White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

Roosevelt was an unabashed eugenicist. He used the bully pulpit of his office to insist that women had a critical civic duty to breed a generation of healthy and disciplined children. He first endorsed eugenics in 1903, and two years later he laid out his beliefs in speech before the Congress of Mothers. Worried about “race suicide,” as he put it, he recommended that women of Anglo-American stock have four to six children, “enough so the race shall increase and not decrease.” Women’s duty to suffer “birth pangs,” and even face death, made the fertile female the equivalent of the professional soldier. Women who shirked their procreative duty were worse than deserters. So he pushed for passage of a constitutional amendment in 1906 that would place marriage and divorce under the control of federal law.49 Taking marriage and divorce laws out of the arbitrary control of the states served a larger eugenic purpose. Every die-hard eugenicist believed that citizens did not have an individual right to marry or to reproduce. As a leading eugenic organization reported in 1914, “Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not merely to the individual who carries it.” Because children produced by unfit parents could cost taxpayers if they became criminals, society had the right to protect itself. Far more dangerous was the cost to the nation’s human stock if degenerates were allowed to breed. In 1913, Roosevelt wrote supportively to the leading eugenicist Charles Daven...