The U.S. and the Holocaust

The anxieties about urbanization, about unlettered, untutored, relatively uneducated peoples coming in in large numbers, the sense that disease was a problem, all of these worries were amalgamated into a belief that immigrants caused these problems, and thus immigration should be held down. -

Narrator

Many white Protestant Americans came to fear they were about to be outnumbered and outbred by the newcomers and their offspring, that they were being replaced. They embraced a new pseudoscience born in Britain called eugenics, which falsely claimed with no evidence that everything from poverty to prostitution, disabilities to what they called feeblemindedness could be eliminated if the individuals they dismissed as socially defective could be stopped from reproducing. "I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding. And when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them." Theodore Roosevelt. The idea was that the bad people have to stop reproducing and the good people need to reproduce more. Negative eugenic says sterilize the wrong people. Snuff them out. And that's the eugenics that the Nazis would pick up on. -

Narrator

Colleges and universities taught eugenics. Medical societies confirmed it. Clergyman preached it. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie funded it. And some of the most prominent people in America championed it. Margaret Sanger, Alexander Graham Bell, even Helen Keller. -

Narrator

It seems to me that the simplest wisest thing to do would be to submit cases like that of the malformed idiot baby to a jury of expert physicians. If the evidence were presented openly and the decisions made public before the death of the child, there would be little danger of mistakes or abuses. We must decide between a fine humanity and a cowardly sentimentalism. -

Narrator

33 of the 48 states would eventually enact Eugenics Laws mandating the forced sterilization of wards of the state

deemed physically or mentally unfit

people in prisons, hospitals, and asylums. More than 60,000 Americans would be sterilized without their consent before the last of these statutes was removed from the books in 2014. Eugenics also provided a racist rationale for those convinced immigration needed to be drastically curtailed. "The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is today being literally driven off the streets of New York city by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the American. They wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women. But they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals. And while he's being elbowed out of his own home, the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race." Madison Grant. Madison Grant was a widely admired conservationist, a friend of presidents, a founder of the Bronx Zoo, responsible in part for saving the California redwoods and preserving the Buffalo, and instrumental in creating Glacier, Denali, and Everglades National Parks. And he was also a violent anti-Semite and a violent anti-Italian and he really was horrified by what he saw happening on the streets of New York. So he publishes a book called "The Passing of the Great Race" in which he puts forward the idea that nationalities have eugenic characteristics. He fills it with all sorts of interesting historical so-called data which is mostly crazy, but it's very persuasive and it does give the anti-immigration movement... It suddenly gives them science. Science says if we let them in then they're gonna destroy the American gene pool. -

Narrator

deemed physically or mentally unfit

For grant and many others, Jews were a distinct race not considered white, dismissed as uncouth Asiatics. Grants supposedly scientific claims about a rigid hierarchy of races was ludicrous. The biological notion of race itself is a fiction, but his ideas caught the imagination of those Americans already opposed to immigration. -

Peter

deemed physically or mentally unfit

People tended to increasingly view nationalities as if they were breeds or species. To liken nationalities to breeds was a fundamental categorical mistake.