Old Fears New Foes (4/5): The Onslaught of Criminals
Why Americans feared Italian Immigrants during the 1920s
New immigrants came from different nations than previous migrants, and were perceived as a threat to the health of the American nation during the first two decades of the 20th-century.
The discussions around the the Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson-Reed Act, were predominantly biological. Nevertheless, we can infer that a different set of anxieties made the passing of this Act possible.
New Immigrants as Dumb and Dangerous
Italians, a significant proportion of these new immigrants, were linked to crime and perversion in the public mind, and thus were seen as a threat to American peace and prosperity.
Mayo-Smith reported that foreigners made up an eighth of the population but were responsible for a third of the crimes (Mayo-Smith, 1888; Laughlin, 1922; Laughlin, 1932). This would mean that each foreigner committed three times the amount of crimes than locals. Sociologist Edward Ross and biologist Robert Grant both argued that Italians were prone to commit crimes (Davenport, 1911; Zenderland, 2001, Spiro, 2009; Okrent, 2019).
Ross thought that a majority of Italians were “peaceable and industrious;” nonetheless, they were also disproportionately responsible for violent crime (Ross, 1914). In 1930, an American congressman said that “Italians are predominantly our murderers and bootleggers” (Cinotto, 2013).
Italian criminal activity was also connected to how they ran restaurants in New York. Italians often defied Prohibition’s alcohol ban and made wine to sell in their restaurants (Cinotto, 2013).
Selling alcohol became so profitable that some establishments declined service to non-drinking patrons (Cinotto, 2013). Middle-class Americans started to patronize these restaurants with a “dual perception of Italian American identity” (Cinotto, 2013).
They viewed Italians as possessing “short-tempered, vindictive, and treacherous masculinity and prolific, cunning, and superstitious femininity.” In contrast, the other identity saw them as “sentimental, gregarious people naturally inclined to the family, beauty, and the arts” (Cinotto, 2013).
Neither of these visions saw Italians as productive labourers. Moreover, their involvement in the sale of alcohol confirmed that they engaged in criminal activity and supported the view that they were perverse.
Some maintained that new immigrants were prone to crime due to their lower mental ability. The intelligence tests administered to the army, and new immigrants appeared to confirm these suspicions. While these tests were considered accurate at the time; they often relied on cultural knowledge.
Henry Laughlin thought that if these tests had been used the US would have better people (1922). Likewise, the inventor of one of these tests, Henry Goddard, claimed that there were many “morons” trying to get into the US (Fancher, 1985).
The army intelligence tests also appeared to show that new immigrants, predominantly Italians, had low intelligence (Messina, 2010; Zenderland, 2001). After the Great War an intelligence test was given to 1.75 million soldiers and according to its results new immigrants were found to have the lowest intelligence (Paul, 1995; Fancher, 1985; Cogdell, 2004).
The data appeared to support their view that new immigrants were dumb, only capable of doing low skilled jobs, and prone to crime. A study in 1925 found that school children of Polish, Italian, and Black underperformed (Herskovits, 1925). By 1923 a consensus emerged that new immigrants “were biologically and intellectually inferior to the Nordics” (Spiro, 2009).
The tests administered often relied on cultural knowledge. Intelligence was directly linked to issues of cultural importance to Americans. Despite these shortcomings the tests were taken as cogent evidence of immigrant inferiority and thus were used to justify restricting their entry into the country (Zenderland, 2001; Jackson, 2006). T
he alleged connection between Italians and crime as well as low intelligence fueled an already existing anti-Italian sentiment. LaGumina, a historian, has shown that by the 1830s many held that “a dirty Irishman is bad enough, but he is nothing comparable to a nasty… Italian loafer” (1973). Bohemians, who were also suspect, frequented new immigrant enclaves (Cinotto, 2013). Italians formed said enclaves.
Some of the concerns regarding Italians have a deeper history
The press often expressed worries about new immigrants. In 1872 The New York Times wrote about Italian’s “natural inclination towards criminality” (LaGumina, 1973). Many articles portrayed Italy as being “plagued by beggars and criminals” (LaGumina, 2018). Reports suggested that Italians had an “[e]vident inclination to crime;” that they were ignorant, indolent, and “their penchant for mendicancy, as opposed to honest labour,” was troublesome (LaGumina, 2018).
Bad portrayals were all too common (Okrent, 2019). In 1923, an article in Collier’s argued that Italians had a predisposition to certain crimes and engaged in “illicit sexuality” (Soper, 2006). Cartoons depicted Italians as sexually dangerous (Soper, 2006).
The “influx of immigrants” was linked to drunkenness and prostitution (Bruinius, 2006, p.34). These concerns had more to do with how new immigrants behaved than with their physical or biological traits.
Developments in Biology and New Immigrants
The rediscovery of Mendel contributed to anxieties about new immigrants (Stern, 2005). *
Mendelian traits can skip generations and therefore examining visually inspecting prospective immigrants was insufficient and their family trees also required investigating (Paul, 1995). The discovery of Mendelian traits in humans led thinkers to examine crime and insanity by pooling immigrants and their children. These studies provided the evidence eugenicists needed.
Some of their findings were:
- In 1890 “40% of inmates in state mental institutions were immigrants or the children of immigrants” (Paul, 1995).
- Laughlin surveyed other hospitals and found 34,3% of all patients were foreigners, whereas the foreign-born only comprised 19,5% of the US population (Laughlin, 1920).
- At Sonoma State Home, more than half of those institutionalised were immigrants, or the children of immigrants, of which Italians made up 8% (Kline, 2005).
- In a broader study of 12,155 patients across institutions, a third were found to have foreign blood (Trent, 1994).
Laughlin tabulated crime quotas based on the proportion of people from each nation residing in the US and had found that immigrants barely exceeded their quota. When he included the children of immigrants; he found that they committed twice as many crimes as expected (Laughlin, 1922).
Like other Southern Europeans, Italians were disproportionately responsible for criminal activity (Laughlin, 1922). They were “disproportionately feebleminded and fertile” (Paul, 1995). Therefore, new immigrants, and in particular Italians, exacerbated the challenges these institutions faced. The overcrowding at these institutions had a large economic cost and raised a series of problems for physicians, psychotherapists, neurologists, and psychologists (Harrington, 2019; Orlic, 2019).
Eugenicists did have an impact on the decision to shift where prospective immigrants were to be assessed. The adoption of Mendelism implied a need to examine prospective immigrants in their country of origin. Thus, consular officers could collect “biological histories” (Smith, 2006) and investigate “shiftless family” (Laughlin, 1920).
In a congressional hearing, Laughlin argued that to protect the United States from “inferior immigrants,” a “pedigree examination in the home territories” was needed (Laughlin, 1924). Thus, the evaluation of prospective immigrants had to be done in their country of origin to avoid the problem these immigrants could cause. While most of the discussion regarding criminality and insanity appears physiological, the effects of allowing said immigrants into the country were economic.
Italians had been unwilling to assimilate, took low paying jobs that forced American workers to lower their demands, and were seen to wreak havoc on labour. They were prone to both criminality and insanity. The links between crime and new immigrants, like anxieties about their assimilation, do not imply underlying heritable differences.
They are also explicable through culture and environment. In fact, the economic cost of treating the mentally ill or pursuing criminals is the same whether these issues originate in biology or culture.
Authors: Christian Orlic & Lucas Heili
This article is based on a paper written by Christian Orlic for one of his graduate degrees.
You can read Part I here: Old Fears New Foes
You can read Part II here: Immigrants Do Not Assimilate
You can read Part III: Immigrants as an Economic Threat
You can read a brief history of Immigrations before 1924: Restricting Undesirable Immigrants
Sources (see the Fears-Foes Sources article).
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their gratitude to Lillian Manansala. Lillian orgsanised a few meetinhgs via Zoom for the colleages in this class to discuss ideas, arguments, and approaches to our research. Lillian also offered some proofreading. We also wanted to thank Eric Revis who provided comments of a general nature. Lastly Scott Thompson provided copy editing of the paper.
*At the dawn of the twentieth century there were competing ideas about how traits were inherited. Theories like that of Weismann had some popularity as did ideas that traits blended. The rediscovery of Mendel occurred in 1900. This view holds that traits are discrete and that they segregate independently. In this case discrete means that a trait for eye colour, for example, is different than one for hair colour, which is also different from one that determines blood types. More importantly, that they pass through generations unchanged. Therefore, traits can skip generations. For more see Bowler 1989.
