Last week in a Twitter response to Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, Dinesh D’Souza linked to a 2017 article published on Breitbart.com in which he claimed the following:
Hitler learned a great deal from the Democrats and from American progressives. He got some of his core policy strategies from them.
Specifically, D’Souza claimed Hitler copied three policies from American Democrats – the treatment of native Americans, the segregation of African-Americans, and sterilization laws and the eugenics movement from the first half of the last century. While all of these claims are problematic, my intention in this post is to fact check him regarding immigration laws and eugenics.
1924 Immigration Act
D’Souza wrote:
Hitler also appealed to the racially exclusionary provisions of U.S. immigration laws, specifically the 1924 Immigration Act that had been pushed by American progressives as a model of enlightened eugenic legislation.
As Kruse pointed out on Twitter, the 1924 Immigration Act was sponsored by two conservative Republicans, Albert Johnson (R-WA) and David Reed (R-PA) and signed into law by Republican president Calvin Coolidge. When Republicans controlled the House, Johnson was the chair of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee. While chair of that committee, Johnson appointed eugenicist Harry Laughlin to be the committee’s “Expert Eugenics Agent” and routed funds for eugenic research to Charles Davenport’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor where Laughlin also worked.
While it is true that the supporters of eugenics and race-based immigration had common cause, it is not true that the Democratic Party was the sole or even leading influence. Members of both parties voted for the bill but it was sponsored and promoted heavily by Republicans.
On a related note, Republicans today are typically the ones who want to slow immigration into the U.S. It was a recent Republican president who wondered why we couldn’t take more people from Norway than from “sh*thole” countries.
Sterilization Laws
D’Souza wrote:
Third, Hitler learned from progressive sterilization laws that had been enacted in America through the influence of activists like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe, himself an advocate of euthanasia by poison gas, praised Hitler for being on the front lines of modern eugenics. Harry Laughlin and Charles Davenport’s Eugenic News termed the Nazi sterilization program “a milestone which marks the control by the most advanced nations of the world of a major aspect of controlling human reproduction.”
It is true that Hitler praised America’s laws allowing the sterilization of people deemed to be deficient in various ways. It is also true that many of the leaders in the eugenics movement supported Germany’s movement to enact similar laws. However, Sanger had little to do with sterilization laws because the eugenics supporters cited by D’Souza didn’t want her help.
While it is safe to say that Margaret Sanger was progressive in her views, she wasn’t viewed as a colleague by those in the mainstream of the eugenics and sterilization movement. She hoped to attach herself to it to further her own cause but leaders in the eugenics movement didn’t seem to want her. Read what eugenics leader Paul Popenoe said in a letter to fellow eugenicist Madison Grant about Sanger’s American Birth Control League:
Dear Mr. Grant,
I have been considerably disquieted by the letter you showed me yesterday, suggesting a working alliance between the American Eugenics Society and the American Birth Control League. In my judgement we have everything to lose nothing to gain to such an arrangement.
[The American Birth Control League] is controlled by a group that has be brought up on agitation and emotional appeal instead of on research and education… With this group, we would take on a large quantity of ready-made enemies which it has accumulated, and we would gain allies who, while believing that they are eugenics, really have no conception of what eugenics is and are actually opposed to it.
[At a recent international birth control conference] two members of our advisory council … put through a resolution at the final meeting, urging that people whose children gave promise of being of exceptional value to the race should have as many children, properly spaced, as they felt that they feasibly could. This is eugenics. It is not the policy of the American Birth Control League leaders, who in the next issue of their monthly magazine came out with an editorial denouncing this resolution as contrary to all the principles and sentiments of their organization.
If it is desirable for us to make a campaign in favor of contraception, we are abundantly able to do so on our own account, without enrolling a lot of sob sisters, grand stand players, and anarchists to help us. We had a lunatic fringe in the eugenics movement in the early days; we have been trying for 20 years to get rid of it and have finally done so. Let’s not take on another fringe of any kind as an ornament.
Sincerely,
Paul Popenoe
Acknowledged eugenics leader Popenoe called Sanger’s group “sob sisters” and a “fringe.” The principle leaders in the movement to enact sterilization laws were people like Popenoe, Davenport, and Laughlin. Continue reading “Eugenics and Republicans: What Dinesh D’Souza Should Learn from History”
