- 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] 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] People tended to increasingly view nationalities
as if they were breeds or species.
To liken nationalities
to breeds was a fundamental categorical mistake.
Hi, I'm Sarah Botstein.
Thanks for watching that excerpt
from our film "The U.S. and the Holocaust",
which explores the story of how
the American people grappled with
one of the greatest humanitarian crises
of the 20th century.
Here are some more clips from the film
and you can watch the entire series
on the PBS Video app, or at PBS.org.