RACE AND THE LAW

The new immigration law reflected the heightened emphasis on “race” as a determinant of public policy. By the early 1920s, political leaders of both North and South agreed upon the relegation of blacks to second-class citizenship. In a speech in Alabama in 1921, President Harding unconsciously echoed W. E. B. Du Bois by affirming that the “problem” of race was a global one, not confined to the South. Unlike Du Bois, he believed the South showed the way to the problem’s solution. “It would be helpful,” he added, “to have that word ‘equality’ eliminated from this consideration.” Clearly, the Republican Party of the Civil War era was dead.

But “race policy” meant far more than black-white relations. “America must be kept American,” declared President Coolidge in signing the 1924 immigration law. His secretary of labor, James J. Davis, commented that immigration policy, once based on the need for labor and the notion of the United States as an asylum of liberty, must now rest on a biological definition of the ideal population. Although enacted by a highly conservative Congress strongly influenced by nativism, the 1924 immigration law also reflected the Progressive desire to improve the “quality” of democratic citizenship and to employ scientific methods to set public policy. It revealed how these aims were overlaid with pseudo-scientific assumptions about the superiority and inferiority of particular “races.”

Table 20.1 SELECTED ANNUAL IMMIGRATION QUOTAS UNDER THE 1924 IMMIGRATION ACT

The seemingly “scientific” calculation of the new quotas—-based on the “national origins” of the American population dating back to 1790— involved a highly speculative analysis of past census returns, with the results altered to increase allowable immigration by politically influential groups like Irish-Americans. Non-whites (one-fifth of the population in 1790) were excluded altogether when calculating quotas—otherwise, Africa would have received a far higher quota than the tiny number allotted to it. But then, the entire concept of race as a basis for public policy lacked any rational foundation. The Supreme Court admitted as much in 1923 when it rejected the claim of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian-born World War I veteran, who asserted that as a “pure Aryan,” he was actually white and could therefore become an American citizen. “White,” the Court declared, was not a scientific concept at all, but part of “common speech, to be interpreted with the understanding of the common man” (a forthright statement of what later scholars would call the “social construction” of race).