1939 Analysis of Declining American Birthrates by the guy who coined "The New Deal"
Stuart Chase & Charting the Conception of Natalism & Liberal Honesty in the Public Discourse
The concept of American demographic collapse has been a meme that feels like it’s a recent phenomenon. But its origins are much earlier.
Senior FDR Advisor and Economist Stuart Chase was complaining about declining birthrates in a 1939 edition of The Atlantic. This is of course prior to the ‘baby boom’ of 1946-1964.
I redid the graph with a little more dumbed-down emphasis:
Sadly the rate has declined even further since 2009.
You can read the article from Stuart Chase here on the Atlantic’s website, or here on Archive.ph
Frankly, I felt as though the pioneer in this field was Pat Buchanan and his wonderfully written “The Death of the West” in 2001.
But Buchanan’s analysis is an echo of Chase’s earlier admonition from 1939 in the Atlantic.
Moderns like to refer to these concerns, and the policies that would turn around declining birth rates, as ‘natalists’ and ‘natalism’ - terms I’ve only started hearing recently though Wikipedia claims its origin is in the 1970s. In general, concern for populations writ large seems a relatively modern concern. If this population paranoia has a direct origin, I contend it comes from the Technocratic movement that Stuart Chase was also a part of, that treated public policy as a matter of proper management, measurement, and application of tested scientific methods.
Prior to this movement and those related to it, populations were relatively predictable in their patterns: people got married. Married people had kids. Since kids are fun, they had lots of them. Society existed to provide for mothers and children.
The effort to arrest and control populations, to direct and steer mass fertility, is part of this line of thinking that led to abortion-on-demand and contraceptive culture.
There was someone who predicted all of this would happen.
Now there’s a fierce competition for resources because borders are open and largely meaningless, births are way down because of toxic cultural values, institutions have collapsed, and there’s an individual fight for jobs, energy, resources, everything.
It’s also worth noting that the advent of people who are explicitly anti-natalists, who actively want fewer people for a variety of reasons, is also a recent phenomenon. The rise of wealthy folks who desire less of the proletariat to manage, fewer peasants to potentially revolt, is something new.
Notable here is the infamous “Jaffe Memo” from 1969.
The Jaffe Memo was a document by Planned Parenthood to reduce fertility, so as to reduce populations, with a wide panoply of policy options such as taxing children and requiring permits for children, alongside ‘abortion and sterilization’ and ‘chronic depression’.
Shitlibs are such wonderful people, really.
What’s interesting is that this 1969 Jaffe memo looks like an almost precise history of the next 50+ years in policy discussions on the left. These were perhaps just paralleling the liberal zeitgeist of the time, or perhaps the left actually hates humanity and wants less of us.
So my point in saying all of this is, between 1939 and 1969, something profound happened in the thought process of American liberals. A shift and a change that I don’t think is well captured in an explanation anywhere else.
By 1965’s passage of the Hart-Cellar Act, American liberals did not want to convert the public, they wanted to replace the public. Hart-Cellar changed the immigration policies of the country to focus on ‘family unification’ as a stated goal. What no one could anticipate except all the leftists voting for it, is that the federal government would just stop enforcing its borders and stop deporting illegals. This extremely dishonest article at NPR relates some of the legislative history around Hart-Cellar.
At some point between 1939 and 1969 American left-wing elite opinion decided that the American people were the problem. There wasn’t a mass-based educational program worth pursuing, it was going to be the aggressive genetic replacement and displacement that would get the social, political, and economic goals they desired.
Today the obviousness of ‘the great replacement’ is a conspiracy theory according to our court masters. But the evidence of memos and policies and speeches and charts and even gleeful editorials suggest otherwise.
The immigrant inflow has altered the U.S. labor market, reshaped the political landscape and prompted new consideration of what it actually means to be American, given how the country's European character is diminishing in relative importance. By 2015, immigrants constituted about 14 percent of the U.S. population, a level not seen since the major immigrant inflows of the early 20th century.
American elites don’t want more blue eyes, they want more brown eyes. They don’t want more blondes, they want more brunettes. It’s not that elites want everyone, or want to treat everyone equally, those are just coded palliative words and sophistry for the masses to stay confused about what’s going on.
If the elites actually wanted equality, true equality and not ‘equity’ to control outcomes, but equality of opportunity and equal treatment under law, there would be zero opposition to that treatment. But that’s not what they want, they want to pick and choose who wins and who loses. The left wants to invent a wrong against those they dislike so they can use power to remedy their crime fantasy.
It’s convenient and sometimes implied by the left and right in this space to reduce this entire argument down to race and various racial power arrangements, but that’s not quite the case either. The elites don’t want blue eyes to leave, they want blue eyes to die out. They don’t just want political, social, or economic power, they already have those things. They want domination, dominion, and oppression. There’s no shared power that they’re offering, there’s no coexistence to be had.
In their twisted thinking: the side that wins gets to live here, and the side that loses gets to die.
True political and social power in America is also hidden behind layers and walls of obfuscation. Whomever is actually sitting at the head table, you can be assured they won’t bother with anything other than symbolic, superficial, and otherwise fake representation.
The deaths of the political losers will be from sky-high healthcare costs, rationed healthcare, and endless litigation/lawfare from made-up civil torts and criminal codes. Their deaths will be from stress and overtaxation and toxic foods and opioids. Their struggles and early deaths will be fodder for the most popular comedians in the country. The losers are meant to be ground down, crushed within a left-wing mortar and pestle. Slow-killers to be sure, but sure-fire killers.
There’s a valid counterpoint here that the liberals of 1939 might have been just posturing for the sake of what they considered politically palatable. I think that’s probably true, but that’s where we get into the challenge of distilling what a group thinks, and separate that from what individuals think.
It’s also true that the Jaffe Memo doesn’t accurately reflect all liberals. But to some extent it does serve as a reflection of subversive elite interest on the left. Jaffe was an elite, he wrote this for his fellow elites, and he certainly wrote controversial thoughts knowing that they would be well-received. We can pardon the incidental left-wing fellow traveler for not endorsing coercive sterilization, but one cannot say that these ideas were verboten among the left-wing elites who are forming, pushing, and implementing those policies.
“The Left” generally speaking is comprised of individuals who have thoughts anchored in ideas and philosophy. These individuals change their minds, affected by reflection, intervening events, things that happen to them. But the other challenge, most notably on the left and not so much on the political right where people just blurt out exactly what they’re thinking, is that the left has agents within it who are active subversives.
The modern left has almost fetishized this concept: that they are active sleeper agents in any social situation, slowly pushing everything to the left.
It’s a remarkable mindset, I have seen it repeatedly especially on the left, and still every time I am surprised by the person engaged in such behavior. Every conversation is in bad faith. Every argument is laced with probes and layers of dishonesty. It’s tiresome to talk with such individuals, who are never honest with their actual beliefs — only seeking to move yours further and further in their direction. Talking with them feels like a marionette trying to attach puppet strings to your mind.
Now, to be fair, modern life also requires a certain degree of dissembling. It’s impolite and impolitic to blurt out your real opinions on full blast in any given social situation. Society and business wants you to bottle up your eccentric views until they reach a boiling point and you vent them on a Substack with 39, now 38, subscribers.
But truly facing social challenges shorn of honest public debate is impossible. Can a group of people have a discussion about major social challenges if a significant portion of those talking are acting with concealed intentions on every point? Of course not.
So part of what changed in American liberalism is not just the mindset, but also, I contend, the honesty with which they brought themselves to the public square. Those are two separate things, though they are hard to divide. Their views changed alongside their levels of honesty. There was a change in underlying values, combined with a greater tendency and inclination to conceal their actual beliefs. Their minds and their tactics changed at similar times.
But one defining characteristic, then and now, has always been the extreme level of liberal arrogance at the rightness of their opinions. Cynicism or no, they are always manifestly convicted of the rightness of their leftist opinion.
So with all that said, here’s a relevant excerpt from a column in the Atlantic, February 1939 - here’s an archive.ph link to access it in case that’s easier. The excerpt is citing to a recent book by Stuart Chase, and Chase’s concern about demographic collapse.
Stuart Chase lived from 1888-1985. He was a man of the left who knew many leading figures on the political left. By trade he was an economist, and wrote many books advocating for various economic policies and positions that, just a few generations later, seem so obscure and esoteric to not even be of much interest to historians.
He and his wife wrote a book, which to us moderns sounds like the plot from Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed" - they tried to get basic minimum wage work and survive, and documented the many associated challenges. He tackled a diverse array of subjects, but was more ‘well-known’ than particularly famous.
Harvard Magazine referred to him as a “public thinker” back when there were such things. Or at least when we pretended that people playing pretend in such a way were at least potentially useful.
Chase wrote a 1932 book called “A New Deal” and published a cover article in The New Republic’s June 29, 1932 issue called “A New Deal for America” mere days before FDR first used the phrase in a speech. The NYT gave Chase credit in their obituary of him for coining the famous phrase.
Here’s the June 29, 1932 article in the New Republic:
Chase was in FDR’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ of advisors according to the NYT Obit, guiding FDR and the “New Deal” disastrously through the 1930’s.
Economists are a funny bunch. Most of the time, they are saved from the empirical results of their prescriptions because no one listens to them. But in Chase’s case, they became national policy. These ideas having become national policy for a decade, they resolutely did not work by any measure of success and were saved only from the global conflict that consumed 50-100 million souls.
A decidedly anti-natalist outcome.
One wonders if that gave him a moment of pause: that it took a global war to overcome the failures of his economic ideas.
Probably not as the go-to mental space for all leftists is cognitive dissonance and confabulation.
One point of unique clarity and consistency for Stuart though, was that he was both opposed to the second World War, and that he recognized Communism as a chronic human rights violator. He was one of those liberals who consistently saw the war racket for what it is, and also didn’t flinch from criticizing the Soviet regime that was the false idol for so many of his leftist colleagues.
Amazingly, in 1940 he published a pamphlet with the America First Committee(!!!) called “Four Assumptions About the War” which laid out very strong reasons against pursuing war in Europe. Here is a compelling passage where the scanning is a little sloppy but still readable:
Let me restate this in case you overlook the significance: the leftist economist who was personal friends with FDR and coined the phrase “The New Deal” was, in 1940, arguing against war with Germany, working with the supposedly pro-Fascist America First committee, and listing out all the horrible things that would happen to America if she fought the war and won.
And in most of the things he outlines, he was quite prophetic.
Now while this is compelling, it’s important to note the duplicity of the Rooseveltians at the time. FDR ran as the ‘peace’ candidate in 1940 fully intending to go to war less than a year later. FDR and friends ensured the Republicans were even more pro-war to ensure a faux political opposition.
But of course this is reflective of what should be the principled liberal opinion. The principled leftist doesn’t want to save the British Empire, he wants to build a more egalitarian America. The principled leftist isn’t concerned with Imperial Japan’s Pacific ambitions, they are concerned with the quality of life of their fellow man down the street.
If you are a liberal, you are a natalist. If you care about the vulnerable, you care about children and mothers and families.
Yet moderns have not only inverted that obvious truth, but they have become aggressively anti-child. It’s very perverse.
As well, the mental insanity of the common left-wing refrain to ‘think global and act local’ - which is a way to say ignore the political and social problems in your own community, the ones you have the most agency and ability to fix, is part of this intellectual evolution.
The TVA may have been unconstitutional and socialistic, but at least it gave poor people cheap power. What does the modern left give the public? Bank bailouts, abortion militancy, gun confiscation, and endless wars.
Stuart Chase was part of a dying breed.
Some of Chase’s estimates and prophecies in the Atlantic article were a bit prescient, others were a bit ham-handed. There were 281.4 million Americans in the year 2000. There were 17 million people in the metropolitan NYC area in 1960.
Stuart Chase was an interesting man. His personal credo was, reportedly,
“I must choose my own path… from among the many and follow it in all faith and trust until experience bids me seek another,”
Chase died in 1985 in Connecticut.
Some of Chase’s papers are at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.