Two final quotations highlight the case for inadequate legal protection as a primary cause for the unconscionable death toll in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (Leon Stein’s excellent book, The Triangle Fire, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962, served as my chief source for information about this event). Rose Safran, a survivor of the fire and supporter of the 1909 strike, said: “If the union had won we would have been safe. Two of our demands were for adequate fire escapes and for open doors from the factories to the street. But the bosses defeated us and we didn’t get the open doors or the better fire escapes. So our friends are dead.” A building inspector who had actually written to the Triangle management just a few months before, asking for an appointment to discuss the initiation of fire drills, commented after the blaze: “There are only two or three factories in the city where fire drills are in use. In some of them where I have installed the system myself, the owners have discontinued it. The neglect of factory owners in the matter of safety of their employees is absolutely criminal. One man whom I advised to install a fire drill replied to me: ‘Let ’em burn. They’re a lot of cattle, anyway.’”
The Triangle fire galvanized the workers’ reform movement as never before. An empowered force, now irresistible, of labor organizers, social reformers, and liberal legislators pressed for stronger regulation under the theme of “never again.” Hundreds of laws passed as a direct result of this belated agitation. But nothing could wash the blood of 146 workers from the sidewalks of New York.
This tale of two work sites—of a desk situated where Huxley debated Wilberforce, and an office built on a floor that burned during the Triangle Shirtwaist fire—has no end, for the story illustrates a theme of human intellectual life that must always be with us, however imbued with an obvious and uncontroversial solution. Extremes must usually be regarded as untenable, even dangerous places on complex and subde continua. For the application of Darwinian theory to human history, Wilberforce’s “none” marks an error of equal magnitude with the “all” of an extreme Social Darwinism. In a larger sense, the evolution of a species like Homo sapiens should fill us with notions of glory for our odd mental uniqueness, and of deep humility for our status as a tiny and accidental twig on such a sturdy and luxuriandy branching tree of life. Glory and humility! Since we can’t abandon either feeling for a unitary stance in the middle, we had best make sure that both attitudes always walk together, hand in hand, and secure in the wisdom of Ruth’s promise to Naomi: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.”
18
The
Internal Brand of
the Scarlet W
AS A SETTING FOR AN INITIAL WELCOME TO A NEW home, the international arrivals hall at Kennedy airport pales before the spaciousness, the open air, and the symbol of fellowship in New York’s harbor. But the plaque that greets airborne immigrants of our time shares one feature with the great lady who graced the arrival of so many seaborne ancestors, including all my grandparents in their childhood. The plaque on Kennedy’s wall and the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty bear the same inscription: Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus”—but with one crucial difference. The Kennedy version reads:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
One might be excused for supposing that the elision represents a large and necessary omission to fit the essence of a longer poem onto a smallish plaque. But only one line, easily accommodated, has been cut—and for a reason that can only reflect thoughtless (as opposed to merely ugly) censorship, therefore inviting a double indictment on independent charges of stupidity and cowardice. (As a member of the last public school generation trained by forced memorization of a holy historical canon, including the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to the Constitution, Mr. Emerson on the rude bridge that arched the flood, and Ms. Lazarus on the big lady with the lamp, I caught the deletion right away, and got sufficiently annoyed to write a New York Times op-ed piece a couple of years ago. Obviously, I am still seething, but at least I now have the perverse pleasure of using the story for my own benefit to introduce this essay.) I therefore restore the missing line (along with Emma Lazarus’s rhyming scheme and syntax):
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Evidently, the transient wind of political correctness precludes such a phrase as “wretched refuse,” lest any visitor read the line too literally or personally. Did the authorities at our Port Authority ever learn about metaphor, and its prominence in poetry? Did they ever consider that Ms. Lazarus might be describing the disdain of a foreign elite toward immigrants whom we would welcome, nurture, and value?
This story embodies a double irony that prompted my retelling. We hide Emma Lazarus’s line today because we misread her true intention, and because contemporary culture has so confused (and often even equated) inappropriate words with ugly deeds. But the authorities of an earlier generation invoked the false and literal meaning—the identification of most immigrants as wretched refuse—to accomplish a deletion of persons rather than words. The supposed genetic inferiority of most refugees (an innate wretchedness that American opportunity could never overcome) became an effective rallying cry for a movement that did succeed in imposing strong restrictions upon immigration, beginning in the 1920s. These laws, strictly enforced despite pleas for timely exception, immured thousands of Europeans who sought asylum because Hitler’s racial laws had marked them for death, while our national quotas on immigration precluded any addition of their kind. These two stories of past exclusion and truncated present welcome surely illustrate the familiar historical dictum that significant events tend to repeat themselves with an ironic difference—the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
In 1925, Charles B. Davenport, one of America’s foremost geneticists, wrote to his friend Madison Grant, the author of a best-selling book, The Passing of the Great Race, on the dilution of America’s old (read northern European, not Indian) blood by recent immigration: “Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to.” Davenport faced a dilemma. He sought a genetic argument for innate Jewish undesirability, but conventional stereotypes precluded the usual claim for inherent stupidity. So Davenport opted for weakness in moral character rather than intellect. He wrote in his 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics—not, by the way, a political tract, but his generation’s leading textbook in the developing science of genetics:
In earning capacity both male and female Hebrew immigrants rank high and the literacy is above the mean of all immigrants…. On the other hand, they show the greatest proportion of offenses against chastity and in connection with prostitution … The hordes of Jews that are now coming to us from Russia and the extreme southeast of Europe, with their intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest, represent the opposite extreme from the early English and the more recent Scandinavian immigration, with their ideals of community life in the open country, advancement by the sweat of the brow, and the uprearing of families in the fear of God and love of country.
The rediscovery and publication of Mendel’s laws in 1900 initiated the modern study of genetics. Earlier theories of heredity had envisaged a “blending” or smooth mixture and dilution of traits by interbreeding with partners of different constitution, whereas Mendelism featured a “particulate” theory of inheritance, with traits coded by discrete and unchanging genes that need not be expressed in all offspring (especially if “recessive” to a “dominant” form of the gene carried on the other chromosome of a given pair), but that remain in the hereditary constitution, independent and undiluted, awaiting expression in some future generation.
In an understandable initial enthusiasm for this great discovery, early geneticists committed their most common and consistent error in trying to identify single g
enes as causes for nearly every human trait, from discrete bits of anatomy to complex facets of personality. The search for single genetic determinants seemed reasonable (and testable by analysis of pedigrees) for simple, discrete, and discontinuous characters and contrasts (like blue versus brown eyes). But the notion that complex behaviors and temperaments might also emerge from a similar root in simple heredity of single genes never made much sense, for two major reasons: (1) a continuity in expression that precludes any easy definition of traits supposedly under analysis (I may know blue eyes when I see them, but where does a sanguine personality end and melancholia take over?); and (2) a virtual certainty that environments can substantially mold such characters, whatever their underlying genetic influence (my eyes may become blue whatever I eat, but my inherently good brain may end up residing in a stupid adult if poor nutrition starved my early growth, and crushing poverty denied me an education).
Nonetheless, most early human geneticists searched for “unit characters”—supposed traits that could be interpreted as the product of a single Mendelian factor—with abandon, even in complex, continuous, environmentally labile, and virtually undefinable features of personality or accomplishment in life. (These early analyses proceeded primarily by the tracing of pedigrees. I can envisage accurate data, and reliable results, for a family chart of eye color, but how could anyone trace the alleged gene for “optimism,” “feeble inhibition,” or “wanderlust”—not to mention such largely situational phenomena as “pauperism” or “communality”? Was Great-uncle George a jovial backslapper or a reclusive cuss?)
Whatever the dubious validity of such overextended attempts to reduce complex human behaviors to effects of single genes, this strategy certainly served the aims and purposes of the early twentieth century’s most influential social crusade with an allegedly scientific foundation: the eugenics movement, with its stated aim of “improving” America’s hereditary stock by preventing procreation among the supposedly unfit (called “negative eugenics”) and encouraging more breeding among those deemed superior in bloodline (“positive eugenics”). The abuses of this movement have been extensively documented in many excellent books covering such subjects as the hereditarian theory of mental testing, and the passage of legislation for involuntary sterilization and restriction of immigration from nations deemed inferior in hereditary stock.
Many early geneticists played an active role in the eugenics movement, but none more zealously than the aforementioned Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944), who received a Ph.D. in zoology at Harvard in 1892, taught at the University of Chicago, and then became head of the Carnegie Institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where he also established and directed the Eugenics Record Office, beginning in 1910. This office, with mixed aims of supposedly scientific documentation and overt political advocacy, existed primarily to establish and compile detailed pedigrees in attempts to identify the hereditary basis of human traits. The hyperenthusiastic Davenport secured funding from several of America’s leading (and in their own judgment, therefore eugenically blessed) families, particularly from Mrs. E. H. Harriman, the guardian angel and chief moneybags for the entire movement.
In his 1911 textbook, dedicated to Mrs. Harriman “in recognition of the generous assistance she has given to research in eugenics,” Davenport stressed the dependence of effective eugenics upon the new Mendelian “knowledge” that complex behavioral traits may be caused by single genes. Writing of the five thousand immigrants who passed through Ellis Island every day, Davenport stated:
Every one of these peasants, each item of that “riff-raff” of Europe, as it is sometimes carelessly called, will, if fecund, play a role for better or worse in the future history of this nation. Formerly, when we believed that factors blend, a characteristic in the germ plasm of a single individual among thousands seemed not worth considering: it would soon be lost in the melting pot. But now we know that unit characters do not blend; that after a score of generations the given characteristic may still appear, unaffected by repeated unions…. So the individual, as the bearer of a potentially immortal germ plasm with innumerable traits, becomes of the greatest interest.
—that is, of our “greatest interest” to exclude by vetting and restricting immigration, lest American heredity be overwhelmed with a deluge of permanent bad genes from the wretched refuse of foreign lands.
To illustrate Davenport’s characteristic style of argument, and to exemplify his easy slippage between supposed scientific documentation and overt political advocacy, we may turn to his influential 1915 monograph entitled The Feebly Inherited (publication number 236 of his benefactors, the Carnegie Institute of Washington), especially to part 1 on “Nomadism, or The Wandering Impulse, With Special Reference to Heredity.” The preface makes no bones about either sponsorship or intent. With three of America’s wealthiest and most conservative families on board, one could hardly expect disinterested neutrality toward the full range of possible results. The Carnegies had endowed the general show, while Davenport paid homage to specific patrons: “The cost of training the field-workers was met by Mrs. E. H. Harriman, founder and principal patron of the Eugenics Record Office, and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, who paid also the salaries of many of the field-workers.”
Davenport’s preface also boldly admits his political position and purposes. He wishes to establish “feeble inhibition” as a category of temperament leading to inferior morality. Such a formulation will provide a one-two punch for identification of the eugenically unfit—bad intellect and bad morals. According to Davenport, the genetic basis of intelligence had already been documented in numerous studies of the feebleminded. But eugenics now needed to codify the second major reason for excluding immigrants and discouraging or denying reproductive rights to the native unfit—bad moral character (as in Davenport’s fallback position, documented earlier in this essay, for restricting Jewish immigration when he could not invoke the usual charge of intellectual inferiority). Davenport writes:
A word may be said as to the term “feebly inhibited” used in these studies. It was selected as a fit term to stand as co-ordinate with “feeble-minded” and as the result of a conviction that the phenomena with which it deals should properly be considered apart from those of feeble-mindedness.
To allay any doubt about his motivations, Davenport then makes his political point up front. Feeble inhibition, leading to immorality, may be more dangerous than feeblemindedness, leading to stupidity:
I think it helps to consider separately the hereditary basis of the intellect and the emotions. It is in this conviction that these studies are submitted for thoughtful consideration. For, after all, the chief problem in administering society is that of disordered conduct, conduct is controlled by emotions, and the quality of the emotions is strongly tinged by the hereditary constitution.
Davenport then selects “nomadism” as his primary example of a putatively simple Mendelian trait—the product of a single gene—based on “feeble inhibition” and leading almost inevitably to immoral behavior. He encounters a problem of definition at the very outset of his work, as expressed in an opening sentence that must be ranked as one of the least profound in the entire history of science! “A tendency to wander in some degree is a normal characteristic of man, as indeed of most animals, in sharp contrast to most plants.”
How then shall the “bad” form of wanderlust, defined as a compulsion to flee from responsibility, be distinguished from the meritorious sense of bravery and adventure—leading to “good” wanderlust—that motivated our early (and largely northern European) immigrants to colonize and subdue the frontier? Davenport had warmly praised the “good” form in his 1911 book as “the enterprising restlessness of the early settlers … the ambitious search for better conditions. The abandoned farms of New England point to the trait in our blood that entices us to move on to reap a possible advantage elsewhere.”
In a feeble attempt to put false labels on segments of
complex continua, Davenport identified the “bad” form as “nomadism,” defined as an inability to inhibit the urge we all feel (from time to time) to flee from our duties, but that folks of normal and decent morality suppress. Nomads are society’s tramps, bums, hoboes, and gypsies—“those who, while capable of steady and effective work, at more or less regular periods run away from the place where their duties He and travel considerable distances.”
Having defined his quarry (albeit in a fatally subjective way), Davenport then required two further arguments to make his favored link of a “bad” trait (rooted in feeble inhibition and leading to immoral behavior) to a single gene that eugenics might labor to breed down and out: he needed to prove the hereditary basis, and then to find the “gene,” for nomadism.
His arguments for a genetic basis must be judged as astonishingly weak, even by the standards of his own generation (and despite the renown of his work, attributable, we must assume in retrospect, to its consonance with what most readers wanted to believe rather than to the quality of Davenport’s logic or data). He simply argued, based on four dubious analogies, that features akin to nomadism emerge whenever situations veer toward “raw” nature (where genetics must rule), and away from environmental refinements of modern human society. Nomadism must be genetic because analogous features appear as “the wandering instinct in great apes,” “among primitive peoples,” in children (then regarded as akin to primitives under the false view that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), and in adolescents (where raw instinct temporarily overwhelms social inhibition in the Sturm and Drang of growing up). The argument about “primitive” people seems particularly weak, since a propensity for wandering might be regarded as well suited to a lifestyle based on hunting mobile game, rather than identified as a mark of inadequate genetic constitution (or any kind of genetic constitution at all). But Davenport, reversing the probable route of cause and effect, pushed through any difficulty to his desired conclusion: