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Herbert Hoover TLS on Immigration and Eugenics during the Great Depression
Herbert Hoover TLS on Immigration and Eugenics during the Great Depression
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Description:

Hoover Herbert

Bi-fold TLS on stationary stock with letterhead of The White House, Washington, 7" x 9". Dated "December 27, 1929" and boldly signed by President Herbert Hoover as "Herbert Hoover' with a large 3" signature. Typed on recto of first page with other pages blank.  Light toning, otherwise near fine.

 

Herbert Hoover typed letter signed to Leon Whitney, Executive Secretary  of the American Eugenics Society.

It is hard to really to fully grasp the position Leon Whitney played in the world of science, government and politics. But few are aware his writings and philosophies were closely followed in the late 1920's by a young German corporal, Adolf Hitler. Hitler closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, then Executive Secretary of the American Eugenics Society, along with Madison Grant, both of whom who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its “corruption” by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. Hitler even wrote fan mail to Grant who had written the book The Passing of the Great Race. “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.“  And just shortly after in the early 1930s, Hitler was writing to both Whitney and Grant espousing that Grant's book  The Passing of the Great Race was “his Bible”.

 

Hoover's letter to Whitney references his letter of December 24th, and notes "In the question you mention are due as much as anything else to the old trouble of definition of terms. I have never heard that the Department of Commerce took the point of view that immigration was solely a commercial question. In fact, I know quite the contrary that the Department has always regarded it to a very considerable degree a social questions. Then we get into a further difficulty in terms as to what a biological basis would be …"

 

The discussions underlying the letter no doubt were referencing the position held by the Eugenic society regarding immigration controls. Just 9 years earlier, in 1920, Harry Laughlin from the Eugenics Record Office appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Using data for the U.S. Census Bureau and a survey of the number of foreign-born persons in jails, prisons and reformatories, he argued that the "American" gene pool was being polluted by a rising tide of intellectually and morally defective immigrants – primarily from eastern and southern Europe. Sympathetic to Laughlin's message, Committee Chairman Albert Johnson of Washington State appointed Laughlin as "expert eugenics agent." In this capacity, Laughlin conducted research from 1921 to 1931. He took a fact-finding trip to Europe, used free postage to conduct large-scale surveys of charitable institutions and mental hospitals, and had his results published by the Government Printing Office. His research culminated in his 1924 testimony to Congress in support of a eugenically-crafted immigration restriction bill. The Eugenics Research Association displayed a chart beneath the Rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington showing the cost to taxpayers of supporting Laughlin's "social inadequates."

 

The resulting law, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, was designed consciously to halt the immigration of supposedly "dysgenic" Italians and eastern European Jews, whose numbers had mushroomed during the period from 1900 to 1920. The method was simply to scale the number of immigrants from each country in proportion to their percentage of the U.S. population in the 1890 census – when northern and western Europeans were the dominant immigrants. Under the new law, the quota of southern and eastern Europeans was reduced from 45% to 15%. The 1924 Act ended the greatest era of immigration in U.S. history.

Upon signing the Act, President Calvin Coolidge commented, "America must remain American." This phrase would become the rallying cry of anti-immigration sentiment until after World War II. The eugenic intent of the 1924 law and the quota system it established remained in place until they were repealed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

This letter however was written just after the start of the Great Depression, during another period when questionable immigration policy was at play.  In the late 1920s, about 60,000 people would enter the U.S. annually from “non-quota” countries, primarily Mexico, and many of them stayed for years.   (The 1924 Immigration Act had established strict quotas for immigration from Europe, Asia and Africa, but did not limit immigration from North or South America.)  As long as migrants had a visa and a job, they could stay as long as they wished.  Any migrant without a valid visa could be deported at any time, and any migrant, temporary or permanent, could be deported if they became a public charge.  Local law enforcement agencies were the primary means for apprehending illegal immigrants, and the burden of proof was on the migrant to show a valid visa and employment. As unemployment climbed during the Great Depression, most American citizens believed that jobs and charity should be reserved for Americans, and that non-citizens should return to their home countries. President Hoover’s only official action was to eliminate inward migration by reducing the number of visas to almost zero, on the grounds that most applicants would likely find no work and become public charges.  As the Depression worsened, private businesses and industry often took matters into their own hands.  In Detroit, for example, the automakers fired many of their Hispanic workers, including legal migrants and even American citizens of Hispanic descent.  Without jobs, many chose to leave the country rather than risk a deportation hearing.  In some cases they left after being threatened or detained by local law enforcement or Bureau of Immigration officials.  Others were alarmed by the anti-immigrant rhetoric or hostile attitude of their neighbors.  The largest such repatriation project took place in Los Angeles, organized by the City of Los Angeles with cooperation from the Department of Labor and Los Angeles County officials.  In 1930 and 1931, tens of thousands of Mexicans were rounded up and put on trains, often with their American-born children, and summarily shipped across the border. 

An intriguing letter from President Hoover to Leon Whitney, a founding member of the American Eugenics Society which no doubt had undercurrents of immigration and Eugenic concerns on several levels.


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