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Jewish Involvement in Shaping American

Immigration Policy, 1881-1965: A Historical

Review

Kevin MacDonald

California State University-Long Beach

This paper discusses Jewish involvement in shaping United States immigration pol-

icy. In addition to a periodic interest in fostering the immigration of co-religionists

as a result of anti-Semitic movements, Jews have an interest in opposing the estab-

lishment of ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies in which they reside as

minorities. Jews have been at the forefront in supporting movements aimed at alter-

ing the ethnic status quo in the United States in favor of immigration of non-Euro-

pean peoples. These activities have involved leadership in Congress, organizing

and funding anti-restrictionist groups composed of Jews and gentiles, and originat-

ing intellectual movements opposed to evolutionary and biological perspectives in

the social sciences.

INTRODUCTION

Ethnic conflict is of obvious importance for understanding critical as-

pects of American history, and not only for understanding black/white eth-

nic conflict or the fate of Native Americans. Immigration policy is a para-

digmatic example of conflict of interest between ethnic groups because

immigration policy influences the future demographic composition of the

nation. Ethnic groups unable to influence immigration policy in their own

Please address correspondence to Dr. MacDonald, Department of Psychology, California

State University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901.

Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies

Volume 19, Number 4, March 1998

© 1998 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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interests will eventually be displaced or reduced in relative numbers by

groups able to accomplish this goal.

This paper discusses ethnic conflict between Jews and gentiles in the

area of immigration policy. Immigration policy is, however, only one as-

pect of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles in America. The

skirmishes between Jews and the gentile power structure beginning in the

late nineteenth century always had strong overtones of anti-Semitism.

These battles involved issues of Jewish upward mobility, quotas on Jewish

representation in elite schools beginning in the nineteenth century and

peaking in the 1920s and 1930s, the anti-Communist crusades in the post-

World War II era, as well as the very powerful concern with the cultural

influences of the major media extending from Henry Ford's writings in the

1920s to the Hollywood inquisitions of the McCarthy era and into the con-

temporary era. That anti-Semitism was involved in these issues can be seen

from the fact that historians of Judaism (e.g., Sachar, 1992, p. 620ff) feel

compelled to include accounts of these events as important to the history

of Jews in America, by the anti-Semitic pronouncements of many of the

gentile participants, and by the self-conscious understanding of Jewish par-

ticipants and observers.

The Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the United

States is especially noteworthy as an aspect of ethnic conflict. Jewish in-

volvement has had certain unique qualities that have distinguished Jewish

interests from the interests of other groups favoring liberal immigration pol-

icies. Throughout much of this period, one Jewish interest in liberal immi-

gration policies stemmed from a desire to provide a sanctuary for Jews

fleeing from anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe and elsewhere. Anti-Semi-

tic persecutions have been a recurrent phenomenon in the modern world

beginning with the Czarist persecutions in 1881, and continuing into the

post-World War II era in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As a result,

liberal immigration has been a Jewish interest because "survival often dic-

tated that Jews seek refuge in other lands" (Cohen, 1972, p. 341). For a

similar reason, Jews have consistently advocated an internationalist foreign

policy for the United States because "an internationally-minded America

was likely to be more sensitive to the problems of foreign Jewries" (Cohen,

1972, p. 342).

However, in addition to a persistent concern that America be a safe

haven for Jews fleeing outbreaks of anti-Semitism in foreign countries,

there is evidence that Jews, much more than any other European-derived

ethnic group in America, have viewed liberal immigration policies as a

mechanism of ensuring that America would be a pluralistic rather than a

unitary, homogeneous society (e.g., Cohen, 1972). Pluralism serves both

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internal (within-group) and external (between-group) Jewish interests. Plu-

ralism serves internal Jewish interests because it legitimates the internal

Jewish interest in rationalizing and openly advocating an interest in Jewish

group commitment and non-assimilation, what Howard Sachar (1992, p.

427) terms its function in "legitimizing the preservation of a minority cul-

ture in the midst of a majority's host society." The development of an eth-

nic, political, or religious monoculture implies that Judaism can survive

only by engaging in a sort of semi-crypsis. As Irving Louis Horowitz (1993,

p. 86) notes regarding the longterm consequences of Jewish life under

Communism, "Jews suffer, their numbers decline, and emigration becomes

a survival solution when the state demands integration into a national

mainstream, a religious universal defined by a state religion or a near-state

religion." Both Neusner (1987) and Ellman (1987) suggest that the in-

creased sense of ethnic consciousness seen in Jewish circles recently has

been influenced by this general movement within American society toward

the legitimization of minority group ethnocentrism.

More importantly, ethnic and religious pluralism serves external Jew-

ish interests because Jews become just one of many ethnic groups. This

results in the diffusion of political and cultural influence among the various

ethnic and religious groups, and it becomes difficult or impossible to de-

velop unified, cohesive groups of gentiles united in their opposition to Ju-

daism. Historically, major anti-Semitic movements have tended to erupt in

societies that have been, apart from the Jews, religiously and/or ethnically

homogeneous (MacDonald, 1994; 1998). Conversely, one reason for the

relative lack of anti-Semitism in America compared to Europe was that

"Jews did not stand out as a solitary group of [religious] non-conformists"

(Higham, 1984, p. 156). It follows also that ethnically and religiously plu-

ralistic societies are more likely to satisfy Jewish interests than are societies

characterized by ethnic and religious homogeneity among gentiles.

Beginning with Horace Kallen, Jewish intellectuals have been at the

forefront in developing models of the United States as a culturally and

ethnically pluralistic society. Reflecting the utility of cultural pluralism in

serving internal Jewish group interests in maintaining cultural separatism,

Kallen personally combined his ideology of cultural pluralism with a deep

immersion in Jewish history and literature, a commitment to Zionism, and

political activity on behalf of Jews in Eastern Europe (Sachar 1992, p. 425ff;

Frommer, 1978).

Kallen (1915; 1924) developed a "polycentric" ideal for American eth-

nic relationships. Kallen defined ethnicity as deriving from one's biological

endowment, implying that Jews should be able to remain a genetically and

culturally cohesive group while nevertheless participating in American

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democratic institutions. This conception that the United States should be

organized as a set of separate ethnic/cultural groups was accompanied by

an ideology that relationships between groups would be cooperative and

benign: "Kallen lifted his eyes above the strife that swirled around him to

an ideal realm where diversity and harmony coexist" (Higham, 1984, p.

209). Similarly in Germany, the Jewish leader Moritz Lazarus argued, in

opposition to the views of the German intellectual Heinrich Treitschke, that

the continued separateness of diverse ethnic groups contributed to the rich-

ness of German culture (Schorsch, 1972, p. 63). Lazarus also developed

the doctrine of dual loyalty which became a cornerstone of the Zionist

movement.

Kallen wrote his 1915 essay partly in reaction to the ideas of Edward

A. Ross (1914). Ross was a Darwinian sociologist who believed that the

existence of clearly demarcated groups would tend to result in between-

group competition for resources. Higham's comment is interesting because

it shows that Kallen's romantic views of group coexistence were contra-

dicted by the reality of between-group competition in his own day. Indeed,

it is noteworthy that Kallen was a prominent leader of the American Jewish

Congress (AJCongress). During the 1920s and 1930s the AJCongress cham-

pioned group economic and political rights for Jews in Eastern Europe at a

time when there were widespread ethnic tensions and persecution of Jews,

and despite the fears of many that such rights would merely exacerbate

current tensions. The AJCongress demanded that Jews be allowed propor-

tional political representation as well as the ability to organize their own

communities and preserve an autonomous Jewish national culture. The

treaties with Eastern European countries and Turkey included provisions

that the state provide instruction in minority languages and that Jews have

the right to refuse to attend courts or other public functions on the Sabbath

(Frommer, 1978, p. 162).

Kallen's idea of cultural pluralism as a model for America was popu-

larized among gentile intellectuals by John Dewey (Higham, 1984, p. 209),

who in turn was promoted by Jewish intellectuals: "If lapsed Congrega-

tionalists like Dewey did not need immigrants to inspire them to press

against the boundaries of even the most liberal of Protestant sensibilities,

Dewey's kind were resoundingly encouraged in that direction by the Jew-

ish intellectuals they encountered in urban academic and literary commu-

nities" (Hollinger, 1996, p. 24).

Kallen's ideas have been very influential in producing Jewish self-con-

ceptualizations of their status in America. This influence was apparent as

early as 1915 among American Zionists, such as Louis D. Brandeis. Bran-

deis viewed America as composed of different nationalities whose free de-

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velopment would "spiritually enrich the United States and would make it a

democracy par excellence" (Gal, 1989, p. 70). These views became "a

hallmark of mainstream American Zionism, secular and religious alike"

(Gal, 1989, p. 70). But Kallen's influence extended really to all educated

Jews:

Legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst

of a majority's host society, pluralism functioned as intellectual

anchorage for an educated Jewish second generation, sustained

its cohesiveness and its most tenacious communal endeavors

through the rigors of the Depression and revived anti-semitism,

through the shock of Nazism and the Holocaust, until the emer-

gence of Zionism in the post-World War II years swept through

American Jewry with a climactic redemptionist fervor of its

own. (Sachar, 1992, p. 427)

Explicit statements linking immigration policy to a Jewish interest in

cultural pluralism can be found among prominent Jewish social scientists

and political activists. In his review of Kallen's (1956) Cultural Pluralism

and the American Idea appearing in Congress Weekly (published by the

AJCongress), Joseph L. Blau (1958, p. 15) noted that "Kallen's view is

needed to serve the cause of minority groups and minority cultures in this

nation without a permanent majority"—the implication being that Kallen's

ideology of multiculturalism opposes the interests of any ethnic group

in dominating America. The well-known author and prominent Zionist

Maurice Samuel (1924, p. 215) writing partly as a negative reaction to the

restrictive immigration law of 1924, wrote that "If, then, the struggle be-

tween us [i.e., Jews and gentiles] is ever to be lifted beyond the physical,

your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual and

cultural homogeneity with the State. But it would be foolish to regard this

as a possibility, for the tendency of this civilization is in the opposite direc-

tion. There is a steady approach toward the identification of government

with race, instead of with the political State."

Samuel deplored the 1924 legislation and in the following quote he

develops the view of the American state as having no ethnic implications.

We have just witnessed, in America, the repetition, in the pecu-

liar form adapted to this country, of the evil farce to which the

experience of many centuries has not yet accustomed us. If

America had any meaning at all, it lay in the peculiar attempt to

rise above the trend of our present civilization—the identifica-

tion of race with State. . . . America was therefore the New

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World in this vital respect—that the State was purely an ideal,

and nationality was identical only with acceptance of the ideal.

But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken

one, that America was incapable of rising above her origins,

and the semblance of an ideal-nationalism was only a stage in

the proper development of the universal gentile spirit. ... To-

day, with race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its

fangs, and to the heartless refusal of the most elementary hu-

man right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly insult. We are

not only excluded, but we are told, in the unmistakable lan-

guage of the immigration laws, that we are an "inferior" people.

Without the moral courage to stand up squarely to its evil in-

stincts, the country prepared itself, through its journalists, by a

long draught of vilification of the Jew, and, when sufficiently

inspired by the popular and "scientific" potions, committed the

act. (pp. 218-220)

A congruent opinion is expressed by prominent Jewish social scientist

and political activist Earl Raab' who remarks very positively on the success

of revised American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition

of the United States since 1965. Raab notes that the Jewish community has

taken a leadership role in changing the Northwestern European bias of

American immigration policy (1993a, p. 17), and he has also maintained

that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States

is that "(a)n increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has

made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of big-

otry to develop" (1995, p. 91). Or more colorfully:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the

American population will soon be non-white or non-European.

And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond

the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in

this country. We [i.e., Jews] have been nourishing the American

climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That

climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous na-

ture of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes

our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical

than ever (Raab, 1993b, p. 23).2

Indeed, the "primary objective" of Jewish political activity after 1945

"was ... to prevent the emergence of an anti-Semitic reactionary mass

movement in the United States" (Svonkin 1997, 1998). Charles Silberman

(1985, p. 350) notes that "American Jews are committed to cultural toler-

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ance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are

safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as

well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example,

not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of Ameri-

can Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stance on most other

so-called 'social' issues."3 Silberman's comment that Jewish attitudes are

"firmly rooted in history" is quite reasonable: there has indeed been a ten-

dency for Jews to be persecuted by a culturally and/or ethnically homoge-

neous majority that come to view Jews as a negatively evaluated outgroup.

Similarly, in listing the positive benefits of immigration, Diana Aviv,

director of the Washington Action Office of the Council of Jewish Federa-

tions, states that immigration "is about diversity, cultural enrichment and

economic opportunity for the immigrants" (quoted in Forward, March 8,

1996, p. 5). And in summarizing Jewish involvement in the 1996 legisla-

tive battles a newspaper account stated that "Jewish groups failed to kill a

number of provisions that reflect the kind of political expediency that they

regard as a direct attack on American pluralism" (Detroit Jewish News,

May 10, 1996).

It is noteworthy also that there has been a conflict between predomi-

nantly Jewish neo-conservatives and predominantly gentile paleo-conser-

vatives over the issue of third world immigration into the United States.

Many of these neo-conservative intellectuals had previously been radical

leftists,4 and the split between the neo-conservatives and their previous al-

lies resulted in an intense internecine feud (Gottfried, 1993; Rothman &

Lichter, 1982, p. 105). Neo-conservatives Norman Podhoretz and Richard

John Neuhaus reacted very negatively to an article by a paleo-conservative

concerned that such immigration would eventually lead to the United

States being dominated by such immigrants (see Judis, 1990, p. 33). Other

examples are neo-conservatives Julian Simon (1990) and Ben Wattenberg

(1991), both of whom advocate very high levels of immigration from all

parts of the world, so that the United States will become what Wattenberg

describes as the world's first "Universal Nation." Based on recent data,

Fetzer (1996) reports that Jews remain far more favorable to immigration to

the United States than any other ethnic or religious group.

It should be noted as a general point that the effectiveness of Jewish

organizations in influencing American immigration policy has been facili-

tated by certain characteristics of American Jewry. As Neuringer (1971, p.

87) notes, Jewish influence on immigration policy was facilitated by Jewish

wealth, education, and social status. Reflecting its general disproportionate

representation in markers of economic success and political influence,

Jewish organizations have been able to have a vastly disproportionate ef-

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fect on United States immigration policy because Jews as a group are

highly organized, highly intelligent, and politically astute, and they were

able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual re-

sources in pursuing their political aims. Similarly, Hollinger (1996, p. 19)

notes that Jews were more influential in the decline of a homogeneous

Protestant Christian culture in the United States than Catholics because of

their greater wealth, social standing, and technical skill in the intellectual

arena. In the area of immigration policy, the main Jewish activist organ-

ization influencing immigration policy, the American Jewish Committee

(AJCommittee), was characterized by "strong leadership [particularly Louis

Marshall], internal cohesion, well-funded programs, sophisticated lobbying

techniques, well-chosen non-Jewish allies, and good timing" (Goldstein,

1990, p. 333).

In this regard, the Jewish success in influencing immigration policy is

entirely analogous to their success in influencing the secularization of

American culture. As in the case of immigration policy, the secularization

of American culture is a Jewish interest because Jews have a perceived

interest that America not be a homogeneous Christian culture. "Jewish civil

rights organizations have had an historic role in the postwar development

of American church-state law and policy" (Ivers, 1995, p. 2). Unlike the

effort to influence immigration, the opposition to a homogeneous Christian

culture was mainly carried out in the courts. The Jewish effort in this case

was well funded and was the focus of well-organized, highly dedicated

Jewish civil service organizations, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress,

and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It involved keen legal expertise

both in the actual litigation but also in influencing legal opinion via articles

in law journals and other forums of intellectual debate, including the popu-

lar media. It also involved a highly charismatic and effective leadership,

particularly Leo Pfeffer of the AJCongress:

No other lawyer exercised such complete intellectual domi-

nance over a chosen area of law for so extensive a period—as

an author, scholar, public citizen, and above all, legal advocate

who harnessed his multiple and formidable talents into a single

force capable of satisfying all that an institution needs for a suc-

cessful constitutional reform movement. . . . That Pfeffer,

through an enviable combination of skill, determination, and

persistence, was able in such a short period of time to make

church-state reform the foremost cause with which rival organi-

zations associated the AJCongress illustrates well the impact

that individual lawyers endowed with exceptional skills can

have on the character and life of the organizations for which

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KEVIN MACDONALD

they work. ... As if to confirm the extent to which Pfeffer is

associated with post-Everson [i.e., post-1946] constitutional de-

velopment, even the major critics of the Court's church-state

jurisprudence during this period and the modern doctrine of

separationism rarely fail to make reference to Pfeffer as the cen-

tral force responsible for what they lament as the lost meaning

of the establishment clause (Ivers, 1995, pp. 222-224).

Similarly, Hollinger (1996, p. 4) notes "the transformation of the eth-

noreligious demography of American academic life by jews" in the period

from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as the Jewish influence on trends

toward the secularization of American society and in advancing an ideal of

cosmopolitanism (p. 11). The pace of this influence was very likely influ-

enced by immigration battles of the 1920s. Hollinger notes that the "the

old Protestant establishment's influence persisted until the 1960s in large

measure because of the Immigration Act of 1924: had the massive immi-

gration of Catholics and Jews continued at pre-1924 levels, the course of

American history would have been different in many ways, including, one

may reasonably speculate, a more rapid diminution of Protestant cultural

hegemony. Immigration restriction gave that hegemony a new lease of life"

(p. 22). It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the immigration battles

from 1881 to 1965 have been of momentous historical importance in shap-

ing the contours of American culture in the late twentieth century.

The ultimate success of Jewish attitudes on immigration was also influ-

enced by intellectual movements that collectively resulted in a decline

of evolutionary and biological thinking in the academic world. Although

playing virtually no role in the restrictionist position in the Congressional

debates on immigration (which focused mainly on the fairness of maintain-

ing the ethnic status quo; see below), a component of the intellectual

Zeitgeist of the 1920s was the prevalence of evolutionary theories of race

and ethnicity (Singerman, 1986), particularly the theories of Madison

Grant. In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant (1921) argued that the

American colonial stock was derived from superior Nordic racial elements

and that immigration of other races would lower the competence level of

the society as a whole as well as threaten democratic and republican insti-

tutions. Grant's ideas were popularized in the media at the time of the

immigration debates (see Divine, 1957, pp. 12ff) and often provoked nega-

tive comments in Jewish publications such as The American Hebrew (e.g.,

March 21, 1924, pp. 554, 625).5

The debate over group differences in IQ was also tied to the immigra-

tion issue. C. C. Brigham's study of intelligence among United States army

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personnel concluded that Nordics were superior to Alpine and Mediterra-

nean Europeans, and Brigham (1923, p. 210) concluded that "[i]mmigra-

tion should not only be restrictive but highly selective." In the Foreword to

Brigham's book, Harvard psychologist Robert M. Yerkes stated that "The

author presents not theories but facts. It behooves us to consider their re-

liability and meaning, for no one of us as a citizen can afford to ignore the

menace of race deterioration or the evident relation of immigration to na-

tional progress and welfare" (in Brigham, 1923, pp. vii-viii).

Nevertheless, as Samelson (1975) points out, the drive to restrict immi-

gration originated long before IQ testing came into existence; and restric-

tion was favored by a variety of groups, including organized labor, for

reasons other than those related to race and IQ, including especially the

fairness of maintaining the ethnic status quo in the United States. More-

over, although Brigham's IQ testing results did indeed appear in the state-

ment submitted by the Allied Patriotic Societies to the House hearings,5 the

role of IQ testing in the immigration debates has been greatly exaggerated

(Snyderman & Herrnstein, 1983). Indeed, IQ testing was never even men-

tioned in either the House Majority Report or the Minority Report, and

"there is no mention of intelligence testing in the Act; test results on immi-

grants appear only briefly in the committee hearings and are then largely

ignored or criticized, and they are brought up only once in over 600 pages

of congressional floor debate, where they are subjected to further criticism

without rejoinder. None of the major contemporary figures in testing . . .

were called to testify, nor were their writings inserted into the legislative

record" (Snyderman & Herrnstein 1983, 994).

It is also very easy to over-emphasize the importance of theories of

Nordic superiority as an ingredient of popular and congressional restric-

tionist sentiment. As Singerman (1986, 118-119) points out, "racial anti-

Semitism" was employed by only "a handful of writers"; and "the Jewish

'problem' . . . was a minor preoccupation even among such widely-pub-

lished authors as Madison Grant or T. Lothrop Stoddard and none of the

individuals examined [in Singerman's review] could be regarded as profes-

sional Jew-baiters or full-time propagandists against Jews, domestic or for-

eign." As indicated below, arguments related to Nordic superiority, includ-

ing supposed Nordic intellectual superiority, played remarkably little role

in congressional debates over immigration in the 1920s, the common argu-

ment of the restrictionists being that immigration policy should reflect

equally the interests of all ethnic groups currently in the country.

Nevertheless, it is probable that the decline in evolutionary/biological

theories of race and ethnicity facilitated the sea change in immigration

policy brought about by the 1965 law. As Higham (1984) notes, by the

time of the final victory in 1965 which removed national origins and racial

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ancestry from immigration policy and opened up immigration to all human

groups, the Boasian perspective of cultural determinism and anti-biologism

had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that "it became

intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic

differences. The whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a power-

ful ideological weapon" (Higham, 1984, pp. 58-59).

Jewish intellectuals were prominently involved in the movement to

eradicate the racialist ideas of Grant and others (Degler, 1991, p. 200).

Indeed, even during the earlier debates leading up to the immigration bills

of 1921 and 1924, restrictionists perceived themselves to be under attack

from Jewish intellectuals. In 1918, Prescott F. Hall, secretary of the Immi-

gration Restriction League, wrote to Grant that "What I wanted . .. was the

names of a few anthropologists of note who have declared in favor of the

inequality of the races. ... I am up against the Jews all the time in the

equality argument and thought perhaps you might be able offhand to name

a few (besides Osborn) whom I could quote in support" (in Samelson,

1975, p. 467).

Grant also believed that Jews were engaged in a campaign to discredit

racial research. In the Introduction to the 1921 edition of Passing of the

Great Race, Grant complained that "[i]t is well-nigh impossible to publish

in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races

which are hysterically sensitive even when not mentioned by name. The

underlying idea seems to be that if publication can be suppressed the facts

themselves will ultimately disappear. Abroad, conditions are fully as bad,

and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in

France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among

French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish

influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation

in France."

Particularly important was the work of Columbia University anthro-

pologist Franz Boas and his followers. "Boas's influence upon American

social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated" (Degler,

1991, p. 61). He engaged in a "life-long assault on the idea that race was a

primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capa-

bilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his

ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture" (p. 61).

"Boas, almost single-handedly, developed in America the concept of cul-

ture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the

literature of social science" (p. 71).

Throughout this explication of Boas's conception of culture and

his opposition to a racial interpretation of human behavior, the

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central point has been that Boas did not arrive at the position

from a disinterested, scientific inquiry into a vexed if controver-

sial question. Instead, his idea derived from an ideological com-

mitment that began in his early life and academic experiences

in Europe and continued in America to shape his professional

outlook. . . . there is no doubt that he had a deep interest in

collecting evidence and designing arguments that would rebut

or refute an ideological outlook—racism—which he consid-

ered restrictive upon individuals and undesirable for society... .

there is a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon

the profession and the public. (Degler, 1991, pp. 82-83)

There is evidence that Boas strongly identified as a Jew and viewed his

research as having important implications in the political arena and partic-

ularly in the area of immigration policy. Boas was born in Prussia to a

"Jewish-liberal" family in which the revolutionary ideals of 1848 remained

influential (Stocking, 1968, p. 149). Boas developed a "left-liberal posture

which ... is at once scientific and political" (Stocking, 1968, p. 149) and

was intensely concerned with anti-Semitism from an early period in his life

(White, 1966, p. 16). Moreover, Boas was deeply alienated from and hos-

tile toward gentile culture, particularly the cultural ideal of the Prussian

aristocracy (Degler, 1991, p. 200; Stocking, 1968, p. 150). For example,

when Margaret Mead was looking for a way to persuade Boas to let her

pursue her research in the South Sea islands, "she hit upon a sure way of

getting him to change his mind. 'I knew there was one thing that mattered

more to Boas than the direction taken by anthropological research. This

was that he should behave like a liberal, democratic, modern man, not like

a Prussian autocrat.' The ploy worked because she had indeed uncovered

the heart of his personal values" (Degler, 1991, p. 73).

Boas was greatly motivated by the immigration debate as it occurred

early in the century. Carl Degler (1991, p. 74) notes that Boas's profes-

sional correspondence "reveals that an important motive behind his fa-

mous head-measuring project in 1910 was his strong personal interest in

keeping America diverse in population." The study, whose conclusions

were placed into the Congressional Record by Representative Emanuel

Celler during the debate on immigration restriction (Cong. Rec.,April 8,

1924, pp. 5915-5916), concluded that the environmental differences con-

sequent to immigration caused differences in head shape. (At the time,

head shape as determined by the "cephalic index" was the main measure-

ment used by scientists involved in racial differences research.) Boas ar-

gued that his research showed that all foreign groups living in favorable

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social circumstances had become assimilated to America in the sense that

their physical measurements converged on the American type. Although he

was considerably more circumspect regarding his conclusions in the body

of his report (see also Stocking, 1968, p. 178), Boas (1911, p. 5) stated in

his Introduction that "all fear of an unfavorable influence of South Euro-

pean immigration upon the body of our people should be dismissed." As a

further indication of Boas's ideological commitment to the immigration is-

sue, Degler makes the following comment regarding one of Boas's environ-

mentalist explanations for mental differences between immigrant and na-

tive children: "Why Boas chose to advance such an adhoc interpretation is

hard to understand until one recognizes his desire to explain in a favorable

way the apparent mental backwardness of the immigrant children" (p. 75).

Boas and his students were intensely concerned with pushing an ideo-

logical agenda within the American anthropological profession (Degler,

1991; Freeman, 1991; Torrey, 1992). In this regard it is interesting that Boas

and his associates had a much more highly developed sense of group iden-

tity, a commitment to a common viewpoint, and an agenda to dominate

the institutional structure of anthropology than did their opponents (Stock-

ing, 1968, pp. 279-280). The defeat of the Darwinians "had not happened

without considerable exhortation of 'every mother's son' standing for the

'Right.' Nor had it been accomplished without some rather strong pressure

applied both to staunch friends and to the 'weaker brethren'—often by the

sheer force of Boas's personality" (Stocking, 1968, p. 286). By 1915 the

Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a

two-thirds majority on the Executive Board (Stocking, 1968, 285). By 1926

every major department of anthropology in the United States was headed

by a student of Boas, the majority of whom were Jewish. According to

White (1966, p. 26), Boas's most influential students were Ruth Benedict,

Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert

Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier. All of

this "small, compact group of scholars . . . gathered about their leader"

(White, 1966, p. 26) were Jews with the exception of Kroeber, Benedict

and Mead. Indeed, Herskovits (1953, p. 91), whose hagiography of Boas

qualifies as one of the most worshipful in intellectual history, noted that

[t]he four decades of the tenure of [Boas's] professorship at Co-

lumbia gave a continuity to his teaching that permitted him to

develop students who eventually made up the greater part of

the significant professional core of American anthropologists,

and who came to man and direct most of the major depart-

ments of anthropology in the United States. In their turn, they

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

trained the students who . . . have continued the tradition in

which their teachers were trained.

By the mid-1930s the Boasian view of the cultural determination of human

behavior had a strong influence on social scientists generally (Stocking,

1968, p. 300).

The ideology of racial equality was an important weapon on behalf of

opening immigration up to all human groups. For example, in a 1951 state-

ment to Congress, the AJCongress stated that "The findings of science must

force even the most prejudiced among us to accept, as unqualifiedly as we

do the law of gravity, that intelligence, morality and character, bear no

relationship whatever to geography or place of birth."7 The statement went

on to cite some of Boas's popular writings on the subject as well as the

writings of Boas's protege Ashley Montagu, perhaps the most visible oppo-

nent of the concept of race during this period. Montagu, whose original

name was Israel Ehrenberg, theorized that humans are innately cooperative

(but not innately aggressive) and there is a universal brotherhood among

humans (see Shipman, 1994, p. 159ff). And in 1952 another Boas protege,

Margaret Mead, testified before the President's Commission on Immigration

and Naturalization (PCIN) (1953, p. 92) that "all human beings from all

groups of people have the same potentialities. . . . Our best anthropologi-

cal evidence today suggests that the people of every group have about the

same distribution of potentialities." Another witness stated that the execu-

tive board of the American Anthropological Association had unanimously

endorsed the proposition that "[a]ll scientific evidence indicates that all

peoples are inherently capable of acquiring or adapting to our civilization"

(PCIN, 1953, p. 93). By 1965 Senator Jacob Javits (Cong. Rec., 111, 1965,

p. 24469) confidently announced to the Senate during the debate on the

immigration bill that "[b]oth the dictates of our consciences as well as the

precepts of sociologists tell us that immigration, as it exists in the national

origins quota system, is wrong, and without any basis in reason or fact for

we know better than to say that one man is better than another because of

the color of his skin." The intellectual revolution and its translation into

public policy had been completed.

JEWISH ANTI-RESTRICTIONIST POLITICAL ACTIVITY

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity up to 1924

While Jewish involvement in altering the intellectual discussion of

race and ethnicity appears to have had longterm repercussions on United

308

KEVIN MACDONALD

States immigration policy, Jewish political involvement was ultimately of

much greater significance. Jewish opinion is not monolithic. Nevertheless,

although there have been (and notably are) dissenters, Jews have been "the

single most persistent pressure group favoring a liberal immigration policy"

in the United States in the entire immigration debate beginning in 1881

(Neuringer, 1971, p. ii):

In undertaking to sway immigration policy in a liberal direction,

Jewish spokesmen and organizations demonstrated a degree of

energy unsurpassed by any other interested pressure group. Im-

migration had constituted a prime object of concern for prac-

tically every major Jewish defense and community relations or-

ganization. Over the years, their spokesmen had assiduously

attended congressional hearings, and the Jewish effort was of

the utmost importance in establishing and financing such non-

sectarian groups as the National Liberal Immigration League

and the Citizens Committee for Displaced Persons.

As recounted by Nathan C. Belth (1979, p. 173) in his history of the

Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADD, "In Congress, through all the

years when the immigration battles were being fought, the names of Jewish

legislators were in the forefront of the liberal forces: from Adolph Sabath to

Samuel Dickstein and Emanuel Celler in the House and from Herbert H.

Lehman to Jacob Javits in the Senate. Each in his time was a leader of the

Anti-Defamation League and of major organizations concerned with demo-

cratic development." The Jewish congressmen who are most closely identi-

fied with anti-restrictionist efforts in Congress have therefore also been

leaders of the group most closely identified with Jewish ethnic political

activism and self-defense.

Throughout the entire period of almost 100 years prior to achieving

success with the immigration law of 1965, Jewish groups opportunistically

made alliances with other groups whose interests temporarily converged

with Jewish interests (e.g., a constantly changing set of ethnic groups, reli-

gious groups, pro-Communists, anti-Communists, the foreign policy inter-

ests of various presidents, the political need for presidents to curry favor

with groups influential in populous states in order to win national elec-

tions, etc.). Particularly noteworthy was the support of a liberal immigra-

tion policy from industrial interests wanting cheap labor, at least in the

period prior to the 1924 temporary triumph of restrictionism. Within this

constantly shifting set of alliances, Jewish organizations persistently pur-

sued their goals of maximizing the number of Jewish immigrants and open-

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

ing up the United States to immigration from all of the peoples of the

world. As indicated in the following, the historical record supports the

proposition that making the United States into a multicultural society has

been a major goal of organized Jewry beginning in the nineteenth century.

The ultimate Jewish victory on immigration is remarkable because it

was waged in different arenas against a potentially very powerful set of

opponents. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, leadership of the re-

strictionists was provided by Eastern patricians such as Senator Henry

Cabot Lodge. However, the main political basis of restriction ism from 1910

to 1952 (in addition to the relatively ineffectual labor union interests) de-

rived from "the common people of the South and West" (Higham, 1984, p.

49) and their representatives in Congress. Fundamentally, the clashes be-

tween Jews and gentiles in the period between 1900 and 1965 were a

conflict between Jews and this geographically centered group. "Jews, as a

result of their intellectual energy and economic resources, constituted an

advance guard of the new peoples who had no feeling for the traditions of

rural America" (Higham, 1984, pp. 168-169).

Although often concerned that Jewish immigration would fan the

flames of anti-Semitism in America, Jewish leaders fought a long and

largely successful delaying action against restrictions on immigration dur-

ing the period from 1891-1924, particularly as they affected the ability of

Jews to immigrate. These efforts continued despite the fact that by 1905,

there was "a polarity between Jewish and general American opinion on

immigration" (Neuringer, 1971, p. 83). In particular, while other religious

groups such as Catholics and ethnic groups such as the Irish remained

divided and ambivalent on their attitudes toward immigration and were

poorly organized and ineffective in influencing immigration policy, and

while labor unions opposed immigration in their attempt to diminish the

supply of cheap labor, Jewish groups engaged in an intensive and sustained

effort against attempts to restrict immigration.

As recounted by Cohen (1972, p. 40ff), the AJCommittee's efforts in

opposition to immigration restriction in the early twentieth century consti-

tute a remarkable example of the ability of Jewish organizations to influ-

ence public policy. Of all the groups affected by the immigration legisla-

tion of 1907, Jews had the least to gain in terms of numbers of possible

immigrants, but they played by far the largest role in shaping the legislation

(Cohen, 1972, p. 41). In the subsequent period leading up to the relatively

ineffective restrictionist legislation of 1917, when restrictionists again

mounted an effort in Congress, "only the Jewish segment was aroused"

(Cohen, 1972, p. 49).

Nevertheless, because of the fear of anti-Semitism, efforts were made

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KEVIN MACDONALD

to prevent the perception of Jewish involvement in anti-restrictionist cam-

paigns. In 1906, Jewish anti-restrictionist political operatives were in-

structed to lobby Congress without mentioning their affiliation with the

AJCommittee because of "the danger that the Jews may be accused of be-

ing organized for a political purpose" (comments of Herbert Friedenwald,

AJCommittee secretary; in Goldstein, 1990, p. 125). Beginning in the late

nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments developed by Jews were

typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals, and as part

of this universalizing effort, gentiles from old line Protestant families were

recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts and Jewish groups such

as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews

(Neuringer, 1971, p. 92).

As was the case in later pro-immigration efforts, much of the activity

was behind-the-scenes personal interventions with politicians in order to

minimize public perception of the Jewish role and provoke activities of the

opposition. Opposing politicians, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, and organi-

zations like the Immigration Restriction League were kept under close scru-

tiny and pressured by lobbyists. Lobbyists in Washington also kept a daily

scorecard of voting tendencies as immigration bills wended their way

through Congress and engaged in intense and successful efforts to con-

vince Presidents Taft and Wilson to veto restrictive immigration legislation.

Catholic prelates were recruited to protest the effects of restrictionist legis-

lation on immigration from Italy and Hungary. When restrictionist argu-

ments appeared in the media, the AJCommittee made sophisticated replies,

based on scholarly data and typically couched in universalist terms as ben-

efiting the whole society (e.g., Neuringer, 1971, p. 44). Articles favorable

to immigration were published in national magazines and letters to the

editor were published in newspapers. And efforts were made to minimize

the negative perceptions of immigration by attempting to distribute Jewish

immigrants around the country and by getting Jewish aliens off public sup-

port. Legal proceedings were filed to prevent the deportation of Jewish

aliens. And eventually the Committee organized mass protest meetings.

Indeed, writing in 1914, the sociologist Edward A. Ross had a clear

sense that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue. Ross

provides the following quote from prominent author and Zionist pioneer

Israel Zangwill as clearly articulating the idea that America is an ideal

place to achieve Jewish interests.

America has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale [i.e.,

the Pale of Settlement, home to most of Russia's Jews]; any one

of her fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a

311

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than

to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose

Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collec-

tive votes would practically guarantee them against future per-

secution (Israel Zangwill, in Ross, 1914, p. 144).

Jews therefore have a powerful interest in immigration policy:

Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration pol-

icy of the United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our

net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commis-

sion's bill. The power of the million Jews in the Metropolis lined

up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposi-

tion to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers

and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and

to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew

money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and

its numerous publications. From the paper before the commer-

cial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise pro-

duced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature

that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in Amer-

ica emanates from subtle Hebrew brains (Ross, 1914, pp. 144-

145).

Ross (1914, p. 150) also reported that immigration officials had "be-

come very sore over the incessant fire of false accusations to which they

are subjected by the Jewish press and societies. United States senators

complain that during the close of the struggle over the immigration bill

they were overwhelmed with a torrent of crooked statistics and misrepre-

sentations of Hebrews fighting the literacy test." It is also noteworthy that

Zangwill's views on immigration were highly salient to restrictionists in the

debates over the 1924 immigration law (see below). In an address re-

printed in The American Hebrew (Oct. 19, 1923, p. 582), Zangwill noted

that "There is only one way to World Peace, and that is the absolute aboli-

tion of passports, visas, frontiers, custom houses, and all other devices that

make of the population of our planet not a co-operating civilization but a

mutual irritation society."

It is noteworthy that, despite elaborate and deceptive attempts to pre-

sent the pro-immigration movement as broad-based, Jewish activists were

well aware of the lack of enthusiasm of other groups. During the fight over

restrictionist legislation at the end of the Taft administration, Herbert

Friedenwald, AJCommittee secretary, wrote that it was "very difficult to get

312

KEVIN MACDONALD

any people except the Jews stirred up in this fight" (in Goldstein, 1990, p.

203). The AJCommittee also contributed heavily to staging anti-restriction-

ist rallies in major American cities, but allowed other ethnic groups to take

credit for the events, and it organized groups of non-Jews from the West to

influence President Taft to veto restrictionist legislation (Goldstein, 1990,

pp. 216, 227). Later, during the Wilson Administration, Louis Marshall

stated that "We are practically the only ones who are fighting [the literacy

test while] a great proportion [of the people is] indifferent to what is done

(in Goldstein, 1990, p. 249).

The forces of immigration restriction were temporarily successful with

the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 which passed despite the intense

opposition of Jewish groups. Divine (1957, p. 8) notes that "Arrayed against

[the restrictionist forces] in 1921 were only the spokesmen for the south-

eastern European immigrants, mainly Jewish leaders, whose protests were

drowned out by the general cry for restriction." Similarly during the 1924

congressional hearings on immigration, "the most prominent group of wit-

nesses against the bill were representatives of southeastern European immi-

grants, particularly Jewish leaders" (Divine, 1957, 16).

Neuringer (1971, p. 164) notes that Jewish opposition to the 1921 and

1924 legislation was motivated less by a desire for higher levels of Jewish

immigration than by opposition to the implicit theory that America should

be dominated by individuals with northern and western European ancestry.

The Jewish interest was thus to oppose the ethnic interests of the peoples of

northwestern Europe in maintaining an ethnic status quo or increasing their

percentage of the population. However, even prior to this period Jewish

organizations were adamantly opposed to any restrictions on immigration

based on race or ethnicity, indicating that they had a very different view of

the ideal racial/ethnic composition of the United States than did the non-

Jewish European-derived peoples.

Thus in 1882 the Jewish press was unanimous in its condemnation of

the Chinese Exclusion Act (Neuringer, 1971, p. 23) even though this act

had no direct bearing on Jewish immigration. In the early twentieth century

the AJCommittee at times actively fought against any bill that restricted

immigration to white persons or non-Asians, and only refrained from active

opposition if it judged that AJCommittee support would threaten the immi-

gration of Jews (Cohen, 1972, p. 47; Goldstein, 1990, p. 250). In 1920 the

Central Conference of American Rabbis passed a resolution urging that

"the Nation . . . keep the gates of our beloved Republic open ... to the

oppressed and distressed of all mankind in conformity with its historic role

as a haven of refuge for all men and women who pledge allegiance to its

laws" (in The American Hebrew, Oct. 1, 1920, p. 594). The American

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

Hebrew (Feb. 17, 1922, p. 373), a publication founded in 1867 that repre-

sented the German-Jewish establishment of the period, reiterated its long-

standing policy that it "has always stood for the admission of worthy immi-

grants of all classes, irrespective of nationality." And in his testimony in the

1924 hearings before the House Committee on Immigration and Natural-

ization, the AJCommittee's Louis Marshall stated that the bill echoed the

sentiments of the Ku Klux Klan and characterized it as being inspired by

the racialist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. At a time when the

population of the United States was over 100,000,000, Marshall stated that

"we have room in this country for ten times the population we have" (p.

309), and advocated admission of all of the peoples of the world without

quota limit, excluding only those who "were mentally, morally and physi-

cally unfit, who are enemies of organized government, and who are apt to

become public charges;"8 similarly Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, representing the

AJCongress and a variety of other Jewish organizations, asserted "the right

of every man outside of America to be considered fairly and equitably and

without discrimination."9

By prescribing that immigration be restricted to 3% of the foreign born

as of the 1890 census, the 1924 law prescribed an ethnic status quo ap-

proximating the 1920 census. The House Majority Report emphasized the

idea that prior to the legislation, immigration was highly biased in favor of

Eastern and Southern Europeans and that this imbalance had been contin-

ued by the 1921 legislation in which quotas were based on the numbers of

foreign born as of the 1910 census. The expressed intention was that the

interests of other groups to pursue their ethnic interests by expanding their

percentage of the population should be balanced against the ethnic inter-

ests of the majority in retaining their ethnic representation in the popula-

tion.

The 1921 law gave 46% of quota immigration to Southern and Eastern

Europe even though these areas constituted only 11.7% of the United

States population as of the 1920 census. The 1924 law prescribed that

these areas would get 15.3% of the quota slots—a figure that was actually

higher than then-representation in the population. "The use of the 1890

census is not discriminatory. It is used in an effort to preserve as nearly as

possible, the racial status quo of the United States. It is hoped to guarantee

as best we can at this late date, racial homogeneity in the United States.

The use of a later census would discriminate against those who founded

the Nation and perpetuated its institutions" (House Rep. 350, 1924, p. 16).

After 3 years, quotas were derived from a national origins formula based

on 1920 census data for the entire population, not only the foreign born.

While there is no doubt that this legislation represented a victory for the

314

KEVIN MACDONALD

northwestern European peoples of the United States, there was no attempt

to reverse the trends in the ethnic composition of the country but rather to

preserve the ethnic status quo.

While motivated by a desire to preserve an ethnic status quo, these

laws may also have been motivated partly by anti-Semitism, since during

this period opposition to immigration was perceived as mainly a Jewish

issue (see above). This certainly appears to have been the perception of

Jewish observers: for example, prominent Jewish writer Maurice Samuel

(1924), writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1924 legislation, wrote

that "it is chiefly against the Jew that anti-immigration laws are passed here

in America as in England and Germany" (p. 217), and such perceptions

continue among historians of the period (e.g., Hertzberg 1989, p. 239).

This perception was not restricted to Jews. In remarks before the Senate,

the anti-restrictionist Senator Reed of Missouri noted that "Attacks have

likewise been made upon the Jewish people who have crowded to our

shores. The spirit of intolerance has been especially active as to them"

(Cong. Rec.Feb. 19, 1921; p. 3463), and during World War II Secretary of

War Robert Stimson stated that it was opposition to unrestricted immigra-

tion of Jews that resulted in the restrictive legislation of 1924 (Breitman &

Kraut, 1987, p. 87). Moreover, the House Immigration Committee Majority

Report (House Report #109, Dec. 6, 1920) stated that "by far the largest

percentage of immigrants (are) peoples of Jewish extraction" (p. 4), and it

implied that the majority of the expected new immigrants would be Polish

Jews. The report "confirmed the published statement of a commissioner of

the Hebrew Sheltering and Aid Society of America made after his personal

investigation in Poland, to the effect that 'If there were in existence a ship

that could hold 3,000,000 human beings, the 3,000,000 Jews of Poland

would board it to escape to America'" (p. 6).

The Majority Report also included a report by Wilbur S. Carr, head of

the United States Consular Service, that stated that the Polish Jews were

"abnormally twisted because of (a) reaction from war strain; (b) the shock

of revolutionary disorders; (c) the dullness and stultification resulting from

past years of oppression and abuse. . . ; Eighty-five to ninety percent lack

any conception of patriotic or national spirit. And the majority of this per-

centage are unable to acquire it" (p. 9; see also Breitman & Kraut [1987, p.

12] for a discussion of Carr's anti-Semitism). Consular reports warned that

"many Bolshevik sympathizers are in Poland" (p. 11). Similarly in the Sen-

ate, Senator McKellar cited the report that if there were a ship large

enough, 3,000,000 Poles would immigrate. He also stated that "the Joint

Distribution Committee, an American committee doing relief work among

the Hebrews in Poland, distributes more than $1,000,000 per month of

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

American money in that country alone. It is also shown that $100,000,000

a year is a conservative estimate of money sent to Poland from America

through the mails, through the banks, and through the relief societies. This

golden stream pouring into Poland from America makes practically every

Pole wildly desirous of going to the country from which such marvelous

wealth comes" (Cong, Rec.,Feb. 19, 1921, p. 3456).

As a further indication of the salience of Polish-Jewish immigration

issues, the letter on alien visas submitted by the State Department in 1921

to Albert Johnson, Chairman of the Committee on Migration and Natural-

ization, devoted over four times as much space to the situation in Poland

as it did to any other country. The report emphasized the activities of the

Polish-Jewish newspaper Der Emigrant in promoting emigration to the

United States of Polish Jews, and the activities of the Hebrew Sheltering

and Immigrant Society and wealthy private citizens from the United States

in facilitating immigration by providing money and performing the paper-

work. (There was indeed a large network of agents in Eastern Europe who,

in violation of United States law, "did their best to drum up business by

enticing as many emigrants as possible" [Nadell, 1984, p. 56].) The report

also noted the poor condition of the prospective immigrants: "At the pre-

sent time it is only too obvious that they must be subnormal, and their

normal state is of very low standard. Six years of war and confusion and

famine and pestilence have racked their bodies and twisted their mentality.

The elders have deteriorated to a marked degree. Minors have grown into

adult years with the entire period lost in their rightful development and too

frequently with the acquisition of perverted ideas which have flooded Eu-

rope since 1914" [presumably a reference to radical political ideas that

were common in this group; see below} (Cong. Rec.,April 20, 1921, p.

498).

The report also stated that articles in the Warsaw press had reported

that "propaganda favoring unrestricted immigration" is being planned, in-

cluding celebrations in New York aimed at showing the contributions of

immigrants to the development of the United States. The reports for Bel-

gium (whose emigrants originated in Poland and Czechoslovakia) and Ro-

mania also highlighted the importance of Jews as prospective immigrants.

In response, Representative Isaac Siegel stated that the report was "edited

and doctored by certain officials" and commented that the report did not

mention countries with larger numbers of immigrants than Poland. (For

example, there was no mention of Italy in the report.) Without explicitly

saying so ("I leave it to every man in the House to make his own deduc-

tions and his own inferences therefrom" [Cong. Rec.,April 20, 1921, p.

316

KEVIN MACDONALD

504]), the implication was that the focus on Poland was prompted by anti-

Semitism.

The House Majority report (signed by 15 of its 17 members with only

Reps. Dickstein and Sabath not signing) also emphasized the Jewish role in

defining the intellectual battle in terms of Nordic superiority and "Ameri-

can ideals" rather than in the terms of an ethnic status quo actually favored

by the committee:

The cry of discrimination is, the committee believes, manufac-

tured and built up by special representatives of racial groups,

aided by aliens actually living abroad. Members of the commit-

tee have taken notice of a report in the Jewish Tribune (New

York) February 8, 1924, of a farewell dinner to Mr. Israel Zang-

will which says:

Mr. Zangwill spoke chiefly on the immigration ques-

tion, declaring that if jews persisted in a strenuous op-

position to the restricted immigration there would be

no restriction. "If you create enough fuss against this

Nordic nonsense," he said, "you will defeat this legis-

lation. You must make a fight against this bill; tell them

they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifica-

tions are of cardboard, and if you press against them,

they give way."

The Committee does not feel that the restriction aimed to be

accomplished in this bill is directed at the Jews, for they can

come within the quotas from any country in which they were

born. The Committee has not dwelt on the desirability of a

"Nordic" or any other particular type of immigrant, but has held

steadfastly to the purpose of securing a heavy restriction, with

the quota so divided that the countries from which the most

came in the two decades ahead of the World War might be

slowed down in order that the United States might restore its

population balance. The continued charge that the Committee

has built up a "Nordic" race and devoted its hearing to that end

is part of a deliberately manufactured assault for as a matter of

fact the committee has done nothing of the kind (House Rep.

350, 1924, p. 16).

Indeed, one is struck in reading the 1924 Congressional debate by the

rarity with which the issue of Nordic racial superiority is raised by those in

favor of the legislation, while virtually all of the anti-restrictionists raised

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

this issue.10 After a particularly colorful comment in opposition to the the-

ory of Nordic racial superiority, restrictionist leader Albert Johnson re-

marked that "I would like very much to say on behalf of the committee that

through the strenuous times of the hearings this committee undertook not

to discuss the Nordic proposition or racial matters" (Cong. Rec.,April 8,

1924; p. 5911). Earlier, during the hearings on the bill, Johnson remarked

in response to the comments of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise representing the

AJCongress that "I dislike to be placed continually in the attitude of assum-

ing that there is a race prejudice, when the one thing I have tried to do for

11 years is to free myself from race prejudice, if I had it at all."11 Several

restrictionists explicitly denounced the theory of Nordic superiority, includ-

ing Senators Bruce (p. 5955) and Jones (p. 6614) and Representatives Ba-

con (p. 5902), Byrnes (p. 5653), Johnson (p. 5648), McLoed (p. 5675-6),

McReynolds (p. 5855), Michener (p. 5909), Miller (p. 5883), Newton (p.

6240); Rosenbloom (p. 5851), Vaile (p. 5922), Vincent (p. 6266), White, (p.

5898), and Wilson (p. 5671; all references to Cong. Rec.,April 1924).

Indeed, it is noteworthy that there are indications in the Congressional

debate that representatives from the far West were concerned about the

competence and competitive threat presented by Japanese immigrants, and

their rhetoric suggested they viewed the Japanese as racially equal or supe-

rior, not inferior. For example, Senator Jones stated that "we admit that [the

Japanese] are as able as we are, that they are as progressive as we are, that

they are as honest as we are, that they are as brainy as we are, and that

they are equal in all that goes to make a great people and nation" (Cong.

Rec., April 18, 1924, p. 6614); Representative MacLafferty emphasized Ja-

panese domination of certain agricultural markets (Cong. Rec. April 5,

1924, p. 5681), and Representative Lea noted their ability to supplant

"their American competitor" (Cong. Rec.April 5, 1924, p. 5697). Repre-

sentative Miller described the Japanese as "a relentless and unconquerable

competitor of our people wherever he places himself" (Cong. Rec.April 8,

1924, p. 5884); See also comments of Representatives Gilbert (Cong. Rec.

April 12, 1924, p. 6261) Raker (Cong. Rec. April 8, 1924, p. 5892) and

Free (Cong. Rec.April 8, 1924, p. 5924ff).

Moreover, while the issue of Jewish/gentile resource competition was

not raised during the Congressional debates, quotas on Jewish admissions

to Ivy League universities were a highly salient issue among Jews during

this period. The quota issue was highly publicized in the Jewish media and

the focus of activities of Jewish self-defense organizations such as the ADL

(see, e.g., the ADL statement published in The American Hebrew,Sept. 29,

1922, p. 536). Jewish/gentile resource competition may therefore have

been on the minds of some legislators. Indeed, President A. Lawrence Low-

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KEVIN MACDONALD

ell of Harvard was the national vice-president of the Immigration Restric-

tion League as well as a proponent of quotas on Jewish admission to Har-

vard (Symott, 1986, 238), suggesting that resource competition with an

intellectually superior Jewish group was an issue for at least some promi-

nent restrictionists.

It is probable that anti-Jewish animosity related to resource competi-

tion issues was widespread. Higham (1984, p. 141) writes of "the urgent

pressure which the Jews, as an exceptionally ambitious immigrant people,

put upon some of the more crowded rungs of the social ladder" (Higham,

1984, p. 141). Beginning in the nineteenth century there were fairly high

levels of covert and overt anti-Semitism in patrician circles resulting from

the very rapid upward mobility of Jews and their competitive drive. In the

period prior to World War I, the reaction of the gentile power structure was

to construct social registers and emphasize genealogy as mechanisms of

exclusion—"criteria that could not be met by money alone" (Higham,

1984, 104ff, p. 127). During this period Edward A. Ross (1914, p. 164)

described gentile resentment for "being obliged to engage in a humiliating

and undignified scramble in order to keep his trade or his clients against

the Jewish invader"—suggesting a rather broad-based concern with Jewish

economic competition. Attempts at exclusion in a wide range of areas

were increased in the 1920s and reached their peak during the difficult

economic situation of the Great Depression (Higham, 1984, p. 131ff).

However, in the 1924 debates the only Congressional comments sug-

gesting a concern with Jewish/gentile resource competition (as well as a

concern that the interests of Jewish intellectuals are not the same as their

gentile counterparts) that I have been able to find are the following from

Representative Wefald:

I for one am not afraid of the radical ideas that some might

bring with them. Ideas you cannot keep out anyway, but the

leadership of our intellectual life in many of its phases has

come into the hands of these clever newcomers who have no

sympathy with our old-time American ideals nor with those of

northern Europe, who detect our weaknesses and pander to

them and get wealthy through the disservices they render us.

Our whole system of amusements has been taken over by

men who came here on the crest of the south and east Euro-

pean immigration. They produce our horrible film stories, they

compose and dish out to us our jazz music, they write many of

the books we read, and edit our magazines and newspapers

(Cong. Rec.,April 12, 1924, p. 6272).

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

The immigration debate also occurred amid discussion in the Jewish

media of Thorsten Veblen's famous essay "The Intellectual Pre-eminence of

Jews in Modern Europe" (serialized in The American Hebrew beginning

September 10, 1920). In an editorial of July 13, 1923 (p. 177), The Ameri-

can Hebrew noted that Jews were disproportionately represented among

the gifted in Louis Terman's study of gifted children and commented that

"this fact must give rise to bitter, though futile, reflection among the so-

called Nordics." The editorial also noted that Jews were overrepresented

among scholarship winners in competitions sponsored by the state of New

York. The editorial pointedly noted that "perhaps the Nordics are too proud

to try for these honors. In any event the list of names just announced by the

State Department of Education at Albany as winners of these coveted

scholarships is not in the least Nordic; it reads like a confirmation roster at

a Temple." There is indeed evidence that Jews, like East Asians, have

higher IQs than Caucasians (Lynn, 1987; MacDonald, 1994; Rushton,

1995).

The most common argument made by those favoring the legislation,

and the one reflected in the majority report, is the argument that in the

interests of fairness to all ethnic groups, the quotas should reflect the rela-

tive ethnic composition of the entire country. Restrictionists noted that the

census of 1890 was chosen because the percentages of the foreign born of

different ethnic groups in that year approximated the general ethnic com-

position of the entire country in 1920. Senator Reed of Pennsylvania and

Representative Rogers of Massachusetts proposed to achieve the same re-

sult by directly basing the quotas on the national origins of all people in

the country as of the 1920 census, and this was eventually incorporated

into the law. Representative Rogers argued that "Gentlemen, you can not

dissent from this principle because it is fair. It does not discriminate for

anybody and it does not discriminate against anybody" (Cong. Rec.April

8, 1924; p. 5847). Senator Reed noted, "The purpose, I think, of most of us

in changing the quota basis is to cease from discriminating against the

native born here and against the group of our citizens who come from

northern and western Europe. ! think the present system discriminates in

favor of southeastern Europe (Cong. Rec.,April. 16, 1924; p. 6457) (i.e.,

because 46% of the quotas under the 1921 law went to Eastern and South-

ern Europe when they constituted less than 12% of the population).

As an example illustrating the fundamental argument asserting a legiti-

mate ethnic interest in maintaining an ethnic status quo without claiming

racial superiority, consider the following statement from Representative

William N. Vaile of Colorado, one of the most prominent restrictionists:

320

KEVIN MACDONALD

Let me emphasize here that the restrictionists of Congress do

not claim that the "Nordic" race, or even the Anglo-Saxon race,

is the best race in the world. Let us concede, in all fairness that

the Czech is a more sturdy laborer, with a very low percentage

of crime and insanity, that the Jew is the best businessman in

the world, and that the Italian has a spiritual grasp and an ar-

tistic sense which have greatly enriched the world and which

have, indeed, enriched us, a spiritual exaltation and an artistic

creative sense which the Nordic rarely attains. Nordics need

not be vain about their own qualifications. It well behooves

them to be humble. What we do claim is that the northern Eu-

ropean, and particularly Anglo-Saxons made this country. Oh,

yes; the others helped. But that is the full statement of the case.

They came to this country because it was already made as an

Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often en-

riched, but they did not make it, and they have not yet greatly

changed it. We are determined that they shall not. It is a good

country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going

to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no mat-

ter what their merits, to make it something different. If there is

any changing to be done, we will do it ourselves (Cong. Rec.

April 8, 1924; p. 5922).

The debate in the House also illustrated the highly salient role of Jew-

ish legislators in combating restrictionism. Representative Robison singled

out Representative Sabath as the leader of anti-restrictionist efforts, and,

without mentioning any other opponent of restriction, he also focused on

Reps. Jacobstein, Celler, and Perlman as being opposed to any restrictions

on immigration (Cong. Rec.April 5, 1924, p. 5666). Representative Blan-

ton, complaining of the difficulty of getting restrictionist legislation through

Congress, noted "When at least 65 per cent of the sentiment of this House,

in my judgment, is in favor of the exclusion of all foreigners for five years,

why do we not put that into law? Has Brother Sabath such a tremendous

influence over us that he holds us down on this proposition?" (Cong. Rec.

April 5, 1924, p. 5685). Representative Sabath responded that "There may

be something to that." In addition, the following comments of Representa-

tive Leavitt clearly indicate the salience of Jewish congressmen to their

opponents during the debate:

The instinct for national and race preservation is not one to be

condemned, as has been intimated here. No one should be bet-

ter able to understand the desire of Americans to keep America

321

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

American than the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Sabath], who is

leading the attack on this measure, or the gentlemen from New

York, Mr. Dickstein, Mr. Jacobstein, Mr. Celler, and Mr. Perlman.

They are of the one great historic people who have maintained

the identity of their race throughout the centuries because they

believe sincerely that they are a chosen people, with certain

ideals to maintain, and knowing that the loss of racial identity

means a change of ideals. That fact should make it easy for

them and the majority of the most active opponents of this mea-

sure in the spoken debate to recognize and sympathize with our

viewpoint, which is not so extreme as that of their own race,

but only demands that the admixture of other peoples shall be

only of such kind and proportions and in such quantities as will

not alter racial characteristics more rapidly than there can be

assimilation as to ideas of government as well as of blood

(Cong. Rec., April 12, 1924; pp. 6265-6266).

The view that Jews had a strong tendency to oppose genetic assimila-

tion with surrounding groups occurred among other observers as well and

was a component of contemporary anti-Semitism (see Singerman, 1986,

pp. 110-111). Jewish avoidance of exogamy certainly had a basis in reality

(MacDonald, 1994, Ch. 2-4). Indeed, it is noteworthy that there was pow-

erful opposition to intermarriage even among the more liberal segments of

early twentieth-century American Judaism and certainly among the less lib-

eral segments represented by the great majority of Orthodox immigrants

from Eastern Europe who had come to constitute the great majority of

American Jewry. For example, the prominent nineteenth-century Reform

leader David Einhorn was a lifelong opponent of mixed marriages and re-

fused to officiate at such ceremonies, even when pressed to do so (Meyer,

1988, p. 247). Einhorn was also a staunch opponent of conversion of gen-

tiles to Judaism because of the effects on the "racial purity" of Judaism

(Levenson, 1989, p. 331). Similarly, the influential Reform intellectual

Kaufman Kohler was also an ardent opponent of mixed marriage. In a view

that is highly compatible with Horace Kallen's multiculturalism, Kohler

concluded that Israel must remain separate and avoid intermarriage until it

leads mankind to an era of universal peace and brotherhood among the

races (Kohler, 1918, pp. 445-446). The negative attitude toward intermar-

riage was confirmed by survey results. A 1912 survey indicated that only

seven of 100 Reform rabbis had officiated at a mixed marriage, and a 1909

resolution of the Central Council of American Rabbis declared that "mixed

marriages are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and should be

discouraged by the American Rabbinate" (Meyer, 1988, p. 290). Gentile

322

perceptions of Jewish attitudes on intermarriage therefore had a strong

basis in reality.

The Involvement of Jewish Immigrants in Radical Politics.

The congressional debates of 1924 reflected a highly charged context

in which Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were widely perceived to

not only avoid intermarriage but also to retain a separatist culture and to be

disproportionately involved in radical political movements. The perception

of radicalism among Jewish immigrants was common in Jewish as well as

gentile publications. TheAmerican Hebrew editorialized that "we must not

forget the immigrants from Russia and Austria will be coming from coun-

tries infested with Bolshevism, and it will require more than a superficial

effort to make good citizens out of them" (in Neuringer, 1971, p. 165). The

fact that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were viewed as "infected

with Bolshevism . . . unpatriotic, alien, unassimilable" resulted in a wave

of anti-Semitism in the 1920s and contributed to the restrictive immigration

legislation of the period (Neuringer, 1971, p. 165). In Sorin's (1985, p. 46)

study of immigrant Jewish radical activists, over half had been involved in

radical politics in Europe before emigrating, and for those immigrating after

1900, the percentage rose to 69%. Jewish publications warned of the pos-

sibilities of anti-Semitism resulting from the leftism of Jewish immigrants,

and the official Jewish community engaged in "a near-desperation . . .

effort to portray the Jew as one hundred per cent American" by, e.g., orga-

nizing patriotic pageants on national holidays and by attempting to get the

immigrants to learn English (Neuringer, 1971, p. 167).

Similarly, in England, the immigration of Eastern European Jews into

England after 1880 had a transformative effect on the political attitudes of

British Jewry in the direction of socialism, trade-unionism, and Zionism,

often combined with religious orthodoxy and devotion to a highly separa-

tist traditional lifestyle (Alderman, 1983, p. 47ff). The more established

Jewish organizations fought hard to combat the well-founded image of

Jewish immigrants as Zionist, religiously orthodox political radicals who

refused to be conscripted into the armed forces during World War I in

order to fight the enemies of the officially anti-Semitic Czarist government

(Alderman, 1992, p. 237ff).

The Jewish Old Left, including the unions, the leftist press, and the

leftist fraternal orders (which were often associated with a synagogue), was

a part of the wider Jewish community, and Jewish members typically re-

tained a strong Jewish ethnic identity (Howe, 1976; Liebman, 1979; Buhle,

1980). This phenomenon occurred within the entire spectrum of leftist or-

KEVIN MACDONALD

323

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

ganizations, including organizations such as the Communist Party and the

Socialist Party whose membership also included gentiles (Liebman, 1979,

p. 267ff; Buhle, 1980).

Werner Cohn (1958, p. 621) describes the general milieu of the immi-

grant Jewish community in the period from 1886-1920 as "one big radical

debating society":

By 1886 the Jewish community in New York had become con-

spicuous for its support of the third-party (United Labor) can-

didacy of Henry George, the theoretician of the Single Tax.

From then Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were fa-

mous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeat-

edly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New

York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress. And many Social-

ists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts.

In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist

and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the

most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The

United Hebrew Trades, the International Ladies' Garment Work-

ers' Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish

Daily Forward. This was the period in which extreme radicals—

like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman—were giants in

the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants—

among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young

Morris R. Cohen—were radicals. Even Samuel Gompers, when

speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radi-

cal phrases.

In addition, The Freiheit, which was an unofficial organ of the Com-

munist Party from the 1920s to the 1950s "stood at the center of Yiddish

proletarian institutions and subculture . . . [which offered] identity, mean-

ing, friendship, and understanding" (Liebman, 1979, pp. 349-350). The

newspaper lost considerable support in the Jewish community in 1929

when it took the Communist party position in opposition to Zionism, and

by the 1950s it essentially had to choose between satisfying its Jewish soul

or its status as a Communist organ. It chose the former, and by the late

1960s it was justifying not returning the Israeli occupied territories in oppo-

sition to the line of the American Communist Party.

The relationship of Jews and the American Communist Party (CPUSA)

is particularly interesting because a concern with Communist subversion

under the direction of the Soviet Union was a feature of the immigration

debates of the 1920s and because a substantial proportion of the CPUSA

324

KEVIN MACDONALD

were foreign born.12 Beginning in the 1920s Jews whose backgrounds de-

rived from Eastern Europe played a very prominent and disproportionate

role in the CPUSA (Klehr, 1978, p. 37ff). Merely citing percentages of Jew-

ish leaders probably does not adequately indicate the extent of Jewish in-

fluence in the CPUSA, since active efforts were made to recruit gentiles as

a sort of "window dressing" to conceal the extent of Jewish influence in the

movement (Klehr, 1978, p. 40; Rothman & Lichter, 1982, p. 99).

Klehr (1978, p. 40) estimates that from 1921 to 1961, Jews constituted

33.5% of the Central Committee members and the representation of Jews

was often above 40% (Klehr, 1978, p. 46). In the 1920s a majority of the

members of the Socialist Party were immigrants and an "overwhelming"

(Glazer 1961, pp. 38, 40) percentage of the CPUSA consisted of recent

immigrants, a substantial percentage of whom were Jews. In Philadelphia

in the 1930s, fully 72.2% of the CP members were the children of Jewish

immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth century (Lyons, 1982, 71). As late as 1929, 90% of the members

of the Communist Party in Philadelphia were foreign born and in June of

1933 the national organization of the CPUSA was still 70% foreign born

(Lyons, 1982, 72-73). Jews were the only native-born ethnic group from

which the party was able to recruit. Glazer (1969, p. 129) states that at

least half of the CPUSA membership of around 50,000 were Jews into the

1950s and that there was a very high rate of turnover, so that perhaps 10

times that number of individuals were involved in the Party and there were

"an equal or larger number who were Socialists of one kind or another."

Writing of the 1920s, Buhle (1980, p. 89) notes that "most of those favor-

able to the party and the Freiheit simply did not join—no more than a few

thousand out of a following of a hundred times that large."

There was also great concern within the Jewish community that the

overrepresentation of Jews within the CPUSA would lead to anti-Semitism

from the 1920s through the Cold War period: "The fight against the stereo-

type of Communist-Jew became a virtual obsession with Jewish leaders and

opinion makers throughout America" (Liebman, 1979, p. 515), and indeed,

the association of Jews with the CPUSA was a focus of anti-Semitic litera-

ture (e.g., Henry Ford's [19201 International Jew;John Beaty's [1951] The

Iron Curtain Over America). As a result, the AJCommittee engaged in inten-

sive efforts to change opinion within the Jewish community by showing

that Jewish interests were more compatible with advocating American de-

mocracy than Soviet Communism (e.g., emphasizing Soviet anti-Semitisrn

and Soviet support of nations opposed to Israel in the period after World

War II) (Cohen, 1972, p. 347ff).

325

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1924-1945

The saliency of Jewish involvement in United States immigration pol-

icy continued after the 1924 legislation. Particularly objectionable to Jew-

ish groups was the national origins quota system. For example, a writer for

the Jewish Tribune stated in 1927, "we . . . regard all measures for regulat-

ing immigration according to nationality as illogical, unjust, and un-Ameri-

can" (in Neuringer, 1971, p. 205). During the 1930s the most outspoken

critic of further restrictions on immigration (motivated now mainly by the

Great Depression) was Representative Samuel Dickstein, and Dickstein's

assumption of the chairmanship of the House Immigration Committee in

1931 marked the end of the ability of restrictionists to enact further reduc-

tions in quotas (Divine, 1957, pp. 79-88). Jewish groups were the primary

opponents of restriction and the primary supporters of liberalized regula-

tions during the 1930s while their opponents emphasized the economic

consequences of immigration during a period of high unemployment (Di-

vine, 1957, pp. 85-88). Between 1933 and 1938, Representative Dickstein

introduced a number of bills aimed at increasing the number of refugees

from Nazi Germany and supported mainly by Jewish organizations, but the

restrictionists prevailed (Divine, 1957, p. 93).

During the 1930s, concerns about the radicalism and unassimilability

of Jewish immigrants as well as the possibility of Nazi subversion were the

main factors influencing the opposition to changing the immigration laws

(Breitman & Kraut, 1987). Moreover, "[c]harges that the Jews in America

were more loyal to their tribe than to their country abounded in the United

States in the 1930s" (Breitman & Kraut, 1987, p. 87). There was a clear

perception among all parties that the public opposed any changes in immi-

gration policy and that the public was particularly opposed to Jewish immi-

gration. The 1939 hearings on the proposed legislation to admit 20,000

German refugee children therefore minimized the Jewish interest in the

legislation. The bill referred to people "of every race and creed suffering

from conditions which compel them to seek refuge in other lands."13 The

bill did not mention that jews would be the main beneficiaries of the legis-

lation, and witnesses in favor of the bill emphasized that only approx-

imately 60% of the children would be Jewish. The only person identifying

himself as "a member of the Jewish race" who testified in favor of the bill

was "one-fourth Catholic and three-quarters Jewish" with Protestant and

Catholic nieces and nephews, and from the South which was a bastion of

anti-immigration sentiment.14

On the other hand, opponents of the bill threatened to publicize the

very large percentage of Jews already being admitted under the quota sys-

POPULATION AND ENVIRONME

326

KEVIN MACDONALD

tem—presumably an indication of the powerful force of a "virulent and

pervasive" anti-Semitism among the American public (Breitman & Kraut,,

1987, p. 80). Opponents noted that the immigration permitted by the bill

"would be for the most part of the Jewish race," and a witness testified

"that the Jewish people will profit most by this legislation goes without

saying" (in Divine, 1957, p. 100). The restrictionists argued in economic

terms, e.g., by frequently citing President Roosevelt's statement in his sec-

ond inaugural speech "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-

nourished" and citing large numbers of needy children already in the

United States. However, the main restrictionist concern was that the bill

was yet another in a long history of attempts by anti-restrictionists to de-

velop precedents that would eventually undermine the 1924 law. For ex-

ample, Francis Kinnecutt, President of the Allied Patriotic Societies, em-

phasized that the 1924 law had been based on the idea of proportional

representation based on the ethnic composition of the country. The legisla-

tion would be a precedent "for similar unscientific and favored-nation leg-

islation in response to the pressure of foreign nationalistic or racial groups,

rather than in accordance with the needs and desires of the American peo-

ple."15

Wilbur S. Carr and other State Department officials were important in

minimizing the entry of Jewish refugees from Germany during the 1930s.

Undersecretary of State William Phillips was an ardent anti-Semite with

considerable influence on immigration policy between 1933-1936 (Breit-

man & Kraut, 1987, p. 36). Throughout the period until the end of World

War II attempts to foster Jewish immigration, even in the context of knowl-

edge that the Nazis were persecuting Jews, were largely unsuccessful be-

cause of an unyielding Congress and the activities of bureaucrats, espe-

cially those in the State Department. Public discussion in periodicals such

as The Nation (Nov. 19, 1938), and The New Republic (Nov. 23, 1938)

charged that the restrictionism was motivated by anti-Semitism, while op-

ponents of admitting large numbers of Jews argued that admission would

result in an increase in anti-Semitism. Henry Pratt Fairchild (1939, p. 344),

who was a restrictionist and was highly critical of the jews (see Fairchild,

1947), emphasized the "powerful current of anti-foreignism and anti-Semi-

tism that is running close to the surface of the American public mind, ready

to burst out into violent eruption on relatively slight provocation." Public

opinion remained steadfast against increasing the quotas for European refu-

gees: a 1939 poll in Fortune (April, 1939) magazine showed that 83%

answered "no" to the following question: "If you were a member of Con-

gress would you vote yes or no on a bill to open the doors of the United

States to a larger number of European refugees than now admitted under

327

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

our immigration quotas?" Less than 9% replied "yes" and the remainder

had no opinion.

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1946-1952

Although Jewish interests were defeated by the 1924 legislation, "the

discriminatory character of the Reed-Johnson Act continued to rankle all

sectors of American Jewish opinion" (Neuringer, 1971, p. 196). During this

period, an article by Will Maslow (1950) in Congress Weekly reiterated the

belief that the restrictive immigration laws intentionally targeted Jews:

"Only one type of law, immigration legislation which relates to aliens out-

side the country, is not subject to constitutional guarantees, and even here

hostility toward Jewish immigration has had to be disguised in an elaborate

quota scheme in which eligibility was based on place of birth rather than

religion."

The Jewish concern to alter the ethnic balance of the United States is

apparent in the debates over immigration legislation during the post World

War II era. In 1948 the AJCommittee submitted a statement to the Senate

subcommittee which simultaneously denied the importance of the material

interests of the United States as well as affirmed its commitment to immi-

gration of all races:

Americanism is not to be measured by conformity to law, or

zeal for education, or literacy, or any of these qualities in which

immigrants may excel the native-born. Americanism is the spirit

behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to

people of all races, all religions, all nationalities (in Cohen,

1972, p. 369).

In 1945 Representative Emanuel Celler introduced a bill ending Chi-

nese exclusion by establishing token quotas for Chinese, and in 1948 the

AJCommittee condemned racial quotas on Asians (Divine, 1957, p. 155).

On the other hand, Jewish groups had an attitude of indifference or even

hostility toward immigration of non-Jews from Europe (including Southern

Europe) in the post-World War II era (Neuringer, 1971, pp. 356, 367-369,

383). Thus Jewish spokesmen did not testify at all during the first set of

hearings on emergency legislation which allowed immigration of a limited

number of German, Italian, Greek, and Dutch immigrants, escapees from

Communism, and a small number of Poles, Orientals, and Arabs. When

Jewish spokesmen eventually testified (partly because a small number of

the escapees from Communism were Jews), they took the opportunity to

328

KEVIN MACDONALD

once again focus on their condemnation of the national origins provisions

of the 1924 law.

Jewish involvement in opposing restrictions during this period was

motivated partly by attempts to establish precedents in which the quota

system was bypassed and partly by attempts to increase immigration of

Jews from Eastern Europe. The Citizen's Committee on Displaced Persons,

which advocated legislation to admit 400,000 refugees as nonquota immi-

grants over a period of 4 years, was funded mainly by the AJCommittee

and other Jewish contributors (See Cong. Rec., October 15, 1949, pp.

14647-14654; Neuringer, 1971, p. ii) and maintained a staff of 65 people.

Witnesses opposing the legislation complained that the bill was an attempt

to subvert the ethnic balance of the United States established by the 1924

legislation (Divine, 1957, p. 117). In the event, the bill that was reported

out of the subcommittee did not satisfy Jewish interests because it estab-

lished a cut-off date that excluded Jews who had migrated from Eastern

Europe after World War II, including Jews fleeing Polish anti-Semitism. The

Senate subcommittee "regarded the movement of Jews and other refugees

from eastern Europe after 1945 as falling outside the scope of the main

problem and implied that this exodus was a planned migration organized

by Jewish agencies in the United States and in Europe" (Senate Report No.

950 [1948], pp. 15-16).

Jewish representatives led the assault on the bill (Divine, 1957, p.

127), Representative Emanuel Celler terming it as "worse than no bill at all.

All it does is exclude . . . Jews" (in Neuringer, 1971, p. 298; see also

Divine, 1957, p. 127). In reluctantly signing the bill, President Truman

noted that the 1945 cutoff date "discriminates in callous fashion against

displaced persons of the Jewish faith" (Interpreter Releases, 25 [July 21,

1948], pp. 252-254). On the other hand, Senator Chapman Revercomb

stated that "there is no distinction, certainly no discrimination, intended

between any persons because of their religion or their race, but there are

differences drawn among those persons who are in fact displaced persons

and have been in camp longest and have a preference" (Cong. Rec.May

26, 1948, p. 6793). In his analysis, Divine (1957, p. 143) concludes that

the expressed motive of the restrictionists, to limit the program

to those people displaced during the course of the war, appears

to be a valid explanation for these provisions. The tendency of

Jewish groups to attribute the exclusion of many of their core-

ligionists to anti-Semitic bias is understandable; however, the

extreme charges of discrimination made during the 1948 presi-

dential campaign lead one to suspect that the northern wing of

329

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

the Democratic party was using this issue to attract votes from

members of minority groups. Certainly Truman's assertion that

the 1948 law was anti-Catholic, made in the face of Catholic

denials, indicates that political expediency had a great deal to

do with the emphasis on the discrimination issue.

In the aftermath of this bill, the Citizens Committee on Displaced Per-

sons released a report labeling the bill as characterized by "hate and rac-

ism" and Jewish organizations were unanimous in denouncing the law (Di-

vine, 1957, p. 131). After the 1948 elections resulted in a Democratic

Congress and a sympathetic President Truman, Representative Celler intro-

duced a bill without the 1945 cutoff date, but the bill, after passing the

House, failed in the Senate because of the opposition of Senator Pat Mc-

Carran. During the hearings, McCarran noted that the Citizens Committee

had spent over $800,000 lobbying for a liberalized bill, with the result that

"there has been disseminated over the length and breadth of this nation a

campaign of misrepresentation and falsehood which has misled many pub-

lic-spirited and well-meaning citizens and organizations" (Cong. Rec.,

April 26, 1949, pp. 5042-5043). After defeat, the Citizen's Committee in-

creased expenditures to over $1,000,000 and succeeded in passing a bill,

introduced by Representative Celler, with a 1949 cutoff date that did not

discriminate against Jews but largely excluded ethnic Germans who had

been expelled from Eastern Europe. In an odd twist in the debate, restric-

tionists now accused the anti-restrictionists of ethnic bias (e.g., Senator Eas-

tland, Cong. Rec.April 5, 1950, p. 2737; Senator McCarran, Cong. Rec.

April 5, 1950, p. 4743).

At a time when there were no outbreaks of anti-Semitism in other parts

of the world creating an urgent need for Jewish immigration and with the

presence of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Jewish organizations still vigor-

ously objected to the continuation of the national origins provisions of the

1924 law in the McCarran-Walter law of 1952 (Neuringer, 1971, p. 337ff).

Indeed, when District Court of Appeals Judge Simon H. Rifkind testified on

behalf of a wide range of Jewish organizations against the McCarran-Wal-

ter bill he noted emphatically that because of the international situation

and particularly the existence of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Jewish

views on immigration legislation were not predicated on the "plight of our

co-religionists but rather the impact which immigration and naturalization

laws have upon the temper and quality of American life here in the United

States."16 The argument was now typically couched in terms of "democratic

principles and the cause of international amity" (Cohen, 1972, p. 368)—

the implicit theory being that the principles of democracy required ethnic

330

KEVIN MACDONALD

diversity and the theory that the good will of other countries depended on

American willingness to accept their citizens as immigrants. Rifkind noted

that "[T]he enactment of [the McCarran-Walter bill] will gravely impair the

national effort we are putting forth. For we are engaged in a war for the

hearts and minds of men. The free nations of the world look to us for moral

and spiritual reinforcement at a time when the faith which moves men is as

important as the force they wield."17

The McCarran-Walter law explicitly included racial ancestry as a crite-

rion in its provision that Orientals would be included in the token Oriental

quotas no matter where they were born. Herbert Lehman, a senator from

New York and the most prominent senatorial opponent of immigration re-

striction during the 1950s (Neuringer, 1971, p. 351), argued during the

debates over the McCarran-Walter bill that immigrants from Jamaica of

African descent should be included in the quota for England and stated that

the bill would cause resentment among Asians (Neuringer, 1971, pp. 346,

356). Representative Emanuel Celler and Representative Jacob Javits, the

leaders of the anti-restrictionists in the House, made similar arguments

(Cong. Rec., April 23, 1952, pp. 4306, 4219). As was also apparent in the

battles dating back to the nineteenth century (see above), the opposition to

the national origins legislation went beyond its effects on Jewish immigra-

tion to include advocacy of immigration into the United States of all of the

racial/ethnic groups of the world.

Reflecting a concern for maintaining the ethnic status quo as well as

the salience of Jewish issues during the period, the hearings of the subcom-

mittee considering the McCarran immigration law noted that "The popula-

tion of the United States has increased three-fold since 1877, while the

Jewish population has increased twenty-one fold during the same period"

(Senate Report No. 1515 [1950], pp. 2-4). The bill also included a provi-

sion that naturalized citizens automatically lost citizenship if they resided

abroad continuously for 5 years. This provision was viewed by Jewish or-

ganizations as motivated by anti-Zionist attitudes: "Testimony by Govern-

ment officials at the hearings . . . made it clear that the provision stemmed

from a desire to dissuade naturalized American Jews from subscribing to a

deeply held ideal which some officials in contravention of American policy

regarded as undesirable . . . ."18

Reaffirming the logic of the 1920s restrictionists, the subcommittee

report emphasized that a purpose of the 1924 law was "the restriction of

immigration from southern and eastern Europe in order to preserve a pre-

dominance of persons of northwestern European origin in the composition

of our total population" but noted that this purpose did not imply "any

theory of Nordic supremacy" (Senate Report, No. 1515, [1950], pp. 442,

331

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

445-446). The argument was sometimes phrased in terms of an emphasis

on the "similarity of cultural background" of prospective immigrants, but

again the underlying logic was that ethnic groups already in the country

had legitimate interests in maintaining the ethnic status quo.

It is important to note that Jewish spokesmen differed from other lib-

eral groups in their motives for opposing restrictions on immigration during

this period. In the following I emphasize the Congressional testimony of

judge Simon H. Rifkind who represented a very broad range of Jewish

agencies in the hearings on the McCarran-Walter bill in 1951.19

• Immigration should come from all racial/ethnic groups:

We conceive of Americanism as the spirit behind the welcome

that America has traditionally extended to people of different

races, all religions, all nationalities. Americanism is a tolerant

way of life that was devised by men who differed from one

another vastly in religion, race background, education, and lin-

eage, and who agreed to forget all these things and ask of a new

neighbor not where he comes from but only what he can do

and what is his spirit toward his fellow men (p. 566).

• The total number of immigrants should be maximized within very

broad economic and political constraints: "(T)he regulation [of immigra-

tion] is the regulation of an asset, not of a liability" (p. 567). Rifkind em-

phasized several times that unused quotas had the effect of restricting total

numbers of immigrants, and he viewed this very negatively (e.g., p. 569).

• Immigrants should not be viewed as economic assets and imported

only to serve the present needs of the United States:

Looking at [selective immigration] from the point of view of the

United States, never from the point of view of the immigrant, I

say that we should, to some extent, allow for our temporary

needs, but not to make our immigration problem an employ-

ment instrumentality. I do not think that we are buying eco-

nomic commodities when we allow immigrants to come in. We

are admitting human beings who will found families and raise

children, whose children may reach the heights—at least so we

hope and pray. For a small segment of the immigrant stream I

think we are entitled to say, if we happen to be short of a partic-

ular talent, "Let us go out and look for them," if necessary, but

let us not make that the all-pervading thought (p. 570).

The opposition to needed skills as the basis of immigration was consistent

with the prolonged Jewish attempt to delay the passage of a literacy test as

332

KEVIN MACDONALD

a criterion for immigration, beginning in the late nineteenth century until a

literacy test was finally passed in 1917.

While Rifkind's testimony was free of the accusation that present im-

migration policy was based on the theory of Nordic superiority, Nordic

superiority continued to be a prominent theme of other Jewish groups ad-

vocating immigration from all ethnic groups, particularly the AJCongress.

The statement of the AJCongress at these hearings focused a great deal of

attention on the importance of the theory of Nordic supremacy as motivat-

ing the 1924 legislation, but also noted the previous history of ethnic dis-

crimination that existed long before these theories were developed, includ-

ing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the gentlemen's agreement with

Japan of 1907 which limited immigration of Japanese workers, and the

exclusion of other Asians in 1917. The statement noted that the 1924 legis-

lation had succeeded in its aim of preserving the ethnic balance of the

United States as of the 1920 census. However, it noted that "the objective

is valueless. There is nothing sacrosanct about the composition of the pop-

ulation in 1920. It would be foolish to believe that we reached the peak of

ethnic perfection in that year."20 Moreover, in an explicit statement of

Horace Kallen's multicultural ideal, the AJCongress statement advocated

"the thesis of cultural democracy which would guarantee to all groups

'majority and minority alike ... the right to be different and the respon-

sibility to make sure that their differences do not conflict with the welfare

of the American people as a whole.' "21

During this period, the Congress Weekly, the journal of the AJCongress,

regularly denounced the national origins provisions as based on the "myth

of the existence of superior and inferior racial stocks" (Oct. 17, 1955, p. 3)

and advocated immigration on the basis of "need and other criteria unre-

lated to race or national origin" (May 4, 1953, p. 3). Particularly objection-

able from the perspective of the AJCongress was the implication that there

should be no change in the ethnic status quo prescribed by the 1924 legis-

lation (e.g., Goldstein, 1952a, p. 6). The national origins formula "is outra-

geous now . . . when our national experience has confirmed beyond a

doubt that our very strength lies in the diversity of our peoples" (Goldstein,

1952b, p. 5).

As indicated above, there is some evidence that the 1924 legislation

and the restrictionism of the 1930s were motivated partly by anti-Semitic

attitudes. Anti-Semitism and its linkage with anti-Communism was also ap-

parent in the immigration arguments during the 1950s preceding and fol-

lowing the passage of the McCarran-Walter act. Restrictionists often

pointed to evidence that over 90% of American Communists had back-

grounds linking them to Eastern Europe, and a major thrust of their efforts

was to prevent immigration from this area and to ease deportation pro-

333

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

cedures to prevent Communist subversion. Since Eastern Europe was also

the origin of most Jewish immigration and because Jews were dispropor-

tionately represented among American Communists, these issues became

linked and the situation lent itself to broad anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

about the role of Jews in American politics (e.g., Beaty, 1951). In Congress,

the notorious anti-Semite Representative John Rankin, without making ex-

plicit reference to Jews, stated that,

They whine about discrimination. Do you know who is being

discriminated against? The white Christian people of America,

the ones who created this nation. ... I am talking about the

white Christian people of the North as well as the South. . . .

Communism is racial. A racial minority seized control in Russia

and in all her satellite countries, such as Poland, Czechoslo-

vakia, and many other countries I could name. They have been

run out of practically every country in Europe in the years gone

by, and if they keep stirring race trouble in this country and

trying to force their communistic program on the Christian peo-

ple of America, there is no telling what will happen to them

here" (Cong. Rec., April 23, 1952, p. 4320).

Reinforcing these links, the position of mainstream Jewish organiza-

tions such as the AJCommittee, which opposed Communism, often co-

incided with the position of the CPUSA on issues of immigration. For

example, both the AJCommittee and the CPUSA condemned the McCar-

ran-Walter act while, on the other hand, the AJCommittee had a major role

in influencing the recommendations of President Truman's Commission on

Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) for relaxing the security provisions

of the McCarran-Walter act, and these recommendations were warmly

greeted by the CPUSA at a time when a prime goal of the security provi-

sions was to exclude Communists (Bennett, 1963, p. 166). Jews were dis-

proportionately represented on the PCIN as well as in the organizations

viewed by Congress as Communist front organizations involved in immi-

gration issues, and this was undoubtedly highly salient to anti-Semites. The

chairman of the PCIN was Philip B. Perlman and the staff of the Commis-

sion contained a high percentage of Jews, headed by Harry N. Rosenfield

(Executive Director) and Elliot Shirk (Assistant to the Executive Director),

and its report was wholeheartedly endorsed by the AJCongress (see Con-

gress Weekly, Jan. 12, 1952, p. 3). The proceedings were printed as the

report Whom We Shall Welcome with the cooperation of Representative

Emanuel Ceiler.

In Congress, Senator McCarran accused the PCIN of containing com-

munist sympathizers, and the House Un-American Activities Committee

334

KEVIN MACDONALD

(HUAC) released a report stating that "some two dozen Communists and

many times that number with records of repeated affiliation with known

Communist enterprises testified before the Commission or submitted state-

ments for inclusion in the record of the hearings.... Nowhere in either the

record of the hearings or in the report is there a single reference to the true

background of these persons" (House Report No. 1182, 85th Congress, 1st

Session, p. 47). The report referred particularly to Communists associated

with the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born (ACPFB)

headed by Abner Green. Green, who was Jewish, figured very prominently

in these hearings, and Jews were generally disproportionately represented

among those singled out as officers and sponsors of the ACPFB (pp. 13-

21). HUAC provided evidence that ACPFB had close ties with the CPUSA

and noted that 24 of the individuals associated with the ACPFB had signed

statements incorporated into the printed record of the PCIN.

The AJCommittee was also heavily involved in the deliberations of the

PCIN, including providing testimony and distributing data and other mate-

rial to individuals and organizations testifying before the PCIN (Cohen,

1972, p. 371). All of its recommendations were incorporated into the final

report (Cohen, 1972, p. 371) (including a deemphasis on economic skills

as criteria for immigration, scrapping the national origins legislation, and

opening immigration to all the peoples of the world on a "first come, first

served basis"), the only exception being that the report recommended a

lower total number of immigrants than recommended by the AJCommittee

and other Jewish groups. The AJCommittee thus went beyond merely advo-

cating the principle of immigration from all racial/ethnic groups (token

quotas for Asians and Africans had already been included in the McCarran-

Walter act) to attempt to maximize the total number of immigrants from all

parts of the world within the current political climate.

Indeed, the Commission (PCIN, 1953, p. 106) pointedly noted that the

1924 legislation had succeeded in maintaining the racial status quo and

that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was not the national

origins system (because there were already high levels of non-quota immi-

grants and because the countries of Northern and Western Europe did not

fill their quotas) but the total number of immigrants allowed into the

United States. The Commission thus viewed changing the racial status quo

of the United States as a desirable goal, and to that end made a major point

of the desirability of increasing the total amount of immigration (PCIN,

1953, p. 42). As Bennett (1963, p. 164) notes, in the eyes of the PCIN, the

1924 legislation reducing the total number of immigrants "was a very bad

thing because of its finding that one race is just as good as another for

American citizenship or any other purpose."

Correspondingly, the defenders of the 1952 legislation conceptualized

335

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

the issue as fundamentally one of ethnic warfare. Senator McCarran stated

that subverting the national origins system "would, in the course of a gen-

eration or so, tend to change the ethnic and cultural composition of this

nation" (in Bennett, 1963, p. 185), and Richard Arens, a congressional staff

member who had a prominent role in the hearings on the McCarran-Walter

bill as well as in the activities of the HUAC, stated that "these are the

critics who do not like America as it is and has been. They think our peo-

ple exist in unfair ethnic proportions. They prefer that we bear a greater

resemblance or ethnic relationship to the foreign peoples whom they favor

and for whom they are seeking disproportionately greater immigration priv-

ileges" (in Bennett, 1963, 186). As Divine (1957, p. 188) notes, ethnic

interests predominated on both sides; the charges of racism made against

the restrictionists who were advocating the ethnic status quo were bal-

anced against the attempts by anti-restrictionists to alter the ethnic status

quo in a manner that conformed to their own perceived ethnic interests.

The salience of Jewish involvement in immigration during this period

is also apparent in several other incidents. In 1950 the representative of the

AJCongress testified that the retention of national origins in any form would

be "a political and moral catastrophe" ("Revision of Immigration Laws"

Joint Hearings, 1950, pp. 336-337). The national origins formula implies

that "persons in quest of the opportunity to live in this land are to be

judged according to breed like cattle at a country fair and not on the basis

of their character, fitness or capacity" (Congress Weekly 21, 1952, pp. 3-

4). Divine (1957, p. 173) characterizes the AJCongress as representing "the

more militant wing" of the opposition because of its principled opposition

to any form of the national origins formula, whereas other opponents

merely wanted to be able to distribute unused quotas to Southern and East-

ern Europe.

Representative Francis Walter noted the "propaganda drive that is be-

ing engaged in now by certain members of the American Jewish Congress

opposed to the Immigration and Nationality Code" (Cong. Rec.Mar, 13,

1952, p. 2283), noting particularly the activities of Dr. Israel Goldstein,

president of the AJCongress, who had been reported in the New York

Times as having stated that the Immigration and Nationality law would

place "a legislative seal of inferiority on all persons of other than Anglo-

Saxon origin." Representative Walter then noted the special role that Jew-

ish organizations had played in attempting to foster family reunion rather

than special skills as the basis of United States immigration policy. After

Representative Jacob Javits stated that opposition to the law was "not con-

fined to the one group the gentleman mentioned" (Congressional Record,

March 13, 1952, p. 2284), Walter responded as follows:

336

KEVIN MACDONALD

I might call your attention to the fact that Mr. Harry N. Rosen-

field, Commissioner of the Displaced Persons Commission and

incidentally a brother-in-law of a lawyer who is stirring up all

this agitation, in a speech recently said:

The proposed legislation is America's Nuremberg trial.

It is "racious" and archaic, based on a theory that peo-

ple with different styles of noses should be treated dif-

ferently.

Representative Walter then went on to note that during the hearings

on the bill, the only two organizations that were hostile to the entire bill

were the AJCongress and the Association of Immigration and Nationality

Lawyers, the latter "represented by an attorney who is also advising and

counseling the American Jewish Congress." (Indeed, Goldstein [1952b]

himself noted that "at the time of the Joint House-Senate hearings on the

McCarran bill, the American Jewish Congress was the only civic group

which dared flatly to oppose the national origins quota formula.")

Representative Emanuel Celler then stated that Walter "should not

have overemphasized as he did the people of one particular faith who are

opposing the bill" (p. 2285). Representative Walter agreed with Celler's

comments, noting that "there are other very fine Jewish groups who en-

dorse the bill." Nevertheless, the principle Jewish organizations, including

the AJCongress, the AJCommittee, the ADL, the National Council of Jewish

Women, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, did indeed oppose the

bill (Cong. Rec.,April 23, 1952, p. 4247), and when Judge Simon Rifkind

testified against the bill in the Joint Hearings, he emphasized that he repre-

sented a very wide range of Jewish groups, "the entire body of religious

opinion and lay opinion within the Jewish group, religiously speaking,

from the extreme right and extreme left" (p. 563).22 Rifkind represented a

long list of national and local Jewish groups, including in addition to the

above, the Synagogue Council of America, the Jewish Labor Committee,

the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, and 27 local Jewish councils

throughout the United States. Moreover, the fight against the bill—which

became the McCarran-Walter act—was led by Jewish members of Con-

gress, including especially Celler, Javits, and Lehman, all of whom, as indi-

cated above, were prominent members of the ADL.

Albeit by indirection, Representative Walter was clearly calling atten-

tion to the special Jewish role in the immigration conflict of 1952. The

special role of the AJCongress in opposing the McCarran-Walter act was a

source of pride within the group: on the verge of reversing the act in 1965,

337

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

the Congress bi-Weekly editorialized that it was "a cause of pride" that

Rabbi Israel Goldstein had been "singled out by Rep. Walter for attack on

the floor of the House of Representatives as the prime organizer of the

campaign against the measures he co-sponsored" (Feb. 1, 1965, p. 3).

The perception that Jewish concerns were an important feature of the

opposition to the McCarran-Walter act can also be seen in the following

exchange between Representative Celler and Representative Walter. Celler

noted that "The national origin theory upon which our immigration law is

based . . . [mocks] our protestations based on a question of equality of

opportunity for all peoples, regardless of race, color, or creed." Representa-

tive Walter replied that "a great menace to America lies in the fact that so

many professionals, including professional jews, are shedding crocodile

tears for no reason whatsoever" (Cong. Rec. Jan. 13, 1953, p. 372). And in

a comment referring to the peculiarities of Jewish interests in immigration

legislation, Richard Arens, Staff Director of the Senate subcommittee that

produced the McCarran-Walter act, pointedly noted that "one of the cu-

rious things about those who most loudly claim that the 1952 act is 'dis-

criminatory' and that it does not make allowance for a sufficient number of

alleged refugees, is that they oppose admission of any of the approximately

one million Arab refugees in camps where they are living in pitiful circum-

stances after having been driven out of Israel" (in Bennett, 1963, p. 181).

The McCarran-Walter act was passed over President Truman's veto,

and Truman's "alleged partisanship to Jews was a favorite target of anti-

Semites" (Cohen, 1972, p. 377). Prior to the veto, Truman was intensively

lobbied, "particularly [by] Jewish societies" opposed to the bill, while gov-

ernment agencies, including the State Department urged Truman to sign

the bill (Divine, 1957, p. 184). Moreover, individuals with openly anti-

Semitic attitudes, such as John Beaty (1951), often focused on Jewish in-

volvement in the immigration battles during this period.

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1953-1965

During this period, the Congress Weekly regularly noted the role of

Jewish organizations as the vanguard of liberalized immigration laws: for

example, in its editorial of Feb. 20, 1956 (p. 3), it congratulated President

Eisenhower for his "unequivocal opposition to the quota system which,

more than any other feature of our immigration policy, has excited the

most widespread and most intense aversion among Americans. In advanc-

ing this proposal for 'new guidelines and standards' in determining admis-

sions, President Eisenhower has courageously taken a stand in advance of

even many advocates of a liberal immigration policy and embraced a posi-

338

KEVIN MACDONALD

tion which had at first been urged by the American Jewish Congress and

other Jewish agencies."

The AJCommittee made a major effort to keep the immigration issue

alive during a period of widespread apathy among the American public

between the passage of the McCarran-Walter act and the early 1960s. Jew-

ish organizations intensified their effort during this period (Cohen, 1972,

pp. 370-373; Neuringer, 1971, p. 358), with the AJCommittee helping to

establish the Joint Conference on Alien Legislation and the American Immi-

gration Conference (organizations representing pro-immigration forces) as

well as providing most of the funding and performing most of the work of

these groups. In 1955 the AJCommittee organized a group of influential

citizens as the National Commission on Immigration and Citizenship "in

order to give prestige to the campaign" (Cohen, 1972, p. 373). "All these

groups studied immigration laws, disseminated information to the public,

presented testimony to Congress, and planned other appropriate activ-

ities. . . . There were no immediate or dramatic results; but AJC's dogged

campaign in conjunction with like-minded organizations ultimately prod-

ded the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to action" (Cohen, 1972, p.

373).

An article by Oscar Handlin (1952), the prominent Harvard historian

of immigration, is a fascinating microcosm of the Jewish approach to immi-

gration during this period. Writing in Commentary (a publication of the

AJCommittee) almost 30 years after the 1924 defeat and in the immediate

aftermath of the McCarran-Walter act, Handlin entitled his article "The im-

migration fight has only begun: Lessons of the McCarran-Walter setback."

The title is a remarkable indication of the tenacity and persistence of Jew-

ish commitment to this issue. The message is to not be discouraged by the

recent defeat which occurred despite "all the effort toward securing the

revision of our immigration laws" (p. 2).

Handlin attempts to cast the argument in universalist terms as benefit-

ing all Americans and as conforming to American ideals that "all men,

being brothers, are equally capable of being Americans" (p.7). Current im-

migration law reflects "racist xenophobia" (p. 2) by its token quotas for

Asians and its deprivation of the right of West Indian blacks to take advan-

tage of British quotas. Handlin ascribes the restrictionist sentiments of Pat

McCarran to "the hatred of foreigners that was all about him in his youth

and by the dim, recalled fear that he himself might be counted among

them" (p. 3)—a sort of psychoanalytic identification-with-the-aggressor ar-

gument (McCarran was Catholic).

In his article Handlin repeatedly uses the term "we" (as in "[i]f we

cannot beat McCarran and his cohorts with their own weapons, we can do

339

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

much to destroy the efficacy of those weapons (p. 4))," suggesting Hand-

lin's belief in a unified Jewish interest in liberal immigration policy and

presaging a prolonged "chipping away" of the 1952 legislation in the ensu-

ing years. Handlin's anti-restrictionist strategy included altering the views

of social scientists to the effect "that it was possible and necessary to distin-

guish among the 'races' of immigrants that clamored for admission to the

United States" (p. 4). Handlin's proposal to recruit social scientists in the

immigration battles is congruent with the political agenda of the Boasian

school of anthropology discussed above. And as Higham (1984) notes, the

ascendancy of such views was as an important component of the ultimate

victory over restrictionism.

In an arguably tendentious rendering of the logic of preserving the

ethnic status quo that underlay the arguments for restriction in the period

from 1921-1952, Handlin stated:

The laws are bad because they rest on the racist assumption

that mankind is divided into fixed breeds, biologically and cul-

turally separated from each other, and because, within that

framework, they assume that Americans are Anglo-Saxons by

origin and ought to remain so. To all other peoples, the laws say

that the United States ranks them in terms of their racial prox-

imity to our own 'superior' stock; and upon the many, many

millions of Americans not descended from the Anglo-Saxons,

the laws cast a distinct imputation of inferiority (p. 5).

Handlin then deplored the apathy of other "hyphenated Americans" to

share the enthusiasm of the Jewish effort: "Many groups failed to see the

relevance of the McCarran-Walter Bill to their own position"; he suggested

that they ought to act as groups to assert their rightful interests: "The Italian

American has the right to be heard on these issues precisely as an Italian

American" (p. 7; italics in text). The implicit assumption is that America

ought to be composed of cohesive subgroups with a clear sense of their

group interests in opposition to the peoples deriving from Northern and

Western Europe or of the United States as a whole. And there is the impli-

cation that Italian-Americans have an interest in furthering immigration of

Africans and Asians and in creating such a multiracial and multicultural

society.

Shortly after Handlin's article, William Petersen (1955), also writing in

Commentary, argued that pro-immigration forces should be explicit in their

advocacy of a multicultural society, and that the importance of this goal

340

KEVIN MACDONALD

transcended the importance of achieving any self-interested goal of the

United States, such as obtaining needed skills or improving foreign rela-

tions. In making his case he cited a group of predominantly Jewish social

scientists whose works, beginning with Horace Kallen's plea for a multi-

cultural, pluralistic society, "constitute the beginning of a scholarly legitim-

ization of the different immigration policy that will perhaps one day be-

come law" (p. 86), including, besides Kallen, Melville Herskovits, Geoffrey

Gorer, Samuel Lubell, David Riesman, Thorsten Sellin, and Milton Konvitz.

These social scientists did indeed contribute to the immigration bat-

tles. For example, the following quotation from a scholarly book on immi-

gration policy by Milton Konvitz of Cornell University reflects the rejection

of national interest as an element of United States immigration policy—a

hallmark of the Jewish approach to immigration:

To place so much emphasis on technological and vocational

qualifications is to remove every vestige of humanitarianism

from our immigration policy. We deserve small thanks from

those who come here if they are admitted because we find that

they are "urgently" needed, by reason of their training and ex-

perience, to advance our national interests. This is hardly immi-

gration; it is the importation of special skills or know-how, not

greatly different from the importation of coffee or rubber. It is

hardly in the spirit of American ideals to disregard a man's char-

acter and promise and to look only at his education and the

vocational opportunities he had the good fortune to enjoy (Kon-

vitz, 1953, p. 26).

Handlin wrote that the McCarran-Walter law was only a temporary

setback and he was right. Thirty years after the triumph of restrictionism,

only Jewish groups remained as persistent and tenacious advocates of a

multicultural America. Forty-one years after the 1924 triumph of restric-

tionism and the national origins provision and only 13 years after its reaffir-

mation with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, Jewish organizations suc-

cessfully supported ending the geographically based national origins basis

of immigration intended to result in an ethnic status quo in what was now

a radically altered intellectual and political climate.

Particularly important is the provision in the Immigration Act of 1965

that expanded the number of non-quota immigrants. Beginning in their

testimony on the 1924 law, Jewish spokesmen had been in the forefront in

attempts to admit family members on a nonquota basis (Neuringer, 1971,

p. 191). During the House debates on immigration surrounding the McCar-

341

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

ran-Walter Act, Representative Walter (Cong. Rec., p. 2284, March 13,

1952) noted the special focus that Jewish organizations had on family re-

union rather than on special skills. Responding to Representative Javits

who had complained that under the bill 50% of the quota for "Negroes"

from the British West Indies colonies would be reserved for people with

special skills, Walter noted that "I would like to call the gentleman's atten-

tion to the fact that this is the principle of using 50 percent of the quota for

people needed in the United States. But, if that entire 50 percent is not

used in that category, then the unused numbers go down to the next cate-

gory which replies to the objections that these Jewish organizations make

much of, that families are being separated."

Prior to the 1965 law, Bennett (1963, p. 244), commenting on the

family unification aspects of the 1961 immigration legislation, noted that

the "relationship by blood or marriage and the principle of uniting families

have become the 'open Sesame' to the immigration gates." Moreover, de-

spite repeated denials by the anti-restrictionists that their proposals would

affect the ethnic balance of the country, Bennett (1963, p. 256) commented

that the "repeated, persistent extension of nonquota status to immigrants

from countries with oversubscribed quotas and flatly discriminated against

by [the McCarran-Walter act] together with administrative waivers of inad-

missibility, adjustment of status and private bills, is helping to speed and

make apparently inevitable a change in the ethnic face of the nation" (p.

257)—a reference to the "chipping away" of the 1952 law recommended

as a strategy in Handlin's article. Indeed, a major argument apparent in the

debate over the 1965 legislation was that the 1952 law had been so weak-

ened that it had largely become irrelevant and there was a need to over-

haul immigration legislation to legitimize a de facto situation.

Bennett also noted that "(t)he stress on the immigration issue arises

from insistence of those who regard quotas as ceilings, not floors [oppo-

nents of restriction often referred to unused quotas as "wasted"], who want

to remake America in the image of small-quota countries and who do not

like our basic ideology, cultural attitudes and heritage. They insist that it is

the duty of the United States to accept immigrants irrespective of their

assimilability or our own population problems. They insist on remaining

hyphenated Americans" (1963, p. 295).

The family-based emphasis of the quota regulations of the 1965 law

(e.g., the provision that at least 24% of the quota for each area be set aside

for brothers and sisters of citizens) has resulted in a multiplier effect which

ultimately subverted the quota system entirely by allowing for a "chaining"

phenomenon in which endless chains of the close relatives of close rela-

tives are admitted outside the quota system:

342

KEVIN MACDONALD

Imagine one immigrant, say an engineering student, who was

studying in the U. S. during the 1960's. If he found a job after

graduation, he could then bring over his wife [as the spouse of

a resident alien], and six years later, after being naturalized, his

bothers and sisters [as siblings of a citizen]. They, in turn, could

bring their wives, husbands, and children. Within a dozen

years, one immigrant entering as a skilled worker could easily

generate 25 visas for in-laws, nieces, and nephews (McConnell

1988, p. 98).

The 1965 law also de-emphasized the criterion that immigrants should

have needed skills. (In 1986, less than 4% of immigrants were admitted on

the basis of needed skills, while 74% were admitted on the basis of kinship

[see Brimelow, 1995].) As indicated above, the rejection of a skill require-

ment or other tests of competence in favor of "humanitarian goals" and

family unification had been an element of Jewish immigration policy at

least since debate on the McCarran-Walter act of the early 1950s and ex-

tending really to the long opposition to literacy tests dating from the end of

the nineteenth century.

Senator Jacob Javits played a prominent role in the Senate hearings on

the 1965 bill, and Emanuel Celler, who fought for unrestricted immigration

for over 40 years in the House of Representatives, introduced similar legis-

lation in that body. Jewish organizations (American Council for Judaism

Philanthropic Fund; Council of Jewish Federations & Welfare Funds; B'nai

B'rith Women) filed briefs in support of the measure before the Senate

Subcommittee, as did organizations such as the ACLU and the Americans

for Democratic Action with a large Jewish membership.

Indeed, it is noteworthy that well before the ultimate triumph of the

Jewish policy on immigration, Javits (1951) authored an article entitled

"Let's open the gates" that proposed immigration level of 500,000 per year

for 20 years with no restrictions on national origin. In 1961 Javits proposed

a bill that "sought to destroy the [national origins quota system] by a flank

attack and to increase quota and nonquota immigration" (Bennett, 1963, p.

250). In addition to provisions aimed at removing barriers due to race,

ethnic and national origins, included in this bill was a provision that

brothers, sisters, and married sons or daughters of United States citizens

and their spouses and children who had become eligible under the quota

system in legislation of 1957 be included as nonquota immigrants—an

even more radical version of the provision whose incorporation in the

1965 law facilitated non-European immigration into the United States. Al-

though this provision of Javit's bill was not approved at the time, the bill's

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

proposals for softening previous restrictions on Asian and Black immigra-

tion as well as removing racial classification from visa documents (thus

allowing unlimited nonquota immigration of Asians born in the Western

Hemisphere) were approved.

It is also interesting that the main victory of the restrictionists in 1965

was that Western Hemisphere nations were included in the new quota

system thus ending the possibility of unrestricted immigration from those

regions. In speeches before the Senate, Senator Javits (Cong. Rec. 111,

1965, p. 24469) bitterly opposed this extension of the quota system, argu-

ing that placing any limits on immigration of all of the people of the West-

ern Hemisphere would have severely negative implications on United

States foreign policy. In a highly revealing discussion of the bill before the

Senate, Senator Sam Ervin (Cong. Rec. 89th Congress, 1st session, pp.

24446-51, 1965) noted that "those who disagree with me express no

shock that Britain, in the future, can send us 10,000 fewer immigrants than

she has sent on an annual average in the past. They are only shocked that

British Guyana cannot send us every single citizen of that country who

wishes to come." Clearly the forces of liberal immigration really wanted

unlimited immigration into the United States.

The pro-immigrationists also failed to prevent a requirement that the

Secretary of Labor determine that there are insufficient Americans able and

willing to perform the labor which the aliens intend to perform, and that

the employment of such aliens will not adversely affect the wages and

working conditions of American workers. Writing in the American Jewish

Year Book, Liskofsky (1966, 174) notes that pro-immigration groups op-

posed these regulations but agreed to them in order to get a bill that ended

the national origins provisions. After passage "they became intensely con-

cerned. They voiced publicly the fear that the new, administratively cum-

bersome procedure might easily result in paralyzing most immigration of

skilled and unskilled workers as well as of non-preference immigrants."

Reflecting the long Jewish opposition to the idea that immigration policy

should be in the national interest, the economic welfare of American citi-

zens was irrelevant; securing high levels of immigration had become an

end in itself.

The 1965 law is having the effect that it seems reasonable to suppose

had been intended by its Jewish advocates all along: the Census Bureau

projects that by the year 2050, European-derived peoples will no longer be

a majority of the population of America. Moreover, multiculturalism has

already become a powerful ideological and political reality (Brimelow,

1995). Although the proponents of the 1965 legislation continued to insist

that the bill would not affect the ethnic balance of the United States or

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KEVIN MACDONALD

even impact its culture, it is difficult to believe that at least some of the

proponents were unaware of the eventual implications. Opponents, cer-

tainly, were quite clear that it would indeed affect the ethnic balance of the

United States. Given the intense involvement of organizations such as the

AJCommittee in the details of immigration legislation and their very nega-

tive attitudes toward the North-Western European bias of pre-1965 United

States immigration policy and very negative attitudes toward the idea of an

ethnic status quo embodied, e.g., in the PCIN document Whom We Shall

Welcome, it appears unlikely to suppose that these organizations were un-

aware of the inaccuracy of the projections of the effects of this legislation

that were made by its supporters. Given the clearly articulated interests in

ending the ethnic status quo evident in the arguments of anti-restrictionists

throughout the period from 1924-1965, the 1965 law would not have

been perceived by its proponents as a victory unless they viewed it as

ultimately changing the ethnic status quo. Revealingly, the 1965 law was

viewed as a victory by the anti-restrictionists, and it is noteworthy that after

regularly condemning United States immigration law and championing the

eradication of the national origins formula precisely because it had pro-

duced an ethnic status quo, The Congress bi-Weekly completely ceased

publishing articles on this topic.

Moreover, Lawrence Auster (1990, p. 31 ff) shows that the supporters

of the legislation repeatedly glossed over the distinction between quota

and non-quota immigration and failed to mention the effect that the legisla-

tion would have on non-quota immigration. Projections of the number of

new immigrants failed to take account of the well-known and often com-

mented-upon fact that the old quotas favoring western European countries

were not being filled. Moreover, continuing a tradition of over 40 years,

the rhetoric of those in favor of the bill presented the legislation of 1924

and 1952 as based on theories of racial superiority and as involving racial

discrimination rather than in terms of an attempt to create an ethnic status

quo.

Even in 1952, Senator McCarran was well aware of the high stakes at

risk in immigration policy:

I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization

and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, con-

taminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity

will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would

praise the contributions which have been made to our society

by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. America

is indeed a joining together of many streams which go to form a

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

mighty river which we call the American way. However, we

have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs

which have not become integrated into the American way of

life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today,

as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for ad-

mission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solu-

tion of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through

a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United

States. ... I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the ene-

mies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in

amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed

more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group

since we achieved our independence as a nation (Senator Pat

McCarran, Cong. Rec.,March 2, 1953, p. 1518.)

CONCLUSION

The defeats of 1924 and 1952 did not prevent the ultimate victory of

the Jewish interest in combating the cultural, political, and demographic

dominance of the European-derived peoples of the United States. What is

truly remarkable is the tenacity with which Jewish ethnic interests were

pursued for a period of close to 100 years. Also remarkable was the ability

to frame the argument of immigration-restrictionists in terms of racial supe-

riority in the period from 1924-1965 rather than in such positive terms as

the ethnic interests of the peoples of northern and western Europe in main-

taining a status quo as of 1924.

During the period between 1924 and 1965 Jewish interests were largely

thwarted, but this did not prevent the ultimate triumph of the Jewish per-

spective on immigration. In a very real sense the result of the immigration

changes fostered by Jewish intellectual and political activity have constitu-

ted a longterm victory over the political, demographic, and cultural repre-

sentation of "the common people of the South and West" (Higham, 1984,

p. 49) whose congressional delegates were in the forefront of the restric-

tionist forces. Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb (1995) notes that

it is the descendants of those WASPS who settled the west and south who

"by and large did the most to lay out the infrastructure of this country, quite

often suffering educational and professional regression as they tamed the

wilderness, built the towns, roads and schools, and initiated a democratic

way of life that later white cultures were able to take advantage of without

paying the price of pioneering. Today they have the least, socioeconomi-

cally, to show for these contributions. And if one would care to check a

346

KEVIN MACDONALD

map, they are from the areas now evincing the greatest resistance to gov-

ernment practices." Webb's ideas are not new but reflect the sentiments a

great many congressmen voiced during the immigration debates of the

1920s.

It is instructive to consider the possible longterm effects of this sea

change in American immigration policy combined with the current em-

phasis on multiculturalism. The shift to multiculturaiism has coincided with

an enormous growth of immigration from non-European-derived peoples

beginning with the Immigration act of 1965 which favored immigrants

from non-European countries. Many of these immigrants come from non-

western countries where cultural, gender, and genetic segregation are the

norm. Within the context of multicultural America, they are encouraged to

retain their own languages and religions and encouraged to marry within

the group.

The movement toward ethnic separatism is highly problematic. His-

torically, ethnic separatism has been an extremely divisive force within

societies. At the present time there are ethnically based conflicts on every

continent, and formerly multi-ethnic societies are breaking away and es-

tablishing ethno-states based on ethnic homogeneity (Tullberg & Tullberg,

1997). These results confirm the expectation that indeed ethnicity is impor-

tant in human affairs. People appear to be extremely aware of group mem-

bership, and ethnicity remains a common source of group identity. Individ-

uals are also keenly aware of the relative standing of their own group in

terms of resource control and social status. And they are willing to take

extraordinary steps in order to achieve and retain economic and political

power in defense of these group imperatives.

It is instructive to think of the circumstances which could minimize

group conflict given the assumption of ethnic separatism. Theorists of cul-

tural pluralism, such as Horace Kallen, envision the possibility that differ-

ent ethnic groups would retain their distinctive identity in the context of

complete political equality and economic opportunity. The difficulty with

this scenario is that no provision is made for the results of competition for

resources within the society.

In the best of circumstances one might suppose that the separated

ethnic groups would engage in absolute reciprocity with each other, so that

there would be no differences in terms of any measure of success in the

society, including social class membership, economic role (e.g., producer

versus consumer; creditor versus debtor; manager versus worker), or fertil-

ity between the separated ethnic groups. All groups would have approx-

imately equal numbers and equal political power, or if there were different

numbers there would be provisions ensuring that minorities could retain

347

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

equitable representation in terms of the markers of success. Such condi-

tions would minimize hostility between the groups because it would be

difficult to attribute one's status to the actions of the other group.

However, given the existence of ethnic separatism, it would still be in

the interests of each group to advance its own interests at the expense of

the other groups. All things being equal, a given ethnic group would be

better off if it ensured that the other group had fewer resources, a lower

social status, lower fertility, and proportionately less political power than

itself. (Indeed, lowering the political and demographic power of the Euro-

pean-derived peoples of the United States has clearly been the aim of the

Jewish political and intellectual activities discussed here.) The hypothe-

sized steady state of equality therefore implies a set of balance of power

relationships—each side constantly checking to make sure that the other is

not cheating; each side constantly looking for ways to obtain dominance

and exploitation by any possible means; each side willing to compromise

only because of the threat of retaliation by the other side; each side willing

to cooperate in a manner which involves a cost only if forced to do so by,

e.g., the presence of external threat. Clearly any type of cooperation which

would involve true altruism toward the other group would not be ex-

pected.

Thus the ideal situation of absolute equality would certainly require a

great deal of monitoring and undoubtedly be characterized by a great deal

of mutual suspicion. However, in the real world even this rather grim ideal

is highly unlikely. In the real world, ethnic groups differ in their talents and

abilities; they differ in their numbers, fertility, and the extent to which they

encourage parenting practices conducive to resource acquisition; and they

differ in the resources held at any point in time and in their political power.

Equality or proportionate equity would be extremely difficult to attain, or to

maintain after it has been achieved, without extraordinary levels of mon-

itoring and without extremely intense social controls which would enforce

ethnic quotas on the accumulation of wealth, admission to universities,

obtaining high status jobs, etc.

Because of differing talents and abilities and differing parenting styles

between ethnic groups, there would be a need to have different criteria for

qualifying and retaining jobs depending on ethnic group membership.23 In

the real world, therefore, there would have to be extraordinary efforts

made to attain this steady state of ethnic balance of power and resources. It

is of great interest that the ideology of Jewish-gentile co-existence has

sometimes included the idea that the different ethnic groups develop a

similar occupational profile and (implicitly) control resources in proportion

to their numbers. The dream of the German assimilationists during the

348

KEVIN MACDONALD

nineteenth-century was that the occupational profile of the Jews after

emancipation would be highly similar to that of the gentiles—a "Utopian

expectation . . . shared by many, jews and non-Jews alike" (Katz, 1986, p.

67). Efforts were made to decrease the percentage of Jews involved in trade

and increase the percentages involved in agriculture and artisanry. In the

event, however, the result of emancipation was that Jews were vastly over-

represented among the economic and cultural elite of the society, and this

overrepresentation was a critical feature of German anti-Semitisrn from

1870-1933.

Similarly, during the 1920s plans were proposed in which each ethnic

group received a percentage of placements at Harvard and other univer-

sities reflecting the percentage of racial and national groups in the United

States. These plans certainly reflect the importance of ethnicity in human

affairs, but surely a society based on this type of ethnic special interest is

not one which a social engineer in the manner of Lycurgus, Moses, Plato,

or the American Founding Fathers would design as a blueprint for an entire

society. The levels of social tension are bound to be chronically high.

Moreover, there is a considerable chance that ethnic warfare would occur

even if precise parity had been achieved via intensive social controls: as

indicated above, it would always be in the interests of any ethnic group to

obtain hegemony over the others.

If one adopts a cultural pluralism model in which there is free compe-

tition for resources and reproductive success, differences between ethnic

groups are inevitable, and history suggests that such differences would re-

sult in animosity from the groups that are losing out. The Tutsi/Hutu strug-

gle in Rwanda and its neighbors is only one of the latest of many tragic

examples. Assuming that there are ethnic differences in talents and abili-

ties, the supposition that ethnic separatism could be a stable situation with-

out ethnic animosity requires either a balance of power situation main-

tained with powerful social controls, as described above, or it requires that

at least some ethnic groups be unconcerned that they are losing in the

competition.

I regard this last possibility as remote at best. The proposition that an

ethnic group should or would be unconcerned with its own eclipse and

domination is certainly not expected by any theoretical or ideological

perspective of which I am aware. The present immigration policy essen-

tially places America "in play" as an arena of ethnic competition in a

sense which does not apply in the non-western nations of the world

where the implicit assumption is that territory is held by its historically-

dominant people. Under present policies, each racial/ethnic group in the

world is encouraged to press its interest in expanding its demographic

349

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

and political presence in America and can be expected to do so if given

the opportunity.

Contrary to policies they advocate for the United States, American

Jews have had no interest at all in proposing that immigration to Israel

should be similarly multi-ethnic or that Israel should have an immigration

policy that would threaten the hegemony of Jews in Israel. Indeed, the very

deep ethnic conflict within Israel is an excellent example of the failure of

multiculturalism. Similarly, while jews have been on the forefront of move-

ments to separate church and state in the United States and often protested

lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union, the control of religious affairs

by the Orthodox in Israel has received only belated and half-hearted oppo-

sition by American Jewish organizations (Cohen, 1972, 317) and has not

prevented the all-out support of Israel by American Jews, despite the fact

that Israel's policy regarding immigration is quite the opposite of that of

western democracies.

At present the interests of non-European-derived peoples to expand

demographically and politically in the United States are widely perceived

as a moral imperative, while the attempts of the European-derived peoples

to retain demographic, political, and cultural control are represented as

"racist" and patently immoral. From the perspective of these European-

derived peoples, the prescribed morality entails altruism and self-sacrifice,

and it is unlikely to be viable in the long run. And, as we have seen, the

viability of such a morality of self-sacrifice is especially problematic in the

context of a multicultural society in which everyone is highly conscious of

group membership and there is between-group competition for resources.

Although the success of the anti-restrictionist effort is an indication

that people can be induced to be altruistic toward other groups, I rather

doubt such altruism will continue to occur if there are obvious signs that

the status and political power of the European-derived group is decreasing

while the power of other groups increases as a result of immigration and

other social policies. The prediction, both on common sense grounds and

on the basis of psychological research on social identity process (e.g.,

Hogg & Abrams, 1987), is that as other groups become increasingly power-

ful and salient in a multicultural society, the European-derived peoples of

the United States will become increasingly unified and that contemporary

divisive influences among the European-derived peoples of the United

States (e.g., issues related to gender and sexual orientation; social class

differences; religious differences) will be increasingly perceived as unim-

portant. Eventually these groups will develop greater cohesion and a sense

of common interest in their interactions with the other ethnic groups with

profound consequences on the future history of America and the West.

350

KEVIN MACDONALD

ENDNOTES

1. Raab is associated with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADD, and is execu-

tive director emeritus of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis Univer-

sity. He is also a columnist for the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin.Among other works, he

is co-author, with Seymour Lipset of The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing-Extremism in

America, 1790-1970 (Lipset & Raab 1970), a volume in a series of books on anti-

Semitism in the United States sponsored by the ADL.

2. In Australia, Miriam Faine, an editorial committee member of the Australian Jewish

Democrat stated that "The strengthening of multicultural or diverse Australia is also our

most effective insurance policy against anti-semitism. The day Australia has a Chinese

Australian Governor General I would feel more confident of my freedom to live as a

Jewish Australian" (in McCormack 1994, p. 11).

3. Moreover, a deep concern that an ethnically and culturally homogeneous America

would compromise Jewish interests can be seen in Silberman's comments on the attrac-

tion of Jews to "the Democratic party . . . with its traditional hospitality to non-WASP

ethnic groups. ... A distinguished economist who strongly disagreed with Mondale's

economic policies voted for him nonetheless. 'I watched the conventions on television,'

he explained, 'and the Republicans did not look like my kind of people." That same

reaction led many Jews to vote for Carter in 1980 despite their dislike of him; 'I'd rather

live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than by

those I saw at the Republican convention' a well-known author told me" (pp. 347-348).

4. Goldberg (1996, p. 160) notes that the future neo-conservatives were disciples of

Trotskyist theoretician Max Schachtman. A good example is Irving Kristol's (1983)

"Memoirs of a Trotskyist."

5. Grant's letter to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization emphasized

the principle argument of the restrictionists, i.e., that the use of the 1890 census of the

foreign born as the basis of the immigration law was fair to all ethnic groups currently in

the country, and that the use of the 1910 census discriminated against the "native Amer-

icans whose ancestors were in this country before its independence." He also argued in

favor of quotas from western hemisphere nations because these countries "in some cases

furnish very undesirable immigrants. The Mexicans who come into the United States are

overwhelmingly of Indian blood, and the recent intelligence tests have shown their very

low intellectual status. We have already got too many of them in our Southwestern

States, and a check should be put on their increase" (p. 571). Grant was also concerned

about the unassimilability of recent immigrants. He included with his letter a Chicago

Tribune editorial commenting on a situation in Hamtramck, Michigan in which recent

immigrants were described as demanding "Polish rule," the expulsion of non-Poles, and

that only the Polish language be spoken even by federal officials. Grant also argued that

differences in reproductive rate would result in displacement of groups that delayed

marriage and had fewer children—clearly a concern that as a result of immigration his

ethnic group would be displaced by ethnic groups with a higher rate of natural increase.

(Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Natural-

ization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 5, 1924; p.

570.)

6. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Natural-

ization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 5, 1924, p.

580-581.

7. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Commit-

tees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R.

2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 391.

8. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturaliza-

tion House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 3, 1924, p. 303.

351

POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

9. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Natural-

ization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 3, 1924, p.

341.

10. For example, in the Senate debates of April 15-19, 1924, Nordic superiority was not

mentioned by any of the proponents of the legislation but was mentioned by the follow-

ing opponents of the legislation: Senators Colt (p. 6542), Reed (p. 6468), Walsh (p.

6355). In the House debates of April 5, 8, and 15, virtually all of the opponents of the

legislation raised the racial inferiority issue, including Reps. Celler (p. 5914-5915),

Clancy (p. 5930), Connery (p. 5683), Dickstein (p. 5655-5656, 5686), Gallivan (p.

5849), Jacobstein (p. 5864), James (p. 5670), Kunz (p. 5896), LaGuardia (p. 5657),

Mooney (p. 5909-5910), O'Connell (p. 5836), O'Connor (p. 5648), Oliver (p. 5870),

O'Sullivan (p. 5899), Perlman (p. 5651); Sabath (p. 5651, 5662), and Tague (p. 5873).

Several representatives (e.g.. Reps. Dickinson [p. 6267), Garber [pp. 5689-5693] and

Smith [p. 5705J) contrasted the positive characteristics of the Nordic immigrants with

the negative characteristics of more recent immigrants without distinguishing genetic

from environmental reasons as possible influences. They, along with several others,

noted especially the lack of assimilation of the recent immigrants and their tendencies to

cluster in urban areas. Rep. Allen argued that there is a "necessity for purifying and

keeping pure the blood of America" (p. 5693). Rep. McSwain, who argued for the need

to preserve Nordic hegemony, did not do so on the basis of Nordic superiority but on

the basis of legitimate ethnic self-interest (pp. 5683-5; see also comments of Reps. Lea

and Miller). Rep. Gasque introduced a newspaper article that referred to the "laws of

heredity" and to the swamping of the race that had built America (p. 6270).

11. Restriction of Immigration. Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Natural-

ization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 3, 1924; p.

351.

12. See, e.g.. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration

and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 5,

1924; p. 733ff.

13. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Represen-

tatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the

United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, p. 1.

14. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Represen-

tatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the

United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, p. 78.

15. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Represen-

tatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the

United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, p. 140.

16. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Commit-

tees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R.

2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 565.

17. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Commit-

tees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R.

2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 566. See also statement of Rabbi Bernard J. Bamberger,

President of the Synagogue Council of America; See also the statement of the

AJCongress, pp. 560-561.

18. Statement of Will Maslow representing the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Sub-

committees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716,

H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 394.

19. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Con-

gress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9,1951, pp.

562-595.

20. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Con-

gress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9,1951, p. 410.

352

KEVIN MACDONALD

21. joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Con-

gress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p.

404.

22. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the judiciary, 82nd Con-

gress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p.

563.

23. Moreover, achieving parity between Jews and other ethnic groups would entail a very

high level of discrimination against individual Jews for admission to universities or em-

ployment opportunities, and would even entail a large taxation on Jews in order to

prevent the present Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth, since at present Jews

are vastly over-represented among the wealthy and the successful in the United States

(e.g., Ginsberg, 1994; Lipsett & Raab, 1995). Beginning in the 1920s, studies have re-

peatedly shown that Ashkenazi Jews have a full-scale IQ of approximately 117 and a

verbal IQ in the range of 125 (see MacDonald, 1994 for a review). By 1988, Jews

constituted about 40% of admissions to Ivy League colleges and Jewish income was at

least double that of gentiles (Shapiro, 1992, p. 116). Shapiro also shows that Jews are

overrepresented by at least a factor of nine on indexes of wealth, but that this is a

conservative estimate because much Jewish wealth is in real estate which is difficult to

determine and easy to hide. While constituting approximately 2.4% of the population of

the United States, Jews represented one half of the top 100 Wall Street executives. Lipset

and Raab (1995) note that Jews contribute between one-quarter and one-third of all

political contributions in the United States, including one-half of Democratic Party con-

tributions and one-fourth of Republican contributions. Indeed, many Jewish intellectuals

(including "neo-conservatives" such as Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Irving

Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, and Earl Raab) as well as Jewish organiza-

tions (including the ADL, the AJCommittee, and the AJCongress) have been eloquent

opponents of affirmative action and quota mechanisms for distributing resources (see

Sachar, 1992, p. 818ff).

REFERENCES

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