Quotes by David Starr Jordan
On Race
“We may admit that the introduction of African blood has not been a gain to the republic."
From War and the Breed, 1915
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"This growth in civic knowledge is impossible without a foundation of intelligence. The choice of negro suffrage was the wisest choice among the many wrongs having their rise in negro slavery. It was the least of the evils, no doubt, but an evil nevertheless. Every evil is likely sooner or later to become a festering sore in the body politic.”
From The Heredity of Richard Roe, 1911
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“The great majority of Filipinos have never yet heard of Spain, much less the United States. This is especially true of the Malay pirates of the Southern Islands and the black imps of the unexplored interior, as capable of self-government or of any other government as so many monkeys."
From Imperial Democracy, 1898
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“Earliest human remains; some ape-like, but not more so than Australians and some negroes. Blue-gum negroes, blue gum apes.”
From Factors in Organic Evolution, 1894
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"In general, the highest range of possibilities in every field has been reached by the ‘blond races’ of Europe. Groups of less individual or of less aggregate achievement may properly be regarded as ‘lower.’”
From War and the Breed, 1915
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“In most Spanish and Portuguese Colonies, Latin blood has been mixed with aboriginal, producing crosses showing few of the virtues of the European stock.”
From War and the Breed, 1915
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"Wherever degenerate, dependent, or alien races are within our borders today, they are not a part of the United States. They constitute a social problem; a menace to peace a welfare."
From Imperial Democracy, 1898
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“Mexico's teeming millions, ignorant, superstitious, and ill-nurtured, with little self-control… lacking, indeed, most of our Anglo-Saxon values."
From The Days of a Man, Volume 1, 1922
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"No one wants the lowest class of Chinese, for there is nothing so unutterable bad as the low, uneducated, Chinese of the lowest type. It is this class that makes up what we call 'Chinatown,' and no one wants another Chinatown in any city in this country"
From San Francisco Chronicle article, 1905
On (Dis)Ability
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“We have also the pedigrees of the dissolute, the feeble-minded, the idle, the defective. We find in these that evil and weakness rarely originate de novo, but that they are handed down as a baneful legacy from generation to generation.”
From The Heredity of Richard Roe, 1911
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“Poverty, dirt, and crime are the products of those, in general, who are not good material.”
From The Heredity of Richard Roe, 1911
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“What scientific eugenics does aim for is for the elimination, by restriction, of hopeless hereditary feeble-mindedness and of defects which must condemn one’s posterity to ineffective and joyless lives.”
From "Aim of Scientific Eugenics," 1913
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The crétin of Aosta has been developed as a new type of man. In fair weather the roads about are lined with these awful paupers - human beings with less intelligence than the goose and less decency than the pig."
From The Human Harvest, 1907
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"The second [eugenic goal]
is the limitation by public authority of the marriage of the defective, the insane, and the criminal."
From The Heredity of Richard Roe, 1911
On Eugenics
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"The blood of a nation determines its history."
From The Human Harvest, 1907
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“If Richard Roe by chance is defective, unable by heredity to rise to the level of helpfulness and happiness, it is not a wholesome act to help him to the responsibilities of parenthood. It is a wise charity to make him as comfortable as may be with the assurance that he shall be the last of his line.”
From The Heredity of Richard Roe, 1911
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"The seeds of Rome's fall lay not in race nor in form of government, nor in wealth nor in senility, but in the influences by which the best men were cut off from parenthood, leaving its own weaker strains and strains of lower races to be fathers of coming generations.”
From "War Selection in the Ancient World," 1915
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"The strong races were born of hard times, they have fought for all they have had, and the strength of those they have conquered has entered into their wills. They have been selected by competition and sifted by the elements. They have risen through struggle and they have gained through mutual help, and by the power of the human will have made the earth their own."
From The Heredity of Richard Roe, 1911
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"Indiscriminate charity has been a fruitful cause of the survival of the unfit. To kill the strong and feed the weak is to provide for a progeny of weakness."
From The Human Harvest, 1907
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"The dangers of foreign immigration lie in the overflow to our shores of hereditary unfitness. The causes that lead to degeneration have ling been at work among the poor of Europe."
From The Heredity of Richard Roe, 1911