Charles Darwin's Immigration Policy In The Late Nineteenth Century

Eugenics was introduced by sir Francis galton who, interestingly enough, was a cousin of Charles Darwin. It began as a way to better the human race and stop negative genetic traits from continuing on generation to generation. Eugenics may have started out as a way to better humans but it became something much worse.

Immigration has always been a major part of America. In fact, without immigration the creation of America would not have been possible. The majority of immigrants came to America for religious freedom and economic opportunities. However, for the most part before the 1870’s most immigrants were Protestants from northern and western Europe. These immigrants often migrated to the United States as families and usually lived on farms with family or friends who had already migrated beforehand. A lot of immigrants came to America with a plan or goal in mind. They often had saved up money for the long immigration overseas, were skilled in a certain trade, or had already been educated at a high level. Sadly, this would not last. Immigration

Social Darwinism is a theory that individuals, peoples, and groups are subject to darwinian laws of natural selection. Another way to describe social darwinism is survival of the fittest. The strongest and the smartest will survive. It is now largely discredited, it was advocated in the late 19th and early 20th century by Herbert Spencer and others. It was used to justify political conservation, imperialism, to discourage intervention and reform and racism. This theory was used to support the laissez faire capitalism and political conservatism.

In recent history, many Americans have had a growing concern for the immigration (both legal and illegal) growth in our country. While the United States of America was settled by European immigrants, the unprecedented growth the late 1800s saw, led to reform on the immigration policy, which once was nonexistent. Based on conditions floods of immigrants caused in the cities of the country, the immigration reform was needed. Not only were the lives of immigrants negatively impacted in the United States, but so were previously settled Americans.

Eugenics is the science of improving the human race by regulating who can bear children. Progressives saw this as a nation that was going to be permantly divided by race and ethnic lines. This began the process of Americanization, a homogenous natural culture. Women were often targets of Americanization because they follow tradition and culture. Children were also a primary target because of their innocent nature. Educators, employers, labor leaders, social reformers, and public officials made it their goal to Americanize immigrants. The Army began standard IQ tests taken by immigrants, scientifically proving they were far below white intelligence. Ford Motor Company sent people to investigate immigrant homes to evaluate clothing, furniture, food preferences, and enrolled them in English classes.

Scientists believed that through selective breeding future generations would be able to reach its full potential. Charles Darwin’s brother was one of the scientists who firmly believed in the Eugenics process at the time. They truly believed that they were doing America a

Millions of immigrants over the previous centuries have shaped the United States of America into what it is today. America is known as a “melting pot”, a multicultural country that welcomes and is home to an array of every ethnic and cultural background imaginable. We are a place of opportunity, offering homes and jobs and new economic gains to anyone who should want it. However, America was not always such a “come one, come all” kind of country. The large numbers of immigrants that came during the nineteenth century angered many of the American natives and lead to them to blame the lack of jobs and low wages on the immigrants, especially the Asian communities. This resentment lead to the discrimination and legal exclusion of immigrants,

In these years, when Darwin's Origin of Species, popularized by Herbert Spencer as "the survival of the fittest, " and applied to races as well as species in a vulgarized form, Social Darwinism, the coming Christian triumph was presented as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant one.

Families across the country rushed to be tested and deemed genetically fit, or otherwise. While all this was going on, eugenics fans blazed across the country toting such propaganda as "Some Americans are born to be a burden on the rest" (Carlson 4), while claiming that it is the duty of the superior to ensure that the "feebleminded" did not over-run them. The hype among the higher upper class was to prove yourself worthy of being especially genetically adept, no matter what background you hailed from (the hypocrisy of this is terrible). Only when eugenicists began to actively sterilize patients did an opposite reaction to eugenics present itself.

Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, created the theory of evolution. Known as Darwinism, this theory basically states that all species arise and develop through the natural selection, increasing individual’s ability to compete and survive. This paper will outline how Darwinism was used to classify some as inferior, how Social Darwinism and Eugenics shaped the immigrant experience in America, and why fundamentalist Christians opposed Darwinism. Survival of the fittest is one way to define Darwinism. This attitude could make some individuals feel inferior and unsubstantial compared to others who were stronger, smarter, more attractive, and able to respond to change.

Social Darwinism was a concept that emerged later in the nineteenth century suggesting that what applied to nature could also apply to human society – that the strong prevail over the weak, that superior races prevail over inferior races. This concept with its theme of struggle and survival of the fittest appealed to Hitler. “Struggle” wrote Hitler “is the father of all things…He who wants to live must fight and who does not want to fight in this world where external struggle is the law of life has no right to exist”*.

Eugenics was looked to by many in the United States government, as an alternative resource to utilize in an attempt to better American society. Likewise, Eugenics was introduced into the world by the cousin of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton. Correspondingly, Sir Francis Galton, in 1904, placed an article in the American Journal of Sociology summarizing the use of Eugenics as the superior individual going up against and eradicating the inferior individuals of society, which in return would cause the production of natural selection to substantially spread up it's processed (Lewis, 2016). Henceforth, also encouraging urbanized people or the less fit from breeding and producing offsprings faster than the more fit, because of their lower intelligence

The theory of Eugenics can be dated back all the way to 400 B.C. but was not popularized until the mid-1800s by an English scientist, Francis Galton. He researched and published the theory that aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human population through selective breeding (NC Office of Archives and History). As the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton applied the Darwinism science (survival of the fittest) to heredity characteristics. Two types of Eugenics stemmed from the theory, positive and negative. Positive eugenics is encouraging the “best” people in the society based on financial and personal features to have more children while negative eugenics is picking people with flaws and defects from the population

In 1895 Charles Darwin published a book describing his theory of evolution, and his theory of the natural selection process. This theory caused much uproar in the religious community because Darwin’s theory went against the story of creation portrayed in the Holy Bible. His theory claimed that all life currently in place had evolved and adapted from a single organism in the beginning. Over time and by process of natural selection only the dominant species were left over while the other, less dominant species, went extinct. His theory, backed by scientific analysis, had dismissed the idea of a single deity creating all life on Earth. It is not like Darwin had a personal agenda against religion or anything,

Due to Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory, a prejudiced distinctive form of Social Darwinism developed known as eugenics which is the study that all inferior social groups should be sterilized to prevent the increase in inferior population. Eugenics is the belief that people who are unfit continue to reproduce more unfit offsprings, creating a unfit population, therefore needs to be sterilized. Eugenicists believe that the masses of people who were deficient in intelligence are a real “danger to the human gene pool and should be institutionalized, serialized, or both” (Ruggiero 21). Panicked and alert by this eugenics study psychologist and eugenicist Henry Goddard wrote: “we need to hunt them down in every possible place and take care of them, and see to it that they do not propagate and make the problem worse, and that those who are alive today do not entail loss of life and property and moral contagion in the community by the things they do because they are weak-minded” (Ruggiero 21). In result of President Theodore Roosevelt promoted that America should have “good breeders as well as good fighters” he supported the “Rigid System of Selection” which was the sterilization of “an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives and perhaps ultimately to worthless racial types” (Ruggiero 21). Based on Darwin 's theory the