Defectives in the land: disability and American immigration policy, 1882-1924, February 23, 2010

- [Douglas Baynton] Yesterday, you're name came up, Ed. - [Ed Holton] Uh-oh. - [Douglas Baynton] One of the students said, "You know, "Ed Holton is retiring soon and he's absolutely a treasure. "He's a storehouse, he knows everything "about history of medicine, "so if you're doing any research on history of medicine, "you should go talk to him quick." So, I'd sort of pass that along. - [Ed Holton] You're a treasure. - [Douglas Baynton] That's the word that was used. So, and to those of you who are my students, this is a regular class. It's not well set up for taking notes, I'm afraid. You don't have a writing surface, but try as best you can, okay? This is a lecture for the class and then, I"ll try to keep this to about half an hour, so we'll have plenty of time for questions and discussion afterwards. So, again, especially for my students, as you're taking notes, any questions that occur to you as you're going along, make sure you jot them down because you'll forget them by the end. And then after our discussion, we'll take about a 10 minute break and then we'll just resume back here and have our class as usual. So as Ed said, I'm working on a book about immigration policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A lot has been written about this because this is the beginning of American immigration policy, federal immigration policy. Before that, while there were a smattering of state laws having to do with migration across state lines or, in some places like New York, immigrants coming into the country, for the most part, the United States was open. It was just an open country to immigrants and it was hardly regulated at all. So, in the 1880s and 90s, the federal government began to regulate immigration, and most of the work that's been done on that has focused on race. The focus is, of course, on the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was a very important law passed in 1882. Then, there were a series of what are usually depicted as fairly narrowly targeted laws having to do with foreign radicals, public health, contract labor, and medical inspection to prevent the spread of disease and so on. And then the next really major law was in 1924, first enacted in 1922 on a temporary basis, and then '24, the National Quotas Act, which sets quotas for people immigrating from other countries. And that's really the main focus, so Chinese exclusion and the 1924 act. That's where the action has been in immigration policy history. And you can see why. A lot of the concern, a lot of the panic having to do with immigration had to do with both increasing numbers and people coming from different places than they had been coming earlier in the 19th century. So as you can see, still in the 1870s, immigration is picking up, but most of it is from Germany, Britain, and Ireland, places from which there had been a lot of immigration throughout the 19th century. In 1880s, Germany and Britain are still in the top two places and Scandinavia is moving up and tied with Ireland. And this is where you first start seeing, you see the increased numbers, five million people. You start having a real debate about the problems of numbers and how to limit them. 1890s is, you see a dramatic change in the source of immigrants. The numbers go down a little bit in that decade because there's a major depression from 1893 to '98. So the pull factors of the U.S. economy are not as favorable. But the shift in country of origin is obvious. So Italy moves into first place, Austria-Hungary into second place, and Russia is now tied with Germany. And for native-born Americans and for a lot of Americans, this is seen as a problem. People from places with strange cultures, foreign cultures, different from the folks who were already here. And this continues. Then in the 1900s, the numbers shoot way up to almost nine million people, and again, from these same places, from people who are members of less-favored nations in the length of the time or less-favored races. And the 19 teens, the numbers come down somewhat because of the war, because of World War I, but still the numbers are predominant from these less-favored racial groups. So if you look at the histories that have been written about this period, you find a focus on nationality and race. To give just a few prominent examples, John Higham's classic work, Strangers in the Land, identified three main currents of anti-immigrant sentiment in the 19th century: anti-Catholicism, fear of foreign radicals, and racial nativism. Roger Daniels wrote in his book, Coming to America, that by 1917, the immigration policy of the United States had been restricted in seven major ways, and then he lists Asians, criminals, persons who fail to meet certain moral standards, persons with various diseases, paupers, radicals and illiterates. And Alan Kraut's book, Silent Travelers, which is all about medical inspection, really focuses on disease, on communicable disease and the importance of preventing contagion. But during these years, there are thousands upon thousands of people who don't fit categories that have been central to the histories of the period, people who were not paupers, were not carriers of disease, who, where the only target against them was that they were defective in some way. And so it's treated as a medical issue, but it's not a contagious disease issue. It's a matter of defect, which could cause problems with that person working or with them passing along defects to future generations. So, and the term, defect, corresponds mostly, overlaps mostly with what we usually term disability today. Now one other feature of the way people write about this period is from 1882, when you get the first major federal immigration law, to 1924, aside from the Chinese Exclusion Act, the period is termed selective. The laws were mostly about selecting or sifting through immigrants. And the period after 1924 is restrictive. So that's where you get immigration restriction, per se, is only after 1924. So what I'm doing is trying to reorient the history of the time to take into account what we now know about disability, about attitudes towards people with disabilities and economic discrimination against people with disabilities. The laws before 1924 had been mostly passed over as sensible, all right? When historians write about this, it's well, okay, there were these laws, there was this law that restricted this group, this law that excluded that group, and you go through it and you get to the outrageous stuff where certain racial groups are excluded. And the exclusion of people with disabilities is portrayed more or less as common-sensical, as understandable. So what I wanna do is bring together the so-called selective period and restrictive period and say, no, really, this is a period that we should treat as a whole. It's a period in which Americans are trying to figure out how to limit the numbers of people coming into the country generally, but especially to limit people who are seen as defective types. And the way they do that at first is by having inspection. So first, they inspect individuals and they have a series of laws which I'm going to get to restricting particular types of disabilities, particular types of defects. And then they go through this individual inspection and they weed the individuals out. Now the assumption was that that would not only target feeble-minded individuals, crippled individuals, insane individuals, to use the terminology of the time, but also would limit the numbers of people from Italy who were known to be prone to feeble-mindedness at the time. This was what was known, to limit the number of people from Austria-Hungary who were prone to physical defects, who were prone to degeneracy, to limit Russians, and especially Russian Jews, who were also known to be degenerate in a variety of ways. So it was individuals with defects and also types of people or races of people who were seen as defective overall that they were trying to limit. And so they did this through inspection and that got to be more and more expensive, more and more difficult as the numbers went up, too many people were getting through the screens that they had set up. They tried, over the years, to make it more and more efficient, to they tried to expand the laws to capture more people, but in the end, it wouldn't work. The idea of restricting people by nationality, to have a quota, was an old idea. People had been talking about it a long time, but it was seen as radical and immigrant groups in the United States opposed them, so it was controversial and difficult to pass. But by the 1920s, there was a general consensus that the old system was not gonna work, the numbers were gonna keep going up, we couldn't inspect them all, it was costing a fortune and we need a new approach. And so they shifted to national quotas. Now the national quotas would target the nationalities and limit the number of people from Italy directly, and at the same time, that would reduce the number of defective individuals because people from those countries were known to have a disproportionate number of defective individuals. So, the whole thing is one effort to restrict people who are defective and not really two separate phases or two separate kinds of ideas. So in 1882, the first law excludes any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge. A lunatic is the term for a person who is hopelessly insane, as they would say at the time, so it's an extreme term to mean someone who is incapable of taking care of themself. An idiot is the scientific term, at the time, it's interesting how these terms always go through a process of becoming slang, of becoming insults and then we discard them, but idiots and imbeciles and morons were all scientific terms for grades of cognitive disability. Idiot was considered to be the lowest grade, the most severely affected. And then any person unable to take care of himself or herself, that was meant to capture people with physical disabilities generally, disabled who would generally be unable to support themselves. Now I'm simplifying here, because there's a number of steps along the way where the laws are changed in little increments, but by 1903, the law now has insane persons, which was meant to be a little broader than lunatic, epileptics are added, paupers are added, and persons likely to become a public charge. In practice, paupers was, most people who were in that category were people with various disabilities, so that captures a lot of people with disabilities, and then persons likely to become a public charge. So the shift here is from unable, when the inspector says they're unable to take care of themselves, no. They've made it a little broader now, if the inspector judges the person likely to become a public charge, that is, to be put in an institution or go on some sort of public welfare. By 1907, they have expanded from idiots to imbeciles, which is considered the next category up, and then feeble-minded persons, which is an extremely broad term that in the regulations, I'll talk about it in a minute, it's described very expansively. So epileptics, insane persons, likely to become a public charge. But then, interestingly, they add this. So, in a separate category from this, persons who are found to be mentally or physically defective, that defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such an alien to earn a living. So, all along, these are mandatory exclusions, so if the doctor says the person's an imbecile or feeble-minded, they have to be excluded. The likelihood to become a public charge is the inspector's judgment being brought into play. This continues to apply to everybody in general, but not to people found defective. If you're defective, you're now put in a separate category where the inspector doesn't have to say likely, likely to be a public charge. All he had to say is that defect may affect your ability to earn a living. So over the years, they're making this more and more broad, lowering the bar, giving more and more discretion to the inspectors to exclude people. So this is the legislation, and then regulations are issued by the Immigration Service for inspectors, and the regulations, at this time, direct inspectors to exclude persons with any mental abnormality, whatever, which justifies the statement that he alien is mentally defective and then goes on to explain that this is intended to exclude aliens of a mentally inferior type, not comprehended in other aspects of the law, and without being under the necessity of showing they have a defect which may affect their ability to earn a living. So any mental defect, then, a mental defect, can also be applied as a means of excluding the person, even if the inspector thinks they might be able to earn a living. And then any borderline mental case which might be described as mentally deficient or slow-witted or having mental illness, may be also excluded. Now the way these laws have come into immigration policies so far is to talk about how these were applied to certain ethnic groups, right? So these are disproportionally applied to certain types, to people from certain kinds of cultures, in part, just because they may not behave in a normal fashion. The inspector, not understanding their culture, may think they're mentally defective because of their cultural norms, or it might be because of stereotypical notions of certain nationalities. So people have done this, but really, to talk about the problem of this kind of prejudice against national groups or racial groups, to decry the slander against these particular groups, but not to think about what does this tell us about how people were thinking about disability at the time, why were these things such major problems and why was this a way of excluding despised racial groups by describing them as disabled in various ways. And by the way, to be honest, in 1917, they added the category of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, which includes unstable individuals on the borderline between sanity and insanity, such as moral imbeciles, pathological liars, vagrants, cranks, and persons with abnormal sex instincts. And this shows how linked together all of these ideas were. Defect took in immorality because a person who was immoral, say a prostitute, for example, or someone addicted to unhealthy sexual practices, right, or someone who had an undeveloped moral faculty. So this was a defect of the brain that also was inherited, that could be passed along to your children. Pathological liars, moral imbeciles, all right, so it has to do with they're not just intellectual imbeciles, but there are moral imbeciles and this is a condition that's in the body that can be passed along. This was the regulation under which gays and lesbians were excluded until the 1970s. The famous images that we have and a very common idea we have about medical inspection comes from images like this where they're looking for trachoma. This is something that all immigrants remember with horror, of having the button hook used to turn back their eyelid and look for signs of trachoma, which was a highly contagious disease of the eye. It was difficult to cure and could result in blindness. And you find in immigrant memoirs these sorts of statements: "This I remember well - the eye exam. "It was such a fright, such a fright." And you see this image over and over again, but what they were looking for was not just contagious disease, but also defects in the body that had nothing to do with disease. Victor Safford was an inspector, wrote in his memoir that "It is no more difficult "to detect poorly built, defective "or broken down human beings "than to recognize a cheap or defective automobile. "The wise man will want to see both in action, "performing as well as at rest." And here, he's echoing the words actually used in the inspectors instructions, that "Individuals should be seen first at rest "and then at motion to detect irregularities "in movement, abnormalities of any description." And then they list, they have a long list of representative sort of defects that would be cause for exclusion. They emphasize, this is not a complete list, this is not inclusive of everything, but just examples of the kinds of things that you could exclude for: arthritis, asthma, bunions, deafness, deformities, flat feet, heart disease, hernia, hysteria, poor eyesight, poor physical development, more on that in a moment, spinal curvature, vascular disease of the heart, varicose veins. And I just excerpted, they happen to have a much longer list than that. So the exclusion of people with defects or disabilities was central to the laws and central to the practice of inspection. It was a huge part of the inspector's job, was to look for people with various kinds of defects. The Commissioner General of Immigration in 1907 wrote that, "The exclusion from this country "of the morally, mentally, and physically deficient "is the principal object to be accomplished "by the immigration laws." And as I mentioned, morally, mentally, and physically, these things were all intertwined, so these were not separate sorts of issues. These all had to do with inheritable defects. Now why did this become a problem at this particular time? Why did these laws proliferate at the end of the 19th century? One of the main reasons, and the one that is explicit, it's always openly stated, talked about at the time in history is economic. So that's the likely to become a public charge issue. The more implicit one, the one that's less often openly talked about, never written into the laws, although it comes up in congressional debates and it comes up in the Immigration Service memos is eugenics, is the movement at the time to limit the reproduction or increase in the number of defective persons. So one way that was being accomplished was by institutionalization of defective people and by sterilization of people both in and outside of institutions. But the other prong of the attack, as they said, they had a two-prong approach to eugenics, the other was to prevent the entry into the country of defective persons who would pass along their defects. Now one of the things I really wanted to talk about, and then I decided I don't really have time 'cause I gotta do too much general kind of stuff so that you know what the general picture is, is how this has to do with the changed notion of time. In my class, we've been talking about this, how at the end of the 19th century, there was a new conception of time, both in the sense of clock time, the sense of daily time, as well as a sense of time as history, how both of these work. And so I will, if I have time, I'll talk a little bit more about that, but this is to break down eugenics. It's very easy to say eugenics and just have this neat label on things, but what does that mean exactly? Well, one problem was that life was speeding up considerably, time was money, efficiency was the watch word of the day and factory work required efficient workers and the economy required efficient workers and everybody was expected to go faster and faster, and so disability became more of an issue in that context. And then, also, evolution, evolutionary theory and simplified notions of that as evolutionary progress, climbing up a ladder, and fear of decline played into this, as well. And so not only were individuals expected to work hard and get ahead, but the society was competing internationally, globalization was proceeding at the time, and so both the nation and the race were seen as being in a race to improve and to progress. So more on that later, if I can. One of the diagnoses that was used a lot that I think illustrates the eugenic aspect of this was known as poor physical development, which I mentioned on that list, or poor physique. So this is a quote from William Williams, who was a very important guy in Immigration Service and he was commissioner of Ellis Island for many years, but he wrote in 1904 that "All thinking men "realize that we are confronted with problems "of far greater importance "than the immediate material development of the country, "and that we cannot sacrifice our national ideals "and character for mere pecuniary gain." The economic argument went back and forth because there were people who were arguing for unrestricted immigration because they wanted more and more workers to keep wages down so the economy could grow faster and any restrictions threatened economic growth. So people debated a lot on the economic side of this, and what he is alluding to here, the greater threat that really supersedes any economic considerations are problems of far greater importance which was the future inheritance of the country and the level of the racial stock that we had in the country. So after this quote, he goes on to argue that the country is receiving too many immigrants whose physical condition is poor and he says we can't exclude all of these under the likely to become a public charge or may affect their ability to earn a living because their are an awful lot of people coming in who have jobs, who have professions, who have vocations that do not require a robust physique and they're clearly able to earn a living and they always have earned a living, so we can't exclude them on those grounds but they're undesirable because they would have a negative effect on future generations. So poor physique quickly became a major reason for excluding immigrants and the Commissioner-General of the Bureau of Immigration defined it in 1905 in this way. A certificate meaning the inspector would give the immigrant a medical certificate for poor physique and it implies that the alien is "undersized, "poorly developed, physically degenerate," degeneracy is a real, it's a buzzword of the time, it's an important keyword in this whole debate and it has to do with something that is heritable and that can be passed down. So something in this person's past has caused them to have a degenerate inheritance and they will continue to pass that along to their children. And so, as he goes on to say, "very likely to transmit "his undesirable qualities to his offspring, "should he unfortunately for the country "in which he is domiciled, have any." I love the syntax of that sentence. There's a whole bunch of quotations like this about the problem of poor physique. This one is interesting because the immigrant of poor physique is not able to perform rough labor, but even if he were able, employers won't hire them. So this is a economic argument, not in the sense that they are unable to work, but they will face discrimination in the workplace because of their difference because of their defect, and so they won't get a job. Now, when Williams wrote his report, he didn't use the term eugenics, he kind of danced around the issue. It was clear in the context of the time what he's talking about. But the people who came to his, to support him, were not so circumspect about it. So there was the Immigration Restriction League, which was openly eugenicist and the founders of that, Prescott Hall and Robert DeCourcy Ward, wrote a series of letters and articles seconding what Williams said about poor physique, urging the Immigration Bureau, urging Congress to pass laws and specifying, from a eugenics standpoint, good physique is a fundamental influence. So just to give you one example of an immigrant, I've got lots of individual stories that I'm working with, some of these are just heartbreaking, but this one is about a immigrant by the name of Israel Bosak, who came in January of 1906. He was a tailor and owned a tailor shop in Russia before it was burned down by a mob in a anti-Jewish pogrom. That's why there're a lot of Russian Jews immigrating during the early 1900s was because there was a whole series of pogroms in Russia against Jews. So he explained to the immigration officials that he had left the country for that reason. He intended to send for his wife and children as soon as he got settled. He was not destitute, he had $65, which was more than most immigrants had coming at the time. He had lots of relatives and friends who were here who he identified by name and who came to testify on his behalf. But he was certified as having poor physique. Now ordinarily, in most of these cases, the board of inspectors, they'd have a board of three officials who would make the decision, in most of these cases, the person with a poor physique, they were just sent right back. But in this case there was a member of the board who was a political appointee by President Roosevelt, and he was usually very sympathetic to Jewish immigrants. He made a speech saying that "Bosak has come here, "driven from his home by the mob, "to establish a home for himself. "He has friends here to support him. "It seems to me but nothing but the simplest humanity "and consistent with the laws of the land "to permit him to enter and I move his admission." This got appealed because there was a disagreement on the board, it got appealed to Washington, there is a lengthier record, which is why I was able to get a complete record on this. But the inspector was the only one who saw this as any reason at all to admit. The commissioner at Ellis Island wrote a letter that went in with this appeal to Washington saying he should be excluded. The Commissioner-General of Immigration in Washington said that "I call attention to Department Letter 48,462," which was a circular that had emphasized the dangers, the eugenic dangers of immigrants with poor physique, and the Secretary of the Treasury concurred and wrote more in his report about the eugenic dangers and Israel Bosak was deported back to the country he had been driven from by the mob. So, this was a fairly typical sort of case, and in some cases, there's an overlap of ethnicity and disability, as in this case. In other cases, it's simply a defect. It's a British immigrant who has a hearing impairment or is blind or something, and they're excluded on that basis. So the aspect of time that I'm working on in this, there is, during this time, this shift from seeing the Earth as a a fairly static and designed place, right, that has been designed as it is, to an evolving, constant changing planet, one which has been characterized by progress over time from lower, simpler forms to higher and more advanced forms. And as part of that, social scientists theorized a hierarchy of races. So not only did you have the hierarchy of simpler, ruder sorts of animals, but also simpler and ruder races of man. And with the idea of progress came a constant fear of decline, as well, and there was a huge debate about was American declining because of defective immigrants who were ruining the genetic stock. At the same time, the term handicapped starts to be used when talking about defective persons. The way it comes about is it's imported from sports. It's actually an old term, comes from a game, hand in cap, that was played in London by street kids in London and it migrated to horse racing where you'd weight down the faster horse with stones to slow it down, that was a handicapped race, to sports in general, to then, when people started talking about life as a race, in the late 19th century, the struggle for existence, the race for life, certain people were handicapped in the race for life. So that's how it came from sports to persons, handicapped in the race for life became a very common sort of phrase and, more and more, was applied specifically to people with disabilities and, gradually, they became known as the handicapped. At the very same time, the term mental retardation replaces idiots and imbeciles and morons. There again, it's a matter of being retarded, of being slowed down. The problem of being slow or a person who is slow, right, that term becomes much more common at the time. In general, in a much more competitive and industrialized economy, time becomes something to spend, not to waste, to invest wisely, all of that, all the time as money sort of vocabulary becomes pervasive, and life as a race vocabulary becomes pervasive, and the race of races on the planet becomes a pervasive sort of idea. And it's in that context that people start worrying about the country being dragged down, slowed down, made deficient, being made retarded by the influx of defective types of people. Once the exclusion of defective individuals is well established and accepted, then people start talking about keeping out the defective races more directly. So in the Atlantic Monthly, an editorial wrote, at the turn of the century, that "The necessity of straining out immigrants "who are deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, insane, "pauper or criminal is now conceded by men "of all shades of opinion "and there is resentment at the attempts of such persons "to impose themselves upon us. "And now we need to move on "and talk about more broad sorts of restrictions, "in order to capture the slow-witted Slav, "the neurotic Jewish immigrants, "the degenerate and psychopathic types "that are so common from Eastern and Southern Europe." I actually forgot to skip. When they talked about immigrants from these defective races, they talked about the physiognomy of them, the inferior physiognomy. So certain groups, physiognomy proclaims inferiority of type. They're short, they have small crania, this is an immigration restrictionist who was at Ellis Island and he's describing the immigrants he's seen coming in in 1914. "In every face there was something wrong, "lips thick, mouth coarse, upper lip too long, "cheek bones too high, chin poorly formed. "There were sugar-loaf heads, moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern jaws and goose-bill noses." And then South Europeans run to low stature, Italians are dwarfish, Portuguese, Greeks and Syrians are undersized. The Hebrews are "very poor in physique," the "opposite of our pioneer breed." And this sort of rhetoric is pervasive in the debate, as well. They are physically degenerate as well as being, and you could see it in their physiognomy and they're also prone to tuberculosis, to diabetes, to feeble-mindedness, to heart disease, to all sorts of degenerate sorts of diseases. So, in general, what I want to do is bring disability into the story of immigration, put it at the center of the story, really, and then arrange what has been at the center around the notion of the defect. I went a little bit longer than I wanted to. I always do. And so now we'll have questions, discussion, any sort of comments you'd like to make. You can turn on the lights. Yes. I'm sorry, if there was any what? - [Audience Member] If there was any account of this same sort of persecution to people already... I guess - [Douglas Baynton] Yeah, see, that's the other part of the context that's really important to take into account. When most people write about this, the write about the racial situation in the country. So this is after the Civil War, the South is struggling to reestablish racial hierarchy and Jim Crow laws, and there are all these new races coming into the country. But, also, at this time, we have widespread institutionalization of people with disabilities, increasingly widespread sterilization of people with disabilities, campaigns to eradicate the use of sign language by deaf people to try to normalize them, the same sorts of things going on in the schools for the blind, the emphasis on normal sort of function, normal appearance. Generally, there are laws being passed, the now colloquially known as ugly laws, the unsightly beggar laws that a beggar cannot go on the street and display their missing limb of their defect in order to get money. And in general, you find a turn against people with disabilities being out in public, people who are visibly disabled, they should be at home, being taken care of by someone, they should be in an institution and they should not be visible. And so to the extent they do go out in public, if they're deaf, they shouldn't sign, if they're blind, they shouldn't use a cane, they should learn to be as normal as possible, normal appearing, you know, the whole range of these sorts of things going on that this is in the context of. So, good question. - [Audience Member] My understanding of the Immigration Law of 1924 was that they, they polled a percentage of people in the United States from various countries and various nationalities and then assigned the same percentage growth for those people. - [Douglas Baynton] Right. - [Audience Member] So, if they were really trying to cut out certain races, then it would seem to me like they would have different proportions within races. - [Douglas Baynton] Right, well in practice, though, that's how it actually worked out. So there was a long debate over how to do this and, of course, there was a lot of objection to targeting particular countries. Actually, we targeted the Chinese and in this same law, we targeted the Japanese. That was okay. But European races, as they were called, and these were all races, there was Italian race, the Irish race, the Slavic race and so on. There was a lot of opposition to targeting particular European races. So when they first passed this law, they used the 1910 census and said we are going base the quotas on who was here in 1910. And that was more favorable because there had not been as many people from the disfavored races at that time. That was in 1922, that was the first provisional law that was passed. And when it was made permanent in 1924, they moved that back to the 1890 census to restrict it even more. 1890 is before you really had much immigration at all from Eastern Europe or Southern Europe. So you've got huge quotas for people from Britain, people from Germany, people generally from the North and West of Europe, way more than were gonna come. There weren't that many people coming from those countries. So they had huge quotas, then you had very limited quotas for people from Southern Europe and from Eastern Europe. So immigration was really severely restricted by these laws and it reflected the racial makeup that the lawmakers preferred and wanted to see. Yes, yeah. You have to speak up. - [Audience Member] You were talking about In any of the exclusion acts of Asian immigrants, was religious practice ever seen as evidence of or deficiency? I know there's a lot of talk that at that time, certain religious practices, like Buddhists - [Douglas Baynton] Yeah, that's true. Now I've never come across people talking specifically about, say, Buddhism. You do see idol worship and superstition and false beliefs and that sort of euphemistic references to the religion. In general, what you see is talk about cultural habits and practices and political proclivities that are inherited. All sorts of things were inherited, right, so in general, people are thinking in a neo-Lamarkian sort of way, that acquired characteristics are inherited and passed along. The Chinese had been living under despotism and with superstition and false beliefs for so many generations that it's so deeply ingrained, it's in their blood, is what they would say. That if they moved here, it would gradually go away but it would take maybe hundreds of years, it would take generations upon generations for them to actually change and be able to live in a democracy and understand how to be a democratic people and so on. So I haven't seen religion specifically targeted, but there's always this long laundry list of cultural attributes that are also physical attributes. Yeah. - [Audience Member] You mentioned how this eugenics and the idea of eugenics is They took, actually, as you know in World War II, the horrors of the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese to remove, to discredit eugenics and I'm asking if you know of, if it was removed, some of these practices, of restricted practices removed or if they were, some of them remained and some of them removed. - [Douglas Baynton] They most have remained, and so, and actually, the idea of eugenics went away because of the Nazis has been debunked in recent years, in recent research. It certainly was discredited in certain ways. Starting in really the 1920s and 30s, geneticists were saying this is nonsense, it's pseudoscience and it doesn't work. And then by the 30s, the Nazis are discrediting it for people in the West and then certainly by after the war. But institutionalization and sterilization for eugenic purposed continues right through the 50s and 60s, so a quite lively sterilization program here in Iowa and across the country. So really, this kind of open talk of perfecting the race, of illuminating inferior types and all of that, and especially racial talk, at least goes undercover. It's discredited as a public discourse, but the actual idea of the importance of weeding out defects through sterilization and so on, or keeping inferior types out of the country, that really doesn't change. So it's the 1965 Immigration Act that starts to remove some of these specific defect-oriented restrictions, but they still exclude most people under the likely to become a public charge law anyway. So, anyway, it's discredited in some ways but continues in some ways as well. Yeah. - [Audience Member] About this period of immigration in the United States, during this period of time, what was the picture practicing the same customs, speaking the same language? - [Douglas Baynton] Yes, yes. The immigrant nations, so Australia and Latin American countries and Canada, all instituted these sorts of things at the same time. And eugenics was a world-wide movement, so this was something happening in the industrialized world and especially in immigrant countries. Some were less strict. Canada was less strict than us, and some of the problems we'll talk about here was people coming in through Canada and walking across the border somewhere. And Australia had some restrictions that were tighter than ours. They had a literacy, we passed a literacy test in 1917 for English. In Australia, you had to... No, we had a literacy test for any language. If you were literate in any language, you could come in. Australia, you had to be literate in English specifically. So they varied from place to place, but everyone was doing something like this in immigrant countries. Yeah. - [Audience Member] What if there were people in the general population who were opposed to this, what was the situation? - [Douglas Baynton] Yeah, good question. There were people in Congress who would stand up and talk against this. They would talk about racial prejudice in the laws, and there were people who opposed sterilization and institutionalization, but for the most part, it was individuals, there were conservative Catholics who were opposed to eugenic measures on the basis of the idea of the sanctity of all human life and such. But what you find generally is eugenics was not confined to any one group. It was a very popular sort of idea and it crossed from progressives to conservatives. You find sort of different ways of expressing it and acceptance of some things but not others among various groups, but not whole lot, and really no organized push back against these sorts of laws except where it affects particular groups. So you have Jewish organizations who were fighting against the poor physique law because it's being used to target Jews a lot and other immigrant groups who were arguing against restrictions and so on. But no, for the most part, this is very popular. The immigration laws, aside from the literacy test which employers opposed a lot, most of these immigration laws passed really easily and by 1922, the quota law passed really easily. So it wasn't a tough sell. I'm sorry, say again. - [Audience Member] Are any of these eugenics laws that are appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, I know Oliver Wendell Holmes seems to have been pretty receptive to it generally. I would imagine What was the case? - [Douglas Baynton] Well, so the famous one is the one you're talking about where he wrote "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," or "is enough," the grammar is there. I'm blanking on the name of the case, what's the case? Somebody should know it. The... Well, anyway, the famous case. - [Audience Member] I forgot about that, actually, but generally speaking. - [Douglas Baynton] It's a Virginia sterilization law, right, which the Supreme Court said, it's by almost unanimously. There's one person who goes against it but we don't know why 'cause he didn't write anything. And so, so generally, the courts approved the sterilization laws, they say that, yeah, there's no bar to those laws at all. And the immigration laws, the courts stay out of this stuff 'cause immigration is always Congress's prerogative and the courts really don't get involved at all. - [Audience Member] Were there exceptions to whose concern was they would be a welfare case-- - [Douglas Baynton] Yes. Yes, and there I--