Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xliv:4 (Spring, 2014), 475–508. WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? Trent MacNamara Why “Race Suicide”? Cultural Factors in U.S. Fertility Decline, 1903–1908 “If in Europe they have but four Births to a marriage,” wrote Ben Franklin in 1751, “we may here reckon eight.” Franklin’s near-accurate assessment of abun- dant American fertility inspired Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798) linking widespread misery to unchecked human birth. Yet even as Malthus wrote, Ameri- can birthrates were beginning to decline. Total fertility rates fell steadily through the 1930s, when they brieºy dipped below re- placement level before booming (through the early 1960s), busting (during the 1960s and 1970s), and leveling off at 2.0 or so, where they remain.1 The challenge of isolating underlying causes and processes in fertility declines like the American one has frustrated generations of demographers, historians, and other scholars of reproductive eth- ics. No consensus about how to explain fertility differences across time and space, or even about whether such explanation is feasible, has emerged. Since quantiªable socioeconomic indicators alone do not appear to be sufªcient, demographers have begun to pay in- creasing (and increasingly sophisticated) attention to qualitative and “cultural” evidence as a nexus of contingency in historical fer- tility behavior.2 Trent MacNamara is a Ph.D. candidate, Dept. of History, Columbia University. © 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00611 1 For the timing of U.S. fertility decline, see Ansley J. Coale and Melvin Zelnik, New Esti- mates of Fertility and Population in the United States (Princeton, 1963). For recent research that challenges Coale and Zelnik’s estimates, see J. David Hacker, “Rethinking the ‘Early’ Decline of Marital Fertility in the United States,” Demography, XL (2003), 605–620. 2 Much of the skepticism regarding purely quantitative macrolevel approaches to fertility decline stems from the reports of the Princeton European Fertility Project (efp), a large-scale inquiry into the origins of fertility decline in 700 provinces in Europe. The project discovered no measurable indicator or set of indicators that could reliably predict fertility transitions across that continent. The efp has since been criticized for working at too high a level of ag- gregation, but its key conclusion about the importance of “cultural factors” in explaining fer- tility change has remained robust. See Susan Cotts Watkins, “Conclusions,” and Barbara A. Anderson, “Regional and Cultural Factors in the Decline of Marital Fertility in Europe,” in Watkins and Coale (eds.), The Decline of Fertility in Europe (Princeton, 1986), 420–449, 293– 313. For subsequent work on cultural approaches to fertility decline, see Robert A. Pollak and Watkins “Cultural and Economic Approaches to Fertility: Proper Marriage or Mesalliance?” Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 476 | TRENT MACNAMARA Anthropologists and historians have not always appreciated demographers’ resort to culture, often criticizing it as a “black box” or “residual” view, in which culture serves as an enigmatic wild card rather than a historically and locally speciªc set of patterns and dispositions for interpreting and acting. Though some recent de- mographic work actively sought to avoid treating culture as merely the qualitative leftovers from quantiªcation—typically by disag- gregating social groupings and incorporating historical and ethno- graphic context—culture is still more commonly treated as an ethnolinguistic means of transmitting novel ideas about reproduc- tion rather than a dynamic and substantial context for the develop- ment of those ideas.3 This approach is understandable: Historical demographers tend to shy away from the inexactitudes of qualitative research; most cultural assumptions are difªcult, if not impossible, to meas- ure empirically. Yet the ability of traditional quantitative demo- graphic methods to explain fertility trends without supplemental qualitative research has attracted considerable skepticism. As van de Walle wrote in 1980, “Non-statistical evidence...isthe only one capable of shedding light on...therole of psychological Population and Development Review, XIX (1993), 467–496; Anthony T. Carter, “Does Culture Matter? The Case of the Demographic Transition,” Historical Methods, XXI (1988), 164–169; E. A. Hammel, “A Theory of Culture for Demography,” Population and Development Review, XVI (1990), 455–485; David I. Kertzer and Tom Fricke, “Toward an Anthropological De- mography,” in idem (eds.), Anthropological Demography: Towards a New Synthesis (Chicago, 1997), 1–35. For an application of ethnographic methods to the study of historical fertility pat- terns, see Jane C. and Peter T. Schneider, Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860–1980 (Tucson, 1996). For the United States, see Mark J. Stern, Society and Family Strategy: Erie County, New York, 1850–1920 (Albany, 1987). Early historical demography was not exclusively focused on quantitative and socioeconomic indicators. J. A. and Olive Banks incorporated cultural inquiry into their studies of fertility in England, Prosperity and Par- enthood (London, 1954), and Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (Liverpool, 1964). Even “classic” demographic-transition theorists allowed for the importance of culture in the timing of fertility decline. See Frank Notestein, “Population—The Long View,” in Theodore W. Schultz (ed.), Food for the World (Chicago, 1945), 40–57. For a critical overview of much of this historical-demographic literature by a historian concerned with the particular- ity of human experience, see Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (New York, 1996), 1–66. 3 Focus on culture as a means of transmission grows from the groundbreaking work on such ethnolinguistic barriers to fertility innovation as Ron Lesthaeghe, The Decline of Belgian Fertil- ity, 1800–1970 (Princeton, 1977), and Watkins, “Conclusions.” But as Kevin McQuillan points out—in Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour: Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750– 1870 (Montreal, 1999), 5—“One does not marry earlier or have a larger family simply because one speaks a certain language or lives in a certain area.” Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 477 motivations in the decline of marital fertility.” Three decades later, McNicoll observed, “The global fertility decline is now the stuff of history....Itsanalytical treatment relies more on qualitative argu- ment and less on the elaborate statistical modeling that had earlier sought (if less than wholly persuasively) to allocate causality.”4 Historians using qualitative sources, however, have heretofore focused overwhelmingly on a small coterie of activists in re- counting the history of birth control in America. According to Szreter, and van Poppel, they have ignored “the systematic diver- gence between popular values and practices and those of the tiny minority in the intelligentsia who made birth control and sexuality their business to discuss, investigate, and legislate.”5 This study uses the sources and methods of cultural history, as well as quantitative content analysis whenever possible, to suggest answers to a question usually posed by demographers rather than narrative historians: By what popular processes, and for what rea- sons, did fertility rates decline in many industrial nations during and after the nineteenth century? It investigates this issue using 605 arti- cles published in nine U.S. urban newspapers between 1903 and 1908—a period when millions of Americans, at the behest of their president, considered the origins of fertility decline and the nature of the reproductive good. These newspaper articles reveal how Americans living amid an acknowledged demographic change un- derstood the phenomenon. What were the changing social forces that ªrsthand observers perceived to be the reasons for declining fertility?6 In the sources sampled herein—including stories, editorials, and letters to the editor drawn from mainstream dailies aimed at the country’s respectable middle classes—Americans reºected on how different values in different generations produced more or fewer children. This material speaks to public ideals rather than to private 4 Etienne van de Walle, “Motivations and Technology in the Decline of French Fertility,” in Robert Wheaton and Tamara Hareven (eds.), Family and Sexuality in French History (Phila- delphia, 1980), 136; Geoffrey McNicoll, “Legacy, Policy, and Circumstance in Fertility Tran- sition,” Population and Development Review, XXXV (2009), 777–794. 5 Szreter, Robert A. Nye, and Frans van Poppel, “Fertility and Contraception during the Demographic Transition: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXIV (2003), 141–154. 6 The 605 articles came from Chicago Tribune (151), Washington Post (96), Boston Globe (92), New York Times (89), Los Angeles Times (57), Atlanta Constitution (49), Baltimore Sun (40), New-York Tribune (27), and Hartford Courant (4). See Table 3 for details about these papers. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 478 | TRENT