Race suicide

Race suicide was an alarmist term used in eugenics, coined in 1900 by the sociologist Edward A. Ross.[1][2] Racial suicide rhetoric suggested a differential birthrate 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]

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".

In 1902, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt 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] Likewise, in 1905, he argued that a man or woman who is childless by choice "merits contempt".[9]

In Canada, the idea of race suicide was espoused by W.S. Wallace, author of "The Canadian Immigration Policy," which 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.[10]

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. Retrieved 2019-08-16.
  3. Caron, Simone M. (2008). "Race Suicide, Eugenics, and Contraception, 1900–1930". Who Chooses?: American Reproductive History since 1830. doi:10.5744/florida/9780813031996.003.0003.
  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. 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.
  8. John Van Vorst, Marie Van Vorst (1903). The woman who toils: being the experiences of two ladies as factory girls. Doubleday, Page & company.
  9. Roosevelt, Theodore (1905). "On American Motherhood".
  10. Wallace, W.S. "Examination of Our Immigration Policy". University of Toronto Monthly. 6.

Further reading
  • Walker, Francis A. (August 1891). "Immigration and Degradation". The Forum. Vol. 11. pp. 634–44.
  • "An Assault on Free Speech". The Butte Daily Post. November 20, 1900. The other subject, and the one that gave offense to Mrs. Stanford, was a discussion of the coolie labor problem, in which Dr. Ross strongly favored a continuance of the policy of restricted immigration from the Orient, such as the republican party is pledged to. He said [...] 'To let this go on, to let the American be driven by coolie competition, to check the American birth-rate in order that the Japanese' birth-rate shall not be checked, to let an opportunity for one American boy be occupied by three Orientals so that the American will not add that boy to his family, is to reverse the current of progress, to commit race suicide.'
  • Ross, Edward A. (1901). "The Causes of Race Superiority". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 18: 67–89. ISSN 0002-7162. JSTOR 1009883.
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