Transcript for: Immigration, Eugenics, and American Society
The anxieties
about urbanization, about unlettered, untutored, relatively uneducated peoples
coming in in large numbers, the sense that
disease was a problem, all of these worries were
amalgamated into a belief that immigrants
caused these problems, and thus immigration
should be held down. - [Narrator] Many
white Protestant
Americans came to fear they were about
to be outnumbered and outbred by the newcomers
and their offspring, that they were being replaced. They embraced a
new pseudoscience born in Britain called eugenics, which falsely claimed
with no evidence that everything from
poverty to prostitution, disabilities to what they
called feeblemindedness could be eliminated if the
individuals they dismissed as socially defective could
be stopped from reproducing. "I wish very much that the wrong people
could be prevented entirely from breeding. And when the evil nature of these people is
sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons
forbidden to leave offspring behind them." Theodore Roosevelt. - The idea was that the bad
people have to stop reproducing and the good people
need to reproduce more. Negative eugenic says
sterilize the wrong people. Snuff them out. And that's the eugenics that
the Nazis would pick up on. - [Narrator] Colleges and
universities taught eugenics. Medical societies confirmed it. Clergyman preached it. John D. Rockefeller and
Andrew Carnegie funded it. And some of the most
prominent people in America championed it. Margaret Sanger, Alexander Graham Bell, even Helen Keller. - [Narrator] It seems to me that the simplest
wisest thing to do would be to submit
cases like that of the malformed idiot baby to
a jury of expert physicians. If the evidence were
presented openly and the decisions made public
before the death of the child, there would be little danger
of mistakes or abuses. We must decide between
a fine humanity and a cowardly sentimentalism. - [Narrator] 33 of the 48 states would eventually
enact Eugenics Laws mandating the forced
sterilization of
wards of the state deemed physically
or mentally unfit: people in prisons,
hospitals, and asylums. More than 60,000 Americans
would be sterilized without their consent before the last of these
statutes was removed from the books in 2014. Eugenics also provided
a racist rationale for those convinced immigration needed to be
drastically curtailed. "The man of the old stock
is being crowded out of many country districts
by these foreigners just as he is today being
literally driven off the streets of New York city by the
swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the
language of the American. They wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning
to take his women. But they seldom
adopt his religion or
understand his ideals. And while he's being
elbowed out of his own home, the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others
the suicidal ethics which are exterminating
his own race." Madison Grant. Madison Grant was a widely
admired conservationist, a friend of presidents, a founder of the Bronx Zoo, responsible in part for
saving the California redwoods and preserving the Buffalo, and instrumental in
creating Glacier, Denali, and Everglades
National Parks. - And he was also a
violent anti-Semite and a violent anti-Italian and he really was horrified
by what he saw happening on the streets of New York. So he publishes a book called "The Passing
of the Great Race" in which he puts
forward the idea that nationalities have
eugenic characteristics. He fills it with all sorts
of interesting historical so-called data which
is mostly crazy, but it's very persuasive and it does give the
anti-immigration movement... It suddenly gives them science. Science says if we let them in then they're gonna destroy
the American gene pool. - [Narrator] For
grant and many others, Jews were a distinct race
not considered white, dismissed as uncouth Asiatics. Grants supposedly
scientific claims about a rigid hierarchy
of races was ludicrous. The biological notion of
race itself is a fiction, but his ideas caught
the imagination of those Americans already
opposed to immigration. - [Peter] People tended to
increasingly view nationalities as if they were
breeds or species. To liken nationalities to breeds was a fundamental
categorical mistake. Hi, I'm Sarah Botstein. Thanks for watching that excerpt from our film "The U.S. and the Holocaust", which explores the story of how the American people grappled with one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the 20th century. Here are some more clips from the film and you can watch the entire series on the PBS Video app, or at PBS.org.