Through A Xenophobic Lens

At the turn of the twentieth century, social theories developed in both the U.S. and Europe suggested that those at the top, or those most well endowed with good genetics, would stay that way, while those with poor genetics had little hope of changing their circumstances. Degeneration theory, as this concept was called when it took root in the United States from the late 1890s, before it had evolved to formally become eugenics in the 1910s, and beyond. While eugenics offices opened in Berlin in 1905, in England in 1907-08, and in the United States in 1910, there were many forms of it, including degeneration theory. What bound all the theories together was the notion of biology and heredity. Westerns like Martyrs of the Alamo became a vehicle to explore these concerns because they inundated everyday Americans with illustrations of national identity. Films like these often mixed fantasy with ideology. This is clearly evident in W. Christy Cabanne’s anti-Mexican sentiment in Martyrs of the Alamo. Examining Cabanne’s film through the lens of degeneracy theory provides a greater understanding of American social concerns in the 1910s. These concerns, characterized by xenophobic depictions of immigrants, particularly Mexicans, culminated in the linking of immigrant bodies and disease with heredity and genetics, namely through theories of degeneration . Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo suggests, through the reproduction of the conflict surrounding the Alamo Mission, that the alternative to “race suicide” is a fantasy of American heroism, collectivism, and cultural exclusion. (SS and TZCS)

The Democratic Fit

This chapter discusses how Progressives began supporting eugenic initiatives in order to cultivate a citizenry with the necessary attributes—at minimum, independence, rationality, moral behavior, and devotion to American institutions—out of the patchwork polity entrenched in the existing party system. Against the backdrop of growing immigration and urban industrial poverty, the eugenics campaign, targeting the “socially inadequate,” flourished as an effort to increase the proportion of citizens deemed fit to those identified as unfit. Teddy Roosevelt, whose concerns about “race suicide” led him to speak and write often on the topic, was among the most high-profile advocates of eugenics, campaigning actively to encourage greater reproduction rates among those citizens possessing ideal citizen characteristics.

Jiu-Jitsuing Uncle Sam

The emergence of Japan as a major world power in the early twentieth century generated anxiety over America’s place in the world. Fears of race suicide combined with a fear of the feminizing effects of over-civilization further exacerbated these tensions. Japanese jiu-jitsu came to symbolize these debates. As a physical example of the yellow peril, Japanese martial arts posed a threat to western martial arts of boxing and wrestling. The efficiency and effectiveness of Japanese jiu-jitsu, as introduced to Americans in the early twentieth century, challenged preconceived notions of the superiority of western martial arts and therefore American constructions of race and masculinity. As Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. nation wrestled with the Japanese and jiu-jitsu, they responded in various ways to this new menace. The jiu-jitsu threat was ultimately subjugated by simultaneously exoticizing, feminizing, and appropriating aspects of it in order to reassert the dominance of western martial arts, the white race and American masculinity.

Why “Race Suicide”? Cultural Factors in U.S. Fertility Decline, 1903–1908

Study of a sample of 605 newspaper articles produced between 1903 and 1908 tracks Americans' explanations for fertility decline, demonstrating the perceived importance of economic and “cosmic” factors but arguing that these factors and others are best understood in the context of individual-level moral views. For contemporaries seeking to explain the trend toward smaller families, the most significant frames of analysis involved dichotomies concerning self and society, worldliness and transcendence, and near- and long-term sensibilities about time.