Elimination of the Fittest? How Economists Led the Hysteria Over “Race Survival”

Come to class this week. We’re reading from leading economists of the early 20^th century who were avowed eugenicists. 

This meant they believed that the racial superiority of whites was threatened by immigration and welfare policies that set up conditions for "dysgenic competition" between the races, with the darker groups snuffing out the supposed superiority of whites.

These economists strongly opposed immigration because this “race amalgamation” would dilute the “white stock.”

I share excerpts and welcome comments:

“Fear and dislike of immigrants certainly were not new in the Progressive Era. But leading professional economists were among the first to provide scientific respectability for immigration restriction on racial grounds.

They justified race based immigration restriction as a remedy for ‘race suicide,’” a Progressive Era term for the process by which racially superior stock (“natives”) is outbred by a more prolific, but racially inferior stock (immigrants).

The term “race suicide” is often attributed to Edward A. Ross (1901a, p. 88), who believed that ‘the higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off by collective action.’”

By 1912, Simon Patten (p. 64), the reformist Wharton School economist who served as AEA president in 1908, could say, “[T]he cry of race suicide has replaced the old fear of overpopulation.”

In explaining why those of inferior stock were more prolific, early Progressive Era economists emphasized how economic life under industrial capitalism was increasingly dysgenic, that is, it tended to promote the survival of the unfit.

Patten, for example, argued (as quoted in D. Ross, 1991, p. 197) that “every improvement . . . increases the amount of the deficiencies which the laboring classes may possess without their being thereby overcome in the struggle for subsistence that the survival of the ignorant brings upon society.”

In response, Patten ultimately argued for the state taking over the task of

selecting the fittest—eugenics. “Social progress is a higher law than equality,” Patten (1899, pp. 302–303) volunteered, and the only way to progress was the “eradication of the vicious and inefficient.”

…

Practical implications: Oppose any social welfare program that helped the poor on grounds that compassion would help the poor survive … and “outbreed” successful people.

…

We will explore whether there are echoes today from the past, including this example:

Walker (1899, p. 424) proposed that native Americans would not compete with immigrants from the “low-wage races.” “The American shrank from the industrial competition thrust upon him,” Walker argued. “He was unwilling himself to engage with the lowest kind of day labor with these new elements of the population; he was even more unwilling to brings sons and daughters into the world to enter that competition.” Walker (1896, p. 828) characterized the new elements of the population—“ peasants” from “southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia”—as “beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.

Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us.” Walker (1899, p. 447) predicted that, without racial immigration restriction, “every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe, [in] which no breath of intellectual life has stirred for ages . . . [will] be decanted upon our shores.”

Source: Thomas C. Leonard, Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era (2005)