The French have a word for it: débaptiser.

A prominent French scientist, Alexis Carrel (1878-1944) won the Nobel Prize for his inventions. His work saved military and civilian lives during both world wars. After his death, a grateful nation baptized the medical school of Lyons as Alexis-Carrel University. In the 1990s, however, critics recalled that Carrel had been an ardent eugenicist. In his book Man the Unknown (1935), Carrel recommended the use of gas chambers to deal with criminals and the insane. In the 1936 preface to the German edition, he praised the new National Socialist government’s eugenic policy of forced sterilization. The French government quickly debaptized Alexis-Carrel University and rebaptized it in the name of T. H. Laënnec, the uncontroversial inventor of the stethoscope.

In our own nation the work of debaptism continues apace as we confront our racist history. Calhoun Hall at Yale has been renamed. A senator and vice president, John Calhoun was an ardent defender of slavery and white supremacy. Georgetown recently removed the names of Thomas Mullady and William McSherry from campus buildings since both Jesuits had been prominent in the sale of slaves to distant Southern plantations in 1838.

Sanger argued for compulsory sterilization and segregation for people with disabilities.

As we purify our national memory, I would like to nominate my own candidate for debaptism: Sanger Square in Manhattan. Named after Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), the founder of the Birth Control League (the future Planned Parenthood), the square honors an improbable feminist icon who championed a coercive brand of eugenics.

Sanger’s eugenics creed is clearly stated in her speech “My Way to Peace” (1932). The centerpiece of the program is vigorous state use of compulsory sterilization and segregation. The first class of persons targeted for sterilization is made up of people with mental or physical disability. “The first step would be to control the intake and output on morons, mental defectives, epileptics.” A much larger class of undesirables would be forced to choose either sterilization or placement in state work camps. “The second step would be to take an inventory of the second group, such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection and segregate them on farms and open spaces.” Those segregated in these camps could return to mainstream society if they underwent sterilization and demonstrated good behavior. Sanger estimates that 15 million to 20 million Americans would be targeted in this regime of forced sterilization and concentration camps. In Sanger, the humanitarian dream of a world without poverty and illness has deteriorated into a coercive world where the poor, the disabled and the addicted simply disappear.

Sanger represents a genteel prejudice shared by many members of America’s ruling class in the early 20th century.

Sanger’s eugenics project carried its own racial preoccupation. In a letter of Dec. 10, 1939, to Clarence Gamble (cited here), she explains the nature of her organization’s outreach to the African-American community: “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” In her autobiography she proudly recounts her address to the women of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, N.J., in 1926.

Dethroning a cultural idol like Sanger is not easy. The problem goes deeper than the link between her birth control movement and the sexual revolution. Sanger represents a genteel prejudice shared by many members of America’s ruling class in the early 20th century. To face squarely the glacial eugenics of Sanger one must demythologize the Progressive movement’s pantheon: Theodore Roosevelt (who staunchly supported the eugenic research of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratories), Woodrow Wilson (who as governor of New Jersey signed a law in 1911 mandating the forced sterilization of “the feeble-minded”), and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who in the Buck v. Bell case in 1927 declared forced-sterilization statutes constitutional). Such biases have consequences. At least 60,000 American citizens were sterilized against their will under the weight of such mandates.

When we improbably debaptize Sanger Square, I propose a new baptismal name: that of Carrie Buck (1878-1966), the Virginia woman whose fate as a sterilization victim was sealed by the 1927 court decision. The state of Virginia had condemned Buck as feeble-minded, as incorrigible and as sexually promiscuous. She was in fact a C pupil, only mildly disruptive in class, and the child she bore out of wedlock was the result of being raped by the nephew of her foster parents.

For all our current efforts to face the destructive biases in our history, we find it difficult to admit, let alone condemn, our longstanding hostility toward people with disabilities and to confront those elites who have fostered that contempt. Our cult of Margaret Sanger is a sign of that enduring refusal.

Margaret Sanger, “My Way to Peace,” Jan. 17 1932 .

Typed speech. Source: MSMMargaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress 130:198 .

Sanger delivered this speech to the New History Society, part of a series on “My Plan for Peace.” For other versions, including one published in the Birth Control Review, see MSM S71:336, 338, 341, 345, and 348.

MY WAY TO PEACE

Margaret Sanger

URL of the original posting site: https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=129037.xml

Science has been applied to the various channels of life’s needs especially to our environment. Industry, commerce, education, hygiene, surgery, agriculture, dairy, factory, mining and even war have had the benefits of the best that science could command; but it has not yet been applied to improving the quality of life itself nor to the maintenance of PEACE.

MY WAY TO PEACE would be First, to put into action the fourteen points of President Wilson’s, upon which Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies. Second, to have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems, and appoint a Parliament of Population Directors representing the various branches of science.

This body to direct and control the population through Birth rates and immigration, and direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with the taste, fitness and interest of the individuals.

The main objects of the Population Congress would be:

(a) to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of our population.

(b) to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11.

(c) keep the doors of Immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble-minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphiletic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred from entrance by the Immigration Laws of 1924.

(d) apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization, and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

(e) to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feeble-minded parents, the government would pension all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.

(f) the whole dysgenic population would have its choice of segregation or sterilization.

(g) there would be farm lands and homesteads where these segregated persons would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.

The first step would thus be to control the intake and output on morons, mental defectives, epileptics.

The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection and segregate on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.

Having coralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health not punishment, it is safe to say that about fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense–defending the unborn against their own disabilities.

The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers’ health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxis goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs her health; place these mothers under public health nurses to instruct them in practical scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives–thus reducing maternal mortality.

There would be a careful follow-up in the homes where infants have died, to ascertain the causes and to prevent when possible the further increase of children until the causes have been removed–reducing infant mortality.

While the above steps seem to be emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.

With the future citizens safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate attention, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.

There would then be a definite inexorable ruling that the population should increase slowly at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust the increasing numbers to our social and economic system.

The Birth Rate in the United States in 1931 was 15.0 and the death rate about 11, which allowed for a survival rate of 4%, or an increase in the population, including immigration, of over 20%.

Immigration: Open the gates of the U.S.A. to those countries whose inhabitants have the inherent talents and national characteristics desirable, eliminating entirely those countries whose subjects have already been difficult to assimilate.

This plan to be in operation for ten years. In the meantime we shall organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain WORLD PEACE.

Subject Terms:

• “unfit” to reproduce, descriptions of
• eugenics
• fertility limitation, of physicaly disabled and diseased
• sterilization, candidates for

Copyright 2003. Margaret Sanger Project