![]() The now-excluded categories of people, it was believed, had “made an excessive contribution to our feeble-minded, insane, criminal and other socially inadequate classes.” A related federal act prohibited entry to “epileptics, and insane persons paupers professional beggars persons likely to become a public charge persons afflicted with a loathsome or dangerous disease and persons who have committed a felony or other crime involving moral turpitude.” Polygamists, prostitutes and those with “mental or physical defects which might affect their ability to earn a living” were also banned.Ī natural reading of The Adventures of Augie March views it as Bellow’s artistic response to the contradictions inherent to the historical moment of his arrival in this country. Conspicuously, the 1924 Act left the door open to migrants from Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway.Įugenicists celebrated the 1924 Act as a measure that would “preserve the purity of American stock” by welcoming immigrants only “of higher intelligence,” who thus presented “the best material for American citizenship”. The 1924 Act accordingly slashed immigration rates from targeted nations by 98%, barring admission to Russian Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Turks, Armenians, Lithuanians and Africans, among many others. The law was informed by the burgeoning eugenics movement, which maintained that peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa were genetically inferior to those from Northern and Western Europe. He recalled his nine-year-old self thinking the fireworks, flags, bunting and parades of Independence Day were for him, meant to hail the promise of his new life in America.īut the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act told a less welcoming story. His whole life, Bellow retained a vivid impression of the first day he spent in America: July 4, 1924. By 1924, when Bellow took up residence with his family in the Russian Jewish enclave of Humboldt Park, 70% of Chicago residents were foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. The city’s population quadrupled in thirty years’ time, growing from 500,000 residents in 1880 to over 2 million in 1910. From 1880 to 1924, waves of newcomers, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe. The new law slammed the door on a tide of humanity that had been flowing to America since the late 19th-century, ending the greatest era of mass migration to the United States in its history. Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, a drastic and sweeping revision of federal immigration policy. The Bellow family arrived on American soil two short months after the U. ![]() They had originally come to Canada to flee anti-Semitic violence and political persecution in their home city of St. He would remain an “illegal alien”-we would now say, “undocumented immigrant”-until the age of 27.īellow was born in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec. Saul Bellow arrived with his family in Chicago on July 4, 1924, smuggled by bootleggers across the border from Canada. Bellow’s US Passport | Saul Bellow Papers | Special Collections Research Center | University of Chicago ![]()
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