Jeremiah Whipple Jenks (1856–1929) was an American economist, educator, and professor at Cornell University, who held various posts in the United States government throughout his career.
Jenks was interested in the political aspects of economic problems and he served frequently on various government commissions and made many reports on currency, labor, and immigration issues.
Progressive Era economists focused on making economics compatible with morality, and sought to institute governmental regulations which were favorable to large corporations.
The National Civic Federation was a business-dominated organization that aligned with the ideologies of reformist minded economists like Jenks, as it sought to implement uniform state legislation on multiple issues including worker's compensation, child labor, and taxation.
Although the bill was ultimately unsuccessful, Jenks sat on the four-man committee headed by John Bates Clark which drafted a preliminary version of the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act.
With the Dillingham Commission, he wrote model legislation for the Mann Act of 1910, which focused on the restriction of white slavery and sex trafficking into the United States.
Jenks was instrumental in the writing and the passage of the Dillingham Immigration Bill of 1911, which was ultimately vetoed by President William Howard Taft.
However, this bill was one of the first to restrict immigration on racial grounds, and set the precedent for many restrictionist policies which were soon to be passed by the federal government, such as the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924.
In reality, their proposed plan still instituted quotas for different immigrants based on race, it would just be less exclusionary for members of Asian countries.
He applied his experiences abroad in different colonies across the world, as he increasingly thought it was the duty of the federal government to place restrictions on immigration into the US.
These studies led by Jenks and the Commission were noted to not conform to research methods as they did not hold any public hearings, nor cross-examine any witnesses.
The Commission also did not utilize any data already available to them, such as census reports, studies by state bureaus of labor, or other agencies, in order to come up with their own unique conclusions.
Scholar Mae Ngai notes the racial aspects of this legislation, as she says the language of eugenics dominated the political discourse on immigration during this period.
[7] The Commission divided the immigrants they studied by ethnicity and race, thus showing how they fed into the language of eugenics and the ideology of the National Origins Act of 1924.
After studying a mine in northern Pennsylvania, they came to the conclusion that immigrants were reducing the standard of civilization for all Americans, which was to negatively affect their morality.
[10] Jenks and his key staff assistant, anthropologist Daniel Folkmar, collaborated on an extensive racial dictionary that became an important feature of the Commission's report to Congress.