American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [192]
McSweeney had managed to outlive his former nemesis, Terence Powderly, by four years. He had rebuilt his life to such a degree that senators, congressmen, judges, and other dignitaries turned out for his funeral. In contrast, Powderly died in relative obscurity. He had gone from being the most famous labor leader of the late nineteenth century to an obscure government bureaucrat, a low-level functionary working within the Immigration Service that he once ran.
Powderly had once been a staunch restrictionist who opposed immigrant contract laborers and warned that immigrants posed a menace to the nation’s health. By 1920, Powderly changed his tune. In his new position, he was concerned that government was neglecting the needs of immigrants. “We have admitted them as we have received baled hay, bars of pig iron and casks of olive oil,” he wrote to his boss, “not a single throb of human sympathy has been extended to them and not a thing has been done to assure them of a welcome.” By the time of his change of heart, it was too late. Powderly was little more than a powerless bureaucrat who needed his job for the paycheck that staved off poverty in his old age.
Freed from the burdens of petty political and labor squabbles, Powderly lived out his final years with little of the mental and emotional stress that plagued him in the past. He remarried, wrote his autobiography, and continued his work as an amateur photographer. He died in 1924 at the age of seventy-five.
The immigration work of McSweeney and Powderly belonged to another era. They both passed away during a time when the nation’s immigration laws changed dramatically and Ellis Island, the site of their bitter feud a quarter century earlier, had gradually begun to fade in importance.
Powderly was not the only person to have second thoughts. Psychologist Henry Goddard, who coined the term “moron,” had done much to buttress beliefs in the mental inferiority of immigrants. By the late 1920s, he had changed course and now believed that most individuals scoring below the mental age of twelve were not morons. Despite his lifetime of work on the subject, Goddard wrote in 1928 that psychologists were “still limited to a definition of feeble-mindedness that is unscientific and unsatisfactory.”
Taking issue with supporters of eugenics, Goddard came to believe that feeblemindedness was curable and that environment played just as strong a role in intelligence as genes. In the late 1920s, he even concluded that there was not much evidence to show that feebleminded parents begat feebleminded children. Goddard had never personally been drawn to the racism that infected others associated with eugenics, but by the 1920s he would go so far as to write that the “distribution of intelligence in the different races is probably the same.” By this time, immigration quotas were solidly in effect and Goddard’s national influence had waned.
Unlike Goddard, University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross had been much more heavily invested in the genetic inferiority of immigrants. He had earlier coined the term “race suicide” and complained that many new immigrants resembled prehistoric creatures and were “the descendants of those who always stayed behind.” A proud Anglo-Saxon and defender of Nordic superiority, Ross was also a progressive who believed immigrants from southern and eastern Europe retarded the advancement of American civilization by bringing illiteracy, vice, and political corruption.
By the time he wrote his autobiography, Ross had moderated his views. He still professed a belief in eugenics and birth control and was proud that his writings had helped build support for the quota laws of the 1920s. Yet something happened to the man who had once penned articles such as “The Causes of Race Superiority” and “The Value Rank of the American People.” Since then, Ross had traveled the world and softened his views toward non-Nordic cultures. A chastened Ross now declared: “Far