Eastern Europe. They too were much darker than the
dominant strains of Northern Europe, and many were Catholics. There was a
growing feeling that these new immigrants, like the Negroes, were
inherently alien and intrinsically unassimilable. Liberals in the
progressive movement, who were concerned about protecting the integrity
and morality of American society, were in the fore-front of those who
feared the new hordes of "swarthy" immigrants.

One of those who feared that the large influx of South and East Europeans
would undermine the quality of American life was Madison Grant. In his
book The Passing of the Great Race, he warned that Nordic excellence
would be swamped by the faster-spawning Catholic immigrants. Originally
these racial stereotypes had some cultural and historical basis, but they
were gaining a new strength and authority from the sociological and
biological sciences centering in the concepts of Social Darwinisn.

Darwinism and related theories in anthropology and sociology helped to
give an aura of respectability to racism in both Europe and America. The
same kind of pseudo-scientific thinking which was developed in Europe to
justify anti-Semitism was used in America to reinforce prejudices against
Negroes as well as against Jews and South Europeans. In the first half
of the nineteenth century the American anthropologist Samuel George
Morton argued that each race had its own unique characteristics. Racial
character, he believed, was the result of inheritance rather than of
environment. Because these characteristics found specific environments
congenial, each race had gravitated to its preordained geographic habitat.

Darwin's theory of evolution offered another explanation for the
existence of differing species in the animal kingdom, and anthropologists
concluded that it would also provide an explanation for racial
differences in mankind. Early anthropologists and sociologists were
preoccupied with dividing humanity into differing races and trying to
catalog and explain these differences. Phrenology was another
pseudo-science which attempted to construct a system according to which
intellectual and moral characteristics would be correlated with the size
and shape of the human head. On this basis many tried to divide mankind
into physical types and to assign to each its own intellectual and moral
qualities. Another one who believed that human races could be
scientifically measured and that their su