Culture Of Life 101… “The Racism In Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review”

By BRIAN CLOWES

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of 900 of the most extreme quotes from The Birth Control Review, organized by topic, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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Contributors to The Birth Control Review loathed the Catholic Church, but they had plenty of hatred left over for minorities. When these eugenicists started talking about “race suicide” and “human stock,” they could not help but rank various racial, ethnic, and national groups according to their utility, thereby revealing their naked racism.
To begin with, what did these eugenicists consider to be the “master race”? H.J. Muller wrote “I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that in respect of mental gifts the Nordic race marches in the van[guard] of mankind.” One of Harry H. Laughlin’s biographers described him as “among the most racist and anti-Semitic of early twentieth-century eugenicists.” He stated in The Birth Control Review that “it is generally agreed that biologically — physically, mentally, and emotionally — the Greeks were perhaps the finest product of human breeding since the advent of the human species.”
Some defenders of Sanger or her journal claim that writers referring to “race suicide” or “the decline of the race” were speaking of humanity as a whole. Anyone who has studied The Birth Control Review realizes that nothing could be further from the truth.
For example, Julian Huxley founded the World Wildlife Fund and was a leading English pro-abortion agitator. In The Birth Control Review, he commented: “There is, first, the mere question of quantity of population, quantity of Americans in the world versus the quantity of Englishmen, versus the quantity of Africans, versus the quantity of Chinese. If you have one race whose population is going down and another whose population is going up, there is always the possibility of race suicide.”
In The Spectator, Huxley gave his opinion that: “The negro mind is as different from the white mind as the negro from the white body. The typical negro servant, for instance, is wonderful with children, for the reason that she really enjoys doing the things that children do….You have only to go to a nigger camp meeting to see the African mind in operation — the shrieks, the dancing and yelling and sweating, the surrender to the most violent emotion, the ecstatic blending of the soul of the Congo with the practice of the Salvation Army. [Intermarriage between the] negro and Caucasian type gives rise to all sorts of disharmonious organisms….
“By putting some of the white man’s mind into the mulatto, you not only make him more capable and more ambitious (there are no well authenticated cases of pure blacks rising to any eminence), but you increase his discontent and create an obvious injustice if you continue to treat him like any full-blooded African. The American negro is making trouble because of the American white blood that is in him.”
The most vocal contributor to The Birth Control Review was undoubtedly Lothrop Stoddard, a member of the National Council of the American Birth Control League. He wrote in his book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy that: “Black blood, once entering a human stock, seems never really bred out again….White men cannot, under peril of their vary race existence, allow wholesale Asian immigration into White race areas….The grim truth of the matter is this: The whole White race is exposed, immediately or ultimately, to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races.
“And, of course, the more primitive a type is, the more prepotent it is. This is why crossings with the negro are uniformly fatal. Whites, Amerindians, or Asiatics — all are alike vanquished by the invincible prepotency of the more primitive, generalized, and lower negro blood….We or the next generation will take in hand the problem of race depreciation, and segregation of defectives and abolition of handicaps penalizing the better stocks will put an end to our present racial decline.”
Stoddard emphasized his concerns in the pages of The Birth Control Review, fretting that “it is the lower elements of the population, the negroid aboriginal tribes and the Pariahs or Outcasts, who are gaining the fastest.”
This concern with “differential fertility” permeated the BCR. Malcolm H. Bissell wrote that “the white will practice voluntary restriction of their numbers while ‘uncivilized’ races remain prolific, with the ultimate result of the extermination of white civilization by a ‘rising tide of color’.”
Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and longtime chairman of the British Eugenics Society, wrote extensively on this topic, claiming in The Birth Control Review that “of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind….We ought to decide, in the first place, whether it would be preferable that there should be a larger number of persons at a lower level of civilization or a smaller number at a higher stage of culture.”
Many other eugenicists writing for The Birth Control Review insisted on ranking people based upon their intelligence. H.J. Muller said:
“Average specimens of the mongoloid races greatly excel the average Negro in mental equipment….It is indisputable that the population of southern Europe is less well equipped mentally than that of northern Europe, and the population of eastern Europe than that of western Europe…both by temperament and character, and also in respect of rational endowment, the Mediterranean occupies an intermediate position between the Nordic and the Negro.”

The “Solution”

It is no surprise that the many eugenicists who wrote for The Birth Control Review saw birth control as the solution to the problem of differential fertility — that is, too many children from the “lower” races and not enough from the “higher” races. L.C. Dunn wrote:
“From this discussion it appears that the social and biological worth of the individual is determined by his inheritance; that the different races are radically unequal in mental endowment, and that civilization in America is threatened with deterioration through overpopulation, the unrestricted reproduction of persons of bad heredity and inferior racial constitution. The remedy is tersely given — Birth Control.”
Others believed that differential mortality would solve what Elmer A. Carter called “the vexatious Negro problem.” He wrote:
“Not a few anthropologists and sociologists have valiantly maintained that the difference in Negro and white mortality rates is conclusive evidence of the innate inferiority of the Negro…the Negro who, in addition to the handicaps of race and color, is shackled by mental and social incompetence serenely goes on his way bringing into the world children whose chances of mere existence are apparently becoming more and more hazardous.”
In an article entitled “God’s Chillun” in the special “Negro Number” of The Birth Control Review, Walter Terpenning wrote:
“Many of the colored citizens are fine specimens of humanity. A good share of them, however, constitute a large percentage of Kalamazoo’s human scrap pile….The dissemination of the information of birth control should have begun with this [Negro] class rather than with the upper social and economic classes of white citizens.”

Enough Racism
To Go Around

At least we cannot accuse the contributors to The Birth Control Review of being inconsistent in their racism, because they held everyone in contempt who did not measure up to their Nordic ideal.
On Puerto Ricans: “He lives literally in chronic starvation, crowding his filthy scarecrow body into a hut where his female counterpart and their numberless wretched children almost always share at least one of his diseases.”
On Italians: “Look over ‘Who’s Who in America’ for Italian names. They are conspicuous by their absence.”
On the Polish: “Polish men are often immoral because they have been born of too young mothers or preceded by many born before.”
On Southerners: “The southern woman is fifty years behind the rest of the women in the country. She has no mind, no individuality, no initiative, and without question accepts all the absurd conventionalities that hedge her about and keep her a charming and useless dependent on her husband.”

Staying With The Program

Nearly a century ago, John Galsworthy wrote in The Birth Control Review that “I’m afraid there’s no question but that it’s unpatriotic not to believe in limiting our population….Birth control is essential for the slums, anyway.”
Alexander Sanger, grandson of Margaret and head of Planned Parenthood’s largest affiliate, said the same thing 60 years later: “We currently have a small storefront office in central Harlem, and it is my first priority to see if we can transform that into [an abortion] clinic….With all her success, my grandmother left some unfinished business, and I intend to finish it.”
And so, the eugenics program targeting the “lower” races in the United States continues unabated under the banner of “choice.” It took 82 years to lynch 3,445 blacks, which lead to universal outrage and social revolution. It takes 82 hours to kill that many black babies through abortion.
The result is inevitable. One-tenth of the white race has been wiped out by legal abortion, but a staggering one-third of the black race has been aborted.
The American Birth Control League led the way in the 1920s, and its successor, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America leads, the way now. As former PPFA President Faye Wattleton boasted: “I believe Margaret Sanger would have been proud of us today if she had seen the directions that we have most recently in this organization taken.”