The Progressive Origins of Eugenics Critics: Raymond Pearl, Herbert S. Jennings, and the Defense of Scientific Inquiry

Abstract

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, a succession of popular books decried the impact that “new” immigrants were having on the United States. Fearing that the racial quality of the American people was being eroded by the large number of immigrants that had been arriving in the previous decades, the books clamored for radical restrictions on the number of immigrants the country should admit. These books reflect the pervasiveness of the belief that new immigrants were biologically inferior to older immigrants and native-born Anglo-Saxons. This belief, in turn, was rooted in a theory of permanently fixed racial identities that had been circulating throughout Europe and the United States for decades, despite cautions of professional scientists who argued that these theories were not “proven.” Yet non-scientists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were the ones who enjoyed widespread public authority on such complex scientific theories as heredity, genetics, and eugenics because they explained these difficult subjects in easily understandable terms–despite the fact that they grossly over-simplified the theories. Simultaneously, they raised shrill cries that these new arrivals thus threatened the “superior” racial stock of America. The anti-immigrant wave that Grant, Stoddard, and others fanned was based on what Grant described as “the science of race,” which he claimed proved “the immutability of somatological or bodily characters.”

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