War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (26 page)

T
he American masses were not rising up demanding to sterilize, institutionalize and dehumanize their neighbors and kinfolk. Eugenics was a movement of the nation’s elite thinkers and many of its most progressive reformers. As its ideology spread among the intelligentsia, eugenics cross-infected many completely separate social reform and health care movements, each worthwhile in its own right. The benevolent causes that became polluted by eugenics included the movements for child welfare, prison reform, better education, human hygiene, clinical psychology, medical treatment, world peace and immigrant rights, as well as charities and progressive undertakings of all kinds. The most striking of these movements was also one of the world’s most overdue and needed campaigns: the birth control movement. The global effort to help women make independent choices about their own pregnancies was dominated by one woman: Margaret Sanger.

Sanger was a controversial rabble-rouser from the moment she sprang onto the world stage, fighting for a woman’s most personal right in a completely male-dominated world order. In the early part of the twentieth century, when Sanger’s birth control movement was in its formative stages, women were second-class citizens in much of America. Even the most powerful women in America, such as Mrs. Harriman, could not vote in a federal election, although the most uneducated coal miner or destitute pauper could. Many husbands treated their wives like baby machines, without regard for their health or the family’s quality of life. Inevitably, in this state, many women could not expect any role in the world beyond a life of childbearing and childrearing. Sanger herself was the sixth of eleven children.
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Motherhood was to most civilizations a sacred role. Sanger, however, wanted women to have a choice in that sacred role, specifically if, when and how often to become pregnant. But under the strict morals laws of the day, even disseminating birth control information was deemed a pornographic endeavor.
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Sanger was not an armchair activist. She surrounded herself with the very misery she sought to alleviate. Working as a visiting nurse in New York City, Sanger encountered unwanted pregnancies and their consequences every day, especially in the teeming slums of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. There, the oppressive reality of overpopulation and poverty cried out for relief. Without proper health care, poor women often died during pregnancy or in labor. Without proper prenatal care, children were often born malnourished, stunted or diseased, further straining family resources and subverting the quality of life for all. Infant mortality was high in the sooty slums of New York.
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In her autobiography, Sanger dramatized the moment that moved her to devote her life to the cause. It occurred one night in 1912 when she was called to the disheveled three-room flat ofJake and Sadie Sachs. The young couple already had three children and knew nothing about reproductive controls. Just months earlier, Sadie had lost consciousness after a self-induced abortion. Later, Sadie pleaded with Sanger for some information to help her avoid another pregnancy. Such information did exist, but it was not commonly available. One doctor advised that Sadie’s husband “sleep on the roof.” Now Sadie was pregnant again and in life-threatening physical distress. Sadie’s frantic husband summoned nurse Sanger, who raced to the apartment and found the young woman comatose. Despite Sanger’s efforts, Sadie died ten minutes later. Sanger pulled a sheet over the dead woman’s face as her helpless, guilt-ridden husband shrieked, “My God! My God!”
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“I left him [Jake Sachs] pacing desperately back and forth,” Sanger recounted in her autobiography, “and for hours I myself walked and walked and walked through the hushed streets. When I finally arrived home and let myself quietly in, all the household was sleeping. I looked out my window and down upon the dimly lighted city. Its pains and griefs crowded in upon me, a moving picture rolled before my eyes with photographic clearness: women writhing in travail to bring forth little babies; the babies themselves naked and hungry, wrapped in newspapers to keep them from the cold; six-year-old children with pinched, pale, wrinkled faces, old in concentrated wretchedness, pushed into gray and fetid cellars, crouching on stone floors, their small scrawny hands scuttling through rags, making lamp shades, artificial flowers; white coffins, black coffins, coffins, coffins interminably passing in never-ending succession. The scenes piled one upon another on another. I could bear it no longer.”
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Sanger was never the same. A crusader at heart, she was thrust into a mission: to bring birth regulating information and options to all women. It was more than a health movement. It was women’s liberation, intended to benefit all of society. Sanger and her circle of friends named the program “birth control.” She traveled across the nation demanding the right to disseminate birth control information, which was still criminalized. She fought for access to contraception, and for the simple right of a woman to choose her own reproductive future. She herself became a worldwide
cause
cilebre.
Her various advocacy organizations evolved into the worldwide federation known as Planned Parenthood. Sanger eventually assumed legendary status as a champion of personal freedoms and women’s rights.
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Because Sanger challenged the moral as well as the legal order, and antagonized many religious groups that understandably held the right to life an inviolable principle, Sanger made many enemies. They dogged her everywhere she went, and in every endeavor.
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Sanger-hatred never receded. Decades after her death, discrediting Sanger was still a permanent fixture in a broad movement opposed to birth control and abortion. Their tactics frequently included the sloppy or deliberate misquoting, misattributing or misconstruing of single out-of-context sentences to falsely depict Sanger as a racist or anti-Semite.
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Sanger was no racist. Nor was she anti-Semitic.

But Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist, and she would turn her otherwise noble birth control organizations into a tool for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives,
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mass incarceration of the unfit
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and draconian immigration restrictions.
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Like other staunch eugenicists, Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenically superior strains could multiply without competition from “the unfit.”
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She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and the unfit as “human waste” not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human “weeds” should be “exterminated.”
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Moreover, for both political and genuine ideological reasons, Sanger associated closely with some of America’s most fanatical eugenic racists.
¹⁴
Both through her publication,
Birth Control Review,
and her public oratory, Sanger helped legitimize and widen the appeal of eugenic pseudoscience.
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Indeed, to many, birth control was just another form of eugenics.

But why?

The feminist movement, of which Sanger was a major exponent, always identified with eugenics. The idea appealed to women desiring to exercise sensible control over their own bodies. Human breeding was advocated by American feminists long before Davenport respun Mendelian principles into twentieth century American eugenics. Feminist author Victoria Woodhull, for example, expressed the belief that encouraging positive and discouraging negative breeding were both indispensable for social improvement. In her 1891 pamphlet,
The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit,
Woodhull insisted, “The best minds of to-day have accepted the fact that if superior people are desired, they must be bred; and if imbeciles, criminals, paupers and [the] otherwise unfit are undesirable citizens they must not be bred.”
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Twenty years later, Sanger continued the feminist affinity for organized eugenics. Like many progressives, she applied eugenic principles to her pet passion, birth control, which she believed was required of any properly run eugenic society. Sanger saw the obstruction of birth control as a multitiered injustice. One of those tiers was the way it enlarged the overall menace of social defectives plaguing society.
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Sanger expressed her own sense of ancestral self-worth in the finest eugenic tradition. Her autobiography certified the quality of her mother’s ancestors: “Her family had been Irish as far back as she could trace; the strain of the Norman conquerors had run true throughout the generations, and may have accounted for her unfaltering courage.”
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Sanger continued, “Mother’s eleven children were all ten-pounders or more, and both she and father had a eugenic pride of race.”
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Sanger always considered birth control a function of general population control and embraced the Malthusian notion that a world running out of food supplies should halt charitable works and allow the weak to die off. Malthus’s ideals were predecessors to Galton’s own pronouncements. Indeed, when Sanger first launched her movement she considered naming it “Neo-Malthusianism.” She recounted the night the movement was named in these words: “A new movement was starting …. It did not belong to Socialism nor was it in the labor field, and it had much more to it than just the prevention of conception. As a few companions were sitting with me one evening, we debated in turn
voluntary parenthood, voluntary motherhood, the new motherhood, constructive generation,
and
new generation.
The terms already in
use-Neo-Malthusianism, Family Limitation,
and
Conscious Generation
seemed stuffy and lacked popular appeal. … We tried
population control, race control,
and
birth rate control.
Then someone suggested ‘Drop the [word]
rate.’ Birth control
was the answer…. “
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Years later, Sanger still continued to see eugenics and birth control as adjuncts. In 1926, her organization sponsored the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. In a subsequent
Birth Control
Review
article referencing the conference, Jewish crusader Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, declared, “I think of Birth Control as an item … supremely important as an item in the eugenic program…. Birth control, I repeat, is the fundamental, primary element or item in the eugenic program.”
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Indeed, Sanger saw birth control as the highest form of eugenics. “Birth control, which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by the most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.”
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More than a Malthusian, Sanger became an outspoken social Darwinist, even looking beyond the ideas of Spencer. In her 1922 book,
Pivot of Civilization,
Sanger thoroughly condemned charitable action. She devoted a full chapter to a denigration of charity and a deprecation of the lower classes. Chapter 5, “The Cruelty of Charity,” was prefaced by an epigraph from Spencer himself: “Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles. “
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Not as an isolated comment, but on page after page, Sanger castigated charities and the people they hoped to assist. “Organized charity itself,” she wrote, “is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the ‘failure’ of philanthropy, but rather at its success.”
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She condemned philanthropists and repeatedly referred to those needing help as little more than “human waste.” “Such philanthropy … unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”
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Sanger added,
“[As]
British eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity is always associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect, feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute necessity is to discourage it.”
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She continued, “The most serious charge that can be brought against modern ‘benevolence’ is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from thel community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering and the social injustice which makes some too rich and others too poor."
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