LEE D. BAKER Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology Duke University July 19, 2000

QUESTION: Why is Franz Boas a significant figure in the field of anthropology?

LEE BAKER: [Franz Boas left two major legacies. The first is that] he de-linked race, language and culture, making arguments that people and cultures do not go from savage, barbarian, to civilized. We see them in terms of relative to each other. And the second is the notion of culture. When you, I, and many Americans think of the term culture, we often think of it in terms of being cultures, opposed to culture, which implies higher or lower.

QUESTION: How did Boas' early experiments begin?

LEE BAKER: In the late 1890s Franz Boas gets appointed to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. At this time he develops a long-term research strategy into the development of children's growth. He's comparing immigrant children to Native American children he measured a number of years before. And he wants to simply do original research [at the Worchester public schools] in terms of measuring children's growth. [H]e secures the permission of the school committee, gets all the approvals from the principals, et cetera.

However, the publisher of the Worcester Daily Telegram is up in arms: "This German immigrant want[s] to go into our school" - he uses that term - "and measure our children!" And he launches a campaign in the newspaper that railed against Franz Boas. It's actually quite comical in terms of painting Boas as this lecherous immigrant that wants to touch the heads of our Worcester girls and tell them to unlace their ribbons in their hair and take off their shoes just to get their measurements. What is this German with dueling scars up to?

So he gets the whole community involved in the campaign against allowing Franz Boas to measure the Worcester school kids. Next the Worcester school committee says, "Wait a minute, this is science. You're not letting us conduct our studies. This is our school district, after all. And the people of Worcester want this to happen."

Austin P. Christie, the publisher of the Worcester Daily Telegram, says, "Wait a minute, let's see what the public wants to do." He says that people should write in to the newspaper and vote, "Should Professor Boas measure the school kids or should he not?" [T]he votes came in and it was overwhelmingly against Franz Boas and his efforts to measure the kids of Worcester.

But what happens is, the kids from Worcester - being indiscriminate teens as they were - said they wanted to be measured. They somehow thought it was interesting to raise the ire of both the press and parents alike to be measured by this exotic man from a far-away land. So they in a sense rebelled, forcing their parents to sign the permission slips and allow them to be measured. So thanks to the indiscretion of Worcester teens, Franz Boas got his first and important study of children's growth.

[But] what Franz Boas was really up to was trying to determine whether or not these children looked more American than their immigrant parents, and indeed he found that out. He demonstrated that the students that were born in the United States looked and grew more along the same lines as their counterparts in the United States as opposed to their counterparts in, say, Italy, the Ukraine, or Lithuania.

QUESTION: What was Changes in Bodily Form, and why was it a significant study?

LEE BAKER: The Worcester study was a prelude to a much more extensive study entitled Changes in Bodily Form which was sponsored by the Dillingham Commission. The scope of the study was just awesome. [Boas] measured thousands upon thousands of New York schoolchildren to demonstrate one thing: he stated that immigrants in the United States after one generation look nothing like their parents in terms of whatever people were measuring in terms of head size before. So, immigrant children, their measurements were indistinguishable with their American counterparts that had been here for years.

QUESTION: What's the implication of this conclusion in terms of the culture versus biology debate?

LEE BAKER: I think that this is a very, very significant case. Remember when [the eighteenth century French evolutionist Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck had said that [when] giraffes hold their neck higher and higher, they get higher necks? Well, Boas is almost making a Lamarckian argument that just by being in America, you look more American.

In many respects Franz Boas was demonstrating the plasticity of human potential in terms of in the right environment: individuals can look very much different than in different environments.

It's almost intuitive now, but in war-torn Yugoslavia, those children are growing up different than children in Hope Valley, North Carolina.

QUESTION: Describe the scientific landscape when Changes in Bodily Form was published.

LEE BAKER: The context of Changes in Bodily Form comes at [a period of tension] within the scientific field. On the one hand, you have the biological determinants, who believed that nothing could change individual from a state of savagery or inferiority. That the Italians coming onto our shores were imbeciles and they were just diluting the American stock and nothing could happen to change them.

However, missionaries, social workers, many people involved in religious education believed that people could change and that with the right Christian environment and the right temperate soul, could change and become civilized, could become an important part of the American polity.

So this was almost a debate, you know, can people change or can they not? Are they doomed to a savage inferiority? Or with the right environment, can people become useful citizens? This was the sort of language they used in the late nineteenth century. Obviously, missionaries believed people could be changed, there could be salvation, they could become Christian and become civilized all in one fell swoop.

However, others - Frederick L. Hoffman is a good example - believed that, no, they're doomed to inferiority. And all the philanthropy and all the education in the world is wasting money and precious resources that should actually be committed to the privileged because they're the ones who are going to progress and advance anyway.

This was the debate. And Boas came squarely down on the side that, no, people can change. This is not only on the customs and behaviors side, this is on the brains and body size. Boas was actually at a loss of words to really explain this, but he was demonstrating that the actual shape of people's bodies changed in the environment of the United States, which was actually quite profound.

QUESTION: In refuting the idea of biological determinism, what was Boas ultimately trying to prove?

LEE BAKER: In some respects Franz Boas had a master plan in terms [of] trying to unseat this notion that there [are] real hierarchies in terms of culture, races and language. What he's trying to demonstrate is that cultures are not better nor worse than any others. They're just equally complex and equally important on their own merit. So therefore, the Shoshone should be seen in the same way that the Quatiutl should be seen in the Northwest, should be seen in the same way the Iroquois is seen in New York.

People are saying, "that's fine," when one Native American group is no different than any others. But the implication of that is suggesting that the Australian aboriginal be seen up against the Laplander, or the Scandinavian should be seen in the same light as the person from Papua New Guinea. Which is also, people might say, "okay, that's understandable. Each culture has its own merits, on its own terms."

But what's the implication when they start to see the African American school child in Roanoke Rapids, Virginia alongside the white school girl in Roanoke Rapids, Virginia? What happens if you start to see the Jewish boy on the Upper East Side in New York next to the Irish boy in midtown Manhattan? Well, [there] were long-held beliefs that these types of cultures were different. [So,] even though Franz Boas was looking at different Native American groups, the implications for this had larger ramifications in terms of comparing one group with another group within the United States, within the urban environment, within the institutions of American society.

QUESTION: But, to clarify, Franz Boas wasn't exactly an advocate of cultural relativism as we conceive it today, right?

LEE BAKER: In recent years Franz Boas has been associated with the notion of cultural relativism, and people oftentimes think cultural relativism means there's no good, there's no bad, that there is just the way people do things. This is not entirely true on two fronts. One, Franz Boas was not technically a cultural relativist. His work against the Nazis in Europe demonstrates that. And second, his perspective on cultures was not necessarily advocating a notion of cultural relativism.

What Franz Boas advocated was looking at cultures relative to each other, opposed to organizing them in a hierarchical fashion, from savage, to barbarian, to civilized. So this linkage of Franz Boas with modern-day notions of cultural relativism is somewhat erroneous.

It's important to understand: [the Boasians] weren't going to say, oh, lynching someone is okay because that's the way they do it in the South. No. That wasn't the sort of cultural relativism. It wasn't moral relativism in that sense. It was, if you want, relative cultures, not cultural relativism.

QUESTION: How did Boas' ideas on culture and race influence African American intellectuals at the time?

LEE BAKER: At this time, organizations like the NAACP involved Franz Boas in their publications [and] symposiums - as well as [in] their efforts to organize and lobby Congress [on] behalf of this idea of equality. [They wanted] to demonstrate that America needs to live up to its creed, this notion of equality for all Americans. The pillars of democracy should stand for all. That was their argument. But they didn't have any scientific data to back that up. So they turned in many respect to Franz Boas.

In 1905 Franz Boas wrote his first public piece on African American bodies, demonstrating that they're not inferior than any other bodies, in a special issue of Charities in 1905. Two weeks later after this first public piece, W. E. B. DuBois writes Boas saying, "Hmmm, we can use this sort of research in my studies in Atlanta."

What happened after that was a long and fruitful relationship between Franz Boas, W. E. B. DuBois and many other scholars in the African community. Even though Franz Boas was not embraced heartily during this first decade of the twentieth century by other scientists, he was embraced heartily by African Americans and other reform-minded folks arguing for equality. And it was his research that provided the initial scientific underpinning for their claims for equality.

QUESTION: How did Franz Boas' work influence the outcome of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954?

LEE BAKER: During Brown v. Board of Education, one of the important briefs that was used was a social science statement on race. [The] important brief that convinced Earl Warren to bring a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court forward on the Brown decision was based on Franz Boas' earlier work. One could argue you found Changes in Bodily Form - in this notion that races are not necessarily static, and races cannot be seen as superior or inferior - in that 1954 statement. So in many respects it was Franz Boas' work on Changes in Bodily Form that enabled the social science statement in Brown to move forward.

In a more tangible matter, it was actually Franz Boas' students - Otto Kleinberg in particular - that helped to write and draft that social science statement, taking what they learned in school as well as in his writings and moving forward.

QUESTION: How did the book American Dilemma - which greatly impacted the Brown decision - borrow from Franz Boas?

LEE BAKER: One of the most important documents in that Brown decision was Gunnar Myrdal's immense book American Dilemma. What's important in that book, American Dilemma, is that you see Franz Boas' work on race throughout. What they use is this idea that there is no difference between the races. This is where much of Franz Boas' work crystallized.

QUESTION: But Myrdal only incorporated part of Boas' theory, right?

LEE BAKER: What's also interesting is that Myrdal, as well as the NAACP legal defense fund, took only half of the Boasian equation. They only wanted to demonstrate that the races were no different. What they didn't want was this notion that one culture is just as good, just as important, just as rich, just as historical as any other. In many respects the NAACP was making an assimilationist argument and did not want to have the justices consider the rich and important folklore, how unique African Americans were in terms of rich cultural heritage because they were trying to say that segregation was un-American.

So it's a complex, very interesting argument the NAACP was trying to make. What they only wanted was Boas on race. They threw away Boas on culture, if you will. [Boas'] big legacy would be his racial stuff. But not his cultural stuff. Because during this period, up until the 1960s at least, many people that were fighting for equality were also fighting for assimilation. That was a very complex and interesting argument to make.

New River Media Interview with: William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies University of Wisconsin

QUESTION: Talk about the Frederick Jackson Turner and the American Frontier.

WILLIAM CRONON: Frederick Jackson Turner's significance to the frontier in American history is that his is arguably the most influential essay that an American historian has ever written. In it, he tries to argue that the movement of European immigrants onto North American land is the defining experience of American history. The movement of Europeans and Easterners into the wilderness, and the transformative effects of the wilderness on American culture, American identity, and American politics is what makes America or the United States what it is.

Turner's argument was that as Europeans moved into the wilderness, they had an encounter with what he called "savagery‚" which didn't just mean Indian people, although it certainly did mean that as well. And as they moved into this savage place, they shed the trappings of civilization. They were forced to go back to primitive ways of life, and they, in effect, rediscovered their racial energies, rediscovered themselves, went back to first principles, and reinvented both their character and their democracy as a result. In Turner's view, people left crowded environments in European cities, in Northeastern American cities where work was hard to find - where the possibility of class conflict was great - and were able to move out onto free land and find a new life for themselves. They did this in a way that focused them on farm making, community-making, rather than on class conflict. And he referred to this as the safety valve function of the frontier, that by, in effect, providing an alternative outlet for what might otherwise be dangerous political tendencies, the frontier had protected America from violent class conflict of the kind that happened, say, in 1871 in Paris. It's not a very accurate reading of American labor history, but it was an argument that had a lot of political force at the time.

QUESTION: Did Turner believe that America was a good thing?

WILLIAM CRONON: I think you won't understand Turner if you don't recognize what a profoundly nationalistic person he was. He was immensely proud of the United States of America, regarded, with many of his generation, as one of the most compelling stories, not just in our history, but in all of human history. So, one of the things he's seeking to do in the frontier thesis is to argue that there's something exceptional about America, and that democracy and other institutions that he believed no European nation had achieved, were things that made America unique, and in his view had flowed off of the frontier experience.

QUESTION: How did his thesis come about when it did?

WILLIAM CRONON: The interesting context for Turner's frontier thesis is the emergence of new, quantitative style of analysis in the United States Census Office. Starting really in the 1880s, you begin to see whole new sorts of volumes produced by the Census that are analyzing various thematic aspects of the American nation, beautiful books on the American nation, beautiful books that are loaded with maps. You go to the 1880 Census and you see these fabulous volumes, an entire volume just devoted to forests and what's happening to American forests. So you begin to get analyses of natural resources and also analyses of demography. And in the demographics of the Census, Turner begins to see maps that suggest to him that there is a fundamental change going on in American population movements. What he saw was a pattern of settlement in the United States that's changing.

The inspiration for this famous essay of Turner's comes in a curious way. He receives a bulletin in the mail, a rather obscure bulletin from the Census Bureau saying, suddenly, that there is no longer a noticeable frontier line on the demographic maps that the Census is producing. Up until that time, every decade that the Census had been taken, if you drew a map showing areas that had more than two people per square mile, and areas that had less than two people per square mile, there's a very clear demarcation on the map, and that line moves gradually westward. Come 1890, because of the changing patterns of settlement, you can no longer see that line. Turner reads those words and says, wait a second, this is history making, this is a radical turning point in American history, and everything will be different from now on.

QUESTION: What kind of a historian was Turner?

WILLIAM CRONON: One of the things that's interesting about Turner is that, although famous for these few essays that he wrote - and he's not a very productive scholar in terms of publishing books and articles - he's more a doer of a history than a writer of history. He takes all this new data that's coming off of the Census, and he tries to figure out ways of using it statistically, and the best technique that's available to him at the time, because he's not a very sophisticated statistician, is to map that data. He draws map after map after map showing every conceivable variable from the Census arrayed across counties, trying to correlate the demographics of the Census, the economic data of the Census, usually with political phenomena. So, he tries to explain voting patterns in national elections by linking it to soil types, or economic activity, or what-have-you.

Turner is one of the new group of historians that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century, early twentieth century, who are clearly progressive in their political inclinations, and who are vocal advocates for something that they call the "New History." And that new history has a couple of characteristics. One is, it is far more committed than any prior body of historical scholarship to social science analysis. It tries to use statistics. It uses the kind of data that historians had not used much until that time in order to gain new insights and make new arguments. The other strand of the new history is, those new insights, those new arguments, are pointed toward political interventions, very explicit political interventions to say history can make a difference to policy. We can change the way we govern this country by using data in new ways.

Turner is pioneering a notion that history is not just about telling stories, it's about solving problems. And so rather than the great grand narrative histories that we associate with some of the really wonderful historical writers of the nineteenth century - whose main job it was to tell a story over many volumes about great figures doing great things in the American landscape. Turner really was interested in figuring out what had happened there, and doing it often without reference to great men, great individuals. He was really interested in ordinary folk. And one of the ways you get at ordinary folk is to turn to new kind of documents and count folks. If people haven't left letters, they haven't left diaries, they don't surface in the historical record in some other way, then the way to tell their stories are through the Census, through more obscure kinds of sources that require statistics if we're to get at those people's stories.

QUESTION: What are some of the ways Turner's thesis influenced Americans at the time?

WILLIAM CRONON: One of the things that's so interesting about the frontier thesis is the very disparate effects it has in American popular culture, in American politics in the decades following the publication of Turner's essay. On the one hand, the frontier thesis becomes a source of support for immigration restriction, on the grounds that if the frontier had been the melting pot of America, the new immigrants coming to the United States would not become American citizens in the same way that earlier peoples had. Likewise, for those like Teddy Roosevelt, who believed that America needed a frontier experience, the frontier thesis could become a justification for imperialism, could become one of the things that would justify the Spanish American War, or the occupation of the Philippines. And then, seemingly very different still, but also linked to Teddy Roosevelt, if you believe that wilderness is fundamental to American national identity, then you need to protect wilderness to protect that part of America. So what do you do, you set aside national parks. And so, curiously, the frontier thesis can support immigration restriction, extra-national imperial expansion, and national park formation all at the same time.

QUESTION: Did people recognize the importance of his essay at the time it was presented, in 1893?

WILLIAM CRONON: At the time that Turner delivered it at the Chicago World's Fair, nobody noticed. It was delivered at the American Historical Association Meeting. Newspapers don't pick it up. It could almost not have ever been delivered at all. And it's only when people like Teddy Roosevelt, or Woodrow Wilson embrace it and say, here's this amazing piece of thinking done by this young obscure assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, that it begins to attract attention. And it gradually builds from that point to become, in many ways, the central narrative synthesis of all of American history for the next two or three decades.

It's easy to forget that Turner delivered this essay at exactly the moment when American history was emerging as a serious academic discipline. Up until that time, really what was taught in the university was classical history, Greek and Roman history, and so modern history, meaning history since the Renaissance, was a brand new subject. Turner provides a template, a paradigm, for how American history can be taught, and he provides many of the young scholars trained in his graduate seminar who will shape the American academy as it thinks about American history as a subject. And so, really, for the first twenty years in which American history is written, Turnerian history is a defining story that is always told. And even when people begin to resist that Turnerian story and ask why aren't cities here, why aren't factories here, why don't we know more about immigrants, they're all kind of doing it in counter-point with Turner, so Turner defines that story for decades.

QUESTION: Was the Frontier Thesis all that new, and how accurate was it?

WILLIAM CRONON: Although we now talk about the Turner thesis, and we attribute to Frederick Jackson Turner responsibility for the frontier as a part of American history, in fact all that he really did was to take ideas that were very much in the air at the end of the nineteenth century, and truth be told had been present in American writing since the middle of the eighteenth century. These are very old ideas that the frontier defines America. He takes them, writes them brilliantly, and this is crucial, gives them academic legitimacy. He says, "These are serious ideas." One of the ways he does that is with statistics, with the Census data that he adds to the story. And so, having done that, suddenly he takes the familiar American notions that many Americans believe defined their nation, and he says, "this is true. The university says it's true. You can believe this."

One of the hard things about taking the Turner thesis seriously is recognizing that its arguments about the frontier as being the source of American democracy or the engine that defines American character, are probably not right, they're probably wrong. Subsequent scholars have argued at great length that, in fact, democracy comes to America at least as much from British common law or Magna Carta, or the struggles of the American Revolution as it does from anything that happened on the frontier. And so, we can take each element of Turner's argument and say it's inaccurate. But you then have to couple that with the other insight, which is that people at the end of the nineteenth century believed that he was right, believed that the frontier thesis was correct. And so it helped explain culture at that moment.

Probably the most problematic aspect of the Turner thesis, and of the whole idea of the frontier, is what it does to Indian peoples. It defines Indians as not even existing on those census maps, because when we draw those maps of two people per square mile we're not counting Indians on those maps, and we're acting as if that's virgin land, uninhabited land, we're erasing Indians from the map. Worse, we're defining their land as a savage land, and we're saying that the land of savagery, which is being attributed to Indians, is the space where this American encounter with wilderness happens. From an Indian point of view that land didn't get savage until the white folks arrived. So there's something deeply racist about this way of thinking of the frontier, which is very much of a piece with the end of the nineteenth century. Turner is very much a man of his time in thinking this way. But, for us to embrace that way of thinking is to do great violence to Indian peoples and Indian history in this country.

One of the challenges of doing Western history, or frontier history, is that the frontier operates in American culture not just as true history, somehow an accurate rendition of the past, it's also profoundly important as a myth. And the fact that people believe in that myth means that it operates as a historical force whether or not it's true. And the fact that Americans believe that the frontier is where they come from, that they believe that John Wayne, and the Marlboro man, and Buffalo Bill define who we are as a nation, means that we as historians have to take that myth seriously. We have to write about the myth in history, even when it's not a very accurate depiction of what actually happened back there.

QUESTION: Is there a link between Turner and social science?

WILLIAM CRONON: Turner really is one of the very first American historians who conceives of his intellectual activity as a social science. He really does think of history as a problem solving activity, not a storytelling activity. So he draws from all sorts of sciences, natural and social that are going on around him. He's much inspired by Darwin. Evolution is everywhere in his thought. He's influenced by an Italian economist, who really gives him his ideas of ow people operated on the frontier. And maybe one of the biggest influences on Turner is geography, he's in love with maps. And the application of maps as statistical tools, as a way not just of depicting information, but of analyzing information, is the heart of what Turner is about. His seminars with graduate students are full of these analytical maps in which he asks them to map soil types on one map, and votes for populists on another map, and argues that soil causes the populist vote. And you know, those maps are still available .

QUESTION: What happened to Turner himself after 1893?

WILLIAM CRONON: Turner's life after this famous 1893 essay is like an academic dream story, but with a funny hook at the end of it. He becomes one of the most famous historians of his generation. His graduate seminar at the University of Wisconsin trains many of the most important historians of the preeminent place that an American historian could move, but curiously all through this period he publishes almost nothing. In fact, he becomes one of the great non-publishing historians of his generation. He publishes mainly little essays, not whole books, and the only books he publishes, really, are collections of essays. He retires from Harvard in the middle of the 1920s, moves back to Madison, Wisconsin, for just a year before being called out to the Huntington Library in California, where he spends the rest of his life.

QUESTION: Is there a connection between his origins in Wisconsin, and his thesis?

WILLIAM CRONON: Turner grows up in this little town in central Wisconsin called Portage. Interestingly, his father is the editor of the local newspaper. And in many ways his father, Andrew Jackson Turner, is a kind of frustrated amateur historian, and his son takes over that desire to understand how we tell stories about the American past. And I think for both father and son, it is a story of Portage as the quintessential American frontier town. Turner writes about all the different ethnic immigrant groups who fill the landscape, the rural landscape around Portage. And he tells the story of that town as a kind of microcosm of this American melting pot that he thinks of as the frontier.

He comes out of that experience, he goes off to college, goes off to graduate school, but he never loses track of the fact that he's a child of Wisconsin, and even more a child of the Mississippi valley. And the frontier experience of Wisconsin and the Mississippi Valley is for him the defining frontier experience. You can't actually read the Turner frontier essay in 1893 without seeing that what he's really doing is taking the story of Portage, Wisconsin, and mapping it onto the American map, so it becomes the story of all of America.

QUESTION: How well has his work aged?

WILLIAM CRONON: Over the course of the twentieth century there's great controversy about the Turner thesis, and the feeling on the part of many historians that it really can't be salvaged. But, one of the most interesting efforts to salvage it comes from a scholar named David Potter who writes a book called People of Plenty, in 1954. In that book Potter argues that Turner was right, but for the wrong reasons. It wasn't free land that defined American character, or was the source of American democracy, or shaped American culture, it was abundant natural resources. Free land is just a special case of abundant energy, abundant good fertile soil. And it was really having vast quantities of resources for a small population that made Americans special. That's a more plausible version of the argument in some ways, than just focusing on land that you could buy for low prices.

QUESTION: What about the frontier concept in general?

WILLIAM CRONON: A part of the frontier myth that I think continues to define American culture even now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is this notion that the United States is a place where people start over again. Turner doesn't invent this, it goes all the way back to John Winthrop's City On A Hill in Boston. But, the notion that you go the United States, you go to the wilderness and you start over, you shed the trappings of civilization, you wipe clean the slate, start from first principles, invent the good society, that is operating in American politics long after we're concerned about the frontier. When John Kennedy talks about the new frontier of space, and when Star Trek talks about space the final frontier, those are all about the newness of America, and the possibility of being new in this landscape, and the frontier is very much a part of that vision.

The power of this frontier myth in American culture remains very potent indeed. The commitment to individualism, the notion that everybody is as good as everybody else, that you can kind of meet people where they are, all those qualities that when Europeans visit the United States they comment on, they get ascribed to the frontier. Whether they really come from there, you and I can't say, but people think they come from the frontier. That's what Turner tells them. And so people celebrate the frontier as a place where people can really be down home people, a place where they can be real Americans, and that experience remains pretty sacred to an awful lot of people in this country.

QUESTION: Talk a bit about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair as an experience.

QUESTION: Please characterize the prevailing ideas of race around 1900.

MATTHEW JACOBSON: We tend to think of race in this country almost entirely in binary terms of black and white. And then, if pressed, most Americans will move to a spectrum, also based on color, of maybe five large groups. But at the turn of the century, there were upwards of 36 races in some schemes, 75 in other schemes, and the largest [number of distinctions] being within what we now think of as being one white race: [namely] the distinctions between Anglo-Saxons, who uniformly were at the top of the white hierarchy, on the one hand, and then [other white] groups like Celts, Slavs, Hebrews, Mediterraneans, groups we now think of in terms of ethnicity, or culture-based groupings.

But at the time, the distinctions that people were implying by that phraseology - Celt or Hebrew - that was a level of difference that ran far deeper than modern distinctions of ethnicity. So when they talked about the Hebrew race or the Celtic race or the Slavic race, they really did mean race in the way that we tend to mean race when we use it a century later; that is, as a kind of biological, heritable package of traits of one sort or another.

[Within] the hierarchies themselves, although they vary, there's a three-tiered scheme that distinguished Nordic from Alpines and Mediterraneans. Then there were some much finer kinds of schemes that would have thirty-six or so or forty races from Europe, some tags that at least are words that we've heard, like Hebrew or Celt, although it's a different meaning than we tend to think of now. Others of these distinctions are words that have just totally disappeared from the language, just as the visual distinction that one might make by looking upon a face has also just dissolved. It has no more meaning in the late twentieth century.

QUESTION: How would this scheme of race be influenced by the wave of immigrants coming to America between 1880 and 1920?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: One of the long-term inheritances of this period is this notion that American democracy isn't just for any chance comers; that in the phraseology of the time, there is such a thing as fitness or unfitness for self-government. And that's written into our political culture very deeply, as early as 1790. The very first naturalization law says that only those who are "free white persons" can become naturalized citizens.

Now, that had two incredible consequences, that phraseology, free white person. On the one hand, it laid the way for millions of people from Europe to get in as free white persons. But these were not at all the people who the law's framers had in mind. In fact, they were precisely the kind of people [about whom] the American inhabitants of the late nineteenth century started to wonder, "Well, how white are they? Are they really white? Are they fit for self-government? They certainly don't seem to be."

And what you start to see in the latter half of the nineteenth century is a fracturing of that idea of a unified whiteness, and [instead] a series of finer distinctions made between Anglo-Saxons, on the one hand, and for example Celts in the 1850s and after, who were the first group of free white persons who dragged themselves ashore in the numbers that seem to sort of raise political questions for the fate of the republic. Later in the century, especially eastern and southern Europeans, were known as Hebrews, Slavs, Mediterraneans - the people now who are the so-called white ethnics, [namely] Jews, Italians, Poles.

QUESTION: How were these so-called "races" considered biologically separate?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: [People at the time saw] the distinctions as quite visible, and one of the important things is that they [appeared so] to people on both sides of the divide. It isn't just the case that a bunch of people who called themselves Anglo-Saxons were tarring other people whom they called the Hebrews or Celts as inferior. In fact, many of the groups coming ashore, for reasons of their own, and embedded in their own histories, had biologized or racialized senses of self as well.

[Thus] the long history of Saxon oppression against the imperiled Celts in Ireland comes ashore with the Irish, so that the notion of a Celtic identity has meaning to the Irish as well as for the Anglo-Saxon old-guard. Similarly, the idea of racial Jewishness had tremendous meaning for a generation of immigrants, especially Russian intellectuals who felt themselves Jewish for particular political and social reasons, both Old and New World, but who had no real connection to the religion. And race became one of the idioms that was very important for building Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries.

On the other hand, you have long-time residents in the United States, people who think of themselves as Anglo-Saxons, who think of themselves as being incredibly distant socially and biologically from these newly-arrived immigrants. And as the debate over the immigration policy heats up, they almost naturally seize on some of the social-scientific and biological scholarly work that is focusing on things like cranial capacity, physiognomy, stature, measurable kinds of characteristics that will go along with this package of presumed social or political traits.

QUESTION: What were some of the racial stereotypes that emerged from these so-called "scientific" studies?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: In a number of scholarly disciplines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only was race becoming central to the notion of how to think about the world's peoples, but race itself was being measured. It was thought to be measurable in various ways. So you get biologists who are interested in things like cranial capacity or bodily form, or ultimately the genes. You've got psychiatrists or psychometrists, as they were called at the time, who are interested in measuring intelligence, and a standardized test would measure the innate capacity of not just the individual but an entire people.

So some of the current notions of who a different people was over-determined by this kind of attention on the part of various disciplines, so that the Pole is notoriously kind of sluggish but also steadfast and plodding, a hard worker. The Jew is sneaky perhaps, cunning, too cunning, and clannish. The Italian is notoriously quicker-tempered, even dangerous. And these are things that you'll find in a cool kind of scientific language.

In some places you'll find it in much more heated language than others. You see horrific kinds of political cartooning of these various types that match a kind of visual and unmistakable visuality of a group with the parcel of traits that are presumed to go along with it. So, you know, Harper's magazine, for example, runs in the 1880s an engraving of a scene in which an Italian is beating an eight-year-old child because the child hasn't brought home as much money from a day of, you know, playing the accordion as expected. And the brutality of the scene is matched by the physicality of Italianness that's being depicted there.

So there's a real meshing of the idea of physicality and unmistakable kind of physical, biological identify, a meshing of that with the supposed character traits that go along with it. And these are things that are kind of multiplied across the spectrum from the popular press to the scientific treatises, and even school-books. In a primer for children in 1907, one of the exam questions is, "Name a civilization which is low, and explain why it is low." So this notion of not only recognizing difference but then ranging it into some kind of hierarchical order is, in some ways, the business of the day in several disciplines, and certainly in political discourse as well.

QUESTION: How did the anthropologist Franz Boas respond to this kind of thinking?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: In the 1890s and into the 1910's, Boas was beginning to formulate and ultimately launch an assault on some of the most powerful and most widely accepted ideas of the hereditarians; that is, the folks who thought that all human capacity and human traits could be traced down through lineage; in other words, it was innate. It was unchangeable.

And the assault that he launched was really two-pronged. First, in the 1890s, he began to question some of the hierarchical ordering that scholars in various disciplines were making, based largely on evolutionist thought. One of the ironies of this history is that when evolutionism, as a way of thinking and a way of analyzing humanity, when it first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, in some ways it was an intervention in a debate on the side of what you might think would be the less racialized or racist view of groups and group-hood.

I mean, in the 1850s there was this debate over whether humanity is one or whether the differences among humans are traceable to different points of origin. And evolutionism at first seems to solve the question in favor of human unity. It says, well, whatever difference there is, is based on different trajectories that have been traced out from a single site of creation.

But by the end of the century, that part of it, its softer edges had almost disappeared, because what evolutionist thought did was it set up a scale that, while it did away with the idea of innate quality, it set up a scale of presumed progression from point A to point B all the way through to point Z, in such a way that it became very easy for people to assume not only that groups will pass through the same stages but that some groups have obviously passed through more of those stages and have gotten further along that trajectory that humanity is on, such that if the distinctions aren't innate, that's actually a moot point because the distinctions are so great.

So one of the ironic inheritances of the latter nineteenth century from evolutionist thought is that, well, yes, in fact, there is this hierarchy that is so entrenched in human development that it's unlikely to change at all. And that's the first place that Boas starts his line of questioning. He starts to wonder, first of all, whether there's a real kind of ethnocentrism in the way that the questions are being posed and the answers are being sought.

And he also starts to wonder about some of the results themselves, even taken on their own terms. He starts to wonder, "Well, if we're seeing this cultural trait among this people and this cultural trait among this people, why should we assume that one is an imperfect version of the other?" which is the basis of hierarchy on the evolutionist scale. He starts to say, "Well, maybe those two developments are completely detached from each other and that evolutionists are misreading their own data in such a way as to create hierarchy where actually that's not at all what's going on." That's the first [prong].

And the second prong of his attack on this whole way of thinking was a much more forceful attack on the hereditarian argument, particularly in the 1910s, when he starts to look at the changes, the bodily changes, the physical changes that immigrant groups undergo once they're in the United States. And this is the most radical kind of protest against some of the hereditarian presumptions, and it's the most radical kind of environmentalist argument to set in opposition.

He's saying, "You know, you're saying that Hebrews or Mediterraneans or Celts, or whoever they are, are so innately Hebrew, Mediterranean or Celtic that they're never going to change; they'll never be anything else. And yet, right here in front of our very eyes, right here on American soil, just looking from one generation to the next, we can see all kinds of bodily changes and facial changes that point to something else in the development of these peoples than the hereditarians are willing to take into consideration."

QUESTION: What are the important findings of Boas' work for the Dillingham Commission?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: Boas does a study of his own. He does very precise measurements of bodily form in various ways to determine that while the hereditarians are arguing that so innate are racial differences that they will never change - once a Celt, always a Celt. Boas is now saying, "Well, if we measure a difference from one generation to the next, right here on American soil we have proof that that hereditarian argument is mistaken. In fact, we see tremendous changes, and we can measure them between the Celts of yesteryear and the American-born Celt."

And so he's launching the most radical kind of critique of hereditarianism, and it's the most radical kind of environmentalist argument one could make at the time. And the study itself is included in the Dillingham Commission report [1911], that voluminous report on immigration that Congress puts together. But his presence there really does not have much impact certainly on congressional debate and certainly not on popular kind of street-level political discussion. His environmentalist argument about race and types really kind of falls by the wayside.

QUESTION: Was scientific racism a new phenomemon?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: This kind of what we might call scientific racism of the period is nothing new at all. In fact, one might argue that science is what made race to be race in the first place, going all the way back to the late eigthteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Science, with at least the presumption of precision, with its weightiness, with its authority as a kind of regime of knowledge: it's the piece that makes observable differences, whether they're physical or whatever, between peoples - science is what creates this distinction, and has the kind of social power that race ultimately does.

So, scientific racism isn't new at the turn of the century or on into the 1910's, but what is new is the range of sciences now that are organizing themselves around the race concept and are actively and feverishly, one might say, investigating race in various ways. What is new in this period is, the number of sciences involved and the kind of feverishness of activity across the scientific branches around the race question and the race concept. So psychology and biology and the rising science of genetics and the social sciences, historiography; there are just so many disciplines that are organized and are rapidly organizing themselves around an investigation of race that, in that sense, it's a new period.

It's a new period also in the level of influence that science is having on policy debates and on policy itself. And that really comes to fruition in the debates over the 1924 [immigration] restrictive legislation, where eugenicists and their arguments about thinking about immigration, not in terms of laborers coming in to do the work of the nation but in terms of seed stocks coming in to generate and procreate the next Americans, that's the kind of thinking that really carries the day in those debates, and that's a degree of influence that perhaps the sciences have never had before.

So, you have all these sciences now responding to the social conditions of the day, not just immigration, although that was a big one, but also urbanization, the move from countryside to city, new levels of urban distress and new kinds of social problems that the nation hadn't faced as being so central to national character. I mean, now, you know, at the turn of the century and after, there's no question this is no longer Thomas Jefferson's country of yeoman farmers. This is an industrial republic, whatever that means. And as people look around, they start to see some of what that means, that there are going to be slums, there are going to be undesirable types, however you want to define that and however you want to understand their undesirableness.

So, the ways in which what you might think as the kind of cool logic of science, on the one hand, and heated political discussion, on the other, one of the ways that those two things come together - and you can see it - is in the immigration question and the debate over it. And there are incredible linkages between the Immigration Restriction League, which is kind of formed by the Harvard class of 1889, it turns out, and comes into existence as a formal organization in 1894. They become the most vocal political group around the immigration question. In the 1890s, they have what you might call kind of proto-eugenist idea about ranking Celts and Slavs and Hebrews against Anglo-Saxons.

QUESTION: Talk about the period in which eugenics kind of starts to come into its own and some of the specifics on it.

MATTHEW JACOBSON: In this country, eugenics really starts to come into its own right after the turn of the century, particularly with the establishment of the Eugenics Research Center in Cold Springs Harbor on Long Island. A Chicago biologist named Charles Davenport is given a lot of money from the Carnegie Foundation to do eugenic research and genetic research. And that gives what had been a kind of vague intellectual movement; that gives it a kind of infrastructure. It gives it a place. It gives it some money. It gives it some laboratories. It gives it a name. It kind of becomes a focal point for eugenicists of every walk of life to kind of get into the picture and treat eugenics, this idea of biologically engineering society, as a serious idea and an idea that is not only practicable but is a good one.

[For] Davenport, immigration represents the importation into the country of genetic material that is unalterable, and it's also readable. You can read racial character. You can see it. You can measure it. You can define it. And ultimately, if you understand it well enough, you can use those ideas for breeding a better society or, you know, keeping procreation down among certain elements of the population who aren't desirable. And ultimately, of course, you can also use it in deciding who should be able to come into the country and become a naturalized citizen.

And ultimately that not only is the spirit of thought that carries the day in the debates in the '10s over immigration and restriction, but it's the same folks; it's the same people. You know, Davenport has connections with some of the people who are involved in intelligence testing, people like H. H. Goddard, who does intelligence testing on Ellis Island and determines, from a psychological or an intelligence point of view, that certain races are undesirable.

They have ties with other people who will later become very important in congressional debates, people like Madison Grant, who perhaps doesn't have the kind of formal training as some of the scientists like Davenport but is very prolific. He's very interested in the question and he gets a very high profile. Another person who testifies before Congress is Harry Laughlin, who cuts his eugenic teeth, as it were, as one of the researchers at the Cold Spring Harbor station.

So there's a lot of traffic, not only in ideas in this period between eugenics as a rising science and policymakers in Washington, but there's actual physical traffic among people who become friends, who have various connections, who are related in one way or another with the project at Cold Spring Harbor and then who show up to testify before Congress years later, with very much the same kind of arguments in mind. It's important that this was not a strict consensus. These ideas did not go unchallenged, and some of the fights on the floor of Congress were actually quite vocal and quite bitter over this question.

QUESTION: What about the rise of the idea that intelligence is measurable?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: In the area of intelligence, the two key figures in the United States are H. H. Goddard, who brings Binet to the United States and introduces the idea on this side of the Atlantic that intelligence is measurable, and not only that it's measurable but that it can be used in a practical way in social policy and the like. And the other is Lewis Terman from Stanford, who really popularizes Binet's thinking, first at the World's Fair in 1915, [where he] unveils the Binet-Stanford intelligence test.

When Binet came up with this method of measuring intelligence in France, he made some very forceful and distinct caveats about how the test could and could not be used. He said, first of all, that it could only be used to make gross distinctions between people who are normal and people who, for one reason or another, are operating at a sub-normal level. But beyond that, the test isn't going to tell you anything.

He also insisted that you couldn't rank races or classes on the basis of a particular individual's performance on the test or even a huge sample of individuals' performance on the test. You could only evaluate an individual using the test. And third - and this is most important in his thinking - that whatever you find on the test, if you find someone testing poorly, you cannot write them off for some kind of better performance later on. People aren't stuck where they are. It's not innate, immutable, native intelligence. You're just testing where someone is at a particular moment.

Now, in the United States, all of those caveats go by the wayside. People like H. H. Goddard and Louis Terman, who popularized the Binet test in the United States, within this context of debates over immigration and the like, they use the tests in precisely the way that Binet himself said they could not be used. So they do try to use the tests not only to make gross generalizations between normal and abnormal, but actually to rank people at every point from the lowest scores to the highest and think of that as a kind of static hierarchy that is meaningful and think of the distinctions within those categories as meaningful.

They do tie test scores to race. They do make that extrapolation from the individual performance to the race that that testee is supposedly representing. And they also do think of these scales as being immutable. So if someone tests poorly once, then that kind of tells you everything you need to know about their capacity, no matter how far down the road you want to look.

H. H. Goddard's real contribution to American psychiatry was he added a third category to what had been a two-tiered scheme. Before Goddard there were - when you're thinking about abnormalities, there were idiots and imbeciles, idiots being the lowest on the scale, idiots being the most kind of hopeless. Goddard added a third category, morons, which are kind of borderline.

The thing that made morons, in Goddard's estimation, so important, so worthy of study and such an important kind of social presence, is that morons were thought to be - he called them low-grade defectives; that is, morons were thought to be functioning enough that they could actually enter society and take part in society as workers, as voters, and most importantly for Goddard and some of the other eugenic thinkers, as procreators, as family members. They would be the mothers and fathers of the future generations of Americans.

QUESTION: What did Goddard conclude from his trip to Ellis Island?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: One of the things that he did was [go] to Ellis Island to test out his idea of morons, and also to make some of these linkages between individuals and the way they tested and races. And it's kind of astonishing now to look at from an empirical or scientific point of view in terms of the way science is supposed to be conducted, because he goes to Ellis Island at a time when, you know, twenty-six million people are coming ashore within a few decades of each other over a long time. Over a million are coming in any given year, if you pick the right one - if you pick 1907 for example, one of the peak years. So we are talking about millions of people. And he goes to Ellis Island and he tests a few. I mean, really a handful. So, maybe on the basis of eighteen Hungarians and thirty-nine Russian Jews, extrapolates first and then calculates that enormous percentage of the people that are coming ashore on Ellis Island are by his phraseology "morons"; that is, a risk for the republic. So he pronounces with confidence that upwards of 70 percent of the people coming from Eastern and Southern Europe are low-grade defectives who are going to bring the nation down one way or another.

QUESTION: Explain how the Johnson Act of 1924 ties into eugenics.

MATTHEW JACOBSON: The Johnson Act in 1924 is really the kind of touchstone of the whole restrictionist effort of the previous decades, and particularly the eugenicists' effort to limit immigration based on biological ideas about who some peoples were and what their likelihood of success for and in the republic was.

Now, in the Johnson Act every group that was defined as a group got a quota of two percent based on their overall numbers in the country in the 1890 census. One of the things that that did by going all the way back to 1890 is to cut out from the calculations all of those millions who had arrived after 1890. And so it cut to a trickle the immigration from precisely those regions where on racial grounds people were considered to be morons in Goddard's estimation, or at least a bad risk in the estimation of Goddard. So that two percent of the 1890 census for a group like Eastern European Jews is almost nothing. It's a bit more for Italians.

So while it's called a National Origins Act, it really is very much a racial act. It's a racial origins act, if you will. It's based on eugenics thought, and it's a kind of demographic and geographical scheme for deciding upon the numbers of incoming immigrants. But what it does in fact is cut out exactly the people who eugenicists were the most afraid of.

QUESTION: What happens to this discussion in the 1930s and 1940s?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: There are some really significant shifts that are traceable to changing historical circumstances. On the one hand, the 1924 act solved, if you will, the immigration problem. So all of those distinctions - Hebrews, Slavs, Mediterraneans - they really kind of lose their salience. The questions are not as pressing.

Another way is the great African American migration from the rural South to the urban North and to the West around the two world wars - completely changes the racial alchemy of precisely those cities where the problematic Eastern and Southern Europeans had arrived earlier on. So suddenly in a city like Boston in 1870 and past the turn of the century the most salient racial divide in the city [had been] between Anglo Saxons and Celts. By a bit later on in the twentieth century that's not the case anymore.

Once the number of black inhabitants is not counted in the hundreds or even in the thousands but in the tens or hundreds of thousands in many industrial cities, suddenly black and white become the major most salient racial divide in cities like Detroit, New York, Boston. So the racial alchemy changes dramatically, and those white races, those one-time white races from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century become what we now call white ethnic. Ethnicity is a rather modern invention for talking about difference in a different way. Ethnicity is not a kind of biologically based immutable biologicized difference in the blood, a parcel of hereditary genetics or bodily material. Ethnicity is cultural.

And so one of the things that you see, certainly over those middle decades of the twentieth century, is the kind of reconsolidation of whiteness. What had been simply white persons in the early nineteenth century had then become a series of white races, and now again in the mid-twentieth century is reconsolidated as a white race or the Caucasian race.

Another element of this is the kind of retreat from racial thinking on the part of many scientists, particularly in response to what was going on in Nazi Germany. I mean, one of the things that is interesting and chilling actually is that many high-ranking Nazis looked to some of the eugenics thought and eugenics-based policies of the United States as an inspiration, that they were reading people like Madison Grant and they were looking at things like the Immigration Act of 1924 as models for here's how you can take what we know to be true from the standpoint of racial science - here's a model for taking that knowledge and turning it into policy.

So I think understandably, especially in the United States, but I think across Europe as well, there is a kind of retreat on the part of the scientific community once it becomes clear how racial thinking is being used in Nazi Germany. So you have these highly politicized tracts in the late 1930s and 1940s about the race concept and how it's mistaken, how we might revise our thinking about human differences, and Boas [was] himself writing quite overtly about the possible incompatibility between the race concept and the functioning of a polity that is calling itself democratic.

QUESTION: Was there a lasting legacy of Franz Boas' work: Changes in Bodily Form of the Descendents of Immigrants in the Dillingham Commission's report?

MATTHEW JACOBSON: The real contribution of Changes in Bodily Form is as the most radical kind of critique of the hereditarian argument and the most radical kind of advancement of a truly environmentalist kind of approach. [He was saying:] "we can measure as a way of finding out the truth about humanity and all its diversity." And what he is finding goes right at the heart of the hereditarian argument, because in his measurement of body shape and body form and body type and the like, he finds that in fact there's a tremendous change between the pure types from the old world and the pure types from the new world, that in fact immigrants over even just a short span of time, over one generation, might change quite a bit in a physical, measurable way. And what that implies is that the hereditarians have it completely wrong. I mean, they are talking about immutable types. They are talking about unshakable characterology. They are talking about a kind of being, a racial being that is etched in stone that will never change anything. Right before your eyes, right here among these throngs that you are so worried about, if you are in the new world, we can see changes, and quite rapid ones at that.

Now, this work does get included in the Dillingham Commission's report. But in terms of the debate over policy, it really kind of gets pushed to the back burner, and it has very little impact at all on the way that the discussions are shaped, and certainly not as much impact as the eugenics argument. And so people like Henry Laughlin and Madison Grant were testifying before Congress, giving the racial hereditary point of view and that argument about its policy implications.

QUESTION: Help us get in the mind-set of the time, how people thought about race.

MATTHEW JACOBSON: I think one of the hardest things from our vantage point now at the end of the century is the way in which the racial distinctions that were discussed earlier in the century were every bit as racial, if you will, as the racial distinctions that we still recognize. So it's not just that people were misusing the word "race" when they talked about Hebrews or Anglo-Saxons; it's that they saw race in a different way, that physiogamy impressed itself on their consciousness in a different way. And I think that it's very hard for us now that those distinctions have melted away. I mean, race clearly is with us still, and the racial distinctions that we live with strike us as natural and as, you know, they will never disappear. But that's the power of race. It seems natural, it seems part of the landscape.

But in fact it is always changing. [It's not that] earlier people really thought that Celts were a different race whereas now we know that they are not. In fact, they were a different race, because everyone thought so, including themselves. And that's what's very hard to get inside of in retrospect. And I think it's important that we do, because I think there is tremendous power in unlocking race from the inside out, and to understand its mutability, the way it is generated at certain moments in different ways.

It has never been the case that democracy in this country has been wide open. There [has] always been some kind of presumption that certain people are fit for self-government and certain people aren't. And that's a phrase that we don't use anymore. In fact, from the beginning, democracy and racism have been [inextricably linked, and] the notion of democracy was based on racial presumptions, about fitness for self-government for that very narrow circle in the late eighteenth century of "We the People," and that circle has been expanding over two centuries and more now. But I don't think that the presumption [is] that democracy is just something you can throw the doors open to and allow anyone to participate. And I think that's something that a lot of Americans misunderstand about their political culture.

QUESTION: What was the scope of immigration to this country in the period we are talking about, the turn of the last century?

ALAN KRAUT: Between 1880 and the mid 1920s, approximately 23 and a half million immigrants came to the United States, more than at any other time. Our friends the demographers tell us that more people were on the move then than at any other time in human history.

QUESTION: What were some of the things that were going on in Europe that were driving these migrations?

ALAN KRAUT: Historians often talk about the migrations of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries as controlled by kinds of "pushes and pulls." The pushes were often economic changes that were going on in home countries. For example, in southern Italy there was enormous poverty, some of it stirred by natural disaster, some of it stirred by the oppressiveness of northern land owners on the southern peasantry, some of it stirred by unusual patterns of economic competition.

QUESTION: Was liberty a real draw for the people coming here?

ALAN KRAUT: The overwhelming number of immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were really in search of economic opportunity. They were in search of better jobs, higher wages, education for their young, a better livelihood and better lives down the road. But they were also concerned - and this was especially true of minority groups in parts of southern and eastern Europe - with political liberty, the ability to participate in the political system, the ability to function in the world without the oppressiveness of a totalitarian regime. And, of course, they were also interested in religious liberties. For evangelical Christians, for eastern European Jews, for any number of minority groups, the pull of the United States and its attitude of religious liberty was very, very great.

QUESTION: Tell us how the face of the city was changing with this massive wave of immigrants.

ALAN KRAUT: The vast majority of immigrants who came to the United States spent at least some time in cities. Many ultimately would go out to the countryside and would be engaged in farming activities, but most spent some time in the cities. And many made their livelihoods and their futures in the cities as industrial workers. Naturally, with such high concentrations of immigrants, it changed the whole nature of American urban life. Foreign language newspapers appeared. Stores that catered to the specific food needs and consumer desires of the newcomers arose. The newcomers themselves used the high concentration of population in cities as ways of launching themselves as entrepreneurs - push carts, small stores; these were the ways that many of these newcomers entered the economy. The cities buzzed with the activity that came out of these various immigrant groups.

QUESTION: How was this group of immigrants different from previous waves of immigration?

ALAN KRAUT: Prior to the end of the 19th century, the greatest number of immigrants coming to the United States were coming out of northern and western Europe. They were coming from England and Ireland and, of course, from central Europe, from the German states. They tended to be Protestant in religion with the exception of the Irish, who were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. And they tended to be very much skilled or semi-skilled immigrants who were coming to this country as well. They were often fair-skinned. And some, at least in the case of the English and the Irish, spoke English.

This was, of course, not the case in the late nineteenth century. The late nineteenth century brought to the United States millions of Catholics and Jews and darker-skinned people, duskier complexions, many of them in much greater levels of poverty than those who had come at an earlier time. The result is that there was a tremendous belief on the part of American nativists that these newcomers were of inferior stock, that they simply were not as good as the western and northern Europeans that had come at an earlier time . . .

QUESTION: Talk about the poverty issue. Is it true to characterize them as different economically?

ALAN KRAUT: Well, every migration to the United States has had within it the very, very poor. Who could have been poorer or more downtrodden than the Irish who came during the 1840s escaping the potato famine? So there were certainly poor who had come to the United States before. But in terms of just raw numbers of poor, unskilled labor, the late 19th century, of course, took precedence. And what that meant was that there were enormous social problems that came with the newcomers; first, the need to find jobs, then the need to find housing, then the need to, of course, earn enough income to raise their families and to create some sort of sense of opportunity for themselves and for the next generation.

When we think back at where the immigrants lived and we think about the teeming neighborhoods of New York's lower east side or parts of Chicago or we think of the crowded conditions of the Chinese in San Francisco or the difficulties of the Mexicans coming across the Rio Grande and living in communities within Texas, we think about real poverty that certainly shaped the immigrants' lives, shaped their view of America when they first arrived. America was the glowing land of opportunity, but when they actually arrived, they discovered something else other than a glowing land of opportunity. They discovered at best a land that had jobs, but often a land that was not completely receptive to them and where they would in some cases suffer even greater hardship and poverty than they had in their home countries.

The tenement house, which loomed kind of like a giant against the night sky, many, many stories high, with all of its disadvantages - airless, sunless, inner rooms - for many immigrants, while not a pleasant place to live, was at least a place where they had neighbors who spoke the same language that they did, where they could raise their children and hope for something better and work for something better.

QUESTION: Did many of them go home again?

ALAN KRAUT: When we think of the immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we're talking about essentially 23 and a half million people who came between the 1880s and the mid-1920s, when restriction was imposed. But of that 23 and a half million people, approximately a third returned to their place of origin. Not everyone who came to the United States liked it. Not everybody who came to the United States succeeded in the way that they thought they ought to. Many were also lonely for family and for friends. In some cases, men returned to find wives because they weren't happy with the women who they met in the United States. They wanted a woman from the old country who understood the ways of their group.

And so there was a constant flow, a circulation, if you will, of immigrants back and forth between their home countries and the United States. And some groups were actually labor migrants. The Italians, the southern Italians, are the best example of that, of a group that migrated seasonally, until restriction. Many of those Italian laborers [went back and forth] quite a few times before making the decision to stay in the United States or return to Italy permanently.

QUESTION: What were some of the sources of the nativist [anti-immigrant] response to immigrants?

ALAN KRAUT: There was an old immigrant saying: "America beckons, but Americans repel." That old immigrant saying, translated into many languages, conveys the kind of love-hate relationship that the United States and its people had with new arrivals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. On the one hand, the United States desperately needed the labor of these newcomers. On the other hand, they were strange to many Americans. They were of different religious persuasions. They were poorer. They looked different from most native-born Americans. And so, there was a fear of the stranger. On the one hand, we wanted immigration. On the other hand, we didn't want immigrants. And so there was an effort to repel those newcomers, sometimes by simply discouraging them, not giving them jobs, not being decent to them and fair to them in terms of housing, and so on.

There was also an effort to pass laws and restrictions that would repel newcomers. Many Americans felt that they needed protection from these immigrants, protection from their bodies and protection from their culture. In terms of their bodies, the inspection procedure at Ellis Island, the medical inspection, was one way that Americans attempted to express, through their government agencies, the desire to admit only immigrants that would benefit the United States, not sickly, weak immigrants who would be unproductive workers.

QUESTION: How significant were the restrictive policies such as inspection?

ALAN KRAUT: The United States, in its desire to repel undesirable immigrants to the United States, focused, of course, on those they regarded as physically unfit, mentally unfit, emotionally unable to support themselves in the United States. And yet, with all of the restrictions, with all of the inspections, with all of the interrogations to eliminate criminals, prostitutes, anyone who might be morally suspect, when we look at the overall figures for how many immigrants were accepted and rejected, we know that only between 2 and 3 percent of newcomers in any given year actually were rejected. Why is that?

Well, in part it was the desire of the United States to continue this very, very valuable influx of newcomers to fuel American industry. And at the same time, it reflects the desire of Americans to admit those who would be productive. And consequently, the Ellis Island hospital admitted cases that could be cured, and people were then admitted after spending time in the Ellis Island hospital. Immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century tended to be between the ages of eighteen and thirty. In most individuals, that's the healthiest portion of life. And so, consequently, this was not an enfeebled group of newcomers who were arriving, by and large, but rather young men and young women who were enjoying robust health and looked, at least, as if they were going to be very productive. And that's exactly what the United States wanted.

QUESTION: Can you characterize the forms of nativist reactions to the level of immigration at this time?

ALAN KRAUT: Opposition to immigration was really of two kinds. There were Americans who feared that the newcomers would take their jobs or drive down the wage scale and resisted immigration because it simply wasn't in their own economic best interest to support immigration. American labor unions, including the American Federation of Labor, opposed immigration very often because the immigrants worked for lower wages.

But there was another genre of immigration opponent that was concerned with who the immigrant was and what the immigrant was. Organizations like the Immigration Restriction League was concerned about the racial composition of these newcomers. In the United States and in other countries of western Europe during this period, there was an increasing attention to eugenics, the belief that you could improve the human condition and improve human stock by careful breeding.

Overall, eugenicists looked at immigration as an enormous challenge. Not all immigrants were inferior, but many eugenicists believed that it would be to the advantage of the United States to limit immigration severely, particularly from parts of Asia and parts of southern and eastern Europe, precisely those areas that were the big donors of immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. And so eugenicists became major advocates of limiting immigration.

Around the same time the eugenicists were making their arguments, there was a great enthusiasm for IQ testing; that is, finding out what the intelligence quotient was for different segments of the American population. World War I provided a tremendous opportunity for those who were interested in mental testing. They could give mental tests to recruits and determine exactly how the young American male stood up in terms of intelligence to other populations that were being tested at the time. And so approximately 1.75 million young men in the World War I period were given IQ tests.

Some were given IQ tests that involved written instructions and written answers, the Alpha test. And some were given the Beta version of the intelligence test, which involved pictures and a lot of non-verbal material, non-written material. The result was, from the standpoint of many testers, very surprising. They discovered that the average mental age of the Army recruit was approximately thirteen, and for some ethnic portions of the population, even lower. Italians were estimated to be, I believe - to have a mental age of 11.3 years; Russian Jews equally low.

What should one make of these results? Critics of the test pointed out that there was an enormous cultural bias in the testing procedures. The questions asked often required an understanding of the culture more than they did the content or the response of the question. So, for example, one question accompanied by a picture of a tennis court asked, "What's missing from this picture?" Well, the tennis net was missing from the picture. But if you were a newly-arrived immigrant who had never played tennis, you'd hardly be aware of what this field was or that there was a net missing from the picture at all.

So, consequently, there were many who challenged the validity of these tests at all in any way assessing the intelligence and capabilities of immigrants coming to the United States. The frightening part was, of course, that these social scientists published their results. The information was being disseminated. Congressmen and senators read the information; many of them, of course, immediately calling for a consideration or reconsideration of the issue of immigration restriction.

In addition to that, there was a scientific response/refutation, principally by Franz Boas, a prominent anthropologist at Columbia University, who had studied immigrants. He had studied them physically to determine whether or not they could be as robust as native-born Americans, given adequate diet and exercise and living conditions. But he also was a major critic of the intelligence testing that was being done.

QUESTION: How well accepted was eugenics at the time?

ALAN KRAUT: When we talk about eugenics, we often have a kind of knee-jerk reaction that's shaped by the experience of Nazi Germany, who after all took eugenics to the ultimate extent, by attempting to systematically exterminate those who they decided were genetically not valuable, unfit to be part of the population.

But if we go back to the earlier part of the twentieth century, intelligent, bright, well-meaning reformers and intellectuals thought very highly of the science - and they did believe it was a science - of eugenics. After all, if farmers could breed cattle and other animals and get the best results, why couldn't well-meaning social planners do the same thing with human stock? Eugenics was not a notion confined to a narrow group of scientists somewhere off in an isolated laboratory. It was rather a very popular notion that people talked about all the time.

QUESTION: Let's focus in specifically on the Dillingham Commission [1911] and the influence of this government report. Boas wrote part of it, but wasn't he the lone voice saying that genetics didn't determine everything?

ALAN KRAUT: Every conceivable kind of stereotype made its way into the nativist literature of the time, and not just from evil-minded kind of marginal figures, but respected academics spewed forth a kind of constant barrage of epithets and criticisms of newly-arrived immigrants as being simply unfit to join the American population.

And so there was this kind of academic critique of the newcomers and the belief that they really weren't fit. Well, if they weren't fit, what could you do about it? Some argued for extreme moves such as sterilization. Others argued that simply immigration restriction would do the job. And so the Dillingham report, a report sponsored by the Congress of the United States, consisting of approximately forty-two volumes of data collected on every aspect of the immigration experience, by and large concluded that there was a need for some kind of control of immigration to the United States, especially some sort of restrictive measures.

And not everyone who participated in the Dillingham report agreed. There were voices like that of Franz Boas, the anthropologist from Columbia University, who argued that immigrants weren't of an inferior genetic type; they were simply people whose life experiences, had been different, and that if they had had similar life experiences, similar diet, similar exercise, similar opportunities to native-born Americans, their bodily types would not be all that different.

And, in fact, Boas conducted a study which demonstrated that in the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of newcomers in their bodily type tended to resemble more native-born youngsters than youngsters coming as new immigrants to the United States. Those findings were very, very significant because they told those Americans who were sort of on the fence, not completely opposed to immigration but not quite in favor completely either, that they really had less to fear than perhaps they thought about these newcomers and what their bodies would mean to the American population.

QUESTION: Describe the political path that ended in the quotas of 1921 and 1924.

ALAN KRAUT: Well, by the 1920s, the debate resumed over immigration to the United States. It was the period after the First World War. It was a time when many Americans felt that the economic advantages of immigration had been fulfilled to the extent that they could be - that is, immigrants were making up a large part of the American labor force in our factories and in our mines - and that immigrants might represent a national security hazard. After all, was it not true, many argued, that many eastern Europeans were sympathetic to communism, to Bolshevism as it was called, and to the ideas of anarchism? At the very least, many seemed to be socialists.

And so arguments began to grow that the United States should restrict immigration. Some of those arguments were the old biological arguments, the arguments that eugenicists had raised. Some of them were the arguments raised by the American Federation of Labor; that is, immigrants were lowering the wages of American workers and taking jobs from native-born American workers.

And then there were the arguments that the immigrants were of different genetic stock and were dangerous to Americans and a political threat beside. By the 1920s, Congress was debating immigration restriction. And the intent was not to restrict any one particular group, as in the case of the Chinese exclusion law, but rather a broader kind of restriction that would limit the various groups that had been coming to the United States in greater numbers since the 1890s.

In 1921, Congress passed temporary legislation which limited the number of the percentage of immigrants of each particular group coming to the United States. And that notion of a national origins quota system was made permanent in 1924 with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that limited immigration of any particular group to 3 percent of that group's population in the United States as of the 1890 census. And so a national origins quota system was instituted as a way of limiting, once and for all, immigrants coming to the United States from Asia and southern and eastern Europe.

QUESTION: Let's talk about how far some of the immigrant groups had come in just those 20 or 30 years.

ALAN KRAUT: In the period from 1890 to the restriction in the 1920s, even as newcomers were continuing to arrive, those who had arrived at an earlier period were engaged in a process of Americanization and integration, a kind of national integration. Their children were going to school and learning American ways. Many were becoming citizens, were becoming naturalized Americans. They were climbing the socioeconomic ladder.

And so by the mid-1920s, when immigration restriction is being debated in Congress, there were those who had succeeded, those who had become prominent, who were very angry with the American Congress for shutting the door. Fiorello LaGuardia, the famous mayor of New York, the Little Flower himself, had been an immigration interpreter on Ellis Island while he was going to New York University law school at night. He had very vivid memories of the immigrants coming through Ellis Island, gateway to the United States. And as a politician and later as a mayor of New York in the 1940s, LaGuardia was one of the really vocal opponents of immigration restriction.

QUESTION: Can you say something about the post-1965 act?

ALAN KRAUT: Beginning in the mid 1970s, and especially during the 1980s, 1990s, the United States experienced an increasingly large and robust wave of immigration to the United States. Unlike the earlier waves in the early part of the twentieth century coming out of southern and eastern Europe, this new wave was coming primarily from Latin America, from Mexico, from countries in southeast Asia, and by the end of the century from eastern Europe as well, post-Cold War eastern Europe.

The response to this immigration was very different than the response in the early part of the twentieth century. In 1965, there was a sea change in American immigration law. The country abandoned the national origins quota system and adopted a system which stressed family reunification, the admission of immigrants who offered something to the United States professionally or in terms of badly-needed skills. We no longer wanted to restrict immigration from particular countries the way we had in the earlier period. We were more interested in the overall number of immigrants who were coming to the United States and what those immigrants could offer the United States and what the United States could offer those newcomers in terms of keeping families together and so on.

So the United States had a very immigrant-friendly legislation - has had immigrant-friendly legislation since 1965. By the same token, the United States entered a new period of immigration flow. Beginning in the 1970s, particularly after the Vietnam War, when we got refugees coming out of Southeast Asia. We began slowly, and in a kind of crescendo movement, to see more and more Southeast Asians, Latin Americans, Indians, Chinese and, since the end of the Cold War, eastern Europeans, finding their way to the United States, emigrating to the United States, most as immigrants, some as refugees. So now the United States found itself with a new wave of immigration, coming often from countries that were quite nearby.

QUESTION: Can you compare the two periods of immigration, then and now?

ALAN KRAUT: As we approach the first decade of the 21st century, one of the striking things about immigration is that while it seems large - and indeed, the current wave of immigration may ultimately be the largest in American history - in terms of the percentage of immigrants in the American population and even in states with the highest percentage of immigrants, it's relatively modest compared to what we saw earlier in the twentieth century.

For example, the percentage of immigrants at the turn of the century in cities like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia tended to be in the neighborhood of 12 to 14 percent. Today they're more in the neighborhood of 8 percent at most, and in some cases less. So the American population is certainly feeling some of the pressures of immigration, but by the same token, immigrants are today making some of the same important contributions that immigrants made earlier in the twentieth century. They're enriching the labor force with their labor. They're paying taxes, which increase revenues. And they're, of course, enriching American culture by their very presence, contributing to the very heterogeneous culture of the United States.

QUESTION: Let's talk about kind of old paradigms of immigration versus new. And I guess it would be really the uprooted person, the transplanted, or those kinds of ideas.

ALAN KRAUT: In 1961, Oscar Handlin published a very important and very eloquent book called The Uprooted. Handlin's model is a model of donor countries and host countries, migrants going from one place, uprooting themselves, totally abandoning their societies, and going someplace else and replanting themselves and starting new lives. Immigration historians no longer look at it in quite that kind of pattern. And that immigration paradigm has been abandoned in favor of a much broader, what we sometimes call a transnational paradigm.

What is one to say about a businessman in Florida who wakes up in the morning, hops on a plane, does business in Santo Domingo, and returns by dinnertime, or families who spend part of the year in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela and part of the year in Miami or others who continue to go back and forth between homes, having two domiciles, one in their home country in Asia and one in the United States; Indian engineers and scientists who are doing business in the United States via computers and email but are residents still of villages at home and come to the United States for periods of time and then go home for periods of time?

When we talk about the transnational paradigm and we talk about individuals and families who are sharing their time and their lives between old world and new world, we're not talking about something that's a recent phenomenon alone. We can look back at the early twentieth century when Italian laborers, who were sometimes called "birds of passage" by American immigration officials, spent part of their year in the United States working and earning money and part of their year at home with their families and friends in their villages in southern Italy, but who, in the meanwhile, were also sending dollars home, dollars that were important in supporting families and in generating activity within the economies of their villages in their home country.

QUESTION: Is there something that your students are consistently surprised by, that dispels their myths about immigration?

ALAN KRAUT: Many Americans who see docu-dramas about immigration on television or movies or read novels about immigration or listen to Neil Diamond's song "America," as if everybody is coming to America, are sometimes amazed to discover that not all those who have unsatisfactory lives choose immigration as an option. And not all those who have chosen to migrate, to leave their home countries and go elsewhere, have chosen the United States; that from our point of view, from the point of view of Americans, immigration is a very, very important part of the American experience, and we feel that we have been enormously generous and open to the foreign-born of other lands.

And yet for many, the United States was not the most desirable place to go. Other countries have also been recipients of immigrants, host nations. And many of those who, in fact, have come to the United States have not been happy here and have wanted to go home and have gone home and stayed home and not joined the American population. Many Americans are surprised to learn that the United States was not the only host country of choice for migrants, and many Americans are also very surprised to learn that those who come here are often disillusioned, don't want to stay, and, in fact, go home, and that there has been an enormous outflow of immigrants as well as an influx.

Having said all that, the United States nevertheless remains and continues to view itself quite properly as a nation of nations, a nation that has grown enormously strong and vital and robust because of the economic skills and cultural richness that has been brought to these shores by the foreign-born. As we enter the twenty-first century, if we stop and think about what is true of the United States, one of the great truths about this country is that it is a nation of nations, a nation composed of many, many other groups from other parts of the world.