CHAPTER 7: Birth Control

The 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 crossinfected
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 child rearing. Sanger herself was the sixth of eleven children.'

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.2

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.3

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!"4

"I left him Oake 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."5

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
celebre. 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.6

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.7

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.8 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,9 mass incarceration
of the unfitlO and draconian immigration restrictions. II 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."12 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."13 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. IS 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."16

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. 17

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."18 Sanger continued,
"Mother's eleven children were all ten-pounders or more, and both she and
father had a eugenic pride of race."19

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 .... "20

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."21

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."22

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."23

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."24

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."25

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."26

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 the 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."27

Like most eugenicists, she appealed to the financial instincts of the
wealthy and middle class whose taxes and donations funded social assistance.
"Insanity," she wrote, "annually drains from the state treasury no less
than $11,985,695.55, and from private sources and endowments another
twenty millions. When we learn further that the total number of inmates in
public and private institutions in the State of New York-in alms-houses,
reformatories, schools for the blind, deaf and mute, in insane asylums, in
homes for the feeble-minded and epileptic-amounts practically to less
than sixty-five thousand, an insignificant number compared to the total
population, our eyes should be opened to the terrific cost to the community
of this dead weight of human waste. "28

She repeated eugenic notions of generation-to-generation hereditary
pauperism as a genetic defect too expensive for society to defray. "The offspring
of one feebleminded man named Jukes," she reminded, "has cost the
public in one way or another $1,300,000 in seventy-five years. Do we want
more such families?"29

Sanger's book, Pivot of Civilization, included an introduction by famous
British novelist and eugenicist H. G. Wells, who said, "We want fewer and
better children ... and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace
we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior
citizens that you inflict upon US."30

Later, Sanger's magazine reprinted and lauded an editorial from the
publication American Medicine, which tried to correct "the popular misapprehension
that [birth control advocates] encourage small families. The
truth is that they encourage small families where large ones would seem
detrimental to society, but they advocate with just as great insistence large
families where small ones are an injustice to society. They frown upon the
ignorant poor whose numerous children, brought into the world often
under the most unfavorable circumstances, are a burden to themselves, a
menace to the health of the not infrequently unwilling mother, and an
obstacle to social progress. But they frown with equal disapproval on the
well-to-do, cultured parents who can offer their children all the advantages
of the best care and education and who nevertheless selfishly withhold
these benefits from society. More children from the fit, less from the
unfit-that is the chief issue in Birth Control." But on this last point, however,
Sanger disagreed with mainstream eugenicists-she encouraged
intelligent birth control even for superior families.31

Sanger would return to the theme of more eugenically fit children (and
fewer unfit) again and again. She preferred negative, coercive eugenics.
"Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and diagnostic aspects,
in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility of the
'unfit' and the feeble-minded establishing a progressive unbalance in
human society and lowering the birth-rate among the 'fit.' But in its socalled
'constructive' aspect, in seeking to reestablish the dominance of
[the] healthy strain over the unhealthy, by urging an increased birth-rate
among the fit, the Eugenists really offer nothing more farsighted than a
. 'cradle competition' between the fit and the unfit."32

Sanger's solutions were mass sterilization and mass segregation of the
defective classes, and these themes were repeated often in Pivot of
Civilization. "The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization
must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the
hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during
the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile
children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The
male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one or
two generations would give us only partial control of the problem.
Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential
source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate
sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to
the feeble-minded."H

Indeed, Sanger listed eight official aims for her new organization, the
American Birth Control League. The fourth aim was "sterilization of the
insane and feebleminded and the encouragement of this operation upon
those afflicted with inherited or transmissible diseases .... "34

For her statistics and definitions regarding the feebleminded, Sanger
subscribed to Goddard's approach. "Just how many feebleminded there are
in the United States, no one knows," wrote Sanger in another book, U70man
and the New Race, "because no attempt has ever been made to give public care
to all of them, and families are more inclined to conceal than to reveal the
mental defects of their members. Estimates vary from 350,000 at the present
time to nearly 400,000 as early as 1890, Henry H. Goddard, Ph.D., of the
Vineland, N.]., Training School, being authority for the latter statement."35

Similarly, she accepted the view that most feebleminded children
descended from immigrants. For instance, she cited one study that concluded,
"An overwhelming proportion of the classified feebleminded children
in New York schools came from large families in overcrowded slum
conditions, and ... only a small percentage were born of native parents."36

Steeped in eugenic science, Sanger frequently parroted the results of
U.S. Army intelligence testing which asserted that as many as 70 percent of
Americans were feebleminded. In January of 1932, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
sent Sanger a quote from a British publication asserting that one-tenth of
England's population was feebleminded due to "random output of unrestricted
breeding." In a letter, the Eagle editor asked Sanger, "Is that a fair
estimate? What percentage of this country's population is deficient for the
same reasons?" Sanger wrote her response on the letter: "70% below 15
year intellect." Her secretary then formally typed a response, "Mrs. Sanger
believes that 70% of this country's population has an intellect of less than
15 years."37 Her magazine, Birth Control Review, featured an article with a
similar view. "The Purpose of Eugenics" stated, "Expert army investigators
disclosed the startling fact that fully 70 per cent of the constituents of this
huge army had a mental capacity below ... fourteen years."38

When lobbying against the growing demographics of the defective,
Sanger commonly cited eugenic theory as unimpeachable fact. For example,
she followed one fusillade of population reduction rhetoric by assuring,
"The opinions which I summarize here are not so much my own,
originally, as those of medical authorities who have made deep and careful
investigations."39

Sanger was willing to employ striking language to argue against the
inherent misery and defect of large families. In her book, U70man and the
New Race, she bluntly declared, "Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther
in demonstrating the immorality oflarge families, but since there is still
an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who
find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful
thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."40

At times, she publicly advocated extermination of so-called human
weeds to bolster her own views. For example, her August 15, 1925, Collier's
magazine guest editorial entitled "Is Race Suicide Probable?" argued the
case for birth control by quoting eminent botanist and radical eugenicist
Luther Burbank, "to whom American civilization is deeply indebted."
Quoting Burbank, Sanger's opinion piece continued, "America ... is like a
garden in which the gardener pays no attention to the weeds. Our criminals
are our weeds, and weeds breed fast and are intensely hardy. They must be
eliminated. Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce. Allover
the country to-day we have enormous insane asylums and similar institutions
where we nourish the unfit and criminal instead of exterminating
them. Nature eliminates the weeds, but we turn them into parasites and
allow them to reproduce."41

Sanger surrounded herself with some of the eugenics movement's most
outspoken racists and white supremacists. Chief among them was Lothrop
Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide o/Color Against White World Supremacy.
Stoddard's book, devoted to the notion of a superior Nordic race, became a
eugenic gospel. It warned: "'Finally perish!' That is the exact alternative
which confronts the white race .... If white civilization goes down, the
white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant
colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption
.... Not to-day, nor yet to-morrow; perhaps not for generations; but
surely in the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately
doomed."42

Stoddard added the eugenic maxim, "We now know that men are not,
and never will be, equal. We know that environment and education can
develop only what heredity brings." Stoddard's solution? "Just as we isolate
bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and
amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in
its native habitat ... [which will] as with all organisms, eventually limit ...
its influence."43

Shortly after Stoddard's landmark book was published in 1920, Sanger
invited him to join the board of directors of her American Birth Control
League, a position he retained for years. Likewise, Stoddard retained a key
position as a member of the conference committee of the First American
Birth Control Conference.44

Another Sanger colleague was Yale economics professor Irving Fisher, a
leader of the Eugenics Research Association. It was Fisher who had told the
Second National Congress on Race Betterment, "Gentlemen and Ladies,
you have not any idea unless you have studied this subject mathematically,
how rapidly we could exterminate this contamination if we really got at it,
or how rapidly the contamination goes on if we do not get at it."45 Fisher
also served on Sanger's Committee for the First American Birth Control
Conference, and lectured at her birth control events. Some of these events
were unofficial gatherings to discuss wider eugenic action. In a typical
exchange before one such lecture in March of 1925, Laughlin wrote to
Fisher, "I have received a letter from Mrs. Sanger verifying your date for
the round-table discussion .... Dr. Davenport and I can meet you ... thirty
minutes before Mrs. Sanger's conference opens ... so that we three can
then confer on the business in hand in reference to our membership on the
International Commission of Eugenics."46

Henry Pratt Fairchild served as one of Sanger's chief organizers and major
correspondentsY Fairchild became renowned for his virulent anti-immigrant
and anti-ethnic polemic, The Melting Pot Mistake. Fairchild argued,
"Unrestricted immigration ... was slowly, insidiously, irresistibly eating away
the very heart of the United States. What was being melted in the great
Melting Pot, losing all form and symmetry, all beauty and character, all nobility
and usefulness, was the American nationality itself." Like Stoddard,
Fairchild compared ethnic minorities to a vile bacterium. "But in the case of a
nationality," warned Fairchild, "the foreign particle does not become a part of
the nationality until he has become assimilated to it. Previous to that time, he
is an extraneous factor, like undigested, and possibly indigestible, matter in
the body of a living organism. That being the case, the only way he can alter
the nationality is by injuring it, by impeding its functions."48 Like Fisher,
Fairchild offered key speeches at Sanger's conferences, such as the 1925 Sixth
International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference and the 1927
World Population Conference. In 1929, he became vice president and board
member of Sanger's central lobbying group, the National Committee for
Federal Legislation on Birth Control; in 1931 he served on the advisory board
of Sanger's Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, and later he served as vice
president of the Birth Control Federation of America.49

Stoddard, Fairchild and Fisher were just three of the many eugenicists
working in close association with Sanger and her birth control movement.
Therefore, even though Sanger was not a racist or an anti-Semite herself,
she openly welcomed the worst elements of both into the birth control
movement. This provided legitimacy and greater currency for a eugenics
movement that thrived by subverting progressive platforms to achieve its
goals of Nordic racial superiority and ethnic banishment for everyone else.

***

Because so many American eugenic leaders occupied key positions within
the birth control movement, 50and because so much of Sanger's rhetoric on
suppressing defective immigration echoed standard eugenic vitriol on the
topic,5l and because the chief aims of both organizations included mass
sterilization and sequestration, Sanger came to view eugenics and her
movement as two sides of the same coin. She consistently courted leaders
of the eugenics movement, seeking their acceptance, and periodically
maneuvering for a merger of sorts.

The chief obstacle to this merger was Sanger's failure to embrace what
was known as constructive eugenics. She argued for an aggressive program of
negative eugenics, that is, the elimination of the unfit through mass sterilization
and sequestration. 52But she did not endorse constructive eugenics,
that is, higher birth rates for those families the movement saw as superior.53
Moreover, Sanger believed that until mass sterilization took hold, lower
class women should practice intelligent birth control by planning families,
employing contraception, and spacing their children. This notion split the
eugenic leadership.

Some key eugenicists believed birth control was an admirable first step
until more coercive measures could be imposed. However, other leaders
felt Sanger's approach was a lamentable half-measure that sent the wrong
message. A telling editorial in Eugenical News declared that the leaders of
American eugenics would be willing to grant Sanger's crusade "hearty support"
if only she would drop her opposition to larger families for the fit,
and "advocate differential fecundity [reproductive rates] on the basis of
natural worth."54

In other words, Sanger's insistence on birth control for all women, even
women of so-called good families, made her movement unpalatable to the
male-dominated eugenics establishment. But on this point she would not
yield. In many ways this alienated her from eugenics' highest echelons.
Even still, Sanger continued to drape herself in the flag of mainstream
eugenics, keeping as many major eugenic leaders as close as possible, and
pressing others to join her.

Typical was her attempt on October 6,1921, to coax eugenicist Henry
Osborn, president of the New York's Museum of Natural History, to join
ranks with the First American Birth Control Conference. "We are most
anxious to have you become affiliated with this group and to have your
permission to add your name to the Conference Committee." When he
did not reply, Sanger sent a duplicate letter five days later. Her answer
came on October 21, not from Osborn, but from Davenport. Davenport,
who vigorously opposed Sanger's efforts, replied that Osborn "believes
that a certain amount of 'birth control' should properly be exercised by the
white race, as it is by many of the so-called savage races. I imagine, however,
that he is less interested in the statistical reduction in the size of the
family than he is in bringing about a qualitative result by which the defective
strains should have, on the average, very small families and the efficient
strains, of different social levels, should have relatively larger families."
Davenport declined on Osborn's behalf, adding, "Propaganda for
birth control at this time may well do more harm than good and he is
unwilling to associate himself with the forthcoming Birth Control
Conference ... [since] there is grave doubt whether it will work out the
advancement of the race."55

Sanger kept trying. On February 11, 1925, she wrote directly to
Davenport, inviting him to become a vice president of the Sixth
International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. Within
forty-eight hours, America's cardinal eugenicist sharply declined. "As to
any official connection on my part with the conference as vice president, or
officially recognized participant or supporter, that is, for reasons which I
have already expressed to you in early letters, not possible. For one thing,
the confusion of eugenics (which in its application to humans is qualitative)
with birth control (which as set forth by most of its propagandists, is quantitative)
is, or was considerable and the association of the director of the
Eugenics Record Office with the Birth Control Conference would only
serve to confuse the distinction. I trust, therefore, you will appreciate my
reasons for not wishing to appear as a supporter of the Birth Control
League or of the conference. "56

Not willing to take no for an answer, Sanger immediately wrote to
Laughlin at Cold Spring Harbor, asking him to join a roundtable discussion
at the conference. Among the conference topics devoted to eugenics
was a daylong session entitled, "Sterilization, Crime, Eugenics, Biological
Fertility and Sterility." Irving Fisher was considering participating, and by
mentioning Fisher's name, Sanger hoped to entice Laughlin. When
Laughlin did not reply immediately, Sanger sent him a second letter at the
Carnegie Institution in Washington on March 23, and then a third to Cold
Spring Harbor on March 24. Fisher finally accepted and then wired as
much to Laughlin, who then also accepted for the afternoon portion of the
eugenic program. 57

Ironically, during one of the conference's sparsely attended administrative
sessions, when Sanger was undoubtedly absent, conservative eugenic
theorist Roswell Johnson took the floor to quickly usher through a special
"eugenic" resolution advocating larger families for the fit. It was exactly
what Sanger opposed.58

Johnson, coauthor of the widely used textbook Applied Eugenics, introduced
the resolution and marshaled a majority from the slight attendance
while Sanger's main organizers were presumably out of earshot. It read:
"Resolved, that this Conference believes that persons whose progeny give
promise of being of decided value to the community should be encouraged
to bear as large families, properly spaced, as they feel they feasibly can."
Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic energetically pounced on the
resolution. 59

Outraged, Sanger immediately repudiated the resolution-unconcerned
with whether or not she alienated her allies in the mainstream
eugenics movement. "It is my belief," she declared in the next available volume
of Birth Control Review, "that the so-called 'eugenic' resolution, passed
at the final session of the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth
Control Conference, has created a lamentable confusion .... It was interpreted
by the press as indicating that we believed we could actually increase
the size of families among the 'superior' classes by passing resolutions recommending
larger families. "60

Despite the public row, Sanger continued to push for a merger with the
Eugenics Research Association. The ERA had considered affiliation, but
eventually declined. "For the time being ... [the organization] would not
seek formal affiliation with the Birth Control Conference."6\ Yet the overlap
between Sanger's organizations and the most extreme eugenic bodies
continued. The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1922, was the key
advocacy and propaganda wing of the movement. Its board of directors,
which included Davenport and Laughlin, also included two men who
served on Sanger's organizational and conference boards, University of
Michigan president Clarence C. Little and racist author Henry Pratt
Fairchild. Moreover, the American Eugenics Society's advisory council
included a number of men who also served in official capacities with
Sanger's various organizations, including Harvard sociologist Edward East,
psychologist Adolf Meyer, and Rockefeller Foundation medical director
William Welch.62

Therefore, it was only natural that the issue of merger continued to
resurface, especially since Sanger's conferences and her publication, Birth
Control Review, continued to trumpet the classic eugenic cause, often in the
most caustic language. For example, a February 1924 birth control conference
in Syracuse featured a paper entitled "Birth Control as Viewed by a
Sociologist." The speech argued, "We need a eugenic program and by that
I mean a program that seeks to improve the quality of our population, to
make a stronger, brainier, and better race of men and women. This will
require an effort to increase the number of superior and diminish that of
the inferior and the weakling .... It is quite important that we cut down on
the now large numbers of the unfit-the physical, mental and moral subnormals."
This speech was quickly reprinted in the May 1924 issue of Birth
Control Review, with the eugenic remarks highlighted in a special subsection
headlined "Eugenics and Birth Control."63

In the December 1924 Birth Control Review, another typical article, this
one by eugenicist John C. Duvall, was simply titled "The Purpose of
Eugenics." In a section subtitled "Dangerous Human Pests," Duvall
explained, "We therefore actually subsidize the propagation of the Jukes
and thousands of others of their kind through the promiscuous dispensation
of charitable relief, thereby allowing these classes of degenerates to
poison society with their unbridled prolific scum, so that at the present
time there are about one-half million of this type receiving attention in
publicly maintained institutions, while thousands of others are at large to
the detriment of our finer elements." The article added thoughts about
eradicating such a problem. "It is interesting to note that there is no hesitation
to interfere with the course of nature when we desire to eliminate or
prevent a superfluity of rodents, insects or other pests; but when it comes
to the elimination of the immeasurably more dangerous human pest, we
blindly adhere to the inconsistent dogmatic doctrine that man has a perfect
right to control all nature with the exception of himself."64 It was the second
time that year that Sanger's magazine had published virtually the same
phrases declaring lower classes to be more dangerous than rats and bugs.65
Such denunciations were commonplace in Birth Control Review.

No wonder then that in 1928, leaders of the American Eugenics Society
began to suggest that its own monthly publication of eugenic proselytism,
Eugenics, merge with Sanger's Birth Control Review. Leon Whitney, execu
tive secretary of the American Eugenics Society and a Sanger ally, wrote
Davenport on April 3, 1928, "It would be an excellent thing if both the
American Birth Control League and the American Eugenics Society used
the same magazine as their official organ, especially since they were both
interested so much in the same problems." Whitney took the liberty of
meeting with Sanger on the question, and reported to colleagues, "She felt
very strongly about eugenics and seemed to see the whole problem of birth
control as a eugenical problem." As to combining their publications, he
added, "Mrs. Sanger took very kindly to the idea and seemed to be as
enthusiastic about it as I was."66

But most of the eugenics movement's senior personalities recoiled at
the notion. Furious letters began to fly across the eugenics community. On
April 13, Paul Popenoe, who headed up California's Human Betterment
Society, reviewed the Whitney letter with racial theorist Madison Grant,
who happened to be traveling in Los Angeles. The next day, his agitation
obvious, Popenoe wrote Grant a letter marked "Confidential" at the top. "I
have been considerably disquieted by the letter you showed me yesterday,
suggesting a working alliance between the American Eugenics Society and
the American Birth Control League. In my judgment we have everything
to lose and nothing to gain by such an arrangement .... The latter society
... is controlled by a group that has been brought up on agitation and
emotional appeal instead of on research and education. With this group,
we would take on a large quantity of ready-made enemies which it has
accumulated, and we would gain allies who, while believing that they are
eugenists, really have no conception of what eugenics is.... "67

Popenoe reminded Grant that Sanger had personally repudiated the
Johnson Resolution in favor of larger families. "If it is desirable for us to
make a campaign in favor of contraception," stressed Popenoe in condescending
terms, "we are abundantly able to do so on our own account,
without enrolling a lot of sob sisters, grandstand players, and anarchists to
help us. We had a lunatic fringe in the eugenics movement in the early
days; we have been trying for 20 years to get rid of it and have finally done
so. Let's not take on another fringe of any kind as an ornament. This letter
is not for publication, but I have no objection to your showing it to Mr.
Whitney or any other official of the American Eugenics Society .... "68

Grant dashed off an urgent missive to Whitney the next day, making
clear, "I am definitely opposed to any connection with them .... When we
organized the Eugenics Society, it was decided that we could keep clear of
Birth Control, as it was a feminist movement and would bring a lot of
unnecessary enemies .... I am pretty sure that Dr. Davenport and Prof.
Osborn would agree with me that we had better go our own way indefinitely."
Grant copied Davenport.69

Davenport was traveling when the letters started flying. On his return,
he immediately began to rally the movement's leading figures against any
"alliance with Mrs. Sanger." Davenport emphasized his feelings in a letter
to Whitney. "Mrs. Sanger is a charming woman," he began, "and I have no
doubt about the seriousness of her effort to do good. I have no doubt, also,
that she may feel very strongly about eugenics. I have very grave doubts
whether she has any clear idea of what eugenics is.... We have attached to
the word, eugenics, the names of Mrs. E. H. Harriman and Andrew
Carnegie-persons with an unsullied personal reputation, whose names
connote good judgment and great means. Such valued associations have
given to the word, eugenics, great social value and it is that which various
organizations want to seize."70

He continued, "Now comes along Mrs. Sanger who feels that birth
control does not taste in the mouth so well as eugenics and she thinks that
birth control is the same as eugenics, and eugenics is birth control, and she
would, naturally, seize with avidity a proposal that we should blend birth
control and eugenics in some way, such as the proposed [joint] magazine
.... The whole birth control movement seems to me a quagmire, out of
which eugenics should keep."7l

Davenport concluded with a clear threat to steer clear of any merger
talk, or else. "I am interested in the work of the American Eugenics
Society," he stated, "but I am more interested in preserving the connotation
of eugenics unsullied and I should feel that if the Eugenics Society tied
up with the birth control movement that it would be necessary for the
Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Institution of Washington to
withdraw its moral support."72

But the idea of a merger between eugenic and birth control groups
never subsided. By the 1930s, both movements had fragmented into
numerous competing and overlapping entities-many with similar
names. Sanger herself had resigned from the American Birth Control
League to spearhead other national birth control organizations. In 1933,
when the Depression financially crippled many eugenics organizations, a
union was again suggested. This time the idea was to merge the American
Birth Control League and the American Eugenics Society precisely
because the concept of a birth control organization now free of Sanger's
strong will-but flush with funds-was attractive. But as all learned, no
organization associated with birth control, whether or not Sanger was
still associated with it, could be free from the presence of the birth control
movement's founder.

On February 9, 1933, Fairchild wrote to Harry Perkins, president of
the American Eugenics Society. "For two or three days I have been meaning
to write to you, to report on recent developments. Things are moving
pretty fast. Miss Topping has been asked by the Board of the A.B.C.L.
[American Birth Control League] to spend two weeks or so interviewing
various people, especially those not connected with any of the organizations
involved, about the desirability of a merger .... Last Sunday I had a
chance to talk with Margaret Sanger, and found her enthusiastic and
entirely ready to cooperate. So about the only thing that remains to make it
unanimous is an assurance that a working majority of the Board of the
League is favorably inclined. There is every evidence that that requirement
can be met. When that point is reached the main remaining question at
issue will be that of finances. The Eugenics Society has none anyway, so
that is easily disposed of. The main question is whether the supporters of
the League, particularly the Rockefeller interests, will continue, or enlarge
their contributions in case a merger is carried out."73

Within a month, the idea was again dead. "It looks as if the merger,
after all, will not materialize in the immediate future," Fairchild informed
Perkins. "It is the same old difficulty. The majority of the Board of the
League seems to be in favor of a merger ... a pet dream ... cherished for
years. However, they absolutely balk at the mention of Margaret Sanger.
They all profess to love her dearly, and admit that she is one of the biggest
women in the world, but they say that it is utterly impossible to work with
her, and that any association which had her on its Board would go to pieces
in a very short time, etc., etc., etc."74

Refusals by eugenic stalwarts carried their own organizational dangers.
Fairchild and others actually feared Sanger would try to absorb large parts
of the eugenics movement into her own. "As you may know," Fairchild
warned Perkins, "I think the League is going to try to get a large number of
the members of our Board and Advisory Council on to their Board. I shall
not assist them in this effort, as I do not think the League is now, or ever
can be as an independent organization, competent to function effectively in
the field of Eugenics, although that is now their great objective. If, however,
they do succeed in getting several of our members on their Board, it
may make it possible for us to over-ride the objections to Mrs. Sanger by
force of ballots if this ever seems desirable. "75

The Great Depression continued to nudge the causes together. Still
pending was the question of which movement would absorb the other.
Perkins received yet another frank letter in mid May of 1933 from Popenoe.
"Regarding amalgamation with The American Birth Control League,"
Popenoe wrote, "all of us out here were opposed to such a move when
Whitney took it up five or six years ago and got in some premature and
unfavorable publicity. Since then, conditions have changed a good deal.
Mrs. Sanger's withdrawal from the League, followed by that of many of her
admirers and of her husband's financial support, has crippled the League
very badly in a financial way and it has also lost prestige scientifically for
these and other reasons and because other agencies are now actively in the
field .... The Birth Control League now has much less bargaining power
than it had five or six years ago and if a coalition were worked out it could
not expect to get such favorable terms as it would have asked for at that time.
The same unfortunately applies in still greater measure to The American
Eugenics Society because of its present depressed finances."76

Popenoe added candidly, "In effect, I should be perfectly willing to see
the Eugenics Society swallow the Birth Control League .... I should not
like to see the reverse situation in which the Birth Control League would
swallow the Eugenics Society and tie us all up with its slogans and campaign
practices .... If it comes to definite negotiations, the Birth Control
people will naturally hold out for all they can get, but I think that a good
poker player could get some big concessions from them."n

But no amount of maneuvering or economic desperation or organizational
necessity would allow the equally doctrinaire movements to find a
middle ground. The old men of eugenics would not permit it so long as
Sanger would not compromise. Each side believed they possessed the more
genuine eugenic truth. Both movements roamed the biological landscape in
perpetual parallel, following the same lines but never uniting. Moreover,
the thin space between the groups was mined. Once, on May 22, 1936, the
executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, George Reid
Andrews, circulated to the directors a list of prestigious names to consider
adding to the board. Sanger's name appeared on page one. Two weeks later
Perkins received a handwritten note from another society officer: "Mr.
Andrews has been dismissed ... with no opportunity to present his case."78

Sanger went on to lead numerous reform and women's advocacy organizations
around the world. Her crusades evolved from birth control and
contraception into sex education and world population control. She championed
the cause of women on all continents and became an inspiring fig
ure to successive generations. Her very name became enshrined as a beacon
of goodwill and human rights.

But she never lost her eugenic raison d'etre, nor her fiery determination to
eliminate the unfit. For instance, years after Sanger launched birth control,
she was honored at a luncheon in the Hotel Roosevelt in ew York. Her
acceptance speech harkened back to the original nature of her devotion to
her cause. "Let us not forget," she urged, "that these billions, millions, thousands
of people are increasing, expanding, exploding at a terrific rate every
year. Africa, Asia, South America are made up of more than a billion human
beings, miserable, poor, illiterate labor slaves, whether they are called that or
not; a billion hungry men and women always in the famine zone yet reproducing
themselves in the blind struggle for survival and perpetuation .... 79

"The brains, initiative, thrift and progress of the self supporting, creative
human being are called upon to support the ever increasing and
numerous dependent, delinquent and unbalanced masses .... I wonder how
many of you realize that the population of the British Isles in Shakespeare's
time was scarcely more than six millions, yet out of these few millions came
the explorers, the pioneers, the poets, the Pilgrims and the courageous
founders of these United States of America. What is England producing
today with her hungry fifty million human beings struggling for survival?
She had then a race of quality, now it's merely quantity. One forgets that
the Italy of the Renaissance, of the painters, the sculptors, the architects,
was a loose collection of small towns-a tiny population that was yet the
nursery of geniuses. There again quality rises supreme above quantity.80

"This twentieth century of ours has seen the most rapid multiplication
of human beings in our history, quantity without quality, however .... Stress
quality as a prime essential in the birth and survival of our population .... 81

"[The] suggestion I would offer as one worthy of national consideration
is that of decreasing the progeny of those human beings afflicted with
transmissible diseases and dysgenic qualities of body and mind. While our
present Federal Governmental Santa Clauses have their hands in the taxpayer's
pockets, why not in their generous giving mood be constructive and
provide for sterilizing as well as giving a pension, dole-call it what you
may-to the feebleminded and the victims of transmissible, congenital diseases?
Such a program would be a sound future investment as well as a
kindness to the couples themselves by preventing the birth of dozens of
their progeny to become burdens, even criminals of another generation."82

Sanger did not deliver this speech in the heyday of Roaring Twenties
eugenics, nor in the clutches of Depression-era desperation, nor even in a
world torn apart by war. She was speaking at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting
of the Planned Parenthood Federation on October 25,1950. A transcript
of her remarks was distributed to the worldwide press. A pamphlet was also
distributed, entitled "Books on Planned Parenthood," which listed seven
major topics, one of which was "Eugenics." The list of eugenic books and
pamphlets included the familiar dogmatic publications from the 1930s covering
such topics as "selective sterilization" and "the goal of eugenics."83

Almost three years later, on May 5, 1953, Sanger reviewed the goals of a
new family planning organization-with no change of heart. Writing on
International Planned Parenthood Federation letterhead, Sanger asserted
to a London eugenic colleague, "I appreciate that there is a difference of
opinion as what a Planned Parenthood Federation should want or aim to
do, but I do not see how we could leave out of its aims some of the eugenic
principles that are basically sound in constructing a decent civilization."84

Margaret Sanger gave hope to multitudes. For many, she redefined
hope. In the process, she split a nation. But when the smoke cleared on the
great biological torment of the twentieth century, Margaret Sanger's movement
stands as a powerful example of American eugenics' ability to pervade,
infect and distort the most dedicated causes and the most visionary
reformers. None was untouchable. If one who loved humanity as much as
Sanger could only love a small fraction of it, her story stands as one of the
saddest chapters in the history of eugenics.

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