The Problem of
Restriction in American Immigration:
Italian Immigrants
and the Discourse of Science
Doctoral Dissertation Proposal
Michael Mezzano Jr.
This dissertation investigates the intellectual currents and political forces that led to a dramatic reversal of American immigration policy in the 1920s. Federal policy changed from a generally welcoming attitude toward immigrants to a system of ³racial² selection implemented in 1929 that was aimed largely at excluding Southern Italians and other ³racially² inferior groups. The dissertation repositions scientific debates at the center of the restrictionist movement, examining discussions of the role of nature and heredity after 1860 in Italy and the United States to demonstrate that scientific knowledge was pivotal in rationalizing restriction. The Italian case was particularly significant, as a recently unified Italy confronted the perception of two racially distinct populations in the North and South of the peninsula. As Southern Italians began emigrating in large numbers in the late 19th century, this stigma of biological inferiority followed them across the Atlantic, and provided an essential foundation for immigration restriction. Proponents of immigration restriction in the United States employed the language of biology and heredity to dictate policies to admit only ³Nordic² or ³Anglo-Saxon² immigrants, which explicitly positioned Southern Italians as racially inferior. Yet, the biological explanation was frequently challenged by counter-discourses in both countries, and the dissertation studies the simultaneous growth of scientific paradigms that privileged environment and culture over biology. These debates show that although the field of scientific knowledge was highly contested, biological determinists were ultimately better able to ³prove² the role of biology and heredity in human development, and they used this knowledge to influence the immigration policies of the United States.
The Immigration Restriction Movement:
The definitive work on American attitudes toward immigration in this era remains John Higham¹s Strangers in the Land (1955), which suggests that three distinct types of nativism circulated through the United States in the years between the Civil War and 1925: anti-radical, anti-Catholic, and racial. Each of these iterations of xenophobia are driven by nationalist sentiment, which in times of social or economic distress, became quite powerful.[1] Higham argues that the outbreak of World War I and the attendant desire for ³100 Per Cent Americanism²‹a uniform nationalist ideology‹ultimately obliged policy makers to exclude the immigration of Europeans who were perceived as racially different, and thus unable to assimilate. Higham¹s analysis has withstood challenges, criticism, and the developments of the ³new² social history for nearly fifty years because of its breadth and sophistication.[2]
Higham¹s narrative, however, is insufficiently attentive to developments in science and scientific theories. Although he correctly places great emphasis on the complexities of ³racial nativism,² his depiction of science leaves the reader with the impression that, like nativism itself, scientific knowledge waxed and waned along with nationalist emotions and sentiments. Higham himself is aware of these shortcomings and in a new afterword to the 1992 edition admits that his chapter on Nordic racism in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries was ³only partly successful in analyzing the scientific ideas that affected race thinking.²[3] Higham also presents a static picture of the Anglo-Saxon ideology that underpinned racial nativism: nativism shifts between anti-radical, anti-Catholic, and racial prejudices, but the ideal racial type nativists sought to protect remains strangely consistent.[4] An examination of the identity that ³Anglo-Saxon² or ³Nordic² represented reveals, however, recurring contestation and significant change over time.[5]
In 1917 the wartime United States Congress passed legislation designed to drastically limit the total number of immigrants arriving in the U.S., thereby initiating over a decade of restrictionist re-writing of American immigration law. Previous acts created categories of immigrants beyond the pale of admission: Asians, feeble-minded persons, immigrants with contagious diseases, or other qualities that would limit their ability to support themselves or assimilate into the dominant culture. After five presidential vetoes of acts requiring immigrants have basic literacy skills, the legislation passed in 1917 excluded immigrants unable to read in any language.
The 1921 Immigration Act continued the restrictive trend by shifting exclusion to a racial/ethnic basis in an effort to privilege Nordic or Anglo-Saxon immigrants. The Act limited the number of possible immigrants from a country to a quota of 3% of that country¹s number of emigrants enumerated in the 1910 Census. Three years later Congress reduced the percentage limit to 2% of the representative population in the 1890 census, a provision specifically designed to admit a very small number of southern and eastern European immigrants. It also moved the medical examination of immigrants to the European consulates overseas, to control the monthly quotas better and undercut the efforts of humanitarians to circumvent them. When the National Origins provision of the 1924 Act finally went into effect in 1929, it determined the extent of certain nations¹ contributions to American racial ³stock² in an attempt to preserve the United States¹ imagined ³Nordic² or ³Anglo-Saxon² racial composition. Out of the 150,000 total immigrants that could be admitted annually, the ³races² from northern and western Europe received the majority of the quotas. Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for example, were assigned a quota of 65,721, whereas only 5,802 Italians were allowed to enter each year.[6] This racial distinction formed the American immigration policy until 1965.
The dramatic increase in the number of Southern Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century was especially troubling for nativists; these impoverished Catholic newcomers became the special targets of restrictionists. One European observer had noted as early as in 1806, ³Europe ends at Naples and ends badly. Calabria, Sicily, and all the rest belong to Africa,² and this stigma attached to the unique situation of the Italian South‹in Europe but not of it‹became a well-used trope.[7] After unification in 1861, Northern Italians dominated the leadership of the new state and attempted to incorporate Southern Italians into the new nation through statistical studies, state policies, and force. When many of these attempts failed to create a coherent Italian identity, meridionalisti (intellectuals who studied the questione meridionale‹³the Southern Question²) reverted to racial or biological explanations for the backwardness of Southern Italians.[8] The U.S. government, conservatives, and progressives were all influenced by the writings of meridionalisti.[9] Thus, as anti-Italian sentiments developed in the U.S., the discourse of inferiority and difference was already well established within Italy. Viewed in this light, American attitudes toward Southern Italians cannot be adequately understood without considering intellectual developments in Italy.
Higham¹s study‹along with most histories of American nativism‹does not address this aspect of ³Orientalism² within one country, which fit neatly into the racial views of many American scientists that placed the Anglo-Saxon race at the top of the hierarchy of human races.[10] Considering the dramatic policy shift toward immigration, and the racial basis of it, these intellectual developments outside the United States are important parts of the story.
Reassessing Restriction:
By focusing on American restrictive tendencies alongside, and in conversation with, the history of the questione meridionale in unified Italy, this dissertation uncovers a broader, richer, and fundamentally transnational context to the history of American immigration restriction. Restriction was possible largely because the language of racism was transformed in the late nineteenth century into a relatively coherent intellectual scaffolding, predicated on the belief that biology determined individual and group development. Insights from Darwinian evolutionary theory merged with ideas of heredity to fix and reify racial identities. The nascent field of criminal anthropology claimed to prove the existence of ³born criminals² who could be detected because of their physiological characteristics, and the statistical and empirical data that supported these conclusions gave a ring of legitimacy to them. Intellectuals could now explain social anxieties through a scientific language that gave them a certain ³objective² authority, and the biological explanations for cultural backwardness gained increasing purchase as the scientific foundations became stronger.
Mid-nineteenth century Europe witnessed the emergence of a fear of ³degeneration²: worries of biological atavism, cultural regression, and the decline of civilization. Intellectuals allied these concerns with evolutionary theory in an attempt to control‹or stop‹degeneration. Speaking of Italy, Donald Pick notes, ³Concepts of atavism and degeneration articulated the horror of a largely northern Italian medical and scientific intelligentsia in the face of a fragmented and Œbackward¹ countryside on the one hand, and, increasingly, by the perceived volatility and delinquency of urban populations.² After 1861, in a society in which roughly 8 out of 1,000 Italians spoke the dialect of the national government and optimistic estimates figured roughly 75% of the population was illiterate, Pick suggests ³Italy was desperately in need of ideal symbolism and supervision.²[11] Positivist intellectuals like Pasqulae Villari, Leopoldo Franchetti, Cesare Lombroso, Alfredo Niceforo, Giuseppe Sergi, and Enrico Ferri, among others, gave rise to an entire intellectual field (meridionalismo) dedicated to scientific studies of the South. When national governmental policies proved unable to alter the cultural practices, public health, and economic position of the Southern Italians, some meridionalisti began attributing these failings to innate and distinct racial characters.[12]
Yet fears of degeneration were palpable in the United States as well; the sociologist Richard Dugdale¹s study of the Juke family in upstate New York in 1877 raised the specter of racial deterioration even before the heavy volume of ³new immigration.²[13] After the publication of Charles Darwin¹s The Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, Americans had a sophisticated framework to understand evolution and heredity.[14] Darwin¹s ideas were adapted by English scientists like Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Herbert Spencer, and formulated into ³racial² sciences of eugenics and biometry.[15] These empiricist and hereditarian trends found fertile ground in the United States, which had been classifying African-Americans and Asians as innately inferior for some time. These sciences became crucial to legitimizing racial anxieties, as positivism and determinism were in unified Italy.[16] European countries understood that they, as sovereign nations, had the right to decide who was desirable as future citizens, and through a strict application of hereditarian theory‹articulated in Italy itself‹American nativists decided that Southern Italians were not welcome.
While positivist anthropologists and eugenicists were developing their own disciplines, however, other scientists in the nineteenth century were making important advances and discoveries in the field of public health, proving, for instance, the ³germ-theory² of disease. Politicians, administrators, and scientists charged with protecting the public health, especially when confronted with terrifying outbreaks of epidemics, had a great deal of power and responsibility. Robert Koch¹s discovery of the microorganisms that caused tuberculosis and cholera suggested to scientists the importance of the environment. As the movement of people in Europe and the Atlantic increased in the late 1800s, these advances were crucial for preventing outbreaks of contagious diseases; an outbreak of cholera in Naples in 1884 not only embarrassed the State, but many foreign governments refused to allow admission to Italian immigrants in because of the risk spreading the epidemic.[17] When the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1891, it incorporated many of these theories of contagion into the legislation, which required the federal government to oversee the medical inspection and admission of immigrants, and barred the entry of immigrants afflicted with transmittable diseases.
This medicalization of immigration was an important development in American immigration policy, although it is usually studied in the context of medical advances, rather than considering the way it strengthened the argument for environmental influences on racial types. Historians have shown how immigration could be coupled with fears of degeneration, disease, and public health; Alan Kraut, in particular, has shown how restrictionists deployed a ³medical nativism² against many different waves of immigrant aliens.[18] Scholars writing on the medical examination of immigrants at Ellis Island have shown convincingly that the idiom of science and medicine was structured by social contexts and anxieties, and was simultaneously used by restrictionists to cut off the flow of immigration. Unfortunately, this work typically considers events only within the U.S.‹there is little consideration of how ideas from other countries, like Italy, combated these static notions of race and biology.[19]
By examining the debates among scientists and intellectuals in Italy and the United States over the foundations of scientific knowledge and their application, this dissertation will remedy these shortcomings. The differences between private letters and public writings show ideas‹contested ideas, certainly‹moving back and forth across the Atlantic along with migrants. Biological mechanists like Charles Davenport, an American eugenicist, and Alfredo Niceforo, a Sicilian criminologist, exchanged publications, shared information, and worked to spread each other¹s ideas in their respective countries.[20] That the language of ³inferiority² was so often applied to Southern Italians, and was both scientifically supported and opposed by some Italian intellectuals, is an important aspect of the history of immigration restriction.
We cannot understand the development of American immigration restriction without considering the U.S. in a larger, trans-Atlantic perspective. Higham and others have not adequately analyzed the Italian influences on American immigration policy. Specifically important to this dissertation is the Darwinian fear of racially inferior Italian immigration, and the threat it presented to the public health of American citizens. The overarching structure of the dissertation, by incorporating tensions between ³nature² and ³nurture² will show how scientific theories became a way‹legitimate because they were scientific‹of excluding certain types of immigrants.
On Method:
Of necessity, this dissertation will be especially attentive to language and discourse. In the private correspondence of restrictionists and scientists, they conveyed their prejudices in a forthright manner. Yet in their public speeches, testimonies, and essays‹which were quite extensive‹they actively discussed their sentiments in neutral and objective ³scientific² language. It is equally important, though, to see ways in which these rarified ideas and sophisticated material practices were popularized and perceived by the larger public. George Mosse¹s work, attentive to many of these issues, offers a useful framework for analyzing how popular notions of science evolved outside of the disciplines that created them.[21]
Also important as a model has been the work of Michel Foucault, who has provided methods to investigate how certain structures of discourse‹particularly those of a scientific nature‹are formed. Yet as Sander Gilman and Nancy Leys Stepan suggest, science was simultaneously a powerful tool of oppositional discourse. By focusing the research and narrative around the private letters and public writings of intellectuals in this era, this dissertation will show how fluid the state of scientific knowledge was, and therefore, how important controlling it was for immigration restriction.[22]
Sources:
Archival Sources Italy:
Papers of the Comissariato
dell¹Emigrazione, Archivio di Stato, Rome, Italy.
Papers of the Ministero di
Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Rome, Italy.
Sidney Sonnino Papers‹Cabinet
(1914-1919), Historical Diplomatic Archive, Ministero degli Affari Esteri,
Archivio Storico Dimplomatico, Rome, Italy.
Central Arbitrator¹s
Committee on Emigration, Historical Diplomatic Archive, Ministero degli Affari
Esteri, Archivio Storico Dimplomatico, Rome, Italy.
Museo di Antropologia ed
Etnografia dell¹Universita degli Studi di Torino.
Museo di Antropologia
Criminale ³C. Lombroso² dell¹Universita degli Studi di Torino.
Museo di Antropologia
Universita degli Studi di Bologna, Bologna.
Museo di Storia Naturale,
Departimento di Biologia Evolutiva e Funzionale, Universita di Parma.
Fondazione di Studi Storici
³Filippo Turati,² Firenze.
Museo di Antropologia ³G.
Sergi,² Universita degli Studi di Roma ³La Sapienza,² Rome.
Printed Primary Sources
Italy:
Il Bolletino dell¹Emigrazione, Archivio di Stato, Rome, Italy.
Annual Reports of the
Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio.
Scientia/Rivista di
Sciencza [Bologna, Cosenza, Genova]
Archival Sources United
States:
Papers of the Immigration
Restriction League, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Papers of Robert DeCourcy
Ward, Harvard Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Papers of Robert DeCourcy
Ward, Special Collections, Boston Public Library, Boston, MA.
Papers of Joseph Lee,
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.
Papers of Henry Cabot Lodge,
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.
Papers of Francis Amasa
Walker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Records of the Eugenics
Record Office, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.
Papers of Charles B.
Davenport, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.
Papers of Herbert Spencer
Jennings, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.
Records of the American
Eugenics Society, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.
Papers of Franz Boas,
American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.
Papers of Lothrop Stoddard,
Balch Institute [now merged with Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia,
PA.
Madison Grant Correspondence,
New York Zoological Society, Office of the Secretary and Chairman of the
Executive Committee, Bronx, NY.
Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Records of the House Committee
on Immigration, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Records of the Senate
Committee on Immigration, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Records of the Public Health
Service, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Hearings on the House and
Senate Committees on Immigration, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Papers of Ales Hrdlicka,
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Papers of Harry H. Laughlin,
Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO.
Papers of John Harvey
Kellogg, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
Papers of Ellsworth
Huntington, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.
Printed Primary Sources
U.S.:
New York Times
Congressional Record
Proceedings of the Race
Betterment Foundation (3 vol. from
three annual meetings)
Science
Reports of the Immigration
Commission (1911; 41 vols.)
Tentative Outline: The dissertation will proceed roughly chronologically, with overlapping time frames to demonstrate the crucial links and connections between science and restriction.
Introduction
Ch. I. Making the Body Intelligible: Early Scientific Theories
Ch. 2. On the Origin
(and Creation) of Species: Creating Inferior Breeds in Italy and America
Ch. 3.
Searching for the ³True Nature of Science²
Ch. 4. ³This Pleasurable Pursuit of the Alien²
Ch. 5. Medical Inspection
Summer
2002: Research in Boston-area archives/and-or/Philadelphia and master
relevant historiographies.
Fall
2002- Spring 2003: Apply for grants, continue researching in local
archives, complete drafts of two preliminary chapters on I.R.L. and Census
materials for publication.
Summer
2003: Research in Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
Fall
2003-Spring 2004: Travel to Italy to research in archives.
Summer
2004: Research in D.C.
Fall
2004-Spring 2005: Conclude all US research during teaching breaks; apply
for Dissertation Fellowship.
Summer
2005: Wrap up all outstanding research.
Fall
2005-Spring 2006: Write the draft of the manuscript.
Fall 2006: Defend and/or teach.
[1] John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992; [orig. 1955]).
[2] Some notable contributions to this field are Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso Press, 1990); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
[3] Higham, Strangers in the Land, 336. See also John Higham, ³Instead of a Sequel, or How I Lost My Subject,² Reviews in American History 28:2 (2000), 327-339.
[4] Higham also explained that to keep American nationalism at the center of the narrative ³I treated the ethnocentric attitudes displayed in stereotypes as a relatively stable precondition for the much more volatile passions of nativism.² Higham Strangers in the Land, 343.
[5] Two important examples of the fragile state of American racial ideologies are presented in Kristin Hoganson, Fighting For American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Race and Gender in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[6] Mai Ngai¹s recent article ³The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924² in The Journal of American History 81:1 (June, 1999), is important in showing how these notions of race became a part of immigration policy in the United States only with great difficulty.
[7] Creuzé de Lesser, ³Voyage en italie et en sicilie,² (1806), cited in Gabriella Gribaudi, ³Images of the South: The Mezzogiorno as seen by Insiders and Outsiders,² in Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, eds. The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited (Exeter, UK: University Exeter Press, 1997), on p. 87.
[8] John Dickie, Darkest Italy: Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860-1900 (New York: St. Martin¹s Press, 1999). See the work of the Sicilian anthropologist Alfredo Niceforo, L¹Italia Barbara contemporanea (Milan: 1989); Italiani del nord e Italian del sud (Turin: 1901.
[9] Peter D¹Agostino¹s recent essay highlights the connection of Italian criminal anthropologists to American racial thought. Peter D¹Agostino, ³Craniums, Criminals, and the ŒCursed Race¹: Italian Anthropology in American Racial Thought, 1861-1924,² Comparative Studies in Society and History v. 44, n. 2 (April 2002), 319-43.
[10] The phrase is taken from the subtitle of a volume edited by Jane Schneider, Italy¹s ³Southern Question²: Orientalism in One Country (New York: Berg, 1998).
[11] Donald Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4; 118; see also Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Patriarca suggests that pre-unification statisticians copied many techniques and methods from the French, which were ultimately seized upon by nationalists who used them to create a statistical picture of a coherent Italy.
[12] Some of the major works in English are: John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860-1900 (New York: St. Martin¹s Press, 1999); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860-1915 (2nd ed. Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1999; [orig. Rutgers University Press, 1986]); Lumley and Morris, eds. The New History of the Italian South; Jane Schneider, ed. Italy¹s ³Southern Question²: Orientalism in One Country (New York: Berg, 1998).
[13] Nicole Hahn Rafter¹s collection White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), which reproduces excerpts from over a dozen ³eugenic family studies² of native-born families, is useful in showing that the fears of racial deterioration were indigenous, and not specifically related to the arrival of large numbers of immigrants, while Dorothy Ross places the development of American social sciences within the distinct American ideology of ³exceptionalism.² See Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
[14] Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1955 [orig. 1944]); Diane Paul, ³Eugenics and the Left,² Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (October-December, 1984), 567-90; idem, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995); Donald Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1966); Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984 [1963]); Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); Robert Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University press, 1979). Charles Rosenberg has argued for the necessity of considering the social context in which the authority of science was deployed, particularly in the nineteenth century. It is the social context, not empirical research or internal logic that determined the contours of 19th century hereditarian thought. See Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, rev ed. 1997 [orig. 1976]), 32.
[15] Galton pioneered both fields. In Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883) he described eugenics as the study ³of the conditions under which men of a high type are produced.² In the first volume of Biometrika he explained that ³the primary object of Biometry is to afford material that shall be exact enough for the discovery of incipient changes in evolution which are too small to be otherwise apparent.² Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883),44; Biometrika v. 1, n. 1 (Oct 1901), 9.
[16] An important book on the history of anti-Asian sentiment is Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). See also Louis Menand¹s recent The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), which highlights the intellectual traditions‹as well as social prejudices‹of pioneer American scientist Louis Agassiz.
[17] See Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884-1911 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995).
[18] Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ³Immigrant Menace² (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 2-4; see also Kraut, ³Plagues and Prejudice: Nativism¹s Construction of Disease in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century New York City² in David Rosner, ed. Hives of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public¹s Health (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) is also instructive in making this link between medicine and anti-immigrant sentiment. A recent dissertation by Amy Lauren Fairchild stresses the importance of discerning regional variations in medical inspection at all of the American entry-points, and downplays the medical and racial division between northern and southern Europeans in favor of a white/non-white racial binary. Amy Lauren Fairchild, ³Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and Defense of the Nation, 1891 to 1930² (Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1997).
[19] See also Elizabeth Yew, ³Medical Inspection of Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1891-1924² Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 56: 5 (June, 1980), 488-510; Anne-Emanuelle Birn, ³Six Seconds Per Eyelid: The Medical Inspection of Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1892-1914² Dynamis 17 (1997), 281-316. Mai Ngai, ³The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law.²
[20] The correspondence between the two can be found in Charles Davenport¹s papers, held at the American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
[21] Mosse¹s essential works include: Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
[22] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Basic Books, 1994 [1970]); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Basic Books, 1994 [1973]); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander Gilman, ³Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism² in Dominick LaCapra, ed. The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 73. Gail Bederman used a Foucauldian analysis of discourse in her book Manliness and Civilization (1995) with great effect. As she suggests, being attentive to discourse enables the researcher to see how specific types of knowledge are created, and how these ideas are translated into material practices. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 24. Also helpful has been Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, Theda Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).