The Stereotypes Of Race-Suicide And The Progressive Movement

Darwinism is the idea of “survival of the fittest,” particularly in regards to one’s rate of reproduction. Race-suicide refers to when a native population—the “superior” stock—is outbred by immigrants who are “racially inferior” to them. These terms are kindred in the eyes of eugenists, as the reproduction of these “inferior” immigrants could cause there to be less opportunities for the more “fit” and superior natives. Additionally, these Progressive Era eugenists based fitness not on Darwin’s criteria of a high reproduction rate, but rather on other attributes such as race. In page 209 of Retrospectives, a leading economist named Edward A. Ross argued that treating people of differing races as equal was dangerous, because it led to the deaths
of “[H]alf a million picked whites” in order to grant equality to “[F]our million unpicked blacks.” Essentially, Ross—who was echoed by other economists and eugenists of the Progressive era—deemed the act of treating everyone as equally fit foolish, because to him it would lead to persecution against the natives who were meant to be fittest in society. Moreover, he used race to distinguish between the natives and immigrants of a country by praising the former as the “higher race” on page 209, instead of thinking of it as a way to form many groups of people based on their physical attributes and cultures as society now does.