In the late 1910s and early 1920s, a succession of popular books decried the impact that "new" immigrants were having on the United States. Fearing that the racial quality of the American people was being eroded by the large number of immigrants that had been arriving in the previous decades, the books clamored for radical restrictions on the number of immigrants the country should admit. These books reflect the pervasiveness of the belief that new immigrants were biologically inferior to older immigrants and native-born Anglo-Saxons. This belief, in turn, was rooted in a theory of permanently fixed racial identities that had been circulating throughout Europe and the United States for decades, despite cautions of professional scientists who argued that these theories were not "proven." Yet non-scientists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were the ones who enjoyed widespread public authority on such complex scientific theories as heredity, genetics, and eugenics because they explained these difficult subjects in easily understandable terms—despite the fact that they grossly oversimplified the theories. Simultaneously, they raised shrill cries that these new arrivals thus threatened the "superior" racial stock of America. The anti-immigrant wave that Grant, Stoddard, and others fanned was based on what Grant described as "the science of race," which he claimed proved "the immutability of somatological or bodily characters."²

     If by "the science of race," Grant meant something anthropological, he was overstating his case. The professional anthropologists Franz Boas and Aleš Hrdlička—immigrants to the United States themselves—researched in fields that specifically disputed notions of fixed racial identities. Boas's work consistently undermined both the alleged stability of the human body form and its hereditary basis. As for the Bohemian-born Hrdlička, his researches with indigenous tribes in the American West and in Mexico, similarly confirmed an elasticity of human body types. In November of 1923, he told the Yale University political economist Irving Fisher that "I am wholly unable to say that any one group has superior or inferior endowments mentally or even physically." Hrdlička, who was serving with Fisher on a eugenics committee investigating immigration—alongside Grant and Congressman Albert Johnson—threatened to resign because of the way scientific knowledge was being manipulated to influence legislation favoring restriction.³