We Have All Been Here Before

Bill,


With the demise of Late Night With Charlie Rose, I'd been casting about for something else to watch while I ride the exercise bike before work. Good leftie that I am, I looked to other shows on PBS as possibilities. One has to be careful about that. There is a an unmistakable sky-is-falling quality to shows such as Frontline; even the opening drums and trumpet theme lets you know there's trouble ahead. If all you ever watched was Frontline you'd never believe that for most of the people in the country and the world, as you've recently pointed out, things are better than they've ever been.


Still I had to find something, so I settled on The American Experience, a cultural history show that runs every few weeks or so. I'm working my way through an episode called The Eugenics Crusade. As its title suggests, the show details the long and sordid history of the Eugenics movement in the United States, from its misinterpretation of Mendel's laws of inheritance at the turn of the 1890s to its capture of the public imagination at its height in the 20s, and on to its ignominious end in disgrace, as the logical implications of the movement were so capably demonstrated by the Nazis in the 30s and early 40s.


There's no question of the sincerity of the founders and promulgators of the movement, and their unshakable certainty that they were engaged in the use of science for the public good. This was not some fringe idea supported by a bunch of racist crackpots. The notion that one could improve the human race through selective breeding of favorable traits in the white Protestant individuals who displayed them, and eliminate unfavorable traits by reducing breeding in the foreign, criminal, or poor individuals who displayed them, was a broadly held cultural meme that affected public policy. Fear of foreign contamination was a major impetus for the Johnson Reed Act of 1924, which dramatically reduced incoming numbers of inferior races such as Slavs Italians and Jews, and excluded Japanese immigrants altogether. More than 30 states passed forced sterilization laws. Before the practice ended more than 60,000 American went under the knife.


Parts of this are hard to watch. I try, mostly without success, to withhold judgment about the vile nature of such a movement, and the nativism and xenophobia that fueled it. At least that's how I see it. Not so for a minority of our countrymen, for whom not much as changed when it comes to anxiety about those who are different from themselves, and the ability of  a leader with just the right talent to stoke those fears for his own advantage. The irony that most of our ancestor immigrants were treated with the same degree of scorn  is apparently lost upon them.


Its easy to predict what the historical and popular judgment will be about the current anti immigrant craze We have been here before, alas and we will undoubtedly be here again.


Eli