Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908–1929

3. An Unhealthy Relationship: Eugenics and Americanization in New York, 1914–1917

3   • An Unhealthy Relationship Eugenics and Americanization in New York, 1914–1917 Americanization gained momentum as both a social movement and public policy in 1913–1915. In 1913 California created its Commission of Immigration and Housing, Massachusetts appointed a temporary Commission of Immigration , and Pennsylvania added a Division of Immigration and Unemployment to its new Department of Labor and Industry. Rhode Island created a temporary immigration commission in 1914.1 Frances A. Kellor, the former chief investigator for the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, was working to build a national movement through the Committee for Immigrants in America while her successor, Marian K. Clark, was making her own mark on the NYBII.2 Clark maintained Kellor’s programs, but she changed the underlying ideol­ ogy of the bureau’s Americanization policy. Unlike Kellor, Clark was a eugenicist who advocated immigration restriction as the best way to shape American culture and society. According to Clark, the genetically unfit had to be excluded from entering American society so the American “melting pot” could have the right kind of human ingredients to forge a new and stronger race of Americans. The new chief investigator’s attempt to graft eugenics onto Americanization weakened the bureau politically. As conservatives attacked the NYBII for interfering with businesses’ labor practices, New York progressives were unwilling to defend the bureau because of Clark’s advocacy of a eugenicsbased immigration policy. Politicians who represented New York’s many immigrant neighborhoods were also less inclined to support the bureau because of Clark’s anti-immigrant language. As Americanization gained more attention nationally, the NYBII—the nation’s first immigrant social welfare agency—should have been at the forefront of this new movement. Instead, Clark had to fight just to keep the bureau politically and fiscally alive. In 1915 54 New York’s education officials initiated their own Americanization program, separate and independent of the NYBII, which focused on adult education. The introduction of eugenics into New York’s immigrant social welfare policy reveals the ideological elasticity of both prewar Americanization and eugenics.3 On the surface, these two movements had much in common: Both relied heavily upon state power for social engineering. Both placed a premium upon expertise (especially eugenics, with its pretensions of science). And although eugenics was concerned with the genetic makeup of individuals and Americanization with personal identity, both emphasized observable behavior.4 Most importantly, the slippery language and weak theoretical bases of eugenics and Americanization allowed both movements to be all things to all people.5 Although eugenics and Americanization were part of the larger progressive movement, the two were, nonetheless, incompatible. Americanization sought the transformation of the immigrant from foreigner into American, and this transformation was to occur by means of an improved social environment. Even the educational approach to Americanization was based upon the assumption that the immigrant could assimilate himself through instruction. But the Mendelian form of eugenics dominant in the United States rejected the power of the social environment and depended entirely upon biology; a genetically damaged individual was dangerous regardless of the type of environment he or she was in. The only solution was to segregate and exclude the “defective” from the rest of the population.6 Clark’s conservative vision of Americanization challenged progressive assumptions about the role of the social environment in fostering assimilation. Some progressives advocated immigration restriction as a way of facilitating assimilation by cutting off continuously replenishing sources of foreign cultures . Assimilation was possible, but only in a more culturally stable, AngloAmerican -dominated environment.7 But eugenicists denied that assimilation of the foreign-born was biologically possible under any conditions. Cultural traits were hereditary, and disease -carrying genes could never be eliminated—only made recessive. Descendents of genetically healthy immigrants could potentially assimilate, provided that they intermarried with eugenically correct native-born Americans, but the foreign-born could not change their culture any more than they could change their genetic composition or their ancestry. Clark supported immigration restriction because she deemed most immigrants to be socially undesirable and culturally and biologically inferior. What distinguished Clark from other “racial nationalists” was that she did An Unhealthy Relationship 55 56 Americanization in the States not single out particular immigrant groups, such as the Chinese or Jews, for exclusion or removal. Instead she reserved her ire for aliens who had been deemed defective by state medical, prison, or charity authorities.8 Clark maintained all of...