The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, June 24, 2024

Notably: The historian Steven Hahn writes perceptively in Illiberal America (2024) that “illiberal solutions always seemed the resort for liberal-directed problems.” Case in point: the eugenics movement of the 1920s in America was very much a liberal project championed by the economist Irving Fisher and, most of all, by Margaret Sanger, who’d founded the Birth Control League in 1921 to “elevate the function of motherhood,” but also to develop “a race of well-born children” (Sanger’s words) and advocate “sterilization of the insane and feeble-minded.  Speaking no differently than Jim Crow’s bigots, she saw a “menace to civilization” in the “lack of balance between the birthrate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ and saw “no more urgent problem” than the “over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” (The headline of a Sanger biography’s review in The New York Times in 1992: “Margaret Sanger, Warrior for Women’s Rights.”) She held a national conference on birth control framed by those principles in December 1921. Participants were a who’s who of liberalism. They included Herbert Croly, the editor of The New Republic, Will Durant (though I’m hesitant to call him a liberal: these days he’d be to the right of Patrick Buchanan), Theodore Dreiser, Havelock Ellis, and Winston Churchill (no liberal, that one). Durant in a footnote in Our Oriental Heritage had written: “Blood, as distinct from race, may affect a civilization in the sense that a nation may be retarded or advanced by breeding from the biologically (not racially) worse or better strains among the people.” The philosophy, which Theodore Roosevelt had loved in his day (favoring sterilization of criminals and the feebleminded), would culminate in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1927 opinion upholding legislation giving government authority to sterilize “imbeciles,” and one of Holmes’s most repellant phrases (there were so many from that justice too often too wrongly considered a stylist): “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Sanger supported the decision. Holmes appears to have been reincarnated as French novelist Michel Houellebecq. In 2020, Planned Parenthood announced it would remove Margaret Sanger’s name from its Manhattan health center and from an award. I’ve never been comfortable with the erasure of history or the canceling of individuals in most contexts. But removing a name here and there is neither. It’s more of a proper reckoning, the way laws change, the way morals change. We are not imprisoned by “founders,” a worthy lesson to keep in mind about those other ones, who tend to stifle more than inform our present, or our more humane reparations toward the future. 

—P.T.

 

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Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate “product of her time.” Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated. Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan at a rally in New Jersey to generate support for birth control. And even though she eventually distanced herself from the eugenics movement because of its hard turn to explicit racism, she endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which allowed states to sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge — a ruling that led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the 20th century. […] We don’t know what was in Sanger’s heart, and we don’t need to in order to condemn her harmful choices. What we have is a history of focusing on white womanhood relentlessly. Whether our founder was a racist is not a simple yes or no question. Our reckoning is understanding her full legacy, and its impact. Our reckoning is the work that comes next. And the first step is making Margaret Sanger less prominent in our present and future. 

–From From Alexis McGill Johnson, from “I’m the Head of Planned Parenthood. We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder,” The New York Times, April 17, 2021.

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