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CRITICAL MASSES: AMERICAN POPULATIONISM, EUGENICS, AND WAR, 1945 TO 1975 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN AMERICAN STUDIES MAY 2019 By Robert J. Barsocchini Thesis Committee: Jonna Eagle, Chairperson Noenoe Silva Jeffrey Tripp Keywords: overpopulation, eugenics, sterilization, Korean War, Vietnam War DEDICATION To Anchi, Melrose, Scottie, Patrick, Francis, Fern, and Charlotte. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge Jonna Eagle for being generous with her time and comments and Noenoe Silva and Jeffrey Tripp for their helpful insights. I would also like to thank my wife, Anchi, for listening to a lot of talk about populationism and offering her usual perceptive responses and support. iii ABSTRACT This thesis argues that American thinkers in the post-war period (1945 to 1975) who diagnosed global overpopulation made implicit suggestions that “population problems” could be addressed by raising death rates, such as through war. I illustrate that the fear of population growth, which became ubiquitous in the United States during this time, largely derives from eugenically influenced concerns over losing power relative to colonized people of color around the world, but that these concerns also predate eugenics. I then apply this lens to readings of the Korean and Vietnam wars, arguing that populationist thinking is evident in these campaigns and that its prevalence at this time likely intensified American violence and increased a focus on eliminating large numbers of people, including civilians. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................... vii PREFACE ................................................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER ONE ........................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................................................ 22 CHAPTER THREE .................................................................................................................... 51 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 84 LITERATURE CITED .............................................................................................................. 93 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Percentages of Women Sterilized, 1968 to 1982………………………………………19 vi LIST OF FIGURES Chapter 1 Figure 1.1: Plan Your Family……………………………………………………………………17 Chapter 2 Figure 2.2: The Population Bomb………………………………………………………...…...…27 Chapter 3 Figure 3.3: Tokyo After Firebombing………………………………………………………...…56 Figure 3.4: Beefeater Label………………………………………………………………………72 vii PREFACE In a common method of surgical sterilization, a scalpel is used to open the abdomen above the pubic bone, providing access to the reproductive organs to be excised. In a common method of military attack, an explosive device produces shockwaves, shrapnel, and debris that erupt, bludgeon, or cut into the body and internal organs, often resulting in an inability to produce children as a result of injury or death. These sets of practices were brought into relief, for me, while I was studying the Korean and Vietnam wars and tried looking at them through the lens of black feminist anti-war activism.1 I learned that in addition to anti-war activism, black feminist groups were resisting coercive sterilization, which, to my surprise, I found had risen sharply in the United States in the post-WWII period. This occurred predominantly in the early 1970s, when, for example, somewhere between 25% and perhaps more than 50% of Native American women were sterilized without consent, as were many thousands of African American, Puerto Rican, and other women.2 Scholars of the subject of mass sterilization have noted as recently as the mid 2010s that these events remain understudied.3 I found it unsettling that coercive sterilization driven by what some scholars have identified as a genocidal impulse had spiked at a time when a war that I already knew involved racist, gendered, and classist thinking was being waged against Vietnam. Was there any connection or overlap, I wondered, between the ideas and affects that were driving sterilization 1 Blandford, Virgina A. (1981). Black Women and Liberation Movements. Institute for Arts and Humanities, Howard University. Washington, D.C. 2 Hansen, R., & King, D. (2013). Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth- Century North America. New York: Cambridge University Press. P. 254 n107. 3 Pegoraro, L. (2015). “Second-rate victims: the forced sterilization of indigenous people in the USA and Canada.” Settler Colonial Studies. 5:2. 161-173; Connelly, Matthew. (2013). “The Cold War in the longue durée: global migration, public health, and population control.” In Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westard, Odd Arne. The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Vol III.” Cambridge University Press. viii and warfare? I began to look into scholarship on the post-war rise in coercive sterilization and was again surprised by what I found. Respected and accomplished scholars have attributed the spike in part to an ascendant social milieu called the “renaissance of eugenics.”4 However, eugenics is a field that I believed (as do many people) to have essentially died with the Nazis. In a sense, this is correct: after the Nazis, eugenics was highly stigmatized. But as the United States took an unprecedented hold on and moved to consolidate global power, another preoccupation arose, principally driven by Americans: the idea that the world was becoming “overpopulated.” I initially avoided the overpopulation aspect of the scholarship on the post-war rise in coercive sterilization because it seemed like a different topic than the one that I was intrigued by, which was eugenics. But there was another reason why I was hesitant to pursue the subject of overpopulation: the perspective that I had unconsciously and unknowingly gleaned from American culture was that the world is overpopulated. There should, I assumed, be far fewer people. Living in Los Angeles, I had been frustrated with traffic and congestion. My partner was familiar with a half- joke that I would make when I heard that someone we knew was having a kid: “Great. Another person on the 405.” I would sit in my office in Burbank and dream of being somewhere in the countryside in green, open spaces.5 I felt a kind of frustration or anger towards large masses of people. It is discomfiting now to think about where and how, specifically, much of this anger would have been vaguely directed. 4 Kühl, S. (2013). For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene. Palgrave Macmillan; Hansen, R., & King, D. (2013). Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America. New York: Cambridge University Press. 5 As Paul Virilio points out, this was also a dream of the Nazis, who, as we will see, were similarly obsessed with “overpopulation.” Virilio, Paul. (2009). War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Verso. P. 70. ix Although I was hesitant to explore the topic, I reached a point in studying the renaissance of eugenics at which looking into the overpopulation thesis became unavoidable. This is because, as I learned, with the post-war stigmatization of eugenics and the gradual rise of civil rights discourses, many people who had previously supported eugenics moved into promoting the idea that the world was overpopulated.6 Some scholars even argue that the desire to control “overpopulation” in the twentieth century can be understood as an outgrowth of eugenics.7 One particularly liberal eugenicist who moved into overpopulation was Raymond Pearl. Pearl publicly condemned the naked racism of many of his colleagues, but characterized his move into population studies with a question that captures much of the ethos of overpopulation theory: if we can’t get desirable people to raise their fertility enough to counter-balance the rising fertility of undesirable people (which turn out to be mostly colonized people of color), is there a way to decrease the fertility of undesirable people?8 Without directly stating it, this question deals with a classic issue in eugenics: differential fertility. The term captures the concern that the “unfit” within the white race and people of color (generally perceived by white eugenicists, and Euro-Americans in general, as less “fit” than, and thus inferior to, whites) would surpass the fit whites in fertility and eventually contaminate and wipe them out. This was originally dubbed “race suicide,” and at least one straggling book using this phrase openly in its title was published as late as 1945, while most people toned down the explicitness of, or sublimated and consciously denied, the racial, class, gendered, and ableist effects of eugenics.9 6 Kühl (2013). 7 Connelly, M. (2013); Allen, G. E., & Turda, M. (2015). “Eugenics as a Basis of Population Policy.” In J. D. Wright, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral