Your hunch is correct: It’s not Donald
Trump. While in office, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a letter on this
subject. For context, Roosevelt wrote in response to a published article about
a public health doctor who advised Americans to have smaller families.
The president wrote:
“There are countries which,
and people in all countries who, need to be warned against a rabbit-like
indifference to consequences in raising families. The ordinary American,
whether of the old native stock or the self-respecting son or daughter of
immigrants, needs no such warning. He or she needs to have impressed upon his
or her mind ... that it is a simple mathematical proposition that, where
the average family that has children at all has only three, the race at once
diminishes in numbers, and if the tendency is not checked will vanish
completely, - in other words, there will be race suicide.
Not only the healthiest,
but the highest relations in life are those of the man and the woman united on
a basis of full and mutually respecting partnership and wise companionship in
loving and permanent wedlock. If, through no fault of theirs, they have no
children they are entitled to our deepest sympathy. If they refuse to have
children sufficient in number to mean that the race goes forward and not back,
if they refuse to bring them up healthy in body and mind, then they are
criminals (underlining added).”
Roosevelt believed deeply in the
superiority of the white race. In a speech titled “On American Motherhood,” he
expressed fear that rising white American infertility and use birth of control would
mean that the white race not keep pace with the birth rate of ethnic minorities.
Again, he used the term “race suicide.”
Some newspapers found this argument shocking
or offensive, and lampooned Roosevelt. The picture is from the Ohio State
Journal, where Roosevelt is seen congratulating former President Grover
Cleveland on the birth of a son—a son who was the offspring of an extra-marital
affair. Cleveland had his former lover/mother of his son committed to an insane
asylum. (My title, “Pop” Quiz, is a weak attempt at a pun directed at
Cleveland.)
Here is hoping that this brief moment
of looking back helps us think about the present and look to the future.
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