… Many eugenicists regarded disease as nature’s way of weeding out the unfit1. Charles Davenport, America’s foremost eugenic scientist, warned in 1915, “The artificial preservation of those whom the operation of natural agencies tends to eliminate … may conceivably destroy the race.” He considered it “anti-social” to “unduly restrict the operation of what is one of Nature’s greatest racial blessings – death.” 2His comments exemplified the close kinship between eugenics and earlier Social Darwinist and Malthusian attacks on public health and social welfare programs, a link that remained powerful throughout the history of eugenics. A speaker at the 1914 National Conference on Race Betterment, the first major American eugenics conference, explained that “death is the normal process of elimination in the social organism, and … in prolonging the lives of defectives we are tampering with the functioning of the social kidneys.”3
Wikipedia “A Lebensborn birth house in Nazi Germany. Created with intention of raising the birth rate of “Aryan” children from extramarital relations of “racially pure and healthy” parents.”
Malthusianism and eugenics were far from unpopular ideas in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many prominent figures who are considered liberal by today’s standards endorsed parts of the underlying rationalizations. By the turn of the century there was talk of race suicide, that not-so-subtle claim that by admitting foreigners and the poor, the country was in danger of losing its superior stock — the Northern Europeans. The term first appeared in print in 1901, when a speech given by sociologist and eugenicist Edward Ross was published.
For a case like this I can find no words so apt as “race suicide.” There is no bloodshed, no violence, no assault of the race that waxes upon the race that wanes. The higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off from itself by collective action. The working classes gradually delay marriage and restrict the size of the family as the opportunities hitherto reserved for their children are eagerly snapped up by the numerous progeny of the foreigner. The prudent, self-respecting natives first cease to expand, and then, as the struggle for existence grows sterner and the outlook for their children darker, they fail even to recruit their own numbers. It is probably the visible narrowing of the circle of opportunity through the infiltration of Irish and French Canadians that has brought so low the native birth-rate in New England. Ross, Edward A. “The Causes of Race Superiority.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (1901): 67–89.
- Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work among Them. New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872.
- Gordon, Linda. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. University of Illinois Press, 2002.
- Pernick, M S. “Eugenics and Public Health in American History.” American Journal of Public Health 87.11 (1997): 1767–1772. aphapublications.org (Atypon).
- Ross, Edward A. “The Causes of Race Superiority.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (1901): 67–89.
