The Eugenics era court that authored Jacobson also approved racial segregation, praised monopolies, cheered child labor, imprisoned people for speeches, banned minimum wage laws, ordered forced sterilizations, and stripped millions of their rights based on their parents' ancestry
— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) September 13, 2021
A few historical events from the Eugenics era:
Three generations of imbeciles are enough, --Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
This is stunning to me. A Supreme Court justice, men who interpret the law of the land, calls for eugenics programs with this statement.
Then there's the exclusionary 1924 Immigration Act:
COHEN: Yeah, so the 1924 law really changed American immigration dramatically whereas in the old days, people would pretty much just show up at Ellis Island. The people who supported the Immigration Act of 1924 wanted to maintain the racial composition of the United States, so they imposed national quotas, which actually set the immigration from different countries on what that country's percentage of the population was in 1890. And the idea was that was a time when there were a lot of, you know, so-called Nordics in the United States.
Half of all U.S. sterilizations were conducted in California.
Armed with seemingly scientific and medical explanations, eugenicists wanted to make sterilization legal. By 1910, genetic statutes had been enacted in Washington, California, and Connecticut, and by the end of the 1920s, twenty-four states had passed involuntary sterilization laws.7 A major force behind this increase in eugenics legislation was Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). In 1922, Laughlin authored a model sterilization law that became the prototype for similar laws enacted in The United States. By January 1935, approximately 20,000 involuntary eugenic sterilizations had been performed in the United States, half of which were conducted in California.8
High unemployment and poverty rates contributed to the public's tolerance for eugenic sterilization.
Another major motivation for eugenics was the heavy immigration—and its attendant xenophia—that the United States experienced around the turn of the century. Many psychiatrists warned that if better medical inspections of immigrants were not performed, the consequences would be deportation or sterilization. Eugenicists’ testimony before Congress helped pass the exclusionary 1924 Immigration Act. The economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, with its high unemployment and poverty rates, further contributed to the public’s tolerance for eugenic sterilization.
The guy who influenced the Eugenics movement in Congress was Harry H. Laughlin, 1880-1943.
