Talk about being slow on the uptake.
A lengthy New York Times profile this week on Cordelia Scaife May, the late heiress to the Mellon banking fortune, suggests her personal politics took a “darker” turn when she embraced extreme anti-immigrant positions, not when she slummed for decades with eugenicists and abortionists.
Because, for the New York Times, sidling up to race-obsessed fanatics like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger is nothing compared to calling for America’s borders to be sealed.
The New York Times tracks how May, an “environmental-minded socialite,” went from being an “indifferent student, an unhappy young bride” and “a miscast socialite” to being one of the top funders of hard-line nativist groups. The narrative offered by the New York Times is that May went from good to bad, that her story is one of a well-intentioned progressive who went too far.
That all may be. But the report, titled “Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out,” is simply mistaken when it suggests May’s politics took a turn for the worse when she embraced severe anti-immigrant positions. I can assure you her descent into ugliness happened long before that — and that fact is based on the New York Times’ own reporting. You just have to read a bit before you get there.
The 23rd and 24th paragraphs read:
Mrs. May first worked for the Planned Parenthood chapter in Pittsburgh and later joined the board of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. “I have always admired and tried to take a part in the work that you started,” she wrote in a 1961 letter to Mrs. Sanger.
Just so we are all on the same page: Margaret Sanger is the same lunatic who wrote in 1932 that the United States should “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, Insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.”
This is the same woman who provided May with the “sense of direction” she “craved,” back before the wealthy socialite’s “darker” turn, according to the New York Times.
Planned Parenthood’s founder also wrote that the U.S. should maintain a “stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring,” and that Congress should “give certain dysgenic groups in our population [the] choice of segregation or sterilization.”
Sanger, who also once said, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief aim of birth control,” wrote of those she considered “unfit” that they ought to be relocated to “farm lands and homesteads” where “they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.”
None of this is mentioned in the New York Times report, by the way. May’s devotion to Sanger is mentioned only briefly in a few paragraphs as a way to explain the heiress’ introduction to politics and activism.
The 26th paragraph continues:
There is more:
Mrs. May joined the board of the Population Council, a group founded by John D. Rockefeller III that emphasized family planning and economic development as ways to lower birthrates around the world. She and some relatives together contributed $11.4 million to the council during the 1960s, and Mrs. May joined the group’s president, Frank Notestein, on trips to Asia to review projects.
May would go on to work for Planned Parenthood for more than two decades, according to the New York Times, all the while embracing her “passion” for helping “women prevent unplanned pregnancies.” She quit eventually to make anti-immigration policy her chief focus. May chased her dream of barring immigrants from the U.S. right up until her death in 2005.
To recap: By the time May went full nativist over immigration, she was already a population control enthusiast working for the nation’s largest provider of abortion. She was also a willing and eager acolyte of Sanger, the high priestess of the Church of Eugenicist.
Maybe these pursuits are not as different as the New York Times assumes.
In other words, I think we can say May’s supposed turn happened a little before immigration became her chief focus.
