Not only was Washington a leader in opposing nonwhite immigration and hounding people of color with legal restrictions and burning crosses, it was also an early adopter in 1909 of eugenics laws which took “choice” away from some Americans by installing a system of involuntary sterilizations. In 1921, the state Legislature took an even harsher stand against the “unfit” with a broadened list of who could be forcibly sterilized, including the “feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts.” Such laws received U.S. Supreme Court sanction under the Buck v. Bell decision of 1927 when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously declared that “three generations of imbeciles is enough” to justify sterilizing women — as it turned out, mostly poor Black women. Nearly 700 Washingtonians were sterilized under state law until the practice ended here in the 1940s. More than 2,600 in Oregon were sterilized until the early 1980s.
Of the 1920s, Egan has written, “That was a mean decade, with Jim Crow locked in place, Prohibition the law of the land and immigrants who weren’t white Protestants all but locked out. The underlying theme of all this meanness is intolerance.” That was in a prescient 2021 New York Times column about our current state, called “America Is Getting Meaner.” Things have gotten even meaner since.
We’re emerging from the jagged end of our own pandemic — doffing our masks even as an average of 250 Americans continue to die each week, adding to a growing total of 1,010,000 dead. Meanwhile we’re just beginning to learn about the impacts of long COVID. History is rhyming hard as we enter the 2020s with the pandemic shifting into the background for many Americans. We’re facing an altered world and people who want to change it even more radically, some wanting to turn the clock back to earlier centuries.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, for instance, runs strongly against public sentiment and takes away a Constitutional right established a half-century ago. Justice Clarence Thomas and Republican activists who seek to roll back same-sex marriage and contraception threaten more rights and norms.
We’re not only seeing the acolytes of intolerance in the streets but running some of our institutions as well, including the present Supreme Court. Congress’s January 6 committee hearings are also revealing how many elected officials — including the committee’s own Congressional colleagues — are willing to discard the will of the voters for violence if they don’t get their way, led by the former president of the United States who has amped everyone up on a lie.
The Roaring ’20s got a nickname that suggested thrills and wild times, including running us into the Great Depression. In this century, we’re making a good effort to be dubbed “The Mean Decade.”
Let’s hope we stop trying to earn that title.