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by their “narrow and sloping foreheads” and asymmetrical faces. The women were no better. He found them largely unattractive, with every face betraying some fatal flaw—“lips thick, mouth coarse, upper lip too long, cheekbones too high, chin poorly formed, the bridge of the nose hollowed, the base of the nose tilted or else the whole face prognathous.” It seemed that almost every foreign face Ross encountered betrayed a deep inferiority that bordered on the subhuman. “There were so many sugar-loaf heads, moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern jaws, and goose-bill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator,” he wrote. That these men and women were contributing their genes to the American melting pot was enough to make men like Ross despondent.

A leading academic, Ross was also a Progressive, yet so many of his observations seemed rooted more in prejudice than in social science. To Ross, Jews were small, weak, and “exceedingly sensitive to pain.” Slavs were “immune to certain kinds of dirt,” while Mediterranean types were skilled at “nimble lying.”

Ross predicted that these new immigrants would cause “a mysterious slackening in social progress” and an overall decline in national intelligence. All of this inferior genetic material floating in the American gene pool would create an increasingly sluggish people, in contrast to the hearty and independent Anglo-Saxon settlers. Crime, drunkenness, sexual immorality, and venereal disease would rise, while “intelligence, self-restraint, refinement, orderliness and efficiency” would decline.

These descriptions placed immigrants on the evolutionary scale far behind the vigorous Anglo-Saxons who settled America. Such stereotypes could take a tragicomic twist, as when a member of the Ellis Island medical staff, Howard Knox, told a meeting of the Eugenics Research Association at Columbia University that a recently deported thirty-nine-year-old Finnish immigrant closely resembled the “missing link” that scientists have searched for to explain the evolutionary gap between apes and humans.

To Knox, this immigrant resembled a man from the early Stone Age, with a low, receding forehead, long, shaggy eyebrows, thick, protruding lips, a massive jaw, long arms, teeth angled outward, and each finger resembling a thumb. The man’s profession—a linesman for the telephone company—seemed to prove Knox’s thesis, “since he may have inherited the characteristics of his ancestors who perhaps often found it necessary to climb to the tree tops to escape some giant animal of their time.” He further explained that while he had never found a man with a tail, he held out hope that he would find such a creature at Ellis Island.

Amidst such pressing concerns for the future of American genetic stock, Henry Goddard offered his services to officials at Ellis Island, where he found a willing ally in William Williams. During his second term as commissioner, Williams was even more convinced that too many undesirable immigrants were entering the country. He was concerned that mentally defective immigrants would “start vicious strains which lead to misery and loss in future generations and influence unfavorably the character and lives of hundreds of persons.” Robert DeC. Ward praised Williams for doing “more than anyone else to keep the blood of our race pure.”

Williams complained to his superiors in Washington that under the current law “many families of poor stock are admissible who practically never rise out of a certain narrow border-land between independence and dependence.” As part of his work, he sent an inspector to report on some three dozen Italian and Jewish children in New York City deemed feebleminded by local schools and hospitals. The longer the families had been in America, Williams argued, the worse off they were. These families, he wrote, came from classes that “have been going down hill for some time” due to “bad living conditions, in-breeding, over-breeding, the strain of persecution.”

Neither Congress nor