Early-1900s American intellectuals classified Southern and Eastern European immigrants as racially inferior

Evidence

An 1890 report by Carl Campbell Brigham, a Princeton University professor, titled A Study of American Intelligence, ranked Russian, Italian, and Polish immigrants at the bottom of the intelligence scale, just above African Americans. Another professor, Ellwood P. Cubberley, in his 1909 book, Changing Conceptions of Education, distinguished between the inferior new immigrants of Southern and Eastern Europe and the superior earlier immigrants from Northern Europe. He stated, “These southern and eastern Europeans are a very different type from the north European who preceded them. Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative and not possessing Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order and government, their coining has served to dilute tremendously our national stock, and to corrupt our civic life.” Policy makers used such reports to argue for the need to restrict immigration in order to prevent the dilution of the (Northern European) White race in America. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 239

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the current chapter’s parallel between historical anti-European nativism and contemporary anti-Muslim racialization; also echoes patterns in the reader’s other work on how racial categories get assigned to ‘immigrant others’ across eras. — connects to: European immigrants’ racial difference had to be intellectually manufactured — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 768; Southern congressmen framed southern European immigrants as racially impure — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 984; Postwar IQ testing data grouped immigrant whites into inferior racial ranks — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1664 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both documents show racialized/class-based narratives used to police who belongs in the national body.