Psychologist Raymond Cattell argues against the “mixture of blood between racial groups” (Cattell, 1933, p. 155). A few years later, he declared that Black individuals have “contributed practically nothing to social progress and culture” and argued against their full citizenship (Cattell, 1937, p. 56). Cattell argued that these individuals should “be brought to euthanasia” for this inferiority. In 1972, he again argued that such “race mixing” would result in “the intelligent maintainers of the culture being completely replaced by lower intelligences” (Cattell, 1972, p. 154). He continued to maintain the dangers of race-mixing through the early 1990s.

The Johnson-Reed Act passes, limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and favoring immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. The goal of the Act, as stated, was to preserve American homogeneity. Italians, Greeks, and Eastern European Jews were heavily impacted and Syrian immigration was limited to 100 people per year. It further extended a ban on Asian immigration. Psychological research was cited by eugenics leaders in congressional testimony leading up to passage of the Act. It was argued that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were endowed with inherently poor genetic material and that restriction was needed to preserve American racial stock (Doyle, 2014; Laughlin, 1923; Tucker, 1994; Gelb, Allen, Futterman, & Mehler,1986 ).

Culturally biased test questions and examination procedures, along with an assumption of White, American normativity, led to results that established a clear racial hierarchy of performance with White, American-born recruits scoring highest on IQ tests and Black recruits, particularly those from the American south, scoring the lowest. 89% of Black recruits were labeled by the Committee as “morons” (Kevles, 1968; Rury, 1988; Yerkes, 1921).