A Disability History Of The United States (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.”1 Coolidge was not alone. The mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans who provided the cheap labor that fueled the nation’s industrial and economic expansion now generated fears about a deteriorating national body, as did the mass migration of African Americans out of the rural South and into the urban North. Since the early twentieth century, a growing wave of concern about the changing nature of the nation’s citizens had overwhelmed the United States, its politics, and its culture. People with disabilities fought against increasingly stringent and harsh laws and cultural attitudes, but despite their efforts the definition of “undesirable” became ever more wide, fluid, and racially/ethnically based. Physical “defects,” both scientists and the casual observer increasingly assumed, went hand in hand with mental and moral “defects.” This resulted in the forced sterilization of more than sixty-five thousand Americans by the 1960s, and in the most restrictive immigration laws in US history (that, among other things, excluded people with disabilities).
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