those coming from foreign countries to cast their lot with us and obtain the blessings of American citizenship. The nation’s success and stupendous growth, [is] largely due to the assimilation and thrift of millions of sturdy and patriotic adopted citizens.⁴¹ In other words, the literacy test was a solution in search of a problem.

Even the arrival of unprecedented millions of new immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century did not lead inexorably to the idea that the federal government must—or even could—restrict them. Organized opposition to the new immigrants began to emerge, but it was not universal. Nativist organizations such as the Sons of the Golden West reinvigorated the anti-Asian sentiments of the Chinese exclusion era and organized against Japanese and Koreans. Craft labor unions called for the restriction of unskilled immigrants, and three Harvard alumni founded the IRL in 1894. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism were ubiquitous. Yet even in the face of growing opposition, many Americans argued against restrictions. Some claimed, as had Grover Cleveland, that immigration was no problem at all, or even that it was the source of the United States’ strength and uniqueness. Others believed it was a problem, but only in the crowded northeast. Moreover, many believed that regulating such a massive phenomenon was beyond the ken of the federal government, which in the nineteenth century had been thought of more in terms of its limits than its possibilities. The phrases immigration question and immigration problem, much less immigration policy, for example, barely appeared in print in the United States before 1900.⁴²

Racial thinking surely motivated the commission’s most important recommendation: a quota system that would restrict the number of each race arriving each year based on a percentage of arrivals in the past years, and the limitation of the number of immigrants arriving annually at any port. But historical accounts that blame racial prejudice alone for the commission’s call for restrictions are insufficient. Instead, it was the collision of unprecedented numbers of immigrants with the emergence of new ideas about the federal government’s capacity and social scientists’ ability to find solutions to problems.⁴³

I do not pretend that this book tells everything about the Dillingham Commission; twenty-nine thousand pages confound summary or tidy conclusions. And like much of the federal government, the commission was internally inconsistent. The chapters that follow combine collective biography and policy history to focus on people particularly important to how the commission turned out—Jeremiah Jenks and W. Jett Lauck, for example. I necessarily focus more on the thinkers than the people they thought about. A new telling of the creation of the commission finds its roots not in a crisis over European immigration, but as part of a response to anti-Asian discrimination in California. I reveal how the Dillingham Commission helped spur the creation of the modern Jewish lobby to challenge restrictions and the labeling of Jews as a separate race. I delve into the empathetic approach the young economist W. Jett Lauck brought to the twenty reports on immigrants in industry, even as he recommended restriction. I also show the simultaneous influence of women on the commission, and of the commission on women, by telling the stories of the majority of the staff members who were