S1 E10: William Howard Taft
The Past, the Promise, the Presidency
00:00
The Guarded Gate, Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Keeps Two Generations of Europeans Out of America
In the 1890s, as immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe suddenly accelerated, there was a return of nativist feeling. A bill in 1897 that was used a literacy test to limit people coming from these countries passed Congress three times before Taft vetoed it. Ocrant: My book ties in this political story with a parallel story of science or fake science. This is the so-called science of eugenics, which had been invented in the UK or first name, certainly in the 1860s.
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