19th-Century Eugenics Movement and its Relation to Immigration in America
b'Eugenics is the science of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by \\u201cbreeding out\\u201d disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population. Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these conditions could be bred out of the gene pool. In the 19th century there was a great deal of support for eugenics, and the ones seen as the lesser beings were the European immigrants trying to get to America, particularly the Jews. Today, we have a conversation on the history of anti immigration policy and its connection to eugenics in the late 19th Century with Daniel Okrent.\\n\\xa0\\nGuest: Daniel Okrent\\xa0was the first public editor of\\xa0The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of\\xa0Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and was editor-in-chief of general books at Harcourt Brace. He has written several books including Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, as well as his most recent and the topic of today, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Laws That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.\\n\\xa0\\n\\nThe post 19th-Century Eugenics Movement and its Relation to Immigration in America appeared first on KPFA.'