“B IRTH C ONTROL :
T O CREATE A R A C E
OF THOROUGHBREDS ”
MARGARET LOUISE HIGGINS SANGER
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1873
March 2, day: The United States federal Congress passed a “Comstock Act,” making the us the only Western nation
that provided criminal penalties for disseminating birth control or information about it. It became a crime to
import or distribute any device, medicine, or information designed to prevent conception or induce abortion,
or to mention in print the names of sexually transmitted diseases. Nurses and physicians acting in their official
capacity were stripped of their freedom of speech: under sanction of punishment they were never to mention
such information to their patients.1
Petite Suite for orchestra by Georges Bizet is performed for the first time, at the Theatre de l’Odeon, Paris.
The audience accorded it polite applause.
1879
September 14: Margaret Louise Higgins was born in Corning, New York to an Irish-born stonemason, Michael
Hennessey Higgins, and the devout Catholic Irish-American Anne Purcell Higgins. She would attend
Claverack College and Hudson River Institute in 1896 and enter the nursing program at White Plains Hospital
in 1900.
Was Thoreau being original when he declared to Parker Pillsbury, in early 1862, “One World At A Time” —
or was he perchance merely instancing a common saying? I notice that at the Convention of the National
Liberal League in Cincinnati, Ohio on this day, Robert Green Ingersoll used the phrase at the end of his speech,
and did so without attributing it to Thoreau. (Other possibilities include that he was quoting Thoreau without
attribution, and that both he and Thoreau were quoting from some earlier, unattributed source.)
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Allow me to say that the cause nearest my
heart, and to which I am willing to devote the remainder of my
life, is the absolute, the absolute, enfranchisement of the
human mind. I believe that the family is the unit of good
government, and that every good government is simply an
aggregation of good families. I therefore not only believe in
perfect civil and religions liberty, but I believe in the one
man loving the one woman. I believe the real temple of the human
heart is the hearthstone, and that there is where the sacrifice
of life should be made; and just in proportion as we have that
idea in this country, just in that proportion we shall advance
and become a great, glorious and splendid nation. I do not want
the church or the state to come between the man and wife. I want
to do what little I can while I live to strengthen and render
still more sacred the family relation. I am also in favor of
granting every right to every other human being that I claim for
myself; and when I look about upon the world and see how the
children that are born to-day, or this year, or this age, came
into a world that has nearly all been taken up before their
arrival; when I see that they have not even an opportunity to
labor for bread; when I see that in our splendid country some
who do the most have the least, and others who do the least have
the most; I say to myself there is something wrong somewhere,
1. Such pro-quantity, anti-birth-control government agendas would of course give rise to their opposite — a pro-birth-control reform
countermovement known as “eugenics” that would be construable as righteous because pro-quality and anti-quantity.
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and I hope the time will come when every child that nature has
invited to our feast will have an equal right with all the
others. There is only one way, in my judgment, to bring that
about; and that is, first, not simply by the education of the
head, but by the universal education of the heart. The time will
come when a man with millions in his possession will not be
respected unless with those millions he improves the condition
of his fellow men. The time will come when it will be utterly
impossible for a man to go down to death, grasping millions in
the clutch of avarice. The time will come when it will be
impossible for such a man to exist, for he will be followed by
the scorn and execration of mankind. The time will come when
such a man when stricken by death, cannot purchase the favor of
posterity by leaving a portion of the gains which he has wrung
from the poor, to some church or Bible society for the glory of
God. Now, let me say that we have met together as a Liberal
League. We have passed the same platform again; but if you will
read that platform you will see that it covers nearly every word
that I have spoken — universal education — the laws of science
included, not the guesses of superstition — universal education,
not for the next world but for this — happiness, not so much for
an unknown land beyond the clouds as for this life in this world.
I do not say that there is not another life. If there is any God
who has allowed his children to be oppressed in this world he
certainly needs another life to reform the blunders he has made
in this. Now, let us all agree that we will stand by each other
splendidly, grandly; and when we come into convention let us
pass resolutions that are broad, kind, and genial, because, if
you are true Liberals, you will hold in a kind of tender pity
the most outrageous superstitions in the world. I have said some
things in my time that were not altogether charitable; but,
after all, when I think it over, I see that men are as they are,
because they are the result of every thing that has ever been.
Sometimes I think the clergy a necessary evil; but I say, let
us be genial and kind, and let us know that every other person
has the same right to be a Catholic or a Presbyterian, and gather
consolation from the doctrine of reprobation, that he has the
same right to be a Methodist or a Christian Disciple or a
Baptist; the same right to believe these phantasies and follies
and superstitions — [A voice — “And to burn heretics?”] No — The
same right that we have to believe that it is all superstition.
But when that Catholic or Baptist or Methodist endeavors to put
chains on the bodies or intellects of men, it is then the duty
of every Liberal to prevent it at all hazards. If we can do any
good in our day and generation, let us do it. There is no office
I want in this world. I will make up my mind as to the next when
I get there, because my motto is — and with that motto I will
close what I have to say — My motto is: One world at a time!
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1902
The Maria Mitchell Association was formed.
A few months before completing nurse training at White Plains Hospital, Margaret Louise Higgins got married
with the architecturally trained William Sanger (the couple initially settled in Hastings, a New York suburb
where the husband would find employment as a draftsman, and would produce three children).
1910
The family of Margaret Louise Higgins Sanger and William Sanger relocated from Hastings into New York
because the husband was dissatisfied with his architectural work as a draftsman and was seeking to become a
painter (the wife returned to nursing to help support the family). The Sangers would become immersed in
Greenwich Village culture, joining a circle of intellectuals, activists, and artists that included Max Eastman,
John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman.
Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring Harbor.
Charles Davenport’s HEREDITY IN RELATION TO EUGENICS.
1912
Margaret Sanger began a column “What Every Girl Should Know” for the New York Call. When she wrote
on venereal disease she would experience her first battle with censors (they deeming such topics obscene).
The Salvation Army opened a lodging for the destitute in New York. Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building and
Warren and Wetmore’s Grand Central Palace exhibition hall were completed. Dance instructor Arthur Murray
began teaching at a studio in the Grand Central Palace building.
William Hammerstein staged a Woman’s Suffragette Week at his Victoria Theatre in New York, at which
Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette’s daughter Fola lectured. Hammerstein lost money but garnered lots and
lots of publicity.
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February 12: Georg, Baron von Hertling replaced Klemens von Podewils-Dürnitz as President of the Council of
Ministers of Bavaria.
In the factory town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Margaret Sanger led 119 children of strikers out of danger
(the National Guard would be called in to prevent any recurrences of grandstanding activities such as this).
Negotiations between the imperial (Peking) and revolutionary (Nanking) Chinese governments resulted in the
regent father of six-year-old Hsüan-T’ung agreeing to his son’s abdication and the establishment of the
Republic of China. Power to form a government was granted to Yüan Shih-kai. Pu-yi had been three years old
when he had become emperor, with his father serving as regent. There was great resentment against foreigners
in general and in particular against the Manchu government, and in 1911 rebellion had swept through the
country. This ended 267 years of Manchu rule and an imperial system that had endured for some two millennia.
The lad would of course be allowed to continue to live in the Forbidden City on Tiananmen Square in Peking
(Beijing), protected and contained by its 35-foot walls and moat.
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1914
The Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded as World War I began, pledging to “keep the bonds of Christian
love unbroken across the frontier.”
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Margaret Sanger separated from her husband William and began a series of affairs with several men, including
Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells. She was indicted for circulating through the mails a magazine The Woman
Rebel, in which she attacked the “Comstock Law” restrictions on distribution of contraceptive information.
FEMINISM
The US Senate voted down the “Susan B. Anthony” amendment.
Nevada and Montana enfranchised women citizens.
New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacobs patented the brassiere (the original purpose of the device was to flatten
the breasts, rather than support or protect them).
The Congressional Union alienated leaders of the National American association by campaigning against prosuffrage Democrats in the congressional elections.
Dr. Bernard Weil mobilized into the French army soon after the outbreak of World War I. The family, including
André Weil, born in 1906, would move each time he was transferred.
SIMONE WEIL
During the Great War, Otto Frank would be serving in the German Army, and he would reach the rank of
lieutenant. (Later on, he would have occasion to discover that this having been a good soldier wouldn’t really
serve to obtain for him or for his family any particular credit as “good Germans.” Go figure.)
ANTISEMITISM
ANNE FRANK
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March: Margaret Sanger prepared the initial issue of The Woman Rebel, a radical feminist monthly that advocated
militant feminism (including the practice of birth control). For this reason three issues would be banned and
in August she would be indicted for the violation of postal obscenity laws. Unwilling to risk a lengthy stay in
a federal prison, in October she would jump bail and as “Bertha Watson” embark for England. En route she
would instruct friends to release 100,000 copies of “Family Limitation,” a 16-page pamphlet providing explicit
instructions on the use of a variety of contraceptive methods such as suppositories and douches.
1915
Anna Howard Shaw’s tactical conservatism culminated in a loss of support from the National American
members. She resigned and Carrie Chapman Catt replaced her as president.
FEMINISM
Margaret Sanger had been promoting woman-controlled contraceptives such as suppositories and douches.
In this year, visiting a Dutch birth-control clinic, she was made aware of a new more flexible diaphragm that
so long as it was carefully fitted by medically trained staff could prove greatly effective.
October: William Sanger had gone to jail for 30 days for distributing a copy of his wife’s “Family Limitation”
pamphlet to an undercover postal agent. She, keen to focus media attention on her trial and generate favorable
public support, returned to New York to face the charges against her as editor of The Woman Rebel. When the
couple’s 5-year-old daughter Peggy died suddenly in November, the federals decided that they would avoid
unfavorable publicity by dropping this prosecution. Margaret Sanger embarked on a nationwide tour to
promote birth control and managed to get herself arrested in various cities.
FEMINISM
1916
October 16, day: Margaret Sanger, Fania Mendell, and Ethel Byrne opened America’s 1st birth-control clinic, in
Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York (it would be raided on the 24th and its nurses incarcerated, with Margaret
herself held for a month).2
FEMINISM
In Helsinki, five of the Six Songs op.86 by Jean Sibelius to words of Tavaststjerna, Karlfeldt, and Snoilsky
were performed for the initial time.
2. Upon appeal the Brownsville decision would be upheld, but the New York State appellate court would exempt physicians from
the law prohibiting dissemination of contraceptive information to women so long as the contraceptive devices were being prescribed
for the health of the patient — this loophole would allow Margaret Sanger the opportunity in 1923 to open a legal, physician-run
birth control clinic.
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1921
November 2, day: The American Birth Control League was founded in New York, led by Margaret Sanger.
“Anna Christie” opened in New York. The play would gain fame for its playwright, Eugene O’Neill.
1922
Margaret Sanger had little but contempt for the “Asiatic races,” as she and her eugenicist friends called them,
and proposed that in some way their numbers be drastically reduced. If white civilization was to fulfil its
promise of “more without end,” it would also need to involve a “war without end” upon the weak and unworthy
among us. In this year Sanger visited Japan, and that didn’t help even one little bit, except that in her
autobiography she would single out the Chinese in particular among the people of Asia, as a phenomenon
resembling plague, writing that “the incessant fertility of [the Chinese] millions spread like a plague.”
Well Adjusted White Woman, the Hope of Our Future
However, in this year this white-lady-with-attitude’s preoccupation went beyond racial inferiority to include
individual inferiority as well. In her PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION she asked not only that the “genetically inferior
races” be sterilized, but also, so that the “weeds ... overrunning the human garden” would be extirpated, that
all “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted” be segregated out of the general human population, which is to say,
institutionalized.
RACISM
(And after all, wasn’t this lady right about the Chinese people? –For instance, between April 1922 and
November 1923 our marines would be forced to venture onto China’s soil fully five times in order to
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adequately protect USers and their interests during various periods of native restlessness! ;-)
US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
For the following three decades the sickle cell trait would be being viewed as a “latent” disease. Some US
physicians would promote the idea that sickle cell disease could be spread into the general populace by
“disordered Negro blood.”
MALARIA
(The physicians who would be promoting this theory would be, by some odd coincidence, white men.
But now you look here — this has nothing to do with that.)
In this year Margaret Sanger got married with oil magnate James Noah H. Slee, presumably just as racist as
she, but did so on her own terms, insuring her financial and sexual independence. (Slee, who would die in
1943, would make himself the main funder of the birth control movement.)
FEMINISM
1928
Margaret Sanger angrily resigned as president of the American Birth Control League as her leadership in the
movement was eclipsed by younger professionals with more mainstream agendas. The American Birth
Control League and the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau would merge in 1939 into the Birth Control
Federation of America (later to be renamed Planned Parenthood Federation of America).
At some point in the late 1920s (I am positioning the information in 1928 merely for convenience), with the
Great Stone Face showing signs of weathering and losing its resemblance to a human profile, and so the State
of New Hampshire, struggling to preserve its tourist industry, began to attempt to bolt and chain these rocks
in position. A great rock facelift.
Before
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1929
April 15, day: New York police raided Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, confiscating
equipment and published materials and taking into custody the two doctors and three nurses they discovered
on the premises (the case would be dismissed).
1934
Margaret Sanger’s CODE TO STOP THE OVERPRODUCTION OF CHILDREN. On page 71 we find the following:
“Feeble-minded persons, habitual congenital criminals, those afflicted with inheritable diseases, and others
found biologically unfit should be sterilized or in cases of doubt be isolated as to prevent the perpetuation of
their afflictions by breeding.”
Not all Fools are Feebleminded
EUGENICS
Is that so amazing? In this decade the State of Maine was officially sponsoring tourism by advertising itself to
potential tourists as a region possessing a high percentage of “native-born white stock.” The State of Maine
was pointing out that tourists (who of course were white) would meet there a remarkably small number of
persons of “foreign parentage,” and boasting that in fact there were in the entire state “only a thousand Negroes
and less than a thousand Indians.”
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1938
Margaret Sanger’s AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
1942
The US Mint issued zinc-coated steel pennies and silver nickels to free up copper and nickel for the war effort.
By this point Margaret Sanger was living in Tucson, Arizona and had retired from active participation in the
birth control movement.
The movies “Casablanca” and “Bambi” were released.
1951
Margaret Sanger urged development of an oral contraceptive for humans.
1952
Lord Bertrand Russell got married a 4th time, with Edith Finch.
By the end of World War II growing alarm over the consequences of population growth, particularly in the
Third World, had renewed interest in efforts to build an international birth control movement, propelling
Margaret Sanger out of retirement. There are too many little brown people! Working with family planning
leaders in Europe and Asia, in this year she helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation
(IPPF), and she would serve as its president until 1959.
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1965
A decision of the US Supreme Court, Griswold v. Connecticut, made birth control legal for married couples.
Only a few months later, on September 6, 1966, Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement,
would die in a Tucson nursing home at the age of 86.
Austin Meredith’s rancid comments:
The joke’s on us, because we insist upon supposing that someone who is antislavery must also be antiracist
when that fairly often has simply not been so, when we insist upon supposing that someone who is egalitarian
and an advocate of fairness must also be opposed to the extermination of the unfit when that fairly often has
simply not been so, when we suppose that someone who is in favor of careful birth control is in favor of the
careful nurturing of children, etc. We need to own up to the fact that we live in a world in which an antislavery,
abolitionist attitude can and often does spring from a feeling that persons of color have no business even
existing, or have no business being here in our nation with us. Prime examples of that attitude would be Hinton
Rowan Helper’s THE IMPENDING CRISIS and Hinton’s white hero, good ol’ boy Waldo Emerson.
We need to own up to the fact that we live in a world in which an egalitarian attitude of fairness toward all can
and often does spring from a feeling that we are being bothered by the presence of unfitness and incompetence.
Prime examples of that attitude would be Adolf Hitler and Margaret Sanger.
I wonder why it is that we have such difficulty appreciating this.
We live in a world in which, very often, people come at us posturing with Righteous Attitude A and come at
us posturing with Righteous Attitude B — because these accumulating righteousnesses constitute their cover
story for their clutching at Unrighteous Attitude C. For instance, from time to time we discover that someone
who is vehemently antiracist and loud about it also happens to be covertly antiSemitic. From time to time we
discover that someone who is vehemently antisexist also happens to be covertly speciesist. Etc. This is a hard
world. It is a strange world. But it is very real. In this real world when the devil comes visiting us, he comes
quoting Scripture.
It may be from time to time that we notice even ourselves “putting our best foot forward” in this manner in
our search for acceptance and for personal acceptability. —We’re a mixed bag, we humans are.
EUGENICS
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,
such as extensive quotations and reproductions of
images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great
deal of special work product of Austin Meredith,
copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will
eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some
of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button
invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap
through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—
allows for an utter alteration of the context within
which one is experiencing a specific content already
being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin
Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by
all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any
material from such files, must be obtained in advance
in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”
Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please
contact the project at <[email protected]>.
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until
tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”
– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”
in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: June 9, 2013
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a
human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we
have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of
the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What
these chronological lists are: they are research reports
compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules
which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining.
To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a
button.
Commonly,
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has
obvious
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deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules
stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and
then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of
the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely
resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and
love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve,
and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes
available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the
creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out
of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking
and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of
a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and
upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge.
Place your requests with <[email protected]>.
Arrgh.
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