“Summarizing this review of recent conditions of immigration, it appears certain that, unless conditions change themselves or are radically changed, the populations of the United States will…rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature...it seems possible that under present conditions the ratio of insanity in the population will rapidly increase…”
-Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911)
“If the country were to open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants.”
-Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
Many blamed immigrants for stealing jobs and bringing disease. Eugenics and immigration restriction seemed to offer solutions to social and economic problems plaguing America.
“Do these Slovaks and Syrians add as much to the strength of the human piers that support our civilization as the Scotch-Irish or the Scandinavians? ...the later comers lack the ancestral foundations of American character...their children will, nevertheless, impede our progress.” |
“..the worst thing to happen to the… United States was the bringing of large numbers of Negroes, nearly the lowest of races, to our shores.”
-"Eugenical News", 1924
"...I can not rid myself of the conviction that the literacy test constitutes a radical change in the policy of the Nation which is not justified in principle." |
"The tests have told the truth. These boys are ineducable. . . Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come." |
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In 1917, the League triumphed, convincing government to mandate literacy tests to incoming immigrants.
“There is an old immigrant saying translated into many languages that goes, ‘America beckons, but Americans repel.'” |