Eugenics and the 1920s

Racist Dirt and Exclusion

BY GABRIEL MATIAS CASTILHO

If you think America’s recent history of gatekeeping access and citizenship to immigrants is a recent event, understand that at least a century ago, when the entire old world was recovering from the Great War (before diving head first into more conflicts), this was the rule. Even though 1924 U.S. president Warren G. Harding said America’s need was “not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration,” applying a targeted and broad exclusion act was at the very least incongruent.

Since the end of the First World War, the country progressively saw a breakdown of the ability of other people to access it. The Red Scare was starting to take ground and politicians wasted no time to crackdown on immigration policies. After the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1917, U.S. Representative Albert Johnson, an eugenics advocate, and Senator David Reed devised the Asian Exclusion Act, further enforcing a ban on Japanese immigration and causing ripples on Korean and Filipino immigration. It, of course, quickly found support among the Ku Klux Klan, as proponents of the act sought it as an opportunity to “establish a distinct American identity by preserving its ethnic homogeneity.”

However, back in the day, exclusion acts were the international norm. Closed borders in Europe following the First World War were security measures to “preserve national identities,” and countries like Brazil had acts enshrined in their legislation that excluded people from Africa and Asia, derangedly claiming European blood held a “biological, intellectual and cultural superiority.”

In today’s times, however, those acts have been long gone, but their memory lives on in society. The structural racism afflicting migrants from Asia and Africa back in the early 20th century only increased the white American desire for segregation.

As much as people like to call the 1920s as a period of prosperity, know that it started tarnished with racist dirt and eugenic exclusion.