Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants

Just a quick share of a primary source I took a quick peek through to see how it might be useful for my project on immigration and mental health inspectors at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century.

As a social historian it’s no surprise that I had an interest in anthropology in college. I took, that I can remember, cultural and physical anthropology courses. That’s where I was introduced to folks such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Franz Boas, several of the formative thinkers in the discipline.

Although I could tell pretty quickly that the 1911 report of the Dillingham Immigration Commission, “Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,” did not have anything useful for me, I was immediately intrigued when I saw that its lead researcher and author was Franz Boas. I have encountered Boas once before in my research on this topic as he was briefly a part of a eugenics organization, the American Breeders Association [1]. However, I also know that he was a vociferous opponent of leading eugenicist Madison Grant. And, with just a little digging to refresh my memory, I also learned that he was especially hated by Grant for his opposition to the concept of a “cephalic index”–an aspect of scientific racism that correlated head size and shape to intelligence [2].

So I was surprised to read his opening paragraph:

In most of the European types that have been investigated the head form, which has always been considered one of the most stable and permanent characteristics of human races, undergoes far reaching changes coincident with the transfer of the people from European to American soil. For instance, the east European Hebrew, who has a very round head, becomes more long-headed; the south Italian, who in Italy has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short-headed; so that in this country both approach a uniform type, as far as the roundness of the head is concerned.

The hundreds of pages that follow include graph after graph of the differences in bodies of the descendants of immigrants over time. I was surprised that Boas was party to this way of thinking. Maybe it’s more complicated than I am giving it credit for being since I don’t have the time to delve too deeply but it certainly also fits with the many different ideas we have come to call scientific racism that were so prevalent at the time.

Here’s the report: United States Immigration Commission, “Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants. Final report,” 1911.

[1] Barry Alan Mehler, “A History of the American Eugenics Society, 1921-1940,” (diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988), 190.

[2] Ann Gibson Winfield, “Eugenics and Education: Implications of Ideology, Memory, and History for Education in the United States,” (diss., North Carolina State University, 2004), 108.