Although the Bible preaches (in Leviticus 19:33-34), “to not vex strangers,” and “love them as thyself,” groups have acted with prejudice toward perceived foreigners.
Migrants (foreigners we deal with close-up) have generally been viewed with more distain than people in other nations (foreigners far away).
Also, people in “higher” social classes may perceive the “lower orders” as strangers.
Society has long worried about being polluted by “bad blood.”
In Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th Century Britain, Kevin Siena describes how British doctors saw the blood in “plebian” bodies.
In a 1659 treatise, Dr. Thomas Willis stated that “depauperated [or impoverished] blood was ‘lifeless’ and ‘a poor thin juice.’”
One hundred years later (1764), Dr. James Grainger postulated that Creoles developed “wasting diseases” because of a “watery poverty of the blood.”
As late as 1841, Dr. George Leith Roupell claimed that “pauper’s lifestyles were deleterious to sanguification [the production of healthy blood].”
For generations, British doctors held to the prejudicial notion that the corrupted blood of the poor endangered “higher” classes.
Rotten Bodies was written just before COVID-19 hit; it explains how Brits were terrified of possible epidemics and plagues during the 1800’s.
These fears resulted in “plebians” being removed to workhouses, hospitals, slums, and prisons—as a type of human garbage.
This fear also resulted in undesirables being “transported” to the American colonies, and (later) to Australia.
(“Transportion” is the term used.
It was a punishment used for many crimes—from stealing, to performing an illegal marriage.)
Siena recounts, in chapter five (“Jail Fever and Prison Reform”) of Rotten Bodies, how the birth of the U.S. (in 1776), set off a “public health disaster” in the British prison system.
Thousands of debtors, petty thieves, disrupters, and fallen women—who’d been sentenced to transportation to the thirteen colonies as indentured servants—were stuck in overcrowded prisons, or placed on decrepit prison ships.*
Hundreds died of jail fever while authorities figured out how to strand convicts in Australia.
(Australia was a more permanent solution than America, since colonial America indentured servants sometimes escaped, or returned to Britain after their sentences were up.)
Jane Austen’s England, by Roy and Lesley Adkins, also deals with transportation, focusing on the era when Jane Austen lived.
This book mentions Elizabeth Smith, who was transported to the colonies, in 1774, for a seven-year sentence.
(Smith had stolen 12 pounds of sugar, worth 4 shillings.)
I wonder how many descendants of Ms. Smith have learned how she ended up in America.
Or did she return to Britain?
For over three hundred years, transportation was used to deport British criminals from British soil to British possessions (the 13 colonies, the Caribbean, and Australia, but seldom to Canada).
Numbers are difficult to come by.
According to one estimate, about 40,000 convicts were sent to the colonies between 1533-1776.
However, another account says that over 52,000 convicts were transported between 1718-1776 alone!
Those totals seem rather low.
(Between one-fifth, and one-seventh, of the convicts transported, died en route of jail fever or small pox.
After they arrived at their destinations, hundreds died in the colonies, of disease, or from abuse.)
Transportation wasn’t just used to punish thieves and prostitutes.
Those considered “treasonous” against the King—either for speaking up against his policies, or for religious reasons—were punished by being sent to America.
Carpenter and Puritan, John Coad, wrote the memoir, A Memorandum of the Wonderful Providences of God to a Poor Unworthy Creature.
This book details Coad’s experiences during the Duke of Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1688.
He was wounded during the rebellion, and ended up being transported to Jamaica.
The character, Dr. Peter Blood—in the 1935 swashbuckler Captain Blood—is partially based on John Coad.
Returning to the subject of blood, the U.S. Senate worried about “pollution” when it debated the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
In Reece Jones’ book, White Borders, he describes how Senator John Franklin Miller (1831-1886) argued for the Act, saying that the U.S. should “keep pure the blood which circulates through our political system” and not allow “the debasement of our civilization through the injection. . . of a poisonous, indigestible mass of alien humanity.”
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 wasn’t repealed until 1943!
(Besides severely limiting Chinese immigration, this law (that lasted over sixty years) prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens, or voting.)
In the end, it finally was repealed (says Jones in White Borders)—not for moral reasons, but because China was our partner in WWII.
An issue discussed in White Borders, and Rachel Maddow’s Prequel, is how the American eugenics movement greatly influenced Adolf Hitler, and his credo that immigrants and Jews were “a poison in the body” of Germany.
Hitler lauded the American Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in Mein Kampf.
He had a copy of American fake scientist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) in his bunker, when he committed suicide.
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act had two major goals, but only one was clearly expressed in the legislation.
Goal One was to limit Asian immigration to the U.S.; that one was crystal clear.
Goal Two was to shift the immigration flow back to Northern Europe, and away from Southern and Eastern Europe; that goal was disguised.
The “trick” was to implement a quota system built on the 1890 census.
The largest share of “immigrant slots” went to Britain at 65,721, a quota seldom used up.
Where the Act had the greatest effect was in limiting Italians, Greeks, Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians, and Romanians.
For example, 222,260 Italians were allowed to enter the country in 1921, but only 2,662 Italians were allowed in 1925.
(Data from Round Trip to America and White Borders.)
Dr. Charles Richard Drew (1904-1950) was an American surgeon and researcher who specialized in preserving and storing blood for transfusions.
His innovative techniques and systems (especially with blood plasma) kept thousands of U.S. and British soldiers alive during WWII, and continue to save lives today.
Dr. Charles Drew was Black.
In 1942, he resigned as his post—as Medical Director of the American Red Cross—after his organization refused to change its’ unscientific policy of segregating blood by the “race” of the donor.
The Red Cross did discontinue this policy six years later (1948) after it finally ruled that there was no reason to segregate blood.
* “More than 60% of those found guilty at Old Bailey in 1774 [the chief criminal court of London] were transported [to the 13 colonies].” (page 147, Rotten Bodies: Class & Contagion in 18th-Century Britain, Kevin Siena, Yale University Press, 2019).
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