Abstract
Theories of race-making have recognized the confusion and contradiction in state-led racial projects but have not sufficiently elaborated their unintended consequences. Focusing on the relationship between the state, racial science, and immigration policy in the early twentieth century United States, this article illustrates how practical challenges in racial projects can jeopardize and thereby eventually trigger innovations in modes of racial governance. The Dillingham Commission (1907–1911) was a Congressional investigative commission that attempted to collect comprehensive data on immigrants in order to provide a scientific foundation of immigration policy. Specifically, the most powerful members of the Commission’s executive committee wanted to single out Southern and Eastern Europeans (SEEs) and portray them as “undesirable races.” Developing such a classification scheme, however, proved to be difficult, and the facts collected from the field did not support their goal, instead demonstrating that in many cases SEEs were not very different from other immigrants and their native-born counterparts. The idea for national quotas, as well as the theoretical foundation for the inclusion of SEEs, emerged in this process, not as an outcome of ideological design but as an unintended byproduct of knowledge production. I highlight the pursuit of facts-based governance and relative autonomy of middle-level managers as key factors that enabled such process.
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Notes
I define the immigration restrictionists as the broad coalition of intellectuals, politicians, and activists who were concerned about the impact of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century. Although they differ in specifics, all of them believed that there should be a government intervention aimed at controlling, if not stopping, the inflow of SEEs (see Tichenor, 2002).
Benton-Cohen (2018) has showed that ideological motivations of the executive committee members were not homogenous. Southern politicians were focused on how European immigrants would compare to African Americans as labor force; an executive member from California was concerned about the Asian immigration; and most importantly, William Bennett, a Republican Congressman from Manhattan, was a staunch supporter of immigrants. Lodge and Dillingham, the two senior members, had implicit backing of Teddy Roosevelt, who enthusiastically embraced immigration restriction (Spiro, 2009). At the end of the Commission’s tenure, Lodge and Dillingham were able to keep other members in line, and all but one member, Bennett, signed on the conclusion and policy recommendation that reflected the restricsionist perspective. But this was by no means a foregone conclusion in the beginning. The power balance within the executive committee surely tilted towards restrictionists but there were other forces in play as well.
Perlmann (2018) provides a detailed account of the political contestations around the “Hebrew” category centering on the activities of the American Jewish Committee.
Born in Wisconsin, Folkmar studied at Harvard and the University of Chicago before receving his doctrate degree in anthropology from the University of Paris. The result of his work in the Philippines, Album of Philippine Types, was displayed in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, along with the plaster casts he made with the assistance of the prisoners (Kramer, 2006: 426; Rydell, 1984). Benton-Cohen (2018) points out that his wife, Elnora Folkmar M.D., who is listed as a co-author in the Dictionary, may have had an important influence on the volume, because as a practicing physician she most likely has had a more sophisticated understanding of human physiology than her husband.
Daniel G. Brinton (1837–1899), mentioned in the left side, was an author of Races or Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography (1890), a comprehensive review of European racial science. William Z. Ripley (1867–1941), presented on the right side, was a well-known Harvard economist who spearheaded the Progressive-era criticisms of big businesses and banks. This table, however, touched on his other career as a very successful and provocative race scholar. In The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (1899), Ripley argued that Europeans consisted of three races – Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean – instead of just one “white” or “Caucasian” race. See Painter (2010, pp. 212–227).
From 1899 to 1910, the total number of immigrants in African (black) category was 33,630 — less than 0.4% of all immigrants (9,555,673) during the period (DCR, 1911, vol.1, p. 97). In the main volumes of the reports, the Dillingham Commission used both “negro” and “black” to refer to African Americans, not immigrants in “African (black)” category.
Before the theory of natural selection and Mendelian genetics were widely accepted, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was an authoritative source on how an organism came into its current form. According to Lamarck, acquired characteristics could transform organisms and those transformations were inheritable. Inspired by his theory of gradual biological change, some race scholars questioned whether racial categories were transformable over time and whether individuals can be classified into a different race, depending on the environmental context (Hattam, 2007).
English culture and tradition held an important place on the minds of the WASP elites, such as Lodge (see Solomon, 1956).
W. Jett Lauck, Immigration Commission-Reports and Plans of W. Jett Lauck, Box 80, W. Jett Lauck Papers, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Lauck’s documents do not bear the name of the Commission, but upon a close inspection it becomes clear that they are working drafts of the Commission report.
The final reports of the Commission do not contain the names of the agents. Lauck Papers feature several field reports with authors’ names. One recognizable figure among the agents is LeRoy Hodges, a Washington and Lee University graduate who had a prolific career in the state of Virginia and federal government. While he was still a college student, he was probably hired by Lauck, who had held a faculty position at the university prior to working full time in the Commission (see LeRoy Hodges Papers 1908–1942, Special Collections, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA) The other is Erville B. Woods, who later became a faculty member of the sociology department at the Dartmouth College. He received his doctorate degree from University of Chicago in 1906. If these two figures are representative of the agents, I suspect that most of the field agents were students or recent graduates who had received at least some training in social science methodology.
Anonymous, “Community Report for Immigration Commission.” Box 62, W. Jett Lauck Papers.
Anonymous, “Community Report for Immigration Commission.” Box 62, W. Jett Lauck Papers.
See Perlmann (2018) for a detailed exposition on Hourwich’s life and work. Hourwich worked for years in Washington D.C. as a federal employee. Through his acquaintance with Husband, he was able to access Commission’s data before it was published.
“View of Minority,” authored by Bennet, featured a different take on the issue. While recognizing the value of the Commission’s work, Bennet contended that, based on the Commission’s data, “immigrants are not criminal, pauper, insane, or seekers of charity” and that the proposed literacy test was not a logical conclusion from the report. The half-page minority report was attached at the end of the 48-page introduction in the executive summary, followed by more than 800 pages of statistical tables.
Ngai (1999) notes that the calculation was ridden with untenable assumptions and contradictions, the point that even Hill himself acknowledged.
William W. Husband, Sept. 4. 1941. “How the Quota Limit System of Regulating Immigration Happened.” Box 2, Folder 1, Husband Papers. Chicago History Museum, Chicago, IL.
Biographical information obtained from the official homepage of United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (“Agency History”, http://www.uscis.gov/history-and-genealogy/our-history-25).
Husband, “How the Quota Limit System of Regulating Immigration Happened.” Box 1, Husband Papers. The press releases and other related materials are also included in the same folder.
Husband, February 1, 1913. “The Immigration Problem of Today” Address given at the Republican Club of New York. Box 1, Husband Papers.
Husband, February 23, 1915. “Immigration Restriction” Address given at Washing D.C. Fifth Congress of the National Federation of Religious Liberals. Box 1, Husband Papers.
Franz Boas’s study in the Dillingham Commission exemplifies this argument. See Benton Cohen (2018).
Granted, the concept of assimilation had already been available since the middle of the nineteenth century, if not earlier. However, as a review from the turn of the twentieth century shows, the discussion of assimilation was tied to the colonial conquest and violent territorial acquisition, often conflating intermarriage (“mixture of blood”), genocide, and changes in language and customs (Simon 1901). The concept of ethnicity made clear the distinction between biology and culture, opening up the space for modern conception of assimilation that focused on peaceful, gradual erosion of group distinction over time.
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I thank Ann Swidler, Cybelle Fox, Irene Bloemraad, Taeku Lee, Mara Loveman, Cristina Mora, Marion Fouracde, Carlos Bustamante, Katherine Benton-Cohen, Armando Lara-Milán, Kristen Nelson, John Lie, Louise Ly, Katherine Maich, Tristan Ivory, Jaeeun Kim, katrina quisumbing king, Anna Skarpelis, Mary Grover, Leslie Hinkson, Roger Waldinger, Brendan Shanahan, Chris Mueller, Richard Wright, Israel Reyes, Mingwei Huang, Hana Brown, John Campbell, Rebecca Johnson, and anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting on this paper. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Neil Fligstein. This article was accepted before the editorial transition of January 1st, 2024.
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Kim, S. Blinded by the facts: Unintended consequences of racial knowledge production in the Dillingham commission (1907–1911). Theor Soc 53, 425–464 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-024-09542-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-024-09542-x