Disease, Deformity, and Defiance: Writing the Language of Immigration Law and the Eugenics Movement on the Immigrant Body

Abstract

[T]he following classes shall be excluded from admission to the United States ... All idiots, insane persons, epileptics, and persons who have been insane within five years previously; paupers; persons likely to become a public charge; professional beggars; persons afflicted with a loathsome or with a dangerous contagious disease; persons who have been convicted of a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude. --32 Stat. 1214, sec. 2 of 1903 US Statutes at Large Immigration should first of all be considered a long-time investment in family stocks. --American Eugenics Society (quoted in Kevles 95) The process of migration, acculturation, and naturalization for immigrants to the United States is, under the best of circumstances, traumatic. Their bodies, as repositories of their cultures, serve as microcosms of the homelands they have left behind. As they change and Americanize, they are in a sense destroying these homelands. Although immigrant aid societies, immigrant churches, and ethnic communities have traditionally done their part in smoothing immigrants' transition to the US, their efforts have often been undermined by the attitudes of the country's dominant group and by the tenor of its immigration laws. The restrictive language of US immigration law has from its first appearance been surprisingly vivid, often bearing close structural and rhetorical resemblance to the nativist utterances of contemporaneous American writers and thinkers. Both sources bristle with emotionally loaded catalogues of negative attributes describing the immigrant body. It seems likely, therefore, that the language and the sentiment of the immigration statutes were fed by nativist rhetoric, and that these statutes, in turn, helped legitimate and perpetuate such prejudices. Immigrant authors, in response, have written in both their fiction and their memoirs about how this language has affected the ways that they have imagined themselves as embodied individuals. The interplay between laws and nativism, and the literary responses triggered by both, is complex and wide-ranging, manifest in many immigrant groups over more than a hundred years of US history. I will limit my inquiry here to the immigration statutes enacted between 1891 and 1924 and to the role that the burgeoning eugenics movement in the United States played in the production of those laws. The stories written by Anzia Yezierska and Mary Gordon that take place during this same period will provide examples of literary responses. Although Yezierska is an immigrant and Gordon a third-generation American writing about her grandmother's generation, both appear preoccupied with the effects of nativist sentiment on the immigrant body. In this article I argue that the regulation and repression of immigrants' behavior in their new land and their discomfort with their embodied selves is an important strain in their literature, one that is closely linked to the official language of the law and the unofficial language of the dominant group. Anxiety over American immigration during the second half of the nineteenth century was triggered less by the oddness of those who were entering the country than by their number. The Jews and the Irish--the two groups whose literature I am using as examples--were in evidence in the country from its earliest days, but as long as their numbers were few, they did not seem menacing. Indeed, between 1769 and 1875 the country had an open-door immigration policy. There were no restriction clauses in US immigration laws until 1875 because of the country's desperate need for settlers and workers. As the Jews and the Irish, as well as many other immigrant groups, became more noticeable, however, the country's dominant group, Protestants whose ancestors came from northern Europe, began to seek reasons for exclusion. They found fertile ground in the pseudo-science of eugenics. Both the term eugenics, from the Greek meaning well born, and the movement itself began in England in 1883 with Francis Galton, a statistician and cousin of Charles Darwin. …