Population Control: Good Old Days

In the good old days, books could--without fear of reprisal--be titled, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Lothrop Stoddard's book would achieve a kind of immortality it would not otherwise have had when F. Scott Fitzgerald presented his portrait of a certain strain of WASP American in The Great Gatsby:


“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. "I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we——”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

Perhaps it was legal considertions that forced Fitzgerald to thinly disguise the Stoddard work. He may have altered the name of the author and the title of his work, but Fitzgerald was not fabricating contemporary attitudes toward non-white peoples. This was also the period in which the eugenics movement had begun to flourish here in the United States, and Jack London could unblinkingly write of "The Yellow Peril." The concluding sentences of that work have echoes in current political reality:

The world is whirling faster to-day than ever before. It has gained impetus. Affairs rush to conclusion. The Far East is the point of contact of the adventuring Western people as well as of the Asiatic. We shall not have to wait for our children's time nor our children's children. We shall ourselves see and largely determine the adventure of the Yellow and the Brown. (Italics mine.)

It is interesting that though he titled his essay, "The Yellow Peril," London did not fail to include the similar threat posed by the growth of the "brown" races. A bit later in the twentieth century, however, the racial policies of the Nazis and the Fascists gave such phrases as "white supremacy" and the "master race" decidedly horrific connotations, and such terminology fell from use--at least in polite public discourse.

The truth is, however, that discussions of population control are still regularly cast in terms of race or ethnicity. In addition, given capitalism's need for markets and cheap labor, one would be hard pressed to see in print--or in any other medium--the advantages of a nation or the whole globe, for that matter, limiting population growth. Religion, race, politics and economics all come to play in discussions of population. Viewed strictly in terms of the health of the planet, this should not be the case. The very term ecology implies that there is some ideal balance of population, available resources and the health of the ecosystem.

What the environmentalists of our own day make painfully clear to all but those who profit from ignoring the reality is that there are too many automobiles, too many smoke stacks, overproduction of agricultural products, overfishing of the seas, disastrous incursions into wetlands areas, virgin forests and rain forests, scarcity of potable water, irresponsible building of dams...

(To be continued)