"with "voluntary sterility among married men and women of good life . . . If the best classes do not reproduce themselves the nation will of course go down." Roosevelt's distinctions were rooted in the readily expressed racism of his time and in animosity toward Japanese and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, whose comparative fecundity seemed to threaten the whiteness of the nation. But they were also an expression of judgment against the women exercising new forms of public autonomy."