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THAT OKRENT ARTICLE IS EXCELLENT _-- very much worth reading On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 12:51 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > NY Times Op-Ed, May 5, 2019 > A Century Ago, America Built Another Kind of Wall > By Daniel Okrent > > In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a > law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction > seem mild by comparison. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent > people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien > accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, > about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years > later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the > statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.” > > The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House > policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has > infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes > with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should > remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants > of specific nationalities. The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked > were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Some were highly > regarded scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. One ran > the nation’s foremost genetics laboratory. Another was America’s leading > environmentalist at the time. Yet another was the director of the > country’s most respected natural history museum. > > Together, they popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made > ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is > passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day > of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved > what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: > enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and > other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is > manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American > institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.” > > What was different about the new, putatively scientific campaign was > that even whiteness was no ticket to entry. > > Writing about Slavic immigrants, the sociologist Edward A. Ross of the > University of Wisconsin — later the national chairman of the American > Civil Liberties Union — declared, they “are immune to certain kinds of > dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man.” The president of > Massachusetts Institute of Technology said newcomers from eastern and > southern Europe were “vast masses of filth” who were “living like swine.” > > The Washington Post editorialized that 90 percent of Italians coming to > the United States were “the degenerate spawn” of “Asiatic hordes.” A > Boston philanthropist, Joseph Lee, his city’s leading supporter of > progressive causes, explained to friends why he became the single > largest financial backer of the anti-immigrant campaign: His concern, he > wrote, was that without a restriction law, Europe would be “drained of > Jews — to its benefit no doubt but not to ours.” > > The “biological” justifications for this nativism were first developed > in Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island, in laboratories financed by the > widow of the railroad baron E.H. Harriman. (One of her goals, Mary > Harriman said, was preventing “the decay of the American race.”) The > laboratory’s head, the zoologist Charles B. Davenport, took the ideas of > the British gentleman scientist Francis Galton — who had coined the word > “eugenics” in 1883 — welded them to a gross misunderstanding of the > genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, and concluded that the makeup of > the nation’s population could be improved by the careful control of > human breeding. One of the first steps, he believed, was to impose new > controls on open immigration. > > At first, Davenport wished to bar the immigration only of people > afflicted by specific disorders — epileptics, the “feebleminded” and > others of similarly troublesome (to Davenport) disability. But soon he > was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by “The Passing of the > Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and > the era’s most prominent conservationist. A bilious stew of dubious > history, bogus anthropology and completely unfounded genetic theory, > Grant’s work persuaded Davenport and others that the American > bloodstream was threatened not by suspect individuals, but by entire > ethnic groups. > > First published in 1916 and reissued in a series of revisions over the > next eight years — all of them brought into print by Maxwell Perkins, > the celebrated editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway — “The > Passing of the Great Race” savagely denigrated the peoples of eastern > and southern Europe while exalting the “Nordics” of northwestern Europe. > With the presumed authority of scholarship, he summarized the essential > argument of racial eugenics. > > “Whether we like to admit it or not,” Grant wrote, “the result of the > mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting” to the > “lower type.” Lower than Nordics were the questionable “Alpines.” Lower > than the “Alpines” were the woeful “Mediterraneans.” And, he concluded, > “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” > > Grant was not an actual scientist. But Henry Fairfield Osborn, a > world-famous paleontologist and his closest friend, definitely was. > Osborn, who once expressed his opposition to the extension of the > Westchester Parkway near his country estate because it would bring > thousands of “East Side Jews” to the area, presided over the American > Museum of Natural History for 25 years, and made that institution the > beating heart of the combined eugenics and anti-immigration movement. “I > am convinced,” said Osborn, that the “spiritual, physical, moral and > intellectual structure” of individuals is “based on racial > characteristics.” It wasn’t a matter of ethnic bias, he said — it was > “cold-blooded” science. > > Other scholars rallied to the cause. Robert M. Yerkes — his name > immortalized today at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in > Atlanta — conducted a severely flawed series of tests of American > servicemen purporting to establish the intellectual inferiority of > eastern and southern Europeans. Charles W. Gould, a lawyer in New York, > sponsored “A Study of American Intelligence,” by Carl C. Brigham, a > young Princeton psychologist (and later the inventor of the SAT). > Brigham’s conclusion: “There can be no doubt that recent history has > shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of > peoples to this country.” > > At the same time, Perkins and his colleagues at Charles Scribner’s Sons > published a raft of books promoting racialized eugenics. Scribner > publicists wrote in one promotion piece: “The inrush of lower races is > threatening the very blood of our country.” Perkins’s authors were > echoed in the country’s leading magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. > “Race character is as fixed a fact as race color,” the Post declared. > “Thirty years ago,” the magazine insisted in another article, “science > had not perhaps sufficiently advanced to make us fully aware” of the > danger of open immigration. Now it had. > > When the 1924 Immigration Act reached the floor of Congress, passage was > assured. Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Immigration and > Naturalization Committee, declared that “the fundamental reason” for > immigration restriction was “biological.” During the floor debate, one > congressman said the law was provoked by “the necessity for purifying > and keeping pure the blood of America.” Given the arguments presented by > so many of the nation’s leading scientific figures, who could disagree? > > The resulting law established quotas by nation; they cut like a scythe. > In the last year before their introduction, more than 220,000 Italians > entered the United States. The quota slashed that number to less than > 4,000. Reductions nearly as harsh were imposed on other eastern and > southern European groups, while tens of thousands of slots reserved for > Britons, Scandinavians and other “Nordics” went unfilled. > > The 1924 quotas remained in force for more than 40 years — while the > economic devastation of a worldwide depression hit southern Europe > especially hard; while a 1939 measure that would have allowed 20,000 > German Jewish children into the United States died in Congress, and the > savagery of the Holocaust began; while the Nazis and their allies > starved 350,000 Greeks and slaughtered 200,000 Serbs; and while > displaced-persons camps stretched across the ruins of postwar Europe. > > In 1920, Charles Davenport had asked Madison Grant, “Can we build a wall > high enough around this country” to keep out the unwanted? They could, > and they did. > > Daniel Okrent is the author of “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and > the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European > Immigrants Out of America.” > > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/mameerop%40gmail.com _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
