the early 1900s, southern and eastern Europeans were considered a racial threat by whites of Anglo Saxon origin. Dressing up racial typologies in the new scientific garb of heredity, Davenport assigned particular behavioral traits to different races of immigrants. He observed that Poles were “independent and self-reliant though clannish”; Italians were prone to commit “crimes of personal violence”; and “Hebrews” fell “intermediate between the slovenly Serbians and Greeks and the tidy Swedes, Germans, and Bohemians.”40 Davenport advocated preventing the reproduction of bad stock through a
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