The Dillingham Report, Franz Boas, and the Measurement of U.S. ‘New’ Immigrants, 1907-1911[1]
By Tibor Frank
The Dillingham Commission
On February 20, 1907 the U.S. Congress established an Immigration Commission consisting of ten Senators and Representatives. Its influential members included Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, one of the most powerful leaders of the Senate. The timing and selection of the Commission members was in response to a growing anti-immigrant movement as numerous ‘White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant’ Americans were mobilized against the millions of ‘new’ immigrants arriving from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Czarist Russia, Romania, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.[2] The newcomers were generally characterized as members of inferior races, biologically unprepared for assimilation or democratic self-government, and were considered undesirable. Americans had never especially welcomed Catholics, Jews, and the Chinese. From the Irish to the Chinese, from the Italians and the Eastern Europeans to the Mexicans, newly arrived unskilled labourers were generally treated with contempt and generated fears that they would become public charges, undermine labour standards, corrupt American morals. Senator John W. Daniel of Virginia declared in 1899: “There is one thing that neither time nor education can change. You may change the leopard’s spots, but you will never change the different qualities of the races...”[3]
Social Darwinism and its theorists Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel found many followers in American universities and political circles. With Haeckel’s ‘biogenetic law’ lending ‘scientific’ legitimacy to racist theories, educated Americans considered ‘primitive races’ ‘half-devil and half-child’.[4] Proponents of scientific racism subscribed to the arguments of Alfred P. Schultz, whose 1908 book, ‘Race or Mongrel’ argued “that the fall of nations is due to the intermarriage with alien stocks; [and]…a nation’s strength is due to racial purity; a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless emigration is rigorously restricted” (Hankins 1937, 778-79). The leading American Social Darwinist, Yale professor William Graham Sumner preached similar dogmas of inequality and unrestricted competition for nearly 40 years (1872-1909) (Sumner 1963).
The establishment of the Dillingham Commission was a sign of the increasing presence and weight of Social Darwinism and biological racism in American political thinking. President Theodore Roosevelt was himself a Social Darwinist and went so far as to warn the American nation that the declining birth rate of Anglo-Saxon America would lead to what he called the slow death of the Anglo-American ‘race’, writing in 1907 that if the declining birth rate were not halted the future of the ‘white race’ will be taken over by Germans and Slavs.[5] Three times presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan was so disturbed by this current in the American social climate that he began to campaign against Social Darwinism and the idea of evolution. After reading ‘The Descent of Man’, he told sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1905 that Darwin’s theories “weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth”.[6]
No politician was more active and successful in translating Social Darwinism and biological racism into daily politics than Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) (Munro 1961). In 1908 Senator Lodge traced fundamental changes in the national and ‘racial’ origins of immigration since 1868. He noted that not only had the sum total of immigrants increased tenfold, but that immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Italy, Poland, and Russia had increased dramatically while those of English, Scottish, Irish, German, and Scandinavian origin had decreased. Expressing the fears of many Americans of English ancestry he wrote: “The problem which confronts us is whether we are going to be able to assimilate this vast body of people, to indoctrinate them with our ideals of government, and with our political habits, and also whether we can maintain the wages and the standards of living among our workingmen in the presence of such a vast and rapid increase of population.”[7] Lodge called for a general overhaul of immigration policies and restrictive legislation, thereby becoming a pioneer of the quota system that would be introduced after World War I.[8]
All this serves as a background to the significance of the Dillingham Commission. Senator William Paul Dillingham of Vermont spent much of his 23 years in the Senate attempting to promote immigration restriction legislation. The most astonishing product of his activities is the Dillingham Report, possibly the most voluminous and far-reaching migration study of all time. The fact that he never succeeded in passing any major legislation before 1921 suggests that there was strong political and public opposition to immigration restriction. Only the wartime anti-alien hysteria and the Red-Scare of 1919 made passage possible. It was the Johnson Act of 1921 that first created national immigration quotas, becoming the culminating effect of Dillingham’s political career and radically curtailing U.S. immigration for nearly half a century. The National Origins Act of 1924 was even more stringent and both laws were especially designed to cut off the ‘new immigration’ (Kline 1959).
The Dillingham Commission consisted of three Senators, three Representatives, and three Presidential appointees. Apart from Senator Lodge, the most influential member of the Commission was Cornell University political economist Jeremiah Whipple Jenks (1856-1929). Jenks convinced the Commission not to conduct regular congressional hearings: instead they commissioned research projects in particular areas. From these projects, Jenks and W. Jett Lauck published ‘The Immigration Problem’ in 1911, which became the basic reference work on the subject for many years (Bidwell 1961).
Jeremiah W. Jenks and Franz Boas
One of the founders of modern anthropology, Franz Boas (1858-1942) was to have a profound impact on the perception of ‘new’ U.S. immigration from East Central and Southern Europe. Born in the Rhineland, Germany and educated in Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, he studied science, mathematics, languages, and the humanities in the best tradition of nineteenth century German higher education. His 1881 doctoral dissertation, Contributions to Understanding the Colour of Water, showed him to be a scientist attracted by interdisciplinary research with an avid interest in new areas and the ability to consider science as a whole. He soon decided that ethnology provided scope for the range of his interests. In 1882 he joined the Anthropological Society and studied anthropometry with the leading German expert Rudolf Virchow. Boas’s first major anthropological study was written as an assistant in the Berlin Ethnology Museum (Boas 1883) while he was also a Privatdozent for natural geography at the University of Berlin. Boas found satisfaction as a scientist in Berlin, but the anti-liberal climate and anti-Semitism of late nineteenth century Germany alienated him. After an Arctic research voyage in 1887 he stopped in New York, took a job as assistant editor of the journal ‘Science’ and settled down in the United States (Lesser 1968).
During his long and prolific American career, Boas had many major achievements. He paid particular attention to the cultures of North American Indians, and wrote basic studies on theoretical issues in anthropology, on the relationship between heredity and environment, on race, anthropometry, and the methodology of ethnology. None of his work found as much general interest or caused such a scientific sensation as his 1911 study of physical changes between the bodies of immigrants from Europe and those of their American children.[9] The project had results that astonished Boas himself and which contradicted the expectations of the work’s sponsor, the Dillingham Commission. The results were first published as part of the 42 volumes of the Dillingham Report (1907-1911) (Frank 2000).
Boas had turned to Jeremiah W. Jenks with his project for an anthropological investigation and Jenks brought it to the Immigration Commission.[10] Boas felt it would be a good idea to become part of the gigantic Immigration Commission investigation that was under way and the connection seems to have come entirely from Boas’ initiative. Boas’ research plans were ambitious, but his international reputation won him the Commission’s support. Jenks may also have approved of Boas partly because of his own doctoral education at the University of Halle, which made him comfortable with the personality and intellectual background of the German scholar.
Boas knew of some earlier investigations which indicated that there were physical differences between immigrants and their descendants, but which did not identify them in terms of cephalic indices (Bowditch 1877; Peckham 1882, vol. 6; vol. 7; Boas 1916, 713). Boas’ first brief formulation is in a letter addressed to Jenks suggesting the existence of five “racial types, representing the principal divisions of immigrants”. At this point Boas did not give any specific details as to the nature of these groups, but added that these types should be studied first, “as immigrants”, second, “as emigrants”, and third, “after their arrival here. In their descendants” (Boas Papers 1908a). He proposed to investigate 120,000 individuals with 20 observers on 3,000 working days. Within a few days Boas provided Jenks with a much more elaborate plan that identified most of the essential details of his future investigation.
Boas was very explicit about the issues at stake. Instead of the tall, blond, Northwestern Europeans, masses of Eastern, Central, and Southern Europeans were now migrating to America, and many questioned the impact of this on America’s ability to assimilate the new immigrants successfully. The main problems to be investigated, Boas continued, included first and foremost “the selection that takes place by immigration; the modifications that develop in the children of the immigrants born abroad, and the further changes which take place in the children of the immigrants born in this country, and the effect of intermarriages in this country”. In the same letter, Boas raised some of the most fundamental issues and put forward his hypotheses concerning the investigation planned:
A comparison … shows that, on the whole, the American develops more rapidly and more favourably than the European, and it should be investigated whether the immigrants become subjected rapidly to the same influences which have determined the physique of the American.
Furthermore, there are marked distinctions in type between the American and the European of the same nationality [....] the whole investigation should be directed towards an inquiry into:
1.The assimilation or stability of type.
2.Changes in the characteristics of the development of the individual. (Boas Papers 1908a)
Boas had no prejudices against the people whom he was about to investigate. Instead of ‘race’, Boas used throughout his proposal the word ‘type’ or ‘racial type’ as a generic term. “The most important types of Europe are: 1. North Europeans, 2. East Europeans, 3. Central Europeans, 4. South Europeans (particularly Italians of the region south of Rome). As a fifth group should be added either Russian Jews or the inhabitants of Asia Minor and Syria” (Boas Papers 1908a). Before going on to some of the practical problems of the investigation, he raised the basic questions of the study:
1.How does the immigrant type differ from the home type […]?
2.Is the part of the immigrant population returning to Europe in any way different from that part of the population that stays here?
3.In how far and how much does the development of the children growing up in the United States differ from the development of the immigrant race, and does it approach the characteristic development of the American child?
4.Is this tendency to assimilate […] increased and emphasized in the children of immigrants born in this country?
5.Do the descendants of immigrants differ from the home type, and do they tend to become similar to the American type? Do children of Americans and immigrants form a new type, differing from either, or do they tend to revert to either the American type or the foreign type, and to which? What is the fertility of the mixed marriages? (Boas Papers 1908a).
For Boas this last question seemed to have particular relevance for the basic dilemma he sought to resolve and he compared the problem of the mixture of ‘new’ immigrants and the existing American ‘type’ with the mixture of the Native Americans and the white population. Speaking to this, Boas explicitly stated the issue the Immigration Commission was about to face: “The question […] is, how strong is the power of assimilation of the present American type when intermarrying with types of southern and eastern Europe?” (Boas Papers 1908a). Boas closed the letter on an optimistic and self-confident note concluding that “the practical results of this investigation will [. . .] settle once for all the question whether the immigrants from southern Europe and from eastern Europe are and can be assimilated by our people” (Boas Papers 1908a). Jenks asked for further information and Boas was quick to answer – and in great detail. He again used some of his earlier research on Indians to make his point clear and proposed an investigation of the children:
In our cities […] the children of Italians, Russians, and North Europeans […] live approximately in the same conditions; and I anticipate that the most important contribution to the solution of the problem will be the ascertaining of data showing whether children of the first and second generation of the various types mentioned show an increasing degree of similarity in [. . .] their physical and mental development, or whether the differences that have been observed are really of racial character (Boas Papers 1908a).
Boas received the approval of the Commission in May 1908 and started work at Ellis Island on the different physical characteristics of different immigrant groups. Others began an investigation in the New York City schools and Boas enthusiastically reported to Jenks “I find everywhere a very cordial willingness to co-operate” (Boas Papers 1908a). Boas also planned to involve the Board of Health, the YMCA, and private schools, and he developed a plan for similar investigations in Italian and Austrian schools if he could interest those in charge of the schools.
Even at this early stage, Boas found some surprising though ‘entirely provisional’ results: “It appears very clearly that the children of American-born parents pass through school much more rapidly than the children of foreign-born parents, and that this is due essentially to the social conditions that prevailed during the early childhood of the children” (Boas Papers 1908a).
Boas traveled to Europe later in the summer of 1908 and discussed his investigation in Lemberg (now Lviv), Rome, Dresden, and Berlin. There he explored possibilities for cooperation, investigated comparable research samples, and searched for special instruments of measurement. His European report to Jenks from Berlin reconsidered both his U.S. research strategies and the schedule of his planned comparative investigations in Europe. Some of his results already anticipated the conclusions of his final report which would be submitted to the Dillingham Commission some two years later, and he also raised some entirely new questions as well. Boas distinguished three different ‘races’ among the European immigrants, “Eastern”, “Centre [sic] European”, and “South European” “races”, to which he added “that of the East European Jews”.
Boas was already aware of some of the issues and findings that were to make his investigation so controversial in its final form. “Much to my surprise, an important change in type may also be noticed in the East European Jews, which race was particularly the subject of our inquiry; the race is very short headed, but there is a decided tendency toward increase in length of head” (Boas Papers 1908a). By the end of 1908 Boas had extended the scope of his research by including the parents of the schoolchildren being investigated.
Throughout the investigation, Boas stayed in constant touch with the Commission. In addition to Professor Jenks’ support, he won that of Senator Lodge and William S. Bennet, another influential member of the Commission. Jenks’ correspondence shows considerable understanding of and cooperation with Boas and his investigation. Boas had to get approval for every observer he engaged, however temporarily, and Jenks remained the ultimate supervisor of the whole operation. Boas also needed Jenks’ assistance to use census reports. Their relationship became very close and they often met when Jenks came to New York City.
The work of the Commission depended on funds appropriated by Congress, which were occasionally cut drastically. By March of 1909 Boas seems to have gained almost all the information he was to gather. To get more money from the Commission, he submitted a summary of his work that presented the history of the investigation and the main findings. The first effort in 1908, had been to collect measurements in high schools, and measurements of East European Jews. Boas reported:
1.Descendants from the immigrants are better developed and developed earlier than the immigrants themselves.