1917

Immigration Act excluded adult aliens who could not read a short passage in English or some other language (the literacy test opposed by psychiatrists) but was still a milestone for psychiatry by extending the eligibility period for deportation to five years and including ‘constitutional psychopathic inferiority,’ as well as ‘vagrancy’ and ‘chronic alcoholism,’ as grounds for exclusion and – by implication – deportation. . . . But proofs of how little psychiatric opinion had in common with public opinion was the fact that as psychiatrists congratulated themselves, the country was becoming steadily more xenophobic and nativist. . . Nativists, heady with victory, began to position themselves for the next battle: a quota system was implemented in the 1921 Immigration Act and then again in the 1924 Act, which lasted until 1965 (2% quota on each national group based on 1890 census; with upper limit of 150,000 immigrants per year beginning in 1929) (Dowbiggin II, 224-227). The preceding year, 1923, Fritz Lenz, after Ploetz the most prominent advocate of Nordic ideology, appointed to first German chair in race hygiene at University of Munich (Friedlander, ch 1).