In his insightful exploration of the “prehistory” of the Holocaust, “Why the Germans? Why the Jews?” (2011), the German historian Götz Aly observed that the Nazis' racial theories were significant not so much in fomenting anti-Semitism, which was already ingrained among all social strata of Germany and Austria by the time Hitler arrived on the scene, as in making that hatred acceptable to the haters. The idea that an objective, scientific theory of racial purity lay behind their antipathy to the Jews, Mr. Aly wrote, allowed Germans “to conceal their shameful, base resentment of others behind supposedly more sophisticated arguments.”
In “The Guarded Gate,” Daniel Okrent points out that many of those “sophisticated” arguments were born in the U.S.A. As he sardonically observes of the postwar Nuremberg defendants who cited in their defense the views of American racial theorists like Madison Grant and American eugenics laws like the one upheld in the infamous 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell: “These men didn't say they were ‘following orders' . . . ; they said they were following Americans.” In Mr. Okrent's account, a uniquely American enthusiasm for eugenics similarly inspired leaders of the anti-immigrant movement of the early 20th century. Bigotry that had once uncomfortably and unsystematically found expression in religious, moral or political polemics—the Irish were controlled by the pope; Italians were criminals; Russian Jews were socialists—could now be couched in the dispassionate language of science.
Mr. Okrent's previous book, “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” (2010), chronicled a contemporaneous political movement whose legislative achievements were quickly rolled back. Anti-immigration forces were more lastingly effective: Their efforts culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which slashed immigration of Eastern European Jews by more than 90% and Italians and other Southern Europeans by 99%, while doubling quotas for immigrants from northwest Europe. Its policies remained in effect for four decades.
Eugenics in America was not initially motivated by ideas about race per se. Managing the inheritance of human traits was, in the words of biologist Charles Davenport, merely “preventive medicine.” If marriages that increased the chances of passing on a genetic defect could be discouraged, mankind would improve, and problems like epilepsy and insanity that appeared to run in families might over time be eliminated. Many progressive-minded leaders in the early 20th century saw “genetic hygiene” as a natural application of Darwinian theory and embraced eugenics as part of a larger movement to supplant the discord of politics with scientifically grounded policy making.
It was Madison Grant, the wealthy conservationist and co-founder of the New York Zoological Society, who (in the words of the historian John Higham, whom Mr. Okrent quotes) “put the pieces together,” fusing eugenics with anti-immigrant xenophobia. Grant's argument, typical of many other racial theorists of the era, was that not just individuals but whole “races”—Grant claimed there were three such in Europe, the “Nordic,” “Alpine” and “Mediterranean”—possessed distinct physical, moral and intellectual characteristics that were, as he claimed, “transmitted unchanged from generation to generation.” Moreover, only by scrupulously policing the boundaries of race could a “superior” group escape degeneration through “cross-breeding.” Genetic hygiene had become racial hygiene.
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