C’mon, I know you have some non-zero level of reading comprehension. I suggest you re-read my response. Note in particular the inclusion of the word “noisemakers” and the phrases “seem relevant to add” and “assuming the 43 are actually representative”.
But if you want to throw down with semantic nitpicking, I’ll play along. At least for a short time…
Like heatmiserfl, I don’t believe for a minute that the inclusion of Sanger is because of her interest in eugenics. Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Linus Pauling, John Maynard Keynes all supported eugenics, to name a very few. None of them made the list. The man most responsible for promoting eugenics in the US was Charles Davenport - he didn’t make the list, even though he worked directly with the pre-war Berlin eugenics institute (name of which escapes me atm.)
Furthermore, Sanger’s interest in eugenics was not race-based, as you claim (and unlike Davenport.) Sanger was concerned about medical fitness and not skin color. Sanger promoted only sterilization for the profoundly retarded or diseased. Also, she did not agree with euthanasia for the unfit, unlike other eugeneticists of the time. Sanger’s repeatedly stated view was that the best way to ensure the healthiest children was to put birth control in the hands of women who could decided best when and with whom to conceive.
I have no desire to whitewash eugenics but to pretend that Sanger deserves special criticism for it, while insisting that her crusade for birth control is just a coincidence, is, well, “disingenuous” is the politest word I can find.
As for the abortion, which is kind of a side issue here - Sanger stated repeatedly that it was sometimes justified, when done by a doctor, even though she felt it was taking a life. She felt education and open access to birth control were the best means of eliminating abortion. She’s right about that, too, but it puts her at odds with all the major anti-abortion groups out there. And again, I don’t believe for a minute that’s just a coincidence in conservative’s hatred to her.
I know.
I tried to imagine. Names as I thought of them:
John Brown
FDR
LBJ
Jimmy Carter
Margaret Sanger
George McGovern?
Rachel Carson
…
Andrew Jackson?
4/7 hits.
Carter is unfairly blamed for the collapse of an unsustainable domestic petroleum industry.
Since that time, it’s been stupidly chic to blame him for an exaggerated description of the woes of the 1970’s while downplaying similar problems since. Rather than to deal with reality, actual economic policy on the right has come up short in dealing with chronic unemployment–preferring to just move the homeless into a different category. Such persons have no place to denounce Carter.
I’m a bit surprised George Soros isn’t higher on the list, since according to the righties all he does is go around crushing countries currencies, then using the billions in profits to fund evil liberal causes here in the United States. He’s the liberal version of Blofeld.
Woody Wilson has been getting a ton of hate on conservative talk radio over the past year. Racist, creator of the UN, failed foreign policies, creator of the Fed etc etc. I think I remember Mike Savage or Glen Beck classifying him as a downright evil individual.
Oh, you’re right. I stand corrected in my above post - Woody’s #5. Although like Stanger, I suspect the racist charges are more incidental to the big issues (the Fed & the UN, birth control) in terms of conservative ire.
eta - It was League of Nations, actually, wasn’t it?
As the only President ever to have a PhD, Wilson is a predictable enough target for populist anti-intellectuals like Savage and Beck.
I think Senator Joe McCarthy would rank pretty high as would J. Edgar Hoover. Also, any number of openly racist and race-baiting politicians (e.g., Theodore G. Bilbo or Strom Thurmond) would fill a few slots.
I’m a liberal but even I think Herbert Hoover got a bit of a bad rap with regards to the Depression. He had only been in office a few short months before it happened. His predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, probably deserves more blame and should be ranked higher on any “worst figures in American history” list put together by liberals. In any case, both Hoover and Coolidge were far better presidents than James Buchanan who could easily be on either a conservative or liberal list.
Somebody could’ve included William Quantrill. Regardless of whether you’re liberal or conservative, you’d have to consider him pretty odious.
For certain limited definitions of the word “create”,
That bastard, thinking that “health/welfare” and “education” are actually distinct enough to warrant being separate departments. How stupid. :rolleyes:
I’m sure you’ll join in my burning hatred of William Howard “Yoko” Taft for breaking up the Department of Commerce and Labor?
CMC fnord!
Reading the excerpts of what Margaret Sanger wrote, this struck me “It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence.”
Sounds like it’d fit right into the Republican platform in any year in my lifetime. Can’t see how any Republican, conservative, right-winger, your preferred word here, would find anything to obje … oh wait,
“We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother…” “No one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable but they will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. This is the only cure for abortions.”
The entire purpose of tarring Sanger with a grossly over simplified accusation of eugenicist is to blow the dog-whistle and leave in the minds of the sharp-eared that Planned Parenthood has a hidden nefarious agenda. Mind you, I’ve heard and read folks who straight-up say that Planned Parenthood’s business is the elimination of minority races. :rolleyes:
An “abortion should be safe and rare, because effective contraceptives should be cheap and common” Sanger (and PP) is infinitely harder to argue against than the caricature of Sanger (and by extension PP) as a pre-Nazi Nazi eugenicist is.
No, Sanger really was a racist. She was a “nativist” who didn’t want foreigners coming into her America. Nowadays she’d be saying we should make English the official national language and complaining about the Ground Zero mosque.
As I said in comments at Right Wing News, while living in South Carolina in late 1991, I overheard some kids taunting one another. “You’re Pee-Wee Gaskins!” “Well, YOU’re Pee-Wee Herman!” At the time, I was amused by the childish lumping together of a serial killer and a guy who’d been caught masturbating in a movie theater.
I hadn’t thought about that for many years, but this list called that vignette back to mind.
What, ya mean people like David Dixon Porter, my personal hero? How would that indicate my “sympathies”, and what would it indicate about them?
Nativist is not the same as racist (although there’s undoubtedly a large overlap.) And while I have made a life study of Sanger, I haven’t been able to find anything from that wasn’t aimed at curtailing poverty and disease, rather than race. Have you?
Some of the most common quotes about her racism are either misattributions or completely unsourced. That line supposedly by her about black people being human weeds to exterminate - there’s no source for it. Cite Wikiquotes Sometimes people say it comes from Sanger’s work, “The Pivot of Civilization”. It doesn’t. You can read "Pivot at Project Gutenberg. It ain’t there.
That line about from the letter Sanger wrote to a Dr. Gamble in 1939 gets a lot of mileage in a truncated form: “We do not want word to go 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.” Here’s a larger excerpt (copied from Wikileaks:
Sanger’s point was that she wanted educated the black populace and counter her attackers who were accusing her of racial eugenics. Like crowmanyclouds points out - people today are still accusing birth control advocates of committing genocide against blacks.
Here’s a better explanation of the Negro Project, Sanger’s role in its beginnings, and its evolution, from the Sanger Papers newsletter at NYU
Sanger’s writing, in its entirety, makes it clear that her goal was to eradicate poverty and the perpetuation of the poverty cycle by education and access to birth control. The black population at the time was among the poorest and had among the least access to education or medical care. There is nothing in Sanger’s papers to support the idea that she was working for the extermination of poor blacks. There’s just that one partial quote, saying she doesn’t want people to get the wrong impression, and from that, anti-Planned Parenthood forces have blared it about that the “wrong impression” was really her super secret plan all along. And somehow she managed to talk all sorts of important people, including black leaders, into making it happen, without ever once letting on except for this one slip.
Was Sanger a racist? Sure. It was the 20’s. Everyone was a racist. Everyone hated poor immigrants. No surprises there. Undoubtedly some individual doctors involved were racists. But there’s nothing in Sanger’s papers to support that her goal was anything other than to eliminate poverty by focusing on some of the people with the least resources: uneducated black women with no access to reproductive control.
She was the founder of Planned Parenthood which to them=abortion. It doesn’t matter that she herself only supported abortion in special cases.
And what the hell was wrong with Alinsky? You might as well as put Martin Luther King on the list. Yeesh.
Even if Sanger was pro-negative-eugenics (how’s that for a weird hyphenation?), her actions didn’t really lead to any major policies or practices that disenfranchised the feeble-minded or whomever she didn’t like. She’s known for starting the birth control movement because that actually happened. If Sanger’s eugenics position was somehow criteria to make it on your list of Worst Figures in American History, the rest of your list would probably be filled with run of the mill skinheads.
My guess is that she was included because of the whole Planned Parenthood = Abortion link that Guinastasia mentioned.
Excellent post. Let’s just say that Sanger’s strain of racism was common at the time and much milder than, say, the average teabagger ( 
). Most importantly, even if she looked down on African Americans, just like Lincoln BTW, she was empathetic of their plight and supported policies to help African Americans in the South get access to better education. That doesn’t sound like someone who thinks they are genetically inferior.
Now, I think she was, by far, most harsh on the wide range of people who were considered to be mental deficients or “feeble minded” as Guin quoted (those who ended up in mental institutions like the mentally retarded, epileptic, mentally ill). These mental problems (with the exception of dementia caused by illness or old age) were considered to be heritable and effective treatment was rare or not available. So sterilization was considered to be a proper course of action and this approach on people in institutions lasted well into the 20th century.
But let’s just say that I doubt most conservative bloggers are serious students of history and Sanger is bad 'cuz she’s one of the founders of FemNazism and the prime perpetrator of the egg, sperm and fetal holocaust.
Here’s some of Sanger’s own words on the subject of who should be allowed to have children.
Yeah. She was a eugenicist. Like I said above, she was concerned with eradicating disease and unfit-ness in the species. She wanted to sterilize the most mentally-defective. She believed birth control and empowering women to decide their own reproductive choices was the best way to promote overall improvement in the human race. She was not trying to commit genocide against black people.
That extended quote is ugly to modern ears but it’s not racist.
NOTE: when I said above: “And while I have made a life study of Sanger, …” I really meant to say “And while I have not made a life study of Sanger, …”
I also have not made a life study of typing, sadly.
As I wrote, I think her prejudices were primarily against foreigners not blacks.
While Sanger cloaked her arguments as being directed against the “feeble-minded” you have to remember that she used that as a broad term. She considered things like being arrested or being poor or having VD as evidence that somebody was mentally unfit and shouldn’t be allowed to have children and pass on their faults to another generation.
And while Sanger never personally advocated genocide, she did argue strenously that the government needed to “do something” about these people. They were a threat to our society and we shouldn’t let sentimentality prevent us from protecting ourselves from them. So it’s not a big leap to genocide - if somebody had stepped forward in the 1930’s and started advocating a “final solution” they would have been using Sanger’s words to support their position.