The past several years have seen a national increase in mass shootings by white supremacists, many of whom have cited their belief in the supposed “Great Replacement” as a motivating factor for their violence. The “Great Replacement” is a far-right, white supremacist conspiracy theory that argues that the white race is being replaced by people of color, immigrants, and Jewish people. While several scholars have attributed the theory’s origins to the rise of the internet age and subsequent online communities for white power activists, this paper argues that “Great Replacement” ideology continues a white supremacist tradition of conspiratorial thought that dates back over a century, originating with the similarly named theory of “race suicide.”

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, different trends in immigration and the simultaneous rise to prominence of pseudoscientific racism in the United States led many prominent nativists to claim that the white race was committing “race suicide,” killing off its own race by allowing immigrants into the country and by having interracial children. This theory was intertwined with the rise of the early eugenics movement, a large-scale effort to strengthen civilization by promoting white reproduction and attempting to impede reproduction among “undesirable” populations. I use the case studies of two leading U.S. political figures and eugenicists–President Theodore Roosevelt and conservationist Madison Grant¬¬ –to demonstrate how the “race suicide” theory functioned as a pronatalist argument that encouraged white, “fit” women to reproduce. From the passing of the first Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to the 1924 Immigration Act, this paper charts the four-decade influence of the race suicide theory, which I argue further speaks to a continued tradition of white supremacist groups relying on “narratives of victimhood” to justify racial and xenophobic violence.