The internal brand of the scarlet

Natural History, March, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

One might be excused for supposing that the elision represents a large and necessary omission to fit the essence of a longer poem onto a smallish plaque. But only one line, easily accommodated, has been cut - and for a reason that can only reflect thoughtless (as opposed to merely ugly) censorship, therefore inviting a double indictment on independent charges of stupidity and cowardice. (As a member of the last public school generation trained by forced memorization of a holy historical canon, including the Gettysburg Address, the Preamble to the Constitution, Mr. Emerson on the rude bridge that arched the flood, and Ms. Lazarus on the big lady with the lamp, I caught the deletion right away and got sufficiently annoyed to write a New York Times Op-Ed piece a couple of years ago. Obviously, I am still seething, but at least I now have the perverse pleasure of using the story for my own benefit to introduce this essay.) I therefore restore the missing line (along with Emma Lazarus's rhyming scheme and syntax):

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Evidently, the transient wind of political correctness precludes such a phrase as "wretched refuse," lest any visitor read the line too literally or personally Did the authorities at our Port Authority ever hear about metaphor and its prominence in poetry? Did they ever consider that Lazarus might be describing the disdain of a foreign elite toward immigrants whom we would welcome, nurture, and value?

This story embodies a double irony that prompted my retelling. We hide Emma Lazarus's line today because we misread its true intention, and because contemporary culture has so confused (and often even equated) inappropriate words with ugly deeds. But the authorities of an earlier generation invoked the false and literal meaning - the identification of most immigrants as wretched refuse - to accomplish a deletion of persons rather than words. That is, the supposed genetic inferiority of most refugees (an innate wretchedness that American opportunity could never overcome) became an effective rallying cry for a movement that did succeed in imposing strong restrictions on immigration beginning in the 1920s. These laws, strictly enforced despite pleas for timely exceptions, immured thousands of Europeans who sought asylum because Hitler's racial laws had marked them for death, while our quotas on immigration precluded any addition of their kind. These two stories of past exclusion and truncated present welcome surely illustrate the familiar historical dictum that significant events tend to repeat themselves - the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

In 1925, Charles B. Davenport, one of America's foremost geneticists, wrote to his friend Madison Grant, the author of a best-selling book, The Passing of the Great Race, on the dilution of America's old (read northern European, not Native American) blood by recent immigration: "Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to." Davenport faced a dilemma. He sought a genetic argument for innate Jewish undesirability, but conventional stereotypes precluded the usual claim for inherent stupidity. So Davenport opted for weakness in moral character rather than intellect. In his 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics - not, by the way, a political tract but his generation's leading textbook in the developing science of genetics - he wrote:

In earning capacity both male and female Hebrew immigrants rank high and the literacy is above the mean of all immigrants. . . . On the other hand, they show the greatest proportion of offenses against chastity and in connection with prostitution, the lowest of crimes . . . .The hordes of Jews that are now coming to us from Russia and the extreme southeast of Europe, with their intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest, represent the opposite extreme from the early English and the more recent Scandinavian immigration, with their ideals of community life in the open country, advancement by the sweat of the brow, and the uprearing of families in the fear of God and love of country.

The rediscovery and publication of Mendel's laws in 1900 had initiated the modern study of genetics. Earlier theories of heredity had envisaged a "blending" or smooth mixture and dilution of traits by interbreeding, whereas Mendelism featured a "particulate" theory of inheritance, with traits coded by discrete and unchanging genes that need not be expressed in all offspring independent and undiluted, but that remain in the hereditary constitution, awaiting expression in some future generation.

In an understandable initial enthusiasm for this great discovery, early geneticists committed their most common error in trying to identify single genes as causes for nearly every feature of the human organism, from discrete bits of anatomy to complex facets of personality. The search for single genetic determinants seemed reasonable for simple, discrete, and discontinuous characters and contrasts (like blue versus brown eyes). But the notion that complex behaviors might also emerge from a similar root in simple heredity of single genes never made much sense, for two major reasons: (1) a continuity in expression that precludes any easy definition of traits supposedly under analysis (I may know blue eyes when I see them, but where does a sanguine personality end and melancholia take over?); and (2) a virtual certainty that environments can substantially mold such characters, whatever their underlying genetic influence (my eyes may become blue whatever I eat, but my inherently good brain may end up residing in a stupid adult if poor nutrition starved my early growth and poverty denied me any education).