Margaret Sanger’s National Portrait Gallery Bust Should Go — But Not (Merely) because She Was Racist

National Review ^ | 8/27/15 | Ian Tuttle

[markomalley]

Via the Washington Examiner:

About two dozen anti-abortion leaders and pastors, most of them black, gathered in front of the National Portrait Gallery Thursday morning to protest its display of a bust of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

Chanting “you must remove the bust,” E.W. Jackson and other black activists argued that various writings and statements by Sanger prove she was a racist white supremacist who doesn’t deserve to be honored alongside civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.

“If Margaret Sanger had her way, Rosa Parks and MLK would never have been born,” said Jackson, who heads the group Staying True to America’s National Destiny, or, STAND. “It’s an outrage the national museum would honor such a person and add insult to injury by putting her in the Struggle for Justice exhibit.”

Jackson said he has gathered 14,000 signatures for a petition to have the bust removed. . . .

The National Portrait Gallery has said it won’t remove the bust. Director Kim Sajet said there is no “moral test” for people to be accepted into the gallery.

Sajet’s is a good nominee for Idiotic Quote of the Day. Reminder: Sanger’s bust is in an exhibit called “The Struggle for Justice.” Affirmative moral judgment undergirds the whole exhibit.

Yet sympathetic as I am to the protesters’ ends — Godspeed the day Margaret Sanger is an object of national scorn! — I confess ambivalence toward the means. Over the past few months, we’ve seen removing “offensive” statues become a way of disappearing disagreeable episodes in American history. Whatever the merits of some of these efforts (for instance, minimizing persisting psychic wounds in the country, etc.), the inquisition went positively lunatic, extending even to Thomas Jefferson. Suffice it to say that “racism” and “white supremacy” have become such grave charges that they automatically outweigh any other considerations (even, in the case of Jefferson, that he composed one of the greatest political documents in the history of mankind).

Additionally, the protesters’ charge would be more incisive if “The Struggle for Justice” were exclusively about racial justice. But it’s not. Sanger is one of several persons — Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Betty Friedan — lauded for advancing the causes of women. So we’re left with a sticky question: Does Margaret Sanger’s racism outweigh her contribution to the “advancement” of women? Or did she do so much good (“good”) for women that we can forgive her white supremacy?

That National Portrait Gallery — and our larger pluralistic culture — have no reliable way to adjudicate such a dispute. Certain hierarches have developed, so that we play a sort of identity RoShamBo (race trumps sexuality, sexuality trumps religion, &c.), but these judgments are historically determined — e.g., class, which matters little in the U.S., matters immensely in Great Britain — and, given a little thought, not particularly compelling.

The case against Margaret Sanger’s inclusion in a de facto Hall of American Heroes is not that she violated the sanctity of this or that identity group; it’s that her project, in principle and consequence, was decidedly un-American. Her eugenicist scheme favored certain lives over others, and she claimed for herself and other enlightened persons the right to determine who was and was not “fit” for procreation; while her crusade for “sexual liberation,” institutionalized in the form of Planned Parenthood, devalued life, enabling the abortion-on-demand regime that has made possible America’s 1 million abortions per annum. Sanger’s “triumph” has been the creation of a culture that glorifies casual sexuality — at enormous economic, moral, and psychological cost — and that has grown numb to barbarism. All of this was predicated on Sanger’s rejection of the fundamental conviction that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were rights guaranteed to every American.

Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, and most of the other persons recognized in “The Struggle for Justice” accepted the vision of justice laid out by the American Founding, and helped to perfect it. Sanger, by contrast, rejected that vision, and attempted to substitute her own. She is not a little responsible for the chaos that has followed.

This is not an argument likely to move the National Portrait Gallery, of course. The claims of superficial identities have grown all-consuming; we have largely abandoned attempting to think beneath them. But there is a strong case to be made against Margaret Sanger’s having any place of distinction in American public life, and we need not default to identity politics to make it.

[markomalley]

Margaret Sanger was one of the most evil women of the 20th Century, if not THE most evil woman of the 20th Century. She was a Eugenicist who wanted to wipe out whole populations.

Just take a look at the masthead of the Birth Control Review, the Journal of the Birth Control League (predecessor to Planned Butcherhood):

In case you think that the masthead might be inartfully worded pap and not their real agenda, please note the title of an article from another issue of that rag:

Or we have this article from April 1933 ("The Sterilization Issue"):

(My question is which leftist determines who is socially inadequate?)

In case this is not sufficient, here's another example. You've heard, of course, of the Negro Project, right? It was an effort to place their eugenic clinics in black neighborhoods...to make sure that their gene pool would be cut off. In this 12/10/1939 letter to Charles Gamble, founder of P&G, she discloses:

If you take a look at page 102 of the April, 1933 issue of the Birth Control Review (Sanger's Journal of her Birth Control League which, after the war, morphed into Planned Butcherhood) you will note an interesting article titled, Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need. The doctor was Dr. Ernst Rüdin. In case you're not familar, Dr. Ernst Rüdin was honored by Hitler as being the "pioneer of the racial-hygienic measures of the Third Reich." He was one of the collaborators of Margaret Sanger.

Sanger was a child of the sexual revolution 50 years before the sexual revolution was even conceived. She believed the birth of a child was a shame and a large family was a catastrophe:

Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, (New York: Eugenics Press, 1920), chapter 5.

(btw, if you click on the link, there's even worse to read in that book)

[Arm_Bears]

This could get good.

[Joe 6-pack]

Once they get rid of Sanger, they need to go after Woodrow Wilson.

[Sasparilla]

This sounds a lot like protests against the Confederate flag and removing monuments. History is history, whether we like it or not.

[markomalley]

This sounds a lot like protests against the Confederate flag and removing monuments. History is history, whether we like it or not.

The Confederate Flag movement desires to erase it from history. I imagine that if you were to ask any of the people involved in this movement to remove Sanger's bust from this exhibit, they would have no problem with placing her bust in a more historically accurate setting: listing her as one of the leaders of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. Perhaps putting it in an interpretive display next to the Negro Project, the Tuskegee Experiments, and so on, would put her image in its appropriate context.

And that is the fundamental difference between the two.

[SeeSharp]

...who doesn’t deserve to be honored alongside civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.

Well, while we're at it, Rosa Parks was a communist activist. The bus stunt was staged.

[Impy]

Take it down cause she was ugly, no one wants to look at dat beeoch.

[BillyBoy]

>> This sounds a lot like protests against the Confederate flag and removing monuments. History is history, whether we like it or not. <<

>> The Confederate Flag movement desires to erase it from history. I imagine that if you were to ask any of the people involved in this movement to remove Sanger's bust from this exhibit, they would have no problem with placing her bust in a more historically accurate setting: listing her as one of the leaders of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. Perhaps putting it in an interpretive display next to the Negro Project, the Tuskegee Experiments, and so on, would put her image in its appropriate context. And that is the fundamental difference between the two. <<

Disagree.

The rallying cry of those who want the confederate flag removed from state government displays and events has always been "the flag belongs in a museum", not that the flag should be "erased from history" and modern Americans should not be aware that it ever existed. They are against it being incorporated into present-day state flags and flown over state capitol buildings, but not against teaching people that the Confederacy existed from 1861-1865 and that the flag was one of their symbols. I doubt anyone who opposes "confederate heritage" promotion by state governments would have a problem with the flag being displayed in an appropriately historically accurate setting as an interpretive museum display teaching people about the existence of a secessionist government that was formed in the mid 19th century for the purpose of persevering slavery. Their objection comes from using the flag in modern day context as a symbol of "states rights" and "southern pride" given its controversial origins and incendiary nature.

Likewise, those who oppose modern day statues and memorials to Margaret Sanger are not in favor of "erasing her from history" and pretending she never existed. Rather, they are against today's governments glorifying her as a role model for women and a figure that modern-day women owe a debt of gratitude towards. They have no problem with putting up a display that teaches about her in a historical context as a polarizing, controversial early 20th century figure who advocated for eugenics and racism.

I don't see a big difference between the two at all. Sanger is a divisive figure that does NOT represent all women or feminists despite her fan club's wishes that she does, and the Confederacy is a divisive figure that does NOT represent all southerners or supporters of limited government, despite its fan club's wishes that it does.