Margaret Sanger's father was an ardent Georgist

PGA Weblog ^

[ProgressingAmerica]

Everywhere you look in early progressivism, the influence of Henry George and his ideals as espoused in the book Progress and Poverty can be found.

So when doing some digging around this morning, I was surprised to learn that Sanger's father Michael was ardently in favor of George's ideas. My surprise was only in the individual,(my reaction was more like "Oh wow - now, that figures. It makes perfect sense.") for in the aggregate it is impossible to have progressive ideology without Henry George.

The Higgins family was so impacted by the work of George that one of Margaret's brothers was named Henry George McGlynn Higgins. This is just as significant for what you do see - as what you don't see. Henry George McGlynn Higgins, is named both after Henry George himself, and also a well known(I would say notorious) at the time Georgist priest in New York, Edward McGlynn.

In Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, the following is written: (page 18)

Similarly intolerable to most of Corning was Michael Higgins's support of Henry George's radical solution to the inequitable distribution of wealth in America. George proposed a single tax for landowners on the unimproved value of land. In a home with few books, George's exposition of this idea in Progress and Poverty - Published in 1879, the year of Maggie Higgins's birth - held an important place in a small family library that included the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Gulliver's Travels, Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, and Michael's medical books on physiology.

Indeed, here is what Margaret Sanger herself had to say about her brother, who passed away at the young age of four: (Autobiography, page 29)

Henry George McGlynn Higgins had been named for two of the rebel figures father most admired.

Henry George strikes again. Henry George is to progressive ideology what Karl Marx is to communist ideology.

[DiogenesLamp]

Conservatives have ceded the universities, the press, and the government to the liberals. Because of this most future business executives end up with liberal notions as well. So we have ultimately ceded the business establishment to liberals as well.

I do not believe "ceded" is a correct term at all. They were simply powerless to halt the advancing erosion of liberal thought into such institutions because these institutions are inherently liberal by their very nature.

Wealth itself creates inherent liberal predilections.

Liberals are not as stupid and emotional as conservatives claim. Marxist theory is quite complex and is certainly not based on emotion.

I didn't say that they were. It is their voters which represent the bulk of the stupid population in this nation. The Liberal leadership are often quite intelligent, but they do not make arguments that work on intelligent people. They put forth arguments which only work on fools.

Arguing against Marxism, socialism, Keynesian economics, progressivism, and nihilism requires intelligence and a knowledge of the logical and/or pragmatic fallacies underlying all of those bad philosophies.

It does if you wish to engage in academic arguments with leftist theorists. It is utterly a pointless effort if you wish to sway elections. The public at large is not moved by intellectual arguments, but instead by emotional arguments.

Remember this?

*That* is how you deliver a knockout punch.

We have abandoned the field. Conservatives are on radio stations, podcasts, YouTube videos, and think tanks primarily preaching to the choir.

We have not abandoned it. We have been driven from it due to the fact that wealth induces liberalism in those who have it. Over time, the wealthy moved ever further to the left, and there was no force capable of being applied to move them back in the other direction.

However, as long as the official sources of "knowledge" and "wisdom" are held captive by the left, there is little hope that our country will move back toward its founding principles.

We are moving ever in the direction of Statism and Aristocracy. It has been pointed out to me that Socialism and Communism is really just a vehicle to create an aristocracy, (party apparat) and that forcing the remander of the population to remain poor is a deliberate feature of the ideology.

By destroying the middle class, you eliminate possible challenges to your power structure from below.

[Bratch]

Since the Wonder Woman movie will be piquing interest in the character, I thought I'd include this article about Sanger's background and her connection to the Amazon.

---

Wonder Woman based on Margaret Sanger

By Jeff Quinton on May 23, 2016

Over the weekend, I saw an article on largely unknown facts about comic books or comic book characters. I can’t find it right now, but it was on a click-bait site. It included a fact about Wonder Woman that I hadn’t heard before.

The fact I hadn’t read or heard before? That Margaret Sanger was the basis for Wonder Woman. It may be something that has been widely reported at some point, but I’d never heard it. The creator of the comic even did his best to hide that fact for as long as possible.

A 2014 article in Smithsonian magazine by Jill Lepore confirms the report. In 1942 it was reported that Wonder Woman’s creator was Dr. William Moulton Marston, “an internationally famous psychologist.”

The article includes a quote from Marston that, “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”

Smithsonian notes that Marston’s attitude was a response to the popularity of sexually violent comic books:

But at a time when war was ravaging Europe, comic books celebrated violence, even sexual violence. In 1940, the Chicago Daily News called comics a “national disgrace.” “Ten million copies of these sex-horror serials are sold every month,” wrote the newspaper’s literary editor, calling for parents and teachers to ban the comics, “unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one.”

Marston was hired as a consultant by the founder of All-American Comics, Maxwell Charles Gaines. Gaines wanted to use Marston to shield him from criticism.

A staff writer named Olive Richard interviewed Marston at his home for Family Circle magazine in 1940.

From that interview, via Smithsonian:

“Some of them are full of torture, kidnapping, sadism, and other cruel business,” she said.

“Unfortunately, that is true,” Marston admitted, but “when a lovely heroine is bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive in the nick of time. The reader’s wish is to save the girl, not to see her suffer.”

Lepore goes on to note that “Olive Richard” is the pen name for Olive Byrne, who already lived with Marston and his wife. More on Olive Byrne:

She was also the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most important feminists of the 20th century. In 1916, Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, Olive Byrne’s mother, had opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States. They were both arrested for the illegal distribution of contraception. In jail in 1917, Ethel Byrne went on a hunger strike and nearly died.

Marston and Byrne met when she was a senior at Tufts and he was her psychology professor. They fell in love and he told his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, that Byrne could move in with them or he would be moving out. Marston fathered two children by each of the women in the household between 1928 and 1933. Holloway finally admitted  to Byrne’s sons in 1963 that Marston was their father. Gaines knew none of this when he hired Marston.

In case you’re having trouble keeping up, Lepore notes (via NPR), “So there was his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, his mistress, Olive Byrne and another woman named Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, who kind of was in and out of the family.”

Lepore discussed Sanger as inspiration for Wonder Woman in more detail in an NPR interview from 2014. That interview also notes that the costume for Wonder Woman was inspired by erotic pinup art.

Wonder Woman debuted in All-Star Comics in 1941 and appeared on the cover of Sensation Comics in 1942. In theSmithsonian article, Lepore notes that controversy ensued:

But in March 1942, the National Organization for Decent Literature put Sensation Comics on its blacklist of “Publications Disapproved for Youth” for one reason: “Wonder Woman is not sufficiently dressed.”

From the NPR interview:

But one of the things that’s a defining element of Wonder Woman is that if a man binds her in chains, she loses all of her Amazonian strength. And so in almost every episode of the early comics – the ones that Marston wrote – she’s chained up or she’s roped up. It’s usually chains. And then she has to break free of these chains, and that’s, Marston would always say, in order to signify her emancipation from men. But those chains are really an important part of the feminist and suffrage struggles of the 1910s that Marston was – had a kind of front-row seat for.

Also in the NPR interview, host Terry Gross and Lepore discuss the “big kind of fetishistic, sexual aspect to the bondage and the chains in Wonder Woman.”

A woman member of the advisory board for Gaines’ comics even sent a letter of complaint about Wonder Woman’s”“sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc.” and Lepore agrees with her in the story:

She had a point. In episode after episode, Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled. “Great girdle of Aphrodite!” she cries at one point. “Am I tired of being tied up!”

Marston shrugged off the criticism and when Dorothy Roubicek, an editor who actually worked on Wonder Woman, complained, he said:

“Of course I wouldn’t expect Miss Roubicek to understand all this,” Marston wrote Gaines. “After all I have devoted my entire life to working out psychological principles. Miss R. has been in comics only 6 months or so, hasn’t she? And never in psychology.” But “the secret of woman’s allure,” he told Gaines, is that “women enjoy submission—being bound.”

Marston was hiding his relationship with Olive Byrne, his connection to Margaret Sanger, which tied into the images of bondage:

Hidden behind this controversy is one reason for all those chains and ropes, which has to do with the history of the fight for women’s rights. Because Marston kept his true relationship with Olive Byrne a secret, he kept his family’s ties to Margaret Sanger a secret, too. Marston, Byrne and Holloway, and even Harry G. Peter, the artist who drew Wonder Woman, had all been powerfully influenced by the suffrage, feminism and birth control movements. And each of those movements had used chains as a centerpiece of its iconography.

More details on the use of similar art in Sanger-related publications is included on the second page of the Smithsonianarticle.

Lepore sums up that section with this:

When Marston created Wonder Woman, in 1941, he drew on Sanger’s legacy and inspiration. But he was also determined to keep the influence of Sanger on Wonder Woman a secret.

More on Margaret Sanger:
the Inspiration for Wonder Woman

Margaret Sanger was the founder of what is now the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.

Sanger was known as a free love (e.g. the arrangement already mentioned that her niece was involved in) and birth control activist, but what her supporters want to cover up now is her support for eugenics.

Much of the quotes have been cited before by the modern pro-life movement. I’ll get to them in a moment but I thought that quoting her Wikipedia entry might be a good thing to do, since any edits to her biography there are highly scrutinized due to the controversy surrouding her.

From Wikipedia:

In “The Morality of Birth Control,” a 1921 speech, she divided society into three groups: the “educated and informed” class that regulated the size of their families, the “intelligent and responsible” who desired to control their families in spite of lacking the means or the knowledge, and the “irresponsible and reckless people” whose religious scruples “prevent their exercising control over their numbers.” Sanger concludes, “There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”

Sanger’s eugenic policies included an exclusionary immigration policy, free access to birth control methods, and full family planning autonomy for the able-minded, as well as compulsory segregation or sterilization for the “profoundly retarded”. In her book The Pivot of Civilization, she advocated coercion to prevent the “undeniably feeble-minded” from procreating.

 

National Right to Life has written more about Sanger and eugenics:

But if someone is truly “unfit,” he or she is too stupid or out-of-control to stop reproducing voluntarily. So, as Sanger wrote in 1921, governments should “attempt to restrain, either by force or persuasion, the moron and the imbecile from producing his large family of feeble-minded offspring.”

Now you understand Sanger’s support of forced sterilization of the “unfit,” something enthusiastically promoted by many of her friends and collaborators, such as former Planned Parenthood president Alan Guttmacher (after whom Planned Parenthood’s former research arm is named) or Clarence Gamble, who used his fortune to set up sterilization clinics throughout the South and Midwest.

Gamble was proud of his work promoting involuntary sterilization but complained in 1947 that there was much more to do: “For every one man or woman who has been sterilized, there are 40 others who can continue to pour defective genes into the State’s bloodstream to pollute and degrade future generations.”

Some Sanger quotes, from Life News (here and here):

• “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
• “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”
• “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities.  The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the 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.”
• “[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”
• “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan … I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses … I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak … In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.”
• I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world – that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin – that people can – can commit.

The creator of Wonder Woman was living with two lovers, his wife, and their children. He thought women want to be submissive and bound and he admired Sanger, an advocate of free love and eugenics. I can see why he hid all of this from the people behind what became DC Comics.

 

 

[tioga]

My hometown of Corning does NOT boast statues of Margaret Sanger, we are ashamed of her.

[x]

Surely a single tax on land values would be preferable to what we have now.

Henry George strikes again. Henry George is to progressive ideology what Karl Marx is to communist ideology.

Meh. If you were some kind of a dissenter in late 19th century America you gravitated to Henry George. He wasn't an out and out socialist like Edward Bellamy. And he didn't have much in common with later socialists or communists.

Artsy "progressives" who gathered in places like Fairhope or Arden may not have been everybody's cup of tea, but they were benign compared to later statists and Leninists. When times changed, former Georgists changed with them and many moved further left, but that wasn't something one could blame on Henry George.

[Zionist Conspirator]

I'm re-reading (or at least skimming) my copy of Daniel Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left. It is fascinating, though heartbreaking, to learn that anti-Masonry, temperance, and the Pledge of Allegiance were products of the Left of their day.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Actually, everything started going wrong with the Shattering of the Vessels (Shevirat HaKelim).

[Zionist Conspirator]

I believe Albert J. Nock was also a Georgian at one time.

[LIConFem]

You’re absolutely right. I stand corrected. I had read about her some years ago, and I guess I confused the negative eugenics in the form of involuntary sterilization with abortion.

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[ProgressingAmerica]

Thank you for this.

This is fascinating.

[ProgressingAmerica]

The fatal flaw is that you are comparing, as if they are static objects. What about "making progress"?

Ask yourself this question:

Where did all the Georgists go? Many if not most of them "made progress" onto the next logical step in the goodness of wealth redistribution and all forms of nationalization - not just land nationalization. Socialism. They became socialists. That's where the Georgists went. "Making progress".

There are way too many high-profile early progressives who were highly driven Georgists(or directly related to them) - for any other answer to be accurate. Bernard Shaw is an easy high profile example. He came to activism via George. Before long, he was reading Marx, and he finally went so far as to advocate for killing people in gas chambers.

I'm absolutely not saying that George is responsible for what Shaw became - Shaw "made progress" many years before that. He left Georgism by the side of the road for his new ideology. What I am saying, is that this word "progress"...... "progress" is far too often ignored and/or misunderstood by WAY too many conservatives in understanding how these people get to where they got. "Now" is killing us.

When you start to examine progressivism as a timeline, and if you truely want to start at the beginning, there's Henry George. And I'm not talking about disparate ideologies which came from far off lands, which while important, are disparate. They're minor roots of the tree. Henry George is not only a major root, he's a part of the tree trunk.

You mentioned Edward Bellamy. How do you think people were willing to accept what Bellamy was peddling? They had had a decade of the Georgist teet to suckle themselves on. Looking backward was published in 1889. Progress and Poverty was published exactly 10 years earlier. 1879. I don't care what anybody says. That's not a coincidence. I don't believe in coincidences when it comes to progressivism, that's foolish. One book clearly leads directly to the other. All these people back then who were the readers, they all "made progress". That's where the Georgists went. They "made progress".

[x]

People who are looking for something new and different are going to pick up and new trends and drop them later on if they're not satisfied.

Henry George was a critic of the capitalism of his day, and also a critic of state socialism. If you're looking for socialism, George and his ideas about land and the single tax could serve as a stepping stone to socialism.

If you weren't headed in that direction, you didn't have to go there. Libertarians like Frank Chodorov and Albert Jay Nock were also admirers and (for a time at least) followers of Henry George. More here.