by Paul Morland
Expressed in terms of deaths per thousand, death rates were below ten in some parts of north-western Europe. If these seem remarkably low today, it is thanks to the retreat of disease and early death, but also thanks to the fact that recent population growth had given rise to a young population. The elderly in a population of recent expansion are a small percentage of the total, and so their demise is statistically small within the wider society. At this point, with its recent fast population growth, Europe had a young population that resembled a school more than a home for the aged–life expectancy was rising sharply, and mortality rates were exceptionally low.
Staying in Europe
The third determinant of population change, alongside birth rates and death rates, is of course migration. The decades before the First World War had seen the greatest ever outflow of Europeans, predominantly to the Americas. At its peak in the early years of the twentieth century, European migration overseas reached almost 1.5 million a year, people predominantly leaving for the United States and overwhelmingly for the Americas as a whole, Canada and Argentina being attractive destinations for people from Britain and Italy respectively. During the First World War emigration out of Europe fell rapidly (men who might have gone were conscripted, transatlantic shipping was tied up bringing supplies to the Allies, and some of the countries which had been sources of emigration came to be at war with the US), and it never recovered.
In the 1920s the doors of the United States were progressively closed and the outlets for European emigration limited. American politicians were eager to restrict emigration, particularly by those whom they considered of ‘unsuitable stock’, and they did this by implementing quotas based first on the pre-war balance of the immigrant population, then on the basis of the pre-war balance of total population, favouring those considered Anglo-Saxon in the widest sense of the word or at least from a background more conducive to assimilation, and discriminating against those who had come from Italy and eastern Europe–mostly Catholics, and those who had come from Russia–largely Jews.12 Catholics were associated in the minds of many in the American establishment with the alcoholic riff-raff of the big cities, particularly in the north-east, and there was a distinctly Protestant tinge to the Prohibition movement, which banned alcohol during the 1920s and early 1930s. As for Jews, widespread and continuing prejudice kept the doors of the United States largely barred just when entry was most desperately needed.
Emigration out of Europe fell in the years before the Second World War to a couple of hundred thousand a year. To some extent this was not only the result of US immigration policies but also of changed circumstances in Europe. In much of Europe, the 1920s were years of opportunity and economic growth, reducing the desire to seek the good life beyond the Continent’s shores. The loss of millions of young men in the war, callous though it may sound to say it, opened up opportunities for the boys left at home, whether in terms of career advancement or available women. Emigration had tended to be a rural phenomenon, and European societies were becoming decreasingly rural; for many, migrating to the town or city was the alternative to leaving Europe altogether. When the economic slump hit in the early 1930s, not only were American immigration restrictions very tight, but the economy of the USA was also in depression and unemployment high, making it an unattractive destination for emigration. Indeed, some poor souls–recent Finnish immigrants–were persuaded to ‘return’ to the Finnish parts of the Soviet Union: few survived long, dumped in the icy wastes of Karelia or, as suspect foreigners, deported to Siberia.
In national terms, the exception to the emigration slowdown was the UK, which continued to have a large overseas empire looking for recruits. In the early 1920s, British and Irish emigration rose to nearly 200,000 per annum, only slightly lower than the pre-war figure. Thereafter, however, British emigration too fell off rapidly, and less than a third the number left in the 1930s as had in the 1920s. For the rest of Europe, the drop-off was dramatic.13 Italy, by far the greatest exporter of people in the early years of the twentieth century, was an extreme case. Around 400,000 Italians had left Italy in the peak year of the first decade of the twentieth century; by the late 1930s annual emigration was barely 25,000. The lands of Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the core parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the war, had seen total emigration of around a quarter of a million a year in the first decade of the century. Restrictions changed this, as did the Great Depression–central Europe suffered badly from the economic downturn, but unlike in previous slumps, the United States, suffering its own economic problems, no longer offered the prospect of prosperity or even employment–and by the 1930s emigration from lands of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire had fallen to a negligible 5,000–6,000 per annum. All the main recipient countries–the USA, Brazil, Canada and Argentina–witnessed correspondingly steep reductions in inflows.14 The great movement of Europeans to the New World was over.
The reduction in people leaving Europe–along with falling death rates–helped to offset the Continent’s falling fertility rates and reduce the impact of its decline in demographic growth, so that even with fewer children being born, the population continued to grow because fewer people were leaving, either in a coffin or on a boat. Meanwhile, while fewer people were leaving Europe, more were moving between its countries. Europeans had always moved between European countries, Britain being an exception due to its relative isolation. Before the First World War movement was not on a very large scale. The biggest intra-European movement between states had been of persecuted Russian Jews, many fleeing to the USA, some to destinations such as Canada, Argentina and South Africa but many staying within Europe and arriving in the relatively tolerant atmospheres of Western Europe, particularly France and the UK. After 1918, movement within the Continent became more widespread. This was mostly westward, and its preferred target was France, in part thanks to encouragement by the French government. Put simply, the west of Europe was freer and more prosperous than the east, and so it acted as a magnet. In 1931 there were more than 3 million European immigrants living in France–twice the number living in Germany and three times those living in the UK–a figure which represented more than 7% of the French population.15 The greatest sources were Poland, Italy and Spain.
There was also much movement within countries, generally from poor, rural, peripheral areas to industrial centres: in Italy from south to north; in Spain into the Basque and Catalan regions; within the British Isles from Ireland and Scotland to the English Midlands and south-east. Much of this movement was driven by economics–the search for a livelihood–but some was politically motivated, such as the movement of around 400,000 Jews from Germany and Austria in the 1930s or the flight of half a million or so Republicans from Spain to France in the wake of their defeat by Franco.
These bare numbers should not numb us to the human triumphs and tragedies often involved. For many, arrival in Western Europe was as liberating as emigration to the United States had been for a previous generation. However, German Jews who fled to France were interned after the outbreak of war in 1939, and handed over to the Germans when France fell in 1940; few survived the war. The philosopher Walter Benjamin, fleeing Nazi-occupied France for Spain in 1940, committed suicide when he came to believe that he would be turned back (a monument in his memory stands at Portbou, the town at the French–Spanish border on the Mediterranean). The great cellist Pablo Casals, having fled in the other direction the previous year, for decades avoided playing in countries which recognised Francoist Spain, which he had left for Roussillon, in French Catalonia (a statue and museum in his memory stand in Prades, on the French side of the border but under the shadow of the same mountain where Benjamin died). It was in the interwar years that the intellectual Isaiah Berlin, the banker Sigmund Warburg, the psychologist Sigmund Freud and the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner arrived in the UK, along with the father of the later leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, Michael Howard, and the parents of recent Labour Party leader E
d Miliband, all of whom were fleeing from conflagrations further east.
Race, Pessimism and Policy
Between the wars Europe went through what Britain had experienced before 1914, namely a steep fall in fertility rates and a sharp decline in population growth. As yet there wasn’t a complete understanding of what is now called the ‘demographic transition’, whereby a population will stabilise at a higher level once it has experienced growth as it moves from high birth rates and high death rates, through high birth rates and falling death rates, to low birth rates and low death rates.
Before the First World War, besides the worry about rival nations’ population growth, there was concern about domestic fertility decline in the UK. US President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt railed against ‘wilful sterility–the one sin for which the penalty is national death, racial suicide’. Roosevelt was at least in this a man of deed as well as word–he himself had six children. At the end of the First World War, German futurologist and prophet of doom Oswald Spengler forecast that Europe’s population would go into a 200-year-long decline, blaming wealth and female emancipation, while British writer G. K. Chesterton fretted in 1930 that ‘if the recent decline in the birth rate continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all’ and the French demographer Alfred Sauvy worried that Europe would be full of ‘old people in old houses with old ideas’. In 1935, Keynes warned that ‘a change over from an increasing to a declining population could be very disastrous’.16
The sentiment of interwar demographic pessimism was captured in 1937 by G. F. McCleary, a prolific writer on matters relating to population and a one-time senior official at the UK’s Ministry of Health. ‘People are beginning to realise that [the decline in the birth rate] cannot indefinitely be counteracted by reductions in the death rate,’ he wrote.17 Infant mortality was already fairly low and its further reduction, while desirable, would not have a material impact on population. As interwar demographer Dudley Kirk succinctly put it: ‘death can be postponed but never eliminated’.18 Life expectancy might continue to lengthen, but would do so only steadily. By contrast, the reduction in the number of births appeared rapid and alarming.
The developing sense of a decline in population growth and the prospect of falling population was now quite general. Malthus had been turned on his head, at least for the time being. Whereas before the First World War demographic concerns were mostly about how one’s own nation stood in relation to a rival nation, in the interwar period there was an increasing appreciation that what had started in Britain was going continent-wide and also impacting the peoples of European extraction beyond Europe’s shores, particularly in the Americas. This was an era when racist attitudes we find horrendous and astonishing today were quite normal, reflected in both public discourse and policy. Anti-Semitism was taken for granted, as was the idea that people of African and Asian origin were inferior. Sometimes concerns about slowing population and ethnicity led to tensions between the quantitative and what was considered the qualitative. On the one hand, a large population was seen as a ‘good thing’ for a country, particularly given the need to make up numbers from war losses and a fear of the ‘next round’. On the other hand, not just any numbers would do, and some people were infinitely to be preferred to others. The eugenics movement, proposing active measures to improve the ‘quality’ of the population ‘stock’, was closely associated with the birth control movement. Marie Stopes, for example, urged the forcible sterilisation of those deemed unfit for parenthood and propagation of the race.
Concerns for the supposed quality of the population were particularly prevalent in the United States, where immigration restrictions rolled out after the First World War explicitly aimed to preserve the country’s ethnic mixture and were in particular focused on reducing migration from southern and eastern Europe, which had been so predominant at the turn of the century. Although population growth did indeed decline as a result, it was still almost 1.5% in the 1920s although it dropped to half this rate in the 1930s.
Even for those permitted to enter, the United States was not always an attractive place to be.19 Congressman Albert Johnson, cooriginator of the 1924 Johnson Act imposing strict controls on immigration, opined that the ‘day of unalloyed welcome to all people, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, had definitely ended… Our hope is a homogenous nation… Self-preservation demands it.’ In the debate on the Act, a senator from Maine called for a ‘racially pure country’ while a congressman from Maine suggested that ‘God intended [the US]… to be the home of a great people, English speaking–a white race with great ideals, the Christian religion, one race, one country, one destiny’.20 A congressman from Indiana was even more explicit, arguing that there
is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World… we cannot make a well-bred dog out of a mongrel by teaching him tricks.21
The background to both the debate and the anti-immigration legislation was fuelled by pessimism and racial prejudice. The two most notable interwar polemics foretelling the doom of the white race as a whole were not by Europeans but by Americans, namely Madison Grant’s 1919 The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History and Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. The two authors’ focus was different, although their underlying ideology of obnoxious racial prejudice was similar and Grant wrote the preface to Stoddard’s work. Grant was more interested in ‘racial science’ than in demography; although stressing the importance of ‘primary races’, he distinguished quite sharply between those of different European origin and concluded that
if the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to… blind ourselves to all distinctions of race, creed and color, the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the age of Rollo.22
Stoddard, too, worried about the ‘Mediterranean’ versus the ‘Nordic’ element within the white race, fearing that the industrial revolution had stimulated the growth of the former type even in England, where the evolutionary selective processes favouring the Nordics were growing less strong as the country became less rural: ‘The small, dark types in England increase noticeably with every generation.’23 Yet his concerns were essentially pan-European in nature. He may have had his preferences among Europeans, but he was more worried about their collective fate in the face of the rise of people of non-European origin. He noted and lamented the impact of the First World War in Europe on population, fearing the ‘Chinese braves [sic]’ of Lenin and their destructive, Asiatic influence on Russia and calling for ‘white solidarity’.24 A mixture of Bolshevik agitation, Japanese ambition and sheer Chinese and Indian demographic weight threatened to topple European domination of the globe now that the Europeans had so weakened themselves by their lethal internecine squabble. It comes as no surprise that Stoddard was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and that his work is thought to have contributed the idea of the Untermensch or ‘subhuman’ to the Nazi lexicon.
The works of Grant and Stoddard encouraged works in a similar vein, such as John Walter Gregory’s 1925 The Menace of Color. They also entered the popular consciousness through works such as Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
‘Civilization’s going to pieces’ broke out Tom violently… ‘Have you read “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by this man Goddard?… The idea is if we don’t look out, the white race will be utterly–will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.’
Although Tom’s attitude seems somewhat mocking, Fitzgerald’s own attitude to Stoddard’s ideas was probably quite sympathetic. Recent research has shown how editors stripped much of his work of open racism and anti-Semitism.25
However, not all Americans
took the same pessimistic view of the prospects for whites, although their ‘optimism’ was no less charged with unpleasant racial prejudice. It was not that those like Edward M. East, author of Mankind at the Crossroads, were eager to express any cosmopolitan views; rather, that their interpretation of the data was different. East noted that globally there were more ‘Whites’ (550 million) than ‘Yellows’ (500 million), ‘Browns’ (450 million) or ‘Blacks’ (150 million). He conceded that the ‘Others’ might collectively outnumber whites and this was ‘indeed a terrifying sum total from the white point of view’.26 However, he challenged the pessimists’ growth figures and suggested that the white population in North America had a demographic profile allowing it to double every fifty-eight years and that in Europe to double every eighty-seven years, while the other races would take well over one hundred years to double in the case of blacks and well over two hundred years in the case of south and east Asians.27 By global and longer-term historical standards, the growth rate of peoples of European origin was still strong, and by and large, non-whites had not yet had a demographic ‘awakening’.
Comparing population growth figures of the different races, East insisted that ‘anyone who sees white stagnation… needs a pair of spectacles’; although fertility rates were falling, so were mortality rates, and this was supporting population growth. ‘The Stork may have become less active, but the inertia of Death has more than made up the difference,’ he wrote. The reason for the pre-eminence of whites and their falling death rates was the existence and persistence of empire: ‘The white race is increasing rapidly. Why? Simply because it has political control of nine-tenths of the habitable globe.’28 In a virtuous circle, East said, demographic strength would maintain empire and empire would sustain demographic strength. The blacks were no threat at home any more than the coloured races were abroad; the ratio of white to black in the United States had been 7.9 to 1.8 million in 1820; in 1920 it was 94.3 to 10.5 million. US blacks had gone from being 22% of the white population in the USA to 11% over that century, the result of massive white immigration in the intervening years.29 East waxed lyrical, even biblical, albeit voicing some slight concern about Africa: