1_ Slavery / indentured service
In earliest times, people lived sharing goods reciprocally, gathering what the land gave them to eat, or hunting in the wilderness for meat and fur. Others went fishing. Occasionally, when other groups invaded their territories, they fought to preserve their source of subsistence. At certain time, when the population had increased and they were aware of the importance of storing the foods they acquired from the land (agriculture), they enslaved prisoners of war to work on food production.
However, war was not the only source to maintain slavery as such institution was also maintained out of debt and deviance (violation of norms, rules or social order), child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves. And regarding the formation of American society and its multiculturalism, slavery was part of this cultural identity, but it was an atypical institution as this social stratification was not the antithesis of an antagonist dominant class. Besides, the institution of slavery was established in North America after 1619, almost a century before the end of the Feudal regime, a socio-economic system characterized by a strict division into classes, i.e., nobility, clergy, peasantry, and, in the later Middle Ages, burgesses; a private jurisdiction based on local custom and the landholding system whereby a vassal held land from a superior in exchange for allegiance and service.
Indeed, American society was atypical for slavery was held as legal institution during its early capitalism, meaning that these two socio-economic coexisted for many years until the emancipation proclamation ending human bondage in America which had begun in Virginia in 1619 although this state officially recognized it in 1661. The other states that recognized slavery were Massachusetts in 1642, Connecticut in 1650, Maryland in 1663 and New York and New Jersey in 1664.
Indeed, the social stratification of slavery as a socio-economic society with two main classes in conflict, slaveholders and slaves, was not authentic in North America. The only feature of an authentic or typical slave system found in American slavery was that slaves were inheritable for they were kept like human livestock by planters or slave-owners. Those slaveholders “elaborated a view that the slaves, brought to America by the Dutch, English, Portuguese and Spanish, were inferior and not fully humans”. Thus, colonizers justified slavery (conformity accepting the use_ means, function and goals_ of slavery) as an ideology making social arrangement inevitable, necessary and fair (functionalism). Another macro aspect found in the Southern slaves states was that of conflict theory as only a given stratified part of that people could hold slaves depending on their economic power.
Slavery was the main workforce used for cotton, sugarcane and tobacco production; however, later, immigrants were used too, leading to the consolidation of America's cultural identity. It was through servitude and indentured service that poor immigrants could settle in North America.
Before writing about Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration, we are forced to write a little about America's history, a history of Immigration as the very most part of American population is not autochthon
The first of British colonies to take hold in North America was Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, made up of townsmen and adventurers more interested in finding gold than farming. Between 1607 and 1624 approximately 14,000 people migrated to the colony.
In 1620, a group of 101 Puritans, men, women and children, set out for the English Virginia Colony in the New World on board of the Mayflower sailing ship, but a storm sent them far north and they landed in the natural harbor of Provincetown on Cape Cod Bay. Believed themselves outside the jurisdiction of any organized government, the men on board of the Mayflower drafted a formal agreement to abide by “just and equal laws”. It was the Mayflower Compact.
Afterward, a new wave of immigrants arrived on the shores of Massachusetts Bay in 1630 bearing a grant from King Charles I to establish a colony. Their leader, John Winthrop, openly set out to create a “city upon a hill” in the New World. By this, he meant a place where Puritans would live in strict accordance with their religious belief.
The rigid orthodoxy of the Puritan rule was not to everyone's desire. One of the first to challenge John Winthrop, who had been elected governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a clergyman named Roger Williams. This latter objected to the colony's seizure of Indian lands (rebellion/proposal) as he purchased land from the Narragansett Indians in what is now Providence, Rhode Island, in 1636.
In 1670, the first settlers arrived in what is now Charleston, South Carolina. An elaborated system of government was prepared for the new colony; but one of its prominent features was a failed attempt to create hereditary nobility.
In 1681, Williams Penn received a large tract of land west of the Delaware River from James Duke of York (the future James II of England). This land became known as Pennsylvania. To help populate it, Quaker Penn actively recruited a host of religious dissenters from England and the continent_ Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Moravians, and Baptists. Penn arrived the following year to its granted huge territory, landing in New Castle where there were already Dutch, Swedish and English settlers living along the Delaware River. Those colonialists pledged allegiance to Penn as their new Proprietor. Then the first general assembly was held in the colony. It was there where he founded Philadelphia, the “city of Brotherly Love”.
William Penn, an early champion of democracy and religious freedom, was notably distinguished for his good relations and successful treaties with Lenape Indians, a group of several organized bands of Native American people with shared culture and linguistic characteristics. These Indians people were a sedentary matriarchal society that relied heavily on agriculture to survive.
Being one of the earlier supporters of colonial unification, it is said that William Penn wrote and urged for a Union of all the English colonies. He set forth some democratic principles or rules in the Pennsylvania Frame of Government, a sort of constitution for the Province of Pennsylvania that served as an inspiration for United States Constitution, adopted on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention held just in Philadelphia.
Georgia was settled in 1732, the last of the 13 colonies to be established. It had a unique quality. It was set out to create a refuge where poor and former prisoners would be given new opportunities. Judge and prison authorities offered convicts a chance to migrate to colonies like Georgia, instead of serving prison sentences. Ships captains received larges rewards to take on board poor migrants, called indentured servants. In other cases, the expenses of transportation and maintenance were paid by colonizing agencies like the Massachusetts Bay Companies. In return, indentured servants agreed to work for the agencies as contract laborers, usually for four to seven years. It has been estimated that half of the settlers living in the colonies south of New England came to America under this system. However, no social stigma was attached to a family that had its beginning in America under this semi-bondage or servitude.
Furthermore, there was a very important exception in building America: slavery. The first African black people were brought to Virginia in 1619, just 12 years after the founding of Jamestown, and a year before the arrival of the Mayflower to Massachusetts.
At the beginning, many African black people were regarded as indentured servants who could earn their freedom. Nevertheless, by 1660, due to the demand of plantation labor in the Southern colonies, the institution of slavery began to harden around them, and Africans were brought to America in shackles for a lifetime of involuntary servitude.
For two century, many generations of black people passed away dreaming of being free one day, some years before Abraham Lincoln brought into law “The Emancipation Proclamation”, giving freedom to the slaves. Many other slaves, fortunately, had already escaped to the North.
One phase of the antislavery movement involved helping staves escape to safe refuges in the North or over the border with Canada. An elaborate network of secret routes, known as the “Underground Railroad”, was firmly established in the 1830s in all part of the North. In Ohio alone, it is estimated that from 1830 to 1860 no few than 40,000 fugitive slaves were helped to freedom, through the “Underground Railroad”.
Slavery had already assumed much greater importance as a national issue. In 1786, George Washington wrote that he devoutly wished that some plan might be adopted “by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure and at imperceptible degrees (positive innovation denying slavery as a means of production which should be abolished slowly so as not to affect negatively good production _goals)”. Moreover, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had banned slavery in the Northwest Territory.
Slavery was really necessary in the South. The rise of a great cotton-growing industry stimulated by the introduction of new types of cotton and by Eli Whitney's invention in 1793 of the cotton gin, which separated the seeds from cotton, needed slaves laborers. Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution, a period of major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transport and technology, increased greatly the demand for raw cotton while the opening of new land in the West extended the area for cotton cultivation.
Sugarcane also contributed to slavery in the South. By 1830, Louisiana was supplying the nation with about half of its sugar supply. Finally, tobacco growers moved westward, taking slavery with them.
Slavery had inherited a system of brutality and coercion in which beating and the breakup of families through the sales of individuals were common, while it was ignored that slavery was an open violation of every human being's inalienable right to be free.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free,” said Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln had long regarded slavery as evil. In 1854, he declared that all national legislation should be framed on the principle that slavery was to be restricted and eventually abolished. He also contended that the principle of popular sovereignty was false, for slavery was the concern of local inhabitants and that of the United States as a whole.
In sum, in the United States, slavery is not considered as an entire socio-economic system like the one in Ancient time of Egypt, Greece and Rome, but as a feature of a given stratified society, seen in a synchronic perspective. That was, indeed, the case of the two-century slavery of the United States, which did not surge out of a natural socio-economic evolution or transition where class consciousness stands. Rather than a fundamental mood of production, slavery was, I think, a specific, “synchronic” and functional means of land production (plantation) at earliest times of the United States' society. If we consider slavery deviance, without doubt, it was anyway necessary for the socio-economic development of the young American society (Fundamentalist perspective/strain theory), not matter being conformist, innovator, ritualistic or “retreats”. Clearly, the South was conformist toward slavery while the North was rebel towards it through the “Emancipation Proclamation”, which gave freedom to the slaves. Another rebellion against slavery was the “Underground Railroad” slave escaping system through which slaves reached their freedom.
Let conclude stating that “every phenomenon or process bears in itself the seed of its own destruction”. This philosophical criterion may be perceived regarding American slavery. The institution of slavery was no longer necessary of as a means of production due to the fact that the early capitalist good production needed better qualified and skillful workers to cope with the needs of American economic perspective, expansionism and domain. Moreover, American government was in need of an increasing taxpayer for its own financial power and Internal Revenue Service. The Southern States did not agree with giving up holding slavery. That was why slavery was one of the causes of American Civil War.
After Abraham Lincoln's assassination, people kept entering to the United States to seek a better life. Nevertheless, along with legal immigration, other people were entering without authorization to meet mainly their socio-economic needs. While doing so, major deviance was occurring. And as a social control upon deviant immigration (illegal), the Eugenic Laws were created.
2_ Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration: Deviance and Social Control on Immigration.
When Europe knew that a new civilization existed in westerly land across the ocean, it became a New World of dream and hope for almost everyone, a dream since its earliest times, but for its autochthon inhabitants who were for the most part swept away on behalf of a new era, it was worse than a nightmare. It was an era created by immigrants who had been entering freely to that new world before the arrival of the Mayflower with its one hundred and one Pilgrims bringing a sort of gubernatorial agreement for social order, i.e. their Compact.
After part of the new world had become the United States of America, many people kept entering increasingly in it from abroad, while within which, others already settled were leading towards the West, seeking a new frontier for land and wealth. And then, a huge Nation out of immigrants for the most arouse, but plenty of deviance.
However, immigration has become an issue of concern in American history for its immense economic and social impact, both positive and negative. Consequently, as if based on a control theory working against motivations to deviate, “or, I would say, to control deviance”, and to impose negative sanctions against deviate and disturbing immigration, Eugenic movements were created.
Within this issue regarding the Eugenics Laws, some sociological theories can be denoted explicitly in it, such as the Merton's strain/anomie theory, due to the fact that Eugenics Laws restricting immigration did not accept either the means to deviate, i.e. “immigrate unlawfully” and uncontrollably, or the goals, a disturbing and disproportionate immigration and its holistic effect (when illegal immigration provides wealth, even through money laundry, drug smuggle, or through any other norm or law violation _deviance/crime_, it becomes a motivation for other people to immigrate without authorization). While not accepting the means and the goals regarding the issue of immigration (relatively speaking as many who opposed immigration had been immigrant) the Eugenics Laws came about as immigration restriction.
The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 did everything eugenicists had hoped for. First, it limited total immigration to 165,000 — about 15-20% of peak years. More important, it restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
Retrospectively speaking, the eugenics movement had coincided with one of the greatest eras in U.S. immigration of the 20th century. Unlike earlier waves of immigrants who came primarily from northern Europe, the 20th century brought an influx from southern and eastern Europe. Eugenicists, most of who were of northern and western European heritage, worried that the new immigrants weakened America biologically (conflict theory), and lobbied for federal legislation to selectively restrict immigration from “undesirable” European countries (labeling theory). In addition, full of concerns, labor organizations had been feeding on fears that American working class would be displaced from their jobs by an oversupply of cheap immigrant labor from Russia and Eastern Europe. Further waves of immigrants had been being labeled negatively biasing them as bad people.
In sum, Social control is best defined as a series of measures that serve as a general guarantee of people conforming to norms to do what is expected and appropriate, and therefore, as all groups develop systems of social control to punish deviants, Eugenics Laws restricting immigration are ones of these social control measures.
The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson-Reed Act, including the National Origins Act, Asian Exclusion Act, was a United States federal law that limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, down from the 3% cap set by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921. It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. This law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who were immigrating in large number starting in the 1890, as well as prohibiting the immigration of East Asians and Asian Indians.
Since American's first naturalization law in 1790 limiting the privilege of US citizenship to “free white persons”, further laws on immigration was set mainly to restrict entry to keep America for Americans (Monroe), as President Calvin Coolidge said when he signed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, “America must remain America”. Yet, this immigration view became an anti-immigrant perspective until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
3_ More on Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration: Definition from reliable source
Eugenics: science dealing with improvement of heredity factors through social control of reproduction. According to Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, it is the study of human improvement by genetic means.
Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Sir Douglas Galton and half-cousin of Charles Darwin was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.
He proposed in its book Hereditary Genius in 1869 that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1926, supported Galton's theories. The US eugenics also supported restriction on immigration from nations with “inferior” stock, such as Italy, Greece, and counties of Eastern Europe, and argued for sterilization of insane, retarded and epileptic citizens
McGraw-Hill Science & Technology Encyclopedia on eugenics states that it's the study of factors that influence the hereditary of future generations. Eugenics (a thought to be a science and social movement) proposes to improve humanity's future by increasing the number of children produced by persons who are superior and by reducing the number produced by persons who are physically or mentally deficient.
Oxford Companion to the body on eugenics states that the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, believed that human evolution could be consciously directed.
The history of eugenics began in Britain with Sir Francis Galton (1822 - 1911), who coined the term “eugenic” meaning “wellborn.
For many early-twentieth-century intellectuals, it seemed that heredity was of signal important in predicting human performance and that it should play a key role in social policies and programs for human betterment. Anxious about their social status and changes in America's ethnic makeup, they saw eugenics as a way to legitimize racial and ethnic interpretations of differential human worth.
Eugenics is the “applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population. See more on Eugenics in Wikipedia.
4_ Conclusion
Abraham Lincoln stated that the principle of popular sovereignty was false, for slavery was the concern of local inhabitants and that of the United States as a whole. Slavery was abolished but not without suffering. Some people are saying that regardless being emancipated inhabitants, black people still feel landless in their soul. Why are they called African-Americans?
Regarding immigration, a country's sovereignty stands within its borders. It is, however, also false when it is broken by uncontrolled immigration! Ancient Roman Empire declined and disappeared out of its uncontrolled flux of immigrants seeking prosperity in Roman huge territory.
Eugenic Movement played a great role in American history until it became anti-ecological regarding human natural selection. Before World War II, German government imposed a sort of Eugenic-like control en Germany.
