Rachel Maddow Show, #1 Cable News Program for two straight months, gets real:
Last night’s Rachel Maddow Show was just as astonishing as the night before. Rarely do we see the kind of honesty and deep reporting from newscasters this day and age that Maddow regularly exhibits, and it appears she has taken the gloves off in terms of exposing the reality of our country’s dark underbelly of racism and eugenics. She is hard-hitting, and she teaches the too-busy-to-be-fully-informed masses like a boss.
The clip above is the first half of the show, but try to find the entire segment; it lays out the uncomfortable facts about the Republican-Party being based on not only racism, but eugenics, and the leadership role the United States has in this regard. Eugenics was not a Nazi creation—it was an American creation, and actually inspired Hitler’s aspiration for an Aryan Ethno-State. (If anyone watches this segment and still thinks that Trump and Republican leaders will work with Democrats to pass the Dream Act, I have a bridge to sell you.)
A quick synopsis of the clip: (Names/titles are bolded to easily scan)
1. The U.S. had its very own Office of Eugenics in the 1920s, well before Adolph Hitler came into power. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson was the head of the Democratic Party (now the Republican Party), and was beaten in midterm elections. Albert Johnson, a Washington Republican Congressman and raging racist and eugenics-believer, took over Congress and became the “Chairman of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization.” Johnson was also the President of the Eugenics Research Association of America at that time, and he brought in a fellow Association member and “expert eugenics consultant,” Harry Laughlin, to consult the Immigration Committee of Congress.
2. In 1922 Harry Laughlin created a minority intelligence scale of sorts, in partnership with the Carnegie Institute: "Relative social inadequacy of the several nativity groups and immigrant groups of the U.S.: all types of social inadequacy." It’s just as appalling as one would imagine. “Social inadequacy” included things like: feeblemindedness, epilepsy, crime, insanity, tuberculosis, blindness, deafness, deformity, and dependency.” This is based on one’s national origin.
Laughlin also wrote a compulsory sterilization law for various states to improve the American gene pool. The law was found Constitutional in Buck v. Bell (1927), and was a template for states to implement sterilization of the “unfit,”—all people who relied on state assistance for their continued survival. Does this sound familiar?
Before the “model” sterilization law was drafted, only twelve states had passed sterilization laws. By 1940, thirty of the then forty-eight states of the Union had enacted eugenical sterilization laws. In 1933, the Reichstag of Nazi Germany used Laughlin’s law as a template for the passage of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
3. In 1924, new President Calvin Coolidge signed an anti-immigration law that was written by Albert Johnson: the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. It was a eugenics bill to “protect America from a stream of alien blood, and to stop American civilization from descending into barbarism” (6:38 in video above). The bill halted immigration from Asia completely, and restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe—Jews, Italians, and other non-whites, in other words. They allowed only the number of immigrants to match the number of the same nationality in 1890—to bring the country back to its “desired whiteness.”
Rachel then showed clips of Senators who supported the bill, including Senator Elison Durant Smith (9:05 in clip). I have added more of his lengthy speech: note the “Who is American?” question and discussion, which we are having yet today.
“I think we now have sufficient population in our country for us to shut the door and to breed up a pure, unadulterated American citizenship. I recognize that there is a dangerous lack of distinction between people of a certain nationality and the breed of the dog. Who is an American? Is he an immigrant from Italy? Is he an immigrant from Germany? If you were to go abroad and some one were to meet you and say, “I met a typical American,” what would flash into your mind as a typical American, the typical representative of that new Nation? Would it be the son of an Italian immigrant, the son of a German immigrant, the son of any of the breeds from the Orient, the son of the denizens of Africa? We must not get our ethnological distinctions mixed up with out anthropological distinctions. It is the breed of the dog in which I am interested. I would like for the Members of the Senate to read that book just recently published by Madison Grant, The Passing of a Great Race. Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic breed. It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries, but a country to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power, and yet the youngest of all the nations. I myself believe that the preservation of her institutions depends upon us now taking counsel with our condition and our experience during the last World War.”
Flash-forward to then Senator Jeff Sessions, on-record speaking to Steve Bannon of Breitbart in 2015: (10:07 in clip above)
“In seven years we’ll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the Republic. And some people think we’ve always had these numbers, but it’s not so. It’s very unusual. It’s a radical change.”
The Republican Party platform is rooted in eugenics, disguised as “immigration reform,” and the Party continues to implement the same policies that were introduced in the 1920s—subjugate, use for white benefit, and even kill off, people of color because they are “inferior” to whites. We should—immediately—stop using the term “immigration reform,” stop supporting “immigration reform” in the Republican context, and call a spade a spade. It is a long-nurtured belief/policy/aspiration of the American white elite to “keep America white.”
Very good diary from 2013 by SemDem that briefly lays out the Ivy League spearheading of the eugenics movement in the U.S.: “Richwine Scandal Recalls Hitler’s Ivy League Connections.”
There’s much more….watch the entire episode if you can.