Reading through the Francis Parker Yockey essay, I am reminded of why I left behind that stage of my ideological career. I was initially enthralled with Yockey due to his sweeping knowledge of history and philosophy. As I learned more about these subjects in my own right, largely inspired by his influence, I began to see the flaws in his analysis.
Where to begin?
1.) Racial Consciousness – White racial consciousness organically grew out of black slavery and the American frontier experience. Creating a White ethnostate is a peculiarly American project. The whole tradition of using race as a marker of ethnic identity started in America and the other colonies.
Europeans never defined themselves in racial terms. The British and Spanish did to a lesser extent after accumulating their colonial empires, but most European nations were never “racially conscious” in the American sense.
Germany’s brief flirtation with racialism was due to Anglo-American influence. Eugenics and Darwinism were also imported into Germany from Britain and America.
The German school of anthropology, which Franz Boas brought to America, had traditionally stressed the importance of culture over heredity. By an accident of history, the German culturalist school of anthropology triumphed in “race materialist” America while Anglo-American hereditarianism was exported to Nazi Germany.
2.) Economics – The Yockey essay posits the existence of “continental Europeans attached to Listian economics.” List’s own “National System” of economics was inspired by his observations of America’s economic development and Alexander Hamilton’s theories.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the U.S. that hid behind its high tariff wall and the American state that constantly intervened in the private economy to promote “internal improvements,” the greatest of which was the Panama Canal.
“Yurop” was the world epicenter of the “free trade” movement. America only switched to “free trade” after the Second World War when the rest of the industrialized world was laying in smoldering ruin.
3.) Tradition – This idea that Europeans were attached to authority, tradition, and landed property is widely off the mark. Europe was the site of the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution. There was nothing traditional about the NSDAP in Germany or the Fascists in Italy; it was the decline of traditional authority that led to the triumph of Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism.
4.) Liberalism – America was founded as a republic. The American Founders considered themselves republicans, not liberals. Liberalism has traditionally been associated with the Netherlands and British Empire. America became infatuated with “liberalism” in the 1920s and 1930s.
5.) Enlightenment – It is commonplace in racialist circles to deplore the Enlightenment. If only the Enlightenment had never happened, everything would be swell, racially speaking. This is another old chestnut.
Most of the Enlightenment philosophers were racialists. It was the Enlightenment that inspired the first systematic attempts to classify the human races. The Enlightenment lionized science which undermined the old Christian ideal of the unity of humanity.
The roots of anti-racism can be traced back to Romanticism. In reaction to the Enlightenment, the Romantics glorified the “noble savage” and the primitive. They deplored modern industrial civilization. The modern love affair with the negro and all the screeds about how European imperialism has “oppressed” the Third World can be laid at the door of Romanticism, not the Enlightenment.
6.) Destroying Europe – Europe immolated itself in two fratricidal World Wars. It is hardly the fault of Americans that Communism was so popular in Europe or that European nation-states could not get along. A thoughtful American might respond that if Europe had developed a greater sense of racial consciousness, it would never have blown itself to pieces and lost its world leadership.
7.) Jews – Europeans emancipated the Jews all by themselves. By the early twentieth century, the Jewish Problem was already far advanced in Germany. Jews were involved in subversive movements all across Europe.
8.) Corruption – European nationalists have claimed for centuries that poor, innocent Europe is being corrupted by hopelessly decadent America.
In fact, upon close examination, you will see that the opposite is true: communism, romanticism, socialism, feminism, anarchism, fascism, liberalism, anti-racism, anti-fascism, postmodernism, cultural relativism, and post-structuralism were imported into America from Europe.
American youth are indoctrinated in these subversive ideals in public schools which is another European innovation. The last thing they are taught is their own history and traditions.
Francis Parker Yockey was brilliant in many ways, but his demonization of America and his romanticized portrait of Europe is false and misleading. That said, I highly recommend reading him. No self respecting White Nationalist should be without a copy of Imperium in his private library.
He was a nihilist in the same way Huxley was a nihilist.
Lena,
If interested in a Traditionalist assessment of Sartre’s world-view, see chapter 14 of Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola.
I am not sure if the book is available to read online, but many of his other books are.
Regarding Huxley: here is some interesting correspondence between he and Savitri Devi.
Perhaps when referring to the French influence you are referring to DeSade, from whom the word sadism comes from. If you are suggesting that academia has been thoroughly influenced by DeSade, then I would have to agree. Huxley, who totally and absolutely lacks idealism referred to Sade as “the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”
Well then I would agree this Enlightenment materialist, reason to the extreme thinker completely infected academia. Reason taken to the extreme as in Sade is the modern economic man, where morality and ecnomics are seperated.
For Sade and his adherents, religion, art, beauty, romantic sexual love, the spiritual hunger and quest for truth leave them bored, to mock is clever and fun, and of coarse any one who could feel these things must be delusional and insane.
Hayes, Huntington and the rest are all out of date has beens. Their works have been refuted by modern scholarship. They weren’t even very good when they were contemporary. Third-rate mediocrities, they were. So sad.
No, they are not, and no, they have not. Obviously there is not 1-1 displacement of native births by immigrants. It is not that the population would have grown to exactly the same number had there been no immigrants. As Madison Grant says in The Conquest of a Continent, “No one would claim that such a generalization is exact.” Your citation of “anti-racist” “modern scholarship” notwithstanding (an article containing the following quotes: “racism,” “Anglo-Saxon racism,” “Anglo-Saxon racism,” and “fears of old-stock Americans who felt threatened by change”), the argument that immigration reduced native birth rates by an important degree is compelling. If you change a few words, your arguments that the old Americans needed the immigration of millions of southern and eastern Europeans are nearly indistinguishable to today’s arguments about how Americans need the immigration of millions of Mexicans and others or how Europeans need the immigration of millions of Africans and Middle Easterners.
As Thomas Jefferson asks, is it not preferable for the population to grow at a somewhat lower rate than to be swamped by masses of aliens? Moreover, Ellsworth Huntington says that even if America had a reduced population without immigration, “there is no good reason to think that we are better off because of mere numbers. Quality counts for vastly more than quantity.”
Furthermore, your claim that the racial demographics of the United States would have been markedly worse without mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe is shown to be false by a look at United States Census data. In the 1870 Census, prior to the “New Immigration,” whites comprised 87.1% of the United States population. In the 1930 Census, after the mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, whites comprised 88.7% of the United States population.
Europeans (I include the British and Irish in this) love to lecture Colonial populations about non-Whites.
I’m thinking of people like the Swede Gunnar Myrdal lecturing American Southerners about the Negro problem. This was based on the extensive Swedish experience of Negroes up to the 1940’s lol.
As someone with a South African accent, they never tire of making their points about how the Whites should leave Africa because they have no right to be there, while often at the same time saying White Africans have no right to come to Europe on the basis of race. Hypocritical Euro-liberal scum 🙂
My father had experience of being a White South African in Ireland in the 70s and 80s, when all the Irish “experts” on the Negro question would lament the Apartheid system. I am of course referring to people whose expertise comes from watching TV and who have never been to SA or met a real negro.
Europeans love to pontificate with abstract notions of morality which lead to tragedy for the Colonial populations who actually have lived for Centuries around non-White populations.
If there was anything good about Coloureds, White South Africans would have been the first to see it. The fact of Apartheid being implemented by religious, paternalistic Whites is all the evidence one needs for the Ethnostate.
I’m not a fan of Europe’s petty nationalisms. Having lived in a colony, I know WN is the way forward.
WPWW
Thanks Robert. I am currently studying Huxley for my next blog post.
Here’s one example: in 2003, the US Supreme Court made homosexuality legal, banning state laws against homosexuality, which were in effect in 13 states at the time (Michigan, Texas, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Missouri, and several southern states including Virginia). Amongst the reasons given was that Europe guaranteed the right to homosexuality, and therefor the US should as well in order to bring us in line with them
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-102.ZS.html
[referring to a 1989 US Supreme Court case upholding state laws criminalizing homosexual behavior] reasoning and holding have been rejected by the European Court of Human Rights, and that other nations have taken action consistent with an affirmation of the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct. There has been no showing that in this country the governmental interest in circumscribing personal choice is somehow more legitimate or urgent.
“other nations have taken action consistent with an affirmation of the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct.” of course refers to Europe.
So, according to our elites on the Supreme Court, since Europe has legal homosexuality, America had better have it as well.
If I dig around, I can find tons more examples similar to this, for example the restricting of our use of capital punishment.
I have found NO examples of ‘America does this left wing thing, so we had better do it too’ being used as directives in Europe.
Jim Giles would build the “Big Ass White Wall.”
“I have found NO examples of ‘America does this left wing thing, so we had better do it too’ being used as directives in Europe.”
It happened the other way – films of Americans being nasty, racist and right wing used as sermons to demolish resistance. The whole civil rights thing was used in Europe to demolish resistance to non-white immigration by presenting the “racists” as bad, evil people. Obviously it was jews making these films but the audience in Europe didn’t know that.
“Could the jews have got the 1965 immigration law passed in 1860?”
In a vote split four ways, I’d say they passed it with 39%. It was, after all, the point at which it became an ideological “nation”.
Well, O.K., they had to fight a war for it. So, five years more, 1865.
Seriously, I’m continuously amazed at the White Gentile Americans (not you) who relish history who have never examined the Jewish presence in our political affairs prior to the 20th century. Number one, it doesn’t make any sense. They obviously had plenty of financial, and thus political, clout long before then. Number two, their ideology is written all over the Lincoln-Chase (Hamlin? heh, heh) administration. Whites could be slaughtered but Jewish speculators received reprieves from the President. Eh? Number three, big anti-White events took place prior to WW1. Between 1867 and the early 20th century, America was flooded with Jews. Gee, who decided that? The Federal Reserve Act of 1913? Come on!
“I have found NO examples of ‘America does this left wing thing, so we had better do it too’ being used as directives in Europe.”
Except that the US has troops stationed in Europe. There are no European enforcers in the US.
“Come on!”
You’re right about them having had a lot of influence over a long time i just quibble at words like “control.” I feel they pretty gradually increased their influence over a long time with 1965 being the big turning point and Obama’s election as the pinnacle so far.
However my view is although their power is very strong it is also very fragile because it’s built on stealth and camouflage. As soon as people see them out in the light a lot of their power goes.
Between 1867 and the early 20th century, America was flooded with Jews. Gee, who decided that?
Who “decided” to flood America with Chinese? Who “decided” to flood America with Irish? Who “decided” to flood America with Italians?
There were no immigration restrictions until the 1875 Page Act and 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. There were no numerical limits on European immigration until the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and 1924 Immigration Act.
http://books.google.com/books?id=2NNLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA112#v=onepage&q&f=false
Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization, pp. 112-113
That basically became true. Here’s the demographics today for those states:
Massachusetts:
Irish (23.8%), Italian (14.2%), French/French Canadian (or Franco-American) (12.9%), English (11.8%), and German (6.7%).
Rhode Island:
Irish (19%), Italian (19%), French Canadian (17.3%),[39] English (12%), Hispanic 11% (predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican, with smaller Central American populations),[40] and Portuguese (8.7%)
New Hampshire:
22.5% Irish
19.3% English
17.0% French
10.5% Italian
9.7% German
8.6% French Canadian
4.9% Scottish
4.4% Polish
Connecticut:
# 19.3% Italian
# 17.9% Irish
# 10.7% English
# 10.4% German
# 8.6% Polish
# 6.6% French
# 3.0% French Canadian
The US government demands that potential NATO members adopt hate speech and anti-Holocaust denial laws that would be struck down as unconstitutional here. How does that happen? Because this country is in the hands of an alien, hostile elite that has not yet managed to do away with the First Amendment.
Percentage of Whites who voted for Obama in the former Confederate states.
Alabama 10%
Mississippi 11%
Louisiana 14%
Georgia 23%
South Carolina 26%
Texas 26%
Arkansas 30%
Tennessee 34%
North Carolina 35%
Virginia 39%
Florida 42%
Maybe you should move to Alabama.
It would make a big difference if America’s Jews disappeared with it.
But if they moved to Europe things would take a turn for the worse.
That is 100% false. Turkey, a NATO member, is a hotbed of pro-Hitler and ‘holocaust denial’
Of the 28 NATO countries, only 11 have laws against ‘holocaust denial’. Canada does not, but has that ‘human rights commission’, so I suppose we could call that 12, which is still a minority of NATO countries which have laws banning ‘holocaust denial’ and ‘hate speech’
Austria, Bosnia, Lichtenstein, and Switzerland are not NATO members, but have ‘holocaust-denial’ laws.
It’s mainly a continental European attitude towards banning ‘hate speech’ and other speech crimes, vs the Anglo-Saxon/Nordic concept of ‘freedom of speech’
Where do these laws against ‘hate speech’ and ‘holocaust denial’ come from? Why, they’re a natural extension of continental European aristocratic thinking, of course:
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/images/pdfs/246.pdf
The article is quite lengthy, but that’s the part which best summarizes the parts relevant to this discussion.
That’s where he lived his entire life up until a few months ago. Not a whole lot of ‘WN’ activity going on there either, apparently. As regards the large number of whites in VA who voted for Obama, these came largely from the government workers and similar creatures in the DC suburbs.
Not really-Jews have effectively vanished from most European countries aside from France, and a small remnant in Britain. The problem there is that jewish (marxist) thought processes have ingrained themselves in the minds of whites there far more than they have here. That’s why they are all to some degree or other pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel but very pro-multicult/left, much more so than here.
Is there any White local government that advocates for our race? I doubt you can find one elected official who fights for us. There’s no localized and independent action when it comes to the things the Jews want to control.
We don’t live in a free or open society. Our enemies always find a way around the purely theoretical rights we have when those rights get in the way of their agenda. The persecution of Ezra Pound, the railroading of Matt Hale, and the shameless shredding of the Constitution in the War on Israel’s Enemies, sometimes called the War on Terror, are just a few examples.
That results in the feds swooping in and filing civil rights charges, so obviously nobody is going to be dumb enough to openly do so. You do see a lot of state and local ‘implicitly pro-white’ laws against illegals, such as the recent Arizona law, and assorted things done on the down-low, or with some other motive given as the official reason.
Even simple things like bans on overnight street parking: these laws don’t make much sense at first glance, but don’t seem really ‘threatening’ either. But, they make it quite difficult for households with multiple adults to live in the neighborhood, which means the usual immigrant tactic of having 10 people live in a house and split the rent runs into a major speed bump. Nearly impossible for the feds to prove that’s why they did it though, so towns can get away with such laws.
The United States has 6 million of the world’s 14 million Jews. I don’t know how much of the wealth of Jewry that represents but it can’t be much less than half. Take away half their wealth and Jews would have less power worldwide, including Europe.
So much for “localized and independent action.”
Europe is run by gentile anti-white liberals, with little to no direct ongoing influence by jews. The jews, in conjunction with unhealthy domestic currents, poisoned the culture generations ago, and now it continues on autopilot. This is why most European nationalists regard the American WN focus on jews as ‘crude’ and view it with contempt, since the anti-white positions there are manned by indigenous whites. Here of course the jews do have enormous power, but in Europe it is mainly gentile whites who push anti-white policies. Every jew could vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, and Europe would still continue on an anti-white multicult course. In the US of course, it would make an enormous difference, since the left/multicult here is mostly run by jews.
Relative to Europe, there is more localized and independent authority here. This has been much more so historically, up until the 1960s, and prior to the 1930s there wasn’t much of any federal government. Anyways, the further they can remove it from the appearance of ‘racism’, the more likely they are to get away with it.
“Is there any White local government that advocates for our race?”
PA has a few state level reps and such that are, especially, driving home the anti-illegal immigrant position and other implicitly white policies…Daryl Metcalfe, there are a few more that escape memory at the moment…
http://graphjam.com/2010/05/14/funny-graphs-american-european-culture/
Whites in Alabama disliked Obama in 2008. That was before gutting NASA, the Gulf Oil Spill, Obamacare, and McChrystal.
@ Vlad Katonic
Win.
“We don’t live in a free or open society. Our enemies always find a way around the purely theoretical rights we have when those rights get in the way of their agenda.”
I don’t think it pays to overstate their power. Their main influence is indirect and through the media and *completely relies* on the majority of people not realising its there. If jews developed purple skin one day their influence would drop 90% overnight as it became obvious how overwhelming their numbers were in the media, political and banking sectors. They rely on invisibility.
“Your citation of “anti-racist” “modern scholarship” notwithstanding (an article containing the following quotes: “racism,” “Anglo-Saxon racism,” “Anglo-Saxon racism,” and “fears of old-stock Americans who felt threatened by change”), the argument that immigration reduced native birth rates by an important degree is compelling.”
When did I use the term anti-racist? As for those quotes, it is idiots like you who give a sane and sound “racism” a bad name. And the argument regarding immigration and reduced native birth rates is compelling only to imbeciles who disregard all of the well documented and well argued evidence to the contrary. I note that you have not so much as attempted to contend with the criticism presented in the paper.
” If you change a few words, your arguments that the old Americans needed the immigration of millions of southern and eastern Europeans are nearly indistinguishable to today’s arguments about how Americans need the immigration of millions of Mexicans and others or how Europeans need the immigration of millions of Africans and Middle Easterners.”
Why change my words at all? Can’t grapple with valid arguments, can you? Further, the comparison of past European immigration and current non-European immigration is made precisely by those who wish to destroy us. Whereas I make a distinction between the two, both you and contemporary immigrationists do not. You have more in common with each other than either of you do with me. Wise up, dummy. Finally, my argument is very simple: less immigrants, higher black ratios. Deal with it.
“As Thomas Jefferson asks, is it not preferable for the population to grow at a somewhat lower rate than to be swamped by masses of aliens? Moreover, Ellsworth Huntington says that even if America had a reduced population without immigration, “there is no good reason to think that we are better off because of mere numbers. Quality counts for vastly more than quantity.”
Two points. First, you are clearly evading and backtracking. You began by disputing my claim that immigration improves the White/Black ratio in favor of Whites. Now you’re shifting the argument to the supposed benefits of a lower growth rate and superior “quality”. You can’t have it both ways. Second, aside from the fact that founding-stocksters aren’t at all superior in quality to immigrants (you give ample proof of it yourself), my original point still stands; is it preferable to be swamped by masses of White aliens or to be subsumed by masses of native Blacks more alien still? I guess you like the Blacks. (So apparently did Tommy 😉 )
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Volume 28. January 1992
IDEOLOGICAL CURRENTS AND THE INTERPRETATION
OF DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS: THE CASE OF FRANCIS AMASA WALKER
DENNIS HODGSON
Late nineteenth-century influences on American population thought are highlighted
by focusing on Francis Amasa Walker’s theory of native American fertility decline.
Malthusianism, Darwinism, and racism combined to produce a new biological Malthu-
sianism that identified a population calamity more harmful than overpopula-
tion-biological deterioration. The plausibility of Walker’s theory is examined with
respect to contemporary demographic theory and demographic fact. Its reception by
American social scientists is described: acceptance of biological Malthusianism was
widespread, and scrutiny of an ideologically useful but empirically untenable theory
proved difficult when the social scientific community shared a particular value position.
In a short life-span of fifty-six years, Francis Amasa Walker was a Civil War general,
president of the American Economic Association (1885-1892), president of the American
Statistical Association (1882-1896), president of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology (1881-1896), and superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 censuses.1 He is remem-
bered by economists mainly for developments occurring early in his career, when he
was a major actor in the revamping of American economics. He introduced statistics
into the curriculum and effectively demolished the classic wage-fund theory, a bulwark
of laissez faire economics.2 His ascendancy to high positions within the profession marked
the fall from dominance of the traditionalists. During the 1880s, however, Walker “grew
more conservative” as he reacted to changes that threatened the position of old-line
Americans, specifically, outbreaks of labor unrest and the influx of large numbers of
eastern and southern Europeans.3
This essay focuses on a theory Walker developed during his later “conservative”
years, and the reason why he is still remembered by American students of population.
In 1891 he explained the native American’s small family size: the influx of “inferior”
immigrants willing to work for low wages heightened competition, and made the native
“unwilling to bring sons and daughters into the world.” Practically, this theory fostered
a racial nativism that eventually resulted in the discriminatory national origins quota
acts of the 1920s.4 Intellectually, it exemplified a fusing of Darwinian and racial notions
with those of classic Malthusianism that produced a new “biologic” Malthusianism. From
Walker’s time until the 1930s, the effect of demographic change on the biological quality
of the population was a focal point of American population research. In fact, during
this period of heightened racial and class anxiety, predictions of retrogression and doom
were common,5 leading many to point to the declining proportion of Nordics or Anglo-
Saxons and to appeal to prejudice to prove race degradation. Because Walker’s theory
offered an explanation of a widely known demographic trend, it was both of great
policy import and amenable to empirical scrutiny. Its acceptance by many American
social scientists without such scrutiny, however, illustrates the power of race and class
to subvert the scientific method.
A Biologic Malthusianism
Malthus wrote his Essay on Population in 1798, and for the next century popula-
tion theorizing took place largely within a Malthusian framework.6 This was true even
in America, the country Malthus used to illustrate a population’s ability to increase
geometrically when encountering no shortage of resources. The lack of any subsistence
check to population growth prompted a “debate” to develop among American students
of population. Anti-Malthusians questioned whether the availability of subsistence
actually did limit population growth, while Malthusians considered America’s twenty-
five year doubling time an unusual and temporary condition, the exception proving the
Malthusian rule.7 Nonetheless, early in the century all were measuring the nation’s pro-
gress by its rate of population increase, and American discussions of Malthus had a
decidedly abstract quality about them.8 Some, like John Adams, were led to belittle
the theory’s significance.9
Two actual population trends, however, did capture the attention of Americans:
fertility decline and immigration. Ever since the 1800 census, white fertility showed a
continual decline. In 1843 George Tucker related fertility decline to urbanization and
a rising standard of living: “Checks to natural multiplication, those arising from prudence
or pride, will continue to operate with increased force as our cities multiply in number
and increase in magnitude, and as the wealthy class enlarges.”10 This “standard of living”
explanation conformed to basic Malthusian premises. The middle and upper classes,
Malthus argued, delayed marriage and limited their childbearing to protect their stan-
dard of living. Though his gloomy forecast of the mass of mankind living in poverty
as population continually pressed against the means of subsistence arose from his belief
that the lower classes were not likely to exercise such “moral restraint,” nineteenth-cen-
tury American political economists came to be more optimistic on this point. They
believed that a rising standard of living was inducing ever larger proportions of the
population to act “prudently” in their reproductive behavior.11
Walker accepted this “standard of living” explanation early in his career though
adding negative undertones to it.12 As late as 1889, just two years prior to proclaiming
his new theory, he still made no reference to immigration when explaining fertility decline:
“It was the change from the simplicity of the early time to comparative luxury, including
a rise in the standard of living, the multiplication of artificial necessities, the rapid ex-
tension of a paid domestic service, the increasing introduction of women into factory
labor, the substitution of the hotel and boarding-house for the self-sufficing, self-
contained family, which, in the main, constituted the retarding force …. It was all
the natural result of the changed social and economic conditions under which the
American people had come to live.”13 His novel theory, therefore, was not the result
of slow accretion, but of sudden conversion.
The second population trend attracting attention was immigration. In the 1840s
over one and a half million immigrants, nearly three times the number of the preceding
decade, arrived in America. Most were destitute peasants fleeing starvation in Ireland.
Opposition to mid-century immigration was quick to develop. Focusing on their poverty
and their Catholicism, the Know-Nothing movement harnessed political support for stop-
ping the flow.14 In 1856 Samuel Busey juxtaposed the immigrants’ high fertility with
the decreasing fertility of the native population, arguing not that their influx caused
the decline, but that it threatened to change the American character.15 But political
economists of the time tended to find few economic difficulties with immigration. Amasa
Walker, Francis’s father and a renowned political economist, contended that the im-
migrants’ labor was being put to productive use, that the nation’s aggregate wealth was
being enhanced, and that native wages were being “improved rather than injured.” He
reasoned that since “the general intelligence and enterprise of the native population are
far in advance” to those of the newcomers, immigrants would become factory workers
while natives would become managers.16 Nathan Allen, a New England physician, took
this tack when he explicitly related native fertility decline to immigration. Immigrants
pushed the native American up the class structure. Native women no longer performed
domestic chores; female immigrant servants did them. Native men no longer performed
manual labor; male immigrants did the heavy work. This upward mobility, he argued,
was accompanied by changes in tastes and habits that led to small families.17
As the century drew to a close a new population concern arose: Robert Porter,
superintendent of the 1890 census, heralded the end of the frontier.18 In a “filled”
America, Malthusianism lost its hypothetical quality. Students of population were quick
to apply standard Malthusian assumptions in their analyses of American population
trends. With no frontier, an expanding population would lead to an era of declining
marginal returns as resources became more scarce and costly.19 Francis Walker used
the passing of the frontier to argue that immigration had changed from being a positive
to a negative factor in the nation’s development: “There was a time, a long time, when
every able-bodied man coming to our shores, however poor and even however ignorant,
if not vicious or criminal, brought an added strength to the young nation. The more
came, the more there was for all and for each. A continent was to be wrested from
savage nature, was to be annexed, occupied, cultivated; and every one’s help was welcome
in the great work.” He went on to note, however, that “to-day, the tracts of public land
worth taking up under the homestead and preemption acts are few and far between.”
With the closing of the frontier, “a labor-problem is at last upon us.” He contended
that in this new environment, large numbers of poor immigrants only heightened com-
petition and lowered the standard of living of the native worker.20
Initially, Richmond Mayo-Smith, professor of political economy at Columbia
University, presented an analysis of unrestricted immigration’s impact on native fertility
that extrapolated from the accepted “standard of living” explanation of fertility decline.
For him, “the ideal sort of population is not one that increases with enormous rapidity.
It is one where there is a small number of births, a small number of deaths, and a long
average life, and where the people are kept in good health and strength. Such an ideal
population can exist only where there is a high standard of living, where there is prudence
and self-restraint, and where there is the hope that the position of children may be better
than that of the fathers.” Unrestricted immigration increased competition between native
and immigrant, and worked to lower the standard of living of the native. This made
“prudential restraint” less likely among the native working class: “It is difficult at the
best to induce a population to adopt the prudential restraint,—to refrain from getting
married, and having children unless there is a reasonable prospect that their children
will be able to maintain themselves in the same habits of life as their parents,—but a
continuous immigration removes even that possibility, for the place which would have
been taken by the children is now taken by the foreigner. Every reward for self-restraint
and prudence is thus taken away.”21 Unrestricted immigration was a menace because
it threatened to end fertility decline among native Americans. Although conforming
with accepted demographic theory, Mayo-Smith’s analysis attracted little attention and
no followers. Nor did he repeat it in his classic 1890 treatise, Emigration and
Immigration.22
American population specialists had begun responding to a new Malthusianism,
one that identified a population calamity more harmful than overpopulation: biological
deterioration. During the nineteenth century, classic Malthusianism had mixed with
Darwinian and racist elements. Darwin took Malthus’s idea that superfluous reproduc-
tion provoked a fight for survival and used it to explain biological change.23 Belief that
competition and natural selection produced beneficial change had become nearly universal
among educated Americans.24 Many linked evolutionary notions with the racial theories
that presumed a hierarchy of races then coming into vogue. John Fiske, for example,
was an early advocate of Spencerian and Darwinian thought who went on to popularize
Anglo-Saxon racism and to help establish the Teutonist historical school in America.
Academics, overwhelmingly of north-western European heritage, found “scientific”
theories identifying Teutons, Anglo-Saxons or Nordics as the superior race particularly
captivating.25
Out of this mix of ideas, a biologic Malthusianism emerged that differed significantly
from the classic sort. With class and race being used as surrogate measures of genetic
quality, changes in a population’s racial and class composition assumed a supreme im-
portance. The low fertility of the native American and the influx of prolific and “inferior”
peoples came to be viewed as a biological catastrophe: a regressive evolutionary pro-
cess. The inverse relationship between class and fertility that was understandable from
the vantage point of classic Malthusianism, became devastating and unacceptable.26
Beginning with Galton, who took Darwin’s idea of natural selection and proposed the
process be aided through science to breed a superior human species, plans to correct
this noxious imbalance were fashioned.27
The vision of a “filled” America facing resource limitations that emerged at the end
of the century, therefore, did not produce calls for policies that would simply slow
growth: ending immigration and encouraging fertility decline.28 Most American students
of population adopted biologic Malthusianism, and refused to advocate any activity
that might lower the fertility of native couples. They did not oppose the Comstock Laws
that made the distribution of contraceptive information and devices illegal, fearing that
“prudent and thoughtful” natives would disproportionately avail themselves of birth
control.29 Instead, they first fought to prohibit the “sub-common representatives of cer-
tain unachieving and indistinguished strains” from gaining entrance to America, and
later allied themselves with eugenicists to work for higher fertility from the biologically
fit and lower fertility from the unfit.30
Walker, born of yeoman English colonial stock, responded to America’s changing
demographic reality in an exemplary biologic Malthusian manner. Captivated by racial
theorizing, he started with Teutonism and evolved a version of Anglo-Saxon racism that
attempted to explain America’s singular superiority in evolutionary terms:
There is no reason to suppose that otherwise than through coming predomin-
ately from the intelligent and virtuous middle class of the old country, constituting
thus a picked body from which were, in a great measure, excluded the weak, the
vicious, the effeminate persons of dwarfed stature, tainted blood and imperfect
organization, the first settlers of New England possessed any superiority in the quality
under consideration over the English people in general. It was to their experiences,
extending through many generations, upon this inhospitable shore, that their descen-
dants were to owe the development of a mechanical faculty which was to place them
as far ahead of the English as the English are ahead of any other branch of the
Teutonic race; as the Teutonic race are ahead of the Slavic or the Celtic.31
Having such a racial definition of the American character made it difficult to
acquiesce to the surge in immigration of Slavs, Jews, and Italians that began in the
1880s.32 He regarded their impoverished conditions as evolutionary proof of racial
inferiority and foresaw assimilation problems:
They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively
easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from
beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence …. They
have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily
the problem of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are
descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make
laws and choose chieftains.33
Speaking at Lehigh University in 1887, he blamed America’s expanding labor problems
on the influx of “vast hordes of brutalized peasants” coming from “countries compar-
atively new to our immigration statistics.” A detailed probe of shifting migration streams,
however, awaited the appearance of his 1891 Forum article, in which he proposed his
novel theory of native fertility decline.34
Walker’s Theory
In the Forum article Walker related nineteenth-century immigration and fertility
trends. Massive immigration “checked the disposition of the native toward the increase
of population at the traditional rate.” In those “north-eastern and northern middle States”
into which immigrants “poured in such numbers”
Our people had to look upon houses that were mere shells for human habitations,
the gate unhung, the shutters flapping or falling, green pools in the yard, babes
and young children rolling about half naked or worse, neglected, dirty, unkempt.
Was there not in this, sentimental reason strong enough to give a shock to the prin-
ciple of population? But there was, besides, an economic reason for a check to
the native increase. The American shrank from the industrial competition thus thrust
upon him. He was unwilling himself to engage in the lowest kind of day labor with
these new elements of the population; he was even more unwilling to bring sons
and daughters into the world to enter into that competition.
Immigration, instead of adding to the US population, only replaced native Americans
with immigrants: “That if the foreigners had not come, the native element would long
have filled the places the foreigners usurped, I entertain not a doubt.”35 Although this
“displacement” notion had a long history in American population thought, Walker
seemed unaware of earlier versions.36
He offered a “coincidence” of statistics to support his theory. Early in the century,
during a period of minimal immigration, Elkanah Watson had made a set of popula-
tion projections based upon the simple assumption of a constant rate of growth, the
one present from 1790 to 1810. The decennial rate of increase in population from 1820
through the 1850s actually stayed quite close to Watson’s prediction, even though im-
migration increased fourfold from the 1820s to the 1830s, and then nearly tripled again
to 1,713,000 during the next decade. Why had the rate of population remained constant
in the face of such substantial immigration?
Walker thought there were three possible answers: mere coincidence, the vacant
places left by a decline in native fertility attracted foreigners to fill them; or, native
Americans restricted their fertility in response to the influx of foreigners. Walker found
the great accuracy of Watson’s projections (coming within 50,000 of the actual 1840
and 1850 census counts) too improbable an occurrence to have happened by coincidence.
Nor could he imagine, considering the state of trans-oceanic communication and
transportation, how foreign peasantries would “know” the exact number of spaces that
could be filled each decade by a fall in native rates. This left only the third possibility.
He noted that “decline in the native element . . . occurred chiefly in just those regions
to which the newcomers most freely resorted.” And with the rise of immigration to over
5,250,000 for 1880-1890, and “with no assurance that this number may not be doubled
in the current decade,” Walker called for restriction to preserve “the nation’s birthright.”37
By 1896 Walker was so convinced that unrestricted immigration was the major
reason behind nineteenth-century native American fertility decline that he attacked the
traditional “standard of living” argument that was to be found in nearly every political
economy text (including the latest edition of his own).38
Is the proposition that the arrival of foreigners brought a check to the native
increase a reasonable one? … I answer, Yes …. It has been said by some that
during this time habits of luxury were entering, to reduce both the disposition and
the ability to increase among our own population. In some small degree, in some
restricted localities, this undoubtedly was the case; but prior to 1860 there was no
such general growth of luxury in the United States as is competent to account for
the effect seen. Indeed, I believe this was almost wholly due to the cause which
has been indicated.39
The Plausibility of Walker’s Theory
The empirical justification Walker provided for his theory was remarkably meager,
especially considering his access to census data and his acknowledged skill as a statisti-
cian. From 1790 to 1860 the nation expanded significantly in geographic size as new
states entered the union, yet he did not consider this factor’s possible impact on the
nation’s decennial rates of population increase. Although he asserted that native fertility
decline was greatest in those areas receiving the most foreign immigrants, he provided
no documentation. Nor did he divide the nation into regions experiencing high and low
levels of immigration to see if their patterns of native population increase were different.
He also failed to seek out consistencies and inconsistencies between rates of change in
immigration and rates of change in population increase. Walker’s failure to conduct
appropriate statistical analyses raised doubts about the theory’s validity.40
Even the “coincidence of statistics” that Walker did use was suspect. In 1891 he
commended the accuracy of Watson’s projections, yet in 1873 he had belittled Wat-
son’s methodology, explicitly objecting to Watson’s assumption of a constant rate of
growth. In that earlier year Walker attributed the accuracy of Watson’s 1820-1860 predic-
tions to blind “luck,” and asserted that Watson’s predictions for the remaining decades
of the century would considerably overestimate the population growth of a nation that
had begun “to leave agriculture for manufacturing pursuits.”41 After 1860 the rate of
overall population growth actually did decline even as the pace of immigration picked
up. Yet, for some reason in 1891 Walker decided to end his comparison between Wat-
son’s projections and actual census results in 1860, the last year for which a “remarkable
accuracy” was evident.42 Perhaps this was because treating post-1860 demographic trends
would raise doubts about his contention that each immigrant displaced a native birth.
One would have to believe that over five million native births were stifled by immigra-
tion during the 1880s, a decade during which the entire population increased by less
than thirteen million. One would have to believe that if ten million immigrants were
to come in the 1890s, as Walker feared, almost no native couple would bear a child
during that decade. Even as stated, there was a fantastic element in Walker’s “coincidence
of statistics”: how could American couples possibly have “known” the precise number
of births to forego so as to exactly compensate for the number of arriving immigrants
during each decade from 1820 to 1860?
Walker’s theory corresponded poorly with known fertility patterns. In 1843 Tucker
had calculated that the white birth rate had continuously declined since 1790, including
during the decades when immigration was insignificant.43 In 1891 Oswald Ottendorfer
observed that fertility decline is “especially noticed among the wealthier classes who never
dream that their children have ever to compete with foreigners in the market for labor.”
Since the living standards of all classes had been increasing for some time, Ottendorfer
called it a “mistake” to believe that “the reluctance of our native population to bring
forth sons and daughters is due to the fear that they would have to compete in the market
for labor with hordes of immigrants, whose customs are repulsive to them and who
are lowering the standard of living.”44 Walker never did document a decline in the living
standard of the native working class or even a specific decline in its fertility. Walker
also never dealt with other anomalies that questioned his theory’s validity. For instance,
in “The Colored Race in the United States” Walker, documenting the US black popula-
tion’s shrinking decennial rate of increase (from 37.5% for 1800-1810 to 13.9% for
1880-1890), never explained why the low-wage population of the South had a lower
rate of population growth than the higher-wage population. Nor did he offer a reason
why the presence of a low-wage black population had not brought about significant fer-
tility decline among Southern whites.45
There was actually little demographic need for Walker’s theory. Fertility trends were
beginning to be subjected to increasingly sophisticated analysis. John Billings, for
instance, analyzed 1880 and 1890 US census data as well as international statistics and
documented that the birth rate had recently fallen most rapidly in agricultural states,
particularly in the South and among the black population, and least rapidly in the North-
eastern states. He also noted that they had fallen throughout much of Europe. The fall,
he thought, was due to “the deliberate and voluntary avoidance or prevention of child-
bearing on the part of an increasing number of married people, who not only prefer
to have few children, but who know how to obtain their wish.” Changing women’s roles
and a rising standard of living were seen as fostering small family norms. Young women
were “being imbued with the idea that marriage and motherhood are not to be their
chief objects in life,” that they “should aim at being independent of possible or actual
husbands,” and that “housekeeping is a sort of domestic slavery” which should be replaced
by “remunerative employment.” The “great increase in the use of things which were
formerly considered as luxuries, but which now have become almost necessities” led
married couples “to have fewer children in order that they may be each better provided
for.” Billings made no mention of immigration in his interpretation.
The trends Billings noted implied that a general process of fertility decline was under-
way in all industrializing societies. It was spreading throughout Europe, and in the United
States, where it began earlier, it infiltrated to the rural South by the 1880s. Walker’s
identification of immigration as the major factor in native fertility decline could make
little sense of such trends. Very few immigrants in the 1880s were making their way
to Southern states, and no European country had experienced significant immigration.
Identifying urbanization and industrialization as the factors most responsible for declining
fertility made many fertility differentials understandable. For instance, high fertility im-
migrant groups gave birth to children whose fertility dropped dramatically, often to
levels approaching that of the native population.47 Since immigrants had overwhelm-
ingly chosen to settle in large industrial cities, their children were more likely to live
in cities, to be employed in non-agricultural jobs, and to have lower fertility than the
general population. Walker and his advocates could only develop strained explanations
of this dramatic decline: the offspring of Irish immigrants lowered their fertility because
they found themselves competing with newly arriving Italians and Slavs more impover-
ished than they.48 They never documented downward pressure on Irish-American living
standards, however, and simply used the low fertility of the second generation to “prove”
that increased competition existed. Such circular reasoning demonstrated more an un-
willingness to be dissuaded than effective theorizing.
There also were problems with Walker’s theory on the more abstract level. As evolu-
tionary theory, it made little sense. Fitness could be measured objectively, by survival
rates. A “superior” race being supplanted by an “inferior” race as a result of competi-
tion contradicted basic Darwinian premises. The success that dimwitted and degenerate
groups had competing economically and reproductively with superior native Americans
needed a non-evolutionary explanation. Walker and other restrictionists attributed it
to the benevolence of the natives. Their high level of civilization had produced an elevated
sensibility that made generosity second nature to them. Only a clear awareness of the
true Darwinian principles could curb such destructive benevolence. Walker preached:
“it is never to be forgotten that self-defense is the first law of nature and of nations.
If that man who careth not for his own household is worse than an infidel, the nation
which permits its institutions to be endangered by any cause which can fairly be removed
is guilty not less in Christian than in natural law.”49 Leaving an open door to inferior
peoples was misplaced, destructive, and unnatural. In what could be a rationale for both
the restrictionist movement and the later eugenics movement, Mayo-Smith contended
that: “the state is often obliged to interfere in the process of natural selection in order
to make sure that the really fittest survive.”50 Calls for state intervention to end com-
petition and cryptic definitions of “fitness,” however, made for an incoherent evolu-
tionary theory.
Walker’s theory also had problems as economic theory. His “end of the frontier”
analysis had America entering into an era of pressure of population on resources, of
Malthusian overpopulation. Yet his policy recommendation of restricting immigration
was not directed at reducing overpopulation. Ending immigration would lead, he hoped,
to a resurgence of native American fertility, not to a reduction in population growth.
Thus, Walker’s compositional concerns clearly confounded his Malthusian analysis. In
general, the racial focus of biologic Malthusianism was not easily integrated into the
discipline of economics. Contending that individuals ought to behave in ways that benefit
race, unsettled nearly all the axioms of a field built on the assumption that individuals
act in a utilitarian manner, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.51 Walker, for in-
stance, wished to revert “to when an able bodied and industrious laboring man could, with
the exertion of all his powers, hardly provide the barest means of subsistence for himself
and his family,” if such a reversion would end the allure America had for “degraded”
immigrants.52 Such a recommendation was incomprehensible in economic terms.
The Rapid Acceptance of Walker’s Theory
Despite its flaws, Walker’s theory was quickly and, for the most part, uncritically
accepted. It provided the Immigration Restriction League with a potent rationale for
its racially based opposition to immigration. With its replacement of the “good” old
by the “degenerate” new theme, it resonated with the nascent eugenics movement. With
its call for state action to alleviate social ills, it touched on the progressive strain of
reformers. In many ways it was both the harbinger and the cornerstone of an era of
biologic Malthusianism, of heightened concern over race and class issues. The reitera-
tion of Walker’s theory began in the 1890s and continued through the 1920s.53
Walker’s ideas mobilized popular support for immigration restriction, especially
among the educated elite, in ways that had not happened before. In the spring of 1894
the Immigration Restriction League was formed by a group of recent Harvard graduates,
led by Prescott Farnsworth Hall and Robert DeCourcy Ward.54 Both made use of
Walker’s theory in a most polemical way. Hall used it to liken immigration to genocidal
infanticide: “the main point is that the native children are murdered by never being
allowed to come into existence, as surely as if put to death in some older invasion of
the Huns and Vandals.”55 Ward exploited its racial dimension: “The question is a race
question, pure and simple. … It is fundamentally a question as to what kind of babies
shall be born; it is a question as to what races shall dominate in this country.”56 Edward
Alsworth Ross boosted the political potency of the theory by labeling it “race suicide,”
a term which President Theodore Roosevelt adopted and gave wide currency by adding
that it was “the greatest problem of civilization” since it resulted in “the elimination
instead of the survival of the fittest.”57
Walker’s use of Darwinism and Teutonism proved fortuitous. At the turn of the
century, the rediscovery of Mendel’s research and the power of Weismann’s contentions
led many to believe that science had proven heredity’s transcendent role in molding human
destiny. Lamarckian beliefs about the inheritability of acquired characteristics were
discredited, and the significance of race greatly enhanced. A Eugenics Section of the
American Breeders Association was formed in 1906, largely by natural scientists, marking
the formal establishment of the American eugenics movement. Its goal was “to emphasize
the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.”58 As a result,
demographic trends assumed an ominous importance to eugenicists. They, like Walker,
were firmly convinced that the new immigrants were innately inferior and that immediate
intervention in the nation’s population dynamics was needed to prevent a biological
catastrophe.59 In 1908 the Eugenics Section established an Immigration Committee to
end the flow of “defective germ plasm” into the country. Restrictionists and eugenicists
shared a biologic Malthusianism, and increasingly overlapped in policies and personnel.60
In fact, immigration restriction was considered a form of eugenics: “some advanced
persons are talking of regulating marriage with a view to the elimination of those unfit
for other purposes than mere survival; yet most people fail to realize that here in the
United States we have a unique opportunity, through our power to regulate immigra-
tion, of exercising artificial selection upon an enormous scale.”61
During the early decades of this century, many progressives concerned with the
nation’s urban problems and social workers dealing with the problems of the nation’s
poor were attracted to biologic Malthusianism.62 Richard Dugdale’s classic study of
family degeneracy, The Jukes (1877), paved the way for thoroughly hereditarian
treatments of the theme, such as Henry Goddard’s The Kallikak Family.6* Convinced
by such genealogical studies that the source of poverty could be found in inferior genes,
they looked to immigration restriction and eugenics for solutions. Even Margaret Sanger,
who began her career as a socialist espousing the need for birth control among the masses,
was a fervent eugenicist by the 1920s. She contended that the national origins quota
acts did not go far enough in controlling “the quality of our population.” To “cut down
the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable at home,” she called for govern-
ment pensions for inferior couples who would undergo sterilization.64 Walker’s theory
made its way into the standard social welfare texts of the time as well: “It seems un-
questionable that the unfittest class of immigrants that have ever come to our shores
is increasing yearly in numbers. We may and should be willing to permit our native
stock to be annihilated by a superior people; but it is inconceivable that we should know-
ingly promote, by conscious act, an intermarrying and intermingling of peoples, which
will indefinitely lower the standard of American or any other manhood.”65
Twenty years after Walker first formulated the theory, Henry Pratt Fairchild, later
to be elected the first president of the Population Association of America, presented
an unmodified version of it. The native worker limited “the size of his family to preserve
his standard of living” because “already certain classes of work are commonly known
as ‘Dago labor,’ others as ‘Hunkie labor,’ and a self-respecting American parent sad-
dens at the thought of his children entering them.”66 The first volume of Reports of
the Immigration Commission (1911) noted “there is ground for argument or specula-
tion” that “less immigration of a character tending to keep down wages and working
conditions might have been attended by a larger natural increase among the native-born
portion of the population.” As early as 1909 Census publications were dividing the white
population into native (“those with ancestors at the First Census”) and “foreign stock,”
and estimation procedures were being devised to determine the proportion of each in
the current population.67 Restrictionists were continually honing their legislative pro-
posals to increase their appeal, and the mechanics of the eventual national origins quota
acts were being developed.
There was opposition to restriction and there were critiques of Walker’s theory.
Walter Willcox, Cornell University statistician and advisor to the Census, provided much
of the evidence used to question Walker’s theory, although he himself did not oppose
restriction. His reconstruction of nineteenth-century fertility trends from census data
found evidence of a decline as early as 1810, well before the onset of substantial
immigration. Although never rejecting Walker’s theory, he questioned its adequacy. Isaac
A. Hourwich and E. A. Goldenweiser, scholars with “new” ethnic origins, used Willcox’s
evidence in open attacks on the theory. They proceeded to empirically question all its
central assumptions. That areas with the greatest number of immigrants tended to be
those with greatest fertility decline among the native born, was simply due to the tendency
of immigrants to settle in cities; both declining fertility and immigration were conse-
quences of nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization.68 These quite com-
petent critiques, however, converted no restrictionists and had little effect on the public’s
exposure to Walker’s theory.69
Indeed proliferation of many forms of biologic Malthusianism during the early
decades of this century indicates a general receptivity to the viewpoint. Eugenicists suc-
ceeded in having states pass eugenic sterilization laws that authorized the involuntary
sterilization of the “feebleminded” and other “defectives.”70 As early as 1888 both Edward
Bemis and Mayo-Smith studied and reported the high rates of insanity, poverty, and
criminality found among new immigrants.71 This strategy of proving racial inferiority by
reference to increasingly detailed government statistics had produced a mass of findings
regarding immigrants by the early decades of the twentieth century: high rates of
imprisonment and insanity; low scores on Army intelligence tests; small cranial capacities,
etc.72 Significant numbers of American social scientists participated in this enterprise.
And considering much of the “evidence” was due to faulty analysis and questionable
interpretation, such defective scholarship is a measure of the strength of biologic Malthu-
sianism. The passage of national origins quota acts that explicitly discriminated against
eastern and southern Europeans is, perhaps, the clearest manifestation of this strength
and of its widespread public acceptance.
What might account for the distressingly few social scientists who critically examined
Walker’s theory, a theory of such great policy import?73 A. M. Carr-Saunders, a British
demographer, speculated in 1936 that: “It is only possible to explain the prevalence of
a theory so contrary to common sense and so lacking in factual support by supposing
that it is used as a ready-made argument with a respectable ancestry wherewith to attack
freedom of entry, which is disliked for reasons that cannot be conveniently disclosed.”74
During the early decades of this century many American social scientists were of native
extraction. The social changes which Walker found so disturbing, similarly affected
them.Walker’s fears were their fears, and his theory offered them reassurance. Its biologic
Malthusianism allowed them to assert their superiority, and to claim that science con-
firmed it. It allowed them to act in ways that protected their interest, and to claim that
they were furthering the commonweal. Walker’s theory was an exegesis of native
American problems and a rallying cry for action. Treating it disinterestedly, as a simple
theory of fertility decline, was difficult to do.
Conclusion
The belief that unrestricted immigration had caused native fertility decline in the
nineteenth century was difficult to reconcile with either existing demographic theory or
demographic fact, but ideologically it was quite useful. Race degeneration was the para-
mount concern of the new biologic Malthusianism, which posited two “scourges” as
the cause: declining fertility of native Americans and immigration of inferior races.
Classic Malthusian interpretations of the relationship between fertility decline and im-
migration led to perplexing policy recommendations. Allen, for instance, saw the new
immigration as “pushing” the native up the class structure and thereby causing downward
fertility. From the vantage point of biologic Malthusianism, the race suffered, but the
individual benefitted. Mayo-Smith’s initial analysis, too, was problematic. He implied
that continued unrestricted immigration would stimulate native fertility even while it
impoverished the native. The race benefitted, but the individual suffered. Only Walker’s
explanation regarded unrestricted immigration as both an economic problem and the
cause of the native’s declining fertility. Hence, an unequivocal policy recommendation:
eliminating one “scourge” to enhance both native fertility and economic well-being.
Some have argued that Walker’s theory was partially valid since immigration, by
stimulating the upward mobility of the native, might have fostered native fertility
decline.75 They, however, misconstrue Walker’s theory. Walker resolutely contended
that America had “a labor problem” and that immigration was lowering, not raising,
the native’s standard of living. Immigration would continue, he claimed, until no
“difference of economic level exists between our population and that of the most degraded
communities abroad.”76 The upward mobility explanation might have a firmer empirical
and theoretical basis in population studies, but it was not Walker’s theory. Such an ex-
planation would have very limited utility for a restrictionist: persuading people of the
need to end a source of upward mobility was too difficult a task.
By framing the issue in racial terms and by claiming that immigration lowered the
general American living standard, the dubious demography of Walker’s actual theory
was revealed to be an ideological marvel, a “two-edged sword of racial and economic
attack upon the tradition of free immigration.”77 It worked to defuse a potentially
problematic class issue.78 Farmers, factory workers, shopkeepers and mill owners would
undoubtedly be affected quite differently by restricting immigration. Yet Walker’s theory
allowed restrictionists to claim that all “natives” had a common interest in closing the
door: “To put the matter concretely, the greatest danger of unselected immigration is
its effect upon the native birth rate.”79 Once race replaced class, consensus was possible.
By claiming that the actions of the inferior were causing the demise of the superior,
Walker’s theory invoked and enhanced the appeal of biologic Malthusian thought. Native
couples were not responsible for their deficient fertility, native workers were not respon-
sible for their economic failures, and the higher classes were not responsible for the
conditions of the poor. The new immigrants were responsible for all these ills, and preven-
ting their entry would remedy them.
In the end Walker’s theory can best be understood not as a scientific explanation
of a demographic trend, but as an ideological construct designed to allay the fears of
old-stock Americans who felt threatened by change. Walker imparted a form to an amor-
phous menace, provided a means of reconstructing a crumbling social order, and gave
hope for the future. The fabrication of a theory in such discord with past developments
in population studies illustrates the distinctive concerns that developed among educated
native Americans in the late nineteenth century. The acceptance of a theory with such
negligible empirical support illustrates the inherent appeal that biologic Malthusianism
had for many in the social scientific community. It also illustrates the frailty of relying
on the possibility of empirical disproof to ensure validity. Ultimately, when the bulk
of such a community shares a particular value position, rigorous scrutiny of an
ideologically useful but empirically untenable theory is unlikely.
Notes
1. For a reverential view of Walker’s life see James P. Munroe’s biography, A Life of Francis Amasa Walker
(New York: Henry Holt, 1923). For a treatment of Walker’s important contributions to economics see Ber-
nard Newton, The Economics of Francis Walker: American Economics in Transition (New York: Kelley, 1968).
2. The wage-fund doctrine contended that the average worker’s wage was determined by the ratio of the
number of workers to a fixed amount of money, a percentage of the employer’s capital. Worker efforts to
organize and gain higher wages, therefore, could not succeed since such actions did not affect the amount
of money in the “wage-fund.” Walker argued that employers actually paid wages based upon their assessment
of the value of the product being produced, not the value of their capital. See Walker, The Wages Question
(New York: Henry Holt, 1876). For treatments of Walker’s role during the transitional period in American
economics see: Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), pp. 121-123; and Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the
Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975),
pp. 39-48.
3. See Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, Vol. 3 (New York: Viking, 1949),
pp. 107-108, for a treatment of Walker’s growing conservatism. For a specific treatment of Walker’s reaction
to the “new” immigrants, see Barbara Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1956), pp. 69-81.
4. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1963), pp. 142-148, thinks Walker exerted
“a more telling intellectual influence” on the development of a racial nativism than either Henry Cabot Lodge
or Nathaniel S. Shaler. Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Social Thought (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), p. 54, identifies Walker’s theory as “the first major impetus” in
the generation of that nativism, since it “put into figures the fear that already gnawed at many Americans
of native stock” and gave them substance.
5 Popular examples of this pessimistic literature are: Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New
York- C Scribner’s Sons, 1916); Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World
Supremacy (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1920) and Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under
Man (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1922).
6. Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 578.
7 Joseph J. Spengler, “Population Doctrines in the United States, I: Anti-Malthusianism,” “Population
Doctrines in the United States, II: Malthusianism,” Journal of Political Economy 41 (1933): 433-467, 639-672.
8 See George Tucker, “On The Future Destiny of the United Sates” and “On the Theory of Malthus,”
in his Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy, by a Citizen of Virginia (Georgetown,
D C • Joseph Milligan, 1822), pp. 1-24 and pp. 305-336; and Henry Carey’s treatment of Malthus and America’s
capacity for population increase in Principles of Political Economy, Vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and
Blanchard, 1840), pp. 47-52.
9 “That the first want of man is his dinner, and the second his girl, were truths well known to every democrat
and aristocrat, long before the great philosopher Malthus arose, to think he enlightened the world by the
discovery.” John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Vol. 6, edited by Charles Francis Adams (Boston:
Little, Brown, & Co., 1856), p. 516.
10. George Tucker, The Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years, as Exhibited
by the Decennial Census (Boston: Little, Brown, 1843), p. 103.
11. See Edward Prince Hutchinson, The Population Debate: The Development of Conflicting Theories Up
to 1900 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), pp. 317-318.
12 Francis A. Walker, “Our Population in 1900,” Atlantic Monthly 32 (1873), p. 494: “As the line of
agricultural occupation draws closer to the great barren plains; as the older Western States change more and
more to manufactures and to commerce; as the manufacturing and commercial communities of the East become
compacted; as the whole population tends increasingly to fashion and social observance; as diet, dress, and
equipage become more and more artificial; and as the detestable American vice of ‘boarding,* making children
truly ‘encumbrances,’ and uprooting the ancient and honored institutions of the family, extends from city
to city and from village to village,-it is not to be doubted that we shall note a steady decline in the rate
of the national increase from decade to decade.”
13 Francis A. Walker, “The Growth of the Nation in Numbers, Territory and the Elements of Industrial
Power,” Providence Journal (19 June 1889): 3. William Petersen noted the sharp break between Walker’s
“early” and “late” explanations of declining native fertility in The Politics of Population (New York: Double-
day, 1964), pp. 198-200.
14. David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 105-155.
15. Samuel C. Busey, Immigration: Its Evils and Consequences (New York: De Witt & Davenport, 1856),
pp. 82-89.
16. Amasa Walker, The Science of Wealth, Student’s Edition (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872), pp.
441-442.
17. Nathan Allen, “Changes in New England Population,” Popular Science Monthly 23 (1883): 441-442.
Allen had developed an unusual theory in which behavioral changes, especially in women, cause physiological
changes that reduce fecundity; see “The Law of Human Increase; or, Population Based on Physiology and
Psychology,” Quarterly Journal of Psychological Medicine 2 (1868): 209-266.
18. See Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988), pp. 84-86; and Gerald Nash, “The Census of 1890 and the Closing of the Frontier,” Pacific Northwest
Quarterly 71 (1980): 98-100.
19. Richmond Mayo-Smith began such treatments in 1888, see “Control of Immigration II,” Political Science
Quarterly 3 (1888): 218-225. They continued right up through the 1910s: Frank Fetter, “Population or Pros-
perity “American Economic Review 3, March Supplement (1913): 5-19; Warren Thompson, Population: A
Study in Malthusianism (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915); and Edward Dana Durand, “Some
Problems of Population Growth,” Quarterly Publications of the American Statistical Association 15(1916):
129-148. These later treatments attributed the sluggish growth of the American standard of living to the popula-
tion reaching Malthusian limits.
20. Francis A. Walker, “Immigration,” Yale Review 1 (1892): 126, 129, 136-137.
21. Mayo-Smith, “Control of Immigration II,” p. 203.
22. Emigration and Immigration: A Study in Social Science (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890).
In this work Mayo-Smith simply never dealt with the impact of immigration on native fertility. He described
(pp. 143-146) a local process of “substitution” of native labor by “low standard of living” immigrant labor
that was similar to Walker’s theory, yet he contended (pp. 57-58) that immigration added significantly to the
overall population.
23. Darwin’s attribution of his theory of natural selection to a reading of Maithus is well known: Charles
Darwin, Life and Letters, Vol. 1, edited by Francis Darwin (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1887), p. 68.
24. The classic work on this development is Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860-1915;
see also Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979) for an argument that minimizes the presence of Social Dar-
winism, rigorously defined, in American thought.
25. See Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, pp. 127-136. She noted that from the 1890s to the 1920s most
American social scientists were native born, inclined to believe in Anglo-Saxon superiority, and were sup-
porters of immigration restriction.
26. With biologic Malthusianism, the consequence of population dynamics that assumes greatest impor-
tance is its impact on the biological quality of a population, not its impact on the prosperity of a people.
Biologic Malthusianism was not an exclusively American phenomenon. Very similar concerns arose in Great
Britain at the time, see Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining
Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). With Britain’s
greater racial homogeneity and lower rates of immigration, biologic Malthusian concerns focused more ex-
clusively on the higher fertility rates of the lower classes. In America these qualitative concerns revolved around
both immigration and differential fertility, see Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 134-157.
27. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan,
1869).
28. Louis R. Harley did present such a consistent policy position in “The Doctrine of Maithus as It Relates
to Modern Society,” American Magazine of Civics 6 (1895): 13-20. He argued for immigration restriction
and for increasing the economic independence of women in order to reduce their fertility. His was a lonely voice.
29. See. R. F. Clarke, “Neo-Malthusianism,” North American Review 163 (1896): 345-361 • Dennis Hodgson,
“Ideological Origins of the Population Association of America,” Population and Development Review 17
(1991): 1-34, examines the biologic Malthusian stance taken by American students of population toward the
birth control movement at that time.
30. The quote is from Edward Alsworth Ross, “Comments on Husband’s Paper, ‘The Significance of
Emigration,’ “American Economic Review 2, March Supplement (1912): 87. For the later alliance of American
students of population with the eugenics movement see Linda Gordon, “The Politics of Population: Birth
Control and the Eugenics Movement,” Radical American 8 (1974): 61-74; James Reed, From Private Vice
to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books,
1978), pp. 202-210.
31. Walker, “The Growth of the Nation in Numbers,” p. 3.
32. By the 1890s Walker had come to accept the notion that the Irish might have some racial potential,
see “Immigration,” pp. 131-132.
33. Francis A. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” Atlantic Monthly 77 (18%): 828.
34. Francis A. Walker, The Labor Problem of Today,” address delivered before the Alumni Association
of Lehigh University, 22 June 1887 (New York: Alumni Association of Lehigh University, 1887): 21, 23;
“Immigration and Degradation,” Forum 11 (1891): 634-644.
35. Walker, “Immigration and Degradation,” p. 640-642.
36. According to Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” p. 824, the belief that “immigration constituted
a net reinforcement of our population” was “so far as I am aware, held with absolute unanimity by our people.”
While most Americans viewed immigration favorably because it brought additional hands to tame the conti-
nent, some had expressed doubts. Benjamin Franklin in his 1751 “Observations Concerning the Increase of
Mankind and the Peopling of Nations,” Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 4, edited by Leonard W. Labaree
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 232, came close to paraphrasing Walker’s theory: “The Impor-
tation of Foreigners into a Country that has as many Inhabitants as the present Employments and Provisions
for Subsistence will bear; will be in the End no Increase of People; unless the New Comers have more industry
and Frugality than the Natives, and then they will provide more Subsistence, and increase in the Country;
but they will gradually eat the Natives out.” Thomas Jefferson in his “Notes on Virginia,” Writings of Thomas
Jefferson, Vol. 2, edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Associa-
tion, 1903), pp. 116-121, also argued that immigration doesn’t increase final population size but only has
a profound (and negative) impact on population composition. A common antislavery argument in colonial
days was the negative impact slavery had on white immigration since white farmers would have to compete
with slave labor, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1961), p. 149. Finally, a nearly intact version of Walker’s theory appeared in 1878, see M. J. Dee,
“Chinese immigration,” North American Review 127 (1878): 519-522. As Higham noted, Strangers in the
Land, p. 360, there is no evidence that Walker drew on Dee’s work as the source for his exposition.
37. Walker, “Immigration and Degradation,” pp. 638-640, 643-644.
38. His text, Political Economy, 3rd edition (New York: Henry Holt, 1887), p. 310, contains a traditional
“standard of living” explanation: “Within the past twenty-five years, the rate of natural increase in the North-
eastern States has encountered a decided check, due to the rising standard of living in communities whose
productive capabilities are already fully developed.” There was no mention of immigration causing either
a decline in the standard of living or a decline in fertility.
39. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” pp. 824-825.
40. Walter Willcox, “Immigration into the United States, in International Migration, Vol. 2, edited by Walter
Willcox (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1931), pp. 93-103; and Warren Thompson and
P. K. Whelpton, Population Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw Hill, 1933), pp. 304-311.
41. Walker, “Our Population in 1900,” p. 488-489, 494.
42. In 1889, while still advocating a “standard of living” explanation of fertility decline, Walker had analyzed
the decline in accuracy of Watson’s predictions in a most disparaging manner: “Quite as remarkable as was
the fulfillment of his predictions during the early half of the century has been their failure in the latter half.
In 1870 he was found to be 3.75 millions above the census enumeration; in 1880 6.25 millions above; while
it is all but certain that his estimate for 1890 will be found 12 millions, and that for 1900, 20 millions, or
more, in excess of the actual numbers”; see Walker, ‘The Growth of the Nation in Numbers,” p. 3.
43. Tucker, Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth, pp. 89-105.
44. Oswald Ottendorfer, “Are Our Immigrants to Blame?,” Forum 11 (1891): 544-545.
45. Francis A. Walker, “The Colored Race in the United States,” Forum 11 (1891): 501-509. John Com-
mons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 207-208, noted that “if Superinten-
dent Walker’s view is sound in all respects, the Southern white should shrink from competition with the negro
in the same way that the Northern white shrinks from competition with the immigrant.” Interestingly, when
Commons found that “he does not do so,” he still accepted Walker’s theory. The fact that “the South has
been remote from the struggle of modern competition” turned out to be reason enough for Commons to
explain this incongruity.
46. John Billings, “The Diminishing Birth-Rate in the United States,” Forum 15 (1893): 468-469, 474-476.
47. Most studies of the fertility of the children of immigrants found that it was higher than that of the children
of native parents and lower than that of the foreign born; see Joseph A. Hill, “Comparative Fecundity of
Women of Native and Foreign Parentage in the United States,” Publications of the A merican Statistical Associa-
tion 13 (1913): 583-604. Some implied that the children of the immigrants had lower fertility than even the
children of native parents, see Commons, Races and Immigrants in America, pp. 203-204. In a recent analysis
of the public use sample of the 1900 census Miriam King and Steven Ruggles found this to be the case, “American
Immigration, Fertility, and Race Suicide at the Turn of the Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History
20 (1990): 347-369.
48. See Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” pp. 825-826 for a description of successive waves of increas-
ingly impoverished immigrant groups forcing down American wages. Commons, Races and Immigrants in
America, pp. 204-205, described how the “Irish race” currently was being “displaced by the Italians and Slavs”
and was “resorting to the same race suicide which itself inflicted a generation or two earlier on the native
colonial stock.”
49. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” p. 829.
50. Richmond Mayo-Smith, “Control of Immigration III,” Political Science Quarterly 3 (1888): 416.
51. See Thorsten Veblen, “Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science?” Quarterly Journal of Economics
12 (1898): 373-397; and Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, pp. 125-133.
52. Walker, “The Labor Problem of Today,” pp. 26-27.
53. See Sydney G. Fisher, “Has Immigration Increased Population?,” Popular Science Monthy 48 (1895):
244-255; Frederick A. Bushee, The Declining Birth Rate and Its Cause,” Popular Science Monthly 63 (1903):
355-361; Prescott Famsworth Hall, Immigration (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1907), pp. 107-111 ;
John R. Commons, “Amalgamation and Assimilation,” Chautauquan 39 (1904): 217-227, and Races and
Immigrants in America, pp. 198-208; Robert Hunter, “Immigration the Annihilator of Our Native Stock,”
The Commons (1904): 114-117; Henry Pratt Fairchild, “The Paradox of Immigration,” American Journal
of Sociology 17 (1911): 254-267, and Immigration (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 215-231; Edward Alsworth
Ross, The Old World in the New (New York: Century, 1913), pp. 300-304; and Standing Room Only? (New
York: Century, 1927), pp. 318-325; James J. Davis, Selective Immigration (St. Paul, Minnesota: Scott-Mitchell
Publishing, 1925), pp. 155-160; Roy L. Garis, Immigration Restriction (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 219;
Weld A. Rollins, “The Effect of Immigration on the Birth Rate of the Natives,” Journal of Heredity 21 (1930):
387-402.
54. Walker was offered, but declined, the presidency of the Immigration Restriction League; he did become
a vice-president of the League’s National Committee. John Fiske, the Teutonist, became the League’s first
president.
55. Prescott Farnsworth Hall, “Selection of Immigration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 19 (1904): 182.
56. Robert DeCourcy Ward, ‘The Restriction of Immigration,” North American Review 179 (1904): 236.
57. “For a case like this I can find no words so apt as ‘race suicide.’ There is no bloodshed, no violence,
no assault of the race that waxes upon the race that wanes. The higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates
itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off by collective action. The
working classes gradually delay marriage and restrict the size of the family as the opportunities hitherto reserved
for their children are eagerly snapped up by the numerous progeny of the foreigner. The prudent, self-respecting
natives first cease to expand, and then, as the strug
– H.L. Mencken
The remainder of the notes to the Hodgson paper.
57. “For a case like this I can find no words so apt as ‘race suicide.’ There is no bloodshed, no violence,
no assault of the race that waxes upon the race that wanes. The higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates
itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off by collective action. The
working classes gradually delay marriage and restrict the size of the family as the opportunities hitherto reserved
for their children are eagerly snapped up by the numerous progeny of the foreigner. The prudent, self-respecting
natives first cease to expand, and then, as the struggle for existence grows sterner and the outlook for their
children darker, they fail even to recruit their own numbers.” See Edward Alsworth Ross, “The Causes of
Race Superiority,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (1901): 88. The Roosevelt
quote comes from “A Letter from President Roosevelt on Race Suicide,” American Monthly Review of Reviews
35 (1907): 550.
58. Quoted in Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, p. 63.
59. See Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, pp. 79-82, 144-159; and Kenneth
M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 101-113.
60. Hall and Ward thought of renaming the Immigration Restriction League to “The Eugenics League,”
and they actually did direct the Immigration Committee of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders
Association.
61. Hall, “Selection of Immigration,” p. 170.
62. Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968) treats
the reaction of the progressives to the eugenics movement. Marque-Luisa Miringoff, “The Impact of Popula-
tion Policy upon Social Welfare,” Social Service Review 54 (1980): 305-310, treats the adoption of hereditarian
doctrines by early twentieth-century social welfare professionals.
63. Richard Lewis Dugdale, The Jukes (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1877); Henry H. Goddard, TheKallikak
Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
64. Quotes are from Margaret Sanger, ‘The Function of Sterilization,” Birth Control Review 10 (1926):
299. For a treatment of Sanger’s shift from socialism to biologic Malthusianism, see David Kennedy, Birth
Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970): 108-126.
65. Robert Hunter, Poverty (New York: Macmillan, 1904), p. 315. Walker’s contrast between the high quality
immigrant of old and the inferior new immigrant is repeated by Edward T. Devine, The Principles of Relief
(New York: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 162-168.
66. Fairchild, The Paradox of Immigration,” pp. 260-261.
67. The quote is from Reports of the Immigration Commission, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1911), p. 494. William S. Rossiter, A Century of Population Growth (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1909) attempted to disaggregate the 1900 white population into “native” and
“foreign” groups. About half this volume is taken up with the task. This work became “a stock reference
for the Nordic supremacists,” see Margo Anderson, The American Census: A Social History, pp. 144-145.
68. Walter F. Willcox, Proportion of Children in the United States, Bulletin 22, Bureau of the Census
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905); Walter F. Willcox, “The Change in the Proportion
of Children in the United States and in the Birth-Rate in France During the 19th Century,” Publications of
the American Statistical Association 12 (1911): 490-499; E. A. Goldenweiser, “Walker’s Theory of Immigra-
tion,” American Journal of Sociology 18 (1912): 342-351; Isaac A. Hourwich, Immigration and Labor: The
Economic Aspects of European Immigration to the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912).
Hourwich (p. 221) obviously viewed Walker’s theory as a key restrictionist tool since he devoted an entire
chapter to a critique of “this theory, originated by Gen. Francis A. Walker, until lately held unchallenged
[in] the field of economic and sociological discussion.”
69. Articles on immigration written by social scientists for the popular press during the 1920s tended to
be racially based apologies for restriction and often presented Walker’s theory; see William A. Satariano
“Immigration and the Popularization of Social Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
15 (1979): 310-320.
70. Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Laboratory of
the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922).
71. Edward W. Bemis, “Restriction of Immigration,” and “The Distribution of Our Immigrants,” Andover
Review 9 (1888): 251-264, 587-596; Richmond Mayo-Smith, “Control of Immigration, I” Political Science
Quarterly 3 (1888): 46-77.
72. Allan Chase extensively documents the accumulation of such evidence, The Legacy of Malthus: The
Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1977).
73. This was true even of those specializing in population studies, such as Fairchild. For instance, Warren
Thompson, originator of the theory of the demographic transition and one of the leading American
demographers of the twentieth century, simply asserted Walker’s theory in 1915: “It is a phenomenon very
generally observed that where peoples of different standards of living, whose cultures are not too widely different,
come into contact, those having lower standards of living supplant those having higher standards.” He gave
no actual examples or references. See his Population: A Study in Malthusianism, p. 159.
74. A. M. Carr-Saunders, World Population (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 205.
75. Thompson and Whelpton, Population Trends in the United States, p. 308; William S. Rossiter, Increase
of Population in the United States 1910-1920, Census Monographs, No. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1922), pp. 100-101.
76. See Francis Walker, “The Tide of Economic Thought,” Publications of the American Economic Associa-
tion 6 (1891): 34; “Immigration,” pp. 135-136; “Restriction of Immigration,” pp. 826-828. Quote is from “Restric-
tion of Immigration,” p. 828.
77. Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, p. 79.
78. Restrictionists blamed the explosion in late nineteenth-century immigration on a fiendish coalition of
steamship lines, railroad companies and large industrialists. This coalition searched the outlying areas of Europe,
selling now-inexpensive passages to America and drumming up low-wage workers for the industrialists’ factories.
This class analysis pitted the interest of a tiny few (who were not generally from “established” families) against
that of the mass of Americans. See Bemis, “Restriction of Immigration”; Walker, “Immigration and Degrada-
tion”; Hall, “Selection of Immigration”; Hunter, “Immigration the Annihilator of Our Native Stock”; Ward,
“The Restriction of Immigration”; Fairchild, “The Restriction of Immigration.”
79. Hall, “Selection of Immigration,” p. 180.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/19/7-diversity/
White people love ethnic diversity, but only as it relates to restaurants.
Many white people from cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York will spend hours talking about how great it is that they can get Sushi and Tacos on the same street.
“Europe is run by gentile anti-white liberals, with little to no direct ongoing influence by jews. The jews, in conjunction with unhealthy domestic currents, poisoned the culture generations ago, and now it continues on autopilot.”
That’s not really true in Britain. When Hitler chased them off the continent Britain was first stop. The BBC is as dominated by jews as US media is and banking and big business also which in turn ties into party funding. Like the states, pro Israel, pro immigration politicians get funding and positive media and anyone remotely nationalist gets the opposite. The current PM when he was a candidate for the leadership of his party got funding from a jewish billionaire from Finland for example.
Also, Britain unfortunately got most of the swarm Putin chased out of Russia.
However the BBC is a good example of how their power is constrained by having to be invisible. They don’t have influence as jews. They have influence as part of the left-liberal ideology they created – an ideology that served jewish interests without being obvious so they could recruit white liberals to the cause in the same way they created communism as a way to get white people help them take over. If they speak as left-liberals i.e on immigration they speak as “white” anti-racists not as jews. That’s why they have a problem with Israel.
They were so successful creating the left-liberal anti-white culture at the BBC they can’t wriggle out of it over Israel. The BBC is pretty anti-neocon and anti-Israel and the jews have to mostly go along with it because otherwise it blows their cover.
“This is why most European nationalists regard the American WN focus on jews as ‘crude’ and view it with contempt, since the anti-white positions there are manned by indigenous whites.”
I think they’re still there but it’s less obvious. For example in Europe they might own the media but there’s not enough of them to fill all the editor and commentator jobs so the control is less strong. Also if Euro WNs looked at party funding they’d see the jewish influence as well but most people don’t do that. Either way as they are less obvious it makes sense to not talk about them so much in Europe i guess.
“Every jew could vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, and Europe would still continue on an anti-white multicult course.”
I think that’s only 1/2 true. It would carry on for a while with the anti-white liberals but they’re only maybe 15% of the white population. I think the balance of forces would gradually change without jewish media control and funding and they’d be over-thrown within a few years. What’s happening is completely unnatural. It’s only the relentless guilt-tripping over race that keeps people down.
In democracies the media is the critical thing to control.
G. Hood @ Vlad Katonic
Win.
HAHA IM GLAD SOMEONE CAUGHT THAT [WIN]!!!
One of your best posts to date, Hunter, and all excellent and accurate insights that refute many of these anti-American conjectures.
No matter a man’s success or intelligence, he is still a man with his own limited perspective and biases, so it’s nice to see that you don’t shy away from arguments against even respected intellectuals. It shows courage and an independent mind.
I like the banner change, I think it’s more appropriate. We’re in a fight for survival.
Furthermore, your claim that the racial demographics of the United States would have been markedly worse without mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe is shown to be false by a look at United States Census data. In the 1870 Census, prior to the “New Immigration,” whites comprised 87.1% of the United States population. In the 1930 Census, after the mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, whites comprised 88.7% of the United States population.
Indeed, what a silly statement. If anything it would have been markedly better, we would not have diluted our culture and the standard for White would not have degenerated to what it is today.
We have declined from the greatest Nordic reservoir in the world, as Coon stated, to now declaring that West Asians and North Africans are White Americans. Such standards are held by some commentators and posters on this very blog. They often make arguments about “relative genetic distance,” you know who they are.
As someone with a South African accent, they never tire of making their points about how the Whites should leave Africa because they have no right to be there, while often at the same time saying White Africans have no right to come to Europe on the basis of race. Hypocritical Euro-liberal scum
Nice to get a White South African’s perspective. They’re good people, from my own experiences and others I’ve talked to, some who’ve lived there, never a bad thing to say about them.
“Race is, in the first instance, how a man feels.” If you are not a “man of race,” or racially conscious, then you are truly “raceless,”
How a man feels has a lot to do with his environment and what type of education and experiences he’s had. How a man feels can change. That’s what we’re after, changing how White people feel.
So I wouldn’t say it is the prerequisite, the biological race is, which can not be altered.
Bear in mind that alot of these ’spiritual racialist’ types are fighting Nordicist type thinking. (and thank goodness for that!)
Right, we’ve got it all wrong, we shouldn’t be judging “racialists” by the color of their skin or their ancestry. “I have a dream…”
BTW, one of the biggest proponents of spiritual racialism here is a Nordicist.
It’s a shame some people can’t debate without personal attacks, Hunter didn’t deserve those shots. A lot of interesting points anyway.
Hunter is being true to his audience, Americans. Being anti your target audience is not a smart move.
The native culture of the country—that is, the culture of the low caste Anglo-Saxons who preserve the national tradition—is almost completely incapable of producing ideas. It is a culture that roughly corresponds to what the culture of England would be if there were no universities over there, and no caste of intellectual individualists and no landed aristocracy—in other words, if the tone of the national thinking were set by the nonconformist industrials, the camorra of Welsh and Scotch political scoundrels, and the town and country mobs.
That’s right, a bunch of rednecks whipped yer tails in WW2 and we put people on the moon. What does that say about the rest of ya? Sour grapes anyone?
White people love ethnic diversity, but only as it relates to restaurants.
Many white people from cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York will spend hours talking about how great it is that they can get Sushi and Tacos on the same street
An amusing point. You know, enjoying exotic cuisine is fine, it’s the exotic people that we don’t want here. We should do like the Japanese do, and send our own chefs out to learn other cuisines, then they come back and open an all-White ethnic restaurant. All the benefits without any of the disadvantages!
I want to say that I had many points of difference with the original piece, but all the foregoing comments have more than covered my abortive sputterings. So while the little essay got me annoyed, it more than made up for it by prompting the very intelligent comments that followed.
Let’s try to keep this thread somewhat on topic-the massive pastes of things more related to the nordicism debates on the forum would be better suited over there
And the argument regarding immigration and reduced native birth rates is compelling only to imbeciles who disregard all of the well documented and well argued evidence to the contrary. I note that you have not so much as attempted to contend with the criticism presented in the paper.
The “criticism” is that there is not a one-to-one displacement of native births by immigrants and that native births do not decline by exactly the number of immigrants. This “criticism” of one particular idea about the relationship between immigration and native birth rates hardly invalidates the idea that immigration contributed to a decline in native birth rates. You and your sources have not shown that immigration had no effect on native birth rates.
Further, the comparison of past European immigration and current non-European immigration is made precisely by those who wish to destroy us. Whereas I make a distinction between the two, both you and contemporary immigrationists do not.
Tell us why Americans should mind being race-replaced by Mexicans but not mind being race-replaced by Italians. That Italians are European or white is not a justification for race-replacement.
Answer this question: Would you object to millions of Anglo-Saxons immigrating to Italy? It would, after all, be “European immigration,” so by your own standards and justifications how could you object? In fact, by your standards and rationalizations, Italians should be grateful to have their white population bolstered by the immigration of millions of Anglo-Saxons.
First, you are clearly evading and backtracking. You began by disputing my claim that immigration improves the White/Black ratio in favor of Whites. Now you’re shifting the argument to the supposed benefits of a lower growth rate and superior “quality”. You can’t have it both ways.
No, I am not evading or backtracking. You are unable to comprehend suppositional statements. I said that there is good reason to believe that immigration did to some extent reduce native birth rates, though obviously not in an exact one-to-one displacement of native births by immigrants, but that even if America would have had a somewhat reduced population without immigration there is no reason to think this would have been detrimental.
Second, aside from the fact that founding-stocksters aren’t at all superior in quality to immigrants (you give ample proof of it yourself)
You are so self-deluded that you cannot see that you are a poster child for why the mass immigration of southern Europeans was a disaster for Americans. Your attitude is indistinguishable from that of Mexicans, Jews, Indians, Chinese, and so on, who come to the United States and then denigrate us old Americans, lecture us about how much we need them, tell us that we are a bunch of idiots and rednecks who could never succeed or amount to anything without them, and essentially say that we should kneel down before them to thank them for dispossessing us in the country our ancestors built.
As for the quality of the founding stock and their descendants, read this post:
“America as it might have been”
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2008/11/america-as-it-might-have-been.html
is it preferable to be swamped by masses of White aliens or to be subsumed by masses of native Blacks more alien still
Wise up, dummy. Finally, my argument is very simple: less immigrants, higher black ratios. Deal with it.
False dichotomy, false premises.
I notice that you ignored the Census data.
In the 1870 Census, prior to the “New Immigration,” the United States was 87.1% white. In the 1930 Census, after the mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, the United States was 88.7% white.
By the year 1960 immigration restriction had been in place for more than 35 years. The mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe, which according to you was absolutely vital, had been cut off for decades, so by your reasoning one would expect that the racial demographics of the United States would markedly worsen in that time. The reality is that in the 1960 Census the United States was 88.6% white.
I guess you like the Blacks. (So apparently did Tommy)
Your pathetic innuendo, which is unfounded, underscores your similarity to anti-white leftists, who despise the founding stock of America just as much as you do. As I have often said, those who oppose Northern European racial preservation are remarkably similar to anti-white leftists both in personality and in the arguments they use.
“Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free white laborers.”
Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography
Mark,
Of course biological race is the prerequisite. To reduce this to the simplest terms: All Aryans are “Whites,” but not all Whites are Aryans. If we cannot awaken “Whites” (at least a willful majority of them) to Who They Are, we cannot win.
I do not see Nordish racial preservationism, or even Nordic-determinism as practiced by the SS, as being incompatible with White Nationalism, Radical Traditionalism and “spiritual racism.” When I finally write my post on “the Nordish question & WN,” I imagine it will be quite lengthy. I should stop putting it off.
Evola’s views on race are often misinterpreted by American WNs. He took for granted that the audience for which he was writing was racially conscious (“those who understand the problem summarised by Gobineau,” as he put it) and he would have been appalled by anyone using his work as a tool for race-denial. A homogeneous “race of the body” is absolutely essential to an organic state, but the race of the body, in and of itself, is not sufficient to maintain a healthy and virile civilisation. The liberal decadence of Sweden, “the last refuge of the classic Nordic race” (Coon, TRoE) attests to this sad fact.
Evola’s essay on The Secret of Degeneration, which I’ve quoted above, sheds some light on his racial perspective.
There has been a lot of oversimplification and unnecessary polarisation in the comments lately: Europe vs. America; Ideology vs. Tactics; Race of the Body vs. Race of the Spirit, etc.
Most of this is completely unnecessary.
“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
“Indeed, what a silly statement. If anything it would have been markedly better, we would not have diluted our culture and the standard for White would not have degenerated to what it is today.”
Don’t be so sure. As early as 1837 August Belmont, a Jew connected to the Rothschild family, was allowed to immigrate into America and become an American citizen.
He then proceeded to legally intermarry into a prominent European-American family, and was allowed to rise to the highest levels of society.
He even was allowed to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
And this was long before a large amount of immigration from Southern or Eastern Europe occured.
Also, long before significant immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe occurred Judah P. Benjamin was allowed to become a citizen of the United States AND then a citizen of the Confederate States of America, in spite of being half Ashkenazi Jew and half Seraphic Jew.
In fact, they even allowed him to become a U.S. Senator from Louisiana, and to hold three cabinet positions in the Jefferson Davis administration.
“We have declined from the greatest Nordic reservoir in the world, as Coon stated…”
An odd position to say the least, given the existence of several Countries in Scandinavia which have always been more Nordic than America.
Perhaps America had a greater number of Nordic genes than those Countries, but by the same token America has a greater number of Nordic genes than those Countries now as well, if you want to use quantity of genes as your metric.
“…to now declaring that West Asians and North Africans are White Americans.”
Largely that’s the Census bureau.
“Such standards are held by some commentators and posters on this very blog.”
Robert Lindsay does, but he isn’t a contributor.
“They often make arguments about ‘relative genetic distance,’ you know who they are.”
Relative genetic distance is an important principle of biology. It has been discussed at length by the great scientist Frank Salter.
To say that the Japanese are closer to the Chinese than either are to Iranians is not to say that Japanese are Chinese, or that Chinese are Japanese.
In the same way to say that Whites are closer to upper caste Hindus than to Japanese is not to say that upper caste Hindus are White, or that Whites are upper caste Hindus.
As for my calling Iranians Aryans, that was obviously an example of someone using the term in its original meaning.
The earliest uses of the word Aryan we know of have it used as an ethnonym by ancient Indo-Iranian peoples.
Later, in the Hindu Epics, the word tended to take on a primarily moral meaning.
And then even later the word started being used to mean peoples traditionally given to speaking-Indo-European languages, a category including nearly all Europeans.
Then even later than that some people came up with the erroneous theory that Indo-European peoples had their origin somewhere around Germany, but given how utterly wrong they were I see no reason to dignify their misuse of terminology by accepting it as valid.
“That’s right, a bunch of rednecks whipped yer tails in WW2…
Actually it was a bunch of Russians, though the Rednecks probably gave the Russians the push they needed to gain their ideologically disastrous victory.
“…and we put people on the moon.”
With Werner Von Braun’s help.
Anyway, it is true that Mencken was more Anti-American is his attitudes than was justified, in my opinion.
Just because the American upper class aped Europeans so much didn’t necessarily mean that American culture was inferior.
It could’ve been instead a question of the American elite being pretentious and overly status conscious snobs.
“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
That’s a very relevant and wise quotation.
Anyway, sometimes this site brings to mind the great battle between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians.
Carleton Coon, The Races of Europe
Interesting quote from Coon.
He was using the word greatest in a different sense than I thought.
Although this post has been led far and wide, I’m pretty sure that any reasonable person can see that, politically, as Yockey understood it, America is (or ‘was’ but no longer, as american WNs would like to see it) a danger to Europe.
There is both a ‘biological’ race and a ‘spiritual’ race and in his denial of biology, Yockey was barking up the wrong tree. There are zillions of whites who are of the ‘biological’ race and very few who are of the ‘spiritual’ race, but there cannot be any of the spiritual who aren’t also of the biological. the biological is the very foundation of all the rest. even white total-liberal jerkoffs can be useful if they happened to marry and mate with another white total-liberal jerkoff: just by that action they are contributing to OUR future. Conversely, just because some brownie digs the classics and loves our civilization, does not make him part of the ‘spiritual’ white race: he would be merely a tool for us (ally, if we wanna be nice), but ultimately he is still an alien.
One can and should be pan-Aryan in sympathies: when the brownies are putting our mutiliated corpses in the ground, I doubt they will construct epitaphs of ‘here lies a southern secessionist’, ‘here lies a nordic’, ‘here lies an american’. But ultimately, the only sphere of action for any one of us is in our own backyards and there needn’t be a worldwide imperium of whiteness. I have no intention of getting one internationale off of our backs only to hand our sovereignty over to another, even if pro-white.
“This “criticism” of one particular idea about the relationship between immigration and native birth rates hardly invalidates the idea that immigration contributed to a decline in native birth rates. You and your sources have not shown that immigration had no effect on native birth rates.”
The Hodgson paper goes well beyond demolishing the one to one argument. You and your sources have not shown that immigration had a negative effect on native birth rates.
“Tell us why Americans should mind being race-replaced by Mexicans but not mind being race-replaced by Italians. That Italians are European or white is not a justification for race-replacement.”
Mexican does not equal Italian. And Italians aren’t “race-replacing” anybody.
“Would you object to millions of Anglo-Saxons immigrating to Italy? It would, after all, be “European immigration,” so by your own standards and justifications how could you object? In fact, by your standards and rationalizations, Italians should be grateful to have their white population bolstered by the immigration of millions of Anglo-Saxons.”
Italy is a small, overcrowded nation with a relatively low non-White minority of recent vintage. So the comparison is absurd. But if that wasn’t the case; if Italy had a large non-White population and a sprawling national territory, then no, I most certainly would not. I would welcome it.
“You are unable to comprehend suppositional statements.”
Your “suppositional” statement was suspiciously absent before the claim that immigrants lowered native birth-rates was challenged. It appeared afterwards. Quite a coincidence.
“You are so self-deluded that you cannot see that you are a poster child for why the mass immigration of southern Europeans was a disaster for Americans.”
Then I’m also a poster child for why without immigrants the nation as a whole would have the racial demographics of Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. Some disaster.
“False dichotomy, false premises.”
Keep telling yourself that.
“I notice that you ignored the Census data.
In the 1870 Census, prior to the “New Immigration,” the United States was 87.1% white. In the 1930 Census, after the mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, the United States was 88.7% white.”
I ignored it because it begs the question. If immigrants didn’t adversely effect native birth-rates then the Census data only shows that White ratios would have been lower. The question is immigrant effects on native birth-rates not statistical data for any given period.
“By the year 1960 immigration restriction had been in place for more than 35 years. The mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe, which according to you was absolutely vital, had been cut off for decades, so by your reasoning one would expect that the racial demographics of the United States would markedly worsen in that time. The reality is that in the 1960 Census the United States was 88.6% white.”
You’re forgetting to factor in the natural increase of immigrant stock present before 1924. Without it, I doubt White proportions would have been as high. (Time now for a “suppositional” statement, huh Mr. Miggles?)
“Your pathetic innuendo, which is unfounded, underscores your similarity to anti-white leftists, who despise the founding stock of America just as much as you do.”
Anti-White Leftists hate all Whites, not just founding stocksters. What does that say about your scorn for other Whites?
“As I have often said, those who oppose Northern European racial preservation are remarkably similar to anti-white leftists both in personality and in the arguments they use.”
The similarity is only apparent to blockheads like you.