B&W photo of a family of 7
A newspaper photograph from 1919 of Joseph Patrick Tumulty with his wife and six children, under the headline "President Wilson's Private Secretary Is Not an Advocate of Race Suicide"

Race suicide was an alarmist eugenicist theory, the term being coined in 1900 by the sociologist Edward A. Ross.[1][2] Racial suicide rhetoric suggested a differential birth rate between native-born Protestant and immigrant Catholic women, or more generally between the "fit" or "best" (white, wealthy, educated Protestants), and the "unfit" or "undesirable" (poor, uneducated, criminals, diseased, mental and physical "defectives," and ethnic, racial, and religious minorities),[3] such that the "fit" group would ultimately dwindle to the point of extinction.[4][5] Belief in race suicide is an element of Nordicism.[6] In anti-East Asian discourse, the concept is associated with the "Yellow Peril".[6][7]

In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the United States, called race suicide "fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country" and argued that "the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race, and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people."[8][9] Likewise, in 1905, he argued that a man or woman who is childless by choice "merits contempt."[10]

In Canada, W. Stewart Wallace, the author of "The Canadian Immigration Policy," endorsed the idea of race suicide. "The Canadian Immigration Policy" cited the native-born population's "struggle to keep up appearances in the face of the increasing competition" as a purported cause of its low birth rate. Wallace claimed that immigrants did not increase a nation's population but merely replaced it.[11]

References

  1. ^ Lovett, Laura L. (2009). "The Political Economy of Sex: Edward A. Ross and Race Suicide". Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938. Univ of North Carolina Press. pp. 77–108. doi:10.5149/9780807868102_lovett. ISBN 978-0-8078-6810-2. JSTOR 10.5149/9780807868102_lovett.
  2. ^ "The Eugenics Archive". Eugenicsarchive.ca. Archived from the original on 2018-01-13. Retrieved 2019-08-16.
  3. ^ Caron, Simone M. (2008). "Race Suicide, Eugenics, and Contraception, 1900–1930". Who Chooses?: American Reproductive History since 1830. pp. 44–80. doi:10.5744/florida/9780813031996.003.0003. ISBN 9780813031996.
  4. ^ Dyer, Thomas G. (1992). "Race Suicide". Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. LSU Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-1808-5.
  5. ^ Levine-Rasky, Cynthia (July 8, 2018). "The 100-year-old rallying cry of 'white genocide'". The Conversation. Retrieved 16 April 2020.
  6. ^ a b Bashford, Alison (2014). Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. Columbia University Press. pp. 109–114. ISBN 978-0-231-51952-6.
  7. ^ Park, Jin-kyung (27 July 2017). "Interrogating the 'Population Problem' of the Non-Western Empire: Japanese Colonialism, the Korean Peninsula, and the Global Geopolitics of Race". Interventions. 19 (8): 1112–1131. doi:10.1080/1369801X.2017.1354961. ISSN 1369-801X. S2CID 164412615.
  8. ^ The Woman Who Toils, John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst; "My Dear Mrs. Van Vorst:
    I must write you a line to say how much I have appreciated your article, "The Woman Who Toils." But to me there is a most melancholy side to it, when you touch upon what is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country—that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial.
    WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, October 18, 1902.    "
  9. ^ John Van Vorst, Marie Van Vorst (1903). The woman who toils: being the experiences of two ladies as factory girls. Doubleday, Page & company.
  10. ^ Roosevelt, Theodore (1905). "On American Motherhood".
  11. ^ Wallace, W.S. (1906). "Examination of Our Immigration Policy". University of Toronto Monthly. 6: 150–155.

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