Southern and Eastern Europeans were once branded unassimilable in the USA

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Intrusions into the European enclaves put stress on the law and strain on the administrative apparatus. With a native police force that was considered unsuitable to apprehend (even poor) Europeans, place and race were not in sync, people were displaced and locating themselves across racial lines. With formal sumptuary laws long rescinded, some social categories of people were no longer easily fixed to speech, housing, and dress. Material possessions were becoming unreliable indices these “wavering” classes and of specific social kinds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 865 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien; Southern congressmen framed southern European immigrants as racially impure — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 984; Southern congressmen racialized southern Europeans by analogy to miscegenation with Blacks. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 2304 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Early-1900s American intellectuals classified Southern and Eastern European immigrants as racially inferior #expands (0.95) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 239
• Poor Europeans’ presence destabilized the alignment of race, place, and material signifiers #complicates (0.72) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 865