“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
While the famous lines by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty continue to proclaim the welcome offered to immigrants coming to the United States, the reality has often been somewhat different.
Even though potential immigrants traveling in first- or second-class often managed to enter the country with only a rudimentary assessment, passengers traveling in steerage were processed through the immigration station at New York Harbour's Ellis Island. First opened in 1892, the inspection stations of Ellis Island acted as the central processing point for millions of immigrants arriving from Europe and other parts of the world Thorough medical examinations by physicians appointed by the Public Health Service were required to check for contagious diseases or other medical problems and immigration officials often relied on medical evidence to weed out "unsuitable" candidates. Based on an 1882 immigration law, any immigrant deemed to be "likely to become a public charge" could be blocked from entering the United States. That included any medical deformity or condition that would make an immigrant unable to earn a living. While many physicians objected to their medical findings being used to screen potential immigrants, immigration officials often justified their decision to exclude "unsuitable" immigrants.
In that same legislation, "imbeciles" and the "feeble-minded" were included as being unfit to enter the United States. Not only were the feeble-minded considered to be prone to various social problems including drug abuse and crime, but they also seen as a danger to the genetic health of the nation (due to their inferior genes being passed on to future generations). Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were regarded as a particular concern for Americans worried about the eugenics of immigration.
Due to widespread concerns about "feebleminded" immigrants, having the physicians who examined immigrants test for low intelligence seemed to make good sense to the immigration officials and politicians imposing limits on who could be allowed into the country. Except for the problem of how to test for intellectual problems, that is. Though early intelligence scales had already been developed for use with children needing special education, providing something equivalent for immigrants, many of whom could not even speak English. was more difficult.
It was psychologist, Henry Goddard, who first traveled to Europe in 1908 to learn how to use the new intelligence test first developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon. After returning to the United States, Goddard translated and revised Binet's test for use at the training school where he worked. He also developed an early classification system for the intellectually impaired children at his school, i.e., any children with an intelligence quotient (IQ) of less than 70. For children with a score between 51 and 70, the term moron was used. All children with scores between 26 and 50 were labelled imbeciles and any child with an IQ of 25 or less was labelled an idiot. Though these are considered offensive terms today, Goddard's classification system matched his own theories about eugenics and how low intelligence should be dealt with.
Goddard also established his credentials as an authority on feeble-mindedness through two well-known books highlighting the genetic risks associated with allowing people of low intelligence to breed. His 1912 book, The Kallikak Family, traced the genealogy of two branches of one family, one "feeble-minded" and the other normal. Though modern reevaluation of Goddard's findings suggest that Goddard understated the role of environmental factors, his book proved to be highly influential, especially with early eugenicists such as Madison Grant and Charles B. Davenport.
Given the concerns over allowing potentially feeble-minded immigrants into the country, it was not surprising that Henry Goddard was invited by the Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island to advise staff on the best way of assessing immigrant intelligence. Though Goddard's initial impression was that concerns about feeble-minded immigrants were likely exaggerated, he conducted tests of his version of Alfred Binet's test for use with immigrants. Comparing his own test results with what immigration doctors were reporting, Goddard concluded that his trained staff were more accurate in detecting immigrants with low intelligence. On that basis, he recommended that Congress allocate funds to provide Ellis Island with sn assessment department for measuring feeble-mindedness.
Many of the immigration doctors themselves objected to the use of Goddard's intelligence tests to weed out low-IQ immigrants. One of them, Howard Andrew Knox, published an article in 1913 in the Journal of the American Medical Association which pointed out how inappropriate it was to use tests developed for schoolchildren on immigrants with limited English skills. As he pointed out:
To the uninitiated using routine tests for defectives nearly all the peasants from certain European countries appear to be of the moron type; but of course this is a fallacy. If these peasants are questioned about conditions existing in the land from which they come most of them will show average intelligence.
But Knox and his colleagues were still eugenics supporters themselves and endorsed the political call to weed out the "feeble-minded". As Knox stated in another article published that same year, it was more important to identify morons than people who were insane since morons would "immediately start a line of defectives whose progeny, like the brook, will go on forever, branching off here in an imbecile and there in an epileptic, costing the country millions of dollars in court fees and incarceration expenses." All that remained was to come up with a reliable method of identifying these mental defectives.
When Goddard's researchers visited Ellis Island in 1913 to test 165 immigrants, they still had to decide how to interpret those results. After finally published his findings, Goddard stated that je and his researchers identified a disproportionately high number of immigrants as mentally defective. He then wrote that "one can hardly escape the conviction that the intelligence of the average ‘third class’ immigrant is low, perhaps of moron grade." He charitably suggested that this was due to the poor environments from which they had come rather than their genetics though.
Despite the controversy over Goddard's results, there was enough political support for the idea of IQ screening for immigrants, despite the fact that many immigrants didn't speak English and often required interpreters to make themselves understood. That the Binet scales were primarily verbal in nature, not to mention the fact that the interpreters themselves often had difficulty understanding the concepts used in testing, did little to derail the IQ testing supporters.
Fortunately, there was already a potential solution available. Psychologists working with hearing impaired patients and children with language deficits had developed specialized performance tests relying on nonverbal skills. Many of these tests involved “formboards” requiring test-takers to fit geometric figures into similarly-shaped impressions in the board. The most famous of these was developed by Edoard Seguin and it was already being used for nonverbal performance testing in children with language needs. Other tests included jigsaw puzzles and “picture formboards” that attempted to reduce verbal testing as much as possible.
The doctors stationed at Ellis Island incorporated many of these non-verbal tests into the battery used with new immigrants and also developed several new tests as well. Howard Knox developed two non-verbal tests which he described in as 1913 article. The first of these was a “Visual Comparison Test” using line drawings to match for size and complexity. The second one, the "Knox Cube Imitation Test", required test-takers to tap a series of cubes in a sequence shown to them by the tester.
In a 1914 paper, Knox wrote that he had conducted the tests on "over 4,000 suspected defectives in the last eighteen months and many more made by my associates ... all were considered sufficiently near the required standard to be allowed to pass, except 400 certified as feeble-minded and (in a few cases) as imbeciles." Different versions were used including an "Imbecile test" for people with a a mental age of less than six. There was also a "Moron test" which could only be solved by someone with a mental age less than ten. Knox recommended that these tests be given several times to ensure that immigrants didn't pass the test by accident.
Since the number of potential immigrants identified as feeble-minded was far greater than what the doctors had detected before the intelligence testing began, this was regarded as proof for the value of psychological testing at Ellis Island. To minimize problems caused by language and culture differences, Knox also developed an expanded testing process, including a careful interview to ensure that they had basic cognitive skills. In most cases, immigrants received only a cursory examination with only those failing the interview being passed on for more in-depth testing.
Though Knox left Ellis Island by 1916, he continued to publish in various eugenic and public health journals and played a role in expanding the definition of mental deficiency to include paupers, criminals, epileptics, and other "persons possessing stigmata and deformities." He also argued that male immigrants should meet fitness standards at least equal to what would be demanded by the U.S. Army. His tests, which were later produced by commercial test publishers, set the standard for screening immigrants for decades to come.
By 1921, the U.S. government established a quota system and shifted responsibility for immigrant screening to U.S. embassies or consulates around the world. While Ellis Island continued to be used for immigrant detention and deportations (including thousands of "enemy aliens" being held there during World War II), the facility was finally closed in the 1950s. It eventually reopened to visitors as a tourist site in 1976 and the Ellis Island Immigration Museum opened in 1990. Visitors to the museum can still see many of Knox's intelligence tests on display, along with other reminders of the countless thousands of immigrants who passed through the system during its heyday.
So what can I say about Howard Knox? While his intelligence tests had a significant influence on the early history of intelligence testing, his name has been largely forgotten except by psychology historians. Many of the nonverbal test elements he developed continue to be used in different intelligence tests and he is rightly regarded as a pioneer in non-verbal intelligence testing. Still, while some of his ideas about how language and cultural barriers can interfere with intelligence testing are valid enough, his beliefs about eugenics are hard to defend. Though he was certainly not the only eugenicist of that era, the critical role he played in how potential immigrants would be screened made him one of the most influential.
As for the human cost of Knox's work, that is harder to determine. We will likely never know what became of the many immigrants identified as feeble-minded by Knox and his fellow testers. Certainly many of these same "feeble-minded" immigrants were routinely allowed into the country before intelligence testing became the norm and without the dire predictions of the eugenicists coming to pass. That a disproportionately high number of immigrants regarded as being inferior came from non-English speaking backgrounds and cultures only helped reinforce the prevailing belief in the genetic superiority of "true" Americans.
Along with rigid quota systems in place for potential immigrants, the eugenics movement would claim other victims as well. Many of the same policies advocated by Knox and his fellow eugenicists would be used to implement compulsory sterilization on thousands of "inferior" men, women, and children in the United States and Canada. It would take decades, and the horrendous example of the Holocaust in Europe, to eventually overturn the eugenics laws although many still remained in place until the 1960s or later.
The price of these laws, including restitution payments made to the victims, would ensure that their influence would continue even today. In an era of anti-immigration furor and calls for deadly force to be used to prevent even immigrant children from entering the country, the xenophobia that turned Ellis Island into a proving ground for racial politics a hundred years ago is still alive and well today.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.