Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [9]
One of the country’s leading eugenicists at the time was Harry Laughlin, who pushed (unsuccessfully) for a federal sterilization law. Laughlin also provided extensive testimony to Congress in support of the Immigration Act of 1924. The legislation was the brainchild of Albert Johnson, a senator from Washington State and honorary president of the Eugenics Research Association. It targeted the Italian and Russian (read: Jewish) influx of the early 1900s by limiting the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already present in the United States. Worried that these foreign hordes were diluting our “native stock,” Laughlin told lawmakers that according to his research, an “excessive” number of immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe were mentally deficient and thus “unfit.”
Laughlin eventually became the House of Representative’s chief eugenics advisor. In that capacity he drew up legislation that never became law in the United States but did provide the model for the Law for Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, a compulsory sterilization measure enacted by Nazi Germany in 1933. Laughlin would go on to receive an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936 for his work on the “science of racial cleansing.” He also cofounded and was the first president of the Pioneer Fund, which would later serve as a major benefactor to John Tanton.
I don’t know what Harry Laughlin thought about the environment. But I do know what the leading environmentalists of his day thought about eugenics and immigration. The word eugenics comes from the Greek term meaning “well-born” and was coined in 1883 by British hereditarian Sir Francis Galton, a cousin and confidante of Charles Darwin. (Both men, in fact, were fans of selective human breeding. Recall that the subtitle of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection is The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.) The first international Congress of Eugenics was held in London in 1912. The second gathering was held in New York in 1921. It was hosted by the American Museum of Natural History at the urging of Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum’s president. A zoologist by training (and a nephew of J. P. Morgan), Osborn was the nation’s pre-eminent naturalist and an intimate of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He was so enamored with eugenics that he had established the Galton Society at the museum in 1918. It joined the American Breeders Association, the Race Betterment Foundation, and other eugenics organizations that argued for stricter immigration controls to ward off racial suicide and preserve the environment. In his opening address to the conference, Osborn called for an immigration quota system and said eugenics should be the vehicle for promoting natural conservation in the United States.
The Galton Society was cofounded by Madison Grant, who’s largely known for writing The Passing of the Great Race, a best-selling nativist polemic arguing that nonwhite immigrants—which included Southern and Eastern Europeans, according to his definition—were overpopulating America and corrupting the country’s superior Nordic stock. “The immigrant laborers,” he wrote, “are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by sword.” Grant was a lawyer with no background in history or science, but Osborn wrote the introduction to the book, lending credence—and the museum’s stamp of approval—to wild assertions based on nothing