WEBVTT - Part Two: The Population Control Movement 0:00:01.200 --> 0:00:05.359 It's the podcast that it is. This is the podcast 0:00:05.519 --> 0:00:08.600 that it is, not the one it's not. I'm Robert 0:00:08.600 --> 0:00:14.480 Evans Behind the Bastards Part two an intro, But are 0:00:14.560 --> 0:00:18.320 you I'll never do that again? Um, I'm so sorry. 0:00:18.440 --> 0:00:20.520 I like it. No, I feel like I'm getting all 0:00:20.560 --> 0:00:23.599 of the treats right now between the appropriate intro and 0:00:23.640 --> 0:00:25.680 then to see an intro. Would you say you're going 0:00:25.720 --> 0:00:30.560 to do neither one of these again? No? Never. Next 0:00:30.600 --> 0:00:33.040 episode I'm going to introduce by just shouting out the 0:00:33.120 --> 0:00:36.440 name of a famous ethnic cleansing and then uh, yeah, 0:00:36.520 --> 0:00:39.640 it's gonna be very bad. But this time you've got 0:00:39.640 --> 0:00:43.160 a song. Of course. Our guest today in part two 0:00:43.280 --> 0:00:46.320 of our Population Control episode, as in part one, is 0:00:46.440 --> 0:00:50.400 Samantha McVeigh of stuff your mom never told you, Samantha, 0:00:50.400 --> 0:00:52.599 mom never told you stuff mom never told you yet? 0:00:52.600 --> 0:00:57.360 Know you and my mom specifically, Yeah to how are 0:00:57.440 --> 0:01:00.840 you doing, Samantha? Has has life changed dratically for you 0:01:00.880 --> 0:01:03.400 since part one? Well? I did go visit my dog, 0:01:03.440 --> 0:01:06.600 who I do put her away during recordings because she 0:01:06.720 --> 0:01:09.560 is a very loud barker. But h yeah, so you 0:01:09.600 --> 0:01:12.480 know that always makes me a little happier. That's good. Yeah, 0:01:12.480 --> 0:01:15.480 it's always good to see dogs. I don't remove Anderson 0:01:15.560 --> 0:01:19.160 because I have separation anxiety. Yeah, but I feel like 0:01:19.160 --> 0:01:22.040 Anderson so much better behaved than Peaches. Peaches is just 0:01:22.200 --> 0:01:25.360 kind of allowed just wait for somebody to get a 0:01:25.400 --> 0:01:29.759 package delivered. She hates the package delivery pieces, like she's like, 0:01:30.120 --> 0:01:33.840 is it for me? No? Fuck you? Right? Anderson has 0:01:33.920 --> 0:01:38.400 that in common with Jeff Bezos. There you go. Wait, 0:01:38.520 --> 0:01:41.280 is Anderson making just as much money for every package 0:01:41.319 --> 0:01:46.640 being delivered to two thousand dollars a second son of 0:01:46.680 --> 0:01:49.600 a bit? Yeah, and she does not share a dime 0:01:49.640 --> 0:01:55.280 of it. It's very frustrating, very rudy dog I have. Yeah, 0:01:55.760 --> 0:01:58.520 she has so many jet skis that she can't even use. 0:02:00.000 --> 0:02:03.080 Got to make that bank? You you do? You? Anderson 0:02:03.480 --> 0:02:06.800 speaking of making that bank, not at all, speaking of 0:02:06.840 --> 0:02:11.160 making that bank, speaking of population control. When we left 0:02:11.200 --> 0:02:13.720 off our long winding story about the Dalkon Shield and 0:02:13.760 --> 0:02:17.040 the population control movement, we had gotten to Margaret Sanger. 0:02:17.080 --> 0:02:19.920 Have you heard Does that name ring a bell to you? Samantha? Yeah, 0:02:19.960 --> 0:02:23.120 of course we have kind of mentioned her previous previous 0:02:23.160 --> 0:02:27.440 episodes with previous Yeah, yeah, she's you know again kind 0:02:27.440 --> 0:02:29.680 of seen as the founder of planned parenthood, at least 0:02:29.720 --> 0:02:32.040 the organizations that became it, and popularizer of the term 0:02:32.080 --> 0:02:34.960 birth control. And in many ways, Margaret was a bridge 0:02:35.000 --> 0:02:38.400 between the eugenics movement, which was fundamentally racist, and the 0:02:38.400 --> 0:02:43.200 population control movement, which was usually racist but not necessarily racist. 0:02:43.200 --> 0:02:46.680 It's actually a much more complicated kind of terrible. Um. 0:02:46.760 --> 0:02:49.160 Margaret was not a eugenicist in the Nazi way. She 0:02:49.200 --> 0:02:52.600 supported birth control access for everybody, including the kind of 0:02:52.600 --> 0:02:54.760 white people that you kind of assumed she felt were 0:02:54.800 --> 0:02:59.040 a superior race. She was comfortable talking to fascists. In 0:02:59.040 --> 0:03:02.639 her nineteen thirty autobiography, she wrote, always, to me, any 0:03:02.680 --> 0:03:05.000 aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted 0:03:05.040 --> 0:03:07.200 an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the 0:03:07.280 --> 0:03:10.000 ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of 0:03:10.040 --> 0:03:12.919 the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. So she did 0:03:12.960 --> 0:03:15.359 talk to the KKK. There are pictures that will claim 0:03:15.440 --> 0:03:17.600 to be her with the KKK. They're not her. Um. 0:03:17.639 --> 0:03:19.720 There's no picture of that meeting. But she did give 0:03:19.720 --> 0:03:24.400 a speech to a women's KKK group. UM. And you 0:03:24.440 --> 0:03:26.800 can find a lot online about Singer's racism. It's a 0:03:26.880 --> 0:03:31.360 very frustrating subject to research because she definitely was problematic, 0:03:31.800 --> 0:03:34.519 but also her her status as founding mother of the 0:03:34.560 --> 0:03:36.760 safe contraception movement in the US has made her the 0:03:36.800 --> 0:03:39.480 target of a bunch of disingenuous right wingers who want 0:03:39.480 --> 0:03:41.440 to paint planned parenthood and birth control as part of 0:03:41.440 --> 0:03:43.480 a racist plot to wipe out black people. And that 0:03:43.640 --> 0:03:45.480 is not true. It wasn't true of Margaret Sanger, to 0:03:45.520 --> 0:03:48.480 be honest. Um, she did embark on something called the 0:03:48.520 --> 0:03:50.960 Negro Project, and that is a not a great thing 0:03:51.000 --> 0:03:56.640 to call anything. Yeah, but it was not what you 0:03:56.760 --> 0:03:59.280 might assume it was. It was an effort to spread 0:03:59.400 --> 0:04:02.800 education and access to birth control in black communities, particularly 0:04:02.800 --> 0:04:05.640 throughout the South. The reality of the project is complex. 0:04:05.720 --> 0:04:09.080 Singer and her colleagues did deliberately appeal to white racists 0:04:09.120 --> 0:04:11.080 in their attempts to get funding for the project. I'm 0:04:11.080 --> 0:04:14.440 gonna quote from a right up by New York University here, Sanger, 0:04:14.520 --> 0:04:17.320 Ryan Art, and Sanger secretary Florence Rose drafted a report 0:04:17.360 --> 0:04:20.479 on birth control and the Negro skillfully using language that 0:04:20.520 --> 0:04:23.720 appealed to both eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and 0:04:23.760 --> 0:04:27.599 progressives committed to shepherding African Americans into middle class culture. 0:04:27.880 --> 0:04:30.960 The reports stated that Negroes present the great problem of 0:04:31.000 --> 0:04:33.840 the South, as they are the group with the greatest economic, 0:04:33.880 --> 0:04:36.760 health and social problems, and outlined a practical birth control 0:04:36.800 --> 0:04:40.840 program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and 0:04:40.880 --> 0:04:44.840 that still breed carelessly and disastrously, a line borrowed from 0:04:44.839 --> 0:04:49.200 a June nineteen thirty two Birth Control Review article by W. E. B. Dubois. 0:04:49.279 --> 0:04:55.360 So again very problematic, also quoting W. B. D b 0:04:55.880 --> 0:05:01.400 Uh yeah, and it's it was not. Again this is 0:05:01.440 --> 0:05:04.320 framed modern and modern times by usually like right wing 0:05:04.320 --> 0:05:07.320 anti birth control people as like evidence of her racism. 0:05:07.360 --> 0:05:10.919 The Negro Project was very popular with black community leaders 0:05:10.920 --> 0:05:13.040 at the time, and it would be unfair to frame 0:05:13.080 --> 0:05:16.240 it as an act of genocide. Sanger wrote repeatedly of 0:05:16.240 --> 0:05:19.320 the importance of bringing in black doctors, stating at one point, 0:05:19.520 --> 0:05:21.800 I do not believe that this project should be directed 0:05:21.839 --> 0:05:25.040 or run by white medical men, which is good if 0:05:25.080 --> 0:05:27.599 you're going to do a healthcare project like focused on 0:05:27.640 --> 0:05:30.040 the black community like that, that that shows like she 0:05:30.040 --> 0:05:32.479 she was not, like she was capable of understanding like 0:05:32.520 --> 0:05:40.800 what was necessary in order to actually reach people. Yeah yeah, nine. 0:05:40.839 --> 0:05:43.080 She argued in a letter that black ministers needed to 0:05:43.120 --> 0:05:45.520 be heavily involved in the project in order to gain 0:05:45.560 --> 0:05:48.000 the trust of their communities. We do not want word 0:05:48.040 --> 0:05:50.840 to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, 0:05:50.960 --> 0:05:53.000 and the minister is the man who can straighten out 0:05:53.000 --> 0:05:54.800 that idea if it ever occurs to any of their 0:05:54.839 --> 0:05:59.880 more rebellious members. Again, it's a problematic language there. But 0:06:00.040 --> 0:06:02.720 also like, there's no evidence she was actually going in 0:06:02.760 --> 0:06:05.000 for genocide because she was again doing the same thing 0:06:05.040 --> 0:06:07.480 with white people. She was a birth control across the 0:06:07.520 --> 0:06:10.720 board advocate, right, she wanted everyone to have more access 0:06:10.720 --> 0:06:13.919 to contraceptives. Um, there are people on the right like 0:06:13.960 --> 0:06:16.960 Denisia Suza who will spread wildly untrue claims about Singer, 0:06:17.040 --> 0:06:19.440 like that she called black people human weeds and a 0:06:19.480 --> 0:06:22.600 minis to civilization, and there is no evidence of this. 0:06:23.040 --> 0:06:27.200 Singer's own legacy contains enough problematic facts without making up lies. 0:06:27.279 --> 0:06:29.760 She was a eugenicist, and she wrote in nineteen twenty 0:06:29.839 --> 0:06:33.719 three that birth control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practiced. 0:06:33.760 --> 0:06:36.560 It means the release and cultivation of the better elements 0:06:36.560 --> 0:06:40.359 in our society and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual 0:06:40.520 --> 0:06:44.120 extinction of defective stocks, those human weeds who threatened the 0:06:44.120 --> 0:06:46.640 blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization. So she 0:06:46.720 --> 0:06:49.680 did call people human weeds, but she wasn't referring to 0:06:49.760 --> 0:06:53.880 black people. She was referring more to mentally challenged people, 0:06:53.920 --> 0:06:56.400 more to people with like who are prone to diseases. 0:06:56.560 --> 0:06:59.560 And that's bad, Like, that's really bad. But she was 0:06:59.600 --> 0:07:03.279 not like a for exterminating everything but white people. She 0:07:03.400 --> 0:07:07.080 was for exterminating people she considered unhealthy, or at least 0:07:07.080 --> 0:07:10.080 exterminating them from the gene pool, which is again bad. 0:07:10.360 --> 0:07:12.440 But let's be accurate about the kind of bad it is, 0:07:12.600 --> 0:07:17.480 you know. Yeah, we don't need to make it anymore. Yeah, criminal. 0:07:17.480 --> 0:07:18.720 I don't know what I would say, because it's not 0:07:18.760 --> 0:07:22.880 flower either. It's bad. It's already bad. She didn't want 0:07:22.920 --> 0:07:25.640 to make that humanity better by wiping out black people. 0:07:25.720 --> 0:07:28.520 She wanted to make black people and white people better 0:07:28.600 --> 0:07:31.360 by wiping out folks who had what she considered to 0:07:31.440 --> 0:07:36.560 be like bad qualities through selective breeding. And that's really terrible. 0:07:36.920 --> 0:07:39.760 Also to classify for herself what those bad qualities are 0:07:40.080 --> 0:07:45.480 like Yeah, that is bad, but like it's not the 0:07:45.560 --> 0:07:47.720 kind of bad like again, because they tried a friend 0:07:47.760 --> 0:07:50.480 that Like, no, the progressives always been trying to wipe 0:07:50.480 --> 0:07:54.560 out black people. Like, that's not what she was doing. Um, information, 0:07:54.600 --> 0:07:56.480 she was just a bad person. She was she was 0:07:56.600 --> 0:08:00.400 There's plenty that's bad about her. Yeah, let's be actually 0:08:00.440 --> 0:08:04.600 honest when we condemn someone. She also stated during another speech, 0:08:04.800 --> 0:08:08.200 I believe now immediately there should be national sterilization for 0:08:08.280 --> 0:08:11.360 certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged 0:08:11.360 --> 0:08:13.480 to breed and would die out where the government not 0:08:13.600 --> 0:08:19.680 feeding them. Um, you know that's bad, But again it's 0:08:19.680 --> 0:08:21.440 the kind of like. Part of why they like to 0:08:21.440 --> 0:08:24.080 try to frame her badness as something different is because 0:08:24.080 --> 0:08:26.480 if you're accurate about it, you can find a funk 0:08:26.520 --> 0:08:29.720 load of Republicans who say that the poor should starve, right, 0:08:29.800 --> 0:08:32.240 like the people who can't work on their own in 0:08:32.280 --> 0:08:35.240 find Jordan Peterson talking about like how terrifying it is 0:08:35.280 --> 0:08:37.760 that some people aren't intelligent enough to be in the military, 0:08:38.040 --> 0:08:39.480 and like say, like, because so what do we do 0:08:39.559 --> 0:08:43.320 with those people? Like that's a really like what Margaret 0:08:43.360 --> 0:08:46.439 Sanger was saying back then is still common today. Um, 0:08:46.600 --> 0:08:48.679 people dress it up a little bit more. I mean 0:08:48.679 --> 0:08:51.520 it kind of relates to the COVID things like that's fine, 0:08:51.600 --> 0:08:56.560 they're already they're already problems if they die, so's they're unproductive. Yeah, 0:08:56.640 --> 0:09:02.280 they're unproductive, they're on the government. Actually, Um, yeah, she 0:09:02.440 --> 0:09:04.720 just she was bad. She just was not the kind 0:09:04.720 --> 0:09:06.720 of bad people liked SUSA like to paint her as. 0:09:06.720 --> 0:09:09.600 And in fact, a lot of progressive black leaders at 0:09:09.600 --> 0:09:12.040 the time liked Margaret Sanger and what she was trying 0:09:12.080 --> 0:09:15.200 to do. Uh. In one nine letter to Dr C. J. 0:09:15.320 --> 0:09:17.599 Gamble of Procter and Gamble fame, she urged him to 0:09:17.640 --> 0:09:20.720 get over his resistance to hiring a full time negro physician, 0:09:20.800 --> 0:09:23.679 as quote, the colored negroes can get closer to their 0:09:23.679 --> 0:09:25.480 own members and more or less lay their cards on 0:09:25.480 --> 0:09:29.160 the table, which means they're ignorant, superstitions and doubt. Um. 0:09:29.240 --> 0:09:31.600 And again she's also she's number one saying that black 0:09:31.600 --> 0:09:33.840 people are ignorant and superstitious, which is bad, but also 0:09:33.880 --> 0:09:36.440 saying that like, no, you get educated black people to 0:09:36.480 --> 0:09:39.080 talk to them about birth control. So again, she's a 0:09:39.160 --> 0:09:42.440 problematic person, but not what do SUSA likes to paint 0:09:42.440 --> 0:09:45.240 her as. She was very paternalistic in her dealings with 0:09:45.280 --> 0:09:48.360 black people. Obviously that is extremely clear for reading anything 0:09:48.400 --> 0:09:51.280 about her um, But her own letters and correspondence don't 0:09:51.280 --> 0:09:54.000 show she wanted to eliminate groups of people, um other 0:09:54.040 --> 0:09:56.000 than like she wanted to eliminate groups of people, I guess, 0:09:56.040 --> 0:09:59.000 but not that the way that is portrayed um. In 0:10:00.080 --> 0:10:02.240 she wrote that quote, the Negro race has reached a 0:10:02.240 --> 0:10:04.720 place in history when every possible effort should be made 0:10:04.720 --> 0:10:07.479 to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution 0:10:07.520 --> 0:10:10.199 to the future of America. Negro parents, like all parents, 0:10:10.280 --> 0:10:13.600 must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness, 0:10:13.640 --> 0:10:19.320 from health, not from despair. See it's complicated here, especially 0:10:19.320 --> 0:10:21.959 since one of the things historians who are honest will 0:10:21.960 --> 0:10:24.080 point out is that if you're judging people by the 0:10:24.120 --> 0:10:27.480 standards of the time, Margaret Sanger was woke for her 0:10:27.559 --> 0:10:31.360 period of time. Like she she had enlightened views on 0:10:31.480 --> 0:10:36.640 race relations for the time, right, Yeah, and she got 0:10:36.679 --> 0:10:40.200 some kind of equality and understanding that the the way 0:10:40.240 --> 0:10:42.520 to talk to people is not by telling them what 0:10:42.559 --> 0:10:45.000 to do, but to actually include the I guess, yeah, 0:10:45.040 --> 0:10:48.120 exactly exactly, to include them and to include their community, 0:10:48.160 --> 0:10:52.600 and to like yeah, again, everything is bad back there. 0:10:53.000 --> 0:10:55.920 It's still bad now. It was even worse than I 0:10:55.960 --> 0:10:58.760 guess in that standard and that time standards, she was 0:10:58.840 --> 0:11:03.840 seen as progressive, that leer as again like the eighties 0:11:03.880 --> 0:11:09.120 when they stopped saying yeah things as well. Yeah, she 0:11:09.240 --> 0:11:11.920 was better on race relations than most white people of 0:11:11.920 --> 0:11:15.439 her social class in that time. Um, because her actual 0:11:15.520 --> 0:11:19.440 thing wasn't race as much as it was eliminating people 0:11:19.480 --> 0:11:22.320 she thought weren't intelligent enough, people who were poor and 0:11:22.360 --> 0:11:24.800 thus unintelligent, Like that was the kind of people that 0:11:24.840 --> 0:11:28.880 Margaret Sanger wanted to wipe out. Um, yeah, he just wanted, 0:11:29.000 --> 0:11:31.560 you know, because to kill all of a certain other groups. 0:11:31.600 --> 0:11:34.320 It's fine, fine, Yeah, it's it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, so 0:11:34.520 --> 0:11:36.240 it's yeah. I'm gonna quote now from a write up 0:11:36.240 --> 0:11:37.920 in the Journal of Past and Present that kind of 0:11:37.920 --> 0:11:41.160 points out the the actual kind of eugenicist Margaret Singer was. 0:11:41.679 --> 0:11:44.400 She argued that contraception was not merely a personal choice, 0:11:44.440 --> 0:11:47.400 but a public good, indeed a pantasa for social problems 0:11:47.520 --> 0:11:49.920 for the unfit. It was a duty, and Sanger became 0:11:49.920 --> 0:11:52.559 convinced that states had to intervene when necessary to prevent 0:11:52.559 --> 0:11:55.959 their propagation. Her movement would thus court government repression to 0:11:56.000 --> 0:11:59.079 gain visibility and sympathy for the cause of liberating individuals 0:11:59.080 --> 0:12:02.000 from unwanted birth, while striving to win state support for 0:12:02.040 --> 0:12:05.520 top down programs to shape populations. Sanger herself felt that 0:12:05.559 --> 0:12:07.920 she never had a country and instead devoted her life 0:12:07.920 --> 0:12:10.640 to the movement. For her, birth control was a secular 0:12:10.679 --> 0:12:14.079 faith that would advance peace between people's by reducing Malthusian 0:12:14.160 --> 0:12:19.480 pressures and depriving militant nationalists of cannon fodder. So that 0:12:20.080 --> 0:12:23.319 is interesting to me, um, because that's why she's kind 0:12:23.320 --> 0:12:26.640 of the founder of the population control movement. And that's 0:12:26.640 --> 0:12:28.880 where it splits from eugenics, because she's not talking about like, 0:12:28.920 --> 0:12:31.320 I want the white race to succeed. She's talking about, 0:12:31.360 --> 0:12:34.079 I want to engineer humanity, and birth control is the 0:12:34.120 --> 0:12:36.920 way to do that. And I'm you know, she above 0:12:36.960 --> 0:12:41.320 all else frightened of overpopulation, and particularly overpopulation of poor people, Right, 0:12:41.400 --> 0:12:44.920 that's kind of her thing. So yeah, in the nineteen 0:12:44.920 --> 0:12:48.600 thirties and forties, obviously, eugenics was still very big. Various 0:12:48.600 --> 0:12:52.960 fascist states adopted hardcore racist eugenicist policies. Hitler's policies were 0:12:52.960 --> 0:12:55.319 based heavily on a different state, and federal policies in 0:12:55.360 --> 0:12:57.320 the United States that had been named it breeding and 0:12:57.480 --> 0:13:00.920 immigration restrictions of certain groups of people. Uh Hitler described 0:13:00.960 --> 0:13:03.600 the invasion of Eastern Europe and its subsequent genocides as 0:13:03.600 --> 0:13:06.880 the planned control of population movements to restore the numbers 0:13:06.880 --> 0:13:10.440 and qualities of the Aryan race. Japan's imperial government, on 0:13:10.440 --> 0:13:12.760 the other hand, set itself to the task of purifying 0:13:12.800 --> 0:13:15.760 what they called the Yamato race. Now, when all of 0:13:15.760 --> 0:13:17.840 the dust had settled from World War Two, the horrors 0:13:17.840 --> 0:13:19.520 of the death camps proved to be the nail in 0:13:19.559 --> 0:13:23.120 the coffin for eugenics as a worldwide movement. Obviously, remnants 0:13:23.160 --> 0:13:25.640 of eugenics policies remain in the US for a frightening 0:13:25.640 --> 0:13:27.880 long time, and one can argue even into today in 0:13:27.920 --> 0:13:30.920 some ways. But no longer was eugenic thinking something you 0:13:30.920 --> 0:13:34.839 could advocate openly without drawing nasty comparisons to Nazis. So 0:13:35.360 --> 0:13:38.559 the Nazis kind of kill eugenics as a respectable movement 0:13:38.800 --> 0:13:42.640 because of you know, the death caffs. Like people see 0:13:42.679 --> 0:13:46.640 where that leads. But population control, like this is part 0:13:46.640 --> 0:13:49.240 of why what's kind of like brilliant about what Sanger 0:13:49.280 --> 0:13:51.600 and other population control advocates do when they split from 0:13:51.600 --> 0:13:55.880 the eugenics movement. Population control only gets more popular after 0:13:55.920 --> 0:13:59.520 World War Two. Margaret Sanger herself even pointed to Nazi 0:13:59.559 --> 0:14:03.439 extermi nation centers as evidence of the quote widespread devaluation 0:14:03.480 --> 0:14:06.520 of human lives that was caused when people didn't have 0:14:06.600 --> 0:14:10.520 birth control. Um like, because basically there were so many 0:14:10.640 --> 0:14:13.760 useless people that it made everyone's life worth lesson that's 0:14:13.760 --> 0:14:17.040 what made these these massacres possible. And instead, if we 0:14:17.080 --> 0:14:20.360 had just sterilized people with quote dysgenic qualities of body 0:14:20.360 --> 0:14:23.120 and mind, these death camps would never have become a thing. 0:14:24.720 --> 0:14:30.360 That's the whole reach. Like that's yeahs like you had 0:14:30.400 --> 0:14:34.440 to play in order to justify why your cause could 0:14:34.480 --> 0:14:37.640 be better than this bad cause. But because it wasn't happening, 0:14:38.800 --> 0:14:44.120 it happened. M Yeah, yeah, it's and it's like that's 0:14:44.120 --> 0:14:46.880 a bad way to explain. It's it's all bad. It's 0:14:46.960 --> 0:14:51.320 very bad. Um. Yeah. So Sanger and her fellow travelers 0:14:51.360 --> 0:14:54.320 believed that intelligence was the most important qualities to select 0:14:54.400 --> 0:14:57.920 forth idiots they felt should be discouraged from breeding. Obviously, 0:14:57.920 --> 0:14:59.640 there's a lot of problems with this, but the chief 0:14:59.680 --> 0:15:02.520 one is that dumb and poor were synonyms for people 0:15:02.600 --> 0:15:04.920 like Margaret Singer, and they always have been. For the 0:15:04.920 --> 0:15:06.880 population control mo When they talk about wanting to like, 0:15:07.400 --> 0:15:10.360 you know, stop unintelligent people from breeding, they're talking about 0:15:10.400 --> 0:15:13.200 poor people, right. What they really mean is uneducated or 0:15:13.240 --> 0:15:18.280 not educated to my standards. Aldous Huxley cited research that 0:15:18.360 --> 0:15:23.280 suggested an inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility. Basically, Huxley 0:15:23.360 --> 0:15:25.960 was pointing out that like intelligent people have less children 0:15:25.960 --> 0:15:29.200 and he called for a world population policy. And in 0:15:29.240 --> 0:15:31.800 this Huxley was making the same argument that Mike Judge 0:15:31.840 --> 0:15:33.960 did in the movie Idiocracy, which is why I find 0:15:33.960 --> 0:15:37.240 that movie problematic because the whole the fundamental idea like 0:15:37.280 --> 0:15:40.040 idiocracy is everything Margaret Singer was talking about, if we 0:15:40.120 --> 0:15:43.240 let dumb people breed, the world will become stupid, which 0:15:43.720 --> 0:15:48.120 isn't how genetics works. But yeah, it's it's bad. Um, 0:15:48.560 --> 0:15:50.440 it's frustrated to me, Like the degree to which people 0:15:50.440 --> 0:15:52.280 like right now is just like idiocracy, and it's like, no, 0:15:52.360 --> 0:15:56.600 it's not like these people are anyway. Very first, the 0:15:56.640 --> 0:15:59.760 whole concept of who is an idiot who isn't as 0:15:59.800 --> 0:16:04.720 a um problematic in itself. Like, yeah, and it's part 0:16:04.800 --> 0:16:07.280 of you know, honestly, like the fact that there's so 0:16:07.320 --> 0:16:10.440 many folks who were like you know, quote unquote coastal 0:16:10.440 --> 0:16:12.520 elites who like to clare folks in the Deep South 0:16:12.600 --> 0:16:14.400 to be dumb because of like the way they talk 0:16:14.520 --> 0:16:16.520 or the differences in their education is part of what 0:16:16.600 --> 0:16:20.480 like has makes those people easier to recruit by folks 0:16:20.520 --> 0:16:23.720 who are trying to take advantage of them. Um, it's 0:16:23.800 --> 0:16:28.360 very it's all very frustrating. It's it's very frustrating. But 0:16:28.440 --> 0:16:32.560 you know what's not frustrating. This is frustrating. It's not 0:16:32.640 --> 0:16:34.040 time for an ad pivot. I'm just going to keep 0:16:34.040 --> 0:16:36.720 popping about racism. Yeah, sorry in the late night that 0:16:36.800 --> 0:16:38.080 that was a little bit of a fake out there 0:16:38.080 --> 0:16:42.680 and you see that that was good. Okay, what are 0:16:42.720 --> 0:16:46.160 we doing here? You're like, is there a second part 0:16:46.200 --> 0:16:49.280 of the segment that I didn't know? Right back into 0:16:49.840 --> 0:16:52.840 bigot Aldous Huxley. So, in the late nineteen forties and 0:16:52.840 --> 0:16:55.560 early fifties, thinkers like Huxley began to panic over the 0:16:55.600 --> 0:16:58.680 thought of a population explosion, which they considered to be 0:16:58.720 --> 0:17:01.040 an existential threat on the level of a nuclear war 0:17:01.600 --> 0:17:04.360 because the poorest nations on Earth, the global South, had 0:17:04.400 --> 0:17:07.760 the highest populations and most rapid rates of population growth. 0:17:07.960 --> 0:17:11.680 This is where population control advocates focus their efforts. So again, 0:17:11.840 --> 0:17:14.520 we're not racist. We're not trying to call certain races. 0:17:14.760 --> 0:17:16.679 But the poor are having the most babies and we 0:17:16.720 --> 0:17:18.480 want to stop that. And also all of the poor 0:17:18.520 --> 0:17:21.880 live in these specific countries, and they're not white, right right, 0:17:24.920 --> 0:17:29.639 It's not about race. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In nineteen fifty eight, 0:17:29.720 --> 0:17:33.000 Dwight D. Eisenhower called a meeting of his National Security 0:17:33.040 --> 0:17:36.320 Council to discuss foreign aid. He told them they neglected 0:17:36.320 --> 0:17:38.479 what he viewed as the biggest threat to their future, 0:17:38.520 --> 0:17:40.400 even more dire than the Cold War. And I'm gonna 0:17:40.440 --> 0:17:43.320 quote from historian Matthew Connolly here, who's quoting someone who 0:17:43.359 --> 0:17:46.280 is in that NSC meeting with Eisenhower. In all our 0:17:46.320 --> 0:17:49.080 discussions of the problem of underdeveloped countries and the kind 0:17:49.080 --> 0:17:51.600 of assistance which we could effectively provide them, we had 0:17:51.640 --> 0:17:53.520 not yet faced up to what was really the most 0:17:53.600 --> 0:17:57.840 serious problem, namely that of exploding population growths. As far 0:17:57.880 --> 0:18:00.800 as he could see, continued the President, the only solution 0:18:00.840 --> 0:18:03.560 to this problem throughout the world was finding an effective 0:18:03.600 --> 0:18:07.520 two cent contraceptive. Eisenhower thought that something drastic had to 0:18:07.560 --> 0:18:10.439 be done to solve this problem, though he certainly did 0:18:10.440 --> 0:18:12.359 not know how to get started on this solution, and 0:18:12.400 --> 0:18:16.600 he furthermore could not himself get it started. So Eisenhower 0:18:16.680 --> 0:18:19.119 did form a Presidential Commission on US fourign aid and 0:18:19.160 --> 0:18:21.399 test them with the goal of finding ways for the 0:18:21.480 --> 0:18:24.520 US to help poorer nations reduced fertility rates. In an 0:18:24.600 --> 0:18:28.320 NSC meeting, he confided to his men that overpopulation was 0:18:28.400 --> 0:18:30.720 quote a constant worry to him and from time to 0:18:30.840 --> 0:18:35.680 time reduced him to despair. So he is the basics 0:18:36.320 --> 0:18:40.480 I've been trying to put him in basis for Thanos. Yeah, 0:18:41.760 --> 0:18:46.960 for this character. Okay, yeah, I'm waving get in now. 0:18:47.280 --> 0:18:49.720 I will say though, Eisenhower also doesn't think that the 0:18:49.760 --> 0:18:53.720 president can do anything about this. He thinks that that's 0:18:53.800 --> 0:18:57.920 like not the job of the federal government to provide contraceptives. Um. 0:18:58.080 --> 0:19:00.720 So he thinks it's critical and import but he also 0:19:00.760 --> 0:19:03.040 thinks that like, I can't do this or have the 0:19:03.080 --> 0:19:05.879 government do this because that would be wrong, which I 0:19:05.880 --> 0:19:10.040 don't know, it seems weird to me. Um. Yeah. Around 0:19:10.080 --> 0:19:12.960 the same time, population control advocates had started pushing the 0:19:13.040 --> 0:19:14.840 u in, which was new at the time, and US 0:19:15.000 --> 0:19:17.800 government to distribute contraceptives in poor countries as a way 0:19:17.840 --> 0:19:20.679 to curb birthrates, but Ike refused to consider this, stating 0:19:20.760 --> 0:19:23.679 I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is 0:19:23.720 --> 0:19:27.480 not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility. 0:19:28.560 --> 0:19:31.560 Once he left office, Eisenhower became the honorary co chair 0:19:31.600 --> 0:19:35.720 of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, right alongside Harry Truman. Yeah, 0:19:35.800 --> 0:19:37.800 I meant she didn't know that Harry Truman and Eisenhower 0:19:37.800 --> 0:19:41.480 were like chairman of the Plan Parnet. I'm having so 0:19:41.520 --> 0:19:46.040 many questions right now, like that Republicans used to be 0:19:46.200 --> 0:19:49.680 very different. I mean again, we talked about this in 0:19:49.720 --> 0:19:52.520 episode we just recorded. But like Barry Goldwater, who was 0:19:52.560 --> 0:19:55.440 like seen as the first Trump like was a pro 0:19:55.680 --> 0:19:58.200 abortion access advocate at the end of his life. So 0:19:58.440 --> 0:20:01.919 Republicans have really gone off the deep ense recently. But 0:20:01.960 --> 0:20:05.080 it is worth pointing out how recent they're like antipathy 0:20:05.119 --> 0:20:07.639 to birth control and stuff is right, I mean, to 0:20:07.720 --> 0:20:09.880 be fair, the difference today seems to be that they're 0:20:09.920 --> 0:20:12.280 more worried about, you know, people being born as to 0:20:12.400 --> 0:20:14.960 whether or not they die later, They're okay, they're dying later. 0:20:15.080 --> 0:20:18.919 Part now they have always been because Dwight Eisenhower was 0:20:18.960 --> 0:20:26.919 a big murdering people advocate. Yeah, I mean, and in 0:20:27.000 --> 0:20:30.200 fairness to most of the people he murdered were Nazis, 0:20:30.280 --> 0:20:32.879 so like you got to give him some credit, but 0:20:32.960 --> 0:20:34.720 he killed a lot of people who weren't Nazis. We 0:20:34.720 --> 0:20:38.159 can talk about the Congo and ship. Yeah, yeah, I 0:20:38.200 --> 0:20:40.719 think that was under him, And like, you know Korea, 0:20:40.840 --> 0:20:43.639 well that was Truman, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:46.680 lot of the Cold Wars started. Yeah, I mean Eisenhower's 0:20:47.240 --> 0:20:51.360 complex Korean was under Truman. Um. Yeah, Eisenhower was complicated 0:20:51.400 --> 0:20:54.159 because he is one of the only presidents, maybe the 0:20:54.200 --> 0:20:57.520 only whoever like directly did ounce the military industrial complex, 0:20:57.520 --> 0:20:59.280 and he did it right when it was like starting off. 0:20:59.320 --> 0:21:02.040 He was like, this is happening, and it's bad and 0:21:02.080 --> 0:21:04.560 it's going to destroy our entire country if we let it. 0:21:04.760 --> 0:21:08.480 But also he's who it got started under Um and 0:21:08.560 --> 0:21:10.520 he let it happen and then kind of on his way, 0:21:10.560 --> 0:21:11.960 I was like, oh, by the way, I left you 0:21:12.000 --> 0:21:14.479 all with a big old problem. So I don't know, 0:21:15.080 --> 0:21:18.880 complicated figure Eisenhower still is one of the best presidents 0:21:18.920 --> 0:21:21.280 we ever had. But all of our presidents are criminals, 0:21:21.359 --> 0:21:30.359 so you know, yeah, quotation marks around best. So um yeah. 0:21:30.400 --> 0:21:33.119 Once he left office, Ike winds up as the honorary 0:21:33.119 --> 0:21:35.280 co chair of Planned Parenthood, and in this position he 0:21:35.280 --> 0:21:39.240 turned his focus to lambasting welfare programs, including federally funded 0:21:39.240 --> 0:21:40.919