Race suicide was an alarmist term used in eugenics, coined in 1900 by the sociologist Edward A. Ross. 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), such that the "fit" group would ultimately dwindle to the point of extinction. Belief in race suicide is an element of Nordicism. In anti-East Asian discourse, the concept is associated with the "Yellow Peril".
In 1902, US 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." Likewise, in 1905, he argued that a man or woman who is childless by choice "merits contempt."
In Canada, the idea of race suicide was espoused by W. Stewart Wallace, the 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.
Further reading
- Gordon, Linda (2002). "Race Suicide". The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. University of Illinois Press. pp. 86–104. ISBN 978-0-252-09527-6. JSTOR 10.5406/j.ctt3fh3j5.
- Leonard, Thomas C (November 2005). "Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era" (PDF). Journal of Economic Perspectives. 19 (4): 207–224. doi:10.1257/089533005775196642.
- King, Miriam; Ruggles, Steven (Winter 1990). "American Immigration, Fertility, and Race Suicide at the Turn of the Century". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 20 (3): 347–369. doi:10.2307/204082. JSTOR 204082. PMID 11617376.
- MacNamara, Trent (2018). "Race Suicide". Birth Control and American Modernity: A History of Popular Ideas. pp. 37–64. doi:10.1017/9781108650465.002. ISBN 9781108650465.</ref>
- "What is race suicide? - Times of India". Timesofindia.indiatimes.com. 2004-09-26. Retrieved 2019-08-16.
External links
- Walker, Francis A. (August 1891). "Immigration and Degradation". The Forum. Vol. 11. pp. 634–44.
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"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. doi:10.1177/000271620101800104. ISSN 0002-7162. JSTOR 1009883.