Why “Race Suicide”? Cultural Factors in U.S

Home , Headline, May 1903

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 abundant 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 replacement 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 ethics. 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 increasing (and increasingly sophisticated) attention to qualitative and “cultural” evidence as a nexus of contingency in historical fertility 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 fertility 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 demographic work actively sought to avoid treating culture as merely the qualitative leftovers from quantiªcation—typically by disag- gregating social groupings and incorporating historical and ethnographic context—culture is still more commonly treated as an ethnolinguistic means of transmitting novel ideas about reproduction rather than a dynamic and substantial context for the development 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 measure empirically. Yet the ability of traditional quantitative demographic 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 patterns, 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 argument 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 reasons, did fertility rates decline in many industrial nations during and after the nineteenth century? It investigates this issue using 605 articles 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 understood 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 MACNAMARA actions. Unlike a traditional historical-demographic data set, the sample provides no way to correlate individuals’ apparent invest- ment in one ideal or another with their completed fertility. But even if social ideals do not dictate social actuality, such ideals can provide a context for people’s decisions. What sort of ideas and be- haviors did members of a social group see as permissible (or not)? What was the path of least cultural resistance for nonradical couples contemplating the reproductive good? Why did observers believe that these couples accepted or rejected a particular path? Commen- tators acted as both moralists and amateur historians, reºecting on the relationship between attitude and behavior across time. The evidence generally suggests a strongly pronatal climate in the Progressive-era United States—particularly among men— presenting a variety of explanations for some Americans’ refusal to conform to that ideal. This study examines a selection of these explanations, their interrelationships, their assumptions, and their place in the wider culture of the United States. It also compares the views of cultural observers of the period with those of subsequent demographers, particularly theorists of the “second demographic transition.”

sources and methods All of the articles consulted herein emerged from a debate initiated by a letter that President Theo- dore Roosevelt originally wrote in private but consented to have published in 1903, excoriating the apparent tendency of Ameri- cans to produce ever-smaller families. Addressing a journalist who had noted the reluctance of young seamstresses in a small New York mill town to marry, Roosevelt wrote, “You touch upon what is fundamentally inªnitely more important than any other question in this country—that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial....Themanorwoman who deliberately avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selªsh as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race, and should be an object of con- temptuous abhorrence by all healthy people.”7 Roosevelt’s words caused a sensation among Americans un- used to hearing a statesman speak on matters so earthy and domes-

7 Theodore Roosevelt in Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (New York, 1903), 82.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 479 tic, much less in such scathing terms. The president’s demand that his much-mooted “strenuous life” be extended into the home (and bedroom) struck some Americans as barbaric, others as eccentric or comic. But in popular culture, his repeated condemnations of “race suicide,” which persisted until his death in 1919, inspired vo- luminous and mostly sympathetic responses, notably in the daily press, the period’s preeminent public forum. Thousands of journalists and citizens felt qualiªed to speak on the matter by virtue of their own life experiences. Reproductive rates had previously been too obscure or too awkward a topic to merit much public attention, but when Roosevelt made the issue commonplace, cultural observers felt sanctioned to contribute to a new body of social thought. As the editors of Life wrote in 1903, “Anyone can discuss it. It is a matter that concerns every family and is of universal interest; no wonder it is profusely considered.”8 Few middle-class Americans seem to have questioned Roose- velt’s ideas. Commentators on birthrates in the newspapers sampled herein either supported Roosevelt’s pronatal crusade (55 percent) or adopted a neutral position (29 percent); only 15 percent took issue with it. At the poles of opinion, pronatalism was even more dominant: 26 percent of writers were strongly in favor, whereas only 6 percent were not. Men and non-journalists tended to be more supportive than were women or newspaper writers (see Table 1). The pronatal slant of the coverage probably did not steer many American newspaper readers into reproductive decisions that they would not otherwise have made. U.S. total fertility rates, around 3.5 per woman in 1900, continued falling steadily after 1903. Even Roosevelt’s supporters generally doubted that moral exhortation would reverse that trajectory: “We do not believe that the words of any man or of any hundred men, however eminent, could effect any great change in a matter of this kind,” wrote an editor of The New York Times in 1903. Instead, the papers provided a public space in which such changes could be considered in light of social ideals.9 This study proceeds from two assumptions about the role of newspapers as reºections of public opinion. First, papers acted as

8 Life, March 12, 1903, 216. 9 “Dr. Andrews on Race Suicide,” New York Times, 13 Nov. 1903. A Boston Globe reader wrote, “Dear mothers, don’t you think we might let the baby subject fall through? If we talk for six months at the end of that time we shall still each hold her own opinion” (3 Nov. 1907).

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Total 25.6 29.8 29.4 9.9 5.3 (n ϭ 605) Female 16.2 24.3 17.6 25.7 16.2 (n ϭ 74) Male/likely male 26.9 30.5 31.1 7.7 3.8 (n ϭ 531) Male, 58.2 15.7 10.4 9.7 6.0 non-journalist (n ϭ 134) Journalist 11.5 37.2 44.1 6.3 1.3 (n ϭ 304) note Just 3% of the women were employed by the newspapers in which their words appeared, as opposed to 57% of the men. The non-journalist subset allows for comparison between men and women commenting as private citizens.

clearinghouses for conventional moral opinion. As Cooley wrote in 1909, “The essential function of the newspaper is to serve as a bulletin of important news and a medium for the interchange of ideas.” Its stock in trade was “organized gossip...thesort of inter- course that people formerly carried on at cross-road stores or over the back fence.” Second, editors avoided straying too far from the presumed opinions of their readerships. Bryce, another theorist of public opinion at the time, conceived of newspapers not only as “narrators” and “advocates” but also, most importantly, “as weath- ercocks.” “They indicate by their attitude what those who conduct them and are interested in their circulation take to be the prevailing opinion of their readers. It is...asanindex and mirror of public opinion that the press is looked to. This is the function it chieºy aims at discharging.”10 The corresponding idea of content analysis has a long history. Max Weber in 1910 and Alvan Tenney in 1912 proposed large- scale press-monitoring projects to record what Tenney called “social weather.” Although subsequent scholars often emphasized the role of newspapers in manufacturing public opinion rather than 10 Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York, 1911), 84; James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London, 1888), II, 263. Bryce’s analysis of newspapers has since been endorsed by contemporary scholars of public opinion: Carroll Glynn, Susan Herbst, Garrett O’Keefe, and Robert Y. Shapiro, Public Opinion (Boulder, 1999), 93–102, 381–415.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 481 ratifying it, others continued to see, and use, the press as a window on everyday assumptions and attitudes—particularly valuable regarding populations before the advent of scientiªc polling. Ac- cording to Bauer, “A text corpus is the representation and expression of a community that writes. CA [content analysis] allows us to construct indicators of worldviews, values, attitudes, opinions, prejudices and stereotypes, and compare these across communities. In other words, CA is public opinion research by other means.”11 Tenney and Weber’s proposals for content analysis were frustrated by logistical constraints. In the past decade, however, massive text-searchable databases have vastly reduced the time costs of compiling large volumes of thematically focused material. This study draws upon a sample gathered through keyword searches in one such database, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The primary search term for this study was race suicide—commonly used by all sides of the debate to introduce the issue—supplemented with birth rate (and) family (or) children. Excluded from the search results were duplicates (such as wire service reports), extremely short items (such as column ªllers), and articles that reported on large individual families but lacked analytical content (this type of article occurred 135 times, often under the headline “No Race Suicide Here”).12 Each article was coded for the presence of any of twenty-three “frames” regarding fertility decline—such social phenomena as economic self-interest, education, or religiosity—that contemporaries associated with falling birthrates. Each frame was devel- oped through the use of a grounded-theory approach, in which categories were continually reªned before coding. Frames of this kind, ªrst used in historical demography by Wilmoth and Ball, are a key feature of content analyses that go beyond word- frequency counts to more nuanced assessments of popular media content.13

11 Martin W. Bauer, “Classical Content Analysis: A Review,” in idem and George Gaskell (eds.), Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound: A Practical Handbook (Thousand Oaks, 2000), 133–134. 12 For Weber, Tenney, and other predecesors of content analysis, see Klaus Krippendorff, Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (Thousand Oaks, 2013), 4–7. 13 See John R. Wilmoth and Patrick Ball, “The Population Debate in American Popular Magazines, 1946–90,” Population and Development Review, XVIII (1992), 631–668; Laura Stark and Hans-Peter Kohler, “The Debate over Low Fertility in the Popular Press: A Cross- National Comparison, 1998–1999,” Population Research and Policy Review, XXI (2002),

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 482 | TRENT MACNAMARA This study (see Table 2) measures the frequency of any mention of a framing device, regardless of a commentator’s level of emphasis or approval of its conventional meaning. Thus, in the case of, say, an article about religious law that mentioned education in passing, both the “religion” and “education” frames would be marked equally, as a single instance. Moreover, because the frames are intended as a measure of cultural salience rather than popularity, each frame’s frequency rating embodies the entire spectrum of opinion about it. For example, articles that either excoriated “luxury” as a suppressant of fertility, rejected this common framing device, or merely noted its prevalence would be marked equally under the rubric of “luxury.” Note that when commentators rejected one or another way of viewing fertility decline, they were not re- jecting the cultural salience or power of that view but merely argu- ing for another way of seeing fertility decline. Such rejections, rare as they were, overwhelmingly concerned two frames unpopular with birth controllers—“religion” and “nature”—and one frame unpopular with pronatalists—“economic rationality.” Eleven of the frames were classiªed as “explanatory,” meaning that they implied a cause for fertility decline. The remaining twelve were descriptive. In two cases, this division was not clear-cut. One of them, concerning the gender origins of fertility decisions, is discussed later. The other, “poverty,” includes both descriptions of large families as a phenomenon of the poor and explanations of fertility control as a means of avoiding poverty. The latter was classi- ªed with the explanatory frames because most of the commentators had more of an agenda than merely to notice the association of poverty with large families: On the one hand, pronatalists tended to shame the wealthy for viewing large families as unaffordable by citing the many poorer couples who managed to have them and/or to castigate the wealthy for adopting “luxurious” habits instead of producing children. On the other hand, birth-control advocates

535–574; idem, “The Popular Debate about Low Fertility: An Analysis of the German Press, 1993–2001,” European Journal of Population, XX (2004), 293–321. Stark and Kohler point out that text-searchable databases allow inclusion of articles in which the central focus is not the topic at hand, thus providing a fuller picture of fertility’s place in the matrix of cultural ideas. For media content analysis of fertility debates in the 2000s, see Katerina Georgiadis, “Fertile Debates: A Comparative Account of Low Fertility in the British and Greek National Press,” ibid., XXVII (2011), 243–262; Jessica Autumn Brown and Myra Marx Ferree, “Close Your Eyes and Think of England: Pronatalism in the British Print Media,” Gender and Society, XIX (2005), 5–24.

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Economic Economic circumstances reward smaller families. rationality Luxury Excessive desire for wealth and comfort suppresses childrearing. Poverty Large families are restricted to the economically backward; small families are a means of avoiding impoverishment. Religion Lower fertility reºects secularization. Nature Lower fertility reºects detachment from nature, natural law, or a sanctiªed notion of a biological continuum. City life Ideals and economics of urban life discourage childbearing. Landlord Urban landlords seek to exclude large families. discrimination Macrohistorical The course of civilization—modernization, progress, or factors decadence—leads to inevitable fertility decline. Education Expense and/or ideational content of education encourages smaller families. Health Mental and/or physical health considerations encourage smaller families. Women’s social Women’s extra-domestic ambitions discourage roles childrearing. descriptive and frequency in other frames meaning in the context of family size sample (%)

Female agency Women decide or have the right to 21.3 decide. Male agency Men decide or have the right to decide. 14.2 Female and Both sexes decide or have the right to 11.6 male agency decide. Native stock Falling birthrates concern “old stock” 9.7 Americans. Immigration Immigrants’ birthrates are treated 10.5 separately from those of the native-born. Legislation Birthrates are potentially inºuenced by 8.9 new public policies. African African-American birthrates are 2.6 Americans considered.

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Fertility abroad Falling birthrates outside the U.S. are 8.4 considered (excluding articles in which the only foreign country mentioned is France). Fertility in Falling birthrates in France are 6.4 France considered. Statistics Article contains precise demographic 16.3 statistics. Quality/ Speciªc mention is made of quality/ 7.7 Quantity quantity tradeoff in childbearing. Private Childbearing decisions are not a 2.1 legitimate public concern.

note Frequencies for explanatory frames listed in Table 3.

argued that poor families would do better ªnancially by limiting their number of children. In both cases, the implication was that increased economic calculation led to decreased family size. Since coding for content in this way demands countless minor subjective judgments and tends to neutralize rich layers of ambiguity, insinuation, emphasis, and interconnection, the exact percent- ages generated herein should be read with caution. They are best understood as approximations of the relative importance of various issues to contemporary observers. When apropos, representative quotations and comments illustrate the underlying qualitative complexity of the coded material. Though content analyses often focus on the internal complexities of, and relationships between, analytical categories, this study mostly does not. Instead, it relies on the frames as a form of background information, allowing us to understand their relative signiªcance within a debate that turned on broad assumptions about the good life. The parties to this debate were disproportionately male (85 percent of the sample), middle-class, and politically techno- cratic. Few females wrote for newspapers or occupied the kinds of public position that made their views newsworthy during the 1900s. Of the 605 articles, 304 primarily record the views of (usually anonymous but presumably male) newspaper reporters, edi-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 485 tors, and columnists. The 301 remaining articles primarily tran- scribe the views of people not employed by a newspaper, such as public speakers; only 25 percent of them record women’s (disproportionately pro–birth control) opinions. Other biases concern the newspapers’ politics and those of their readerships. The papers’ party afªliations differed, but most of them were only weakly partisan (see Table 3). In any event, Re- publican or Democratic afªliations were not necessarily good ba- rometers of opinion on social issues (Prohibition, for example, di- vided both major parties). More relevant is the status of each of these dailies as an establishment broadsheet pitched to the educated middle classes. The papers reºected the “progressivism” of many urban, educated Americans—that is, their support for social change insofar as it was overseen by people like themselves and did not fundamentally alter the status quo. Rural papers were less amenable to analysis because most of their “race suicide” coverage came in the form of wire-service reports. In a sample of ten small-town newspapers from a dairy- farming county in far northern New York State, for example, 130 articles on birthrates printed between 1903 and 1908 yielded just eight locally produced items—four editorials, three articles about individual large families in the county, and one article about local school enrollments. This scarcity of original content made the time costs of assembling a parallel rural sample prohibitive.14 The middle-class Americans likely to write for the sampled papers, or see their views printed therein, held vague and mostly unspoken assumptions about who composed the endangered “race.” Roosevelt himself was markedly unspeciªc in deªning it. In one speech on the subject, the president referred obliquely to “the average citizens, the average men and women who make up the nation.” What he and other commentators undoubtedly meant by such abstractions was the dominant culture to which they belonged—white, nonindigent, civically engaged and en- franchised, and native-born or assimilated. Tacitly excluded were three large groups—African Americans, unassimilated immigrants, and the white native indigent—who together comprised about

14 The newspapers, from St. Lawrence County, New York, are the Canton Commercial Ad- vertiser, Gouverneur Tribune-Press and Others, Hammond Advertiser, Madrid Herald, Massena Ob- server, Norwood News, Ogdensburg Advance, Ogdensburg Journal, Potsdam Courier-Freeman, and Potsdam Herald-Recorder.

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Table 3 Newspapers by Political Afªliation, Approval for Pronatalism, Circulation, and Rowell’s Classiªcation

CHICAGO WASHINGTON BOSTON NEW YORK LOS ANGELES TRIBUNE POST GLOBE TIMES TIMES Percentage of sample 25.0 15.9 15.2 14.7 9.4 Political afªliationa Republican Independent Independent Independent Independent Democrat Republican Percentage who support pronatalismb 60.3 53.6 54.3 43.8 65.0 Percentage who oppose pronatalismb 12.6 18.8 9.7 25.8 12.3 Circulationc 162,976 31,656 188,144 100,000 52,558 “Gold Marks”d Yes No No Yes No

ATLANTA BALTIMORE NEW YORK HARTFORD CONSTITUTION SUN TRIBUNE COURANT Percentage of sample 8.1 6.6 4.5 0.7 Political afªliationa Demoratic Independent Republican Republican Percentage who support pronatalismb 57.1 50.0 55.5 75.0 Percentage who oppose pronatalismb 2.0 14.0 14.8 0.0 Circulationc 38,590 66,980 65,850 12,872 “Gold Marks”d Yes Yes Yes Yes aAyer classiªed the Chicago Tribune as “Independent Republican.” On all other papers Rowell and Ayer agreed. b“Strong” or “mild” support/opposition. The overall average for support was 55.4%; for opposition it was 15.2%. cFor circulation ªgures that differed, the more exact ªgure is cited. Globe includes morning and evening edition. dRowell’s Directory bestowed “Gold Marks” on any paper the “advertisers [of which] value it more for the class and quality of its circulation than for the mere number of copies printed.” sources Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory (New York, 1907); N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Manual (Philadelphia, 1907). WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 487 one-quarter of the total population of the United States (then 76 million people).15

explaining fertility decline The observers understood falling birthrates as a moral issue concerning the rightful relationship of self to society. Most of them assumed that the driving force behind falling birthrates was a personal or family interest in restraining the costs of childbearing (economic and otherwise), which came at the expense of the long-term biological survival of the dominant culture. For the pronatalists whose views provided the baseline for public debate, the “selªsh” trend toward smaller families constituted a fundamental threat. U.S. total fertility had roughly halved in the past century; if that trend continued, American institutions would not be transmitted through the family; new immigrants would not assimilate; and the culture would fail. Hence, pronatalists derided adult peers who consciously limited themselves to fewer than three or four children—the numbers generally judged necessary to replace the population. “All important general laws bear hard at times on the individual,” chided a Catholic cardinal from Boston. A physician summing up all post-protozoan evolu- tion wrote, “Starting with the race which is all race and no individual at all, we may end up with the individual which is all individual—the race thus coming to an end.” Other pronatalists condemned their under-reproductive peers in less panoramic terms, referring to such speciªc “self-indulgent” transgressions as the prioritization of leisure, career, or wealth over children.16 Differences of degree, not kind, separated these pronatalists from their critics. Only a tiny minority of birth controllers chal- lenged the notion that individuals owed a reproductive debt to society; few pronatalists, in turn, advocated totally unrestrained fertility. But critics of the race-suicide position generally viewed the

15 Roosevelt, “Address before the National Congress of Mothers,” Washington, D.C., March 13, 1905, in Alfred Henry Lewis (ed.), Speeches and Messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1901– 1905 (Washington, D.C., 1906), 578; Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900 (Washington, D.C., 1902). The census of 1900 enumerated 8,883,991 “Negroes” (Census Bulletin 8, 19), 1,471,332 non-English speakers (II, 490), and 1,916,434 native white illiterates older than ten years (II, 413). Illiteracy is a proxy for indigence here because the U.S. government did not es- tablish a standard measure of poverty until the 1960s. 16 “New Books,” Washington Post, 12 Nov. 1904; “No Race Suicide—Gibbons,” New York Times, 20 Oct. 1907.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 488 | TRENT MACNAMARA immediate welfare of individuals or nuclear families, rather than any transcendent chain of being, as the primary frame of reference for reproductive ethics. “Large families are not the salvation of the nation,” a New York milliner said. “Better one child well brought up than a dozen neglected.” This “quality not quantity” argument dominated the rhetoric of the pro-birth-control minority; 36 percent of them made it explicitly, and even more of them made it im- plicitly. To them, birth control was the result of enlightened worldly self-interest that would ultimately beneªt society, another triumph of rational liberalism over the blind inertia of nature, patriarchy, and clerical fatalism.17 Far rarer was the argument, common later in the century, that reproductive control was an essentially private issue. “If people do not want to have children, whose business is it but their own?” demanded a Chicago women’s club speaker, sixty years before the U.S. Supreme Court arrived at the same position in Griswold v. Connecticut. Almost no one openly disputed Roosevelt and his allies’ basic framing of childbearing behavior as a public moral concern—only 10 percent of the opposition (2 percent of the total number of commentators).18 Within this broad self/society framework, commentators brought dozens of other issues to bear on fertility rates. Many of them (43 percent) invoked economic factors to explain at least some of the U.S. fertility decline. The next-most common frame, “cosmic factors”—including “religion” and “nature”—appeared in just 23 percent of the sample. Further hints at economic factors’ perceived importance are found in other frames—education, for example. Commentators referred more to the cost of educating children than to the content of the teaching as detrimental to fertility. Furthermore, many commentators perceived fertility decline as an inevitable result of macrohistorical factors strongly tied to long- term economic change (see Table 4). Interconnections of this kind link the frames in a vast causal

17 “The Question of Race Suicide,” New York Tribune, 13 Apr. 1903. An anonymous Roo- sevelt administration ªgure wrote, “No one would be less inclined than the President to ad- vise any man to marry who is clearly unable to support his family” (“The President,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Feb. 1906). 18 “Children Cost Too Much,” Los Angeles Times, 9 Dec. 1905. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) struck down a state anti-contraceptive law that violated a constitutional “right of pri- vacy.” This decision would later serve as a crucial basis for the Court’s pro-choice position in the abortion case Roe v. Wade.

Table 4 Explanatory Frames: Issues Understood to Inºuence Fertility Decline entire pro-birth male / male, non- sample pronatalist control female likely male journalist (n ϭ 605) (n ϭ 335) (n ϭ 92) (n ϭ 74) (n ϭ 531) (n ϭ 134)

Economic factors 42.6 41.7 48.9 45.9 42.2 54.5 Economic rationality 25.4 21.8 35.9 31.5 24.4 20.9 Luxury 21.1 28.1 9.8 16.4 22.2 38.1 Poverty 10.2 6.3 28.3 21.9 8.7 9.0 Cosmic factors 23.1 29.3 19.6 32.4 21.4 40.3 Religion 14.7 19.7 12.0 26.0 12.9 30.6 Nature 11.7 14.3 9.8 13.7 11.5 17.9 Urbanization 15.4 18.2 7.6 4.1 14.5 17.2 City life 9.6 11.0 4.3 2.7 10.6 10.4 Landlord discrimination 8.4 10.1 3.3 4.1 9.0 6.7 Macrohistorical factors 12.7 11.0 31.5 21.9 11.6 18.7 Education 10.1 11.3 8.7 16.4 9.1 11.2 Health 9.0 8.1 13.0 26.0 6.8 9.0 Women’s roles 5.6 5.7 4.3 8.2 5.3 7.5 note Percentage totals for categories in italics are less than the sum of their parts because one article could contain references to more than one frame. 490 | TRENT MACNAMARA web, both at the individual and aggregate level. Investigating each of these relationships is beyond the scope of this study. The focus herein remains primarily on the thematic umbrellas that broadly cover the frames—integrative features that quantitative coding can obscure even as it helps to clarify the relative importance of various issues to contemporary observers. Self and Society The ªrst order of business is to examine the ethical dichotomy of self and society, particularly in light of subsequent theory about social change in the twentieth century. Gener- ations of population scholars have examined this theme: “The idea that individualization played an important role in the rise of small families and childlessness was omnipresent in scholarly literature between the wars,” observes Van Bavel. In 1978, Wrigley wrote, “The key change was from a system of control through social insti- tution and custom to one in which the private choice of individual couples played a major part in governing the fertility rate.” Some historians also attributed fertility decline to the purportedly liberat- ing effects of the French and American Revolutions.19 The most widely noted theory of individualization was that of Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa in 1986, which introduced a “second demographic transition” (sdt), marked by increasing individual self-assertion, beginning in the West during the 1960s. “The linch- pin of the ªrst transition system has totally eroded,” Lesthaeghe wrote in 2010. “Collective behavior is no longer kept in check by a strong normative structure based on a familistic ideology supported by both Church and State. Instead, the new regime is governed by the primacy of individual choice.”20 This anti-authoritarian era saw a sexual revolution that “marked a forceful reaction to the notions that sex is conªned to marriage and mainly for procreation only,” a gender revolution “whereby women were no longer subservient to men and hus-

19 Jan Van Bavel, “Subreplacement Fertility in the West before the Baby Boom: Past and Current Perspectives,” Population Studies, LXIV (2010), 1–18. E. Anthony Wrigley, “Fertility Strategy for the Individual and the Group,” in Charles Tilly (ed.), Historical Studies of Changing Fertility (Princeton, 1978), 135–154. Wrigley quoted in Karen Oppenheim Mason, “Ex- plaining Fertility Transitions,” Demography, XXXIV (1997), 447. For political revolution and fertility, see Susan Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, 2009); Amy Kate Bailey, “How Personal Is the Political? Democratic Revolution and Fertility Decline,” Journal of Family History, XXXIV (2009), 407– 425; Rudolph Binion, “Marianne in the Home: Political Revolution and Fertility Transition in France and the United States,” Population: An English Selection, XIII (2001), 165–188. 20 Lesthaeghe, “The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition,” Population and Development Review, XXXVI (2010), 211–251.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 491 bands, but asserted the right to regulate their fertility.” Meanwhile, strictly economic visions of the good life waned in importance. Be- fore the 1960s, “prudent” familism had governed fertility decisions; parents focused on improving material living conditions for their children. When “post-material” values came to the fore, the automony and self-expression of individual adults trumped the traditional material ideals of the family. Van de Kaa summarized the core process of the ªrst transition as “rationalization” and of the second one as “individualization.”21 Morality and Rationality Continuing work along these lines underscores the importance of moral context for historical demography. Despite the difªculties of measuring moral change across time, Lesthaeghe and Wilson argued, “Any sustained reduction in fertility...requires a concurrent development of moral acceptabil- ity.” In their view, the “missing ingredient” in explaining Europe’s fertility transitions was “cultural, not structural.” Amid the “Kul- turkampf” of the late nineteenth century, “calculations of economic advantage associated with higher or lower fertility were far from being solely determined by the nature of household production. Rather, ideological, moral and religious convictions gained importance in an atmosphere of increasing polarization.”22 The sdt theory represents a revival of many of the concerns

21 Lesthaeghe, “Unfolding Story,” 216. Dirk van de Kaa, “The True Commonality: In Reºexive Modern Societies Fertility Is a Derivative,” Population Studies, LVIII (2004). On sdt, in English, see also Lesthaeghe, “The Second Demographic Transition in Western Countries: An Interpretation,” in Mason and An-Magritt Jensen (eds.), Gender and Family Change in Industrialized Countries (New York, 1995), 17–62; van de Kaa, “Europe’s Second Demographic Transition,” Population Bulletin, XLII (1987), 1–59; Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, “Value Orientations and the Second Demographic Transition (sdt) in Northern, Western and Southern Europe: An Update,” Demographic Research, III (2004), 45–86. For the U.S. case, see Lesthaeghe and Lisa Neidert, “The Second Demographic Transition in the United States: Exception or Textbook Example?” Population and Development Review, XXXII (2006), 669–698; idem, “U.S. Presidential Elections and the Spatial Pattern of the American Second Demographic Transition,” ibid., XXXV (2009), 391–400; Jennifer B. Kane, “A Closer Look at the Second Demographic Transition in the US: Evidence of Bidirectionality from a Cohort Perspective (1982–2006),” Population Research and Policy Review, XXXII (2013), 47–80. 22 Lesthaeghe and Chris Wilson, “Modes of Production, Secularization, and the Pace of Fertility Decline in Western Europe, 1870–1930,” in Coale and Watkins (eds.), Decline of Fer- tility in Europe, 291. For an attempt to “reintegrate the sociology and economics of fertility,” see Lesthaeghe and Surkyn, “Cultural Dynamics and Economic Theories of Fertility Change,” Population and Development Review, XIV (1988), 1–45. For another interpretation of the ideational roots of fertility decline, see Lesthaeghe, “A Century of Demographic and Cul- tural Change in Western Europe: An Exploration of Underlying Dimensions,” ibid., IX (1983), 411–435.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 492 | TRENT MACNAMARA that led Roosevelt and others to denounce race suicide at the turn of the twentieth century. Though the theory aims to describe and explain rather than prescribe, its increased prominence reºects re- newed concerns that permanent and self-reinforcing low fertility could lead not just to cultural extinction but also to economic stag- nation, insolvency for aging welfare states with growing pension and health obligations, and political conºict between legacy populations and new immigrants. sdt theorists point out that more than half of the world’s population already lives in countries with below-replacement fertility, and only a handful of above- replacement nations have not shown signs of sustained fertility decline. They accordingly argue that the demographic questions asked by the next generation will be motivated by the problem of low fertility, as birthrates decline or persist below replacement level worldwide.23 Alongside the parallels between sdt theory concerns and those of the pronatal newspaper commentary is a much rougher corre- spondence between the views of Roosevelt’s opponents and those of the original demographic-transition theorists—a fear of over- population and a view of fertility decline as a result of learned rationality and “modernization.” Birth controllers were three times more likely than pronatalists to emphasize the “course of civilization” as the cause of fertility decline. This study’s results invite comparison with the sdt model, particularly its overarching claim for the importance of moral change for fertility behavior and its speciªc claims: (1) that individ- ualistic, adult-orientated family limitation has replaced familistic, child-oriented limitation; (2) that postmaterial values replaced material ones in reproductive calculations; and (3) that both these changes occurred in the 1960s. The newspaper sample presents a strong case for the indispens- ability of historically speciªc moral considerations in assessing the causes of the fertility decline. Despite the predominance of economic frames on fertility behavior, middle-class American observers of falling fertility rarely found “calculations of economic advantage” sufªcient to explain the phenomenon. No matter how rational family limitation may have seemed, the lines between salu-

23 United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, the 2012 Revision, avail- able at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 493 tary economic “prudence” and malign “selªshness”—to use two much-mooted terms of the debate—were ºuid, unclear, and ultimately drawn by moral intuitions about the rightful place of material wealth in the good life. Of the 258 articles mentioning one or more of the three economic frames—“rationality,” “poverty,” and “luxury”—50 percent of them disapprovingly explained fertility decline as the result of luxury. Commentators wrote of “commercialitis,” “money- love,” “the siren calls of fashion,” and “the patent leather life... the universal climb on the social staircase.” “Where money makes for self-indulgence,” wrote one aphorist, “children make for self- denial.”24 Because some commentators denounced decadence among the wealthy while exonerating poorer Americans’ shrinking families, the “luxury” frame overlapped with “rationality” and “poverty.” Given that overlap, 71 percent of the articles that mentioned economics framed the issue in less moralizing, more rationalist terms. Rational economic adaptation was more common than self-indulgence as an explanation for fertility decline. Yet of the rationality/poverty articles, just 27 percent saw these economic factors as sufªcient to explain the issue. The remainder advanced economic explanations alongside others, such as religious belief, urbanization, or education. Only 10 percent of the 605 articles framed declining birthrates solely as the result of individual-level rational economic choice, without an attending moral judgment of over-indulgence. Moreover, even “rationality” frames often carried moral over- tones; commentators tended to paint the parents of small families not as adaptive economic agents but as victims of an economic system that forced them to curtail their fertility. More salient than individual rational action was a collective failure to build a culture in which childbearing seemed advisable and desirable: “Race suicide must continue until the economic problem is solved. President Roosevelt is doing more to prevent race suicide by ªghting the trusts that grind the poor than by scolding the childless woman.”25 In the minds of these Americans, no class of factors ap-

24 “Race Suicide in Fact,” Atlanta Constitution, 24 Jan. 1904; “‘Immorality’ In Best of Menus,” Chicago Tribune, 22 Jan. 1905; “Discerns Causes of Race Suicide,” Chicago Tribune, 5 Aug. 1905; New York Tribune, 26 Nov. 1904. 25 “Stork Not in Dollar Race,” Chicago Tribune, 4 Jan. 1907.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 494 | TRENT MACNAMARA proached the overall importance of economic calculation. Yet few contemporary observers seem to have believed that childbearing amounted to a purely economic decision. Economic foresight might be part of a legitimate rationale for family limitation, but only within the context of morally mediated ideals about the importance of, say, education, health, religious prescription, natural order, and other priorities. In assessing the coding categories, it would be less accurate to say that economic explanations dominated the sample than that moral economy was the prevailing frame of reference for middle-class Americans in their explanations of “race suicide.” Most commentators understood fertility decline not in terms of changing economic rationalities per se but in terms of changing attitudes about money. “Race suicide” was widely understood as a competition between self/immediate family interests on the one hand and social/natural/religious interests on the other—not between economic rationality and irrationality. Economic calculation was understood as one inducement among others that led Americans to emphasize their own immediate-term interests (for better or worse) over presumed competing interests in abundant biological reproduction, as mandated by nature, God, or the social body— or for the dissenters, by blind, thoughtless instinct. Commenta- tors generally did not view their peers as interchangeable economic actors but rather as historical agents whose moral departures from past standards might be self-sustaining, thus altering mainstream opinion about the place of children in a good and righteous life.26 These ªndings show the worth of the arguments advanced by Lesthaeghe, van de Kaa, and others for increased attention to culturally determined moral constraints on potential parents. How do they relate to the sdt theory’s more speciªc arguments about how and when moral codes changed? According to the sdt formula, 26 The idea of moral economy has been used to explain the actions of subordinate groups in response to economic changes that they consider unjust. See Edward P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, 50 (1971), 76–136. For extended treatments of moral-economic debates in the context of early American industrial capitalism, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984); Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolu- tion: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York, 1981). For a synthetic treatment of economic and ideational factors in fertility decline, see Kertzer, “Religion and the Decline of Fertility: Conclusions,” in van Poppel and Renzo Derosas (eds.), Religion and the Decline of Fertility in the Western World (Dordrecht, 2006), 259–270.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 495 birthrates in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America would have been falling due to child-oriented material ambitions, as parents sought to ensure comfort for their offspring. Later, beginning in the 1960s, fertility was low due to continuing economic rational- ism compounded by adult-oriented desires for “post-material” self-fulªllment, in which children would be welcome only as “one of the various components that make it possible for adults to blos- som as individuals.”27 The fact that all of these forces appear in the writings of Amer- icans living before 1910 suggests that the sdt’s periodization requires adjustment. In some cases, it also suggests amendments to its theoretical content. First, concerning child-oriented material ambitions, the evidence suggests that most observers believed materialism to be an essential factor in fertility decline, but they rejected the idea that it centered on children. The question of whether adults or children were the primary beneªciaries of fertility control closely tracked approval or disapproval for pronatalism. Nearly all pronatalist commentators assumed, like Roosevelt, that the impetus for fertility decline came from selªsh adults. Dissenters replied that family limiters were merely looking to their children’s well- being—and by extension producing higher-quality children for society. On this score, 55 percent of the sample subscribed to the idea of adult-oriented fertility decline whereas 15 percent preferred to think that it was child-oriented. In reality, however, the two orientations probably overlapped, and various commentators highlighted one or the other side according to various contingencies. One editorialist, for example, appeared undecided on the question: “I am not, under any circumstances, for a desolating ºood of babies. The number of a family is to me less than the quality....Ontheother hand, every healthy, marriageable woman ought to marry. Better a baby in her arms than a dog in her lap, bottles on her boudoir and vain regrets.” The Chicago Tribune’s editors wrote in a similar vein that Roosevelt’s critique was “right, but with reservations”: “Beneath all exaggera- tions, there exists the big fact that children are no longer casual happenings. Every new human life is more and more a problem and a responsibility.”28

27 Philippe Ariès, “Two Successive Motivations for the Declining Birth Rates in the West,” Population and Development Review, VI (1980), 645–650. 28 “Editorials by the Laity,” Chicago Tribune, 1 Oct. 1905; “The President and the Babies,” Chicago Tribune, 17 March 1905.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 496 | TRENT MACNAMARA The question of which orientation prevailed resists separation and quantiªcation. What is certain is that great numbers of commentators saw adult self-orientation as a major driver of fertility decline—at least as powerful as the socially acceptable, altruistic desire to avoid having children that could not be supported adequately. Their testimony afªrms the importance of a key idea in sdt theory without afªrming the decisive turning point in the 1960s. Rather than inaugurating a deªnitive cultural revolution, that decade probably saw one of the two abiding gravitational poles in fertility motivation—the “self-fulªlling” as opposed to the “familistic”— coming into relative prominence, not simply achieving hegemony. Regarding sdt theory’s concomitant claim that material preoccupations gave way to “post-material” values after 1960 when prosperous, socially secure people became less concerned with economic survival or advancement, the evidence again cuts two ways. To a large extent, Americans of the 1900s spoke as Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa might have predicted, highlighting material motives for fertility restriction and rarely voicing the noneconomic “self-expressive” or “higher-order” goals that sdt theorists reserve for the post-1960 individualist culture—the pre- mium on sex for pleasure, for example. Less than 1 percent of the articles evinced any skepticism toward authority, any desire for challenging and innovative work, or any abstract need for expressive self-differentiation. sdt theory emphasizes the declining importance of traditional marriage after 1960, and 5 percent of all the sampled articles saw the disinclination to marry and/or frivolous divorce as causes of race suicide. Decreased adherence to traditional gender roles, another sdt component (discussed later), was an important trope. A larger problem, however, is that the material versus expressive dichotomy ignores the possibility of people attaining “higher order,” self-fulªlling ends through economic means. Collectively, the commentators insisted on two things: (1) the importance of economic motives and (2) the potential of such motives to provide fulªllment to economically secure individuals or couples outside any familistic strategy, moral scruples permitting.29

29 For the potential of economic goods to fulªll higher-order needs (and their purveyors to inºuence perceptions of those needs), see Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994); idem, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York, 2003); William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 497 None of these points, however, undermines the essential use- fulness of the sdt lens for the U.S. fertility decline. Rather, it suggests that the ªrst and second transitions must be investigated along a longer time horizon, with less decisive starts and ªnishes. On the central questions of child versus adult orientation and materialism versus post-materialism, the evidence collected herein suggests the occurrence of a cultural revolution but one subtler and more atten- uated than that described by Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa. At the core, the newspaper commentators and the sdt theorists are in agreement: Fertility decline was a result of an increased importance of the individual in society, and economic motives, however essential to this phenomenon, could not be understood outside their moral frameworks, which involved changing attitudes about what constituted a good life.30 Religion and the Natural Order In addition to economic circumstances as fertility determinants, contemporaries and theorists also gave their attention to the extent to which people focused on their immediate, personal contingencies as opposed to timeless, universal concerns. This study’s shorthand terms for this orientation, transcendent and pragmatic, were not common in the newspapers; rather they are synthetic, neutral terms for two (nonexclusive) worldviews that suffused the newspaper commentary on falling birthrates. Transcendent-minded people’s ªrst references in fertility matters were God, the natural order, or such sanctiªed organic continuums as the family or society; pragmatists focused on their own ability to control present circumstances and events. Contem- porary commentators thought the transcendently oriented were more likely to view having a large family as part of a higher pur- pose, assuming also that this group was declining in size. Pro- natalists painted under-reproductivity as narrow-minded, petty, and graceless—lacking, as Roosevelt put it, “devotion to high ideals, a proper care for the things of the spirit.” The opposition,

Culture (New York, 1993); Timothy H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004). 30 Other scholars who have questioned sdt’s periodization of key elements include John C. Caldwell, “Three Fertility Compromises and Two Transitions,” Population Research and Policy Review, XXVII (2008), 427–446; Van Bavel, “Subreplacement fertility in the West”; idem and Kok, “Pioneers of the Modern Lifestyle?” For more general criticism, see David Coleman, “Why We Don’t Have to Believe without Doubting in the ‘Second Demographic Transition’—Some Agnostic Comments,” Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, II (2004), 11–24.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 498 | TRENT MACNAMARA meanwhile, defended family limitation as practical and progressive, a rejection of “blind fatalism” in favor of the modern duty “to perfect the practical comfort and well being of the world.”31 A few observers wrote explicitly of worldly or transcendent values (“Do not sell your soul for a few earthly desires”), whereas others passed judgment in more implicit and anecdotal terms. For example, a writer for the Atlanta Constitution imputed petti- ness to childless people, presenting a list of ªfty reasons for the quarrels between a divorcing husband and wife: “because the Mormons are not Indians, because pineapples do not grow in Canada, because he fell in the creek, because he shot the pig, because he sat down on his hat, and BECAUSE THEY HAD NO CHILDREN.”32 Direct consideration of worldliness and transcendence was most common in the second-largest coded category, “cosmic factors.” This category included two coded frames—(1) “religion” (mentioned in 15 percent of the articles), in which lower fertility reºected secularization, and higher fertility refected piety, and (2) “nature” (12 percent), which reºected detachment from an in- tuitive sense of natural order or sanctiªed biological continuum. Considerations of religiosity came mainly from clergy or religious laypeople; questions of natural order drew the attention of a more diverse group. Observers who saw lower fertility as a manifestation of a more secular attitude generally attributed it to a slackening of religious feeling, not a decline in religious instruction. As one reader of the Globe chided critics of large families, “If they have any instinct of parental love, or any spark of the divine love which was instilled into the human race at the beginning, they would not exchange their little troublesome comforts for dollars.” Rarer was a doctor’s invocation of declining religious obedience: “Our forefathers were religious people and heeded the injunction of the Bible to ‘multi- ply on the face of the earth.’”33

31 Roosevelt, “Address to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,” May 16, 1908, Presidential Addresses And State Papers (New York, 1910). “Mankind to Fly,” Los Angeles Times, 13 Sept. 1908; “Children of Ghetto District,” Chicago Tribune, 14 Feb. 1903. 32 “Everybody’s Column,” Boston Globe, 14 Oct. 1906; “A Georgia Domestic Tragedy,” Atlanta Constitution, 1 June 1905 (capitalization in original). 33 “Calls Landlord A Herod,” Chicago Tribune, 4 May 1903; “Old Stock Will Disappear,” Boston Globe, 15 Feb. 1903. This focus on inner-light religiosity aligns with the work of historical demographers for whom direct teaching about reproduction is less important than shared cultural outlooks within religious groups. See Calvin Goldscheider, Population, Modern-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 499 Lestheaghe and van de Kaa assign secularization a central role in bringing about the second demographic transition (as well as the ªrst). An essential precondition of the moral revolutions of the 1960s was “the reduction in religious practice, the abandonment of traditional religious beliefs (heaven, sin, etc.) and a decline in individual sentiments of religiosity (prayer, meditation, etc.).” In fo- cusing on religious “sentiments” as well as formal afªliations, sdt theorists take a wider view of religious belief than did many earlier historical demographers, using sophisticated surveys of values to measure fertility against indices of levels of trust in churches, belief in “the importance of God in life,” etc.34 Early twentieth-century Americans likewise assigned secularization an important role, but they viewed the religious sphere more broadly. The newspaper evidence suggests an amendment to sdt theory’s focus on secularization as a prime mover—the incor- poration of naturalism into assessments of how potential parents viewed their place in the cosmos. The sdt literature, despite its complex measures of secularization, equates the decline of theistic religiosity with a generalized decline in the belief that moral claims originated outside cultural contingency. It thus breaks with the seminal work of Ariès, who posited “immutable Nature,” rather than codiªed religiosity, as the element in “traditional beliefs” that prevented Westerners from limiting fertility more widely before the 1960s.35 Americans of the 1900s understood sensibilities about “nature” as key shapers of reproductive ethics. A sense of embed- dedness in nature encouraged parenthood by providing a connec- tion to the universe and a sense of doing its work. To that extent, naturalism paralleled formal theism. Unlike theistic religiosity, however, naturalism had no established set of beliefs and required no prophetic teaching or faith in the unseen. Naturalism and theistic religiosity were not exclusive categories. In 13 percent of the articles in which at least one of these frames occurred, the other one did, too. Appeals to nature came from moralists who emphasized formal religious thinking— particularly from Catholic clergy for whom natural law explicitly underpinned their theology. “All violations of the laws of nature

ization and Social Structure (Boston, 1971); McQuillan, Culture, Religion, and Demographic Be- haviour. 34 Lesthaeghe and Surkyn, “Value Orientations,” 51, 64. 35 Ariès, “Two Successive Motivations,” 646.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 500 | TRENT MACNAMARA are violations of God’s laws and must ultimately be punished,” said Baltimore’s cardinal in an interview on birthrates.36 Natural order, however, appeared primarily as a cosmic force invoked by cultural critics who made no reference to divinity of any kind. Roosevelt himself was typical of secular-minded Protestants who viewed nature as a prescriptive force outside theology—often with a notable debt to Darwin and Spencer. In re- ply to a New Jersey preacher who advised ordinary people to con- ªne themselves to two children (who could then “taste a few good things”), Roosevelt thundered, “The people who had acted on this base and selªsh doctrine would [soon give] place to others with braver and more robust ideals. Nor would such a result be in any way regrettable; for a race that practised such doctrine—that is, a race that practised race suicide—would thereby conclusively show that it was unªt to exist, and that it had better give place to people who had not forgotten the primary laws of their being.”37 In response to criticism that such talk encouraged “pagan” or atavistic behavior, Roosevelt had an anonymous surrogate clarify that he intended not to unleash unbridled sexuality or nihilistic biological competition among peoples “but merely [to] protest against a form of selªshness which robs nature of her perfect work.”38 The discussion of nature and procreation contained echoes of old debates within Protestantism: One side viewed nature as providing a moral option; others viewed it as a predestinatory force. Roosevelt, despite his disingenuous claim that the extinction of the Americans would not be “regrettable,” took the former position. In his 1906 State of the Union address, Roosevelt stated that “will- ful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.” A minority of naturalists took a more fatalistic view, declaring that American civilization was aging and entering decline. “Civili- zation has always carried within itself the seeds of its own decay,” one columnist wrote. “We cannot escape the penalty that every dominant race has paid to nature.” Indeed, nature frames often in-

36 “Little Talks with Big Men,” Washington Post, 3 Dec. 1905. 37 Roosevelt, “Mother’s Congress Address.” For Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, see, for example, his Essays: Scientiªc, Political and Speculative (New York, 1892). 38 “Large Families or Small?” Washington Post, 1 May 1903; “The Characteristics of Theo- dore Roosevelt, the Man,” Washington Post, 5 Mar. 1905.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 501 tersected with teleological “course of civilization” frames, which ascribed falling birthrates to metahistorical forces (typically “progress” for the birth-control minority and “decadence” for the pronatal majority). Many of the “nature” articles also mentioned metahistorical factors (30 percent), though these two frames each appeared in less than 13 percent of the sample.39 Urbanization was also closely linked to the nexus of religiosity and naturalism. City life sometimes appeared as a metahistorical category in its own right, acting as a placeholder for all of the changes associated with modernity. Cities were especially condemned, however, for distancing their inhabitants from an appreci- ation of transcendence in general and naturalism in particular. The Chicago Tribune described race suicide as “nature’s protest against the unnatural town life,” and Ross wrote that cities, with their “shortened lives, bachelorhood, late or childless marriages, and small families,” “constitute so many blast furnaces where the tal- ented rise and become incandescent, to be sure, but for all that are incinerated without due replacement.”40 For the past few decades, secularization in the United States and elsewhere has been the subject of much debate. Scholars have questioned the meaning and extent of the phenomenon, and even its reality. Some have argued that religiosity has not so much de- clined as it has become more diffuse and private. This study shows that not only was declining adherence to established religious prin- ciples thought to be a major factor in lowering fertility but also that theistic orthodoxy was not regarded as the only way to align reproductive decisions with a cosmic order.41 Time: Short Term versus Long Term A ªnal feature of the transcendence/pragmatism dichotomy concerned how the issue of fertility intersected with ideas about time. Commentators generally believed that people oriented toward immediacy tended to have

39 “Race Suicide Inevitable,” Washington Post, 7 Dec. 1903. Much of this commentary echoed Spencer’s then-popular ideas about progress: “[B]irth rates decrease with the advance of intelligence, which in man is often called the progress of civilization” (“Topics of the Times,” New York Times, 1 May 1905). 40 Edward A. Ross, “Is Race Suicide Economic Agent?” Chicago Tribune, 2 Apr. 1905; idem, “American Race Has Reached Its Zenith, Educator Says,” Chicago Tribune, 4 Aug. 1905. Ross coined the term “race suicide”; Roosevelt adopted it after reading one of Ross’ articles. 41 For material that reviews these debates, see Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds.), Rethinking Secularism (New York, 2011). For privatization, see Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York, 1970); Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London, 1994), 70–79.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 502 | TRENT MACNAMARA fewer children than did those whose sense of relevant time extended farther into the past and future, beyond their lifetimes. A Washington Post editorial, for example, counterposed the French, “seemingly indifferent to the future,” with “the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic peoples...[who] found their empires on the home and build their greatness for posterity”: “The ‘race suicide’ agita- tion means nothing but a wee ºurry to Americans, who, from the beginnings of the republic, have lived and builded [sic] always for the future....Without family, without the loves and cares and responsibilities of family, what is a man’s work worth? Without a no- ble future, without a magniªcent posterity to inherit the fruits of its endeavors and to build upon them a yet nobler state—what is the nation’s life worth? . . . Only that which is worthless perishes with us.”Another writer scolded mere “individuals” for “deliberately, in their own persons, putting an end to the process—millions of years in duration—which has produced them.” Although attitudes toward time have not received the same attention from culturally oriented historical demographers as have attitudes toward the self or religion, contemporary commentary suggests that time orientation was just as important as self-orientation or religiosity as a predictor of fertility decline. To what extent were potential parents oriented toward near-term, practical solutions for the living, as opposed to sublimation in the inªnite?42 Education, Contraception, Race, and Gender The conspicuous self/society and pragmatism/transcendence meta-frames create a strong coherence in the newspaper content. These umbrella categories, like the more speciªc economic, religious, and urbanizing frames on fertility decline, readily align with the so-called modernization models that have emphasized similar factors for more than a century. More surprising is the infrequency of other ideas often understood to undergird fertility decline. Education, for example, received less attention in this respect than might have been ex- pected in a society that demanded increasing amounts of schooling from its middle classes. Educational cost and/or content appeared at roughly the same rate as such relatively unheralded issues as landlord discrimination and personal health. Even less common were references to increasing knowledge about contraceptive methods, which merited only one report. Moreover, black fertility received

42 “France’s Race Problem” Washington Post, 6 Dec. 1907. France’s birthrates had fallen farther, and had been falling longer, than those of the United States. “Reviews of New Books,” Washington Post, 12 Nov. 1904.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 503 mention in fewer than 3 percent of the articles. At the time, black birthrates were higher than white ones and falling at a similar pace, but neither the relatively high rate nor the downward trend wor- ried the newspaper commentators. They were slightly more interested in the high fertility among recent immigrants (11 percent of the articles). When the prospect of legislation to address fertility trends was addressed (9 percent), it was nearly always in conjunc- tion with local proposals to regulate landlord discrimination against families with children. Proposals for formal eugenic legislation were almost entirely absent. Most notable in its absence is a clear conception of family limitation as strongly motivated by, and associated with, women. Nar- rative historians, if not demographers, are accustomed to thinking of spreading contraceptive practices as an outgrowth of the women’s movement. Gordon, for example, characterizes fertility decline as a feminist-led “women’s rebellion” against pronatal patriarchy. Birthrates fell, in her account, as women demanded greater control over their bodies and greater opportunity in public life. Other leading historians of birth control narrow the focus even further, writing the birth-control movement as an organized effort conducted by such women as Margaret Sanger, who began a high- proªle campaign in 1914, on behalf of women. This literature is important as biography but misleads readers about the importance of any one individual or sex to the democratic forces that ultimately made birth control commonplace and legitimate.43 The newspaper commentary supports the idea that men and women had different reproductive interests but not that women were the principal agents of family limitation or the principal parties concerned. If patriarchy was in fact the basic impediment to the spread of family limitation and if feminist action was its impetus, one would expect the pronatalist men who dominated this sample

43 Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana, 2002), 241 (a revision/expansion of Woman’s Body Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America [New York, 1976]). For other works in which women and feminists are the leading agents of birth-control popularization and legitimization, see Edward Shorter, “Female Emancipation, Birth Control, and Fertility in European History,” American Historical Review, LXXVIII (1973), 605–640; Carole Ruth McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, 1999); Jean H. Baker, Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (New York, 2011); Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” Feminist Studies, I (1973), 235–258. For a history that highlights the role of men in the birth-control movement, albeit with a focus on activists, see James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (New York, 1978).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 504 | TRENT MACNAMARA to indict women in particular for their role in abetting “race suicide.” But Roosevelt’s supporters pinpointed female agency less often than the overall average (see Table 5). Neutral and dissenting commentators fell in a similar range, and the gender bias of most articles was neutral: 53 percent of the commentators did not mention gender as a factor in fertility decline; 11 percent mentioned both men and women as contributors to falling birthrates; and the remainder of the articles attributed falling birthrates to the agency of just one sex—21 percent to women and 14 percent to men.44 Holding men as well as women responsible for falling birthrates made sense to middle-class Americans for a number of reasons. Men were commonly regarded as the initiators of non- reproductive and socially irresponsible sex. Two of the dominant contraceptive techniques were “male” (coitus interruptus and the condom). The dominant culture of masculinity made husbands lia- ble for their families’ material welfare. Furthermore, many women were probably uncomfortable suggesting any contraceptive measure to their husbands, preferring an often anxious silence to the ap- pearance of immodesty.45 More women named themselves as the agents of reproductive change than men named them—46 percent versus 18 percent. Women then were nearly as likely to see their sex as agents as to see fertility decline as a gender-neutral or two-sex phenomenon. Many of these claims occupied a gray area between statements of actuality and assertions of ideals. When, for example, a female speaker “characterize[d] women who remain at home, attend to domestic duties, and rear large families as ‘primitive squaws,’” she clearly framed fertility as a women’s issue, but it is not clear

44 For the past thirty years, household-level studies by historical demographers have paid increasing attention to differing gender interests within families and small communities. For early critiques of demographers’ inattention to women’s historical status, see Watkins, “If all we knew about women was what we read in Demography, what would we know?” Demogra- phy, XXX (1993), 551–577; Alison Mackinnon, “Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition? Questions from a Feminist Historian to Historical Demographers,” Gender & His- tory, VII (1995), 222–240. 45 The remaining method, postcoital douching, was female-controlled but unreliable. On the basis of 193 interviews and other sources, Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain, 1918–1960 (New York, 2006), found that “in contrast to the widespread assumption that women were at the forefront of birth control practices,” wives “shied away from the issue,” preferring to leave that disreputable subject in the hands of their husbands. Joseph Ambrose and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (Liverpool, 1964), came to the broader conclusion that “feminism was not a causative inºuence at all” in the democratization of birth control (quotation from J. A. Banks, Victorian Values: Secularism and the Size of Families [London, 1982], 8).

Table 5 Gender Agency for Fertility Decline by Sex and Pronatalism Support male / male non- support oppose neutral/ all female likely male journalist journalist pronatalism pronatalism ambivalent (n ϭ 605) (n ϭ 74) (n ϭ 531) (n ϭ 134) (n ϭ 304) (n ϭ 335) (n ϭ 92) (n ϭ 178)

Female agency 21.3 45.9 18.1 24.6 15.1 20.0 27.2 19.1 Male agency 14.2 4.1 15.4 11.2 16.4 14.6 6.5 14.6 Joint agency 11.6 27.0 9.0 11.9 8.2 13.4 15.2 6.2 Gender neutral 52.9 23.0 57.6 52.2 60.2 51.9 51.1 60.1 506 | TRENT MACNAMARA whether she thought that women were or should be the instigators of fertility decline.46 By contrast, few commentators seemed to think that men should govern family size, though some of them believed that men did so. The ambiguity regarding female agency stemmed from a disparity between women’s vast domestic responsibilities and their limited power. No gender-conscious commentator seems to have doubted that women had the most to gain from fertility control, but few of them seemed to have thought that middle-class women had economic independence, ultimate authority about consequential household decisions, or even complete control of their bodies. This evidence does not show that women were necessarily less effective than men in implementing fertility control within house- holds. Contemporaries saw reproductive behavior primarily as a two-spouse or broadly moral decision, without necessary gender connotations. Although childrearing fell within a women’s “sphere,” and women had much more at stake in childbearing outcomes, commentators viewed reproductive decisions neither as strongly gendered nor, when such decisions were gendered, as overwhelmingly female prerogatives. Stronger than the case for women’s agency is that for women having different reproductive interests and views, regardless of their ability to act on them. Women were much more likely than men to oppose pronatalism; 41 percent supported Roosevelt’s agenda, whereas 42 percent opposed him (versus 57 percent and 12 percent, respectively, for men). Women were also much likelier to frame fertility as a health issue. Unsurprisingly, women who faced the physical dangers of bearing children and the daily challenges of raising them were nearly four times more likely than men to underscore the health costs of large families (for every 1,000 live births in 1900, six to nine U.S. women died from complications re- lated to childbirth). Moreover, women disproportionately framed birth control as a way to prevent poverty and to ensure better education, and they were more likely to see it as an outgrowth of macrohistorical forces.47

“The ªrst demographic transition was a very quiet one,” wrote Lesthaeghe about the fertility decline in Western countries before 46 “Primitive Squaws” Chicago Tribune, 8 March 1903. 47 U.S. Centers for Disease Control, “Achievements in Public Health, 1900–1999:

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 WHY “RACE SUICIDE”? | 507 the 1960s. That assessment is certainly true of the early twentieth- century United States, in the sense that few Americans of the 1900s openly supported fertility control as a solution to social or personal problems, and in the sense that outspoken activism was less important than private action in birth control’s ultimate rise to popularity and legitimacy.48 But fertility change in the United States was not quiet in any civic sense, particularly after 1903 when the popular debate about the moral ideals understood to affect fertility behavior was vigor- ous. Race suicide was a household term; speculation about its causes and consequences was a commonplace of the period. This debate presents a massive well of contemporary thought that can be plumbed for information about cultural beliefs and practices. This sort of testimony resists but does not preclude quantiªcation, and it may well offer us the best opportunity to understand fertility calculations in the manner that the individuals who made them did. Content analysis has its limitations in demographic work. This study does not draw from a representative national cross-section; nor does it measure fertility outcomes against stated ideals, or address cultural change across time except as contemporaries understood it. It summarizes the collective views of hundreds of Ameri- cans about reproduction—an arena in which nearly all adults must act upon intimate ideas concerning the good life. Thus does it sup- plement historical demographic work that confronts, as one de- mographer puts it, “the vexing problems of absent quantitative data on potentially important factors.”49 The evidence gathered in this article lends support to the theory of the “second demographic transition” and its underlying idea that economic factors in fertility change cannot be understood in- dependently of the cultural and moral systems in which they operate. The study also suggests that the sdt’s timescale be broadened— at least in the U.S. case—and that the revolutions in question be thought of as the product of a gradual, ambivalent process rather than a sudden, clean break. “The ‘one transition’ view simply blurs history,” writes Lesthaeghe, but blurriness may actually be an apt

Healthier Mothers and Babies,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 48:38 (Oct. 1999), 849– 858. 48 Lesthaeghe, “Second Demographic Transition in Western Countries,” 21. 49 Michael Teitelbaum, The British Fertility Decline: Demographic Transition in the Crucible of the Industrial Revolution (Princeton, 1984), 192.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00611 by guest on 24 September 2021 508 | TRENT MACNAMARA metaphor for the fundamental changes in attitudes toward self, society, and the universe that the sdt theory is meant to assess.50 Finally, the sources consulted suggest the potential value of ag- gregating analytical categories while individualizing our conceptions of how values operate across populations. In other words, we might research the complex ways in which values acted together and on each other within individuals’ moral views of the world— as opposed to considering macro-factors separately outside their ideational context, while ignoring their jumbled interconnection in living people’s thoughts.

50 Lesthaeghe, “Unfolding Story,” 219.

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