Context & Convergence
Mulberry Street, New York City, Five Points neighborhood, c. 1900. Source: Detroit Publishing Co. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016794146/.
If we want to understand how and why the process of immigrating to the U.S. came to include provisions to inspect the mental “fitness” of the new arrivals, the first place to start is the historical context (a favorite place to start of all historians). In this case, that context is very rich and telling indeed.
A note about language. I could write my own version of this but professor John T.E. Richardson wrote it so well, it is worth the demerits you might assign me for quoting it in its entirety. “Any researcher who studies a historical figure or phenomenon has to cope with the attitudes, values, and especially language that have changed in the years since. In particular, both professionals and laypeople have in the past used different terminology to talk about individuals of limited intelligence. In 1876, for instance, the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Persons was established. This organization changed its name to the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded in 1906, to the American Association on Mental Deficiency in 1933, to the American Association on Mental Retardation in 1987, and to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in 2007…Nevertheless, it would be anachronistic and fundamentally ahistorical to put present-day attitudes and vocabulary into the minds and mouths of people who lived one hundred years ago…Similarly, I will use such terms as mental defectiveness, mental deficiency, mental retardation, idiots, imbeciles, and the feebleminded, because these were the terms used both by professionals and the general public at the time in question. Howard Andrew Knox: Pioneer of Intelligence Testing at Ellis Island, xxx-xxxi.
In 1902, Terence Powderly, a former mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania (1878-1884) and perhaps best known as the Grand Master Workman for the Knights of Labor (1879-1893), wrote an article for the North American Review about public health and immigration. (President McKinley had appointed Powderly as Commissioner General of Immigration in 1897.) He began, as did almost every other author of the period, with a pseudo-historical and sociological description of the previous era of immigration, praising the “the sturdy Englishman, Irishman, Scotchman, Welshman, German and north countryman who came strong in limb and pure in blood” of the mid-nineteenth century. He contrasted that with the rising tide of immigrants “from the countries of southern Europe and the Orient” that brought with them illnesses which were previously unknown in the United States. Powderly focused his assault on lax immigration regulations relative to dangerous and contagious diseases, particularly Favus, a skin disease, and Trachoma, an affliction of the eyes.[1]
Powderly’s alarm about this “new” immigration reflected a growing uncertainty by some Americans over the value immigrants added to the country and an increased attempt to stoke fears around the dangers they supposedly posed. Much was made over their politics as potential anarchists or the economic dangers of flooding the country with cheap labor and labor agitators, and now there was a fear of the dangers they posed to the literal health of the nation.[2] Increasingly, those in favor of tighter restrictions on immigration articulated health-oriented arguments. Alfred Reed, an Assistant Surgeon with the U.S. Public Health Service stationed at Ellis Island, wrote several articles for popular periodicals describing the inspection process and its relation to public health and stated flatly that “one of the most important of the factors having to do with the public health is immigration.”[3] And, like Powderly, he saw an existential threat in the issue. He believed the medical and mental health concerns he saw at Ellis Island “produces problems which not only are unique but whose proper solution is a matter of the gravest concern for the welfare and continuance of this country.”[4] The development of immigration policy intersected with a new conception of public health that contributed to the language used in debates and lent an air of scientific credibility to the arguments for more stringent inspections–and rejections–of potential citizens.
The dramatic rise in immigration that worried Powderly, Reed, and many others coincided with a period of tremendous change in the United States. The “Gilded Age,” which gave way to the “Progressive Era,” are monikers for economic and social upheavals that occurred on nearly every level of American society. In the spirit of progress and uplift, reform movements of the early twentieth century attempted to solve many of society’s worst problems. The advances in technology and wealth created during the Gilded Age did not benefit all Americans equally. In the Progressive Era that followed, reformers used the newest methods of social science and with the help of government oversight attempted to alleviate some of the problems associated with the rapid expansion of industrialization, a massive wave of immigration, and urban migration.[5]
The rapid expansion of industry after the Civil War was integral to many of the changes and anxieties in the U.S. by the turn of the century. Between 1859-1869, the number of factories in the nation had nearly doubled and in the decade following the war, the amount of money invested in manufacturing had more than quadrupled.[6] An unprecedented wave of immigration provided the workers for new factories and became the residents of populous urban centers. The population in the United States more than doubled between 1880-1920 from about 50 million to over 105 million; between 1900-1915 alone more than 15 million immigrants landed on American shores.[7]
Jacob Riis, “Ragpickers Row Alleyway at 59 Baxter St Five Points NYC,” c. 1898.
At the turn of the century, modern cities were awash in subhuman living conditions. The poorest residents were overcrowded in tenements, surrounded by filth due to poor sanitation, and lacking access to adequate nutrition and education. The need for unskilled workers to assemble, stamp, stitch, and operate the machinery of the economy’s new engine was insatiable. Wages were pressed downward by a newly arrived labor force eager for employment and working conditions worsened as the profit motive and fierce competition sacrificed worker safety to market demands. The efforts by reformers, social and biological scientists, and government officials to mitigate these poor living and working conditions took many different forms. Often the preferred solution was “state intervention and regulation.”[8] As industries became more economically and politically powerful and company management felt less obliged to look after their employees’ welfare, reformers increasingly turned to the state for protection.
In the period under consideration, a number of developments converged to create the conditions under which lawmakers thought it necessary to require medical and mental inspections of most new immigrants. As I will explain in future posts this included the development of a nationwide public health movement, which in turn coincided with the inception of the field of psychology, distinct from its previous academic home in philosophy, a focused concern by Progressive Era reformers on cities, especially around mental illness and crime, and finally the emergence of the new field of eugenics.
12/4/24 Note: I first published this entry a couple of days ago and then as I continued to work through the larger article, I decided that it makes more sense to move this section (Context & Convergence) above the section “Introduction of Immigration Inspections,” (previously published 10/31/24). I am not sure why I briefly unpublished this entry since it’s too late to put it before what I posted a couple of weeks ago, but know, dear reader, that I am going to rework the start of the larger project to include this right after the introduction.
[1] T.V. Powderly, “Immigration’s Menace to the National Health,” North American Review (July 1902): 53-6.
[2] For a comprehensive articulation of these concerns see Testimony before the Select Committee of the House of Representatives to Inquire into the Alleged Violations of the Laws Prohibiting the Importation of Contract Laborers, Paupers, Convicts, and other Classes, HR Misc. Doc. 572, 50th Cong., 1st sess., 1888.
[3] Alfred C. Reed, “Immigration and the Public Health,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1913, 315. See also, “The Medical Side of Immigration,” Popular Science Monthly, April 1912, 383-92; “Scientific Medical Inspection at Ellis Island,” Medical Review of Reviews 18, n. 8 (August 1912): 541-4.
[4] Reed, “Immigration and the Public Health,” 316.
[5] The literature on the Progressive Era is vast, a few overviews that examine the socialization of previously private or charitable functions include Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Allen Freeman Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1967); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
[6] Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 145.
[7] U.S. Department of the Interior Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 3; U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States taken in the Year 1920, Volume III: Population (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), 2.
[8] Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13.