Edward A. Ross (1866–1951), a prominent American sociologist, believed immigrants coming into the United States in the early twentieth century were members of the ‘lower races,’ barely human. Ross popularized the phrase ‘race suicide,’ the idea that the reproductive deficiency of Americans of Northwestern European origin would doom an America that would be overtaken by the “beaten men of beaten races” of Southeastern Europe. Ross grouped people according to racial categories that were based on his own subjective contemporaneous and historical analyses of ‘types’ he identifies, such as Hindus, Jews, Chinese, Mediterraneans, Japanese, Celtics, Teutons, and others. As was the case with many of his contemporaries in the academy, he understood his views to be ‘commonsense’ knowledge, not subject to any serious scrutiny or challenge. We can gain insight into the mindset of social scientists at the turn of the twentieth century by examining Ross’ methodology of categorizing and ranking human groups in order to better understand the bases upon which Ross confidently proclaimed that “there is at the present moment no people in the world that is, man for man, equal to the Americans in capacity and efficiency.”