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Now many IRL members took up the banner of eugenics. Ward hoped that immigration officials could practice “eugenic principles in the selection of the fathers and mothers of future American children.” It was feebleminded immigrants more than the insane, Ward believed, who posed the greatest threat to the Republic. “The latter are to a considerable extent segregated and thus prevented from breeding,” he wrote, “but the former are far oftener at liberty, and are thus usually free to breed as they will.”

For Prescott Hall, the ability to sort populations by their genetic stock was a beneficial result of the spread of science. The rise of science and the decline of religion, Hall noted approvingly, “turned men’s gaze in large part from the next world to this.” With a heady mixture of Darwin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Nietzsche, Hall spoke of the new “Christ ideal” rooted not in religious faith but in “human perfection.” He praised the “superman, working in a strenuous life to produce a better world here and now.”

One answer for Hall was birth control. Both the restriction of immigration and the use of birth control should, in his words, be applied both to “defective and delinquent stocks of all races,” as well as “less desirable races.” Why, he asked, was science so devoted to using its new knowledge to breeding animals and plants, but not humans?

As to whether humans were affected more by their environment than by their genes, Hall sided with nature. “You cannot make bad stock into good by changing its meridian, any more than you can turn a cart horse into a hunter by putting it into a fine stable, or make a mongrel into a fine dog by teaching it tricks,” he argued. Hall held out little hope that life in America would have any effect on the intelligence of immigrants. He approvingly quoted eugenicist Karl Pearson, that one “cannot change the leopard’s spots and you cannot change bad stock to good; you may dilute it, possibly spread it over a large area, spoiling good stock, but until it ceases to multiply it will not cease to be.”

At the intersection of eugenics and immigration restriction was the dark pessimism of native-born Anglo-Saxons that their culture would be washed away in a tide of southern and eastern Europeans. Some asked whether the Anglo-Saxon would go the way of the American Indian and the buffalo: to extinction.

Progressive sociologist Edward A. Ross was one of those asking that question. In 1913, Ross gave a lecture on immigration in which he prophesized that when “the blood of the old pioneering breed has faded out of the motley, polyglot, polychrome, caste-riven population that will crowd this Continent to a Chinese density, let there be reared a commemorative monument bearing these words: ‘To the American Pioneering Breed, The Victim of too much Humanitarianism and too little Common Sense.’ ”

One late afternoon, Ross planted himself in New York’s Union Square as garment workers left their jobs and headed back to their tenement homes. At six feet, four inches tall, the patrician academic from Wisconsin must have towered over the diverse, multi-ethnic crowd milling about Union Square. Ross took a quick scan of 368 individuals as they passed him and reported that only 38 “had the type of face one would find at a county fair in the West or the South.”

Ross proudly noted that a trained eye could see that the physiognomy of many ethnic groups painted them as decidedly inferior. So just what kind of faces did Ross see in Union Square and in immigrant enclaves across the country? One was what he called the “Caliban type,” defined by men who were “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality” and who “clearly belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.” These were men, Ross confidently proclaimed, who were the “descendants of those who always stayed behind.”

Whatever Ross’s descriptions lacked in historical or scientific accuracy, they were not lacking in vivid language. When he saw foreignborn men, Ross was struck