The Architects of Hate: Garrett Hardin and Cordelia S. May's Fight for Immigration Restriction and Eugenics in the Name of the Environment

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on the personal correspondence exchanged between Garrett Hardin and Cordelia S. May, leading advocates of population control, environmentalism, and immigration restriction, from the beginning of their friendship in the 1970s to the end of their lives in the early 2000s, this essay explores the closely guarded inner workings and behind-the-scenes efforts they took to realize their hardline xenophobic, eugenicist, and racist vision for a sustained network fighting for a white supremacist, English-speaking country. Drawing on eighteenth-century Malthusian ideas and ideologies and influenced by leading proponents of eugenics like Henry Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, and Frederick Osborn, the dozens of letters they wrote to each other across a thirty-year span indicate that they worked to achieve their goals by joining, infiltrating, and building exclusionary organizations such as Zero Population Growth, Sierra Club, and The Environmental Fund. Set in a richly textured historical context, Hardin's and May's missives indicate that they fretted not only about unsustainable expansion but also about the presence and growing number of low-quality, unintelligent, and diseased people from around the Global South.