{"id":1311948,"date":"2019-06-29T21:00:01","date_gmt":"2019-06-30T03:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/will-column-last-centurys-immigration-debate-makes-todays-seem-enlightened\/"},"modified":"2019-06-29T21:00:01","modified_gmt":"2019-06-30T03:00:01","slug":"will-column-last-centurys-immigration-debate-makes-todays-seem-enlightened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/will-column-last-centurys-immigration-debate-makes-todays-seem-enlightened\/","title":{"rendered":"Will column: Last century\u2019s immigration debate makes today\u2019s seem enlightened"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cWide open and unguarded stand our gates,<\/p>\n

And through them presses a wild motley throng \u2026<\/p>\n

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well<\/p>\n

To leave the gates unguarded?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1892)<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 If you think we have reached peak stupidity \u2014 that America\u2019s per-capita quantity has never been higher \u2014 there is solace, of sorts, in Daniel Okrent\u2019s guided tour through the immigration debate that was heading toward a nasty legislative conclusion a century ago. \u201cThe Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America\u201d provides evidence that today\u2019s public arguments are comparatively enlightened.<\/p>\n

Late in the 19th century, immigration surged, as did alarm about it, especially in society\u2019s upper crust, particularly its Boston portion, which thought that the wrong sort of people were coming. Darwinian theory and emerging genetic science were bowdlerized by bad scientists, faux scientists and numerous philistine ax-grinders with political agendas bent on arguing for engineering a better stock of American humans through immigration restrictions and eugenics \u2014 selective breeding.<\/p>\n

Their theory was that nurture (education, socialization, family structure) matters little because nature is determinative. They asserted that even morality and individuals\u2019 characters are biologically determined by race. And they spun an imaginative taxonomy of races, including European \u201cAlpine,\u201d \u201cTeutonic\u201d (aka \u201cNordic\u201d) and \u201cMediterranean\u201d races.<\/p>\n

Racist thinking about immigration saturated mainstream newspapers (the Boston Herald: \u201cShall we permit these inferior races to dilute the thrifty, capable Yankee blood \u2026 of the earlier immigrants?\u201d) and elite journals (in The Yale Review, recent immigrants were described as \u201cvast masses of filth\u201d from \u201cevery foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe\u201d). In The Century monthly, which published Mark Twain, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, W.E.B. Du Bois and H.G. Wells, an author informed readers that \u201cMediterranean people are morally below the races of northern Europe,\u201d that immigrants from Southern Italy \u201clack the conveniences for thinking,\u201d that Neapolitans were a \u201cdegenerate\u201d class \u201cinfected with spiritual hookworm\u201d and displaying \u201clow foreheads, open mouths, weak chins \u2026 and backless heads,\u201d and that few of the garment workers in New York\u2019s Union Square \u201chad the type of face one would find at a county fair in the west or south.\u201d The nation\u2019s most important periodical, The Saturday Evening Post, devoted tens of thousands of words to the braided crusades for eugenics and race-based immigration policies. Popular poet Edgar Lee Masters (\u201cSpoon River Anthology\u201d ) wrote \u201cThe Great Race Passes\u201d:<\/p>\n

On State Street throngs crowd and push,<\/p>\n

Wriggle and writhe like maggots.<\/p>\n

Their noses are flat,<\/p>\n

Their faces are broad \u2026<\/p>\n

Eugenics was taught at Boston University\u2019s School of Theology. Theodore Roosevelt, who popularized the phrase \u201crace suicide,\u201d wrote to a eugenicist that \u201cthe inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.\u201d Woodrow Wilson warned against the \u201ccorruption of foreign blood\u201d and \u201cever-deteriorating\u201d genetic material.<\/p>\n

Amateur ethnologists conveniently discovered that exemplary southern Europeans (Dante, Raphael, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci) were actually from the north. One wrote, \u201cColumbus, from his portraits and from his busts, whether authentic or not, was clearly Nordic.\u201d (Emphasis added.) Okrent writes: \u201cIn an Alabama case, a black man who married an Italian woman was convicted of violating the state\u2019s anti-miscegenation law, then found surprising absolution when the conviction was vacated by an appellate court\u2019s provocative declaration: \u2018The mere fact that the testimony showed this woman came from Sicily can in no sense be taken as conclusive evidence that she was therefore a white woman.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The canonical text of the immigration-eugenics complex, Madison Grant\u2019s \u201cThe Passing of the Great Race,\u201d is available today in at least eight editions and is frequently cited in the internet\u2019s fetid swamps of white supremacy sites. At the 1946 Nuremberg \u201cDoctors\u2019 Trial,\u201d Nazi defendants invoked that book as well as the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s Buck v. Bell decision upholding states\u2019 sterilization of \u201cdefectives\u201d (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a eugenics enthusiast: \u201cThree generations of imbeciles are enough\u201d) and America\u2019s severely restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. It based national quotas on 1890 immigration data \u2014 before the surge of the \u201cmotley throng.\u201d Okrent writes, \u201cThese men didn\u2019t say they were \u2018following orders,\u2019 in the self-exonerating language of the moment; they said they were following Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four years before the 1924 act, 76% of immigrants came from Eastern or Southern Europe. After it, 11% did. Some of those excluded went instead to Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

George Will\u2019s email address is georgewill@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them presses a wild motley throng \u2026 O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well To leave the gates unguarded?\u201d \u2014 Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1892) WASHINGTON \u2014 If you think we have reached peak stupidity \u2014 that America\u2019s per-capita quantity has never been higher \u2014 there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1311948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-08 12:54:15","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1311948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1311948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1311948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1311948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}