The ills attending modernity could be corrected in three ways. A man could return to the wilderness, as Roosevelt did when he hunted big game in Africa and made a harrowing trip down the Amazon River at the age of fifty-five. War—the raw fight for survival—was a second means of bringing forth ancestral Saxon traits. Breeding, however, remained the most primitive of instincts. In Roosevelt’s mind, childbirth was nature’s boot camp for women, a life-or-death struggle that strengthened the entire race.45
As for war, it did not just build character; it literally reinvigorated the best qualities of the American stock. After spending several years in the Dakotas as a rancher, Roosevelt published his voluminous Winning of the West (1886–96), part American history and part treatise on evolution. The author returned to New York, took up politics, and discovered a new aggressive outlet in imperialist crusading. He rallied behind the Spanish–American War in 1898 and formed his own regiment, the Rough Riders, which he filled with cowboys and mountaineers from the West, plus men like himself, athletes, who had come from Ivy League universities. He even included a number of Indians (in a separate company), a few Irish and Hispanics, one Jewish recruit, and one Italian, all in an attempt to recreate what he thought was the right mix of ethnic stocks for the new American frontier in Cuba. It is important to note that he did not include any black men, nor genuine southern crackers, in his muscular version of Darwin’s Galápagos Islands experiment.46
Roosevelt’s famed ride up San Juan Hill (actually Kettle Hill) was vividly captured by the equally famed artist Frederic Remington. Before he headed to Cuba, Remington had taken a magazine assignment in Florida. There he found the “Cracker cowboy,” who was the antithesis of the pure-blooded American westerner he had earlier known. The men he encountered in Florida wore a “bedraggled appearance”; their unwashed hair, tobacco-stained beards, and sloppy dress reminded him of Spanish moss dripping off oaks in the swamps. Remington saw their lack of “fierceness” (relative to the frontiersman) and compared it to the difference between a “fox-terrier” and a “yellow cur.” Pursuing the animal kingdom analogy further, he said they had no better sense of the law than “gray apes.” These curlike, apish would-be conquerors stole cattle, and then showed surprise when indicted for their crime. Their ignorance was so astounding that they could not even find Texas on the map. Roosevelt would have agreed: the distinct culture of the West did not translate to the South.47
That said, Roosevelt did not try to resolve all the contradictions in his approach to the South. He may have defended racial purity and opposed miscegenation, but he also confessed to Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, that he believed that southern white men, despite their outrage over race mixing, were the first to leer at mulatto women and take black mistresses. Unimpressed by southern whites, and valuing hardworking black men, he did nothing to protect the latter’s right to vote. Washington, Lincoln, and Grant were his heroes, men who lived active, virtuous lives, rejecting comfort and complacency. They weren’t political tricksters, like “Br’er Vardaman,” as one clever journalist called the rabid Mississippian. They weren’t the aristocrats of the antebellum South either, who drank, dueled, and made “perverse” speeches. As he told Wister, white southerners had taken a wrong turn on the evolutionary ladder, using empty bombast to conceal “unhealthy traits.” In the final analysis, the president opined, the Confederate generation and their heirs had contributed “very, very little toward anything of which Americans are now proud.” For him, the Vardamans might be a nuisance, but their days were numbered.48
He could be confident in this future because 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 Davenport that it was the patriotic duty of every good citizen of superior stock to leave his or her “blood behind.” Degenerates, he warned, must not be permitted to “reproduce their kind.”50
It was during the eugenic craze that reformers called for government incentives to ensure better breeding. This was when the idea of tax exemptions for children emerged. Theodore Roosevelt criticized the new income tax law for allowing exemptions for only two children, discouraging parents from having a third or fourth. He wanted monetary rewards for breeding, akin to the baby bonuses established in Australia in 1912. He also promoted mothers’ pensions for widows—an idea that caught on. As one defender of pensions claimed in 1918, the widowed mother was “as much a servant of the State as a judge or general.” Her child-rearing duties were no less a public service than if she had toiled on the battlefield. Like Selective Service, which weeded out inferior soldiers, the pensions were allotted exclusively to “a fit mother.”51
Roosevelt was far from alone. Academics, scientists, doctors, journalists, and legislators all joined the “eugenic mania,” as one California doctor termed the movement. Advocates believed that the way to encourage procreation of the fit was to educate the middle class on proper marriage selection. Eugenic thinking found expression in a flood of books and popular public lectures, as well as “better baby” and “fitter family” competitions at state fairs. Eugenics courses were added to college curricula. Such efforts resulted in the passage of laws imposing marriage restrictions, institutional sexual segregation of defectives, and, most dramatically, state-enforced sterilization of those designated “unfit.”52
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