Prediction and Control:

Global Population, Population Science, and Population Politics

in the Twentieth Century

by

Emily R. Merchant

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(History)
in the University of Michigan
2015

Doctoral Committee:

Associate Professor John Carson, Chair

Professor Barbara A. Anderson
Professor Howard Brick
Professor Paul N. Edwards
 Acknowledgements
In many ways, this dissertation was a joy to write. I found the topic fascinating when I began
writing and it continues to fascinate me today. Going to the archives shaped the story in
ways that I did not expect when I wrote the prospectus but that only deepened my interest
in and commitment to this project. The enthusiasm of my advisors, research subjects, and
interlocutors helped keep my own enthusiasm for the project high, even through difficult and
frustrating moments in the archives and while writing.
I could not have written this dissertation without the assistance and support of many
people and organizations. The seeds of this dissertation were sown in Barbara Anderson’s
demographic theory and methods courses in the Department of Sociology at the University
of Michigan, which I attended in 2008-2009 at the urging of Myron Gutmann. Myron Gut-
mann and Barbara Anderson encouraged my critical interest in the history of demography,
and this encouragement eventually led me back to the Department of History at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, which I had left after earning my M.A. in 2005. I am grateful to John
Carson for agreeing to be my advisor at our very first meeting, and to Kali Israel, Farina
Mir, Nancy Hunt, and Gabrielle Hecht, who helped me successfully petition for re-admission
to the Ph.D. program. I am also grateful to all of the staff and faculty members of the de-
partment for helping me re-integrate into the program and balance it with full-time work at
the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The support and
understanding of my supervisors and colleagues at ICPSR — including Myron Gutmann,
George Alter, Susan Hautaniemi Leonard, Ken Sylvester, Kristine Witkowski, Jeremy Al-
bright, Russell Hathaway, Dan Brown, Brian Gratton, Melannie Hartman, and many others
— made it possible for me to complete my dissertation while pursuing a highly stimulating
and rewarding career.

ii
 This project would not have been possible without the generous funding I received from
several parts of the University of Michigan: the Department of History, the Rackham Grad-
uate School, and the Population Studies Center. Beyond the University of Michigan, I
received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Society for Historians of Amer-
ican Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the Philadelphia Area Center
for History of Science, the Rockefeller Archive Center, Marshall Weinberg, and the Doris
G. Quinn Foundation. My committee — John Carson, Barbara Anderson, Howard Brick,
and Paul Edwards — offered tremendous support and feedback throughout the process. I
received generous assistance from archivists at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University,
the American Philosophical Society, Princeton University, the United Nations, Yale Univer-
sity, and the Rockefeller Archive Center, where I would particularly like to thank Bethany
Antos and Tom Rosenbaum. I am grateful to the History Committee of the Population
Association of America for allowing me to sit in on its 2012 meeting and to the following
demographers for allowing me to interview them: John Knodel, Ronald Lee, Richard East-
erlin, James Trussell, Karen Hardee, Gretchen Condran, Douglas Massey, and Avery “Pete”
Guest. Many people opened their homes to me when I was doing archival research: Rosa
and Eric in New Haven; Andrea and Etan in Palo Alto; David in Philadelphia; Danielle,
Sarah, and Khurram in Princeton; Rebecca Hume in New York; and Suzy and Romain in
Sleepy Hollow. Back at UM, workshops in the Department of History, the Sweetland Writ-
ing Center, the Science and Technology in Society program, and the Environmental History
group helped me work though and refine my ideas. Ken Garner read almost every sentence
of this dissertation and provided invaluable feedback.
Many of the debts I incurred through the years of writing this dissertation were personal.
Graduate students often experience demographic processes while writing dissertations, par-
ticularly marriage, fertility, and migration. The demographic processes I experienced while
writing my dissertation were divorce and mortality. I can’t even begin to thank all of the
friends who helped me through these events, but I would like to try. They include Eliz-

iii
abeth Moss, Elizabeth Sikkenga, Dan Hirschman, Jamie Budnick, Jamie Van Etten, Liz
Ela, Liz Harmon, Laura Ferguson, Crystal Chung, Rebecca Grapevine, Lenny Ureña Vale-
rio, Robyn d’Avignon, Elise Lipkowitz, Diana Mankowski, Christina Johnson, Annie Stultz,
Dallas Bluth, David Edwards, Kai Mishuris, Emily Marshall, Kristen Cibelli, and many
more. The largest debt I owe is to the anonymous woman who saved my life by making a
well-timed call to 911 on the night of September 19, 2013.
The family is a major focus of demographic research, and my family was indispensable to
me throughout this process. My parents, Karen Hilfman and Jon Klancher, never wavered
in their support for me, and never hesitated to make the trek to Ann Arbor when I needed
assistance, whether in moving apartments or in washing my hair when I broke my wrist. My
aunt and uncle, Lesley and Richard Hume, also became surrogate parents to me during this
process, inviting me to live with them when I got divorced, taking care of me through every
illness and injury, and welcoming my friends into their home on holidays and more somber
occasions alike. My cousin Rebecca Hume was an inspiring if long-distance companion
throughout this process, and I was overjoyed to be able to celebrate the birth of two children
to my cousins Michael and Kim Hume while writing this dissertation. As a result of my
own parents’ divorce, I have been blessed with the most wonderful blended-extended family
in the world. It’s hard to say where family begins and ends with one as large as ours, so I
apologize if I have forgotten anyone: Joan Cucinotta and Emily and Kate Reteshka; Nancy,
Sophie, and Maya Klancher; Ken and Lois Levy and Nadine Levyfield; Tania Verafield, Jose
Vera, and Maggie Haase; Mona and Helen Field and Martin Goldstein; Chris Moran and
Anna Khalsa; Judy and Skip Rosner; Ari Rosner and Omri Ayalon; Robert, Joan, Beth
Ann, Walter, Lydia, and David Frank; Kara and Brendan Williams-Kief; Devra and Allen
Kifer; Pamela and Ridley Allen. Patrick Parker was my almost-constant companion during
the last two years of the process. I am grateful to him for making me laugh several times a
day and for keeping me well-supplied with ice cream during the final week of writing.
This dissertation is dedicated to my grandparents, Patricia McMahan and Miriam and

iv
Kenneth Hilfman, all of whom lived through most of the events detailed in the following pages
and passed away while I was carrying out this project. Their constant and unconditional
love and support throughout my life were formative and irreplaceable. My grandmothers
were some of the fiercest women I have ever known. Both served in the military in World
War II and utilized the G.I. Bill to pursue educations and careers that would otherwise have
been unavailable to them. My grandfather was one of the kindest and strongest men I have
ever known. He shared with me his fascination for history and love of learning and teaching,
and even in his last days was always eager to hear about my research. We lost Grandma
Pat in 2011, Grandpa Ken in 2013, and Grandma Mimi in 2014. I am so grateful for the
time I had with them and for the inspiration and confidence they gave me to complete this
project.

v
 Table of Contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x
List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Introduction 1
0.1 Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
0.2 Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
0.2.1 Conceptual Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
0.2.2 Geographical Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
0.3 Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
0.4 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Chapter 1 Population Problems, Models, and Politics 42

1.1 The Malthusian Legacy: Population Thought and
Politics Before the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
1.1.1 Population Accounting: Political Arithmetic and Censuses . . . . . . 46
1.1.2 The Valence of Population: From Malthus to Darwin . . . . . . . . . 49
1.1.3 The Progressive Turn: Neo-Malthusianism and Eugenics . . . . . . . 55
1.2 Population Problems and Population Projections:
Competing Theories and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
1.2.1 Margaret Sanger and the Neo-Malthusians:
Overpopulation and the Logistic Law of Population Growth . . . . . 61
1.2.2 Social Scientific Population Models: Differential Growth . . . . . . . 79
1.3 Comparing the Logistic Law and the Cohort
Component Method: Two Ontologies of
Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
1.4 Demographic Transition Theory: A Social Theory of Population Change . . 111
1.4.1 Modernization and Demographic Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
1.4.2 The Geopolitical Consequences of Demographic Transition Theory . . 117

Chapter 2 Disciplining Demography Between the Wars 124

2.1 International Population Science and European
Population Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
2.2 Funding for Demography and the Politics of
Population in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
2.2.1 Finding Patrons for Demography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
2.2.2 The Population Association of America: Between Eugenics
and Birth Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

vi
 2.2.3 Frederick Osborn and Princeton’s Office of Population
Research: Science in the Service of Eugenics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
2.3 Finding Clients for Demography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
2.3.1 Selling Demography to the U.S. Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
2.3.2 Identifying the Correlates of Fertility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

Chapter 3 The Mid-Century Crisis of Global Demography 191

3.1 Demography in War and Peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
3.1.1 Demography and Postwar Social and Economic Planning . . . . . . . 199
3.1.2 The United Nations: Global Governance for a
Global Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
3.2 Data Friction: Challenges to World Population
Estimation and Projection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
3.2.1 Unavailable data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
3.2.2 Inadequate Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
3.2.3 Incommensurable Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
3.3 Dealing With Data Friction: Making Global
Population Data and Making Population
Data Global . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
3.3.1 Reviving the Logistic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
3.3.2 Making Global Population Data: The U.N. Global
Census Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
3.3.3 Making Population Data Global: Sampling and
Indirect Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
3.4 Challenges to Demographic Transition Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

Chapter 4 The Mid-Century Global Demographic Crisis 271

4.1 The Postwar Construction of Overpopulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
4.1.1 The Demographic Critique of Imperialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
4.1.2 Demography and the Philanthropic-Industrial Complex . . . . . . . . 284
4.2 The Economic Discourse of Overpopulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
4.2.1 Planning Population Control at Colonial Williamsburg . . . . . . . . 301
4.2.2 The Population Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
4.3 Popularizing Overpopulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
4.3.1 Hugh Moore’s Population Bomb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
4.3.2 Empirical Support for Economic Overpopulation . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
4.3.3 Communicating the Results of the Coale-Hoover Report . . . . . . . 327
4.4 Population Control and U.S. Foreign Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
4.4.1 Tracing the Coale-Hoover Report into the U.S. Government . . . . . 332
4.4.2 The Princeton European Fertility Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
4.4.3 U.S. Government Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345

Chapter 5 The Postwar Expansion of Demography and Family Planning 351

5.1 The Expansion of Demography in the U.S. and the Global South . . . . . . . 352

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 5.1.1 Population Studies Centers and Demography Careers in the
United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
5.1.2 Population Studies Centers and Demography Careers in the
Global South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
5.2 The Content of Postwar Demography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
5.2.1 Demography’s Journals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
5.2.2 Fertility Surveys in the 1950s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372
5.3 Family Planning and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393
5.3.1 Toward a More Perfect Contraceptive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
5.3.2 Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Contraception . . . . . . . . . 403
5.3.3 Family Planning Debates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417

Chapter 6 The Population Bomb Squad 428

6.1 The Environmental Overpopulation Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
6.1.1 A New Manhattan Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
6.1.2 Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439
6.1.3 Zero Population Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450
6.2 Counterdiscourses of Population and the Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467
6.2.1 Biological Counterdiscourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468
6.2.2 Demographic Counterdiscourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
6.3 The American Future and Limits to Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
6.3.1 Population Growth and the American Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
6.3.2 The Limits to Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498

Chapter 7 The Geopolitics of Population Control 512

7.1 Beyond Family Planning: Berelson’s Public
Relations Efforts for the Population Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514
7.2 Concerned Demographers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518
7.3 U.N. World Population Conference, 1974 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527
7.3.1 Toward a World Population Plan of Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 530
7.3.2 In Bucharest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 539
7.3.3 The Population Tribune: Rockefeller’s Reversal . . . . . . . . . . . . 550
7.4 From Bucharest to Mexico City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 556
7.4.1 Recovering From Bucharest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 556
7.4.2 The Passing of the Population Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561
7.4.3 Mexico City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569
7.4.4 Demography After 1984 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575

Conclusion 581

Bibliography 589

viii
 List of Figures
1.1 Pearl’s Logistic Curve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
1.2 Observed and Projected U.S. Population, 1700-2100 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
1.3 Yule’s Image of the Populations of the U.S., England, and France . . . . . . 72
1.4 Growth Pattern of Pearl’s Drosophila Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
1.5 Kuczynski’s Net Reproduction Rate for France, Austria, Ukraine, and Poland 91
1.6 Population Projections for the United States by Raymond Pearl and Pascal
Whelpton, and Observed U.S. Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
1.7 Pearl’s Illustration of Population Aging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
1.8 Demographic Transition Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

2.1 Thompson and Whelpton’s U.S. Population Projections, 1928, 1933, and 1938,
and Observed U.S. Population, 1920-1940 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

3.1 Notestein’s 1944 Global Population Projection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

3.2 World Population, as Estimated by the U.N. in 1954 (millions) . . . . . . . . 242

4.1 Hugh Moore’s “Population Bomb” Pamphlet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

4.2 Hugh Moore Newspaper Advertisement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
4.3 Princeton European Fertility Project Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

5.1 Card 1, Growth of American Families Questionnaire, 1955 . . . . . . . . . . 384

6.1 a. Advertisement in The New York Times, March 10, 1968; b. Advertisement
in The New York Times, December 8, 1968. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433
6.2 Advertisement proposed by Moore’s associates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 434
6.3 a. Advertisement in The New York Times, June 12, 1968; b. Advertisement
proposed by Moore’s associates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437
6.4 Advertisement in The New York Times, May 25, 1969. . . . . . . . . . . . . 438
6.5 Cover of Time magazine, February 2, 1970. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470
6.6 World3 model, standard run. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500

ix
 List of Tables
1.1 U.S. Population, as Projected by Raymond Pearl and Pascal Whelpton, 1930-
1970 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

3.1 World Population by Continent, as Estimated by the U.N. in 1954 (millions) 241

x
 List of Abbreviations
ABCL American Birth Control League

AES American Eugenics Society

ANT Actor-Network Theory

CDE Center for Demography and Ecology (University of Wisconsin)

CELADE Centro Latinoamericano de Demografı́a (Santiago, Chile)

ECAFE Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East

ECOSOC United Nations Economic and Social Council

EPA Environmental Protection Agency

ERO Eugenics Record Office

FAO United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

FERA Federal Emergency Relief Administration (United States)

GAF Growth of American Families

GNP Gross National Product

GRR Gross Reproduction Rate

HUAC House Un-American Activities Committee

ICPSR Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

ILO International Labour Organization

IMF International Monetary Fund

IPPF International Planned Parenthood Federation

IUD Intrauterine Contraceptive Device

IUSIPP International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems

INED Institut National d’Études Démographiques (France)

IUSSP International Union for the Scientific Study of Population

xi
KAP Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Contraception

LSE London School of Economics

MMF Milbank Memorial Fund

NAS National Academy of Sciences (United States)

NFS National Fertility Survey (United States)

NIH National Institutes of Health (United States)

NRC National Research Council (United States)

NRR Net Reproduction Rate

OPOR Office of Public Opinion Research (Princeton University)

OPR Office of Population Research (Princeton University)

PAA Population Association of America

PCC Population Crisis Committee

PDR Population and Development Review

PEFP Princeton European Fertility Project

PGAF Population Growth and the American Future

PIC Population Investigation Committee (United Kingdom)

PPFA Planned Parenthood Federation of America

PRB Population Reference Bureau

SPIA School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton University)

SPK Stable Population Keynesianism

SRC Survey Research Center (University of Michigan)

SSRC Social Science Research Council (United States)

TFR Total Fertility Rate

UNFPA United Nations Fund for Population Activities

USAID United States Agency for International Development

WPEC World Population Emergency Campaign

ZPG Zero Population Growth

xii
 Introduction
The twentieth century was an exceptional period in the history of the world’s population:
it grew faster than it ever had before or ever would again, and became the subject of a new
science and a critical arena of intervention for states, international agencies, and nongovern-
mental organizations. This dissertation traces the history of global population dynamics,
demography, and population politics and policy from 1920 to 1984. It examines the ways in
which scientists, activists, and policy makers based in the United States analyzed and in-
tervened in population growth worldwide, focusing on the activity of population projection
— estimating future population size and composition — as the key link between population
change, the science that aimed to understand it, and the policies that sought to accom-
modate or manipulate it. I argue that, as a social science of population, demography has
played a critical role throughout the twentieth century in supporting specific discourses of
population that have legitimized the active intervention of states, international agencies, and
nongovernmental organizations into the reproductive lives of individuals, usually individuals
on the wrong side of social, political, and economic power. At the same time, however, I
contend that demographers themselves played a limited role in constructing these discourses,
as the institutional power of their discipline depended on support from wealthy patrons and
clients, who exercised substantial influence over the content of the field and how its findings
were interpreted and communicated to publics and policy makers.
Between 1900 and 2000, the population of the world grew from about 1.65 billion to
over 6 billion.1 In 1900, the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants lived in rural areas;
in 2000, about half lived in urban areas.2 From 1950 to the present, expectation of life at
1
The estimate of 1.65 billion for the year 1900 is the approximate mid-point between the low estimate of
1.55 billion and the high estimate of 1.762 billion given by the U.S. Census Bureau: [Link]
gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php (accessed 3/29/2015).
2
[Link]
[Link] (accessed 3/29/2015).

1
birth for the world as a whole (a life table index representing the average number of years
an individual would live if subjected to current age-specific mortality rates at all ages) was
approximately 47 years. Today, it is approximately 62 years.3 Over the same period, fertility
rates at the global level have halved, falling from an average of 5.0 children per woman (total
fertility rate), to an average of 2.5 children per woman.4 As a result, the proportion of the
world’s population aged 60 and over increased from 8% in 1950 to about 12% today, and
U.N. demographers expect that it will reach 21% by 2050.5
The rate of world population growth reached its peak at about 2.2% per year in the
mid-1960s.6 Public anxiety about the potentially deleterious economic and environmental
consequences of this population growth reached its peak shortly thereafter. While population
grew most rapidly in Asia and Latin America, where fertility rates remained high even
though mortality rates had fallen dramatically, concern about world population growth was
most palpable in the United States, where prominent and powerful philanthropists and
businessmen pushed world population growth into the public consciousness and onto the
government’s policy agenda.
Numerous U.S.-based organizations sought to provide birth control to women and couples
in the global south — the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that produced raw
materials for industry in North America, Europe, Oceania, and East Asia, many of which
had recently wrested independence from European empires. These organizations promoted
the use of birth control to achieve the small families that had become the norm in the global
north — the countries of North America, Europe, Oceania, and East Asia to which the
profits of global industry and trade flowed. By the late 1960s, these philanthropists had
enrolled the U.S. government and the United Nations in their project of global population
3
United Nations Population Division, World Population Ageing 2013 (New York: United Nations,
2013), url: http : / / www . un . org / en / development / desa / population / publications / pdf / ageing /
[Link] (accessed 04/14/2015), 6.
4
Ibid., 3.
5
Ibid., 11.
6
[Link] (ac-
cessed 3/29/2015).

2
control, with the U.S. government becoming the world’s largest provider of funds to family
planning programs worldwide and to the U.N. Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA),
which was established in 1969 with additional funding from other countries in the global
north, particularly Japan, the U.K., and Sweden.
U.S.-based proponents of population control in the global south developed and perpet-
uated two new discourses of overpopulation that grew out of an older Malthusian tradition
in the postwar period and will be described in greater detail in Chapters Four and Six. The
first, which I call the economic overpopulation discourse, understood population growth as
a barrier to economic development in the global south. The second, which I call the en-
vironmental overpopulation discourse, understood population growth as a threat to global
resource conservation and ecosystem integrity. Both discourses relied on commonsensical
understandings of a fixed supply of economic and environmental goods being divided among
a growing number of people, and on the Malthusian theory that population necessarily
grows faster than the supply of food and other natural resources. The proponents of these
discourses often pointed to the existence of poverty and starvation in the global south to
legitimize their claims that the world was becoming overpopulated and that this overpop-
ulation was the cause of socioeconomic inequality and environmental degradation at both
global and local levels. Science provided support to these overpopulation discourses, and
their proponents played a critical role in funding, popularizing, and politicizing the scien-
tific theories and findings that supported their claims. While the major scientific supporters
of the environmental overpopulation discourse were biologists, the economic discourse drew
support from a new interdisciplinary social science that began to emerge between the wars
in the U.S. and Western Europe and grew dramatically — particularly in the U.S. and the
global south — after World War II: demography.
Demography is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, practiced in universities, government
agencies, and inter- and non-governmental agencies, such as the United Nations and the In-
ternational Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Its object of inquiry is how populations

3
change — through the mechanisms of fertility, mortality, and migration — and the causes and
consequences of population change and its mechanisms. The field is often divided into two
components: formal or mathematical demography explores the formal mathematical relation-
ships between such demographic variables as fertility, mortality, and population structure;
social demography explores the socioeconomic correlates of demographic processes (fertility,
mortality, and migration) and the distribution of such social goods as health, wealth, and
education within and between populations.7 Social demography, like formal demography, is
highly quantitative, utilizing statistical methods to examine large-scale patterns and central
tendencies that emerge from the aggregation of data about individual behavior. The science
of demography grew in tandem with world population and with political projects aimed at
shaping world population growth during the twentieth century. Although governments had
long been engaged in population accounting and analysis, as will be described below and in
Chapter One, it was only after World War I that the analysis of population dynamics be-
came a regular activity of university-based scientists in North America and Western Europe.
Demography secured patronage from the new general-purpose foundations that emerged in
the United States to improve human welfare, and developed a clientele of governmental and
non-governmental agencies. After World War II, the United Nations promoted the collec-
tion of demographic data in all countries of the world, extending the scope of demographic
research to global population. The field grew in size in the 1950s and 1960s, as it gained
new patrons and clients, many of whom were also involved in projects aimed at containing
the world’s rapidly-growing population, and as it attracted and trained new practitioners,
particularly in the United States and the global south.
In the last decade, historians have begun to explore public, intellectual, and govern-
mental anxiety about population growth and policy responses. Matthew Connelly’s Fatal
Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008) set the agenda for recent
historical studies of population thought and politics in the twentieth century. More recently,
7
David Yaukey, Douglas L. Anderton, and Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Demography: The Study of Human
Population, 3rd ed. (Long Grove: Waveland, 2007).

4
Alison Bashford’s Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (2014) has
added nuance to Connelly’s story of global population control. While Connelly explores the
global politics of population as a biopolitics of people and peoples and examines the activi-
ties of governmental, inter-governmental, and non-governmental agencies, Bashford contends
that global population politics were a geopolitics of the Earth and its finite resources, and
analyzes the thought of an interdisciplinary group of anglophone cosmopolitan intellectuals.
By considering these works, along with three texts on population thought and politics in
the United States, I will outline how recent historical scholarship has framed the fundamen-
tal issues around population thought and politics. I will then explain how this dissertation
both develops and challenges these agendas by focusing specifically on the role of demog-
raphy — a new form of scientific expertise specific to human population dynamics — in
twentieth-century population thought and politics.
Connelly and Bashford offer a detailed account of population thought (Bashford) and
population control interventions (Connelly) over the majority of the twentieth century, with
a focus on anglophone thought and interventions in the global south. Connelly critiques
the efforts of “some people” to control the fertility of others “without having to answer to
anyone,” which wreaked humanitarian and political havoc in many parts of the world in the
second half of the twentieth century.8 He traces the tactics of individual, national, philan-
thropic, non-governmental, and inter-governmental actors — including Sanjay Gandhi, Mar-
garet Sanger, Planned Parenthood, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID), and UNFPA — across space and over time as pop-
ulation control shifted from national efforts to manipulate population “quality” (eugenics
projects) to international efforts to manipulate population quantity. Connelly identifies the
organizational and individual links between eugenics movements in the first half of the cen-
tury and population control programs in the second half, particularly in the global south,
where both movements comprised elites who sought to limit the childbearing of the poor. He
8
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge: Belk-
nap, 2008), xi.

5
contends that population control was ultimately about political and economic control — that
of the wealthy over the poor and the countries of the global north over those of the global
south.9 Bashford expands on this story by detailing the population thought of anglophone
intellectuals — including biologists, economists, birth control activists, and novelists — that
supported the efforts to control population size and composition described by Connelly. She
argues that these thinkers viewed World War I as the closing of the global “frontier”: after
the war, all of the world’s territory was under the jurisdiction of either empires or sovereign
states. In response, anglophone intellectuals began to understand population control —
through either contraception or coordinated migration — as the key to global peace.10 Bash-
ford also demonstrates the imbrication of population thought with eugenics throughout the
century, even as population thought and eugenics distanced themselves from racism after
the 1930s. Taken together, Connelly and Bashford suggest that the key to understanding
population thought and politics in the twentieth century is the conceptual intertwining of
biology — that of both human reproduction and natural resources — with politics and eco-
nomics at the global level, which legitimized biological intervention as a response to global
political and economic challenges.
Three recent books — by Derek Hoff, Thomas Robertson, and Paul Sabin — add detail
to the general story told by Connelly and Bashford by examining population thought and
policy specifically in the United States. Analyzing the role of population thought from
the colonial period to the present, Hoff argues that concern about population growth has
underpinned economic and social policy throughout U.S. history, particularly with regard
to western expansion, slavery and its abolition, and such twentieth-century programs as
the New Deal and the Great Society.11 Robertson focuses on the role of population in the
twentieth-century conservation and environmental movements. Like Hoff, Robertson finds
9
Connelly, see n. 8, 378.
10
Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014).
11
Derek Hoff, The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in U.S. History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

6
that population was a major concern for his actors, both environmentalists in the second half
of the twentieth century and conservationists in the first half. He places special emphasis
on the importance of the Cold War for solidifying the relationship between population and
environment in the minds of U.S. publics, scientists, and policy makers.12 Finally, Sabin
explores population as a link between the environment and economy at the end of the
twentieth century by detailing the highly-publicized 1980 bet between biologist Paul Ehrlich
and economist Julian Simon about population growth and scarcity, using it as an analytic lens
through which to examine the growing political divide in the U.S. between environmentalism
on the left and neoliberal market fundamentalism on the right, with debate about markets
and and conservation eclipsing concern with population by the 1990s.13
For the most part, these five books accept at face value the Malthusian contentions of
their actors. For Connelly, Bashford, and Hoff, population growth — particularly in the
twentieth century — presented a major threat to world peace, human well-being, economic
growth, and environmental integrity. Even as Connelly provides a much-needed critique of
the ways in which population control programs were carried out, highlighting their coercive
implementation and non-democratic control, he does not question the basic premise that
population growth had become a global crisis in the second half of the twentieth century.
This orientation is particularly surprising in Bashford and Hoff’s books, as they focus on
the period prior to World War II, when the Malthusian thought that dominated the post-
war period was in a minority, as I will demonstrate in Chapters One and Two. In contrast
to these works, Robertson reserves judgment on the contributions of population growth to
environmental degradation, demonstrating both why this relationship seemed evident to his
actors and how their perceptions may have been influenced by social and political factors,
and Sabin demonstrates how debates about the environment and economy moved beyond
population after the 1980 U.S. election, as I too will discuss in Chapter Seven.
12
Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American
Environmentalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
13
Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2013).

7
 None of these books directly discusses the development and growth of the field of demog-
raphy during the period of analysis. Bashford, Connelly, Hoff, Robertson, and Sabin conflate
demography with population thought more broadly — including popular thought and that
of other types of experts (for example, economists and biologists) — and assume relative
homogeneity in population thought, both among demographers themselves and between de-
mographers, the public, policy makers, and other scientists. As a result, these historians
conflate the economic and environmental discourses of overpopulation that emerged after
World War II, and attribute to them direct continuity with earlier Malthusian theory. By
bracketing the establishment of demography as a scientific field in the twentieth century,
these works neglect to ask how population became a specific field of scientific expertise, how
the thought of the new population experts differed from that of other types of experts, and
how population scientists and their work influenced and were influenced by global population
politics. Rather, they assume that demography was prior to and independent of population
politics, and that it provided unequivocal evidence of population growth and its deleterious
consequences, which then became the basis for political movements and policy interventions.
As a result, these historians accept uncritically not only the authority claimed by demog-
raphers to analyze and predict human population change and its causes and consequences,
but also the necessity of policy interventions to slow population growth in the second half of
the twentieth century. Because Bashford, Connelly, Hoff, Robertson, and Sabin assume the
prior stability of population science, their studies overlook the scientific debates surrounding
overpopulation in the second half of the twentieth century, even after overpopulation had
been established as a “fact” in public and political opinion.
These five books cover much of the same ground — geographically, chronologically, and
conceptually — as this dissertation, and provide important context for the claims made in
the present work. They demonstrate that human population growth at multiple scales was a
central concern of political, economic, and environmental thinkers in the U.S. and the world
in the twentieth century, and that many political programs and policy interventions dur-

8
ing the twentieth century aimed to address political, economic, and environmental concerns
through population management and control. This dissertation both extends and challenges
the claims made in these recent works of history. It extends their claims by demonstrating
that political, economic, and environmental concerns about global population growth gave
rise to a new science of human population dynamics in the twentieth century. It challenges
the existing literature by demonstrating that demography — the new science of human pop-
ulation dynamics — did not unequivocally support the view that global population growth
threatened human survival or directly contributed to poverty or environmental degrada-
tion. Through a discussion of the emergence and development of demographic science, this
dissertation examines how the postwar crisis of global population growth was constructed,
and examines how demography both supported and challenged postwar overpopulation dis-
courses. In contrast to the existing literature, I trace the emergence of scientific expertise
in population and the specific role of demography in twentieth-century population politics.
I examine the production of the knowledge that served as the basis of and justification for
population interventions throughout the twentieth century. I ask how scientists and policy
makers came to see human population change as tractable to scientific expertise and policy
intervention, how those who claimed demographic expertise understood human population
change and its social, economic, political, and biological correlates and consequences, and
how demography and population politics recursively influenced one another to produce and
solve “population problems” at both national and global scales.

0.1 Method

The following seven chapters reconstruct the history of demography and its relationship to
population politics from 1920 to 1984, proceeding roughly chronologically. To locate and
build the framework of the story, I employ a genealogical method to identify relevant ideas,
actors, and events in the history of demography by tracing backward from the present-day

9
structure of the field. This method draws from Michel Foucault’s concept of genealogy, from
the practice of constructing family trees, and from actor-network theory.
From Foucault, it borrows the technique of tracing the coalescence and dissolution of
discursive formations. According to Foucault, discursive formations can be identified “when-
ever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a
regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations).”14 From the
practice of constructing family trees, it borrows the method of backward and lateral linkages
between individuals, which I have supplemented with similar linkages between institutions
and ideas.
The genealogical method I use in this dissertation is inspired by actor-network theory
(ANT), a method developed originally by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon to examine how
a variety of things in the world — from facts to concepts to diseases to people to institu-
tions — are produced dynamically through the assemblage of human and non-human actors
into more and less dense networks that require ongoing work to maintain their stability.15
ANT shares with Ian Hacking’s historical ontology the perspective that many types of things
come into being only through particular conjunctions of actors and activities at particular
moments.16 However, ANT goes beyond the analysis of how things coalesce to examine the
networks that hold them together, how they continue to cohere or how they destabilize, and
what kind of work goes into stabilizing or dissolving them. ANT analysis involves identify-
ing connections between human and non-human actors and tracing the circulation of actors
along those networks. My research for this dissertation has involved following relationships
between people (demographers, philanthropists, policy makers) and things (data, survey
14
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 38.
15
See, for example: Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the
Scallops and the Fishermen in St. Brieuc Bay,” in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an
Integration of Micro and Macro-Sociologies, ed. Karen Knorr-Cetina and A.V. Cicourel (Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1986); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through
Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Intro-
duction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Annemarie Mol, The Body
Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
16
Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

10
questionnaires, contraceptive drugs and devices) both synchronously and diachronically, of-
ten with the exchange of money as the connection among people and between people and
things.
Genealogies of the family tree variety provide demographers with an important source
of data about past populations.17 One major drawback, however, is that they only provide
information about people who had descendants. They begin with those who are alive at the
time of their construction and work backward to identify ancestors; past individuals who
had no children remain invisible, as do their ancestors. Similarly, my research process has
included only individuals and organizations who appear in the conceptual “family tree” of
present-day demography. This fact is not as limiting as it might at first seem, however,
because intellectual fields are not families. Familial genealogies link people only by blood,
marriage, and adoption, whereas an intellectual genealogy can also link people through
institutions, publications, funding, and correspondence. Nonetheless, the scope of this story
— defined by tracing the current field backward — is very different than would be the scope
of a story constructed by identifying instances of population thought, accounting, or analysis
at a given point in the past and tracing them forward.18 The latter would be more likely
to discover dead ends and alternative possibilities. The former is more likely to discover
unexpected origins and previously-unrecognized connections.
After identifying these origins and connections, I pieced together the history of demogra-
phy and population politics chronologically from archival and published sources (described
in greater detail below), using a prosopographical approach to link human actors by genera-
tion or cohort as well as through institutional and familial connections. Prosopography, also
known as collective biography or multiple career-line analysis, seeks to trace the collective
history of generations of human actors to reveal patterns, trends, and actions that are not
17
Emily Klancher Merchant and J. David Hacker, “Historical Demography in the United States,” in
A Global History of Historical Demography: Half A Century of Interdisciplinarity, ed. Antoinette Fauve-
Chamoux et al. (Peter Lang, 2015).
18
Ian Hacking addresses the question of how to do the history of an intellectual field in Ian Hacking, “How
Should We Do the History of Statistics?” I&C 8 (1981): 15–26.

11
readily apparent through individual-level analysis.19 The field of demography provides use-
ful insight to the prosopographical method, recognizing three irreducible dimensions along
which which people experience and are influenced by time and its passage: age, period, and
cohort. Age refers to an individual’s age, period to calendar time, and cohort to the inter-
section of age and period, or to the fact that being a particular age in one year is a different
experience from being that same age in a different year. All works of history account for
period; this dissertation also pays careful attention to actors’ age and cohort, and to the
intersection of these factors with historical periodization.
I define demography circularly, as the work of demographers. I identify actors as demog-
raphers if they belonged to a professional association for the study of human population, such
as the Population Association of America (PAA) or the International Union for the Scientific
Study of Population (IUSSP); if they taught in or were trained in a university-based pop-
ulation research center; if they worked in a governmental or an inter- or non-governmental
agency dealing with documenting and/or predicting change in human population size or
structure (such as the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the U.N. Population Division, or the Insti-
tute for International Applied Systems Analysis); or if they published in journals devoted to
the analysis of human population, such as Demography, Population Studies, Population and
Development Review, Population Research and Policy Review, or Population and Environ-
ment. In addition to demographers, this story includes two other major sets of human and
institutional actors: the first I call “patrons” — individuals and organizations that provided
funding or other forms of support to demography, demographers, and demographic research;
the second I call “clients” — individuals and organizations that used demographic research
either to make political claims or to formulate or legitimize policy. These three (analytic)
categories of actor — demographers, patrons, and clients — overlapped to some degree, with
considerably more overlap between patrons and clients than between demographers and ei-
ther of the other categories. The U.S. government, for example, was both a patron and a
19
Lawrence Stone, “Prosopography,” Daedalus 100, no. 1 (1971): 46–79.

12
client of demography, and employed demographers directly. The non-human actors I follow
include money, data, survey questionnaires, and contraceptive drugs and devices. I closely
track individual and institutional relationships and the circulation of money and ideas be-
tween individuals and institutions in order to demonstrate the enormous material effects
of the work of a very small number of actors. The assemblages that form, dissolve, and
re-form through these relationships and circulations are demographic theories and methods
and actual and proposed population policies and programs, though which the small group
of actors I follow shaped public opinion, policy, and population itself.

0.2 Scope

0.2.1 Conceptual Scope

The genealogical method is particularly appropriate to this dissertation, which is a history of

the present-day scientific field of demography, as it developed in the United States over the
course of the twentieth century, and its relationship to a changing global politics of popu-
lation, from the perspective of U.S.-based scientists, activists, businessmen, philanthropists,
and policy makers. As such, it is not a history of population thought in a broad sense, nor
does it consider other scientific fields that invoke concepts of population, such as popula-
tion ecology or population genetics, though it does note the relationship of these fields to
demography.
As I traced the institutions of demography — professional associations, journals, univer-
sity research and training centers, statistical offices, and funding agencies — and the people
involved in them backward through the twentieth century, the threads frayed, ultimately
dissolving between the world wars into the disparate domains of vital statistics, biology,
public health, life insurance, sociology, economics, birth control, immigration restriction,
and eugenics. It is at this point — the point of dissolution if reading backward or the point
of coalescence if reading forward — that my story begins, though Chapter One includes a

13
brief history of the separate domains that came together — through the processes of nego-
tiation and contestation described in Chapters One and Two — to form a field that could
be recognized as today’s demography by the end of World War II.
This chronology disrupts the periodization of the field identified by the demographers
who, to date, have made the largest contributions to documenting the history of the field.
Demographers writing the history of demography in the twentieth century have mainly fo-
cused on the period between about 1945 and 1985, when the field provided strong support to
the economic overpopulation discourse described above and to population control programs
in the global south.20 Demographers examining the history of their discipline have engaged
much less with the environmental overpopulation discourse, as demography played a minor
role in its construction.21 Dennis Hodgson identifies “sharp breaks” in the mid 1940s and
mid 1980s, which he contrasts to the “steady refinement” of knowledge he attributes to
the period before 1945.22 Paul Demeny has argued that, during the 40-year period between
the “sharp breaks” of the late 1940s and the mid 1980s, when the economic overpopulation
discourse was ascendant, demography was explicitly a policy science, aiming to influence
population trends as much as to understand them.23 Simon Szreter and Susan Greenhalgh
offer additional explanation for demography’s strong alliance with population policy during
this period, but do not question Hodgson and Demeny’s assertion that demography did not
become a policy science until after World War II.24
20
Dennis Hodgson, “Demography as Social Science and Policy Science,” Population and Development
Review 9, no. 1 (1983): 1–34; Dennis Hodgson, “Orthodoxy and Revisionism in American Demography,”
Population and Development Review 14, no. 4 (Dec. 1988): 541–569; Simon Szreter, “The Idea of De-
mographic Transition and the Study of Fertility Change: A Critical Intellectual History,” Population and
Development Review 19, no. 4 (Dec. 1993): 659–701; Susan Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Pop-
ulation Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 1 (1996): 26–66.
21
Kingsley Davis was the demographer who provided the most support to this discourse. David M. Heer,
Kingsley Davis: A Biography and Selections from His Writings (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005).
22
Hodgson, “Orthodoxy and Revisionism in American Demography,” see n. 20, 541.
23
Paul Demeny, “Social Science and Population Policy,” Population and Development Review 14, no. 3
(1988): 451–479.
24
Szreter, “The Idea of Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility Change: A Critical Intel-
lectual History,” see n. 20; Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual,
Institutional, and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography,” see n. 20.

14
 By asserting that demographers oriented their science toward policy only after World
War II, Hodgson and Demeny elide the interwar relationship between demography and pop-
ulation politics and impose continuity between interwar demography and the collection and
analysis of vital statistics — governmental accounting and analysis of population — a prac-
tice that began in Western Europe and North America in the late eighteenth century. In this
dissertation, I argue that vital statistics represent only one of several intellectual forebears of
demography. Vital statistics were certainly necessary for demographic analysis, which built
on some of the analytic methods developed by nineteenth-century vital statisticians. But
while vital statistics were collected and analyzed mainly by government statistical offices
for governmental purposes, the science of demography coalesced only in the first decades of
the twentieth century, when scientists in a variety of fields — including statistics, biology,
public health, sociology, and economics — began to analyze vital statistics in order to de-
velop theories about the causes and consequences of human population change. Moreover,
these scientists were not working in a political vacuum, but instead were drawing on their
analyses to weigh in on critical policy concerns of the 1920s and 1930s, including birth con-
trol legalization, immigration restriction, and eugenics. In contrast to Hodgson, Demeny,
Szreter, and Greenhalgh, I argue in this dissertation that demography as it is known today
was co-produced between the wars by two overlapping sets of actors: the scientists who ana-
lyzed population data and the activists who utilized demographic analyses to make political
claims.
This dissertation identifies the origins of the present-day field of demography at the
intersection of two longer histories — that of population quantification, along with the
attendant rise of probabilistic and statistical thinking, and that of the human and social
sciences. The remainder of this section briefly reviews those two literatures and locates the
present study within each.

15
Population Quantification and the Rise of Probabilistic and Statistical Thinking

Although censuses have a much longer history, historians have demonstrated that the practice
of individual-level census taking and vital registration by states emerged as an adjunct to
the industrial and democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century.25 Prior to these
revolutions, governments rarely counted their subjects directly, instead using mathematical
formulae known as “political arithmetic” to estimate population and its change on the basis
of tax and military records, as described by Alain Desrosières, Andrea Rusnock, Michael
Donnelly, and Theodore Porter.26 Churches recorded vital events — births, marriages, and
deaths — to manage pastoral relationships between parishes and parishioners, and these data
circulated among clergy, intellectuals, and governments through correspondence networks.27
Even before governments began to count individual subjects or citizens, eighteenth-century
medical and statistical thinkers, particularly in France and Great Britain, began to practice
population-level analysis in order to understand such things as the ecological correlates of
health and disease and the efficacy of smallpox inoculation, and to develop profitable models
for life insurance and annuities.28 Through such practices, quantitative arguments came to
25
Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988); David V. Glass, Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the
Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Farnborough: D.C. Heath, 1973); Patrice Bourdelais,
“The French Population Censuses: Purposes and Uses during the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries,” History
of the Family 9 (2004): 97–113.
26
Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1998); Andrea Rusnock, “Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment,” in
The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Cark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1999); Andrea Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in
Eighteenth-Century England and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael Donnelly,
“From Political Arithmetic to Social Statistics: How Some Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Social Sciences
Were Implanted,” in The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in
Context, 1750-1850, ed. Johan Heilbron, Lars Magnusson, and Bjorn Wittrock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999);
Theodore M. Porter, “Statistics and Statistical Methods,” in The Cambridge History of Science: The Mod-
ern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
27
These ecclesiastical records became a valuable source of data for the field of historical demography in the
twentieth century. George C. Alter et al., “Introduction: Longitudinal Analysis of Historical-Demographic
Data,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42, no. 4 (2012): 503–517.
28
Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France,
see n. 26; Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1988).

16
hold authority in the sciences and in politics, and the statistical table comparing values across
units of analysis — whether individuals, places, or occupations — became a commonplace of
scientific and political rhetoric.29 Theodore Porter has argued that quantitative reasoning,
through its claims to objectivity, attains particular authority over policy decisions in places
and at times where there is no universally-recognized decision-making authority and no
universally-shared system of values to guide such decisions.30
With the emergence of democratic governments in France, Britain, and the United States
around the turn of the nineteenth century, states established individual relationships with
citizens, in part through the practice of census taking, which in the United States also served
as the basis of legislative apportionment.31 As James C. Scott has argued, censuses are a
mechanism of surveillance through which states make citizens and subjects legible.32 He
maintains further that the production of legibility involves not only representing objects in
a stylized manner, such as with a map or a table, but also modifying those objects to better
match their stylized representation and thereby facilitate rule or manipulation.33
Counting people both reflects and constitutes relations of power between states and their
subjects or citizens. Conducting censuses — universal, individual, instantaneous, and pe-
riodic enumerations — requires the power to find people and compel them to submit to
enumeration, as will be discussed at greater length in Chapter Three. For that reason, cen-
suses are almost exclusively conducted by states. As nineteenth-century states increasingly
29
Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France,
see n. 26.
30
Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995).
31
Anderson, The American Census: A Social History, see n. 25; Glass, Numbering the People: The
Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain,
see n. 25; Bourdelais, see n. 25.
32
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Frankel points out that the publication of reports on vital
statistics also made citizens legible to one another as well as to the state: Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social
Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006); Hacking describes the publication of these reports as an “avalanche of
printed numbers”: Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society
(1982): 279–295.
33
Also see Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, see n. 28.

17
drew on national narratives to legitimize their sovereignty, censuses claimed to represent
nations as well as citizens, and the concept of population became inextricably intertwined
with ideas of nation, ethnicity, and race. Through the collection of vital statistics, states
and populations produce and stabilize one another: states provide the apparatus to count
citizens and subjects, who provide governments with legitimacy.
Quantification always involves classification, and the task of reducing the complex real-
ity of human identity and diversity generates categories that are socially constructed but
nonetheless have major material, political, and economic consequences.34 Censuses in multi-
national states and empires often classified people by nation, ethnicity, race, language, or
religion, facilitating the management of these differences as a strategy of rule, but also facili-
tating the formation of nationalist movements on the basis of these divisions.35 In states that
claim to be isomorphic with nations, censuses often record information about individuals us-
ing categories of social difference that have been politicized in that particular nation/state
formation, such as race and nativity in the United States, class in Great Britain, and religion
in India.36
Ian Hacking has demonstrated that classification in the human and social sciences affects
the objects that are being classified, in part because they are people and therefore interact
with the classification systems and in part because of the material, political, and economic
consequences that are attached to classification.37 Historians have suggested that the statis-
34
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1999); Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” see n. 32.
35
See, for example: Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and
Population Politics in Late Imperial Russia,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the
Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996).
36
Anderson, The American Census: A Social History, see n. 25; Andrew T. Miller, “Measuring Mulattoes:
The Changing U.S. Racial Regime in Census and Society” (“Annual Meeting of the Population Association of
America,” Washington, D.C., 1991); Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern
Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Clara Rodriguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census,
and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Paul Schor,
“Mobilising for Pure Prestige? Challenging Federal Census Ethnic Categories in the U.S.A. (1850-1940),”
International Social Science Journal 57, no. 183 (2005): 89–101; Sumit Guha, “The Politics of Identity and
Enumeration in India c. 1600-1990,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 1 (2003): 148–167.
37
Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” see n. 32; Ian Hacking, “Making Up

18
tical project of census taking, along with the bureaucratic surveillance it involved and the
numeracy it promoted, produced the self-governing subjects of democratic government.38
Censuses have both universalizing and particularizing tendencies — they universalize by
counting every individual, and particularize by associating individuals with social categories
that may reflect or translate into social, political, or economic inequality.
With regular, universal, and individual enumerations, the practice of census taking pro-
duced a new object of scientific and policy analysis: population.39 Alain Desrosières describes
population as a “statistical object” — an object that exists and can be acted upon because of
its measurement or representation.40 Desrosières uses the word “statistics” in its nineteenth-
century sense, meaning information (usually but not always quantitative) about states and
their citizens or subjects.41 Demography — like vital statistics — defines a population as
a group of people who are enumerated or registered by the same administrative apparatus
— for example, the U.S. population includes everyone counted by the U.S. Census and is
therefore delimited by a territory and an administrative unit that are coterminous; the U.S.
prison population includes all people counted by the Census of State and Federal Adult Cor-
rectional Facilities, and is therefore delimited by an administrative unit that does not map
onto a contiguous territory. Any group that can be aggregated or disaggregated from an
enumeration may also be considered a population. For example, the U.S. population may be
disaggregated into state, county, city, and even Census tract populations. If a census classifies
people by race — as, for example, the U.S. Census does — the population may be disag-
gregated by race, and these racially-defined subpopulations may be analyzed independently.
People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed.
Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986).
38
Nikolas Rose, “Governing By Numbers: Figuring Out Democracy,” Accounting, Organizations and
Society 16, no. 7 (1991): 673–692; Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in
Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood:
Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
39
Donnelly, see n. 26; Libby Schweber, Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France
and England, 1830-1885 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers:
Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
40
Desrosières, see n. 26.
41
Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986).

19
There is nothing natural about these subpopulations (just as there is nothing natural about
administratively-defined populations at national or subnational levels), as the disaggrega-
tion of subpopulations depends on census classification schemes. Similarly, the populations
defined by national censuses may be aggregated to form continental or global populations,
which may be analyzed as such. The field of demography that coalesced in the twentieth
century, because it relied on vital data collected by governments, further contributed to the
stabilization of population as a statistical object coterminous with states.
Population-level analysis depends on the calculation of rates: the number of events in
question occurring in a specified period of time divided by the total number of people at risk
of experiencing such an event.42 Rates calculated by nineteenth-century thinkers included
those of such vital events as birth and death as well as rates of such social and bureaucratic
phenomena as suicides and letters lost by the postal service. Many techniques used by
today’s demographers to calculate rates of vital events were developed in nineteenth-century
statistical offices, and historians of nineteenth-century population statistics have explored
their political uses in France and England during that period.43
Historians have examined the uptake of techniques of mortality analysis in the provision
of life insurance and annuities in North America and Western Europe from the seventeenth
century to the early twentieth century. While these practices initially treated death as a ran-
dom occurrence, by the nineteenth century the collection of population and mortality data
allowed providers to calibrate prices with probabilities of death in order to turn a profit.44
With mortality statistics, chance became something that could be measured, managed, and
profited from. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, life insurance companies also
contributed to the production and analysis of mortality data, and, prior to the establish-
ment of universal vital registration, constituted the major source of mortality data used for
42
Donnelly, see n. 26.
43
Schweber, see n. 39; Cole, see n. 39.
44
Lorraine Daston, “The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance 1650-1830,” in
The Probabilistic Revolution, ed. Lorenz Kruger, Lorraine Daston, and Michael Heidelberger (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1987); Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999).

20
scientific analysis. However, historians have also demonstrated that, despite their increas-
ing reliability on probability and mathematical statistics, insurance companies continued to
hedge their bets with individual medical examinations, and often used aggregate data to
value lives differentially by class or race.45
The calculation of time series of rates suggested to nineteenth-century analysts that
human and social activities might follow natural laws that could be discovered and ma-
nipulated probabilistically if not mechanistically.46 In recent decades, several historians have
addressed the history of probability and mathematical statistics. Lorraine Daston has exam-
ined the roots of probability mathematics in efforts to quantify uncertainty in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Europe.47 Hacking has explored the dual nature of the concept of
probability, which can refer to uncertainty resulting from either indeterminacy (as in the
toss of a coin before it lands) or limited knowledge (as in the toss of a coin after it lands
but before it is seen).48 He demonstrates that thinkers analyzing social statistics in the nine-
teenth century began to consider the a posteriori statistical regularities they encountered
as analogous to the a priori probabilities of mechanistically-determined phenomena.49 This
application of probability to statistics allowed for the aggregate-level prediction of social
phenomena that could not be predicted at the individual level because the underlying mech-
anisms were unknown.50 Alain Desrosières describes probabilistic-statistical reasoning and
argumentation as the “politics of large numbers” because it relies on numerous observations
to identify patterns and regularities.51 Hacking argues that analysts initially assumed that
statistical patterns resulted from real but unknown mechanistic causes, but demonstrates
45
Timothy Alborn, Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society 1800-1914 (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2009); Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical
Individual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
46
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
47
Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, see n. 28.
48
Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability,
Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
49
Hacking, The Taming of Chance, see n. 46.
50
Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability, Induc-
tion and Statistical Inference, see n. 48; Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, see n. 28.
51
Desrosières, see n. 26.

21
that, as the natural sciences also turned toward probabilistic analysis at the end of the nine-
teenth century, social scientists dispensed with the search for causes in a dual process he
describes as “the erosion of determinism” and “the taming of chance.”52
Historians of probability and statistics have demonstrated that these quantitative tools
were developed in the social context of their application, and were only later abstracted
into fields of mathematics.53 One particularly important domain for the development of the
statistical methods used by social scientists is eugenics — the science of improving the human
condition through selective breeding. Donald MacKenzie has demonstrated the origins of
mathematical statistics in efforts to identify and manipulate patterns of human heredity.54
Histories of eugenics and histories of demography acknowledge the importance of each to
the other, but tend to assume the stability and independence of these fields of thought.
Histories of national eugenics movements in Europe between the world wars demonstrate
that proponents of eugenics linked the rise of industrial poverty and growing threats to
geopolitical power (for France vis-à-vis Germany and for Britain in its empire) to declining
fertility, particularly among the professional middle classes.55 Interwar eugenics programs
were not limited to Europe and North America, and a small body of literature documents
their existence in Asia and Latin America as well.56 These studies have demonstrated that
52
Hacking, The Taming of Chance, see n. 46.
53
Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, see n. 28; Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking,
1820-1900, see n. 41; Donald A. MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The Social Construction of
Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Stephen M. Stigler, The History of
Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986);
Stephen M. Stigler, Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
54
MacKenzie, see n. 53.
55
Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-
Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); William H. Schneider, Quality
and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Allan C. Carlson, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: The Myrdals and the
Interwar Population Crisis (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1990); Karl Ittmann, “The Colonial Office and
the Population Question in the British Empire, 1918-62,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
27, no. 3 (1999): 55–81; Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Orlando:
Academic Press, 1985).
56
Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991); Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, The Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-
Japanese Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2002).

22
eugenics movements had strong support in the first half of the twentieth century, that this
support came from multiple political positions, and that it was particularly strong among
the professional middle classes.
Histories of eugenics credit demography with identifying declining fertility in the early
twentieth century and bringing it into the public view, but they also assume a prior stability
and authority for demography that elides the fact that it was — at that same interwar
moment — coming into being with the support of the eugenics movement’s financial and
social capital, as I will discuss in Chapters One and Two.57 Reciprocally, histories of interwar
demography examine the relationship between eugenics and demography during this period,
but assume that the eugenic influence was carefully cordoned off from population science,
and limited to the interwar period.58 For example, Hodgson argues that the influence of
eugenics on demography waned in the 1930s when “Nazi actions largely discredited the
eugenics movement in the public’s eye, and advances in genetics continued to distance the
movement from the scientific community.”59 Hodgson’s erroneous claim is bolstered by the
fact that much of the scholarship on the history of eugenics is limited to the period prior
to World War II. However, Daniel Kevles and Alexandra Stern have demonstrated that
eugenics continued well into the second half of the twentieth century.60 While some interwar
approaches continued — particularly the practice of eugenic sterilization in many states of
the U.S. — new ones appeared, including marriage counseling and medical genetics. Stern
also links eugenics in the twentieth century to conservation and environmental movements,
a connection I will address in Chapter Six. Garland Allen argues that eugenics transformed
into quantitative population control after World War II, and Connelly demonstrates that
national eugenics programs in the global south provided footholds and support for early
57
See, for example: Soloway, see n. 55; Schneider, see n. 55.
58
Dennis Hodgson, “The Ideological Origins of the Population Association of America,” Population and
Development Review 17, no. 1 (1991): 1–34; Edmund Ramsden, “Social Demography and Eugenics in the
Interwar United States,” Population and Development Review 29, no. 4 (2003): 547–593.
59
Hodgson, “The Ideological Origins of the Population Association of America,” see n. 58, 21.
60
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York:
Knopf, 1985); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

23
efforts at population control.61 Alison Bashford, however, argues that eugenics continued
alongside population control after World War II, a view this dissertation supports.62
The history of population quantification, probabilistic and statistical analysis, and the
development of such analysis in the fields of eugenics and insurance is a critical intellectual
context for the history of demography. Demographers continue to depend on vital statistics
collected by states and on analytic methods developed in eugenics and insurance, as will be
discussed at greater length in Chapters One and Two. Some of the scientists now identified
as early demographers worked in the insurance industry, and many prominent twentieth-
century demographers maintained close ties to the American Eugenics Society and other
eugenicist groups and movements throughout the period covered by this dissertation. Popu-
lation quantification and probabilistic-statistical analysis have also been crucial foundations
for the development of the human and social sciences more broadly in the twentieth century.
While the human and social sciences cannot be reduced to statistical analysis of population
data, population data form the denominator for many social, economic, and political in-
dices, and statistics have been endowed with the authority to make claims about people and
societies. The following section turns to the historical literature on the human and social
sciences in the United States.

History of the Human and Social Sciences

Histories of the human and social sciences in the United States typically focus on one of
three periods: the second half of the nineteenth century, when thinkers began to consider
the possibility of scientific approaches to the emerging problems of industrial society; the
first half of the twentieth century, which saw the institutional separation of social science
and social reform; and the second half of the twentieth century, when the U.S. government
began to fund the social sciences and to enlist social scientists in domestic governance and
61
Garland Allen, “Old Wine in New Bottles: From Eugenics to Population Control in the Work of Raymond
Pearl,” in The Expansion of American Biology, ed. Keith R. Benson, Jane Maienschein, and Ronald Rainger
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Connelly, see n. 8.
62
Bashford, see n. 10.

24
international intervention projects.
Scholars who treat the history of the human and social sciences in the second half of the
nineteenth century describe social thought as a response to modernity and its new complex
form of society in which individuals interact with and rely on strangers on a larger scale than
ever before.63 By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become apparent to observers that
modern urban industrial society promoted social inequality. Enormous wealth abutted abject
poverty, which was accompanied by misery and strife. Daniel Rodgers has demonstrated that
the modern urban industrial world at the turn of the twentieth century was a transatlantic
one, with international trade linking North America and Western Europe. On both sides
of the Atlantic, social thinkers hoped that, by investigating the modern world, they could
discover ways to temper its excesses, defuse class conflict, and ameliorate poverty and its
sequelae without disrupting economic growth.64 Dorothy Ross argues that, while European
social scientists focused on socioeconomic inequality as a major social problematic, American
social scientists deferred class analysis to analysis of race and ethnicity, explaining social
inequality in uniquely American terms that denied the need for intervention into the economy
or social structure itself.65
Rodgers points out that this transatlantic world of social reform was also the crucible for
the formation of the modern social science disciplines.66 Many late-nineteenth century U.S.
thinkers traveled to Germany for graduate study in the social sciences (mainly economics),
laying the foundation for the modern American university system, which combined teaching
and research.67 Histories of the human and social sciences in the first half of the twentieth
63
Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Asso-
ciation and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Robert
C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1987); Edward Shils, “The Order of Learning in the United States: The
Ascendancy of the University,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, ed. A.
Oleson and J. Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
64
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap, 1998).
65
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
66
Rodgers, see n. 64.
67
A. Oleson and J. Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); J. Heilbron, “A Regime of Disciplines: Toward a Historical Sociology
of Disciplinary Knowledge,” in The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age,

25
century have demonstrated that, as these new disciplines split from one another and got
institutionalized in new university departments, their practitioners distinguished their own
work from social reform, which also professionalized in such fields as social work during the
same period.68 The division between social science and social reform was a gendered one, with
women largely being excluded from the emerging social sciences and marginalized in the new
professional schools and in public administration.69 Histories of the human and social sciences
during the first half of the twentieth century have demonstrated that the institutionalization
of these new disciplines involved both the definition of the boundaries of the field — including
both the boundaries between disciplines and the boundary between knowledge production
and administration, reform, or treatment — and the guarding of those boundaries through
the development of training and licensing programs.70 These credentialing processes explicitly
excluded amateurs, but also often tacitly excluded women and non-white scholars.71
Scholars who have paid particular attention to the funding of the human and social sci-
ences in the first half of the twentieth century have complicated the narrative of the separa-
tion between social science and social reform by pointing out that philanthropic foundations
were the major source of funding for the human and social sciences during this period. His-
torians have demonstrated that philanthropic organizations funded social science research in
order to inform charity programs but, with this funding, exercised control over the scope,
content, and methods of social science, and over the ways in which poverty and related so-
cial problems would be understood and addressed.72 The organizations that funded social
ed. C. Camic and H. Joas (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
68
For the history of social work, see Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers
and the Professionaliation of Social Work, 1890-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
69
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture,
1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Ellen F. Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social
Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
70
Heilbron, see n. 67.
71
Michael Kennedy and Miguel A. Centeno, “Internationalism and Global Transformations in American
Sociology,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007).
72
Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Network in Cold War America
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Alice O’Connor, Social Science for What? Philanthropy
and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007);
Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United

26
science research promoted new standards of objectivity that eschewed normative approaches
to poverty and embraced quantitative methods.73 By upholding these new definitions of ob-
jectivity, the organizations that funded social science research encouraged social scientists
to take on the role of service intellectual, providing policy makers with information rather
than recommendations.74
Histories of the human and social sciences during the second half of the twentieth century
emphasize the alliance between the social sciences and the U.S. government during World
War II and the Cold War. These works have demonstrated that, during World War II,
military strategists and policy makers began to view the psychological sciences as critical
to the war effort, and to invest in research accordingly.75 During the Cold War, the U.S.
government began to rely even more heavily on the work of human and social scientists —
including sociologists, political scientists, and economists as well as psychologists — both
to maintain political consent in the U.S. and to promote U.S. hegemony abroad.76 Studies
of this period have demonstrated the imbrication of government and universities in the
pursuit of social science, with government funding academic research and academic scientists
working on government contracts, though the large philanthropic foundations continued to
promote social science, with the Ford Foundation establishing the area studies programs of
the Cold War period.77 Grants from government and foundations continued to promote the
States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Ellen Condliffe
Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Mid-
dletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989); Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012); Judith Sealander, Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philan-
thropy and the Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
73
O’Connor, Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside
Up, see n. 72; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, see n. 65.
74
Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate Over Objectivity and Purpose,
1918-1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
75
Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995).
76
Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Sonja M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold
War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Mark Solovey and
Hamilton Cravens, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human
Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Solovey, see n. 72.
77
For academics working on government contract, see Rohde, see n. 76; for the Ford Foundation, see

27
service intellectual model of scholarship, though Joy Rohde has demonstrated that social
scientists working on government contracts took a variety of approaches to the question of
normativity in their work.78 These funding sources also continued to promote the use of
quantitative methods, which remained nearly hegemonic in the social sciences immediately
following World War II.79 However, histories of the human and social sciences demonstrate
that many of these disciplines suffered serious crises of authority in the late 1960s and early
1970s, stemming both from critiques of the involvement of the Vietnam War government in
social science research and from critiques of the exclusivity of the social sciences in terms of
race, class, gender, and ethnicity, all of which served to maintain the existing social order.80
The history of demography fits well within this twentieth-century narrative of the human
and social sciences, and adds some new elements to it. Existing histories of the human and
social sciences assume that it was obvious in advance which topics would be the subjects
of those sciences and how disciplines would be divided from one another.81 As an interdis-
ciplinary field of inquiry lying between the human/social and natural sciences, demography
provides an opportunity to examine the historical process of boundary formation between
these fields. Although many historians discuss the influence of biology, particularly evolu-
tion, on the methods and theories of the social sciences,82 it is only in the realm of human
population projection that scholars have discussed territorial skirmishes between biology and
Solovey, see n. 72.
78
Rohde, see n. 76.
79
George Steinmetz, “American Sociology Before and After World War II: The (Temporary) Settling of a
Disciplinary Field,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007); Calhoun and VanAntwerpen question this view, suggesting that this hegemony was constructed
after its supposed demise by its challengers in the 1960s and 1970s, who cast themselves in contrast to it. Craig
Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, “Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Hierarchy: ‘Mainstream’ Sociology and
its Challengers,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007).
80
Steinmetz, see n. 79; Calhoun and VanAntwerpen, see n. 79.
81
See, for example: Bannister, see n. 63; Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the
Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975);
Haskell, see n. 63; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, see n. 65.
82
See, for example: Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism
in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism
in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997); Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and
Men (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).

28
sociology, a topic this dissertation takes up in Chapters One and Two.83 Attention to the role
of biology in the coalescence of demography between the world wars (Chapter One) and at-
tention to the role of biologists in the establishment of demography’s disciplinary institutions
(Chapter Two) disrupts both the continuity demographers typically assume between their
field and nineteenth-century vital statistics and the assumption that demography was nat-
urally and obviously a social science.84 At the same time, the establishment of demography
between the wars is an often-overlooked aspect of social scientists’ embrace of quantitative
methods and performance of objectivity in that period.
Because demography remained an interdiscipline, rather than becoming a discipline of its
own or being absorbed into an existing discipline, it provides another example of what Joel
Isaac has termed the “interstitial academy” — the highly productive interdisciplinary spaces
between and outside of university departments.85 As I will discuss in Chapters Two and
Five, demography’s location between rather than within university departments made the
field particularly vulnerable to influence from external funding agencies. Demography also
provides an important perspective on the history of funding for the human and social sciences
after World War II, when the U.S. government replaced private philanthropic foundations as
the major benefactor of these fields. I demonstrate in Chapters Four through Six that the
philanthropic foundations themselves promoted government investment in the human and
social sciences, and in this way directly influenced policy.
Locating the origins of demography as a policy-oriented science of human population with
roots in vital statistics, life insurance, public health, birth control, eugenics, biology, and the
social sciences between the world wars offers a new perspective on the field that elucidates
83
Edmund Ramsden, “Carving Up Population Science: Demography and the Controversy Over the ‘Bio-
logical Law’ of Population Growth,” Social Studies of Science 32 (2002): 857–899; Sharon Kingsland, “The
Refractory Model: The Logistic Curve and the History of Population Ecology,” Quarterly Review of Biology
57, no. 1 (1982): 29–52.
84
See, for example: Frank W. Notestein, “Demography in the United States: A Partial Account of the
Development of the Field,” Population and Development Review (1982): 651–687; Hodgson, “The Ideological
Origins of the Population Association of America,” see n. 58.
85
Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 2012).

29
its mutual constitution with population politics and projects of population engineering both
before and after World War II. It challenges the accepted periodization of demography by
disrupting the assumed continuity between demography and vital statistics and by revealing
continuity in demography’s policy orientation across the assumed rupture of World War II.
This dissertation traces the history of demography as a policy science from its coalescence
between the world wars — when it drew support from a range of population-oriented political
projects, as will be described in Chapter One — to the abandonment of global population
control as an element of U.S. foreign policy in 1984, as described in Chapter Seven. It details
the history of population science during a period when powerful individuals and institutions
attributed many of the world’s problems — including poverty, industrial and geopolitical
conflict, resource depletion, and ecosystem degradation — to population dynamics, and
supported and relied on demography as a science that could inform and legitimize population
interventions.

0.2.2 Geographical Scope

The history of demography and population politics presented in this dissertation is both a
U.S. history and a global history, examining the activities of U.S.-based population science
and politics on the global stage. This geographical scope is not arbitrary. In the twenti-
eth century, the United States was a major center of worldwide population research and
intervention. As Matthew Connelly has demonstrated, U.S. actors

were the first to pursue policies intended to shape world population. They played
a leading role in institutionalizing both the science of demography and the po-
litical strategy of family planning, at the same time mentoring protégés around
the world. They were disproportionately represented in the international and
nongovernmental organizations that created standardized population control pro-
grams, which were largely funded by public and private sources in the United
States.86
86
Connelly, see n. 8, 11.

30
Globally, more funding for both demography and population control has come from the
United States than from any other country. This dissertation follows U.S.-based actors
around the world as they negotiated the population politics of fascist Europe between the
world wars, and as they turned their attention to decolonizing countries after World War
II, marshaling population analysis and intervention to keep those countries aligned with
the United States in an increasingly polarized Cold War world. It is a global history not
only because it deals with the world as a whole but also because it examines the role that
population and its science and politics played in twentieth-century world history, from the
Great Depression through World War II, the Cold War, and decolonization.87
Actors in this story include individuals, institutions, publications, and populations, ag-
gregated at a variety of levels. Most frequently, I refer to specific individuals or institutions,
or to the governments or populations of specific countries. At times, I aggregate these actors
further. I use the phrase “the population establishment” to refer to the network of scien-
tific, philanthropic, and governmental institutions and individuals involved in defining and
solving “population problems” worldwide. Although this phrase is sometimes attributed to
Matthew Connelly, it has been used by those critical of population control since at least
1981.88 I also aggregate countries into continents and into two socioeconomic and political
groups, which I term the “global north” and the “global south.”
Broadly, the “global north” refers to the countries that form the “core” of the global
economy (in a world-systems sense), into which the world’s materials and wealth flow as
a result of the imperial relationships established between these countries and the rest of
the world beginning in the fifteenth century.89 In general, these countries are located above
30◦ north latitude, with the notable exceptions of Australia and New Zealand, countries of
large-scale European settlement in the southern hemisphere. The countries of the global
87
At present, this statement is more aspirational than descriptive, but the book will amplify the world-
historical element of the story.
88
The earliest reference I could find is Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981).
89
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

31
north — particularly the U.K., the U.S., Australia, and Canada — have large coal deposits,
which fueled (but did not overdetermine) industrialization, while the countries of the global
south have the climatic conditions necessary to produce many industrial raw materials, such
as cotton, jute, oil, and rubber.90 In general, the countries of the global north are those that
colonized territory in the global south or otherwise benefited economically and politically
from the imperial system that lasted from the late fifteenth century to the mid twentieth cen-
tury. The countries of the global south are those that were colonized or otherwise politically
and economically dominated and compelled to produce the primary materials of industry —
the “periphery” of the world-systems model.91 Such a divide is clearly reductive, and masks
important differences both between and within countries in these categories. However, the
north/south classification is less anachronistic than some of its alternatives. These alterna-
tives include the “three worlds” of the Cold War — the First (capitalist) World, the Second
(communist) World, and the Third (nonaligned) World — and the more/less developed cat-
egories employed by the United Nations and other development organizations, which rely
on a concept of development that emerged only after World War II and elide the history of
imperialism that shaped the very categories of “developed” and “underdeveloped” or “devel-
oping.”92 In contrast, the terms “global north” and “global south” capture the inequalities
between these two categories that have persisted across the colonial/postcolonial rupture,
and emphasize the environmental differences that contributed to the production of political
and socioeconomic differences.
90
China also had large coal deposits, but lacked the access to internal waterways that would have made
their exploitation profitable. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New
York: Verso, 2011).
91
Although the countries of Central and South America established independence from colonial rule in
the nineteenth century, I (and others) classify them into the category of global south because they remained
under the political and economic sway of the United States.
92
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995); Arturo Escobar, “Power and Visibility: Development and the Invention
and Management of the Third World,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 4 (1988): 428–443.

32
0.3 Sources

I have pieced this story together mainly through close reading of evidence gathered from
the archival records, publications, and grey literature (official but unpublished documents
produced in government, academia, non-governmental organizations, and industry) of de-
mographers and their patrons and clients, as well as their interlocutors and antagonists, over
the twentieth century. I conducted oral history interviews with prominent living demog-
raphers, utilized publicly-available transcripts of oral history interviews with demographers
and other key actors carried out by others, and analyzed data and documentation from fer-
tility surveys conducted in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Taiwan in the 1950s and
1960s.
Archival research for this project took me to the Hoover Institution (papers of demog-
rapher Kingsley Davis and U.S. Representative Paul “Pete” McCloskey Jr.), the Stanford
University Archives (papers of biologist Paul Ehrlich and his organization Zero Population
Growth), the American Philosophical Society (papers of biologist Raymond Pearl and eu-
genicist Frederick Osborn and records of the International Union for the Scientific Investiga-
tion of Population Problems and the American Eugenics Society), the Princeton University
Archives (papers of demographers Frank Notestein, Ansley Coale, and Alfred Lotka; papers
of philanthropist Hugh Moore; records of the Wilson School for Public and International
Affairs), the United Nations archives, the Yale University Archives (records of the Milbank
Memorial Fund), and the Rockefeller Archive Center (papers of John D. Rockefeller III and
records of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Population Council). These archival materials
allowed me to identify personal and professional networks of people and institutions, as well
as the links between demographers and their patrons and clients. It also offered perspectives
of the relevant actors on major events and publications.
Published sources, including scholarly journals, academic, technical, and popular books,
and the mass media, provided me with access to the public face of demography and pop-

33
ulation politics, allowing me to identify the circulation of scholarly and popular narratives
about population growth and its causes and consequences. Published sources also allowed
me to analyze narratives that were adjacent or antagonistic to those produced by demog-
raphers and their patrons and clients, placing demography into broader intellectual and
political contexts. JSTOR has given me access to the full text of all articles (as text files)
from three major English-language demography journals — Population Studies, Demogra-
phy, and Population and Development Review — from their establishment through 2010,
facilitating the use of topic modeling (latent dirichlet allocation) to examine and quantify
the content of these journals over time.93 I also used metadata for population-related ar-
ticles from these journals and 38 others to map the conceptual terrain of demography and
its relationship to its neighboring fields.94 These methods are discussed in greater detail at
[Link]
Many demographers were kind enough to let me interview them for the oral history com-
ponent of this project. I conducted interviews with Douglas Massey (by email), John Knodel,
Ronald Lee, Richard Easterlin, James Trussell, Karen Hardee, and Gretchen Condran in 2012
and with Avery “Pete” Guest (by telephone) in 2014. As demographers have long had a ma-
jor role in preserving and writing the history of their discipline, the Population Association
of America (PAA) has a history committee that maintains a website with information about
the history of the PAA and transcripts of interviews that comprise the PAA Oral History
Project and include many of the PAA’s presidents from 1947 to 2013.95 An additional source
of oral history transcripts for this project was the Population and Reproductive Health Oral
History Project in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.96
Censuses and surveys are some of the most important tools of demographic research. As
93
For an accessible discussion of latent dirichlet allocation, see [Link]
09/29/the-lda-buffet-is-now-open-or-latent-dirichlet-allocation-for-english-majors/.
More information about the method and corpus, as well as the results of the topic modeling, are given at
[Link]
94
For methods, corpus, and results, see [Link]
html.
95
[Link]
96
[Link]

34
the dissertation will discuss, demographers have utilized survey methods to conduct research
into the correlates of fertility in the United States since the 1940s, and worldwide since the
1960s. Scholars have demonstrated that these fertility surveys both observed and intervened
in fertility behavior. Many surveys intended not only to measure and evaluate attitudes and
behavior related to fertility, but also to shape attitudes and behavior, and often included
an explicit family planning component.97 These surveys also played an important role in
shaping policy and public opinion surrounding family planning programs.98 Raw data and
documentation are publicly available for some of these surveys through the Inter-university
Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.99 When avail-
able, I draw on survey documentation to examine how demographers studied and attempted
to shape individual attitudes and behavior related to childbearing and contraception, and
analyze survey data to discover the findings of this research independently of the associated
publications.

0.4 Overview

Chapter One begins with a discussion of population thought and accounting in Western
Europe and North America from the eighteenth century to 1920, when my story begins. I
demonstrate that, in 1920, there was no such thing as population science and nobody called
himself a population scientist or demographer. Nonetheless, population had taken a central
role in three political movements — birth control legalization, immigration restriction, and
eugenics — each of which called on visions of future population size and/or composition to
legitimize its agenda. Scientists in a number of fields — including biology, statistics, and
sociology — who were either sympathetic or antagonistic to these movements began to de-
97
Mahmood Mamdani, The Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste, and Class in an Indian Village
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); Agnes Riedmann, Science that Colonizes: A Critique of Fertility
Studies in Africa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
98
Saul Halfon, The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women’s Empowerment, and Regime Change
in Population Policy (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007).
99
[Link]

35
velop systematic methods of analyzing population and predicting its future growth or decline,
which they and others marshaled in support of their political positions. In this chapter, I
trace two competing theories of population growth that were articulated in the 1920s — the
logistic law of population growth, which understood populations as organisms whose growth
was determined by biological factors, and demographic transition theory, which understood
populations as aggregates of individuals whose growth was determined by social factors —
and two competing methods of population projection (estimates of future population size
and/or structure) that corresponded to these theories of growth. I argue that scientific un-
derstandings of population growth were multiple and contradictory: those who asserted their
expertise disagreed over whether populations in North America and Western Europe were
growing or declining, and over which trend was preferable.
Chapter Two traces the institutional history of demography between the world wars,
focusing on the United States, but with brief discussions of similar developments in the
U.K. and the relationship between demography and the politics of population in Western
Europe in the 1930s. I document demography’s acquisition of patrons and clients and their
role in establishing and providing legitimacy to the new interdisciplinary field as it acquired
the trappings of an academic discipline — professional associations, journals, academic re-
search centers, and training programs. I argue that, as demographers and their patrons —
philanthropic foundations — established these institutions, and as demography’s clients —
governments and eugenics societies — began to incorporate demographers and their research
into their own programs and projects, all three types of actors negotiated the boundary be-
tween the science and politics of population. As they did so, they excluded the politics of
birth control and distinguished between mainstream eugenics — which was increasingly dis-
credited through its association with Nazi population policies — and what historians have
termed “reform” or (supposedly) non-racist eugenics, keeping the latter inside and the for-
mer outside the boundaries of population science. I argue that the small size of the field and
the close working and interpersonal relationships between demographers and their patrons

36
and clients gave patrons and clients a substantial degree of influence over the content of the
new interdisciplinary field of demography.
Chapter Three demonstrates that, during and after World War II, U.S.-based demogra-
phers expanded the ambit of their field to include population worldwide. A major catalyst
for this expansion was the postwar establishment of the United Nations and the ambitions
of its founders toward global governance and global socioeconomic development, a new con-
cept made possible by the emergence of national economies as sociotechnical objects.100 U.N.
delegates saw the collection of global population data and production of global population
projections as an important basis for planning, but quickly found that the requisite data were
not available for much of the world, particularly the global south. Since the U.N. had nei-
ther the resources nor the authority to carry out a global census, it provided member states
with technical assistance in establishing systems of enumeration and vital registration, and
supported efforts of academic demographers to develop methods of estimating the detailed
population data required to make projections from sparse information. These methods re-
lied on demographic transition theory, which — at the same moment — faced challenges
from two new population trends: mortality decline in the global south in the absence of
“modernization” and fertility increase in the global north in conjunction with the spread of
birth control. I argue that these challenges to demographic transition theory, combined with
the difficulty of collecting and collating data from the global south, amounted to a crisis of
legitimacy for the new field of demography.
Chapter Four examines how demography overcame this crisis of legitimacy by adapting
demographic transition theory to complement modernization theory and support the emerg-
ing economic discourse of overpopulation. With this adaptation, demography acquired new
patrons — the powerful Rockefeller and Ford Foundations — and new clients — lobbyists for
population control in the global south as a component of U.S. foreign policy and nongovern-
100
See, for example: Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, see n. 90; Daniel
Hirshman and Isaac Ariail Reed, “Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology,” Sociological Theory 32,
no. 4 (2014): 259–282.

37
mental organizations that provided and supported family planning services in the global
south, such as the Population Council, established by John D. Rockefeller III in 1952. These
new patrons and clients saw in demography the solution to their anxiety that the rapid
growth of poor and disaffected populations in the global south would disrupt U.S. economic
and military activities by fueling political unrest, particularly anti-colonial nationalism and
communist revolution. The economic overpopulation discourse relied on the new concept of
national economies as something that could be measured and expanded, posing population
growth as a barrier to economic development, and the dissemination of family planning as a
stimulus to economic growth. As economic development in the global south became a com-
ponent of U.S. Cold War strategy, so too did population control.101 This chapter explores the
role of demography and its patrons and clients in the emergence and popularization of the
economic discourse of overpopulation, tracing a critical study on the relationship between
population growth and economic development in India from grant, to research, to scholarly
publication, to the mass media, and finally to U.S. foreign policy.
Chapter Five documents the influence of the economic overpopulation discourse on the
structure and content of academic demography in the United States and the global south.
During the 1960s, the Ford Foundation and the Population Council funded the establish-
ment of population research centers at universities in the U.S. and the global south, bringing
statisticians and demographers from the global south to U.S. universities for training. I
argue that, to meet the needs of patrons and clients, demographers focused their field nar-
rowly around research on the individual correlates of fertility, rather than the relationship
between fertility and economic development or well-being. Many of these studies included
direct fertility interventions in the global south and among poor and nonwhite Americans.
I demonstrate that concern about population growth among U.S. philanthropists generated
funding for the development of new systemic contraceptives that worked directly on women’s
101
For economic development and foreign aid as a U.S. Cold War strategy, see Amanda Kay McVety,
Enlightened Aid: U.S. Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012).

38
bodies and increased the power of medical authorities over individual childbearing decisions.
This chapter also documents the skepticism of some demographers that the voluntary adop-
tion of family planning could effectively reduce fertility, and the proposals they made for
structural alternatives that would change the social status of women and childbearing. I
argue that these debates over the means of fertility reduction signaled the acceptance by
demographers that high fertility was detrimental to economic development and needed to be
stemmed.
Chapter Six focuses on the domestic politics of population in the United States, exam-
ining the environmental discourse of overpopulation that grew in strength in the late 1960s,
promoted by some of the same interests described in Chapter Four and by some new inter-
ests. This discourse, which posed population growth as a threat to resource conservation and
environmental integrity worldwide, shifted the geographic focus of concern about population
growth from the global south to the global north, where per-capita rates of resource use
and pollution were much higher. I argue that, as the U.S. became more politically divided
toward the end of the 1960s, concern for the environment galvanized support on the left
wing of the political spectrum for coercive population control measures in both the U.S.
and abroad (including calls for new restrictions on immigration to the U.S., which had been
opened by the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965), while continued concern with
the threat of communism and urban unrest generated support on the right for the legaliza-
tion of abortion and the provision of contraceptives worldwide. This chapter offers a new
perspective on what Thomas Robertson calls “environmental Malthusianism” by document-
ing the distinction between the environmental and economic overpopulation discourses and
the strong criticism of the environmental overpopulation discourse by demographers and
some of their patrons, notably the Population Council. These critics challenged the direct
relationship between population growth and environmental degradation proposed by the en-
vironmental overpopulation discourse, and cautioned that population control movements in
the global north diverted attention and resources from population control programs in the

39
global south, which demographers and their patrons continued to promote as necessary for
economic development.
Chapter Seven returns the focus to the global scene. It begins at the height of support
worldwide for the economic discourse of overpopulation and population control programs in
the global south, when the president of the Population Council engineered the Council’s nom-
ination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1972. It then traces critiques of the economic overpop-
ulation discourse, which emerged among demographers in Latin America and demography
graduate students in the U.S., and culminated in the rejection by governments in the global
south of population control as a vehicle for economic development at the 1974 U.N. World
Population Conference. These critiques of the economic overpopulation discourse came from
the political left and precipitated important changes in personnel and strategy within the
major organizations that funded demography research and population control, notably the
Ford Foundation and the Population Council. I demonstrate that, in addition to these in-
stitutional changes, many of the individuals involved in the establishment of demography
and its relationship to the economic discourse of overpopulation — including demographers,
patrons, and clients — died or retired in the decade following the 1974 meeting, opening new
possibilities for research in the field and its relationship to population politics. I also docu-
ment a right-wing critique of the economic discourse of overpopulation that emerged after
the 1974 meeting at the intersection of neoliberalism and evangelical Christianity. The rise
of these ideologies was reflected in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, who used the 1984
U.N. World Population Conference as a platform from which to announce that population
growth in the global south would no longer be a factor in U.S. foreign policy and that the
U.S. government would no longer fund organizations that performed or counseled abortion
anywhere in the world. I argue that this announcement signaled the end of demography’s
policy orientation, opening the field to new topics, methods, and political alignments.
This dissertation offers a new history of the science of demography from its establishment
as an academic field of inquiry between the world wars to the abandonment of population

40
control as a component of U.S. foreign policy in 1984. I argue that this interdisciplinary
science emerged in tandem with the population-oriented politics of birth control legaliza-
tion, immigration, and eugenics in Western Europe and North America. Demographers
themselves saw their work intervening in these debates, as did the patrons and clients of de-
mographic research, who supported and legitimized the institutionalization of demography
in academia and government in the U.S. and exerted considerable influence on the content
of its research. By demonstrating the policy orientation of interwar demography, I disrupt
the claim of demographers that their field became a policy science only after World War
II. Nonetheless, I demonstrate the emergence of two new and distinct political discourses of
overpopulation after World War II, challenging the characterization by historians of postwar
population thought as relatively homogeneous and continuous with earlier Malthusian the-
ory. While other scholars have assumed that demography formed an unambiguous scientific
basis for postwar population interventions, I argue that demography too was shaped by those
interventions through the influence of the field’s patrons and clients on its structure, content,
and public communication. Contextualizing demography in this way is critical, given the
numerous and fundamental uses of demographic data and analyses: as a measure of the
human strength of nations, as the denominator for per-capita social and economic indices,
as an input to other scientific models, as a basis for planning, and as a justification for policy
intervention into the most intimate realms of human life.

41
 Chapter 1
Population Problems, Models, and
Politics
In 1927, American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger organized an international con-
ference for population science in Geneva, drawing participants from Europe, the Americas,
and Asia. At the conference, they discussed population trends, their causes and conse-
quences, and methods of measuring and predicting them. In Global Population: History,
Geopolitics, and Life on Earth, historian Alison Bashford draws a direct line from Thomas
Robert Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population to the 1927 conference, and
from there to the United Nations World Population Year, celebrated in 1974, presenting all
three moments as reflective of awareness of the danger posed by world population growth to
human survival.1 In this chapter, I disrupt that continuous line, arguing that, prior to World
War II, there was no consensus among scientists or policy makers that population growth,
in and of itself, posed a threat to human survival. Rather, I contend that scientists and
policy makers held a variety of ideas about population. I argue further that population was
a deeply political issue, and that the politics of population inflected the various scientific
forms of population analysis that emerged between the wars and are the topic of this chapter.
When Sanger proposed the 1927 conference, population science did not exist as a coherent
field of inquiry and few would have considered themselves population scientists. There was
no consensus about whether human population should be a topic for analysis in the natural
sciences or the social sciences. Over the previous 150 years, population had become an
object of analysis in two non-academic domains in North America and Western Europe: in
government statistical offices, which took censuses and analyzed population change; and in
1
Bashford, see n. 10, 2.

42
private insurance companies, which turned a profit from the analysis of mortality. Population
also served important theoretical functions in economic and biological thought, but had only
just begun to become an object of analysis in those fields at the beginning of the twentieth
century. In the 1920s, scientific analysis of population — other than for purposes of business
and governance — was motivated by three political concerns of the world’s elite: birth
control legalization, immigration, and eugenics. In that decade, scientists in a variety of
fields — including statistics, biology, economics, and sociology — developed new measures
of population growth, each demonstrating a looming “population problem” that mapped onto
these political concerns. Advocates and opponents of birth control legalization, immigration
restriction, and eugenics who were not themselves scientists drew on the work of those
“population scientists” whose analysis best validated their program.
In general, advocates for these programs cited them as solutions to a future “population
problem” — either overpopulation or population degeneration — while opponents cited them
as causes of a future “population problem” — either depopulation or population degenera-
tion. The phrase “the population problem” gained traction between the wars, but it did not
have a stable referent. Those who used the phrase attached it to various and contradictory
versions of “the population problem,” corresponding to their political sympathies. Because
these were problems of the future rather than problems of the present, their advocates and
opponents relied heavily on population projections — estimates of future population size
and structure — to argue for or against these programs. However, in 1920, there was no
agreed-upon method of projecting future population. Projection was not a new concept, but
had in the past been performed by a range of actors for various reasons, and had generally
used methods specific to the population in question and the reason for its projection.2 During
the 1920s, men who would later be recognized as the founders of the new field of population
science — or demography, as its practitioners would generally call it by the end of the 1930s
— developed methods of projecting future population and comparing population growth and
2
For a review of population projections prior to 1920, see George Mair, “Population Projection: The
State of an Art” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1957).

43
decline that met the needs of these political programs. Some of the methods developed in
the 1920s are now staples of demography textbooks.
In this chapter, I offer a brief history of population thought and analysis from the late
eighteenth century to the early twentieth, connecting population thought and analysis to
the three prominent issues in early-twentieth-century population politics: birth control, im-
migration, and eugenics. I then introduce some of the men who, by the early 1930s, would
identify themselves and each other as population scientists, along with the methods they de-
veloped and the political debates in which they participated. These men include Raymond
Pearl and Lowell Reed, biologists at Johns Hopkins University who developed the logistic
law of population and the logistic projection method; Alfred Lotka and Louis Dublin, statis-
ticians at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who developed the intrinsic rate of
natural increase; economist Robert Kuczynski, who developed the net reproduction rate;
and Pascal K. Whelpton and Warren S. Thompson, who developed the cohort component
projection method and demographic transition theory. I examine the particular concept of
population and its relationship to social, political, economic, and biological variables artic-
ulated by each of those methods and theories, and the ways in which they intervened in
political debates. I argue that these methods and theories were suffused with the politics
that motivated their development, and that they shaped how scientists and policy makers
would understand population and population change for the rest of the century.
This chapter demonstrates that scientific and political views of population prior to World
War II were multiple and multivalent. What would become standard measures of popula-
tion and population change were only just being developed, and different measures offered
divergent predictions about the future course of population. Prior to World War II, scien-
tists differed over whether the world’s population and the populations of specific countries
in North America and Western Europe were growing steadily or on the verge of decline, and
disagreed over which future was preferable.

44
1.1 The Malthusian Legacy: Population Thought and
Politics Before the Twentieth Century

Present-day demographers often locate the beginning of their science in the 1798 publication
of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, which signaled a shift in the value ac-
corded to population growth in Western Europe. Previously, European rulers and thinkers
had viewed population and its growth as almost unqualified goods. Populations — de-
fined administratively and territorially — belonged to sovereigns, and were resources that
sovereigns could extract in the form of labor and military service or extract from in the form
of taxation. Sovereigns had little obligation to feed or otherwise maintain their subjects,
though subjects generally had some kind of claim to land for subsistence purposes. Mercan-
tilism, the leading political-economic theory of the early modern period, sought to increase
state wealth as the basis of national security and international power. Mercantilists viewed
large populations as both sign and source of strong and wealthy states, and population
growth as a fuel for economic growth and dynamism.3 Political theorists interpreted pop-
ulation growth as a sign of effective government. Malthus’s Essay introduced ambivalence
into scientific and political understandings of population growth, suggesting that it could
be a liability as well as an asset. Political theorists and heads of state generally continued
to view population growth as a source of national and military strength, though economists
and formulators of domestic policy readily adopted Malthus’s law of population to explain
individual poverty. Malthusian theory inspired Darwin’s theory of natural selection and
supported its application to human social structures. Together, Malthusianism and Social
Darwinism naturalized socioeconomic inequality in the democratic nineteenth-century soci-
eties of North America and Western Europe. This section details these developments and
traces new forms of Malthusianism and Social Darwinism — neo-Malthusianism and eugen-
ics — that emerged on both sides of the Atlantic during the Progressive Era at the turn of
3
Yaukey, Anderton, and Lundquist, see n. 7.

45
the twentieth century.4

1.1.1 Population Accounting: Political Arithmetic and Censuses

Before the nineteenth century, Western European rulers rarely counted their subjects di-
rectly. Churches kept records of births, marriages, and deaths, and states counted whatever
served as the basis of taxation, often hearths, windows, or grain production.5 Population
accountants, known as political arithmeticians, developed mathematical methods for esti-
mating the size of total, taxable, and military-eligible populations from whatever records
or figures were available to them, often using methods developed by scientists outside of
government.6 Political arithmeticians, such as John Graunt and William Petty, developed
the concept of the life table, which quantifies the probability of dying at any given age.
Life tables served as the basis for annuities, an important source of state income in Early
Modern Europe, and for the nascent insurance industry.7 As early modern European rulers
considered population a major source of state wealth and military power, population data
were often maintained as closely guarded state secrets.8
By the end of the eighteenth century, new understandings of population dynamics began
to unsettle the perceived reliability of common methods for estimating population. Early po-
litical arithmetic depended on the assumption of a constant relationship between the number
of births or deaths and total population — that is, constant crude death rates (deaths per
thousand people) and crude birth rates (births per thousand people) — but it had become
apparent that fertility and mortality rates varied across time and space.9 Political arithmeti-
cians therefore began to treat the relationship between births or deaths and total population
4
For a transatlantic analysis of the Progressive Era, see Rodgers, see n. 64.
5
Glass, Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of
Census and Vital Statistics in Britain, see n. 25.
6
Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France,
see n. 26.
7
Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, see n. 28.
8
Bourdelais, see n. 25, 99.
9
Cole, see n. 39.

46
as an empirical question, rather than a constant, and abandoned attempts to calculate total
population from birth and death records. In Great Britain, political arithmeticians found
themselves unable to answer what had become the most pressing population question of the
eighteenth century: whether the population had declined since the 1688 Glorious Revolution
as a result of ineffective rule and urban decadence. Debate over this question precipitated
the passage of the 1800 Population Act, which mandated a decennial census beginning in
1801.10
In France and the United States, the shift from church record keeping and political
arithmetic to government census-taking accompanied the democratic revolutions of the late
eighteenth century, which — at least in theory — made populations sovereign. France’s
Bureau de la statistique générale, which is responsible for taking a census every five years
and publishing the results, was established in August 1798, abolished in September 1812,
and restored in 1834.11 In the United States, census-taking was written into the Constitu-
tion, which mandated direct enumeration as the basis of both taxation and representation.
Decennial censuses began in 1790, and the 1850 census was the first to list each free person
by name.12 Censuses can be a tool of self-government in the sense that, in many places,
they facilitate legislative apportionment, but also in the sense that they are a disciplinary
technology, forging individual relationships with the state that carries them out and serving
as a mechanism of state surveillance, particularly of workers, immigrants, and nonwhites by
the native-born white professionals who served as agents of the state.13
As North American and Western European states extended their bureaucratic and surveil-
lance apparati into the domestic spaces of their citizens and subjects in the nineteenth cen-
10
Glass, Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of
Census and Vital Statistics in Britain, see n. 25.
11
Bourdelais, see n. 25, 107.
12
Slaves were enumerated in separate schedules. According to Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution,
slaves counted as three-fifths of an individual for purposes of representation, though their political power
accrued to southern white men, as slaves could not vote. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History,
see n. 25.
13
Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999); Frankel, see n. 32.

47
tury, they began to extend formal political control over colonies in other parts of the world.
Colonial censuses, however, continued to resemble political arithmetic more than they did
metropolitan censuses, as colonial populations remained subject populations, to be extracted
or extracted from.14 As will be discussed at greater length in Chapter Three, while metropoli-
tan censuses produced self-governing citizens, colonial censuses produced colonial subjects,
and the categories used in those censuses contributed to maintaining the legal distinctions
between Europeans and non-Europeans on which colonial projects depended.
Population data proliferated over the course of the nineteenth century in Europe and
North America.15 States established permanent statistical offices, which developed the in-
frastructure required to take regular censuses and perform vital registration, and invented
new techniques of data analysis and presentation.16 In contrast to the population data col-
lected before the nineteenth century, which may have circulated among select networks of
clergy, scientists, or rulers but were not shared publicly, data collected by nineteenth-century
states were published and publicized as part of nationalizing and democratizing efforts and
to legitimize state power.17 Multi-national states of Central and Eastern Europe used cen-
suses to classify and manage their diverse subjects, often in repressive and extractive ways,
though censuses also inspired and justified nationalist movements within those states.18 Clas-
sification along such lines as race, religion, language, and occupation also served political
purposes in democratic nation-states, both for those designing the categories and for those
being classified.19
14
See, for example, Robert R. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, vol. 1
(London: Oxford University Press, 1948).
15
Ian Hacking has described these data as part of “an avalanche of printed numbers.” Hacking, “Biopower
and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” see n. 32.
16
Schweber, see n. 39; Cole, see n. 39.
17
Rusnock describes the networks through which early modern population data circulated. Rusnock, Vital
Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France, see n. 26; for the
nineteenth century, see Frankel, see n. 32.
18
For an example, see Holquist, see n. 35; Benedict Anderson discusses this role played by censuses in
the anti-colonial nationalisms of the twentieth century, but they played a similar role in nineteenth-century
European nationalisms. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism, Second (New York: Verso, 2006).
19
For example, in designing an 1851 statistical report, French officials classified certain types of workers as
artisans rather than laborers, thereby denying their class identification and reducing the number of “workers”

48
 Censuses not only produce information about population size and composition, but also
shape populations through the process Ian Hacking describes as “making up people” — by
placing people into categories, the classificatory work of census-taking influences how peo-
ple understand themselves and each other in relation to broader social groupings, and can
thereby influence behavior.20 The choice of questions and categories in a census is always a
political decision, and census administrators design censuses to address political issues and
shape their outcomes. In the antebellum U.S., pro- and anti-slavery factions in Congress de-
bated how much and what kind of information should be collected in Census slave schedules,
with Southerners opposing the recording of slaves’ family information, which would have
further humanized them and increased the weight of arguments against the institution of
slavery.21 After the Civil War, the decision to collect information on race, and the categories
used, reflected developments in racial science — the science of human difference — which
itself depended on the availability of census data classified into the relevant categories. These
categories, in turn, changed over time as understandings of race and political uses of race
changed.22 Systems of classification in censuses and other official statistics are vital tools
for the production and maintenance of social categories.23 As such, they never simply reflect
already-existing categories, nor do they classify people without at the same time having some
effect on the people they classify.

1.1.2 The Valence of Population: From Malthus to Darwin

European and North American thinking about population size became more ambivalent
around the time that states began taking censuses. Malthus’s 1798 Essay, written in op-
position to the optimism and idealism of intellectual supporters of the French Revolution
in order to prevent their organization and thereby counter the threat of socialism. Joan Wallach Scott, “A
Statistical Representation of Work: La statistique de l’industrie à Paris, 1847-1848,” in Gender and the
Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
20
Hacking, “Making Up People,” see n. 37.
21
Anderson, The American Census: A Social History, see n. 25.
22
Rodriguez, see n. 36; Nobles, see n. 36.
23
For more examples, see Bowker and Star, see n. 34.

49
— a direct response to Godwin’s “Political Justice” — inverted the valence of population
growth, casting it as the fundamental source of poverty and misery at both individual and
societal levels. Malthus attributed all individual and social ills to a natural tension between
two fundamental facts: “First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly,
that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.24
From these basic principles, Malthus deduced that individuals who could not control their
sexuality, and societies whose members could not control their sexuality, would suffer the
consequences of population pressing against the limits of food supply. This was so because,
Malthus contended, “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the
earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geomet-
rical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.”25 That is, Malthus stated
that population increases geometrically — by a constant proportion — while subsistence
increases arithmetically — by a constant increment.
Present-day scholars who cite Malthus often describe him as the first prophet of overpop-
ulation and inaccurately interpret his law of population as a prediction “that uncontrolled
population growth would lead to war, starvation, and disease.”26 However, unlike the pop-
ulation observers of the early twentieth century who will be discussed later in this chapter,
Malthus was not concerned with the future. Rather, Malthus invoked his law of population
to explain everyday misery. In fact, Malthus never predicted overpopulation, and contended
that population could not grow beyond the limits of subsistence.27 However, he argued that,
always and everywhere, human population strained the capacity of the food supply. The
balance between population and food supply was maintained by two types of checks on pop-
ulation. First was what he called “the preventive check” — sexual restraint, or delaying
24
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement
of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J.
Johnson, 1798), url: [Link] 4.
25
Ibid., 4.
26
Robertson, see n. 12, 5.
27
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Library of Economics and Liberty,
1826), url: [Link] I.I.7.

50
marriage until the resulting offspring could be supported.28 Second were “positive checks,”
a category that included “every cause, whether arising from vice or misery, which in any
degree contributes to shorten the natural duration of human life.” He listed as examples of
these causes “all unwholesome occupations, severe labour and exposure to the diseases and
epidemics, wars, plague, and famine.”29
Because he attributed all forms of misery and all causes of mortality (other than old age)
to population pressure, he interpreted all woes and calamities as evidence of population pres-
sure. Similarly, he attributed to every social institution — such as political organizations,
labor practices, and marriage customs — the motive of managing the balance between pop-
ulation and resources. Malthus viewed the existence of these institutions as both responses
to population pressure and evidence of it. The constant pressure of population on resources
was neither a result of Malthus’s analysis nor a prediction. Rather, it was his foundational
assumption.
For Malthus, poverty was the result of unrestrained sexuality. The only preventive check
he offered was the delay of marriage, and he interpreted non-procreative sexuality — includ-
ing the use of contraception within marriage — as a form of “vice” caused by the pressure of
population on resources. Malthus thereby attributed all forms of human suffering to excessive
sexuality, naturalizing poverty and misery and blaming the poor for their own plight.
Although Malthus is widely regarded as a scholar of population, the main purpose of his
work was not to understand, predict, or control population growth, but rather to justify the
existing social order by naturalizing poverty. By the sixth edition of his Essay, published
in 1826, Malthus had developed a strong argument against poor relief, contending that
assistance to the poor would lead only to an increase in their numbers, and would spread their
misery further across the social spectrum by redistributing resources from those he deemed
worthy to those he deemed unworthy.30 Malthus’s argument carried substantial weight in
28
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with
Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, see n. 24, 20.
29
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, see n. 27, [Link].9.
30
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, see n. 27, III.V.1, III.V.6; also see Michael Eagan,

51
England. His law of population became the intellectual basis for the New Poor Law of 1834,
which eliminated all outdoor relief, forcing the poor to either accept low-paying factory
work or enter workhouses. By helping to create the labor force necessary for the Industrial
Revolution, the New Poor Law participated in the formation of what Marx has termed “a
disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter
had bred it at its own cost.”31
Present-day scholars usually assume that Malthus’s premise regarding the disparity be-
tween population growth and food production was accurate and widely accepted.32 However,
some political economists, notably Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, questioned Malthus’s
theory and critiqued his conclusions, and their nineteenth-century criticism would reverber-
ate into the twentieth century.33 Marx and Engels attributed poverty and hunger not to an
inevitable imbalance between population and food supply, but to the capitalist mode of pro-
duction, in which “the laboring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation
of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned
into a relative surplus population.”34 They rejected the idea that human population growth
could be governed by natural laws, arguing that “an abstract law of population exists for
plants and animals only, and only insofar as man has not interfered with them.”35 If there
were laws of human population, they contended, those laws were specific to the historic
modes of production; Malthus’s laws, if valid, held only for the capitalist mode. Marx and
Engels argued that Malthus had devised his principle of population to explain and naturalize
the coexistence of extreme wealth and extreme poverty under capitalism, and described his
“Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival” (Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 2004), 186.
31
Karl Marx, “Capital, Volume One,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, Second edition
(New York: Norton, 1978), 423. Demographers readily acknowledge that the Industrial Revolution led to
a large increase in England’s population as a result of rising living standards and a concomitant fall in
mortality. It is, however, less commonly acknowledged that the population thought of Malthus helped to
provide the Industrial Revolution’s workforce by justifying the elimination of poor relief.
32
See, for example: Robertson, see n. 12; Hoff, see n. 11.
33
Chapter Seven will discuss the resistance of communist countries to the discourse of impending global
overpopulation in the second half of the twentieth century.
34
Ronald L. Meek, ed., Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb (Berkeley: Ramparts, 1971), 94.
35
Ibid., 94.

52
principle as “even more nonsensical” than the phenomenon it explained.36 Marx and Engels
thereby refused Malthus’s naturalization of poverty, arguing that poverty resulted from —
and was intrinsic to — the capitalist system of production, rather than the unrestrained
“passion between the sexes,” as Malthus had claimed.37
Marx and Engels were not the only nineteenth-century critics of Malthus’s population
principle. Although many economists and policy makers in Western Europe and North Amer-
ica accepted his view of population as a cause of poverty at the family level — attributing
it to lack of sexual self-control — they still viewed aggregate population growth as a sign
of strength, wealth, and power at the national level. The U.S. government, for example,
promoted white population growth throughout the nineteenth century, largely through free
immigration and land grants, as a means of expanding political power westward across the
continent.38 French thinkers blamed their country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War on
falling birthrates, and this disaster touched off a series of debates about nationalism and
women’s roles in and reproductive duties to family, economy, and nation.39 Similar concerns
surfaced in the U.K. surrounding the South African (Boer) War in the first decade of the
twentieth century, with falling birthrates among the middle classes and growing evidence of
ill health among the working classes sparking fears that the U.K. population might be losing
the size and strength it needed to maintain its empire.40
Although policy makers in the U.S., the U.K., and France continued to value aggregate
population growth, Malthus’s principle of population was nonetheless highly productive in
the intellectual realm. In addition to providing support for the passage of the New Poor
Law, it inspired the theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, formulated
independently by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin and described in Darwin’s The
36
Meek, see n. 34, 57.
37
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with
Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, see n. 24, 4.
38
Hoff, see n. 11.
39
Cole, see n. 39.
40
Emily R. Klancher, “Imperial Women: British Women as the Borders of the ‘Imperial Race’ in Britain
and South Africa, 1899-1910” (B.A. thesis, Pomona College, 2001).

53
Origin of Species (1859).41 According to the theory of natural selection, evolution occurred
when random mutations made certain members of populations better able to compete for
limited resources, and therefore able to reproduce more prolifically, than those who lacked
the mutation. This theory depended on the assumption that constant population pressure
placed individuals with different genetic traits into competition with one another for survival
and reproductive success. Natural selection provided additional credibility to Malthus’s
population principle by building on its foundation.42
Social thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century, most notably Herbert
Spencer, read the biological principles of evolution and natural selection back into the social
realm to naturalize poverty and blame the poor for their own plight, as Malthus had done
by attributing poverty and misery to population growth and resource scarcity. Supporters
of this theory, known as “social Darwinism” variously and contradictorily interpreted evo-
lution to suggest on the one hand that “inferior” populations — whether defined racially,
nationally, or socioeconomically — would die out as a result of contact and competition
with “superior” populations — invariably defined as white, Western or Northern European,
and affluent — and on the other hand that “inferior” populations would outbreed “supe-
rior” populations as a result of higher birth rates, endangering the survival of the “superior”
populations.43 Malthusianism and social Darwinism were conservative ideologies in the sense
that they sought to naturalize, justify, and thereby preserve the existing social order. By
introducing his law of population, Malthus aimed not to eliminate or to alleviate poverty,
but rather the opposite: to naturalize poverty and justify the repeal of poor relief. Social
Darwinists similarly argued against poor relief by explaining poverty as the result of genetic
41
Robertson, see n. 12, 5.
42
Latour describes how citations in a “positive modality” can move statements closer to being generally
accepted as fact. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, see
n. 15, 22-23.
43
U.S. economist Warren Thompson, for example, argued both positions, declaring that African-Americans
were committing “race suicide” as a result of their low fertility and cautioning that immigrant populations
would edge out the native-born as a result of their high fertility and low living standards. Warren S. Thomp-
son, “Population Facts for the United States and their Interpretation,” Journal of the American Statistical
Association 18, no. 141 (Mar. 1923): 575–587; Warren S. Thompson, “Standards of Living as They Affect
the Growth of Competing Population Groups,” The Scientific Monthly, July 1923, 57–65.

54
inferiority, a problem that would solve itself through evolution.

1.1.3 The Progressive Turn: Neo-Malthusianism and Eugenics

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, social reformers on both sides of the Atlantic
recognized that unfettered capitalism, coupled with the industrialization and urbanization
to which it gave rise, had begun to engender extreme socioeconomic disparities, resulting
in both dire poverty and labor organization, both of which threatened the capitalist order.
In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, these reformers — now known as
“Progressives” — began to propose mechanisms that would stabilize society and maintain
economic growth while preventing workers from slipping into abject poverty.44 Many of these
proposals involved systems of insurance and public support for meeting workers’ basic social
needs. Two Progressive Era projects focused explicitly on the management of reproduction
as a means of alleviating the social problems caused by poverty: neo-Malthusianism and
eugenics.
Though the phrase neo-Malthusianism was repurposed in the second half of the twentieth
century to refer to concerns about impending overpopulation that pointed to family planning
as a solution (discussed in Chapters Four and Five), it originated in the late nineteenth
century to denote the movement among the professional Western European middle classes
to legalize birth control, both for their own use and to promote among the poor. Like
Malthus, neo-Malthusians attributed poverty to a conflict between population and resources,
particularly at the family level. Unlike Malthus, however, who had classified contraception
as a form of “vice,” neo-Malthusians viewed the legalization and diffusion of contraception
as a solution to poverty. They reasoned that working-class couples should have access to
information about contraception because, without it, their wages would not be able to keep
up with the growth of their families.45 Neo-Malthusians sought to prevent extreme poverty
44
Rodgers, see n. 64.
45
C.V. Drysdale, “The Malthusian Doctrine To-Day,” Birth Control Review 2, no. 2 (1918): 15.

55
among workers by giving them the means to limit the size of their families.
In the United States, the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibited sending contraceptive
devices or information through the mail, and state-level versions of the law that further re-
stricted the distribution of contraceptive knowledge and materials, had essentially outlawed
birth control. Some states also explicitly prohibited the use of contraception. Several Euro-
pean countries enacted similar prohibitions in the late nineteenth century, either specifically
against birth control or against “obscenity” more broadly, which included contraceptive infor-
mation. The first neo-Malthusian organization appeared in Great Britain in 1877 in response
to the trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who had been prosecuted for reprinting
the contraceptive manual Fruits of Philosophy, first published in 1832 by American physician
Charles Knowlton. Neo-Malthusian organizations soon followed in the Netherlands, France,
and Germany, and the first international neo-Malthusian conference was held in Paris in
1900. Neo-Malthusianism came later to the United States, where Margaret Sanger, the most
prominent birth control advocate, had initially promoted contraception as a feminist and
socialist issue. While in exile in Great Britain after her 1914 arrest, however, Sanger became
acquainted with the British neo-Malthusians and aligned her movement with theirs.46 By
1918, there were neo-Malthusian societies in Algeria, Austria, Belgium (both French and
Flemish), Brazil, Cuba, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, in addition to the
countries mentioned above, all organized under the Federation of Neo-Malthusian Leagues.47
Although many neo-Malthusians also supported the principles of eugenics, the two move-
ments were not in complete alignment. Coined in 1883 by Charles Darwin’s younger cousin
Francis Galton, the word “eugenics” — literally “good breeding” — denoted the view that
evolutionary change was progressive rather than random, and that the process in humans
could be accelerated by selectively breeding genetically superior individuals while restricting
the reproduction of those deemed inferior.48 Eugenicists shared the social Darwinist belief
46
Dennis Hodgson and Susan Cotts Watkins, “Feminists and Neo-Malthusians: Past and Present Al-
liances,” Population and Development Review 23, no. 3 (1997): 469–523.
47
Organizations are listed at the beginning of each issue of The Birth Control Review.
48
Galton introduced the idea much earlier, in an 1865 series of articles in MacMillan’s Magazine that

56
that socioeconomic status was an indicator of inherent genetic quality, but differed in assert-
ing that the social order could be improved by increasing the proportion of each successive
generation drawn from the middle and upper classes (positive eugenics), reducing the propor-
tion drawn from the working classes and poor (negative eugenics), and preventing altogether
the reproduction of those thought to have hereditary defects (also negative eugenics).49 By
the turn of the twentieth century, it had become clear in North America and Western Eu-
rope that wealthier couples were having fewer children than poorer couples, and eugenicists
sought to reverse this trend, as will be discussed in greater length in Chapter Two.
Francis Galton founded the Eugenics Record Office at University College London in
1904. In 1907, the Office became the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, and Galton’s protégé Karl
Pearson became director of the laboratory and the first holder of a chair in National Eugenics
endowed by Galton. In the United States, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin established
a Eugenics Record Office in 1910 at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, with funding from
railroad heiress Mary Harriman, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Institution of
Washington.
Although eugenicists in the U.K. and the U.S. had similar goals — improvement in the
genetic quality of human populations — their understandings of genetic inheritance and the
methods they used to research inheritance differed. Eugenicists in the U.S. had accepted
Mendelian genetics as the basis of human inheritance, and accordingly conceptualized all
human characteristics and personality traits — from wanderlust to train-wrecking — as
inherited according to autosomal dominant and autosomal recessive patterns. Eugenicists in
the U.K. did not work within the Mendelian paradigm. Instead, they premised their research
on the theory of ancestral inheritance, which holds that like breeds like, so the traits of
was published in 1869 as Hereditary Genius. His theory was based on the observation that, in England,
prominence tended to run in families. The conclusions he drew from that observation conflated prominence
with ability and elided the passing of social privilege from parent to child. Kevles, see n. 60, 3.
49
Throughout this dissertation, I will refer to genetic “improvement” and the genetic “superiority” and
“inferiority” without scare quotes, as the historical actors used these phrases. However, there has never been
consensus about what makes a person genetically “superior” or “inferior” or what genetic “improvement”
would entail or how it would be measured. Moreover the inheritance of personality traits and characteristics,
including intelligence, in humans, remains a scientific mystery.

57
children are the combined traits of their parents. To give a hypothetical example, ancestral
inheritance predicts that the child of a parent with blue eyes and a parent with red eyes will
have purple eyes, while Mendelian inheritance predicts that the child will have either blue
eyes or red eyes, depending on the alleles inherited from each parent and on whether the red
or blue allele is dominant. This is a trivial example, but to generalize, eugenicists in the U.S.
understood human difference in categorical terms — a person was either “a trainwrecker”
or not — while eugenicists in the U.K. understood human difference in continuous terms
— a person with one trainwrecking parent might have some tendency toward trainwrecking.
Moreover eugenicists in the U.K. believed that the traits of the child could be determined
fairly well in advance from knowledge of the parents, while U.S.-based eugenicists worried
that children could express genes that were not expressed in the parents and could therefore
turn up with traits or “deficiencies” that could not be predicted simply from knowledge of
the parents. U.K. eugenicists therefore developed modes of continuous-variable analysis that
would be later codified as mathematical statistics — including regression and correlation —
while U.S. eugenicists created ancestry charts that linked a person with a given trait to other
family members with the same trait.50
Eugenics was a political movement as well as a science, and enjoyed widespread pub-
lic support in both countries, particularly among middle-class professionals, and above all
among scientists and physicians. Eugenics had more left-wing support in Great Britain,
including that of the Fabian socialists, but was also consonant with Progressive Era ideas of
social engineering in the United States. The most prominent early-20th century advocate of
eugenics in the U.S. was President Theodore Roosevelt, who warned in the early twentieth
century against the danger of “race suicide,” which he defined as the qualitative decline of the
American people as a result of the disproportionate use of birth control among native-born
middle-class white couples. As a solution, Roosevelt advocated a positive eugenic program
“intended to increase the number of Americans with approved bloodlines by promoting larger
50
MacKenzie, see n. 53; Kevles, see n. 60.

58
families among the ‘good stock’ of the nation.”51 Roosevelt’s anxiety, shared by economist
Francis Amasa Walker, who directed the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Censuses, focused on the new
wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the fear that these undesir-
able newcomers and their progeny would become a substantial proportion of the white U.S.
population as a result of their relatively higher birth rates. This eugenic vision focused
on white Americans and white immigrants, implicitly excluding African Americans, Native
Americans, and all other nonwhite Americans and nonwhite immigrants from its national
imaginary. Eugenicists in both Britain and the U.S. sought to improve the “quality” of
the white race through selective breeding in order to maintain white supremacy at both
national and international levels. Support for eugenics was not limited to the U.S. and the
U.K., however. By the interwar period, eugenics movements had taken hold in many coun-
tries of Western Europe, Asia, and Latin America, including Brazil, China, Cuba, France,
Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Sweden, and their leaders met regularly at international eugenics
conferences.52
Like neo-Malthusians, eugenicists sought to effect socioeconomic amelioration by reducing
the number of poor people rather than through redistribution of wealth. However, neo-
Malthusians saw resources as fixed and sought to limit the number of people among whom
they were distributed, whereas eugenicists saw members of the elite as genetically superior
and sought to increase their proportion within the population, regardless of the actual supply
of resources available to them. Moreover, while neo-Malthusians viewed birth control as a
remedy for poverty, eugenicists saw their program not as ameliorating existing poverty but
as reducing its spread to future generations. Initially, eugenicists such as Roosevelt opposed
the legalization of birth control, as it was much more popular among the middle and upper
classes — who they hoped would have larger families — than it was among the working
classes — who they hoped would have smaller families. In the United States, eugenicists
favored sterilization of the supposedly unfit, and worked to have legislation passed in a
51
Jean H. Baker, Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 140-141.
52
Connelly, see n. 8, 79.

59
number of states that provided for the compulsory sterilization of those deemed “socially
inadequate,” a category that could include the nonwhite, the mentally ill, the disabled,
the addicted, and the promiscuous.53 By 1920, 15 states had sterilization laws; by 1937,
compulsory sterilization had spread to 32 states.54
Neo-Malthusianism and eugenics were political projects that called on two dimensions
of population — quantity and quality — for their legitimacy. Birth control activists ap-
propriated Malthus’s name to present their program as the solution to a problem — the
rapid growth of population that outpaced the increase of wages and other resources — that
required the control of population quantity. Eugenicists presented their program as a way
to increase the “quality” of populations, wrapping their political agenda in the language of
biometrics (the application of statistics to human heredity) in Britain and genetics in the
United States. By promoting these programs as solutions, their supporters called into being
and reified two population “problems” — that of quantity and that of quality. In the U.S.,
supporters of another political movement — immigration restriction — also attached their
program to the concept of population, presenting immigration restriction as a way to both
control population quantity and improve population quality. The following section exam-
ines how these political programs influenced the development of measures of population and
population change between the wars.

1.2 Population Problems and Population Projections:

Competing Theories and Politics

After the First World War, a nexus emerged in the United States between neo-Malthusians,
eugenicists, and immigration restrictionists. As Margaret Sanger sought scientific and med-
ical legitimacy for birth control, she formed alliances with scientists and doctors who sup-
ported eugenics and immigration restriction. One of these scientists was Raymond Pearl, a
53
Stern, see n. 60.
54
Baker, see n. 51, 144.

60
biologist at Johns Hopkins University who claimed human population growth as part of the
territory of the field of biology. Yet scientists in other fields — notably statistics, economics,
and sociology — had also begun to analyze population growth, and challenged the authority
of Pearl, and biology more generally, to predict population growth. This section examines
the methods developed by biologists, statisticians, economists and sociologists to evaluate
population change and predict future population growth, and the ways in which analyses
using those methods intervened in debates about birth control, immigration, and eugenics.
I argue that these methods reflected the political sympathies of their developers, and that
each had embedded within it assumptions about what populations are and how they change.

1.2.1 Margaret Sanger and the Neo-Malthusians:

Overpopulation and the Logistic Law of Population Growth

As stated above, Margaret Sanger aligned her movement for legalization of birth control
in the United States with the European neo-Malthusian movement during her 1914-1916
exile in London. An obstetric nurse working in New York City in the first decades of the
twentieth century, Sanger had initially promoted the legalization of birth control as part of a
feminist and socialist program, with the aim of improving the autonomy, sexual satisfaction,
and living standards of poor women and families. She pointed out that the illegality of
contraception didn’t prevent it from being used, but did keep it out of the hands of poor
women, who could not afford to visit the private doctors who could provide them with birth
control information and devices. Sanger wrote sex education articles for the socialist daily
The New York Call, and in 1914 started publishing her own magazine, The Woman Rebel,
in which she advocated that American workers adopt birth control as a means of resisting
capitalist domination by refusing to reproduce capital’s surplus army of labor.55 Sanger also
described birth control as the basis for women’s complete social emancipation and sexual
autonomy.56
55
Baker, see n. 51, 78.
56
Ibid., 83.

61
 Later that year, Sanger was arrested and charged with four counts of violating the Com-
stock laws for mailing The Woman Rebel. She fled to London before her trial. While there,
Sanger studied population statistics in the reading room of the British Museum, while waiting
tables to support herself. She befriended members of the overlapping networks of Fabian so-
cialists, eugenicists, and neo-Malthusians, including H.G. Wells, Marie Stopes, and Havelock
Ellis, and began to incorporate their ideas into her arguments for birth control legalization.
In 1915, Sanger traveled to the Netherlands, the country with the most relaxed contraceptive
laws in Europe, where she visited the women’s health clinics that would became the model
for the clinics she set up on her return to New York in 1916.57
Sanger’s first clinic, located in Brooklyn, provided information only, telling clients where
they could obtain pessaries (similar to cervical caps), spermicides, and condoms, and how
to use them. The police soon raided the clinic and shut it down, arresting Sanger and
her staff. In a negotiated settlement, Sanger pled guilty to obscenity charges and served a
month at the Queens County Penitentiary.58 After her release, she appealed her conviction
on the grounds that the illegality of birth control unconstitutionally forced motherhood on
American women. The judge who heard her case denied her appeal, ruling that women were
not forced into motherhood, interpreting the New York Penal Code to imply that physicians
could be exempted from the state’s Comstock Laws if contraception was necessary for a
woman’s health. Although this decision did not overturn Sanger’s conviction, it did legalize
birth control if prescribed by a physician, laying the foundation for Sanger’s subsequent
alliance with doctors and scientists.59
As a result of their eugenicist convictions, however, many doctors and scientists were
initially hostile to birth control, which they saw as disproportionately reducing the size of
the families that, according to eugenicist doctrine, should be the largest.60 In 1917, Sanger
began to publish a new journal, The Birth Control Review, in which she increasingly aligned
57
Baker, see n. 51, 97-98.
58
Ibid., 122-123.
59
Ibid., 156.
60
Hodgson and Watkins, see n. 46.

62
birth control with the eugenics movement. She even printed a critique of birth control by
eugenicist luminary Paul Popenoe, who blamed contraception for the differential “increase
of less capable persons,”61 so that she could refute his claim that birth control was an enemy
of positive eugenics (the promotion of births among the genetically “superior”) and instead
present it as a vehicle for negative eugenics (the restriction of births among the genetically
“inferior”), one more democratic and easier to implement than sterilization. In 1919, Sanger
published the book Woman and the New Race, in which she presented birth control as the
solution to “‘the glut of inferior children who now threatened society’ imposed by the church
and the state, conspiring to keep women powerless and sexually ignorant.”62 Even in her
eugenicist writings, Sanger’ concern for women’s social and sexual liberation was apparent.
Though Sanger, like most of her contemporaries, genuinely subscribed to some elements
of the negative eugenic program, she had long been an advocate for the poor, and her
courting of eugenics and eugenicists was likely a highly calculated move along the lines of
Michel Callon’s concept of interessement. Callon describes interessement as the process by
which actor A gains the support of actor B for A’s project by making the success of A’s
project indispensable to the realization of B’s own goals. Through this process, A’s project
becomes an “obligatory passage point” for B’s project.63 Eugenics at that time had much
more widespread support and scientific legitimacy than did birth control, and by attaching
birth control to eugenics — indeed, by making it a tool of eugenics or even an obligatory
passage point for eugenics — Sanger legitimized her cause and gained powerful allies. As
her biographer Jean Baker has argued, “in an effort to gain support, she signed on to
negative eugenics, expecting that its proponents would reciprocate and urge birth control as
a solution.”64 This connection between reproductive rights, eugenics, and other movements
61
Paul Popenoe in The Birth Control Review, quoted in Baker, see n. 51, 145.
62
Ibid., 161.
63
For more on interessement see: Callon, see n. 15; Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institu-
tional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of
Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387–420.
64
Baker, see n. 51, 147; Jonathan Eig makes a similar argument in Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill:
How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (New York: Norton, 2014).

63
to control population quality or quantity would continue throughout the century, as I will
describe in later chapters.
Sanger never embraced the positive eugenics program, and for that reason, her overtures
were rejected by the most prominent American eugenicists of the moment, Charles Davenport
and Paul Popenoe. She did, however, forge alliances with eugenicist scientists who were also
neo-Malthusians and whose population concerns had broadened during World War I from
poor families to white humanity in general. Many participants and observers, including
the leaders of the belligerent nations, located the war’s origins in population growth in
Germany and Russia, and the territorial aggression stimulated by that growth.65 World War
I aroused multiple and contradictory population fears, demonstrating that population could
be a source of both strength and vulnerability for states: experts attributed Germany’s
power and aggression to its rapid growth and France’s easy defeat to its low birth rate; at
the same time, larger populations required more resources and more intensive management
of them, particularly in times of war. During World War I, neo-Malthusians began to discuss
birth control legalization not only as a way to alleviate individual poverty, but also as a way
to avert what some experts began to see as the looming Malthusian threat of population
growth outpacing food supply.
World War I indicated that success in twentieth-century warfare would require govern-
ments to maintain adequate food supplies for both military and civilian populations. In
response to this challenge, the U.S. government established the U.S. Food Administration
under the direction of engineer and future U.S. President Herbert Hoover to ensure contin-
uous food supplies to the Allied powers.66 At least one member of the Food Administration,
Harvard plant geneticist Edward East, read Malthus’s Essay during the war, and became
a committed neo-Malthusian, combining support for birth control with support for immi-
65
Baker, see n. 51, 128.
66
For the role of civilian hunger in Germany’s World War I defeat, see Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning:
Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000); for more on the increased wartime powers of the U.S. government, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle
Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).

64
gration restriction and negative eugenics.67 In 1921, Sanger recruited East and his fellow
neo-Malthusian and former Food Administration colleague Raymond Pearl, a biologist at
Johns Hopkins University, to her first scientific conference on birth control and to the board
of her American Birth Control League, which was dedicated to contraceptive research, de-
velopment, distribution, and legalization, through association with science and control by
the medical profession.68
Born in 1879, East’s early work at agricultural extension stations in Illinois and Con-
necticut had focused on corn genetics, laying the foundation for the hybrid corn that would
dramatically increase crop yields after 1940.69 In 1909 he was hired as a faculty member
at Harvard’s Busey Institution, where he mainly studied tobacco breeding, though some
of his work was foundational to the emerging science of human genetics, and some of his
students became leading members of that field.70 As a plant geneticist, East’s research did
not deal directly with human populations. However, he was concerned enough about the
potential of population growth to reach the limit of the Earth’s food resources that, in 1923,
he published the popular text Mankind at the Crossroads, warning of just this possibility.
He began by calculating the Earth’s carrying capacity, assuming that “a reasonable maxi-
mum for the world’s future population is one person for each 2.5 acres on 40 per cent of the
land area of the globe.” He then reasoned that, if current crude rates of population growth
remained constant, the Earth would reach its maximum population of 5.2 billion in just over
a century.71
East warned that, at its maximum population size, the world would not be a pleasant
place to live, but he offered an alternative to the dire future he predicted: “the remedy
proposed is to promote birth control at the lower end of the social scale.”72 This state-
67
Donald F. Jones, “Biographical Memoir of Edward Murray East, 1879-1938,” National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America Biographical Memoirs 23 (1944): 229.
68
Robertson identifies Pearl and East as pioneers of “a robust kind of environmental Malthusianism that
would grow in importance in the wake of World War II.” Robertson, see n. 12, 6.
69
Jones, see n. 67, 222.
70
Ibid., 227-229.
71
Edward M. East, Mankind at the Crossroads (New York: Scribner, 1923).
72
Ibid., 303.

65
ment clearly indicates a eugenic concern, as population limitation could have been produced
through the promotion of birth control at any point on the social scale. His eugenic anx-
ieties are also apparent in his stance on immigration. Although East himself was a plant
geneticist, actively engaged in breeding higher-yielding food crops, he argued that, within
the U.S.,“the most helpful means available to-day for aiding agriculture is an indirect one —
a severe permanent restriction on immigration. Any present cry for immigration can only
be made by the fool, the hypocrite, or the ignorant.”73 While immigration restriction may
have held the promise of slowing U.S. population growth, it would certainly not have affected
world population growth, and the amount of space East devoted to eugenics and immigration
restriction in his book suggests that these were his main concerns and the Malthusian limits
to growth a convenient justification for the programs he promoted. Like Roosevelt before
him, East advocated for eugenic control of the white population of the U.S., as his brand of
racism assured him that white population growth would displace nonwhite populations and
ultimately lead to their extinction.
East’s statement that, if its current growth rate continued, world population would reach
5.2 billion around the year 2023 was not a population projection. He was not predicting a
future population of 5.2 billion, but rather arguing for policies — a eugenic program that
combined birth control and immigration restriction — that would prevent world population
from reaching this seemingly-absurdly high number. Although his numbers were based on
actual data and documented rates of natural increase, they represented a demodystopian
vision of a future in which population growth caused widespread suffering rather than East’s
actual expectation of future population growth.74 His intention was not that readers should
expect a world population of 5.2 billion around the year 2023, but rather that they should
act to prevent it. Sanger praised East’s book as “one of the finest contributions given to the
literature on the age,” but Pearl critiqued it as propagandistic, complaining that it included
73
East, see n. 71, 191.
74
For more on demodystopianism, see Andreu Domingo, “ ‘Demodystopias’: Prospects of Demographic
Hell,” Population and Development Review 34, no. 4 (2009): 725–745.

66
“too much preaching and too much over-elaboration.”75
Pearl shared East’s neo-Malthusian and eugenicist views, but took a different epistemo-
logical approach to the question of population growth and, beginning in 1927, became a
critic of the eugenics program’s scientific validity. Born in the same year as East, Pearl was
an animal geneticist who completed his Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Michigan in
1902. In 1905, he went to London to study biometrics with Karl Pearson at the Francis
Galton Eugenics Laboratory. Pearson and Pearl developed considerable rapport, with Pear-
son describing his protégé as “the most original and powerful of the younger Americans who
have taken up biometric work,”76 and appointing him to the editorial board of his journal
Biometrika.
When Pearl returned to the United States, he put his eugenic training to use at the
Maine Agricultural Experiment Station, attempting to breed hens that would lay more eggs.
Following the principle of ancestral inheritance embedded in the British biometric version
of eugenics, Pearl selectively bred good layers — with the expectation that their offspring
would also be good layers — but soon concluded that this approach was ineffective. Rather,
he found that in order to increase egg production, he had to selectively breed the parents
of good layers. This result offered support for Mendelian genetics rather than ancestral
inheritance as the mechanism of heredity. Pearl himself was surprised at his finding. As
he admitted, he had “approached the subject with a bias in the other direction so far as
there was any bias at all.”77 In 1910, when Pearl informed Pearson of his findings, and of
the challenge that they presented to the principle of ancestral inheritance, Pearson dropped
Pearl from Biometrika’s editorial board.78 Over the next two decades, Pearl would elaborate
this finding into a critique of the scientific claims of the eugenics movement, which will be
discussed at greater length in Chapter Two.
75
Margaret Sanger to Raymond Pearl, Nov. 7, 1923,Raymond Pearl Papers, American Philosophical Soci-
ety, Philadelphia, PA, “Margaret Sanger #2,” box 24; Raymond Pearl to Edward M. East, Nov. 2, 1923,“E.M.
East #4,” box 7.
76
Karl Pearson to Carnegie Institution, Oct. 28, 1909,“Karl Pearson UCL Copies #3,” box 22.
77
Raymond Pearl to Karl Pearson, Jan. 27, 1909,“Karl Pearson UCL Copies #3,” box 22.
78
Raymond Pearl to Karl Pearson, 1910,“Karl Pearson UCL Copies #3,” box 22.

67
 In contrast to East, whose writings on human population were more political than sci-
entific, Pearl argued that biologists should be responsible for studying human population
growth. He contended that human populations are appropriate topics of analysis for biolo-
gists because human populations grow according to natural laws, resemble organisms in their
growth and other properties, and can be studied through analogy to non-human populations.
In 1920, he and his junior colleague Lowell Reed published an article in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences in which they proposed a mathematical law of population
growth and derived from it a method of predicting population size at any future date. At
that point, there were no scientific theories governing the growth rates of human popula-
tions. East had assumed that, in the absence of intervention, population would continue
to grow at its present rate, simply because he had no basis for assuming a different rate of
growth. It was clear that population growth was not constant — censuses in North America
and Western Europe demonstrated vastly different rates of growth in different places and in
different intercensal periods — but there were no agreed-upon explanations for what factors
governed the growth of human population.
As biologists, Pearl and Reed began with the Malthusian premises that populations are
always constrained by the limits of subsistence and that subsistence is the only force limiting
population growth. Pearl and Reed suggested that, governed by these natural limits, human
population must grow along a regular trajectory that could be described by a mathematical
equation, similar to the trajectories of heavenly bodies discovered by astronomers. They also
took an organic view of population, conceptualizing it as an object of analysis with emergent
properties — properties that apply only to the population as a whole and can’t be reduced
to the properties of its individual members, as is the case with an organism, which has an
existence beyond simply a collection of cells. On the basis of this analogy, Pearl and Reed
contended that the trajectory of population growth was none other than the S-shaped curve
of autocatalysis — a chemical reaction in which the reaction product is also the catalyst for
the reaction — which had already been identified by biologist T. Brailsford Robertson as

68
the growth pattern of individual organisms.79
Pearl and Reed were not the first to suggest that human population growth followed
an S-shaped trajectory. As early as 1838, Pierre-François Verhulst, a student of renowned
Belgian astronomer-statistician Adolphe Quetelet, had considered and rejected a similar
curve to describe population growth, naming this curve the “logistique.” Although Pearl
and Reed developed their “autocatalytic” theory of population growth independently, by
1927 Pearl had become familiar with Verhulst’s work and had begun to refer to his own
equation for population growth as the “logistic” curve. For Pearl and Reed, the logistic
was not just a law of population growth, but also a method of population projection: they
contended that the size of a given population at any point in time could be calculated by
fitting the known growth of the population in question to the general equation for a logistic
curve, given in Equation (1.1).
b
y= (1.1)
e−ax +c

The curve described by Equation (1.1) and illustrated in Figure 1.1 is shaped like the
letter S and represents what Pearl and Reed called a “complete cycle of population growth.”80
The x-axis represents time and the y-axis represents population size at any given time. The
lower asymptote represents the starting population — the population size at the beginning
of the growth cycle — and the upper asymptote ( cb ) represents the saturation population.
The letter a is a constant to be fitted empirically, as are b and c. With population data from
three different points in time, an analyst can solve for the three unknown constants (a, b,
and c), thereby determining — in theory, at least — the size of the population in question
at any point in the past or future.
According to this projection method, the saturation population is not given in advance,
nor is it calculated with any reference to the territory itself; rather it is determined by past
79
Raymond Pearl and Lowell J. Reed, “On the Rate of Growth of the Population of the United States
since 1790 and its Mathematical Representation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America 6, no. 6 (June 15, 1920): 280; Pearl had earlier been a harsh critic of Robertson’s
theory that the growth of organisms followed the curve of autocatalysis. Kingsland, see n. 83.
80
Pearl and Reed, see n. 79, 282.

69
 Figure 1.1: Pearl’s Logistic Curve

population growth through the curve-fitting process. With this equation, Pearl argued, “it
is now possible to forecast with a reasonable degree of accuracy not only what the maximum
population for any given area will be, but when it will be, and also when will be the period
of most rapid growth.”81 Pearl and Reed attributed the logistic law to Malthus, describing
it as a mathematical formalization of Malthus’s population principle.

Figure 1.2: Observed and Projected U.S. Population, 1700-2100

In their 1920 article, Pearl and Reed fit a logistic curve to the U.S. population as an
81
Raymond Pearl, “Forecasting the Growth of Nations,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 1921: 704.

70
example, discovering a saturation population of 197 million in the year 2100. This projection
is illustrated in Figure 1.2 (gray line), along with observed U.S. population growth from 1790
to 1920 (black line).82 Pearl and Reed’s application of the logistic law to the population of
the United States highlights some of the important features of their theory. Although Pearl
claimed a basis for the logistic law in biology, the law defined populations administratively,
as those included in government censuses (therefore American Indians and enslaved African
Americans would not have been included in early U.S. population figures). Yet Pearl’s theory
assumed that the biologically-determined rate of growth was always governed by the ultimate
population that could be supported on the territory controlled by a given state. According
to Pearl, the population of the United States — even as early as 1790 — was growing along
a logistic trajectory toward the maximum population that could be supported in the year
2100, after more than three centuries of territorial expansion and technological innovation.
Moreover, the population before 1790 was taken to be zero, not because nobody was living
in the territory that would become the United States, but because there was not yet a census
to count them.
To demonstrate the validity of his theory, Pearl fit logistic curves to historical census
data for an additional 15 countries, and to historical estimates of the population of the
world as a whole.83 However, while logistic curves could be fit to any three data points, no
human population had demonstrated a full logistic growth cycle during the period for which
data had been collected. The observed growth of the population of the United States, for
example, appeared to trace the bottom part of the curve, while that of France appeared to
trace the top, and that of England and Wales the middle. In 1924, Pearl’s admirer, British
statistician George Udny Yule, in his presidential address to the Royal Statistical Association,
brilliantly finessed this fact by superimposing population data for the three countries onto a
single graph to produce the full logistic, shown in Figure 1.3.84 Pearl declared “the dodge”
82
Graph created by author using data from: Pearl and Reed, see n. 79; Susan B. Carter et al., eds.,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition (n.d.), url: [Link]
83
Raymond Pearl, Studies in Human Biology (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1924).
84
G. Udny Yule, “The Growth of Population and the Factors Which Control It,” Journal of the Royal

71
to be “extremely clever” and remarked, “how beautifully the thing comes out!”85

Figure 1.3: Yule’s Image of the Populations of the U.S., England, and France

Arguing that human populations simply grew too slowly for an entire “cycle of growth”
to have been recorded, Pearl also took an experimental approach, contending that “a real
understanding of the problem to which Malthus addressed himself is going to come more
from the intensive study of lower forms of life in the laboratory, under physically and chem-
ically controlled conditions, than from the manipulation of never quite satisfactory demo-
graphic statistics.”86 He attempted to bolster his theory by breeding populations of yeast and
drosophila (fruit flies) in his laboratory and presenting their logistic growth pattern, shown
in Figure 1.4, as evidence “that certain natural laws of growth appear to control population
as definitely as they control an individual.”87 He argued further that it was not necessary
to observe a full cycle of human population growth in order to know that it took the shape
of the logistic curve, drawing an analogy to astronomy, where it was possible “to calculate
Statistical Society 88, no. 1 (1925): 21.
85
Raymond Pearl to G. Udny Yule, Dec. 9, 1934,box 31; Although Yule had not manipulated the data in
any way, fellow statistician A.M. Bowley accused him of misleading his audience with this image, which Yule
presented as evidence of the veracity of the logistic law, despite the fact that no single country’s population
growth had in fact described a full logistic curve. T.H.C. Stevenson, “The Laws Governing Population,
Response to Yule’s Presidential Address,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 88, no. 1 (1925): 76.
86
Raymond Pearl, The Biology of Population Growth (New York: Knopf, 1925), 4-5.
87
Pearl, “Forecasting the Growth of Nations,” see n. 81, 704, image 708.

72
the path of a comet from a relatively few observations, and tell a century in advance exactly
when Halley’s comet, for instance, should be visible from a given point.”88

Figure 1.4: Growth Pattern of Pearl’s Drosophila Population

By the mid-1920s, Pearl had found one human population for which a full logistic cycle
of growth could be observed: the indigenous population of Algeria between 1886 and 1921.
Unlike the other populations Pearl projected — the U.S., France, etc. — this one was
defined ethnically rather than politically, though of course the decision by the French colonial
government in Algeria to subdivide the population by nativity in its census was a political
one. Pearl described this Arab and Berber population as being midway between experimental
(yeast, drosophila, etc.) and European or Euro-American populations — a human population
whose growth Pearl assumed to be uninfluenced by social, economic, and political forces and
thereby determined solely by biological factors. Pearl proposed that the Algerian population
had been at its biological maximum prior to French colonization in the mid-nineteenth
century, and that colonization had initiated a new cycle of growth by linking Algeria to new
markets and introducing methods of agricultural production that increased yields, thereby
expanding the territory’s carrying capacity. He then presented the subsequent population
growth and its leveling off as biological responses to the rising population ceiling, rather than
as results of such social projects and technological developments as public health, sanitation,
88
Pearl, “Forecasting the Growth of Nations,” see n. 81, 704.

73
and birth control.
Pearl drew on popular racist and colonialist tropes to argue that population growth
among indigenous Algerians was governed solely by biological factors — mortality unaffected
by public health measures and fertility unaffected by contraceptive practice. He denied that
the mortality decline that produced recent Algerian population growth could have resulted
from improved health practices, averring that “the fruits of European public health doctrines
and education can scarcely be thought to play any large or direct part in the folkways and
mores of the Arab or Berber. His notions of sanitation, cleanliness, personal hygiene, and
medicine are all his own.”89 In terms of the fertility decline that had caused the growth to level
off, producing the S-shaped trajectory, Pearl denied the practice of birth control on the basis
of the assumption that “the Arabs and Berbers are notoriously much less concerned about
the remote consequences of sexual activity than they are about its immediate pleasures,”
again calling on familiar colonial tropes about nonwhite sexuality to “prove” the absence of
contraceptive practices.90 Pearl drew an analogy to experimental evidence that demonstrated
a decline in egg production among hens in response to increasing population density, claiming
that human fertility was similarly biologically governed.
Pearl’s racist attempts to present indigenous Algerians as midway between experimental
and European populations reveals inconsistencies in his logistic law of population growth.
First, it raises the question of how populations are to be defined. Pearl’s analysis of the
indigenous population separately from the foreign-born population of Algeria suggested a
definition based on nativity, ethnicity, or biology, but the assertion that population growth
was governed by a territory’s carrying capacity suggested a territorial definition. Second,
the fact that Pearl went to such great lengths to “prove” that population growth among in-
digenous Algerians was governed solely by biological factors suggests that population growth
among Europeans or Euro-American was not governed solely by biological factors, and there-
fore should not be predictable using the logistic projection method. However, Pearl argued
89
Pearl, The Biology of Population Growth, see n. 86, 79.
90
Ibid., 107.

74
just the opposite — he cited the observed logistic growth trajectory among indigenous Al-
gerians as “proof” that all human populations grow along logistic trajectories and therefore
could be predicted by fitting logistic curves. Pearl pressed this assertion even further, argu-
ing that “all the complexities of human behavior, social organization, economic structure,
and political activity, seem to alter much less than would have been expected the results of
the operation of those biological forces which basically determine the course of the growth
of populations of men.”91 As evidence of this assertion, he argued that “neither the most
destructive war in all history, nor the most serious epidemic since the Middle Ages (the
influenza scourge), caused more than a momentary hesitation in the steady onward march
of population growth” along a logistic trajectory toward Malthusian saturation.92
Pearl’s claims indicate his view that populations had emergent and organic properties that
superseded the actions of any individual, with growth governed only by biological properties
and subsistence availability. According to these principles, Pearl understood population
growth as an independent variable, and the components of that growth — fertility, mortality,
and migration — as dependent variables. Therefore, population growth was pre-determined;
if fertility were to decline, mortality would decline as well, or migration would increase to
keep population growth on its pre-determined logistic trajectory. Growth could therefore
be predicted but not controlled, and it could be predicted precisely because it could not be
controlled. He therefore argued that human population growth should be a topic for the
analysis of biologists rather than economists or sociologists.
Pearl used his projections to warn the public about the threat of impending overpopula-
tion, publishing articles in popular periodicals with such titles as “Forecasting the Growth
of Nations: The Future Population of the World and Its Problems” (Harper’s 1921), “The
Population Problem” (Geographical Review 1922), and “World Overcrowding: Saturation
Point for Earth’s Population Soon Will Be in Sight, With the Safety Limit for United States
Estimated at 200,000,000 People—How the Nations Grow” (The New York Times 1922).
91
Pearl, The Biology of Population Growth, see n. 86, 18.
92
Pearl, “Forecasting the Growth of Nations,” see n. 81, 711.

75
Although the upper asymptote of the logistic curve, according to Pearl’s logistic law, rep-
resented the saturation population — the largest population that could be supported on
a given territory — Pearl presented saturation as over population, marked by scarcity and
suboptimal living conditions. However, in contrast to East, who advocated birth control
as a means of slowing population growth, Pearl argued that the human population growth
trajectory could not be altered.
Overpopulation was the starting point for Pearl’s analysis, not its outcome. His theory
was predicated on the notion that populations would inevitably grow to their subsistence
limit, and that this limit was the only influence on population growth. Pearl therefore
interpreted any slowdown — whether observed or projected through the extrapolation of a
logistic curve — as evidence of population pressure on resources. However, the slowing of
growth is a fundamental property of logistic curves, meaning that Pearl imposed slowing
growth on future population trajectories and then interpreted that slowdown as evidence
of overpopulation. According to Pearl, fitting a logistic curve to the population of every
country for which he had data “proved” not only that populations grew according to this
“law” but also that populations everywhere — and the population of the world as a whole
— had begun to (or would soon) experience the effects of resource limitation. Even in
countries where growth had not slowed, the logistic curves Pearl fit necessarily predicted
a future slowdown, which he attributed to pressure on resources. Moreover, on the basis
of Malthusian theory, he described the upper asymptote as the “saturation population” —
the size at which population would continually press against the limits of subsistence —
though he never defined the phrase in terms of population density or the ratio of people
to agricultural production, as East had done in his calculation of the Earth’s maximum
population.
Neo-Malthusian arguments about impending overpopulation were readily believable for
some interwar U.S. observers. As a result of large-scale immigration, mainly from Southern
and Eastern Europe, the population of the country had grown dramatically from just under

76
76 million in 1900 to over 105 million in 1920.93 The 1920 census classified more than half of
the U.S. population as urban for the first time, and problems of poverty and overcrowding
were evident in the country’s larger cities.94 Because birth control was more readily available
to wealthier couples, and because larger families required more resources, poorer families
tended to be larger and larger families poorer.95 All of these factors made it easy to attribute
poverty and its sequelae to overpopulation, rather than to inadequate wages or the absence of
social insurance. The businessmen whose philanthropic ventures funded both social science
and poor relief were also heavily invested in overpopulation as an explanation, since it
exonerated their business practices and the capitalist status quo.96
But even Pearl’s own math did not necessarily support his prediction of food shortage
when the U.S. reached its supposed saturation population of 197 million shortly after the
year 2100, or his claim that “our children’s children will have to face a standard of living
much below that which we enjoy.”97 He admitted that the 197 million he predicted for the
U.S. seemed “absurdly small,” as it was only twice the then-current population.98 At the
projected saturation point, the U.S. would have a density of 66 persons per square mile, which
Pearl acknowledged was much lower than the density of many European countries that had
standards of living at least as high as those in the U.S., potentially belying his prediction
of scarcity. Unwilling to give up his Malthusian premise, however, he reasoned that, at
this density, U.S. agriculture would not be able to meet the nation’s food needs, and other
93
Carter et al., see n. 82, Table Aa2.
94
Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century
U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
95
Edgar Sydenstricker and Frank W. Notestein, “Differential Fertility According to Social Class: A Study
of 69,620 Native White Married Women Under 45 Years of Age Based upon the United States Census Returns
of 1910,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 25, no. 169 (1930): 9–32.
96
This assertion will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Two. Fisher, see n. 72; Edward T. Silva and
Sheila Slaughter, Serving Power: The Making of the Academic Social Science Expert (Westport: Greenwood,
1984); O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S.
History, see n. 94.
97
Raymond Pearl, “World Overcrowding: Saturation Point for Earth’s Population Soon Will be in Sight,
with the Safety Limit for United States Estimated at 200,000,000 People—How the Nations Grow,” The
New York Times, Oct. 8, 1922.
98
Pearl, “Forecasting the Growth of Nations,” see n. 81, 708; The U.S. population reached 197 million
around the year 1967. Carter et al., see n. 82, Table Aa7.

77
countries would stop exporting food because their populations would be nearing saturation
as well, according to Malthusian theory. Yet East, taking the opposite approach to U.S.
carrying capacity — calculating it on the basis of agricultural productivity — estimated
that, with a requirement of 2.5 acres per person, the 800 arable acres of the U.S. could
support a population of 320 million (close to the actual U.S. population in the year 2010),
with another 11 million supported by forests and grazing.99 East most certainly did not
recommend such population density, but the carrying capacity he calculated on the basis of
agricultural capacity was much higher than the saturation population determined by Pearl’s
logistic projection method.
Pearl recognized that birth control was in use and could be effective in preventing births to
the couples who used it, and supported Sanger’s efforts to have it legalized. For Pearl, birth
control was a eugenic technology that could alter the quality of the saturation population,
if not its quantity. At the 1921 International Eugenics Congress, he presented a talk titled
“Some Eugenic Aspects of the Problem of Population.” His New York Times article began
with the provocative statement, “They breed like flies!” and went on to explain that “most
cynical persons who make this remark about the inhabitants of the congested quarters of our
great cities do not realize that that is an accurate statement of scientific fact.”100 Comparing
the poor to flies, Pearl contended that

among the lower animals the least intelligent often reproduce most rapidly. And
in mankind that part of the population which, if not the most stupid, at any
rate takes least thought of the future, has the highest birth rate. Hence the lower
classes tend to replace the upper classes. The poor man, facing poverty, and least
able to rear children with the advantages necessary to make them good citizens,
is likely to have the largest family.101

Pearl promoted birth control as part of a eugenic program that could reverse this trend,
reducing the proportion of the population in poverty and increasing the “responsible” and
99
East, see n. 71.
100
Pearl, “World Overcrowding: Saturation Point for Earth’s Population Soon Will be in Sight, with the
Safety Limit for United States Estimated at 200,000,000 People—How the Nations Grow,” see n. 97.
101
Pearl, “Forecasting the Growth of Nations,” see n. 81, 713.

78
“intelligent” segments of the population. Pearl also supported immigration restriction on
the theory that reducing immigration would leave more room for native-born individuals in
the saturation population.
Pearl’s logistic law of population growth and his logistic method of population projec-
tion were based on the Malthusian theory that population growth was entirely governed by
subsistence availability, Pearl’s own claim of human population growth as a subject for the
field of biology, and Pearl’s political support for birth control legalization and immigration
restriction as part of the eugenic project of improving the quality of the U.S. population
by reducing the proportion that was poor or foreign born. The following section describes
scientific and political critiques of the logistic law and logistic projection method, and the
political bases of alternatives to it developed by social scientists later in the decade.

1.2.2 Social Scientific Population Models: Differential Growth

Social scientists throughout the English-speaking world critiqued Pearl’s logistic law of pop-
ulation growth on scientific grounds. Walter Willcox, a vital statistician at Cornell, rejected
the idea that population grew along any smooth trajectory, pointing to the effects of the
Great War as evidence of the jaggedness of population growth.102 U.S. economist Roy Garis,
though a supporter of immigration restriction, rejected the possibility of overpopulation and
argued that “a really intensive capitalistic system of agriculture” could produce enough to
feed the future population at a standard even higher than the present one.103 George Knibbs,
an Australian statistician, made a mathematical critique of Pearl’s logistic law of population
growth, demonstrating that, although a logistic curve could be empirically fit to historical
U.S. Census data, intercensal growth rates did not conform to those predicted by the logistic
102
Walter Willcox, “Population and the World War: A Preliminary Survey,” Journal of the American
Statistical Association 18, no. 142 (1923): 699–712.
103
R. Garis, “Dangers of Overpopulation Doubted; Brighter Future Seen for Nation’s Young,” New York
Times, Nov. 5, 1922.

79
equation.104 British economist A.L. Bowley pointed out that, although the logistic curve ap-
peared to describe past population growth reasonably well, other curves also fit past growth
patterns, throwing doubt on the authority of the logistic to uniquely describe the future
course of growth on the basis of its fit to past growth.105 Economist Victor von Szeliski
rejected the idea that U.S. population growth had, from the beginning, been governed by a
fixed upper limit, arguing

it is impossible to read in economic history how population movements were

conditioned by the geographical knowledge, the highways and the state of the
arts of the time, how births and deaths were affected by the contemporaneous
state of medicine and sanitary engineering and how large cities were made possible
by the development of agricultural machinery, high speed transportation, electric
power, steel frame buildings, refrigeration, and canning, and believe that in earlier
periods the population was growing towards an upper limit governed by physical
factors and inventions which were not to come into being for fifty years.106

With this statement, Szeliski argues that human populations, at different times, grow under
different conditions of possibility.
Pearl did, at times, recognize that technological changes could change the carrying ca-
pacity of a territory and therefore influence population growth — as in his discussion of
Algeria.107 He readily called on this explanation when observed population growth did not
follow a logistic trajectory, as was the case in Germany and Japan, where he attributed de-
viations from the logistic curve to industrialization.108 However, when observed population
growth did not deviate from a logistic trajectory, as was the case for the United States,
he made no mention of the potential effects of industrialization or territorial expansion on
population growth.
104
George Knibbs, “The Laws of Growth of a Population,” Journal of the American Statistical Association
21, no. 156 (1926): 381–398.
105
Stevenson, see n. 85.
106
Victor von Szeliski, “Population Growth Due to Immigration and Natural Increase,” Human Biology 8,
no. 1 (1936): 32-33.
107
Pearl, The Biology of Population Growth, see n. 86.
108
Pearl, Studies in Human Biology, see n. 83.

80
 Above all, social scientists disputed Pearl’s assertion that social, economic, and political
interventions — such as wars, sanitation, industrialization, birth control, and immigration
policy — had no effect on human population growth. The population models they developed
in the 1920s focused on the role of human agency in determining population growth through
activities that regulated mortality (sanitation and health care), migration (politics), and fer-
tility (birth control). This section describes three models, developed by social scientists now
viewed as fathers of demography (as are Pearl and Reed), and still in use by demographers, to
explore their political premises and the ways in which they conceptualized population. These
are the intrinsic rate of natural increase, developed by Alfred Lotka and Louis Dublin; the
net reproduction rate, developed by Robert Kuczynski; and the cohort component method
of population projection, popularized by Pascal Whelpton. In contrast to Pearl’s logistic
law of population growth, which understood human populations as organic entities with
emergent properties that grew according to a natural law, the three models described in this
section conceptualize human populations as aggregates of individuals. Population growth,
therefore, is a result of the summation of individual activities affecting the three components
of population growth: mortality, migration, and fertility.

The Intrinsic Rate of Natural Increase: An Argument Against Immigration

Restriction and Birth Control Legalization

While many scientists in the U.S. favored immigration restriction and birth control legal-
ization, support for these programs was not ubiquitous. Opponents constructed their own
versions of “the population problem” and developed alternative methods of demographic
analysis that predicted imminent population decline in the United States, rather than the
overpopulation at the heart of Pearl’s logistic method. The two main proponents of this
view were Metropolitan Life Insurance statisticians Alfred Lotka and Louis Dublin.
Alfred Lotka was born in 1880 in Lviv, Ukraine, to American parents. He completed his
undergraduate education at Birmingham University in 1901 and pursued graduate work at

81
the University of Leipzig and then at Cornell, returning to Birmingham to earn a [Link]. in
mathematical biology in 1912. Between 1912 and 1922, he worked for the General Chemical
Company, the U.S. Patent Office, the U.S. Bureau of Standards, and the magazine Scientific
American. From 1922 to 1924, Lotka worked in Raymond Pearl’s lab at Johns Hopkins,
and the two remained close friends until Pearl’s death in 1940. Immediately after his stint
in Pearl’s lab, Lotka became supervisor of mathematical research at Metropolitan Life In-
surance, where he worked closely with Louis Dublin. Before Lotka’s death in 1949, the two
published three books together: The Money Value of a Man (1930), Length of Life (1936),
and Twenty-Five Years of Health Progress (1937).
Lotka’s colleague Louis Dublin was born in Lithuania in 1882, but moved to New York
with his parents in 1886. He completed an undergraduate degree in mathematics at the
College of the City of New York in 1901 and a Ph.D. in biology at Columbia in 1904, where
he worked closely with Franz Boas, one of the most prominent critics of racial and eugenic
thought in the early twentieth century.109 Metropolitan Life Insurance hired Dublin in 1909
as part of a new initiative that provided public health, health education, home nursing, and
other welfare services for policyholders as a means of increasing profits.110 Dublin remained
at MetLife until 1952, eventually becoming vice president. He also played a major role
in strengthening the American Public Health Association and laying the groundwork for
modern public health administration systems.111
Dublin was interested not only in predicting the mortality of the American population,
but also in reducing it, and demonstrated that MetLife’s public health and welfare work
saved the company much more money than it cost.112 In particular, Dublin saw these ini-
109
“Louis I. Dublin, Ph.D.,” n.d.,Milbank Memorial Fund Records, Yale University Library, New Haven,
CT, folder 1, box 24; Daniel B. Bouk, “The Science of Difference: Developing Tools for Discrimination in
the American Life Insurance Industry, 1830-1930” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2009), 188; For more
on Boas, see George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essay in the History of Anthropology (New
York: Free Press, 1968).
110
I.S. Falk, “Editorial: Louis I. Dublin: November 1, 1882 – March 7, 1969,” American Journal of Public
Health and the Nation’s Health (July 1969): 1083–1085; Bouk, “The Science of Difference: Developing Tools
for Discrimination in the American Life Insurance Industry, 1830-1930,” see n. 109, 184.
111
Falk, see n. 110.
112
See n. 109.

82
tiatives as a way to reduce the mortality of African Americans relative to white Americans.
MetLife, as was the case with most white-owned insurance companies, insured black poli-
cyholders as substandard risks, using class as a criterion for discrimination in states where
insurance companies were prohibited from pricing policies differentially by race. In contrast
to Frederick Hoffman, statistician at The Prudential, who drew on mortality statistics to
argue that African Americans were inherently, permanently, and terminally inferior to white
Americans, destined to die off as a race and therefore uninsurable, Dublin demonstrated
that African American mortality was decreasing over time, and that the mortality gap was a
result of inferior access to medical care and decent housing rather than biological inferiority,
thereby making the case for black equality and insurability.113
Dublin served as president of the American Statistical Association in 1924. He devoted
that year’s meeting to “the population problem,” and titled his presidential address and
keynote speech “The Statistician and the Population Problem.” Dublin’s version of the
problem, however, was very different from that of Pearl and East. He argued that, although
population growth in Central Europe had been a major factor leading to the outbreak of
World War I, the problem in the United States was not imminent overpopulation, as the
neo-Malthusians argued, but rather anxiety about the threat of overpopulation, which led to
nativism and its expression in immigration restriction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.114
He contended that immigration restriction had no scientific basis; rather “the stream of
papers and books in recent years which has crystallized into an organized propaganda for
the Nordic races in America is simply an effort to give the appearance of respectability and of
science to what is fundamentally an expression of unreasoned prejudice.” Dublin described
the new immigration quotas, passed earlier that year, as “hastily considered legislation,”
and argued that it was the job of the statistician “to get the facts, to analyze them, to weigh
113
Bouk, “The Science of Difference: Developing Tools for Discrimination in the American Life Insurance
Industry, 1830-1930,” see n. 109, 185-186; Louis I. Dublin, “Life, Death and the Negro,” American Mercury,
1927, 37–45.
114
Louis I. Dublin, “The Statistician and the Population Problem,” Journal of the American Statistical
Association 20, no. 149 (1925): 2.

83
their relative importance, and then to arrive at a conclusion based upon the evidence,”
so that policy could be informed by “accurate information or calm, logical reasoning.”115
The fact that Dublin assigned this task to the statistician — then still understood as a
collector and analyst of state data — reiterates that there was as yet no distinct field of
population science or demography. Moreover, by claiming the study of human population
for the statistician, despite Pearl’s prominent claim that it was a topic for biology, Dublin
emphasized the importance of the social, economic, and political determinants of population
dynamics.
Dublin harshly criticized neo-Malthusian population arguments — whether based on
Pearl’s logistic law or on East’s assumption of constant growth — arguing that they er-
roneously “forecast future populations of enormous size which at an early date would tax
the very limits of our natural resources,” promoting unnecessary anxiety and stimulating
racist and anti-immigrant politics.116 He contended that “prophesy is at all times dangerous,
especially so in view of our lack of basic data and the imminent possibility of fundamental
discoveries in agriculture or in the production of synthetic foodstuffs.”117 In addition to sug-
gesting that future food supplies could be greater than those predicted by neo-Malthusians,
he also suggested that future population growth might be less than the neo-Malthusians
predicted. He faulted them for assuming “that the future growth of the country will keep
pace with the increase in past decades without giving due consideration to the underlying
factors which have caused that increase.”118 Dublin attributed recent population change not
to biological factors or natural laws of population but to social, economic, and political fac-
tors, notably industrialization as a cause of population increase and contraception and war
as a cause of population decrease.
Dublin supported this contention by collaborating with Lotka on a new model of pop-
115
Dublin, “The Statistician and the Population Problem,” see n. 114, 3.
116
Ibid., 6.
117
Louis I. Dublin, ed., Population Problems in the United States and Canada: An Outgrowth of Papers Pre-
sented at the Eighty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, December, 1924 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1926), vii.
118
Dublin, “The Statistician and the Population Problem,” see n. 114, 6.

84
ulation growth that was based on a much older population model with which insurance
statisticians were very familiar — life tables. Life tables indicate the probability of death at
each age, and allow insurance companies to calculate the premiums they need to charge in
order to turn a profit.119 Recognizing that the probability of dying depends on age, Dublin
and Lotka understood that a population with an older age structure will have a higher crude
death rate. The same basic life table principle also applies to fertility, since only women are
at risk of giving birth, and that risk depends on age, so a population with a higher propor-
tion of women aged 15–49 will have a higher crude birth rate. Lotka and Dublin therefore
argued that the crude rate of natural increase — the basis for East’s argument — was not
an accurate indication of future population trends because it didn’t account for impending
changes in the age structure of the population, which would change crude birth and death
rates and thereby change the overall rate of growth.
Instead, Dublin and Lotka developed a measure that they termed the “true” rate of
growth, known today as the intrinsic rate of natural increase. Lotka and Dublin defined this
rate as the crude rate of natural increase a given population would exhibit if its age-specific
rates of fertility and mortality were to remain constant long enough for the age structure to
stabilize.120 They therefore argued that it was more likely that age-specific rates of fertility
and mortality — the proportion of people of a given age and sex who can be expected to
give birth or die within the year — would remain constant into the future than that crude
fertility and mortality rates — the number of births or deaths in a year divided by total
population — would remain constant, since the crude rates depended on the population’s
age structure, which is not stable if fertility and/or mortality have changed recently.
The famous publication of this measure — coauthored by Dublin and Lotka — appeared
in 1925 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. The mathematics are clearly
119
Bouk, “The Science of Difference: Developing Tools for Discrimination in the American Life Insurance
Industry, 1830-1930,” see n. 109.
120
This measure is based on the stable population model, which demonstrates that, given constant age-
specific rates of mortality and fertility, in a population closed to migration, the age structure will become
constant (stable) after several decades.

85
Lotka’s work and he is the sole author of the methodological appendix, but Dublin presented
the punchline in his 1924 presidential address: although the then-current crude rate of natural
increase in the United States was 11 per thousand per year, the true rate of natural increase
was only 5.5 per thousand per year.121 In plain English, this means that, although the U.S.
population was at that time increasing at an annual rate of 11 per thousand (1.1%) through
the difference between births and deaths (not including migration), if current age-specific
rates of fertility and mortality were to continue into the future, once the age structure
stabilized, those same age-specific fertility and mortality rates would only produce a natural
increase (growth excluding migration) of 5.5 per thousand, or 0.55%. Dublin and Lotka
explained the difference between the crude rate of natural increase and the intrinsic growth
rate as a function of recent declines in fertility: as the new smaller cohort moved into the
childbearing ages and the current childbearing cohort moved into old age, the population
would have a higher proportion of elderly relative to young adults, which would mean more
deaths and fewer births. Although 5.5 per thousand still represents a growing population,
Dublin warned that, with immigration cut off, the U.S. would “be confronted with the
reality of a stationary [non-growing] population much sooner than any of our forecasters
have imagined,” a thinly-veiled reference to Pearl.122 The relatively low rate of growth Dublin
and Lotka identified was a troubling proposition because economists and policy makers still
viewed population growth as a source of national strength and a prerequisite for economic
growth, which had not entered into Pearl and East’s purely biological analysis.123
Pearl had also predicted eventual population stationarity (zero net growth) — repre-
sented by the upper asymptote of his logistic curve. According to Pearl’s logistic theory,
however, stationarity indicated and resulted from overpopulation. The logistic law held that
a population only became stationary when it reached the limits of its subsistence and simply
121
Louis I. Dublin and Alfred J. Lotka, “On the True Rate of Natural Increase,” Journal of the American
Statistical Association 20, no. 151 (1925): 305–339.
122
Dublin, “The Statistician and the Population Problem,” see n. 114, 7.
123
John Maynard Keynes, “Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population,” The Eugenics Review
29, no. 1 (1937): 13–17.

86
could not grow any further. For Dublin and Lotka, stationarity was the result of numer-
ous individual decisions to limit family size, which they argued were independent of limits
to subsistence. Even if food were readily available, Dublin disagreed with the Malthusian
premise that population growth was inevitable, and contended that “if a population can
increase in a geometric ratio, it can also decrease in the same ratio.” His assessment of that
possibility is clear from his following sentence: “This is the real danger.”124
Lotka and Dublin’s “true” rate of growth was not a population projection. Rather, it
represented what the long-term crude rate of natural increase would be if current age-specific
rates of fertility and mortality continued into the future, immigration notwithstanding. This
measure provided strong support for Dublin’s pro-immigration position, which Lotka seems
to have shared. In fact, they positioned their co-authored article as a critique of immigra-
tion restriction, introducing their research question by stating that “the present policy of
restricting immigration into the United States lends a particular interest to inquiries into
the powers of natural increase of our population,” and continuing to show that those powers
were not as strong as commonly thought or feared.125 Dublin did advocate a eugenic program
in the sense that he emphasized that, as the population approached stationarity, it would be
important “not to weaken its internal composition by increasing the proportion of defective
stock.”126 However, he rejected any correlation between “defectiveness” and national origin.
Dublin also opposed the legalization of contraception, which he saw as a threat to both the
quantity and quality of the U.S. population.127

The Net Reproduction Rate: Comparing Growth Across Populations

Concern for absolute population decline was much more prevalent in Europe, where World
War I and the influenza epidemic had taken a heavier toll, than in the United States. In-
deed, there had been a long history of concern with population decline in certain countries,
124
Dublin, “The Statistician and the Population Problem,” see n. 114, 10.
125
Dublin and Lotka, see n. 121, 305.
126
Dublin, “The Statistician and the Population Problem,” see n. 114, 10.
127
Louis I. Dublin, “The Significance of the Declining Birth Rate,” Science 47, no. 1209 (1918): 201–210.

87
particularly France, where it appeared that birthrates had been falling since the Revolu-
tion, and England, where birthrates had dropped dramatically among the middle and upper
classes.128 European leaders equated population size with national strength and geopolitical
power. France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and its horrifying losses in World War I
seemed to validate fears that population stagnation meant national weakness, while Britain’s
struggles to maintain its hold on South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century sparked
fears that its population might no longer be up to the task of imperial rule.129 These popula-
tion anxieties conflated quantity and quality: as the fertility decline was mainly concentrated
among the middle and upper classes, quantitative decline in fertility (regardless of absolute
population change) was equated with qualitative population decline.130
Between the wars, economist Robert Rene Kuczynski popularized a measure of population
growth developed in 1884 by his mentor Richard Boeckh, director of the Berlin Statistical
Office. This measure, the net reproduction rate (NRR), like the intrinsic rate of natural
increase, refers not to the actual growth of a population, but to the growth of a population
that has experienced constant age-specific fertility and mortality rates for several decades,
and therefore has a stable age structure. Specifically, the NRR indicates the rate at which
women replace themselves.131 An NRR of one says that, on average, every woman born will
have exactly one daughter during her life and the population will replace itself exactly. The
NRR and intrinsic rate of natural increase basically measure the same thing: a population
with an NRR of one has an intrinsic rate of zero; a population with an NRR greater than one
will have a positive intrinsic rate and a population with an NRR less than one will have a
negative intrinsic rate. In a low-mortality population, where most women live to the average
128
Joseph Spengler, France Faces Depopulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1938); Simon Szreter,
Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
129
Cole, see n. 39; Klancher, see n. 40.
130
Teitelbaum and Winter, see n. 55.
131
The NRR specifically describes the rate at which women bear daughters, but since age-specific fertility
rates are usually not available by sex of the child, this is estimated by applying the sex ratio at birth
(boy babies per 100 girl babies) to age-specific fertility rates undifferentiated by sex. Samuel H. Preston,
Patrick Heuveline, and Michel Guillot, Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001).

88
age of childbearing, women must have an average of two children (one daughter and, by
implication, one son) to achieve an NRR of one. In a high-mortality population, where fewer
women live to bear children, those who do live to childbearing age must have more than two
children in order to make up for those who do not live to childbearing age if the NRR is not
to dip below one.
The description of the NRR as the rate at which women replace themselves reflects
the fact that the NRR — like the intrinsic growth rate — is a one-sex model: it models
population growth on the basis of fertility rates experienced by one sex, in this case women.
This definition had important consequences for the way demographers modeled population
growth and conducted fertility research, and for the development of systemic methods of
contraception that worked directly on women’s bodies in postwar period. These consequences
will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters; here I will discuss the reasons for and
analytical implications of this definition. Counting births to men and to women would lead
to the double-counting of fertility, but there is no inherent reason why the female population
at risk of bearing children should be used as the denominator of the birthrate rather than
the male population at risk, since men are also involved in conception. There are, however,
practical reasons to attribute births to mothers rather than to fathers. First, the mother
is always present at the birth, while the father might not be present, and might not even
know that he has had a child. In places where a physician, midwife, or hospital employee
is responsible for recording births, he or she may have better access to information about
the mother than to information about the father. Mothers are therefore easier to account
for. Their childbearing is also easier to model than that of men, since women can only bear
children during a particular age span (usually considered by demographers to be ages 15–49),
and rarely give birth to more than one child per year.
In 1941, when the female-centric model of fertility was in the process of becoming stan-
dard, demographer Robert J. Myers reminded his audience that it was a choice, not a biolog-
ical necessity, pointing out that, “although at first glance it would seem as though rates for

89
men are without meaning since women actually bear the babies, it should be remembered
that where there is a mother, there must also be a father.”132 While demographers in the
mid-twentieth century made occasional use of male reproduction rates — for example, in
the analysis of differential fertility by socioeconomic status, where births to men are corre-
lated with their occupations133 — the NRR is and nearly always has been employed as a
female-centric measure. In 1949, demographers George Stolnitz and Norman Ryder referred
to the NRR as “customarily female,” indicating that the female NRR was more commonly
utilized than the male NRR and that, when sex was not specified, the NRR in question
was a female one. However, the fact that they explicitly stated this assumption indicates
that the naturalization of NRR as a female measure was not yet complete.134 Today, the
unqualified phrases “net reproduction rate,” “gross reproduction rate,” “total fertility rate,”
and “age-specific fertility rate” always refer to female rates, and are defined in demography
textbooks as the rate at which women replace themselves or bear children.135
The decision to attribute births to women in the intrinsic growth rate and the NRR has
both analytical and conceptual implications. Analytically, it may produce a different rate
of net reproduction than would be calculated if births were attributed to men, particularly
in populations with extreme sex disparities, as was the case in Europe after World War I,
which had cost so many male lives.136 In interwar France, for example, a country with more
women than men in the childbearing ages, the female NRR was below one, indicating long-
term population decline, and the male NRR (calculated in the same way, but using male
132
Robert J. Myers, “The Validity and Significance of Male Net Reproduction Rates,” Journal of the
American Statistical Association 36, no. 214 (June 1941): 275.
133
Christopher Tietze, “Differential Reproduction in England,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly (1939):
288–293.
134
George J. Stolnitz and Norman B. Ryder, “Recent Discussion of the Net Reproduction Rate,” Population
Index 15, no. 2 (Apr. 1949): 116.
135
The gross reproduction rate (GRR), like the NRR, specifically refers to the rate at which women bear
female children, with the same qualification cited above, though does not take mortality into account. For
explanations of these measures, see Preston, Heuveline, and Guillot, see n. 131.
136
Alfred J. Lotka, “Review of The Balance of Births and Deaths, Volume I,” Journal of the American
Statistical Association 24, no. 167 (Sept. 1929): 332–333; Alfred J. Lotka to Raymond Pearl, Nov. 28,
1932,Alfred J. Lotka Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ,
folder 4, box 14.

90
age-specific fertility rates rather than female rates) was above one, indicating long-term
population growth.137 The conceptual implication of the female model is the naturalization
of women as the bearers of population, and therefore as the agents of growth and the targets
of pro- or anti-natal interventions, as will be discussed further in Chapter Five.
Kuczynski was born in Berlin in 1876 and studied at the Universities of Freiburg, Munich,
Strasbourg, and Berlin. His research included the history of wages, German economic and
financial problems, food production, and labor conditions. Until the early 1930s, Kuczynski
worked in German statistical offices, with a two-year sabbatical at the U.S. Census Office.
From 1926 to 1932 he was a member of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.,
though he spent most of that period in Germany, moving to England when the political
climate became inhospitable and remaining there until his death in 1947.138

Figure 1.5: Kuczynski’s Net Reproduction Rate for France, Austria, Ukraine, and Poland

While at Brookings, Kuczynski published a two-volume work analyzing European NRRs,

demonstrating that, while the Northern and Western European countries had NRR values
near or below one, indicating imminent decline, the countries of Southern and Eastern Eu-
rope had NRR values well above one, indicating vigorous growth. He warned of the dire
geopolitical consequences of his findings, which suggested a potential shift from north and
137
P.H. Karmel, “The Relations Between Male and Female Reproduction Rates,” Population Studies 1, no.
3 (1947): 249–274; Robert R. Kuczynski, Fertility and Reproduction: Methods of Measuring the Balance of
Births and Deaths (New York: Falcon, 1932).
138
David V. Glass, “Robert Rene Kuczynski, 1876-1947,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 110, no.
4 (1947): 383–384.

91
west to south and east in the European balance of power, and his index provided support
for the pronatalist activities of eugenicist groups and governments throughout Northern and
Western Europe.139 Figure 1.5 graphs the NRR values Kuczynski calculated for some of
the countries of Europe, demonstrating that, by the late 1920s, the net reproduction rate
had dropped below replacement in France (solid black line) and Austria (solid gray line),
but was still above replacement in Eastern Europe, represented in this figure by Poland
(dashed black line) and Ukraine (dashed gray line).140 The figure suggests that, despite the
anxiety apparent in Kuczynski’s text, the net reproduction rates of Eastern Europe were
also falling rapidly. Again, an NRR below one did not necessarily mean that a population
was in decline, only that it would eventually decline if age-specific fertility and mortality
rates remained constant into the indefinite future. Nonetheless, Kuczynski represented his
results as demonstrating imminent decline, and his audience generally accepted his reading.
In England between the wars, the NRR was popularly known as the “Kuczynski rate,” and
newspapers publicized declines over time in the NRR as evidence of national decline and
degeneration.141
Over the next few years, Lotka and Dublin would challenge the originality of Kuczyn-
ski’s NRR, citing its reliance on their intrinsic rate of natural increase and Lotka’s stable
population model.142 While this dispute is largely beyond the scope of the present disserta-
tion, what is important is that, in attempting to resolve it, Brookings Institution Director
E.G. Nourse stated that the questions Lotka and Dublin had raised regarding Kuczynski’s
originality

can be adequately dealt with only by one who is not merely an able mathemati-
cian but also one who has a very considerable familiarity with vital statistics and
demographic concepts. The final questions to be argued involve very delicate
139
See, for example: Soloway, see n. 55; Schneider, see n. 55; Carlson, see n. 55.
140
Graph created by author using data from: Robert R. Kuczynski, The Balance of Births and Deaths,
vol. 1 (New York: MacMillan, 1928); Robert R. Kuczynski, The Balance of Births and Deaths, vol. 2 (New
York: MacMillan, 1931).
141
Soloway, see n. 55.
142
Alfred J. Lotka to Raymond Pearl, Nov. 9, 1936,“Alfred J. Lotka #9,” box 17; Alfred J. Lotka to
Raymond Pearl, Nov. 11, 1936,“Alfred J. Lotka #9,” box 17.

92
 interpretations of concepts which have a demographic as well as mathematical
content. . . . In a word, I believe that the issues are so finely drawn that it is hardly
possible to find anyone who is sufficiently inside and at the same time sufficiently
outside to serve as a non-partisan but qualified arbitrator of the case.143

Nourse’s statements suggest that, by the early 1930s, social scientists had begun to view
population as a distinct field of inquiry, one that drew on mathematics and statistics but
could not be reduced to mathematics or statistics, and one that involved specialized knowl-
edge that, at that time, few had. Indeed, the field was, at that moment, in the process of
being invented, with Lotka, Dublin, and Kuczynski — as well as Pearl, East, and Sanger —
all taking active roles.
Lotka, Dublin, and Kuczynski offered a very different view of the future than did Pearl
and East, one that stemmed from different scientific assumptions and political positions.
Pearl began from the scientific premise that population quantity was biologically determined
and that overpopulation was inevitable, which reflected his political support for immigration
restriction and a eugenic contraceptive program to control the quality of the ultimate satura-
tion population. East supported the same political programs, but began from the scientific
premise that both quantity and quality could be controlled by policy. Dublin and Lotka
viewed population quantity as being shaped by social, political, and economic factors, and
their analytic method validated their political opposition to contraception and immigration
restriction. Meanwhile, Kuczynski’s analysis pointed to a geopolitical anxiety: if Western
European populations were headed toward decline, continued growth of Eastern European
populations threatened the continental balance of power.

The Cohort Component Population Model: An Alternative Projection Method

In 1928, agricultural economist Pascal K. Whelpton published an article in the American

Journal of Sociology in which he presented new projections for the U.S. population, and a
143
E.G. Nourse to Alfred J. Lotka, Sept. 28, 1931,folder 4, box 14.

93
new method of projecting population, now known as the cohort component method.144 In
contrast to the intrinsic growth rate and the NRR, which applied current age-specific rates
of fertility and mortality to a fictitious age-sex structure — the structure that would prevail
if those age-specific fertility and mortality rates remained constant for several generations —
the cohort component method applied fictitious age-specific fertility and mortality rates —
those expected to pertain in the future — to the current age-sex structure. Over the period
of an arbitrary time step — usually five years — the cohort component method “ages”
the current population, applying age-specific mortality rates to each age group, moving the
survivors into the next age group, applying age-specific fertility rates to each female age
group between 15 and 49, and inserting the expected births into the 0-4 age category. The
analyst must also account for expected immigration and emigration within each age category.
Although the cohort component projection method came to be associated with Whelpton,
he was not the first to use it. In 1895, British economist Edwin Cannan had employed this
algorithm to forecast the 1931 population of London for the Metropolitan Water Commission,
and A.L. Bowley had used it in 1924 to calculate the fertility rates that would be necessary
for England and Wales to avoid population decline over the twentieth century.145 Welpton’s
major innovation was to combine the mathematical algorithm used by Cannan and Bowley
— as simple as subtracting expected deaths and emigrations and adding expected births and
immigrations — with predictions of changes in age-specific fertility and mortality rates over
the period of projection. It is this component — changing future fertility and mortality —
that qualifies Whelpton’s work as population forecasting, in contrast to the work of Cannan
and Bowley, which would more appropriately be classified as simulations. Cannan had
assumed constant mortality rates and numbers of births, and Bowley had assumed constant
mortality rates and zero overall natural increase.
144
Pascal K. Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” American Journal of Sociology
34, no. 2 (1928): 253–270.
145
Edwin Cannan, “The Probability of a Cessation of Growth of Population in England and Wales During
the Next Century,” The Economic Journal 5, no. 20 (1895): 505–515; A. L. Bowley, “Births and Population
in Great Britain,” The Economic Journal 34, no. 134 (1924): 188–192.

94
 As demographer Irene Taeuber would put it in 1944, calculations based on “the as-
sumption of the maintenance of present levels of fertility and mortality actually constitute
illustrations of the maintenance of the present vital balance, not predictions of future popula-
tion. Projections which attempt to estimate the probable population of the future must take
account of probable future changes in fertility, mortality, and migration.”146 This distinction
is critical to understanding the ways in which demographers describe present conditions of
population change with reference to the future. As discussed in the Introduction, demogra-
phers deal in population stocks and flows, or quantities and rates of change. Demographers
often illustrate the effects of growth rates on population quantity by invoking the future.
For example, East’s statement that, in the absence of intervention, world population could
reach 5.2 billion by the year 2023 illustrated the magnitude of the then-current population
growth rate. He did not predict that the world’s population would be 5.2 billion in the year
2023, but rather translated the then-current rate of world population growth into a quantity.
It was a statement about the then-current rate of world population growth rather than one
about future world population size. In contrast, in his 1928 article, Whelpton predicted
what the U.S. population would be at five-year increments on the basis not of current rates
of fertility, mortality, and migration, but on the basis of expected future rates.
Whelpton was one of two social scientists working at the Scripps Foundation for Re-
search in Population Problems. The Foundation had been established in 1922 by newspaper
magnate Edward Scripps to promote research on yet another version of “the population
problem”: the fear that population growth in some parts of the world — specifically Asia —
combined with population decline in other parts of the world — specifically North America
and Western Europe — would disrupt the existing geopolitical order. This fear had been
popularized in the U.S. by historian Lothrup Stoddard, who published The Rising Tide of
Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920, and eugenicist lawyer Madison Grant, who
published The Passing of the Great Race in 1916 and wrote the introduction to Stoddard’s
146
Irene B. Taeuber, “The Development of Population Predictions in Europe and the Americas,” Estadistica
(1944): 329.

95
book.
This fear was the global analogue of a central concern of many interwar eugenicists:
differential fertility. Differential fertility refers to the birthrate differentials within countries
between segments of the population considered more favorable and less favorable, usually
defined by class, race, or nativity. In the U.S., for example, differential fertility could refer
either to the higher fertility of the foreign born relative to the native born or to the higher
fertility of the working classes relative to the middle class, while in Western Europe it usually
referred to the latter. Scholars of all political stripes railed against differential fertility
within their own countries. However, although Kuczynski expressed concern about fertility
differentials between North America and Western Europe on the one hand and Eastern
Europe and the U.S.S.R. on the other, most population observers in the U.S. and Western
Europe paid little attention to population growth in other parts of the world. Three factors
that may have contributed to their disinterest are the relative lack of data for countries
outside of North America and Europe (which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter
Three); the fact that population density was low in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, and high mortality kept net population growth low even in places with high fertility;
and the Darwinian belief apparent in East’s work that “superior” races would outcompete
“inferior” ones if space on the planet ever became scarce.147 Others, however, including
Stoddard and Grant along with many U.S.-based businessmen and politicians, viewed the
impending population decline predicted by Lotka, Dublin, and Kuczynski for North America
and Western Europe in a global context.
When Scripps established his research center, it was not immediately clear what type of
experts he should hire. Nobody yet called himself a population scientist or demographer.
Pearl had claimed the study of human population for biology, but scholars in other disciplines
were also analyzing population data. Scripps ultimately chose sociologist Warren Thompson,
whose work Scripps admired. Thompson had completed his dissertation, titled “Population:
147
East, see n. 71.

96
A Study in Malthusianism,” in 1915 under the direction of Columbia University sociologist
Franklin Giddings, who pioneered the use of quantitative methods in the social sciences.
Giddings had encouraged Thompson to work with population data for the United States
because those data were readily available and had not yet been extensively analyzed outside
of government statistical offices.148 In so doing, Giddings claimed population as a topic of
inquiry for the social sciences.
In 1922, Thompson accompanied Scripps on a yacht tour of East Asia, where Scripps
was most concerned about population growth. On their return, Scripps hired Thompson as
director of the brand-new Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, housed at
Miami University in Scripps’s native Butler County, Ohio. Scripps envisioned his Foundation
as a haven where talented scientists could pursue independent research into questions of
population, free from the burden of teaching. He planned to hire a new young scientist every
few years.149 Scripps’s death in 1926 derailed this plan, but before his death Scripps hired the
second member of his population research team, agricultural economist Pascal K. Whelpton.
Whelpton had no prior experience with population research, but such experience was rare,
and the other candidate for the job — Lowell Reed — was two years beyond Scripps’s
arbitrary but strictly enforced age limit for recruits of 35.150 After Scripps’s death, work
at the Foundation continued with funding from the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial,
and Thompson and Whelpton turned their attention from population growth in East Asia
to population growth and population composition — age structure, urban/rural balance,
immigration, internal migration, and race — in the United States.151
148
Warren S. Thompson, Population: A Study in Malthusianism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1915); For more on Giddings and quantitative sociology, see Bannister, see n. 63.
149
Warren S. Thompson, “Description of Scripps Foundation Work,” 1923,“Warren S. Thompson,” box
27; Warren S. Thompson to Frederick Osborn, Jan. 13, 1965,American Eugenics Society Records, American
Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA, “Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems,” box 19.
150
Raymond Pearl to Warren S. Thompson, 1923–1924,“Warren S. Thompson,” box 27; Warren S. Thomp-
son to Raymond Pearl, 1923–1924,“Warren S. Thompson,” box 27; Thompson to Osborn, Jan. 13, 1965,
see n. 149; Clyde V. Kiser, “Contributions of P.K. Whelpton to Demography,” Biodemography and Social
Biology 20, no. 4 (1973): 438–447.
151
Frank W. Notestein and Frederick Osborn, “Reminiscences: The Role of Foundations, the Population
Association of America, Princeton University and the United Nations in Fostering American Interest in
Population Problems,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1971): 68.

97
 Whelpton’s 1928 projection reflected a completely different ontology of population and
theory of population growth than did Pearl’s, but his numbers and the shape of growth he
projected were remarkably similar. Whelpton’s method was much more open to possibility
than was Pearl’s. The cohort component projection method specifies that future vital rates
are applied to the current age-sex structure; it does not specify what those future vital rates
are or how they should be determined. Depending on the analyst’s assumptions about future
fertility, mortality, and migration rates, population could either increase or decrease over the
period of projection, and at any rate. In contrast to Pearl’s logistic law of population growth,
which assumed regular growth along a logistic curve, the cohort component method — at
least in principle — allowed for any trajectory of population growth or decline.
Because the cohort component method is so flexible, using it requires analysts to make
some kind of assumptions about future vital rates. As of 1928, Pearl’s logistic law was the
only available theory of population growth, but as social scientists, Thompson and Whelpton
rejected Pearl’s biological determinism. Whelpton did not present his own coherent theory
of population growth in his 1928 article — Thompson would do that in the following year
— but he did make certain assumptions about the future course of vital rates. Whelpton
predicted future fertility, mortality, and migration rates on the basis of recent trends in those
rates. The trends he identified were in fact very recent because the United States, despite
having carried out the world’s first modern census in 1790, had only just begun collecting
vital statistics. Neither birth nor death registration was universal, and Whelpton had access
to only just over 20 years’ worth of mortality data and an even shorter span of fertility
data. Nonetheless, he charted a declining trend in both fertility and mortality rates, and
predicted that these trends would continue, though at a decreasing rate. He assumed that
white U.S. mortality rates were heading asymptotically toward the then-current mortality
level of New Zealand, which at that time had the world’s highest known expectation of life at
birth.152 This choice suggests a belief that mortality was declining toward some biologically-
152
Expectation of life at birth is a life-table index (e00 ) defined as the average number of years lived by all
persons born in a given year. Preston, Heuveline, and Guillot, see n. 131.

98
determined minimum, beyond which it could not continue to decline. Future fertility rates
were derived from the observed downward trend in age-specific birth rates, which Whelpton
also assumed to be asymptotic — suggesting that he did not expect people to stop having
children altogether — though he did not use data from other countries to establish the lower
limit.153
Although Whelpton’s method was based on changes in vital rates and did not impose a
pre-determined trajectory of population growth, the way Pearl’s did, it did suggest a uni-
versal trajectory of mortality and fertility rates — declining steadily over time but at a
slowing rate, forming inverse logistic curves — and produced a logistic trajectory of popula-
tion growth that looked much like Pearl’s projections. The universality of this pattern would
be formalized the following year by Thompson in his articulation of demographic transition
theory, described below. Just as Kuczynski’s NRR and Lotka and Dublin’s intrinsic rate
of growth attributed births only to women, Whelpton’s cohort component projection model
also calculated future births from female age-specific fertility rates, as has been standard
practice in population projection ever since.
While Pearl usually applied his logistic law of population growth to the populations of
entire countries (the notable exception being his analysis of the indigenous population of
Algeria), Whelpton decomposed the U.S. population according to the divisions that seemed
salient at the time, calculating separate projections for native-born whites, foreign-born
whites, and African Americans, and separating each group by urban/rural status.154 Whelp-
ton chose these divisions because rates of natural increase varied by nativity, race, and
the urban/rural divide, but also because he could: these were the categories by which his
baseline data source — the 1920 Census — had divided the population in this period of ur-
banization, segregation, and nativism. Separate tabulation according to any criteria would
have produced different rates of natural increase.155 Given the contemporary concern with
153
Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144.
154
Ibid.
155
Stephen Epstein makes the same point about the categories used in biomedical research. Stephen Epstein,
Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

99
socioeconomic fertility differentials, Whelpton likely would have made separate projections
by socioeconomic status if census tabulations by class had been available. In Whelpton’s
analysis, however, the prediction of future mortality and fertility rates for native-born whites
was always the central element, with rates for other groups determined as differentials be-
tween those groups and native-born whites that, in some cases, he predicted would narrow
over time.156
Whelpton assumed that African American life expectancy would rise over time but re-
main lower than that of white Americans into the foreseeable future.157 He accounted for
international migration with a fixed rate of one million immigrants every five years, and for
rural-to-urban migration of native-born whites, with the rate slowing asymptotically in the
future. He considered rural-to-urban migration negligible for foreign-born whites, as they
made their choice of urban or rural residence on arrival, and dealt with it in a rather crude
fashion for African Americans, with all natural increase attributed to black urbanites.158
Evaluating Whelpton’s interwar projections in 1957, demographer George Mair commented
that the separate projections of racial, regional, and national groups may have appeared to
add precision to the estimates, but in reality did not because “the basic uncertainties as to
mortality and fertility are apparently more serious than the problems of prediction result-
ing from differential behavior of race-nativity groups.”159 These separate projections did,
however, highlight and naturalize fertility differentials between these groups.
Projecting racial and regional groups separately further reified perceived differences
among them, but it also allowed Whelpton to predict future changes in the racial com-
position and geographic distribution of the U.S. population along with changes in size. His
overall projection for the U.S. was the sum of these separate projections. The ability to
decompose the population of the U.S. into racial or regional groups, or the population of
the world into countries or continents, made the cohort component projection method much
156
Mair, see n. 2.
157
Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144.
158
Mair, see n. 2; Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144.
159
Mair, see n. 2, 129.

100
more capable of speaking to concerns about differential fertility — whether intranational or
international — than Pearl’s logistic method. Pearl’s theory conceived of populations —
whether of a particular country or of the world as a whole — as organic entities that grew
as cohesive units with the same properties as individual organisms. There was no way to
account for different segments of a population growing at different rates. Moreover, Pearl’s
method suffered from a fundamental mathematical limitation: it was not additive. He could,
in theory, fit logistic curves for each country of the world and add them together to derive
total global population, but this method would not produce the same result he would get
if he were to fit a logistic curve to the population of the world, and it would not neces-
sarily produce a logistic curve, simply because the sum of two logistic curves is not itself
necessarily a logistic curve.160 The non-additivity of Pearl’s projections allowed for a formal
mathematical critique of his method that eventually led even Pearl himself to abandon it.161
Whelpton’s method, because it was additive, could be applied globally to address his late
sponsor’s anxieties about international fertility differentials.
The cohort component method drew on the same understanding of population as did the
intrinsic rate of natural increase and the net reproduction rate: an aggregate of individuals,
with the overall size depending on the social, political, and economic factors that influence
individual mortality, fertility, and migration. The cohort component method did not include
a theory of population change, leaving assumptions about future vital rates open to the
160
Kingsland, see n. 83.
161
The non-additivity of logistic curves was first pointed out by Pearl’s colleague, friend, and rival Edwin
Wilson, a mathematician at Harvard. Wilson was an early supporter and adopter of Pearl’s logistic law of
population growth, until he discovered that the logistic did not behave as a natural law should, and could
produce absurd results. As an example, Wilson cited a logistic projection Pearl had made of the future
population of New York City, in which Pearl calculated an upper asymptote of 35 million. When Wilson fit
a logistic curve to the total population of the states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, however, he
calcultated an upper asymptote of 22 million, suggesting that the carrying capacity of the three states was
less than that of one city within those three states. For Pearl’s projection, see the notes section of the Journal
of the American Statistical Association 20, no 152 (December 1925): 569-573. Wilson’s response is in Edwin
B. Wilson and William J. Luyten, “The Population of New York City and its Environs,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 11, no. 2 (1925): 137–143; Pearl responded
to Wilson’s critique by claiming — contrary to his many published statements — that the logistic curve
was not intended as either a natural law of population growth or as a forecasting tool, but was simply an a
posteriori description of population growth. Raymond Pearl to Edwin B. Wilson, Jan. 8, 1925,“Edwin B.
Wilson#2,” box 29.

101
analyst’s judgment, though that judgment had to incorporate biological realities regarding
mortality and fertility. In contrast to the intrinsic rate of natural increase and the net
reproduction rate, the cohort component method allows for migration and for changes in vital
rates: at five-year increments, the analyst updates the size and structure of the population
based on assumed fertility, mortality, and migration rates, and selects the rates to be used
over the next five-year period. The following section further explores the differences between
the logistic law of population growth and the cohort component projection method, debates
between Whelpton and Pearl about the validity of each method, and the different ontologies
and politics of population embedded in each.

1.3 Comparing the Logistic Law and the Cohort

Component Method: Two Ontologies of
Population

Recent scholars have disagreed over which projection method — the logistic or the cohort
component — was more “scientific.” Henk de Gans asks why the cohort component method,
which was based on “speculation” about future vital rates, so quickly displaced the logistic
law, which was based on a mathematical function.162 In contrast, Edmund Ramsden argues
that, after the publication of Whelpton’s article, the cohort component method was rapidly
accepted and institutionalized as the standard for population projection because it was more
analytical and empirical than the logistic method.163
The same debate raged between the wars among Pearl, Reed, and Whelpton. In his 1928
article, Whelpton presented his projection method as an explicit alternative to Pearl and
Reed’s method. Whelpton derided Pearl and Reed as “curve artists” — the term “artist”
suggesting a lack of scientificity in their work — and carefully distinguished his method from
162
Henk de Gans, “Law or Speculation? A Debate on the Method of Forecasting Population Size in the
1920s,” Population (English Edition) 57, no. 1 (2002): 83–108.
163
Ramsden, “Carving Up Population Science: Demography and the Controversy Over the ‘Biological Law’
of Population Growth,” see n. 83.

102
theirs, stating that “no claim is made that the Scripps Foundation estimates represent a
law of population growth.”164 Whelpton described the projections produced by the cohort
component method as “simply the results of an empirical process,” and emphasized that
“these estimates represent simply what will happen under certain conditions of immigration,
birth-rates, and death-rates” — the arithmetical outcomes of a set of assumptions.165 With
this statement, Whelpton disavowed the predictive nature of his projections, emphasizing
his computational labor to elide his exercise of expert judgment to predict the future vital
rates that underpinned his computation. On the other side, Reed emphasized the role of
judgment in the cohort component model to characterize it as subjective. In contrast to the
subjectivity of the cohort component method, he compared the logistic law to the methods
used in the phyical sciences, arguing that

in using the logistic law we are, therefore, following the line of thought that is ap-
plied in the field of physics or chemistry when any empirical equation is found to
fit an observed set of facts and then is used for purposes of extrapolation beyond
the range of observation. When we consider the procedures used by Thompson
and Whelpton, we see that they exercise their judgment to state directly what
the future birth and death rates will be and their population forecasts, being
the direct arithmetic consequences of these rates, have therefore the values to be
ascribed to the judgment of these workers.166

This statement highlights the predictive element of cohort component projection that Whelp-
ton’s description of the method had elided. It also conveniently glosses over the fact that
the extrapolation Pearl and Reed used was itself the product of a theory, though this could
easily be neglected since the theory was built into the computation, such that using the
logistic projection method did not require the exercise of judgment or expertise.167
164
Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144, 267.
165
Ibid., 267, 270.
166
Lowell J. Reed, “Population Growth and Forecasts,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 188 (1936): 165.
167
The dispute over the “scientificity” of the two methods reflects the shift in the focus of scientific practice
from laws to models, described by Giere, and reflects fundamental differences between the natural and
social sciences in the explanation of natural and social phenomena, described by Abbott. Ronald N. Giere,
Science Without Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Andrew Abbott, Methods of Discovery:
Heuristics for the Scoial Sciences (New York: Norton, 2004).

103
 The logistic law and the cohort component model relied on different social ontologies
and employed different definitions of scientific explanation. While the cohort component
model conceptualized society as an aggregate of individuals, the logistic law treated it as an
emergent phenomenon subject to natural laws and with properties irreducible to individual
actions. For Whelpton, population growth was the product of the addition and subtraction
of component individuals. The composition of the population at baseline was critical because
the number of persons in each sex-age-race-region group at the beginning of the projection
and their behavior over the period of projection determined the final population size. In
the cohort component model, as in Dublin and Lotka’s true rate of natural increase and
Kuczynski’s NRR, populations with more women in the childbearing ages would grow more
quickly than those with fewer, even if the same age-specific fertility rates were applied, and
populations more heavily weighted toward the elderly would grow more slowly (or decline
more quickly) because a greater proportion of the population would be exposed to higher
mortality risks. Whelpton also saw population as being segmented along the social lines of
race, nationality, and urban/rural status, with members of different groups facing different
risks of birth and death, such that the relative size of these subpopulations had bearing on
overall population growth. In contrast, in Pearl’s model, population composition was irrele-
vant because the laws of growth applied to the population as a whole and were impervious
to individual actions, such that individual characteristics and behavior had no influence on
the aggregate growth rate.
In addition to viewing populations in additive terms, as aggregates of individuals, the
cohort component model viewed the components of population growth in additive terms, in
contrast to the logistic model, which viewed them in interactive terms. In the cohort com-
ponent model, birth, death, and migration were the independent variables that determined
population growth, and the effect of any component was not related to the effect of any
other component. In Pearl’s model, however, population growth itself was the independent
variable, and mortality, fertility, and migration changed in response to changes in population

104
density and changes in each of the other components. The effects of the components were
interactive rather than additive in the sense that a change in one would change the others
so as to maintain the logistic trajectory of overall population growth.
The logistic law and cohort component models embodied different modes of scientific
explanation. Drawing on Charles Morris’s aspects of symbolic systems, Andrew Abbott in
Methods of Discovery presents three styles of social explanation: pragmatic, semantic, and
syntactic.168 The cohort component model offered a pragmatic explanation of population
growth — one that facilitated intervention into the phenomenon it explained. Whereas the
logistic law was fully determined by past population dynamics and offered only one vision
of the future, the cohort component model was not at all determined by past population
dynamics, only by the baseline population structure and by the prediction of future vital
rates, which were completely open to the judgment of the analyst. Moreover, by specifying
independent effects for each of the components of population growth, it suggested that
adjustments to those components (for example a reduction in fertility through the spread
of birth control, a reduction in mortality through public health initiatives, or a reduction
in migration through restrictive legislation) could alter the future it described. By contrast,
the explanation of population growth embodied in the logistic law was both semantic —
in that explained population growth and its cessation in terms external to population, the
availability of subsistence resources — and syntactic in that it described that growth in
the elegant language of mathematics. It was explicitly not pragmatic, as the ability to
intervene in population growth would have undermined the argument that growth occurs
according to an unchanging mathematical formula. The cohort component model was neither
syntactic nor semantic: future population was the result of a set of additions and subtractions
to current population rather than the result of a mathematical formula, and the model
attributed such growth only to elements of the system itself — birth, death, and migration
— rather than biological, social, economic, or political forces. These differences are vital to
168
Abbott, see n. 167.

105
the history of demography and population control because they meant that, in contrast to
Pearl’s description of population growth occurring according to an inalterable law of nature,
in Whelpton’s model, population growth was the contingent product of policy and individual
choices — mainly about fertility, which was “coming under human control faster than life
extension.”169
Despite the vast differences in their methods and theories, Whelpton’s projection of the
U.S. population looked remarkably similar to Pearl’s, as shown in Figure 1.6.170 Table 1.1
demonstrates that, at each date, Whelpton’s figures were just slightly higher than Pearl’s,
which, as Whelpton explained, “from a popular standpoint seem too low.”171 Whelpton’s
projection also traced an S-shaped curve, with growth slowing and population ultimately
becoming stationary. He even remarked on “the similarity in trend and absolute size between
these population estimates and those of Pearl and Reed (up to 1940), in spite of the entirely
different methods by which they were obtained.”172 Whelpton only predicted population
through 1975, so it is impossible to know how his projections would have compared to Pearl
and Reed’s after that date.

Figure 1.6: Population Projections for the United States by Raymond Pearl and Pascal
Whelpton, and Observed U.S. Population

169
Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144, 257.
170
Graph created by the author using data from: Pearl and Reed, see n. 79; Whelpton, “Population of the
United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144; Carter et al., see n. 82.
171
Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144, 255; Pearl and Reed, see n. 79.
172
Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144, 267.

106
Table 1.1: U.S. Population, as Projected by Raymond Pearl and Pascal Whelpton, 1930-1970
Year Pearl Whelpton

1930 122,397,000 123,600,000

1940 136,318,000 138,250,000
1950 148,678,000 151,620,000
1960 159,230,000 162,670,000
1970 167,945,000 171,460,000

It was not only the model that differed, but also the theory behind it. Whelpton’s
approach was explicitly non-Malthusian and included no concept of a natural limit to pop-
ulation growth.173 Therefore, nothing in his model necessitated that growth take a logistic
shape. Had he assumed lower fertility and higher mortality in the future, the estimate would
have curved downward and, had he assumed higher fertility and lower mortality in the fu-
ture, it would have continued to climb. The projected population curve took this logistic
shape because Whelpton designed it to do so. Although fertility and mortality had declined
steadily over the period for which data were available, he assumed that rates would level off
— with life expectancy never exceeding 70 years — and that they would do so gradually,
producing the same gradual slowing of growth Pearl had predicted. As Jan Van Bavel has
pointed out, however, there was at that time no theory of population growth that would
have suggested that the fertility decline would ever end.174 It is possible, therefore, that with
little information about trends in or the biology of vital rates and no theory about popula-
tion dynamics, Whelpton may have selected the future rates he did because they produced
results that were similar to Pearl’s but slightly higher, as Pearl’s had been critiqued for
being too low. It is also possible that the Malthusian idea of an upper limit against which
173
This distinction is often missed by present-day historians of population studies, for example, Karl
Ittmann, “Demography as Policy Science in the British Empire, 1918-1969,” Journal of Policy History
15, no. 4 (2003): 417–448.
174
Jan Van Bavel, “Subreplacement Fertility in the West Before the Baby Boom: Past and Current Per-
spectives,” Population Studies 64, no. 1 (2010): 1–18.

107
population inevitably presses influenced Whelpton’s projection assumptions even though he
did not explicitly cite it.
Although Whelpton’s projection produced numbers slightly higher than Pearl’s, the “pop-
ulation problem” he predicted was not overpopulation, scarcity, or a reduced standard of
living, but rather the slowing of growth in the United States and population aging, or the
weighting of population toward the elderly. In contrast to Pearl, who argued that any slow-
down or cessation of growth was evidence of a dangerous level of population pressure on
resources, Whelpton argued that a slowing of population growth would present a challenge
to businesses, whose dynamism — along with economic growth more generally — depended
on continued population growth. Quite the opposite of Pearl and his fellow neo-Malthusians,
Whelpton warned that U.S. farmers would need to halt their efforts toward ever-higher pro-
duction levels in order to avoid oversupply and a consequent fall in prices. In 1934, he at-
tended the Third International Conference of Agricultural Economists in Germany, where he
demonstrated the slowing of population growth worldwide (indicated in projections made by
others using his method).175 Whereas Pearl had argued that slowing population growth was
evidence that population was outstripping subsistence resources, Whelpton recommended
that farmers limit their increases in agricultural production so that food supply would not
exceed projected population figures.176 The contrast between Pearl’s interpretation of his
projection and Whelpton’s interpretation of his own very similar projection is striking, and
demonstrates that even very similar population numbers could be marshaled as evidence
175
In contrast to the logistic method, which required minimal data — total population counts at three points
(to solve for the three unknown constants in the logistic equation in the past) — the cohort component model
required detailed data about the baseline population and its recent dynamics. It was also computationally
intensive, as it did not represent population with a continuous equation, but rather with a step function in
which each five-year period had to be calculated independently. Perhaps as a consequence of the extensive
data and intensive computational requirements of the cohort component model, Whelpton himself never
used it to project any population other than that of the United States, though it was rapidly adopted by
population experts in Europe. For this adoption, see Henk de Gans, Population Forecasting 1895-1945:
Transition to Modernity (Boston: Kluwer, 1999).
176
At the same time, however, he suggested that a slowing of population growth could increase the living
standards and purchasing power of the poor, which would increase demand for agricultural products. Pascal
K. Whelpton, “The Population Prospect,” in Proceedings, Third International Conference of Agricultural
Economists, Bad Eilsen, Germany (1934).

108
of very different “population problems” and in support of very different solutions to those
problems.
Whelpton cautioned that the observed and projected decline in fertility would increase the
elderly proportion of the population, a phenomenon known to demographers as “population
aging.” By projecting each birth cohort separately, the cohort component model illustrated
the age-structure of the future population as well as its size, indicating that fertility decline
meant more people in each successive age cohort. Whelpton suggested that this change in
age composition would provide a more supportive environment for high culture, but warned
that it could also lead to political and economic conservatism, strain the capacity of proposed
old age pension schemes, and require that people postpone retirement to make up for the
impending shortfall of younger workers.177 He continued to publish about the aging of the
U.S. population and its causes and consequences throughout the interwar period and, as
fertility continued to decline over the 1930s, his subsequent projections, discussed in Chapter
Two, showed ever more extreme population aging.
Population aging is also a mathematical consequence of Pearl’s model, as demonstrated
by Lotka.178 Pearl finally addressed this aging in 1939 in an infamous speech to the American
Statistical Association. In contrast to Whelpton, who used a social definition of age, dividing
the population into the pre-working (< 15), working (15–64), and post-working (65+) ages,
Pearl used a biological definition of age, dividing the population into the pre-reproductive
(< 15), reproductive (15–49), and post-reproductive (50+) ages. The schema Pearl used in
his presentation to illustrate this division is given in Figure 1.7.179 Pearl referred to societies
with more than 30% of people in the post-reproductive ages as “regressive,” and argued
that people aged 50 and over “have worked out and finished whatever potential biological
justification there ever was for their existence, [and] constitute a social problem of the first
177
Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144.
178
Alfred J. Lotka, “The Structure of a Growing Population,” Human Biology 3, no. 4 (1931): 459–493.
179
Raymond Pearl, “The Aging of Populations,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 35, no.
209 (1940): 288.

109
magnitude,” despite the fact that many of them were still working productively.180 Pearl’s
talk earned him public scorn for his suggestion that people in the post-reproductive age group
— particularly those who favored government support for the aged — had grown too foolish
to be allowed to vote.181 In contrast to Whelpton’s model, where fertility decline produced a
larger proportion of elderly in the population by reducing the proportion of children, Pearl
seems to have considered fertility decline a consequence of a process of population aging
he assumed to be inherent in the population organism — leading to a higher proportion of
people in the post-reproductive ages — rather than its cause.

Figure 1.7: Pearl’s Illustration of Population Aging

In contrast to the logistic model, which offered prediction at the expense of control, the
cohort component model held out the twin promises of prediction and control. Demographer
Donald Bogue reflected on these scientific ideals in 1964, when he confidently stated that
180
Pearl, “The Aging of Populations,” see n. 179, 283, 292.
181
“‘No Ballot for Aged Speech’ — Replies,” n.d.,box 21.

110
“one of the slogans that we often recite to undergraduate students is that the goal of all
science is prediction and control. Demography has been among the first of the social sciences
to develop models for making demographic predictions and in a few years I expect us to
define the accomplishments of demography using both terms of the classic definition.”182
Clearly, demographers had not yet achieved the level of control over population that seemed
much more necessary in 1964 than it had in the 1930s, as will be described in Chapters
Four and Five. Bogue’s comments, however, suggest that they could not have even hoped
for such control without first developing a method of predicting future population that
conceptualized it as the product of potentially-controllable factors: fertility, mortality, and
migration operating independently of one another.

1.4 Demographic Transition Theory: A Social Theory

of Population Change

While anyone can use the cohort component method to easily calculate the effect of any
imposed vital rates on future population, the analyst or someone else must explicitly specify
those rates. Despite Whelpton’s claims of the method’s empiricism, future vital rates cannot
be known empirically; they are not included in even the most complete data sets because they
have not yet occurred. The logistic law of population growth had been both a theory and a
projection method: the theory that populations grew in logistic cycles implied that future
population could be determined by fitting past population data to a logistic curve. The
cohort component model, on the other hand, was atheoretical, simply a mathematical tool,
and it therefore appeared more objective and — as Whelpton claimed — empirical than
the logistic method. However, without any internal theory, using the cohort component
method requires the subjective act of making predictions about the future course of fertility,
mortality, and migration, and the accuracy of the projection depends on the quality of those
182
Donald Bogue, “The Demographic Breakthrough: From Prediction to Control,” Population Index 30,
no. 4 (1964): 453.

111
predictions. Interwar users of the cohort component model could assume that then-current
rates would continue indefinitely — the assumption made in Dublin and Lotka’s intrinsic rate
of natural increase and Kuczynski’s net reproduction rate — or could assume that recent
trends in vital rates would continue, as Whelpton did in his 1928 projections. Assuming
that trends will continue requires knowing the shape of the trend — linear, exponential, etc.
— but, since there is no empirical way to discover the shape of a future trend, making an
assumption about that shape requires a general theory of population dynamics and of how
(and maybe why) vital rates change over time.
In his 1928 projection, Whelpton assumed that vital rates followed downward logistic
trajectories, with mortality and fertility continuing to decline but at decreasing rates. When
fertility decline followed mortality decline, these trends produced the same upward logistic
curve of population growth posited by Pearl. Whelpton did not explain the rationale be-
hind his assumptions but, in the following year, his colleague Warren Thompson published
one of the first articulations of the theory that has informed population projection ever
since — demographic transition.183 This section describes demographic transition theory, its
relationship to modernization theory, which was emerging around the same time, and the
geopolitical consequences it threatened.

1.4.1 Modernization and Demographic Transition

Demographic transition theory is usually attributed to mid-century demographers Frank

Notestein and Kingsley Davis, both of whom made well-known statements of it in the
1940s, or to Adolphe Landry, who described something similar in his 1934 La Revolution
Demographique.184 However, it was Warren Thompson who first laid out the stages of demo-
183
Warren S. Thompson, “Population,” American Journal of Sociology 34, no. 6 (May 1929): 959–975.
184
Dudley Kirk, “Demographic Transition Theory,” Population Studies 50 (1996): 361–387; Although
most commentators describe Landry’s demographic revolution as simply an early version of demographic
transition, Jan Van Bavel has argued that it was fundamentally different in that it had no end point.
Whereas demographic transition is a shift from a high-pressure equilibrium to a low-pressure equilibrium,
demographic revolution involved an infinite decline in fertility to the point of extinction. Van Bavel, see
n. 174.

112
graphic transition in a 1929 article in the American Journal of Sociology, though he did not
name it. Demographic transition is both a historical description and a theory. As histori-
cal description, it refers to the nineteenth-century English experience of declining mortality,
which initiated rapid population growth, followed by declining fertility, which had slowed
— and was expected ultimately to end — population growth.185 Demographic transition
theory is the universalization of this experience: the prediction that all societies will follow
the same demographic trajectory (reduction in mortality followed by reduction in fertility
with population growth in between) as part of the process of modernization — either cause,
consequence, or both.

Figure 1.8: Demographic Transition Theory

Figure 1.8 is a recent textbook illustration of demographic transition theory, with downward-
sloping lines representing mortality and fertility and an upward-sloping line representing
population growth.186 The diagram is divided into four sequential phases, with the first
three indicating the experience of three groups of countries described by Thompson in his
1929 article as representing sequential phases in a universal progression from high fertility
185
Demographic scholarship has indicated that, although demographic transition is often described as the
general experience of Western Europe, only England experienced the textbook case.
186
Adapted from [Link]
articleId=50 (accessed 4/1/2015).

113
and mortality to low fertility and mortality:

Group A. Low mortality and fertility, with little overall population growth:
Northern and Western Europe, and the English-speaking non-European world.
Group B. Declining mortality and still-high fertility, with rapid population
growth: Southern and Eastern Europe.
Group C. High fertility and mortality, with little overall population growth:
The rest of the world.187

Group A had progressed the farthest in the supposedly-universal demographic transition, and
Thompson described Group B as being about 50 years behind group A, but experiencing
a much more rapid mortality decline. Thompson attributed the mortality decline of both
groups to industrialization, and predicted that population could also grow in the Group C
countries if they were to begin to industrialize, pointing to Japan as an example.188
Although Thompson may have been the first to formally state this theory, it crystallized
the geopolitical concerns of Edward Scripps, Lothrup Stoddard, Madison Grant, and other
population observers. At Sanger’s 1927 conference, which Thompson had attended, British
economic historian Mabel Buer, who had recently published a monograph describing the
population consequences of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain,189 cautioned her
fellow population scientists that, although population growth in Asia and Africa appeared
to be slow or nonexistent,

it is important to note that the slowness of their increase is due to the same cause
as was the slow increase of pre-18th century Europe, that is, to a high death rate
and in particular to a high infantile mortality, due to lack of elementary hygiene.
There is every sign that in a few years this will be remedied, and the change has
already begun in India. It seems probable that we shall then have a period in
the East corresponding to the first half of the 19th century in Europe, a period
of a lower death and infant mortality rate (which, however, is still high according
to our notions) and of a birth rate little, if at all, diminished., The result will
be a rapid increase in population which may well be fraught with world-shaking
187
This is a paraphrase, not a direct quotation. Thompson, “Population,” see n. 183, 961-962.
188
Ibid.
189
Mabel Buer, Health, Wealth, and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution (London:
Routledge, 1926).

114
 consequences.190

Demographic transition theory is clearly a variant of the modernization theory that was
beginning to develop in the social sciences, and part of a much longer tradition of conjec-
tural history and social evolutionary thought that Arland Thornton has critically described
as “reading history sideways” and Anne McClintock has described as “anachronistic space”
— viewing different parts of the world as representing distinct stages in a universal trajectory
of human and social development.191 Demographic transition theory associates high mortal-
ity and fertility rates with so-called pre-modern or traditional societies and low mortality
and fertility rates with so-called modern societies, positing that the transition to modernity
in Western Europe and North America both caused and was facilitated by declining mortal-
ity and fertility rates. It assumes that the demographic history of these places represents a
universal trajectory, such that the demographic condition of the rest of the world reflects Eu-
rope’s past and the demographic condition of Europe predicts the rest of the world’s future.
As is also true of modernization theory, demographic transition theory elides the role played
by the non-European world in Europe’s economic development and demographic transition,
supplying raw materials for the industry that supported Europe’s population boom and pro-
viding an outlet for Europe’s excess population. The concept of demographic transition as
a supposedly-universal experience attendant on the also supposedly-universal societal shift
from tradition to modernity was an attractive concept for early twentieth-century social sci-
entists, who sought to identify the laws that universally governed modern societies.192 The
emerging science of demography would benefit considerably from the integration of popu-
190
Margaret Sanger, ed., Proceedings of the World Population Conference, Held at the Salle Centrale,
Geneva, August 29th to September 3rd, 1927 (London: E. Arnold, 1927), 57-58.
191
Arland Thornton, Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental
Paradigm on Family Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather:
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Good accounts of modern-
ization theory in the second half of the twentieth century include: Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future:
Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Michael E.
Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
192
Immanuel Wallerstein, “What Are We Bounding, and Whom, When We Bound Social Research?” Social
Research 62, no. 4 (1995): 839.

115
lation dynamics into modernization theory in the postwar period, as will be discussed in
Chapter Four, as modernization theory held social, economic, and political change to be
mutually causative, and demographic transition theory placed reductions in mortality and
fertility at the center of that nexus.
Demographic transition theory recuperated Pearl’s logistic trajectory of population growth
and reinterpreted it in terms of the social, economic, and political process of modernization.
The growth pattern described by demographic transition theory has a similar S shape to that
of Pearl’s logistic, as shown in Figure 1.8. According to its premises, prior to moderniza-
tion, population is at a high pressure equilibrium, with high rates of mortality and fertility
that balance one another to prevent overall growth; the first consequence of industrializa-
tion or economic development is more secure access to food and higher living standards,
which reduce mortality, particularly among the young, causing population to increase ever
more rapidly as mortality falls further; finally, the social and economic changes attendant on
modernization produce smaller families, and this decline in fertility slows population growth
until fertility rates match mortality rates and a low-fertility, low-mortality equilibrium is
reached. According to demographic transition theory, population growth takes a logistic
shape because mortality and fertility decline along reverse-logistic paths from steady high
rates to steady low rates. The theory thus retained Pearl’s logistic pattern of population
growth, but explained it in terms of changing birth and death rates. It therefore had a flex-
ibility that the logistic law lacked: Pearl’s theory required a Malthusian limit to population
growth and defined the slowing of growth as the nearing of that limit; demographic tran-
sition theory did not preclude Malthusian limits or the possibility of that limit exerting a
dampening effect on population growth, but also explained the slowing of population growth
independently of Malthusian limits. While Pearl’s logistic law explained population change
entirely in biological terms — growth resulted from subsistence availability; limits to that
availability slowed growth — demographic transition theory explained population change
in socioeconomic terms — growth resulted from improvements in food security and sanita-

116
tion; urbanization, education, and industrialization slowed growth by incentivizing smaller
families.
Pearl’s logistic law had conceptualized populations as organisms, growing according to the
same natural laws that governed individual growth, and his logistic growth cycle resembled
a kind of social life cycle. Italian vital statistician Corrado Gini drew on Pearl’s theory to
argue that populations, like individuals, were subject to aging and death. He interpreted the
decline of fertility in Italy as a sign of social senescence, predicting that the Italian population
itself would soon pass and be replaced by the “younger” and more vigorous populations of
Eastern Europe.193 Although demographic transition theory interprets population aging as
a mathematical consequence of fertility decline, it nonetheless incorporates the idea that
populations have a life cycle, in the sense that demographic transition, like the modernization
process that was assumed to produce and accompany it, occurs only once in each society
and marks the modernization or coming of age of that society. Populations that experienced
the transition earlier could be said to be “older,” not only in the sense of having an age
structure more heavily weighted toward the elderly, but also in the sense of having led the
progression through this inevitable process of growth and therefore having the expertise to
help “younger” populations through it, just as colonial powers had characterized imperialism
as a kind of tutelage in modernity. This idea would gain traction in the second half of the
twentieth century, as will be described in Chapters Four and Five.

1.4.2 The Geopolitical Consequences of Demographic Transition

Theory

By universalizing the Western European and North American experience of mortality and fer-
tility reduction and consequent growth, demographic transition theory validated the geopo-
litical concern of Thompson’s late patron, Edward Scripps, that Western European and
North American global hegemony was threatened by nascent population growth in other
193
Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).

117
parts of the world, which was poised to begin just as growth was leveling off in Western
populations. Thompson concluded his 1929 article with a discussion of the geopolitical con-
sequences of the pattern of population growth he had identified, pointing out that “peoples
who have ceased to expand in numbers (France) or almost ceased to expand (Great Britain
and Australia) are now holding great areas of unused lands, while the peoples who are just
coming into their great period of expansion are confined to rather narrow territories that
in some cases are also almost destitute of mineral resources.”194 Thompson asked, “is it
probable that the peoples in Groups B and C will sit quietly by and starve while the Group
A peoples enjoy the lion’s share of the good things of the earth?” He answered that “the
redistribution of the lands of the earth is the problem of problems that we must face in the
world today as a consequence of the new population movements that are now taking place.”
In the final sentence, he wondered, “can it be effected peaceably or must it be achieved by
war?”195
Thompson expanded further on this theme in a monograph published the same year,
titled Danger Spots in World Population, where he argued that the greatest threat to world
peace was differential population growth between Europe, Australia, and North America on
the one side and Asia on the other. He explained this danger by pointing to the relationship
between industrialization and population growth, noting that, when a society industrializes,
“its needs for economic resources begin to expand with incredible rapidity; for not only is a
flood of new wants being constantly released, but the rate of population growth rises by leaps
and bounds.”196 The improved standards of living associated with early industrialization both
reduce mortality — increasing population size — and produce demands for new products.
Thompson argued that, during this expansive stage, “the economic needs of a nation are
chiefly for new lands for actual settlement.” However, at a later stage of industrialization,
when manufacturing was well established and population growth had ceased, “the dominant
194
Thompson, “Population,” see n. 183, 975.
195
Ibid., 975.
196
Warren S. Thompson, Danger Spots in World Population (New York: Knopf, 1929), 6.

118
need is for access to the raw materials of industry and for markets in which to dispose of
the goods made from these materials.”197 The first countries to industrialize had effectively
laid claim to much of Earth’s territory during their early expansive phase, and now sought
to hold onto those territories as sources of raw materials and markets for finished goods, so
countries that were just beginning to industrialize had no room for expansion. Meanwhile,
the countries that controlled much of Earth’s territory and resources no longer had the
population necessary to defend it, while the growing populations of newly industrializing
countries were beginning to present a military threat.
Thompson was most concerned about Japan, which he described as “a nation highly
self-conscious, well unified and organized, with leaders who have learned the game of politics
in the West and who are in a position to make demands with the full force of the nation
behind them.”198 On the basis of demographic transition theory, Thompson predicted that
redistribution of the Earth’s land was inevitable, and he recommended that it be done
peacefully to prevent it occurring violently. An advocate of immigration restriction in the
U.S., Thompson proposed that Japanese and other East Asians be allowed access to the
tropical regions of Australia. Ideally, Australia would “turn this area over voluntarily to some
people fitted to develop its agriculture and other resources in the hope of thus making an ally
if trouble should ever arise regarding the retention of the temperate areas.” He recognized the
unlikeliness of this outcome, given the extreme racism prevalent in Australia, and suggested
as a second possibility “to admit the coloured labour necessary to exploit this region under
the direction of Australians as a dominant landowning class.”199 Thompson’s suggestion
was imbued with the racist theories of the time. He argued that the Japanese, having “a
predominant strain of Malay blood in them,” were well suited to developing tropical lands
but not temperate ones, while whites were suited to temperate but not tropical lands.200 His
plan therefore reserved the temperate regions of Australia for white settlement, though he did
197
Thompson, “Population,” see n. 183, 8.
198
Thompson, Danger Spots in World Population, see n. 196, 67-68.
199
Ibid., 91.
200
Ibid., 43.

119
argue that Australia would have to relax the immigration policies that only permitted Anglo-
Saxon settlement and begin recruiting from Southern and Eastern Europe, particularly Italy
and Germany, which were also experiencing the pressures of industrialization and attendant
population growth. Thompson similarly recommended that Great Britain open its East
African colonies to South Asian settlement so as to foster industrialization in India.
Thompson did not perceive population growth in Asia as a Malthusian threat: although
populations were growing there, population growth was slowing in North America and Aus-
tralia, both of which had vast tracts of sparsely settled land, and population remained quite
sparse in South America and Africa. At the global level, he did not predict overpopula-
tion. However, his concern that transitional populations might have the military strength
to expand their territories by force, while post-transitional populations lacked the numbers
to defend their territories, indicates the continuing perception of population as a source of
national strength. Moreover, he saw the demands for land among transitional populations
as reflecting not subsistence needs, but rather the demands of industrialization. Thompson’s
concern about population growth in Asia was not a Malthusian concern about population
outstripping food supply, but rather an economic concern about industrializing societies re-
quiring more resources — both to feed their larger populations and to feed their nascent
industries — and a geopolitical concern about the possibility of industrializing countries
using violent means — supported by their large populations — to take the resources they
required.

Conclusion

Sanger’s 1927 conference on population science, with which this chapter began, was one of the
foundational moments of twentieth-century demography. At that point, there was no such
thing as population science. The men and women who attended the conference — a group
that included Sanger, Pearl, East, Dublin, Kuczynski, and Thompson — were biologists,

120
sociologists, statisticians, economists, doctors, birth control activists, and eugenicists. By
the end of the 1927 conference, many of its participants had agreed to form an international
professional organization for population science, officially established in the following year
as the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP),
which will be discussed at greater length in Chapter Two. As this chapter has demonstrated,
these actors held a variety of ideas about what populations were, how they changed, and
what political problems future population change might pose. Each had their own political
sympathies, and the methods and measures they wielded — many of which would become
staples of the demographer’s toolbox later in the century — were developed within debates
about such population-related concerns as poverty, immigration, birth control, eugenics, and
empire. Population analysis was therefore always already imbued with population politics,
though it is difficult to tease out whether the politics of particular population observers and
scientists either preceded and informed or followed from and were informed by their analytic
methods.
This chapter has demonstrated that participants in the conference had very different
ideas about what constituted “the population problem.” For Pearl, who had helped Sanger
organize the conference and who presented his logistic law of population growth in its first
session, the problem was the impending overpopulation that was a foundational assumption
of his logistic law (and which, he claimed, was predicted by his projections). While East
advocated for eugenic birth control and immigration restriction programs as means of pre-
venting overpopulation, Pearl advocated for them as a way to improve the quality of the
saturation population he predicted. Dublin viewed Pearl, East, and other neo-Malthusians
as the cause of “the population problem,” as their predictions of overpopulation incited
nativist anxiety and agitation. These predictions had also contributed to the passage of
immigration restrictions in the U.S., which Dublin cautioned would lead to a cessation of
population growth and economic growth. For Kuczynski, “the population problem” was the
rapid decline in fertility experienced by countries in Western Europe, while fertility in East-

121
ern European countries remained high, threatening to increase the power of Eastern Europe
— and particularly the U.S.S.R. — relative to Western Europe. For Thompson, “the pop-
ulation problem” was the growth of population in newly-industrializing countries at a time
when most of the world’s land was under the control of already-industrialized countries with
populations nearing stationarity. He predicted that industrializing countries would begin
to demand more land to provide resources for industry, and that their growing populations
would give them the power to seize that land violently, since the slower-growing popula-
tions of already-industrialized countries would not have the power to defend the territories
they had claimed. While Pearl and East’s version of “the population problem” reflects the
Malthusian theory that population growth strains resources, the versions of “the population
problem” referenced by Dublin, Kuczynski, and Thompson reflect older understandings of
population growth as the source of national strength and economic dynamism.
These competing versions of “the population problem” mapped onto two distinct an-
alytic approaches, one guided by biological and Malthusian theories and the other guided
by social scientific and pre-Malthusian theories. While proponents of the former endowed
populations with emergent properties and attributed all population dynamics to subsistence
availability, proponents of the latter viewed populations as aggregates of individuals, and
attributed population dynamics to individual mortality, migration, and fertility, which they
understood as being controlled by social, economic, and political factors, operating within
biological limits. These two different forms of analysis gave rise to two competing methods
of population projection, the logistic law and the cohort component model. While these
two methods returned numerically-similar projections, their proponents understood these
projections in very different ways, with biologists Pearl and Reed interpreting the slowing of
population growth and eventual population stationarity as an indication of overpopulation
and resource scarcity, and economist Pascal Whelpton interpreting it as a threat to economic
growth and a potential cause of agricultural overproduction.
This chapter has explored the differences between these two analytic approaches, the

122
assumptions behind each, and the consequences of each for understanding, predicting, and
intervening in population change. The following chapter will examine the institutionaliza-
tion of the new field of demography between the wars, focusing on the IUSIPP and on the
development of disciplinary institutions (journal, professional association, research and train-
ing center) for population science in the United States. This chapter has demonstrated that
population science developed in tandem with population-oriented political projects, and that
its analytic tools were imbued with the politics that inspired them and drew support from
them. Chapter Two examines how demographers and demography’s supporters asserted the
scientificity of the new field by drawing boundaries between population science and some
aspects of population politics, and explores how the location of those boundaries shaped the
form and content of the emerging field of demography.

123
 Chapter 2
Disciplining Demography Between the
Wars
In 1928, scientists from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, representing
a variety of fields in the natural and social sciences, established the International Union
for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP). As argued in Chapter
One, at that time there was no coherent field of population science and nobody yet called
himself a population scientist. Those involved in the observation and analysis of population
disagreed over whether population was a biological or social object, and whether its analysis
should use the methods and theories of the natural or social sciences. They discussed a
variety of conflicting issues under the rubric of “the population problem,” including potential
overpopulation, potential population decline, and changing population composition at both
national and global levels.
Over the next ten years, those involved in the IUSIPP and their supporters began to build
the institutional framework necessary to establish demography as an academic discipline,
particularly in the U.S. and the U.K. Literary scholar Robin Valenza defines a discipline as

a field of study that has a recognized community of researchers who have in

common most of the following: an agreed-upon name, a loosely identified object
of knowledge, shared research goals, a finite set of methods of inquiry, a generally
accepted intellectual tradition, a group of institutions that persist and remain
stable over time (such as university departments and academic journals), a system
for perpetuating the discipline by training new practitioners, a group of working
concepts and rules for adding new rules and concepts, and an established manner
for communicating their findings.1

As the people who were coming to be known as demographers established the desiderata
1
Robin Valenza, Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680-1820
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5-6.

124
described by Valenza for their new field in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they drew bound-
aries between the emerging science of demography and the politics of population, asserting
the scientificity of their field by separating it from some of the political causes that drew on
population science for their legitimacy.
Efforts to draw these boundaries between the science and politics of population are exam-
ples of what Thomas Gieryn has termed “boundary work,” which he defines as “ideological
efforts by scientists to distinguish their work and its products from non-scientific intellectual
activities.”2 As discussed in Chapter One, there was no a priori distinction between the
science and politics of population. Indeed, as later chapters will demonstrate, that bound-
ary has been in continual negotiation over the course of the twentieth century. Establishing
professional associations, journals, research centers, and training programs for demography,
moreover, required that the field enlist patrons, wealthy individuals and organizations for
whose causes demography provided intellectual support. The field also needed clients, or
users of demographic analyses whose use would move the findings of demographic research
toward the status of accepted fact.3 The accumulation of patrons and clients are additional
criteria for academic disciplines, as defined by sociologist Edward Shils. He argues that
disciplines require “the organized support of the activity from outside the particular insti-
tution and the reception or use of the results of the activity beyond the boundaries of the
institution.”4 Demography’s need for funding and for uptake gave its patrons and clients
substantial power to shape the development of the field, including where its practitioners
would draw the boundary between demography and population politics.
This chapter illustrates some of the earliest boundary-marking efforts that created de-
mography, facilitated its institutionalization as an academic field, and placed it in the realm
2
Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and
Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (1983): 781–795,
782, emphasis in the original.
3
Latour describes the types of citations that build credibility for scientific findings as “positive modalities.”
Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, see n. 15, 22-23.
4
Edward Shils, “Tradition, Ecology, and Institution in the History of Sociology,” Daedalus 99, no. 4
(1970): 763.

125
of the social sciences between the wars. I begin with the establishment of the IUSIPP and the
ways in which its members negotiated the emerging population politics associated with the
rise of fascism in Europe. I then turn to the United States, where the scientists introduced
in the previous chapter established the Population Association of America (PAA), which has
served ever since as demography’s largest professional association. I examine how demog-
raphers associated with the PAA promoted their expertise to the U.S. government in the
1930s, just as the New Deal administration began to take increased responsibility for social
and economic planning. I argue that government support for this work helped to promote
the cohort component method of population projection — described in Chapter One — over
its competitor, the logistic projection method. I contend further that the use of population
projection for social planning and the growing ascendancy of the cohort component method
contributed to the designation of demography as a social science by the end of the interwar
period.
Through discussion of the founding of the PAA, I explore the relationship between the
PAA, the eugenics movement, demography’s main interwar patron, the Milbank Memorial
Fund, and its main interwar clients, the American Eugenics Society and the Eugenics Society
of Great Britain. I contend that eugenics and demography developed a mutually supportive
relationship during this period, with demography relying on the eugenics movement for fund-
ing, and the eugenics movement relying on demography for scientific legitimacy, particularly
as it sought to distance itself from the increasingly genocidal Nazi population programs, and
as its supporters attempted to establish a new “reform” or “free market” eugenics program
that worked through the universal availability of birth control. Although this chapter focuses
on the institutional history of demography in the U.S., I will also discuss the establishment
of the Population Investigation Committee in the U.K. to demonstrate the close relationship
between eugenics and demography on both sides of the Atlantic between the wars. I argue
that these relationships structured the establishment of demography’s first graduate training
program, the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, and shaped the Office’s

126
research agenda.

2.1 International Population Science and European

Population Politics

The 1927 World Population Conference, discussed in Chapter One, was initially proposed by
American birth control activist Margaret Sanger as one of a series that her American Birth
Control League (ABCL) had sponsored to promote the medical and scientific legitimacy of
birth control since its establishment in 1921. However, ABCL board member and Johns
Hopkins University biologist Raymond Pearl, who had famously developed the logistic law
of population growth and the logistic projection method earlier in the decade, suggested that
the 1927 conference focus specifically on population problems rather than birth control, that
it be limited to scientists and purged of propaganda, and that it serve as the basis for the
formation of an international association of population experts.5 Perhaps recognizing that
the study of human population exceeded the field of biology, Pearl hoped this conference
would initiate an interdisciplinary organization for the scientific study of human population
dynamics. Sanger agreed to these changes, believing that the development of a science of
population would provide her with an additional platform from which to argue for the benefits
and necessity of birth control. Sanger still played a prominent role in the organization
and execution of the conference, and even edited its published proceedings, but assured
attendees that the meeting would be strictly scientific, and that “any mention of birth
control or Malthusianism would be forbidden.”6 By organizing the conference in this way,
Sanger and Pearl drew the boundary between population science and population politics
between themselves, excluding birth control (Sanger) from the new science of population.
The conference laid the groundwork for the IUSIPP, which initially defined population science
in opposition to the politics of birth control. Over the next decade, however, members of the
5
Raymond Pearl to Clarence Cook Little, 1926,“IUSIPP #17 — C.C. Little,” box 15.
6
Richard Symonds and Michael Carder, The United Nations and the Population Question, 1945-1970
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 12.

127
IUSIPP found themselves continually defining demography against a changing landscape of
population politics, particularly as new fascist governments in Germany and Italy began to
engage population in their geopolitical strategies, calling on demography in general, and the
IUSIPP in particular, to provide their population programs with scientific legitimacy.
As the founder of the IUSIPP, Pearl also became its first president. He modeled the
organization on existing international unions in other scientific fields, as an association of
national committees rather than individual scientists.7 Initially, the IUSIPP was comprised
of committees representing Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czechoslovakia,
Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway,
Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.8 As might be considered
fitting for an organization devoted to the study of population, the IUSIPP assessed dues from
and accorded voting power to each national committee on the basis its country’s population.
If a committee so desired, it could increase its voting power (but also its dues) by including the
populations of its non-self-governing colonies. The IUSIPP invited self-governing colonies,
such as Australia, to form their own national committees and pay dues independently.9 Other
than Pearl, the IUSIPP’s leadership was drawn entirely from Western Europe: Corrado
Gini of Italy, Bernard Mallet of Great Britain, and Léon Bernard of France served as the
organization’s vice presidents.
Countries formed the organizing unit of the IUSiPP because, regardless of what “the
population problem” actually was, the IUSIPP’s founders considered it a problem for coun-
tries because countries managed, counted, and benefited from populations. As discussed
in the Introduction, populations were defined by censuses, and only states had the power
to cary out these universal, individual, instantaneous, and periodic enumerations. In 1931,
economist A.B. Wolfe described demography in the Encyclopedia of Social Science as “the
7
Raymond Pearl to Edwin B. Wilson, 1930,“IUSIPP #6,” box 14.
8
International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, The IUSSP in History (International Union
for the Scientific Study of Population, 1985).
9
“The International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems: Its Foundation,
Statutes, Work, and Regulations,” n.d.,folder 13, box 3.

128
numerical analysis of the state and movement of human population inclusive of census enu-
meration and registration of vital processes and of whatever quantitative statistical analysis
can be made of the state and movement of population on the basis of fundamental census
and registration data.”10
Most of the studies presented at IUSIPP meetings and printed in its publications were
specific to the investigator’s own country, but the IUSIPP’s founders viewed the organization
as a forum in which representatives of different countries could discuss common problems
and forge common solutions. They expressed their hope that “the experience of one country
can be placed at the disposal of others and the researches undertaken in each of them pooled
for the advantage of all.”11 Meeting participants included representatives of government sta-
tistical offices as well as research scientists. Yet the founders of the organization recognized
that population questions exceeded the state, as people could not be fully contained within
states. The movement of people across borders was increasingly contested between the wars,
as governments began to exert greater control over entry and exit. Therefore, the founders
of the IUSIPP recognized that “in some cases, such as that of migration, co-operation be-
tween nations in research, and even in action, may be essential.”12 The International Labour
Organization (ILO) — established as part of the peace agreement ending World War I to
represent the needs of the world’s workers — was engaged in the coordination of immigra-
tion as a solution to national and international political tensions. Delegates from the ILO
participated in the IUSIPP, indicating the imbrication of science and policy in the area of
international migration.13
Although the founders of the IUSIPP acknowledged the political nature of population
problems and their solutions, they disavowed any political bias on their own part, commit-
ting the Union to “confine itself strictly to scientific investigations and to refuse to enter
10
Quoted in Walter Willcox, Studies in American Demography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940),
510.
11
See n. 9.
12
Ibid.
13
For the ILO’s work on immigration, see D. Christie Tait, “International Aspects of Migration,” Journal
of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 6, no. 1 (1927): 25–46.

129
upon religious, moral or political discussions or, as a Union, to support a policy regarding
population of any sort whatever, particularly in the direction either of increased or dimin-
ished population.”14 The founders did, nonetheless, intend to influence population policy at
the national level through their research. The organization’s declared aim was to “play a
great part in the collective elucidation of problems which in many countries are already felt
to be of supreme importance to the welfare of their populations,” and thereby “substitut[e]
rational action scientifically grounded for the policies of the demagogue and the mob.”15
Its founders, viewing themselves as service intellectuals, intended the IUSIPP to promote
research, publicize research results, “facilitate the establishment of common standards for
the collection, tabulation, and analysis of data regarding human populations,” and “serve
as a clearing house for the interchange of information about population” that might inform
policy making.16
The establishment of the IUSIPP did not signal agreement about the valence or policy im-
plications of population growth or the nature of “the population problem,” issues introduced
in Chapter One. Pearl continued to express the neo-Malthusian concern that “the growing
hordes of people on the face of the earth are constantly and increasingly adding to the
economic and social difficulties of an already sufficiently harassed world.”17 He also acknowl-
edged alternative population anxieties, noting that “the rapid fall of the birth-rate which is
proceeding both in the United States and in Western Europe is welcomed by some as a solu-
tion. . . while by others it is looked upon as a danger to western civilization in an inevitable
struggle with teeming yellow and black populations.”18 These two statements cover all of
the versions of “the population problem” discussed in Chapter One: the neo-Malthusian
concerns about overpopulation expressed by Pearl and Edward East, the anxieties about
falling white fertility rates — particularly among the middle and upper classes and particu-
14
See n. 9.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Raymond Pearl, “President’s Report, Second General Assembly of the IUSIPP,” n.d.,“IUSIPP #7,” box
14.
18
See n. 9.

130
larly in North America and Western Europe — expressed by Alfred Lotka and Louis Dublin
at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and by Robert Kuczynski at the Brookings
Institution and the London School of Economics, and the concerns about growing nonwhite
populations expressed by Warren S. Thompson of the Scripps Foundation for Research in
Population Problems.
While the neo-Malthusian version of “the population problem” drew its support from
U.S.-based scientists — mainly natural scientists — European scientists were concerned
about the falling fertility rates in their own countries, and the loss of geopolitical power
they feared fertility decline portended. The Great Depression, which began with the stock
market crash of 1929, further stimulated fears about population decline, as policy makers
and economists saw the falling birthrate as a major cause of the economic collapse.19 Fertility
rates declined even further in North American and Western and Northern Europe during the
Depression, further intensifying fears of depopulation.20 These fears were expressed in a 1937
British radio series titled “The Population Problem — The Experts and the Public.” The
series defined “the population problem” as the recent acceleration of the long-term decline
in fertility, which the demographers who participated — including Kuczynski — attributed
to couples’ selfishness, arguing that parents limited their fertility to maintain high living
standards at the expense of weakening the nation both politically and economically.21
Between the world wars, governments throughout Western and Northern Europe en-
acted pronatalist measures. While measures in some countries, such as France and Belgium,
sought to increase fertility across the board, measures in other countries, particularly Sweden
and Germany, combined pronatalism with eugenics, aiming to increase the fertility of some
segments of society while reducing that of others.22 Demographers working in government
statistical offices helped formulate these policies and carried out the analyses that informed
them and provided intellectual justification for them. Perhaps the most prominent of these
19
Keynes, see n. 123.
20
Van Bavel, see n. 174.
21
T.H. Marshall, The Population Problem: The Experts and the Public (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938).
22
For France, see Schneider, see n. 55; For Italy, see Ipsen, see n. 193; For Sweden, see Carlson, see n. 55.

131
government demographers was Corrado Gini, head of the Italian statistical office and vice-
president of the IUSIPP, whose demographic scholarship increasingly began to reflect the
fascist policies of Benito Mussolini at the end of the 1920s.23
Despite the intentions of the IUSIPP’s founders to keep the association free of politics,
its organizational structure and the fact that many of its members worked in government
statistical offices meant that the increasingly tense politics of population in Europe during
the 1930s suffused the IUSIPP’s activities. At the 1928 meeting that officially launched
the association, its leaders decided that the Italian national committee, led by Gini, would
host the organization’s first Congress and General Assembly in Rome in 1931. The General
Assembly was to be a business meeting where the next president would be elected and the
Congress a scientific meeting with papers presented by the members of the IUSIPP national
committees and other population scientists. As 1931 approached, however, the American,
French, and British members of the Union became concerned that Gini’s leadership role in
the IUSIPP would lend scientific legitimacy to his increasingly fascism-inflected research.24
More importantly, the IUSIPP’s sources of financial support in the United States, which
will be discussed at greater length in the following section, refused to support an association
headed by Gini. Support from the U.S. was critical to the IUSIPP’s existence because funds
from other countries had not materialized.25
Fearing that Gini’s succession to the presidency of the IUSIPP would be inevitable at
the 1931 General Assembly if it were held in Rome, and expressing concern about the
quality of the scientific papers that might be accepted by the Italian national committee
for inclusion in the Congress, Pearl and British vice-president Bernard Mallet decided to
move the General Assembly to London. The Congress would go on in Rome as planned, but
wholly under the auspices of the Italian national committee and without the imprimatur of
23
Ipsen, see n. 193.
24
Bernard Mallet to Raymond Pearl, Sept. 9, 1930,“Sir Bernard Mallet #10,” box 18.
25
Raymond Pearl to Bernard Mallet, Aug. 11, 1930,“Sir Bernard Mallet #10,” box 18; Raymond Pearl to
Bernard Mallet, Aug. 21, 1930,“Sir Bernard Mallet #10,” box 18.

132
the IUSIPP.26 Only 50 people attended the London Assembly, with 12 from the U.S. and 24
from the U.K. In contrast, the Rome Congress drew 451 participants, though 190 were from
Italy. Its 27 participants from the United States included Cornell University vital statistician
Walter Willcox, sent by the U.S. government as its official representative, as well as Lotka,
Dublin, Kuczynski, and Whelpton; eugenicist Charles Davenport; and sociologists Henry
Pratt Fairchild of New York University, William Ogburn of the University of Chicago, and
Pitirim Sorokin of Harvard University. Kuczynski presented on the calculation of the net
reproduction rate, described in Chapter One, and Whelpton presented cohort component
projections of the U.S. population.27
Gini refused to attend or send delegates to the London Assembly, where Charles Close
of the U.K. was elected president of the IUSIPP and where it was decided that the next
Assembly and Congress would be held in Berlin in 1934. As 1934 approached, however,
the leaders of the British, French, and U.S. national committees of the IUSIPP worried
that, under the control of the German national committee, the 1934 Congress would offer
scientific legitimacy to German population policy, which by then had combined pronatalism
with eugenic sterilization and genocide. The 1934 meeting was postponed to 1935 in the hope
of coming to a solution, but none was found. Instead, the IUSIPP again disassociated itself
from the Congress, which was boycotted by the U.S. and U.K. committees and dominated by
Nazi population propaganda.28 British demographer David Glass, who attended the Berlin
Congress as a delegate of the British Eugenics Society, reported in the Eugenics Review
that the content of the presentations did not conform to the scientific standards set by the
IUSIPP, and that the overriding theme was “race prejudice.”29
26
For the controversy surrounding the 1931 Congress and Assembly, see folders “Corrado Gini #4” through
“Corrado Gini #7,” box 8 and folders “Sir Bernard Mallet #10” through “Sir Bernard Mallet #13,” box
18, Raymond Pearl Papers, American Philosophical Society.
27
G.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers to Raymond Pearl, Oct. 6, 1931,“IUSIPP #8,” box 14.
28
Although there was no official U.S. representation at the Congress, Frank Hankins represented the U.S.
at the General Assembly. Frank Lorimer, “Circular letter to members of the Population Association of
America,” June 20, 1935,“PAA #1,” box 22.
29
David V. Glass, “The Berlin Population Conference and Recent Population Movements in Germany,”
Eugenics Review 27, no. 3 (1935): 208.

133
 Glass’s review indicates that the U.S. and U.K. committees of the IUSIPP drew the
boundary between the science and politics of population at the emerging distinction between
eugenics and scientific racism. As Elazar Barkan has documented, intellectuals in the U.S.
and the U.K., while maintaining their faith in the idea of social improvement through the
control of reproduction, began to discredit scientific theories of racial difference between the
wars.30 As will be discussed in detail later in this chapter, a generational shift in the eugenics
movement in the U.S. and the U.K. brought to the fore new leaders — Frederick Osborn in
the U.S. and Carlos Blacker in the U.K. — who sought to increase the scientific legitimacy
of eugenics by purging it of its overtly racist content.31 In 1937, the IUSIPP finally held its
first official Congress in Paris, sponsored by the French national committee and organized
by its leader, Adolphe Landry, after thorough vetting by the U.S. and U.K. committees, but
without participation by the Italian or German committees. Debates between the national
committees of the IUSIPP over the location of the boundary between the science and politics
of population, together with mounting geopolitical tensions, contributed to the dissolution
of the IUSIPP after the 1937 meeting.

2.2 Funding for Demography and the Politics of

Population in the United States

Pearl had secured initial funding for the IUSIPP from the Milbank Memorial Fund (MMF),
a public-health oriented charitable organization based in New York. The MMF supplied the
necessary funds on the condition that the IUSIPP would soon be able to support itself on
dues paid by its constituent national committees. This section discusses the MMF’s financial
and institutional support for demography between the wars, and traces the establishment of
the Population Association of America (PAA) as the U.S. national committee of the IUSIPP.
30
Elazar Barkan, Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States
Between the World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
31
Alison Bashford has effectively described the ease with which eugenics and antiracism coexisted in the
late interwar and early postwar periods. Bashford, see n. 10.

134
I argue that negotiations over the establishment of the U.S. committee of the IUSIPP were
also negotiations over the boundary between the science and politics of population, and over
whether population analysis should be the work of natural or social scientists. The story
of the PAA’s founding elucidates the relationship between demography and eugenics in the
United States, and undergirds discussion of the establishment of the first university graduate
training program for demography in the U.S.

2.2.1 Finding Patrons for Demography

After establishing the IUSIPP, Pearl turned to the Rockefeller Foundation for funds to pay
the dues of the U.S. national committee. The Rockefeller Foundation’s chairman, John D.
Rockefeller Jr., was sympathetic to both demography and birth control legalization, but
the Foundation’s trustees would not support any non-scientific population-related endeavor.
In order to ensure that the Foundation’s funds would be used for scientific purposes, the
trustees agreed to support the IUSIPP only through the National Research Council (NRC)
and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), with the understanding that NRC and
SSRC members would jointly form the U.S. committee of the IUSIPP.32 This plan meant
that the U.S. committee would comprise both natural and social scientists.
Pearl and East were both members of the NRC, and nominated themselves to the joint
committee. Despite his earlier claim of human population growth for the field of biology,
Pearl welcomed members of the SSRC to the committee “for the reason that traditionally
many more aspects of the population problem fall into the social sciences.”33 This plan fal-
tered, however, when Pearl’s friend and rival Edwin Wilson, a mathematician at Harvard
University and then-president of the SSRC, refused to participate. Wilson explained his
recalcitrance by listing the multiple and conflicting concerns of SSRC members: that pop-
ulation could not cohere as a unified field of inquiry, that population science could not be
32
Raymond Pearl to Edward M. East, 1929,“E.M. East #8,” box 7.
33
Raymond Pearl to Wesley C. Mitchell, Mar. 6, 1929,“SSRC #3,” box 25.

135
disentangled from population politics, that Pearl’s approach was too biologically determin-
istic, and that population was really a biological issue and should be left to the biologists.34
This episode demonstrates that there is nothing natural or obvious about its present
classification as a social science. The faltering of the plan for the U.S. committee indicated
that, while social and natural sciences each claimed primacy for biological or social factors
as determinants of population change, as discussed in Chapter One, each at times tried to
hand population over to the other. Wilson’s refusal to allow the SSRC to participate in
the IUSIPP’s U.S. committee suggests his agreement with the SSRC member who argued
that population was a biological question. However, in response to Wilson’s refusal, Pearl
too tried to relinquish control over the emerging science of population, offering to let SSRC
members form the entirety of the U.S. committee, and even to step down as IUSIPP’s
president, effectively turning population over to the social sciences, if that would increase
Wilson’s willingness to participate. Wilson responded that he had little interest in population
matters and that the members of the SSRC who were interested in population, including
Walter Willcox, had little respect for the work being pursued by those affiliated with the
IUSIPP, including Pearl, East, Dublin, Lotka, Thompson, and Whelpton.35
Pearl and Wilson were still in the midst of negotiations about forming the U.S. committee
on the eve of the IUSIPP’s 1931 General Assembly. Recognizing that he would have little
legitimacy as president if his own country did not send a committee, Pearl returned to the
Milbank Memorial Fund to request support to form the U.S. committee independently of
both the NRC and the SSRC. The MMF, to which Willcox served as an advisor, agreed to
do so if Dublin chaired the committee.36
Originally called the Memorial Fund Association, the Milbank Memorial Fund was es-
tablished in 1905 by Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, with family money from investments in
34
Edwin B. Wilson to Raymond Pearl, July 11, 1930,“IUSIPP #6,” box 14; Edwin B. Wilson to Raymond
Pearl, Aug. 18, 1930,“SSRC #5,” box 25.
35
See correspondence between Wilson and Pearl, folder “IUSIPP #6,” box 14, Raymond Pearl Papers,
American Philosophical Society.
36
Raymond Pearl to Edwin B. Wilson, Nov. 4, 1930,“IUSIPP #6,” box 14.

136
the Borden Company, to promote public health and social welfare in the U.S. The MMF
began to involve itself in population-related issues at the insistence of board member Thomas
Cochran, who argued that the MMF would be continually fighting an uphill battle against
sickness and poverty if the people it served did not have adequate access to contraception.
Cochran took the standard neo-Malthusian position described in Chapter One: with smaller
families, the poor would not have to stretch their resources as far, and with a smaller pro-
portion of the population in poverty, the MMF could do more for each of those impoverished
people and philanthropists could invest more of their wealth in other causes.37
Milbank Memorial Fund director John Kingsbury, an admirer of Margaret Sanger, sup-
ported Cochran’s suggestion. However, given the still-controversial nature of contraception,
and the fact that it remained illegal in several states, the MMF began its work in the popula-
tion field with investments in research, with the idea that findings would provide intellectual
support for the provision of contraceptives to poor Americans. In 1928 the Fund hired Edgar
Sydenstricker, former statistician of the U.S. Public Health Service, as director of research.
Between 1928 and 1931, Sydenstricker hired Frank Notestein and Clyde Kiser to carry out
research on population, focusing on differential fertility, the then-current phrase to describe
the higher fertility of some segments of the population — usually the poor or foreign-born
— relative to others — usually the middle/upper classes or native-born.38 Notestein was an
economist who had completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1927 under the direction
of Walter Willcox, and Kiser was a sociologist who had completed his Ph.D. at Columbia
University under the direction of Robert Chaddock. Willcox and Chaddock had both been
students of Franklin Giddings, the first full professor of sociology at Columbia University
37
Cochran’s preferred cause was Philips Andover Academy. He had graduated from Andover in 1890 and,
after earning a sufficient fortune in banking, as a partner at J.P. Morgan, became a major benefactor of the
school, with donations totaling $10 million between 1907 and 1931.
38
Research performed by Notestein and Kiser at Milbank includes: Sydenstricker and Notestein, see
n. 95; Frank W. Notestein, “Differential Age at Marriage According to Social Class,” American Journal of
Sociology 37, no. 1 (1931): 22–48; Frank W. Notestein, “The Decrease in Size of Families from 1890 to 1910,”
Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1931): 181–188; Clyde V. Kiser, “Fertility of Social Classes in
Various Types of Communities of the East North Central States in 1900,” Journal of the American Statistical
Association 27, no. 180 (1932): 371–382; Clyde V. Kiser, “Fertility of Harlem Negroes,” Milbank Memorial
Fund Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1935): 273–285.

137
and in the United States, and a pioneer of the use of quantitative data and analysis in soci-
ology.39 The MMF also made grants to Raymond Pearl to study the prevalence and efficacy
of contraceptive use at the population level.
Much of Notestein, Kiser, and Pearl’s research for the MMF was published in the Milbank
Memorial Fund Quarterly, one of the major outlets for demographic research between the
wars, or presented at Milbank’s annual population symposia.40 Pearl presented the results
of his research on the efficacy of contraceptive use at the 1934 Milbank symposium on pop-
ulation. Contrary to his expectation, described in Chapter One, that use of birth control
by couples would have little to no effect on aggregate population growth, his research for
the MMF indicated that, in the aggregate, women who used birth control experienced lower
fertility rates during periods of use than they did during periods of non-use, suggesting the
influence of human agency on population dynamics.41 Pearl announced that “this evidence
destroys the basis of most of my life’s work,” and subsequently renounced his logistic law of
population growth.42 Although he had long advocated the legalization of birth control as a
eugenic measure, he began to promote it as a means of poor relief, arguing that “poverty and
unemployment are being encouraged by the national policy of prohibiting the free dissemi-
nation of scientific birth control information.”43 The research that led to this announcement
will be discussed at greater length later in the chapter.
The Milbank Memorial Fund’s sponsorship of demographic research between the wars
complicates a prevalent theme in histories of the modern social sciences: the increasing sep-
aration of social science from social reform. As historians of the social sciences have argued,
39
Many demographers in the twentieth century have been intellectual descendants of Giddings, as will
be discussed at greater length in Chapter Five. Histories of the social sciences describe him as one of the
founders of sociology, but neglect his foundational role in the history of demography.
40
Between 1928 and 1942, 20% of the journal’s 299 articles were on topics that today would be classified
as demography, including studies of fertility, contraception, mortality, and general population trends and
policies.
41
Raymond Pearl, “Contraception and Fertility in 2,000 Women,” Human Biology 4, no. 3 (1932): 363–
407.
42
Frank Lorimer, “The Development of Demography,” in The Study of Population: An Inventory and
Appraisal, ed. Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 160.
43
“Birth Control Ban Opposed (news clippiing),” Mar. 14, 1934,folder 185, box22.

138
social inquiry began as part of an effort to understand the social effects of such processes
as industrialization and urbanization so as to ameliorate the conditions they produced. Ac-
cording to this narrative, as the social sciences were institutionalized in U.S. universities,
their practitioners disavowed efforts toward social improvement, portraying their own work
as scientific, objective, and masculine in contrast to the work of social improvement, which
was also professionalizing at the time but as a specifically feminine activity outside of uni-
versity social science departments.44 However, even as the activities of social science and
social reform were separated in terms of practitioners and institutional location, much of the
funding for the social sciences continued to come from philanthropic sources, either directly
or through the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The SSRC is an independent orga-
nization established in 1923 to channel foundation money — initially that of the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, and the Spelman Fund — into so-
cial science research that would inform the charitable work of those funders.45 In the early
twentieth century, new general-purpose foundations, such as the Rockefeller and Russel Sage
Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation, viewed their own work of social improvement as
scientific, and sponsored scientific investigations of the social problems they broached in or-
der to both inform and justify their interventions.46 In order for social science to serve those
purposes, the scientists themselves had to be objective and disinterested, and the interwar
patrons of social science, particularly the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, promoted
scientific and quantitative methods of social inquiry to bolster the apparent objectivity of
the research they funded. At the same time, the funding structure in the social sciences
guided research toward investigation of topics relevant to their patrons, who were highly
invested in very specific portrayals of social conditions and their prospects for improvement.
As Donald Fisher has put it, “the trustees and managers of the large foundations accept the
44
See, for example: Furner, see n. 81; Smith, see n. 74; Bannister, see n. 63; For the professionalization of
social reform and its relationship to the social sciences, see: Fitzpatrick, see n. 69; Kunzel, see n. 68.
45
Fisher, see n. 72.
46
O’Connor, Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside
Up, see n. 72.

139
social order and actively work toward solving social problems in order to maintain the status
quo.”47 The implication is that they support research that does the same. The demographic
research sponsored by the MMF — focusing on differential fertility and the population-level
effects of contraceptive use — justified the decision of the MMF’s trustees to include the
provision of birth control in their public health programs as a neo-Malthusian measure to
address poverty by reducing the number of poor people. Even as demographers attempted
to shield their field from the politics of birth control, their financial dependence on the MMF
allowed the organization considerable leverage to set the agenda of their field.

2.2.2 The Population Association of America: Between Eugenics

and Birth Control

In addition to providing the funds for the U.S. national committee of the IUSIPP, the Mil-
bank Memorial Fund also sponsored the establishment of a professional association for the
emerging science of demography in the U.S. This section traces the origins of the Popula-
tion Association of America (PAA), examining how the founders negotiated the boundary
between science and politics so as to serve the needs of both birth control and eugenics.
The idea for the new organization originated with Margaret Sanger and New York Univer-
sity sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild, a eugenicist and advocate of immigration restriction.
Also present at the founding meeting were Dublin and Lotka, Pearl’s colleague Lowell J.
Reed, Pascal Whelpton of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, and
Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, NY. In the article,
“The Ideological Origins of the Population Association of America,” demographer Dennis
Hodgson describes the organization as a coalition of eugenicists, immigration restriction-
ists, birth control activists, and population scientists, though he acknowledges that these
categories blurred and overlapped, and that opponents of each political program were also
involved.48
47
Fisher, see n. 72, 11; also see Silva and Slaughter, see n. 96.
48
Hodgson, “The Ideological Origins of the Population Association of America,” see n. 58.

140
 Given the broad array of concerns held by the participants, those who attended the meet-
ing engaged in considerable negotiation over the scope of the activities the new association
would undertake. The debates revolved around two questions: first, whether the organiza-
tion should focus on the quantitative (size) or qualitative (eugenic) aspects of population;
second, whether it should engage in research or advocacy. Although the users of the phrase
“population quality” rarely specified what exactly they meant by this term, Pearl summa-
rized it as a value “variously appraised through either racial composition, or by what the
psychologists test under the designation ‘intelligence,’ or by sundry economic criteria, or
finally by some overt or concealed combination of these characteristics.”49 These debates
essentially centered on the proper relationship between the new association, eugenics, and
birth control politics.
Fairchild argued for the inclusion of both quantity and quality on that axis and both
research and advocacy on the other. He declared that “population presents two aspects
— qualitative and quantitative,” which he summarized with the question “what kind of
people comprise a society and how many people are there in the society?” He bemoaned
the fact that “the word population has been shifting away from its proper meaning as a
term that should cover the whole field, to a restrictive quantitative meaning,” and stated his
intention to “step in and check this degradation of a very significant word.” Fairchild also
argued for the inclusion of both research and advocacy, with research informing advocacy
for the manipulation of population. He declared it a propitious time for the founding of the
new association because “with the development of economic science, political science, and
geographical science, we are in a position to take up the phenomenon of population as one
of the great factors in human welfare to be rationally manipulated, just as we manipulate
the other factors in human relations.”50
Opposition to including population quality — eugenics — within the scope of the new
49
Raymond Pearl, “The Populations of the New World — Trends and Characteristics,” in Proceedings of
the Eighth American Scientific Congress (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1940), 132.
50
Henry Pratt Fairchild, “Report on Preliminary Conference on a Population Association for the United
States,” Dec. 15, 1930,folder 12, box 3.

141
association came only from Harry Laughlin, who was apparently concerned about compe-
tition with his Eugenics Research Association. He argued that, since his organization was
already engaged in research and advocacy with regard to population quality, and since the
American Birth Control League was already engaged in advocacy with regard to population
quantity, the new group should limit its activities to research on population quantity. Dublin
also argued that the organization should limit itself to research — and especially that it re-
main free of the politics of birth control — recommending that it serve as “a clearing house
for ideas and research” and “not be tied up with any propagandist movement.”51 Sanger
too supported the separation of science and advocacy, and favored the clearinghouse model
for the new association, believing that those working in advocacy needed “a representative
group to whom we could come to seek instruction and advice in the population question,”
and whose advice would be considered scientifically valid by those outside the birth control
movement.52 In other words, the new association could have a stronger political influence if
it did not have explicitly political aims.
The founders ultimately decided that the group would publish a journal to report the
results of population research, but would not “express the results of its scientific researches
in the form of endorsement or support of practical social programs or policies.”53 As a result
of this decision, they rejected the proposed name “National Association for the Scientific
Study and Control of Population” on the grounds that population “control” was beyond
the agreed-upon scope of the organization. They also worried that the word would arouse
opposition, particularly among Catholics and Jews — Catholics because their religion forbade
contraception and Jews because they feared they would be the target of control.54 Instead,
the group called itself the “Population Association of America” or PAA.
The PAA’s final boundary-marking moment occurred when the members of the orga-
nization chose officers at its first official meeting on May 7, 1931. Fairchild and Sanger,
51
Fairchild, see n. 50.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.

142
with whom the idea for the organization had originated, had been nominated for president
and vice president, respectively. As the group’s founders had included both scientists and
non-scientists, membership in the PAA was open to “all persons interested in population
problems,” regardless of their credentials or lack thereof.55 One man present at the meet-
ing, however, objected to Sanger’s nomination, arguing that “the fortunes of the field would
be advanced if the new Association were to guard its scientific nature and keep free from
attachment to the birth control movement.”56 To “guard its scientific nature,” this man —
Frederick Henry Osborn — proposed that only scientists serve in leadership positions. Os-
born, whose background will be discussed in the following section, was a supporter of Sanger
and of the legalization of birth control more generally, and convinced her to refuse her nom-
ination for vice president. Fairchild was still elected president of the PAA, but University of
Chicago sociologist William Ogburn was elected first vice president and Robert Kuczynski
second vice president. Ultimately, those present at the meeting agreed that the members of
the U.S. committee of the IUSIPP should form a College of Fellows within the PAA as a
select scientific group of advisers, from whom officers would be chosen.
The boundary work performed by the members of PAA at its founding in 1931 excised
the politics of birth control from the new science of population. Over the next decade, the
PAA would do some of the work of defining the new field of demography by identifying U.S.
scholars engaged in population-related research, codifying a set of terms for vital processes,
and launching a journal, Population Index, which served as a quarterly bibliography of
demographic scholarship published in journals belonging to a variety of disciplines. As PAA
members identified scholars as demographers, codified the field’s jargon, and selected books
and articles to include in the Population Index bibliography, they built and defined the field
of demography.57 But although these members excluded birth control as a political rather
55
Back matter, Population Index, volume 1, number 3, 1935.
56
Notestein and Osborn, see n. 151, 70.
57
For the census of population scientists, see “Minutes of a Joint Meeting of the American Committee of
the IUSIPP and the PAA,” 1932,“Alfred Lotka #5,” box 17; For efforts to codify jargon, see “Organization
for Research in Population,” Human Biology 6, no. 1 (1934): 238; For Population Index, see Frank Lorimer
to Raymond Pearl, Sept. 6, 1934,“PAA #1,” box 22.

143
than a scientific topic, they included eugenics in the ambit of their new field. The following
section will examine how Frederick Osborn enlisted population science in support of his
new “reform” eugenics program that sought to keep eugenics relevant to modern society by
purging it of its overtly racist elements.

2.2.3 Frederick Osborn and Princeton’s Office of Population

Research: Science in the Service of Eugenics

Born in 1889 to a wealthy and well-connected family, Frederick Osborn was the son of
William Church Osborn, who had, along with Henry Pratt Fairchild, been a founding member
of the American Eugenics Society (AES) in 1926. Frederick, however, belonged to a new
generation of eugenicists who sought to keep eugenics aligned with mainstream science as
scientists distanced themselves from the scientific racial thought that was coming to be
associated with the Nazi party in Germany.58 By the mid-1930s, Osborn had attained control
of the AES, which became a major advocate of what Daniel Kevles has termed “reform”
eugenics. This new brand of eugenics, advocated by Osborn in the U.S. and by Carlos
Blacker in the U.K., differed from mainstream eugenics in two ways. First, it advocated for
eugenic selection within rather than between racial and socioeconomic groups. Second, it
advocated a process of eugenic self -selection that worked through the supposedly uncoerced
childbearing decisions of individual couples, rather than through selection made by some
kind of governmental or scientific authority. In this context, “eugenic selection” refers to the
designation of “superior” couples, who would contribute more children to the next generation,
and “inferior” couples, who would contribute fewer children — or no children at all — to
the next generation. This section will discuss both of these differences between reform and
mainstream eugenics in detail, and their relationship to the emerging science of population.
58
Barkan, see n. 30.

144
Osborn’s Free Market Eugenics

After making a fortune in the railroad and financial industries, Osborn retired from business
in 1928 and installed himself as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural
History, which was then under the direction of his uncle, Henry Fairfield Osborn. Frederick
Osborn’s only degree was a B.A. in English, which he earned at Princeton University in 1910.
In order to advance his education while at the American Museum, Osborn pursued a course
of reading recommended to him by anthropologist and eugenicist Clark Wissler, becoming
an armchair expert in the scientific fields from which eugenics drew its theories.59 Osborn
also spent time as a research associate at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring
Harbor, New York, under the direction of Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin. Prior to
the 1939 closure of the ERO, eugenics had the status of a science in the U.S. — as in the U.K.
at the Francis Galton Eugenics Laboratory — and was nearly inseparable from genetics. As
discussed in Chapter One, scientists at the ERO collected thousands of individual family
trees in order to determine Mendelian hereditary patterns for “a wide variety of physical,
mental, and moral traits in humans.”60 Their work was strongly informed by the racism
that pervaded the worldview of the white professional middle class in the U.S. For example,
ERO eugenicists linked favorable traits, such as inventiveness, to the “Nordic races” and
unfavorable traits, such as criminality, to other racial and national origins.61 The work of
the ERO played a major role in Congressional hearings on immigration restriction in the early
1920s and in the passage of eugenic sterilization laws in 32 states prior to World War II.62
However, by the 1930s, theories that attributed individual social and mental characteristics
to race and national origin were becoming passé, distasteful, and scientifically discredited,
59
“Frank W. Notestein, Interview with Anders Lunde for the PAA Oral History Project,” Apr. 27, 1973,
url: [Link]
pdf, url: [Link]
[Link], 11.
60
Garland Allen, “The Eugenics Redord Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in Institutional
History,” Osiris 2 (1986): 226.
61
Ibid., 246.
62
Allen, “The Eugenics Redord Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in Institutional His-
tory,” see n. 60, 248-249; Stern, see n. 60.

145
as biological bases for racial difference continued to elude scientific identification.63 In an
oral history interview later in his life, Osborn claimed that he had always viewed the work
of the ERO as racist and “emotional rather than scientific.” He took credit for bringing the
unscientific nature of the ERO’s work to the attention of its major sponsor, the Carnegie
Institution of Washington, resulting in the ERO’s loss of funding and its ultimate closure.64
By the time the ERO closed, the emerging science of genetics had begun to demonstrate
that certain diseases were indeed inherited according to a Mendelian genetic pattern. How-
ever, efforts to identify genes that controlled social and character traits, and efforts to define
“race” in biological terms, continued to fail. In 1927, Raymond Pearl published an article
in The American Mercury attacking the assumed scientific basis of eugenic programs that
sought to encourage the reproduction of successful individuals and limit the reproduction
of unsuccessful individuals.65 The article described a study he had undertaken of the fates
of the fathers and sons of famous poets and philosophers to refute the idea that great men
are either born of great men or sire great men. By demonstrating that famous poets and
philosophers are no more likely to have accomplished fathers or sons than anyone else, he
suggested the futility of encouraging large families among “superior” couples and small fam-
ilies among “inferior” couples. This statement reflected growing scientific consensus about
Mendelian genetics, but was a sharp reversal of Pearl’s earlier belief that, that “for the wel-
fare of the state or nation those stocks which are on the whole endowed with the best traits
63
Barkan, see n. 30; Allen, “The Eugenics Redord Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in
Institutional History,” see n. 60, 250.
64
Garland Allen describes the type of work performed under Davenport and Laughlin at Cold Spring Har-
bor and the Carnegie investigation the led to the withdrawal of funds in Allen, “The Eugenics Redord Office
at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” see n. 60; Osborn took credit for that
investigation in Isabel Grossner, “Oral History Interview with Frederick Osborn for the Columbia Univer-
sity Oral History Office,” 1967,Frederick Osborn Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA,
“Osborn - Biography #1,” box 3.
65
This was purely a scientific critique, as Pearl continued to advocate for eugenics as a political program.
Pearl certainly shared the racism, classism, and anti-Semitism of his time, and these personal politics did not
soften over the course of his life. In 1925 he described Gregory Pincus, who would later play a key role in the
development of the birth control pill, as a “lazy Jew,” and in the same year suggested to a colleague that the
National Academy of Sciences should take no further nominations from the mathematics section “until such
time as they have somebody to offer who is neither a Jew nor an ass.” Raymond Pearl to Edward M. East,
May 7, 1925,“E.M. East #5,” box 7; Raymond Pearl to Edwin B. Wilson, Mar. 7, 1925,“Edwin B. Wilson
#2,” box 29.

146
should contribute more, many more, individuals to the next generation than should those
stocks whose characteristics are on the whole bad.”66 While some scholars have argued that
this article signals Pearl’s abandonment of the political project of eugenics,67 Pearl himself
claimed otherwise. He was not withdrawing his support from eugenics, he explained in a
letter to a colleague, but rather was tying “to make a more or less subtle distinction between
eugenics with a good genetics foundation and eugenics with a bad genetics foundation.”68
Osborn and the AES responded to Pearl’s critique and to the growing critique of Nazi
eugenic policies in Germany by separating eugenics from genetics. On the one hand, the
organization sponsored research in genetics to link physical, social, and character traits
to genes whenever possible. Following World War II, Osborn promoted the inclusion of
human genetics in medical school curricula, and genetic counseling in medical practice to
encourage couples with genes that were known to predispose their children to specific diseases
to consider those risks before starting their families. On the other hand, he continued to
promote a eugenic program that sought to increase births to “superior” couples and limit
births to “inferior” couples, but without claiming a basis for that program in the new science
of genetics. He never argued that individual socioeconomic success was not genetically
encoded, but he acknowledged that the science of genetics had not yet identified the relevant
genes and alleles, and probably would not do so for some time.
Because there was no scientific evidence linking social and character traits to specific
genetic markers, Osborn conceded that the American public was unlikely to consent to
a program in which governmental or scientific authorities selected who would and would
not reproduce. Moreover, such a program became increasingly distasteful as government
decisions over life and death became associated with the genocidal Nazi regime in the 1930s,
and with the authoritarianism of the postwar Soviet Union. For these reasons, Osborn
66
Pearl, 1908. Quoted in Robertson, see n. 12, 17.
67
Allen, “Old Wine in New Bottles: From Eugenics to Population Control in the Work of Raymond Pearl,”
see n. 61; Ramsden, “Carving Up Population Science: Demography and the Controversy Over the ‘Biological
Law’ of Population Growth,” see n. 83.
68
Raymond Pearl to Edwin B. Wilson, Dec. 17, 1927,“Edwin B. Wilson #2,” box 29.

147
advocated what I will call a “free market” eugenics program, according to which subtle
mechanisms of social control would encourage “superior” couples to have larger families and
“inferior” couples to have smaller families, without the parents in question even suspecting
outside influences on their childbearing decisions. Osborn argued that such a program was
critical to maintaining the strength of the U.S. population because the mortality decline that
had resulted from industrialization and the concomitant rise in food security and sanitation
had disrupted the process of natural selection. Osborn contended that, whereas previously
the “inferior elements” of the population had died before reaching childbearing age, now
nearly all children who were born lived long enough to reproduce. According to Osborn, the
differential use of contraception by the professional classes only compounded the situation.
As a replacement for natural selection, he called for a new type of conscious selection that
would operate through birth rather than death, with the limitation of births among “the
marginal economic groups” and the encouragement of large families among those of “fine
blood strains.”69
As this language indicates, Osborn conflated socioeconomic success with genetic capacity,
contending that the former reflected the latter. However, he also contended that genetically
superior individuals loved children and desired large families, while the selfishness of genet-
ically inferior individuals translated into a dislike for children and a desire to have as few as
possible. He argued that, in recognizing genetically superior individuals,

certain general tendencies seem evident. It is reasonable to suppose that these

qualities would include a strong physique, good health, love of children, unselfish-
ness, ability to get along with other people, compatibility of husband and wife,
willingness to assume responsibility, and willingness to make sacrifices for the
sake of the family. These are all socially valuable qualities. There is some ev-
idence that these good qualities tend to go together and to be associated with
intelligence more than with stupidity. Thus, it appears that under conditions of
perfectly free choice, couples would tend to have children somewhat in propor-
tion to the degree to which they possess the highly desirable qualities mentioned
69
Frederick Osborn, “The Development of Eugenic Policies,” 1935,“Frederick Osborn - Papers #5,” box
17; Frederick Osborn, “A Eugenics Program for the United States,” 1935,“Frederick Osborn - Papers #3,”
box 17.

148
 above as conducive to large families.70

However, Osborn recognized that the costs of childrearing and the limited availability of
birth control made it difficult for couples to have the number of children they desired.71
Osborn believed that these constraints produced a dysgenic distribution of births: those
who, Osborn felt, should be having more children were also those most likely to use birth
control because they were the ones with the foresight to limit themselves to the number
of children they could support at a high standard of living. As a result, those who lacked
this sense of responsibility had the most children, who presumably inherited this lack of
responsibility through some yet-unknown genetic mechanism.
Osborn proposed numerous measures that would allow parents to have exactly the num-
ber of children they wanted, which — he argued — would translate into a more eugenic
distribution of births between the “superior” and “inferior” segments of the population.
These included some measures that genuinely would have helped everyone — free access
to birth control and abortion — and some that would have reproduced and magnified ex-
isting socioeconomic hierarchies, such as child tax credits proportional to income and free
university education for children of university graduates. Osborn justified these proposals
by arguing that American society as a whole should bear more of the childrearing costs for
those whose reproduction was considered socially beneficial.
At the same time, however, Osborn aimed to distance eugenics from class discrimination
and racism by arguing that eugenic selection should occur within racial groups and socioe-
conomic strata, contending that “if we are to breed a constantly improving stock, it must
be done by raising in every group available for reproduction a greater proportion of children
among those couples who are above the national average of hereditary capacity, and in every
group a lesser proportion of children among those members of the group who are below the
national average in hereditary capacity.”72 For that reason, he maintained that “any effec-
70
“The Development of Eugenic Policies: A Memorandum by the American Eugenics Society,” Eugenics
Review 29, no. 2 (1937): 120.
71
Ibid., 120.
72
Frederick Osborn, “Major Aspects of Eugenic Selection,” 1936,“Frederic Osborn - Papers #7,” box 17.

149
tive program of eugenics should therefore provide for selection within each of the regional,
racial and occupational groups and within each of the broad socio-economic groups,” rather
than between those groups, as had been the underlying mechanism of the ERO’s program.73
Osborn argued that the variance in innate ability within these groups was greater than the
differences in average ability between them, and that eugenic selection should therefore be
based on individual ability rather than race or class. Osborn made this argument in the
statistical language of the normal distribution, suggesting that “if curves for hereditary ca-
pacities of different groups were superimposed, we have every reason to believe that there
would be a large amount of overlapping even between the most diverse groups.”74 In order
to encourage the development of “inborn ability” among children from lower socioeconomic
strata, Osborn promoted the provision of free school lunches.
Osborn’s program did not rely exclusively on the supposedly-natural affinity for or aver-
sion to large families that — he believed — stemmed from genetic superiority or inferiority.
He also recommended that figures with social authority — particularly teachers, clergy, and
medical professionals — be empowered to encourage “promising” couples to have large fam-
ilies and begin them early, and to encourage couples with less potential to practice birth
control. Recognizing that genetic “quality” could not be measured directly, Osborn sug-
gested that, within a given “group,” those charged with identifying “promising couples”
could do so on the basis of the attractiveness of their homes. Osborn maintained that within
socio-economic strata — people who had access to the same level of resources — the quality
of a home “reflects not only the outward characteristics of the parents, but we are justified
in believing that on the whole it is also an indication of their genetic qualities. The science
of genetics will have to make many forward steps before a better measure of genetic quality
can be made available.”75
Because his program depended on the illusion of personal choice, Osborn saw the legal-
73
Osborn, “The Development of Eugenic Policies,” see n. 69.
74
Ibid.
75
Frederick Osborn, “Moral Responsibilities of Parenthood,” 1936,“Frederick Osborn - Papers #6,” box
17.

150
ization and diffusion of contraception as a prerequisite for eugenics. He became a strong
supporter of organizations such as the American Birth Control League, even though these
groups did not have an explicitly eugenic mission, and even though Osborn was not inter-
ested in birth control as a mechanism of empowerment for women or the poor. Nonetheless,
he promoted birth control through these organizations rather than specifically as a eugenic
tool since he was unsure “whether the interjection of the eugenic idea would hasten or retard
public acceptance of the idea of pressure for birth control among the least adequate parents
in our society.” He believed that universal family planning was “the first step towards a
rational program of eugenics,” and felt that the “situation is so urgent that I am willing to
let the program of eugenic education for birth control be secondary to the other reasons of
birth control.”76 As discussed in Chapter One, during the 1920s, Margaret Sanger aligned
her movement for the legalization of birth control with eugenics because, at that time, eu-
genics had more scientific and popular authority. Osborn’s statements suggest that, by the
1930s, the situation had reversed, with the credibility of birth control growing and that of
eugenics waning.

Princeton’s Office of Population Research

To further bolster the credibility of eugenics, Osborn aimed to associate it with the emerging
science of demography. The earlier association of eugenics with genetics had become a
liability for eugenics, as genetic science had been unable to validate the claims of either
mainstream or reform eugenic programs. Demography could not speak to the science of
genetic “superiority” either, but its practitioners did have insight into the relative fertility
of different social groups, and — more importantly for Osborn — into the correlates of
fertility within social groups. In a 1933 reflection on the state of eugenics, he attributed
recent advances not to the work of the Eugenics Record Office or the Eugenics Research
Association, but rather to the Population Association of America, which “has been able in
76
Frederick Osborn to P. S. Barrows, n.d.,“Frederick Osborn - Letters on Eugenics,” box 17.

151
its two annual meetings to present a scientific background for discussion on the qualitative
aspects of population — in other words, eugenics — which has not been approached in my
experience by any of the Eugenics societies.”77 He later described demographers as population
engineers, contending that “soon people will probably decide that they want more or fewer
people in the country in the next generation, or more of a particular kind and fewer of
another kind. . . so they will turn to the demographer and ask him just how to get certain
people to have more children and others to have fewer children.”78 As will be discussed later
in this chapter, Osborn would soon ask demographers exactly that question.
For Osborn, eugenics gained legitimacy from its basis in demography, but the legitimacy
of demography depended on its scientific authority, a view that (at least partially) explains
Osborn’s insistence that Sanger not be elected an officer of the association, despite his sup-
port for her movement to legalize and disseminate birth control. Throughout his life, Osborn
remained a strong advocate of and fundraiser for demography or, as Notestein called him
in 1969, “demography’s statesman.”79 During the 1930s, Osborn obtained a grant from the
Milbank Memorial Fund, of which he was a trustee, to establish a research center and grad-
uate training program for demography within Princeton University’s School of Public and
International Affairs (SPIA). The Princeton Office of Population Research (OPR) opened in
1936, with Notestein as director. Given that Osborn was a Princeton alumnus and would
later become a trustee, and given that both his father and Albert Milbank were Princeton
trustees and founders, funders, and advisors of SPIA,80 the establishment of OPR at Prince-
ton might seem overdetermined. However, Princeton was actually Osborn’s second choice:
he had initially and unsuccessfully attempted to locate the population office at Harvard.81
77
Frederick Osborn, “Memorandum on Eugenics in the United States,” 1933,“Frederick Osborn - Papers
#2,” box 17.
78
Frederick Osborn, “The Inevitable Enlargement of the Field of Demography - PAA Dinner Meeting,
Providence, RI,” Apr. 25, 1959,“Frederick Osborn - Papers #19,” box 18.
79
Frank W. Notestein, “Frederick Osborn, Demography’s Statesman on His Eightieth Spring,” Apr. 10,
1969,Frank W. Notestein Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ,
folder 5, box 8.
80
Harold Dodds, “Albert G. Milbank and His Relationship to Princeton,” 1952,folder 22, box 26.
81
When Osborn did approach Princeton about the possibility of establishing an Office of Population
Research and hiring Notestein to direct it, he felt it important to comment on Notestein’s background,

152
 In his 1936 report to Princeton president Harold Dodds, SPIA director Poole claimed
that, even before Osborn had approached him, “the need for the closest possible study of the
movements of population and their bearing upon social and political problems has long been
felt.”82 Princeton would not, however, fund the new office. Dodds agreed to house OPR and
hire Notestein as its director as long as Notestein’s salary and other administrative expenses
could be obtained externally for at least the first five years. Initially, Notestein’s teaching
load was to include “(1) a few lectures each year to the Juniors in the Economics Department,
and (2) a one-term graduate course in Population Problems which would be open not only
to graduate students but also to high-stand seniors in approved cases.”83 An undergraduate
course was added in 1939. Through 1970, these were the only demography courses offered
at Princeton, though by the mid-1940s most OPR research staff taught at least part time.84
The grant Osborn obtained from the Milbank Memorial Fund not only paid Notestein’s
salary and the administrative expenses of OPR, but also purchased office furniture and cal-
culating machines and paid the salaries of two research assistants, Irene Taeuber and Dudley
Kirk. Irene Taeuber had entered the population field with her 1928 M.A. thesis at North-
western University, “The Inheritance of Pigmentation in the American Negro,” which was
later published by Raymond Pearl in his journal Human Biology. In a 1973 interview, Taeu-
ber described herself as Pearl’s “discovery and protégé.”85 She went on to complete a Ph.D.
informing SPIA director Dewitt Clinton Poole that Notestein’s “people come from Alma, Michigan, having
moved there very early from the East where they had settled before the Revolution.. . . It is quite a German
community and the Notesteins are mostly farmers and teachers.” Dewitt Clinton Poole to Harold Dodds,
Dec. 11, 1935,Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Records, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library,
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, folder 12, box 9, given Notestein’s name, this statement was likely
Osborn’s way of reassuring the Princeton administration that Notestein was not Jewish and not part of the
recent wave of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.
82
Harold Dodds, “President’s Report, 1935-1936,” n.d.,folder 2, box 4.
83
Dewitt Clinton Poole to Frederick Osborn, Dec. 24, 1935,Ansley J. Coale Papers, Seeley G. Mudd
Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, folder 4, box 13.
84
“Princeton Presidents’ Reports 1936-1940,” n.d.,folder 12, box 4; “Interview with Anders Lunde for the
PAA Oral History Project,” 1979,folder 5, box 1; Harold Dodds to Joe Willits, Sept. 28, 1944,Rockefeller
Foundation Records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY, box A82, series 200s, record group 1.1.
85
“Irene B. Taeuber, Interview with Anders Lunde for the PAA Oral History Project,” Apr. 28, 1973, url:
[Link] [Link],
url: [Link]
[Link], 75.

153
in sociology in 1931 at the University of Minnesota, where she studied with Francis Stuart
Chapin, who had been a student of Franklin Giddings. Taeuber completed her education
in the same year as her husband Conrad, also a sociologist engaged in population research.
Irene Taeuber remained at OPR for the rest of her career and became the foremost authority
in the United States on population dynamics in East Asia. In 1971, Notestein would de-
scribe her as “the star in OPR’s crown who must be on everyone’s list of the world’s first ten
demographers.”86 Dudley Kirk was a graduate student in sociology at Harvard University,
studying with vital statistician Edward P. Hutchinson. His dissertation, completed in 1946,
focused on interwar European migration. In 1947, Kirk became the first demographer to
work for the U.S. Department of State.
The MMF also provided a fellowship, including tuition and a stipend, to one OPR grad-
uate student each year.87 The first Milbank Fellow was John Durand, who would become
director of the U.N. Population Division in the 1950s. The Milbank Fellowship attracted
to demography promising young scholars who did not necessarily have a strong interest in
population. One of these scholars was Ansley Coale, who will figure prominently in later
chapters, as he oversaw many of the most important developments in postwar demography
and trained an entire generation of demographers. In 1988, PAA historian Jean Van Der Tak
referred to Coale as the “father, grandfather, progenitor of the U.S. demographic scene,” and
commented to Coale that it “sounds like (most of) the younger people in U.S. demography
have been your students.” Coale replied that, on a visit to the University of Pennsylvania,
where several of his former students were on the faculty, the graduate students declared him
their “grand-mentor.”88 Between 1960 and 1980, as an OPR faculty member, Coale trained
five students who went on to become presidents of PAA.89 Coale had entered graduate school
86
“OPR Anniversary Party,” 1971,folder 2, box 29.
87
See n. 84; Dewitt Clinton Poole to William Church Osborn, Apr. 4, 1936,folder 13, box 9; MMF to
Dewitt Clinton Poole, Mar. 23, 1936,folder 21, box 15; “Statement of Account,” Oct. 24, 1939,folder 21, box
15.
88
“Interview with Jean van der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” 1988,folder 5, box 1.
89
These students were Paul Demeny, Samuel H. Preston, Albert I. Hermalin, Jane A. Menken, and Douglas
S. Massey. See [Link]

154
at Princeton in economics in 1939 and was offered the Milbank Fellowship. As he told an
interviewer in 1979, “I had no money so the only way I could go to graduate school was
with a full ride. I was willing to have an interest in population in order to have a fellow-
ship that would pay my way.”90 In the postwar period, funding for graduate studies would
be an important mechanism for recruiting promising students in sociology and economics
into the field of demography, as will be discussed at greater length in Chapter Five. Other
prominent demographers who were also Milbank fellows at OPR include George Stolnitz,
Norman Ryder, Melvin Zelnik, Paul Demeny, and Al Hermalin.91 The Milbank Memorial
Fund continued to provide this fellowship until 1968.
Upon its founding, OPR immediately became the main locus of demographic activity in
the United States. The PAA frequently held its annual meetings there, and Irene Taeuber
took over the editorship of Population Index. OPR’s financial relationship with the MMF
continued into the 1970s and, as a result, Princeton demographers collaborated closely with
Clyde Kiser, Milbank’s only demographer after Notestein moved to OPR, on projects related
to differential fertility and contraception, which will be described in the final section of this
chapter. As OPR’s founder, and as the liaison between OPR and its major funder, the
MMF, Osborn wielded substantial influence over the OPR’s research program.

The Population Investigation Committee and the Eugenics Society of Great

Britain

This section briefly discusses the institutionalization of demography in the U.K., which also
occurred in the 1930s, to demonstrate that, on both sides of the Atlantic, this new science
emerged with the strong support of the eugenics movement. In 1936, Carlos Blacker, whom
Daniel Kevles has identified as Osborn’s British counterpart in the leadership of reform
90
Similarly, John Knodel developed an interest in population only after receiving the Milbank Fellowship,
having entered graduate school in the Department of Sociology at Princeton without a clear research interest.
Interview with John Knodel, 4-24-2012., see n. 84.
91
“Milbank Memorial Fund Fellows at the Office of Population Research for the Period 1936-1968,”
n.d.,folder 6, box 7.

155
eugenics,92 established the Population Investigation Committee (PIC), together with zoolo-
gist/anthropologist A.M. Carr-Saunders, who had published a global history of population
in 1922, and David Glass, a 1932 graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE). The
stated aim of the PIC was “to promote and undertake research into quantitative and qualita-
tive aspects of population questions.”93 At that time, the most pressing questions were what
had caused the recent decline in fertility rates, particularly among the professional middle
classes, and how might it be reversed. Like OPR, the majority of the PIC’s funding was
external, and for the first 10 to 15 years it came directly from the Eugenics Society of Great
Britain.94 Carr-Sanders was the PIC’s first chairman, followed by Glass, who would be the
face of British demography until his death in 1978. Blacker was Secretary General of the
Eugenics Society from 1930 to 1952 and Honorary Secretary of the PIC for nearly 40 years.
Carr-Saunders and Blacker had both attended the 1927 World Population Conference and
served on the U.K. national committee of the IUSIPP.95
Eugenics in Great Britain stood to the left, politically, of American eugenics, with strong
ties to Fabian socialism. It also had an institutional presence in British universities that it
did not have in U.S. universities, first in the form of the Galton Laboratory for National
Eugenics at University College London — described in Chapter One — and then in the form
of the LSE Program in Social Biology, established in 1930 under the directorship of William
Beveridge — architect of the postwar British welfare state — and with funding from the
Rockefeller Foundation.96 Beveridge defined social biology as “the application of biology to
human society, to cover such topics as variation and heredity in man, selective immunity,
relative importance of environmental factors in social structure and changes, questions of race
92
Kevles, see n. 60.
93
John C. Caldwell, “Demography and Social Science,” Population Studies 50, no. 3 (1996): 314.
94
E. Grebenik, “Demographic Research in Britain 1936-1986,” in Population Research in Britain, ed.
Michael Murphy and John Hobcraft (London: Population Investigation Committee, 1991); G.H.L.F. Pitt-
Rivers, “Report of the IUSIPP General Secretary to the General Assembly, Paris July 1937,” 1937,“IUSIPP
#12,” box 15.
95
Grebenik, see n. 94.
96
For the Galton Lab, see Kevles, see n. 60; for the LSE Program in Social Biology, see Grebenik, see
n. 94.

156
and class in relation to hereditary endowment, economic and biological tests of fitness.”97
Zoologist-statistician Lancelot Hogben chaired the department and Robert Kuczynski served
on the faculty. The PIC replaced the Program in Social Biology in 1937, when Beveridge
and Hogben left LSE and were replaced by Carr-Saunders and Glass. From 1945 to 1978,
Glass served as both Reader in Demography at LSE and Research Secretary of the PIC.
This section has argued that, even as population scientists self-consciously attempted to
draw boundaries between demography and the politics of population, demography developed
strong institutional relationships with a new free-market and purportedly non-racist form of
eugenics. This new version of eugenics that emerged in the 1930s in the U.S. and the U.K.
was an alternative to the older mainstream form of eugenics, which the emerging science of
genetics had begun to discredit and was increasingly associated with the genocidal population
policies of the Nazi state in Germany. While this section focused on demography’s interwar
patrons, the next section turns to its clients, examining attempts by demographers to make
their research relevant to the U.S. government during the Great Depression, and efforts by
the U.S. government to make use of demographic research. The final part explores the use
of demography by private clients, specifically those associated with the American Eugenics
Society.

2.3 Finding Clients for Demography

While the previous section described the ways in which population scientists secured patrons
for their activities, particularly the Milbank Memorial Fund in the U.S. and the Eugenics So-
ciety of Great Britain and the Rockefeller Foundation in the U.K., this section examines how
demographers secured an audience for their work in the U.S. government during the Great
Depression. I argue that the ways in which demography’s practitioners worked with and
made their research relevant to government, together with OPR’s establishment in Prince-
ton’s School of Public and International Affairs, solidified the field’s conceptual location in
97
Quoted in Grebenik, see n. 94, 6.

157
the social sciences rather than the natural sciences and established its orientation toward
public policy. I will also demonstrate how demography’s policy orientation helped the cohort
component projection method become the standard method of population projection. As I
will argue, the cohort component projection method was particularly useful for government
because it facilitated the engineering of population size. Osborn, however, hoped to put
demographers to work engineering the composition of the U.S. population as well as its size.
To achieve this aim, he proposed and secured funding for OPR’s first fertility survey, which
would serve as a prototype for the postwar fertility surveys discussed in Chapter Five.

2.3.1 Selling Demography to the U.S. Government

As demography’s professional association, one of the PAA’s major activities is holding annual
meetings, which serve as fora for the discussion of organizational business and sharing of
research results. In 1935, however, at the suggestion of Henry Pratt Fairchild, a strong
supporter of President Roosevelt and his New Deal administration, the PAA planned its
annual meeting — to be held in Washington, D.C. — as a showcase for the presentation
of demography to the U.S. government as a resource for policy making. This was not,
however, the first contact between government and demographers in the U.S. In 1930,
William Ogburn, director of research for President Hoover’s Recent Social Trends project, a
foray into social science as the basis for social engineering, had enlisted Warren Thompson
and Pascal Whelpton to project the future population of the U.S. and write a monograph
about the causes and consequences of past and future population dynamics. This section
examines that project and then turns to the 1935 PAA meeting and the ways in which
Roosevelt’s New Deal government drew on the newly-available expertise of demography.

158
Recent Social Trends: The Cohort Component Model and
Population Engineering

An engineer who saw in social science the potential to solve the growing social problems
associated with the speculative capitalism of the 1920s, President Hoover launched the Re-
cent Social Trends project in December of 1929. This project was a follow-up to the just-
completed Recent Economic Changes project, which had surveyed economic activities in the
U.S. during the 1920s, a period that would later be recognized as one characterized by un-
sustainable growth that culminated in the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great
Depression. Following the publication of the final report of the Recent Economic Changes
project, Hoover appointed a committee, chaired by economist Wesley C. Mitchell, to com-
mission scholarship in various areas of the social sciences, which would together paint a
composite portrait of U.S. society, illustrating its problems and pointing to policy solutions.
The project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and University of Chicago sociol-
ogist William Ogburn served as research director.98 Ogburn, a former student of Franklin
Giddings who would become one of the first vice-presidents of the Population Association of
America, included the study of population in the Recent Social Trends project. He engaged
Thompson and Whelpton to write a chapter for the volume Recent Social Trends, published
in 1934, and a monograph for the Recent Social Trends series, published in 1933. By includ-
ing population in the project, Ogburn claimed its study for the social sciences; by selecting
Thompson and Whelpton to carry out the research, he helped to standardize their cohort
component projection method and their understanding of population as a social aggregate
of individuals, described in Chapter One.
There are many reasons why Ogburn may have chosen Thompson and Whelpton over
Pearl and Reed to project the future U.S. population and write the population components
of the Recent Social Trends works.99 First, the project was explicitly a social scientific one
98
Karl W. Bigelow, “Recent Social Trends,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 18, no. 1 (1933): 153.
99
An additional reason may have been that Thompson and Ogburn had both been students of Franklin
Giddings at Columbia University and may have known each other in graduate school.

159
and, until his Milbank-funded research on the efficacy of birth control in the early 1930s, de-
scribed above, Pearl continued to give priority to biological rather than social determinants of
population dynamics. Whereas Pearl and Reed’s research focused on identifying similarities
in growth patterns between human and non-human populations, Thompson and Whelpton
carried out substantial research on the social aspects of U.S. population dynamics, including
racial composition, urbanization, fertility decline, and population aging. In contrast to Pearl
and Reed’s logistic projections, which provided only future total population size, Thomp-
son and Whelpton’s cohort-component projections also offered future age-sex structure and
racial and urban/rural composition. Detailed information on age-sex structure would have
been particularly useful to the government in planning for military mobilization, educational
provision, and old age pensions, and would also have been valuable to industry: as Whelp-
ton had argued in his initial presentation of the cohort component method in 1928, the
population aging he predicted meant that continued industrial vitality would require that
businesses design more products for elderly consumers and continue to employ workers past
the age at which they would typically retire.
More importantly, however, the Recent Social Trends project served the needs of social
engineering, and cohort component projections provided a conceptual and pragmatic basis
for population intervention that logistic projections did not. Conceptually, the cohort com-
ponent model both reflected and fostered a sense of openness about future population that
sharply contrasted with the determinism of Pearl’s logistic law. According to the logistic
law, the trajectory of population growth was fully determined by the carrying capacity of
the population’s territory. Because the logistic law left no room for alternative patterns
or speeds of population growth, the logistic projection method produced only one future
scenario, which — Pearl argued — could not be altered by policy or even by disaster, such
as war or epidemic. In contrast, the cohort component method modeled the independent
effect of each component of population growth — fertility, mortality, and migration. Al-
though each component was bounded by biological possibility — for example, by the fact

160
that people can’t live forever and by the fact that women usually can’t bear more than one
child in any given year — they were otherwise open to possibility and manipulation. The
cohort component model therefore allowed for the mathematical assessment of the effects of
various types of policy interventions into fertility, mortality, and migration rates on overall
population size and structure.
Reflecting the openness of the cohort component projection method to a range of future
courses of population growth, Thompson and Whelpton’s projections of U.S. population for
the Recent Social Trends project included five possible future fertility trajectories, three pos-
sible mortality trajectories, and six possible immigration rates, with different scenarios com-
bining these possibilities in different ways. All variants, however, included falling mortality
and fertility and positive net international migration (more immigrants than emigrants).100
These scenarios emphasized the dependence of overall population size and structure on the
components of growth, and the accompanying text emphasized the dependence of the com-
ponents of growth — particularly fertility and migration — on government policy. According
to the cohort component model, fertility, mortality, and migration were the product of social,
economic, and political circumstances — operating within biological limits — rather than
predetermined forces of nature. In contrast to Pearl, Thompson and Whelpton acknowledged
the unknowability of events that have not yet happened. In so doing, they offered up the
possibility that future population, because it could not be known in advance with certainty,
could be controlled, and because it could be controlled, could not be known in advance with
certainty.
In contrast to the logistic projection method, which claimed to accurately predict future
population, the cohort component method allowed users to simulate the effects of various
fertility, mortality, and migration rates on future population size and structure. Typically,
demographers using the cohort component projection method accompany their projections
with a disclaimer, noting that the projections do not constitute predictions. As Whelpton
100
Warren S. Thompson and Pascal K. Whelpton, Population Trends in the United States (New York:
McGraw, 1933).

161
stated in his 1928 article, cohort component projections “represent simply what will happen
under certain conditions of immigration, birth-rates, and death rates,” and are therefore
simply the arithmetical outcomes of a set of assumptions.101 Although Whelpton’s 1928
article included only one future course of population growth, cohort component projections
produced since then, by Whelpton and by others, have typically included multiple variants,
emphasizing both the non-predictive nature of the projections and the dependence of future
population size on future vital rates.
Nonetheless, consumers of population projections — including governments, inter- and
non-governmental agencies, businesses, and scientists — often demand a definitive statement
about future population for use in other scientific models or as a basis for planning. To serve
this purpose, Thompson and Whelpton offered a “medium” variant, which they designated
as the most likely scenario, absent any major social, economic, or political upheavals (such
as world war). As the use of cohort component projections spread, the production of a
set of scenarios — including a medium or most likely variant — became standard practice.
As a result, cohort component population projections are one of a class of objects that
Star and Griesemer call “boundary objects”: “scientific objects which both inhabit several
intersecting social worlds. . . and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them.”102
Boundary objects are those that may be recognized as the same thing by two different
groups of users, but have different identities among those groups. Boundary objects serve
as interfaces between different groups of actors, allowing them to work together despite —
or, as Star and Griesemer might argue, because of — the fact that the common object has
a different meaning for members of each group. Population projections are recognized as
projections by both their producers and their users. However, their producers tend to view
them as simulations — how a particular course of fertility, mortality, and migration would
influence population size and structure — while their users tend to view them as the best
available prediction of future population.
101
Whelpton, “Population of the United States, 1925 to 1975,” see n. 144, 267.
102
Star and Griesemer, see n. 63, 393, emphasis in the original.

162
 As boundary objects, population projections speak differently to different audiences.
Their producers recognize that they are always statements about the effects of past, present,
and assumed future dynamics on population. For consumers, however, population projec-
tions are stimply statements about the future; consumers are often less interested in popu-
lation for its own sake than in the population that will serve as the denominator for some
other indicator or as an input to some other model. This distinction between producers
and consumers is an observation about the division of labor; it is not meant to distinguish
demographers from other scientists or from non-scientists. Indeed, demographers — partic-
ularly those working in government — can be both producers and consumers of population
projections. Irene Taeuber recognized the boundary quality of cohort component projections
as early as 1949, when she argued that projections served the needs of both academic de-
mographers — who could use them to “survey the range of possibilities that lie ahead and
contemplate philosophically the gyrations of the late ’forties” — and “the demographer in
government work,” who “faces incessant demands from operating agencies for estimates of
the population today, tomorrow, and next year.” Demographers working in government, she
continued, had to cope with “the burden of giving categorical answers to queries as to which
one of the Thompson-Whelpton estimates is ‘best’ ” because “the manufacturer, the business
man, and the government official making per capita estimates require a specific population
divisor.”103
Logistic projections, because they specified an absolutely certain population at any future
date, could serve as an excellent tool in planning for population. I define planning for
population as using estimates of future population size (and structure, if available) as the
basis for planning other activities, such as educational provision, old age pensions, factory
locations, and the production and distribution of consumer goods. The medium variant
in a set of cohort component projections also serves this purpose. But cohort component
projections, because of the range of possibilities they permit for future population size and
103
Irene B. Taeuber, “Literature on Future Populations,” Population Index (1949): 193.

163
structure, can also be used for the planning of population. I define planning of population as
using population projections to design interventions intended to influence future population
size and/or structure. Two aspects of the cohort component model make it particularly
useful as a tool for the planning of population. First, the model isolates the effects of
each component of change (and, as discussed in Chapter One, is based on the theoretical
assumption that these components operate independently of one another), illustrating how
each one affects overall population growth and allowing for calculations of the effects of
an adjustment in any of them on the aggregate outcome. Second, the model can be run in
reverse, allowing the user to specify a future “level regarded as desirable, and then determine
what would have to happen to fertility, mortality, and migration, if the assumed goal were to
be achieved.104 That is, it can demonstrate the interventions necessary to produce an ideal
population size and/or structure.
While the medium variant in a set of cohort component projections may employ the
future rates their creator believes most likely to occur in the absence of policy intervention or
drastic social, political, or economic change, cohort component projections that are explicitly
intended as the basis for the planning of population are more likely to employ future rates that
are avowedly hypothetical: either rates that must be achieved in order to produce the desired
population size or composition or rates that must be avoided so as to avert an undesirable
future population size or composition. Perhaps the earliest example of this use of the cohort
component model is Dublin’s presentation at the 1931 meeting of the IUSIPP in London.
Concerned about declining fertility and consequent population aging in the United States,
which he described as “a possible threat to national survival” with “disturbing implications
in the international distribution of the various races,”105 Dublin used the cohort component
projection method not to calculate the future population size and structure he expected
would actually materialize, but rather to illustrate his concern, working up two scenarios
104
Taeuber, “Literature on Future Populations,” see n. 103, 4.
105
Louis I. Dublin, “The Outlook for the American Birth-Rate,” in Problems of Population: Being the
Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Assembly of the International Union for the Scientific
Investigation of Population Problems, ed. G.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers (London: Kennikat Press, 1932), 115.

164
based on different hypothetical assumptions about the future course of fertility in order to
demonstrate the effect that individual childbearing decisions had on population size and
structure. In both scenarios, Dublin had the mortality rate fall to what he thought was its
biological minimum by 1970, bottoming out at the same life expectancy of 70 years predicted
by Whelpton in his 1928 article. In the first scenario, he similarly specified fertility rates
reaching their minimum in 1970, an outcome he personally thought too optimistic; in the
second scenario, fertility continued to decline through the year 2100. The second scenario
resulted ultimately in a smaller and older population, which Dublin cited to warn of the
potential dangers of falling fertility. He argued that

similar changes will undoubtedly occur in most other countries; but if certain of
them, for example, Russia, and especially China and India, continue to increase
their populations, or even maintain their present numbers, the question forces
itself upon us what the international relations in the future will be like. In
the last analysis, numbers must count, and in the future more than ever, when
different political and economic ideals will strive for supremacy. The changes that
are coming through the differential decline in the birth-rate will make a totally
different kind of a world for our grand-children and our great-grand-children to
live in. Those groups that will maintain higher rates will dominate the scene.
There are signs that the era of ruling and of subject peoples is rapidly coming to
an end.106

Dublin’s projections demonstrate that the population stationarity (non-growth) and aging
he feared were not the necessary outcome of natural laws — as Pearl had argued — but
rather were under human control through the control of fertility, and potentially under
governmental control through the implementation of policies to increase fertility. Dublin’s
projections illustrate both the political anxieties underlying demographic research between
the wars, and the utility of cohort component projections to argue for policies to influence
future population change.
In their chapter for Recent Social Trends (1934) and in their monograph for the series,
Population Trends in the United States (1933), Thompson and Whelpton presented all of
their projections in neutral terms, and did not explicitly designate any as a scenario to
106
Dublin, “The Outlook for the American Birth-Rate,” see n. 105, 123-124.

165
be aimed for or avoided. Nonetheless, the accompanying text both described and encour-
aged the possibility of government intervention to shape the future population of the United
States. They legitimized explicit government planning of population by arguing that gov-
ernment policy had always influenced population growth, stating that “though perhaps it is
not generally realized, it is nevertheless a fact that the United States has had a definite and
effective policy regarding the increase of population practically from the commencement of
white settlement.”107 The goal of that policy, they contended, was to increase and whiten
the population of the U.S. through the encouragement of immigration from Northern and
Western Europe, limitation of immigration from other regions, and prevention of the spread
of contraceptive knowledge through such laws as the Comstock Act, which made it illegal
to send contraceptive information or materials through the mail. Thompson and Whelpton
offered policy solutions to the problems posed by the slowing growth and population aging
they projected, and suggested specific policies to alter the size and composition of the future
population they forecast. As an example of the former — policies to plan for population
— they pointed out that rural areas would age more dramatically than would urban areas
(as a result of the rural-to-urban migration of the young accompanied by declining fertil-
ity), and suggested that government should equalize the cost of old-age dependency across
communities. As an example of the latter — planning of population — they suggested that

if it is believed that the present population is not too large, or that still further
increase is needed, then the financial burden of raising the next generation, which
is very unevenly distributed at the present time, should be redistributed so that
those who raise the children will not be compelled to forego their reasonable
share of the material enjoyments of life. If children, in reasonable numbers, are
a national asset, the cost of rearing them should not be loaded so heavily on the
rural population as is now being done.108

Thompson and Whelpton’s projections demonstrated that declining fertility would slow pop-
ulation growth and promote population aging, which — they and others argued — threatened
107
Thompson and Whelpton, see n. 100, 126.
108
Ibid., 171.

166
national security and economic vitality, and then proposed policies to prevent further fertility
decline.

The 1935 PAA Meeting and the Census Class of 1940: Bringing Demography
into Government

The demographers of the PAA continued to promote their work as a basis for policy making
at the 1935 PAA meeting. Fairchild secured a grant for the meeting from the Rockefeller
Foundation and invited representatives of several government agencies, expecting that the
meeting would be “a chance. . . to impress the public with the importance of scientific research
in population for national planning.”109 In response to the Great Depression, an economic
catastrophe resulting from unregulated capitalism, President Roosevelt (FDR), elected in
1932, had launched the New Deal to address the crisis through government spending and so-
cioeconomic planning. The decision to hold this special “showcase” meeting in Washington,
D.C. in 1935 likely reflects demographers’ recognition that the recent turn toward planning
could open a space for their expertise in government activities, turning government into
a long-term client. The program for the meeting included a conversation between demog-
raphers and Census officials and sessions on public health and vital statistics, population
studies in relation to social planning, population distribution and internal migration, and
the place of population studies in the university curriculum. A session on differential fertility
featuring a paper by Frederick Osborn was co-sponsored by the American Eugenics Society.
Eleanor Roosevelt attended this session — reportedly with knitting in hand — to which
she had been escorted by Osborn, a friend of the Roosevelt family, despite his opposition to
FDR’s policies.110 Afterward, the Roosevelts invited the PAA’s leaders to tea at the white
house.111
109
“Minutes of the PAA Annual Meeting, 1934,” 1934,“PAA #1,” box 22.
110
See n. 59, 8.
111
“Clyde Kiser, C. Horace Hamilton, and Joseph J. Spengler, Interview with Harry Rosenberg for the
PAA Oral History Project,” Apr. 26, 1973, url: [Link]
oralhistory/PAA_Presidents_1947-[Link], url: [Link]
PAA/oralhistory/PAA_Presidents_1947-[Link], 64.

167
 The topics selected for the meeting point to the mutual dependence of government and
demographers: demographers relied on governments to collect census and vital data, and
governments relied on demographers for analysis, explanation, and prediction. The Census
Bureau collected much more data than it could afford to analyze in-house. Through a part-
nership between the Census Bureau and the Milbank Memorial Fund, Notestein and Kiser
were able to obtain and analyze previously-untabulated data for the censuses of 1900, 1910,
and 1930. In particular, the Census Bureau had not tabulated size of family by socioeconomic
status, a major topic of interest for demographers, eugenicists, and the Milbank Memorial
Fund.112 Access to these untabulated census data allowed for the proliferation of studies of
differential fertility by demographers associated with Milbank in the 1930s. These studies
attempted to establish not only the dimensions of fertility differentials (income, education,
occupation, etc.), but also their stability or instability over time. Of the 62 demographically-
oriented articles published in the Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly in the 1930s, fully half
were on fertility, with more than half of those specifically on differential fertility.113 Demand
for research on differential fertility increased during the Great Depression, as policy makers
and the public voiced the Malthusian concern that public relief may have been expanding
the size of poor families rather than raising their standards of living. A much-cited study by
Notestein, however, demonstrated that, while families receiving public benefits tended to be
larger than other families, they had been large before beginning to receive benefits, not as a
result.114 But while demographers were able to work with these data, they still had to rely
on the questions chosen by by the Census Bureau, which were not necessarily the questions
of interest to demographers.
Beginning in 1935 and continuing throughout the century, demographers would advise
112
Frank W. Notestein to Frederick Osborn, n.d.,folder 21, box 15; Clyde V. Kiser, “The Fund’s Work in
Population,” n.d.,folder 86, box 29; “Report of the Division of Population Problems,” 1932,folder 74, box
29.
113
Many of these studies are cited in Charles F. Westoff, “The Changing Focus of Differential Fertility
Research: The Social Mobility Hypothesis,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1953): 24–38.
114
Frank W. Notestein, “The Fertility of Populations Supported By Public Relief,” Milbank Memorial Fund
Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1936): 37–49.

168
the government about their data needs and the types of questions and measures that should
be included in the Census.115 In preparation for the 1940 U.S. Census, which was the first
to include sampling (the “long form”) and pretesting, the Census Bureau hired a group of
young and recently-trained demographers, led by Assistant Chief Statistician Philip Hauser,
and including Henry Shryock Jr., George Stolnitz, and John Durand. This group came to be
known as the “class of 1940.”116 Irene Taeuber has described the 1940 U.S. Census as “the
first professional census,” in the sense that it was the first to be designed by professional
demographers.117
The Great Depression demonstrated to economists and policy makers that markets alone
coud not effectively allocate resources or ensure ongoing prosperity in industrial societies.
The New Deal administration instituted new forms of social and economic planning, some
intended specifically to overcome the current crisis and others intended to provide workers
with a permanent social safety apparatus. The 1935 PAA meeting occurred one month after
the passage of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, and may have promoted
the employment of demographers in the new government agencies and programs created
under the act. The National Resources Committee, created the following month, included
a Committee on Population Problems, which included Warren Thompson, William Ogburn,
and Frank Lorimer, and was charged with projecting future U.S. population and analyzing
its economic implications. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) hired
Irene Taeuber’s husband Conrad; Dorothy Thomas, one of the first female demographers
along with Irene Taeuber, served as a consultant to the President’s Committee on Economic
115
See, for example Kingsley Davis, “Testimony, Subcommittee on Census and Statistics of the Committee
on Post Office and Civil Service, House of Representatives, U.S. Congress,” n.d.,Kingsley Davis Papers,
Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, folder 16, box 4.
116
“Philip M. Hauser, Interview with Jean Van Der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” Nov. 12, 1988,
url: [Link]
pdf, url: [Link]
[Link], 34; “Henry Shryock Jr., Interview with Jean Van Der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” Apr. 8,
1988, url: [Link]
[Link], url: [Link]
[Link], 84.
117
See n. 85.

169
Security.118 In 1935, FERA was replaced by the Works Progress Administration, which
started the Current Population Survey as an instrument for the continuous monitoring of the
U.S. population on a sample basis.119 In the early 1940s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
hired demographer Margaret Jarman Hagood, and the Census Bureau hired demographer
Hope Tisdale Eldridge.
After 1935, the U.S. Census Bureau officially adopted the cohort component method
to predict the country’s population into the future for a broad array of consumers in gov-
ernment, academia, philanthropy, and business. However, these were not the only official
projections made by the U.S. government. The passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 ne-
cessitated the projection of the elderly and working populations through 1975. Rather than
using Census Bureau projections, the demographers of the Federal Security Administration
produced their own projections for this purpose, using the logistic method to determine
total future population at all dates between 1935 and 1975 (assuming that the population
would grow along a logistic curve to a high of 150 million in 1975), and the cohort compo-
nent method to determine the age distribution of those future populations.120 This approach
demonstrates that demographers viewed the logistic and cohort component projection meth-
ods as both alternatives and complements to one another, and that a range of actors and
agencies were producing as well as consuming population projections. The cohort compo-
nent method was also adopted as the official method of population projection in several
other countries, notably Great Britain, where the first activity of the Royal Commission on
Population, established in 1944 to address the issue of declining fertility, was to project the
British population using the cohort component model under a range of fertility, mortality,
and migration scenarios.121
118
See n. 59, 8; “Conrad Taeuber, Interview with Anders Lunde for the PAA Oral History Project,” Dec. 5,
1973, url: [Link]
[Link], url: [Link]
[Link], 19; see n. 116, 33, 38.
119
See n. 116, 84.
120
Mair, see n. 2.
121
Mair, see n. 2; Frank W. Notestein, “The Report of the Royal Commission on Population: A Review,”
Population Studies 3, no. 3 (1949): 232–240; Taeuber, “Literature on Future Populations,” see n. 103.

170
 Although there are several reasons why cohort component projections may have been
more attractive to policymakers than were logistic projections in the early 1930s, it was
not at all clear that cohort component projections were superior to logistic projections.
Indeed, the relative quality of the two methods remained in doubt into the 1950s, as will
be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three.122 The cohort component method produced
more detailed information, but also required more detailed input data, and the accuracy of
the output depended on the accuracy of the inputs and the level of correspondence between
predicted and actual future vital rates. Moreover, it was difficult between the wars to assess
the performance of either projection method, simply because not enough time had yet passed
to compare the projections to census figures. When data from the 1930 U.S. Census were
released, they revealed that Pearl’s projection of 122,397,000 was closer to the census count
(122,775,000) than was Whelpton’s projection of 123,600,000.
The ascendancy of the cohort component projection method in government, as well as the
fact that the demographers hired or otherwise engaged by the U.S. and U.K. governments
had been trained in the social sciences (including statistics) rather than the natural sciences,
helped to establish demography’s identity as a social science. The active courting of govern-
ment clients by demographers also oriented this new social science toward policy. The 1936
establishment of OPR in Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs
further contributed to the crystallization of demography’s identity as a policy-oriented social
science. Established in 1930 in response to the rise of the U.S. to a position of world lead-
ership, SPIA was an interdisciplinary division of Princeton University. It initially focused
on undergraduate education, aiming to produce graduates who “will know the underlying
features of History, Politics, Economics, Economic Geography and National Cultures, and
will have a good working knowledge of at least one foreign language, and experience in public
122
Though more recent observers such as Henk de Gans describe the cohort component method as obviously
superior, in his 1957 dissertation, OPR graduate student George Mair presented both methods as valid, and
indicated that each could be superior to the other depending on the circumstances and data quality. de Gans,
Population Forecasting 1895-1945: Transition to Modernity, see n. 175; Mair, see n. 2.

171
speaking, as well as “an understanding of the racial characteristics of foreign peoples.”123 Its
founders also planned to design a graduate program for further training of those who had
completed the undergraduate program.124
Dennis Hodgson has argued that demography shifted from being a social science — with
the aim of understanding social processes — to being a policy science — with the aim of
shaping social processes — after World War II.125 . However, attention to the founding of
the IUSIPP, the PAA, and OPR calls into question both elements of Hodgson’s claim —
that demography originated as a social science (rather than a natural science) and that it
was ever not a policy science — by revealing the ways in which social and natural scien-
tists vied for (and at times tried to relinquish to one another) the authority to speak about
population and by demonstrating that population scientists courted policy makers as clients
of their work from the very beginning. The following section explores demography’s ma-
jor non-governmental project between the wars, demonstrating that, although it was not
commissioned by government, it too aimed to influence the formation of policies that would
shape the social process of family formation.

2.3.2 Identifying the Correlates of Fertility

In 1938, the Committee on Population Problems of the National Resources Committee pub-
lished The Problems of a Changing Population, featuring a new set of cohort component
projections for the United States by Thompson and Whelpton. These new projections were
lower still than those included in Recent Social Trends, which had already been lower than
those Whelpton had published in 1928. Irene Taeuber described these projections as a “pop-
ulation toboggan slide.”126 Figure 2.1 graphs the 1938 projections (dotted gray line), along
with Whelpton’s 1928 projections (solid gray line), Thompson and Whelpton’s 1933 Recent
123
“School of Public and International Affairs, 1930 Report,” 1930,folder 49, box 4.
124
Ibid.
125
Hodgson, “Demography as Social Science and Policy Science,” see n. 20.
126
See n. 85, 77.

172
Social Trends projections (dashed gray line), and the population for 1920-1940, as recorded
by the U.S. Census Bureau (solid black line). The work of the National Resource Committee
demonstrates that, by the end of the interwar period, the U.S. government had come to view
the size, structure, and distribution of the domestic population as a variable in national ad-
ministration, and as something that could potentially be manipulated or engineered through
strategic policy interventions.

Figure 2.1: Thompson and Whelpton’s U.S. Population Projections, 1928, 1933, and 1938,
and Observed U.S. Population, 1920-1940

Projections of slowing population growth displaced neo-Malthusian fears of population

outstripping the world’s natural and agricultural resources, described in Chapter One, and
generated concern that declining fertility would undermine national strength and economic
recovery. By the end of the 1930s, anxieties about population decline in the U.S. had be-
come very similar to those in Europe, discussed earlier in this chapter. Osborn and the
American Eugenics Society added a second layer to this anxiety: since fertility decline was
concentrated among the professional middle classes — those Osborn considered genetically
“superior” — further fertility decline would not only reduce the size and increase the me-
dian age of the population, but would also reduce its inherent genetic fitness, leaving the
U.S. vulnerable to internal strife and external attack. The first part of this section de-

173
scribes how demographers came to understand differential use of birth control as the cause
of differential fertility. The second part examines a study proposed by Osborn, funded by
the Carnegie Corporation and the Milbank Memorial Fund, and carried out by the Scripps
Foundation for Research in Population Problems and Princeton’s Office of Research in 1941
to identify the social and psychological factors promoting differential use of birth control.
Officially titled Study of Social and Psychological Factors Affecting Fertility and unofficially
referred to as the Indianapolis Study, this project used the survey methods of the new field
of public opinion research to assess the social and psychological correlates of fertility so that
philanthropists and policy makers could manipulate them in order to engineer a supposedly-
eugenic distribution of births and thereby improve the quality and increase the quantity of
the U.S. population. My analysis of this study illustrates the ongoing influence of Frederick
Osborn and the Milbank Memorial Fund in the field of demography between the wars, and
describes the new tool of fertility surveys, which would become a common feature of postwar
demography.

Birth Control and Differential Fertility

Although it now seems obvious that differential use of birth control was the underlying
cause of socioeconomic, racial, and regional fertility variation, it was not at all obvious to
scientists between the wars. In 1931, the MMF generated a press release stating that “in the
country as in the city, the higher the economic and social status of the parents, the fewer are
the children born,” and explaining that “whether this limitation of babies is accomplished
entirely by birth control or is partly the result of diminished fecundity, it is impossible to
say.”127 Demographers in the early 1930s advanced numerous theories, including “some loss
of natural capacity to bear children” among middle-class and wealthy women; a “cyclical
rise and fall of racial reproductive vigor”; a metabolic tradeoff between economic success and
reproduction; and more sexual activity among the poor because they had fewer non-sexual
127
“Press Release,” May 13, 1931,folder 175, box 22.

174
activities with which to dissipate “nervous energy.”128
As discussed above, the Milbank Memorial Fund sponsored research by Pearl, Notestein,
and Kiser aimed at answering this question. The major obstacle to research on the causes of
differential fertility was that, while census and vital registration data demonstrated a decline
in fertility among the higher socioeconomic groups, very little data about contraceptive usage
or its efficacy was available, in large part because contraception was still highly controversial
in the U.S. and illegal in many states. Contraceptive use has never been a question in the U.S.
Census, so demographers have always had to look elsewhere for the data necessary to analyze
its prevalence. The first survey of contraceptive practice, known as the Mosher Survey, was
carried out by physician and Stanford professor Clelia Mosher between 1892 and 1920, but
the results were not published until the 1970s.129 Between the wars, demographers took two
approaches to studying contraceptive efficacy. Notestein, together with physician Regine
Stix, collected clinical data from Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau
in New York, in response to a request by Sanger for external review of the efficacy of the
methods used at her clinics.130 Pearl, who could not come to an agreement with Sanger about
the terms of use of these data, carried out a survey of patients in a hospital maternity ward,
as discussed above.131 In contrast to contraceptive research funded by other organizations,
such as John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Bureau of Social Hygiene or Clarence Gamble’s National
Committee on Maternal Health, which focused on clinical and laboratory studies aimed at
developing effective methods of birth control, the research funded by the MMF focused on
who used contraception and how, and the effects of contraceptive use at the level of aggregate
population.
128
Dublin, “The Outlook for the American Birth-Rate,” see n. 105, 117; Frank Hankins, “Has the Reproduc-
tive Power of Western Peoples Declined?” In Problems of Population: Being the Report of the Proceedings
of the Second General Assembly of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population
Problems, ed. G.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers (London: Kennikat Press, 1932), 183.
129
Carl N. Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,”
American Historical Review 79, no. 5 (1974): 1467–1490.
130
Regine K. Stix and Frank W. Notestein, Controlled Fertility: An Evaluation of Clinic Service (Baltimore:
Williams & Wilkins, 1940), xiii.
131
For the negotiations between Pearl and Sanger over the use of her data for research purposes, see folder
“Margaret Sanger #8,” box 24, Raymond Pearl Papers, American Philosophical Society.

175
 Pearl found that the most popular methods of birth control, in order, were condoms,
douching, withdrawal, vaginal suppositories, “other”, rhythm, and pessaries (similar to cer-
vical caps).132 Notestein found that about 95% of the women who came to Sanger’s clinics had
used contraception prior to their first visit (including withdrawal, douching, condoms, vaginal
suppositories, rhythm, pessaries, diaphragms, and sponges) with a 75% success rate.133 As
Linda Gordon has pointed out, contraceptive materials were readily available in the United
States, even when illegal. However, letters received by the U.S. Children’s Bureau between
1915 and 1932 indicate that many couples, particularly poorer ones, were not aware of their
contraceptive options.134 The Milbank studies demonstrated that couples who understood
the principle of withdrawal or knew how to read between the lines of cleverly-worded ad-
vertisements for contraceptive devices and abortifacients could control their fertility with a
relatively high degree of success in the absence of organized family planning services: indeed
at a time when the dissemination of contraceptive knowledge was illegal. This finding would
play an important role in postwar debates about the necessity and efficacy of fertility control
programs in the global south in the postwar period, described in Chapters Four and Five.
Notestein’s discovery that contraceptive knowledge was widespread among women who
had not visited a birth control clinic finally convinced scientists that contraceptive practices
had indeed accounted for recent declines in fertility. Conclusively linking changes in fertility
to contraception helped move the analysis of human population closer to the social sciences,
and made their study through analogy to experimental populations seem less appropriate,
even though human control of fertility could only operate within biological limits. In 1957,
Lorimer would protest the characterization of demography as a branch of biology at a Cold
Spring Harbor symposium titled “Population Studies: Animal Ecology and Demography,”
132
Pearl, “Contraception and Fertility in 2,000 Women,” see n. 41, 397.
133
“Press Release,” Jan. 22, 1934,folder 177, box 22; Regine K. Stix and Frank W. Notestein, “Effectiveness
of Birth Control: A Study of Contraceptive Practice in a Selected Group of New York Women,” Milbank
Memorial Fund Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1934): 57–68.
134
Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2002); Molly Ladd-Taylor, ed., Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’
Letters to the Children’s Bureau, 1915-1932 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986).

176
arguing that “human demography is, it seems to me, both a biological and a social science.
We must always take the biological aspects of vital events ino account; but demographic
processes in man are largely determined by social conditions, and we must rely largely on
the methods of the social sciences in investigating these relations.”135
Once demographers had identified contraception as the proximal cause of differential fer-
tility, it made sense to search for more distal causes. Pearl proposed one cause, explaining
the higher fertility rates of poor and nonwhite women as a result of the fact that the ef-
fectiveness of the methods available at the time were directly related to the diligence and
skill with which they were used. This explanation employed race and class as proxies for
diligence and skill, creating a kind of circularity whereby the higher fertility of poor and
African American women became evidence of their inferior capabilities. For example, Pearl
found that white women were twice as likely to use birth control as African American women.
He explained this finding with the “fact” that “the American negro, probably generally and
certainly under urban conditions, exercises less prudence and foresight than white people do
in all sexual matters.” He backed up this statement by pointing to “the relative prevalence
of venereal diseases, which are generally much more common among the negroes than among
the whites.”136 Pearl went on to explain that

the use of contraceptive methods demands some degree of intelligent foresight.

this is an attribute, or a combination of attributes, more prevalent among whites
than among negroes. The experience of contraceptive clinics in cities has shown
that any method of contraception known at present is not particularly effective
with the general population of negroes. They need something which is more
automatic and requires less intelligent cooperation and foresight on the part of
the individual.137

This statement eerily foreshadows arguments made by postwar population control experts
about birth control in the global south needing to be “foolproof” to overcome lack of motiva-
135
Frank Lorimer, “Human Populations: Historical Study, Introductory Remarks of the Chairman,” in
Population Studies: Animal Ecology and Demography, Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology
(1957).
136
Pearl, “Contraception and Fertility in 2,000 Women,” see n. 41, 395.
137
Ibid., 395.

177
tion on the part of its users, which will be discussed at greater length in Chapters Four and
Five. Indeed, in the latter part of the century, birth control methods designed for women
in the global south, such as Depo Provera, would be initially tested on poor and nonwhite
women in the U.S.138
While Pearl focused on the effectiveness with which couples used birth control, Osborn
promoted the search for the social and psychological factors that would make couples more
or less likely to use contraception or to do so with a greater or lesser degree of success,
which, he argued, would provide valuable knowledge for policies to shape the future size and
composition of the U.S. population. As stated above, population projections were beginning
to suggest that population growth was slowing and would soon level off. Osborn feared
that increasing public anxiety about fertility decline would produce calls for pronatalist
policies, and he was concerned that these should be enacted to increase births only among
those he viewed as desirable. He had heavily criticized the pronatalist programs of such
countries as France and Belgium, which “have been developed for the purpose of increasing
the birth rate, in most cases without regard to the type of people among whom births would
increase.”139 Osborn argued that then-current fertility differentials already favored “the least
well equipped,”140 and asserted that “our social morality as it affects the rate of reproduction
of different groups of our people, is undoubtedly a wrong morality. The ultimate success of
American civilization requires that it be changed.”141 The following section examines how
he employed the new science of demography in the service of that goal.

The Indianapolis Study: Demography in the Service of Eugenics

In 1938, Osborn met with the executive director of the Carnegie Corporation of New York to
secure funding for a study of the social and psychological correlates of fertility among white
138
See Pete McCloskey Papers, Hoover Institution Archive, Stanford University.
139
See n. 70, 122.
140
Frederick Osborn, “Characteristics and Differential Fertility of American Population Groups,”
1933,“Frederick Osborn - Papers #1,” box 17.
141
Frederick Osborn, “Social Morality in a Diminishing Population,” 1935,“Frederick Osborn - Papers #3,”
box 17.

178
contraceptive-users in Indianapolis. Since studies by Pearl and Notestein had demonstrated
that differential contraceptive use was the proximal cause of differential fertility, in order to
reverse that differential, Osborn argued that “it is therefore in the social and economic field
that we must seek the factors which will be most widely effective as measures of eugenic
improvement, and which are most important as fields of eugenic research.”142 The Carnegie
Corporation agreed to grant the funds, channeling them through the MMF, which would
oversee and coordinate the study. This section describes the design and findings of the
Indianapolis Study and its implications for demographic research and its policy applications.
The Indianapolis Study marked the beginning of a long-term collaboration between the
emerging fields of demography and survey research. With census and vital registration data,
demographers could only analyze outcomes. With a survey, they could begin to uncover the
attitudes underlying and motivating the behaviors that produced those outcomes. By the
end of the 1930s, Americans had become familiar with surveys as an instrument through
which “the public” could be known, both to scientists and to itself. Many Americans eagerly
participated in surveys and consumed published survey results.143 Survey research was also
becoming an independent field of knowledge: Princeton University’s Office of Public Opin-
ion Research (OPOR) was established in 1940 alongside OPR in the School of Public and
International Affairs, which by then had been renamed the Wilson School, after former U.S.
President and former Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson. The Indianapolis
Study set the model for postwar fertility surveys worldwide and was therefore the first of
what would become a series of national and international surveys of fertility and family
planning, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five.
The Indianapolis Study was designed and executed in a partnership between the MMF,
OPR, and the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, with Kiser at MMF
and Whelpton at Scripps taking the lead. This collaboration between Frederick Osborn at
142
See n. 70, 119.
143
Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2007).

179
the American Eugenics Society, Kiser at the Milbank Memorial Fund, Notestein at OPR,
and Thompson and Whelpton at the Scripps Foundation indicates the close connections
between demographers, their patrons, and their funders. The field was still a very small one,
practiced mainly by men who inhabited the same social world as one another and as their
funders, and correspondence between them indicates close personal friendships in addition
to close working relationships. The small size of the field and the camaraderie and and
shared values of its practitioners and their patrons and clients allowed patrons and clients
considerable influence over the content of the field, particularly in terms of the research
questions it broached and the methods with which it approached those questions.
The survey questionnaire was based on a set of 23 hypotheses developed by Warren
Thompson that linked social and psychological characteristics to fertility on the basis of
Osborn’s eugenic theories. As discussed above, Osborn recognized and acknowledged that
genetic superiority and inferiority were undefined and unmeasurable, but he maintained that
superiority correlated with affinity for children and the qualities that made for good parent-
ing. The Indianapolis Study was designed explicitly to test the relationship between fertility
and attitudes toward children, selfishness, quality of marital relationships, and the willing-
ness of parents to assume responsibility and make personal sacrifices. Research instruments
included a detailed pregnancy and contraceptive history, a socioeconomic history since mar-
riage, a psychological questionnaire designed by psychologists at OPOR, and a form for other
demographic and descriptive data.144
The study focused on Indianapolis because its designers thought denizens of that city to
be representative of the nation as a whole, drawing on the same model of representativeness
employed by Robert and Helen Lynd in their “Middletown” studies, which had been carried
out in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s and 1930s.145 Fieldwork included an initial household
144
The instrument also included “an ‘Interviewer’s Rating Scale’ in which the interviewer recorded her
personal rating of the husband and wife on a series of attributes.” Clyde V. Kiser, “The Indianapolis Fertility
Study — An Example of Planned Observational Research,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1953):
500.
145
Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Har-
court, Brace, 1929); Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural

180
survey of almost all couples in the city, but intensive interviews were limited to couples in
which both husband and wife were native-born, white, Protestant, educated at least through
the eighth grade, and not previously married. They had to have been married to one another
between 1927 and 1929, with the husband under the age of 40 and the wife under age 30 at
the time of marriage, and resident in a large city during most of the period of their marriage.
Further, they had to have no reason to believe that they were not “relatively fecund.”146
These selection criteria indicate that the study was not meant to represent all Americans, but
rather those whose reproduction was considered beneficial to society. Kiser also attributed
the choice of such a homogeneous sample to budgetary constraints and the resulting desire
“to avoid the necessity of subdivision or separate analysis of the psychological data by such
factors as residence, color, nativity, religion, age, and duration of marriage.”147 Additional
sources of fertility variation would have multiplied the costs of analysis and required a much
larger sample to achieve the requisite statistical power. Within this group, large families
were oversampled in order to produce sufficient data about large and small planned families
as well as large unplanned families.148
Because the Indianapolis Study aimed to identify the correlates of family size among
families with access to contraception, it required a sample in which subjects varied in terms
of actual contraceptive use, but in which all subjects had knowledge of and access to birth
control. Its designers assumed that native-born white Protestants were at the vanguard
of contraceptive use, though results of the initial screening revealed that Jewish families
were smaller in size by about 25%.149 Overall, contraceptive use was relatively high: Kiser
determined that “couples in the Indianapolis study had only about 27 per cent of the births
Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937); also see Igo, see n. 143.
146
Clyde V. Kiser and Pascal K. Whelpton, “Resume of the Indianapolis Study of Social and Psychological
Factors Affecting Fertility,” Population Studies 7, no. 2 (1953): 96.
147
Kiser, “The Indianapolis Fertility Study — An Example of Planned Observational Research,” see n. 144,
499.
148
Kiser and Whelpton, see n. 146, 96.
149
Kiser, “The Indianapolis Fertility Study — An Example of Planned Observational Research,” see n. 144,
499, 505; About two-thirds of Stix and Notestein’s contraceptive users had been Jewish. Stix and Notestein,
“Effectiveness of Birth Control: A Study of Contraceptive Practice in a Selected Group of New York Women,”
see n. 133.

181
that could have occurred” in the absence of contraceptives.150
The first round of interviews was conducted by 43 college students; the second by “eleven
carefully selected and carefully trained women interviewers.”151 As this was one of the first
surveys to ask detailed questions of couples about family-formation practices in their homes
(as opposed to a medical setting), the study’s directors understood the selection and training
of interviewers as critical to response validity, though exactly how interviewer characteristics
and behavior influence survey response is still an open question in survey research. More
attention would be paid to this issue in postwar fertility surveys — particularly international
surveys — as will be discussed in Chapter Five. Indianapolis Study respondents were asked
how many children they had wanted at the time of marriage and whether each pregnancy
had been desired at the time it occurred. However, the study was cross-sectional rather than
longitudinal, meaning that independent and dependent (input and outcome) variables were
measured at the same time, so only correlation and not causation could not be identified.
Answers about the intentions behind each birth may therefore have been subject to recall
bias and post-hoc rationalization.152
The Indianapolis Study failed to find support for Osborn’s hypotheses about the corre-
lation between the personal characteristics of couples and an affinity for large families. As
discussed above, Osborn had hypothesized that, if couples had perfect control over their
family size, those who liked children — a reflection of genetic superiority, Osborn believed
— would have larger families, while those who saw children as a barrier to their freedom
or a source of excessive demands on their time or other resources — a reflection of genetic
inferiority, Osborn believed — would have smaller families. The study found, however, that
“the stronger the interest in and liking for children, the greater the proportion of couples
practising contraception effectively,” and that parents of smaller families were less concerned
150
Kiser, “The Indianapolis Fertility Study — An Example of Planned Observational Research,” see n. 144,
505.
151
Kiser, “Contributions of P.K. Whelpton to Demography,” see n. 150, 443.
152
Richard A. Williams, “Indianapolis Revisited: A New Look at Social and Psychological Factors Affecting
Fertility” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1986).

182
about the personal demands of childrearing.153 Although Kiser and Whelpton critiqued the
psychological metrics used in the study, they also recognized that a major problem with the
study was its cross-sectional design, which meant that attitudes toward childrearing could
not be measured prior to family formation.154 As they put it, “the questions asked are tap-
ping attitudes which are more a function of the respondent’s current responsibility for child
care than a function of factors which helped to determine the couple’s family planning in the
past.”155 They therefore interpreted the correlation between contraceptive use and affinity
for children as an indication that “liking for children is a result of planning behaviour as well
as a motivating cause for it.”156 The finding that better parents were also those who used
contraception — regardless of whether they used contraception because they were better
parents or were better parents because they used contraception — was not good news for
Osborn’s program of voluntary eugenic selection.
Other results of the study, however, were more encouraging for Osborn. He had sug-
gested that happier marriages (again, reflective of supposed genetic superiority) should pro-
duce more children, a proposition the Indianapolis Study tested with a series of measures of
“marital adjustment.” Within the sample as a whole, the study found that marital adjust-
ment was inversely related to family size (unhappier couples having more children), while
among planned families the relationship was direct (happier couples having more children).
Kiser and Whelpton concluded from this evidence that “marital adjustment is directly re-
lated to successful family planning both with respect to preventing unwanted pregnancies
and. . . with respect to success in having as many children as wanted.”157 Given that many of
the methods of birth control available at the time — including rhythm, withdrawal, condoms,
and pessaries — required the cooperation or at least the consent of both sexual partners,
this finding makes sense. As Kiser and Whelpton reported, “the data suggest that fertility
153
Kiser and Whelpton, see n. 146, 102.
154
Kiser, “The Indianapolis Fertility Study — An Example of Planned Observational Research,” see n. 144,
509.
155
Kiser and Whelpton, see n. 146, 104-105.
156
Ibid., 102-102.
157
Ibid., 106.

183
planning was most successful among couples in which both the wife and husband state that
responsibility for contraception was a fifty-fifty proposition, and was least successful among
couples in which each spouse said that the other should take the responsibility regarding
contraception. When each wished the burden on the other, apparently neither spouse took
much responsibility.”158 In the postwar period, feminist efforts to give women more control
over childbearing, together with the search for a “foolproof” contraceptive for the global
south, would lead to the development of systemic contraceptive technologies that worked
directly on women’s bodies, eliminating the need for male cooperation or consent and turn-
ing contraception into a female concern rather than one of couples, as will be discussed at
greater length in Chapter Five.
For the study’s directors, its most exciting result was that the correlation between socioe-
conomic status and family size mirrored that between “marital adjustment” and family size.
Population scholars had long been aware that, in the general population, family size was
inversely related to socioeconomic status: wealthier families had fewer children, producing
the differential fertility patterns that eugenicists decried. The same pattern prevailed in the
sample surveyed for the Indianapolis Study. However, among the subset of couples whose
families were completely planned — that is, each birth intended at the time it occurred and
unintended births averted through contraceptive use — the pattern was reversed: family size
was directly related to socioeconomic status, meaning that wealthier families were larger.159
Kiser viewed this finding as evidence of the desire of those with more economic security for
more children, since couples at all socioeconomic levels seemed to be equally successful in
their family planning efforts. This finding provided support for Osborn’s contention that the
diffusion of birth control throughout society could reverse the prevailing socioeconomic fer-
158
Kiser and Whelpton, see n. 146, 107.
159
This finding was consistent with the results of similar research in interwar Sweden that provided intel-
lectual support for Sweden’s combined eugenic/contraceptive/pronatal program described above. Karl Arvid
Edin, “The Fertility of the Social Classes in Stockholm in the Years 1919 to 1929,” in Problems of Popula-
tion: Being the Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Assembly of the International Union for the
Scientific Investigation of Population Problems, ed. G.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers (London: Kennikat Press, 1932).

184
tility differential.160 It also laid the foundation for postwar economic theories of childbearing
that compared fertility decisions to purchasing decisions.161
The Indianapolis Study resulted in the publication of 33 articles in the Milbank Memo-
rial Fund Quarterly between 1943 and 1958. In general, it identified socioeconomic status
as the strongest predictor of family size, and failed to find consistent correlations between
fertility and psychological factors.162 Kiser and Whelpton qualified these findings, arguing
that “there is good reason to believe that it is not socio-economic status per se but rather
the underlying attitudes and psychological characteristics of these classes that account for
the fertility behavior.”163 However, they found it very difficult to disentangle socioeconomic
status from attitudes, and reported that, even though “characteristic patterns of fertility
differentials are found consistently in classifications by socio-economic status, most clas-
sifications by psychological characteristics within socio-economic groups fail to show such
patterns.”164 For example, the study’s designers had expected to find a higher degree of fam-
ily planning among couples exhibiting “rationality of behaviour,” defined as “the extent to
which behaviour is a result of calculated choice between alternatives rather than the unques-
tioning acceptance on faith of the traditional behavioural standards of the group to which
the individual belongs,” and measured in terms of “tendency to plan in general,” “religious
interest,” and “adherence to traditions.”165 However, these characteristics were all found to
correlate strongly with socioeconomic status, mustering little support for the hypothesis.166
Similar problems plagued attempts to correlate family size with such factors as parents’ fam-
160
Kiser, “The Indianapolis Fertility Study — An Example of Planned Observational Research,” see n. 144,
506.
161
Gary S. Becker, “An Economic Analysis of Fertility,” in Demographic and Economic Change in Developed
Countries, ed. National Bureau of Economic Research (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); Judith
Blake, “Are Babies Consumer Durables?: A Critique of the Economic Theory of Reproductive Motivation,”
Population Studies 22, no. 1 (1968): 5–25.
162
In a 1986 dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, Richard A. Williams argued that the failure
to identify psychological correlates of fertility was a result of the analytic methods available at the time.
Using methods of multivariate analysis developed later in the twentieth century, Williams contends that
psychological factors can be identified. Williams, see n. 152.
163
Kiser and Whelpton, see n. 146, 108.
164
Ibid., 108, emphasis in original.
165
Ibid., 105-106.
166
Ibid., 507-508.

185
ily backgrounds, marital history, health, and happiness, as these variables exhibited strong
collinearity with socioeconomic status.167
The dominance of socioeconomic status as a driver of fertility would become increasingly
salient after World War II, when the growing popularity of birth control would combine
with postwar prosperity to help create the baby boom, as discussed in Chapter Three, and
when anxiety about too-small families among the professional classes in the global north
would be replaced by anxiety about too-large families in the global south, as discussed in
Chapter Four. Another question from the Indianapolis Study that would resurface after the
war is the effect of child sex preference on family planning behavior, as son preference was
well known in some parts of Asia. The designers of the Indianapolis Study recognized that
child sex preferences could either increase or decrease overall fertility, explaining that “it
might encourage some couples to ‘keep trying’ until they have a child of the sex preferred”
or “it might be a deterrent to further fertility among couples having children of the sex
preferred.”168 The study did identify lower fertility among those whose preferences had been
fulfilled (for example, among parents of sons who said they would prefer a son if they could
only have one child), though Kiser and Whelpton acknowledged that “an important weakness
of the data is that the statements regarding sex preference in children are ex post facto,”
and that a parent would be unlikely to state a preference at variance with the actual sex
mix of their children.”169 Along with the effects of sex preference, the issue of the validity
of statements parents made about their attitudes toward children they already have would
come to the fore in postwar fertility surveys, discussed in Chapter Five.
The Indianapolis Study was an important precursor of those surveys, and had been
expressly designed to advance the field of survey research as well as that of fertility research.
Kiser and Whelpton drew from it information about fertility and contraceptive practices
and lessons for the improvement of surveys as a tool for fertility research. They determined
167
Kiser and Whelpton, see n. 146, 100-101.
168
Ibid., 102.
169
Ibid., 103.

186
that the restriction of the sample to one with very homogeneous characteristics had limited
the variation needed to adequately test hypotheses, and that the sample was too small to
yield definitive results.170 Moreover, they felt that the Indianapolis Study had attempted to
test too many hypotheses (23) and had gathered insufficient data for each, despite the fact
that the interview schedules contained over 1,000 questions.171 Future studies, they argued,
should engage in more rigorous pre-testing to allow them to focus on fewer hypotheses and
collect more data on each. Finally, they called for better analytic methods, as “the difficulties
inherent in the interaction of the variables considered constantly confronted the analysts.”172
Kiser also questioned the adequacy of survey methods and statistical measures to the task,
arguing that “the subjects studied are human beings and that decisions regarding fertility
planning and fertility are made by individuals with multiple and complex motivations.”173
Despite this doubt, demographers would come to rely more heavily on survey methods and
statistical measures over the next decades — as discussed in Chapters Three and Five —
though by the end of the century, anthropologically-oriented demographers would begin to
incorporate ethnographic methods into fertility research.174
The Indianapolis Study demonstrates that the political concerns of population scientists,
their patrons, and their clients shaped the contents of demographic research between the
wars, despite the stated desire of its practitioners to purge demography of population politics.
In 1946, Taeuber acknowledged that “the population research of the last twenty-five years
has been unique among the social sciences in the extent to which it has been a function
of government, research, foundations, and institutes,” each with its claims on the work of
demographers.175 The traits Taeuber attributed to demography between the wars would
170
Kiser, “The Indianapolis Fertility Study — An Example of Planned Observational Research,” see n. 144,
508.
171
Ibid., 501.
172
Kiser and Whelpton, see n. 146, 108.
173
Kiser, “The Indianapolis Fertility Study — An Example of Planned Observational Research,” see n. 144,
509.
174
See, for example, Susan Greenhalgh, ed., Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
175
“Population Studies in the United States,” Population Index 12, no. 4 (1946): 255.

187
continue to characterize it after World War II, though its scope would expand beyond North
America and Europe to encompass the whole world, as will be discussed in Chapter Three.

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated how, between 1928 and 1941, demography became recog-
nizable as a distinct intellectual field in the United States — albeit an interdisciplinary
one — associated with the social sciences, with a brief comparative discussion of similar
developments in Great Britain and the broader context of the International Union for Sci-
entific Investigation of Population Problems and the mounting political tensions in Europe
that helped to ignite World War II. Between the wars, demography acquired many of the
disciplinary desiderata described by Valenza, including professional associations, journals,
a lexicon, university research centers, and graduate training programs. However, in order
to establish these institutions, the emergent discipline of demography needed the external
support of the Milbank Memorial Fund and clients for its research in government, science, in-
dustry, and philanthropy. In this chapter, I have argued that, as a result of this dependence,
all three sets of actors — demographers, patrons, and clients — continually negotiated the
boundary between population science and population politics. In the process, birth control
and scientific racism were excluded while the new free-market eugenics was included. I have
also demonstrated that the long-term decline in fertility in North America and Western Eu-
rope, discussed in Chapter One, continued apace in the 1930s, silencing the neo-Malthusian
predictions of overpopulation that had provided scientific justification for birth control legal-
ization and immigration restriction in the 1920s, and intensifying fears of population decline
and the national weakness and economic decline that were expected to follow.
As the history of the IUSIPP indicates, even as its members tried to distinguish demog-
raphy from population politics, the science of population was inextricably bound up with
the politics of population that were becoming important geopolitical strategies between the

188
wars, particularly in Europe. As discussed in Chapter One, intellectuals and national leaders
had long viewed population as a source of national strength and economic dynamism and,
in the 1930s, European states employed new policies aimed at manipulating population in
order to increase their power on the geopolitical stage. These policies included universal
pronatalist measures in France and Belgium, selective pronatalist measures combined with
eugenic sterilization in Sweden and Germany,176 large-scale migration schemes in Germany
and Italy, and genocide in Germany and in other countries occupied by Germany or under its
political influence. As policy makers throughout Europe sought scientific validation for these
measures, demographers in the U.S., the U.K., and France resisted the co-optation of their
science by fascist population politics, even as they actively worked to make it relevant to the
free-market eugenics championed by Frederick Osborn in the U.S. and Carlos Blacker in the
U.K. This new version of eugenics sought to excise overt or scientific racism from its methods
and theories, and to eliminate the explicit role of governmental or scientific authority, using
subtle social pressure to encourage eugenic behavior among the general public.
Demographers themselves are generally the protagonists of the story of demography’s
disciplinary development, with Pearl organizing the IUSIPP, Dublin creating the U.S. com-
mittee, Fairchild spearheading the PAA, Carr-Saunders chairing the PIC, and Kiser and
Whelpton directing the first fertility survey. However, all of these activities required the
backing of organizations and individuals who saw the emerging field of demography as in-
strumental to achieving their political goals, which were largely shared by these early de-
mographers. In the United States, the Milbank Memorial Fund was demography’s major
patron and the American Eugenics Society demography’s major non-governmental client; the
Eugenics Society of Great Britain carried out both functions in the U.K. Governments also
became clients of demography during this period, with the receptivity of officials and policy
makers to demography likely enhanced by the exigencies of the Great Depression and fear
of the political and economic consequences of slowing population growth. In the 1930s, gov-
176
Eugenic sterilization was also practiced in 32 U.S. states, particularly California, whose eugenic laws
provided inspiration to the programs of Germany and Sweden. Stern, see n. 60.

189
ernments began to hire demographers to design censuses and analyze their data, and other
statistical offices adopted the new analytic methods developed in demography. Although
demographers and government statisticians did not jettison the logistic projection method
entirely, the cohort component method served more of the planning needs of government
agencies. After his studies of birth control in the 1930s, Pearl himself abandoned the logistic
law on which the logistic projection method was based.
The next chapter will explore the expansion of the scope of U.S. demography during
and after World War II. As Taeuber has noted, between the wars, “American demogra-
phy remained pre-eminently the demography of the United States.”177 Although some U.S.
demographers — including Taeuber herself — studied populations outside the U.S., most fo-
cused on changes in the size and composition of the domestic population, and demographers
in other countries similarly focused on the populations of their states and empires. During
World War II, the ambit of demography would expand dramatically, as the interests of the
nascent discipline’s patrons and clients directed demographers’ attention to the size and
composition of the population of the world, generating the concept of global population.

177
See n. 175, 264.

190
 Chapter 3
The Mid-Century Crisis of Global
Demography
The previous chapters have demonstrated that, between the world wars, demography coa-
lesced as an interdisciplinary science of human population that promised to provide informa-
tion about population and population change, and thereby facilitate social engineering and
economic planning in the United States and Western Europe. By the beginning of World
War II, the U.S. government had begun to employ demographers in the Census Bureau and
in the government agencies established by the New Deal administration, and population pro-
jection — estimating future population size and structure — had become a routine activity
of demographers working in government. During the war, the U.S. government’s interest in
demography expanded beyond the borders of the United States, as its leaders began to view
population knowledge as critical to wartime strategy, including the coordination of military
and industrial manpower, rationing food and other supplies, and estimating the military
strength of the Axis powers. World War II demonstrated to the leaders of the Allied powers
that population could be a potent geopolitical strategy and weapon. The Axis powers had
invoked population growth to justify their aggression, and had mobilized fertility, mortality,
and migration as geopolitical weapons. When the U.S. emerged from the war as a global
hegemon, its leaders sought to ensure world peace by remaking the world according to the
American model, employing social scientific knowledge along with dollar diplomacy (dis-
cussed at greater length in Chapter Four) to encourage the development of liberal capitalist
democracies worldwide, following the interwar lead of U.S. philanthropic foundations.1
1
Michael Adas, “Modernization Theory and the American Revival of the Scientific and Technological
Standards of Social Achievement and Human Worth,” in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and
the Global Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman et al. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 26.

191
 As the Cold War began, this project took on even greater urgency. As discussed in the
Introduction, the Cold War divided the world into three: the First (industrial capitalist)
World, the Second (industrial[izing] communist) World, and the Third (nonindustrial and
nonaligned) World. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. vied for global
hegemony, in large part by promoting the modernization of Third-World countries according
to competing capitalist and communist models. In the 1950s, U.S.-based political scientists
and economists, including Seymour Martin Lipset, Walt Whitman Rostow, and Rostow’s
colleagues at MIT’s Center for International Studies, developed modernization theory to
describe the capitalist path to modernization and its application in the global south. Mod-
ernization theory contrasted capitalist and communist modernities, associating the latter
with authoritarian governments and lack of individual freedom, and associating the former
with democratic political systems and active civil societies.2 It posited that the social, po-
litical, and economic realms formed a coherent whole, such that transition to modernity in
any one realm would trigger transition in the other two.3 Modernization theorists recog-
nized, however, that communism offered an alternative path to modernity, one that they
feared would be attractive to decolonizing societies in Asia and Africa, and to U.S. satellite
countries in Latin America.4 Acknowledging the social, political, and economic dislocations
associated with modernization, they theorized that the transition to modernity was a period
in which societies were particularly vulnerable to communist revolutions, a view that gained
credence after China’s revolution in 1949.
For modernization theorists, rapid economic development was the key to deterring com-
munist revolutions in the decolonizing societies of the global south. As Timothy Mitchell
has demonstrated, the emergence of macroeconomics between the wars had produced “the
economy” as a statistical object that was coterminous with states (and therefore with popu-
2
Amadae, see n. 76.
3
Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy
Era, see n. 191.
4
Michael E. Latham, “Introduction: Modernization, International History, and the Cold War World,”
in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman et al.
(Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 9-10.

192
lations) and that could be measured by the gross national product (GNP), a macroeconomic
indicator created by Simon Kuznets in 1934 to capture the value of all goods and services
produced by labor and property supplied by the citizens of a country.5 Although GNP was
only one of several available economic indicators, many postwar economists and policy mak-
ers viewed it as an index not only of the overall size of a national economy, but also of the
well-being of a country’s citizens and the modernity of its society. Rostow’s The Stages of
Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, published in 1960, described the engineer-
ing of economic development — the creation of the conditions of self-sustaining economic
growth — as a way to promote non-communist modernization in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. GNP (per capita) therefore became an index of modernization, and the concept of
development came to encompass social, political, and economic transformations that would
promote the growth of GNP. Modernization theorists used quantitative indicators of mod-
ernization — including per-capita measures of GNP, motor vehicles, physicians, newspapers,
energy consumption, city-dwelling, agricultural employment, and education — to evaluate
the “stage” individual countries had reached, and to plan and promote the development of
countries that appeared to be lagging.6 All of these indicators required population measures,
and planning development required planning for population growth.
Demographic transition theory, the discipline’s unifying theory, described in Chapter
One, fit neatly within the framework of modernization theory. Demographic transition the-
ory linked the demographic past of North America and Western Europe to the demographic
future of the rest of the world, positing that the modernization of North America and West-
ern Europe had encouraged mortality decline followed by fertility decline, with rapid popu-
lation growth in the interim. These changes culminated in population stationarity (neither
growth nor decline) at low rates of both fertility and mortality. This schema divided the
world into three categories, which mapped onto modernization theory’s stages of growth:
5
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2002); Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, see n. 90.
6
Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political
Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 76-77.

193
pre-transitional societies with high rates of fertility and mortality; transitional societies with
declining mortality and still-high fertility; and post-transitional societies with low fertility
and mortality. Within this framework, rates of fertility and mortality could serve as indices
of development, and other development indices required population data as their denom-
inators, guaranteeing demographic analysis a place at the center of modernization theory
and efforts by the U.S. government and U.S.-based organizations to analyze and promote
economic development and democratization according to the American model. Population
estimates and projections were also critical for the Soviet Union and other societies that
aimed to modernize according to its model, which relied on careful government planning of
industrialization and economic growth.
To meet these needs, governments and inter- and non-governmental agencies seeking
population information increasingly turned to demographers, who by then had become rec-
ognizable as experts on population dynamics. Whereas demographers had mainly focused
their studies on the U.S. and Western Europe before the war, by the end of the war, the
scope of their analysis encompassed the entire world, making it possible to speak of some-
thing called a global population. Yet demographers in the U.S. and Western Europe faced
two major challenges in meeting the new demands for population estimates and projections.
First, the types of population data required to estimate current population and project fu-
ture population were simply not available for much of the world. Second, new demographic
trends worldwide were beginning to challenge the fundamental premises of demographic
transition theory. After World War II, fertility soared in North America, Western Europe,
and Australia, producing the well-known “baby boom” and challenging the tenet of demo-
graphic transition theory that fertility could only decline. At the same time, international
public health interventions dramatically reduced fertility in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
outside of the context of modernization. The effect was unprecedented population growth
that could not be predicted on the basis of demographic transition theory.
This chapter details the increased demand for demographic analysis during and after

194
World War II, and the growth this new demand engendered for demography, particularly for
the employment of demographers in government and inter- and non-governmental agencies.
It then explores demographers’ perception of the paucity of global population data. I refer
to this problem as “data friction,” a concept I borrow from Paul Edwards, which he defines
as “the great difficulty, cost, and slow speed of gathering large numbers of records in one
place in a form suitable for massive calculation.”7 As demographers turned their attention
to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, they encountered substantial data friction in the form
of data that were unavailable, lacked detail, and were incommensurable. I go on to detail
three approaches demographers took to overcoming data friction, demonstrating the ways in
which these approaches drew on demographic transition theory to facilitate the production
of demographic data in places where they were not readily forthcoming. I conclude, however,
with a discussion of the ways in which new demographic trends were beginning to challenge
demographic transition theory, exploring the potentially destabilizing effect of these anoma-
lies on demographic transition theory and the analytic tools and methods that depended
on it. Together, data friction and the accumulation of theoretical anomalies amounted to a
crisis of demographic legitimacy, challenging the possibility of scientific knowledge of current
and future population size and structure at the global level.

3.1 Demography in War and Peace

While governments in North America and Western Europe had begun to utilize demographic
analysis and population projection as tools of social and economic planning between the
world wars, during World War II they attempted to turn demographic knowledge into a
tool of military strategy. The Allied powers began to use estimates and projections of their
own populations to coordinate military manpower, social services, and labor for defense and
other critical industries. They also used estimates and projections of the populations of
7
Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 80.

195
other countries for military maneuvering and foreign policy planning. Analysis of an en-
emy’s population structure could indicate its military strength, and analysis of an enemy’s
geographical population distribution could indicate strategic locations for bombing or for
maneuvers to cut civilians off from supplies. The U.S. government also engaged demog-
raphers in its project of interning Japanese Americans, using demographic information to
identify Japanese Americans and to locate internment camps.8
Frank Notestein, director of Princeton University’s Office of Population Research (OPR),
commented as early as 1942 that the increased reliance of the U.S. government on demogra-
phers made it difficult for his staff to complete its regular work because the war had “stim-
ulated the interest of various governmental agencies in population and greatly increased
the demands on our staff for reference and other technical assistance.”9 In 1943, President
Roosevelt invited the leadership of the Population Association of America (PAA) — de-
mography’s professional association — to a dinner at the White House in honor of PAA
co-founder and NYU sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild, indicating the development of the
relationship between government and demography that had begun between the wars.10
During the war, OPR gained two new clients: the U.S. Department of State and the
League of Nations. In 1941, OPR entered into a contract with the Office of the Geogra-
pher of the State Department, according to which Notestein and his team would produce
demographic maps of various parts of the world and would provide “population data, and
analyses and interpretations of population data, for the world, including among others trends
of population growth, including natural increase and its components and some estimate of
population change in the near future.”11 Demographic data — even the number of men of
potential military age — were not readily available for many countries of the world, requiring
analysis of the type I will discuss later in the chapter. The State Department’s interest in
long-term population projections suggests plans for potential postwar occupation or other
8
Dorothy Thomas was involved in this effort. Oral history interview with Gretchen Condran, 6/8/2012.
9
Frank W. Notestein, “Progress Report to the Carnegie Corporation,” Mar. 16, 1942,folder 21, box 15.
10
See n. 111.
11
Frank W. Notestein, “Memorandum of Agreement,” 1942,folder 21, box 15.

196
ongoing involvement in other parts of the world. The rising wartime demand for demographic
analyses indicates the rapidity with which governments had come to accept the claims of the
new professional group of demographers — represented by the PAA — that they had the
ability to estimate current population and project future population, and that these abilities
would prove useful for purposes of domestic governance and foreign policy.
As the State Department formulated its wartime strategy, the League of Nations began
to plan for postwar reconstruction. Its Economic, Financial and Transit Department, having
relocated from Geneva to Princeton for the duration of the war, enlisted the help of OPR to
produce population projections that would serve as the basis for postwar reconstruction and
development programs. This project received additional funding from the Carnegie Corpo-
ration, and Notestein’s contract with the State Department allowed OPR demographers to
use data collected with State Department funds for their League of Nations work.
OPR’s wartime contracts funded its expansion, and that of demography in general. Dur-
ing the war, Notestein hired psychologist and former clergyman Frank Lorimer, economist
Wilbert Moore, and sociologists Kingsley Davis and Louise Kiser (wife of Milbank Memorial
Fund demographer Clyde Kiser). Along with research associates Irene Taeuber and Dudley
Kirk and graduate student Ansley Coale, this team produced four publications on the history
and future of the population of Europe — The Future Population of Europe and the Soviet
Union, 1940-1970 by Frank Notestein et al. (1944), Economic Demography of Eastern and
Southern Europe by Wilbert Moore (1945), The Population of the Soviet Union: History
and Prospects by Frank Lorimer (1946), and Europe’s Population in the Inter-War Years
by Dudley Kirk (1946).12 In the early postwar years, OPR demographers would also publish
analyses and projections for the populations of Latin America, the Near East, India, and
Japan.13
12
Frank W. Notestein et al., The Future Population of Europe and the Soviet Union: Population Projections
1940-1970 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1944); Wilbert E. Moore, Economic Demography of Eastern and
Southern Europe (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945); Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union:
History and Prospects (Geneva: League of Nations, 1946); Dudley Kirk, Europe’s Population in the Interwar
Years (Geneva: League of Nations, 1946).
13
See , n.d.,folder 21, box 15.

197
 In 1946, the PAA began meeting again after a wartime hiatus spurred by the U.S. gov-
ernment directive to avoid non-critical travel. Its 1946 meeting surveyed the postwar world
population situation, and its 1947 meeting focused on projection methodology, indicating
the importance of world population and its projection both within and beyond the field of
demography. The U.K. counterpart to PAA, the Population Investigation Committee (PIC),
found a home at the London School of Economics in 1938. The International Union for the
Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP) had disbanded when the war broke
out, but its leadership re-formed the organization in 1947 as the International Union for the
Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP). In contrast to the IUSIPP, which had been an orga-
nization of national committees, the IUSSP was an organization of individual demographers,
though membership required nomination and sponsorship by five current members.14 Mem-
bers were to be “chosen on the basis of their scientific achievements and in such a way as to
maintain a balanced representation among different countries and different fields of special-
ties.”15 Any country with five or more members was expected to form a national committee,
consisting of those members, “to promote the interests of the Union in that country.”16 The
PAA served as the U.S. committee and the PIC as the U.K. committee.
The president of the new IUSSP was French demographer Adolphe Landry, who had also
been the last president of the IUSIPP before the war. Alfred Lotka and PIC director David
Glass were two of seven vice presidents, with the others coming from Peru, Italy, China,
Switzerland, and Poland.17 Frank Lorimer, who had moved to American University after the
war, was the Union’s administrative director. IUSSP’s administrative offices were established
in Washington D.C., with expenses for the first two years covered by a non-renewable grant
from the Rockefeller Foundation, applied for by the PAA on behalf of the IUSSP and matched
by a grant from the PAA itself.18 Over the next three decades, the IUSSP worked to expand
14
Frank Lorimer to American National Committee of the IUSSP, Jan. 10, 1949,folder 6, box 2.
15
Frank Lorimer, “Statement to Members,” Dec. 15, 1948,folder 6, box 2.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Frank Lorimer to G. Mauco, Oct. 21, 1948,folder 6, box 2; Frank Lorimer to IUSSP Executive Committee,
May 9, 1949,folder 6, box 2.

198
its membership, particularly to demographers in newly-independent countries, but as late
as 1979, Miloš Macura of the U.N. complained after an IUSSP meeeting that “I was rather
dissapointed [sic] to see that most of the organizers, authors and invited discussants were
from economically developed countries.”19

3.1.1 Demography and Postwar Social and Economic Planning

Demography flourished after World War II at least in part because the early postwar period
was a golden age of social and economic planning worldwide, and planners increasingly con-
sidered population projections crucial inputs to the planning process.20 Planning of one kind
or another was a common activity among governments at all levels, regardless of political
ideology, in the immediate postwar period. While India, newly independent in 1947, fol-
lowed the Soviet model of comprehensive 5-year plans, other states engaged in more limited
planning activities. For example, the government of the U.K. rolled out new social welfare
programs and the U.S. government subsidized the development of transportation infrastruc-
ture in the forms of interstate highways and airports. Keynesianism had reached its apex in
the field of economics, and economists generally agreed that “mature” capitalist economies
required a measure of governmental oversight, regulation, and stimulation.21 Demographers
continued to advertise the utility of their expertise to these efforts, with Irene Taeuber stating
in 1944 that “no modern nation can plan for its future without some assumptions as to the
size and age composition of the population for which it is planning.”22 Taeuber and others
insisted that all social, economic, and military planning is inherently planning for population
19
Miloš Macura to Bruno Remiche, Jan. 15, 1979,folder 7, box 7.
20
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, see n. 32;
James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in
Lesotho (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War and
Welfare in Kenya, 1925-52 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World:
America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Gabrielle
Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity After World War II (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1998).
21
See, for example, Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American
Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 165.
22
Taeuber, “The Development of Population Predictions in Europe and the Americas,” see n. 146.

199
— planning to accommodate and meet the needs of future populations. Knowing the size
of the potential military force — and that of other countries — remained important. The
expansion of European welfare states required knowledge of the number of people who would
be eligible for various programs, and industrial planning, both in already-industrial states
and in states that hoped to industrialize, relied on projections of the size and composition
of the labor force and the markets for various goods and services.
The popularity of social and economic planning in the immediate postwar period in-
creased the demand for population projections and intensified the reliance of governments,
business, international agencies, and nongovernmental organizations on demographers that
the PAA and IUSIPP had first tried to stimulate between the wars. By 1952, PAA president
Rupert Vance could boast that “population studies hold high prestige in scientific circles:
our analyses are of the greatest practical use and are eagerly awaited by municipalities, plan-
ning boards, and administrators.”23 During and immediately after the war, confidence in the
ability of demographers to predict future population was high. Kingsley Davis articulated
this confidence in a 1946 article in Forum magazine, where he stated that “demographic
trends manifest such regularity that when the basic figures are known, systematic estimates
can be made 20 to 50 years in advance; and recent research has added greatly to the tech-
nologies of estimating.”24 An unsigned article published in Population Index in the same
year claimed that, between the wars, “with improved data, new techniques, and the precise
measurement of the demographic transition,. . . demography tended to become science rather
than literature”25 The field of demography had, by demonstrating the ability of demogra-
phers to predict future population and by insisting on the relevance of population estimates
and projections to the programs of governments and inter- and non-governmental agencies,
achieved the clientele it needed for sustained support.
23
Rupert Vance, “Is Theory for Demographers?” Social Forces 31, no. 1 (1952): 9.
24
Kingsley Davis, “The Shifting Balance of World Population, part I,” Forum, Jan. 1946: 419.
25
See n. 175.

200
3.1.2 The United Nations: Global Governance for a
Global Population

One of demography’s most important new clients after World War II was the United Nations,
established in 1945 as a successor to the League of Nations by the United States, the United
Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. Its fundamental mandates were to maintain world
peace and improve the human condition, and early delegates believed that population played
an important role in both projects. During World War II, the Axis powers had validated
Warren Thompson’s warnings in Danger Spots in World Population, discussed in Chapter
One, by justifying their territorial aggression in terms of population growth and the attendant
need for more land, and had used population — through pronatalist, expansionist, and
genocidal policies — as a strategy for exercising power on the world stage and securing
additional territory.26 After the war, U.N. delegates and policymakers in North America and
Europe understood population dynamics in various parts of the world to pose a potential
threat, both to standards of living in those places, and to the geopolitical order.27 For that
reason, they viewed planning for and of population as critical to maintaining world peace and
improving the human condition. They understood knowledge of past, current, and future
population dynamics as critical to the planning for population that would help to raise global
standards of living. They also viewed the planning of population — the shaping of future
population — as a critical activity, seeing population itself as an independent variable in the
world peace equation and as an object to be monitored and managed.28 As will be discussed
in greater detail below, U.N. delegates encouraged member states to count, project, plan,
and plan for their populations, stating that

in modern times,. . . government has become more and more entrusted with the
planning of economic and social programmes; this requires a fairly accurate
26
Thompson, Danger Spots in World Population, see n. 196.
27
These threats will be disucssed at greater length in Chapter Four.
28
United Nations Population Division, Manual I: Methdods of Estimating Total Population for Current
Dates, Manuals on Methods of Estimating Population (New York: United Nations Department of Social
Affairs, 1952).

201
 knowledge of the size of the country’s population, its rate of growth, its distribu-
tion among the various towns and provinces, its composition by sex, age, ethnic
and educational groups, and the extent to which it is engaged in, or depends on,
various branches of economic activity.29

However, to the extent that the U.N. aspired to global governance, it also sought to count,
project, plan, and plan for a new statistical object: global population.
The 1946 establishment of a Population Commission within the U.N. Economic and Social
Council (ECOSOC) reflected broad acceptance of Taeuber’s 1944 contention that “estimates
of the future trends of population for regions, continents and perhaps even the world are es-
sential for any international planning which is to offer reasonable possibilities for the creation
of a future world order in which accumulating economic and political frictions will not again
lead to world war,” and signaled a new effort to plan and plan for global population.30 Ten
years later, a U.N. representative would reiterate that “all planning procedures for economic
and social development imply judgments of future population.”31 Whereas the U.N. Statisti-
cal Commission was charged with collecting and maintaining the population data that would
serve as the denominator for various indicators of modernization and the quality of human
life, the Population Commission was charged with analyzing those data and projecting future
population, both as the basis of economic and social planning — planning for population —
and to inform potential population policies — planning of population.32 On the twentieth
anniversary of the establishment of the Population Commission, U.N. Secretary-General U
Thant emphasized the importance of planning both for and of population, attributing to the
Population Commission “the growing awareness of world population problems in general,
and the awareness that action by the international community is needed both to develop
29
United Nations Population Division, Manual I: Methdods of Estimating Total Population for Current
Dates, see n. 28, 1.
30
Taeuber, “The Development of Population Predictions in Europe and the Americas,” see n. 146.
31
John V. Grauman, “Towards a General Methodology of Population Projections, by Sex and Age, for
Countries with Only Moderate Amounts of Statistics,” in Proceedings, World Population Conference, 1954,
Rome, by the United Nations (New York: United Nations, 1954), 25.
32
“Correspondence regarding statistical work on population,” 1946,United Nations Archive, New York,
NY, folder 10, box 5, series 543; John D. Durand, “Correspondence,” 1950,folder 1, box 7, series 920.

202
world resources and to moderate population trends.”33 Developing world resources refers to
planning for population; moderating population trends refers to planning of population. In
many ways, planning for and of population were more fantasy than reality in the postwar
period and, as James C. Scott has demonstrated, the high modernist ideals that animated
postwar planning largely failed in the task of improving the human condition.34 Nonetheless,
optimism regarding the promise of planning was high in the immediate postwar period, and
population was at the center of the vision of a planned future.
The Population Commission initially included one representative from each of twelve
member states: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, the Netherlands, Peru, the U.K.,
the U.S., the U.S.S.R., the Ukranian S.S.R., and Yugoslavia. Its chairman was Alberto Arca
Parro of Peru, the vice-chairman was V.A. Rabichko of Ukraine, and the Rapporteur was
David Glass of the U.K.’s Population Investigation Committee.35 Arca Parro and Glass were
also vice-presidents of the IUSSP, indicating the close relationship between that organization
and the U.N. Population Commission. Membership was initially meant to rotate between
countries, but the U.S. maintained a permanent presence. The first U.S. delegate was Philip
Hauser of the Census Bureau, followed in 1951 by Kingsley Davis, then at Columbia Uni-
versity, and in 1961 by Ansley Coale at Princeton. Hauser has described those present
at the first meeting of the Population Commission as “mature demographers, sociologists,
economists or statisticians, well aware of the world population situation at the time and of
the gaps in demographic statistics and knowledge,” suggesting the Commission’s scientific
character.36
33
“Secretary-General’s Statement on 20th Anniversary of the Population Commission,” 1966,folder 33,
box 4, series 885.
34
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, see
n. 32.
35
The Population Commission was also to include representatives from the Economic and Employment
Commission, the Statistical Commission, the Social Commission, and the Interim Commission of the World
Health Organization (to be replaced by a member of the World Health Organization when it was organized).
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1946-47 (New York: United Nations, 1947), 511.
36
Philip M. Hauser, “The Early Years of the Population Commission,” Population Bulletin of the United
Nations 19 (1986): 3.

203
 The technical labor of the Population Commission was performed by the staff of the
Population Division, which also carried out studies requested by other U.N. agencies and
conducted research on its own initiative.37 Notestein speculated that the establishment of the
Population Division had been inspired by the success of OPR’s wartime population projec-
tion work, which had demonstrated the importance of demographic analysis to governance
and policy.38 The fact that Notestein served in an interim capacity as the Population Di-
vision’s first director supports this contention. Pascal Whelpton, originator of the cohort
component projection method, became the Division’s first permanent director in 1950, in-
dicating the importance of population projection among the Population Division’s duties.
Notestein’s former student John Durand succeeded Whelpton as director in 1953, suggesting
the continuation of an intimate link between OPR and the U.N. Population Division.39 In
addition to analyzing the population data collected by the Statistical Division and projecting
future population, the Population Division also surveyed and kept records of the population
policies of U.N. member states.40
The increased demand for demographic products after the war led to the increased em-
ployment of demographers — especially those associated with OPR — by governments and
by inter-governmental and non-governmental agencies. At mid-century, there were more jobs
for demographers than there were demographers,41 though their numbers increased over the
next few decades as the G.I. bill expanded the ranks of higher education and as new sources
of funding encouraged more universities to offer courses in population, as will be discussed
in Chapter Five.42 Examples of demographers employed by governmental agencies include
Notestein, Whelpton, and Durand at the U.N. Population Division; former OPR research
assistant Dudley Kirk, who served as the Chief of the Planning Staff for the Office of In-
37
Hauser, “The Early Years of the Population Commission,” see n. 36.
38
Frank W. Notestein to Dana Munro, Dec. 26, 1946,folder 21, box 15.
39
Hauser, “The Early Years of the Population Commission,” see n. 36.
40
See correspondence between John Durand and Alfred Sauvy about Sauvy’s 1950 “Survey of demographic
legislation,” folder 1, box 7, series 920, United Nations Archives.
41
Notestein remembered in a 1973 interview that in mid-century “the field had more openings than there
were people”, see n. 59, 14.
42
See n. 85.

204
ternational and Functional Intelligence of the U.S. Department of State from 1947 to 1954;
Philip Hauser, who served as a consultant to the Census Bureau; and Irene Taeuber’s hus-
band Conrad, who worked for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) until
1951 and then transferred to the U.S. Census Bureau as assistant director of its Population
Division. In Great Britain, David Glass was heavily involved with the Royal Commission
on Population, which investigated the causes and consequences of recent fertility declines,
and the French government created its own population research center, the Institut National
d’Études Démographiques (INED), appointing demographer Alfred Sauvy as its director.
The increasing employment of demographers in government and inter- and non-governmental
agencies suggests that, by the end of World War II, the field had established its authority
to analyze and predict population, and had established the utility of population analysis for
administration and planning.

3.2 Data Friction: Challenges to World Population

Estimation and Projection

Delegates to the U.N.’s ECOSOC viewed three tasks as critical to their mission of improving
the human condition and maintaining peace in the immediate postwar years: ensuring the
adequate production and distribution of food; repairing the destruction wrought by the
war, particularly in Europe; and promoting economic development in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, many parts of which were still under colonial rule or had come under U.N.
mandate after the war. Delegates from both of the world’s postwar superpowers, the U.S.
and the U.S.S.R., viewed economic development and global modernization, each according
to its own model, as key to maintaining global hegemony. Members of EcoSoc viewed
population projections as a prerequisite to each of its tasks — feeding the world, rebuilding
Europe, and modernizing the rest of the world — but feeding the world was initially its
most pressing task. In 1944, University of Chicago economist Theodore Schultz organized a

205
conference titled “Food in International Relations,” to lay a scientific foundation for postwar
global food policy and for the work of the incipient FAO.43 Schultz asked Notestein to
present on expected world population to the year 2000. In preparation for the meeting,
Notestein made the first projections for the world as a whole on the basis of the cohort
component projection method and demographic transition theory. Notestein projected the
world’s population separately by continent, facilitating the assessment of the balance of food
and population in each region and the creation of policy to correct for imbalances.

Figure 3.1: Notestein’s 1944 Global Population Projection

At the 1944 meeting, Notestein projected a world population of “at least 3 billion people
by the year 2000.”44 Figure 3.1 shows his chart of past and projected global population
growth, which traces an approximately logistic — or S-shaped — growth trajectory.45 From
43
The proceedings were published as Theodore W. Schultz, ed., Food For the World (New York: Arno,
1945).
44
Actual world population in the year 2000 is now estimated at about 6 billion.
45
Frank W. Notestein, “Population—The Long View,” in Food for the World, ed. Theodore Schultz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 57.

206
the vantage point of the twenty-first century, there were two major problems with Notestein’s
1944 projection — the data and theory on which it was based. As demand for projections
of the populations of countries outside of North America and Western Europe grew in the
immediate postwar period, demographers and their clients realized that the requisite data
for cohort component projections were either unreliable or nonexistent in much of the world.
Moreover, new demographic trends — the baby boom in North America, Western Europe,
and Australia and rapid mortality declines in the rest of the world — were beginning to
challenge the utility of demographic transition theory to drive cohort component projections.
This section discusses data friction and the next discusses three ways in which demographers
attempted to overcome data friction; the final section discusses anomalies that began to
accrue to demographic transition theory in the immediate postwar period and the challenges
they posed to demography’s newly-acquired authority.
One of ECOSOC’s main functions was to collect, compile, and distribute social, demo-
graphic, and economic data for U.N. member states. Publications its delegates planned at
the Council’s establishment included a Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, consisting of “eco-
nomic and social statistics of current interest to international organizations and Members of
the United Nations”; quarterly Population and Vital Statistics Reports, which would contain
“the latest estimate of population for each area of the world, and the latest census totals,”
as well as occasional “special tables dealing with population or vital statistics”; a Statistical
Yearbook, which presented social, economic, and demographic data; a Demographic Year-
book, which included demographic data beyond those presented in the Statistical Yearbook,
such as the information necessary to carry out cohort component population projections —
age-sex structure and rates of migration, mortality, and fertility, also by race, nationality,
and urban/rural status — along with information about marriage and divorce, literacy, and
the labor force, and listings of population policies in effect in each member state; and data
arising from special research projects, such as the report National Income Statistics of Var-

207
ious Countries, 1938-1947.46 The Population Division also intended that the Demographic
Yearbook would rotate through a set of themes, beginning with fertility in 1951 and including
mortality, migration, and population characteristics in subsequent years, with a historical
treatment of each so far as the data would allow.47
EcoSoc’s plans for the analysis and publication of demographic, social, and economic
data for its member states suggest that it aspired to make the Statistical Division and the
Population Division centers of calculation, to use Bruno Latour’s phrase. Located at its
headquarters in New York, these divisions would be places where demographers and other
social scientists could compile and analyze data collected by individual member states, facil-
itating international comparisons and global social and economic planning. Population data
were only one of many types of social and economic statistics EcoSoc planned to collect, but
they formed the critical denominator to indices of modernization and development. Cre-
ating a “center of calculation” requires that information from the “periphery” be rendered
into “immutable and combinable mobiles” — that is, heterogeneous information must be
turned into stable, portable, and commensurable data.48 Demographers working with the
U.N. encountered three forms of data friction in their efforts to develop a center of demo-
graphic calculation: in many countries, demographic data were unavailable or incomplete,
not sufficiently detailed (that is, lacking vital statistics and not classified by age and sex),
and incommensurable.

3.2.1 Unavailable data

As discussed in Chapter Two, demographers rely for their analyses on data collected for
other purposes, usually by governments or other administrative bodies. For much of the
world, the minimum data required for population estimation and projection had simply
not been collected. Between the wars, the Economic Intelligence Service of the League of
46
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1947-48 (New York: United Nations, 1948), 564-565.
47
Durand, see n. 32.
48
Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, see n. 15, 227.

208
Nations had published estimates of the total population of each country, but demographers
did not consider these data reliable, and they did not include age-sex structure, which was
critical to the cohort component projection method.49 As censuses had never been taken
in some parts of Africa and Asia, League of Nations figures were estimates or “reasoned
guesses,” though demographers argued that they were “probably as near the truth as some
of the so-called censuses” in other places. This statement impugned the quality of those
censuses rather than praising the quality of the estimates.50 Moreover, although the League
of Nations estimates were updated annually, censuses were rarely conducted more frequently
than every ten years; these estimates were therefore based on extrapolation of the growth
rate calculated from the previous two censuses or on vital registration data — civil records
of births, marriages, divorces, and deaths — which were also incomplete. Sometimes the
same figure was used year after year.51
In the presentation of his 1944 global population projection, Notestein admitted that
the data he used were “estimates even at the most recent dates,” and “in the cases of Asia,
Africa, and Central and South America they are little better than informed guesses.”52 In a
1949 review of these and other early postwar population projections, Taeuber acknowledged
that, for Asia, “the exact level of present fertility was largely a matter of conjecture based on
intricate manipulations of faulty data,” and “in Africa between the Sahara and the Union [of
South Africa] accurate counts, age distributions, and current vital statistics were all lacking
to guide the evaluation of the present or the assessment of the future.”53 Indeed, data were
least readily available for the parts of the world the U.N. was most intent on “developing”:
Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Population size and structure in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were not completely
49
Robert R. Kuczynski, Colonial Population (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 1.
50
In 1937, Robert Kuczynski reported that there had never been a census in the Belgian Congo, the
Kuria Muria Islands, Lebanon, Morocco, Mozambique, New Guinea, New Hebrides, Papua, Rio de Oro,
Ruanda-Urundi, Sarawak, Socotra, Somaliland, Sudan, Surinam, Syria, Tangier, Togoland, or Trans-Jordan.
In many other colonial territories, censuses covered only the European population. ibid., 5-6.
51
Ibid., 7-9.
52
Notestein, “Population—The Long View,” see n. 45, 37.
53
Taeuber, “Literature on Future Populations,” see n. 103, 2.

209
unknown, as many of the countries in those regions did take censuses and some (particularly
in Latin America) had vital registration systems. However, those data were often incomplete,
unreliable, or simply not available to demographers working in the United States or Western
Europe. China is a notorious example of data unavailability. Its population had long been
a mystery to Western demographers, and was frequently described simply as “teeming mil-
lions,” suggesting the racial anxiety that motivated newspaper magnate Edward Scripps to
establish the Scripps Foundation for Research on Population Problems in 1922 to monitor
population growth in East Asia.54 Despite the collection of detailed population data by the
government of China,55 those data were not available to demographers in the West. As a
result, estimates of China’s population by U.S. and European demographers were numerous
and disparate. Thompson stated in 1929 that “there is much popular misapprehension re-
garding the size of China’s population. The figure 400,000,000, so often used, seems to have
a strange fascination for most people.” Although this figure was based on an official estimate
known as the “post-office estimate,” Thompson did not trust it. He preferred the smaller fig-
ure of 315,000,000, which was based on a 1904 estimate by the then-U.S. minister to China,
to which Thompson applied an arbitrary 10% increase. He acknowledged, however, that his
figures were only estimates, “just as the ‘post-office estimate,’ the so-called ‘Minchengpu cen-
sus’ of 1910, and other so-called censuses are estimates.”56 In 1940, vital statistician Walter
Willcox described China as “the hardest nut to crack in estimating the world’s population,”
as it made up “seven-eighths of the one-third of the world’s population not yet counted by
censuses.”57 By 1944 U.S.-based demographers knew the population of China with no more
certainty. As Notestein stated in his Chicago presentation, “opinions concerning the size
of the present population [of China] differ by more than the total population of the United
54
50. The U.S. was also home to hundreds of millions, but they were apparently not “teeming” Thompson,
“Population,” see n. 183.
55
Some of these data are described in Tommy Bengtsson et al., Life Under Pressure: Mortality and Living
Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
56
Thompson, “Population,” see n. 183, 50-51.
57
Willcox, Studies in American Demography, see n. 10, 511.

210
States.”58 When asked in the same year by the Rockefeller Foundation about the prospects
for demographic research on China, Notestein responded that he was “not sure that solid
work can be done on the morass of inadequate statistic [sic] which characterize China.”59
Population data were not much more available or reliable for colonial territories, which
were home to an estimated 13% of the world’s population in 1934 (excluding self-governing
territories, such as the British Dominions and India).60 Western European countries took
censuses and maintained vital registration systems in their colonies, dependencies, and man-
dated territories, but in a 1937 book titled Colonial Populations, British demographer Robert
Kuczynski demonstrated that, although “official data on the total population are available
for every colony in the whole world,” many of those data were “wide of the mark” and
insufficiently detailed for demographic analysis.61 In some places, Kuczynski declared that
“all population figures are wild guesses.”62 The British government had scrapped plans for
its 1941 colonial censuses when World War II broke out, and in some parts of the British
Empire, the 1931 census had been postponed indefinitely as a result of the global economic
depression.63
Kuczynski complained that “demographic data are most scanty for the largest Colonies
and most ample for the smallest.”64 Censuses had been taken every ten years in Anglophone
West Africa from 1871 to 1931, but these were far from complete, and much less so for
the African denizens than for the European and Asian denizens of the colonies. Indeed
these censused differed markedly from those that had become routine in North America
and Western Europe because, in many colonies, complete enumerations were done only in
urban areas. In other areas, population was estimated by local authorities (often representing
structures of indirect rule) or by administrative records. In 1931, in the whole of Anglophone
58
Notestein, “Population—The Long View,” see n. 45, 38.
59
Joe Willits, “Report of Interview with Notestein for Rockefeller Foundation Grant,” Aug. 15, 1944,box
A82, series 200s, record group 1.1.
60
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, 1.
61
Ibid., vii.
62
Ibid., viii.
63
Ibid., xi.
64
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, see n. 14, v.

211
West Africa, Kuczynski estimated that censuses had counted only about 4% of the indigenous
population.65 Colonial officers had made informal counts in rural parts of Gambia and Gold
Coast (today Ghana), covering another 12% of the 1931 indigenous population of Anglophone
West Africa. Therefore, as Kuczynski stated, for the remaining “five-sixths of the total native
population the figures are estimates, based in Nigeria on the tax rolls of adult males and
in Sierra Leone on house-tax lists.”66 Such methods of estimation were reminiscent of the
political arithmetic discussed in Chapter One, which used mathematical formulae to estimate
population on the basis of tax rolls, chimneys, or windows rather than enumerating people
directly.67
Kuczynski impugned these political arithmetic methods of estimating population, con-
tending that methods of estimating colonial populations were such that “people who have
trusted one or another figure would shudder if they discovered how it was computed.” For
example, the 1931 census of Hong Kong reported that “the amount of nightsoil now being
collected approximates to 2,500 piculs or nearly four million taels, which, at taels 3 per
head, gives a population of over 1,300,000, without allowing for wastage.”68 In this instance,
population was estimated not by counting people, but by measuring their fecal production.
Kuczynski likely expected his fellow demographers to “shudder” not just at the idea of
measuring “nightsoil,” but also at substituting the resulting figure for a full census.
The relative paucity of colonial population data presented a stark contrast to the abun-
dance of population data in Europe, where people had been counted in and exposed to what
Ian Hacking has described as an “avalanche of printed numbers” since the late nineteenth
century.69 As discussed in Chapter One, the collection of social and demographic data at the
individual level began in North America and Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth
65
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, see n. 14, 1; Kuczynski, Colonial Pop-
ulation, see n. 49, xi.
66
He did not indicate how he estimated that the uncounted people made up five-sixths of the population.
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, see n. 14, 2.
67
Rusnock, “Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment,” see n. 26.
68
Quoted in Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, vii, note I.
69
Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” see n. 32.

212
century as a critical adjunct to the project of democratic self-government, which required
detailed surveillance and the establishment of individual relationships between states and
citizens.70 If, as Hacking and others have argued, censuses are a tool of biopower, their incom-
plete coverage in colonial territories indicates that colonial biopower was of a different order
than metropolitan biopower, requiring different types of population statistics. The use of
political arithmetic rather than censuses supports Megan Vaughan’s contention that colonial
biopower managed populations en masse to administer labor extraction and taxation, rather
than producing individual subject-citizens, as was arguably the case with metropolitan cen-
suses.71 The difference in these statistics lends weight to Frederick Cooper’s contention that
colonial power was “more arterial than capillary,” with “capillary” power referring to Fou-
cault’s concept of governmentality, the diffusion of power throughout European and North
American societies through such forms of discipline as prisons, educational institutions, and
statistics.72
Many colonial governments lacked the budget and staff required to carry out a complete
census or to maintain systems of vital registration. In Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), the
weakness of the colonial statistical apparatus was apparent in the report of the 1931 census,
which stated that “the Census Office Staff consisted of the director, one Lady Clark and one
(native) office boy,” and continued that “neither of the two European members of the staff
have had previous experience of census duties. The results obtained are therefore the work
of amateurs,” the word “amateur” signaling a contrast to the professional demographers
and statisticians who carried out metropolitan censuses beginning between the wars.73 The
colonial government of Nigeria had spent 5,000 pounds sterling on its 1931 census, which was
0.01% of its decennial budget.74 In describing the results of that census, Kuczynski reported
70
See, for example: Rose, “Governing By Numbers: Figuring Out Democracy,” see n. 38; Cohen, see n. 38.
71
Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991).
72
Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical
Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1533.
73
Quoted in Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, x.
74
Ibid., xi.

213
that “all one can safely say is that the population was probably not under 18,500,000 and
not over 22,000,000.”75 Nigeria was not the only colony for which population enumeration
was rather vague. Kuczynski also noted that “the census figures of the adjoining colonies
of French West and Equatorial Africa are certainly not more trustworthy than those of
Nigeria, and the same is true of some other important colonial and mandated areas.”76 Vital
registration data were similarly wanting. Despite the fact that registration of births and
deaths was, by 1926, compulsory in the British Colonial Empire, it actually covered only
about 6% of the African population in Sierra Leone, 7% in Gambia, 1% in Nigeria and the
Cameroons, and 9% in Gold Coast and Togoland.77
Small budgets and imprecise data suggest either the weakness of colonial states or the
irrelevance of detailed population data to them. Censuses and vital registers facilitate state
power, but also require that states be powerful enough to find people on census day and com-
pel them to submit to enumeration. Colonial governments may simply have been too weak
and underfunded to conduct complete censuses. The incompleteness of vital registration,
especially given the fact that it was “compulsory,” again suggests the weakness of colonial
states and resistance of colonial populations. But it is also possible that colonial govern-
ments simply had no need for the kind of detailed population data produced by metropolitan
censuses and therefore devoted to the task only the financial and human resources necessary
to produce data relevant to colonial administration and extraction.
James C. Scott argues that censuses make populations legible to states. However, these
examples of colonial censuses suggest that different types of government and different rela-
tionships between states and subjects require different types of legibility.78 The difference be-
tween metropolitan and colonial population data suggests that colonial governments sought
a type of legibility that would facilitate the extraction of wealth, labor, and resources, rather
75
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, see n. 14, 2.
76
Ibid., 6.
77
Ibid., 6-7.
78
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, see
n. 32.

214
than a type of legibility that would facilitate self-governing citizenship. Colonial censuses
worked, but not for the same purposes as metropolitan censuses. India provides a striking
counterexample to these generalizations about colonial demographic data. Although India
lacked vital registration, it had complete decadal censuses dating back to 1871, indicating
that colonial states had the ability to collect more detailed population data when there was
reason to do so and when the indigenous population was similarly invested in being enu-
merated. Censuses in India had long been much more complete and regular than in Africa,
in part because India was valued much more by the Crown for its revenue, resources, and
strategic location, but also in part because Indian nationalists used censuses and the data
collected by them strategically in their anti-colonial projects.79

3.2.2 Inadequate Data

Where population data were available, they often lacked the detail required to project pop-
ulation into the future — vital rates and age and sex categories. In contrast to censuses
in North America and Westen Europe, which enumerated each citizen individually, colonial
censuses often reported only the number of people estimated for each age-sex-race category
that was relevant for colonial rule and for the extraction of wealth and labor. A useful
comparison is with the slave schedules in U.S. censuses before the Civil War, which recorded
only the names of slaves and of their owners, omitting information about family relation-
ships, education, occupation, and other data that were collected for the free population of
the United States beginning in 1850.80 If age or sex were distinguished at all in colonial
censuses, the population was often “subdivided merely into adult males, adult females, and
children,”81 which would give an estimate of the colony’s tax base and labor availability,
indicating the imperial view of colonial population as a resource to be extracted or extracted
from, rather than a citizenry to be governed. As stated above, the lack of detailed census
79
Guha, see n. 36; Cohn, see n. 35.
80
Anderson, The American Census: A Social History, see n. 25.
81
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, viii.

215
data for indigenous populations could also be read as a sign of the weakness of colonial
states, or the resistance of colonial populations to enumeration, which is understandable
when enumeration is the basis for taxation or extraction but not representation.82
Although Kuczynski sharply critiqued colonial censuses for want of the detail necessary
for demographic analysis, this lack of detail didn’t make colonial population data objectively
bad. Rather, they were good enough for colonial administration, but not good enough for
cohort component population projections. Here I use the phrase “good enough” to mean
usable for the purpose at hand; it is not a subjective evaluation. More broadly, I am arguing
that the criteria for data quality and precision — even for counting units that exist only in
integer quantities, such as people — are not transhistorical.83 The colonial administrators
who collected data for purposes of governance were not failing to meet an existing standard
of data quality. Rather, the standard by which Kuczynski and U.N. demographers evaluated
colonial population data did not yet exist at the time the data were produced, or did not
exist among the people who produced them. While colonial population data had been
perfectly suitable for the purposes of colonial administration and extraction, it was only when
Kuczynski attempted to assemble these data in a form that would make colonial territories
legible to demographers by turning them into quantities and rates that they began to appear
inadequate.
Beginning between the wars and increasingly after World War II, however, these data
were no longer “good enough” for colonial administration, either. European colonial powers
— notably Great Britain, France, and Portugal — had launched development programs in
their colonies as a way to justify continued political domination, and increasingly demanded
population estimates and projections to facilitate development planning.84 The British Colo-
82
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985); In the United States, censuses serve both purposes (taxation and representation),
so there are incentives and disincentives for both underenumeration and overenumeration. Anderson, The
American Census: A Social History, see n. 25.
83
For more on the social nature of precision, see M. Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995).
84
Ittmann, “Demography as Policy Science in the British Empire, 1918-1969,” see n. 173; Frederick Cooper,
Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York: Cambridge

216
nial Office passed the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 in response to strikes
and uprisings throughout the West Indies and Africa. In contrast to the 1929 Colonial
Development Act, which aimed to increase the capacity of colonial economies and expand
their trade with the U.K., the Colonial Development and Welfare Act sought to improve
the standards of living of Britain’s colonial subjects, including the provision of health care
and education.85 Kuczynski became an official advisor to the Colonial Office, charged with
surveying available population data as the basis for colonial development and welfare pro-
grams.86
Examining the available population data for the British Colonial Empire (that is, the
territories governed by the Colonial Office), Kuczynski complained that, as a result of the
sparsity of vital data, he could say little definitively about fertility trends. He noted for An-
glophone West Africa that “the available data on fertility and on the incidence of venereal
diseases are so scanty and so uncertain that it is impossible to draw any final conclusions,”
and that “nothing is known concerning fertility in rural areas for the last two decades.”
However, on the basis of reports by medical officers of the prevalence of syphilis and gon-
orrhea, and of typical birth spacing of two or three years, Kuczynski argued that there was
“no justification for assuming that fertility of native women is higher than it was in England
60 years ago, and it may still be lower.”87 Incompleteness in birth registration also proved a
challenge to the computation of infant mortality rates, which are calculated as the number of
deaths under one year of age per thousand live births, therefore requiring an accurate count
of both births and deaths. Kuczynski argued that reports by Colonial Officers of excessively
high infant mortality rates — often as high as 400 per thousand — were “defective owing to
incomplete registration of births.”’88
University Press, 1996); Lewis, see n. 20; Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed, see n. 32.
85
Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa, see n. 84,
67.
86
Ittmann, “The Colonial Office and the Population Question in the British Empire, 1918-62,” see n. 55,
67; Ittmann, “Demography as Policy Science in the British Empire, 1918-1969,” see n. 173.
87
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, see n. 14, 8.
88
Ibid., 12.

217
 Kuczynski acknowledged that, despite the relative paucity of data collected by censuses
and vital registration systems in the British Colonial Empire, colonial officers knew quite a
bit about the populations they administered. As he put it, “they cannot carry on without
somehow forming an idea as to whether the population is growing, whether infant mortality
is excessive, whether the incidence of specific diseases is increasing, &c.”89 Officers recorded
these ideas in annual reports, making them part of the corpus of colonial population data,
along with census returns and vital registers. Kuczynski criticized these impressionistic
data, arguing that they “submit as facts what are actually reasoned guesses,” and that
their reader “finds over and over again a consensus of opinion without any real evidence to
support this opinion.”90 This critique indicates Kuczynski’s efforts not only to turn narrative
reports into quantitative data, but also to redefine demographic “facts” and “evidence,”
discounting the observations and analysis of colonial officers and privileging standard counts,
from which demographic rates could be calculated. He argued that demographers could not
take narrative information as fact because narrative information was “opinion” and, in the
realm of population, “the opinions of even the most competent observers so frequently prove
to be wrong.”91 As an example of a wrong opinion, he pointed to a case in which “a Census
Commissioner, who was an outstanding Administrative Officer, and the Senior Health Officer
both wrote that 90 per cent. of the children died before reaching the age of six and many
thereafter, and that at the same time the population was increasing rapidly owing to a large
excess of births over deaths.”92 Kuczynski argued that both statements could not possibly be
true; with child mortality that high, families would need to have an average of 10 daughters
(and presumably an equal number of sons) simply to keep the population from declining.
This observation drew on the net reproduction rate Kuczynski had developed in his work on
Europe in the 1920s, discussed in Chapter One, and suggests an attempt to shift authority
for population analysis from the subjective judgment of local observers to the objective
89
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, see n. 14, v.
90
Ibid., v.
91
Ibid., vi.
92
Ibid., vi.

218
calculation of demographers, even if they lacked knowledge of the local context.
As Kuczynski contended, while colonial officers could be trusted to count people and
vital events, they could not be trusted to interpret those counts. With this argument, he
advanced a claim for a new type of knowledge and expertise: only trained demographers could
state definitively whether populations were increasing or decreasing, or whether fertility or
mortality was high or low and rising or falling. He maintained further that, “to form a
correct opinion on demographic matters without conclusive figures is well-nigh impossible
because demographic facts are not obvious.”93 This is an interesting statement because, in
many ways, demographic facts are obvious: people can be seen with the naked eye and
counted without any special instruments, they only come in integer quantities, and they are
always either alive or dead.
What Kuczynski meant, of course, was that the meaning of these facts was not obvious,
and he was claiming the authority to judge those meanings for the new professional group
of demographers. For this group, he asserted a more scientific and generalizable form of
knowledge than that held by colonial officers, which was more local and particularistic. Yet
Kuczynski also asserted that demographers could not complete their analyses without ade-
quate demographic data, suggesting a division of labor in which colonial officers would carry
out the non-expert labor of counting people and registering vital events, and demographers
would perform the expert labor of calculating vital rates and projecting future population.
Moreover, although Kuczynski critiqued and mocked the political-arithmetic methods colo-
nial officers employed to turn their observations into data, he suggested that, if devised
and used by those with the proper training, similar methods “might lead to valuable re-
sults,” meaning numeric data that demographers could use to calculate rates, project future
population, and draw international comparisons.94 This statement claims the authority of
demographers to synthesize portable and commensurable numeric data from impressionistic
observations; after the war, demographers would develop just this type of approach, as I will
93
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, see n. 14, vi.
94
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, xii.

219
describe later in this chapter.

3.2.3 Incommensurable Data

While Kuczynski’s critiques of the population data embedded in colonial officers’ reports
emphasized their inaccuracy, a larger problem for the U.N.’s aspirations to create a center of
calculation for population was their incommensurability. As the population observations of
colonial officers were embedded in narrative reports, they were not numeric and made sense
only in the context of the local knowledge with which the reports surrounded them. Even
when Kuczynski extracted numeric data from these reports and packaged them into tables for
his 1937 book, they were qualified by 60 pages of narrative metadata (for 30 pages of tables),
with which he had to qualify them. Much of the narrative material surrounding Kuczynski’s
tables detailed the methods of data collection and the segments of the population of each
colony covered by each method. The variation in methods and coverage over time and by
place limited the commensurability of the data he gleaned.
Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens define commensuration as “the transformation
of different qualities into a common metric.”95 In the case of global population data, the
“different qualities” were the populations of different countries, and the “common metric”
numerical descriptions of those populations that counted people using the same methods
and according to the same criteria and could therefore facilitate international comparison.
Espeland and Mitchell exclude censuses from their analysis of commensuration, arguing that
commensuration involves rendering different things quantitatively comparable, whereas with
censuses, “we are simply counting or measuring something rather than commensurating dis-
parate entities” because “implicit in the act of counting is a conception of citizenship or
identity that renders unproblematic the coherence of the relations among diverse people.”96
They suggest that censuses do not need to commensurate because their very existence im-
95
Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, “Commensuration as a Social Process,” Annual Review
of Sociology 24 (1998): 314.
96
Ibid., 317.

220
plies that people are already commensurable. However, as the case of colonial censuses
demonstrates, the inhabitants of colonies were not considered identical. The nature of their
citizenship varied within and between colonies, and their susceptibility to enumeration varied
according to the nature of their citizenship.97 For that reason, colonial governments counted
their populations in ways that made sense for their own administrative purposes, but did
not necessarily facilitate the estimation of world population or its rate of growth.
As a signal of the incommensurability of the colonial population data available to U.N.
demographers immediately after World War II, Kuczynski cautioned users against analyzing
changes in population from year to year, even within the same colony, because “where the
figures increase or decrease this will in many cases be due to actual changes in the population
but will in other cases be due either to a new enumeration or to changes in the methods
of estimating the population.”98 Changes in enumeration methods from census to census
undermined the utility of the time series of population data collected for any given colony
or country. An additional obstacle to international comparison was the question of whether
censuses were de jure — counting the legally resident population — or de facto — counting
the population physically present on census day.99 In colonial territories in particular, with
high rates of labor migration, these could produce very different results and, if one colony
had a de jure census and the neighboring colony a de facto census, it is possible that labor
migrants from the first to the second could be counted twice and labor migrants from the
second to the first not counted at all. This observation points to the duality of population
data: they are collected by governments for internal purposes, but also used by scientists and
by inter- and non-governmental agencies for international aggregation and comparison. An
additional source of incommensurability was that some colonial censuses counted military
and shipping populations, while others did not, which affected the number of Europeans
97
As Espeland and Mitchell point out, the U.S. Constitution solved the antebellum dispute between North
and South about the commensurability of slaves and free people with the “three-fifths compromise,” according
to which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation. Espeland
and Stevens, see n. 95, 317.
98
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, see n. 14, 9.
99
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, 6.

221
included.100 This number also depended on the racial categories used in censuses and the
means by which people were allocated to those categories, which were not stable from place
to place or time to time.
Kuczynski recognized the political nature of race classification, acknowledging that “wher-
ever there is social inequality among several races, more or less numerous members of the
less favoured races succeed in being allocated to that race which is considered as the su-
perior one.”101 In some places, such as the United States prior to the introduction of the
mail-back census form, the attribution of race was done by the enumerator. In other places,
the enumerator’s role was less explicit, though still important. For example, 1921 census
instructions in South Africa indicated that

it will often occur that an Enumerator, especially in the poorer localities, will
be asked for, say, a European form (C.I) by persons who obviously cannot be
classed as white. In such cases Enumerators must be instructed to refrain from
giving offence by any comment or questions in the presence of the parties con-
cerned, but to make a private note on the completed forms against the names of
any persons he considers cannot be classed as European, and report the circum-
stance. Thereafter the particulars in respect of the persons in question should be
transferred to the form or forms applicable to their race.102

Under both systems, the attribution of race depended on the local knowledge of the enu-
merator and, with different enumerators being employed from census to census, the reported
racial composition of a place could change dramatically, even if the actual people being
counted were by and large the same from one census to the next. For example, in the U.S.,
the Census Bureau found a stark decrease in the number of people classified as “mulatto”
from 1910 to 1920, not because the population itself had changed (other than those who
had died, migrated, or been born in the interim), but because 1910 had been the only year
in which the Census employed black enumerators, who may have been more capable of or
interested in recognizing people of mixed race than were white enumerators.103
100
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, 6.
101
Ibid., 10.
102
Ibid., 10-11.
103
Schor, see n. 36; Jennifer L. Hochschild and Brenna Marea Powell, “Racial Reorganization and the

222
 Problems of racial classification in comparative analysis are evident in the following
passage from the 1931 Census of British Malaya:

Of the 2,376 non-British Europeans, 825 were returned as “Dutch,” but it is

probable that many of these should have been included under Eurasians, the
same being true in the case of the 117 “Portuguese.” As to the Dutch, it must be
borne in mind that, in the Netherlands Indies, whence comes the great majority
of these people, the distinction between European and Eurasian is not maintained
as we maintain it, and, for census and other administrative purposes, the two
classes are grouped together as “Europeans and those assimilated with them” or
“Europeans” simply.104

This quote well illustrates Ann Stoler’s contention that divisions between colonizer and col-
onized were neither clear, nor natural, nor unproblematic, and that the establishment and
maintenance of these divisions required continual work of the type performed by the collec-
tion and tabulation of colonial population data.105 It also demonstrates that colonial popu-
lation data were collected mainly to serve internal political purposes, not for international
aggregative or comparative analysis. In French colonies, residents were classified into two
groups, “Europeans and Assimilated” and “Natives,” which might have aided inter-colony
comparison, except that, as Kuczynski noted, these categories were still inconsistent from
place to place. For example, in New Caledonia “the 41,000 ‘Natives’ are composed of 29,000
Natives and 12,000 Asiatics,” while in Algeria, the “European and Assimilated” category
included “Algerian Jews, all naturalized natives and their descendants, and all non-Moslem
foreigners.”106 These examples again indicate the slipperiness of the concept of “race,” which
here seems to refer to some combination of birthplace, citizenship, and religion. Similarly,
in the British Empire, colonial officers were equipped with uniform schedules and rules for
filling them out, but Kuczynski found that “most colonial administrations do not conform
United States Census 1850-1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican
Race,” Studies in American Political Development 22, no. 1 (2008): 59–96; Miller, see n. 36.
104
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, 12.
105
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial
Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
106
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, 14.

223
to these rules and make returns which do not correspond to the headings of the columns.”107
Kuczynski’s finding illustrates the impossibility of imposing any classificatory schema on
humans, who are at once irreducibly heterogeneous and indistinguishably similar.108
These three forms of data friction — unavailability, inadequacy, and incommensurability
— became apparent to the members of the U.N. Population Division when, in 1946, they
requested population data from member states so as to estimate the world’s current popu-
lation and project it into the future. They found that censuses had never been conducted
in many countries, including Ethiopia, Liberia, Belgian Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, Eritrea,
Ecuador, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Iraq, Kuwait, Nepal, Saudi Arabi, Yemen, Singapore, and
New Guinea. In other countries, it had been more than a decade since the most recent
census — most of the British colonies in Africa had not had a census since 1931, El Salvador
had not had one since 1930, Costa Rica had not had one since 1927, and the most recent
census in Haiti had been taken in 1918-1919.109 Official estimates for more recent periods
used the same political-arithmetic methods Kuczynksi had critiqued. For example, popu-
lation estimates for the British Cameroons were based on tax rolls, and therefore excluded
“nomad herdsmen” who “do not reside in one place throughout the year and only pay tax
on their cattle, so that their own numbers are irrelevant to taxation statistics.”110 Similarly,
the Population Division found that “a complete census has never been carried out in Kenya
and the statistics of the African population must be considered to have a fairly large margin
of error” because “the population estimates at present available are estimates made by the
Administrative Authorities based on the number of adult male taxpayers.” It determined
that “calculation of [vital] rates [is] impossible at present.”111 Similarly, censuses in North-
ern Rhodesia (now Zambia) had carefully detailed the European and Asian populations, but
the indigenous population was estimated on the basis of official employment, representing
107
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, 15.
108
For more on the impossibility of human racial classification, see Bowker and Star, see n. 34.
109
“Total Population for Each Area of the World According to the Latest Census, Latest Official Estimate,
and at Midyear 1946,” Mar. 1, 1948,folder 6, box 5, series 920.
110
“Verification of Published Sources: Cameroons (British),” Aug. 1, 1950,folders 1-52, box 11, series 920.
111
“Verification of Published Sources: Kenya,” n.d.,folders 1-52, box 11, series 920.

224
“only a fraction of the total African population.”112 The following section describes three
approaches demographers working with the U.N. took to overcome the data friction they
encountered in their project to produce comprehensive estimates and projections for each
country of the world and thereby to track and project global population.

3.3 Dealing With Data Friction: Making Global

Population Data and Making Population
Data Global

At no time did lack of “good enough” data prevent demographers from making population
projections. As Taeuber stated in 1949, regardless of the quantity or quality of available data,
“population students in government, whether working at international, national, regional, or
local levels, are forced to make estimates of the most probable population size and structure
in the near future, in the middle distance, and in the long run,” because “political, economic,
and social planning necessitates the quantitative evaluation of the future.”113 Taeuber’s use
of the word “forced” implies without explicitly stating that demographers needed to meet
those demands in order to maintain professional credibility and external funding for their
activities, even when they lacked the ideal raw materials with which to do so. Demographers
and U.N. delegates agreed that the countries that most needed social and economic planning
were those with the sparsest population data.114 This section describes three ways in which
demographers in universities, government statistical offices, and inter- and non-governmental
agencies responded to data friction. First, some demographers revived the logistic projec-
tion method, which required less detailed data. Second, the U.N. attempted to stimulate the
collection of population data worldwide, which, following Edwards, I term “making global
population data.” Third, demographers developed methods to mathematically adjust popu-
112
“Central African Statistical Office, Salisbury: Notes on Northern Rhodesia Population Estimates,”
n.d.,folders 1-52, box 11, series 920.
113
Taeuber, “Literature on Future Populations,” see n. 103, 3.
114
Grauman, see n. 31, 25.

225
lation data to make them suitable for use in demographic models and analysis, which, again
following Edwards, I term “making population data global.”

3.3.1 Reviving the Logistic

An initial and short-lived response to the data friction demographers encountered was a
revival of the logistic projection method. In 1944, Taeuber attributed the resurgence of
interest in this method to the fact that the logistic method requires much less input data
than does the cohort component methd and “can be computed in the absence of detailed
information on age structures and birth and death rates,” which were missing for much of the
world.115 Demographers who used the logistic method in the 1940s, however, divorced it from
Pearl’s logistic law of population growth. Even Pearl, before his death in 1940, had conceded
that the logistic was useful only as an empirical description of population growth, abandoning
his former claims to having discovered a natural law, as discussed in Chapter Two.116 Instead,
postwar demographers interpreted the logistic curve as an approximation of projections that
would have been made using the cohort component method and demographic transition
theory, were the requisite data available. In accordance with the logistic law, demographic
transition theory suggested that population should grow along an approximately logistic
trajectory, with declining mortality followed by declining fertility producing an S-shaped
growth curve. Even though they had discarded the logistic law, many demographers viewed
the fitting of past population data to a logistic curve and its extrapolation into the future as
a valid method of population projection, especially when the data necessary to extrapolate
the mortality and fertility declines that produced the logistic trajectory were unavailable.
Pearl’s former collaborator, Johns Hopkins University biologist Lowell Reed, drew on this
logic when he argued in a roundtable at the 1947 PAA meeting that “since population is a
function of an almost infinite number of parameters over time, many of which are unknown,
115
Taeuber, “The Development of Population Predictions in Europe and the Americas,” see n. 146, 338.
116
Harold F. Dorn, “Pitfalls in Population Forecasts and Projections,” Journal of the American Statistical
Association 45, no. 251 (Sept. 1950): 311–334.

226
and since the analysis of the inter-relationship of these parameters is only beginning, the
projection of some of the parameters of the series may frequently lead to results less valid
than the mathematical expansion of the series.”117 In plain English, Reed contended that,
although the cohort component method would produce more detailed projections if enough
data were available, given the sparsity and unreliability of vital data, the aggregate projection
produced by extrapolating the components of growth individually and summing them — as
done by the cohort component method — would be less accurate than the extrapolation of
the aggregate itself.
Perhaps the most well-known postwar use of the logistic projection method was Kingsley
Davis’s Population of India and Pakistan, published by Princeton University Press in 1951.
Davis justified his choice of method by pointing out that the cohort component model “has
the disadvantage that birth and death rates fluctuate more than the natural increase which is
a function of the two, and our knowledge of components is often less than our knowledge of the
population growth as a whole,”118 an argument very similar to that made by Reed in 1947 (at
a meeting Davis no doubt had attended). Davis conceded that “for short-run estimates the
component method is preferable,” but maintained that “for long-run estimates the logistic
is better.”119 Conspicuously missing from his explanation is reference to data quality or
availability. Rather, Davis argued that the logistic method produced better results over
the long term independent of data quality, as overall growth rates were less volatile than
mortality and fertility rates. This assessment may have been influenced by relatively recent
epidemics in India, which had produced spikes in mortality, or by the North American and
Western European baby boom, which had raised fertility and produced population growth
well beyond that projected by Thompson and Whelpton between the wars.
Use of the logistic projection method, even when stripped of its association with Pearl’s
logistic law of population growth, did not remain popular for very long, especially after the
117
Paraphrased in Irene B. Taeuber, “1947 PAA Meeting,” Population Index (1947): 181.
118
Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951),
89.
119
Ibid., 89.

227
U.N. Population Commission rejected its use for official U.N. population projections. In
1954, the U.N. and the IUSSP co-sponsored the first of what would become a decadal series
of world population conferences — meetings of demographers from throughout the world
working in universities, government statistical bureaus, and inter- and non-governmental
agencies. At the 1954 meeting, one U.N. demographer argued that “there is no reason that
population should ever grow precisely in accordance with a mathematical formula,”120 while
another criticized the logistic method for making population projection in general seem a
much “more ‘scientific’ and respectable business than, say, predicting the date of outbreak of
the next war or the name of the next President of the United States” as a result of its “use
of numerical techniques of extrapolation which may suggest analogies with astronomers’
calculations of the future position of the stars.”121 Although it doesn’t specifically name
Pearl or the logistic curve, this sentence directly references Pearl’s analogy of the logistic to
the path of a comet, cited in Chapter One, but suggests that his logistic law was actually
much more akin to fortune-telling. In a 1956 manual on population projection, the U.N.
Population Division rejected Davis’s concern about the volatility of fertility and mortality
rates, and declared that “the ‘component’ method is superior to ‘mathematical’ methods
[including the logistic] in that it involves a separate analysis of the changes affecting each
component of the population,” although it also recognized that “unfortunately, statistical
information is often not sufficiently detailed or accurate to permit the formulation of the
specific assumptions needed in the projection of each component.”122
One explanation for the U.N.’s rejection of the logistic method is that its results may
have been less useful for some planning purposes than were the results of cohort component
projections. As one U.N. demographer stated about logistic projections at the 1954 meeting,
“since projections of this type are not analytic, they can give only very limited information,
120
Grauman, see n. 31, 26.
121
John Hajnal, “The Prospect for Population Forecasts,” in Proceedings, World Population Conference,
1954, Rome, by the United Nations (New York: United Nations, 1954), 43-44.
122
United Nations Population Division, Manual III: Methods for Population Projections by Sex and Age
(New York: United Nations, 1956).

228
both as regards the causes of changes in population trends, and the detailed effects upon
population structure.” Also, since future population growth in the logistic model was fully
determined by past growth, “alternative courses of future population growth, under different
assumptions, can hardly be considered by this method.”123 These two statements point to
the two uses of projections: planning for population and planning of population. Planning
for population required information about future overall size, as well as age and sex struc-
ture; planning of population required information about the effects of the components of
growth on overall population. Logistic projections were considered to “have limited value
for economic and governmental planning, since they yield no information on changes in the
detailed age and sex structure of a population.”124 Demographer Alfred Lotka had, in his
stable population model described in greater detail below, worked out the theoretical age
distribution of populations growing along logistic trajectories, but in 1949 Taeuber disparag-
ingly described this method of determining age structure as “pyramided assumptions that
limit the usefulness of the entire construct as a numerical evaluation of the potentialities of
the future.”125 The age distributions produced by the cohort component method were also
based on “pyramided assumptions” about the future course of fertility and mortality, yet
because they were the outcome of a direct calculation and based on more detailed data,
they could be seen as more empirical. This distinction was important for demography, a
field whose practitioners had claimed scientific authority by distinguishing demography from
population politics on the basis of its quantitative and empirical character, as discussed in
Chapter Two.
Tauber’s statement suggests a continuum between theory and data as the basis of popu-
lation projection: the more detailed the available data (whether observational or synthetic),
the less explicitly a projection relied on theory. Her statement also implied a higher value
attached to projections closer to the data end of the continuum than those closer to the
123
Grauman, see n. 31.
124
See n. 175, 258.
125
Taeuber, “Literature on Future Populations,” see n. 103, 8.

229
theory end. Where data were most limited, Taeuber described projections as “subjective
evaluations of the magnitude of the growth that may come into the future” and critiqued
the literature on East Asia — her area of expertise — as “merg[ing] almost imperceptibly
into the Neo-Malthusianism that views the problems of the East with emotion.”126 Her use
of the words “subjective” and “emotion” suggest a belief that the accumulation of more and
better data would and should eradicate the theoretical component of population projection,
and thereby protect demographic analysis from what she viewed as the contaminating ef-
fects of population politics. Taeuber herself seems to have overlooked the theory implicit in
all projections when she stated that “given long historical series of data and a universe of
stability or regular change, the computation of the component projection is either problem
or exercise in mathematics.”127 Yet, because the future can never be known in advance, “a
universe of stability or regular change” is a theoretical assumption. Moreover, even if one has
a long historical time series of vital rates, and can assume “regular change,” a decision still
must be made as to whether that “regular change” is linear or curvilinear and, if the latter,
what type of curve it follows. That Taeuber left this assumption unstated reflects the fact
that, by the 1940s, all projections — whether made with the logistic or cohort component
method — were based on the assumption that all populations follow the same logistic growth
trajectory characteristic of demographic transition. Indeed, the use of the logistic curve as a
substitute for cohort component projections in the absence of “good enough” data suggests
an acceptance of the idea that populations always grow according to an S-shaped curve.
Such acceptance entailed a view that the curve itself could be used to project population,
even if the curve was by then interpreted as a product of fertility and mortality declining
along reverse logistic trajectories, as implied by demographic transition theory, rather than
a product of population nearing its Malthusian limit, as implied by the logistic law.
Evidence of the general acceptance of the logistic as a trajectory of population growth is
that, even as the cohort component method was being institutionalized as the only legitimate
126
Taeuber, “Literature on Future Populations,” see n. 103, 8.
127
Ibid., 4.

230
approach, projections made using it began to take on and rely on some elements of the logistic
law of population growth, specifically the idea that population is a natural entity with
emergent properties that everywhere and always follows the same pattern of growth. Even
though the cohort component model formally allows populations to grow at any rate and in
any direction, in the absence of detailed data on which to base individualized projections for
specific countries, demographers using this method naturalized population growth in order
to make it predictable: if population growth exhibited the same uniformitarian principles as
other natural phenomena, then it could be predicted without reference to any particularities
of the population in question.
The work of Notestein’s wartime group at OPR on its projections for the 1944 Future
Population of Europe and the Soviet Union, 1940-1970, commissioned by the League of
Nations, illustrates how demographers naturalized and utilized the naturalization of de-
mographic transition and population growth to facilitate projection. In its projections for
Europe, Notestein’s group divided population growth into two components: a “natural” com-
ponent — fertility and mortality without the effects of war — and a “social” component —
all immigration and the excess mortality and reduced fertility produced by war. The group
then explicitly ignored the second component, projecting only the changes in Europe’s pop-
ulation that would have been expected in the absence of immigration and war, contending
that the results “reflect the natural sources of future population growth” and reveal “the
populations that might have been expected in the nations of Europe from an uninterrupted
development of the trends of the interwar period.”128 By labeling war and migration as
“social” and excluding them from projections of “natural” population change, Notestein’s
team elided the socioeconomic factors contributing to changes in mortality and fertility rates
— the determinants of so-called “natural” population change — even though demographic
transition theory explicitly attributed declines in those rates to the social change resulting
from industrialization and its sequelae. In so doing, Notestein’s team implicitly embedded
128
Notestein et al., see n. 12.

231
modernization theory — particularly its assumption that “modernization” advances over
time — in the demographic transition theory that drove their population projections.
Notestein’s group further naturalized the mortality and fertility declines characteristic
of demographic transition by constructing synthetic trajectories of those declines on the
basis of available data from European countries that were thought to represent different
stages of demographic transition. That is, Notestein and his group arrayed the then-current
mortality and fertility rates of the countries of Europe along a continuum from high to
low, and then assumed that this continuum traced a universal trajectory of demographic
transition, with those at the higher end occupying an “earlier” stage of transition and those
at the lower end occupying a “later” stage. Interpreting geographic difference through a
chronological framework based on an assumed universal linear trajectory of “progress” or
“development,” a practice described by Arland Thornton as “reading history sideways,” had
strong intellectual roots in the social sciences, and was the basis of modernization theory.129
By constructing these supposedly-universal trajectories, Notestein’s team treated Europe as
“anachronistic space” and the variation it represented as “panoptical time,” terms coined
by postcolonial literary scholar Anne McClintock to describe a vantage point from which
the whole of human history — in this case the history of population – can be read in a
single glance.130 Once they had constructed these synthetic trajectories, Notestein’s team
could predict future mortality and fertility for any country by locating it on the constructed
trajectories and reading forward.
Naturalizing trajectories of falling mortality and fertility associated with demographic
transition theory allowed demographers to predict demographic change without making ex-
plicit reference to social or economic change. In keeping with modernization theory, which
viewed “modernization” in either the social, economic, or political domain as a driver of
“modernization” in the other two domains, demographers presented declines in fertility and
mortality as a function of time, leaving its causal relationship with social, economic, and
129
Thornton, see n. 191.
130
McClintock, see n. 191.

232
political changes undefined. Just as Pearl’s logistic projection method had been a closed
system, using only past population data from the country in question and no information
about the potential of a given territory to support population growth, the cohort component
method was also a closed system, as it used only current population data from the country in
question and past population data from other countries, with no information about socioe-
conomic conditions in the country whose population was being projected, despite the fact
that demographic transition theory identified those conditions as the drivers of population
change. Naturalizing population change in this way was convenient, as social and economic
data were no more readily forthcoming for many parts of the world than were population
data, and as demographers were continually frustrated in their attempts to formalize and
quantify the relationship between population and social and economic variables, as will be
discussed in Chapter Four.
This idea of a natural pattern of population growth would have been compatible with
the continued use of the logistic projection method, with the logistic curve reinterpreted as
the trajectory of growth produced by demographic transition theory. Yet the logistic posed
three critical problems for global population projection. The first problem was simply that
fitting a logistic curve required three data points, and many countries of the world, even
by 1954, had had fewer than three censuses. The second was an analytic problem: logistic
curves are not additive, because the sum of two logistic curves is not itself necessarily a
logistic curve. Therefore, logistic projections for different countries or continents could not
be summed to produce a projection for regions or for the world as a whole. Moreover, were
the population of the world to be projected using the logistic method, the projected world
population at any date in the future could very well turn out to be less than the sum of the
projected populations of each country at that same date. The third problem was political: in
logistic projections, future population growth is completely determined by past population
growth, leaving no room for manipulation via policy, or planning of population. In contrast
to the cohort component method, which explicitly simulated future population growth on

233
the basis of assumed future rates of mortality, fertility, and migration, and could therefore
predict alternate futures given different policy alternatives, the logistic method produced
only one future. The cohort component projection method therefore offered greater leverage
for efforts to plan and manipulate future population growth.

3.3.2 Making Global Population Data: The U.N. Global

Census Programs

Having rejected the logistic projection method, the U.N. Population Commission instead at-
tempted to stimulate the production of more population data and more detailed population
data by assisting member states with census taking and the development of vital registration
systems. Its delegates agreed with Taeuber’s 1944 contention that “predictions which are
more than theoretical mathematical constructs requires the further development of the basic
census and vital statistics which constitute the raw materials for the construction of predic-
tions,”131 and with Kuczynski’s 1937 statement that “the actual population of a country can
be ascertained only through an enumeration of the people living at a given moment in that
country,” because “all figures obtained by other means than a genuine, all-inclusive census
are estimates or guesses.”132 However, the U.N. lacked the power to require member states
to collect and report demographic data or to collect data directly in all of the countries of
the world. Mechanisms of universal data collection, such as censuses and vital registration,
require the authority to compel people to submit to enumeration, and for that reason is done
mainly by states.
Despite the relative paucity of population data worldwide, the Population Commission
requested detailed data regularly from U.N. member states, hoping that such requests would
“stimulate governments to make available more detailed and more adequate data.”133 The
U.N.’s requests for demographic data — as well as other social and economic data — from
131
Taeuber, “The Development of Population Predictions in Europe and the Americas,” see n. 146, 338.
132
Kuczynski, Colonial Population, see n. 49, vii.
133
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1947-48, see n. 46, 639.

234
its member states made the establishment of statistical offices, vital registration systems,
and census apparati a prerequisite for states that wanted to be recognized as part of the
international community, particularly newly-independent postcolonial states.134 Following
Nigerian independence in 1960, the Federal Minister of Economic Development acknowledged
Nigeria’s obligation to provide population data to international agencies in a 1962 statement
that

it is our duty as a nation to see to it that we produce population census results

which have been thoroughly conducted, verified and appraised, and therefore
acceptable, without any shadow of doubt, to all governments of the world and to
all international bodies such as the United Nations and its agencies, the World
Bank, etc.. . . The impressions of the manner in which a country conducts its
affairs are one of the factors which earn for it the respect or disrespect of the rest
of the world.135

However, the U.N. also recognized that many member states lacked the resources and tech-
nical knowledge to produce the data it requested. In 1947, the U.N. sponsored a World
Statistical Congress, which “focused the attention of its members upon the uses for and the
needs of international organizations for adequate and reliable statistical information from na-
tional governments” and “brought to the attention of the United Nations the need for more
trained personnel in national statistical services as well as the need for providing advice and
assistance in developing national statistical systems.”136 Beginning in 1951, the U.N. offered
fellowships to government statisticians to enable them “to supplement their knowledge both
on theoretical aspects as well as on on practical operational aspects of statistics by train-
ing in statistically advanced countries and through short term training and demonstration
centres.” Twenty-nine fellowships were given in the first year of the program. Under the
same program, the U.N. offered expert assistance to member states “either in carrying out
134
Marion Fourcade has argued that the establishment of national economies also became critical in this pe-
riod. Marion Fourcade, “The Construction of a Global Profession: The Transnationalization of Economics,”
American Journal of Sociology 112, no. 1 (2006): 145–194.
135
S.A. Aluko, “How Many Nigerians? An Analysis of Nigeria’s Census Problems, 1901-63,” Journal of
Modern African Studies 3, no. 3 (1965): 371.
136
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1946-47, see n. 35, 567.

235
specific statistical projects or in developing national statistical services.” In 1951, these
countries included Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Haiti, Libya, Panama,
the Philippines, Syria, Thailand, and Yugoslavia.137
At its first meeting in 1947, the U.N. Population Commission began planning a worldwide
census program for 1950. Censuses are defined by four features: they are universal, counting
all people rather than a sample; individual, listing each person separately; instantaneous,
counting all people at the same time so as to produce a snapshot of population on a given
date; and periodic, repeated at regular intervals to document population changes.138 The
U.N. had neither the authority nor the resources to take a worldwide census; the closest it
could come was encouraging its member states to take censuses in the same year using com-
parable schedules. For 1950, the Inter-American Statistical Institute had planned a “Census
of the Americas,” in which several of the countries of North, Central, and South America
would take censuses in the same year and ask many of the same questions in order to produce
synoptic and commensurable data. The Population Commission suggested that the Census
of the Americas could serve as the basis for its worldwide census program, but acknowledged
that not all countries would be willing or able to take censuses in 1950: although the U.S.
and France and its colonies had traditionally taken censuses in years ending with zero (1940,
1950, etc.), the U.K. and its colonies took theirs in years ending with one (1941, 1951, etc.),
and none of these countries was interested in changing its census date. The U.N. compro-
mised by recommending “that all such member states as are proposing to take censuses in
or around 1950 use comparable schedules.”139 The FAO planned a world census of agricul-
ture for the same year, and the U.N. Statistical Commission offered technical assistance to
governments needing help carrying out either population or agricultural censuses. Together
with the FAO, the government of Mexico, and the Inter-American Statistical Institute, the
137
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1951 (New York: United Nations, 1951), 447.
138
In the U.S., Census Day is April 1. Although respondents can mail their forms back at any time, it
specifically asks for the names and attributes of people who would typically live at that residence on April
1.
139
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1946-47, see n. 35, 512.

236
U.N. Statistical Commission carried out a training course in census administration in 1948
in Mexico City, attended by more than sixty people from sixteen countries.140 After these
censuses, the U.N. developed special training programs in demographic analysis, particularly
for countries where demographic data were becoming available for the first time, to guide
government statisticians in analysis of their new data.141 The nature of training for statisti-
cians and demographers in the global south will be addressed at greater length in Chapter
Five.
In 1949, the U.N. Population Commission published a guide for member states in carrying
out their 1950(ish) censuses, titled Population Census Methods.142 This guide emphasized
the production of internationally-comparable data, and asked states to collect information
about each person’s sex, age, marital status, place of birth, citizenship, native language,
educational characteristics, fertility, economic characteristics, and relationship to household
head, as well as counting the total population and the number living in rural and urban
areas.143 The Population Commission recognized that member states collected data for their
own purposes, and not just to report to the U.N. It justified its own requests for data
from member states by arguing that states needed to collect these data anyway in order to
plan for economic development and social welfare programs. But even as the Commission
acknowledged that states might want additional information about their populations, it
implored member states not to sacrifice international comparability in these areas for the
sake of country-specific information. The Population Commission urged member states that
“in preparing estimates which are useful from a national point of view, it is highly desirable
that every country consider carefully the modifications which would facilitate comparisons
with those of other countries,” and that “where conformity to international standards is not
possible, it is desirable that the deviations from the standards be clearly indicated, or that
140
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1946-47, see n. 35, 564.
141
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1951, see n. 137, 569.
142
This guide followed the publication of “a series of Studies of Census Methods. . . for the guidance of
national statistical officers.” United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1946-47, see n. 35, 566.
143
United Nations Population Division, Population Census Methods, Population Studies (New York: United
Nations Department of Social Affairs, 1949), 3.

237
appropriate sub-totals be given in order that the desired figure may be derived,” sometimes
using the complex mathematical methods developed in the 1950s and 1960s and discussed
in the next part of this section.144
Given “the wide differences in national needs and statistical facilities,” the U.N. Popula-
tion Commission found it difficult to create a schedule that would work for all countries.145
Instead of attempting to “establish specific questions or instructions for census enumeration,”
the Commission recommended that “the techniques used in each census for obtaining the
recommended types of data should be adapted to the special circumstances and needs of the
country.”146 It also recognized that, within the list of information it requested, definitions and
categories were not obvious, even for “total population,” seemingly the most straightforward.
The U.N. lacked the authority to impose a definition of “total population” on its member
states, but the 1949 guide did recommend one: total population was to include everyone
resident in a country on census day, excluding foreign military and diplomatic personnel,
but including the country’s own military and diplomatic personnel living abroad.147 Despite
the inclusion of military and diplomatic personnel living abroad, the guide emphasized a
territorial definition of population, recommending the inclusion of people living within the
territory but outside of the social, economic, and political framework of the state, such as in-
digenous or nomadic groups.148 The guide similarly proposed definitions for each of the other
categories of information, acknowledging that none was transparently obvious. In order to
promote commensurability in population statistics beyond the 1950 censuses, the Popula-
tion Commission asked Notestein to compile a dictionary of demographic terms in English
and French, resulting in the 1958 publication by the U.N. and the IUSSP of the Multilingual
Demographic Dictionary, which established standards for the reporting of demographic data.
Although the Population Commission portrayed censuses as politically neutral scientific
144
United Nations Population Division, Manual I: Methdods of Estimating Total Population for Current
Dates, see n. 28, 3.
145
United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1946-47, see n. 35, 567.
146
United Nations Population Division, Population Census Methods, see n. 143, 3.
147
Ibid., 6.
148
Ibid., 7.

238
counts of population, its members recognized that censuses made political interventions and
statements, at both national and international levels, and that the politics of census taking
were inseparable from the reporting of results. Censuses have never been politically neutral:
the first country to have a regular individual-level census, the United States, instituted it as
a way to apportion representation to Congress among states and levy federal taxes. In many
colonies and newly-independent states, people avoided census enumeration, fearing that it
would be used for taxation or for the conscription of labor or military service, as indeed it
was during the colonial period, or sought to inflate census counts when such counts were
used for political representation.149 In Nigeria, for example, experts believed that the 1950
census — the last to be taken under colonial rule — under-counted the population, while
the 1962 census — the first to be taken under independent self-government — over-counted
the population. In 1950, it was reported that “many people erroneously associated the
census with taxation; moslems [sic] in the Islamic North opposed the counting of women in
purdah; and difficult terrain alongside inadequate transportation led to the omission of many
villages.”150 The 1962 census, which was to serve as the basis for representation in the new
federal legislature, was accompanied by much publicity and enthusiasm for being counted.
When the results were returned, each district accused the others of artificially inflating
their numbers to increase their political representation. As a result of these allegations and
additional evidence of overcounting in some districts, the Prime Minister nullified Nigeria’s
1962 census, repeating the whole process in 1963. The results of the 1962 census were never
published officially.151 The results of the 1963 census were just as controversial as those
of the 1962 census had been, but Nigerian government published them officially and sent
them to the U.N. and other international agencies, despite the fact that “many Nigerian
statisticians, administrators, and scholars are hesitant to accept the population total” given
by the 1963 census, which was 55.7 million, up from 42 million in the 1962 census and 36.5
149
Aluko, see n. 135, 376.
150
Babatunde A. Ahonsi, “Deliberate Falsification and Census Data in Nigeria,” African Affairs 87, no.
349 (1988): 555.
151
Aluko, see n. 135, 384.

239
million estimated just before the 1962 census.152 Nigeria’s 1973 census was also disputed,
so the 1963 figures remained in use for official national and international purposes until the
next census in 1991.153
As of 1982, Lebanon had not conducted a census in 50 years because the ruling Christian
majority in government (where representation was allocated on the basis of religion) prior to
1975 feared revealing the emergence of a Muslim majority in the population.154 In another
example, after China was admitted to the U.N., China “took the official position that Taiwan
was a province of China” and stopped publishing separate population data for Taiwan, a
place that was a major concern for demographers as a laboratory of demographic transition.
In such situations, delegates to the U.N. Population Division decided that they “had to
give priority to the political reality and not in the field of demography.”155 Just as censuses
made citizens legible to states, they also made states legible to the U.N. and other inter-
governmental organizations, and some states resisted aspects of that legibility, or used it
strategically to assert their sovereignty.
By 1954, the Population Division had released estimates of the populations of each con-
tinent for each decade from 1920 to 1950, shown in Table 3.1 and graphed in Figure 3.2.
These numbers, however, came with such qualifications as “it should be noted that many of
these estimates are subject to various errors and that even the resulting continental totals
are not entirely trustworthy,” and “it is not possible now to make any firm estimate for that
fifth of mankind which inhabits the Chinese mainland.”156 Indeed, these numbers reflected
a recent upward revision of China’s population by 100 million on the basis of a 1953 census
there.157 The qualifications the Population Division made to the data it released indicated
152
Aluko, see n. 135, 385.
153
Ahonsi, see n. 150.
154
Donald P. Warwick, Bitter Pills: Population Policies and their Implementation in Eight Developing
Countries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 23-24.
155
See n. 88.
156
United Nations Population Division, “The Past and Future Population of the World and its Continents,”
in Proceedings, World Population Conference, 1954, Rome, by the United Nations (New York: United
Nations, 1954), 270.
157
M.A. El-Badry and Shigemi Kono, “Demographic Estimates and Projections,” Population Bulletin of
the United Nations 19 (1986): 35–43.

240
the difficulty of coordinating a worldwide census program. But while this difficulty stemmed,
in large part, from the complications of producing comparable censuses between countries, it
also stemmed from the challenges of carrying out national censuses. As stated above, taking
a national census requires that the state have the power and resources to find its citizens
and compel them to be enumerated. The former task is particularly difficult in the absence
of communication infrastructure — particularly a national postal system based on home
addresses — and the latter is difficult when states are weak or distrusted by their subjects
or citizens. Censuses are also costly propositions, and the U.N. Population Commission ac-
knowledged that “the cost of periodic detailed censuses is large in relation to the financial
resources of the governments” of many countries, particularly those that had just wrested
their independence from imperial powers.

Table 3.1: World Population by Continent, as Estimated by the U.N. in 1954 (millions)
Continent 1920 1930 1940 1950

World 1,830 2,019 2,235 2,454

Africa 139 154 173 198
Americas 207 244 277 330
Northern America (excluding Mexico) 117 135 146 168
Latin America 90 109 131 162
Asia 990 1,080 1,199 1,320
Europe 486 531 576 593
Oceania 8.8 10.4 11.3 13

Systems of vital registration were even more difficult and costly to implement than were
censuses. In 1953, the U.N. published Principles for a Vital Statistics System to guide
member states in setting up vital registries. Other manuals followed, and the U.N. made
“innumerable exhortations” to member states at international conferences urging them to set
up vital registries.158 However, few countries that did not already have national registration
158
John Cleland, “Demographic Data Collection in Less Developed Countries 1946-1996,” Population Stud-
ies 50, no. 3 (1996): 435.

241
 Figure 3.2: World Population, as Estimated by the U.N. in 1954 (millions)

systems developed them in the second half of the twentieth century. Outside of Europe,
North America, and Oceania, vital registration was most prevalent in Latin America, and
birth registration was more complete than was death registration.159 Elsewhere, registration
was mostly limited to small countries, such as the island states of the Caribbean and South
Pacific, Egypt, Hong Kong, Jordan, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Tunisia.160 One
major obstacle to vital registries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa was that these systems
— as in all countries — rely on reporting by the people who experience the events, usually
parents in the case of births and surviving relatives in the case of deaths. When such events
typically occur in hospitals, hospital personnel can be required to report them, but when
such events do not, registration relies on compulsion. In the case of death registration,
compulsion may take the form of fines or imprisonment, but enforcement could be costly
and time-consuming. In the case of birth registration, parents in countries with strong
bureaucracies are compelled to register their children by the knowledge that children will
need proof of identity, age, and citizenship, but in many parts of the world, such proof
was irrelevant.161 Incomplete birth registration made it difficult to track such socioeconomic
159
Cleland, see n. 158, 434-435.
160
Ibid., 434.
161
Ibid., 435.

242
indicators as infant mortality, even with good mortality registration.

3.3.3 Making Population Data Global: Sampling and

Indirect Estimation

The 1950 world census program demonstrated that universal censuses with detailed age and
sex categories and vital registration systems were simply not feasible for many parts of the
world. Recognizing that their hope of developing a center of calculation for global popula-
tion data remained out of reach, delegates to the U.N. Population Commission responded in
two ways. First, they began to promote the collection of data on a sample basis rather than
universally, as recently-developed statistical methods promised the generalizability of sample
results to whole populations within quantifiable confidence limits. Second, they promoted
the development by demographers of mathematical methods to smooth and synthesize un-
ruly or unavailable population data, rendering them tractable to demographic analysis and
population projection. Through the use of such methods, the U.N. Population Commission
made population data global in the sense of turning the information it had into the quan-
titative and commensurable data it needed for the purposes of tracking and projecting the
world’s population.

Sampling

In 1960 the U.N. again sponsored a world census program and, between 1958 and 1963,
comprehensive national censuses were carried out in 157 countries and territories, enumerat-
ing about 70% of the world’s population.162 For many countries, this was the second census
ever taken, allowing for the first time the calculation of a rate of population growth in the
absence of vital registration systems. However, by the time the Population Commission be-
gan preparations for the 1960 world census program, its delegates had accepted that many
member states would not be able to carry out complete enumerations. For that reason, the
162
Symonds and Carder, see n. 6, 122, fn. 3.

243
Population Commission began to promote sample surveys as an alternative to complete enu-
merations, stating that “a country which finds it impossible to conduct a census can employ
sampling techniques under suitable conditions to secure estimates of basic data of the kind
traditionally obtained in other countries through a census.”163 The U.N. had already begun
to recommend sample vital registration systems where complete registries were infeasible,
and India had established just such a system by the late 1950s.164
Sampling is a statistical technique developed in the first half of the twentieth century and
introduced into the U.S. Census in 1940, whereby a small part of a population of interest — a
sample — statistically stands in for the whole. Sampling resembled political arithmetic in the
sense that information about an entire population was mathematically generated from some
other kind of information — in the case of sampling, from the same information collected for a
group of people expected to represent the whole in a statistical sense. Early forms of sampling
relied on “representative populations,” such as Muncie, Indiana in Robert and Helen Lynd’s
famous “Middletown” studies, and Indianapolis in the fertility survey discussed in Chapter
Two.165 However, because such studies as Middletown and Indianapolis aimed to identify
the “typical,” they did not facilitate the study of systematic variation or deviation from the
“typical.”166 In contrast, random sampling — in which each member of the target population
has an equal chance of being selected for the sample — has the potential to capture the
diversity of the larger population. Sampling made frequent nationally-representative surveys
feasible in large countries whose populations were generally known and locatable, such as
the United States.
Statisticians distinguished sampling from political arithmetic by developing sophisticated
methods to quantify the generalizability of results obtained from a sample. As the Population
Commission stated in its manual for the 1960 world census program,
163
United Nations Population Division, 1960 World Population Census Programme: Sampling Methods and
Population Censuses (New York: Statistical Office of the United Nations, 1957), 2.
164
See n. 116, 52.
165
For more on the “Middletown” studies, see Igo, see n. 143.
166
For the history of sampling, see Desrosières, see n. 26, 210-235.

244
 one of the most important features of modern sampling is that the accuracy of
the results of a scientifically planned sample enquiry can be calculated in advance
with a fair amount of precision, in the sense that for each figure to be estimated
one can state the probable limits of error of estimation. This feature enables one
to design a sample survey in accordance with the precision required for the uses
that are to be made of the data, or with the precision possible within the range
of permissible costs. In other words, a sample can be devised which will yield
results of specified precision at minimum cost or results of maximum precision
at a given cost.167

As this passage indicates, with a sample survey, scientists could optimize the tradeoff between
cost and data quality in advance and return results with a quantitative estimate of their
validity.
The U.S. Census Bureau used sampling for the first time in the 1940 Census. The
Constitution mandates that all persons resident in the U.S. must be counted every 10 years.
The 1940 Census, as was the case with every census prior to and since 1940, counted and
listed basic information for each person. However, additional questions were asked of every
twentieth person.168 These questions included place of birth of father and mother, native
language, whether the person was a veteran of the U.S. military, questions about the person’s
participation in Social Security, occupation and industry, and for women who had ever been
married, age at first marriage, number of marriages, and number of live births.169 A similar
procedure was followed in 1950. In the censuses of 1960-2000, selected households were sent
a “long form,” which included additional questions for all members of the household and
questions about the household itself.170 These procedures allowed for the collection of much
more information than would have been feasible for the entire population, but also linked
these sample questions to the full enumeration, facilitating the extrapolation of results to
the entire population. The Census Bureau also uses sample surveys to test questions ahead
of the full census and to estimate undercount or check the reliability of answers afterwards.
167
United Nations Population Division, 1960 World Population Census Programme: Sampling Methods and
Population Censuses, see n. 163, 2-3.
168
The sample included persons enumerated on lines 14 and 29 of the census forms, about 5% of the
population.
169
[Link] (accessed 4/1/2015).
170
After the 2000 Census, the Census Bureau replaced the long form with the American Community Survey.

245
 The techniques devised by statisticians to calculate the accuracy of sample results account
only for sampling errors — that is, the probability that any finding is an artifact of sampling
and does not accurately represent the population as a whole. Statistical techniques do not
account for other source of error, such as “response errors, errors arising from incomplete
samples, faulty procedures of estimation, errors arising from inadequate preparation of the
questionnaire, defective field and office procedures and faulty analysis of the data,” all of
which had the potential to arise in full censuses as well as in sample surveys.171 Moreover,
statistical estimates of sampling errors assume that samples are drawn from a “sampling
frame,” composed of prior information about all potential “sample units,” whether those
units are individuals, households, cities, or villages.172 A complete enumeration is, therefore, a
prerequisite of a statistically-valid sample. For that reason, the U.N. Population Commission
did not recommend sample surveys as a substitute for a complete enumeration, but suggested
that they could fill in temporarily and “may well serve as an experimental census paving
the way to a complete census to be executed in the near future.”173 However, developing
an appropriate sampling frame in countries that had never had a census was a challenging
task made more difficult by the fact that, in such countries, lists of taxpayers tended to be
incomplete or inaccurate, and other modes of identifying sample units — such as a postal
system — nonexistent.174 The Population Commission recommended that, in such cases,
villages should serve as the sampling unit. It also acknowledged that “when deciding on
the size of the sample it is rarely possible to fix on a definite sampling error in advance to
work out the sample size.” Rather, the sample size was usually determined “by the personnel
available to analyse the results, the available transport, and by the money which a particular
country is prepared to spend.”175
Given that “sample” censuses and systems of vital registration in countries that lacked
171
United Nations Population Division, 1960 World Population Census Programme: Sampling Methods and
Population Censuses, see n. 163, 10.
172
Ibid., 14.
173
Ibid., 77.
174
Ibid., 79.
175
Ibid., 79-80.

246
complete enumerations and registrations usually covered the segments of the population that
were particularly tractable to enumeration, such as those living in urban areas, they were
typically not representative of the country as a whole. As the U.N. Population Commis-
sion acknowledged, “one of the cardinal principles in drawing a ‘representative’ sample. . . is
random selection,” which is possible only with a known sampling frame.176 In the absence
of complete enumerations, the generalizability of samples could not be calculated with any
statistical reliability, and results resembled political arithmetic much more than they resem-
bled the sample surveys that were becoming a routine part of social science research in the
United States. Nonetheless, their association with this new “scientific” form of research gave
estimates derived in this manner more authority among scientists and policy makers than
those described in Kuczynski’s survey of demographic data in the British Colonial Empire.

Indirect Estimation

From the perspective of the U.N. Population Commission, it seems that any number was
better than none. For that reason, the U.N. published a series of manuals in the 1950s
and 1960s to aid government statistical bureaus in estimating population size and structure
and vital rates in the absence of census and vital data. The first manual, published in
1952, stated that “even where a high degree of reliability cannot be attained in view of the
limited information at hand, it is still important to obtain at least some kind of a population
estimate.. . . If an accurate estimate cannot be made under given conditions, this should
not stop efforts to produce as good an estimate as circumstances permit.”177 The manual
provided instructions for estimating total current population in circumstances ranging from
a complete lack of quantitative data to complete coverage by censuses and vital registries. In
the latter case, demographers could estimate current population size by subtracting deaths
and adding births and net migration to the population at the most recent census.178 In the
176
United Nations Population Division, Manual I: Methdods of Estimating Total Population for Current
Dates, see n. 28, 44, emphasis in the original.
177
Ibid., 3.
178
Ibid., 38.

247
former case, the manual recommended making “the best conjecture that can be made under
given circumstances.”179
Some such conjectures were made on the basis of travel reports from the nineteenth
century or the types of colonial administrative reports surveyed by Kuczynski between the
wars. In some cases, figures more closely resembled conventions than estimates. For example,
the manual stated that the population of Ethiopia “has been estimated at a round 15 million,
it being understood that this figure represents only a rough approximation. In the absence of
further information, this same figure is also used as an estimate of probable population size
in the past, and is likely to be retained for several years in the future unless new attempts
are made to obtain a more reliable estimate.”180 However, the manual warned against using
the same estimate year after year if it was suspected that the population of a given country
was increasing or decreasing. For example, in the case of Liberia, it stated that “although
the population of Liberia was estimated by a rough conjecture in 1947 at the round number
of 1,600,000 it was estimated in 1949 at 1,648,000 on the assumption that population is
increasing at a rate of approximately 1.5 per cent per annum.”181 In this example, both the
baseline population and its rate of growth were conjectures; the resulting figure gave the
impression of population growth, but added a much greater sense of precision than either
the baseline estimate or the estimated rate of growth warranted. Indeed, estimating a rate
of population growth or decline in the absence of vital statistics was itself no small task,
and the manual recommended using “visible evidence of population growth or decline,” such
as desertion of settlements or building of new settlements, knowledge of mariage customs
and sexual practices, and knowledge of such events as warfare or drought.182 The manual in
fact cited examples of political arithmetic from Kuczynski’s survey — examples Kuczynski
himself used to impugn colonial data collection — to illustrate how conjectural estimates
179
United Nations Population Division, Manual I: Methdods of Estimating Total Population for Current
Dates, see n. 28, 10.
180
Ibid., 10.
181
Ibid., 10.
182
Ibid., 16.

248
might be made.183
Given that censuses are generally taken at intervals of at least ten years, estimating
current population between censuses requires the same techniques and data as projecting
future population. Both types of calculation require knowledge of fertility and mortality
rates, either current or anticipated. But, as late as 1963, the Population Bulletin of the
United Nations reported that, while 99% of the populations of “developed countries” were
documented by vital registration, only 10% of the populations of “developing countries” were
so documented. Indeed, the existence of vital registration had become one of the markers of
“development.” Moreover, for 28 countries that were thought to have collectively held 36%
of the world’s population, the U.N. could obtain “no satisfactory data” on vital rates.184
To remedy this deficit, in 1968 the U.N. Population Commission published a manual
titled Estimating Basic Demographic Measures from Incomplete Data, written by Ansley
Coale, a former student of Frank Notestein who had succeeded Notestein as director of OPR
in 1959. As a graduate student, Coale had developed the methods Notestein’s team used to
synthesize the data necessary to drive the cohort component model for OPR’s projections
of Europe and the Soviet Union, described above.185 While working on this project, Coale
developed the concept of model life tables, which would play a large part in the methods he
later developed to indirectly estimate vital rates from incomplete data.
Model life tables are premised on the observation that life tables made from detailed
empirical data show strong regularities. On the basis of data from Europe and a few other
parts of the world, Coale and his student Paul Demeny developed a set of four “families”
of life tables, each exhibiting a different shape to the curve of age-specific mortality and
including model life tables for all levels of mortality from expectation of life at birth of 20
183
United Nations Population Division, Manual I: Methdods of Estimating Total Population for Current
Dates, see n. 28, 12.
184
Cited in Dudley Kirk, “Natality in the Developing Countries,” in Fertility and Family Planning: A
World View, ed. S.J. Behrman, Leslie Corsa Jr., and Ronald Freedman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1969), 76.
185
See n. 88; Although Coale was not listed as an author of the resulting publication, he was credited with
designing and overseeing the approach in the Acknowledgments. Notestein et al., see n. 12.

249
years (for women) to 75 years (for women), in five-year increments.186 If mortality for any
five-year age group is known in a given population, it can be matched to the mortality for
that age group in a model life table from the appropriate “family” to estimate mortality
in all other age groups. The life table “families” — North, South, East, and West, were
named for the regions of Europe from which the empirical life tables originated. If the
shape of the mortality curve for the population in question is known, it can be matched to
the most similarly-shaped “family” of model life tables. In the absence of such knowledge,
demographers generally select the West model, which is based on empirical data from East
Asia, Canada, Israel, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand as well as Western Europe,
and is therefore considered the most general of the four.187 Once an appropriate model life
table is identified, the mortality rates from that life table can stand in analytically for the
unknown mortality rates in the population in question.
Closely related to model life tables are model stable populations. The concept of a stable
population was developed by Alfred Lotka between 1907 and 1925 to describe “a material
system in which the physical conditions vary with time” such that “certain individual con-
stituent elements may have a transitory existence as such, each lasting just so long as its
conditions and those of its neighborhood continue within certain limits.”188 Lotka’s language
was deliberately vague, as he intended his stable population model to describe any set of
living or non-living things where the individual things are subject to wear and eventual re-
tirement, whether the “things” are people or industrial components. A stable population is
one that is subject to constant rates of addition (fertility) and subtraction (mortality), and
is closed to migration (or in the industrial example, does not permit the addition of used
components and does not permit the removal of components that are still functional). When
186
Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1966).
187
William Brass et al., The Demography of Tropical Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968),
123; United Nations Population Division, Manual IV: Methods of Estimating Basic Demographic Measures
from Incomplete Data, Manuals on Methods of Estimating Population (New York: United Nations Depart-
ment of Social Affairs, 1967), 8.
188
Alfred J. Lotka, “Studies on the Mode of Growth of Material Aggregates” (1907): 199–216, 199, emphasis
in the original.

250
rates of fertility and mortality remain constant over long periods of time, in the absence of
migration, populations grow at a constant rate (positive, negative, or zero) and the propor-
tions in each age group remain constant (stable). The stable population model therefore
links the mortality, fertility, and age structure of a population, such that any two of these
pieces of information are sufficient to derive the third. For any given population that can
be presumed stable, once a model life table is selected, the analyst needs only a sense of the
fertility rate or rate of natural increase to select a model stable population, which provides all
of the additional information required to project future population growth — age structure
and age-specific rates of fertility and mortality.
But how could demographers fit real populations to model life tables and model stable
populations in the absence of detailed information on mortality and fertility? During the
1960s, Coale led a project on demography in Sub-Saharan Africa that explored just this
question, developing methods of indirect estimation of mortality and fertility rates that are
still taught in demography courses. Published in 1968 as The Demography of Tropical Africa,
the project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Population
Council (these three organizations will be discussed at greater length in Chapter Four), the
Milbank Memorial Fund, and the Carnegie Institution at the instigation of Frank Lorimer,
who had already done substantial research in Africa and had established institutional con-
nections there.189 This project was important to OPR demographers because, by the time
of its proposal in the early 1960s, several African states and colonies had taken censuses,
but much of the data had not yet been analyzed, leaving Africa the most difficult continent
for which to estimate current population and vital rates and project future population. Fur-
thermore, in contrast to Kuczynski’s earlier assertion, preliminary analysis had “indicate[d]
the exciting possibility that African fertility is higher than that observed in any other large
population in the past.”190 But, despite the increased availability of censuses in Africa, U.S.
189
William Brass to Frank Lorimer, Oct. 1, 1961,folder 2, box 1.
190
Ansley J. Coale to Members of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the OPR, Nov. 25, 1960,folder 2,
box 1.

251
demographers recognized that “data from successive censuses cannot generally be used for
reliable estimates of population changes, because of the possible influence of variations in
procedures and circumstances on the calculation of differences.”191 That is, differences in
population counts between the 1950 and 1960 censuses resulted not only from actual pop-
ulation change, but also from changes in census coverage and enumeration methods, and
therefore could not be used to estimate fertility and mortality rates. Moreover, vital statis-
tics were nearly nonexistent and demographers concluded that “information on age [wa]s also
unreliable.”192 For these reasons, Coale described his project as an “experimental program
for obtaining reliable information on fertility, mortality and migration in situations where
one cannot reasonably expect a rapid development of effective vital registration systems of a
classic type in the near future.”193 This approach to demography in Africa suggests that the
continent continued to serve as a “living laboratory” for metropolitan scientific endeavors,
both natural and human, even after formal decolonization.194
In addition to Coale and Lorimer, the project team included Coale’s former student Paul
Demeny, then an economist at the University of Michigan; Belgian demographer Etienne van
de Walle; Don F. Heisel, a field associate with the Population Council; Anatole Romaniuk,
a demographer at the University of Ottowa; and William Brass, a medical demographer at
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Brass, who had previously worked
in the British Colonial Service’s East African Statistical Office, took the lead on developing
methods of “abstracting valid information from bad data.”195 The methods he developed
were remarkably reliable, and are now known as indirect estimation methods or simply
Brass methods. By 1988, Brass had become so well known for having developed a method
to estimate just about any measure for which data were lacking that, when rain broke out
191
Frank Lorimer, “Notes of African Population Studies,” n.d.,folder 2, box 1, emphasis in the original.
192
Ibid.
193
Ansley J. Coale, “Memorandum on Experimental Studies of Population Dynamics in Areas Without
Effective Civil Registers — With Special Reference to Africa (Draft),” Mar. 22, 1960,folder 2, box 1.
194
The phrase “living laboratory” was used initially by Lord Hailey in response to the 1938 publication of
the African Survey. Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of
Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 5.
195
See n. 88; Coale to Faculty Advisory Committee of the OPR, Nov. 25, 1960, see n. 190.

252
at an OPR picnic, one student joked that they “should use the Brass method for keeping off
the rain drops.”196
Coale has described Brass as believing on the one hand that his methods were “no
substitute for good data,” and on the other that “all data are guilty until proved innocent.”197
This duality in Brass’s thought exemplifies the recursive relationship between data and
analysis. Demographers needed to analyze the data they received from governmental and
nongovernmental agencies in order to demtermine population dynamics, but in order to
make those data amenable to analysis they often needed to use analytical methods and
mathematical identities — along with theories about how populations change — to smooth
and standardize the data they had and synthesize the data they didn’t have.
Because vital registration systems were either nonexistent or incomplete in most sub-
Saharan African countries, Brass developed methods for estimating mortality and fertility
from cross-sectional surveys and censuses.198 These methods ensured identity between the
numerator and denominator of vital rates, and depended on asking women questions about
their childbearing histories and their surviving relatives. To gauge fertility, women were
asked two questions: how many children they had had in the last year (or some other period
of time) — which Brass termed “current” fertility — and how many children they had had
altogether — which Brass termed “retrospective” fertility.199 Brass assumed that answers
to both questions would be systematically biased, but that by triangulating these biases,
demographers could arrive at a plausible set of age-specific fertility rates for the population
in question.
Brass expected that reports of current fertility would exhibit systematic bias in the
reference period. Drawing from experience with survey research on household consumption
in the United States and the U.K., he argued that, when asked how many children they had
196
See n. 88.
197
Ibid.
198
William Brass, “Demographic Data Analysis in Less Developed Countries: 1946-1996,” Population Stud-
ies 50, no. 3 (1996): 453.
199
Brass et al., see n. 187, 90.

253
had in the last year, women might not actually report for the last year, but might report for
the last eight months or sixteen months or some other period of time. Brass conjectured that
the actual reference period women used to answer the question would be the same for all
women in a given society, regardless of their age. Therefore, questions about current fertility
might not accurately reflect the number of children born in the previous year, but would
accurately reflect differences in fertility across age groups. That is, answers to questions on
current fertility would accurately describe the shape of the curve of age-specific fertility in
a given society but not necessarily its level. To determine the level, Brass used answers to
questions about retrospective fertility only among younger women, who were thought most
able to accurately report the number of children they had ever had because these events would
have happened more recently and therefore would be less subject to memory lapses.200 Brass
therefore used the retrospective fertility of young women to derive a correction factor to be
applied to reports of current fertility across the age spectrum and thereby produce a more
accurate schedule of age-specific fertility for the society in question.201 Similarly, infant and
child mortality rates were estimated by asking women in each age group how many of their
children had died, and adult mortality rates were estimated by asking women whether their
parents and siblings were still alive.202 With this information, any population could be fit to
a model life table and model stable population, which then provided all of the information
needed to estimate the current age structure of the population and project its future size
and structure.
Coale and Brass recognized that censuses and surveys did not accurately capture ages in
societies where people “do not know their exact ages and are not fundamentally interested in
knowing them,” as was the case in most of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.203 The
fact that censuses and surveys asked about something that was of no relevance to the people
200
Brass et al., see n. 187, 91; Brass, “Demographic Data Analysis in Less Developed Countries: 1946-1996,”
see n. 198, 456.
201
Brass et al., see n. 187, 92.
202
Brass et al., see n. 187, 104; Brass, “Demographic Data Analysis in Less Developed Countries: 1946-
1996,” see n. 198, 461, 463-464.
203
Brass et al., see n. 187, 13.

254
being asked — their age in years from birth — suggests that the information they collected
was intended to benefit the international agencies that analyzed the data rather than the
people the data described. In some parts of Africa, following the pattern of the colonial
period, enumerators classified girls and women into the categories of under one year old, one
year to puberty, puberty to menopause, and post-menopausal, and classified boys and men
into the categories under one year old, one year to taxpaying age, and taxpaying ages.204
These categories suggest the gendered division of productive and reproductive labor that
characterized many colonial societies. In other places, enumerators used the appearance of
subjects, their memories of major events, and their marital status and childbearing histories
to estimate their ages, though such methods often imposed the enumerators’ ideas and values
— regarding, for example, how old a married woman “must” be — onto the people they
recorded. In preparation for Nigeria’s 1962 census, the Census Office asked each local and
district council to set up a Historical Event Committee to submit to the Census Office local
historical events that could be used to estimate individual ages. Such events included

wars; the accession and deaths of Obas and important chiefs; traditional local
activities associated with particular periods and seasons; the regrouping of towns
and villages; the deaths of prominent citizens; the building of new roads and tar-
ring of existing ones; the opening of schools, churches, hospitals, dispensaries,
town halls, post offices, markets, waterworks, and other public institutions; spec-
tacular fires and other disasters; riots, murders, land disputes, and other impor-
tant cases; the arrival or departure of remarkable officials, including residents,
district officers, doctors, headmasters, Imams, and clergy; spectacular marriage
ceremonies, funerals, or other social events in the area; local, regional, and na-
tional elections; the introduction of various types of currency; the introduction
of taxation and changes in tax laws; the introduction of free primary education;
the attainment of independence.205

The Census Office compiled and standardized the list for each local area and for the country
as a whole, and distributed it to census enumerators to assist them in recording ages.
Age heaping — the tendency to round ages to years ending in zero or five — is prevalent
in all societies, even where people do typically know their exact ages. Censuses and surveys
204
Brass et al., see n. 187, 14.
205
Aluko, see n. 135, 379.

255
in anglophone African countries exhibited this common pattern, with the numbers reported
at ages ending in zero or five much greater than those reported at other ages. In francophone
African countries, enumerators were cautioned to be wary of reporting ages ending in zero or
five, which resulted in inverse age-heaping — the number reported at those ages were much
lower than those reported at other ages.206 Demographers used model stable populations to
smooth distorted age distributions, but fitting an actual population to a model stable pop-
ulation required reliance on vital rates calculated for reported ages, introducing circularity
into the process.
As a result of the introduction of more regular censuses, sampling, and indirect estima-
tion, by the mid-1960s the U.N. Population Commission had access to global demographic
data that were detailed enough to track the growth of the world’s population and project
it into the future. In many cases, these data were what Martha Lampland has termed
“provisional numbers” — numbers that stand in for unknown values to facilitate “formaliz-
ing practices,” such as the quantification of future population to plan social and economic
development.207 Lampland argues that provisional numbers are often used when an actual
value is unknown, but some number is needed to get on with the work at hand. In the case
of population data in the early postwar period, the provisional numbers produced through
sample censuses and vital registration systems, and by indirect estimation, allowed demog-
raphers to get on with the work of projecting population into the future, which, in turn,
allowed planners to get on with their work. Moreover, the U.N. Population Commission
viewed incomplete censuses and sample vital registries as progress toward complete coverage
— rendering populations enumerable by establishing infrastructures for enumeration and
teaching people to think of themselves in age, sex, and other socially-relevant categories.
As the production of detailed statistics was considered a characteristic of development, en-
couraging the collection of population data — even provisional data — could be viewed as
206
Brass et al., see n. 187, 34.
207
Martha Lampland, “False Numbers as Formalizing Practices,” Social Studies of Science 40, no. 3 (2010):
378.

256
promoting modernization. Over time, as the U.N. acquired more accurate population data,
it made new estimates for population figures at earlier dates. However, although the creators
of these data recognized their provisional nature, as Lampland points out, the farther one
gets from the process of data production, the more faith are placed in the data: for lack of
alternatives, policy makers and scientists relied uncritically on the population data published
by the U.N. for planning and modeling purposes.
The validity of the stable population model rested on the assumption that the population
in question was, in fact, stable — that is, that it had experienced a constant mortality
schedule and birth rate for the last several decades, and that it was closed to migration.
Such assumptions were both improbable and untestable, given the paucity of historical data,
and relied on demographic transition theory, which held that, prior to “modernization,”
all societies had high and constant mortality (though subject to fluctuations resulting from
famine and epidemics), high and constant fertility, and negligible migration, and were thus
stable. With this assumption, demographic transition theory — like modernization theory
— elided the history and politics of so-called “pre-transitional” societies, placing them in
an ethnographic present that implied cultural stasis and excluded these societies from world
history and politics.208 Coale argued that the assumption of unchanging fertility was valid
for “developing countries where the population is little affected by international migration,
and in the absence of major catastrophes such as wars or great epidemics.”209 However, he
recognized that, even in these countries, mortality had been declining since the late 1940s
as a result of international public health interventions. These mortality declines and the
population growth they stimulated will be discussed at greater length in the next section
and in Chapter Four. In the 1960s, Coale and Demeny experimented with the applicability
of stable population models to populations with constant fertility and declining mortality,
which they termed “quasi-stable.”210 From this research, they derived a table of adjustments
208
Roger Sanjek, “The Ethnographic Present,” Man 26, no. 4 (1991): 609–628.
209
United Nations Population Division, Manual IV: Methods of Estimating Basic Demographic Measures
from Incomplete Data, see n. 187, 25.
210
Ansley J. Coale, “Estimates of Various Demographic Measures through the Quasi-Stable Age Distribu-

257
that could be applied to vital rates estimated from stable populations to account for falling
mortality.211

3.4 Challenges to Demographic Transition Theory

The population estimates and projections produced using indirect estimation methods and
the cohort component projection method relied, at least to some extent, on demographic
transition theory. While the cohort component method of population projection is formally
independent of any theory of population growth, in practice, demographers and others em-
ploying the method assumed that the demographic history of Western Europe and North
America predicted the demographic future of the rest of the world. Dudley Kirk, a research
associate at OPR during the war and a demographer for the U.S. Department of State after
the war, encapsulated this assumption in a 1944 article in the American Sociological Review,
where he stated that

in regard to demographic matters the different countries of the world may be

considered as on a single continuum having both spatial and temporal signifi-
cance. It is spatial in that the degree of development is related to the cultural
and geographical accessibility to the most advanced countries. It is temporal
in that each country in its development is following a general historical pattern
common to all.212

Demographic transition theory, like modernization theory, elided the historical connections
between the supposedly more and less “advanced” parts of the world, obscuring the crucial
fact that Europe’s demographic transition had relied on extracting wealth from the global
south and resulted in sending excess population to other parts of the world.
tion,” in Emerging Techniques in Population Research, ed. Milbank Memorial Fund (New York: Milbank
Memorial Fund, 1963); Paul Demeny, “Estimating Vital Rates for Populations in the Process of Destabiliza-
tion,” Demography 2 (1965): 516–530.
211
United Nations Population Division, Manual IV: Methods of Estimating Basic Demographic Measures
from Incomplete Data, see n. 187, 26.
212
Dudley Kirk, “Population Changes and the Postwar World,” American Sociological Review 9, no. 1 (Feb.
1944): 29.

258
 In the immediate postwar period, new trends in population dynamics challenged the very
core of demographic transition theory — the proposition that all populations had undergone
or would undergo a decline in mortality followed by a decline in fertility, both resulting
from an inevitable process of modernization. Two specific trends appeared as anomalous
to the predictions of demographic transition theory. First, during and after World War
II, birthrates rose in supposedly post-transitional populations, suggesting that fertility did
not necessarily follow a one-way downward trajectory. Second, medical and public health
interventions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America had begun to reduce mortality rates much
more quickly than they had historically declined in Europe. Moreover, these mortality
declines were not accompanied by the forms of economic development that were expected to
reduce fertility, raising the question of whether the demographic transition model — if even
applicable to Europe itself — could be applied outside Europe. As Taeuber stated, “the a
priori assumption that the future populations would develop as orderly extensions of the
trends of interwar years became increasingly questionable in the postwar period.”213
The wartime and postwar rise in fertility in North America, Western Europe, and Aus-
tralia — now known as the “baby boom” — defied all population projections for those areas
produced before World War II. In each projection Whelpton and Thompson made of the
U.S. population after 1928, they successively revised their assumptions of future fertility
downward, reflecting the sharp fertility decline experienced during the worldwide Great De-
pression. From our current vantage point, it seems clear that fertility rates fell to extreme
and unsustainable lows in the 1930s as a result of the global economic depression. During
the Depression, however, demographers interpreted the fertility decline they witnessed in
Western Europe and North America as part of a longer pattern that had begun in the nine-
teenth century and would soon lead to absolute population decline.214 In OPR’s wartime
projections for Europe, Notestein and his colleagues concluded that “population growth will
cease and decline will begin within a generation in Europe west of the 1937 boundaries of
213
Taeuber, “Literature on Future Populations,” see n. 103, 2.
214
Van Bavel, see n. 174.

259
the Soviet Union.”215 But, even by the time Notestein and his team published their pro-
jections, fertility had risen dramatically in Western Europe, North America, and Australia.
In response, Thompson and Whelpton began to revise their projections upward in 1943. In
1948, the National Resources Planning Committee of the United States commissioned new
projections from them, as their 1943 projections were clearly too low, but already by 1949,
the 1948 projections also had “proved too conservative even in their maximum estimates of
number of births.”216 In a 1957 dissertation, OPR graduate student George Mair found that
OPR’s wartime projections for Europe had, for each date since 1940, consistently underesti-
mated population growth. Following a review of all major national-level projections to that
point for the U.S. and Europe, Mair concluded that, “as precise forecasting devices, pro-
jections have on balance been a failure” because none had accorded with actual population
dynamics.217
Discrepancies between projected and realized populations challenged the prevailing cer-
tainty about the value and validity of population projections, the expertise of the scientists
who made them, and the demographic transition theory on which they were based. Expres-
sions of doubt came from close to the demographic profession, mainly from demographers
and other social scientists. One particularly prominent mid-century critic of U.S. population
projections based on demographic transition theory was economist Joseph Davis (no relation
to Kingsley) of the Stanford University Food Research Institute. Davis described himself
as a “ ‘consumer’ of population data and forecasts.”218 In a 1949 pamphlet, Davis attacked
Thompson and Whelpton’s projections for embodying “assumptions that time has proved
unreasonable,” namely the extrapolation of the interwar fertility decline into the postwar pe-
riod.219 Davis argued that fertility trends could not reasonably be extended into the future
215
Taeuber, “The Development of Population Predictions in Europe and the Americas,” see n. 146, 333.
216
“The Population Forecasts of the Scripps Foundation,” Population Index 14, no. 3 (July 1948): 189.
217
Mair, see n. 2, 414.
218
Joseph S. Davis, “Our Amazing Population Upsurge,” Journal of Farm Economics 31, no. 4 (1949):
773.
219
Joseph S. Davis, The Population Upsurge in the United States (Stanford: Food Research Institute, 1949),
39, emphasis in the original.

260
because the factors that influenced fertility did not do so consistently. Characteristics asso-
ciated with lower fertility levels in the 1930s — contraceptive use and higher socioeconomic
status — were associated with higher fertility levels in the 1940s. Contraceptive practice
became more, not less, prevalent during the baby boom, and wartime fertility increases were
led by those with higher levels of income and education, reversing the fertility differentials
that had prevailed between the wars, as described in Chapters One and Two.
This reversal led Davis to criticize demographers’ practice of assuming that cross-sectional
correlations can predict the response of one variable to changes in another. Davis warned
that “one of the dangerous errors into which one easily falls is to assume that generalizations
based on a cross-section analysis at a given time can be applied to changes over time.”220
Studies of differential fertility in the 1930s, such as those sponsored by the Milbank Memorial
Fund and described in Chapter Two, had found lower levels of fertility among those with
higher levels of income and education, and among those who used contraception. On the
basis of these cross-sectional analyses, demographers had assumed that the spread of educa-
tion and contraception, and generally rising prosperity, would lead to lower overall fertility.
However, the correlation between socioeconomic status and contraceptive use obscured an
interaction between these variables that had become apparent in the Indianapolis Study. In
the general population, fertility was inversely correlated with socioeconomic status: those
with higher levels of education and income had fewer children. However, among the contra-
cepting segment of the population, fertility was directly correlated with socioeconomic status:
those with higher levels of education and income had more children. Since the wartime and
postwar spread of family planning had coincided with a dramatic increase in prosperity, it
had allowed couples to plan more children. Davis criticized the interwar assumption that
the diffusion of contraception would further reduce fertility, arguing instead that increasing
control over fertility does not necessarily produce decreasing levels of fertility. Rather, it
simply provides the “ability to regulate, up or down.”221
220
Davis, The Population Upsurge in the United States, see n. 219, 54.
221
Ibid., 54.

261
 In a 1950 presentation to the American and Western Farm Economics Association, Davis
reviewed the population predicted for 1950 by each of Thompson and Whelpton’s projec-
tions, all of which fell well below the then-expected mid-year figure of 152 million.222 Davis
argued that the failure of these projections discredited demographic transition theory, and
urged that “we must unlearn several of the generalizations that population specialists have
effectively taught.”223 Citing the recent rise in fertility, Davis questioned the validity of the
three stages of demographic transition laid out by Thompson in 1929: pre-transitional (high
fertility and mortality, little growth), transitional (high fertility and falling mortality, rapid
growth), and post-transitional (low fertility and mortality, no growth or “incipient decline”).
Thompson had placed the U.S., along with the countries of Western Europe, into the third
category, but Davis argued that “as of 1949, the United States does not clearly fit into any
of the neat categories,” and that “man’s fresh upsurge in this country. . . seems to put us
in a new category.”224 Davis was not suggesting that the U.S. should be reclassified into
the transitional group, but rather that the three categories of demographic transition were
inadequate to describe complex demographic trends.
Davis was not alone in his critique of demographic transition theory as a predictive
instrument. British demographer John Hajnal acknowledged that the main reason interwar
projections had come under attack was not the numeric difference between projected and
actual population, but rather that “they were intended principally to illustrate one thing, the
prospect of the end of population growth and of actual decline in the near future,” whereas
observed population dynamics had shown another thing — the recovery of fertility following
a return to prosperity. He argued that “if the populations of Western nations today fell
short of the predicted populations by as great a percentage as they in fact exceed them,
this would probably be considered a triumphant justification of the analysis underlying the
projections,” as it would not have contradicted demographic transition theory.225
222
Davis, “Our Amazing Population Upsurge,” see n. 218, 768.
223
Davis, The Population Upsurge in the United States, see n. 219, 62.
224
Ibid., 59, 60.
225
Hajnal, “The Prospect for Population Forecasts,” see n. 121, 46.

262
 Demographers and demographic transition theory looked bad not because they had pro-
duced projections that were wrong in the magnitude of change in the growth rate but because
they produced projections that were wrong in the direction of change in the growth rate,
predicting a cessation of growth and even decline when what actually occurred was a re-
vival of growth. Hajnal did not criticize demographers for failing to predict the baby boom,
maintaining that “it seems almost impossible that anyone, however great his ingenuity and
however extensive his knowledge of the facts, could have envisaged the ‘baby boom’ of the
1940’s.” However, he went on to ask, “if with all our hindsight we cannot blame the de-
mographers of the 1930’s, what reason have we to expect better luck in the future?” Hajnal
questioned the entire premise of projection, stating that “it is the failure of human history
to repeat itself, the appearance of the new and unexpected that renders the search for good
methods of forecasting hopeless.”226 Indeed, the very basis of demographic transition theory
is the premise that history will repeat itself, specifically that the observed demographic his-
tory of England and other countries of Western Europe and North America will repeat itself
in every country of the world.
Challenging that premise, public health interventions, particularly in Asia and Latin
America, had begun to suggest that, at least demographically, the future of those continents
would not unfold according to the pattern supposedly set by Western Europe and North
America. As a result of these interventions, mortality began to decline sharply, resulting in
rapid population growth in the absence of the modernization that was expected to produce
fertility decline and bring population to stationarity at a low-mortality and low-fertility
equilibrium. As Notestein put it, “the population grows a good deal as it did in the West,
but unlike the situation in the West, the growth stage has not been accompanied by the
social changes that eventually lead to an end of expansion.”227 Chapter Four will explore in
much greater detail how demographers and their interlocutors understood and responded to
226
Hajnal, “The Prospect for Population Forecasts,” see n. 121, 44.
227
Frank W. Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” Milbank
Memorial Fund Quarterly 22, no. 4 (Oct. 1944): 443.

263
postwar mortality decline in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The point here is, if vital rates
were changing outside of the context of demographic transition, then demographic transition
theory was powerless to predict those changes or to project the resulting population growth.
Just as the baby boom challenged the projection of population in Western Europe and
North America, public health interventions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America challenged
projection in those parts of the world.
These challenges to demographic transition theory threatened the authority of the pop-
ulation estimates and projections predicated on it, and even threw into question the entire
enterprise of population projection. Whereas confidence in the authority of demographers to
project future population had reached its apex between 1944 and 1952, as described above,
Hajnal admitted at the 1954 World Population Conference that “in the light of the unex-
pectedly high rate of population growth of recent years the record of the projections does not
look very impressive.”228 He continued that “a striking indictment could be drawn by piling
up examples of wide discrepancies between populations as forecast and as enumerated,” and
pointed out that “in many cases, the complex work of the forecasters achieved predictions
which were further removed from the facts than naı̈ve extrapolations. . . or even the simple
prediction that the population would remain constant.”229 Davis did not reject the practice
of population projection altogether, but he did reject the authority of demographers to make
projections, questioning their claims to scientific expertise. He declared himself “ashamed
that, like most of my fellow social scientists, I have so long accepted the conclusions of the
population specialists with naı̈ve faith.”230 He argued that “the population forecasting task,
though technical and detailed, is not really simple, as many have supposed, and the requisite
‘know how’ has not yet been acquired. It is highly important that all ‘consumers’ of pop-
ulation forecasts should clearly realize these facts.”231 The title of Mair’s 1957 dissertation,
“Population Projections: The State of an Art,” was itself an implicit critique of population
228
Hajnal, “The Prospect for Population Forecasts,” see n. 121, 43.
229
Ibid., 45.
230
Davis, “Our Amazing Population Upsurge,” see n. 218, 773.
231
Davis, The Population Upsurge in the United States, see n. 219, 37.

264
projection, and he concluded that the practice was not a science but rather an “art.” “With
no dependable methodology to use, no certain idea how his projections will be applied, and
no agreed-upon criteria for his success,” Mair concluded, “the author of population projec-
tions would seem to be operating in an area where intuition, ingenuity, a ‘feel for the data,’
and a measure of good fortune are desirable qualifications for activity.” He expressed his
hope that “future progress will reduce the proportion of art and increase the proportion of
science in the preparation of population projections.”232
Davis suggested that demographers themselves had willfully concealed the uncertainty
and lack of scientific basis for population projections, describing himself as “disturbed that,
so far as I can ascertain, the guild of population specialists has minimized the errors of
judgment, published no serious investigation into the sources of error, and been slow to
warn the rest of us that several basic assumptions which have long been cherished are either
unsound or seriously questionable.”233 By referring to demographers as a “guild,” he further
disparaged their authority as scientists. Davis also challenged the status of demography as
an independent field of expertise, imploring his fellow economists that “we can ill afford to
accept uncritically, and use as authoritative in our own work, the results of any other group of
specialists.” He further asserted that “if we continue to build on the crumbling foundations
I have described, we shall have no excuse for consequent errors in our own work.”234
The emergence of population trends at variance with the predictions of demographic
transition theory, together with the data friction described above, posed a serious threat to
the legitimacy of the new field of demography in the U.S., which continued to rely heavily
on its patrons — external funders of demographic research — and clients — consumers of
population estimates and projections. As OPR and PAA began to look for new patrons in
the postwar period, theoretical anomalies and data friction challenged the claims of Notestein
and other American demographers to produce accurate and useful knowledge about present
232
Mair, see n. 2, 420.
233
Davis, “Our Amazing Population Upsurge,” see n. 218, 774.
234
Ibid., 773.

265
and future population. Robert Hutchins, a Ford Foundation board member, responded to
the suggestion that the Foundation fund demography research with the opposition that “as
everyone knows, those demographers’ populations couldn’t have been wronger [sic],. . . the
field is obviously full of charlatans, there’s no scientific basis to it whatever, and we should
have nothing to do with it.” When others tried to persuade him, he maintained that “these
fellows are no good and I’ll have nothing to do with them.”235 In 1944, economist Simon
Kuznets, in a review of OPR’s work for the Rockefeller Foundation, pointed to the inadequacy
of population data. He argued that the paucity of data made demographers reluctant to
attempt “synthesis of a wide scope in space and extension in time,” and instead focused
demographic analysis on “the few countries and the limited periods for which data are known
to be tolerably good.”236 He concluded that, as a result of data limitations, the science of
demography was very much in its infancy, and not yet useful as a basis for other scientific
models.
In general, although demographers acknowledged the failure of interwar projections to
accurately predict postwar population dynamics, they defended their unique authority to
project future population. Even as Hajnal argued that “as little forecasting as possible
should be done,” he recognized that it would be done nonetheless because governments and
inter- and non-goverment agencies were still demanding “forecasts (generally relatively short-
term forecasts) which differ by only a small percentage from the actual population, whether
they be based on a correct appreciation of the forces at work or on black magic.”237 As
Mair reiterated, “projections are needed, however, and will be made by someone.”238 Both
Hajnal and Mair maintained that that “someone” should be a demographer — someone with
training in the calculation of demographic indices and the theory of demographic transition.
235
Charles T. Morrissey, “Bernard Berelson Interview for Ford Foundation Oral History Project, Session
One,” July 7, 1972,Population Council Records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY, box AD25,
accession 2.
236
Simon Kuznets to Joseph Willits (Rockefeller Foundation), Dec. 6, 1944,box A82, series 200s, record
group 1.1.
237
Hajnal, “The Prospect for Population Forecasts,” see n. 121, 48.
238
Mair, see n. 2, 439.

266
In contrast to Taeuber’s triumphant statement from the previous decade that, as more data
become available, population projections need to rely less on theory, Hajnal argued that
whatever projections were made “should involve less computation and more cogitation than
has generally been applied,” and asserted the unique expertise of demographers to undertake
that “cogitation,” arguing that “forecasts should flow from analysis of the past. Anyone who
has not bothered with analysis should not forecast.”239
An unsigned article in Population Index, likely the work of Taeuber or Notestein (or
both), also defended demographers’ unique expertise to project population, describing the
specialized analysis that went into the prediction of future vital rates:

These terminal rates [of fertility and mortality at the end of the demographic
transition], and the specific paths pursued in reaching them, are estimated on
the basis of various factors, such as the past experience of the United States and
of foreign countries with longer statistical series or more advanced demographic
developments, the differentials and the trends in the differentials among the states
in the United States, the matrix of causal factors that are operative, and the
theoretical or physiological limitations to change. Thus the judgment as to the
maximum probable range of the rates that will exist at some distant period and
the path to that future period is a mature judgment based on inference from
empirical trends of the past and the situation of the present combined with
historical and analytical research on the dynamics of the components.240

This statement marks a departure from the typical language of population projection as a
mathematical exercise devoid of judgment, described in Chapter One. The actual arithmetic
of the cohort component projection method can be done by anyone or by a computer. Here,
however, the author highlights the speculative element of projection and demographers’
privileged position from which to do that speculative work. The phrase “mature judgment”
highlights demographers’ expertise and authority. Their predictions are certainly empirical,
in the sense of being based on quantitative evidence, but future vital rates are not given in
the data and therefore cannot be determined by a casual observer or by a computer: rather,
their prediction requires the “mature judgment” of someone trained in population science.
239
Hajnal, “The Prospect for Population Forecasts,” see n. 121, 51.
240
See n. 216, 189.

267
Indeed, the article argues, in the hands of someone so trained, the prediction of future vital
rates is not speculative but scientific. Such strong assertions of demography’s capability to
project future population suggests the degree to which demographers felt their authority
threatened.

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated that, during and after World War II, governments and inter-
and non-governmental agencies began to rely on population estimates and projections as
critical inputs for military, industrial, social, and economic planning, and on demographers
to produce those estimates and projections. Demography gained new clients during and after
World War II, leading to a small expansion of academic demography at Princeton University,
and producing new jobs in government and in inter- and non-governmental organizations
for demographers. As the field of demography expanded and gained new clients, it also
broadened its scope from North America and Europe to Latin America, Asia, and Africa,
to facilitate the planning of modernization by inter- and non-governmental organizations,
particularly the U.N. and its new specialized agencies.
As demographers turned their attention to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and as
the United Nations began to compile demographic and other socioeconomic data for those
parts of the world, it became apparent that those data would not be readily forthcoming.
Demographers depend on data collected for other purposes — usually by governments for
the purpose of administration — and in many parts of the world, population data simply
had not been collected, or had not been collected recently or regularly. Where such data
were available, they often lacked the detail necessary to estimate current population size
and project it into the future. Analysis of existing population data required sifting through
large quantities of narrative metadata explaining how the data had been produced and which
segments of a given population they covered, limiting the portability of population data and

268
their commensurability for longitudinal and international analysis.
In response to the global paucity of population data, the U.N. encouraged member states
to take roughly simultaneous censuses around 1950 and 1960, using schedules that would
produce comparable results. Although the U.N. offered technical assistance in setting up
census and vital registration systems in member states, many lacked the funds and infras-
tructure to enumerate population and record vital events on a universal basis. Moreover,
the politics of census taking at the national level and reporting census results internationally
limited the availability and reliability of population data for some countries. To produce
complete and comparable data from incomplete censuses and vital registers, demographers
developed methods of indirect estimation of age structures and vital rates, which the U.N.
promulgated among the statistical offices of its member states to meet the U.N.’s demand
for population data. The resulting data were “provisional numbers” — numbers that were
recognized by their producers to be inaccurate, but that nonetheless allowed demographers
to project future population and allowed governments and intergovernmental agencies to get
on with the work of planning.
The methods demographers developed to smooth and synthesize unruly and unavail-
able data relied on demographic transition theory, as did the cohort component projection
method, which used demographic transition theory to predict future rates of fertility and
mortality. But, after the war, new demographic trends — rising fertility in North America,
Western Europe, and Australia and falling mortality elsewhere — challenged the utility of
demographic transition to predict population change anywhere in the world, and had the
potential to challenge the utility of data produced on the basis of demographic transition
theory. The authority of demographers to analyze and project population plummeted from
its postwar high to a nadir in the mid-1950s, when their failure to predict the baby boom
led other scientists and potential funders to discredit their work, and led demographers to
question and then reassert their own legitimacy.
Ultimately, the data friction and theory challenges demographers encountered at mid-

269
century did not undermine their authority to analyze and project population. As the fol-
lowing chapter demonstrates, new potential funders of demography — the Rockefeller Foun-
dation, the Ford Foundation, and others — were more concerned about the geopolitical
and geoeconomic threats posed by population growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
than they were by demographers’ ability to estimate and predict population, and demogra-
phers recuperated demographic transition theory by associating it even more closely with
modernization theory. Over the next two decades, demographers and their new support-
ers increasingly drew on demographic knowledge and authority as the basis from which to
plan population itself through programs to reduce fertility — and thereby reduce population
growth — throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

270
 Chapter 4
The Mid-Century Global
Demographic Crisis
This chapter traces the resolution of the mid-century crisis of global demography described
in Chapter Three, which revolved around two axes. The first was the inability of demogra-
phers and inter-governmental agencies — particularly the new U.N. Population Division —
to collate commensurable global population data with the requisite detail to project popula-
tion size and structure into the future. The second was the emergence of new demographic
trends that presented anomalies to demographic transition theory: rising fertility in the
global north and falling mortality in the global south. I argue that demographers recovered
their own scientific authority and that of their field by creating a new Cold War version of
demographic transition theory that incorporated the multiple causality of modernization the-
ory — the idea that complete modernization could be triggered by shifts in any of the social,
political, or economic realms, through contact with societies that were already “modern.”
Whereas interwar demographic transition theory posited demographic transition — falling
mortality followed by falling fertility — as a result of modernization, Cold War demographic
transition theory posited that causality could work in either direction: that demographic
transition could also stimulate modernization. I argue further that this Cold War version
of demographic transition theory provided intellectual support for an economic discourse of
overpopulation that was, at that same postwar moment, emerging from philanthropic and
business interests in the United States, who provided demography with new patrons and
clients, allowing the field to grow in size and stature.
Despite the paucity of global population data described in Chapter Three, evidence of
rising fertility in the global north and falling mortality in the global south indicated world-

271
wide population growth in the immediate postwar years. Given the alarms demographers
and policy makers had sounded in response to the dramatic fertility declines of the interwar
period — discussed in Chapter Two — it was not at all clear in advance that scientists
or policy makers should have viewed this new postwar population growth with trepidation.
Yet we know that they did. Histories of population thought and policy after World War
II describe how governments and inter- and non-governmental organizations responded to
the postwar crisis of rapid population growth and impending overpopulation. In general,
they take their actors’ concerns about the deleterious consequences of population growth
at face value, beginning with the assumption that population growth produced a clear and
uncontroversial threat to the global environment, world peace, and economic development
in the global south.1 That is, they begin from the premise that growing populations signaled
impending over population.
In contrast, this chapter examines how scientists, philanthropists, businessmen, and pol-
icy makers came to understand world population growth as a danger. As I have demonstrated
in earlier chapters, prior to World War II, there was no scientific or political consensus regard-
ing the valence of population growth. Granted, many observers viewed population growth
in Germany and Japan as important causes of World War II, but they and others also saw
the leveling off of population growth among the Allied countries as a factor. These observers
attributed shifts in the geopolitical balance of power to international growth differentials
rather than overpopulation per se. While most histories of population thought and policy
in the second half of the twentieth century uncritically equate growing world population
with impending overpopulation, I argue that population growth only becomes impending
overpopulation when negative consequences are attached to it. I contend further that the
negative consequences that were attached to population growth in the second half of the
1
See, for example: Connelly, see n. 8; Hoff, see n. 11; Robertson, see n. 12; Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, World
Population Crisis: The United States Response (New York: Praeger, 1973); Donald T. Critchlow, Intended
Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999); John Sharpless, “World Population Growth, Family Planning and American Foreign
Policy,” Journal of Policy History 7 (1995): 72–102.

272
twentieth century were neither obvious nor unequivocal. In this chapter and in Chapter
Six, I describe how two separate but intertwined overpopulation discourses — one economic
and the other environmental — developed in the period between 1945 and 1974, attaching
specific negative consequences to population growth. These discourses were largely produced
and promoted by small groups of wealthy and influential men; my focus is on the role that
demography played in formulating and supporting each discourse, and the ways in which
supporting these discourses shaped the development of demography in the three decades
following World War II.
This chapter focuses on the emergence of the economic discourse of overpopulation, ac-
cording to which population growth in the global south was expected to prevent economic
development, exacerbate poverty, and increase vulnerability to nationalist movements and
communist revolutions, threatening U.S. industry’s access to materials, labor, and markets
and threatening the U.S. military’s access to strategic base locations. The first section de-
scribes the way in which the most well-known and influential U.S. demographers at the end
of World War II — Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis, both at Princeton University’s
Office of Population Research (OPR) — understood global population growth in 1944 and
how their explanation of it changed over the next few years as they began to receive new
sources of funding for their research. I detail the transformation of interwar demographic
transition theory into Cold War demographic transition theory, and explore the influences on
this theoretical adaptation. The second section explores the origin of the postwar scientific
consensus about the economic consequences of population growth that form the starting
point for existing histories of demography and population control. In it, I focus on a 1952
meeting of scientists, businessmen, and philanthropists organized by John D. Rockefeller III
and the organization that emerged from the meeting, the Population Council, which became
demography’s major patron in the postwar period. The third section traces the populariza-
tion of the economic discourse, arguing that demographers were both central and marginal
to its construction and dissemination — central because the discourse relied for its legiti-

273
macy on demographic research and marginal because demographers had little control over
how their research would be interpreted by demography’s clients in government and inter-
and non-governmental organizations. Chapter Five examines the influence of the economic
overpopulation discourse on the development of demography itself during the 1960s, and
Chapter Six traces the growth of the environmental overpopulation discourse in the late
1960s and early 1970s.

4.1 The Postwar Construction of Overpopulation

Although the baby boom presented new challenges to population projection, as described
in Chapter Three, U.S. demographers expressed no concern that postwar fertility increases
and the resulting population growth would threaten the U.S. politically, economically, or
environmentally. Such mathematically-oriented demographers as Pascal Whelpton at the
Scripps Foundation and Norman Ryder at OPR quickly demonstrated that, although there
had been a slight rise in completed family size (the number of children a couple has when they
cease childbearing), most of the postwar fertility increase had stemmed from the coincidence
of late childbearing among older couples who had put it off during the Depression and early
childbearing among young couples who were newly flush with wartime wages and GI-Bill
mortgages, combined with the expected childbearing of couples at ages in between.2 As a
result, most demographers believed the rise in fertility in the U.S. would be short-lived, soon
followed by a resumption of the long-term fertility decline that had characterized the first
half of the century.3
Eugenically-oriented demographers, such as Clyde Kiser at the Milbank Memorial Fund,
were relieved to find that the baby boom had coincided with increased use of contraception
2
Pascal K. Whelpton, Cohort Fertility: Native White Women in the U.S. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1954); Norman B. Ryder, “Problems of Trend Determination During a Transition in Fertility,” The
Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly (1956): 5–21.
3
Frank W. Notestein, “The Significance of Population Trends,” in Preventive Medicine in Modern Prac-
tice, ed. James Alexander Miller (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942); Kingsley Davis, “Small Families
are Still the Fashion: There Has Been a Big Boom in Babies in this Country — But Not in Big Families,”
The New York Times, June 11, 1954.

274
(families can be planned to be large as well as small), and that the number of children
in planned families was directly correlated with income and education (that is, those with
more income and education had more children), in contrast to the inverse correlation in the
general population arising from the fact that higher income couples have higher rates of
contraceptive use.4 Economically-minded demographers, such as Frank Notestein, promoted
the still-common theory that population growth would stimulate economic growth: higher
fertility would mean more consumption and more effective demand, reducing the amount
of government deficit spending that economists and policy makers had by then accepted as
necessary to promote economic growth.5 In contrast, observers without demographic train-
ing expressed concern that rising fertility in the U.S. would strain food production, crowd
schools, and increase unemployment. Conservationists attributed new suburban sprawl to
population growth, though the evidence suggests that the baby boom was stimulated by the
ease of suburban home ownership — facilitated by government-backed mortgages and the
construction of the Interstate Highway system — rather than the other way around.6
Demographers, particularly Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis, were much more con-
cerned with population growth in colonial territories throughout the global south than they
were with population growth in the U.S. In colonial territories, they warned, population
growth challenged subsistence resources and threatened to undermine the mortality decline
that had caused this population growth in the first place. Notestein expected that, in a
country like the U.S., with a well-capitalized manufacturing sector, population growth would
increase effective demand, resulting in more consumption, more jobs, more profits, and even
more consumption, further fueling the cycle. In the global south, however, where economies
were organized around primary production for industry in North America, Europe, Oceania,
4
Clyde V. Kiser, “Fertility Trends and Differentials in the United States,” Journal of the American
Statistical Association 47, no. 257 (1952): 25–48.
5
Frank W. Notestein, “As the Nation Grows Younger,” The Atlantic, 1957, 131–136; Keynes, see n. 123.
6
For the attribution of suburban sprawl to population growth, see Robertson, see n. 12; for the attribution
of the Baby Boom to ease of entry into homeownership, see Emily R. Merchant, Brian Gratton, and Myron
P. Gutmann, “A Sudden Transition: Household Changes for Middle Aged U.S. Women in the Twentieth
Century,” Population Research and Policy Review 31, no. 5 (2012): 703–726.

275
and Japan — and where markets relied on demand in those places rather than local demand
— Notestein and Davis cautioned that population growth would simply swell the agricultural
labor force. They warned that population growth would therefore result in lower commodity
prices and more deeply-entrenched poverty, causing an increase in mortality and a return
to a high-pressure demographic equilibrium (characterized by high fertility and high mor-
tality), but this time at a higher population density, leaving more people more vulnerable
to economic shocks and natural disasters.7 This section describes how Notestein and Davis
understood population growth in the global south at the end of World War II, and how that
understanding changed over the next five years. I explore the influences on this perspectival
shift and argue that, as two of the most influential members of this new field, Notestein
and Davis’s new perspective laid the foundation for a new Cold War version of demographic
transition theory.

4.1.1 The Demographic Critique of Imperialism

Notestein and Davis first presented their concerns about population growth in colonial ter-
ritories at the 1944 annual Milbank Memorial Fund roundtable on global population. Their
analysis amounted to a strong indictment of imperialism and the world-capitalist system,
albeit one that relied on a stadial (progressing in linear stages) view of human history and
faith in a supposedly universal and inevitable modernization process that would also produce
demographic transition.8 They argued that imperial governments, contrary to their claims of
promoting development and modernization in the countries they ruled, had allowed only par-
tial modernization, producing only partial demographic transition: mortality decline without
fertility decline. They contended that the economics of imperialism were inimical to both
modernization and demographic transition, reducing mortality without producing economic
development, and thereby perpetuating poverty while promoting population growth.
7
Notestein, “As the Nation Grows Younger,” see n. 5; Notestein et al., see n. 12.
8
For analysis of the stadial view of human history in the field of demography, see Thornton, see n. 191.

276
Interwar Demographic Transition Theory

In 1945, Davis edited a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science titled “The World Demographic Transition,” in which he outlined his idealized
vision of an integrated process of global modernization and demographic transition. As dis-
cussed in earlier chapters, demographic transition referred both to the observed demographic
history of Western Europe and North America and to the expected demographic future of the
rest of the world. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, populations in West-
ern Europe and North America had experienced a change from a high-pressure demographic
equilibrium (characterized by high mortality, high fertility, and little overall growth) to a
low-pressure demographic equilibrium (characterized by low mortality, low fertility, and lit-
tle overall growth). In most countries (France being a notable exception), mortality decline
preceded fertility decline, causing immense population growth during the transition from
high-pressure to low-pressure equilibria. Demographers attributed the demographic tran-
sition to modernization: the full complex of democratization, economic development, and
social transition from from “traditional” community, Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft, to
“modern” society, Tönnies’s Gesellschaft.9 According to demographic transition theory, the
social and economic changes that accompanied early stages of modernization, particularly
sanitation and market rationalization, reduced mortality by raising living standards, elimi-
nating diseases spread through unclean water sources, and securing adequate access to food.
Later stages of modernization — particularly industrialization, urbanization, the replace-
ment of family functions by other social institutions, mechanisms for investing savings, and
the rise of professions that provided socioeconomic returns to education — led to a shift of
parental investment from child quantity — having more children who could work in family-
based production (whether agricultural or not) and provide for parents in old age — to child
quality — having fewer children but endowing them with education and other resources that
9
Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, see n. 65.

277
would facilitate their professional and economic success.10 Demographic transition theory
held that similar declines in mortality and fertility rates would accompany the supposedly
inevitable and desirable process of modernization elsewhere in the world.
Davis, a sociologist trained at Harvard in the 1930s by Talcott Parsons and Pitirim
Sorokin, had theorized in 1937 that the social institution of the family, which had, prior
to the rise of “modern” society in North America and Western Europe, governed biolog-
ical and social reproduction and enforced norms producing high fertility (to compensate
for high mortality), was incompatible with “modern European civilization.” He therefore
attributed recent fertility declines in Western Europe and North America to the family’s
waning relevance as a social institution.11 According to Davis, “traditional” social and eco-
nomic relations were organized through families, and membership in a family required the
bearing and rearing of children. In urban industrial societies, by contrast, particularly those
with high levels of social and geographical mobility, social and economic life no longer relied
as much on family connections, and such connections, including those between parent and
child, became a hindrance to socioeconomic advancement.12 Writing in the 1930s, Davis may
have been particularly influenced by the Great Depression, which indicated the inability of
families to shield their members from the vicissitudes of the capitalist market economy and
tore families apart as their members sought whatever jobs they could find.
When Davis joined the faculty of OPR in 1942, Notestein largely adopted his under-
standing of the relationship between fertility and socioeconomic structures and institutions.
10
For a clear statement of this theory in Notestein’s work, see Frank W. Notestein, “Economic Problems
and Population Changes,” in The Economics of Population and Food Supply, Eighth International Conference
of Agricultural Economists (1953); economist Gary Becker introduced the language of child “quantity” and
“quality” in Becker, see n. 161; demographer John Caldwell would later describe this shift in terms of
wealth flows, which, in “traditional” societies, flow from child to parent (children provide labor and old-age
security) and, in “modern” societies, flow from parent to child (parents provide for children while growing up;
educational expectations and child labor laws prevent children from contributing to the household economy;
old-age pensions and mechanisms for retirement savings reduce the need for older parents to rely on adult
children) John C. Caldwell, “Toward a Restatement of Demographic Transition Theory,” Population and
Development Review 2 (1976): 321–366.
11
Kingsley Davis, “Reproductive Institutions and the Pressure for Population,” Sociological Review (1937):
289–306.
12
Davis, “The Shifting Balance of World Population, part I,” see n. 24; Kingsley Davis, “The Shifting
Balance of World Population, part II,” Forum, Feb. 1946, 493–498.

278
Notestein and Davis, like other mid-century proponents of the emergent modernization the-
ory, viewed modernization as a qualitative and more or less simultaneous shift in social,
political, and economic organization stimulated by contact with societies that had already
modernized. That is, they viewed modernization as a process of the diffusion of European
social, cultural, economic, and political forms.13 In Davis’s 1945 discussion of the “World
Demographic Transition,” he described colonization and economic investment by the global
north in the global south as important vehicles for modernization and the attendant demo-
graphic transition, but pointed out the ways in which imperialism was falling short of this
goal.
The world-capitalist system, as Notestein and Davis viewed it in 1944, had reduced
mortality in parts of the global south that experienced imperialism or northern economic
investment and political control as a result of the partial modernization that accompanied it:
market integration, sanitation, and political stability. However, imperialism and other forms
of economic investment had also prevented fertility reduction by stifling complete modern-
ization: industry, urbanization, social mobility, and representative democracy.14 Davis ac-
knowledged that promoting complete modernization in the global south (his article focused
on Japan, where U.S. postwar plans included the encouragement of rapid re-industrialization)
would also promote both population growth and an increase in economic, political, and mili-
tary power. Although he acknowledged opposition in the global north to the growth of both
population and geopolitical power in the global south, which he described as “appear[ing]
as a Frankenstein appalling to many observers,” he also argued that only complete mod-
ernization would produce global political and economic stability. Davis dismissed fears of
population growth in Asia as racist, arguing that “the existing civilization of the Orient
is not fixed in the genes of the Asiatic races” but is “rather a historical stage resembling
13
Gilman, see n. 191; Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building”
in the Kennedy Era, see n. 191.
14
Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” see n. 227; Kingsley
Davis, “Demographic Fact and Policy in India,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1944): 256–
278.

279
in some respects the medieval civilization of Europe,” which “will pass irretrievably as the
Asiatic peoples become westernized.”15 These arguments clearly reveal the Eurocentrism of
modernization and demographic transition theories. However, they also suggest a view that,
if the modernization process were allowed to run its full course, the resulting population
growth would not threaten denizens of the global north because it would be accompanied
by the adoption of familiar ways of life and by the proliferation of technologies that would
provide for a larger population at a higher standard of living. That is, it would add to the
“modern” segment of the world’s population rather than competing with it, as many feared.
In other words, he viewed population growth as a natural and beneficial outcome of mod-
ernization and argued that demographic research should focus on facilitating the transition
to modernity through deconolonization.
Notestein and Davis’s critique of colonialism and of the economic domination of the
global south by the global north was not that these activities stimulated population growth
per se, but rather that they inhibited complete modernization and therefore allowed the
demographic transition to stall at the transitional stage, which combined high fertility with
low mortality, resulting in rapid population growth. As Notestein summarized at the 1944
Milbank Memorial Fund roundtable, mortality had declined in places that “have been de-
veloped by the technologically advanced countries primarily as sources of agricultural and
mineral raw materials, often of a specialized kind, and as markets for manufactured goods”
because “such development has required the introduction of strong government, improved
transportation, simple sanitation, and a modicum of epidemic control.” Fertility, however,
remained high because “the only societies in which low birth rates have appeared are those
dominated by the values developed in modern life,” as modern “societies set great store
by the individual, his health, welfare, initiative, and advancement.”16 In contrast, colonial
regimes had preserved “native customs, religions, and social organization, all of which foster
15
Kingsley Davis, “The World Demographic Transition,” Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 237 (Jan. 1945): 7.
16
Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” see n. 227, 432.

280
the maintenance of high fertility.”17 Or, as Davis might have put it, colonial rule maintained
a social order in which status was ascribed through familial relationships rather than at-
tained through individual achievement. Davis also pointed to the economic basis of these
social institutions, arguing that “remaining a satellite nation,. . . India has not developed a
balanced economy and has consequently not achieved the internal structure that will moti-
vate her citizens to reduce their fertility.”18 Notestein estimated that, as a result of colonial
economic conditions, population had grown at an average annual rate of 1.21% per year
in India, 2.08% per year in the Netherlands Indies, and 2.2% per year in the Philippines
between the wars.19 In contrast, the population of the U.S. had grown at a rate of 1.0%
annually between 1920 and 1939.20

Decolonization and Demographic Transition

In their 1944 presentations, Notestein and Davis essentially argued that formal colonialism
had already achieved what it could of its purported “civilizing mission.” They contended
17
Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” see n. 227, 433;
Today it would be more appropriate to say that colonial regimes invented those social institutions, or that
they emerged through processes of multilateral exchange in the colonial setting. See, for example Ann Laura
Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions
of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997).
18
Davis, “Demographic Fact and Policy in India,” see n. 14, 269.
19
Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” see n. 227, 428;
Notestein’s discussion of colonial population dynamics accords with more recent scholarship about the dif-
ferences between colonial and metropolitan biopower and governmentality, touched on in earlier chapters.
As power in Western Europe and North America decentralized, producing the self-regulating subjects of
democratic nation-states who managed their own reproduction, Western European states established more
absolute and centralized forms of power in their colonies, where people, their labor, and the products of their
labor belonged to the sovereign, as in Europe before the nineteenth century. Reading Notestein’s mid-century
work through the lens of Foucault, Hacking, and postcolonial theory indicates a strong relationship between
governmentality, census-taking, and the fertility decline observed in Western Europe and North America in
the nineteenth century, suggesting that the same types of governmental rationality that produce or require
censuses also produce or require the type of self-governing subjects who manage their own fertility. Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978); Hacking, “Biopower and
the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” see n. 32; Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect:
Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991); Annika Berg, “A Suitable Country: The Relationship Between Sweden’s Interwar
Population Policy and Family Planning in Postindependence India,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
33 (2010): 297–320; Rose, “Governing By Numbers: Figuring Out Democracy,” see n. 38; Rose, Powers of
Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, see n. 13.
20
Calculated from Table Aa7 in Historical Statistics of the U.S., Millennial Edition.

281
that perpetuation of formal colonialism or informal economic domination in the global south
would, by increasing population growth without improving living standards and by pre-
venting the development of local industry (or dismantling existing industries), undermine
the further progress of both modernization and demographic transition, with the effect of
expanding and entrenching local poverty. Notestein acknowledged that population growth
within the confines of formal colonialism or quasi-colonial economies posed a threat to U.S.
economic and political security, but argued that population growth could not be slowed under
these economic conditions. He explicitly rejected the idea of providing modern contracep-
tives — which, at that time, consisted of barriers (condoms, diaphragms) and spermicidal
compounds (jellies, foams, and suppository tablets) — to these areas, as existing economic
structures and social institutions incentivized large families. Moreover, his interwar research
had demonstrated that the lack of access to contraceptive materials had not prevented fer-
tility decline in Western Europe and North America in the context of modernization.
Demographic transition theory held that “populations whose social institutions and per-
sonal aspirations are those developed in high mortality cultures are little interested in contra-
ception,” while “populations whose institutions and personal aspirations are those of modern
individualistic cultures will control their fertility in substantial degree with or without the
assistance of modern contraceptive techniques.”21 Notestein’s interwar research, along with
that of Raymond Pearl, had demonstrated that, among the wealthier and more urbane seg-
ments of the U.S. population, prior to the widespread availability of contraceptive devices,
“coitus interruptus, which is adequately described in the Old Testament, [was] used by many
couples with substantial effectiveness,” and could fully account for the pre-World War II de-
cline of fertility.22 The same was true for Western Europe. Reasoning from this experience,
he contended that people everywhere already posessed the requisite knowledge and technol-
ogy to have fewer children if they wanted to. However, among the rural populations of both
21
Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” see n. 227, 437.
22
Notestein, “The Significance of Population Trends,” see n. 3, 33; also see Frank W. Notestein to Alvan O.
Zarate, June 6, 1967,folder 2, box 2.

282
global south and global north, Notestein insisted that “fertility declines will come gradu-
ally and only after the people acquire new interests and aspirations,” which “are likely to
develop only in a period of rising levels of living, urbanization, widespread education, and
growing contacts with foreign cultures.”23 In the absence of those structural changes, he con-
tended, prospective parents in rural societies would have little interest in new contraceptive
technologies.24
Rather than contraceptive provision, the solution Notestein proposed in his 1944 presen-
tation was decolonization, combined with an integrated program of modernization, including
industrialization, land reform, international trade, popular education, public health, social
equality and integration, emigration, and the cultivation of “native political leaders, civil ser-
vants, and native middle classes.”25 Notestein acknowledged that such interventions would
stimulate further population growth and increase the economic, political, and military power
of (former) colonial territories, but argued that “the perpetuation of past policies toward
underdeveloped regions involves greater risk to the peaceful security of the American people
than a policy consciously designed to create larger and more powerful populations in these
areas.”26 Notestein described the alternative to his program as “repression.” He argued
that repression would not succeed anywhere unless it succeeded everywhere, and that “such
universally successful repression is hardly to be expected in a world in which the spread
of education and modern technology has gone too far to be stopped.”27 Such statements,
combined with Notestein’s rejection of large-scale international migration as a way to relieve
population pressure in the global south on the basis that it would “vastly increase the total
size of the sending stock in the world,”28 indicate that his proposal for decolonization and
modernization was rooted in a desire to maintain U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic superi-
23
Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” see n. 227, 438.
24
Notestein had made a similar argument about the rural poor in the U.S., who had some of the country’s
largest families, in 1942. Notestein, “The Significance of Population Trends,” see n. 3.
25
Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” see n. 227, 440.
26
Ibid., 442.
27
Ibid., 442.
28
Ibid., 435.

283
ority rather than a desire to promote global economic or political equality. Nonetheless, it
would have opened the door for considerably greater local control of political and economic
systems in the global south.
The modernization program that Notestein outlined in 1944 and Davis promoted in
1945 — a plan to overcome global poverty and disaffection through decolonization and
investment in and promotion of local economies and civil societies in the global south —
echoed U.S. President Roosevelt’s 1941 promise of worldwide “freedom from want” and
largely anticipated Point Four of President Truman’s 1949 inauguration speech.29 It also
resembled autochthonous (though European-oriented) development programs planned and
initiated between the wars by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Sun Yat-Sen in China.
This program, however, presented a threat to powerful actors on the U.S. scene, particularly
those involved with or otherwise invested in industry.

4.1.2 Demography and the Philanthropic-Industrial Complex

Not coincidentally, Western Europe’s Industrial Revolution had followed its “age of explo-
ration” and intersected with its “age of empire,” promoting the centrally-controlled extrac-
tive form of colonialism that came to characterize the British Colonial Empire (that is, the
British Empire minus the “white dominions” — Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South
Africa) after the upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century, including the 1857 Rebellion in
India and the 1865 Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica.30 Industrial production required the
steady flow of raw materials, many of which — for example, rubber, jute, tin, and cotton —
could be found only in tropical and sub-tropical climates and not in the northern centers of
industry. Europe’s industries solved this problem largely through formal colonialism, with
European states protecting the access of European industries to materials, labor, and mar-
kets in Africa and Asia. In contrast, U.S. industry relied on “dollar diplomacy,” an approach
29
Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign
Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 25, 10-11.
30
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).

284
devised by U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, in which U.S.
banks leveraged the sovereign debt of countries in Latin America and East Asia (as well as
Liberia) to ensure political and economic policies favorable to U.S. economic and national
interests. This strategy arose out of competition with European imperial economies and
aimed to keep European interests out of the Western Hemisphere.31 Under dollar diplomacy,
U.S. corporations purchased large tracts of land in Latin America, such as Henry Ford’s rub-
ber plantations in Brazil and United Fruit’s banana plantations throughout Central America
and the Caribbean, allowing for vertical integration of manufacturing, which both boosted
industrial profits and insulated U.S. industry from the disruption threatened by wars and
business cycles.32 During World War II, the vertical integration of the auto industry allowed
for its rapid transition to the production of armaments and ensured continued supplies of
tropical raw materials despite global economic and political upheaval.33

U.S. Industry and European Empires

After the two World Wars, the European imperial system no longer seemed sustainable
to the architects of U.S. foreign policy, who instead envisioned an empire of free trade
without formal colonialism, similar to dollar diplomacy but on a worldwide scale.34 The
1944 Bretton Woods meetings established the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which
31
Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the
Cold War to the Present, see n. 29, 17.
32
For Ford’s rubber plantations, see Ralf Barkemeyer and Frank Frigge, “Fordlandia: Corporate Citizen-
ship or Corporate Colonialism?” Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 19 (2012):
69–78; for United Fruit, see Peter Chapman, Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World
(Canongate, 2007).
33
Barkemeyer and Frigge, see n. 32; Gerald Davis, Managed By the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped
America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); A 1969 study of vertical integration of U.S. man-
ufacturing over the previous half-century found that backwards integration (integrating the extraction and
processing of raw materials, in contrast to forward integration, which integrates distribution and sales) was
most prevalent in firms relying on overseas materials. Harold C. Livesay and Patrick G. Porter, “Vertical
Integration in American Manufacturing, 1899-1948,” The Journal of Economic History 29, no. 3 (1969):
494–500.
34
Richard H. Immerman, Empire For Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin
to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Julian Go, “Entangle Empires and Informal
Imperialism: The Rise of the US in the Mid-Twentieth Century” (n.d.), url: [Link]
_pdf/jgo- [Link] (accessed 06/15/2014); Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization,
Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present, see n. 29.

285
managed fixed exchange rates for global currencies based on the gold-backed U.S. dollar, and
the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), which aimed to
finance reconstruction in Europe and Japan and the economic development of the global
south. The reconstruction of industry in Western Europe and Japan were key aims of
U.S. foreign policy, with economic growth produced by private industry expected to provide
a bulwark against the spread of communism. To support this reconstruction, the U.S.
provided direct grants to Europe and Asia under the Marshall Plan, much of which was
used to convert energy systems in Europe from coal to oil, thereby creating new markets for
the U.S. oil industry, which played a pivotal role in keeping dollars circulating through the
global economy.35
Rebuilding and expanding industry in Western Europe and Japan, however, required
steady access to colonial materials, labor, and markets. In the immediate postwar period,
therefore, despite the anticolonial rhetoric of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, U.S. policymakers
supported the maintenance of European empires. In return for this support, European im-
perial powers granted U.S. corporations preferential access to colonial materials and markets
and allowed the U.S. military to install bases in strategic locations.36 U.S. manufacturers
purchased raw materials from European colonies, colonies used the dollars they acquired
through this trade to purchase manufactured products from Europe and Japan, giving these
countries the dollars they needed to buy oil and repay wartime debts to the U.S. The U.S.
government, in turn, used this income to pay private companies to build infrastructure in
the U.S. — such as airports and the Interstate Highway system — and to fill contracts for
the military equipment necessitated by the new competition with the U.S.S.R. for global
hegemony. Protected access to raw materials in the global south both increased industrial
profits and ensured uninterrupted production of the military equipment the U.S. ultimately
relied upon to enforce policies in other countries favorable to the U.S. military-industrial
complex.
35
Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, see n. 90, 29-30.
36
Go, see n. 34.

286
 Official U.S. support for the maintenance of European empires did not last much be-
yond the end of the 1940s.37 Anticolonial nationalist movements throughout Asia and Africa
had grown in power during the first half of the twentieth century, and the new United Na-
tions nominally recognized self-determination as a universal right. After World War II, the
U.S.S.R. began to offer economic and military support to nationalist movements throughout
the world, not only threatening Europe with the loss of direct political control of its colonies
but also threatening the preferential access of the U.S. military-industrial complex to ma-
terials and strategic outposts. President Truman’s Point Four program indicated a shift in
U.S. foreign policy from support for continued European imperial control of Asia and Africa
to support for decolonization and modernization. However, the development programs pro-
moted by the U.S. and by such international agencies as the World Bank and IMF were
very different from those proposed by Notestein and Davis in 1944–1945. As had become
apparent in Mexico at the beginning of the century, in Turkey between the world wars, and
in Iran in 1951, modernization did not necessarily need to occur in ways that would benefit
North American, European, and Japanese industry; it could also involve nationalization of
natural resources, expropriation of foreign-owned land, and state ownership of industry and
transportation. The experience of the two global conflagrations during the first half of the
century suggested to scientists and policy makers that population growth would increase
both the desire for local control over the extraction and distribution of resources and the
physical and military power necessary to exert such control.38
In 1944–1945, Notestein and Davis had proposed a program of modernization that in-
volved decolonization and local control over natural resources and infrastructure. Over the
next four years, however, they separately abandoned this anticolonial stance, adapting de-
mographic transition theory in subtle but powerful ways that opened space for population
37
Go, see n. 34; Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign
Policy from the Cold War to the Present, see n. 29.
38
Prior to and during World War II, for example, aggressor nations had pointed to growing populations
to demand access to more territory and had used population growth as a strategy for seizing control over
new territory. Thompson, Danger Spots in World Population, see n. 196; Bashford, see n. 10.

287
control — the “repressive” strategy that Notestein had rejected in 1944 — in U.S.-led de-
colonization and modernization programs in the global south.

The Cold War Adaptation of Demographic Transition Theory

Notestein presented his new take on colonial population growth at the 1947 Milbank Memo-
rial Fund roundtable on global population.39 While he still attributed population growth
in colonial territories to the mortality reductions resulting from imperial rule, he now at-
tributed poverty in the global south not to economic exploitation, but rather to population
growth. In his earlier explanation, colonial and quasi-colonial economic relationships between
countries in the global north and those in the global south produced poverty by preventing
the structural changes — industrialization, urbanization, and the establishment of finan-
cial infrastructure — that would have promoted both equitable economic growth and lower
fertility. In his 1947 explanation, population growth produced poverty and prevented the
structural changes that would have promoted economic development while reducing fertility.
This seemingly slight theoretical adaptation naturalized poverty as the result of a biological
process — population growth — eliding the social, economic, and political factors that, in
his earlier analysis, underpinned both poverty and population growth.
In contrast to his 1944 proposal for structural changes that would have alleviated poverty
and accommodated population growth — though at the potential cost of undermining U.S.
access to colonial materials, labor and markets and to strategic locations for military bases
— in 1947 Notestein proposed a solution that did not threaten the existing geopolitical
and geoeconomic order: the provision of contraceptive technologies so easy to use that they
would be widely adopted even in agrarian societies, where children were still economic assets
and the best bet for old-age security. That is, between 1944 and 1947, Notestein redefined
population growth from an economic problem with a political and economic solution to a
biological problem with a bio-technological solution, albeit one that did not yet exist; in
39
Published as Frank W. Notestein, “Summary of the Demographic Background of Problems of Undevel-
oped Areas,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1948): 249–255.

288
1947, as in 1944, available contraceptive techniques were still limited to abstinence, with-
drawal, and the more cumbersome technologies of barriers and spermicidal compounds. Yet,
in contrast to his 1944 argument that contraceptives would be ineffective without the so-
cioeconomic structures and institutions that motivated their use, in 1947 Notestein argued
that population growth prevented the socioeconomic changes that he advocated in 1944 and
contended that the adoption of contraceptives in the global south was a prerequisite for
economic growth. This argument reversed the relationship between socioeconomic individ-
uation and fertility decline at the heart of demographic transition theory. In Notestein’s
1944 version of the theory, socioeconomic structures and institutions that privileged the in-
dividual over the family — as had emerged in Western Europe and North America over the
previous 150 years in tandem with industrialization, urbanization, and professionalization
— triggered demographic transition; in the 1947 version, demographic transition triggered
economic development and consequent changes in socioeconomic structures and institutions.
Historically-oriented demographers such as Dennis Hodgson and Simon Szreter have
noted the shift in Notestein and Davis’s conceptualization of the relationship between de-
mographic transition and socioeconomic individuation, and have attributed this theoretical
adaptation to causes both internal and external to demography.40 Hodgson and Szreter de-
scribe this theoretical adaptation as a gradual evolution, occurring between 1945 and 1955
in response to various challenges posed to classic demographic transition theory: Notestein’s
1948 tour of East Asia with Rockefeller Foundation officers Marshall Balfour and Roger
Evans, China’s 1949 communist revolution, and economic and demographic studies of the
1950s and 1960s (described in detail below) that challenged the causal relationship between
socioeconomic transformation and fertility decline. John Sharpless adds to this list demogra-
phers’ desire to help solve the postwar crisis of impending overpopulation.41 Comparison of
40
Hodgson includes empirical research in the internal category and the Cold War and foundation support
for family planning in the external category. Hodgson, “Orthodoxy and Revisionism in American Demogra-
phy,” see n. 20; Szreter, “The Idea of Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility Change: A Critical
Intellectual History,” see n. 20.
41
Sharpless, see n. 1.

289
Notestein’s 1944 and 1947 Milbank presentations, however, suggests that his adaptation of
demographic theory occurred much earlier and more decisively than other scholars have sug-
gested, prior to most of the causes Hodgson and Szreter cite, preceded only by the beginning
of the Cold War and by Rockefeller investment in his research. I argue that this theoretical
adaptation was not a response to the postwar crisis of impending overpopulation, as Sharp-
less has suggested. Rather, I contend that it helped to produce the crisis demographers later
worked to solve.

Philanthropy and Demography

The Rockefeller Foundation made its first grants to academic research in demography in
1944, allocating just over $17,000 to the Scripps Foundation for a study “of the influence of
population factors upon labor market problems” and $200,000 to OPR to cover its research
and training program over the next ten years.42 This funding dwarfed the support OPR
received from the Milbank Memorial Fund ($10,000 per year) and was supplemented by
additional Rockefeller Foundation grants for specific projects. As discussed in Chapter Two,
private foundations were the largest funders of the social sciences prior to World War II.
The foundations with the largest investments in this field in the first half of the century
were the Russell Sage Foundation, established in 1907 by Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage,
who had inherited the banking and railroad wealth of her husband Russell; the Carnegie
Corporation, established by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie in 1911; and the Rockefeller
Foundation, established by John D. Rockefeller, creator of Standard Oil, and his only son,
John D. Jr., in 1913.43 Henry Ford created the Ford Foundation in 1936, which also began
42
“The Rockefeller Foundation: Annual Report,” 1944, url: http : / / www . rockefellerfoundation .
org/uploads/files/[Link] (accessed 06/21/2014), url:
[Link]
[Link] (accessed 06/21/2014), 187-189.
43
For the Russell Sage Foundation, see O’Connor, Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social
Question in a World Turned Rightside Up, see n. 72; for the Carnegie Corporation, see Lagemann, see
n. 72; for the Rockefeller Foundation and its related organizations, see Martin Bulmer and Joan Bulmer,
“Philanthropy and Social Science in the 1920s: Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial,
1922-1929,” Minerva 19, no. 3 (1981): 347–407.

290
funding the social sciences after World War II.44 These organizations were among the first
general-purpose foundations in the United States, established with the aim of improving
human well-being worldwide. Funded by industrial profits, they sought to apply corporate
organizational principles to the amelioration of poverty both in the U.S. and abroad.45
Though the initial motivation for their establishment may have been Christian charity
or noblesse oblige, general-purpose foundations created from industrial wealth also served
the industries that endowed them. The ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution in 1913, which gave the federal government the power to tax the income of
individuals and corporations, was quickly followed by the establishment of the charitable
exemption to individual and corporate income tax, turning philanthropy into a method of
reducing both individual and corporate tax burdens, though such burdens remained minis-
cule until the passage of the 1935 Tax Act.46 Withholding this revenue from the government
reduced the state’s power to regulate industry and ameliorate industrial poverty and allowed
industrialists to direct welfare to the areas that suited their interests without democratic over-
sight. The work of many industrially-funded philanthropic organizations aimed to alleviate
some of the poverty and suffering that had accompanied industrialization and urbanization,
thereby relieving some of the labor-related political tensions that, in the first decades of
the twentieth century, large employers feared would lead to stricter government regulation
of industry and the development of welfare state provisions similar to those appearing in
Europe.47 These organizations portrayed themselves as helping those too weak to thrive
under free-market capitalism, thereby attributing poverty to individual failure rather than
systemic inequality.48 Endowed with stock in their parent corporations (Standard Oil, Ford
Motor Company, etc.), foundation budgets throughout much of the twentieth century de-
44
Dwight MacDonald, The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (New Brunswick: Transaction,
2011 [1955]).
45
Zunz, see n. 72; Sealander, see n. 72; Rodgers, see n. 64.
46
Sealander, see n. 72; Zunz, see n. 72.
47
Andrea Tone, The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1997).
48
Robin W. Winks, Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Island Press,
1997), 8.

291
pended on rising industrial profits and stock values, incentivizing activities that ameliorated
poverty without undercutting corporate revenues.
Funding scientific and social scientific research gave general-purpose foundations con-
trol not only over how poverty would be alleviated but also over how its causes would be
understood.49 Making grants for research always involves validating certain programs and
the worldviews they reflect in preference to others.50 Knowledge of poverty and other social
issues produced by the social sciences also influenced policy interventions.51 The National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) and its National Research Council (NRC), private organizations
that provide research services to the federal government to guide policy, owe their promi-
nence and even their continued existence to generous funding from the Carnegie Corporation
and Rockefeller Foundation throughout the twentieth century, and these funders in turn in-
fluenced the staffing of NAS/NRC panels and committees and the issues they studied.52 As
Ellen Condliffe Lagemann has written of the Carnegie Corporation, the “self-imposed man-
date to define, develop, and distribute knowledge was, in a sense, a franchise to govern, in
important indirect ways.”53
As industrial philanthropy expanded over the first decades of the twentieth century, the
powerful men who ran the country’s largest industrial corporations also sat on the boards
of directors of the largest philanthropies, and these philanthropic directorates interlocked
tightly with one another and with those of the corporations that funded them. Although their
day-to-day operations were overseen and executed by a new professional group of nonprofit
managers and administrators, their directors and trustees came from some of the country’s
wealthiest and most powerful families, the members of which rotated through the worlds
of business, government, and philanthropy. John Davison Rockefeller, for example, had
49
O’Connor, Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside
Up, see n. 72; Fisher, see n. 72.
50
Lagemann, see n. 72, 30-31.
51
Winks, see n. 48, 8; Sealander, see n. 72.
52
Lagemann, see n. 72.
53
Lagemann, see n. 72, 6; Sealander also discusses the policy role played by private philanthropic founda-
tions in the first decades of the twentieth century. Sealander, see n. 72.

292
established Standard Oil in 1870 and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, with several other
philanthropic ventures in between, including the University of Chicago, which he founded in
1890. His only son, John D. Jr., born in 1874, inherited the directorship of both Standard Oil
and the Rockefeller Foundation. He also funded philanthropic ventures in birth control and
conservation, which will become relevant later in the story. His six children well illustrate the
tight familial and professional relationships between industry, philanthropy, and government
in the twentieth-century United States. His daughter Abby and eldest son John D. III became
philanthropists, with John D. III becoming chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1952.
Laurance and David went into business; Laurance became a venture capitalist and David a
banker. Both also pursued philanthropy, with Laurance playing a major role in conservation
groups. Nelson and Winthrop became state governors, and Nelson served as Vice President
of the U.S. under Gerald Ford.54 Lewis Strauss, financial advisor to several members of the
Rockefeller family, was a partner in the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company and one
of the first commissioners of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, established by President
Truman in 1947.55 John Foster Dulles, international lawyer and financier between the wars
(clients included J.P. Morgan & Company, United Railways of Central America, and United
Fruit), served as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1935 to 1952, before becoming
President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State in 1953. His brother Allen became director of the
CIA in the same year, and together they helped build the U.S. postwar anticolonial empire.56
The Cold War version of demographic transition theory emerged shortly after the Rocke-
feller Foundation’s first grant to OPR. This grant was, by no means, the only factor contribut-
ing to the theoretical adaptation, but it may have played a role. Between 1945 and 1947, no
new empirical evidence had emerged regarding the relationship between population growth
and economic development, suggesting that the Rockefeller grant — along with the Cold War
54
John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Conscience: An American Family in Public and
in Private (New York: Scribner, 1991).
55
Richard Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great: The Life of Lewis L. Strauss (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1984).
56
Immerman, see n. 34.

293
itself — may have helped to precipitate this theoretical adaptation. When the Foundation
made its first grant to OPR, it established a long-term relationship in which the Foundation
not only became OPR’s main patron but also became a client and, as such, reserved the
right to offer advice and direction to OPR in work that might inform the Foundation’s oper-
ations.57 The Foundation, through the NRC’s Committee on Research on Problems of Sex,
had already invested heavily in the development of contraceptive technologies suitable for
use in the global south (including systemic methods and spermicidal compounds that were
stable at high temperatures), and the Cold War version of demographic transition theory
supported the spread of these technologies as a way to stimulate economic development,
whereas the interwar version had not. In 1948, John D. Rockefeller III organized a tour of
East Asia for Frank Notestein and Irene Taeuber so that they could witness firsthand the
population growth Rockefeller feared would undermine his family’s philanthropic efforts in
the region.58
This new version of demographic transition theory was more compatible with modern-
ization theory than the interwar version had been, as it placed demographic transition on
an equal plane with political democratization, economic development, and the emergence of
civil society, positing that any one could trigger the other three. Whereas interwar demo-
graphic transition theory had understood demographic transition as a response to political,
social, and economic modernization, the Cold War version saw demographic transition as
a potential stimulus to political, social, and economic modernization. In a sense, we might
say that the theoretical adaptation of demographic transition theory “modernized” it, as
it made demographic transition a tool of modernization. If demographic transition were
simply a response to modernization, the field of demography had no role in the Cold War
U.S. project of promoting capitalist modernization in the global south to secure U.S. global
57
Willits, see n. 59; Frank W. Notestein to Joe Willits, Dec. 12, 1944,box A82, series 200s, record group
1.1.
58
This trip, reminiscent of Scripps and Thompson’s 1922 tour of East Asia, resulted in the publication of
Marshall C. Balfour, Public Health and Demography in the Far East: Report of a Survey Trip, September 13
- December 13, 1948 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1950).

294
hegemony. If, however, demographic transition could be engineered, and if engineering de-
mographic transition could stimulate modernization, then demography had a fundamental
role in the Cold War modernization project.59
Tellingly, Kingsley Davis, who left OPR in 1948 for Columbia University, never accepted
the contention that modern contraceptives could reduce fertility in the global south in the
absence of structural change. He continued to focus on structural factors in his explanations
of population growth and in his recommended solutions.60 Yet a new concern also emerged
in Davis’s work, reflecting his new sources of funding. By the end of the decade, Davis
had begun to warn about the environmental consequences of population growth, echoing the
arguments of two prominent and highly influential books published in 1948: Road to Survival
by William Vogt, an ornithologist and chief conservator of the Pan-American Union, and Our
Plundered Planet by Fairfield Osborn, Frederick Osborn’s cousin, director of the Bronx Zoo,
and son of Henry Fairfield Osborn, former president of the American Museum of Natural
History and a founding member of the American Eugenics Society.
Vogt and Osborn’s books picked up on the theme of population and carrying capacity
that Raymond Pearl and Edward East had engaged with between the wars, as discussed
in Chapter One, but added a new twist: according to Osborn and Vogt, not only was the
Earth’s capacity to support life limited, but attempts to stretch subsistence beyond this
fixed carrying capacity would actually reduce future carrying capacity by degrading the
ecosystems on which human life depended.61 In essence, Vogt and Osborn added the idea of
sustainability — the ability to support human life in the long term — to Pearl and East’s
concept of carrying capacity.
The Osborn cousins, Fairfield and Frederick, had been frequent guests in the home of John
59
Sharpless, see n. 1.
60
See, for example: Kingsley Davis, “Population and Change in Backward Areas,” Columbia Journal
of International Affairs 4, no. 2 (1950): 43–49; Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake, “Social Structure and
Fertility: An Analytic Framework,” Economic Development and Cultural Change (1956): 211–235.
61
While some historians have viewed these books as signaling the transition from interwar conservationism
to postwar environmentalism, others have emphasized continuities between these works and the interwar
ecological visions of such scientists as H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley. For rupture, see Robertson, see n. 12,
37; for continuity, see Bashford, see n. 10.

295
D. Rockefeller Jr. while the third generation of Rockefellers — Abby, John D. III, Nelson,
Winthrop, Laurance, and David — were growing up. The Osborns piqued the interest of
John D. III in world population growth and Laurance in conservation. Laurance, born in
1910, became a member of the board of Fairfield Osborn’s New York Zoological Society in
1935. He served as environmental advisor to every president from from Dwight D. Eisenhower
to George W. Bush.62 In 1948, Fairfield Osborn and Laurance Rockefeller established the
Conservation Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the environment through
limiting population growth.63
The Conservation Foundation promoted Osborn’s view that global population control
was necessary to protect the Earth’s ecosystem and funded Davis’s research beginning in
1948, when he left OPR to join the Department of Sociology at Columbia University.64 Over
the next decade, the Conservation Foundation would also support the research of Davis’s
most prominent students, including Judith Blake and Joe Mayone Stycos. This new source
of funding became apparent almost immediately in Davis’s publications, which began to echo
Osborn and Vogt’s arguments — previously dismissed as “alarmist propaganda” by several
members of the PAA — that efforts to increase food production and expand economies to
keep up with rising population would deplete resources, break the ecosystem, and reduce
the planet’s long-term carrying capacity.65 While Davis continued to focus on structural
determinants of fertility, his research never examined the structural determinants of envi-
ronmental degradation, instead tacitly assuming a linear relationship between population
growth on the one side and pollution and resource depletion on the other, promoting the
62
Laurance died in 2004 at age 94 Michael T. Kaufman, “Laurance S. Rockefeller, Passionate Conservation-
ist and Investor, Is Dead at 94,” The New York Times, July 12, 2004; in 1991, he received the Congressional
Gold Medal for this conservation efforts Winks, see n. 48, 1-2.
63
For more detailed discussion of the relationship between Osborn and Rockefeller, see Winks, see n. 48,
41-42.
64
Donald H. McLean Jr. to Lewis L. Strauss, Apr. 3, 1952,John D. Rockefeller III Papers, Rockefeller
Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY, folder 674, box 81, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5.
65
See, for example, Kingsley Davis, “Population and Resources in the Americas,” in Proceedings, Inter-
American Conference on Conservation of Renewable Natural Resources, Denver, by the United States De-
partment of State (1948); for an example of demographers’ views of Vogt and Osborn’s work, see n. 118,
31.

296
view that environmental degradation was an inevitable byproduct of population increase and
economic growth. Beginning in the 1950s, he regularly published articles about population
and the environment in The New York Times, warning that population growth — in both
the U.S. and abroad — threatened supplies of natural resources. In 1955, Davis co-authored
two articles with Fairfield Osborn in The Wall Street Journal. The first, titled “Food and
People: U.S. Farm Surpluses are No Answer to the World’s Food Shortages,” provided a
Malthusian response to the popular contention that U.S. farm surpluses should be trans-
ferred to countries facing a food production deficit, arguing that such provision would only
promote further population growth. Osborn and Davis attributed food deficits to population
growth (rather than to issues of land allocation or food distribution) and argued that, “if
people in such countries are relieved from the consequences of their irresponsibility, there
is little reason to anticipate they would change their social and family habits regarding
child-bearing.”66 The second article, “Space and People: Migration to U.S. Cannot Relieve
World’s Overcrowding,” argued against allowing more immigrants into the U.S. as a tactic
to relieve population pressure on food supplies in the global south, contending that such a
“tidal wave” of immigration would be impossible to assimilate and would overwhelm U.S.
resources while promoting continued high fertility in the sending countries.67 Together, these
articles signal Davis’s adoption of the view that population growth caused global poverty,
and that only direct methods of population control could provide a sustainable solution.
In both Notestein and Davis’s post-1945 writings, the causal relationship between popu-
lation growth on the one hand and poverty and pollution on the other was the starting point
for analysis, not its result. Neither demographer examined the alleged connections between
population growth, poverty, and pollution, and neither presented empirical evidence to sup-
port the purported relationship. Instead, with support from their new funders, Notestein
and Davis turned from examining the causes of poverty and considering how resources could
66
Fairfield Osborn and Kingsley Davis, “Food and People: U.S. Farm Surpluses are No Answer to the
World’s Food Shortages,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 7, 1955.
67
Fairfield Osborn and Kingsley Davis, “Space and People: Migration to U.S. Cannot Relieve World’s
Overcrowding,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 8, 1955.

297
be developed to meet the needs of growing populations to assessing how population growth
could be reduced in poor agrarian societies.
In addition to modernization theory and new sources of funding for their work, the
Cold War itself and the chilling effect it had on intellectual freedom also seems to have
influenced demography’s mid-century theoretical adaptation. Given the political context in
which they were working, a sustained critique of global capitalism and economic imperialism
from within U.S. institutions was likely impossible. With the onset of the Cold War, any hint
of such critique came under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC), which had the potential to destroy careers. Demographers, perhaps because of their
enthusiasm for and involvement in the New Deal during the 1930s, came under particular
suspicion at the beginning of the Cold War. Stories of investigations or delays in acquiring
security clearance for government jobs appear frequently in the interviews of the PAA Oral
History Project. Most notably, Chicago demographer Philip Hauser was investigated by
HUAC while serving as the U.S. delegate to the U.N. Population Commission in 1950, and
Hope Eldridge was removed by the U.S. government from her position the U.N.’s Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the early 1950s for having supported Henry Wallace’s
1948 presidential campaign.68 When Conrad Taeuber was offered a job at the Census Bureau
in 1951, his FBI security clearance took a particularly long time, which he later discovered
was a result of the American Sociological Review having published a special issue on the
U.S.S.R. during World War II, when Taeuber was managing editor of the journal.69 Twentieth
century demographers were well aware of Marx and Engels’s nineteenth-century critiques
of Malthusian theory, described in Chapter One, and understood that adherence to the
Malthusian relationship between population growth and poverty was necessary to avoid
suspicion of communist sympathy during the postwar period.70
68
Hauser had also been a policy advisor to Wallace when Wallace was Secretary of Commerce. For
information about Hauser’s investigation, see: Philip M. Hauser to Frank W. Notestein, Apr. 11, 1950,folder
5, box 13; Frank W. Notestein, Apr. 15, 1950,folder 5, box 13; for Eldridge’s story, see, see n. 116, 93-94;
Margaret Hagood and Henry Shryock Jr. were also investigated by HUAC in the 1950s, see n. 116, 94.
69
See n. 118, 27.
70
Notestein demonstrated this understanding in his response to Hauser’s investigation. Notestein, Apr. 15,

298
 Notestein and Davis’s late-1940s scholarship, influenced by the Cold War, by moderniza-
tion theory, by new patrons and clients, and by the crisis of demographic authority described
in Chapter Three, formed the scientific basis for the two distinct but intertwined discourses
of overpopulation that emerged and gained enormous popular and political traction between
1945 and 1975, one economic and the other environmental. Each discourse had powerful
and wealthy supporters. In many cases, the supporters were the same. For example, the
Rockefeller brothers, the Osborn cousins, and the Ford Foundation (beginning in the 1950s)
all funded scientific research, publicity, and the establishment of organizations to promote
both economic and environmental understandings of population growth as a problem and for
particular population control solutions (discussed in this and the following chapters). These
interests also lobbied governments and intergovernmental organizations around the world for
recognition of the population problems they championed and for financial and policy support
for the solutions they proposed.
Both discourses drew on the Malthusian attribution of poverty, famine, and strife to the
pressure of population on resources, and both discourses grew out of the interwar perception
of differential population growth as a threat to the global political order. Proponents of each
discourse frequently pointed to the other as further evidence of the malevolent effects of
population growth. The two discourses differed, however, in their geographical emphasis —
with the economic discourse placing greater weight on population growth in the global south
and the environmental discourse placing greater weight on population growth in the global
north — in the urgency they accorded the problem — with proponents of the environmental
discourse speaking of population growth in nearly apocalyptic terms — and in the solutions
they proposed — with proponents of the economic discourse promoting solutions based in
the free market and individual autonomy and proponents of the environmental discourse
promoting solutions based in regulation and legal compulsion.71 The following section de-
1950, see n. 68.
71
Rockefeller Foundation, “Memorandum - The Population Problem: A Tentative Analysis,” Feb. 1,
1952,folder 667, box 80, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5.

299
scribes the economic discourse, the individuals and organizations that supported it, and the
forms of scholarship, intervention, and public policy to which it gave rise. I will return to
the environmental discourse in Chapter Six.

4.2 The Economic Discourse of Overpopulation

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the idea that population growth presented a barrier to eco-
nomic development became so widely accepted as to seem “too obvious and straightforward
to question,” as Timothy Mitchell has argued in his critique of the trope of overpopulation
in the development literature on Egypt.72 This trope certainly had roots in the Malthusian
attribution of poverty to the more rapid growth of population than agricultural produce, but
also relied on the new concepts of “the economy” and “economic development” that emerged
in the 1930s and 1940s. As discussed in Chapter Three, during the 1930s, the new practice
of national income accounting contributed to the understanding of national economies as ob-
jects coterminous with states and populations, the size of which could be measured through
the gross national product (GNP).73 Economists and policy makers viewed GNP per capita
as a measure of the well-being of a country’s citizens or subjects, and the stimulation of
growth in per capita GNP a duty of governments. Population played a very important role
in this equation. It represented both the people whose well-being was supposedly reflected
in per capita GNP and the denominator of the calculation. In a very simplistic Malthusian
sense, fewer people meant a smaller denominator and therefore a higher GNP per capita.
Moreover, in order for per capita GNP to continue growing as population expanded — the
sign of successful economic development and an assumed prerequisite of modernization —
aggregate GNP had to grow more rapidly than population. The role of population in the cal-
culation of GNP per capita cast doubt on previous understandings of population growth as
a driver of economic dynamism, discussed in Chapters One and Two. This section examines
72
Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, see n. 5, 210.
73
Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, see n. 90.

300
exactly how the common-sense understanding of population growth as a barrier to economic
development in the global south emerged and gained support from the field of demography.

4.2.1 Planning Population Control at Colonial Williamsburg

By the time John D. Rockefeller III took over the chairmanship of the Rockefeller Founda-
tion in 1952, he had become concerned that population growth in the global south would
undermine his family’s philanthropic efforts and the geopolitical and geoeconomic hegemony
of the United States. Rockefeller had long supported the legalization and spread of birth
control, having told his father as early as 1934 that he wanted to focus his philanthropic ef-
forts in that area.74 The Rockefeller Foundation had already devoted substantial resources to
increasing the world’s agricultural production — leading to the technological developments
now known as the Green Revolution — but had not systematically investigated the possibil-
ity of population control, though it had contributed to contraceptive and eugenic research in
the U.S. and the U.K. Leland DeVinney, head of the Rockefeller Foundation’s social science
division, had advised Rockefeller that “a private individual willing to do so can make an es-
pecially useful contribution” to the “limitation of population growth.” He warned, however,
as birth control was still highly controversial in the U.S., that such efforts would encounter
resistance and that “public discussion of the matter or attempts to formulate over-all general
programs for wide adoption lead inescapably to bitter controversy and are not likely to be
very effective.”75 Rockefeller’s financial advisor, Lewis Strauss, suggested that Rockefeller
hold a small meeting of experts to explore the possibility of population control behind closed
doors.
The meeting took place over three days in June 1952, at the Rockefeller-owned Colo-
nial Williamsburg Inn under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). NAS
74
Rockefeller, John D. III, “Population Growth: The Role of the Developed World,” Population and
Development Review 4, no. 3 (1978): 509–516.
75
Leland C. DeVinney, “Memorandum - Luncheon Conference with JDR III on February 13, 1952,”
Feb. 15, 1952,folder 674, box 81, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5.

301
president Detlev Bronk, who was soon to become the president of the Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research, chaired the meeting, which was paid for by the NAS through a direct
grant from Rockefeller. Participants included Rockefeller associates and Foundation officers;
natural scientists, including embryologist George Corner and Planned Parenthood Federa-
tion of America (PPFA) research director Paul Henshaw; University of Chicago economist
Theodore Schultz, who had begun to establish the new field of development economics;
Frederick and Fairfield Osborn; William Vogt, who was then national director of PPFA;
and demographers Frank Notestein, Irene Taeuber, Dorothy Thomas, Lowell Reed, John
Hajnal, Kingsley Davis, Warren Thompson, and Pascal Whelpon, who was then director
of the U.N. Population Division.76 Although the discussion focused mostly on population
growth in the global south, all participants were Americans, with the exception of British
demographer John Hajnal, who was then a research associate at OPR. Irene Taeuber and
Dorothy Thomas were the only women present.
Despite the meeting’s sponsorship by the NAS and the participation of well-known scien-
tists, the meeting did not reflect general scientific concern about world population growth.77
Other than in the nascent field of demography, scientists had shown little interest in world
population growth and even less interest in controlling it. Those who were concerned with
potential imbalances between population and resources caused by rapidly-declining mortality
in the global south, such as economist Theodore Schultz and mathematician Warren Weaver
(Weaver directed the natural sciences division of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1932 to
1955), advocated the development of natural, human, and industrial resources to meet the
needs of growing populations, much as Notestein and Davis had recommended prior to 1947.78
76
“Memorandum,” Mar. 28, 1952,folder 674, box 81, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5.
77
Connelly, see n. 8, 155-156.
78
Schultz and Weaver presented these views at the meeting. See: National Academy of Sciences, “A Con-
ference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript — morning and evening sessions, 6/20/52,”
June 20, 1952,folder 720, box 85, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5; National Academy of Sciences, “A
Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript — morning session, 6/21/52,” June 21,
1952,folder 723, box 85, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5; National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference
on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript — afternoon session, 6/21/52,” June 21, 1952,folder
722, box 85, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5; National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Popula-
tion Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript — evening session, 6/21/52,” June 21, 1952,folder 721, box 85,

302
Though he had no scientific training himself, Rockefeller intended for the 1952 meeting to
produce a new consensus among leading scientists, businessmen, and philanthropists that
population growth posed an insurmountable barrier to U.S. economic, strategic, and human-
itarian aims in the global south and that population control through the spread of voluntary
family planning would be necessary to effect peaceful decolonization and modernization.
The meeting began with most of the non-demographers pleading their ignorance of pop-
ulation matters and expressing bewilderment at their invitation. They disagreed over what,
exactly, “the population problem” was and what could be done about it. Participants also
disagreed about where “the population problem” was: natural scientists expressed more con-
cern about population growth in the United States, while demographers — who had already
determined the baby boom to be “a temporary cycle, nothing permanent at all” — focused
on the global south.79
Possibly anticipating this lack of consensus, Rockefeller’s advisors had asked Hajnal, un-
der Notestein’s supervision, to prepare a briefing book to inform participants about the causes
and potential consequences of population growth in the global south.80 Given that most par-
ticipants had not previously considered population growth or its global economic, political,
or environmental consequences, Hajnal’s briefing book — which promoted Nostestein’s 1947
contentions that population growth was a source of poverty in the global south and could be
slowed through the promotion of contraception — structured much of the discussion. The
briefing book explained recent population growth in terms of demographic transition theory
and argued that global rates of growth were likely to increase further: although fertility had
fallen dramatically in Western Europe, Oceania, North America and Japan, it was still high
in the rest of the world, though offset for the moment by high mortality. Hajnal warned,
sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5; National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems,
Williamsburg, VA, Transcript — morning session, 6/22/52,” June 22, 1952,folder 721, box 85, sub-series 5,
series 1, record group 5.
79
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning and evening sessions, 6/20/52,” see n. 78, 81.
80
Donald H. McLean Jr. to John D. Rockefeller III and Lewis L. Strauss, Mar. 3, 1952,folder 674, box
81, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5; John Hajnal, “Briefing Materials for Williamsburg Conference on
Population,” 1952,folders 718-719, box 85, sub-series 5, series 1, record group 5.

303
however, that efforts to promote economic development in the global south would reduce
mortality well before reducing fertility, stimulating population growth that could stymie de-
velopment projects. He argued against attempts to increase food production, arguing that
such strategies would further reduce mortality and thereby increase population and attendant
nutrition requirements, while simultaneously promoting increasingly rapid soil erosion.81 Ha-
jnal’s conclusion that continued population growth was unsustainable from both economic
and environmental perspectives formed the starting point for the Williamsburg discussions.
Participants accepted Hajnal’s Malthusian contention that famine and malnutrition in the
global south provided evidence of overpopulation. Hunger, malnutrition, and even famine
were, indeed, real problems in the decades following World War II, but attributing those
phenomena to population growth elided many other important factors, including the distri-
bution of food and other resources, the use of land (often under foreign ownership) to grow
cash crops for a global market rather than food for local consumption, the replacement of
local diets with food manufactured or distributed by multinational corporations, and the
replacement of local knowledge about nutrition with nutrition science that originated in the
global north and often failed to recognize the value of foods grown in the global south.82
As economist Amartya Sen has argued, “starvation is the characteristic of some people not
having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.
While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes. Whether
and how starvation relates to food supply is a matter for factual investigation.”83 People
starve not because there is not enough food — or because there are too many people — but
because they lack the exchange entitlement that would allow them to acquire food. Further,
81
Hajnal, “Briefing Materials for Williamsburg Conference on Population,” see n. 80, 33-34.
82
Henrietta L. Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural
Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994); Verena Raschke
and Bobby Cheema, “Colonisation, the New World Order, and the Eradication of Traditional Food Habits
in East Africa: Historical Perspective on the Nutrition Transition,” Public Health Nutrition 11, no. 7 (2007):
662–674; Cynthia Brantley, “Kikuyu-Maasai Nutrition and Colonial Science: The Orr and Gilks Study in
Late 1920s Kenya Revisited,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30, no. 1 (1997): 49–86.
83
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon,
1981), 1, emphasis in the original.

304
even if there is not enough food, it is not necessarily because there are too many people, but
may also be a product of the global structure of food production and distribution. Rather
than considering the cause of widespread hunger and malnutrition in the global south as a
matter for investigation, as Sen recommends, those present at Williamsburg accepted the
Malthusian attribution of hunger to overpopulation, eliding all other causes, many of which
Notestein and Davis had recognized in 1944.
On the basis of Hajnal’s text, the Williamsburg participants generally agreed that “the
potentialities for growth implicit in extremely high birth rates” in the global south were
“likely to prove a disadvantage to the peoples of those areas in seeking more rapid improve-
ments of their wealth, health and material levels of living.”84 That is, they accepted the
premise that population growth presented a challenge to economic development, which they
understood as a growing economy or GNP per capita, as described above.
Those present at Williamsburg agreed that a stagnant or declining per capita GNP in
the global south could disrupt the global and political order by increasing popular discontent
and fueling nationalist and communist movements, which would be strengthened by growing
populations. They accepted that, in order to keep GNP per capita from declining as pop-
ulations grew (declining GNP per capita implied but did not necessarily constitute overall
worsening of living standards, just as rising GNP per capita implied but did not necessarily
produce overall improvement of living standards), economic growth would need to outpace
population growth.85 While some of the scientists at Williamsburg continued to recommend
interventions aimed at increasing the portion of world resources available to the global south
and continued to view equitable modernization as the best way to stimulate economic growth
while ultimately reducing fertility, they conceded to the view of the majority that popula-
tion control through family planning could facilitate these programs while protecting U.S.
economic interests and containing the spread of communism.
84
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning and evening sessions, 6/20/52,” see n. 78, 86.
85
Ibid., 26.

305
 There were only two problems with this consensus position, which those present at
Williamsburg readily acknowledged: just as when Notestein presented the Cold War version
of demographic transition theory in 1947, there was no empirical evidence demonstrating
either that population growth prevented economic development or that the spread of con-
traceptive information or technology could reduce population growth in agrarian societies.
Nonetheless, the Williamsburg group agreed that investment in the global south — whether
in agriculture, transport, manufacturing, or education and whether by the U.S. government,
the U.N., businesses, or philanthropies — would not produce the desired results (financial
returns, whether to the investors or to the local economy) unless accompanied by a reduction
in fertility.86 While they acknowledged the dearth of empirical data, they concluded that, if
they waited to act until more research had been done, “it will be too late to do anything
about it [reducing fertility].”87 The Cold War provided a further sense of urgency, and the
Williamsburg participants discussed the need to combat “communist propagandists who are
filtering into the villages” of the global south promising “other ways out of the problem” of
poverty.88 Specifically, communism offered state control of land and natural resources and
the promise of directing industrialization to produce maximum benefit for workers, solutions
that had the potential to support a growing population at higher standards of living but that
threatened the prevailing geopolitical and geoeconomic order that benefited U.S. industry.
Those present at Williamsburg briefly discussed, and summarily dismissed, the idea of
international migration as a means of relieving the pressure of population on resources in the
global south, a solution Warren Thompson had promoted between the wars, as described in
Chapter One. Demographic transition theory suggested that, even though population was
growing rapidly in some parts of the global south, the world was not in danger of absolute
overpopulation. Large tracts of land in Australia and the Americas were sparsely populated,
86
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning and evening sessions, 6/20/52,” see n. 78.
87
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— afternoon session, 6/21/52,” see n. 78.
88
Ibid.

306
and population growth in those areas was either already slowing or expected to slow soon.
In fact, leaders of several countries in the global south — including Uruguay, Thailand,
and Brazil — believed their countries too sparsely populated to adequately develop natural
resources.89 U.N. representatives from some of these countries advocated an international
migration program to redistribute populations from more- to less-densely settled regions
of the world. Yet neither the demographers nor any other participants at Williamsburg
endorsed such a program, a reflection both of their own racism and of the racism they
attributed to policymakers in the U.S. and Australia.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Frederick Osborn expressed anxiety that a scheme of
international migration would result in the denizens of the global north being “engulfed by a
great mass of people” who didn’t share their culture or values. Even Thompson abandoned
his support for migration schemes, warning that “there is a very great danger of ruining
our [economic] opportunities, if we have to compete with the populations which are going
to grow rapidly.”90 This statement reflected a global version of Thompson’s 1923 theory
that immigrants to the U.S., because they had lower living standards and could thereby
reproduce at a higher rate on a lower income, would “displace and supplant” the native
born.91 Dorothy Thomas, in contrast, suggested that migration could benefit both sending
and receiving countries, but argued that racist policy makers would block any proposal for
such a scheme.92 The arguments of the Williamsburg group against facilitating migration
from countries in the global south with rapidly-growing populations, either to the global
north or to other parts of the global south, reveal their perception of two fundamentally
opposed segments of the world’s population (the white and the non-white), their concern
89
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning and evening sessions, 6/20/52,” see n. 78, 46-47; United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations,
1952 (New York: United Nations, 1952), 392.
90
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning session, 6/21/52,” see n. 78.
91
Thompson, “Standards of Living as They Affect the Growth of Competing Population Groups,” see
n. 43, 57.
92
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— evening session, 6/21/52,” see n. 78, 11.

307
with maintaining the political and economic superiority of the former over the latter, and
their perception that the latter’s growing numerical superiority posed a threat to the existing
geopolitical and geoeconomic order.
The Williamsburg group agreed that population control in the global south would protect
U.S. economic and political interests, even if it did not actually alleviate poverty or facilitate
economic development. However, they also agreed that a program of population control
would succeed only if it appeared to originate from within the countries in question rather
than being imposed externally, as by a U.N. mandate or as a condition of U.S. foreign aid or
World Bank loans. Economists and policymakers worldwide still viewed population growth as
a source of economic, political, and military strength in the international arena, and pressure
from the U.S. or an international agency to control population growth could appear as an
attempt to reduce that strength. The U.N. Convention for the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948 and ratified by the
requisite twenty member states in 1951, included in the definition of genocide “imposing
measures intended to prevent births” when done “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group.”93 Although the Williamsburg participants
did not explicitly voice this concern, as an attempt to reduce the size of specific national
populations, their population control aims could easily have been construed as genocide.
Warren Weaver reminded the other meeting participants that the program of global
population control they were beginning to formulate would likely generate considerable re-
sistance, as it made sense only “from the point of view of Western Protestant philosophy,”
which was, “from the point of view of this planet, a minority point of view.” He argued
further that “there are thousands and millions of people on this planet whose basic ethical
principles would lead them to totally different ideas about what was worth doing in this field
of population and resources.”94 The group recognized that publics and heads of state would
93
United Nations, “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” (1948), url:
[Link]
94
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning session, 6/22/52,” see n. 78, 38.

308
support measures intended to control population growth only if they perceived population
growth as more of a liability than an asset and if the intended users of family planning
services expressed demand for them. Those present at Williamsburg reasoned that, if they
could create popular demand for birth control and government support for family planning
programs in the global south, technical assistance from U.S.-based organizations and U.S.
government agencies would appear humanitarian rather than self-interested, and fertility
could be reduced through the voluntary use of family planning services.95
William Vogt, the national director of Planned Parenthood, suggested that family plan-
ning clinics would enjoy greater acceptance and popularity, both in the U.S. and overseas,
if they were promoted as maternal health clinics. Vogt’s comment suggests that Planned
Parenthood’s primary agenda had narrowed mainly to population control at the expense
of reproductive health. Moreover, the description by Planned Parenthood research director
Henshaw of his investigation of uterine parasites as a potential method of contraception for
women in the global south dramatically underscores the organization’s privileging of con-
traception over reproductive health. While histories of population control often conflate the
population control and birth control movements, each promoted a different locus of con-
trol.96 Birth control aimed to empower potential parents to choose the number of children
they would have and when they would have them, while population control aimed to give
scientific or political authorities control over the size and composition of populations.
As discussed in Chapter One, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, had
advocated the legalization of contraception by promoting it as a more humane mechanism
for eugenics than sterilization, and had strengthened her movement for female reproduc-
tive health and autonomy by enlisting the support of eugenicist and neo-Malthusian doctors
and scientists. Yet population control movements also derived authority from the personal
autonomy associated with the birth control movement, particularly as authoritarian popu-
95
Hajnal, “Briefing Materials for Williamsburg Conference on Population,” see n. 80, 81.
96
For an exception to this generalization about the literature, see Linda Gordon, “The Politics of Popula-
tion: Birth Control and the Eugenics Movement,” Radical America 8, no. 4 (1974): 61–98.

309
lation control programs became increasingly distasteful in the 1930s and 1940s. In his free
market eugenics program, described in Chapter Two, Frederick Osborn had advocated not
just contraception (the technological means of preventing pregnancy), but also birth control
(the ability of couples to choose the number of children they would have) as a strategy for
improving the “quality” of the U.S. population. He argued that, as long as the social envi-
ronment encouraged couples to choose the “correct” number of children based on their level
of genetic “fitness,” a eugenic distribution of births could be achieved by making contra-
ceptives freely and universally available. That is, Osborn promoted a behaviorist approach
to eugenics, whereby engineering the social environment in which couples made decisions
about childbearing would lead them to unconsciously make the “correct” decisions from a
eugenic standpoint.97 Universalizing the use of contraception was critical to his program, as
he theorized that the most dysgenic distribution of births occurred when only elites in a
given society had access to birth control.98 The Williamsburg participants agreed that popu-
lation control programs could only succeed if they worked through voluntary family planning
programs, paralleling Osborn’s interwar eugenics programs. By suggesting that population
control advocates in the U.S. emphasize family planning clinics as agents of reproductive
health, Vogt was suggesting that, depending on their audience, advocates of population
control could emphasize either the voluntary family planning portion of their program or
the social control portion, which aimed to create a context in which family planning would
produce population control.

4.2.2 The Population Council

Over the course of the meeting, those present at Williamsburg developed a strategy that
would become the agenda of the Population Council, a nongovernmental organization es-
tablished by John D. Rockefeller III and a subset of meeting participants later that year.
97
For a history of behavioral science in the U.S., see Lemov, see n. 82.
98
W. Parker Mauldin to Frederick Osborn and Dudley Kirk, Apr. 11, 1957,folder 40, box 4, record group
IV3B4.2.

310
The strategy comprised three elements: funding demographic research and training, funding
contraceptive research, and providing technical assistance to family planning programs in
the global south. Each element aimed to support voluntary family planning as a vehicle
for population control. Demographic research would demonstrate the need for population
control, assess the possibility of fertility decline in agrarian societies, examine the factors
that led couples to use birth control, and test approaches for promoting the adoption of
family planning. Offering students from the global south training in demography would lead
to indigenous analyses of population dynamics and local expert pressure on governments
to enact population policies and provide family planning programs. As Taeuber put it at
Williamsburg, such training would involve “the development of procedures whereby we can
stimulate an interest. . . and whereby we can cooperate in the development and the policies
that, shall we say, have to be indigenous in the areas.”99 Contraceptive research would de-
velop, in the words of Rockefeller Foundation officer Leland DeVinney, “a more effective,
cheap, foolproof contraceptive device suitable for use among ignorant peasants in backward
areas.”100 Technical assistance would ensure that family planning programs in developing
countries had the requisite supplies and expertise.
The Williamsburg group recognized that the work of the Population Council would be
perceived and received much more favorably worldwide if the Council presented itself as
an international organization without official connections to any government, especially the
U.S. government. On the last day of the meeting, participants joked quite seriously about
how they might create this appearance. Bronk echoed Strauss’s suggestion that the Council
hold its first official meeting abroad, stating that “there are simple devices whereby one can
have one’s friends abroad take the initiative,” to which Strauss responded “we’ll write the
invitations in Sanscript [sic].” Davis continued, “you might give the money to a Frenchman,
who would give it to a Yugoslav, who would eventually give it back to the Council.” Such
99
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning session, 6/21/52,” see n. 78.
100
DeVinney, see n. 75.

311
suggestions indicate the desire of those present at Williamsburg to maintain control over the
nascent Population Council while giving it the appearance of a multilateral organization.
Despite his continued doubt about the international ethics of population control, Weaver
conceded that he had considerable experience in “indirection,” that is, “having international
things initiated without their being aware of it,” with “their” presumably referring to publics
and policy makers, in both the U.S. and the countries in question.101 Such statements and
the levity with which they were made indicate broad acceptance among those present at
Williamsburg of the U.S. government and U.S.-based businesses and philanthropies acting
in the world unilaterally under the guise of multilateralism.
In the months following Williamsburg, Rockefeller and his associates began to worry
that making the Population Council an international body could hinder action rather than
facilitate it. They feared “that the foreigners represented on the Council will be from different
countries, that each will instinctively look at any given problem from the point of view of
his own country and that no two national representatives will place the same emphasis
on the same problem.”102 This international scope was what they believed prevented the
U.N. Population Commission from taking effective action, and their concern that input from
other countries would obstruct any actions the Population Council might take reveals their
awareness that their agenda aimed to advance U.S. interests rather than those of the countries
the Council purported to help.
When the Population Council formed officially later that year, it did so as a U.S.-based
nongovernmental organization, with a board of trustees composed entirely of U.S. scien-
tists, businessmen, and philanthropists. Many trustees had been present at Williamsburg —
John D. Rockefeller III, Frederick Osborn, Frank Notestein, Detlev Bronk, Karl Compton,
Thomas Parran, and Lewis Strauss. Frank Boudreau, executive director of the Milbank
Memorial Fund, was the only trustee who had not participated in the Williamsburg meet-
101
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning session, 6/22/52,” see n. 78, 53.
102
Donald H. McLean Jr. to John D. Rockefeller III, July 28, 1952,folder 674, box 81, sub-series 5, series
1, record group 5.

312
ing. On Notestein’s recommendation, Rockefeller appointed Osborn executive vice-president
and hired Dudley Kirk, who had previously worked at OPR and for the U.S. Department
of State, in the full-time position of Demographic Advisor.103 When Brock Chisholm, a
Canadian physician who had recently become the first director-general of the World Health
Organization, declined Rockefeller’s invitation to become the Council’s president, Rocke-
feller asked Osborn to fill the post temporarily, which he did for the next eight years, until
Notestein succeeded him.104
Initial funds for the Population Council came from Rockefeller sources: the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and individual members of the Rockefeller fam-
ily. In 1954, the Ford Foundation became the Council’s largest donor, with an initial grant of
$600,000 for three years, later increased to $1 million.105 By that time, the Ford Foundation
had become the largest philanthropic foundation in the U.S.; in 1954 it spent four times as
much as the Rockefeller Foundation and ten times as much as the Carnegie Corporation.106
The Ford Foundation originally placed its population activities under its Program in Behav-
ioral Sciences. According to Bernard Berelson, the Ford Foundation’s director of behavioral
sciences, the Foundation initially entered the population field in 1953 at the urging of board
members whose wives supported Margaret Sanger’s work; he described them as “Planned
Parenthood nuts.”107 The Foundation’s first population-specific grants, however, were not to
Planned Parenthood, but rather to the Population Reference Bureau, a eugenically-oriented
organization that interpreted demographic research for the media (discussed in greater detail
below) and to the Population Council, suggesting that the Foundation’s population work may
103
Frank W. Notestein to Frederick Osborn, Dec. 15, 1953,folder 1, box 10.
104
Rockefeller Foundation, “Frederick Osborn Interview Report,” Sept. 4, 1969,folder 494, box 73, sub-series
4, series 3, record group 5.
105
Rockefeller Foundation, see n. 104; Sarah Mellon Scaife, niece of Andrew W. Mellon and one of the
heirs to the Mellon banking, oil, steel, and aluminum fortune, and her daughter, Cordelia Scaife May, were
also early and generous donors. Scaife was a friend of Margaret Sanger and May an environmentalist who
would contribute to population control causes throughout her life, first emphasizing birth control and later
immigration. May established the Laurel Foundation, a conservation organization that promoted population
control, in 1951, and the Colcom Foundation, an anti-immigration organization, in 1996. “Late Heiress’
Anti-Immigration Efforts Live On,” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2013.
106
MacDonald, see n. 44, 4.
107
Morrissey, see n. 235.

313
initially have been motivated by eugenic and Cold War concerns.108 This suggestion gains fur-
ther credence from the timing of the Foundation’s entry into population, which occurred the
year after it “became massively involved in Third World development programs.”109 When
the Ford Foundation phased out its behavioral sciences program in 1957, population moved
to the Program in Economic Development and Administration. The Population Council
recruited Berelson to direct its communications program in 1962. He became president in
1968, and will become increasingly relevant to this story in later chapters.110 Between 1954
and 1994, the Ford Foundation provided the Population Council with a total of $88 million,
an average of about $2.2 million per year.111

The Population Council, Demography, and Eugenics

In addition to supporting the Population Council, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations
also directly funded programs of population research and action. To a large extent, the
Population Council’s staff coordinated the various Ford and Rockefeller population projects,
which meant that most funding decisions were made, either directly or indirectly, by the
Population Council.112 Despite Matthew Connelly’s description of the postwar population
establishment as “a system without a brain,”113 there was actually a substantial degree of
coordination, though much of it occurred unofficially and behind the scenes, through private
communications between Dudley Kirk and Frederick Osborn (and later Frank Notestein, W.
Parker Mauldin, and Bernard Berelson) at the Population Council, Oscar (Bud) Harkavy at
the Ford Foundation, and Marshall Balfour at the Rockefeller Foundation. The leadership
of the Population Council considered their organization the “retailer” and the Ford and
108
Oscar Harkavy, Curbing Population Growth: An Insider’s Perspective on the Population Movement
(New York: Plenum, 1995).
109
John Caldwell and Pat Caldwell, Limiting Population Growth and the Ford Foundation Contribution
(London: Frances Pinter, 1986), 21.
110
Harkavy, see n. 108, 13.
111
Ibid., 13.
112
Morrissey, see n. 235.
113
Connelly, see n. 8, 276.

314
Rockefeller Foundations the “wholesaler” in the population field.114
As president of the Population Council, Osborn was able to insert his eugenic program
into the Council’s broader program of population control. Osborn remained secretary of
the American Eugenics Society (AES) for much of the second half of the twentieth century,
and the AES shared office space with the Population Council at 230 Park Avenue in New
York.115 Throughout the 1950s, the Council granted the AES $4,000 annually.116 Osborn
and others viewed the work of the two organizations as complementary: as one observer put
it, “the Population Council appears to be oriented toward the frightfully urgent control of
racial quantity, while the Eugenics Society serves as a sort of Committee on Racial Qual-
ity.”117 When the Council drafted its first mission statement, Osborn included the eugenic
distribution of fertility as an action point: “the promotion of research and the application of
existing knowledge to develop such changes in the attitudes, habits and environmental pres-
sures affecting the life of human beings so that within every social and economic grouping
parents who are above the average in intelligence, quality of personality and affection will
tend to have larger than average families.”118 Thomas Parran Jr., former Surgeon General
and a Population Council trustee, reported to Rockefeller that he was “sorely troubled”
by this statement, which he feared “could readily be misunderstood as a Nazi master race
philosophy.” Further, he argued that Osborn’s eugenic model of human heredity had been
disproved by genetic research, reiterating Raymond Pearl’s interwar assertion, discussed in
Chapter Two, that “the most talented, intelligent and otherwise socially useful citizens show
very little likelihood of transmitting these traits to their off-spring to a degree significantly
114
“Dudley Kirk, Interview with Jean Van Der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” Apr. 29, 1988, url:
[Link] [Link],
url: [Link]
[Link], 122.
115
Frederick Osborn to Dudley Kirk, Oct. 24, 1966,folder 1796, box 97, record group IV3B4.5.
116
Dudley Kirk, “Proposals for Board of Trustees Meeting of May 13, 1959,” May 4, 1959,folder 42, box 4,
record group IV3B4.2.
117
P.S. Barrows to Frederick Osborn, Mar. 4, 1965,folder 1796, box 97, record group IV3B4.5.
118
“Proposed Establishment of Population Council - Draft,” Oct. 7, 1952,folder 674, box 81, sub-series 5,
series 1, record group 5.

315
greater than they will appear in the off-spring with what one might label average persons.”119
In response to Parran’s objections, Osborn toned down the language of this action point;
in the final version he coded his eugenic aims as “research in both the quantitative and
qualitative aspects of population in the United States in relation to potential material and
cultural resources,”120 a statement that strongly resembled the original mission statement
of the Population Association of America (PAA), discussed in Chapter Two, which Osborn
had also helped to craft.
The field of demography had maintained its close relationship with Osborn’s free market
eugenics throughout the war, even as it distanced itself from the fascist population policies
pursued in Europe. Notestein and other prominent demographers — including Kirk, Kiser,
and Lorimer — served on the AES’s board of directors during the 1950s and 1960s, included
eugenic analyses of population trends in their work, and published occasionally in Eugenics
Quarterly, published by the AES beginning in 1954, and in Marriage and Family Living,
edited by Paul Popenoe and published by the National Council on Family Relations, which
was closely aligned with the AES (Popenoe served on the board of both organizations).121
Osborn, who during the war had served as a major general in the Army’s Information and
Education Division, became vice president of the PAA in 1947, despite his lack of scientific
credentials.
During and immediately after the war, as geneticists began to identify hereditary origins
of certain diseases, Osborn promoted the incorporation of medical genetics into medical
school curricula and promoted genetic counseling (including information about contraception
and sterilization) for couples who had hereditary diseases or the genetic predisposition to
them.122 He also used the authority and visibility he gained from his position as president
119
Thomas Parran to John D. Rockefeller III, Oct. 28, 1952,folder 674, box 81, sub-series 5, series 1, record
group 5.
120
“Proposed Establishment of Population Council - Draft,” Nov. 12, 1952,folder 674, box 81, sub-series 5,
series 1, record group 5.
121
See, for example,“Significance of Population Trends,” which examines the eugenic implications of so-
cioeconomic fertility differentials. Notestein, “The Significance of Population Trends,” see n. 3, 44; for more
on Popenoe, see Stern, see n. 60.
122
Frederick Osborn, “Eugenics: Retrospect and Prospect,” Mar. 26, 1959,“Osborn - Concerning Eugenics,”

316
of the Population Council to promote his free-market eugenics program. This program had
not changed from the interwar period, but he presented new Cold War justifications for it,
including competition with the U.S.S.R., the U.S.’s position of global leadership, and the
need to fend off potential attack from the rapidly-growing nonwhite portion of the world’s
population.123 Some other demographers, particularly those associated with the Population
Council, Princeton, and the Milbank Memorial Fund, shared Osborn’s views. In a 1989
interview, Kirk stated that he had always viewed population growth in the global south in
eugenic terms, and

in a way I hate to go on record for saying this, but I think there’s a real problem in
the Western civilization in that we are approaching a stationary population and
the rest of the world, the less developed world, is rapidly becoming an increasing
proportion of the total population. Since I have a background in political science,
I see that as a power problem too. Because as these countries get developed, and
particularly as China gets developed, their large populations are going to be a
tremendous asset. That’s a debatable question, of course, but I think so. I
think that sheer size is going to have a very great effect on our position. In
the past, Western civilization was a rapidly expanding civilization in numbers, in
population, as well as in technology. I see us having to face a major readjustment
in which power is going to go to other countries. And maybe we’d be better off
if we had more people.124

Since the Council’s population control program and Osborn’s eugenic agenda both relied on
voluntary family planning in a context of subtle social control, Osborn was readily able to
promote both agendas simultaneously.
Although the Population Council did not form as an international organization, it main-
tained its focus on population growth in the global south and cast its population control
efforts as a humanitarian initiative, rather than one that would advance U.S. interests. How-
ever, the Council faced a number of challenges. First, most scientists and policy makers, in
both the U.S. and the global south, did not view population growth as a problem. Second, as
box 4.
123
See, for example: Frederick Osborn, “Population Quality - Speech at the Women’s City Club,” Apr. 1,
1955,“Frederick Osborn - Papers #14,” box 17; Frederick Osborn, “Absolute Weapons – The American
Reply,” 1961,“Frederick Osborn - Papers #21,” box 18.
124
See n. 114, 130.

317
Weaver had pointed out at Williamsburg, if population growth did threaten to outpace the
production of food and other resources, there was much more popular support worldwide for
efforts to increase resource production than for efforts to reduce population growth. Third,
even if publics and policy makers accepted population control as a solution to the growing
imbalance between population and resources, demographic transition theory held that cou-
ples in “traditional” agrarian societies would not voluntarily undertake measures to control
their family size. The following section describes efforts of the Population Council and its
allied organizations to bring population growth in the global south to the wider attention
of scientists, publics, and policy makers in the U.S. and abroad, and to promote population
control through voluntary family planning as a plausible solution.

4.3 Popularizing Overpopulation

When John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council in 1952, he believed that
the organization could most effectively carry out its program if it did so quietly. For that
reason, the Council’s press release announcing its establishment was vague about its agenda,
describing its purpose as

to study the problems presented by the increasing population of the world; to

encourage and support research and the advancement and diffusion of knowl-
edge resulting from such research; to serve generally as a center for the collection
and exchange of information on ideas and developments relating to population
questions; to cooperate with individuals and institutions having similar inter-
ests and to take the initiative in the broad fields that constitute the population
problem.125

This statement described population growth as a problem that needed to be addressed, but
gave readers no indication of what the problem was or how the Population Council intended
to address it. Press reports described the board members as “educators” and their agenda
as an “educational project,” which was mostly true: many board members had taught at
125
“New Group Sets Up Population Study: J.D. Rockefeller 3d Heads Educational Project,” The New York
Times, Aug. 4, 1953.

318
one point in their careers and the Council intended to produce and disseminate knowledge
about the dangers of population growth and the means of controlling it. Moreover, defining
the organization’s mission as education rather than advocacy was key to maintaining its
tax-exempt status.126 The Council did not establish its technical assistance division until
1965, though it did send staff to consult with governments in the global south about family
planning programs as early as 1955. However, the press release offered no hint that the
Population Council’s research aimed to address the “relationship of the world’s population to
its material and cultural resources” by reducing population growth rather than by increasing
resources or distributing them more equitably. In general, the Population Council tried to
avoid publicity in its first decade, both to facilitate work in other countries and to avoid
attracting the opposition of the Catholic Church. One of the Council’s first activities was
to establish an “Ad Hoc Philosophy committee” to explore the Catholic Church’s stance on
contraception, along with that of other possible religious objectors, and potential means of
securing the support of religious leadership.127 Birth control remained controversial enough
in the U.S. throughout the 1950s that Nelson Rockefeller worried about the impact his older
brother’s activities would have on his political career.128
The economic discourse had another strong proponent in the 1950s, one who drew much
more public attention to the cause of population control than did the Population Council:
businessman Hugh Moore, who had contributed to the invention of the Dixie cup nearly 50
years earlier. Moore had made his fortune as head of the Dixie Cup Company, which merged
with the American Can Company in 1957. After reading Vogt’s Road to Survival and the
eugenicist text Population Roads to War or Peace (described below) in the late 1940s, Moore,
a longtime proponent of world peace, began to pour his wealth into population control as
a way to prevent future war and avert the spread of communism. Moore’s approach to
126
Zunz, see n. 72.
127
For records of the Ad Hoc Philosophy Committee, see folders 3-17, boxes 1-2, record group IV3B4.2,
Population Council Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center. In the book, I will explore further the Population
Council’s relationship with the Catholic Church and other religious entities.
128
Rockefeller Foundation, see n. 104.

319
population control was quite different than Rockefeller’s. Whereas Rockefeller set up a
private organization to research and intervene in population growth in the global south
without attracting public attention, Moore established a series of organizations that had as
their primary objective stimulating fear among the American public about population growth
in the global south and its potential to fuel the spread of communism. He lobbied the U.S.
government to make population control a component of foreign policy, and encouraged U.S.
citizens to ask the same of their elected representatives. This section describes the ways in
which Rockefeller and Moore’s activities promoted specific forms of demographic research
and interpretations of research findings in ways that encouraged public support for U.S.
involvement in population control worldwide.

4.3.1 Hugh Moore’s Population Bomb

In 1954, Moore and his associate Tom Griessemer drafted a pamphlet called “The Popula-
tion Bomb” and mailed 1,000 copies to American labor leaders, businessmen, journalists and
newspapers, physicians, lawyers, clergy, scientists, university presidents, and philanthropists.
Moore’s pamphlet was the first use of this now well-known phrase, which forcefully associ-
ated population growth with global conflagration. Drawing on demographic scholarship and
demographic transition theory, the pamphlet explained that world population was growing
faster than it ever had before, and that this growth was dangerous because it produced
widespread poverty and hunger in the global south, making governments there vulnerable to
communist revolution, which would cut U.S. manufacturers off from critical materials, labor,
and markets, destabilize the global balance of power, and threaten U.S. national security.
“The Population Bomb” encouraged readers to lobby the U.S. government to implement
measures to limit population growth abroad, particularly in countries that received U.S. aid.
Later editions included a forward by World Bank president Eugene Black.129 By 1967, Moore
129
Frances E. Walter to Hugh E. Moore, Aug. 9, 1961,Hugh E. Moore Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript
Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, folder 2, box 17.

320
had printed 13 editions of his “Population Bomb,” circulating 1.5 million copies. Each edi-
tion generated considerable media attention. Some newspapers serialized the pamphlet and
published it in its entirety, and excerpts appeared in a 1964 English composition textbook,
Ideas and Backgrounds II . In 1958 Moore produced a miniature edition “at the request of a
professor of sociology who wished to distribute copies to his classes and also at the suggestion
of gynecologists, Protestant ministers, and others who wished to distribute the pamphlet.”130
The pamphlet’s wide circulation and the credibility given it by the press helped make Moore’s
contentions and the economic overpopulation discourse common knowledge.

Figure 4.1: Hugh Moore’s “Population Bomb” Pamphlet

The leaders of the Population Council found Moore’s strategy troubling because Moore
presented population control as a program that would benefit the U.S. They feared that if
130
Hugh E. Moore to Frederick Osborn, June 24, 1958,folder 344, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.

321
the U.S. government implemented coercive policies toward other countries, such as making
foreign aid conditional on their instituting population programs, as Moore recommended,
those countries would reject population control altogether. Members of the Council’s board
also opposed Moore’s explicit promotion of population control as a means of containing the
spread of communism. They did not object to Moore’s contention that population growth in
the global south would facilitate the spread of communism or that population control would
advance U.S. economic and strategic interests. Rather, they objected to the publicity Moore
sought for these contentions, fearing that explicit calls to reduce population growth in the
global south for the benefit of the U.S. would backfire, provoking resistance to family planning
programs as well as nationalist and communist agitation. As board member Hermann Muller
explained,

I quite agree that the population growth occurring in underdeveloped countries

is one of the most menacing developments of our times and that it and the
means of counteracting it should be given far more publicity than they have
had. It is also true, as you point out, that the Communist movement is finding
this situation profitable to themselves and may be able to use it to gain world
dominance if we do not succeed in helping the underdeveloped countries to check
their population growth. However, the misery caused by overpopulation should in
itself provide sufficient argument for its control for the people in underdeveloped
countries and their sympathizers elsewhere. Many of these people have already
been aroused by the Communists to such antagonism against us that the mere
suggestion of our wanting them to change their ways in order to give us an
advantage relative to the Communists would tend to throw them still further
towards the Communist camp. Thus very subtle questions of tactics are involved
in the spread of information and propaganda on this subject.. . . In a case of this
kind I think we can combat World Communism much more effectively and also
help the underdeveloped peoples more effectively by putting our prime emphasis
on the direct detriment of population growth to themselves and to their plans
for the future.131

Whelpton warned Moore that the image on the cover of his pamphlet — a bomb-shaped
world teeming with population and scissors marked “Population Control” snipping off a
131
H.J. Muller to Bruce Barton, Will Clayton, and Hugh Moore, Jan. 31, 1957,folder 344, box 22, record
group IV3B4.2, Muller sent a copy of this letter to Robert Cook at the PRB, who forwarded it to Frederick
Osborn at the Population Council, with the handwritten note “Please don’t circulate too much!”

322
burning fuse, shown in Figure 4.1 — was misleading, as it implied both a much more dire
situation than the reality, and also a much simpler solution. For Whelpton, who had served
as director of the U.N. Population Division and was familiar with global population data,
population growth was still slow enough so as not to require extreme measures, and a delicate
enough matter of international relations that any efforts to reduce it had to be undertaken
with extreme diplomacy.132 Even Osborn, one of Moore’s strongest supporters outside of his
direct group of associates, warned that

for three years now we have had people working in India, Egypt, Japan and other
countries and reporting to us on what can be done. They are all agreed that there
is practically no hostility towards the idea of birth control or contraception in
any of these countries, far less indeed than in the United States. But they all
report that there is a feeling of extreme nationalism which makes it necessary
that they appear to do everything themselves and on their own initiative. They
may want our help but this is not something they want to admit publicly. Our
efforts therefore and those of others in this field are most successful when they
are carried forward quietly, and least successful when there is any publicity about
them.133

Notestein cautioned that coercive measures aimed at reducing fertility were likelier to pro-
duce revolutions against the governments that enacted them than to succeed in slowing
population growth.134
Nonetheless, Rockefeller, Osborn, and Kirk appreciated Moore’s efforts to draw the at-
tention of the U.S. public and policy makers toward population growth in the global south,
recognizing that government support for population control would bring with it access to
vastly greater public funding than even Rockefeller and his fellow industrial philanthropists
could hope to leverage.135 As Rockefeller explained to Moore, “there is no difference between
us as to our objectives in relation to population stabilization and family planning. We all
agree as to the seriousness of the problem and the need for action more commensurate with
its magnitude and urgency. Such differences as we have are entirely as to method and ap-
132
Pascal K. Whelpton to Hugh E. Moore, Jan. 10, 1955,folder 344, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.
133
Frederick Osborn to Hugh E. Moore, Sept. 13, 1955,folder 344, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.
134
See n. 88.
135
Rockefeller Prentice to Hugh E. Moore, Feb. 20, 1964,folder 18, box 2.

323
proach.”136 Population Council staff members worked with Moore and his associates to tone
down the language in the first edition of “The Population Bomb” to make it less potentially
offensive to people in the global south and to weaken the emphasis on preventing the spread
of communism.137 Whelpton also offered his support, writing to Moore, “I hope that your
program does not stop with the one pamphlet which has been issued but that it moves
forward intelligently. If there is anything I can do personally to help in this connection,
please let me know for I shall be glad to cooperate as much as is feasible.”138 In the early
1960s, Osborn gratefully acknowledged that Moore’s work had “created the public climate
that enabled the great foundations to push forward in the field.”139

4.3.2 Empirical Support for Economic Overpopulation

In their correspondence with Moore, Council leaders emphasized that population control pro-
grams should originate in the countries of the global south and that U.S. support for them
should — at least officially — be motivated by “the misery caused by overpopulation.”140
However, there was no scientific or policy consensus as to what constituted overpopulation
or whether population growth was the cause of the “misery” — often a gloss for poverty
and its sequelae — that characterized the global south. When Eugene Black, president of
the World Bank, asked Notestein in 1952 for a pamphlet he could distribute to loan-seeking
countries explaining that rapid population growth could stymie their development efforts,
Notestein responded that there was no empirical evidence for this contention, though he
had been making the same contention for the last five years.141 Notestein’s former student,
Harvey Leibenstein, had just completed a dissertation working out the theoretical basis for
136
John D. Rockefeller III to Hugh E. Moore, Jan. 2, 1968,folder 18, box 2.
137
Dudley Kirk to Frederick Osborn, Jan. 31, 1957,folder 344, box 22, record group IV3B4.2; “Confidential
Memorandum on the Luncheon Discussion of ‘The Population Bomb’ at the Harvard Club in New York,
March 10, 1955,” n.d.,folder 344, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.
138
Whelpton to Moore, Jan. 10, 1955, see n. 132.
139
“Organizations in the Population Field,” 1966,folder 21, box 17.
140
Muller to Barton, Clayton, and Moore, Jan. 31, 1957, see n. 131.
141
See n. 88.

324
what would come to be known as the “low-level equilibrium trap,” whereby high fertility
directed household income into subsistence rather than savings, such that capital invest-
ment could not stay ahead of population growth, thereby preventing growth in per-capita
income.142 In 1954, the Princeton University Press published Leibenstein’s work as part of
its series on population change in the global south, sponsored by the Milbank Memorial
Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation. Leibenstein’s work, however, was entirely theoretical,
with no supporting empirical evidence: up to that point in time, all countries that had ex-
perienced large-scale industrialization, urbanization, and the other changes associated with
modernization had done so in conjunction with rapid population growth.143
When Notestein relayed this information to Black, Black offered World Bank funding
for an empirical investigation of the relationship between population growth and economic
development, to be carried out by Notestein’s OPR colleague and former student Ansley
Coale in collaboration with World Bank economist Edgar Hoover. Titled Population Growth
and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries and known informally as the Coale-
Hoover Report, the project focused on India as a case study and used simulation to assess
the effects of potential population growth on future economic development. Coale projected
India’s population forward thirty years under three different fertility scenarios (all with
the same mortality assumptions) and Hoover projected the economic growth that would
accompany each fertility scenario. They found that a 50% reduction in fertility over the
thirty-year period corresponded to a 40% increase in per-capita consumer income, Coale
and Hoover’s metric of economic development.144 As Coale acknowledged, these simulation
results could not be empirically verified, as they assumed multiple simultaneous futures.145
142
Harvey Leibenstein, A Theory of Economic-Demographic Development (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1954); Warren O. Nelson, “Endocrinology – Achievement and Challenge,” Endocrinology 59, no. 1
(1956): 140–152.
143
Simon Kuznets, “Population and Economic Growth,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
111, no. 3 (1967): 170–193.
144
Ansley J. Coale and Edgar M. Hoover, Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income
Countries: A Case Study of India’s Prospects (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).
145
Ansley J. Coale, Ansley J. Coale: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society,
2000), 38.

325
Nonetheless, the study was widely accepted as definitive evidence that “continued high
fertility is an impediment if not a total barrier to economic and social development.”146
For the next few decades, Coale and Hoover’s study was the only thing resembling empir-
ical evidence for the relationship between fertility and economic growth in the global south,
and it served as the foundation for numerous other studies. Building on Coale and Hoover’s
conclusions, RAND economist Stephen Enke began to publish cost-benefit analyses of pop-
ulation control in 1960, arguing that paying cash incentives to men who had vasectomies
or women who accepted IUDs would have a larger positive effect on economic growth than
direct investment in such programs as land reclamation or urbanization.147
The Coale-Hoover Report was hugely influential and proved pivotal for Coale’s career.
Having served on the faculty of Princeton’s Department of Economics since 1947, Coale
was denied tenure in 1953 due to a dearth of publications in major economics journals,
indicating the marginal place demography still held within that field. The university gave
him a terminal year to finish his projects, during which he carried out much of the research for
the Coale-Hoover Report. On the basis of that research, Notestein convinced the department
to revisit Coale’s case, at which point he was granted tenure.148 Coale went on to become
one of the most well-known and influential demographers of the twentieth century. In 1959,
when Notestein left OPR to serve as president of the Population Council, Coale succeeded
him as director of OPR; in 1961, Coale succeeded Kingsley Davis as U.S. representative to
the U.N. Population Commission (Davis had succeeded Hauser in 1954).149
Coale and Hoover emphasized that the study aimed not to predict what India’s future
146
Ansley J. Coale, “The Voluntary Control of Human Fertility,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 111, no. 3 (1967): 164–169.
147
Incentives appeared more cost effective as the result of an accounting sleight of hand by which the
incentives paid were not considered as part of the cost of the program. Paul Demeny, “The Economics of
Government Payments to Limit Population: A Comment,” Economic Development and Cultural Change
9, no. 4 (1961): 642; for Enke’s original analysis and his response to Demeny, see: Stephen Enke, “The
Economics of Government Payments to Limit Population,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 8
(1960): 339–348; Stephen Enke, “A Rejoinder to Comments on the Superior Effectiveness of Vasectomy-
Bonus Schemes,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 9, no. 4 (1961): 645–647.
148
See n. 88.
149
Coale, Ansley J. Coale: An Autobiography, see n. 145.

326
population or per capita consumer income would be at any point in the future, but rather to
demonstrate the relative effects of different rates of population growth on economic growth.
For that reason, the study was often presented as proof that more population growth meant
less economic growth — even though Coale and Hoover had demonstrated the non-linearity
of the relationship — and that any population growth would have a negative impact on
economic development. But this was not actually what the study demonstrated. As earlier
chapters have discussed, projections are always overdetermined by their starting assump-
tions. The starting assumptions of the economic projections in Coale and Hoover’s study
were those of Leibenstein’s theory of the low-level equilibrium trap: that higher fertility
would reduce household savings and prevent capital accumulation without increasing effec-
tive demand.150 According to this model, high fertility reduced per-capita consumer income
both by increasing the denominator — the size of the population — and by decreasing the
numerator, through the assumption that higher fertility translated into reduced savings, re-
duced capital investment, and reduced productivity. But even within the confines of those
assumptions, Coale and Hoover predicted, as Coale himself stated in his 2000 autobiography,
“significant prospective economic progress even with continued high fertility, and significant
if somewhat modest additional progress should fertility be substantially reduced in the next
generation.”151 That is, the study did not show that population growth would prevent eco-
nomic growth, only that a reduction in population growth could enhance it.

4.3.3 Communicating the Results of the Coale-Hoover Report

Discussions, reviews, and citations of the study almost uniformly neglected the substantial
economic growth Coale and Hoover predicted for India under continued high fertility in favor
of the “significant if somewhat modest additional progress” they predicted under the reduced
fertility scenario.152 Even today, the study is incorrectly described as having predicted falling
150
Coale and Hoover, see n. 144.
151
Coale, Ansley J. Coale: An Autobiography, see n. 145, 37.
152
Ibid., 37.

327
per-capita consumer income under the high fertility scenario,153 which is not at all what Coale
and Hoover found. Rather, they found that per-capita consumer income would increase by
38% under the high fertility scenario and by 95% under the low fertility scenario.154 Harvard
economist Simon Kuznets pointed out that the 40% difference in per-capita income Coale
and Hoover found at the end of the thirty-year simulation period amounted to only about
1% per year compounded, and commented to Coale that it would be easy to produce that
magnitude of increase through economic programs that did not require widespread changes
in the sex life of the populace.155 Nonetheless, demographers and other social and natural
scientists — including Walt Whitman Rostow, who cited the Coale-Hoover Report in his
classic work on modernization theory, The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) — used this
study to argue that fertility reduction was a necessary prerequisite for economic development.
This section examines how his reading of the Coale-Hoover Report became the predominant
one, offering support to the economic overpopulation discourse.
The Population Council emphasized Coale and Hoover’s finding that lower fertility pro-
duced higher economic growth to to scholarly audiences throughout the world, sending copies
of their book to population research centers and government statistical agencies in the global
south, and the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) promoted it among popular and policy
audiences. The PRB had been founded in 1929 by eugenicist Guy Irving Burch to bring
demographic research to the public by publishing readily-understandable summaries of it
for use by the media. In the 1930s, Burch served on the boards of both Margaret Sanger’s
National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control and the American Eugenics
Society. In his own words, the motivating factor behind all of his work was to prevent
the native-born white population of the U.S. from “being replaced by alien or negro stock,
whether it be by immigration or by overly high birth rates among others in this country.”156
153
Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the
Cold War to the Present, see n. 29.
154
Coale and Hoover, see n. 144, 280.
155
Coale, Ansley J. Coale: An Autobiography, see n. 145, 37.
156
Quoted in Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 343.

328
In 1945, Burch published his only book, Population Roads to Peace or War, coauthored with
sociologist Elmer Pendell; it was republished in 1947 under the title Human Breeding and
Survival: Population Roads to Peace or War. In it, Burch and Pendell argued that creating
a lasting global peace would require both quantitative and “qualitative” (eugenic) engineer-
ing of the world’s population.157 Drawing on a trope that was also a favorite of Osborn,
they argued that “if civilized man nullifies nature’s hard methods of thinning out the pop-
ulation and ruthlessly destroying the weakling, civilized man also must substitute humane
methods of limiting the population and of controlling the multiplication of incompetents.”158
That is, they justified population control and eugenics as replacements for natural selection,
which had been undermined by advances in medicine and public health. Burch and Pendell
also favored stringent restrictions on immigration, arguing that “if the immigrants displace
Americans. . . , the Americans whom they displace are the children of our most accomplished
citizens.”159 Burch’s work frequently cited Raymond Pearl and his logistic law of popula-
tion growth, discussed in the previous chapters, even after Pearl himself had abandoned the
logistic law.
Burch directed the PRB until the early 1950s, when he was succeeded by Robert C. Cook,
author of Human Fertility: The Modern Dilemma (1951). Cook had little formal education,
but had been tutored in the sciences by his father, a friend of eugenicist Alexander Graham
Bell. Cook became editor of the Journal of Heredity, organ of the American Genetic Asso-
ciation, in 1922, and joined the PRB in 1932.160 The American Genetics Association was a
sometime competitor and sometime ally of the American Eugenics Society. Its membership
tended to be more aligned with the racial thought of Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe,
and the Eugenics Record Office, discussed in Chapter One, whereas the American Eugenics
Society in the 1930s began to promote Osborn’s free-market eugenics. Paul Popenoe had
157
Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell, Human Breeding and Survival: Population Roads to Peace and
War (New York: Penguin, 1947), 122-123.
158
Ibid., 128.
159
Ibid., 80, emphasis in the original.
160
Joan Cook, “Robert C. Cook, 92, A Longtime Scholar of Human Genetics,” The New York Times,
Jan. 9, 1991.

329
preceded Cook as director of the Journal of Heredity, which in 1934 published Popenoe’s
“glowing review of the Nazi sterilization law.”161 Under Cook’s direction in the 1950s, the
PRB’s budget grew substantially through grants from the Ford Foundation, the Population
Council, and other sources. These grants supported the publication of a newsletter, The
Population Bulletin, eight times a year. The PRB also issued periodic press releases aimed
at keeping its interpretation of population growth and demographic research in the media.
The Population Bulletin had a wide readership in the U.S. and abroad among journalists,
scientists, and other professionals, and the Bureau also promoted it as a classroom resource.
During this period, biologist Clarence Cook Little, scientific director of the Tobacco Indus-
try Research Committee, presided over the PRB’s board of trustees, which also included
demographers Pascal Whelpton, Kingsley Davis, and Joseph Spengler.
Frederick Osborn played an important role in securing funding for the PRB. In addition
to providing small grants from the Population Council, he also facilitated Ford Foundation
grants and solicited donations from other organizations and individuals. However, when
Cook invited Osborn to join the PRB’s board of trustees, Osborn declined, explaining to
Cook that the leaders of the Population Council were “most anxious that the Council should
enjoy the closest cooperation with the Population Reference Bureau and the several other
organizations in which you and I are interested, but they think it better that the relationship
be informal.”162 This informal relationship gave the Population Council editorial oversight of
the Bureau’s publications, allowing the Council to influence how demographic research would
be interpreted by the media and by policy makers. By the late 1960s the PRB had, with a
grant from John D. Rockefeller III’s sister, Abby Rockefeller Mauze, established an office in
Bogota, Colombia, where it translated PRB press releases into Spanish and Portuguese and
forwarded them to the popular press throughout Latin America.163
The Population Bulletin’s summary of the Coale-Hoover Report inaccurately claimed
161
Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of
Paul Popenoe,” Gender & History 13, no. 2 (2001): 307.
162
Frederick Osborn to Robert C. Cook, Dec. 7, 1953,folder 382, box 25, record group IV3B4.2.
163
Hugh E. Moore, “Mobilizing Public Opinion for Population Control,” Sept. 5, 1967,folder 23, box 21.

330
that if India’s fertility levels were to continue unchanged, “economic development will be
stifled by the sheer number of people, and India will not achieve that breakthrough to a
better life for her people that her Five-Year Plans envision. Rather, she will be much more
deeply engulfed in the morass of poverty and misery.”164 Thirty years later, Coale reflected
that India’s population growth had been close to his high projection and “their economic
output was right on the button” of Hoover’s projection. That is, per capita consumer income
had grown by about 38% over the previous thirty years. Coale also discussed the ways in
which his study had been misinterpreted, stating “it’s not true that we foresaw a catastrophe
— people imply we’re Malthusians or something. We foresaw that India was going to do
quite well, and just said that they would do still better if they reduced their fertility.”165
Though Coale later acknowledged that Hoover had predicted substantial economic growth
even under his high fertility scenario, the never challenged the interpretation of his work
that the Population Council and the Population Reference Bureau promoted throughout the
1960s.
The economic overpopulation discourse inspired, informed, and generated funding for
Coale and Hoover’s study of the relationship between population growth and economic de-
velopment in India. I have argued here that it also overdetermined the way in which results
of the study were interpreted, with the Population Council and the Population Reference
Bureau publicizing to scientists and the public a reading of the results that emphasized the
more rapid economic growth simulated in the low-fertility scenario rather than the fact that
the study showed increasing per capita consumer income even with continued high fertility.
The following section traces the influence of the economic overpopulation discourse — and
particularly the role of demography within that discourse — on U.S. foreign policy.
164
Robert C. Cook, “India: High Cost of High Fertility – draft sent to Dudley Kirk,” n.d.,folder 381, box
25, record group IV3B4.2.
165
See n. 88.

331
4.4 Population Control and U.S. Foreign Policy

As discussed above, the Population Council and Hugh Moore both sought to achieve gov-
ernment support for their population control efforts, and the Coale-Hoover Report provided
the cause with critical scientific legitimacy. This section follows the PRB’s interpretation
of the Coale-Hoover Report into government, where the economic overpopulation discourse
gained further support from a study by the National Academy of Sciences and a historical
project carried out at OPR in the 1960s.

4.4.1 Tracing the Coale-Hoover Report into the U.S. Government

The PRB’s interpretation of Coale and Hoover’s study came to the attention of the U.S.
government in 1959 by way of General William Henry Draper Jr., chairman of a commission
appointed by President Eisenhower in 1958 to study U.S. foreign aid programs and recom-
mend improvements. On hearing of Draper’s appointment, Moore — who was personally
acquainted with Draper — sent him a copy of “The Population Bomb” and put him in touch
with Cook at the PRB, who introduced Draper to Coale and Hoover’s study. The Draper
Commission’s final report echoed much of the language of Moore’s pamphlet and PRB publi-
cations, arguing that U.S. foreign aid would fail to realize its objectives if populations in the
global south continued to expand, and recommending that the U.S. assist other countries in
limiting their population growth. Upon receiving the report, President Eisenhower rejected
its recommendations in regard to population control, stating “I cannot imagine anything
more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or func-
tion or responsibility.”166 In his campaign for president in 1959 and 1960, John F. Kennedy
recommended a policy of expanding resources and facilitating their distribution rather than
controlling population.167
166
Quoted in Robertson, see n. 12, 91.
167
Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the
Cold War to the Present, see n. 29.

332
 After submitting his committee’s report, Draper joined Moore in his efforts to raise
money and public support for population control in the global south. In the late 1950s and
early 1960s, Moore became the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s most prolific
fundraiser, not only contributing his own money, but also creating the World Population
Emergency Campaign (WPEC) to solicit donations from others in the business-philanthropic
community. WPEC merged with PPFA in 1961 to form Planned Parenthood - World Popu-
lation, further moving the PPFA’s activities and interests from women’s reproductive health
to global population control.168
Under the auspices of the Hugh Moore Fund, Moore and Draper launched a strategy of
printing full-page advertisements in prominent newspapers, such as The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Moore favored advertisements over
earned media because “in paid space you can tell people what they should do, when they
should do it and where.”169 Some of the ads appealed directly to the President (first Kennedy
and then Johnson) to act on the threat of population growth in the global south and were
signed by a long list of prominent Americans; others urged citizens to pressure the U.S.
government to pursue population control in other countries along with — or even instead of —
foreign aid. Their strategy, expressed by Rockefeller Prentice, cousin of John D. Rockefeller
III and an associate of Hugh Moore, was to “get elected officials to realize that their stand
on the population issue will mean their success or defeat at the polls. If and when we get this
far, we will have men in office who can control policies as to birth control through clinics in
this country and through foreign aid abroad, and implement such policies by the use of public
funds of a magnitude that, admittedly, no single one of us could ever hope to match.”170 By
raising public concern about global population growth, Moore and Draper sought to make
support for population control an obligatory passage point for elected officials. Their ads
were largely text-based, but also included graphs showing world population shooting upward
168
Critchlow, see n. 1, 32.
169
Moore, “Mobilizing Public Opinion for Population Control,” see n. 163.
170
Rockefeller Prentice, Hugh E. Moore, Feb. 20, 1964,folder 2, box 17.

333
from 1 billion in 1830 to a projected 7 billion in 2000. One such ad, shown in Figure 4.2,
featured a cartoon drawing of a stork delivering a large bundle of babies, outpacing a running
U.S. taxpayer overburdened with a bag marked “foreign aid” and unable to keep up with
the stork. The caption read “Population Explosion Nullifies Foreign Aid.”171 In addition to
printing the advertisements in the newspapers, Moore sent them to prominent and influential
Americans. These ads in turn stimulated individual letter-writing to policy makers, urging
them to do something to contain the “population explosion.”172 Moore kept in regular contact
with George Gallup at the American Institute of Public Opinion, who carried out surveys
to assess the effects of Moore’s efforts on U.S. public opinion, and advised Moore on how to
more effectively capture public attention.173
Rockefeller and the trustees of the Population Council, also eager to enroll the U.S. gov-
ernment in their project of population control, took a more measured approach to stimulating
government interest in overseas population control, one that relied more heavily on scientific
authority. In 1962, George Kistiakowsky, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan
Project and former science advisor to President Eisenhower, then chair of the Committee on
Science and Public Policy of the NAS, created a panel to assess existing research on global
population growth and its consequences and to recommend policy approaches. Many of the
scientists selected for the panel had ties either to the Rockefeller Foundation or to the Pop-
ulation Council, including Ansley Coale and Bernard Berelson.174 The panel’s final report,
published in 1963, rehearsed the findings of Coale and Hoover’s study as evidence that the
current rate of world population growth was problematic and needed to be reduced, stating
that “economic progress will be slower and more doubtful if less-developed areas wait for the
supposedly inevitable impact of modernization on the birth rate.” Such an approach, the
report argued, would “run the risk that rapid population growth and adverse age distribution
171
Hugh E. Moore, “Population Explosion Nullifies Foreign Aid: An Appeal to the President of the United
States,” advertisement, June 9, 1963, The New York Times p. 176.
172
See, for example, William L. Langer to President John F. Kennedy, Jan. 29, 1962,folder 2, box 17.
173
George Gallup, Hugh E. Moore, Aug. 14, 1963,folder 2, box 17.
174
National Research Council, The Growth of World Population: Analysis of the Problems and Recommen-
dations for Research and Training (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1963), vii.

334
 Figure 4.2: Hugh Moore Newspaper Advertisement

would themselves prevent the achievement of the very modernization that they count on to
bring the birth rate down.”175 The panel recommended that the U.S. government adopt the
Population Council’s approach, concluding that “this problem can be successfully attacked
175
National Research Council, The Growth of World Population: Analysis of the Problems and Recommen-
dations for Research and Training, see n. 174, 19.

335
by developing new methods of fertility regulation, and implementing programs of voluntary
family planning widely and rapidly throughout the world.”176
The 1963 NAS report on population growth shows the strong influence of Bernard Berel-
son, a behavioral scientist with no specific experience in demography, population, or family
planning, who had just been hired as the Population Council’s communication director. Dur-
ing the war, he had served in the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service with renowned be-
haviorist Harold Lasswell, and worked with Paul Lazarsfeld on his well-known voting studies,
The People’s Choice (1944) and Voting (1954).177 Berelson shared Osborn’s faith that fer-
tility in the global south could be reduced through the provision of family planning services,
given a social environment in which effective educational and propaganda communications
promoted their use. By the time he joined the Population Council in 1962, two highly effec-
tive systemic forms of contraception were available, the Pill and the IUD (these technologies
will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five). What Berelson and the Council lacked,
however, was empirical evidence that couples in “traditional” agrarian societies would adopt
such technologies on a scale large enough to substantially reduce fertility rates. During the
1960s, the Population Council funded two research programs that produced such evidence:
fertility surveys and the Princeton European Fertility Project (PEFP), a large-scale study
in European historical demography. Chapter Five explores fertility surveys in detail; here, I
will briefly discuss the PEFP.

4.4.2 The Princeton European Fertility Project

Coale launched the PEFP in 1963, the same year that the NAS population panel published
its final report. Between 1963 and 1975, Coale and several former students and colleagues
176
By “new methods of fertility regulation,” they likely meant IUDs and other methods that they still
hoped to develop, as the pill had already been on the market in the U.S. for three years. National Research
Council, The Growth of World Population: Analysis of the Problems and Recommendations for Research
and Training, see n. 174, 1.
177
John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson, eds., Mass Communication and American Social Thought:
Key Texts 1919-1968 (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 254.

336
based in the U.S. and in Europe analyzed the relationship between economic development and
fertility in Europe between 1850 and 1950 at the province level, using historical government
statistical reports.178 The project resulted in a series of monographs detailing the historical
fertility decline of each country, and a set of cross-national analyses that attempted to
identify universal patterns. At the outset, Coale expressed his “hope that through a better
understanding of the decline in fertility in the different parts of Europe, we will come to
a better understanding of the prospects for changing fertility in the underdeveloped areas
where the social and economic changes that cause a decline in the birth rate have not yet
occurred.”179 The project therefore aimed to universalize the European experience in two
ways: first by studying European history as a model for the present and future of the rest of
the world, and second by figuring out how to reproduce the European historical experience
in the global south. While the Princeton European Fertility Project is often heralded as
one of the first studies in the field of historical demography,180 it was explicitly forward
looking, treating historical Europe as “a unique statistical laboratory in which to investigate
the conditions under which a population undertakes the voluntary restriction of fertility.”181
Coale received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding for this project, initially from the
Rockefeller Foundation and the Population Council and later from NIH and NSF, after the
U.S. government began funding population research (discussed below).182
The PEFP’s research design linked aggregate fertility rates to the social and economic
conditions of provinces or other subnational administrative units, using ecological regression
(regression with aggregate units of analysis) to test the contention of demographic transition
theory that people living in places that are more “modern” have smaller families. As a result
of inconsistencies in the data across space and over time, the only socioeconomic variables
178
Ansley J. Coale, “Form letter to European demographers and statistical offices,” 1963,folder 11, box 10.
179
Ibid.
180
See, for example, Merchant and Hacker, see n. 17.
181
Ansley J. Coale, “The Decline of Fertility in Europe from the French Revolution to World War II,” in
Fertility and Family Planning: A World View, ed. S.J. Behrman, Leslie Corsa Jr., and Ronald Freedman
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
182
Ansley J. Coale to Allen Sinisgalli, July 24, 1978,folder 1, box 2.

337
used in the project’s cross-national analyses were measures of industrialization, urbanization,
and literacy. With these measures, Coale and his colleagues found no consistent international
correlation between modernization and fertility, a result that they and others interpreted as
evidence that economic development was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain historical
fertility decline in Europe and was therefore neither necessary nor sufficient to reduce fertility
in the global south.183
On the basis of his results, Coale rejected economic development as a structural precondi-
tion for fertility decline, instead presenting three individual-level preconditions: first, couples
must believe that it is possible and acceptable to plan their fertility (in terms of quantity,
timing, or both); second, couples must perceive an advantage (material or otherwise) in re-
ducing their fertility; third, they must have access to effective techniques of contraception.184
The formulation of preconditions at the individual level reflects the adoption of individual
surveys as a tool of fertility research. By the 1960s, fertility surveys following the model
of the Indianapolis Study described in Chapter Two were being carried out all over the
world, as will be discussed in Chapter Five. These studies, like the Indianapolis Study,
aimed to correlate family size with individual attitudes and characteristics — mainly the
socioeconomic characteristics identified by the Indianapolis Study — rather that structural
characteristics of the societies in which individuals lived. However, the demographers who
carried out the PEFP had no data regarding either fertility change at the individual level
or individual attitudes associated with fertility. These preconditions did not arise from the
actual findings of the PEFP, but rather from the PEFP’s inability to identify a structural
relationship between fertility decline and industrialization, urbanization, or literacy. While
the classic model of demographic transition had theorized that fertility would decline sponta-
183
Etienne van de Walle and John Knodel, “Demographic Transition and Fertility Decline: The European
Case,” in Proceedings, Meeting of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (1967);
Ansley J. Coale, “Factors Associated with the Development of Low Fertility, An Historic Summary,” in
Fertility, Family Planning, Mortality, World Population Conference 1965, Belgrade, by the United Nations
(1965); Constance Holden, “World Population: U.N. on the Move but Grounds for Optimism are Scant,”
Science 183, no. 4127 (1974): 833–836.
184
Ansley J. Coale, “The Demographic Transition,” in Proceedings, Meeting of the International Union for
the Scientific Study of Population, Liège (1973), 65.

338
neously when socioeconomic conditions disincentivized large families, the model formulated
by Coale and his colleagues in the Princeton European Fertility Project suggested that fertil-
ity decline resulted from the diffusion of the three preconditions — through communication
and technology transfer — independent of socioeconomic conditions.
Project participants developed and exhibited this diffusion model through the use of
maps as tools of both analysis and presentation, illustrated in Figure 4.3.185 Although map-
ping was not a new technique in the social sciences — Charles Booth’s 1891 maps of poverty
in London and the 1895 Hull House Maps and Papers are just two prominent nineteenth-
century examples186 — the Princeton European Fertility Project may have been the first
use of chloropleth maps — maps in which the shading represents the value of the thing
being measured in the given territory — to illustrate social change moving across space over
time.187 Mapping levels of fertility and the timing of fertility decline allowed Coale and his
colleagues to identify spatial patterns that may have gone unnoticed if they had arranged
their data only in alphabetic tables. The maps demonstrated that the boundaries between
fertility regimes corresponded closely to linguistic and religious boundaries. Within regions
united by common language and/or culture, neighboring provinces tended to have similar
levels of fertility and experienced fertility decline around the same time, even if they had
differing values of the socioeconomic indicators, while provinces divided from their neighbors
by language tended to have different levels of fertility, even if they had similar values of the
socioeconomic indicators. Coale suggested that linguistic, religious, or cultural “boundaries
may serve as firebreaks that temporarily confine a spread of controlled fertility. . . both be-
cause regions with different cultures are differentially resistant to the prerequisites of decline,
and because a region defined by a common language and culture is a natural unit within
which diffusion occurs.”188
185
Ansley J. Coale, “Map 2. Index of Marital Fertility, Provinces of Europe, 1900,” n.d.,folder 17, box 10.
186
Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women’s Work in the 1890s,” in
The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
187
Myron P. Gutmann et al., “Introduction,” in Navigating Time and Space in Population Studies, ed.
Myron P. Gutmann et al. (2011).
188
Coale, “The Demographic Transition,” see n. 184, 67.

339
 Figure 4.3: Princeton European Fertility Project Map

In addition to the maps, project participants also pursued more formal tests of the spatial
relationships they posited by including distance measures and indicators of physical barriers
in their regression models. Though their results were not always statistically significant,
those that were suggested that the fertility transition may have occurred through the spread
— from place to place and from early adopters to later adopters within each place — not
just of contraceptive knowledge and technology (precondition #3), but also of the very idea
that the number and timing of births could be planned (precondition #1) and that doing so
would be advantageous (precondition #2). The maps, which were included in several of the
project’s publications, became both illustrations and demonstrations of the new diffusion
model.
Upon finding that Europeans had adopted family planning at varying levels of socioeco-
nomic development and that fertility change seemed to follow cultural or linguistic bound-
aries, Coale and his colleagues argued that “there is no convincing basis for asserting that
a program of indoctrination in the advantages in health and welfare from reduced fertility

340
would inevitably be a failure in a rural poorly educated population.”189 Coale even argued
that the three preconditions for fertility decline were also prerequisites for “achiev[ing] the
conspicuous material gains from modernization,” thereby suggesting that by instilling these
prerequisites, family planning programs could stimulate either modernization or the “con-
spicuous material gains” associated with it.190
By the time Coale announced this conclusion at the 1973 meeting of the International
Union for the Scientific Study of Population, the Population Council was already engaged
in just the kind of propaganda effort he recommended to spread what Arland Thornton has
described as “developmental idealism,” the idea that small families and economic develop-
ment are mutually constitutive.191 Coale’s results therefore did not form the basis for the
Council’s program of technical assistance, which it officially launched in 1965, but rather
provided intellectual justification after the fact. Indeed, Coale and his funders may have
known in advance that the results of the project would validate the Council’s family plan-
ning efforts. Pilot work by OPR graduate students John Knodel and Nathanial Iskandar
had demonstrated varying levels of socioeconomic indicators at the onset of fertility decline
in different parts of Europe, and a third graduate student, William Leasure, had used the
mapping technique in his dissertation on the historical fertility decline in Spain, demon-
strating that fertility decline had correlated with language rather than with any indicator
of socioeconomic development.192 Although Coale framed the project as a search for the
socioeconomic correlates of fertility transition, he also knew at the outset that “the decline
appears to have taken place under quite diverse circumstances” as well as “at quite different
times.”193 It seems that he may have expected ultimately to reject the causal link between
fertility decline and socioeconomic development, and instead provide support for population
control efforts even in the absence of economic development.
189
Coale, “The Demographic Transition,” see n. 184, 69.
190
Ibid., 69.
191
Thornton, see n. 191.
192
See n. 88; William Leasure, “Factors Involved in the Decline of Fertility in Spain 1900-1950” (Ph.D.
diss., Princeton University, 1962).
193
Coale, “Form letter to European demographers and statistical offices,” see n. 178.

341
 Other demographers questioned Coale’s rejection of socioeconomic variables as predic-
tive of fertility decline. Berkeley demographer Judith Blake, then-wife and former student
of Kingsley Davis, suggested that such conclusions exemplified the “particularistic fallacy,”
which occurs “when one turns one’s attention entirely to the association between particu-
lar variables — urbanization, education social mobility — and declining family-size goals,
instead of utilizing the associations to trace out the basic and more general mechanisms
involved.” Blake argued that, instead of looking for consistent relationships between par-
ticular variables, demographers should be concerned more broadly “with factors making
children less and less useful to parents and increasingly expensive,” and should recognize
that “the exact nature of these factors will necessarily vary between historical periods and
among societies.”194 In other words, fertility decline could still depend on economic develop-
ment even if the same socioeconomic variables were not always associated with it. Similarly,
University of Pennsylvania demographer Richard Easterlin, a former student of Dorothy
Thomas, proposed an alternative model in which parents always had a target number of
offspring in mind but only began to exercise control over their fertility when the supply of
children began to exceed demand for them (either through an increase in supply resulting
from shortened breastfeeding or reduced infant mortality or through a decrease in demand
resulting from a rise in the cost of childbearing). He argued that, while the target number
of children may be culturally determined, fertility control only appeared in response to so-
cioeconomic shifts that disrupted the equilibrium between supply and demand, though the
specific trigger would likely vary from place to place and time to time, and the timing of
fertility decline would depend on the intersection between cultural family size preferences
and shifts in supply and demand.195 Blake and Easterlin both argued that the lack of con-
sistent socioeconomic correlates of fertility did not mean that socioeconomic factors did not
affect or even determine fertility. Blake and Easterlin’s critiques, though they questioned
194
Judith Blake, “Demographic Science and the Redirection of Population Policy,” Journal of Chronic
Disease 18 (1965): 1181–1200.
195
Richard Easterlin, “Toward the Cumulation of Demographic Knowledge,” Sociological Forum 2, no. 4
(1987): 835–842.

342
the efficacy of family planning programs in agrarian societies, accepted the economic terms
in which demographers were increasingly couching their theories about fertility and family
planning. As discussed in Chapter Two, demographers had begun to view childbearing deci-
sions as consumer choices, a perspective encouraged by the results of the Indianapolis Study
and embedded in the postwar fertility studies and family planning interventions that will be
described at greater length in Chapter Five.
Blake and Easterlin’s models were actually quite consistent with the findings of the PEFP.
Although the project failed to produce a grand synthesis, in which the same socioeconomic
variables predicted the same levels of fertility across space and time, it did not find that
socioeconomic factors were uncorrelated with fertility. Rather, it found that “because of
a different culture based on a different language and different history, Basques with a cer-
tain number of years of schooling and a given occupation are different from Catalonians
with the same qualifications, Germans from Frenchmen and Southern Italians from North-
ern Italians.”196 By highlighting the ways in which socioeconomic variables could function
differently depending on time and place, the PEFP exemplified an enduring tension in the
emergent field of historical demography: that between historical social science, which uses
historical data to identify natural laws of society that are independent of time and place,
and social scientific history, which uses quantitative analysis to reveal information about
particular societies in the past, and to identify their unique elements or contingencies in
their historical experiences.197
While the PEFP is widely regarded as having demonstrated the importance of cultural
factors in the study of fertility and the adoption of family planning, it focused mainly on
the socioeconomic correlates of fertility decline, which could be measured quantitatively,
rather than the cultural correlates, most of which could not. Ron Lesthaeghe, who wrote
the monograph for Belgium, complained that, because the project was a quantitative one, he
and his fellow participants were “forced, whether we like it or not, to treat these [cultural]
196
Coale, “The Demographic Transition,” see n. 184, 67.
197
Merchant and Hacker, see n. 17.

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variables in one lumped, residual category, where, in fact, they do not belong.”198 The
socioeconomic variables therefore remained the main explanators of fertility change, and
any variation in fertility for which they could not account was ascribed to “unmeasured
traditions and habits of mind,” which presumably could be altered through education and
propaganda.199 However, Lesthaeghe and Massimo Livi-Bacci, who wrote the monograph
for Italy, demonstrated that mentalities were not independent of socioeconomic conditions.
Both demographers included in their analyses a measure of secularization as a proxy for the
adoption of a rational outlook, operationalizing it as the level of support for non-Catholic
political parties. Although they found this variable to have an independent effect on fertility,
secularization was itself a result of such socioeconomic processes as industrialization and
urbanization. Moreover, even with secularization/rationalization controlled for, Lesthaeghe
found in Belgium that “on the whole, the relationship between industrialization-urbanization
and the marital fertility decline cannot be denied.”200
The PEFP’s subnational units of analysis allowed for the comparison of provinces within
the same countries whose denizens spoke different languages or followed different religions.
However, because the project analyzed fertility at the aggregate level, participants could
draw only limited conclusions about the effects of even the few cultural factors they could
include without succumbing to the ecological fallacy. Livi-Bacci described the project’s
aggregate analysis as “always a very imperfect substitute for individual data that can be
regrouped to present information about persons classified according to their individual char-
acteristics.”201 This statement suggests that, despite its aggregate design, the project aimed
to identify the characteristics of couples that would make them more receptive to family plan-
ning programs, rather than to identify the characteristics of societies that correlated with
low aggregate fertility or might precipitate aggregate fertility decline. Livi-Bacci’s statement
198
Ron J. Lesthaeghe, The Decline of Belgian Fertility, 1800-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1977), 41.
199
Coale, “The Demographic Transition,” see n. 184, 67.
200
Lesthaeghe, see n. 198, 164.
201
Massimo Livi-Bacci, A History of Italian Fertility During the Last Two Centuries (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977), 139.

344
also indicates that project participants were aware of the ecological fallacy, which Barbara
Anderson described particularly well in the project’s summary volume. Anderson argued
that the finding that a province with a large proportion of group X has higher aggregate
fertility than a province with a large proportion of group Y does not mean that members
of group X necessarily have higher fertility than members of group Y; it could also be that
members of both groups have higher fertility when group X is in the majority than when
group Y is in the majority.202 Coale’s preconditions for fertility decline, however, operated
at the individual level, and therefore could not be tested with aggregate analysis of the type
performed by the PEFP. In fact, no causal inference of any kind could be drawn simply
from the type of cross-sectional data analysis that comprised the project. As Lesthaeghe
acknowledged, “using non-experimental data, no statistical procedure is capable of proving
or disproving that a relationship is solely asymmetric or causal.” Therefore, “results from
regression analysis can be given a causal interpretation only when one is willing to accept
the existence of a theoretical causal model on a priori grounds.”203 The analyses performed
by project participants could identify correlations, but turning those correlations into state-
ments about causation required theory, in this case Cold War demographic transition theory.

4.4.3 U.S. Government Response

As with the Coale-Hoover Report, what Coale and others said about the PEFP carried more
weight in terms of public opinion and policy than did the contents of the project’s publica-
tions. While critiques of the project have provided ample fodder for debate within the field
of demography, they were largely overlooked by the philanthropists and policy makers who
pointed to the study as intellectual support for the project of reducing population growth in
the global south through the provision of family planning clinics. The Population Council
202
Paraphrased from Barbara A. Anderson, “Regional and Cultural Factors in the Decline of Marital
Fertility in Western Europe,” in The Decline of Fertility in Europe: The Revised Proceedings of a Conference
on the Princeton European Fertility Project, ed. Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986).
203
Lesthaeghe, see n. 198, 152.

345
had launched this strategy unofficially in 1955, prior to the initiation of research for the
PEFP and, by the time the project started, the Council, together with Moore and Draper’s
group, had enrolled the U.S. government in the project of global population control. By that
time, the Population Council and Moore and Draper’s group had developed allies within
the State Department and the Agency for International Development (USAID), who worked
diligently and incrementally to shift U.S. policy toward providing family planning assistance
as part of overseas aid and development programs. In 1958, Senator J. William Fulbright,
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who had worked with Draper on the Marshall
Plan a decade earlier, told foreign aid officials in India that “they certainly should be doing
something about population growth even if they did not report it to Congress.”204 In 1962,
Sweden announced that it would begin providing birth control as part of its foreign aid
programs, creating a climate in which the U.S. could do the same without appearing to be
acting out of self-interest.205 The same year, the U.S. Department of State hired Robert W.
Barnett to oversee population matters, on which he consulted with Hugh Moore, William
Draper, and Robert Cook.206 In 1963, following the publication of the NAS report on global
population growth, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee added an amendment to the
1961 Foreign Aid Bill proposed by Senator Fulbright authorizing “research into the prob-
lems of controlling population growth” and “technical assistance to cooperating countries in
carrying out programs of population control.”207 Also in 1963, President Kennedy approved
a $500,000 grant to the World Health Organization for research on human reproduction.208
In 1964, Moore and Draper established the Population Crisis Committee (PCC) to for-
mally carry out their project of securing public support for population control and lobbying
policy makers.209 They explicitly decribed their aim as “promot[ing] governmental action of
large proportion instead of private aid which, welcome as it is, can never be enough to have
204
Piotrow, see n. 1, 76.
205
Ibid., 71.
206
Hugh E. Moore, “State Department Visit,” Mar. 13, 1962,folder 2, box 17.
207
Quoted in Piotrow, see n. 1, 78.
208
Caldwell and Caldwell, see n. 109, 77.
209
Moore, “Mobilizing Public Opinion for Population Control,” see n. 163.

346
an effective impact upon the world population problem.”210 Rockefeller, Osborn, Draper, and
Moore saw the 1964 presidential election as an opportunity to bring their concerns to the
Johnson administration, in hopes that he would devote further resources to their cause. By
that time, population control had gained broad support from across the political spectrum,
with former presidents Eisenhower and Truman both agreeing to serve as honorary chairmen
of Planned Parenthood, each on the condition that the other also agreed.211 Following the
election, Rockefeller and Draper organized a delegation, headed by Dean Acheson, the for-
mer Secretary of State who had attributed the success of China’s communist revolution to
overpopulation, to visit the President and explain to him the dangers of population growth
in the global south, but Johnson refused to see them.212 With continued pressure from ad-
vocates of the Population Council and the Population Crisis Committee both inside and
outside of the government, Johnson was convinced to address population in his 1965 State
of the Union speech, where he promised to “seek new ways to use our knowledge to help
deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources.”213
His use of the phrase “explosion in world population” suggests Moore’s influence.
Over the course of the year, Johnson became more explicit about his support for family
planning as a way to promote economic development in the global south and to reduce
poverty in the U.S. In June, at the U.N.’s twentieth anniversary celebration, he urged his
fellow heads of state to “act on the fact that less than five dollars invested in population
control is worth hundreds of dollars invested in economic growth,” suggesting that he had
been convinced by Enke’s work.214 Later that year, the Office of Economic Opportunity
began to finance Planned Parenthood projects to provide poor women in the U.S. with
family planning services.215 That same year, USAID inaugurated its first family planning
program; it established an Office of Population in 1966.
210
Hugh E. Moore, “Population Crisis Committee,” n.d.,folder 17, box 18.
211
Piotrow, see n. 1, 88.
212
Hugh E. Moore to John D. Rockefeller III, Oct. 26, 1964,folder 18, box 2; Piotrow, see n. 1, 88.
213
Quoted in Piotrow, see n. 1, 89.
214
Quoted in Connelly, see n. 8, 213.
215
Piotrow, see n. 1, 91.

347
 Also in 1965, Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, a physician who had long supported
the legalization and promotion of birth control and was in frequent contact with Moore,
launched a series of hearings that continued for the next three years about the consequences
of global population growth and the potential for population control. The hearings included
testimony from former President Eisenhower and his science advisor; Rockefeller, Draper,
and other leaders of the Population Council, the Population Crisis Committee, Planned Par-
enthood, and other organizations that had emerged to promote population control; Dr. John
Rock, one of the developers of the contraceptive pill, and Dr. Jack Lippes, developer of one
of the new IUDs (Lippes Loop); and demographers, conservationists, and activists of various
kinds.216 Throughout the hearings, Gruening observed aloud that “this is entirely a matter of
freedom of information and freedom of choice, without compulsion,. . . and it is merely a mat-
ter of making knowledge available,” echoing the rhetoric of voluntarism that the Population
Council continued to promote.217 Widespread publicity of these hearings further served to
make the economic discourse of overpopulation common knowledge among the U.S. public.
In 1967, the Department of State appointed a special assistant for population matters and
Congress added Title X, “Programs Relating to Population Growth,” to the 1961 Foreign
Assistance Act. This amendment explicitly earmarked foreign aid funds for population con-
trol activities, beginning with $35 million in fiscal year 1968. This amount would expand
considerably over the next few years as will be discussed in Chapter Six.218 USAID’s pop-
ulation budget supported government-sponsored family planning programs in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, and supported U.S.-based family planning organizations that worked in
those continents, including the Population Council, the International Planned Parenthood
Federation, and the Pathfinder Fund, which supplied local family planning associations in
target countries that did not allow direct U.S. population assistance.219
216
Piotrow, see n. 1, 106.
217
Quoted in ibid., 106.
218
The director of USAID initially objected to this large earmark for population activities, but Draper’s
influence was stronger. Warwick, see n. 154, 46.
219
Warwick, see n. 154, 45-49; after the 1973 Helms Amendment to Title X, which prohibited the use of
USAID funds to provide abortion services abroad, USAID increased funding to IPPF, which could continue

348
Conclusion

Most histories of demography or population control in the second half of the twentieth
century assume that population growth presented a clear and unequivocal threat to economic
development in the global south and efforts to overcome poverty in the U.S. They also
assume that birth control provided an obvious solution, though one that required scientific
research and had to overcome prudery and religious objections. This chapter has disrupted
these assumptions by treating the postwar population crisis as an event that had to be
discursively created, rather than one that occurred naturally.
Earlier chapters have demonstrated that, prior to World War II, demographers and policy
makers viewed population growth as a source of national strength and economic vitality,
and worried when the populations of other countries grew faster than the populations of
their own countries. In this chapter, I showed that, as of 1944, demographers perceived
population growth in the global south not as a barrier to economic development, but rather
as a symptom of an economy that had been actively underdeveloped by colonial rule and
economic exploitation. Their research suggested that only economic development could
reduce population growth by creating a desire for smaller families.
Yet only a few short years later, these demographers had changed their analysis, suggest-
ing that rapid population growth imperiled economic progress and environmental integrity,
and that the diffusion of family planning programs could reduce fertility — even in agrarian
societies — and thereby stimulate modernization. This chapter has suggested that demog-
raphy’s theoretical adaptation was influenced by the field’s new patrons and clients, by
the Cold War and its restriction of academic freedom, and by modernization theory, which
emphasized multiple causality.
Demography’s new patrons and clients incorporated the Cold War version of demographic
transition theory into their own population-oriented agendas to control world population to
advance the interests of U.S. philanthropy and business, as well as national security and
to provide abortion services (though not directly with USDAID funding) Warwick, see n. 154, 5.

349
political and economic hegemony. Recognizing that efforts from within the U.S. aimed at
controlling population growth abroad would arouse resistance unless they were motivated
by efforts to promote economic development and alleviate poverty, patrons funded research
that would provide scientific legitimacy to the economic discourse of overpopulation — in-
cluding the Coale-Hoover Report and Coale’s Princeton European Fertility Project. Even
when these studies did not offer direct empirical evidence that population growth prevented
economic development or that couples would use contraception in the absence of economic
development, demography’s new clients — including the Population Reference Bureau and
Hugh Moore and his associates — interpreted these studies in ways that nonetheless sup-
ported the economic overpopulation discourse, and publicized those interpretations through
the mass media and personal connections to policy makers.
By the end of the 1960s, two small and interconnected groups of men — those associated
with the Population Council, led by John D. Rockefeller III and Frederick Osborn, and
those associated with the Population Crisis Committee, led by Hugh Moore and William
Draper — had produced enough publicity for the economic discourse of overpopulation and
enough support for their program both among the public and within the government to
secure investment from the U.S. government in demographic research and global population
control. The following chapter will explore the effects of those investments on the structure
and content of demographic research in the 1950s and 1960s.

350
 Chapter 5
The Postwar Expansion of
Demography and Family Planning
The field of demography grew dramatically between 1950 and 1975, largely as a result of
direct investment by the Population Council, the Ford Foundation, and the U.S. govern-
ment. These organizations funded research on fertility throughout the global south by U.S.
demographers, the establishment of population research centers at U.S. universities and in
the global south (both within universities and free-standing), and the training of graduate
students in demography from both the U.S. and the global south, who went on to careers as
faculty members, government statisticians, and family planning administrators. This chap-
ter traces the expansion of demography during this period, focusing on the ways in which
the field’s patrons influenced its growth and the ways its clients (often the same people and
institutions as the patrons) utilized the findings of its research to promote global population
control.
The first section describes the establishment of population research centers and the ca-
reers of some demographers in the U.S. and the global south. I argue that the institutional
location of these interdisciplinary centers between rather than within traditional academic
departments rendered them dependent on external funding, giving their patrons — first the
Ford Foundation and the Population Council and then the U.S. government — substantial
leverage over the research that would be carried out in these centers. I also demonstrate that
the Ford Foundation and the Population Council funded the training of demographers from
the global south to produce indigenous support for the economic overpopulation discourse
and advocacy for the establishment of government family planning programs.
The second section explores the substance of demography research during this period,

351
first by examining the content of the two major English-language demography journals in
the postwar period, and then by exploring two fertility surveys in depth, one in the mainland
U.S. and the other in Puerto Rico. I argue that the influence of demography’s funders focused
its practitioners’ research on fertility in the global south, promoted the use of quantitative
methods, and encouraged an individual-level economic view of fertility that was tractable to
analysis with quantitative methods. I demonstrate that, while the U.S. study aimed simply to
assess childbearing intentions to improve population projection and planning for population,
the Puerto Rico study also aimed to influence childbearing practices, specifically to promote
the use of birth control to produce small families, thereby engaging in the planning of
population.
The final section examines how the Population Council — both a patron and client of
demography in this period — utilized the research it funded to secure international support
and legitimacy for its population control project. I discuss the development of new systemic
contraceptive methods at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the Council’s
faith in these methods — particularly the IUD — as technologies that could stimulate
modernization by reducing fertility — and the Council’s use of a new survey program —
Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) of Contraception — to lobby for government
provision of family planning programs throughout the global south. In this section, however,
I also demonstrate that the Population Council’s individual-level economic view of “the
population problem” and its solution was not monolithic, exploring an alternative vision
proffered by Berkeley demographers Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake.

5.1 The Expansion of Demography in the U.S. and the

Global South

In 1961, after some prompting from the staff of the Population Council, the Ford Foundation
began making grants to establish population research and study centers at U.S. universities,

352
following the model of OPR. The focus of research at these centers was to be fertility,
particularly its reduction in the global south. Recognizing that these centers would recruit
an international body of students and produce research that would have an audience of
international policymakers, the Ford Foundation placed them at some of the most prestigious
U.S. research universities, beginning with the University of Pennsylvania, the University of
Michigan, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, the University of North Carolina, the
University of California at Berkeley, the Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University.1
By the end of the decade, when the U.S. government began to take over the funding of
population research, the Ford Foundation had established 12 population research centers at
U.S. universities (some universities, including the University of Chicago and the University
of Michigan, boasted two centers) and about half that number at universities in the global
south.2 These centers trained an international cadre of population experts who published
their findings in new demography journals, staffed government statistical offices, and oversaw
family planning programs. Demography offered lucrative and exciting careers, and those who
chose it provided critical scientific support and legitimacy to the economic overpopulation
discourse and programs to control population growth worldwide.

5.1.1 Population Studies Centers and Demography Careers in the

United States

Several of the U.S. universities at which the Ford Foundation established population studies
centers already had strong programs in population research. Two of these, the University of
Chicago and the University of Michigan, play a particularly prominent role in this chapter
and in the broader history of demography. Frank Notestein, the first director of Princeton
University’s Office of Population Research, is often considered the father of demography;
1
Harkavy, see n. 108, 41; Caldwell and Caldwell, see n. 109, 69; Ronald Freedman, “The Program of the
University of Michigan Population Studies Center,” Sept. 1, 1961,folder 251, box 15, record group IV3B4.2.
2
Caldwell and Caldwell, see n. 109, 2.

353
indeed, he is the first university faculty member to have held the title of demographer.3
However, the field’s intellectual genealogy can be traced back to Franklin Giddings, one
of the founders of sociology and a pioneer of quantitative social research (Notestein was a
student of Giddings’s student Walter Willcox). As discussed in Chapter Two, Giddings was
the first full professor of sociology at Columbia University and in the United States, and
trained many students who would go on to become demographers. One such student was
William Fielding Ogburn, research director of the Recent Social Trends project described in
Chapter Two, who became chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago
in 1927. Ogburn’s quantitative approach was at odds with the reigning “Chicago School of
Sociology,” which took a qualitative approach focused on urban ecology. Both traditions,
however, provided foundations for demography.
Demographers trained at Chicago in the Giddings/Ogburn tradition included Philip
Hauser, who would later become the director of the Ford-funded Population Research and
Training Center at the University of Chicago, and Ronald Freedman and Otis Dudley Dun-
can, who would become the director and associate director of the Ford-funded Population
Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Demographers trained in the urban ecology
tradition also established Michigan connections, with Roderick McKenzie, a former student
of Robert Park and Ernest W. Burgess at Chicago, becoming a professor of sociology at
the University of Michigan in 1941. At Michigan, McKenzie trained urban ecologist Amos
Hawley, who trained demographer Donald Bogue, who would later direct the University of
Chicago’s second Ford-funded population center, the Community and Family Studies Cen-
ter. These intellectual lineages intersected one another: Bogue also studied with Ronald
Freedman at the University of Michigan, and Duncan’s work was heavily influenced by the
Chicago School’s urban ecology approach. The career trajectories of Hauser, Freedman, and
Bogue illustrate typical paths through the field of demography at the time, as well as the in-
3
Warren Thompson and Pascal Whelpton, demographers at the Scripps Foundation for Research in
Population Problems, housed at Miami University in Ohio, were not faculty members and did not train
students, though many students from the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan worked on
Scripps projects as part of their training.

354
stitutional connections between academic population centers, government statistical offices,
and the Ford Foundation and Population Council.
Born in Chicago in 1909, Hauser received all of his training in sociology at the University
of Chicago, completing the Ph.D. in 1938. He worked at the U.S. Bureau of the Census from
1938 to 1947, forming part of the Census Bureau’s legendary “Class of 1940,” discussed in
Chapter Two.4 While at the Census Bureau, Hauser helped to develop the Current Pop-
ulation Survey, which, along with the Census, has become an important source of social
scientific data in the United States.5 In 1947, Hauser left the Census Bureau to become
professor of sociology and director of the Chicago Community Inventory at the University of
Chicago, which became the Population Research and Training Center when Hauser received
a Ford Foundation grant in 1962. Hauser continued to address his work to popular and
policy audiences, and became one of the few academic demographers to adopt Hugh Moore’s
phrase “the population explosion,” introduced in Chapter Four. In 1960, Hauser gave a
series of public lectures at the University of Puget Sound, later published as a book titled
Population Perspectives, in which he argued that “the adverse effects of explosive population
increase on the efforts of the underprivileged people of the world to achieve higher levels of
living are producing explosive world political problems.”6 In 1963, Moore proposed “The
Population Explosion” as the theme for a meeting of the American Assembly, a program at
Columbia University that periodically brought prominent Americans together with experts
in various fields to discuss pressing social issues. On Moore’s recommendation, Hauser was
asked to prepare the steering materials for the meeting, which he solicited from prominent
demographers — including Ansley Coale and Irene Taeuber at OPR and Frank Notestein
and Dudley Kirk at the Population Council — and which were published afterward under
the title The Population Dilemma. This meeting — which was funded by the Population
4
The Census Bureau’s “Class of 1940” included Henry Shryock, Jr., OPR’s first research associate, and
John Durand, OPR’s first graduate fellow., see n. 116, 34; Henry Shryock, Jr., a fellow member of the
“Class of 1940,” attributes the professionalization of the Census Bureau to the Great Depression, when
many statisticians and other social scientists were out of work., see n. 116, 84.
5
See n. 116, 36.
6
Philip M. Hauser, Population Perspectives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 4.

355
Council, the Ford Foundation, and the Laurel Foundation — helped to produce consensus
among demographers, businessmen, policy makers, and the American public about the need
for population control in the global south.7 Hauser remained at the University of Chicago
until his retirement in 1979. During that time, he served as the first U.S. representative to
the U.N. Population Commission and served as a consultant to the U.N. and the Population
Council on population education and family planning programs throughout the global south,
including Burma (Myanmar), Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea,
and Thailand. Hauser served as president of the PAA in 1950-1951 and of the American
Sociological Association in 1967-1968.8
Freedman was born in Canada in 1917, but raised largely in Waukegan, Illinois. He
completed a B.A. in history and economics in 1939 and an M.A. in sociology, both at the
University of Michigan. He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago
in 1947 (after serving in the military during World War II), and returned to the University
of Michigan as a faculty member, where he remained until his retirement in 1987. In the
late 1940s, he collaborated with Pascal Whelpton at the Scripps Foundation on analysis of
data collected for the Indianapolis Study, discussed in Chapter Two. At the University of
Michigan, Freedman was affiliated with the Survey Research Center, where he helped to
establish the ongoing Detroit Area Study, and founded the Michigan Population Studies
Center in 1961, with funding from the Ford Foundation. The Center carried out numerous
fertility surveys and family planning studies overseas, with support from both the Ford
Foundation and the Population Council. Through these studies, Freedman helped to promote
demographic transition in Taiwan, as will be discussed later in this chapter.9 He served as
president of the PAA in 1964-1965.
7
The Laurel Foundation was established in 1951 by Cordelia Scaife May, one of the heirs to the Mellon
fortune. May was an environmentalist and anti-immigrationist who also contributed generously to the
Population Council and to Moore’s organizations.
8
See n. 116, 33.
9
Ronald Freedman and John Y. Takeshita, Family Planning in Taiwan: An Experiment in Social Change
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Ronald Freedman, Observing Taiwan’s Demographic Transi-
tion: A Memoir (Ann Arbor: Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, 1998).

356
 Bogue completed a B.A. in sociology at the State University of Iowa in 1939 and an M.A.
in sociology at Washington State College in 1940. He enrolled in the sociology Ph.D. program
at the University of Michigan after serving in the military during World War II. While
studying urban ecology under Amos Hawley, he also carried out demographic research as a
research assistant at the Scripps Foundation, focusing on internal migration and metropolitan
structure in the U.S. In 1953, Hauser recruited Bogue to be the Associate Director of the
Chicago Community Inventory. Soon thereafter, Bogue spent a year at a U.N. population
research and training center (funded by the Population Council - more below) in Chembur,
India. While there, he came to accept the Population Council’s explanation of poverty
in the global south. As he described in a 1989 interview, “I saw the fertility problem in
its stark reality and became intensely interested in it as a population problem and began
working with the people of the Indian family planning association,” believing that “the
population problem” could be readily solved by establishing family planning clinics and
convincing people to use them.10 When he returned to Chicago, Bogue began to study social
psychological “theories of inducing behavior change — theories of persuasion, motivation,
attitude change theory — trying to apply this to the problem of fertility control.”11 He
took over the University of Chicago’s Family Study Center (originally established by Ernest
Burgess in 1947) with a grant from the Ford Foundation to turn it into the Community
and Family Study Center, and focused the Center’s research program on experiments in
communication to stimulate the uptake of family planning, both in the global south and
among the black and Latino residents of Chicago. Bogue continued to teach in the sociology
department, but increasingly taught classes on communication, social psychology, and social
change.12
Prior to the establishment of population studies centers, most courses on population
10
“Donald J. Bogue, Interview with Jean Van Der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” Mar. 30, 1989,
url: [Link]
pdf, url: [Link]
[Link], 41.
11
Ibid., 41-42.
12
Ibid., 43.

357
dynamics were taught in sociology or economics departments, and many dealt with U.S.
issues, notably internal migration and labor market composition. Other than at Princeton,
few graduate students in sociology or economics focused their research on population, and
many of those who did went on to careers with the Census Bureau or the United Nations.
Between 1931 and 1960, 26% of the PAA’s presidents worked for the U.S. government or
the U.N., as compared to 15% over the remainder of the century.13 The establishment
of the population studies centers created more jobs for faculty with research interests in
population, especially formal (mathematical) demography and fertility in the global south.
Most universities never established demography departments, so population studies faculty
continued to hold tenure in departments of sociology, economics, or epidemiology, though
their offices were usually in a separate physical space. As a result, population studies faculty
typically had more interaction with one another, even though they may have been from
different departments, than they had with members of their own home departments.14
The University of California at Berkeley was the notable exception to this pattern, though
its first department of demography was short lived.15 Kingsley Davis relocated from Columbia
University to Berkeley in 1955 as a professor of sociology, accompanied by his wife and former
student Judith Blake. In 1956, with funding from the Ford Foundation, Davis established
Berkeley’s International Population and Urban Research program, which housed research
projects on urbanization and land and resource use worldwide.16 In 1965, Davis and Blake
together created Berkeley’s Graduate Group in Demography, which became the Department
of Demography in 1967. The department disbanded in 1972 as a result of internal strife and
13
[Link]
14
Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political
History of Twentieth-Century Demography,” see n. 20.
15
In the 1960s, the University of Pennsylvania developed a Ph.D. program in demography through its
Population Studies Center, but never created a department of demography. Caldwell and Caldwell, see
n. 109, 67.
16
The grant for this center was separate from the Ford Foundation’s population center program of the
1960s. Research focused on urbanization and resource use rather than fertility per se. “Kingsley Davis,
Interview with Jean Van Der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” May 1, 1989, url: [Link]
sdsu . edu / Research / Projects / PAA / oralhistory / PAA _ Presidents _ 1961 - 76 . pdf, url: http : / /
[Link]/Research/Projects/PAA/oralhistory/PAA_Presidents_1961-[Link].

358
lack of funding.17 In a 1989 interview, Davis reported substantial animosity among fellow
PAA members toward his department because “it wasn’t the way they’d done things. They
all had Ph.D.s in some other field,” and worried that their credentials would be depreciated
by the existence of Ph.D.s specifically in demography.18 Davis had a somewhat different
intellectual background than the other demographers in his generation, having studied soci-
ology at Harvard University with Talcott Parsons and Pitirim Sorokin, whose work focused
on systemic and structural explanations of individual behavior. This training likely inspired
Davis and Blake’s strong critiques of the Population Council’s individual-level approach to
population control, which will be discussed in the final section of this chapter.
The new population research centers emphasized demography’s quantitative orientation.
Contemporaries have described the physical space of a typical population research center
as “characterized by its piles of questionnaires, its boxes of punched cards, its computing
equipment, and its seminar room.”19 The expansion of the field coincided with the rise
of computing in universities, and demographers — along with political scientists — were
some of the first social scientists to use university mainframe computers for their research.
Population studies centers were also known for large-scale collaborative research projects
employing large technical staffs, such as the fertility surveys that will be discussed in the
following section.
Demography’s quantitative focus protected the field from external critique, as training
in the quantitative methods of population became a prerequisite for judging scholarship. It
insulated the field from the changing theoretical orientations of the other social sciences, as
demographic training focused on method rather than theory, and reinforced the idea that
population growth was a biological problem with a technological solution.20
17
Very little information seems to be available on this. See: see n. 16; “Judith Blake, Interview with
Jean Van Der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” May 4, 1989, url: [Link]
Research/Projects/PAA/oralhistory/PAA_Presidents_1977-[Link], url: [Link]
edu/Research/Projects/PAA/oralhistory/PAA_Presidents_1977-[Link].
18
See n. 16.
19
Caldwell and Caldwell, see n. 109, 60.
20
Greenhalgh suggests that this may have been how demographers “missed the critiques of modernization
theory that swept through development studies in the late 1960s and 1970s,” and argues that any critiques

359
 While Susan Greenhalgh has described the highly quantitative nature of demography as
a factor keeping would-be practitioners out of the field, interviews with past PAA presidents
suggest that it also attracted many people into the field. Notestein and Coale, for instance,
were drawn to demography because it was more mathematical at the time than other subfields
of economics. As Notestein explained of his decision during graduate school to focus on
population,

suddenly it dawned on me that births, deaths, movement of homes, marriage,

these were vital events, that everything in the economy and society focused on
it. And it had a central core of arithmetic, mathematical rigor.. . . It was an
exciting way of looking at the world. I’m afraid it wasn’t from a reformist point
of view that I got into it; just the sheer joy of watching the variables behave.21

While many demographers — including Notestein, Hauser, and Bogue — did aim to improve
the world through their research, it was the satisfaction of working with data and models
that originally drew them into the field. As a graduate student in sociology at Columbia, Ju-
dith Blake chose demography as her subfield because, compared to other areas of sociology,
demography was “awash in data.”22 While Blake did go on to produce highly original and
groundbreaking research, demographers in general have been described as having “conven-
tional personalities” and feeling “most comfortable writing quantitative papers that make
incremental contributions to previous literature,” contributing to conformity and consensus
within the discipline.23
The quantitative nature of demography seems in particular to have attracted women with
strong mathematical backgrounds into the field. Some of the most prominent female demog-
raphers of the twentieth century had undergraduate or graduate degrees in mathematics or
that did make their way to demographers “might perhaps have been stifled by their close contacts with
the family planning world, which held certain truths, in particular, its assessment of the seriousness of the
global population problem and the correctness of the family planning solution to it, to be beyond question.”
Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political
History of Twentieth-Century Demography,” see n. 20, 47.
21
See n. 59, 15.
22
See n. 17, 95.
23
Avery Guest, “Gatekeeping Among the Demographers,” in Editors as Gatekeepers: Getting Published
in the Social Sciences, ed. Rita J. Simon and James J. Fyfe (Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 87.

360
biostatistics, including Mindel Sheps, Margaret Hagood, Jane Menken, Barbara Anderson,
and Evelyn Kitagawa. Female demographers in academia faced the same discrimination as
did women in other fields. Princeton did not admit women to its graduate programs until the
late 1960s. In contrast to the University of Chicago, which had a longer history of admitting
female graduate students, the first female OPR student to earn a Ph.D. was Leela Visaria
in 1972, followed by Barbara Anderson and Hilary Page in 1973. Yet few of the women who
completed Ph.D.s became faculty members during this period. Dorothy Thomas, who earned
her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in 1924, became the first female professor at
the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1948, and became co-director of the
University of Pennsylvania’s Population Studies Center when it was established in 1962 with
a grant from the Ford Foundation.24 Judith Blake followed Davis to Berkeley, but lectured
in the nursing school at U.C. San Francisco until she was able to get a faculty position at
Berkeley, first in the School of Public Health in 1962 and then in the short-lived Department
of Demography, which she helped to found in 1967. Several other female demographers,
including Irene Taeuber, Jane Menken, Mindel Sheps, and Beverly Duncan, held research
associate positions in academic population centers.25 Others, including Margaret Hagood
and Hope Eldridge, worked for the Census Bureau or the United Nations (or both, as in
the case of Eldridge). Possibly because demography focused on large research projects and
because there were ample job opportunities for demographers in government, where gender
discrimination for research positions was less intense than in academia, women were able to
participate in demography at higher rates than in other subfields of sociology, economics,
and statistics. Between 1931 and 2006, 17% of PAA presidents were women, as compared
to 9% of presidents of the American Sociological Association and the American Statistical
Association, and 2.5% of presidents of the American Economic Association.26
In addition to funding faculty posts, the Ford Foundation and the Population Council
24
Thomas had been married to Chicago School sociologist W.I. Thomas, another link to this intellectual
tradition.
25
Menken became a lecturer at OPR in 1977 and a professor in 1980.
26
[Link]

361
also provided generous fellowships for graduate students studying demography, following the
lead of the Milbank fellowship program described in Chapter Two and extending the model
beyond Princeton. In its first five years, the Population Council provided fellowships to 69
students from 21 countries.27 Princeton and the Universities of Michigan and Chicago were
major hubs for Population Council fellows, and major loci of training for U.S. demogra-
phers who went on to work in academia, government, and nongovernmental organizations.
Throughout the 1960s, there were more jobs available for demographers than there were
people qualified to fill the positions, so graduate students in sociology or economics could be
assured that studying population would both fund their education and lead to employment
afterwards.28 Although the Ford Foundation offered more financial support to university
population studies centers and their students than did the Population Council, the influence
of the Council went far beyond financial support and graduate fellowships. In 1971 demog-
rapher Paul Demeny, then director of the Population Institute at the East-West Center in
Hawaii, and a former Population Council fellow, stated that his center received minimal
funding from the Population Council. Nonetheless,

the Council’s influence is present in every facet of our work from abundant use of
Council publications in training to continuously encountering Council-supported
programs and projects in our contacts in Asia. Former Council Fellows include
not only the Director, but also the Assistant Director for Professional Study
and Training, the Assistant Director for Institutional Cooperation, and two ad-
ditional members of the Institute’s research staff. Our support does not come
from the Council, but without the Council our Institute would probably never
have existed.29

The reliance of population research centers — and the field of demography more broadly —
on external funding from the Ford Foundation and Population Council gave these patrons
27
“Present Activities and Future Needs of the Demographic Division,” 1958,folder 40, box 4, record group
IV3B4.2.
28
Ansley J. Coale, “Memo,” Oct. 26, 1964,box A82, series 200s, record group 1.1; “Notes on JDR’s Memo:
Population Council Program - New Items and Items for Increased Emphasis,” 1960,folder 41, box 4, record
group IV3B4.2.
29
Paul Demeny to August Schou, Nov. 23, 1971,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box AD25, accession
2.

362
considerable power to shape the research demographers would perform, as I will explore at
greater length later in this chapter.

5.1.2 Population Studies Centers and Demography Careers in the

Global South

As discussed in Chapter Four, the legitimacy of population control programs sponsored by

U.S.-based organizations required that the citizens and governments of the countries in which
they operated welcome those programs as the solution to a perceived problem of population
growth. The final section of this chapter examines how the Population Council used fertility
surveys to demonstrate a demand for family planning services among denizens of the global
south. This section examines how the Population Council and the Ford Foundation, through
funding the training of students from the global south at population research centers in the
U.S. and establishing population research centers in the global south, created indigenous
experts who could explain to their governments why population growth was a problem and
how family planning programs could help.
The population research centers described in the previous part of this section recruited
students from the global south, many of whom had already worked in government statistical
agencies, and many of whom were supported by Population Council fellowships. After com-
pleting Ph.D.s in the United States — most studied at Princeton, Michigan, or Chicago —
these fellows were expected to return home to staff government statistical agencies, adminis-
ter family planning programs, or direct population studies centers that the Ford Foundation
or Population Council established in local universities. When NIH and USAID began to
fund demography research and training in the late 1960s, these agencies also supported the
training of students from the global south.
The directors of Princeton’s OPR, the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Cen-
ter, and the University of Chicago’s Population Research and Training Center viewed the
training of students from the global south as a critical part of their centers’ missions. Hauser

363
reported that he began to recruit international students to his program because “what was
clear was that the most severe population problems were in the Third World. But in the
Third World there was practically nobody who could be called a demographer, who could
begin to provide the basic data for policy, which they badly needed.”30 He and his counter-
parts at Princeton and Michigan aimed to train students who would return to their home
countries to serve as “a source of local authority on the population problems of each major
country or region of the underdeveloped areas.”31 They expected that the students they
trained would explain to policy makers in their countries of origin that population growth
would prevent economic development, and that family planning programs could stimulate
economic growth. Decades later, demographer John Caldwell argued that, through these
research and training programs, the Ford Foundation and the Population Council “literally
talked down the birthrate” in the global south by stimulating enough anxiety about popu-
lation growth to lead to the establishment and promotion of family planning clinics, exactly
what the participants at John D. Rockefeller III’s 1952 Williamsburg meeting had hoped to
do.32
Hauser’s most prominent international student was Mercedes Concepcion, now known as
the “mother of Asian demography.”33 Her career will serve as an example of demographers
from the global south who trained at U.S. population research centers. Prior to studying
demography, Concepcion, born in 1928, was a biostatistician at the U.N. Statistical Training
Centre at the University of the Philippines. She first met Hauser in 1955, when he spoke
on population at the Philippine Statistical Association. Later that year, the Director of
the Statistical Training Centre, an American statistician who had previously worked at the
U.S. Bureau of the Budget, recruited Concepcion to attend the U.N. Seminar on Population
Problems in Asia and the Far East, held in Bandung, Indonesia and sponsored by the Popu-
30
See n. 116, 40.
31
See n. 27.
32
Caldwell and Caldwell, see n. 109.
33
“Mercedes Concepcion, Interview with Rebecca Sharpless for the Population and Reproductive Health
Oral History Project,” Aug. 17, 2004,Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA, url:
[Link]

364
lation Council.34 The seminar, which lasted ten days, included statisticians and economists
from nearly every country in East Asia, who attended not because they believed population
growth to be a problem in their countries, but rather to learn from U.S. demographers why
population growth was problematic.35 A few years later, Dudley Kirk, then Demographic
Director of the Population Council, offered Concepcion a fellowship to study demography in
the U.S. Because Princeton was not yet admitting women to Ph.D. programs, Concepcion
went to the University of Chicago to study with Hauser.36 After she finished her degree in
1964, the Ford Foundation, acting on the recommendation of Hauser, Kirk, and Oscar “Bud”
Harkavy, director of the Ford Foundation’s population programs, established the Population
Institute at the University of the Philippines and appointed Concepcion its director.37
Concepcion’s career was exceptional but not unique. In the same year that the Ford
Foundation established the Population Institute at the University of the Philippines, it also
founded the College of Population Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, under
the direction of one of Bogue’s former Chicago students, Visid Prachuabmoh. Later in the
1960s, the Foundation established a population center at the University of Indonesia under
the direction of Nathanial Iskandar, who had studied demography with Ansley Coale at
Princeton.38 In the mid-1980s, Kirk reported that over a third of the “leading demographers
in less developed countries” had attended graduate school in the U.S. as Population Council
fellows.39 In 1971, Coale reflected that, when he carried out his landmark study with Edgar
Hoover on the relationship between population growth and economic development, “we found
few expert demographers in India and Mexico and fewer social scientists in other disciplines
who had an expert knowledge of population.” Since then, he continued, the field had grown
immensely, and “an impressive fraction of the best of these [new] demographers — in the
United States and in the less developed countries — were trained as Population Council
34
See n. 33, 5.
35
Ibid., 8.
36
Ibid., 6-7.
37
Ibid., 13.
38
See n. 33, 14; see n. 10, 41.
39
See n. 114, 120.

365
fellows.”40
In the late 1960s, with the encouragement of the Ford Foundation, the NIH began to take
over the funding of population centers at U.S. universities. At the international universities,
the Ford Foundation made initial multi-year grants to establish population research centers,
but made continuation grants dependent on matching funds from within the country, which
further incentivized center directors and faculty to bring their work to the attention of local
governments.41 Initially, the core faculty of population studies centers in the global south
were educated in the global north — mostly in the U.S. — and taught largely from texts
produced in the U.S. Demography students in the global south were therefore trained to
analyze population through the theories, models, and ideologies developed by demographers
and their funders in the global north, much as Marion Fourcade has described for the field
of economics during the same period.42
In addition to the university population centers funded by the Ford Foundation, the Pop-
ulation Council funded the establishment of demographic research and training centers under
the aegis of the U.N., beginning in 1956 in Chembur, India, and continuing with centers in
Santiago, Chile in 1957 and Cairo, Egypt in 1963.43 These centers, which focused on training
government demographers to promote and facilitate census taking and vital registration in
the surrounding regions, hired local directors but included U.S.-based demographers (from
both universities and government) as consultants.44 The Population Council provided demog-
raphy textbooks and monographs published in the U.S. to research centers and universities
in the global south, sometimes translating them into local languages.45
In general, both Ford and U.N. population centers in the global south seem to have met
40
Ansley J. Coale to August Schou, Oct. 29, 1971,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box AD25,
accession 2.
41
See n. 33, 14.
42
Fourcade, see n. 134.
43
Caldwell and Caldwell, see n. 109, 47; “Principal Activities in India of the Demographic Division, The
Population Council,” 1959,folder 40, box 4, record group IV3B4.2.
44
Bogue and Dorothy Thomas both served as consultants to the Chembur center in the 1950s., see n. 116,
86.
45
See n. 28.

366
the aims of their funders.46 Mercedes Concepcion, as director of the population center at the
University of the Philippines, organized conferences of prominent demographers and policy
makers and placed articles about population growth in the local daily newspapers, leading
to the formation in 1968 of a government committee to “study the population problem with
the idea of recommending a policy to the president,” which Concepcion also directed. The
influence of the Population Council is evident in the committee’s final report, which, as Con-
cepcion described informally many years later, urged that “we need to undertake a program
of family planning so that each Filipino could partake of the fruits of national progress.’47
In 1971, President Ferdinand Marcos signed the proposed policy into law, creating family
planning programs supported with funds from the U.S. Agency for International Develop-
ment (USAID) and the U.N. Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA).48 Frederick Osborn
credited the research of Carmen Miró, a Panamanian demographer who studied in the U.S.
as a Population Council fellow and became the first director of the Centro Latinoamericano
de Demografı́a (CELADE), the U.N. population center in Santiago, with promoting the ac-
ceptance of birth control in Latin America and making the leaders of the Catholic Church
receptive to consideration of population control measures.49
Although demography never became a stand-alone discipline — even today, most people
who identify as demographers have degrees in sociology, economics, or epidemiology — the
system of population studies centers encouraged demographic scholarship to develop as a
unique and identifiable interdiscipline.50 However, the establishment of population research
centers kept demography relatively insular, even as it expanded. It remained a close-knit
field whose practitioners knew one another and whose patrons and clients attended its annual
46
See n. 27.
47
See n. 33, 16.
48
See n. 33, 17; As late as 2004, the majority of contraceptives in the Philippines came from USAID., see
n. 33, 36.
49
Rockefeller Foundation, see n. 104, For the book, I will explore the writings of Miró and Concepcion in
greater depth to examine how they countered Catholic opposition and how they both adopted and adapted
demographic theory and overpopulation discourses from the United States.
50
Joe Mayone Stycos, who studied with Davis at Columbia, coined the word “interdiscipline” to refer to
demography. J. Mayone Stycos, ed., Demography as an Interdiscipline (Transaction, 1989).

367
meetings. Between 1963 and 1979, all of PAA’s 15 presidents had been trained in one of
six population studies centers (two at Michigan, five at Chicago, two at Princeton, one at
Wisconsin, four at the University of Pennsylvania, and one at North Carolina).51 Even
today, PAA meetings have been described as “a big family reunion, with the different major
demographic centers being various wings of the family, and most participants claiming some
relationship to the major demographic centers.”52 The insularity of the field, its institutional
concentration in a small number of population research centers, and its dependence on
external funding – first from the Population Council and the Ford Foundation and then
from the NIH and USAID — contributed to the field’s focus on fertility in general and on
family planning in the global south in particular, which will be described at greater length
in the following section.

5.2 The Content of Postwar Demography

Under the influence of its postwar patrons, demography focused narrowly around questions of
fertility, mainly how to reduce it in the global south. This section examines that research. I
begin with an overview of the contents of demography’s two major English-language journals,
using topic modeling to assess the relative prevalence of fertility and other themes over this
period. I demonstrate that demography focused increasingly on fertility research after the
establishment of the Population Council. I then explore two prominent fertility surveys
through examination of their data, documentation, and publications.

5.2.1 Demography’s Journals

Demography’s first journal, Population, published by the International Union for the Sci-
entific Investigation of Population Problesm (IUSIPP), was suspended when World War
II began and never resumed publication. Population Index, published by the PAA begin-
51
[Link]
52
Guest, see n. 23, 88.

368
ning in 1935 (originally under the title Population Literature) was mainly a bibliography of
population-related studies published elsewhere and a newsletter for the PAA. In the twenty
years after World War II, three new population-oriented journals appeared. Population,
a French-language journal, was established in 1946 by France’s Institut National d’Études
Démographiques (INED). In 1947, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed David
Glass, director of Britain’s Population Investigation Committee (PIC) to launch Popula-
tion Studies.53 Although it was based in the U.K., Population Studies was an explicitly
international journal. Glass was chief editor, but recruited Frank Notestein of OPR, P.C.
Mahalanobis of the Indian Statistical Institute, C.E. Quensel of Lund University in Sweden,
and Alfred Sauvy of INED to serve as “foreign editors.” The PAA established Demography
in 1964 under Donald Bogue’s editorship, with a grant from the Ford Foundation.
A comparison of the contents of Population Studies and Demography using topic modeling
(latent dirichlet allocation) indicates some of the ways in which the emphasis of the field
shifted in the early 1950s after the establishment of the Population Council in 1953 and
the simultaneous involvement of the Ford Foundation in demography.54 In its first ten
years, Population Studies emphasized research on Europe, including historical research, and
work on demographic transition and other social theories. During that period, the journal
devoted less than 5% of its content to topics related to the global south and another 5% to
fertility, suggesting that fertility — particularly in the global south — was not an emphasis
of demographic research prior to the mid-1950s. After that point, the share of the journal
devoted to fertility rose to a high of 28% in 1962. By contrast, mortality was confined to
less than 10% of the journal’s content until 2002, and the share devoted to migration fell
from 9% in 1950 to 2% in 1985.55 Established in 1964, Demography devoted roughly 20%
53
“The Rockefeller Foundation: Annual Report,” 1944, url: http : / / www . rockefellerfoundation .
org/uploads/files/[Link] (accessed 07/23/2014), url:
[Link]
[Link] (accessed 07/23/2014), 274-275.
54
The method and results are discussed in greater detail at [Link]
tmod/[Link].
55
[Link]

369
of its content to fertility and family planning right from the start, with an additional 25%
devoted to surveys (mainly fertility surveys) and censuses.56 Migration never comprised more
than 10% of the content of Demography and, prior to 1985, mortality never exceeded 5%
of journal content. Between 1955 and 1983, Population Studies and Demography published
more than twice as many articles concerning fertility as they did concerning mortality and
migration combined. Yet, despite this focus on fertility, the field of demography largely
eschewed research on gender and sexuality, even as these became legitimate areas of inquiry
in demography’s neighboring disciplines.57
The share of space in the two journals devoted to mortality rose in the 1990s as population
aging in the global north made mortality a more pressing concern, but only exceeded the
share devoted to fertility in the early twenty-first century. Mortality was little discussed by
demographers during the first few postwar decades because demographers and their funders
perceived mortality as a problem that had largely been solved, giving rise to the new problem
of rapid population growth. With the exception of internal migration within the U.S., which
was much researched by both academic and government demographers during the 1940s and
1950s, migration has received little attention from demographers and its share of space in
Population Studies and Demography has remained miniscule. In his 1960 address to the PAA,
Dudley Kirk described migration as “the stepchild of demography,” a revealing metaphor in a
discipline that takes the family as a major object of analysis.58 Sidney Goldstein, addressing
the PAA as president in 1976, ten years after the United States re-opened its doors to
large-scale immigration, suggested that this characterization was still valid.59
56
[Link]
57
Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political
History of Twentieth-Century Demography,” see n. 20; Susan C. Watkins, “If All We Knew About Women
Was What We Read in Demography, What Would We Know?” Demography 30, no. 4 (1993): 551–577.
58
Dudley Kirk, “Some Reflections on American Demography in the Nineteen Sixties,” Population Index
26, no. 4 (1960): 307.
59
There are numerous reasons for the marginalization of migration within demography. To begin with,
there was very little funding for migration research. The leadership of the Population Council and the Ford
Foundation explicitly opposed considering immigration as a solution to the global “population problem,” and
concentrated their organizations’ resources on research (and action) to control fertility. Data on migration
were also notably sparse. Most countries do not gather statistics on emigration. While immigration is
more commonly documented, it is only half of the story, and is also difficult to track, particularly in the

370
 This content analysis suggests the role of the Population Council and the Ford Foundation
in shaping the content of these two journals. However, the history of Demography also
suggests that the influence of the journal’s funders was limited. Donald Bogue, one of the
founders of Demography, served as the journal’s editor for its first four years. His final issue
as editor was a special issue titled “Progress and Problems of Fertility Control Around the
World,” which included articles by Bud Harkavy, head of the Ford Foundation’s population
program, Frank Notestein, who was then president of the Population Council, and Reimert
Ravenholt, director of USAID’s recently-established Office of Population, in addition to
articles assessing family planning programs in every region of the global south and among
poor Americans. This issue produced considerable anxiety among PAA members, who feared
that it indicated too much control of the field by its funders. Bogue was subsequently
replaced as editor by Beverly Duncan, a University of Michigan demographer trained in
urban ecology at the University of Chicago (and wife of Otis Dudley Duncan), and the PAA
began to exercise greater control over the journal’s content. Duncan’s work was strongly
quantitative and focused on urban demography and social inequality and mobility in the
United States. Under her editorship, the proportion of articles using regression and other
forms of multivariate analysis increased dramatically, as did the share of articles dealing
with such U.S. social issues as race relations, educational attainment, urbanization and
suburbanization, while the share dealing with fertility surveys in the global south (described
in the following part of this section) declined considerably.60
Even before Duncan took over as editor, Demography had a strongly quantitative empha-
sis, as did Population Studies, reflecting the quantitative orientation of the field as a whole
and of the Ford-funded centers in particular, as described above. Since its establishment,
case of undocumented immigrants and those who overstay visas. Intercensal differences, once mortality
is accounted for, offer an estimate of net migration between censuses, but this figure masks the actual
volume of immigration and emigration, and renders circular migration invisible. For discussion of this
method of estimating immigration, and the problems therein, see Brian Gratton and Emily R. Merchant,
“Immigration, Repatriation, and Deportation: The Mexican-Origin Population in the United States, 1920-
1950,” International Migration Review 47, no. 4 (2013): 94–975; Sidney Goldstein, “Facets of Redistribution:
Research Challenges and Opportunities,” Demography 13, no. 4 (1976): 425.
60
[Link]

371
Population Studies has devoted roughly 30% of journal space to the language of quantitative
analysis; for Demography this figure is around 50%.61 A later editor of Demography has
described the journal as being shaped by the field’s dense social network of practitioners
and reflective of a strong consensus within the field regarding what constituted important
substantive issues and valid approaches. Even in the mid-1990s, he contended that it was
well known among members of the PAA that “specific candidates for editor will only be
selected if they view demography as fundamentally a scientific profession (and reject po-
litical activism in their professional roles).”62 During the period discussed here, “scientific”
scholarship meant quantitative.

5.2.2 Fertility Surveys in the 1950s

Fertility was at the center of demography research in the 1950s and 1960s. With funding
from the Population Council, the Ford Foundation, and USAID, U.S. demographers and
demographers in the global south developed the fertility survey — first conducted in Indi-
anapolis in 1941, as described in Chapter Two — into a routine tool of demographic research
and fertility intervention. These surveys used questionnaires to examine fertility behavior
and contraceptive attitudes worldwide, and experimental family planning interventions to
directly reduce fertility in the global south and among poor and nonwhite Americans. These
studies were largely designed by men, despite their focus on women’s reproductive experi-
ences, and — as will be argued below — largely sought to separate fertility from sexuality
and the gendered division of power in families and societies.
Although fertility studies did not comprise the entirety of the field during this period,
they garnered the majority of funding from the Population Council, the Ford Foundation,
and USAID. It is in this period that historians of demography have most strongly recognized
the field’s policy orientation. Demographer Paul Demeny, for example, has characterized the
61
[Link]
62
Guest, see n. 23, 89.

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population research funded by USAID as “industrial” and a “handmaiden in family planning
programs.”63 According to Susan Greenhalgh, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, USAID “put
a high premium on research products that could be quantified, standardized, replicated,
and packaged for use in countries around the world.”64 She argues further that accepting
foundation and government funding for their research required demographers to judge their
scholarship and that of their colleagues by the funders’ criteria, which privileged measurable
impacts over scientific process.65 This section examines two fertility surveys in detail, one
carried out in the mainland United States in 1955 and the other in Puerto Rico in 1953–
1954. Using the publications of these studies as well as their raw data and documentation,
I explore their scientific and policy aims, and interrogate the differences between the two
studies.

Growth of American Families

In the early 1950s, Freedman, together with Pascal Whelpton at the Scripps Foundation,
designed the Growth of American Families (GAF) study, the predecessor of today’s National
Survey of Family Growth and the template for fertility surveys and family planning experi-
ments in the global south.66 GAF was the first nationally-representative fertility survey, and
utilized the infrastructure of the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center (SRC) to
interview a representative sample of married U.S. women. SRC had been founded in 1948
by Rensis Likert, Leslie Kish, Angus Campbell, and several of their wartime colleagues from
the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division of Program Surveys.67 In 1949, SRC and the
University of Michigan’s Research Center for Group Dynamics together formed the Institute
for Social Research, which now houses the university’s Population Studies Center, as well as
63
Demeny, “Social Science and Population Policy,” see n. 23, 464, 466.
64
Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political
History of Twentieth-Century Demography,” see n. 20, 43.
65
Ibid., 44.
66
For the National Survey of Family Growth, see [Link] (accessed
4/6/2015).
67
Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-1960 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987), 340-341.

373
its Center for Political Studies and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social
Research.68 Over the next few decades, Likert, Kish, Campbell, and their colleagues and
students developed and tested the basic methods of survey research that are still used to-
day, from sampling to response scales.69 In the late 1940s, SRC researchers launched several
ongoing nationally-representative survey programs, including the Consumer Finance Survey
(now known as the Survey of Consumers) and the American National Election Study.70
The first wave of GAF, carried out in 1955, was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation
and the Population Council.71 GAF surveyed married U.S. women about their contracep-
tive practices and childbearing intentions to better understand the causes of the baby boom
and to improve predictions of future fertility in the U.S. and thereby produce more accu-
rate population projections.72 The baby boom and subsequent theoretical research on the
mathematics of population size and structure had demonstrated to demographers that, in
societies with very low mortality and little international migration — as in the postwar U.S.
— fertility was the main factor contributing to population change. The baby boom had
also revealed that the spread of contraception did not necessarily lead to uniformly small
families, as families can be planned to be any size. The experience of the Great Depres-
sion and baby boom had suggested that the increasing availability of contraception allowed
couples to adapt their childbearing plans to short-run economic fluctuations, and demog-
raphers warned that such practices meant that “ ‘bulges’ and ‘gaps’ may be created at the
bottom of the age structure which seriously affect many aspects of the society as they move
68
Converse, see n. 67, 341.
69
Ibid., 367-373.
70
[Link] (accessed 6/2/2014).
71
Pascal K. Whelpton to Frederick Osborn, Oct. 7, 1955,folder 338, box 22, record group IV3B4.2, Freed-
man and Whelpton applied to the Population Council for funds with which to analyze the data they had
collected, as they had expended the entirety of the Rockefeller Foundation grant ($91,835) on data collection;
“The Status of the Study of Growth of American Families,” Sept. 30, 1955,folder 338, box 22, record group
IV3B4.2; the Population Council’s grant to GAF in the fall of 1955 amounted to $8500 Ronald Freedman to
Frederick Osborn, Oct. 30, 1955,folder 338, box 22, record group IV3B4.2, although the Population Council
did not contribute funds to the study until after data were collected, the record of correspondence demon-
strates that Population Council leaders, particularly Frederick Osborn and Dudley Kirk, played a substantial
role in the design of the study.
72
Ronald Freedman, Pascal K. Whelpton, and Arthur A. Campbell, Family Planning, Sterility and Pop-
ulation Growth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959); Harkavy, see n. 108, 20.

374
inexorably up the pyramid of ages for the longer life expectancy of modern man.”73 When
Freedman typed these words in 1961, observers had already blamed the baby boom for the
unexpected rise in the number of school-aged children that had caused overcrowded schools
and teacher shortages in the 1950s.74 More than forty years later, that “bulge” had begun
to near retirement age, threatening to break both private and public pension systems.75
Freedman and Whelpton intended that GAF be repeated every five years, generating an
empirical basis with which to update U.S. population projections and improve their utility
for planning purposes. The conceptualization and design of the 1955 wave shows no intention
of influencing fertility behavior, only understanding and predicting it.76 Interviewers were
explicitly instructed to “maintain, as usual, an impartial attitude on controversial issues,”
a category that still included birth control. The instructions distinguished between science
and activism, informing interviewers that “we are seeking facts for a scientific study. We
do not take a stand for or against family limitation, or for or against a desirable family
size.”77 In later waves, some questions suggested an effort to increase the acceptability of
contraception to respondents, and simultaneous surveys outside the continental U.S. — such
as the 1953–1954 study in Puerto Rico described in detail below — explicitly aimed to
influence reproductive behavior.78
In contrast to the Indianapolis Study, which employed psychological and socioeconomic
factors to explain achieved family size, GAF and other postwar surveys focused specifically
on socioeconomic factors and on women’s knowledge of and attitudes toward contraception.
As discussed in Chapter Two, the psychological measures in the Indianapolis Study had not
73
Ronald Freedman, “The Sociology of Human Fertility: A Trend Report and Bibliography,” Current
Sociology 10 (1961): 36.
74
“Teachers Needed,” The New York Times (Aug. 10, 1959).
75
Floyd Norris, “As Baby Boom Ages, Era of Guaranteed Retirement Income Fades,” The New York
Times, Nov. 12, 2004, C1.
76
“A Memorandum on Population Research at the University of Michigan,” Mar. 2, 1954,folder 294, box
18, record group IV3B4.2; “Instruction Booklet: A Study of the Growth of American Families (Preliminary),”
Nov. 5, 1954,folder 337, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.
77
See n. 76.
78
Reuben Hill, J. Mayone Stycos, and Kurt W. Back, The Family and Population Control — A Puerto
Rican Experiment in Social Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959).

375
yielded any promising results, and Whelpton and Kiser had recommended that future fertility
surveys limit the number of covariates they included in order to reduce costs and facilitate
analysis. GAF likely focused on socioeconomic factors because the Indianapolis Study had
indicated that these factors had the most statistical power to explain variations in family
size. The Indianapolis Study had suggested an analogy between childbearing decisions and
purchasing decisions, and the design of postwar fertility surveys incorporated this analogy.
Initially, GAF was not truly nationally representative, as it was limited to white respon-
dents (including Mexican American respondents, per U.S. Census classification), but the
1960 wave added nonwhite respondents.79 Whelpton and Freedman initially confined the
sample to women, citing cost-related limitations. Their intention to add men in later waves
indicates recognition that both men and women make childbearing decisions and that, in the
1950s, available contraceptive methods required the cooperation of both partners. However,
subsequent waves of the study were also confined to women, suggesting an increasing per-
ception among scientists, their funders, and the public that women were the main agents of
reproduction, a view that became more prevalent with the introduction of systemic methods
of birth control that women could use without the cooperation or knowledge of their male
partners.80
In designing the study, Whelpton and Freedman decided not to make it longitudinal,
which would have involved re-interviewing the same respondents every five years in addition
to adding new women to replace those who aged out of the sample. Instead, they decided
to draw an entirely new sample for each wave, so as to protect respondent confidentiality.81
As a result, what they measured was not whether couples achieved their fertility intentions
but whether, on average, a sample of women at age x had the number of kids at time t + 5
that a different sample of women aged x − 5 had said at time t that they planned to have at
time t + 5. Such an approach was expected to produce roughly equivalent results and pose
79
See n. 76.
80
Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, see n. 72, 11.
81
Pascal K. Whelpton and Ronald Freedman, “A Study of the Growth of American Families,” American
Journal of Sociology 61, no. 6 (1956): 596.

376
less threat to respondents of having their confidentiality inadvertently violated.82
In the early 1950s, respondent confidentiality was an important consideration because
GAF asked women detailed questions about their experiences of marriage, childbearing, and
contraceptive use, which was still highly controversial in the U.S. and even illegal in some
states. Freedman and Whelpton worried that fear of disclosure would prevent respondents
from providing truthful — and therefore scientifically valid — answers. By the time of
the first wave in 1955, Americans had become accustomed to answering survey questions
and to learning about themselves and their neighbors through published survey reports.83
Gallup and Roper polls had begun to question Americans about their attitudes toward
contraception in 1936, but had not asked about personal practices.84 Sexual behavior had
started to become a legitimate topic of survey research with the publication of the Kinsey
Reports: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female in 1953. A brief discussion of the Kinsey studies will serve to locate GAF in the
context of survey and sexuality research in the mid-century United States and demonstrate
how GAF aimed to elicit information about fertility while eliding respondents’ sexuality.
Growth of American Families and the Kinsey Reports
Indiana University biologist Alfred Kinsey was not the first scientist to survey American
sexual behavior, but he was most well-known in the early 1950s.85 His research program was
funded by the Rockefeller Foundation through the National Research Committee for Research
in Problems of Sex, the same committee through which the Foundation sponsored biomedical
82
By the early 1960s, reinterviewing the same respondents no longer seemed to pose the same social threat,
and Freedman added a longitudinal study of family size preferences to the Detroit Area Study. “Ronald
Freedman, Interview with Jean Van Der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” June 12, 1989, url: http:
//[Link]/Research/Projects/PAA/oralhistory/PAA_Presidents_1961- [Link], url:
[Link] [Link],
73.
83
Igo, see n. 143, 4.
84
See n. 76.
85
The earliest known survey of sexual attitudes and practices in the U.S. was carried out between 1892 and
1920 by Stanford University physician Clelia Mosher. Other early studies include Factors in the Sex Lives
of Twenty-Two Hundred Women, published by Katharine B. Davis in 1929, and A Thousand Marriages: A
Medical Study of Sex, published by Robert Latou Dickinson and Lura Beam in 1931. Clelia Duel Mosher,
The Mosher Survey: Sexual Attitudes of 45 Victorian Women, ed. James MaHood and Kristine Wenburg
(New York: Arno, 1980); for more on Kinsey, see Igo, see n. 143, 194.

377
research on reproduction and contraception.86 With his Reports, Kinsey aimed to document
the full range of human sexual activity, a scientific field that was “more poorly established
than the understanding of almost any other function of the human body.”87 By reducing
sexuality to a bodily function, he also sought to normalize all sexual activities. Kinsey
explicitly aimed to make his work available to the general public, which — he felt — had the
right to scientific information about sexuality that was not “biased by moral, philosophic,
or social interpretation.”88 GAF shared the scientific goals of the Kinsey studies, aiming
to document the range and variability of childbearing attitudes and contraceptive practices
among U.S. women, but also had an explicit policy goal that Kinsey’s studies lacked.89 In
the first wave, that goal was simply to accurately predict future population and thereby
facilitate planning for population. In later waves, GAF and its successors also aimed to
identify potential policies that would facilitate fertility reduction among some segments of
the population: planning of population.
Both GAF and the Kinsey studies employed individual face-to-face interviews, with re-
spondents assured complete confidentiality.90 However, the different aims of the studies pro-
duced stark differences in methods of sampling and interviewing. These differences also
corresponded to divergent concepts of representativeness and commensurability applied by
the investigators. For GAF and later U.S. fertility surveys, the overriding concern was
generalizability: survey results would only prove useful for population projection or policy
formulation if they could be generalized to the U.S. as a whole. GAF therefore utilized
86
Adele E. Clarke, Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and “The Problems of
Sex” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); the Ford Foundation’s behavioral science program also
recommended a grant to the Kinsey group in the early 1950s, but the Foundation’s board vetoed it, finding
Kinsey’s research too controversial Morrissey, see n. 235.
87
Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1953), 5.
88
Ibid., 5.
89
Kinsey’s studies may have had the implicit policy goal of reducing discrimination againt individuals who
engaged in non-normative sexual practices, but he proclaimed no explicit policy goals.
90
Interviewers for both studies recorded responses on paper during the interviews, but those with Kin-
sey’s team used a code that only the four members of the team could decipher. They found that showing
respondents exactly what they were recording (which would have been unintelligible to the respondent him-
or herself) helped inspire confidence and presumably elicited more truthful answers. Kinsey et al., see n. 87,
59-60; see n. 76.

378
the most current methods of probability sampling; its investigators boasted that the sam-
ple drawn could be generalized to the total U.S. population (of married white women aged
18–39) with a 95% level of confidence.
Kinsey, however, eschewed such sampling methods, arguing that, although his sample
could not be generalized to the broader population, the results he obtained were a more
accurate description of the sexual experience of his sample. Kinsey contended that drawing
a probability sample for his study would be impossible, as such a sample would need to
include sufficient numbers of subgroups representing the intersection of all of the variables
that influenced sexual behavior: age, education, class, and religion, to name only a few.91
Kinsey further assumed that, even if such a sample could be drawn, “persons selected for
study by the objective and impersonal processes of random sampling, and confronted by
an investigator of whom they had never heard, would simply refuse to give information
on as personal and emotional a subject as sex,” producing a high enough non-response
rate to invalidate the sample.92 Instead, he used “group psychology” to recruit respondents,
approaching them through existing social organizations, both formal (prisons, universities,
churches) and informal (subcultures, friendship networks). Despite Kinsey’s assertion of
greater validity achieved through his sampling method than through a probability sample
(given the nature of his topic), his approach opened the study up to criticism by those who
did not want to believe its results.93
In designing GAF, Whelpton and Freedman sought to avoid such critiques and explic-
itly contrasted their sampling method to Kinsey’s. They pointed out in the introduction to
the published volume of results that, although it would have been easier and less costly to
91
Sampling methodology calls for sampling on the independent variables. That is, the sample should be
drawn such that the factors that are expected to influence the outcome (in this case, sexual behavior) are
distributed in the same way as in the population to which the sample will be generalized. Roger Sapsford,
Survey Research, Second Edition (London: Sage, 2007), 51-81; Kinsey et al., see n. 87, 26.
92
Kinsey et al., see n. 87, 25.
93
However, a committee of statisticians appointed by the NRC Committee for Research on Problems of
Sex found that, despite its limitations, Kinsey’s statistics on sexual behavior were the best available and
far superior to the nine other sex studies the committee examined. Igo, see n. 143, 191-192; William G.
Cochran, Frederick Mosteller, and John W. Tukey, “Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report,” Journal of
the American Statistical Association 48, no. 264 (1953): 673–716.

379
have “sought accessible and willing respondents,” the results would not have been general-
izable to the larger population with quantifiable levels of confidence.94 Such generalizability
was important not only for scientific credibility, but also because Freedman and Whelpton
planned to use the results to project future U.S. population. They also hoped the scientific
nature of the sampling process would inspire confidence among respondents, who were told
that “the addresses at which we interview are selected purely by chance and are an accurate
cross-section of the nation. The results of all the hundreds of interviews are combined and
published in a report which [sic] represents the country as a whole. The report is statisti-
cal, and no person is ever identified. Your interview is held in strictest confidence.”95 This
paragraph, in a letter from Angus Campbell, director of the SRC, to potential respondents
identified by the sampling process, not only assured them that the study was not investigat-
ing them personally but also enlisted them in the scientific project, asking them to respond
truthfully not just on their own behalf but also for those they statistically represented. Poten-
tial respondents also received letters from the study’s Medical Sponsoring Committee, which
included well-known doctors associated with contraceptive and infertility research, such as
Alan Guttmacher and John Rock, and the general Sponsoring Committee, which included
Detlev Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS); Judge Learned Hand
of the U.S. Circuit Court; Anna Lord Strauss, former president of the League of Women
Voters; and Charles P. Taft, former president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ
in America.96 These letters further emphasized confidentiality and the study’s importance
for projecting and planning for future population growth.
GAF and the Kinsey studies both used standardized interviewing methods in order to
94
Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, see n. 72, 12.
95
University of Michigan Survey Research Center) Angus Campbell (director, “Form letter to potential
respondents to the Growth of American Families Study,” Feb. 1955,folder 337, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.
96
Alan F. Guttmacher, “Form letter to potential respondents to the Growth of American Families Study,”
Feb. 15, 1955,folder 337, box 22, record group IV3B4.2; Lowell J. Reed, “Form letter to potential respondents
to the Growth of American Families Study,” Feb. 15, 1955,folder 337, box 22, record group IV3B4.2; Frederick
Osborn declined Whelpton’s invitation to the Sponsoring Committee, stating that he, John D. Rockefeller
III, and the Population Council wanted to avoid that level of publicity at that time Frederick Osborn to
Pascal K. Whelpton, Jan. 12, 1955,folder 337, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.

380
ensure comparability between respondents, but the methods differed substantially between
the two projects. GAF employed the existing SRC apparatus, which comprised field offices
throughout the country staffed by trained interviewers. Freedman and Whelpton designed
a questionnaire that they expected would elicit the information they sought and sent it out
in the hands of 150 trained female interviewers.97 Interviews took 75 minutes on average,
but some lasted up to three hours. Kinsey took a rather different approach. Just as he
had doubted the effectiveness of probability sampling, he also felt that “it is a mistake to
believe that standard questions fed through diverse human machines can bring standard
answers.”98 Kinsey recognized that the way a question is asked will shape the response and,
rather than using the exact same phrasing from interview to interview — the way GAF and
other SRC studies attempted to standardize results — he instructed his staff to ask questions
in whatever way was necessary for the respondent to give a truthful and accurate answer.
For example, to determine the rate of syphilis among his respondents, he would ask whether
a person had “bad blood” in regions where that euphemism was common and “syphilis” in
other places or when his respondents had medical training.99
To ensure that interviews elicited the same information from respondent to respondent,
the number of interviewers in the Kinsey studies was quite limited. For the female study, only
four members of the study staff, all with high levels of education (but not all women), carried
out the interviews.100 Kinsey interviews took 90 minutes to two hours on average, slightly
longer than those for GAF, and were much less structured. Whereas Kinsey interviewers
had the freedom to adapt their language and interviewing styles to establish rapport and
ensure intelligibility, and could add or subtract questions to elicit the information they
sought, GAF questionnaires included standard skip patterns and probes.101 Freedman and
97
Whelpton and Freedman recognized the importance of having women ask these intimate questions,
but do not seem to have elicited female consultation on the study as a whole. Freedman, Whelpton, and
Campbell, see n. 72, 14.
98
Kinsey et al., see n. 87, 61.
99
Ibid., 61.
100
Ibid., 58.
101
See n. 76, A skip pattern indicates the path an interviewer should take through a questionnaire on the
basis of the respondent’s answers. For example, GAF questionnaires instructed interviewers that, if a woman

381
Whelpton believed that respondents would give their opinions most readily and truthfully
when interviewers did not express any personal opinions about the topic of the study, and
saw the questionnaire as a technology that would control for interviewer variability.102 It is,
however, impossible to know whether and the extent to which GAF interviewers departed
from the rigid language and order of their survey instruments. Many questions in the survey
were open-ended, with interviewers given a few lines to write the response. These were later
coded into a standard set of answers to facilitate quantitative analysis.
Separating Fertility from Sexuality
Freedman and Whelpton shared Kinsey’s concern that potential respondents would be
reluctant to participate in a standard survey about sex conducted by strangers.103 In contrast
to Kinsey, who trained interviewers to establish rapport with respondents and who solicited
subjects who were already familiar with the study and who had been recruited by other
participants, Freedman and Whelpton dealt with the problem by removing discussion of
sexual activity from their survey as much as possible. Their questionnaire asked detailed
questions about women’s childbearing intentions and contraceptive practices, but none about
their sexual practices. Although Kinsey had found that almost half of his female respondents
had experienced premarital sex, GAF only interviewed married women. The language of the
questionnaire, though it asked women for the dates and outcomes of all pregnancies, did not
imply any expectation that women would have had a need or desire for contraception outside
the context of marriage.104 GAF thereby effectively portrayed fertility as a consequence of
marriage rather than a consequence of sexual activity.
The extreme delicacy with which GAF approached the sexuality of respondents is fur-
ther reflected in the questionnaire’s omission of the word “contraception,” and its use of
the phrase “birth control” only as a probe. GAF investigators designed the questionnaire
stated that she had never been pregnant, not to ask her to list the dates of her pregnancies or the ages of
her children. A probe is an alternate wording for a question that an interviewer is to use if a respondent
does not answer satisfactorily.
102
See n. 76.
103
Ibid.
104
Kinsey et al., see n. 87, 286; see n. 76.

382
so that questions about contraception would occupy only about 10% of interview time.105
Interviewers never named specific contraceptive methods, and respondents were also given
the opportunity to avoid naming them. Respondents were told that “many married couples
do something to limit the size of their families and to control when their children come,” and
asked “how do you feel about that?” Interviewers also asked, “how does your husband feel
about married couples limiting family size and controlling when children come?” and finally,
“in your own case, have you or your husband ever done anything to limit the number of your
children or to keep from having them at certain times?”106 If the respondent answered this
question in the negative, the interviewer followed with a probe: “Some things couples do may
not be considered birth control. Doctors and public health workers are interested in learning
how many people use these methods. Have you ever made use of either of the methods on this
card – you can tell me by the numbers on the card.” The interviewer would then hand the
respondent a card listing, by number, safe period (rhythm) and douche.107 If the respondent
answered that she had “done something” to limit the number of children she had or to con-
trol when she had them, she was handed a different card, shown in Figure 5.1, which listed
by number the methods of birth control then available.108 Respondents were asked simply
to give the number corresponding to the methods they had used. Freedman and Whelpton
had decided on the card method of questioning after pretests, carried out in Detroit using
the infrastructure of the Detroit Area Study, found that some respondents were reluctant to
name contraceptive methods, and interviewers also reported that they preferred not having
to name methods.109 The card format also educated both respondents and interviewers about
contraceptive techniques that they may not have known about previously. This effect was
105
Ronald Freedman to Frederick Osborn, Dec. 14, 1954,folder 337, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.
106
Ronald Freedman, Arthur A. Campbell, and Pascal K. Whelpton, “Growth of American Families, 1955
[machine-readable dataset],” Nov. 17, 2009,Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research,
Ann Arbor, MI, ICPSR20000-v1, 147; “Growth of American Families Questionnaire,” Jan. 4, 1955,folder
338, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.
107
Freedman, Campbell, and Whelpton, see n. 106, 148; see n. 106.
108
Freedman, Campbell, and Whelpton, see n. 106.
109
Pascal K. Whelpton to Frederick Osborn, Jan. 4, 1955,folder 337, box 22, record group IV3B4.2; Freed-
man to Osborn, Dec. 14, 1954, see n. 105.

383
likely unintended, at least in the first wave, as GAF interviewers were advised that “we do
not provide information or advice about birth control, health measures, or ethical problems
about which a Respondent should see her physician, her minister, or seek other professional
advice.”110 In later U.S. fertility studies and in international studies, it seems more evident
that survey methods were consciously intended to influence contraceptive knowledge and
behavior.111

Figure 5.1: Card 1, Growth of American Families Questionnaire, 1955

GAF interviewers tried to elicit the number of children a woman considered ideal, the
number she wanted, the number her husband wanted, the number her friends had, and the
number she expected to have, as well as why she wanted and expected the numbers she gave.
Women were also asked how many children they would have if they could live their entire
reproductive lives over exactly as they wished. These questions were followed by a series of
rather existential questions aimed at assessing whether a woman believed she could achieve
her desired family size:

59. Some people feel that their lives have worked out just the way they wanted.
Others feel that they’ve really had bad breaks. How do you feel about the way
your life is turning out?
60. What do you think your chances are of living the kind of life you’d like to
have. Do you think they are pretty good, not so good, or what?
61. Some people feel that they can make pretty definite plans for their lives for
the next few years. Others feel they aren’t in a position to plan ahead. How
about you? Do you feel able to plan ahead or not?112

The investigators intended these questions to gauge “personal competence,” the extent to
110
See n. 76.
111
Riedmann, see n. 97.
112
Freedman, Campbell, and Whelpton, see n. 106, 152.

384
which the respondent either “feel[s] personally competent to control her environment” or
“feel[s] helpless and at the mercy of forces beyond her control.”113
To their surprise and relief, Whelpton and Freedman found that most of the respondents
selected for the 1955 wave of GAF participated enthusiastically, suggesting, perhaps, that
married women were not as averse to discussing sex with strangers as they and Kinsey had
feared. The response rate was 91%, in contrast to the 87% that was then typical for surveys
on other topics. About half of the non-responders were unable to participate and the other
half unwilling, with about half of the latter objecting to the nature of the survey and the
other half simply unwilling to participate in any survey.114 Among the 2,713 women who did
participate, only 10 refused to answer the questions about contraception.115 The investigators
speculated that women were excited to be asked about their experiences and opinions on a
topic they knew something about, and noted that “a few women who were willing to answer
all our questions about family growth and family planning said that our questions about
income were ‘too personal’ !”116
The Three-Child Norm
Whelpton and Freedman found that completed family size had decreased from the late
nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, with ever-married women born between
1871 and 1875 having 4.0 children on average and women born between 1906 and 1910 hav-
ing only 2.4.117 However, results from the 1955 wave of GAF, in which 84% of respondents
reported wanting between two and four children, suggested that completed family size would
rise to an average of 3.0 for women born between 1931 and 1935.118 Whelpton and Freedman
113
Ronald Freedman and Pascal K. Whelpton, “Tentative Outline of Objectives for a Study of the Growth
of American Families,” July 9, 1954,folder 337, box 22, record group IV3B4.2.
114
Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, see n. 72, 14.
115
Interviewers classified 92% of respondents as having been “good” or “very good” participants. This
percentage was higher among those who reported having used birth control than among those who had not,
with 95% of users being classed as “good” or “very good” participants in contrast to 88% of non-users.
Author’s analysis of Freedman, Campbell, and Whelpton, see n. 106; see n. 71.
116
Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, see n. 72, 14; see n. 76.
117
Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, see n. 72, 340.
118
The three-child family seems to have become a norm to a greater extent even than it was a personal
preference: while 93% of women stated 2–4 children as the ideal American family size, 25% of respondents
wanted more children than the number they reported as ideal and 24% wanted fewer. Author’s analysis of

385
interpreted the 2–4 child range as a strong consensus about ideal family size among Amer-
ican women, while other observers pointed out that two- and four-child families were very
different, with very different implications for long-term population growth.119
With no evidence for how this norm might change in future generations, the population
projections Whelpton and Freedman made on the basis of GAF results assumed family size
would remain constant for the rest of the century, producing a total U.S. population of
311,997,000 in the year 2000.120 They issued the typical disclaimer along with their projec-
tion, reminding readers that “such forecasts show only what would happen if immigration,
mortality, and fertility were to follow specified trends which seem reasonable in the light of
current knowledge.”121 They expressed even more caution than they had in regard to past
projections, as GAF had identified quite widespread use of contraception, and a strong de-
sire among couples to limit childbearing in times of economic stress. The 1955 wave of GAF
found that 70% of women surveyed had used some form of contraception and an additional
9% intended to do so in the near future.122 As a result of the widespread acceptance of family
planning and the practice of limiting family size during economic downturns, the recent pat-
tern of fertility had been cyclical rather than steadily falling, as predicted by demographic
transition theory (described in Chapter Two). This finding suggested that post-transitional
fertility was strongly tied to economic cycles, producing additional support for the analogy
between childbearing and consumer behavior.123
Freedman, Campbell, and Whelpton, see n. 106; Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, see n. 72, 340.
119
Judith Blake, “Ideal Family Size Among White Americans: A Quarter of a Century’s Evidence,” De-
mography 3, no. 1 (1966): 163.
120
Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, see n. 72, 340. Actual U.S. population in the 2000 Census was
281,421,906.
121
Ibid., 377, emphasis in the original.
122
Most of those who had not already used contraception and did not plan to use it found it unnecessary
because, either due to physiological factors or infrequency of sexual activity, they had discovered that they
did not conceive as readily as other couples., see n. 71.
123
Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, see n. 72, 377.

386
Fertility Surveys and Family Planning Experiments in Puerto Rico

In the years just before the first wave of GAF, a different group of demographers carried
out a similar fertility survey in Puerto Rico. This survey, directed by Joe Mayone Stycos,
who was then a student of Kingsley Davis and a Population Council fellow at Columbia
University, included a family planning experiment that aimed both to reduce fertility among
participants and to identify the most effective means of doing so through voluntary family
planning services. This study, funded by the Conservation Foundation and the Population
Council, exhibited the influence of both the Council’s individual-level economic framework
for analyzing fertility and Kingsley Davis’s structural approach, which will be discussed at
greater length in the final section of the chapter.
Laura Briggs has described Puerto Rico as a laboratory for U.S. development policies in
the global south after World War II, and Stycos’s family planning experiment as a pilot for
population control programs that would soon appear throughout the global south.124 The
Puerto Rico study, carried out in 1953–1954 and published in 1959 as The Family and Pop-
ulation Control: A Puerto Rican Experiment in Social Change, first examined childbearing
desires and contraceptive use among a representative cross-sample of Puerto Rican couples,
then tested educational methods of encouraging contraceptive use among the portion of the
population least likely to use existing family planning services, the rural poor.125 As the
title indicates, the study was also an intervention, aimed at reducing the fertility of study
participants and determining how family planning programs could attract more clients.
Birth control had long been available in Puerto Rico, first through feminist and socialist
family planning programs connected to Margaret Sanger’s organizations in the mainland
United States, and later through government-sponsored public health programs that pro-
moted birth control as a eugenicst and neo-Malthusian solution to insular poverty. However,
the shift to government provision of family planning services also corresponded to the re-
124
Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 112.
125
See n. 28; Hill, Stycos, and Back, see n. 78.

387
placement of more-effective barrier methods with less-effective spermicidal compounds, as
program administrators and consultants believed diaphragms and cervical caps too compli-
cated for proper use by poor nonwhite women, a position also voiced by interwar demographer
Raymond Pearl, as discussed in Chapter Two.126 Stycos’s study followed up on a previous
study by Paul Hatt, published in 1952 as Backgrounds of Human Fertility in Puerto Rico,
which had found that Puerto Rican parents tended to have more children than they desired
as a result of “inadequate negative control of fertility.”127 Stycos and his colleagues therefore
officially framed their study as investigating how to increase the ability of couples to achieve
their desired family size, though even a cursory reading of study documentation or publi-
cations indicates that it also attempted to promote small family desires among its study
subjects.
Stycos and his colleagues trained graduates of the University of Puerto Rico to serve as in-
terviewers for the study, reflecting the Population Council’s policy of utilizing local personnel
and promoting local family planning initiatives. For the experimental phase, health educa-
tors were recruited from among graduate students in Health Education at the University’s
Medical School.128 Investigators found that training graduate students in health education
to serve as group leaders influenced their views favorably toward small families and family
planning and increased their knowledge about birth control, which would continue to influ-
ence their later public health work.129 Indeed, Briggs has attributed the widespread use of
birth control in Puerto Rico in the 1960s to the fact that “a huge array of Puerto Rican
modernizing middle-class professionals took up the banner of overpopulation, advocating
the idea that familial poverty was caused by too many children, and through a combina-
tion of educating, cajoling, and pressuring working-class women, succeeding in raising the
rate of birth control use.”130 This observation suggests that, by training local personnel in
126
Briggs, see n. 124; Pearl, “Contraception and Fertility in 2,000 Women,” see n. 41.
127
Hill, Stycos, and Back, see n. 78, 2.
128
Ibid., 32-25.
129
Ibid., 267.
130
Briggs, see n. 124, 122.

388
the mechanics of family planning and the ideology of overpopulation, the study influenced
interviewers as well as respondents, with effects lasting much longer than the study itself.
In contrast to GAF and to later fertility surveys in the global south (discussed in the
following section), the Puerto Rico study aimed to discover the social and cultural context of
childbearing, suggesting Davis’s sociological influence.131 It notably included interviews with
husbands as well as wives, indicating recognition by the investigators that both husbands and
wives contributed to contraceptive decisions and fertility outcomes during this period, when
available contraceptive methods required the participation of both members of a couple.132
In particular, the study sought to correlate non-use of birth control to a traditional culture
of male dominance and female modesty. Interviewers asked women, “many husbands forbid
their wives to do certain things, don’t they? What happens in your case? Does your
husband forbid you to. . . ” followed by six items, including using make-up, going out alone,
and dancing with other men at parties.133 Men were also asked about things they prohibited
their wives to do. To gauge modesty, interviewers asked women how embarrassed they
would be listening to dirty jokes, undressing in front of their husbands, being examined by
a doctor or a nurse, and talking with their husbands about menstruation or sex.134 These
questions refer back to colonial tropes that view male dominance and female subordination
as a sign of the supposed “backwardness” of nonwhite people.135 Nonetheless, they also
suggest recognition that gender relations influenced childbearing, something that was rarely
discussed in demography literature, but would become a critical component of Kingsley
Davis’s critique of the Population Council’s family planning approach to population control,
discussed in the final section of this chapter.
131
Warwick, see n. 154.
132
The study included both legally married couples and “consensual unions.” Hill, Stycos, and Back, see
n. 78, 193.
133
Ibid., 434.
134
Ibid., 435.
135
See, for example, Philippa Levine, “What’s British about Gender and Empire? The Problem of Ex-
ceptionalism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 273-274;
Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-
1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

389
 Questions about birth control were much less abstract in the Puerto Rico study than in
GAF, but were equally delicate. Puerto Rican respondents were asked to: “suppose there
is a couple called Marı́a and José. They are poor and have six children. Marı́a does not
want to have any more children but José does not care how many children they have.”
Respondents were then asked if they thought Marı́a “should do something or not.”136 Such
questions reveal an a priori assumption that childbearing is burdensome to women but not
men, and that it is therefore the woman’s responsibility to pursue contraceptive options.
They also conceptually associated large families with poverty, implying that poor couples
should limit their childbearing and that using birth control might alleviate their poverty. In
contrast to GAF, in which neither interviewers nor respondents were required to name specific
methods of contraception, interviewers in the Puerto Rico survey listed several types of birth
control — sterilization, douche, jelly or cream, diaphragm, condom, withdrawal, rhythm, and
abstinence — and asked respondents of both sexes whether they knew about each, whether
they had used each and, if so, when and to what effect.137 Both men and women were asked
if they knew where to obtain family planning assistance and whether they had ever been
to a government-sponsored family planning clinic. Whereas GAF interviewers had been
explicitly cautioned not to give respondents information about birth control, interviewers
for the Puerto Rico survey also served as liaisons to family planning clinics.
The experimental phase of the study focused on the segment of Puerto Rican society
found in the interview phase to be least likely to use available family planning services: the
rural poor who lacked education beyond the eighth grade.138 The study tested the efficacy of
two different educational programs aimed at increasing uptake of family planning services and
reducing family size among the rural poor, examining how such programs could most cost-
effectively stimulate contraceptive use among the largest number of people.139 The success
of the study was measured in terms of fertility decline rather than proportion of demand
136
Hill, Stycos, and Back, see n. 78, 432.
137
Ibid., 439.
138
Ibid., 258.
139
Ibid., viii.

390
met, belying the study’s official goal of empowering families to achieve their desired family
size. Whereas the interview phase exhibited Davis’s influence, the experimental phase — on
which Ronald Freedman served as a consultant — exhibited the influence of the Population
Council.
For the experimental phase, respondents were divided into three groups: the first received
invitations to a series of three educational meetings, the second received a series of three
pamphlets, and the third — the control group — received neither. Investigators measured
the success of these programs by comparing attitudes and practices between a pre-treatment
interview and a post-treatment interview for treatment and control groups. The design of
the educational program indicates awareness by the study’s directors that respondents were
not particularly interested in limiting the size of their families. Fearing that introducing
the topic of family planning at early meetings would stimulate a boycott of later meetings,
the study’s directors designed the meetings such that family planning was not brought up
until the third and final one. The first focused on planning in general (with clothes shopping
presented as an example), and the second meeting included viewing a film produced by the
U.S. Public Health Service and the Puerto Rico Department of Health, which contrasted an
unhappy family with many children to a happy family with fewer children, promoting the
idea that small families were superior.140 In the third meeting, men and women were given
separate lectures by physicians on the physiology of reproduction and different contraceptive
options. The series of pamphlets paralleled the series of meetings, with the first one telling
participants that “if things are planned, they end well,” and the second contrasting large
and small families through an analogy to planting banana trees “as far apart as one can
support.”141 The third pamphlet, titled “Marı́a Solves Her Problem,” told the story of a
woman who “feels that she cannot have any more children and goes to the clinic.” As the
doctor in the story explained various contraceptive options to Marı́a, readers learned about
140
Hill, Stycos, and Back, see n. 78, 263.
141
Ibid., 263.

391
them along with her.142 However, even with sessions designed in this way, many respondents
did boycott them: of those selected, only 59% of women and 40% of men attended at least
one meeting, and only 16% of the women and 8% of the men attended all three. When asked
why they did not attend, most respondents cited inconvenience rather than opposition to
the material. Men in particular said they needed to work or look for work during meeting
times, suggesting that they attributed their own financial circumstances to low wages or lack
of work rather than family size.143 Those who did attend typically arrived late, sometimes
by up to an hour.144
The Puerto Rico family planning experiment exemplifies a tension the Population Council
and its representatives continued to encounter throughout their population control activities.
On the one hand, they sought to frame their activities as helping couples achieve existing
small family desires. On the other hand, they explicitly worked to instill small family desires
among study participants. The leaders of the Population Council, including Notestein — its
president from 1959 to 1968 — resolved that tension by insisting that small families were
beneficial for couples in the global south, even if the couples themselves didn’t realize it.
Notestein compared the work of the Council to public health work in a hypothetical world
in which

malaria were as welcome as children — if a majority of young couples felt that

they had really not justified their existence until they had undergone four or
five attacks of malaria, which, moreover, they thoroughly enjoyed; if their fa-
thers, mothers, mothers-in-law, uncles and aunts were constantly urging them to
become exposed to the disease as soon as possible; if each new onslaught were
welcomed with approbation by the whole community; and if to avoid this attrac-
tive disease, each deviant couple had to spray its own home with DDT acquired
somewhat furtively.145

By comparing children to malaria, Notestein dismissed all of the social, economic, and cul-
tural reasons for childbearing as superstition and irrationality, justifying the prevention of
142
Hill, Stycos, and Back, see n. 78, 263.
143
Ibid., 277.
144
Ibid., 278.
145
Quoted in Bernard Berelson, “On Family Planning Communication,” Demography 1, no. 1 (1964): 95.

392
pregnancy as a service to the couple involved, regardless of how many children they actually
wanted.
Although the interview component of the Puerto Rico study strongly resembled GAF, the
two projects had very different goals. While GAF aimed to assess childbearing intentions and
contraceptive practices in the mainland U.S. so as to project and plan for population, the
Puerto Rico study aimed to assess how childbearing intentions and contraceptive practices
in Puerto Rico could be manipulated so as to facilitate the planning of population through
large-scale efforts to create a desire for small families and stimulate the uptake of available
methods of birth control. Fertility surveys in the U.S. and family planning experiments
in the global south changed after 1960, a result of the availability of new systemic birth
control options and of the influence of Bernard Berelson, the former director of the Ford
Foundation’s population programs who joined the Population Council in 1962 and served as
its president from 1968 to 1974. The new approach to both fertility surveys and population
control is the subject of the next section.

5.3 Family Planning and Beyond

The Population Council’s approach to population control changed dramatically in the 1960s,
reflecting the influence of its new communications director, Bernard Berelson, who later be-
came the Council’s president. Whereas the Puerto Rico study had focused on the couples
least likely to use birth control, providing them with educational programs aimed at creating
among them a desire for a small family and the motivation to use birth control to achieve
small families, fertility surveys sponsored by the Population Council in the 1960s — many
of which were part of a new program, titled Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP)
of Contraception — aimed to change public opinion and shape policy regarding the gov-
ernment provision of family planning in the global south and assistance to those programs
from the U.S. government and U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations. The intervention

393
components of those programs focused not on education, but on providing new birth control
technologies to women who were already interested in using them, with the aim of creating
a new social norm rather than influencing the family size desires of individual couples.
Bernard Berelson was a propaganda and behavioral science expert who joined the Pop-
ulation Council in 1962 to direct its propaganda programs, described by Council staff as
“education” or “communication.” When the Council’s leaders first began to discuss recruit-
ing a communications director in 1958, they were explicitly advised to select not a scientist
but rather “an information specialist who can determine the best, surest and simplest way of
getting a story across, particularly when you must reach a large number of illiterates or semi-
literates.”146 Berelson was just the man. He had earned his Ph.D. in library science at the
University of Chicago in 1941 under the direction of Doug Waples, whose research focused
on propaganda communication and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Berelson’s
first book, co-authored with Waples while a graduate student and titled What Reading Does
to People: A Summary of Evidence on the Social Effects of Reading and a Statement of
Problems for Research (1940), examined the influence of reading on behavior.147 His disser-
tation analyzed data from a voting survey, attempting to explain why people vote as they do,
and was published as part of Paul Lazarsfeld’s The People’s Choice (1948). During the war,
Berelson served with renowned behavioral scientist Harold Lasswell in the Foreign Broadcast
Intelligence Service, which analyzed enemy broadcasts and produced material for broadcast
in the Americas. He returned to Chicago’s Graduate Library School after the war as a
dean, taking a leave from 1951 to 1957 to develop the Ford Foundation’s behavioral science
program, which initially housed the Foundation’s population activities.148 Ultimately, the
behavioral sciences program fell victim to McCarthy era censorship. Grants recommended
by program officers for Kinsey’s sex research and for research on American Indian history
146
Francis A. Jamieson and Martha Dalrymple to John D. Rockefeller III, Dec. 11, 1958,folder 40, box 4,
record group IV3B4.2.
147
Douglas Waples, Bernard Berelson, and Franklyn R. Bradshaw, What Reading Does to People: A Sum-
mary of Evidence on the Social Effects of Reading and a Statement of Problems for Research (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1940).
148
Morrissey, see n. 235.

394
and racial integration in St. Helena were vetoed by the board as too controversial, and
the program dissolved in 1957.149 Bud Harkavy took over the Ford Foundation’s population
program in 1959.150 Berelson returned once again to the University of Chicago, this time to
the Graduate School of Business, where he remained only a few years before moving on to
Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research in 1960 and then to the Population
Council in 1962 to lead the Council’s work on family planning communication.151
Berelson arrived at the Population Council just as the Council’s investment in research
to develop a more “foolproof” contraceptive that would facilitate population control in the
global south was beginning to bear fruit. This section begins by describing how that research
led to the development of the IUD in the early 1960s, and then discussed how a new survey
program, funded by the Population Council and strongly influenced by Berelson, aimed to
promote IUD use in the global south and thereby create a small-family norm. I argue,
however, that these surveys were also intended to produce public and policy support for
family planning programs in the U.S. and the global south, and for assistance by the U.S.
government to such programs. In the final part of the section, I discuss critiques of the
Population Council’s approach to population control by Berkeley demographers Kingsley
Davis and Judith Blake, and their proposals for an alternative, structural approach.

5.3.1 Toward a More Perfect Contraceptive

By the time Berelson joined the Population Council, contraceptive technology had changed
dramatically. Prior to 1960, birth control options were limited to behavioral techniques
(withdrawal, rhythm, abstinence), barriers (condoms, diaphragms, cervical caps), and sper-
micidal compounds (suppository tablets, jellies, powders, foams), all of which required the
cooperation or at least the consent of both sexual partners and a degree of motivation
149
Morrissey, see n. 235.
150
Caldwell and Caldwell, see n. 109, 79.
151
Isabel S. Grossner, “Bernard Berelson Interview for Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project,” May 1,
1967,box AD25, accession 2.

395
and skill that experts in the global north believed were lacking in the global south. De-
mographers and population control activists inferred from the historical experience of the
global north that a couple’s degree of willingness to use birth control was the multiplicative
product of its motivation to limit family size and the simplicity of available contraceptive
techniques. Interwar research, described in Chapter Two, had shown that, with enough
motivation, couples would use even the most onerous means of limiting their family size —
abstinence, withdrawal, barriers, and compounds. Conversely, experts expected that, with
a simple enough contraceptive technology, family size in the global south could be reduced
with only the bare minimum of motivation.152 As Berelson put it, “the greater the interest,
the more will effective contraception be practiced at a given level of technology. The better
the technology (‘better’ for the given population in convenience, cost, effectiveness, safety,
etc.), the more will effective contraception be practiced at a given level of interest.”153 The
leaders of the Population Council therefore believed that creating and disseminating simple
contraceptives — the approach Notestein advocated in 1947154 — would have the same effect
on fertility, by reducing the requirement for motivation, as industrialization, urbanization,
and education — the approach had Notestein advocated in 1944155 — would have had by
increasing motivation. In 1964, Berelson argued that family planning could precede other
aspects of “the general modernization of society” because “the components [of moderniza-
tion] are uneven and do not progress in any set pattern. So something has to be in front,
and why not family planning? ”156 This statement suggested that, with the appropriate tech-
nology, family planning had the potential to stimulate other changes considered to be part
of “modernization.”
152
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning and evening sessions, 6/20/52,” see n. 78; Berelson, “On Family Planning Communication,” see
n. 145, 97.
153
Bernard Berelson, “National Family Planning Programs: Where We Stand,” in Fertility and Family
Planning: A World View, ed. S.J. Behrman, Leslie Corsa Jr., and Ronald Freedman (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1969), 360.
154
Notestein, “Summary of the Demographic Background of Problems of Undeveloped Areas,” see n. 39.
155
Notestein, “Problems of Policy in Relation to Areas of Heavy Population Pressure,” see n. 227.
156
Berelson, “On Family Planning Communication,” see n. 145, 98, emphasis in the original.

396
 In the early 1950s, manufacturers of spermicidal foaming powders began to package them
in single-use tablets, which could be inserted into the vagina by hand and were better suited
to conditions in the global south, as they were stable in hot climates and their use did not
require access to running water. Factories in India and Japan soon began producing these
tablets locally.157 In 1955, the Population Council sent Frank Notestein and Leona Baum-
gartner, New York City’s Commissioner of Health, to India to consult with the government’s
family planning program, which had been established in 1952. Baumgartner, whose husband
was the director of Durex, manufacturer of Durafoam spermicidal tablets, enthusiastically
endorsed foaming tablets as the ideal form of birth control for India.158 With funding from
the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard University immediately launched a study of the efficacy
of foaming spermicidal tablets, now known as the Khanna Study, in the Ludhiana district of
Punjab. The study failed to find convincing evidence that the tablets could reduce aggregate
birth rates, mainly because investigators were unable to distinguish between their acceptance
by those to whom they were offered their subsequent use by those who accepted them. As
Mahmood Mamdani argued in a critical examination of the study, most participants had
little interest in birth control but accepted the tablets to be polite. In his own follow-up
study, Mamdani was shown a sculpture that one man had made out of the tablets he ac-
cepted, rather than using them for their intended purpose.159 Studies in the continental U.S.
and Puerto Rico indicated that, even when used, foaming spermicidal tablets were not very
effective.160 These tablets, though available in the United States, were never very popular
there, with less than 1% of GAF respondents in 1955 reporting having used them.161
Although spermicidal tablets were easy to use, they did not satisfy the most important
criterion of the population establishment for contraceptive technology because they left too
much agency in the hands of users, who could decide, with each act of sexual intercourse,
157
Ilana Löwy, “Defusing the Population Bomb in the 1950s: Foam Tablets in India,” Studies in History
and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 584.
158
Ibid., 586.
159
Mamdani, see n. 97.
160
Löwy, see n. 157, 591.
161
Author’s analysis of Freedman, Campbell, and Whelpton, see n. 106.

397
whether or not to use them. At the same time, feminist activists in the U.S. sought even
easier and more reliable birth control methods than barriers and spermicidal compounds.
The demand for new contraceptive technologies by these two groups — population control
activists and birth control activists — led to the development of two new systemic methods,
the intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD) and the oral contraceptive pill (the Pill). Both
were highly effective at preventing pregnancy and had the potential to increase the control of
women and couples over their childbearing, but also required access to medical care. While
women who received the Pill could decide when to discontinue it, removing an IUD required
medical assistance.
The Pill and the IUD both depended on research in the field of endocrinology, which, prior
to the 1940s, had received little institutional support because of its association with sex.162
In the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation began to fund endocrinological research through
the National Research Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, the same committee
that funded Kinsey’s research. However, despite the growing interest among doctors and
philanthropists in endocrinology, the impetus for the development of a pill women could
take orally to prevent pregnancy came from feminist activists Margaret Sanger and Katharine
McCormick.163 In 1951, Sanger commissioned endocrinologist Gregory Pincus to develop the
“magic pill” she had first envisioned in 1912.164 Additional funds came from the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America, at that time under the directorship of William Vogt.165
In 1953, McCormick, a scientist and heir to the International Harvester fortune, pledged
to cover any remaining costs.166 Notably, the Population Council, though it funded other
aspects of Pincus’s work, did not contribute to the development of the oral contraceptive,
as it did not meet the organization’s criteria for an ideal contraceptive technology for the
162
James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society
Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 283; Clarke, see n. 86.
163
Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang,
2001), 204; Eig, see n. 64.
164
Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, see n. 163, 209-211.
165
Ibid., 212.
166
Ibid., 214.

398
global south.167
In 1954, the same year that Stycos carried out the experimental phase of his fertility study,
Pincus chose Puerto Rico as the site for large-scale human testing of his new drug, utilizing
the existing family planning infrastructure and the high level of knowledge local doctors had
in contraceptive techniques, as well as the fact that Puerto Rico’s colonial status meant easy
access to potential research subjects who had little legal protection.168 Nearly immediately,
Pincus’s team encountered local criticism of the use of Puerto Rico as a laboratory to test
drugs intended for women in the mainland U.S.169 For the developers of the pill, however,
these critiques were countered by positive press in such magazines as Science, Time, Fortune,
Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Ladies’ Home Journal, in response
to which mainland American women wrote to Pincus offering themselves as test subjects.170
Scientists and doctors involved in the development of the Pill also tested it on their wives
and daughters.171 The FDA initially approved Enovid — the Pill’s first brand name — in
1957 to treat menstrual disorders, but many doctors also prescribed it “off-label” to prevent
pregnancy, a use for which the FDA approved it in 1960.172 At this time, thirty states still
had laws restricting the advertisement and sale of contraceptives, and in Connecticut the
use of contraceptives was entirely illegal.173
In the first decade after FDA approval, the Pill — which soon came in multiple forms from
various pharmaceutical companies — was lauded as a technology that had freed millions of
women and their male partners throughout the world from the fear and burden of unintended
pregnancy.174 As the first medication designed to be taken daily by healthy individuals, the
Pill produced enormous profits for pharmaceutical companies and became a model for new
167
Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, see n. 163, 215.
168
Ibid., 221-222.
169
Ibid., 223.
170
Ibid., 225-226.
171
Eig, see n. 64.
172
Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, see n. 163, 226.
173
Ibid., 227-228.
174
In 1967 the Population Council estimated that 12.84 million women worldwide were taking oral contra-
ceptives, with about half of those in the U.S. ibid., 239.

399
types of pharmaceutical therapies.175 While the development of the Pill has been criticized
as further removing contraception from the direct control of women — as it required a
prescription — there is also evidence that women’s demand for it influenced the way medicine
was practiced, with patients beginning to ask doctors for specific prescriptions.176
Despite the popularity of the Pill in the U.S. and Western Europe, the Population Council,
whose leaders believed taking a daily pill to be too much responsibility for women in the
global south and for poor and nonwhite women in the global north, continued to pursue
research on methods that would require even less effort and allow for less agency among
users.177 That is, population control activists attributed large families in the global south and
among poor and nonwhite couples in the global north not to a calculated choice but rather to
an inability to effectively use available contraceptive techniques, calling on an older discourse
that characterized the poor and nonwhite as unintelligent and sexually indiscriminant.178
Accordingly, they sought a technology that would transfer — to the greatest extent possible
— the responsibility for family limitation from couples to the method itself. In contrast to
Sanger and McCormick, who sought a technology that would increase women’s control over
their reproductive systems, population control activists — including those associated with
Planned Parenthood — simply sought the cheapest and easiest method of reducing fertility
in the global south. Research efforts during the 1950s indicate that the Population Council
was interested in male methods as well as female methods,179 and the discussion at John D.
Rockefeller III’s 1952 Williamsburg meeting (see Chapter Four) of a uterine parasite that
would render women infertile until they received an antidote from a doctor indicates that
fertility control was considered a higher priority than health and that population control
activists sought to place the control of fertility in the hands of doctors or family planning
175
Eig, see n. 64.
176
Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, see n. 163, 240-241.
177
National Academy of Sciences, “A Conference on Population Problems, Williamsburg, VA, Transcript
— morning and evening sessions, 6/20/52,” see n. 78.
178
See, for example, Pearl, “Contraception and Fertility in 2,000 Women,” see n. 41.
179
Nelson, see n. 142; Sheldon J. Segal, “Contraceptive Research: A Male Chauvenist Plot?” Family
Planning Perspectives 4, no. 3 (1972): 21–25; see n. 27.

400
authorities rather than parents or potential parents.
The Population Council funded research on a number of potential contraceptive methods
that required very little action on the user’s part and therefore held the promise of popu-
lation control. The most successful was the IUD, an ancient contraceptive technology that
was manufactured commercially in the U.S. prior to the 1873 Comstock Act.180 Yet when
the medical profession began to endorse, supervise, and regulate contraception, doctors con-
tinued to treat the IUD as an illicit and inferior method. Its connection to endometriosis
and infection, and the pain associated with insertion, did not help its reputation.181 Because
IUDs protected women from pregnancy for years after insertion, however, they had poten-
tial as a tool of population control, and the Population Council began funding research in
1961 that led to the development of Gynekoil and the Lippes Loop, both of which became
widely available in 1963.182 In 1962, the Population Council began to sponsor international
conferences on intrauterine contraception to raise the profile of the method among the med-
ical establishment. In 1963 the Council launched the journal Studies in Family Planning to
report on field experiments with IUDs in the global south. By the time the journal’s third
issue was printed, over 50 such studies had been launched and IUDs had been placed in
over 100,000 women.183 The Population Council held the patent on the Lippes Loop and
Gynekoil, licensing production at no cost in any country with a national family planning
program. By 1967, IUDs were being manufactured in Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Pakistan,
South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey, and the Population Council had also provided molds and
raw materials free of charge.184
Berelson and Notestein held high hopes for the IUD as a population control device. Berel-
son expressed these hopes at the Population Council’s second international IUD conference
180
Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, see n. 163, 31.
181
Ibid., 263-264.
182
Ibid., 265.
183
“Report on Intra-uterine Contraceptive Devices,” Studies in Family Planning 2 (1 1964): 11; Bernard
Berelson, “Application of Intra-Uterine Contraception in Family Planning Programs,” in Proceedings, Second
International Conference on Intra-Uterine Contraception, New York, by the Population Council (1964), 9.
184
Frank W. Notestein to Jan Myrdal, June 1, 1967,folder 1, box 20.

401
in 1964, where he argued that

in many environments this method may well signify the difference between suc-
cess and failure in family planning programs and hence it represents, at least
potentially, a tremendous contribution to the welfare of individual families and
national communities, with all that this means for the economic prosperity, the
political stability, and the freedom of mankind. Indeed, I believe that this simple
device can and will change the history of the world.185

Berelson’s exuberance suggests that he viewed and promoted the IUD as a technology of
modernization — a simple device that, without even requiring the ongoing consent of those
who used it, would reduce fertility and thereby stimulate economic development.
The IUD was an ideal technology for the Population Council, as it cost pennies to produce
and could be inserted by staff with only minimal training. Once in place, the Lippes Loop
— the IUD of choice for the Population Council and later for USAID — would prevent
conception indefinitely without any further action, and “acceptors” could not easily remove
them or choose not to use them.186 IUDs were convenient for women and couples who wanted
to avoid conceiving for long periods of time, though they continued to carry the risk of
infection, pain, and bleeding, and many women in the global south who developed these
complications did not have easy access to medical care. Participants in the Population
Council’s IUD conferences recognized this problem. However, as J. Robert Willson, chair of
obstetrics and gynecology at Temple University, reasoned to the other participants, “perhaps
the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the
infection she acquires is sterilizing but not lethal.”187 Alan Guttmacher, a gynecologist who
was then president of the American Planned Parenthood Federation and went on to found
the Guttmacher Institute, acknowledged the power of the IUD not only to enable couples
to achieve their desired small families but also to prevent them from achieving their desired
larger families. As he put it, “once the damn thing is in the patient cannot change her mind.
185
Berelson, “Application of Intra-Uterine Contraception in Family Planning Programs,” see n. 183, 13.
186
Ian Angus and Simon Butler, Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
(Chicago: Haymarket, 2011), 89.
187
Quoted in Connelly, see n. 8, 202-203.

402
In fact, we can hope she will forget it’s there and perhaps in several months wonder why she
has not conceived.”188

5.3.2 Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Contraception

Under Berelson’s direction, in the 1960s the Population Council began to fund a new inter-
national fertility survey program, known as Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Contra-
ception (KAP), which followed a template devised by Berelson himself.189 Though modeled
on the fertility surveys of the 1950s, KAP studies aimed less to determine how to promote
the uptake of family planning services among respondents — though they did encourage IUD
acceptance — and more to demonstrate existing demand in the global south for government-
sponsored family planning programs, and thereby shape public and official opinion in favor
of family planning. That is, KAP studies were designed not primarily to answer research
questions about respondent’s knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding contraception,
but rather to produce evidence of demand for family planning services that the Population
Council could use to pressure governments in the global south to accept help from the U.S.
and the U.N. in providing such services to their citizens.
The Population Council recruited Ronald Freedman to help design these studies, send-
ing him in 1960 to Hong Kong, India, Japan, and Thailand. In 1961, Freedman became
co-director of the Taiwan Population Studies Center, established that year with a grant
from the Population Council, and director of the University of Michigan’s Population Stud-
ies Center, established the same year with a grant from the Ford Foundation.190 In 1963,
Freedman launched the first of a series of KAP surveys in Taiwan, in conjunction with a
new family planning program that offered the IUD and the Pill. Over the next 23 years,
188
Quoted in Connelly, see n. 8, 205.
189
This template is detailed in an article published in the first issue of Demography. Berelson, “On Family
Planning Communication,” see n. 145.
190
L.P. Chow, “A Programme to Control Fertility in Taiwan: Setting, Accomplishment and Evaluation,”
Population Studies 19, no. 2 (1965): 157; Caldwell and Caldwell, see n. 109, 68; Frank W. Notestein,
“Statement in Support of Application by University of Michigan Population Studies Center for NIH Grant
for its Program of Research on Fertility and Family Planning in Taiwan,” Mar. 30, 1967,folder 1, box 20.

403
the Taiwan project became a kind of “overseas research laboratory” for the Michigan Pop-
ulation Studies Center, generating a wealth of data for student and faculty research, even
though few University of Michigan students or faculty members actually traveled to Taiwan
or participated in data collection.191 It also served as a pilot for KAP survey programs and
family planning programs that would be established during the next decade in other parts
of the global south.

Creating a Small-Family Norm

In contrast to the Puerto Rico study, which had attempted to stimulate contraceptive use
among the segment of the population least likely to show interest, the KAP studies and the
family planning experiments carried out in conjunction with them instead targeted those
who already had as many children as they wanted or were otherwise receptive to the idea
of family planning.192 Focusing efforts on this segment of the population gave investigators
maximal return on minimal investment and allowed them to demonstrate substantial demand
for family planning services among respondents surveyed. Furthermore, Berelson predicted
that once the elites in a society — the “opinion leaders,” as he called them — began using
contraception and having small families, the trend would soon spread to the rest of the
population, as had occurred in the U.S.193
KAP studies focused on creating new small family norms from the top down, rather
than influencing the desires of individual families, as the Puerto Rico study had done. This
approach allowed Freedman to state quite honestly that the survey program did not attempt
to “persuade couples that they should want fewer children.”194 Bogue wrote in 1968 that
191
John Caldwell, “The Changing African Family Research Program,” 1973,box AD25, accession 2, 74;
Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political
History of Twentieth-Century Demography,” see n. 20.
192
Berelson, “On Family Planning Communication,” see n. 145, 95.
193
Bernard Berelson, “KAP Studies on Fertility,” in Family Planning and Population Programs: A Review
of World Developments, ed. Bernard Berelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 659; Bogue
questioned the effectiveness of this approach Donald Bogue, “Hypotheses for Family Planning Derived from
Recent and Current Experience in Asia,” Studies in Family Planning 1, no. 3 (1964): 8.
194
Freedman and Takeshita, see n. 9, 353.

404
family planning programs and experiments funded by the Population Council “are not, as
many believe, a passive pleading with individual couples to forego childbearing which they
otherwise would wish to experience. Instead it is an aggressive campaign to transform
the cultural prescriptions for childbearing all over the world.”195 As an example, he cited a
slogan that India’s government-sponsored family planning program was trying to popularize:
“two or three children — that’s enough.”196 Working toward this aim, Freedman’s program
in Taiwan included posters displayed in public places that showed a grandmother gazing
approvingly at her son, his wife, and their three children, with a caption noting “how healthy
and happy they are” and instructing viewers to go to their nearest health station for more
information.197
In 1968, the Population Council teamed up with Disney to produce an animated film in
which an artist, portrayed by Donald Duck, creates an “everyman” character, explicitly an
amalgamation of the world’s peoples, and then contrasts the man’s socioeconomic status with
a large family to that with a small family, implying that family planning produced individual
prosperity and raised social status. The film described the recent mortality declines and
resulting population growth in the global south, contending that the increase in the number
of the world’s peoples was slowing the progress of man’s [sic] mastery over his surroundings.
The small family, with three children, has plenty to eat and is able to sell the excess of its
agricultural production and buy a radio; the children are healthy, happy, and educated. In
contrast, the large family, with seven children, must consume all of the food it produces
and therefore cannot afford a radio; the children are weak and hungry and the mother is
overworked and exhausted. The film promoted family planning as a set of tools that allowed
parents to have “only the children you want and only when you want them.” It informed
audiences that family planning was safe and “acceptable,” and that many people were already
using it, including “your neighbors.” It concluded by stating that “the real measure of a
195
Donald Bogue, “Progress and Problems of World Fertility Control,” Demography 5, no. 2 (1968): 539–
540, 540, emphasis in the original.
196
Ibid., 540.
197
Freedman and Takeshita, see n. 9, 117.

405
man is not how many children he can produce, but how well he takes care of them.”198 This
film encouraged parents to consider children as liabilities rather than assets, and to view
childbearing as a consumer choice with desirable alternatives.
Contraceptive surveys also promoted the view of childbearing and material well-being
as a trade-off, for example asking respondents whether they would rather have a(nother)
child or such consumer goods as a radio or a television.199 The surveys therefore became a
vehicle for spreading the consumer approach to childbearing demographers associated with
post-transitional societies and modernity. They clearly did not reach everyone, but the
designers of the KAP studies expected that they would have spill-over effects, and even
assessed the spill-over radius so that family planning programs could use their advertising
budgets as cost-effectively as possible.200 In contrast to the randomized controlled trials that
are popular today in development economics, and even the Puerto Rico study, which used a
control group to disentangle the effects of the fertility intervention from other influences on
fertility, KAP studies were not controlled in any way. Investigators did not examine whether
the intervention actually reduced the fertility of those it targeted, or whether it benefited
participants, either at the individual or aggregate level. Increased use of birth control at
the individual level and reduced aggregate fertility were the only measures of the studies’
effects, and reduced fertility among non-study participants was still interpreted as evidence
of success.

Producing Reproductive Subjects

Because they promoted the IUD as the preferred method of contraception, KAP studies
focused on women, who could have an IUD inserted without the consent or even knowledge
of their husbands. In Taiwan, respondents who seemed receptive to contraception were given
50% off coupons for IUD insertion and visited by family planning workers or sent to nearby
198
[Link] (accessed 7/29/2014).
199
Riedmann, see n. 97.
200
Bernard Berelson and Ronald Freedman, “A Study in Fertility Control,” Scientific American 210, no. 5
(1964): 29–37; Freedman and Takeshita, see n. 9.

406
clinics. Respondents were given the full range of contraceptive options, but the Pill was de-
emphasized in favor of the IUD, which was considerably cheaper for users at 75 cents per IUD
insertion compared to 75 cents per monthly pill cycle.201 Investigators estimated the cost to
the program of each IUD “acceptance” at $4-$8, which they deemed “far below the eventual
economic value of each prevented birth, which has been estimated as being between one
and two times the annual per capita income.”202 Such analyses likely influenced President
Johnson’s 1965 statement to the U.N. that “less than five dollars invested in population
control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.”203 However, IUD programs
were not without problems. By setting target levels of IUD acceptance and offering incentives
to family planning workers who recruited IUD “acceptors,” family planning experiments
created conditions rife for coercion. Moreover, because such programs emphasized large-
scale campaigns to insert IUDs — often using mobile units and paramedical staff — many
of the women who received them did not have sufficient access to medical care to deal with
complications, such as bleeding and infection. By the late 1960s, the IUD had fallen into
severe disrepute in India for just this reason.204
U.S. fertility surveys also continued to focus on women after the first wave of GAF,
despite the original intentions of Freedman and Whelpton to add male respondents when
funds permitted. When Freedman turned his attention to Taiwan, OPR demographers
Charles Westoff and Norman Ryder took over GAF, carrying out the 1965, 1970, and 1975
waves under the title “National Fertility Survey” (NFS). Though the study was funded by the
National Institutes of Health, the Population Council still exerted influence, with Berelson
advising Westoff and Ryder. In these surveys, interviewers began to discuss the specifics of
various birth control methods with respondents, emphasizing the pill and the IUD, and also
201
Freedman and Takeshita, see n. 9, 123.
202
Berelson and Freedman, see n. 200, 37.
203
Quoted in Connelly, see n. 8, 230. Connelly attributes the statement to the influence of the work of
economist Stephen Enke, discussed in Chapter Four. Enke’s influence on Johnson is well-documented, but
he was not the only scientist making cost-benefit analyses in favor of population programs.
204
“Reimert Ravenholt, Interview with Rebecca Sharpless for the Population and Reproductive Health Oral
History Project,” July 18, 2002,url: [Link]
[Link], 90-91. Richard Easterlin interview, 5/3/2012.

407
elicited opinions about the acceptability of abortion.
The Population Council also funded family planning experiments in the U.S. during the
1960s, through Bogue’s Community and Family Study Center at the University of Chicago.
These experiments employed mass communication techniques to promote contraceptive use
among Chicago’s poor black and Latino residents. Although the studies focused on com-
munication techniques, based on the assumption that poor Chicagoans did not know about
birth control or where to get it or how to use it, results indicated that they simply could not
afford it. Bogue found that locating family planning clinics closer to the homes of prospec-
tive clients increased use of services, but many potential Pill takers could not afford its $2.50
per-month cost.205 Other methods were not necessarily any cheaper: assuming that condoms
cost roughly $0.25 apiece, for couples who had sex twice a week on average, the cost would
have been about the same. Such findings suggest that the $4,000 spent on communica-
tions by the program might have been better spent in subsidies for contraceptive supplies,
though Bogue and his colleagues continued to explain relatively low levels of contraceptive
use among their study populations in terms of ignorance and carelessness.206 By the end
of the decade, African American community leaders had begun to critique such efforts as
genocidal, charging that they aimed to eliminate the black population rather than acceding
to requests for civil rights. Although Bogue and his colleagues may have had the best of in-
tentions, their premise that adopting contraception and reducing family size would alleviate
poverty among black Americans rang hollow, particularly in the context of the continued
enforcement of involuntary sterilization laws and de jure and de facto discrimination in jobs,
housing, government programs, and public services.207
Systemic contraceptive methods and fertility surveys that focused on women identified
women worldwide as the agents of reproduction, and women in the global south and poor
205
John Ross, “United States: The Chicago Fertility Control Studies,” Studies in Family Planning 1, no.
15 (1966): 3.
206
Ibid., 3.
207
See Robert G. Weisbord, “Birth Control and the Black American: A Matter of Genocide?” Demography
10, no. 4 (1973): 571–590.

408
and nonwhite women in the U.S. as targets of population control. In contrast to the Puerto
Rico study, few KAP studies examined the gender dynamics of fertility or the sexuality of its
respondents; most simply focused on women’s bodies as the point at which a technological
intervention could be made, ideally through the insertion of an IUD. They therefore viewed
the IUD and other systemic contraceptive methods as a technological solution to the problem
of high fertility that could be implemented without altering the social, cultural, or economic
context in which childbearing decisions were made.208
The association of reproduction with women might seem obvious, since reproduction
occurs largely inside women’s bodies and since reproductive rights have, since the 1960s,
become a major focus women’s rights activism. But that association was not at all obvious
in the early 1950s. Although women are responsible for childbearing and in many places
for childrearing, prior to 1960, available methods of contraception required the cooperation
— or at least the consent — of both partners, giving men a critical measure of control
over family size. However, models of population growth developed between the world wars
required only a figure for female fertility rates — rather than the fertility of men or couples
— to assess population growth and project population size and structure, as discussed in
Chapter One. Demographers using the cohort component projection method calculated
future population by subtracting expected deaths and adding expected births to the current
population; expected births were calculated as the product of the number of women aged
15–49 and the female fertility rate. Therefore, if Freedman and Whelpton could determine
how many children U.S. women planned to have on average, they could project future U.S.
population growth.
In contrast to GAF, which aimed only to monitor childbearing intentions, the Puerto
Rico study, which aimed to modify fertility, included men in both survey and intervention
components, as the methods of contraception then available required their cooperation and
consent. With the availability of the Pill or the IUD, however, only women needed to “ac-
208
Warwick, see n. 154.

409
cept” family planning, and the Population Council — through the KAP survey program —
began to approach women in the global south as partners in its population control project.
Together, the female-centric nature of population models and fertility surveys and the de-
velopment of contraceptive technologies that worked on women’s bodies turned women into
two types of reproductive subjects: those who could be trusted to control their own fertility
— middle-class white U.S. women — and those who needed the assistance and prodding
of governments and non-governmental agencies — women in the global south and poor and
nonwhite U.S. women.

Producing Policy Subjects and Objects

The Population Council continued to advise on the design of U.S. fertility surveys and,
under Berelson’s influence, in 1965 the NFS added questions about perceptions of popula-
tion growth as a policy issue, both in the U.S. and in other countries, asking respondents
whether they considered U.S. or world population growth a serious problem and whether
they approved of the federal government providing assistance to local or state family planning
programs in the U.S. or to family planning programs in other countries. Such questions, by
framing population growth as problematic, may have encouraged respondents to view U.S.
and world population growth with greater trepidation and possibly to translate those views
into their reproductive and political activities. Birth control was still a relatively controver-
sial topic in the U.S. and, until 1965, still illegal in some states. With evidence from the
NFS, the Population Council could point to widespread support among U.S. women for le-
galization of contraception and abortion in the U.S. and for government subsidies for family
planning, both at home and abroad.
KAP surveys produced an object of knowledge and policy known as the “KAP-gap,”
defined as the “significant (and measurable) fraction of women in Third World Countries
who want no more children but who are not using contraception for one reason or another.”209
209
Charles F. Westoff, “Is the KAP-Gap Real?” Population and Development Review 14, no. 2 (1988):

410
Berelson, Notestein, and other members of the population establishment pointed to KAP-
gaps and to other evidence of demand for family planning services in KAP surveys to pressure
governments in the global south to establish or expand family planning services and to
accept assistance from the U.S. government or U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations,
such as the Population Council and Planned Parenthood. For example, in Turkey, Berelson
pointed to a KAP finding that 70% of men and 79% of women approved of the use of
contraception, concluding that the “result is a striking mandate, virtually an instruction” and
that the Turkish people “very strongly wish that the government would organize a program
to inform them about family planning.”210 In its analysis of KAP data, the Population
Council interpreted any expressed interest in limiting family size or desire to have no more
children as demand for family planning services, a practice Hauser compared unfavorably
to a market study in which “a 70 percent affirmative response to a question of whether the
respondent would like to have a jeep constituted a measurement of the market for jeeps.”211
In 1966, drawing on KAP findings, Berelson drafted a declaration on family planning,
stating that “the majority of parents desire to have the knowledge and the means to plan
their families; that the opportunities to decide the number and spacing of children is a basic
right.”212 John D. Rockefeller III solicited the signatures of twelve heads of state (Colombia,
Finland, India, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, Tunisia, the United
Arab Republic, and Yugoslavia) and presented the declaration to U.N. Secretary-General U
Thant on Human Rights Day, December 10, 1966. By the following year, thirty heads of state
had signed on.213 With this resolution, Berelson and Rockefeller transformed the Population
225.
210
Quoted in Anthony Marino, “Kap Surveys and the Politics of Family Planning,” Concerned Demography
3, no. 1 (1971): 48.
211
Philip M. Hauser, “Family Planning and Population Programs: A Book Review Article,” Demography
4, no. 1 (1967): 404.
212
“Statement on Population by World Leaders,” Dec. 10, 1966,folder 5, box 4, series 857; John D. Rocke-
feller III to U Thant, Dec. 14, 1966,folder 5, box 4, series 857.
213
New signatories were Australia, Barbados, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Indonesia, Iran,
Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Trinidad and
Tobago, the U.K., and the U.S. “World Leaders Declaration on Population,” 1967,folder 9, box 19, series
288.

411
Council’s activities from potentially genocidal — under the U.N. Convention for the Preven-
tion of the Crime of Genocide, as discussed in Chapter Four — to humanitarian, and made
the provision of family planning services — either by governments or by nongovernmental
organizations — a prerequisite for membership in the international community.
Following the adoption of this resolution, John D. Rockefeller III headed a commission
under the auspices of the United Nations Association of the United States of America to
review U.N. population activities. Its final report recommended the establishment of a U.N.
“Trust Fund for Population,” which was established in 1969 as the United Nations Fund for
Population Activities (UNFPA). UNFPA initially received half of its funds from USAID and,
in addition to supporting government-sponsored family planning programs worldwide, also
supported many of the same U.S.-based family planning organizations funded by USAID,
including the Population Council and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Additional funding came from other countries in the global north, with the U.K., Japan, and
Sweden making the largest contributions. Together, the NFS in the U.S. and KAP studies
in the global south constructed white middle-class women in the U.S. as policy subjects who
were concerned about population growth at home and abroad, approved of contraception
and abortion, and wanted their government to do something about the dangerous fertility of
women in the global south and poor and nonwhite women in the U.S., who were constructed
by these studies as objects of policy intervention by the U.S., the U.N., and governments in
the global south.

Making Populations Surveyable

Despite the political success of the KAP program, the conduct of the surveys garnered
substantial criticism from demographers and other social scientists in the U.S. Many of
these critiques turned on the validity of cross-cultural survey research, an issue that had
become a topic of empirical investigation within the field of survey research, but had received

412
little attention from KAP investigators.214 KAP surveys generally used the same methods of
sampling and interviewing as GAF and NFS. Although samples were usually not nationally
representative, they were selected according to procedures that had become standard in
social survey research over the previous 20 years. Interviewers were recruited locally, trained
thoroughly, and equipped with standard questionnaires, with which they were expected to
elicit representative and commensurable information. However, critics of the KAP program
argued that standard methods of survey research practiced in the U.S. would not produce
valid results in other countries, particularly given the assumed cultural differences between
the U.S. and most parts of the global south. This critique echoed Kinsey’s contention that
such methods don’t produce reliable results for studies on sensitive topics.
In contrast to the women surveyed for GAF, most KAP respondents had no prior expe-
rience with survey research, so the roles of interviewer and respondent and the framework
for their interactions were not part of local social repertoires.215 Whereas survey interviewers
in the United States could draw on the authority of science and of the survey as a familiar
instrument of scientific authority, interviewers for KAP surveys tended to rely on the global
power of the U.S. and on their own social status as well-educated and often bilingual elites to
compel respondent participation.216 Because of respondents’ lack of familiarity with survey
research in general and with the concept of family planning in particular, interviewers — who
were usually recruited locally — found themselves “instruct[ing] the respondents concerning
the meanings of the questions and. . . direct[ing] them to relevant responses.”217 Critics of
the KAP program pointed to inconsistencies in survey answers and to sensitivity analysis
— which showed that small changes in the phrasing of a question produced substantial dif-
ferences in results — to argue that respondents may not have been answering the questions
214
Robert Edward Mitchell, “Survey Material Collected in the Developing Countries: Sampling, Measure-
ment, and Interviewing Obstacles to Intra- and International Comparisons,” International Science Journal
27, no. 4 (1965): 665–685, See, for example,
215
Harvey M. Choldin, A. Majeed Kahn, and B. Hosne Ara, “Cultural Complications in Fertility Inter-
viewing,” Demography 4, no. 1 (1967): 244.
216
Riedmann, see n. 97.
217
Choldin, Kahn, and Ara, see n. 215, 247.

413
investigators thought they were asking.218
Critics suggested that thinking about family in quantitative terms was a foreign prac-
tice for many KAP survey respondents; therefore, questions about ideal or desired family
size were not eliciting long-held opinions, but rather answers respondents thought up on
the spot, if they answered at all — KAP interviewers encountered considerable resistance
to their questions. Many women refused to answer questions on their husbands’ behalf, in-
cluding questions about age, occupation, level of education, and previous marriages. Many
respondents, suspicious that interviewers may be government employees, refused to provide
specifics on their income in order to avoid taxation. In many places, women would not an-
swer questions regarding marriage or sex in their husband’s presence. Many women simply
refused to answer questions about whether or not they wanted another child or to express
a preference for a particular number of children.219 Some lied outright and even ridiculed
interviewers.220 Others may have supplied answers they knew the interviewers wanted to
hear.221 As Agnes Riedmann has pointed out, survey coding methods largely elided nonstan-
dard answers, eliminating evidence of resistance to survey methods from the data and the
historical record.222
In contrast to the Puerto Rico study, questions about contraception in KAP surveys were
just as vague as they had been in the 1955 wave of GAF, mostly avoiding the specific terms
“contraception,” “birth control,” and “family planning,” and instead asking respondents if
they thought it was permissible to “do something” to prevent having “too many” children
or having children “too often,” allowing respondents free reign to interpret those phrases.223
One contemporary critic described the KAP interview as follows:

poorly-trained interviewers are sent to question at a very high speed illiterate

women on problems they have never heard about in a totally artificial setting
218
Hill, Stycos, and Back, see n. 78, 26; Marino, see n. 210, 42-43.
219
Choldin, Kahn, and Ara, see n. 215, 248-250.
220
Riedmann, see n. 97.
221
Hauser, “Family Planning and Population Programs: A Book Review Article,” see n. 211, 403-404.
222
Riedmann, see n. 97.
223
Marino, see n. 210, 47.

414
 (the interview situation) with questionnaires often composed by foreign experts
who know little of the local culture, do not even speak the local language or
dialects, and have often lived only a few weeks in the country. The results of
such surveys tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies, as they nearly all show,
in varying degrees, that the people interviewed have favorable opinions toward
family planning.224

Whereas Whelpton and Freedman could be fairly confident that respondents to the GAF
survey knew what interviewers meant when they asked about “doing something” to limit
family size, critics charged that designers of KAP surveys deliberately used this vague lan-
guage not to avoid offending respondents’ delicate sensibilities — as had been the case for
GAF — but rather because they expected respondents to be more likely to agree if they
didn’t know exactly what was being asked.
Critics charged that KAP surveys were designed to produce results that would justify
the Council’s programs while making it impossible to test the efficacy of those programs in
reducing population growth and spurring economic development.225 In the late 1960s and
early 1970s, a small group of dissident graduate students (who will be discussed at greater
length in Chapter Seven) harshly criticized their field, decrying the fact that

demographers are being used as administrators and public relations men for gov-
ernmental family planning programs around the world. The pages of Demogra-
phy and other population journals have been filled with glowing reports of family
planning. To the layman, these reports have the ring of scholarly objectivity
and truth. To many professionals, they have become the ultimate in slipshod
methodology, half-baked interpretations, and outright lies.226

The funders and directors of KAP studies paid little attention to the validity issues raised
by critics. It is even possible that Berelson recognized that his methods might be artificially
increasing the size of the KAP-gap, which was also increased by the inclusion of women
who were not at risk of pregnancy or stated that they did not want to use birth control,
224
Quoted in Marino, see n. 210, 42.
225
Marino, see n. 210, 65; Hauser, “Family Planning and Population Programs: A Book Review Article,”
see n. 211, 407.
226
Editors of Concerned Demography 1969, quoted in Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Population
Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography,” see n. 20,
44.

415
but viewed this inflation as a benign exaggeration necessary to provide family planning
services to clients who would begin to express demand once services were available and
once the Population Council’s educational communication programs had created a small-
family norm. Berelson frequently pointed to parallels between family planning practices
and intentions in the global south, as demonstrated by KAP surveys, and the historical
experience of the global north, arguing that family planning programs in the former were
replicating the endogenous fertility transition that had occurred in the latter, just as public
health programs in the global south had stimulated a mortality transition similar to the
one that had been produced through improved living standards in the global north in the
nineteenth century, thereby suggesting that family planning was contributing to the natural
path of progress described by demographic theory.227
Critiques of KAP studies, by questioning the validity of survey research conducted among
respondents who were not familiar with the survey format, suggests a perhaps inchoate view
among demographers that survey research in the U.S. produced valid results not as a function
of the sampling and interviewing methods themselves, but rather because respondents had
become accustomed to those methods and knew how to provide the expected information.
In other words, through practice on a national scale, Americans had become “surveyable” in
the sense that they knew how to provide information useful to social science. This critique
suggests that KAP studies did much more than elicit the answers the Population Council
sought: they also created a populace trained in the survey interaction and therefore sur-
veyable by U.S.-based researchers, just as the sample censuses described in Chapter Three
contributed to making populations in the global south enumerable by nascent government
statistical agencies.228 Interviewers trained to administer a standardized questionnaire could
easily be reassigned to another study and, with practice, respondents could more easily
place themselves into such arbitrary social categories as age, race, ethnicity, and religion,
227
See, for example, Berelson, “National Family Planning Programs: Where We Stand,” see n. 153.
228
These concepts are more specific forms of James C. Scott’s concept of states rendering subjects “legible.”
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, see n. 32.

416
thereby facilitating future social research. The KAP program of the 1960s was followed by
the World Fertility Survey in the 1970s, and today USAID regularly collects information
about marriage and fertility through the Demographic and Health Survey.229

5.3.3 Family Planning Debates

Berelson concluded from the results of the NFS and KAP studies and family planning exper-
iments in the U.S. and in the global south that “if throughout the world unwanted children
were not conceived, a large part of the ‘population problem’ would disappear.”230 He there-
fore argued that the provision of voluntary family planning services was rapidly solving the
world’s “population problem.” By 1970, 22 countries had enacted policies or programs aimed
at reducing population growth through the provision of family planning: Ceylon (Sri Lanka),
China, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Mauritius, Morocco, Nepal,
Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago,
Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Republic (Egypt). Another 16 — Barbados, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dahomey, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Gambia, Honduras, Hong Kong, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, and Venezuela — welcomed
the provision of family planning services by non-governmental organizations, such as the Pop-
ulation Council and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. In Pakistan, family
planning programs employed more people than any other sector except the military and the
railroad.231 However, not all demographers agreed with Berelson’s assessment. This section
explores the thought of two demographers: Donald Bogue, who enthusiastically agreed with
Berelson, and Kingsley Davis, who — along with Judith Blake — questioned the ability of
voluntary family planning programs to effectively limit population growth and challenged
individual-level explanations of fertility and family size.
229
[Link]
230
Berelson and Freedman, see n. 200, 31.
231
Bogue, “Progress and Problems of World Fertility Control,” see n. 195, 539.

417
Donald Bogue’s “Contraception Adoption Explosion”

At the PAA’s 1964 meeting, Bogue, then president of the Association, presented an address
titled “The Demographic Breakthrough: From Projection to Control,” in which he described
the successes of KAP studies and family planning experiments carried out in 1963, including
those in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Hong Kong, India, Malaysia,
Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and West Pakistan (Pakistan). He argued
that results of these studies “left no doubt that by planned intervention they had induced
a downward change in the birth rate in high-fertility populations.”232 He went on to qualify
this assessment, acknowledging that the studies had not “clearly demonstrated that the
birth rate of a population of major size in an underdeveloped nation has been genuinely
slackened by a fertility-control program,” but he suggested that such slackening probably had
occurred, and “we merely lack the methodology to measure it quickly.”233 Bogue predicted
that “refinements [to family planning programs] that will be made in the next five to ten
years, may well lead to social-engineering work that will have as great an impact upon
the course of human history as any of the major inventions or discoveries in the physical
sciences.”234 With this statement, Bogue compared population control to other engineering
and development projects: a dam to hold back the flood of humanity. He shared Berelson’s
faith that the IUD and other contraceptive technologies were technologies of modernization
that, once adopted on a large enough scale, could trigger the modernization process.
By 1967, more than half of the denizens of the global south lived in countries with
government-sponsored family planning programs explicitly intended to reduce birth rates.235
In that year, Bogue published an article in Public Interest titled “The End of the Popula-
tion Explosion,” in which he argued that the spread of intensive family planning programs
throughout the global south would solve “the population problem,” producing global pop-
232
Bogue, “The Demographic Breakthrough: From Prediction to Control,” see n. 182, 449.
233
Ibid., 449.
234
Ibid., 450.
235
Frank W. Notestein, “The Population Crisis: Reasons for Hope,” Foreign Affairs 46, no. 1 (1967): 171.

418
ulation stationarity by the end of the century.236 Bogue contended that existing population
projections were misleading because they did not account for the results of KAP surveys that
showed a desire for smaller families and openness to birth control as a means of producing
them, support for family planning programs among heads of state in countries with high
fertility, the development of family planning as a field of professional research with strong
philanthropic support, a slowing of the progress of mortality decline, social and psychological
change, and new contraceptive technologies. To describe the import of these factors, Bogue
re-purposed the language of the “population explosion,” predicting that “the world is on the
threshold of a ‘contraception adoption explosion,’ ” evidence of which, he argued, would be
available as early as the censuses of 1970.237
Bogue contended that efforts by his Community and Family Study Center, by Freedman’s
Population Studies Center, and by the Population Council and Ford Foundation to promote
the provision and uptake of contraception in the global south had produced a “social rev-
olution,” making past population dynamics — including Europe’s demographic transition,
which had been unassisted by modern family planning programs — an invalid predictor of
future population change. He dismissed all existing population projections, arguing that “de-
mographers who continue to try to foresee the future of world population growth right now
by carefully fitting curves to time series or to seek the roots of matrices summarizing masses
of age-specific historical information in the search for hidden indicators of the future are
making extrapolations from invalid premises.”238 While Bogue did not reject these methods
absolutely, he contended that “in times of social revolution it often is fruitless to forecast the
future on the basis of past experience.”239 Bogue presented an alternative projection of future
world population that aimed to take this “social revolution” into account. But although he
argued that social changes made it impossible to predict the future on the basis of the past,
236
Donald Bogue, “The End of the Population Explosion,” Public Interest 7 (1967): 11–20.
237
Ibid., 19.
238
Donald Bogue, “The Prospects for World Population Control,” in Alternatives for Balancing World Food
Production and Needs, ed. Iowa State University Center for Agricultural and Economic Development (Ames:
Iowa State University Press, 1967), 74.
239
Ibid., 74.

419
he did not propose any systematic way to use social or economic factors, or even rates of
contraception uptake, to predict future vital rates. Instead, he simply assumed that the rate
of world population growth had peaked in 1965 and that “from 1965 onward, therefore, the
rate of world population growth may be expected to decline with each passing year. The
rate of growth will slacken at such a pace that it will be zero or near zero at about the year
2000.”240 These assumptions produced a total world population of 5 billion in the year 2000,
as compared to the 1963 U.N. projection of 6.1 billion, which was much closer to actual world
population in the year 2000.241 This projection, in both method and outcome, differed much
less from other projections made at the time than Bogue’s rhetoric would lead one to expect.
It preserved demographic transition theory’s faith that populations must eventually become
stationary (that is, neither growing nor shrinking), and retained the dominant assumption
of population projection that growth rates were on a downward trajectory toward zero that
was caused by changes in social, economic, and political factors, but not formally correlated
with them in the model. Bogue simply made that trajectory much more rapid than other
demographers did, so that stationarity or near-stationarity would be reached by the end of
the century. Bogue was still fitting curves, just steeper curves than other demographers were
fitting.
Bogue attached the standard disclaimer to his projection, emphasizing that it did not
indicate what future population necessarily would be, only what it could be with contin-
ued investment in family planning programs. In so doing, he highlighted the fact that all
population projections are based on untestable assumptions about the future; his assump-
tions were simply more optimistic than others, if population growth is viewed as a crisis.
Bogue explicitly referenced the performativity of population projections — their effects on
future population growth — arguing that the pessimism of constant-fertility projections —
which activists claimed showed what population would be in the absence of policy change
240
Bogue, “The End of the Population Explosion,” see n. 236, 9.
241
Hania Zlotnik, “Population Projections and World Population Trends,” in Demography, ed. Zeng Yi
(Oxford: Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, n.d.).

420
— “sapped the morale of family planning workers in the developing countries,”and thereby
contributed to the prevention of fertility decline.242 In contrast, he intended his projections to
show family planning workers “how close they actually are to success” and to motivate them
further by demonstrating that “they have it within their grasp to improve dramatically their
countries’ fortunes.”243 Such explicit acknowledgment of the effects of population projection
on population change itself is rare among demographers, and Bogue was severely criticized
for openly advocating on behalf of the future he predicted, rather than “approach[ing] the
problem with the detachment of a researcher.”244 Hauser criticized Bogue’s work as “extreme
crusading efforts that had. . . no place in a department of sociology,” casting his projection
as activism rather than science and eliding the fact that many population projections had
activist intentions, as discussed in Chapter One.245
The response of Bogue’s colleagues to his projection suggests that other demographers
were well aware of the effects of population projections on population policy and population
growth. However, they feared that — rather than promoting increased effort and expendi-
ture on family planning programs, as Bogue believed — Bogue’s optimistic figures would
lead governments — particularly the U.S. government, which had budgeted $35 million for
overseas family planning programs in fiscal year 1968 — to think that the “population prob-
lem” had been solved and that no further investment or effort was necessary. Dudley Kirk,
demographic director of the Population Council, objected that “one does not see the grow-
ing use of the new contraceptives even in combination with existing and foreseeable new
methods, quickly closing the enormous gap” between fertility in the global north and global
south, as Bogue’s projection assumed with population growth converging to zero.246 Ansley
Coale, in a letter to Sander Levin, Assistant Administrator for Development Support at
USAID, critiqued the factual basis of Bogue’s projection, pointing out that “in all of the
242
Bogue, “The End of the Population Explosion,” see n. 236, 10.
243
Ibid., 10.
244
Karol J. Krotki, “Discussion: Prospects for Population Control,” Journal of Farm Economics 49, no. 5
(1967): 1102.
245
See n. 116, 48.
246
Kirk, “Natality in the Developing Countries,” see n. 184, 92.

421
countries he lists in Eastern Africa, except Mauritius and Reunion, there are just no sound
data indicating a decline in fertility. In fact there are no recent census or survey data and no
vital registration.”247 Presumably, this paucity of data would have hindered any efforts at
population projection, but Coale criticized only Bogue’s efforts, promoting the idea that out-
of-control fertility in these places required U.S. government intervention. Kirk and Coale’s
critique of Bogue’s projection suggests their recognition that family planning programs in
the global south were not having the intended effect on world population growth. However,
rather than suggesting a different approach, they simply argued for increased investment
and effort. In fact, the rate of population growth had reached its peak in 1965, as Bogue
claimed, but this fact would not become apparent until the censuses of 1970, and subsequent
fertility decline did not occur as rapidly as Bogue predicted.

The Structural Approach of the Berkeley Demographers

Also in 1967, Davis published an article in Science, titled “Population Policy: Will Current
Programs Succeed?” This article challenged Bogue’s optimism, setting off a public debate
with the demographers associated with the Population Council over the ability of family
planning programs and small-family propaganda to slow global population growth. Davis
demonstrated that KAP studies had shown a strong desire for upwards of three children
among respondents in the global south, and that family planning experiments and pilot
programs had indicated that “acceptors” of family planning tended to be older couples
who had already achieved large families rather than younger couples who sought to plan
small families. He contended that the Population Council’s technological solution to “the
population problem” had not produced the “social revolution” that Bogue had claimed, and
that reducing fertility to the replacement level (the level at which population is stationary
and neither grows nor shrinks) would require an actual revolution in gender relations to
produce the structural change that would promote family planning uptake.
247
Ansley J. Coale to Sander Levin, Oct. 17, 1978,folder 1, box 2.

422
 Judith Blake, Davis’s colleague, wife, former student, and occasional collaborator — who
had gone to graduate school on a Population Council fellowship — had been making similar
arguments over the preceding years. She argued that KAP surveys consistently revealed a
desire for at least four children, meaning that even with the universal availability of family
planning services, world population would continue to grow.248 Blake also expressed doubt
that educational and propaganda programs of the types implemented in family planning ex-
periments could effectively reduce desired family size because “to date we have no compelling
reason to believe that developing peoples will ever be merely propagandized or ‘educated’
into wanting really small families.”249 In contrast to Notestein, who had argued that family
planning was in the interests of parents or prospective parents, even if they didn’t realize it,
Blake and Davis acknowledged that large families could be socioeconomically advantageous,
in both the global north and the global south. A decade earlier, they had published an
article explaining exactly how the institution of the family produced high fertility in agrar-
ian societies: young couples lived with or in close proximity to their parents, who provided
free child care; women’s status in their husbands’ families depended on the children they
bore; inheritance systems required the production of sons.250 However, even though Blake
and Davis recognized that large families could be in parents’ interests, they contended that
“there is no reason to expect that the millions of decisions about family size made by couples
in their own interest will automatically control population for the benefit of society. On the
contrary, there are good reasons to think they will not do so.”251 This statement echoed in
reverse the anxiety of interwar population experts, who had identified family limitation in
Europe as being in the interest of individual couples but detrimental to society as a whole,
as discussed in Chapter Two.252 Blake and Davis’s critiques of the Population Council’s ap-
proach to population control never questioned the necessity of population control, only the
248
Blake, “Demographic Science and the Redirection of Population Policy,” see n. 194, 1183.
249
Ibid., 1184.
250
Davis and Blake, see n. 60.
251
Kingsley Davis, “Population Policy: Will Current Programs Succeed?” Science 158, no. 3802 (1967):
730–739.
252
See, for example, Marshall, see n. 21.

423
efficacy of voluntary family planning programs to achieve it.
In contrast to the demographers affiliated with the Population Council, who believed
that family planning programs could reduce fertility without changing the systems of gen-
der inequality within which childbearing decisions were made, Davis and Blake argued that
fertility reduction would require a complete overhaul of gender norms and relations: “mod-
ification of the complementarity of the roles of man and women,” by which they meant
“restructur[ing] both the occupational system and the domestic establishment to the point
of permanently modifying the old division of labor by sex.”253 Davis continued to believe,
as he had since the 1940s, that “reductions in mortality require only a change of means,
but reductions in fertility require changes in both ends and means,” suggesting that fertility
reduction required an alteration of the entire social structure of childbearing.254
The Population Council and the demographers associated with it responded to Davis’s
challenge, and the debate continued over the next two years in the pages of Science and
Demography, culminating in Bernard Berelson’s well-known 1969 article, “Beyond Family
Planning.”255 While other critics of population control programs have pointed to this article
as a signal that the Population Council and other population control organizations had begun
to embrace more coercive methods of population control, it is actually a critique of coercive
methods increasingly being proposed by other organizations, particularly Paul Ehrlich’s Zero
Population Growth, which will be discussed in Chapter Six. In the article, Berelson examined
and rejected all of the proposals for going “beyond family planning,” as either technologically,
administratively, economically, or politically infeasible. Even the suggestion of encouraging
female labor force participation, he warned, “runs up against the political problem that such
employment would be competitive with men in situations of already high male unemployment
and underemployment.”256 Berelson’s objections to proposals to go “beyond family planning”
highlights the strategy the Population Council had taken from its formation: to reduce
253
Davis, “Population Policy: Will Current Programs Succeed?” See n. 251, 738.
254
Notestein to Zarate, June 6, 1967, see n. 22.
255
Bernard Berelson, “Beyond Family Planning,” Science 163, no. 3867 (1969): 533–543.
256
Ibid., 536.

424
population growth without changing underlying social structures or stimulating political
opposition, either in the U.S. or in the global south, as discussed in Chapter Four. For
the Population Council, maintaining the geopolitical and geoeconomic order was not only a
higher priority than reducing population growth; it was also the end to which the organization
directed population control. In his article, Berelson reiterated that “strong political pressures
[by the U.S.] to effect population control in developing countries seems more likely to generate
political opposition abroad than acceptance. It is conceivable that such measures might be
adopted here, but it is hardly conceivable that they would be agreed to by the proposed
recipients. Such a policy seems likely to boomerang against its own objective.”257
The debates between Davis and Blake and the Population Council and its affiliated de-
mographers demonstrates that, despite the Population Council’s influence over the content
of demographic scholarship, the economic overpopulation discourse and the individual-level
explanations of fertility and approaches to population control it promoted were not mono-
lithic during the 1960s. Davis and Blake were the main proponents within demography of
the alternative structural explanation of high fertility and some of the very few scholars to
examine the role of gendered divisions of power in the family and society. As discussed
above, their training was more firmly grounded in sociology than was that of Notestein or
Coale, which may have increased their attention to structural factors. They also relied less
on funding from the Population Council and the Ford Foundation than did demographers
at Princeton University and the Universities of Michigan and Chicago, and therefore may
have had more latitude to engage alternative approaches. Finally, their geographical dis-
tance from the New York headquarters of the Population Council and the Ford Foundation,
and their proximity to the California environmental movement, which will be discussed in
Chapter Six, likely also influenced their approach.
257
Berelson, “Beyond Family Planning,” see n. 255, 536.

425
Conclusion

Falling mortality and rapid population growth in the global south after World War II raised
the concern of powerful U.S.-based philanthropic interests, as described in Chapter Four,
who in turn raised unprecedented funds for the field of demography, which the Population
Council and the Ford Foundation viewed as a key ally in producing anxiety about population
growth among governments worldwide and generating governmental support for the provision
of family planning services as a solution to “the population problem.” This chapter has
demonstrated that investments in demography by the Population Council and the Ford
Foundation stimulated the dramatic expansion of the field in the United States through the
establishment of population research centers at U.S. universities. These organizations also
funded the training of students from the global south in demography and the establishment
of population research centers in the global south. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations
also funded the establishment of demography-specific journals in the U.S. and the U.K.,
providing outlets for the publication of the research they supported. Under the influence of
these new patrons, demography research focused increasingly on fertility and its reduction
in the global south, though separated fertility from analysis of gender or sexuality.
Beginning in the 1950s, survey research became a key component of demography’s toolkit
for investigating fertility, both in the United States and in the global south. These surveys
were often accompanied by experimental family planning studies aimed at reducing fertility
among women in the global south and poor and nonwhite women in the U.S. In addition to
these stated aims, the surveys shaped public and policy opinion regarding family planning
and its provision by the U.S. government and governments in the global south, turning access
to family planning into a human right recognized by the U.N. and supported by its Fund
for Population Activities. These studies supported the understanding of global poverty as a
biological problem — caused by population growth — with a technological solution — new
contraceptive technologies that could be effective even in societies where parents had little

426
desire or motivation to limit the size of their families and where women’s status depended
on childbearing.
This view, though dominant, was not universal. Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake at-
tributed large families not to the lack of effective contraception, but rather to patriarchal
social structures that incentivized large families. Along with this alternative understanding
of population growth, they offered an alternative structural proposal for population control.
Although Blake and Davis challenged the Population Council’s approach to slowing pop-
ulation growth, they never challenged its view of population growth as a serious problem.
For that reason, Debates between Bogue, Davis, Blake, and the Population Council about
the efficacy of family planning programs to reduce population growth served to reinforce
the predominant understanding — among scientists, activists, publics, and governments —
that worldwide population growth remained a serious problem. Whether, as Bogue argued,
family planning programs were swiftly reducing fertility or, as Davis argued, they barely
made a dent, all participants in the debate had already accepted the premise that global
population growth presented a barrier to economic development and needed to be stopped.

427
 Chapter 6
The Population Bomb Squad
Kingsley Davis’s 1967 Science article signaled and contributed to a shift in the public and
scientific understandings of global population growth. As discussed in Chapter Four, two new
overpopulation discourses had emerged among U.S.-based scientists, publics, philanthropists,
businessmen, and policy makers after World War II. The economic overpopulation discourse,
which was the focus of the two previous chapters, initially gained more attention and support,
as it described population growth in the global south as a major threat to U.S. global political
and economic supremacy in the Cold War context. While demographic scholarship provided
support for the economic discourse, it was largely silent on the environmental discourse, with
the exception of work by Davis and some of his associates.
Davis and Blake did not have the same ties to the Population Council that the demog-
raphers of Princeton University and the Universities of Michigan and Chicago had, but they
had an additional source of funding: the Conservation Foundation, which had been estab-
lished in 1948 by Fairfield Osborn and Laurance Rockefeller to promote population control
as a conservation measure. These men, along with Davis and William Vogt, had linked
population to the environment through agriculture, arguing that the intensive agriculture
necessary to feed the world’s growing population was not sustainable and would deplete the
world’s soil, ultimately reducing the Earth’s carrying capacity.1 Over the next two decades,
increases in the use of such agricultural inputs as irrigation and synthetic fertilizer further re-
duced the sustainability of industrial agriculture, while U.S. foreign policy and philanthropic
efforts spread these new agricultural methods to the global south. By the mid-1960s, new
environmental concerns had emerged, including pollution — brought to U.S. public atten-
1
See, for example, Davis, “Population and Resources in the Americas,” see n. 65.

428
tion by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring — and resource depletion. In
the 1960s, the environmental overpopulation discourse incorporated these concerns. It also
began to present population growth worldwide — but particularly in the global north, where
per-capita rates of pollution and resource depletion were higher — as an imminent threat to
human survival.
This chapter brings the focus of analysis back to the United States, examining the growing
influence of the environmental overpopulation discourse on U.S. public opinion and policy
in the 1960s, and particularly the relationship of demography to this discourse. Existing
histories of population thought and politics in the U.S., including Connelly’s Fatal Miscon-
ception, Hoff’s The State and the Stork, and Robertson’s The Malthusian Moment, have
failed to distinguish between economic and environmental discourses of overpopulation, in-
stead presenting environmental and economic concerns about population growth simply as
constituent parts of a broader Malthusianism. By paying attention to the role of demogra-
phy and its patrons and clients, however, this chapter untangles the tensions between these
two discourses, and particularly the antagonism of most U.S.-based demographers to the
environmental overpopulation discourse and environmentally-motivated calls for population
control.
In this chapter, I focus on a fairly narrow slice of time — from the publication of Davis’s
article in 1967 to the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment. I demonstrate that
population activist Hugh Moore, though mainly concerned with the potential economic and
political consequences of population growth in the global south — as described in Chapter
Four — helped to popularize the environmental overpopulation discourse as a means of gener-
ating public support in the U.S. for increased funding of USAID population control programs
in the global south. As I show in this chapter, the economic and environmental overpop-
ulation discourses had closely intertwined origins and overlapped considerably: proponents
of the environmental discourse did not dispute the contention that population growth was a
major cause of poverty and political instability. However, while proponents of the economic

429
discourse promoted population control as a stimulus to economic development, proponents
of the environmental discourse opposed further economic development anywhere in the world
and called for population reduction to preserve current living standards without further dam-
aging the environment. I demonstrate that, while the environmental overpopulation gained
the support of natural scientists — notably biologists Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin —
most demographers — with the notable exception of Davis — harshly criticized the environ-
mental overpopulation discourse, pointing out that environmental degradation worldwide
had far outpaced population growth and calling for market-based solutions. Nonetheless,
I argue that the environmental overpopulation discourse was particularly attractive to the
U.S. white middle class, as it explained urban strife, continuing poverty, and environmental
degradation in the United States — all coming to a boiling point in the 1960s — in biological
terms — a result of population growth — and offered a technological solution — birth con-
trol. The environmental discourse also attracted the support of the growing political left to
population control by aligning it with the antiwar movement and the movement for women’s
rights, while maintaining support on the right through proposals to limit immigration and
attributing student unrest to the large size of the baby boom generation. However, I argue
that, by attracting public and policy attention to population growth in the U.S., the envi-
ronmental discourse also stimulated research into America’s “population problem” by social
and computational scientists, and that this research began to undermine support for both
the environmental and economic overpopulation discourses.

6.1 The Environmental Overpopulation Discourse

This section traces the growing visibility and influence of the environmental overpopulation
discourse from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. I demonstrate that Moore and Draper began
to promote the environmental discourse as part of a new advertising campaign designed to
increase public support for government funding of population control in the global south.

430
Although Moore and Draper were mainly concerned with the spread of communism in the
global south, they sought to raise anxiety about population growth among U.S. voters by
attributing to it problems closer to home, including urban poverty and strife, crime, and
pollution. Natural scientists also began to consider human population growth as a factor
in ecosystem degradation, most notably Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, who
rapidly became a public figure with the 1968 publication of his book The Population Bomb,
which borrowed from Hugh Moore not only its title, but also its concern with the spread of
communism, adding to it growing environmental anxieties. I argue that Ehrlich’s book linked
the political and economic concerns of Moore and Draper with the antiwar and environmental
movements, generating support for population control across a rapidly-dividing political
spectrum, embodied in the grassroots organization Zero Population Growth.

6.1.1 A New Manhattan Project

Even after the U.S. government approved the addition of family planning to the work of the
Agency for International Development (USAID), discussed in Chapter Four, Dixie cup inven-
tor Hugh Moore and General William Henry Draper Jr. continued to fear that population
growth in the global south would increase vulnerability to communist revolution, threatening
the access of U.S. manufacturers to the raw materials, labor, and markets they depended
on worldwide, and threatening the access of the U.S. military to strategic bases. USAID
established an Office of Population in 1966, under the direction of Reimert Ravenholt, for-
merly a faculty member at the University of Washington Medical School. Ravenholt soon
discovered considerable opposition among USAID mission directors to the direct provision
of contraceptives to countries receiving aid, as Congress had not explicitly designated any
funds for family planning, and providing contraceptives would have diverted scarce resources
from other development projects. Only a miniscule portion of the vast USAID budget for
overseas development came in the form of grants: India, for example, received $250 million
in aid from the U.S., but only $8 billion was granted outright; the rest was loaned. Realizing

431
that countries receiving aid would not use loans to pay for population control programs,
Ravenholt enlisted the assistance of Moore and Draper to increase the amount of aid money
available in direct grants to population programs.2
Moore and Draper quickly planned and launched a new strategy to generate public pres-
sure on Congress to earmark foreign aid money specifically for population control. Keeping
with the theme of nuclear warfare initiated with Moore’s “Population Bomb” pamphlet,
Moore and Draper dubbed the strategy the “Manhattan Project.”3 The Manhattan Project
involved a new set of newspaper advertisements. In contrast to those published earlier in
the decade, which had focused on population growth in the global south as a threat to U.S.
political and economic hegemony — discussed in Chapter Four — Moore and Draper’s later
ads aimed to bring “the population problem” home to U.S. citizens. Advertisements in the
late 1960s blamed U.S. population growth for the poverty, urban strife, and pollution that
had become critical concerns of President Johnson after his 1964 election. This new strategy
was based on the theory that “the average man is much more concerned with conditions he
can see in this country than in far-away Asia.”4
A full-page advertisement Moore placed in the New York Times in 1968 (Figure 6.1a)
showed a young man preparing to stab an elderly man, with text informing readers that

city slums — jam-packed with juveniles, thousands of them idle — breed discon-
tent, drug addiction and chaos. And crime in the cities is not the only problem.
We have air and water pollution in wide areas. And the quality of life in this
great country of ours is deteriorating before our eyes with the rapid increase of
people. Is there an answer? Yes — birth control is one.5

Another ad published in the same year (Figure 6.1b) displayed a graph showing that crime
had increased along an apparently exponential trajectory since 1960, with a headline stat-
ing “This is the crime explosion. . . and the population explosion is an underlying factor.”6
2
See n. 204, 90.
3
“Manhattan Ad Schedule,” Feb. 2, 1968,folder 8, box 17.
4
Hugh E. Moore to Emerson Foote, Harry Hicks, and J. Drew Catlin, Jan. 5, 1968,folder 8, box 17.
5
Hugh E. Moore, “Have You Ever Been Mugged?” Advertisement, Mar. 10, 1968, The New York Times,
p. E5.
6
Hugh E. Moore, “This is the Crime Explosion,” advertisement, Dec. 8, 1968, The New York Times, p.

432
These advertisements and others like them offered up population growth as a single and
simple explanation for crime, poverty, and pollution, eliding such factors as structural in-
equality, inadequate municipal services, and industrial practices (related to both pollution
and employment).

Figure 6.1: a. Advertisement in The New York Times, March 10, 1968; b. Advertisement in
The New York Times, December 8, 1968.

Moore’s associates also proposed advertisements that directly attributed poverty to large
families, including one that showed a couple with eight children and a headline reading “We
spend over $4 billion a year on welfare. Yet we spend only $24 million a year to get to the
cause of the problem” (Figure 6.2).7 This ad linked the older Malthusian trope — attributing
poverty to large families and the sexual indiscretion of the poor, discussed in Chapter One
— with the emerging trope of new welfare programs producing “dependency” among those
they aimed to help, and thereby promoting the female-headed households that increasingly
bore the brunt of social scientific explanations for poverty and social unrest, such as Daniel
241.
7
Hugh E. Moore, “Advertisement proposals,” n.d.,folder 25, box 16.

433
 Figure 6.2: Advertisement proposed by Moore’s associates.

Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965).8 These new
discourses of crime and welfare dependency were gendered, raced, and sexualized, centering
around the image of the “welfare queen,” a depiction of welfare recipients as “lazy, sexually
promiscuous, African American women who spawned the criminal ‘culture of poverty’ in
America’s inner cities.”9
Moore and his associates took care to avoid direct attribution of the “population explo-
sion” to nonwhite Americans or to the poor, making an effort to avoid charges of racism
by picturing only white people in their crime and poverty ads and by using such phrases as
“inner cities” and “welfare” to signal race without actually naming it.10 Yet internal mem-
oranda put the blame for such problems not on population growth generally, but on the
8
Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in
Twentieth-Century U.S. History, see n. 94.
9
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “ ‘The Crime of Survival’: Fraud Prosecutions, Community Surveillance, and
the Original ‘Welfare Queen’,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 2 (2007): 329.
10
Paul Krugman refers to such phrases as “racial dog-whistles” because they signify only to those trained
to hear them. Paul Krugman, “That Old-Time Whistle,” The New York Times, Mar. 16, 2014, url: http:
//[Link]/2014/03/17/opinion/[Link].

434
indiscriminate reproduction of the poor and nonwhite. As one memo claimed, “this black
population explosion is the cause of 99% of riots and crime. As long as our politicians con-
done multiple births to the illiterate and degenerate, our nation will suffer more and more
before being destroyed from within, making it easy for the Russians and Red Chinese to
come in and take over without firing a shot.”11 Such rhetoric reflects the fear of communist
revolution at the heart of Moore’s efforts.
The racial subtext of these advertisements was readily apparent to newspaper readers,
drawing criticism from many quarters, perhaps most vocally from Planned Parenthood, one
of the major beneficiaries of Moore’s fundraising efforts. In a 1968 press release, the Executive
Committee of Planned Parenthood - World Population excoriated Moore and Draper’s “Have
You Ever Been Mugged?” ad, stating “it is our belief that its utter lack of humanity, its
fallacious single focus on the poor and its implied plea for coercive control of the fertility of
certain segments of the U.S. population are destructive of the deep human concern for the
rights, dignity and health of the individual for which this organization has campaigned for
more than 50 years.” The press release continued,

it is a fact that population growth in the United States is mainly caused not by
the poor but by middle and upper income Americans who have an average of
three children per family. Therefore, the implication that the U.S. population
explosion is a slum phenomenon is patently untrue. Nor certainly are the poor
responsible for the pollution of our air and water and the deterioration of our
quality of life. As the President’s Commission on Crime pointed out, the poor
are the primary victims of crime; they are also the chief victims of our failure to
provide voluntary birth control help through the tax-supported services on which
they depend for health care.. . . They don’t need ‘population control.’ They need
family planning services.12

Other critics argued that the advertising campaign’s focus on childbearing among the poor
seemed to excuse “wonton procreation by rich people at the expense of the poor,” who were
most vulnerable to the effects of the resource depletion and pollution caused by the world’s
11
“Untitled Memorandum,” 1968,folder 24, box 16.
12
Planned Parenthood - World Population Executive Committee, “Resolution,” Mar. 14, 1968,folder 8,
box 17.

435
wealthy.13
Over the next three years, Moore and Draper’s advertising campaign received much
more positive than negative feedback, not only from the public, but also from policy makers,
including the Nixon administration, World Bank president and former Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara, and Senators and congressional Representatives of both major parties.14
These ads told readers that population growth “is your problem and you can do something
about it. Tear out this ad and send it to anyone in Washington you think might be helpful.
Urge the Government to initiate a crash program to deal with the population problem.”15 In
addition to the public pressure created by these ads, Moore and Draper put direct pressure on
Senator William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who engineered
the passage of the Title X amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, earmarking funds for
USAID’s population program, as discussed in Chapter Four.16 These earmarks subsequently
rose from $35 million in fiscal year 1968 to $121 million in fiscal year 1972, as USAID funding
for health care simultaneously fell from $131 million in fiscal year 1968 to just over $35 million
in fiscal year 1972.17
After the criticism of their crime and poverty ads, Moore and Draper focused their
advertisements more on the environment, attributing the air and water pollution that were
becoming a matter of increasing concern for the U.S. public and U.S. government to the
sheer number of people in the United States. A 1968 ad showed a man drinking water, with
the headline “Warning: The water you are drinking may be polluted” (Figure 6.3a) The text
below the image attributed pollution to “the rapidly rising population of the United States”
and explained that “our population is rising so fast, water purification methods simply can’t
keep pace.”18 A proposed ad that never made it into print (Figure 6.3b) read “Every day we
13
Erich Goldmeier to Hugh E. Moore, May 12, 1968,folder 9, box 17.
14
See Hugh Moore Papers, folders 11-12, box 17, Princeton University Library.
15
“Are You Afraid to Go Out at Night?” May 25, 1968,folder 9, box 17.
16
See n. 204.
17
Public Law 90-137 1967, see n. 204, 92; For USAID expenditures on population and health, see Julian L.
Simon, “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News,” Science 208, no. 4451
(1980): 1433.
18
Hugh E. Moore, “Warning: The Water You Are Drinking May Be Polluted,” advertisement, June 12,

436
Figure 6.3: a. Advertisement in The New York Times, June 12, 1968; b. Advertisement
proposed by Moore’s associates.

dump the waste products of 150 million people into our water. And then we drink it.”19 Such
advertisements elided the industrial sources of pollution in the U.S., presenting pollution as
a direct consequence of the growing population.
Moore and Draper’s ads also tied pollution back to crime and poverty, presenting popu-
lation growth as the ultimate cause of all of these problems. A 1969 ad (Figure 6.4) asked
readers “How many people do you want in your country?” Below, it read,

Let’s take a look at conditions in our country as they exist today with our present
population of 200 million Americans. Our waters — rivers, lakes and beaches
— are polluted. We are literally deafened by noise, and poisoned by carbon
monoxide from 100 million cars. Our city slums are packed with youngsters —
thousands of them idle, victims of discontent and drug addiction. And millions
more will pour into our streets in the next few years at the present rate of
procreation. You go out after dark at your peril. Last year one out of every four
hundred Americans was murdered, raped or robbed.20
1968, The New York Times, p. 48.
19
Moore, “Advertisement proposals,” see n. 7.
20
Hugh E. Moore, “How Many People Do You Want in Your Country?” Advertisement, May 25, 1969,

437
 Figure 6.4: Advertisement in The New York Times, May 25, 1969.

But, the ad continued, “birth control is an answer.”21 Yet another set of advertisements
linked poverty and pollution by pointing to the cost to taxpayers of addressing both issues.
An ad run in the New York Times on April 15, 1968 implied that taxpayers were financing
runaway population growth, stating

Today is April 15th. The last day to pay your taxes. If you think they were high
this year, wait ’til next year. And the next year. And the year after that. As our
population has increased, so have our needs. And as our needs have increased, so
have our costs. Today the ever-mounting costs of welfare, education, pollution
control, conservation and other services — important as they are — threaten to
overwhelm and overtax us.22

Moore and Draper’s “Manhattan Project” advertisements appeared at a moment when

many Americans feared their country was coming apart. The Vietnam War was beginning
The New York Times, p. E5.
21
Moore, “How Many People Do You Want in Your Country?” See n. 20.
22
“Population Committee ‘Taxes’ Headline and Sample Text,” 1968,folder 24, box 16.

438
to seem increasingly unwinnable, particularly after the Tet Offensive occurring earlier that
year. Opinion regarding the war was rapidly dividing the U.S. and reducing U.S. credibility
worldwide. The failure of civil rights legislation passed earlier in the decade — the 1964 Civil
Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act — to measurably change the living conditions
of African Americans led to violent confrontations between citizens, law enforcement, and
the National Guard across the nation’s cities between 1965 and 1968. Industrial pollution
was becoming increasingly visible. The population of the U.S. had grown dramatically since
the end of World War II, from about 140 million in 1945 to 200 million in 1968, a growth
rate of about 1.5% per year.23 Much of this growth had resulted from the baby boom — the
sharp wartime and postwar fertility increase discussed in Chapter Three — and therefore
corresponded with a more youthful age structure. The antiwar movement and the movements
for civil and women’s rights drew massive support from this younger generation, generating
anxiety among older and more conservative Americans that this recent population growth
was producing the same kind of political instability in the U.S. that they feared it would
produce in the global south.24 Around the same time, intellectuals other than demographers
were beginning to write books for popular audiences attributing worldwide disaffection and
unrest to population growth, as will be discussed in the following section.

6.1.2 Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb

Inspiration for Moore’s new advertisements came from two 1967 books: Famine 1975! Amer-
ica’s Decision: Who Will Survive? by brothers William and Paul Paddock and Moment in
the Sun: A Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment by political
23
In comparison, from the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act limiting immigration to the end of
World War II, U.S. population grew by about 0.9% per year. Calculated by the author from Carter et al.,
see n. 82, Table Aa6 and Aa7.
24
Not all young Americans were politically liberal; the conservative movement also drew its share of
support from the baby boom generation. Although population growth in the global south was caused by
mortality decline rather than fertility increase, as it was in the U.S., both changes produced a more youthful
age structure, as the mortality decline in the global south was concentrated among children and childbearing
women.

439
scientist Robert Rienow and his wife Leona Train.25 The Paddocks — agronomist William
and diplomat Paul — focused on the global south, predicting that continuing population
growth would produce serious famines in the upcoming decade, rendering many countries
dependent on food aid from the United States, and that the U.S. would not be able to
provide enough food to save all of the world’s hungry people. They therefore proposed a
“triage” system, according to which the U.S. would divide countries asking for food aid into
three categories: those beyond saving, those that could get by without aid, and those that
could be aided by U.S. efforts. The Paddocks placed Haiti, Egypt, and India in the first
category, arguing that no amount of aid would prevent massive starvation and disorder in
those countries. They placed Gambia and Libya in the second category — countries that
could get by without U.S. assistance — and Tunisia and Pakistan in the third category —
countries that both needed and could benefit from U.S. food aid, and therefore should receive
it.26
The Paddocks were just two among many who were beginning to suggest that “the
population problem” in the global south should be solved by raising mortality rates rather
than continuing to attempt to reduce fertility rates.27 William Lindsay White, editor of
The Emporia Gazette of Emporia Kansas, recommended in private letters to Hugh Moore
that “the United Nations. . . send out a task force to poison village wells” or that “the Ford
Foundation. . . popularize cannibalism by distributing a book of recipes to be prepared by
Julia Child.”28 The second suggestion is clearly an ironic reference to Jonathan Swift’s “A
Modest Proposal” (1729), but the first — poisoning village wells — was more or less serious,
though White acknowledged that it would never happen. The seriousness of this proposal
becomes apparent from its context. White wrote to Moore that
25
Moore to Foote, Hicks, and Catlin, Jan. 5, 1968, see n. 4.
26
James W. Sire, “Review of Famine-1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? ” Journal of the
American Scientific Affiliation (1968).
27
For a fictional account of this approach, see Lionel Shriver, Game Control: A Novel (New York: Harper,
2007).
28
William Lindsay White to Hugh E. Moore, Aug. 14, 1968,folder 9, box 17; William Lindsay White to
Hugh E. Moore, Sept. 10, 1968,folder 9, box 17.

440
 we have just returned from Africa, and last year traveled through Asia starting in
India and including Siam, Viet Nam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Seoul and Tokyo. In
my opinion, the situation is so bad and the explosion point so near that the only
truly constructive and effective solution I can think of would be for the United
Nations to send out a task force to poison village wells. I can see that there
would be some criticism of this, but on the other hand what is the suggested
alternative?29

White encouraged Moore’s work with the exhortation “more power to your pen.”30 He later
wrote to Moore that “I realize there are many objections to the plan I presented. It has only
one merit, which is that it would probably work, and all of the alternatives of which I have
heard in my opinion certainly would not.”31 It was after this statement that he made the
second and ironic suggestion. These suggestions, along with the Paddocks’ “triage” plan,
reveal a pervasive view that inhabitants of the global south were not only expendable, but
also less than human.
The Rienows’ book, Moment in the Sun, focused on the U.S. and its growing environ-
mental concerns. One of Moore’s associates described it as “the first attempt to bring all
our various environmental crises together in one book and then to lay them squarely at the
feet of their basic cause: The American obsession for uncontrolled, unthinking growth of
the economy and the population.”32 However, the Rienows placed much more emphasis on
population growth than on unregulated economic growth as the cause of the environmental
degradation that had become more visible throughout the 1960s, leading to the passage of
the Air Quality Act and Water Quality Act by President Johnson in 1965 and the creation
of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by President Nixon in 1970. Their book did
not acknowledge the role of policy or development, neglecting to mention that sprawling sub-
urbs and investment in the construction of highways rather than railroads meant more cars
on the road driving greater distances; breaking ground for this construction released carbon
into the atmosphere and exposed the soil to erosion, leading to silt deposition in streams,
29
White to Moore, Aug. 14, 1968, see n. 28.
30
Ibid.
31
White to Moore, Sept. 10, 1968, see n. 28.
32
“For Mr. Moore: Moment in the Sun,” n.d.,folder 25, box 16.

441
rivers, and lakes; agricultural specialization meant that feedlot operators had no crops on
which to spread animal manure and crop producers could more cheaply fertilize their land
with synthetic fertilizer, the production of which burned carbon and the application of which
led to nitrogen runoff.33
The book that resonated most with the public was The Population Bomb, published by
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968 at the behest of the Sierra Club. Between
1968 and 1978, it sold over 3 million copies.34 The Population Bomb combined the domestic
concerns of the Rienows with the international concerns of the Paddocks. Ehrlich borrowed
more than just the title from Hugh Moore. As Moore stated in a form letter that he enclosed
when mailing Ehrlich’s book to his supporters, The Population Bomb “expresses my own
view of the frightening prospects of the world population out of control.”35 Moore pointed
to Ehrlich’s credentials to legitimize his claims in the book, informing supporters that “Dr.
Ehrlich is a scientist of repute, Professor of Biology at Stanford University, yet he states the
case for population control as dramatically as any science-fiction writer could do.”36
In fact, The Population Bomb was largely a work of demodystopian science fiction. It
devoted considerable space to spinning out horrific and highly speculative futures, including
global nuclear war and massive famines. These scenarios had no basis in empirical evidence,
and were described by other scientists as “frightening.”37 The only one that did not end in
nuclear war involved the U.S. cutting off food aid to countries that were “beyond hope” —
including India and Egypt — leading to massive “die back” and allowing for the formation
of a world government with strict controls on population growth, agricultural development,
and industrialization.38 Such scenarios clearly exceeded the scientific expertise of Ehrlich,
a specialist in butterfly biology. Few of Ehrlich’s claims about the dangers of population
33
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of the Secretary, 1968,folder 25, box 16; Barry Commoner, The
Closing Circle (New York: Bantom, 1971).
34
Eagan, see n. 30, 174.
35
Hugh E. Moore, Jan. 10, 1969,folder 5, box 17.
36
Ibid.
37
Jan Newhouse to Paul R. Ehrlich, Sept. 27, 1969,Paul R. Ehrlich Papers, Stanford University Archives,
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, folder 9, box 2, series 4.
38
Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), 72-80.

442
growth were supported by scientific research. Nonetheless, within a year of its publication,
The Population Bomb had been assigned in approximately 200 classes around the country.39
Ehrlich was born in 1932 and grew up in suburban New Jersey, where he had ready access
to the butterflies that fascinated him.40 He earned a B.S. in zoology at the University of
Pennsylvania and, while there, read William Vogt’s Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn’s
Our Plundered Planet. He completed a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Kansas in 1957
and took a faculty position at Stanford University in 1959.41 He began to speak publicly
about environmental issues in January 1965, but turned his focus to population as the
ultimate cause of environmental degradation, poverty, and other social issues only later that
year, during a research trip to Asia. As had been the case for other scientists and population
activists, Ehrlich was severely troubled by the poverty he encountered in India. In The
Population Bomb, he famously recounted his impressions during a taxi ride with his wife
and daughter, describing the Delhi streets as

alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting,
arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window,
begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People
herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through
the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the
scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were,
frankly, frightened.42

In his fright, Ehrlich attributed the poverty he saw around him to the poor people them-
selves: there were obviously too many of them. The image of defecating and urinating in the
streets evokes the wanton sexual behavior no doubt underlying this scene in Ehrlich’s mind.
Population growth provided a convenient explanation for their poverty — that is, a biolog-
ical explanation with a technological solution.43 Ehrlich’s tropical epiphany is reminiscent
39
Paul R. Ehrlich to Richard Bowers, Mar. 3, 1969,folder 8, box 4, series 4.
40
Biographical accounts state that his interest in butterflies was encouraged by a mentor at the American
Museum of Natural History, but I have not been able to find out who this mentor was. Eagan, see n. 30, 184.
41
Ibid., 184.
42
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, see n. 38, 15. This is probably the most-frequently cited passage in the
book, but few who cite it comment on his obvious fear of brown bodies.
43
Robertson, see n. 12, 136-137.

443
of Darwin’s: his theory of natural selection was inspired by the prolific growth of flora and
fauna in the Galapagaos islands.44 It also clearly reflects a fear that the poverty and desper-
ation he witnessed in India could spread to California if rapid population growth continued
unabated. Ehrlich’s description of overwhelming numbers of brown bodies suggests anxiety
about immigration from the global south to the United States — and particularly from Latin
America and Asia to California — that was beginning to increase after the 1965 passage of
the Immigration and Nationalization Act, another victory of the civil rights movement.45
Following the Paddocks’ premise, Ehrlich argued that rapid population growth had al-
ready doomed India and other parts of the global south to large-scale famines, and lamented
that coercive population control measures had not been taken earlier. Davis’s 1967 critique
of voluntary family planning as a solution to “the population problem,” discussed in Chapter
Five, resonated with Ehrlich, who quoted Davis in The Population Bomb, stating of fam-
ily planning that “by offering only the means of couples to control fertility, it neglects the
means for societies to do so.”46 Referencing an earlier proposal by Indian minister Sripati
Chandrasekhar to sterilize Indian men who had three or more children, Ehrlich argued that
“we should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical
instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for
training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies.”47 By the time he wrote The Population
Bomb, he contended it was already too late, and endorsed the Paddocks’ Malthusian triage
suggestion, proposing that it was in the best interest of the entire world for the U.S. to sit
quietly by and let a large part of India’s population starve to death.
Although Ehrlich argued that the countries of the global north were not beyond hope
— in contrast to his characterization of many countries in the global south — he contended
that much of the global north was “overpopulated” according to three criteria. First, many
44
Personal communication with John Carson, 3/24/2015.
45
For the Immigration and Naturalization Act and its relationship to the civil rights movement, see John
D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap, 2002).
46
Quoted in Robertson, see n. 12, 137; See also Paul R. Ehrlich to Cynthia Hochberg, June 23, 1969,folder
9, box 2, series 4.
47
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, see n. 38, 165-166.

444
of these countries were not self-sufficient in food and, as population grew in food-producing
countries, there would be less available for import. Second, these countries relied on mineral
and energy resources from other parts of the world, which would also become scarce as
population grew in resource-producing countries. Finally, he argued that the countries of the
global north “have exceeded the capacity of their environments to dispose of their wastes,”
with New York City, for example, facing a garbage crisis.48
Just as Moore had done in his “Manhattan Project” campaign, in The Population Bomb,
Ehrlich attributed all social, economic, and environmental ills — from poverty and hunger in
the global south to pollution, traffic, and racial tensions in the global north — to population
growth, though with no more scientific evidence than Moore had presented in his ads. Despite
his own history of anti-racist activism,49 Ehrlich contended that overpopulation — not racism
— was the cause of the country’s recent urban race riots. In contrast to the 1968 report of
the Kerner Commission, which attributed urban unrest to segregation and discrimination,50
Ehrlich gave a biological explanation. He noted that “we know all too well that when
rats or other animals are overcrowded, the results are pronounced and usually unpleasant.
Social systems may break down, cannibalism may occur, breeding may cease altogether.
The results do not bode well for human beings as they get more and more crowded.”51
Ehrlich’s explanation dehumanized urban residents, elided a long history of de jure and de
facto segregation and discrimination in policing and the provision of public services, and
elided the fact that rural areas were losing population as cities grew, indicating that they
were growing through migration as well as natural increase.52
Of the environment, Ehrlich stated that “the causal chain of deterioration is easily fol-
lowed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much
48
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, see n. 38, 9; David Bird, “Garbage Disposal Posing City Crisis,” New
York Times, June 19, 1967, 37.
49
Robertson, see n. 12, 130.
50
Excerpts from the Kerner Report, History Matters ([Link] (ac-
cessed 12/19/14).
51
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, see n. 38, 168.
52
Jack Rosenthal, “Census Expert Discounts Population Growth Issue,” The New York Times, Jan. 14,
1971, 1.

445
pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too
much carbon dioxide – all can be traced easily to too many people.”53 This passage was
quite powerful and is often cited. Draper evoked it in his appeal to the Democratic Party
to add population control to its 1968 presidential campaign platform, stating that “we have
crowded schools, polluted air and water, traffic jams, unspeakable slums and large families
living from one generation to another in poverty. The quality of life for many of our cit-
izens is threatened by increasing population pressures.”54 But neither Draper nor Ehrlich
explicitly traced the link between pollution or poverty and people, implying that the causal
pathways from people to cars, factories, detergent, pesticides, etc. — and from there to
poverty, racial tensions, and urban violence — were obvious and unequivocal. Comparing
population growth to the uncontrolled multiplication of cells characteristic of cancer, Ehrlich
argued that solving “the population problem” required deaths from starvation or violence,
which he compared to “the cutting out of the cancer.”55
At the core of Ehrlich’s sweeping pronouncements about the imminent demise of human
civilization was a targeted critique of pesticide use in U.S. agriculture that offers a clue to
his focus on population and his decision to appeal directly to the public. Ehrlich argued that
the dangers of agricultural pesticides — many of which were still unknown — far outweighed
their benefits, recommending that they be avoided until their safety could be ensured.56 He
also detailed his own efforts to bring these dangers to the attention of the U.S. Department
of Agriculture, using his scientific credentials to demand greater regulation and oversight
of pesticide use. Yet, as he recounted, these efforts were foiled by the far greater lobbying
capacity of the pesticide industry, and its efforts to portray its opponents as “communist
sympathizers.”57 Ehrlich’s description of this experience indicates that he well understood
53
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, see n. 38, 66-67, emphasis in the original.
54
William H. Draper Jr., “Testimony Before the Platform Committee of the 1968 Democratic National
Convention Committee,” Aug. 23, 1968,folder 47, box 40, series 1.
55
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, see n. 38, 166.
56
STS scholars have described the principle of avoiding unknown dangers as the “precautionary princi-
ple.” Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe, Acting in an Uncertain World, trans. Graham
Burchell (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
57
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, see n. 38, 126; this episode is an example of efforts by industry to

446
the technological drivers of environmental degradation, but had given up on regulation as the
solution. Instead, he recommended population control, thereby individualizing a systemic
problem. Though he did advocate for policy mechanisms to reduce population growth,
in The Population Bomb, Ehrlich appealed to a grassroots audience in the U.S., who could
respond by having fewer children, even if Ehrlich’s calls for legislation to promote population
control failed. With a smaller population, Ehrlich reasoned, all of the industrial causes of
environmental degradation would decline, even in the absence of regulation, the passage of
which he had concluded was nigh impossible.58
By suggesting that population control could prevent pollution and resource depletion,
Ehrlich promoted the same “per capita solution” that proponents of the economic overpopu-
lation discourse promoted. The suggestion that population control could stimulate economic
development relied on the mathematics of per-capita GNP, the measure of economic growth.
The fewer members of the population among whom aggregate GNP needed to be divided,
the higher per-capita GNP would be. While this proposal is mathematically correct, it ig-
nores such factors as economies of scale that disrupt the assumed linear relationship between
population and GNP per capita. Similarly, calculations of per-capita resource use or pol-
lution generation masquerade as causal relationships, implying that an increase or decrease
in population would produce a proportionate change in pollution or resource depletion. In
a strictly subsistence society, such a linear relationship might be plausible, but in an indus-
trial society it is not.59 The fallacy of the per capita solution is immediately apparent in a
comparison between its role in the economic and environmental discourses. In the economic
discourse, the numerator is fixed and the per-capita value varies: changing the number of
people does not change the overall income, but does change the number of people among
whom it is being divided. In the environmental discourse, the numerator varies with the
discredit science so as to avoid regulation, as described in Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of
Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
58
Robertson, see n. 12, 146-147.
59
Angus and Butler, see n. 186.

447
denominator and the per-capita value is fixed: each person accounts for the same amount
of environmental harm regardless of how many there are. This is an extreme simplification,
but demonstrates the different roles the per capita solution plays in each discourse.
Other natural scientists joined Ehrlich’s cause, most notably University of California
at Santa Barbara biologist Garret Hardin, whose famous 1968 article “The Tragedy of the
Commons” also called for population control through legislation.60 Hardin had admired the
work of Vogt and Osborn since their 1948 publications, and shared their faith in eugenics as
a biological solution to social problems.61 In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin refuted
Adam Smith’s proposition that the emergent effect of individuals acting in their own interest
necessarily benefits society as a whole, arguing that the “invisible hand” of the market fails
to effectively allocate resources held in common, such as air, water, and land. He gave two
examples. In the first, common land is overgrazed when herders try to maximize their profits
by increasing the size of their herds. In the second, the environment suffers when industries
acting in their own interest fail to mitigate the pollution associated with their production
processes or with the consumption of their products. Hardin contended that childbearing by
the poor led to the first type of “tragedy,” as (he argued) this childbearing was subsidized
by the welfare state, and thereby redistributed resources from the more to less deserving,
much as Malthus had suggested in his argument against the eighteenth-century English
Poor Law and Moore and Draper contended in their newspaper ads. Hardin contended
further that all childbearing contributed to the second type of “tragedy,” as (he argued)
“the pollution problem is a consequence of population.”62 Although a strong supporter of
freely-available contraception and abortion, Hardin believed these measures were not enough
to bring population to stationarity. Citing Davis’s argument that parents the world over still
wanted more than two children on average, he maintained that any effort to limit population
growth through voluntary means would fail.
60
Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243–1248.
61
Robertson, see n. 12, 154.
62
Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” see n. 60, 1245.

448
 Hardin contended that appeals to conscience aimed at a voluntary reduction in childbear-
ing would work among the conscientious segment of the population, but not among the selfish
or irresponsible. As a result, the selfish and irresponsible would have more children than
the conscientious. Making the eugenicist assumption that selfishness and irresponsibility are
genetically inherited, Hardin concluded that this type of differential fertility would produce
a less-conscientious and ultimately larger population. Quoting Charles Galton Darwin —
grandson of Charles Darwin and a distant cousin of Francis Galton, the originator of eugen-
ics — he stated that the end result would be that “nature would have taken her revenge,
and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the
variety Homo progenitivus.”63 In a 1970 article in Family Planning Perspectives, Hardin ar-
gued against voluntary means of slowing population growth by claiming that desire for large
family is an inherited trait. For that reason, he continued, “in a condition of free choice,
the women who have more children than average will leave more descendants to carry on
the same characteristic in the next generation. As one generation succeeds another, the
fertile breeders will thus outbreed the relatively infertile, and there will be a tendency for
the numbers of children to increase with each succeeding generation.”64 This claim reflected
and promoted the belief that all characteristics and actions are genetically determined. On
the basis of such reasoning, Hardin argued that coercion was a legitimate solution as long
as it was “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.”65
He suggested that coercion be exercised through the tax code, by increasing the expense
of childbearing, similar to the plan Frederick Osborn had first proposed forty years earlier
to improve the “quality” of the U.S. population by reducing or reversing the socioeconomic
fertility differential, described in Chapter Two, and one Ehrlich also recommended in The
Population Bomb.
63
Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” see n. 60, 1246.
64
Garrett Hardin, “Multiple Paths to Population Control,” Family Planning Perspectives 2, no. 3 (1970):
25.
65
Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” see n. 60, 1247.

449
6.1.3 Zero Population Growth

Publication of The Population Bomb immediately turned Ehrlich into a public figure. Over
the next few years, he appeared on numerous television and radio talk shows promoting the
environmental discourse of overpopulation. By the end of 1968, Ehrlich had helped found
a new organization, Zero Population Growth (ZPG).66 As will be discussed in the following
section, demographers generally scorned the organization and its goal of “zero population
growth.” The major exception was Kingsley Davis, who served on ZPG’s board of directors.
In this section, I argue that, although ZPG claimed to be an environmental movement, its
main aim was worldwide population control for the purpose of preserving the living standards
of its founders and the American elite. Nonetheless, it briefly maintained a large following
of young people aligned with the antiwar movement and the women’s rights movement, who
believed they could help the world by having fewer children.
ZPG aimed to generate a grassroots movement of young Americans and Canadians dedi-
cated to limiting their own reproduction and to bringing into power policy makers committed
to limiting the reproduction of others, both at home and abroad. Although Ehrlich at times
found himself in opposition to other ZPG leaders, he was the public face of the organization.
ZPG’s first newsletter in 1969 urged members to read The Population Bomb because “as
our president, Paul’s views, probably more so than anyone else’s, can be considered those of
ZPG.”67 Belying his grassroots aspirations for the organization, Ehrlich invited members of
Moore and Draper’s Population Crisis Committee to ZPG’s board of directors, signaling a
continued alliance with Moore and Draper’s top-down population movement.68 The Popula-
tion Crisis Committee also adopted some of Ehrlich’s premises and ZPG’s rhetoric. In 1969,
Draper, who had just become the U.S. representative to the U.N. Population Commission,
gave an address at a testimonial dinner in Washington, D.C., at which he advocated that
66
“ZPG Statement of Purposes and Goals,” 1969,folder 7, box 1, series 4; Kingsley Davis is often credited
with having coined the phrase “zero population growth,” but it was first used by George J. Stolnitz in
George J. Stolnitz, “A Century of International Mortality Trends,” Population Studies 9, no. 1 (1955): 51.
67
“ZPG Communicator,” Mar. 1, 1969,folder 7, box 1, series 4.
68
Emerson Foote, Apr. 19, 1969,folder 9, box 1, series 4.

450
the U.S. government accept zero growth by the year 2000 as its official population policy.69
ZPG primarily presented itself as an environmental organization, calling for population
control in the U.S. and Canada because, as a 1969 brochure stated, “our air, water and soil
are being polluted. The deterioration and despoliation of our environment is due to the
demands placed upon it by increasing numbers of people.”70 Although ZPG also called for
population control in the global south — and, in fact, advocated more extreme and coercive
measures there — the organization focused the majority of its attention on the U.S., both
because its leaders viewed the U.S. as “already overpopulated” and because it recognized
that other countries would be loath to submit to population control programs initiated by
the U.S. if the U.S. government were not also making efforts to control its own population.71
A substantial proportion of the U.S. public seemed receptive to this message: like Moore
and Draper’s ads and books by Ehrlich, the Paddocks, and the Rienows, it provided a single
explanation for everything going wrong in the world, which seemed to be spiraling out of
control at the end of the 1960s, as discussed above. A 1969 Gallup Poll found that 54% of
respondents believed U.S. population growth to be a serious problem and 44% believed that
maintaining current living standards would eventually require population control.72
ZPG literature employed the same scare tactics Ehrlich had used in The Population Bomb
and Moore and Draper had used in their newspaper ads to present population growth as a
critical threat to the U.S. middle class and thereby create a “crisis atmosphere.” A graduate
student and former family planning worker in the Department of Population Dynamics at
Johns Hopkins University advised Ehrlich in 1970 that

most people will never prefer birds to televisions or will never be seriously con-
cerned about the world their grandchildren will inherit. On the other hand,
almost everybody’s frame of reference places large values on his own survival and
on some consumer goods. So, the strategy is to shape the ‘crisis’ to fit the frame
of reference, rather than to try to get people to change their frames of reference
69
“Brochure, Population Crisis Committee,” n.d.,folder 23, box 16, series 1.
70
“Brochure, ZPG,” 1969,folder 1, box 1, series 4.
71
“ZPG Newsletter,” May 1, 1970,folder 4, box 1, series 4.
72
“California ZPG Newsletter,” 1969,folder 7, box 1, series 4.

451
 to fit the ‘crisis’. . . . Concentrate on threats to ecology and space, not for their
own sake but as they relate to and cause threats to our GNP, color television,
air conditioning, automobiles, and the other things that have high place in the
majority’s frame of reference.73

ZPG literature presented population growth, both at home and abroad, as a threat to
the very survival of the U.S. government and the American people. The title of a 1970
pamphlet was “Zero Population Growth: Program for Survival.” It argued that, if birth
rates did not decline, “the death rate will increase because of food shortages and increased
pollution of the environment.”74 The pamphlet warned that “if we add 100 million more
people to the population of the United States by the year 2000. . . we will be on the brink of
disaster. . . , if we get there at all.”75 ZPG literature never specified exactly how population
growth would cause food shortage or environmental degradation in the United States, instead
presenting vague population projections accompanied by even vaguer suggestions of the
negative consequences. For example, a brochure with a photo of a baby on the front bearing
the title “Does the Population Bomb Threaten His Future?” predicted that “in 35 years
there will be 100 million more people in the U.S. – an increase of 50% from 1970” and
asked, “do we want our children to grow up in a world of 50% more pollution, smog, houses,
freeways, parking lots and crowding, with less parks, open spaces, and wildlife?”76 These
statements suggested that pollution and material development (houses, freeways, parking
lots, etc.) increased in direct proportion to population and were necessitated by population
growth, eliding other causes, such as the rise of independent living among both older and
younger adults and the increasing distance between homes and jobs.77
In reference to population growth outside the U.S., the brochure was much more explicit,
warning that “in 20 years there will be twice as many people in the underdeveloped countries
73
Samuel B. Hopkins, “Frame of Reference, Burden of Proof, and Governmental Approaches to Population
and the Environment,” 1970,folder 4, box 1, series 4.
74
“Zero Population Growth: Program for Survival,” 1970,folder 3, box 1, series 4.
75
Ibid., The U.S. population did, in fact, add nearly another 100 million people by the year 2000 without
inducing disaster.
76
“Does the Population Bomb Threaten His Future?” N.d.,folder 3, box 1, series 4.
77
See, for example, Merchant, Gratton, and Gutmann, see n. 6.

452
as there are today.” After attributing hunger and starvation in the global south to population
growth (rather than lack of entitlement to food),78 it went on to explain that “malnourished
people are poorly motivated, do not think clearly, and are more susceptible to propaganda,”
asking, “will there be much hope for political stability in such a world?”79 ZPG literature
thereby explained unrest in other parts of the world as a biological response to starvation,
and predicted — as Moore had done a decade before — that population growth would
promote the spread of communism.
Although the U.N. published detailed cohort component population projections for all
parts of the world every few years (including in 1963 and 1968), ZPG literature did not
use these projections, which predicted an eventual slowing of population growth as a result
of demographic transition. In 1968, the U.N.’s medium projection for the year 2000 was
6.5 billion. Instead, The Population Bomb and ZPG offered — in lieu of projections —
illustrations of the effects of then-current growth rates on future population, just as Edward
East had done in Mankind at the Crossroads, discussed in Chapter One. In The Population
Bomb, Ehrlich pointed to the current world population doubling time of 37 years. Doubling
time is a demographic index that — like population projections — might be considered
a boundary object, defined in Chapter Two.80 Doubling time speaks coherently to both
specialist and non-specialist audiences, but has different meanings to each: doubling time is
a standard index demographers use to express an instantaneous rate of population growth
— that is, the rate of population growth at a given moment. Doubling time is analogous
to the net reproduction rate (NRR), discussed in Chapter 1, which expresses the current
instantaneous growth rate in terms of the effect it would have on total population if current
growth rates remain constant. Doubling time is calculated as shown in Equation (6.1), where
dtime is the doubling time in years and r is the annual growth rate, expressed as a percentage
78
The concept of entitlement and its relation to starvation is developed in Sen, see n. 83.
79
See n. 76.
80
Star and Griesemer, see n. 63.

453
of current population.
ln2
dtime = (6.1)
ln(1 + r)

Both doubling time and NRR are period indices that describe current mortality and fertility
rates but express no judgment about whether those rates will remain constant into the future.
For that reason, doubling time is a statement only about current population growth, not
about the effect that growth will have on future population. To a non-specialist audience,
however, a statement of doubling time sounds like a prediction: population will double in
a given number of years. Ehrlich played on the boundary nature of this measure in The
Population Bomb, when he pointed out that the then-current world population doubling
time was 37 years, a valid demographic statement, but then went on to state that “if growth
continued at that rate for about 900 years, there would be some 60,000,000,000,000,000
people on the face of the earth. This is about 100 persons for each square yard of the Earth’s
surface, land and sea.”81 This statement is factually correct and reminiscent of the constant-
rate calculations of future population in Edward East’s 1923 Mankind at the Crossroads,
discussed in Chapter One. However, just like East’s calculation, Ehrlich’s was intended to
inspire action rather than to accurately predict future population. It also suggested a sense
among Ehrlich and his colleagues that future population growth needed to be exaggerated
in order to incite appropriate action. Other scientists criticized Ehrlich’s hyperbole, as will
be discussed later in this chapter.
In addition to supporting local chapters throughout the United States and Canada, ZPG
maintained lobbying staffs in Washington D.C. and Sacramento to bring its agenda to the
attention of policymakers at national and state levels. ZPG leaders also aimed to use the
organization’s membership as “a political structure that can be mobilized to support partic-
ular candidates or particular bills before the Congress.”82 In 1970, Senator Joseph Tydings
introduced to the U.S. Senate a Joint Resolution on Population. Largely written by ZPG
81
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, see n. 38, 18.
82
See n. 74.

454
staff, the resolution stated that “unchecked population growth significantly increases the
difficulty and cost of solving America’s social, economic, and political problems, and directly
contributes to the pollution and degradation of our environment,” and that “it is only by
its own example that America can hope to lead the fight to curb world population growth,
which is obstructing economic progress and threatening starvation, mass unemployment, and
civil strife in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”83 Through such
efforts, the environmental discourse of overpopulation entered the realm of U.S. policymak-
ing, joining and bolstering the economic discourse introduced by Moore, Draper, and their
allies in Congress.
Viewing access to birth control, abortion, and employment opportunities for women as
prerequisites for reducing population growth in the U.S., ZPG allied with the feminist move-
ment.84 It supported the efforts of the National Organization of Women to pass the Equal
Rights Amendment, and pushed for universal access to contraception and abortion, particu-
larly for unmarried women, who faced greater restrictions than did married women.85 ZPG
also favored the expansion of affirmative action programs to increase employment opportu-
nities for women, better enforcement of Title IX of the 1972 U.S. Educational Amendments,
which prohibited discrimination by sex in federally-funded educational activities, and equal
pay for women and men, following Davis’s premise that reducing fertility required the provi-
sion of alternatives to childbearing for women.86 By aligning itself with the women’s rights
movement, ZPG aimed to bolster the legitimacy of its project and gain the support of the
women’s movement for population control.
But despite its efforts to expand access to contraception and abortion, ZPG’s leaders
did not see voluntary family planning as a solution to “the population problem” in the
United States. ZPG literature echoed the Planned Parenthood critique of Moore’s mugging
83
“Senate Joint Resolution on Population,” May 18, 1970,folder 4, box 1, series 4.
84
See n. 74.
85
Paul R. Ehrlich to Leonard Ball, Jan. 7, 1971,folder 3, box 1, series 4; Lucinda Cisler, chair of NOW’s
Taskforce on Reproduction, also served on the national board of ZPG. Robertson, see n. 12, 157-159.
86
“A Recommended Population Policy for the United States,” 1976,folder 6, box 3, series 4.

455
ad, arguing that “the increase in our population is not being caused by the unwanted chil-
dren of the 5 million poorest women in the United States,” a reference to the 1970 Family
Planning Act, which explicitly aimed to provide contraception to the estimated five million
women who could not afford it. Ehrlich and his ZPG colleagues also refuted the accusation
that overpopulation discourses were implicitly racist and classist, attributing excessive U.S.
population growth to “the 40 million other women of child-bearing age, predominately [sic]
white, middle to upper income, confirmed contraceptive users, having the number of children
they want.”87 For this reason, ZPG leaders supported the stance taken by Davis in his 1967
Science article and by Ehrlich in The Population Bomb that “voluntary family planning is
not a population policy.”88
On the basis of Davis’s contention that eliminating unwanted childbearing would not
bring fertility below the replacement level unless desired family size was also reduced, ZPG’s
political aims went far beyond increasing women’s access to birth control, abortion, educa-
tion, and employment. The organization also advocated “removal of the subsidies, direct
and indirect, given to large families (more than two children),” including “income tax ex-
emptions for children beyond the second.”89 ZPG even recommended raising the income tax
exemption for the first two children to increase the disincentive for the third child.90 In 1970,
Senator Bob Packwood and U.S. Representative Paul “Pete” McCloskey, Jr., both support-
ers of ZPG, introduced bills to eliminate child tax deductions after the second child.91 One
proponent of such policies argued in 1968 that “the time has now come to react to prolific
parenthood as we act toward other types of environmental contaminants.”92 Proposals to
encourage reduced childbearing through economic incentives, as well as advertisements that
stated “children are beautiful. . . they cost about $40,000 each,” belied the organization’s
87
“Declaration on Population and Food Prepared by the Environmental Fund for the U.N. World Popu-
lation Meeting,” 1974,folder 11, box 2, series 4.
88
Ibid.
89
See n. 67; see n. 74.
90
“ZPG Press Release,” Nov. 28, 1969,folder 6, box 1, series 4.
91
Hoff, see n. 11, Chapter 7, Kindle Edition.
92
Ed Chasteen, “Should the Government Limit Births?” 1968,folder 19, box 16, series 1.

456
claim that it aimed to control population growth among the wealthy as much as among the
poor.93
By 1972, however, as a result of critiques of ZPG’s aims and strategies by people of
color and the poor, Ehrlich had abandoned the idea of using taxation to control population,
recognizing that such measures targeted the poor and also penalized children. The alternative
Ehrlich proposed to such a market-based approach was legal coercion. He acknowledged that
“if we could find a way to enforce compulsory birth control it would be much more democratic
than many of the other methods that are being proposed,” as it would not allow parents
who could afford more children to have them. However, he also recognized that “it is a
difficult thing to put over to people who often are offended by the idea.”94 One member
of ZPG’s board who was also a board member of Planned Parenthood resigned from the
ZPG board because its advocacy of compulsory family limitation conflicted with Planned
Parenthood’s voluntarist position. This board member was himself in favor of compulsory
family limitation, but recognized that many of Planned Parenthood’s clients — largely poor
and nonwhite Americans who may have been targets of involuntary sterilization laws —
were very sensitive to the suggestion of coercion. Recognizing also that ZPG members,
being mostly white and middle class, were very different from Planned Parenthood’s clients,
and that ZPG could therefore take a riskier stance, he encouraged the organization “to
pioneer, to take positions which seem extreme now, but which we think the logic of events
will in the course of time bring a majority of people to accept.”95
ZPG materials justified the organization’s advocacy for population control policies in the
U.S. by warning that population would only continue to grow if the U.S. government did
not encourage the public to take action. Suggestions for such policies as changing the tax
structure were accompanied by warnings that failure to take such action immediately would
produce the need for more drastic measures later, including the rationing of resources as well
93
“ZPG Advertisement,” 1974,folder 1, box 3, series 4.
94
Paul R. Ehrlich, “Response to Chasteen,” Jan. 26, 1970,folder 5, box 1, series 4.
95
illegible to Richard Bowers, Oct. 2, 1969,folder 8, box 1, series 4.

457
as strict limits on childbearing.96 In this way, ZPG presented continued population growth as
a threat to individual liberty in the U.S., suggesting that population growth could produce
totalitarianism at home as well as communism abroad.97
Close reading of ZPG literature reveals that its leaders mainly perceived population
growth as a threat to their own standard of living and consumer preferences, and promoted
population control as a way to protect their material wealth and freedom to consume. A 1974
brochure stated that it was “preferable to support a smaller number of human beings at an
equitable and sufficient standard of living than a greater number at a lesser level,” attributing
poverty and the unequal distribution of resources at both global and national levels to human
numbers.98 ZPG founder Richard Bowers articulated his idea of the “equitable and sufficient
standard of living” he sought to protect for himself and his associates when he stated in
1970 that the world’s natural resources “are not adequate to provide such items as a 9
room house (not to speak of a wilderness mountain retreat or a quest cottage by the sea)
two cars, quality heating systems, a wide variety diet, elaborate wardrobe, etc. etc. which
have been and are the hallmark of the successful person” if the U.S. population exceeded
100 million.99 He was not critiquing these material aspirations; rather he was arguing that
the U.S. population must be reduced in order to make them attainable. However, ZPG
never advocated for a more equitable distribution of resources, nor did its rhetoric suggest
that everyone could attain this excessive standard, even if the U.S. population were to fall
to 100 million. Rather, the organization argued that increasing population growth would
lead governments to impose conservation measures, which ZPG literature described as “a
reduction in personal freedoms.”100 Such statements suggest that ZPG’s leaders saw the
freedom of the “successful” to pollute and consume as more valuable than the freedom of
others to reproduce.
96
See n. 83.
97
See n. 70.
98
“A Statement of the Goals of ZPG, Inc.,” 1974,folder 2, box 3, series 4.
99
Richard Bowers, “100 Million Americans by the Year 2000?” 1970,folder 7, box 4, series 4.
100
See n. 86.

458
 By 1976, ZPG’s leaders had become more explicit in their aims. The organization’s
statement that “to the extent that we can protect the environment for future generations
only at expense to the present generation in material standards, government controls and loss
of freedom, or dependence upon foreign sources of supply, we will choose less environmental
protection” indicated that its leaders saw environmental protection as a means to the end
of population control, rather than the other way around.101
Appealing to potential members with slogans borrowed from Moore and Draper’s adver-
tising campaign, including “how many millions more do YOU want in the United States?”102
ZPG particularly aimed to attract college and even high school students, who had not yet
started families and could therefore be persuaded to minimize their childbearing.103 At $10
for a regular membership and only $4 for a student membership, the bar to entry was low,
though ZPG encouraged new and existing members to become “donors” at $20, “sustaining
members” at $50, or “patrons” at $120.104 ZPG also sold earrings made from IUDs and
Valentine’s Day cards with red condoms enclosed.105 Membership grew by an average of 100
people per day throughout the first half of 1970 and, by the end of the year, the organization
boasted over 30,000 members in more than 300 chapters.106 In addition to recruiting young
members, ZPG also advocated “population education” in public schools, to teach children
about the causes and consequences of population growth, thereby further supporting and
spreading the economic and environmental discourses of overpopulation.107 ZPG’s leaders
hoped to mobilize some of the political power student activists had developed through the
social movements of the 1960s.108
ZPG did prove particularly popular among college students, and officially aligned itself
101
See n. 86.
102
See n. 70.
103
“ZPG Q&A,” n.d.,folder 3, box 1, series 4.
104
See n. 74.
105
Carol Oppenheim, “Big Zero for Zero Population’s Goal,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 14, 1978, A1.
106
Shirley Radl, “Report to Board of Directors, ZPG,” July 21, 1970,folder 3, box 1, series 4; Robertson,
see n. 12, 170.
107
See n. 86.
108
“Circular letter from the ZPG secretary to members and directors,” May 1, 1969,folder 7, box 1, series
4.

459
with the antiwar movement in 1970, when it issued a press release condemning the Vietnam
War as an “ecological catastrophe.”109 ZPG also tapped into the growing environmental
awareness of student activists and their support for the feminist movement and the legaliza-
tion of birth control and abortion, as discussed above.110 The white middle-class students
who flocked to ZPG were members of the “baby boom” generation, born during the resur-
gence of fertility in the late 1940s and early 1950s that no expert had predicted. As children,
they had experienced housing scarcity and overcrowded schools, and thus had little trouble
believing that their world was overpopulated.111 Moreover, population growth provided a
simple and approachable explanation for the war in Vietnam and poverty at home. For
these students, having a vasectomy or getting an IUD seemed a tangible way to make a
difference in the world.112 Ehrlich himself publicized the fact that he had had a vasectomy
after the birth of his only child, sometimes even wearing a button inviting people to “ask
me about my vasectomy.”113
ZPG’s leaders initially defined the goal of their organization — zero population growth —
as replacement-level fertility — that is, a total fertility rate (TFR) of approximately 2.1.114
They understood that, as a result of population momentum (larger cohorts moving into
the childbearing ages as a result of high fertility in previous decades), even the immediate
achievement of a TFR of 2.1 would produce population growth for another 70 years or so,
until the age structure stabilized. However, ZPG Executive Director Shirley Radl empha-
sized the importance of giving the public readily-understandable information, and feared
109
Shirley Radl, “Report to ZPG Board of Directors,” May 6, 1970,folder 5, box 1, series 4; “ZPG Press
Release,” 1970,folder 5, box 1, series 4.
110
Robertson, see n. 12, 160.
111
Ibid., 160.
112
See, for example: Kenneth J. Fanucchi, “Youth Advised to Press for Population Control,” Los Angeles
Times, Oct. 10, 1971, SF–A3; Keith Frye, “A Teacher’s Sad Tale of Ecology and Young Activists,” The
Globe and Mail, Oct. 18, 1971, 7.
113
Michael Dean, “Interview with Paul Ehrlich at Open University, England,” 1972,folder 28, box 1, series
5.
114
The total fertility rate is a period measure that reflects the sum of age-specific birth rates over all
childbearing ages at a particular moment in time. A TFR of 2.1 means that, if a woman were to experience
then-current age-specific fertility rates over the entire span of childbearing ages (15–49), she would have 2.1
children. If age-specific fertility rates remain constant over a long period of time, TFR will equal average
family size.

460
that the details of demographic analysis would discourage public action.115 For that reason,
ZPG’s initial slogan was “stop at two.” An early pamphlet explained that “by having two
children, a couple reproduces its own number. That is, they are providing ‘replacements’
for themselves.” In contrast, the pamphlet continued, couples who have three children add
one member to the population, and “that child will grow up and have children who will
have children, etc. So that one extra child results in an addition of a lot more than one to
the population.”116 Those who wanted large families were encouraged to adopt. In a 1970
statement of the organization’s goals, the leaders specified “zero population growth in the
U.S. by 1980 and in the world by 1990,” defining “zero population growth” as replacement
fertility.117 A survey of ZPG members demonstrated that most believed that the limitation
of families to two children would immediately end population growth in the U.S.118
Fertility among younger women fell dramatically in the years following 1968, likely reflect-
ing trends toward later marriage, the increasing acceptability of cohabitation, and increasing
educational and occupational opportunities for women.119 By the beginning of 1972, news-
paper headlines in major cities around the country were announcing that, as a result of
this fertility decline, the U.S. was nearing zero population growth, following ZPG’s lead in
defining “zero-population growth” as replacement fertility. On February 17, 1972 the New
York Times informed readers that “the number of children that American women expected
to bear dropped so sharply between 1967 and 1971. . . that the nation is fast approaching
zero population growth rates among younger women.”120 On June 4, the New York Times
announced that birth rates had been so low during the first quarter of 1972 that “the total
fertility rate — a sophisticated demographic measurement — is now virtually at the ‘re-
placement level,’ ” and went on to define the “replacement level” as “the milestone level
115
Radl, “Report to Board of Directors, ZPG,” see n. 106.
116
See n. 103.
117
“ZPG Draft Goals,” 1970,folder 4, box 1, series 4.
118
Larry Barnett, “ZPG Membership Profile,” n.d.,folder 11, box 3, series 4.
119
Merchant, Gratton, and Gutmann, see n. 6.
120
Jack Rosenthal, “New Census Study Projects Decline in Rate of Births,” The New York Times, Feb. 17,
1972, 1.

461
which, maintained over decades, would bring a population of stable size.”121 A front-page
headline in the New York Times on December 5 announced “Nation’s Births Show Drop
Below Zero-Growth Level.”122 The following day, the Los Angeles Times printed an article
titled “Under Zero: U.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Record Low.”123
Simultaneously, membership in ZPG began to dwindle, falling from its 1970 high of 32,000
to 21,000 at the end of 1972. Projecting that membership would continue to decline to 13,000
members by the end of 1973 and 8,000 by the end of 1974, ZPG’s board of directors feared
that the organization would not have the funding necessary to sustain its programs beyond
that point.124 To try to revive public interest in the organization, ZPG leaders took credit
for the recent decline in U.S. fertility, but also changed their definition of “zero population
growth” from replacement-level fertility to population stationarity, a balance of births and
deaths. Membership recruitment letters announced that “this result of our work has led
to the mistaken but widely held notion that U.S. population has stopped growing and that
growth is no longer a problem.”125 In contrast to its earlier message that all the ills of the
world could be solved if every couple would “stop at two” children, ZPG literature now
announced that “the overpopulation problem is a complex one that cannot be answered by
oversimplified solutions.”126 It also continued to promote the idea that the United States
was “already overpopulated,” and required population reduction rather than stationarity.127
This shift in approach reflects the multiplicity of potential future implications that can be
drawn from the same demographic trends, as discussed in Chapter One.
Supporting this view of the complexity of population, ZPG began trying to educate
the public about population momentum and to revise the organization’s target family size
121
Jack Rosenthal, “The Panic As You Approach Zero: Population,” The New York Times, June 4, 1972,
E4.
122
Jack Rosenthal, “Nation’s Births Show Drop Below Zero-Growth Level,” The New York Times, Dec. 5,
1972, 1.
123
“Under Zero: U.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Record Low,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 6, 1972, 4.
124
“ZPG Board of Directors Monthly Report,” Dec. 1, 1970,folder 1, box 1, series 4.
125
“ZPG Recruitment Letter,” Mar. 19, 1979,folder 2, box 2, series 4.
126
Ibid.
127
“A Program for ZPG, Inc.,” June 10, 1974,folder 2, box 3, series 4.

462
downward.128 ZPG also attempted to mobilize members to educate their fellow citizens. In
1974, when newspaper headlines announced that the total fertility rate in the U.S. had
reached 1.9, ZPG instructed members to send letters to editors with the following text:

In the article “ ” (date), you state that parents “are having 1.9 children, fewer
than is needed to replace themselves; thus, we have reached the era of zero
population growth.” I would like to point out that even if the present U.S. birth
rate holds steady, we will not reach zpg for about 70 years. Children of the post-
war baby boom are now entering prime childbearing years, creating a potential
parent boom. Their fertility patterns will determine to a large extent when–if
ever–we reach zpg.129

In 1972, ZPG drafted a resolution to promote one-child families rather than two-child fami-
lies, stating

we are running out of time in the struggle to maintain a livable America, and we
recognize the need for attaining a zero rate of population growth at the earliest
practicable date, and the year 2040, almost 70 years off, would be the approx-
imate date for realization of zero population growth if the average number of
children per family is brought down to about 2.1, and this date is now seen to
be unacceptably far away and would be a classic case of “too little, too late.”130

In a 1971 newsletter for his other organization, the Center for Optimum Environments,
ZPG founder Richard Bowers referred to advocacy of replacement-level fertility as “a pro-
natalist position.”131 However, ZPG’s leaders privately acknowledged that “any target level
of fertility would have a large fudge factor; we do not know how to fine tune fertility, nor
is it possible with present knowledge to predict exactly what level of fertility would best
suit the needs of a rapid but non-disruptive transition to ZPG.” They therefore suggested
that the organization “ought to pick a figure that stands out in some way, as did the round
number ‘2’ in our early focus on the two child family.”132 This correspondence suggests the
128
“Timetable for Achievement of ZPG,” n.d.,folder 1, box 1, series 4; “ZPG Press Release,” Dec. 7,
1972,folder 11, box 2, series 4.
129
“ZPG Media Target List,” July 1, 1974,folder 1, box 3, series 4.
130
“ZPG Draft Resolution on One-Child Family,” Apr. 18, 1972,folder 8, box 44, series 1.
131
“Statement of Beliefs and Goals, Center for Optimum Environments,” 1971,folder 33, box 44, series 1.
132
See n. 128.

463
lack of a scientific basis — whether in demography or in environmental science — for ZPG’s
recommendations.
To stem the outflow of membership and promote further fertility decline, ZPG’s leaders
aimed to disseminate the organization’s message more broadly through movies and televi-
sion.133 They were initially pleased to learn of the 1971 production of a film titled ZPG that
would be released by Paramount. With a million-dollar budget, ZPG was filmed in Denmark
by the same crew that had filmed Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.134 The film was a faithful repre-
sentation of the future ZPG predicted in the absence of voluntary population limitation.135
It depicted a post-apocalyptic future in which nuclear war had made part of the world unin-
habitable and population growth in the rest of the world had led to the establishment of an
authoritarian regime in which everyone wore the same drab jumpsuits; food and other re-
sources were strictly rationed. Pollution was so bad that characters waded through thick blue
smoke whenever they ventured outside, and had to wear full-face masks in order to breathe.
However, even with strict rationing, the government decides that population is growing too
quickly and declares a strict moratorium on births, with any violation to be punished by the
death of the baby and its parents. An industry of life-like dolls emerges to satisfy parental
instincts, but adults in the childbearing ages nonetheless begin to go crazy because they are
unable to fulfill their biological need to reproduce. Although the film did make it clear that
the demodystopia it depicted — as well as the decision of the authoritarian government in
that demodystopia to ban childbearing — resulted from the unwillingness of couples in the
1970s to voluntarily limit their childbearing, it also associated any policy measures aimed
at limiting births with authoritarianism. The film’s heroes, a young man and woman, have
a baby despite the ban, and manage to escape from their repressive society into the nuclear
wasteland that exists on the other side. Therefore, although the film was a cautionary tale
about the extreme environmental destruction that would ensue if population growth did not
133
“Report to ZPG Board of Directors,” Dec. 31, 1971,folder 1, box 1, series 4.
134
Hal E. Seilstad, “Report on ZPG Film,” 1971,folder 1, box 1, series 4.
135
The film is available for viewing at [Link] (accessed
4/10/2015).

464
abate, it also celebrated the illicit childbearing of its protagonists.
ZPG’s leaders were horrified when they saw a premiere of the film. They acknowledged
that its director had “sincerely tried to make a film that will present the urgency of population
stabilization to a mass of unconcerned apathetic citizens.”136 However, they feared that “as
the film presently stands it could be very damaging to us” because “there was a strong
association of ZPG with ‘The Edict’ that their [sic] shall be no child bearing for thirty
years.”137 ZPG asked Paramount to add either a prologue or an epilogue that would “set
the picture in a positive context.”138 When Paramount refused, ZPG demanded that the
title of the film be changed, and waged an unsuccessful legal battle to prevent Paramount
from using the name “ZPG.” Ultimately, ZPG condemned the film publicly, issuing a press
release stating that the film “leads people to believe that our organization wishes couples to
have no children. In fact, we have always been in favor of children. It is our official policy
that couples should be urged to have a maximum of two children.”139 But despite ZPG’s
efforts to distance itself from the film, its continued insistence that even replacement-level
fertility was too high led journalists to predict that the government would soon respond to
the still-growing population with draconian measures, such as parenthood licensing or baby
rationing.140
As fertility declined further in the 1970s and as ZPG increasingly lost support on the
political left, the organization turned its attention to immigration, pointing out that, even
with replacement-level fertility, immigration would produce continued population growth
in the U.S. and Canada. To illustrate this point, ZPG materials presented projections of
the U.S. and Canadian populations with current levels of immigration and with reduced
levels.141 ZPG’s leaders also pointed out that, since the 1965 immigration reform in the U.S.,
136
Hal E. Seilstad, “Confidential Memo to the ZPG Executive Committee,” Feb. 8, 1972,folder 1, box 1,
series 4.
137
“Circular letter to ZPG chapter leaders,” Feb. 17, 1972,folder 7, box 3, series 4.
138
Seilstad, “Confidential Memo to the ZPG Executive Committee,” see n. 136.
139
“ZPG Group Condemns ‘ZPG’ Film,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 5, 1972, F12.
140
Meryle Secrest, “Parenthood Licensing Predicted,” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1972, E13.
141
See n. 86.

465
the bulk of immigration was coming from the global south, where fertility rates were higher
than in the U.S., and warned that “it is likely that immigrants will bring their customary
fertility patterns with them, at least for their generation.”142 In addition to recommending
that the U.S. and Canada enact stricter controls on legal immigration, ZPG also advocated
increased efforts to eliminate illegal immigration, arguing that “illegal immigrants should
be denied by law the benefits of legal residency, including the right to employment, public
assistance, social security, and public services.”143 Kingsley Davis, the only demographer on
ZPG’s board of directors, recommended that the U.S. institute a “migrant exchange policy,”
whereby for every U.S. immigrant received by another country, that country could send one
emigrant to the U.S.144 The Rockefeller Brothers Fund made a special donation to ZPG
to fund its anti-immigration activities.145 Despite Ehrlich’s statements that ZPG’s policy
recommendations were not intended to be racist or exclusionary — he emphasized that the
organization promoted birth limitation and immigration restriction across the board — ZPG
became increasingly associated in the public mind not only with authoritarianism, but also
with racism and exclusion.146
The Holt International Children’s Fund critiqued ZPG’s position on immigration in 1974,
with its executive director writing to Ehrlich, “I find it difficult to understand when an
organization, with the fundamentally humanitarian stature of Zero Population Growth, can
take this nationalistic turn to what is essentially a global problem.”147 In 1975, Scott Young of
Toronto’s Globe and Mail referred to ZPG as “Apartheid Canada Limited.”148 When critics
pointed out that immigration restriction would not affect population growth at the global
level, ZPG’s leaders pointed to the higher per-capita rates of resource depletion and pollution
generation in the U.S. and Canada than in the global south, arguing that individuals would
142
See n. 86.
143
“ZPG Immigration Policy Recommendation,” 1975,folder 4, box 3, series 4.
144
Oppenheim, see n. 105.
145
Susan Jacoby, “Anti-Immigration Campaign Begun,” The Washington Post, May 8, 1977, 5.
146
See, for example, Norman Hartley, “Immigration Curb Plea Defended By Sponsors,” The Globe and
Mail, Apr. 25, 1975, 2.
147
John Adams to Paul R. Ehrlich, Oct. 3, 1974,folder 1, box 3, series 4.
148
Scott Young, “The ZPG Scare,” The Globe and Mail, Apr. 25, 1975, 31.

466
have less of an impact on the environment if they remained in the global south rather than
migrating to the global north, again citing the fallacious “per capita solution,” which will
be critiqued in greater detail below.
Together, Moore and Draper’s environmental advertisements, Paul Ehrlich’s The Popu-
lation Bomb, and the publicity of ZPG brought the environmental overpopulation discourse
into the public view. It presented population growth as a powerfully simple explanation, not
only for poverty and strife in the global south, but for poverty, strife, pollution, and resource
depletion worldwide, including in the United States. It attributed the traffic, smog, racial
tensions, crime, political polarization, and suburban sprawl that were coming to character-
ize the U.S. to population growth, not just among the poor and nonwhite, but also among
wealthy consumers. This discourse attracted support from both ends of the increasingly
divided political spectrum, with the right wing seeing in population control a solution to
growing government expenditures on welfare, municipal services, and policing, as well as a
justification to limit immigration, and the left wing seeing in population control an answer
to poverty, warfare, and environmental degradation.

6.2 Counterdiscourses of Population and the Environ-

ment

In addition to declining U.S. fertility, another reason for ZPG’s falling numbers in the early
1970s was the growing realization of grassroots members that even the immediate achieve-
ment of population stationarity would likely not reverse the trend of environmental degrada-
tion and depletion of non-renewable resources, which had increased much more rapidly than
had population in recent decades.149 This public awareness was fueled by well-publicized
opposition to Ehrlich’s work and to the ZPG program by scientists in several fields. On an
Australian talk show in 1971, agricultural economist Colin Clark pointed out that Ehrlich’s
149
Shirley Radl to Edgar Chasteen, n.d.,folder 1, box 1, series 4; “Clipping from Newsweek,” n.d.,folder 7,
box 16, series 1.

467
claim in The Population Bomb that food production in the global south fell further behind
population growth every year was simply incorrect according to the data of the U.N. Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO).150 Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
explicitly refuted many of Ehrlich’s assertions in his 1971 bestseller The Closing Circle. De-
mographers were particularly critical of Ehrlich and ZPG, arguing that the U.S. was in no
way overpopulated, that pollution had advanced much more rapidly than population over
the most recent decades, and that engineering an immediate end to population growth in
the U.S. would require draconian measures and have detrimental effects on the country’s
age structure. This section examines these critiques of the environmental overpopulation
discourse.

6.2.1 Biological Counterdiscourses

Ehrlich’s most visible and vocal critic from the natural sciences was Barry Commoner, a
biologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Commoner had been born in New York in
1917 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, and grew up in an environment of radical social
activism.151 In contrast to Ehrlich, who sought to distance himself from charges of radical
leftism, Commoner’s politics were avowedly socialist, and he aimed to make the environ-
ment part of a broader social revolution.152 Commoner earned an undergraduate degree in
zoology at Columbia University in 1937 and a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University in
1941.153 He served in the U.S. navy in World War II. Afterward, he became a professor of
plant physiology at Washington University in St. Louis and an editor at Science Illustrated
magazine. In 1966, he established the interdisciplinary Center for Biology of Natural Sys-
150
“Monday Conference, Australian Broadcasting Commission,” Aug. 30, 1971,folder 64, box 2, series 5.
151
Rupert Cornwell, “Barry Commoner: Scientist Who Forced Environmentalism into the World’s Con-
sciousness,” The Independent, Oct. 6, 2012, url: [Link]
barry - commoner - scientist - who - forced - environmentalism - into - the - worlds - consciousness -
[Link].
152
Eagan, see n. 30, 185, 187.
153
It is possible to imagine that Commoner overlapped with Franz Boas at Columbia University.

468
tems, which aimed to study the environment in its entirety.154 He was an outspoken critic of
nuclear weapons, and research he did on the accumulation of strontium-90 in babies’ teeth
helped secure passage of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.155 Like Ehrlich, Commoner saw
links between ecosystem degradation, poverty, and civil rights, but he attributed these to
structural factors — particularly industrial processes and the failure of their regulation —
rather than population growth. In contrast to the leaders of ZPG, Commoner was described
in an obituary as “anything but a materialist,” practicing “frugal” habits, including using
only public transportation.156 Commoner graced the cover of Time magazine on February
2, 1970, the first issue to include a section on the environment (Figure 6.5).157 This maga-
zine appeared just a few months before the first Earth Day, signaling overwhelming public
awareness of the environmental crisis.
Commoner’s 1971 The Closing Circle was a direct retort to Ehrlich’s The Population
Bomb, albeit one that took a much more measured tone and included more scientific evi-
dence. Commoner acknowledged that ecosystem degradation had reached crisis proportions
and needed to be addressed immediately, but he sharply critiqued Ehrlich’s attribution of
environmental degradation to population growth. In a 1970 Earth Day statement at Brown
University, he declared that “environmental pollution is not to be regarded as an unfortu-
nate, but incidental, by product of the growth of population, the intensification of production,
or of technological progress. It is, rather, an intrinsic feature of the very technology which
we have developed to enhance productivity.”158 He pointed out that the rate of ecological
damage had increased dramatically since the end of World War II, with pollution levels rising
between 200% and 2000% in various areas (air, water, etc.) since 1946.
Commoner contended that this acceleration corresponded to the implementation by U.S.
industry of the scientific developments of the interwar period, many of which consisted in
154
in 1981, Commoner moved the Center to Queens College in New York. Cornwell, see n. 151.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid.
157
“Fighting to Save the Earth from Man,” Time, Feb. 2, 1970.
158
Quoted in Eagan, see n. 30, 169-170.

469
 Figure 6.5: Cover of Time magazine, February 2, 1970.

synthesizing new molecules and materials that had no place in the ecosystem.159 The pro-
duction of these materials used vastly more power and created more pollution than did
the use of their natural counterparts, and the materials themselves became pollutants once
they had been produced, as there were no mechanisms in the natural world to absorb them
or break them down. Whereas Ehrlich and other proponents of the environmental over-
population discourse contended that these technological changes had been necessitated by
population growth, Commoner attributed them to the profit motive of large corporations,
and the fact that the environmental costs of production were borne by society rather than
159
Commoner, The Closing Circle, see n. 33, 125-130.

470
industry.160 Commoner’s work challenged the environmental discourse of overpopulation by
pointing out that “environmental degradation is not simply the outcome of some general
expansive process, growth of population, or the demand for goods, but of specific changes
in the ways goods are produced, which are themselves governed by powerful economic and
political considerations.”161
Commoner tied the environmental crisis to poverty in the global south and the widen-
ing socioeconomic gap between global north and global south by demonstrating that the
synthetic products contributing to ecosystem degradation were replacing products grown
in the global south, undermining agricultural economies and particularly undercutting the
efforts of agricultural producers to obtain fair prices. Where natural products continued to
be produced, they were increasingly subject to massive use of dangerous pesticides. Citing
anthropologist Clifford Geertz, he suggested that this shift in U.S. industry to synthetic
materials not only hurt the environment — producing effects that masqueraded as a “popu-
lation problem” in the global north — but also contributed to poverty in the global south by
eviscerating markets for natural materials, slowing economic growth, increasing poverty, and
therefore producing the appearance of a “population problem” there as well.162 Commoner
also cited interwar demographic transition theory to argue that population growth was a
result of poverty in the global south, not its cause.163 Echoing the 1944 analyses of Notestein
and Davis, Commoner contended that “the population explosion is a cost of the Western
industrial society that we are so proud of.”164 To the extent that population growth did con-
tribute to environmental degradation, Commoner argued that it was because humans had
broken out of their role in the ecosystem (for example, by placing human wastes into water
rather than the soil system, of which they are a part), and contended that the environment
160
Eagan, see n. 30, 173.
161
Barry Commoner, “The World Environment: A Zero-Sum Game,” The Washington Post (June 4, 1972):
B1.
162
Commoner, The Closing Circle, see n. 33, 244.
163
Barry Commoner, “How Poverty Breeds Overpopulation and Not the Other Way Around,” Ramparts
13, no. 10 (1975): 21–25, 58–59.
164
Quoted in Eagan, see n. 30, 177.

471
was paying the costs of social and economic inequality, both within and between countries.
To support his contention that the majority of the increase in pollution since 1946 had
been caused by technological changes in U.S. industry, Commoner decomposed the increase
in pollution since 1946 into the proportions caused by population growth, changing consumer
habits, and new production methods. He found that — with the exception of automobile-
related pollution — nearly 80%-85% of the increase had been caused by postwar changes
in production processes, while only 15%-20% had been caused by population growth and
a negligible amount by changing consumer habits. In the case of automobile-related pollu-
tion, changes in production — with cars being made heavier and therefore requiring more
materials and fuel — had contributed only about 40% of the increase in pollution. The
remainder had been caused by changing consumer habits — an increase in car ownership
and distance traveled — which had contributed close to 60% of the increase in pollution.
He argued, however, that these changes had occurred in response to suburbanization and
the construction of the Interstate Highway system (and lack of investment in railways), and
were not a sign of growing affluence.165
Commoner refuted the contention that pollution was growing more rapidly than popu-
lation because the U.S. was becoming more affluent — that is, the attribution of increasing
per-capita pollution to increased per-capita consumption. While he acknowledged that con-
sumption of leisure and luxury goods had increased since 1946, per-capita consumption of
the basics — food, shelter, and clothing — had changed little, suggesting that any aggregate
increases in affluence were not shared evenly across U.S. society and therefore contributed
only a small portion of the increase in pollution.166 Commoner demonstrated further that,
to have prevented the 1946-1971 increase in pollution in the U.S. only through population
control would have required an 86% decrease in the size of the country’s population.167
This analysis roundly discredited Ehrlich’s “per capita solution” by demonstrating that
165
Commoner, The Closing Circle, see n. 33, 175; also see Commoner, “The World Environment: A Zero-
Sum Game,” see n. 161.
166
Commoner, The Closing Circle, see n. 33, 135-137.
167
Ibid., 210.

472
new industrial practices had increased Americans’ per-capita impact on the environment
without measurably increasing their well-being. In 1969, Commoner had appeared at a
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on a panel with Ehrlich
and Hardin, where he told them that “saying that none of our pollution problems can
be solved without getting at population first is a copout of the worst kind.”168 He also
critiqued the environmentalist slogan “consume less” for promoting the individualist per
capita solution, arguing that such a message would “not be very well received” by poor
Americans and especially African Americans, “who consume less than is needed to sustain
a decent life.”169 For Commoner, the causes of both poverty and pollution were structural.
One of his most famous sayings is “pollution begins not in the family bedroom, but in the
corporate board-room.”170
Commoner did not contend that population growth could continue indefinitely, but ar-
gued that regulation of production processes was much more urgent than population control.
Drawing explicitly on interwar demographic transition theory, he argued that parents would
voluntarily have fewer children if they could be guaranteed of the survival of the children
they did have. Echoing Notestein and Davis’s 1944-1945 assessments of the world popu-
lation situation, he recommended programs to further reduce infant mortality as the best
way to hasten population stationarity.171 These recommendations contrasted sharply with
calls by Ehrlich and other proponents of the environmental discourse of overpopulation for
a suspension of “death-control” measures until fertility had fallen.
Scientists in other fields accused Ehrlich of exaggerating the rapidity and gravity of
population growth, and of stepping beyond his expertise in his public statements on popu-
lation.172 John Lear, the science editor at the Saturday Review, where Ehrlich and physicist
168
Quoted in Eagan, see n. 30, 178.
169
Quoted in ibid., 185.
170
Quoted in ibid., 186.
171
Stewart Udall and Jeff Stansbury, “The Ehrlich-Commoner Rift,” 1972,folder 79, box 23, series 1.
172
T.R. Parsons, the Scientist-in-Charge of the Environmental Research Group of the Fisheries Research
Board of Canada, for example, critiqued an article Ehrlich published in the Saturday Review, titled “The
Food-from-the-Sea Myth,” pointing out that “Dr. Ehrlich is not a marine scientist, and his report was very
much a compendium of well-known works dealing with specific subjects, rather than a fair appraisal of a

473
John Holdren (currently senior science advisor to President Obama) authored a weekly col-
umn, received numerous critiques and complaints from well-known scientists that Ehrlich
and Holdren misled readers and deliberately tried to “scare people into believing they face
only one set of alternatives when in fact the true alternatives are several.”173 Lear wrote to
Ehrlich in 1971,

I beg you not to assume that, simply because you have not seen it, serious
criticism of your columns has not been received here. I cannot go into much
detail because most of it has been on a private level in telephone calls and personal
conversations with scientists I have known for many years. The critics include
major scientific figures at one end of the spectrum and, at the other, students of
yours who so far as I know have been devoted to you in the past. You are right
in supposing that I am not concerned about criticism per se. I worry about it
only where I feel there is some justification for it.174

Princeton demographer Frank Notestein made a similar critique at the 1970 meeting of
the Population Association of America (PAA), where, in an invited presentation on Zero
Population Growth, he tacitly referenced Ehrlich’s hyperbolic tactics, stating that “it is a
sad day when we see professionally expert distortions of the truth peddled to the public under
the highest scientific auspices, as if truth can be fostered best by untruth.”175 He and other
demographers feared that Ehrlich’s exaggerations regarding the rate and consequences of
population growth would anger readers who, feeling deceived, would turn against population
control altogether.
problem.” T.R. Parsons, “Response to ‘Food-from-the-sea Myth’,” 1972,folder 100, box 23, series 1.
173
John Lear to Paul R. Ehrlich, Mar. 25, 1971,folder 100, box 23, series 1.
174
Ibid.
175
Frank W. Notestein, “Zero Population Growth,” Population Index 36, no. 4 (1970): 444; Paul Demeny,
a former student of Notestein, critiqued ZPG rhetoric for “its aggressiveness in supplying a set of easily
identified villains for many or all of our troubles, its lack of self-doubt and distaste for qualification, its
capacity to see black and white where there are only shades of grey,” which “serve it well with a public that
abhors complexity and yearns for simple answers and tangible scapegoats.” Philip Hauser, Judith Blake,
and Paul Demeny, “Discussion of Notestein’s ‘Zero Population Growth’,” Population Index 36, no. 4 (1970):
464.

474
6.2.2 Demographic Counterdiscourses

With the exception of Berkeley demographers Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake, demogra-
phers — particularly those associated with the Population Council — were highly critical of
the environmental overpopulation discourse and of Ehrlich and ZPG (both the organization
and its goal). As Ehrlich wrote in a 1969 letter to Bowers, “the Population Council (or at
least its biggest wheels) hates my guts, those of Kingsley Davis, Garrett Hardin, and indeed
anyone else who has taken an approach to population control except their ‘go slow and use
family planning’ one.”176 Notestein was quite open about his opinion of Ehrlich. When asked
in 1970 to review a new book by Ehrlich and his wife Anne titled Population, Resources,
and Environment, Notestein declined, explaining “I’ve been saying such nasty things about
Ehrlich and doing so publicly, my friends would never believe I could give him an honest
break.”177 In an internal Population Council memorandum, Notestein and Council president
Bernard Berelson described ZPG as a “cult paying lip service to ecology but rather lightly
based in science and deeply rooted in emotion.”178 Nearly as soon as Ehrlich published The
Population Bomb and began calling for explicit population limitation policies in the United
States (as opposed to policies to provide birth control to the poor), demographers began
speaking out against him and against his proposed policies for the United States.
In general, demographers — particularly those with disciplinary training in economics,
such as Notestein, Coale, and Demeny — were not in favor of continued population growth
in the U.S., but expressed confidence that the market would adequately allocate increasingly
scarce resources in ways that would discourage fertility and encourage the development of
alternative resources. They also continued to assert that population growth in an already-
developed economy would lead to economic growth through increased demand. Ansley Coale
devoted his 1968 presidential address to the PAA to arguing against “a campaign for fewer
births” in the United States, pointing out that, even if U.S. population reached one billion,
176
Paul R. Ehrlich to Richard Bowers, Mar. 14, 1969,folder 8, box 4, series 4.
177
Frank W. Notestein, Otis Dudley Duncan, Apr. 11, 1970,folder 8, box 13.
178
Bernard Berelson to Frank W. Notestein, Nov. 11, 1970,folder 7, box 28.

475
the country would still be populated at a lower density than much of Europe.179 Explicitly
citing Moore’s newspaper ads and Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, Coale criticized the fact that

it has become fashionable to explain almost every national failure or shortcom-

ing by rapid population growth — the ugliness and hopelessness of slum life,
wasteful and irritating traffic jams, unemployment and delinquency among the
disturbingly large fraction of adolescents who drop out of school, the pollution
of air and water, and the disappearance of the natural beauty of our country
behind a curtain of billboards and under a blanket of kleenex and beer cans.180

In his address, Coale also refuted Hardin’s claim that childbearing was not subject to market
forces because it was subsidized by the welfare state. In contrast, Coale expressed confidence
that, with contraception and abortion universally available, “if every individual knowledge-
ably pursues his self-interest, the social interest will best be served,” arguing that rising costs
of housing and subsistence in the U.S. would cause “population growth to cease before the
Malthusian positive checks of famine and disease reassert themselves.”181
Coale inverted Ehrlich’s attribution of urban poverty and strife to high fertility, instead
arguing that “fertility in the urban ghettos will fall if discrimination is alleviated, if edu-
cational and employment opportunities are equalized.”182 He also pointed out the fallacy
of the per capita solution with regard to pollution, which did not increase in proportion to
population size. Coale therefore contended that “a population one-half or three-quarters
the size of the current one in the United States could ruin the potability of our fresh water
supplies and poison our atmosphere by the unrestricted discharge of waste.”183 Notestein
made a similar point in his 1970 PAA presentation, pointing out that energy use was grow-
ing much more rapidly than was population, stating that “if we wished to achieve the per
capita use of electricity of 1960 without increasing the total produced above the 1940 level,
we would need to reduce our United States population below 25 million,” that is, a reduction
179
Ansley J. Coale, “Should the United States Start a Campaign for Fewer Births?” Population Index 34,
no. 4 (1968): 471.
180
Ibid., 467.
181
Ibid., 468.
182
Ibid., 470.
183
Ibid., 470.

476
of approximately 86%, as Commoner would calculate independently.184 He argued further
that the focus on stopping population growth as the primary solution to the problem of
environmental degradation was “a distraction from an immediate attack on pollution” by
more direct means.185 Similarly, University of Chicago demographer Philip Hauser argued
that the ZPG movement presented “the problems of environmental pollution and the pop-
ulation explosion. . . as a smoke screen to obscure other problems that should have priority,
including the problems of the slums, racism, and the ‘urban crisis’ in general.”186
Coale and other social scientists cautioned that a rapid slowing of population growth
would shift the age distribution of the U.S. population upwards, just as Thompson and
Whelpton had pointed out in their interwar projections of population stationarity.187 In the
1973 book The Genetic Fix, Columbia University sociologist Amitai Etzioni warned that
fertility decline would make the entire country resemble Florida by increasing the median
age of the population.188 Borrowing from a French writer, Coale described this scenario as
“old people ruminating over old ideas in old houses,”189 though Hauser argued that such a
shift in the age distribution could “solve some of the present problems relating to youth.”190
Coale and Etzioni warned that slower population growth would also have a negative effect on
economic growth, making poverty more difficult to alleviate. Etzioni argued that, even with
population stationarity, differential birth rates between the poor and middle classes would
“intensify social conflict because there are going to be children with fewer resources de-
manding their share.”191 Such arguments tacitly assumed the impossibility of redistribution
184
Notestein, “Zero Population Growth,” see n. 175, 446.
185
Ibid., 447.
186
Hauser, Blake, and Demeny, see n. 175, 455.
187
Coale issued similar warnings about the one-child policy enacted in China in 1979. Ansley J. Coale,
“Population Trends, Population Policy, and Population Studies in China,” Population and Development
Review 7, no. 1 (1981): 85–97.
188
“Zero Population Growth is Viewed as Unattainable — and Undesirable,” The New York Times, Aug. 13,
1973, A7.
189
Coale, “Should the United States Start a Campaign for Fewer Births?” See n. 179, 471.
190
Hauser, Blake, and Demeny, see n. 175, 455.
191
Etzioni also posited that raising the living conditions of the poorest Americans was easier in a growing
economy, where increases in the income of the poorest could come from that growth rather than from
redistribution., see n. 188.

477
of resources between the poor and wealthy.
Demographers attributed such problems as urban crowding, traffic, and pollution not to
aggregate population growth, but rather to the geographical unevenness of population growth
resulting from internal migration. They pointed out that migration from rural to urban areas
had caused cities and suburbs to swell rapidly while rural areas found their populations
dwindling, particularly in the productive and reproductive ages, slowing economic growth
and increasing old-age dependency ratios. In January 1971, Conrad Taeuber, Census Bureau
demographer and supervisor of the 1970 Census (and husband of Princeton demographer
Irene Taeuber), discussed these issues in a 1971 speech at Mount Holyoke College, where
he argued that “economic and social factors are more important than population growth
in threatening the quality of American life.”192 A summary of his speech published in the
New York Times informed readers that “the Government’s chief professional demographer
took public issue today with the view that population growth is the major challenge to the
quality of life in America.”193
While no demographer denied that the United States and the world as a whole were
experiencing an environmental crisis, most attributed this crisis to mismanagement of world
resources rather than population growth. Even those who advocated economic growth in
the global south as a means of alleviating poverty, such as Coale, attributed environmental
degradation to “the growth of our economy rather than that of our population, combined with
a total disregard of the environmental consequences of economic activities.”194 He and other
demographers — including Frank Notestein — did not recommend limiting economic growth
as a means of mitigating pollution, but instead recommended that market mechanisms be
put into place to make manufacturers responsible for the pollution caused by production or
consumption of their goods.195 Notestein expressed strong faith in the possibility of nuclear
192
See n. 149.
193
Rosenthal, “Census Expert Discounts Population Growth Issue,” see n. 52.
194
Ansley J. Coale, “Untitled speech,” 1975,folder 9, box 12, 2.
195
Coale, “Untitled speech,” see n. 194, 3; Ansley J. Coale, “How Important is Population? - Presented to
the Environmental Council,” 1972,folder 12, box 10; Notestein, “Zero Population Growth,” see n. 175, 446.

478
research to provide clean, cheap, and renewable energy in the near future. While Coale
argued that nonrenewable resources should be priced so as to reflect their scarcity, Notestein
argued that resources that were then scarce might no longer be considered resources in the
future, when they had been replaced by cheaper, more efficient, or more plentiful resources.
He declared that “resources are not material,” but rather “socially defined,” pointing out
that coal and petroleum had only become resources when they became integral to the global
economy.196 These market-based solutions to environmental problems would gain popularity
in the 1980s, as will be discussed in Chapter Seven.
Demographers also continued to urge that childbearing be regulated by the market rather
than by the legislative imposition of quotas or other forms of child rationing proposed by
Ehrlich. Their market-based approach to childbearing reflected both a reaction against
the authoritarianism associated with non-market allocation mechanisms and the traces of
Frederick Osborn’s free-market eugenics program, introduced in Chapter Two. In his 1968
presidential address to the PAA, Coale spoke favorably of the interwar eugenics program
of the Swedish government, also described in Chapter Two, which had inspired Osborn’s
program.197 He described an ideal population policy in which antifertility agents were added
to public water supplies and the antidote sold at a price controlled by the government to
produce an ideal birthrate. He lauded this hypothetical system for promoting higher levels
of childbearing among the wealthy without penalizing the poor for unplanned births.198
Coale recognized that such a policy would be possible only in science fiction, but described
it nonetheless “to characterize, even if in an unrealistic fashion, features that one would
like to find in a program for regulating fertility.”199 While Coale and other demographers
associated with the Population Council supported many of the same causes ZPG supported
— such as universal availability of contraception and abortion and increased educational and
occupational opportunities for women — they opposed ZPG’s proposals for the universal
196
Notestein, “Zero Population Growth,” see n. 175, 445.
197
Coale, “Should the United States Start a Campaign for Fewer Births?” See n. 179, 473.
198
Ibid., 473-474.
199
Ibid., 474.

479
adoption of a one- or two-child norm — either through policy or through propaganda — as
both dysgenic and counter to the free market.200 Osborn continued to promote his eugenics
program until 1972, when the American Eugenics Society changed its name to the Society for
the Study of Social Biology (currently the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology);
prominent demographers remained closely associated with the Society and Osborn’s eugenic
thought seems to have remained a major influence.
Yet these demographers did not suggest that markets could not or should not be managed
by governments, nongovernmental organizations, or intergovernmental agencies to produce
desired results. Coale’s fantasy population policy involved governments manipulating the
price of the antifertility antidote so as to shape population growth in desired ways. As dis-
cussed in Chapter Two, Osborn supported demographic research specifically for its potential
to produce insight into how childbearing decisions were made so that the social context
in which those decisions were made could be manipulated in order to produce a “eugenic”
distributions of births. The Population Council’s work in the global south, described in
Chapters Four and Five, aimed to provide couples with the freedom and technology neces-
sary to control their family size, while also encouraging them to see children as consumer
goods and manipulating the economic and social environment in which childbearing deci-
sions were made.201 Indeed, the very concept of demographic transition depended on the
idea of parents viewing childbearing as part of a complex economic calculation with different
tradeoffs in pre-transitional and post-transitional societies. Similarly, economically-oriented
demographers associated with the Population Council viewed environmental degradation as
a market failure. The environmental costs of production and consumption, they argued,
were externalities that needed to be integrated into the cost of production and consumption,
and doing so would require actively creating a market for pollution and its remediation, as
200
Coale, “Should the United States Start a Campaign for Fewer Births?” See n. 179, 474; in 1970, Berkeley
demographer Judith Blake critiqued Notestein’s championship of reproductive freedom “at the expense of
any other values and freedoms that might get in the way” Hauser, Blake, and Demeny, see n. 175, 457.
201
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, “Commission on International Development
Meeting of Experts on Population Problems,” Nov. 8, 1968,“World Bank, Washington,” box AD25, accession
2.

480
President George H.W. Bush would begin to do with the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.202
Existing histories of population thought and politics in the United States do discuss some
of these critiques of the environmental overpopulation discourse, particularly Commoner’s,
but neglect the specific critique of this discourse leveled by demographers.203 Attention to
demographers’ critiques of claims that the U.S. was overpopulated and that population
growth posed a major threat to environmental quality indicate that overpopulation hysteria
— or Malthusianism, as many historians describe it — was not monolithic. It came in
different forms, with different types of scientists, philanthropists, and activists promoting
each, though some promoted more than one. Teasing out these differences allows insight
into how, when, by whom, and for what purposes specific overpopulation discourses were
constructed, shedding light on the general phenomenon of postwar anxiety about impending
global overpopulation.

6.3 The American Future and Limits to Growth

Two large-scale projects with major publications in 1972 also contributed to the environmen-
tal overpopulation discourse: Population Growth and the American Future, a commission
appointed by President Nixon to examine the potential consequences of population growth
in the U.S., and Limits to Growth, a systems modeling project commissioned by a group of
intellectuals and businessmen known as the Club of Rome. On the surface, both projects
seemed to offer support to both economic and environmental overpopulation discourses, and
were touted as demonstrations of the dangers of continued population growth. However,
though a closer reading of each, I argue in this section that they generated uncertainties
about the consequences of population growth and revealed alternative causes for the so-
cial ills that proponents of overpopulation discourses had attributed to population growth,
destabilizing the very discourses that they initially aimed to support.
202
Sabin, see n. 13, 192.
203
See, for example, Robertson, see n. 12, 181-184.

481
6.3.1 Population Growth and the American Future

President Nixon appointed the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future
(PGAF) in 1970, after considerable prodding from William Henry Draper Jr. and from
John D. Rockefeller III, who testified before the House of Representatives that “there is no
problem facing mankind today more important than the population problem” and “there
is very little being done anywhere in the world that is commensurate with the magnitude
and seriousness of the problem.”204 Just as Ehrlich had argued in The Population Bomb,
Rockefeller contended that population growth in the U.S. posed a threat to “the quality
of life.”205 He also echoed Ehrlich’s suggestion that “U.S. aid would be received with less
reserve if we indicate our recognition that we too have a population problem and are in fact
taking tangible steps to do something about it.”206
John D. Rockefeller III chaired the Commission and the Population Council exercised
subtle power over the selection of members, who included Ford Foundation executive vice
president David E. Bell, Population Council president Bernard Berelson, Senators Alan
Cranston and Bob Packwood, and U.S. Representatives John N. Erlenborn and James H.
Scheuer.207 Demographer Charles Westoff, then associate director of Princeton’s Office of
Population Research, served as executive director of the Commission’s technical staff.208
Consultants included biologists Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner; demographers Ansley
Coale, Kingsley Davis, Richard Easterlin, Frank Notestein, Norman Ryder, Joseph Spengler,
J. Mayone Stycos, and Conrad and Irene Taeuber; economists Stephen Enke, Edgar Hoover,
204
John D. Rockefeller III, “Statement of John D. Rockefeller 3rd at hearings on S. 2701, to establish
a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Executive and Legislative Reorganization
Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, house of Representatives,” Nov. 19, 1969,folder
134, box 22, record group IV3B4.7, 2.
205
Ibid., 3.
206
Ibid., 4.
207
John D. Rockefeller III to Bernard Berelson, Dec. 30, 1971,folder 478, box 71, sub-series 4, series
3, record group 5; “Population Growth and America’s Future: A Family Planning Perspectives Special
Feature,” Family Planning Perspectives 3, no. 2 (1971): 45–52.
208
Charles F. Westoff, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Population and Census, Committee on Post
Office and Civil Service, U.S. House of Representatives,” Oct. 23, 1975,folder 492, box 72, sub-series 4, series
3, record group 5.

482
and Harvey Leibenstein; and Population Council staffers Sheldon Segal, Christopher Tietze,
and Stephen Viederman. These Commission members and consultants had been major
contributors to the economic and environmental overpopulation discourses.
In the message to Congress in which he announced the creation of the Commission, Nixon
began with the narrative of population growth that had become standard among proponents
of both economic and environmental discourses of overpopulation:

In 1830 there were one billion people on the planet earth. By 1930 there were
two billion, and by 1960 there were three billion. To-day the world population
is three and one-half billion persons. These statistics illustrate the dramatically
increasing rate of population growth. It took many thousands of years to produce
the first billion people; the next billion took a century; the third came after 30
years; the fourth will be produced in just 15. If this rate of population growth
continues, it is likely that the earth will contain over seven billion human beings
by the end of this century. Over the next 30 years, in other words, the world’s
population could double. And at the end of that time, each new addition of one
billion persons would not come over the millennia nor over a century nor even
over a decade. If present trends were to continue until the year 2000, the eighth
billion would be added in only five years and each additional billion in an even
shorter period.209

This constant-rate pseudo-projection, like those in Moore and Draper’s ads and ZPG liter-
ature, were not intended to actually describe future population, but rather to justify taking
action to control population growth. By assuming constant fertility into the future, Nixon
produced numbers that were much higher than those generated by U.N. projections, which
accounted for expected demographic transition. Nixon’s statement suggests that his agree-
ment to appoint the Commission was prompted by considerable hyperbole on the part of
Draper and other advisors. Moreover, although Nixon tasked the Commission only with
analyzing potential growth of the U.S. population, he justified its creation by pointing to
poverty and hunger in the global south and attributing these serious problems to rapid pop-
ulation growth worldwide. His call for increased research on birth control technology and
demography also suggests the influence of the Population Council on his speech, though
209
Richard Nixon, “Message to Congress on World Planning of Population Growth,” n.d.,folder 19, box 16,
series 1.

483
the Council usually counseled against the use of hyperbolic claims about future population
growth.210
The Commission was explicitly charged with projecting U.S. population from 1970 to 2000
and estimating “the public resources that would be required to deal with the anticipated
growth,. . . the effects of growth on the activities of government at all levels, and. . . the effects
of growth on environmental pollution and on natural resources.”211 It was also asked to
recommend “various means appropriate to the ethical values and principles of this society
by which our Nation can achieve a population level properly suited for its environmental,
natural resources, and other needs.”212 Between 1970 and 1972, with the assistance of a staff
of social scientists at times as large as 20, the Commission heard testimony in five cities
across the U.S. and fielded a nationally-representative public opinion poll, carried out by
Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey. The Commission spent about half
of its $1.5 million budget on contract research by social scientists — primarily demographers
— with contractors explicitly asked to contrast outcomes for a scenario in which the average
American family had three children to outcomes for a scenario in which the average American
family had two children.213 These instructions indicated the recognition by demographers and
other experts that fertility was the main factor influencing U.S. population growth and that it
was largely under the conscious control of individuals and couples. The resulting projections
indicated that, with an average of three children per couple, U.S. population would reach 300
million in 1996 and 400 million in 2014; with only two children, U.S. population would reach
300 million in 2021; with its then-current rates of childbearing (approximately 2.5 children
per couple), U.S. population would reach 300 million in 2008.214 The Commission’s public
opinion survey found an overwhelming preference for a two-child family, with at least one
210
Nixon, see n. 209.
211
Westoff, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Population and Census, Committee on Post Office and
Civil Service, U.S. House of Representatives,” see n. 208, 3.
212
Ibid., 4.
213
Ibid., 4-5.
214
All three scenarios assumed that immigration would continue at its 1970 levels., see n. 207, 46.

484
child of each sex.215 In addition to the final report, Population and the American Future,
published in 1972, the Commission released an interim report in 1971 and published seven
volumes of research papers.216
Initially, Rockefeller and the members of his Commission believed that population growth
was responsible for many of the problems Moore attributed to it in his advertising campaign
and Ehrlich and ZPG attributed to it in their literature: pollution, poverty, crime, and
racial tensions.217 In June 1971, Commission member and Senator Alan Cranston, with
support from his fellow Commission member and Senator Bob Packwood, introduced a
resolution to the Senate (S.J. 108) calling for population stabilization.218 The belief that
population growth needed to be stopped also seems to have been fairly prevalent among the
general U.S. public: the Commission’s public opinion survey found that 65% of respondents
characterized population growth in the U.S. as “a serious problem,” with only 7% stating
it was “not a problem at all.”219 However, respondents generally ranked other problems
as being more serious than population growth, including pollution, racial discrimination,
poverty, and crime. 66% of respondents stated that adding another 100 million to the U.S.
population would be “too much,” but only about 25% of respondents could accurately state
the then-current U.S. population.220 When asked if the federal government should “try to
do anything to slow down population growth in the United States,” 56% said it should, and
50% felt that the number of immigrants should be reduced, but 68% said that tax policy
215
When asked “the ideal number of children a family should have,” 43% of respondents stated two, 22%
stated three, 16% stated four children, and no more than 2% stated any other number “Opinion Research
Corporation Survey No. 51039, enclosed in letter from Jerry Lipson and Diane Wolman to the members
of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,” Sept. 14, 1971,folder 443, box 67,
sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5, 2.
216
Westoff, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Population and Census, Committee on Post Office and
Civil Service, U.S. House of Representatives,” see n. 208, 4.
217
Robert Parke Jr., “Hearings on Senator Cranston’s Resolution, S.J. 108,” July 6, 1971,folder 447, box
67, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5.
218
Robert Parke Jr. to Commission PGAF, June 8, 1971,folder 447, box 67, sub-series 4, series 3, record
group 5.
219
26% characterized population growth in the U.S. as “not so serious a problem” and 2% stated no opinion.,
see n. 215, 2-3.
220
Ibid., 4-5.

485
should neither encourage nor discourage childbearing.221
In a press conference on March 17, 1971 announcing the release of the Commission’s
interim report, Rockefeller and his Commission stated a “general feeling among the commis-
sioners that population stabilization is desirable as a long-run goal.”222 They acknowledged
that food was not likely ever to become scarce in the U.S. — even with an average family
size of three children — and that population growth was not the main cause of environmen-
tal degradation, but argued that continued rapid population growth “could well magnify
problems arising from the way we use our resources and technology.”223 However, the Com-
mission stated its position that population stationarity should be pursued not as an end in
itself, but rather as “a means to facilitate the achievement of other social goals,” including
“improvements in the status of women, in the socioeconomic conditions of disadvantaged
minorities, and in the health and opportunities of children.”224 The report also emphasized
that a two-child average family size would not require a two-child uniform family size, leav-
ing room for both large families and childless couples, an implicit nod to Osborn’s eugenics
program. Nonetheless, the leaders of the Population Crisis Committee and Zero Population
Growth were encouraged by this report.225 ZPG founder Richard Bowers subsequently wrote
to the members of the Commission, urging them to adopt a timeline for the U.S. to reach
a stationary population and suggesting that such a timeline could serve as “a type of self-
fulfilling prophesy,” much as Donald Bogue had argued of his highly-criticized projections
of the 1960s, described in Chapter Five.226
Over the next year, however, as members of the Commission reviewed the research pro-
duced by their contractors and heard testimony from experts and community leaders, they
221
See n. 215, 7, 9. Records do not indicate the total number of respondents, but they do show that 53%
were female (47% male) and 89% were white (10% were black and 1% were another race).
222
Andrew P. O’Meara, “Letter to members of the Population Crisis Committee,” Mar. 24, 1971,folder 47,
box 40, series 1.
223
See n. 207, 49.
224
Ibid., 51.
225
O’Meara, see n. 222.
226
Richard Bowers, “ZPG Appeal to the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,”
1971,folder 33, box 44, series 1.

486
learned two things. First, they learned that, despite the development of new contraceptive
technologies in the last decade — the Pill and the IUD — and despite the passage of the
Family Planning and Population Research Act in 1970, Americans did not have complete
control over their fertility, and were still having more children than they wanted. Second,
they heard from leaders of the African American community that problems such as poverty
and discriminatory provision of public services were in no way caused by overpopulation,
and that African Americans in general “regarded talk of zero population growth as genocide
aimed at them,” particularly when government-sponsored family planning clinics appeared
in neighborhoods that otherwise lacked health care services.227 The fact that the 1970 Fam-
ily Planning and Population Research Act specifically targeted the fertility of the poorest
women also created the impression that “the government is trying to use birth control to
eliminate the poorest and blackest elements of society,” rather than dealing directly with
poverty and racial discrimination.228
The Commission’s hearings provided opportunities for poor and nonwhite Americans to
address the population concerns of the white middle and upper classes. Eugene S. Callen-
der, President of the New York Urban Coalition, told the Commission that the hyperbolic
vignettes of an overpopulated future that had become ubiquitous in population control lit-
erature actually described the current conditions of most African Americans, stating that
“for many of us, living in cramped quarters, collecting minimal salaries for dead-end jobs,
the future holds no fears we are not facing today.”229 Speaking to calls by ZPG for fertility
reduction to preserve American living standards, he stated — much as Commoner had pre-
dicted — that “minority people can not begin to consider a threat to a life-style which they
do not share” and “will not countenance any further moves to limit their freedom so that
white America can live securely.”230 He informed the Commission that leaders of the black
227
“Black Genocide Seen,” The New York Times, Apr. 16, 1971.
228
Carol T. Foreman to John D. Rockefeller III, Oct. 21, 1971,folder 443, box 67, sub-series 4, series 3,
record group 5, 1.
229
Eugene S. Callender, “Population Control and Black Survival,” Sept. 28, 1971,folder 443, box 67, sub-
series 4, series 3, record group 5, 5.
230
Ibid., 6.

487
community would not even consider taking a position on population growth until they had
achieved “the end to all conditions — economic and social — which are decimating our pop-
ulation,” including “the ingrained racism which breeds indifference or overt hostility towards
minority people.”231 Speaking to resource depletion, he stated that “at this point, minorities
use such a small percentage of America’s resources that our only concern should be with
receiving a more equal portion.”232 In its final report, the PGAF Commission, rather than
attributing poverty among African Americans to too-large families, as the interim report had
suggested, instead recognized that “the presently high fertility of deprived minority groups,
while not substantially threatening the common goal, is best attributed to their historic
exclusion from the mainstream of American life with regard to education, housing, jobs, and
income. When that major discrepancy is removed, their fertility will almost certainly come
into balance with the majority’s level, to the advantage of both.”233
At the same time, the members of the Commission learned that, for many Americans —
particularly African Americans, poor Americans, and those with less education — childbear-
ing was still not entirely voluntary. Advance results of the 1970 National Fertility Survey,
provided to the PGAF Commission by Norman Ryder and Charles Westoff of Princeton’s
Office of Population Research, indicated that unplanned pregnancies resulting in unwanted
births were still fairly common among the women surveyed. They were more prevalent
among black women than among white women, and more prevalent among women with less
education and lower incomes. Black women with no high school, on average, reported that
43% of the births they had had were unwanted; black women with household incomes of less
than $4,000 per year reported that 48% of births were unwanted.234 Members of the PGAF
Commission learned that the Family Planning and Population Research Act was not being
adequately funded, with a means test limiting service provision to women with household
231
Callender, see n. 229, 5-6.
232
Ibid., 6.
233
Westoff, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Population and Census, Committee on Post Office and
Civil Service, U.S. House of Representatives,” see n. 208, 7-8.
234
Norman B. Ryder and Charles F. Westoff, “1970 National Fertility Study: Preliminary Statistics,”
1971,folder 443, box 67, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5.

488
incomes under the $4,200 poverty line.235 In his testimony to the Commission, Deputy Mayor
of New York Timothy Costello reported that 1,800 of the approximately 3,000 counties in
the United States provided no family planning services whatsoever, as was the case for 90%
of the country’s nonprofit general care hospitals.236
Even for women who could afford family planning services, contraceptive technology was
still not ideal. Feminist groups, including Planned Parenthood, expressed a need in the U.S.
for the same types of contraceptive technologies Reimert Ravenholt of USAID desired for the
global south: birth control that was “not coitus-related” and did not require a prescription
or medical supervision, and “a medically safe abortifacient that can be simply administered
with minimal medical supervision.”237 The experience of population control programs in
the global south had demonstrated that women preferred systemic contraceptives that they
could administer themselves — that is, the Pill rather than the IUD — and that women
were more likely to use these contraceptives if they did not require a prescription or doctor
visit.238
Under Ravenholt’s leadership, USAID shifted the emphasis of its population programs
from the IUD to the Pill and initiated a program to deliver birth control pills to couples
in their homes. USAID contracted with various U.S. pharmaceutical companies to provide
the pills, packaging them in white envelopes decorated with a woman’s silhouette in blue.239
This standard packaging allowed USAID to maintain “brand continuity,” while retaining
the freedom to contract with the lowest bidder. Going from house to house in male-female
pairs, fieldworkers would give a three-month supply of the “Blue Lady Pills” to anyone who
235
Foreman to III, Oct. 21, 1971, see n. 228, 1-2; Carol T. Foreman to Commission PGAF, Oct. 11,
1971,folder 443, box 67, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5.
236
Timothy Costello, “Testimony Delivered by Deputy Mayor Timothy Costello for Mayor John V. Lindsay,
Before the President’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,” Sept. 27, 1972,folder
443, box 67, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5, 1.
237
Alfred F. Moran, “Statement Presented to the Commission on Population Growth and the American
Future,” Sept. 27, 1971,folder 443, box 67, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5, 3.
238
“Victor-Bostrom Fund Report for International Planned Parenthood Federation,” 1970,folder 105, box
23, series 1.
239
“Adrienne Germain, Interview with Rebecca Sharpless for the Population and Reproductive Health Oral
History Project,” June 19, 2003,url: [Link]
[Link], 53.

489
demonstrated interest. Ravenholt argued that, once couples had the pills, they would begin
discussing whether or not to use them. It was immaterial to him whether the couple began
using the pills immediately or at some point in the future, or even if they gave their own
pills to a friend or neighbor who had run out, as long as the distribution program resulted in
the development of “a cadre of successful pill-takers in the population.”240 While this non-
medical approach to the delivery of systemic contraceptives perhaps suggests a lower degree
of concern by the U.S. government for the health of women in the global south than for
women in the U.S., where oral contraceptives required a prescription, it also made effective
birth control more readily available to them.
Access to abortion was also much more difficult in the United States than it was in some
other parts of the world. Abortion on demand became available in New York in 1970. Within
the next year, approximately 167,000 abortions had been performed in New York City alone,
demonstrating a large demand for this medical service. Yet, even after the legalization of
abortion in New York in 1970 and in the U.S. as a whole in 1973, it remained a medical
procedure that could be performed only by a doctor in a hospital or clinic. In 1971, members
of a Los Angeles feminist health collective had adapted a method of manual-suction uterine
aspiration from illegal abortionist Harvey Karman.241 Calling it “menstrual extraction,” the
collective promoted the technique — using equipment that could easily be assembled from
readily-available materials — as a “home health care procedure” women could practice on
themselves or one another to extract the contents of the uterus on the date of an expected
period, thereby avoiding both menstruation and pregnancy.242 Menstrual extraction resided
in a legal gray area in the United States, as it was not an abortion: it evacuated the contents
of the uterus before a pregnancy test (of the 1970 variety) could indicate whether she was
pregnant or not.243
240
See n. 204, 108.
241
Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Techno-
science (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 157.
242
Ibid., 158.
243
Ibid., 150.

490
 Despite the questionable legality of menstrual extraction in the United States, Ravenholt
adapted it further for use in the global south. While, as Michelle Murphy has pointed
out, menstrual extraction was defined by its user-built apparatus,244 very similar devices
were mass-produced in Kansas under contract by the U.S. government at $8.70 apiece for
distribution by USAID in the global south as “menstrual regulation” kits.245 Menstrual
regulation, just like menstrual extraction, allowed the contents of the uterus to be aspirated
before a pregnancy could be medically confirmed, thereby skirting abortion laws where the
procedure was illegal. Representatives of USAID spoke of menstrual regulation in vague
terms, stating that it “can affect the possibility of a pregnancy” and, when asked if it
was equivalent to abortion, insisting that “abortion is not a clearly defined legal term.”246
Unlike menstrual extraction, menstrual regulation was usually performed by health-care
professionals, but Ravenholt pointed out that the kits were easy and safe enough to use that
the procedure could be performed by nurses or midwives rather than doctors, or even by
women on themselves. In 1973, the Helms Amendment to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act
prevented USAID from providing pregnancy termination services, at which point Ravenholt
enlisted the support of the Mellon Foundation to continue USAID’s menstrual regulation
program.247
Also in the early 1970s, USAID funded research into the development of “a nontoxic
and completely effective substance which, when self-administered by a woman, on a single
occasion would ensure the non-pregnant state at the completion of a monthly cycle.”248
Ravenholt considered such a product — something midway between a once-a-month oral
contraceptive and an abortion pill that did not require medical supervision — to be the ideal
form of birth control, for both the global south and the United States. In testimony before the
244
The Del-em Menstrual Extraction Device was patented, but not available for sale; users made their own
according to instructions provided by its inventors. See drawing in Murphy, see n. 241, 158.
245
See n. 204, 121; See drawing in Murphy, see n. 241, 151.
246
“National Commission for the Observance of World Population Year – First Meeting,” July 31,
1974,folder 15, box 29, 2.
247
See n. 204, 123.
248
Ibid., 124.

491
Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Alfred F. Moran, Executive
Vice President of Planned Parenthood for New York City, pointed out that such an ideal
contraceptive was still nowhere on the horizon for U.S. women. Effective systemic methods
of birth control were still expensive and controlled by doctors, and therefore unavailable to
couples who could not afford to see a doctor or to young women who could not seek medical
care without parental consent. Moran called for funding for new, simpler, safer, and more
effective forms of birth control that did not require medical supervision, as well as legislation
that would allow teenagers to obtain effective birth control without parental consent and the
provision of sex education in schools and by other agencies that served youth.249
Members of PGAF learned that even information about contraception was still difficult to
obtain, particularly for young women and couples. Hariette Surovell, a high school student
and chair of the New York High School Women’s Coalition, testified before the PGAF
Commission that “our curriculum is severely lacking in a topic that is of vital concern to
a large percentage of high school students; namely, contraception.”250 Surovell herself had
compiled information on contraception and on birth control and STD clinics that served
minors for her peers, as their school was not providing such information. She estimated
that she was approached at school by an average of four girls each week who “thought they
were pregnant, their sisters were pregnant, or their friends were pregnant,” and who “had no
idea that a simple, low-cost test for pregnancy exists.”251 She continued that many “don’t
even have a clear picture of how babies are made.”252 Moreover, as Betty Rollin, editor
of Look Magazine, pointed out, women still had few alternatives to motherhood, and few
realized that it was not compulsory. She argued for “legislation that improves the lot of
women professionally” as an important counter to the social “motherhood myth,” which
taught women that “no matter what kind of career thoughts they have, first and foremost
249
Moran, see n. 237, 3.
250
Hariette Surovell, “Testimony before the Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the Amer-
ican Future,” Sept. 27, 1971,folder 443, box 67, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5, 1.
251
Ibid., 3.
252
Ibid., 4.

492
they must be wives and mothers.253 The Commission’s public opinion survey demonstrated
broad support for sex education, contraceptive availability, and abortion: 87% stated that
information about birth control should be made available by the government, 62% favored
sex education in schools (including information about contraception), and only 6% stated
that abortion should be “not permitted under any circumstances.”254
Ultimately, the Commission found that the social and political costs of producing im-
mediate population stationarity outweighed “the ‘costs’ of the most likely magnitudes of
population growth for the U.S. to the year 2000.”255 Its final report recommended that “the
nation welcome and plan for a stabilized population,” but did not recommend any policies
specifically aimed at bringing about population stationarity.256 Following the suggestion of
Princeton demographer Charles Westoff, the report began by reviewing the evidence for and
against continued population growth, concluding that stationarity was preferable to contin-
ued growth.257 The report acknowledged that Americans had always valued and promoted
population growth as a means to national security and economic prosperity, but stated that
economic development and technological progress had eliminated the need for continually-
growing populations. However, most members of the Commission agreed on the desirability
of population stationarity only if its achievement did not “in any way interfere with the
desires, aspirations, and needs of any family concerning its size or number.”258 In contrast
to ZPG, which recommended that pro-natalist tax policies be replaced with anti-natalist tax
policies, the PGAF report recommended that pro-natalist policies be replaced by policies
that were neutral toward childbearing.259 Unsurprisingly, given its close connections to the
253
Betty Rollin, “Testimony before the Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American
Future,” 1971,folder 443, box 67, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5, emphasis in the original.
254
See n. 215, 8-9.
255
Charles F. Westoff, “Further Reflections on Population Policy,” Sept. 17, 1971,folder 443, box 67, sub-
series 4, series 3, record group 5, 1.
256
Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population and the American
Future: The Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (Chicago: Signet,
1972), 192.
257
Westoff, “Further Reflections on Population Policy,” see n. 255, 2.
258
Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, see n. 256, 266.
259
Westoff, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Population and Census, Committee on Post Office and
Civil Service, U.S. House of Representatives,” see n. 208, 11.

493
Population Council, the Commission also recommended an increase in government funding
for demographic research.260
Following the Population Council’s approach to population control, the final report rec-
ommended that the government ensure the universal availability of contraception and abor-
tion, as well as comprehensive sex education and increased occupational and educational
opportunities for women. However, in contrast to the rhetoric of the Population Council,
the Commission recommended these policies not as means to the end of population station-
arity, but rather as ends in themselves, “intrinsically desirable on all kinds of grounds other
than demographic.”261 Commission members intended their recommendations to “aim at
creating social conditions wherein the desired values of idividuals, families, and communities
can be realized; equalizing the social and economic opportunities for women and members of
disadvantaged minorities; and enhancing the potential for improving the quality of life.”262
Therefore, if population stabilization were to be achieved, it “would be primarily the result
of measures aimed at creating conditions in which individuals, regardless of sex, age, or
minority status, can exercise genuine free choice.”263
While most members of the Commission agreed that there were no advantages to con-
tinued population growth, there was substantial disagreement about the report’s subsequent
recommendations, particularly on the hot-button issues of abortion and immigration. While
many members felt that, in recommending legal abortion on demand, the Commission had
gone too far, many also felt that, in not recommending the limitation of immigration, the
Commission had not gone far enough.264 Rockefeller himself became an outspoken advocate
of safe and legal abortion during this period, and remained so for the rest of his life. Mem-
260
Westoff, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Population and Census, Committee on Post Office and
Civil Service, U.S. House of Representatives,” see n. 208, 15.
261
Westoff, “Further Reflections on Population Policy,” see n. 255, 2; Westoff, “Testimony before the
Subcommittee on Population and Census, Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, U.S. House of Rep-
resentatives,” see n. 208, 3.
262
Westoff, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Population and Census, Committee on Post Office and
Civil Service, U.S. House of Representatives,” see n. 208, 9.
263
Ibid., 10.
264
Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, see n. 256, for abortion, see
177; for immigration, see 206.

494
bers of the Commission disagreed about the relationship between population growth and
the environment. The final report placed considerable emphasis on population growth as a
cause of environmental deterioration, analyzing the issue in per-capita terms, which — as
Senator Alan Cranston pointed out — misleadingly attributes the production decisions of
large corporations to individual consumers of their products. Although the report stated
that “population growth is clearly not the sole culprit in ecological damage,”265 in his own
statement at the end of the report, Cranston argued that “population growth is not the
major culprit, either.” Explicitly citing Barry Commoner, he pointed out that “the ecolog-
ically unsound technological developments of the past two decades would have created the
environmental crisis even if the population had been stable during that period.”266 Cranston
acknowledged that “slowing population growth will give us time to reevaluate and change our
technology,” but contended that population stationarity “cannot substitute for the changes
wich must be made if we are to survive.”267 Commission member Grace Olivarez objected to
the language of “wanted” and “unwanted” childbearing, stating that it “smacks too much
of bigotry and prejudice,” conflating unplanned pregnancy with segments of society “unde-
sired” by the white majority.268 She also emphasized that the legalization of abortion and
provision of contraception were not solutions to the problem of poverty.269
The Commission’s final report devoted considerable attention to the distribution of pop-
ulation within the United States, arguing that many of the domestic problems commonly
attributed to aggregate population growth — including urban and rural poverty, crime, traf-
fic, racial strife, and air pollution — were actually a product of the massive suburbanization
experienced by the United States since World War II. Historian Derek Hoff has argued that
the attention paid to population distribution, by both the PGAF Commission and the Nixon
Administration, was a ruse to detract attention from the problem of aggregate population
265
Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, see n. 256, 71.
266
Ibid., 268.
267
Ibid., 268.
268
Ibid., 293.
269
Ibid., 294.

495
growth.270 Yet aggregate population growth was not a problem — U.S. farmers were pro-
ducing more food on less land than ever before and population density in the U.S. as a
whole, and even in its largest cities, was still considerably lower than population densities in
Europe. Population growth in the U.S. was, however, highly uneven. Demography research
had demonstrated that, over the previous 25 years, young rural Americans had moved into
the outskirts of growing metropolitan regions, where they were joined by members of the
white middle class fleeing central cities. Both sets of migration swelled the population of
the urban peripheries, drawing businesses away from central cities, increasing the average
distance workers had to travel between jobs and homes, draining rural areas of their most dy-
namic and productive residents, and leaving those who could not move out of inner cities —
particularly African Americans who were largely barred from home ownership in the growing
suburbs through both de jure and de facto mechanisms of discrimination — without jobs or
adequate public services.271 The Commission concluded that, while stationarity at the ag-
gregate level could alleviate some of the problems caused by suburbanization, the U.S. would
still face “problems associated with rural depopulation and metropolitan growth,” the latter
including “congestion, pollution, and severe racial separation.”272 The Commission recom-
mended that population distribution be addressed through policies to promote the growth
of smaller cities — thereby taking some of the pressure off of larger cities — and policies
to bring jobs to people who lacked them.273 Citing the 1968 report of the Kerner Commis-
sion, the PGAF report also devoted considerable space to detailing the injustices perpetrated
against African Americans through residential segregation and recommended that “action be
taken to increase freedom in choice of residential location through the elimination of current
patterns of racial and economic segregation and their attendant injustices.”274 Specifically,
270
Hoff, see n. 11, chapter 7.
271
The authors of the Commission’s report recognized that “reverse commuting” — from homes in cities to
jobs in suburbs — “can be expensive, time consuming, and difficult.” Presidential Commission on Population
Growth and the American Future, see n. 256, 219, also see 207.
272
Ibid., 43, 44.
273
Ibid., 208-211.
274
Ibid., 213.

496
the report suggested that the federal government make a greater effort to promote racial and
socioeconomic diversity in growing suburbs and “reduce the dependence of local jurisdictions
on locally collected property taxes.”275
Although the final report of the PGAF Commission did not recommend policies explicitly
aimed at slowing population growth, it nonetheless sought to allay the fears expressed by
demographers and economists that population stationarity would slow or end the economic
growth that was credited with having raised living standards in the U.S. dramatically since
the beginning of World War II. Its authors pointed out that, although GNP would increase
faster with faster population growth, slower population growth would result in higher per-
capita income, just as Coale and Hoover had found for India in their 1958 study. Regardless
of whether Americans tended to have two or three children per family, however, research
contracted by the Commission indicated that GNP per capita would at least double by 2000.
However, the report also acknowledged that this increase in GNP, regardless of population
growth, would not end poverty, which was largely caused by the exclusion of the poor
“— because of age, incapacity, poor training, family responsibilities, fiscal disincentives, or
discrimination in the labor market — from the system that produces and distributes income
and the things income buys.”276
Contemporaries cited the appointment of President Nixon’s Commission on Population
Growth and the American Future as an acknowledgment that U.S. population growth was
having deleterious consequences. Historians also cite the appointment and final report of
the Commission as evidence of harmful levels of population growth, critiquing the Nixon
Administration for not implementing the policies it proposed to limit population growth.277
However, as I have argued here, the Commission’s final report did not propose policies
to limit population growth. As it investigated every social, economic, and environmental
problem attributed to U.S. population growth by Moore, Draper, and Ehrlich, it found that
275
Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, see n. 256, 218-221.
276
Ibid., 46-48.
277
See, for example: Hoff, see n. 11; Robertson, see n. 12.

497
population growth was not the main cause of any of these problems, instead pointing to
structural factors. The policies it proposed — including the controversial recommendation
to legalize abortion — were explicitly not made with the ultimate aim of reducing population
growth, but rather with the aim of reducing structural inequality, which may in part explain
why President Nixon greeted them with distaste.

6.3.2 The Limits to Growth

While the PGAF Commission explored the consequences of population growth from a social
science perspective, a team of systems modelers based at MIT explored it from a compu-
tational perspective, leading to the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth. Sponsored
by a group of environmentally-oriented intellectuals and businessmen who called themselves
the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth described a global systems modeling exercise
commissioned by the Club, initiated by MIT professor Jay Forrester, and completed by
his students Donella and Dennis Meadows. The model Forrester and the Meadows built,
known as World3, simulated the future dynamics of population, industry, pollution, natural
resources, and agriculture at a global scale.278 In its basic strategy, the World3 model re-
sembled the projection exercise at the heart of Ansley Coale and Edgar Hoover’s Population
Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries, using a model not to predict
the future, but to examine how alternative trajectories of change in one part of a system
influenced change in other parts of the system. Coale and Hoover’s model — which they
had calculated without the aid of computers — allowed them only to analyze the effects of
different rates of population growth on per-capita consumer income. Using a more complex
computational model, the Club of Rome was able to simulate a system with multiple inter-
acting subsystems, and to experiment with how changes in any subsystem — population,
industry, pollution, resources, or agriculture — affected all of the other subsystems simulta-
278
George J. Church, “Can the World Survive Economic Growth?” Time, Aug. 14, 1972, 56–57.

498
neously, accounting for feedbacks within and between all parts of the overall system.279 On
the basis of the World3 model, which showed that continuation of then-current patterns of
population growth and economic growth would lead to global disaster, the authors of The
Limits to Growth concluded that averting global disaster required immediate actions to limit
the growth of both populations and economies.
As Coale and Hoover had done, the Meadows were careful to emphasize that their models
were simulations, not predictions. They did not claim to know what would happen in the
future, only that their model, by formalizing the relationships between various aspects of
a complex system, could indicate the likely impact of growth trajectories within any part
of the system on any other part. Graphs of future scenarios presented in the book left the
scale off of the y-axis (indicating quantities of population, industry, resources, etc.) and
made the time scale on the x-axis deliberately vague (with 1900 at one end and 2100 at
the other, but with no intermediate markings) to deter readers from interpreting the graphs
as predictions. Of course, as with population projections, these simulations were read as
predictions nonetheless, by both supporters and detractors. The Club of Rome itself read
the model as a prediction when using it as a basis for policy recommendations, stating

if the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food

production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on
this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The
most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both
population and industrial capacity.280

Time magazine described the model as “the first vision of apocalypse ever prepared by
computer.”281
The authors illustrated this apocalypse in their standard model run (Figure 6.6) which
assumed that both population and per-capita industrial production would continue on their
279
A schema and simulation of the model can be found at [Link]
(accessed 4/11/2015).
280
Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jurgen Randers, Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of
Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972), 23.
281
Church, see n. 278, 56.

499
 Figure 6.6: World3 model, standard run.

exponentially-upward trajectories, with no changes in the allocation of resources within or

between societies.282 In this scenario, stocks of non-renewable resources declined at an ever-
greater rate, eventually reaching an inflection point. World3 modeled diminishing returns
on the extraction of non-renewable resources, simulating the real-world situation in which
easy-to-extract resources are mined first, with extraction requiring additional resources as
the more readily-available reserves are depleted. The model assumed that, when resources
282
Meadows, Meadows, and Randers, see n. 280, 124.

500
fell below the inflection point, capital would be diverted from industry and agriculture to
resource extraction, leading to a decrease in food production and material standards of living,
increasing mortality and causing a sudden drop in population.283 Also contributing to food
shortages and increasing mortality in the model was the rising pollution caused by continued
resource extraction and industrial growth, which — in the model — decreased agricultural
yields and increased mortality.
While most of the model’s individual effects and feedbacks made sense scientifically and
logically, many of them could not be tested empirically.284 For example, while it is easy
to believe that rising pollution would diminish human life and agricultural yields, the ac-
tual quantitative relationship between pollution and mortality or pollution and yields was
unknown, as experimental research to discover these relationships was entirely unfeasible.
Critics of The Limits to Growth often pointed to the lack of empirical data underlying the
model.285 Although its creators continually emphasized that it was intended to illustrate
complex interrelationships between parts of the system rather than predicting a likely fu-
ture, quantitative models of all kinds that require explicit specification of quantities or effects
that are not known or agreed-upon — akin to Martha Lampland’s “provisional numbers”
discussed in Chapter Three — tend to elevate those estimates to the status of truth simply
by specifying them numerically and using them to produce model outcomes, regardless of the
disclaimers attached to the model by its creators.286 Complex systems models of this type
can reveal patterns that emerge from the interactions of many processes that are individually
known, but whose cumulative effects can’t be easily deduced from that knowledge. However,
as with any model, they are fully determined by their assumptions, even if the emergent
effects of those assumptions cannot be predicted in advance.
The results of the standard run suggested that continued exponential growth of popula-
tions and industry was unsustainable, and that allowing this growth to continue would put
283
Meadows, Meadows, and Randers, see n. 280, 125.
284
Ibid., 118.
285
Church, see n. 278; also see Sabin, see n. 13, 88.
286
Lampland, see n. 207.

501
world systems in a state of “overshoot,” from which returning to equilibrium would require
a contraction of industry and population, either through deliberate planning or through
natural and market forces. The Club of Rome cautioned that, if the process of overshoot
depleted or seriously damaged some non-renewable resource, it would reduce the Earth’s
carrying capacity below what it would have been otherwise, as Osborn and Vogt had argued
regarding soil overuse in 1948.287 Working through eleven other hypothetical scenarios, the
Club of Rome found that the path to sustainability required population stationarity and
stabilization of capital stock, along with investment in renewable technologies and pollution
mitigation. Each of these interventions was necessary to create a sustainable scenario within
the model. Simply doubling the available resources led to skyrocketing levels of pollution
that drove mortality way up, both directly and through its effects on crop yields.288 If pol-
lution control measures were added to the model, population would rise to the point of food
shortage.289 This crisis could be delayed but not averted by assuming “perfect” birth control,
meaning that only desired children are born.290
In the text of The Limits To Growth, the authors placed considerable emphasis on pop-
ulation growth as the driver of the ultimate collapse in the standard model run. However,
they also made it clear that exponential population growth was not the sole trigger of the
disaster scenario; rather, it was exponential population growth combined with exponential
growth in industrial output per capita.291 When the authors brought population to imme-
diate stationarity by setting the birth rate equal to the death rate (clearly stating that this
choice was “an experimental device, not necessarily a political recommendation”), without
any other changes, the system still collapsed from depletion of natural resources, as in the
standard run.292 In a preliminary 1971 article, Jay Forrester argued that population was
a dependent variable in the system, a result of other factors and not the driving force,
287
Meadows, Meadows, and Randers, see n. 280, 92.
288
Ibid., 126.
289
Ibid., 137.
290
Ibid., 139.
291
Ibid., 68.
292
Ibid., 159-160.

502
as Ehrlich or Moore might have argued. Echoing interwar demographic transition theory,
he stated that “the population explosion is perhaps best viewed as a result of technology
and industrialization.”293 He also cautioned that efforts at population control might be self
defeating. Drawing on demographic research showing that planned family size tends to cor-
relate directly with income (that is, in a perfectly contracepting population, wealthier people
have more children), he warned that, if population control produced the material gains it
promised, it might lead to larger families in later generations.294
Likely reflecting their concern with population as a driver of global disaster, the au-
thors did not publish the results of a model run in which capital stock was stabilized (by
setting the investment rate equal to the depreciation rate) but population allowed to con-
tinue growing, stating only that limiting capital investment was not sufficient to produce
a sustainable system.295 Finally, the authors modeled a sustainable world by capping the
growth of both population and capital, reducing per-capita resource consumption, shifting
spending away from material goods and toward food production, education, and health, in-
creasing the durability of industrial capital, and enriching agricultural soils.296 Given how
many parameters they tweaked between the model run with only population control and
the final sustainable model, it is not at all clear how much population control (if any, given
the reduction in desired family size resulting from improvements in education, health, and
living standards borrowed by the model from demographic transition theory) was required
to achieve sustainability. It was abundantly clear, however, that population control — even
the immediate achievement of zero growth — would have little power to prevent imminent
collapse if economic growth continued apace.
The Club of Rome expressed optimism, not only about the possibility of reaching sus-
tainability, but also about potential improvements to global quality of life in the sustainable
system, which they termed “equilibrium.” The authors of The Limits to Growth contended
293
Jay W. Forrester, “Counterintuitive Behavior,” Technology Review, 1971.
294
Ibid.
295
Meadows, Meadows, and Randers, see n. 280, 161.
296
Ibid., 162-163.

503
that “the evolution of a society that favors innovation and technological development, a soci-
ety based on equality and justice, is far more likely to evolve in a state of global equilibrium
than it is in the state of growth we are experiencing today.”297 They also rejected the axiom
that had become standard in the U.S. following World War II that economic growth raised
everyone’s standard of living, and that with enough growth, high standards could be had for
everyone without requiring redistribution. Instead, they argued that “the present patterns of
population and capital growth are actually increasing the gap between the rich and the poor
on a worldwide basis, and that the ultimate result of a continued attempt to grow according
to the present pattern will be a disastrous collapse.”298 Ehrlich lauded the book as evidence
in favor of his arguments about the dangers of population growth.299 However, in contrast
to the leaders of ZPG, who promoted population control as a way to preserve current living
standards in the U.S. and other countries of the global north, the Club of Rome argued that,
even with stringent population control measures, these standards were unsustainable.300
The results of the Club of Rome’s modeling exercise were widely publicized, through
articles in such popular magazines as Playboy, Time, and The Economist, and through a
briefing of legislators, heads of government agencies, and business leaders at the Smithsonian
Institution in March 1972, the same month the PGAF Commission released its final report.301
The Limits to Growth sold over ten million copies.302 Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter was
particularly taken with the predictions of the World3 model. After his inauguration as U.S.
President in 1977, he hired Gerald Barney, a member of the MIT systems analysis group, to
develop a comparable model for the United States through the end of the century, a project
on which Anne Ehrlich, Paul’s wife and often-unacknowledged co-author, consulted.303 This
model informed many of Carter’s policies, from conservation to investment in alternative
297
Meadows, Meadows, and Randers, see n. 280, 175.
298
Ibid., 178.
299
Sabin, see n. 13, 82.
300
“An End to All This,” Playboy, July 1, 1971.
301
Sabin, see n. 13, 82; see n. 300; Church, see n. 278; “Limits to Misconception,” The Economist, Mar. 11,
1972, 20–21.
302
Connelly, see n. 8, 341.
303
Sabin, see n. 13, 127.

504
energy sources.304
Although The Limits to Growth is today remembered mainly as a call for population con-
trol,305 it actually demonstrated that population control alone could not prevent impending
disaster. Its publication instead implicated the faith of mid-century modernization theorists
that economic growth — that is, growth in per-capita GNP — could solve the problem of
poverty and inequality, both within and between societies, without redistributive measures
and therefore within the rubric of a capitalist free market. Limits to Growth instead demon-
strated the environmental costs of economic growth, and argued that sustainability would
require the equalization of access to Earth’s resources and the profits derived therefrom.
Interestingly, neither supporters nor critics of The Limits to Growth addressed its call for
redistribution, which may simply have been beyond the pale of what coud be discussed in the
Cold War United States. There was, however, considerable criticism of the Club of Rome’s
call for an end to economic growth. Two strands of this critique emerged in the 1970s. The
first originated among advocates of the poor in the global north and political leaders in the
global south, who argued that halting economic growth — in the assumed absence of redis-
tribution or other structural change — would perpetuate inequality both within and between
societies. The second originated among economists and proponents of the nascent neolib-
eral movement, who contended that the World3 model accounted neither for technological
progress nor for market mechanisms, both of which could prevent the disaster it predicted
without necessitating either redistribution or an end to economic growth.
The first critique appeared nearly immediately. George J. Church, a writer for Time,
warned in 1972 that “a no-growth world would have extreme difficulty providing either
social justice or freedom.” Simply halting growth, he contended, would require “a world dic-
tatorship” with considerable governmental direction of environmental matters. He warned
that such a system would arouse particular ire among denizens of the global south, who
“already suspect that the no-growth argument is an elitist, aristocratic, white man’s con-
304
Sabin, see n. 13, 129.
305
See, for example, Robertson, see n. 12, 180; Sabin, see n. 13, 80-82.

505
spiracy to lock them into perpetual poverty.”306 Within the U.S., industrialists warned that
capping economic growth would prevent the amelioration of poverty, just as Etzioni argued
in The Genetic Fix. A 1972 advertisement for Mobil stated that “growth is the only way
America will ever reduce poverty.”307 Another Mobil ad suggested that economic growth
was necessary to mitigate already existing pollution, apparently oblivious to the irony that
Mobil’s products were a major source of pollution.308 MIT political scientist Willard John-
son critiqued the assumption that economic growth would automatically alleviate poverty,
arguing that “there is no clear evidence that poverty is or can be eliminated as a conse-
quence of the processes of general economic growth,” because “poverty is a feature built
into the current American economy and social structure.”309 Nonetheless, he argued that —
particularly given the high representation of poor and African American workers in the most
polluting industries — “a lack of continued growth, without substantial change in national
policies to facilitate the transfer of wealth and income through transfer payments, tax reform
and job development, or vigorous antidiscrimination efforts would probably have disastrous
consequences for blacks, and perhaps for the poor more generally.”310
At the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in June 1972,
leaders from the global south joined the critique of the environmental discourse of overpopu-
lation and of the Club of Rome’s call to end economic growth, arguing that the Conference’s
emphasis on population effectively made the countries of the global south — where popula-
tion was growing most rapidly — responsible for solving a problem that had originated in
the global north, where pollution and resource use were increasing most rapidly. Ambas-
sador Miguel A. Ozorio de Almeida, head of Brazil’s delegation to the conference, described
conference preparations as being “marked by what might be called the ‘Calvinistic’ attitude
that the developed countries have demonstrated, by their development, a special right to
306
Church, see n. 278, 56.
307
Quoted in Willard R. Johnson, “Should the Poor Buy No Growth?” Daedalus 102, no. 4 (1973): 168.
308
Ibid., 168.
309
Ibid., 169.
310
Ibid., 171.

506
salvation and perpetuation, thus passing on to the more numerous underdeveloped peoples
the responsibility for creating the necessary space on earth.”311 He and other delegates from
the global south warned that they would not “hold back their own economic development in
the name of ‘environmental preservation.’ ”312 Ambassador Ozorio de Almeida argued further
that, in addition to the measures already proposed at the conference — limitations on pop-
ulation and economic growth of countries in the global south, and a reduction in emissions
produced in the global north — the countries of the global north should be asked to “reduce
their own demographic numbers and, if necessary, their industrial ‘predation’ upon nature so
as to reduce their claim upon the natural resources of underdeveloped countries.”313 Ozorio
de Alameida and representatives of other countries in the global south — including Algeria,
Argentina, Costa Rica, Dahomey, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Uruguay — demanded com-
pensation for lost trade revenue resulting from international environmental regulation.314
The United States was the only aid-giving country whose delegates were unwilling to assist
countries in the global south with the financing of environmental protection measures, and
the only country whose delegates voted against a proposal to reduce production of synthetic
materials, aimed at both curbing pollution and stimulating markets for natural products in
the global south.315
In the Environment Forum, a parallel conference of nongovernmental organizations,
Ehrlich’s calls for “zero population growth” were “shouted down as ‘nonsense’ and ‘geno-
cide,’ ” and his microphone was turned off during a panel discussion.316 Five more antagonists
of Ehrlich’s took the stage to speak on behalf of the global south, making Ehrlich feel “am-
311
Quoted in Barbara Ward, “The World: Pollution,” The Economist, May 27, 1972: 68.
312
Ibid., 67.
313
Quoted in ibid., 68.
314
Casey Bukro, “Poor Lands Ask Compensation: Rich Nations Urged to Bear Cost for Clean Environ-
ment,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1972, A2.
315
Claire Sterling, “U.S. Losing Argument With Poor Nations at Stockholm,” The Washington Post, June 8,
1972, A29; “Prophets of Doom Come on Strong But Ecology Talks Sideline Them,” Los Angeles Times,
June 15, 1972, A16.
316
Joe Alex Morris Jr., “World Population Issue Surfaces at Conference: Third World Nations Indicate
That They Will Oppose Family Planning As Conspiracy,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1972, A2.

507
bush[ed].”317 Ehrlich complained that population had been “kicked under the rug” when it
should have been “at the top of the issues” discussed at the conference.318 University of Col-
orado professor Kariba Munio, originally from Kenya, blamed pollution on capitalism and
referred to population control as “nothing short of genocide.”319 Given the explosive nature
of population talk at the conference, U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim proposed that
the issue be tabled until the 1974 U.N. World Population Conference, which will be discussed
in Chapter Seven.
While this first critique of The Limits to Growth focused on the potentially deleterious
consequences of limiting economic growth, particularly for the global south and for the poor
in the global north, the second critique undermined the Club of Rome’s call for an end to
economic growth by pointing out that the World3 model did not account for market forces
that would promote resource substitution and pollution mitigation, or for the technological
advances that would facilitate these desiderata. A reviewer for The Economist argued that
the prediction of disaster resulting from continued economic growth was inevitable for any
scientist who “plots existing exponential economic growth against the elasticities of supply
and substitution for particular things as assumed within known technology,” suggesting that
technological improvements would allow for continued economic growth within the confines
of natural resource limitations.320 Another critic complained that The Limits to Growth mis-
understood “almost every market elasticity” and criticized “its blinkered obsession with the
supposed importance of today’s largely accidental mix of materials.”321 As British economist
Barbara Ward explained, “there are always changes. Scarcities bring about modifications
in price; these stimulate the appearance of substitutes or the discovery of new reserves and
also bring about unpredictable swings in the pattern of demand. Any supposedly iron law of
317
Sabin, see n. 13, 56.
318
Jr., “World Population Issue Surfaces at Conference: Third World Nations Indicate That They Will
Oppose Family Planning As Conspiracy,” see n. 316.
319
Ibid.
320
See n. 301, 20.
321
“Ecodoom: Fall of Rome,” The Economist, June 3, 1972: 78.

508
exponentially diminishing supply has yet to be discovered.”322 As a result of its inability to
model technological change, the New York Times Book Review dismissed the World3 model
as an example of “the oldest maxim of computer science: Garbage In, Garbage Out.”323
This critique, which centered on the ability of markets to adequately distribute scarce
resources and faith in the potential for yet-undeveloped technologies to accommodate both
population growth and economic growth within the Earth’s natural limits, gained a vocal
advocate in the late 1970s: University of Illinois economist Julian Simon. In the late 1960s,
Simon had published articles on “marketing” family planning and small families in the
global south, with funding from the Population Council.324 By 1970, however, Simon’s view
of population growth had changed. Influenced by agricultural economist Ester Boserup, who
argued in the 1965 book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth that population growth
and the scarcity it produced spurred technological development, Simon reconsidered the
economics of population growth.325 In a 1970 talk titled “Science Does Not Show There Is
Overpopulation,” he described population growth as “a triumph for mankind” and argued
that “whether population growth is too fast or too slow is a value judgment, not a scientific
one.”326 His increasingly market-based understanding of population and the environment
will be addressed at greater length in Chapter Seven.
The Limits to Growth provided both support and uncertainty to the environmental over-
population discourse. In its emphasis on population control as necessary to avert any future
ecosystem collapse, it heightened public and expert anxiety about population growth. How-
ever, The Limits to Growth also undermined the idea that population control was a panacea
that would allow for and even promote continued economic growth, as proponents of the
322
Ward, see n. 311, 68.
323
Quoted in Sabin, see n. 13, 88.
324
For Population Council funding, see Frank W. Notestein to Shlomo Maital, Nov. 21, 1978,folder 7, box
13; Simon’s articles include: Julian L. Simon, “A Huge Marketing Research Task: Birth Control,” Journal
of Marketing Research 5, no. 1 (1968): 21–27; Julian L. Simon, “The Role of Bonuses and Persuasive
Propaganda in the Reduction of Birth Rates,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 16, no. 3 (1968):
404–411.
325
Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under
Population Pressure (Chicago: Aldine, 1965).
326
Quoted in Sabin, see n. 13, 62.

509
environmental and economic overpopulation discourses had argued. It insisted that inequal-
ity and environmental degradation did not result from individual reproductive or financial
profligacy, but rather from unlimited economic growth and its unequal distribution. The
OPEC oil embargo of 1973–1974 and the resulting energy crisis appeared to offer additional
support to the arguments of The Limits to Growth, suggesting that fossil fuels were indeed
growing scarce, and that increased efforts to mine them would divert productivity from
agriculture and industry.327 Ultimately, however, the rise of neoliberalism in the U.S. and
Western Europe would lead to a restored faith in markets and their ability to allocate scarce
resources among growing populations (usually in highly unequal ways), as will be discussed
at greater length in Chapter Seven.

Conclusion

The popularization of the environmental overpopulation discourse in the United States —

through Moore and Draper’s advertisements, Ehrlich’s writings and public appearances, and
the efforts of Zero Population Growth — heightened the concern of U.S. citizens about pop-
ulation growth worldwide by attributing to it the increasingly acute problems of their own
country: war, political polarization, poverty, crime, urban strife, traffic, and pollution. Pop-
ulation growth offered a unified explanation for all of these problems, and population control
appeared as a simple technological solution. The environmental discourse particularly cap-
tured the attention of white middle-class students and other young people. These members
of the “baby boom” generation had grown up in a relatively crowded world, and saw the
sacrifice of large families as something they could do to ease the social, economic, political,
and racial tensions that were palpable in the U.S. and worldwide by the late 1960s. For
young people who became involved in the antiwar movement and movements for civil and
women’s rights, the environmental movement was closely aligned, and population one of its
327
Timothy Mitchell explains how oil producing countries created the perception of scarcity in the early
1970s in Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, see n. 90.

510
most visible issues.
Growing concern about population growth among U.S. citizens and policy makers trans-
lated into increased government funding for population control programs both at home and
abroad. However, it also resulted in increased funding for research into the causes and
consequences of “the population problem,” and this research began to undermine both the
environmental and economic overpopulation discourses. Natural scientists and demogra-
phers demonstrated that environmental degradation had far outpaced population growth
over the previous decades, attributing pollution to new industrial processes that also under-
mined markets for natural resources, thereby contributing to poverty in the global south.
Research done by the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future revealed
that the roots of poverty, crime, and urban strife lay in structural inequality rather than
population growth, and attributed traffic, resource depletion, and some types of pollution
not to aggregate population growth but to suburbanization. Finally, The Limits to Growth
demonstrated that human society was on a collision course with the planet Earth, and that
population control would not deter that collision.
While this chapter has traced the growing influence and visibility of the environmental
overpopulation discourse in the 1960s, it has also demonstrated that visibility exposed the
discourse to challenges — from scientists in the global north and policy makers in the global
south — that it could not withstand. Critiques of the environmental overpopulation discourse
and new research supporting those critiques destabilized the environmental overpopulation
discourse and also began to weaken the economic overpopulation discourse. The economic
discourse came under increasing attack later in the 1970s, as will be discussed in Chapter
Seven, which turns the focus of this story back to the global arena.

511
 Chapter 7
The Geopolitics of Population Control
In 1970, U.N. Secretary-General U Thant acknowledged that the U.N. had fallen far short
of its goals for the “United Nations Development Decade” of the 1960s. He declared that a
“Second United Nations Development Decade” would begin on January 1, 1971.1 This time,
the U.N. would pay particular attention to world population growth as a factor in develop-
ment. When U Thant announced the Second Development Decade, he also announced that
1974 would be World Population Year, with a World Population Conference at which leaders
from member states would focus on setting policies aimed at slowing population growth to
promote development.
The 1970 announcement of World Population Year within the framework of the Second
United Nations Development Decade was a major victory for the economic overpopula-
tion discourse, as it signaled support from the U.N. for population control as a strategy of
economic development. However, by the end of the decade, the economic overpopulation
discourse had largely fallen apart. In the 1960s and 1970s, the experience of the global south
indicated that economic growth could occur in the presence of high fertility, but that neither
economic growth nor fertility decline would alleviate poverty, improve living standards, or
close the socioeconomic gap between the global north and global south. By the mid-1970s,
demographers and other social scientists had begun to accumulate empirical evidence ques-
tioning the Coale-Hoover model of population growth and economic development. These
studies provided scientific support to a political critique of the economic overpopulation
discourse leveled by demography graduate students in the U.S. and intellectuals and policy
makers in the global south. When this critique erupted at the 1974 World Population Con-
1
Peter Jackson, “A Prehistory of the Millennium Development Goals: Four Decades of Struggle for
Development in the United Nations,” U.N. Chronicle 44, no. 4 (2007).

512
ference, John D. Rockefeller III, a major architect of the economic overpopulation discourse,
acknowledged that the efforts of the population establishment over the previous two decades
had failed to alleviate poverty or promote economic development and announced that new
approaches would be necessary.
This chapter traces the demise of the economic overpopulation discourse from about
1970 to 1984. It begins with a little-known and unsuccessful episode in the history of the
Population Council’s public relations efforts that aimed at shoring up global public support
for the Council and — by extension — for the economic overpopulation discourse. I then
turn to the scientific and political critiques of that discourse that were beginning to emerge
in Latin America and the United States, which shaped political debates at the 1974 World
Population Conference. I argue that the Conference signaled the rejection by a majority
of the world’s countries of the economic overpopulation discourse and of population control
as a strategy of modernization or economic development. Following the Conference, several
organizations that had played a strong role in promoting the economic overpopulation dis-
course and carrying out population control projects — including the Population Council, the
Ford Foundation, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation — began to shift
their efforts from population control to reproductive health. This shift was facilitated by the
passing of many members of the overpopulation generation — including Frank Notestein,
Frederick Osborn, William Henry Draper Jr., and John D. Rockefeller III — and the growing
power of a new generation who came of age during the civil rights era. However, I demon-
strate that these new efforts to promote reproductive health in the global south and the
U.S. were challenged beginning in 1984 by the rising political power of neoliberalism and
evangelical Christianity in the United States. The chapter ends by examining how these
ideologies combined to destroy the last vestiges of the economic overpopulation discourse
and threaten reproductive health and autonomy worldwide.

513
7.1 Beyond Family Planning: Berelson’s Public
Relations Efforts for the Population Council

After U Thant’s 1970 announcement of the Second United Nations Development Decade and
World Population Year, Population Council president Bernard Berelson launched his most
ambitious public relations effort on behalf of the Population Council: getting the Council
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1972, the year of the Council’s twentieth anniver-
sary.2 Berelson’s rationale was that “international efforts to come to grips with the world’s
population problem would be considerably enhanced if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee
would offer recognition to one of the private organizations active in this field.”3 That is,
the Prize would not only celebrate what the Council had already done, but would further
promote its population control project by enhancing its legitimacy in the geopolitical arena.
Rockefeller expressed the same rationale when he explained that “recognition of one [member
of the population establishment] would endorse the efforts of all – and assist in overcoming
political obstacles which continue to hamper the progress we all so earnestly seek.”4 How-
ever, the perception by the public that the Council had engineered its own nomination would
undermine the effect Berelson and Rockefeller expected the nomination to have.
Berelson and his staff researched the Prize and detailed the steps they would need to take
in order to secure a credible nomination.5 To avoid revealing “evidence that it’s a planned
campaign,” Berelson engaged the assistance of demographer Ronald Freedman, director of
the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, who recruited Ansley Coale,
director of Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, and Phillip Hauser, director
of the Population Research and Training Center at the University of Chicago, to form an
2
Bernard Berelson to John D. Rockefeller III, Dec. 7, 1970,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,” box AD25,
accession 2.
3
John D. Rockefeller III to Lester Pearson, Sept. 20, 1971,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box
AD25, accession 2.
4
Ibid.
5
Bernard Berelson, “Nobel Peace Prize,” Aug. 13, 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,” box AD25,
accession 2.

514
“organizing committee.”6 In his correspondence with Freedman, Berelson referred to their
work as “Project X” and encouraged Freedman to call him collect as often as necessary
to discuss it.7 Berelson’s reliance on Freedman, Coale, and Hauser in this effort, and their
willingness to assist him, indicates the strong personal relationship between these men and
the level of Council influence over the activities of the research centers it funded.
Berelson did the majority of the organizing, leaving nothing to chance or to Freedman’s
judgment. Berelson developed the approach and supplied Freedman with all of the necessary
correspondence. He identified five people with connections to the Council who were also eli-
gible to submit nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize: former Colombian president Alberto
Lleras Camargo, who was eligible as a member of the International Court of Arbitration; and
former Nobel laureates Lester Pearson, Ralph Bunche, Linus Pauling, and Norman Borlaug.
Berelson supplied Freedman with a letter (to be sent from Freedman under his own name)
for each of these men (including a few sentences specific to each), asking them to nominate
the Council and including a sample letter of nomination from which they could draw in
writing their own letters.8 He also gave Freedman a letter to send to John D. Rockefeller
III, asking Rockefeller to send an additional note of encouragement to Pearson, Bunche, and
Lleras Camargo.9 In his draft note from Freedman to Rockefeller, Berelson used open flat-
tery to cajole Rockefeller, obsequiously informing him that “my colleagues and I are deeply
gratified to be associated with this venture, whatever the outcome. Certainly the population
field deserves such recognition and the roles of the Council and of you yourself as founder
and Chairman have been of historic importance.”10 Berelson instructed Freedman to solicit
6
Harrison Huey, “Confidential Memorandum to Bernard Berelson: Notes on Conversation with Mr.
Francis Harmon,” July 15, 1970,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,” box AD25, accession 2.
7
Bernard Berelson to Ronald Freedman, Aug. 27, 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,” box AD25,
accession 2; Bernard Berelson, “Letter from Freedman to go along as a separate letter but in the same
envelope with some of the requests for supporting statement,” 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,” box
AD25, accession 2.
8
Bernard Berelson, “Letter from Ronald Freedman to Pearson, Bunche, Pauling, Borlaug, and Lleras
Camargo,” 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August, 1971,” box AD25, accession 2.
9
Bernard Berelson, “Letter from Freedman to Rockefeller, later,” 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August,
1971,” box AD25, accession 2.
10
Bernard Berelson, “Letter from Freedman to Rockefeller, now,” 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,”
box AD25, accession 2.

515
similar encouragements for Linus Pauling and Norman Borlaug from Roger Revelle and Jack
Maier of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had funded much of their research.11 Although
Pearson, Bunche, and Pauling declined to nominate the Population Council, Borlaug and
Lleras Camargo both agreed, submitting nomination letters to Freedman to forward to Oslo
along with the letters of support he solicited.12
Berelson identified about 25 additional potential supporters and provided Freedman,
Coale, and Hauser with a letter to send to each.13 For potential supporters in other coun-
tries, Berelson gave Freedman an additional letter, asking “whether you think it might be
possible to secure a supporting statement for the Council from someone high in your govern-
ment who appreciates the assistance the Council has been able to provide to your country
and to this field.” The form letter continued, “since (the Prime Minister, the King, the
President, etc.) signed the World Leaders Statement on Population that was initiated by
Mr. Rockefeller, it may be that he (she) would be willing to submit a supporting statement
at this time.”14 International support seemed particularly critical, both because the Nobel
Peace Prize was an international award and because global opinion of the United States
had suffered as a result of the Vietnam War. Berelson was advised that “it’s going to be
hard for any American to win the Prize now. Any American is behind the eight ball as
long as the Vietnam War is going on. You can’t award a peace prize to a country that’s
at war.”15 Datus Smith Jr., assistant to Rockefeller, suggested to Berelson that his nomi-
nation efforts “soft-pedal official U.S. participation” at least “until after there had been an
impressive accumulation of non-U.S. support.”16 In addition to the formal nominations and
11
Bernard Berelson, “Letter from Freedman to Roger Revelle,” 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,”
box AD25, accession 2; Bernard Berelson, “Letter from Freedman to Jack Maier,” 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970
- August 1971,” box AD25, accession 2.
12
Alberto Lleras Camargo to August Schou, May 24, 1972,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box
AD25, accession 2; Norman Borlaug to August Schou, Nov. 23, 1971,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,”
box AD25, accession 2.
13
Bernard Berelson, “Letter from Freedman (or Coale or Hauser, as appropriate), requesting supporting
statements,” 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,” box AD25, accession 2.
14
Berelson, “Letter from Freedman to go along as a separate letter but in the same envelope with some of
the requests for supporting statement,” see n. 7.
15
Huey, see n. 6.
16
Datus Smith Jr. to Bernard Berelson, Aug. 11, 1971,“Nobel Prize, 1970 - August 1971,” box AD25,

516
the letters from Coale and Hauser, Freedman received letters of support from 16 people,
including World Bank president and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,
U.N. Population Division director Miloš Macura, and directors of population studies centers
at the East-West Center (Honolulu), Hacettepe University (Ankara), the Statistical Center
(Manila), Australian National University, the University of the Andes (Bogotá), and Har-
vard University.17 Many of these directors were recipients of Population Council grants or
fellowships.
Each letter sent by Freedman, Coale, and Hauser to potential nominators or supporters
included a statement by Berelson, explaining why the Population Council was deserving
of the Nobel Peace Prize. The statement detailed the Council’s work to improve living
conditions in the global south through the provision of family planning services, arguing
that “any improvement in the human condition cannot fail to improve the prospects for
peace.” He continued,

differential rates of population growth among countries is a potential source of

international friction. The unhappy disparity between the rich and the poor
nations, the haves and the have-nots, is only heightened by the differential bur-
dens of population growth, as the frustration of rising aspirations by continued
population growth leads to conflicts on the international front and to repressive
solutions internally.18

This statement drew on the economic discourse of overpopulation, attributing international

strife and the socioeconomic inequalities that underpinned it to population growth, and
legitimized the Council’s population control work as promoting international peace.
The International Planned Parenthood Federation also celebrated its twentieth anniver-
sary in 1972, and fifty members of the Swedish Parliament nominated one of its founders,
Elise Ottesen-Jensen, for the Nobel Peace Prize in that year as well.19 Ultimately, the Nor-
accession 2.
17
Ronald Freedman to Bernard Berelson, Feb. 7, 1972,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box AD25,
accession 2.
18
Berelson, “Nobel Peace Prize,” see n. 5, 1-2.
19
“International Planned Parenthood News,” 1972,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box AD25,
accession 2.

517
wegian Nobel Committee declined to award a Peace Prize in 1972. Following Freedman’s
request, Borlaug and Lleras Camargo re-nominated the Population Council for 1973, but in
that year the Prize was shared between Henry A. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho.20 Nonetheless,
John D. Rockefeller III was pleased with Berelson’s work as president of the Population
Council, telling Berelson that, under his “imaginative and effective leadership,” the Council
“really has become a major factor in the world population picture.”21 By the beginning of the
1970s, however, there was still little evidence that population control efforts were either re-
ducing fertility or improving living standards. In fact, population growth had begun to slow
at the end of the previous decade, but the 1970 censuses were still being tabulated, so that
slowing had not become apparent. Moreover, even when it did become apparent, new evi-
dence from the global south was beginning to question the theoretical basis for Ansley Coale
and Edgar Hoover’s 1958 Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income
Countries, which remained one of very few sources of empirical support for the economic
overpopulation discourse.

7.2 Concerned Demographers

Challenges to the Coale-Hoover model of population growth and economic development came
mainly from demographers and other social scientists affiliated with CELADE, the U.N. pop-
ulation research center in Santiago, Chile, and CEBRAP, the Brazilian Center for Analysis
and Planning in São Paulo. These scholars leveled strong critiques at modernization theory
and the economic overpopulation discourse, which was deeply imbricated with modernization
theory, as discussed in Chapter Four. At the 1970 Regional Latin American Population Con-
ference in Mexico City, scholars from CELADE and CEBRAP argued that the transition to
20
For the Council’s re-nomination, see: Alberto Lleras Camargo to August Schou, Jan. 17, 1973,“Nobel
Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box AD25, accession 2; Ronald Freedman to Alberto Lleras Camargo, Dec. 5,
1972,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box AD25, accession 2; Ronald Freedman to Norman Borlaug,
Oct. 20, 1972,“Nobel Prize, September 1971 - 1973,” box AD25, accession 2.
21
John D. Rockefeller III to Bernard Berelson, Dec. 30, 1971,folder 478, box 71, sub-series 4, series 3,
record group 5.

518
modernity in Western Europe and North America was not an appropriate template for coun-
tries in the global south, which “have to cope with trade barriers, barriers to international
labor mobility, and small-scale markets,” none of which had been issues for the countries of
Western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century.22 These scholars contended
that the focus of experts in the global north on fertility in the global south as an explanation
of poverty and inequality detracted attention from structural and geopolitical factors. In
particular, they maintained that the mechanism linking fertility to economic growth in the
Coale-Hoover model — the investment of household savings in capital accumulation — was
not relevant to Latin America, where most households did not have enough income to save,
regardless of fertility.23 By focusing on per capita income as the outcome, the Coale-Hoover
model failed to account for extreme inequality in the countries of the global south. Angel
Fucaraccio of CELADE argued that the economic overpopulation discourse and the Coale-
Hoover model themselves were tools of the dominant class to repress dissent among the poor
who are “the potential executioners of the current system.” The swelling of their ranks
posed a threat to the existing order, he maintained, because “the greater their number and
the greater their share of the total population, the greater is their power, ceteris paribus.”24
Susana Torrado de Ipola extended this argument to the international arena, contending that
“the U.S. government does not use, as much as it crudely manipulates those theories that
postulate a decline in fertility as a prerequisite of economic and social development.”25 She
continued that the State Department’s approach to poverty in the global south was not to
change the conditions causing it, but rather “to prevent the absolute growth of the exploited
groups” who posed a threat to the established geopolitical order.26
These critiques came to the attention of U.S.-based demographers through the activities
22
Eric R. Weiss-Altaner, “Fertility Decline, Savings and Economic Growth,” Concerned Demography 2,
no. 3 (1971): 8.
23
Ibid., 9.
24
Paraphrased in ibid., 11.
25
Susana Torrado de Ipola, “A Contribution of the U.S. Department of State to the Latin American
Population Conference, Mexico, 1970,” Concerned Demography 2, no. 3 (1971): 3–6, 4, emphasis in the
original.
26
Ibid., 5.

519
of graduate students who, inspired by the scholarship from Latin America, launched a dis-
sident movement within the Population Association of America (PAA) in 1968. This group,
known as Concerned Demographers, consisted mainly of graduate students who described
themselves as “women and men of the left who believe in the development of a more egalitar-
ian and democratic social structure at home and the encouragement of social revolution and
economic development abroad.”27 They affiliated themselves with the antiwar and civil and
women’s rights movements, and with Science for the People, an organization founded in 1969
that used Marxist theory to advocate against racism, sexism, and classism in science, and
for the use of science, technology, and medicine to “serve social needs rather than military
and corporate interests.”28
The name “Concerned Demographers” was a direct reference to the Union of Concerned
Scientists, an organization founded in 1968 by faculty and graduate students at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology to advocate for peaceful rather than military applications
of science by the U.S. government. One of its stated aims was “to devise means for turning
research applications away from the present emphasis on military technology toward the
solution of pressing environmental and social problems.”29 The establishment of these orga-
nizations in the late 1960s indicates a growing sense among U.S.-based scientists that the
U.S. government — a major funder of scientific research — could not be trusted to use scien-
tific knowledge to improve the human condition. Scientists’ concerns also reflected a broader
loss of trust in the U.S. government among U.S. citizens during the Vietnam War and other
upheavals of the 1960s. In the humanities and social sciences, the late 1960s saw calls for a
radicalization of traditional disciplines, including attention to issues of race, gender, class,
imperialism, and capitalism, as well as alternatives to methods that had become standard.
The Concerned Demographers advocated for global social justice within the practice of
demography and for greater openness and democracy in demographers’ own institutions, par-
27
Concerned Demographers, “The PAA: A Time for Change,” Concerned Demography 1, no. 4 (1970): 2.
28
[Link] (accessed 5/15/15).
29
Union of Concerned Scientists, Founding Document: 1968 MIT Faculty Statement (n.d.), url: http:
//[Link]/about/[Link]#.VVX4revZr8F (accessed 05/15/2015).

520
ticularly the PAA, where they lobbied for full voting rights for student members and for the
active recruitment of African American graduate students to population research centers.30
Drawing on standpoint theory, the Concerned Demographers argued that “the experience of
being black would probably give added insights and awareness into the experiences of minor-
ity status which might lead to more fruitful research.”31 They also critiqued demography’s
lack of attention to women’s rights, with one member arguing that “fertility rates around
the world will not be brought down until women are liberated from their role as a tool in the
means of production, until they are freed from the degradation of being a baby producing
machine.” She also pointed to discrimination against women in demography itself, “where
women are permitted to be clerical assistants but rarely are seen in the classroom.”32
The Concerned Demographers were based initially at the University of Wisconsin and
later at the University of Pennsylvania. The group drew members from population studies
centers at other universities — particularly the University of Michigan and Cornell University
— and members took turns hosting the group’s newsletter, Concerned Demography, at their
home institutions.33 Concerned Demography expressed the members’ views, published their
research, and discussed research published in Latin America. According to former member
Charles Hirschman, it was no accident that the organization formed at the University of
Wisconsin’s Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE). CDE boasted a young faculty,
many of whom had been trained at the University of Michigan, where the influence of
Chicago-trained urban ecologists Beverly and Otis Dudley Duncan was strong. The research
of CDE faculty tended to focus on such issues as racial inequality, segregation, and social
stratification.34 Duncan himself, however, seems to have been highly critical of the group.
30
Concerned Demographers, “PAA Business Meeting: No Yawns This Year,” Concerned Demography 1,
no. 4 (1970): 8–9.
31
Ibid., 9.
32
Concerned Demographers, “Reader Response — Pro and Con,” Concerned Demography 1, no. 4 (1970):
13.
33
Telephone interview with Avery “Pete” Guest, 6/17/2014; interview with Gretchen Condran, 6/8/2012.
34
“Charles Hirschman, Interview with the PAA History Committee for the PAA Oral History Project,”
May 1, 2014, url: http : / / geography . sdsu . edu / Research / Projects / PAA / oralhistory / Charles _
Hirschman_interview_May_2014.pdf, url: [Link]
oralhistory/Charles_Hirschman_interview_May_2014.pdf.

521
At the 1969 PAA meeting, when Duncan was president, he invited anyone dissatisfied with
the PAA to leave, a clear reference to the Concerned Demographers.35 While some senior
demographers were interested in and sympathetic to the Concerned Demographers, such as
Barbara Lee Heyns of Harvard University, who thanked the them for “a welcome critique of
the field,”36 others felt that the group’s activities threatened the security of the discipline’s
funding, indicating the strong influence of the Ford Foundation and the Population Council.37
Thomas E. Steahr of the University of North Carolina described Concerned Demography as
“the worst piece of anti-intellectual propaganda I have ever had the misfortune to read.” He
warned its editors that “national circulation of such trash does a disservice to yourself, the
field of demography, and the University of Wisconsin.”38
The Concerned Demographers were openly critical of the funding structure of their field,
particularly the ways in which senior scholars allowed funders to direct their work in exchange
for “very high salaries, consulting fees, and prestige.”39 Berelson, Freedman, and Donald
Bogue were particular targets. The Concerned Demographers also critiqued the Population
Council in general for its association with Frederick Osborn and his eugenics program.40 In
response, Berelson not only acknowledged his influence over demographic scholarship, but
defended the right of funders to direct scientific research, rejecting the “tired claim of the
academic disciplines to be allowed to do anything they want when they want and to complain
if funding sources are not prepared to respond to that rather arbitrary claim.”41
Concerned Demography described the PAA as “an active advocate of the established
order” that “den[ied] its role just as actively,” pointing to the individual and organizational
links between the PAA, the Census Bureau, the U.S. Agency for International Development
35
Véronique Petit, Counting Populations, Understanding Societies: Towards an Interpretative Demography
(New York: Springer, 2013), 43.
36
Concerned Demographers, “Reader Response — Pro and Con,” see n. 32, 11.
37
Guest interview.
38
Concerned Demographers, “Reader Response — Pro and Con,” see n. 32, 10.
39
Concerned Demographers, “The PAA: A Time for Change,” see n. 27, 2.
40
Guest interview.
41
Bernard Berelson to Norma Nager and Paul Schollaert, Apr. 21, 1970,“PAA 1970,” box AD28, accession
2, 3.

522
(USAID), the Ford Foundation, and the Population Council.42 The Concerned Demographers
referred to the 1968 special issue of Demography on family planning, edited by Donald Bogue
and discussed in Chapter Five, as “a propaganda sheet for the A.I.D.-Nixon position on why
family planning is needed around the world.”43 They recommended that the PAA establish
“Poor People’s Advisory Committees” — analogous to PAA’s advisory committee to the
Census Bureau — to “meet with various civil rights, minority and lower income groups to
find out their needs for research information and how the PAA might facilitate necessary
studies.”44 With this proposal, the Concerned Demographers called for a more explicit linkage
between politics and science, pointing out that politics and science were already linked in the
PAA’s service to the Census Bureau. They characterized the PAA’s “statements of being
‘value-free’ and non-partisan” — central to PAA rhetoric from its interwar founding — as
“hypocritical.”45
Substantively, the Concerned Demographers opposed the framing of population control
as a solution to all of the world’s problems and objected to the focus of mainstream demog-
raphy on individual factors as drivers of fertility. They argued that demographers needed
to think structurally — about economic, social, and political institutions rather than indi-
vidual behavior — to understand demographic patterns.46 They believed that “handing out
transistor radios to men as incentive to have a vasectomy was not the way to improve living
standards” in the global south.47 Research published in Concerned Demography offered al-
ternative explanations for many of the social ills frequently attributed to population growth.
For example, in a 1972 article, Hirschman addressed the issue of unemployment in the global
south, pointing out that it was unsurprising that “population explosionists” attributed “sur-
plus labor” to high fertility “since this is also their explanation for every social problem
42
Concerned Demographers, “The PAA: A Time for Change,” see n. 27, 1-2.
43
Ibid., 2.
44
Ibid., 3.
45
Ibid., 2.
46
Guest interview; Charles Hirschman, “A New Look at Human Ecology and Marx,” Concerned Demog-
raphy 3, no. 2 (1972): 2–6.
47
Condran interview.

523
known to mankind.”48 Instead, Hirschman pointed to the efforts of companies in the core
countries of the global north to retain market share in the newly-independent countries of
the global south, arguing that this imported industrialization “did not create the backward
and forward linkages, which are crucial to sustained economic development.”49 That is, even
when countries in the global south substituted imports with domestic industries, those indus-
tries were still vertically integrated into companies based in the global north, with assembly
occurring in the global south, but all other steps in the manufacturing process controlled by
and accruing wealth for multinational companies, a situation which also impeded the devel-
opment of export industries in the global south. Hirschman pointed out that aid from the
global north had promoted the development of capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive
industrialization in the global south, requiring companies in the global south to purchase
capital from the global north and underutilize their human resources. He called for more
research, not on individual-level drivers of unemployment in the global south, but on “how
foreign businesses gain entry to the local economy and then continue to pursue policies which
are inimical to the full utilization of local manpower resources.”50 As a solution, he did not
recommend birth control to prevent the expansion of the labor force, but rather argued that
“it will be necessary to alter the present structural links between the advanced capitalist
countries and the path to industrialization in developing nations.”51 In effect, these gradu-
ate students were attempting to revive the interwar version of demographic transition theory
and its critique of imperialism and international economic exploitation.
A review of Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s 1970 book, Population, Resources, Environment in
Concerned Demography concluded that “the Ehrlichs have their hearts in the right place,”
but offered the following critique:

they do not produce a detailed theoretical description of the connections between

48
Charles Hirschman, “The Labor Surplus Problem in Third World Countries: Alternative Explanations,”
Concerned Demography 3, no. 1 (1972): 6.
49
Ibid., 11.
50
Ibid., 12.
51
Ibid., 13.

524
 population and the ills they diagnose. They are thus open to the danger that
bad theory may yield bad action: it identifies the wrong devil, or overemphasizes
one devil, while the more important fiends hoof away unscathed.52

As was common in the Concerned Demographers’ critiques of the population establishment,

the reviewer described the Ehrlichs’ population control project as an effort to maintain the
geopolitical status quo, which was threatened by population growth. Characterizing the
geopolitical order as “a system of exploitation and inequality,” the reviewer argued that
it “is seriously threatened by continuing population growth” because “such growth reveals
the inadequacies of an inflexible system and sharpens them. All the while it provides a
weapon to the exploited by increasing their numbers.”53 Like the population establishment,
the Concerned Demographers explicitly acknowledged the revolutionary potential of global
population growth; unlike the population establishment, they welcomed it.
In 1970, the Concerned Demographers responded to the announcement of Rockefeller’s
Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, discussed in Chapter Six.
They predicted that “population growth rates will be used as the prime explanation of
most of the social problems around the world. The commission will conclude that growth
rates are the primary cause of slow economic development, poverty within nations, riots,
war and whatever other ills afflict man.” They predicted further that “the commission’s
report will then be used to justify our inaction on tackling the real, complex causes of
these problems around the world.”54 The Concerned Demographers stated that they did not
oppose population stationarity, but argued that population growth was not the world’s most
pressing problem. Rather, they contended that “the real problems abroad are symbolized
by the name Rockefeller. American industries, such as those owned by the Rockefellers,
are draining foreign countries of their resources.”55 Steve Weissman of the Pacific Studies
52
Eric R. Weiss-Altaner, “Review of Population, Resources, Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich,”
Concerned Demography 2, no. 3 (1971): 15.
53
Ibid., 22.
54
Concerned Demographers, “The Rockefeller Commission: Hope for Whom?” Concerned Demography 1,
no. 4 (1970): 5.
55
Ibid.

525
Center in Palo Alto, California, expressed a similar sentiment in a 1970 article in Ramparts,
titled “Why the Population Bomb is a Rockefeller Baby.”56 As discussed in Chapter Six, the
Rockefeller Commission defied these expectations, but the expectations nonetheless speak
to the issues addressed by the Concerned Demographers
By 1973, Concerned Demography had ceased publication. It is unclear exactly what hap-
pened to the group, but it appears that most of its leaders finished their Ph.D. programs and
got jobs in population studies centers or departments of sociology, with their critique dissi-
pating as they became part of the establishment.57 Guest went on to edit Demography from
1991 to 1993 and Hirschman served as president of PAA in 2005, though both men retained
a reflexive orientation toward the field of demography.58 Although the group’s existence was
short lived, the Concerned Demographers had called attention to their field’s political al-
legiances and the effects of those allegiances on demographic scholarship, demanding that
demographers account for their power in the world.
The activities of the Concerned Demographers also contributed to a revival of Notestein
and Davis’s interwar version of demographic transition theory. Notestein commented several
times that he resented the use of the name “Concerned Demographers,” as it implied that
he and other demographers affiliated with the Population Council were not concerned about
global poverty and inequality. In response to the group’s presentations and publications, he
emphasized his own attribution of high fertility to unfavorable socioeconomic conditions. In
subsequent statements, he described the Population Council’s work as being as an adjunct
to structural change rather than a trigger of modernization.59
The co-optation of the Concerned Demographers by the population establishment did
not inhibit the critical analysis of mainstream population thought in Latin America that
had inspired their work. In a 1974 report to the Ford Foundation, Carmen Miró, director of
56
[Link] (ac-
cessed 1/7/2015).
57
Guest interview.
58
See, for example, Guest, see n. 23.
59
Frank W. Notestein to Unsigned, Dec. 10, 1969,“PAA 1970,” box AD28, accession 2.

526
CELADE and a former Population Council fellow, reported that “in the case of Latin Amer-
ica, the demographic phenomena considered by many as the most problematic. . . appear as
having their main causes in the historical process which led to the formation of capitalistic
dependent societies characterized by a growing internal heterogeneity.”60 Echoing Notestein
and Davis’s interwar work, Miró argued that Latin American countries were not poor because
of their high fertility but rather were poor and had high fertility because “the differential
manner of insertion of these societies into the world economy determined initially the for-
mation in most countries of national economies dependant [sic] on exports of agricultural
products, cattle, mineral products or other raw materials.”61 She recommended much more
detailed analysis of rural and urban populations in specific countries and specific economic
sectors to more fully understand the relationship between population and economic develop-
ment. Such social scientific critiques of the economic overpopulation discourse destabilized it
and provided support to political critiques of population control as a development strategy,
which emerged at the U.N.’s 1974 World Population Conference.

7.3 U.N. World Population Conference, 1974

The World Population Conference opened in Bucharest, Romania on August 19, 1974. It
was the third in the U.N.’s decennial series of world population conferences, following Rome
(1954) and Belgrade (1965), but was the first to be organized explicitly as a political meeting
rather than a scientific meeting. Whereas the previous meetings had been co-sponsored
by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) and focused on
scientific issues of population accounting and analysis, the 1974 meeting was sponsored
entirely by the U.N. and included delegations from all 135 member states — 1,250 delegates
60
Carmen Miró, “Interrelationship of Population Policy and Aspects of Development,” Oct. 29, 1974,“Ford
Foundation Conference on Social Science Research on Population and Development,” box AD30, accession
2, 5.
61
Ibid., 5.

527
in total — with the explicit aim of discussing and setting global population policies.62 Parallel
to the official conference, scientific and nongovernmental organizations held a Population
Tribune, though there was some overlap: the Population Council participated in both the
Tribune and in the official conference in its consultative status with the U.N. Economic and
Social Council.63
Surprisingly few participants or observers commented on the curious choice of Bucharest,
the capital of Romania, as the venue for a conference aimed at limiting world population
growth. Romania was a socialist state (though not closely aligned with the U.S.S.R.) that,
under the leadership of Nicolae Ceauşescu, had outlawed contraception and abortion in
1966 in an effort to increase the birth rate — an extreme form of the general pronatalism
of socialist states aimed at increasing the size of their work forces.64 Ceauşescu’s policies
seemed a poor model for the conference, not only because they were pronatalist but also
because they were coercive. Gail Kligman has described Ceauşescu’s policies as “one of the
most repressive pronatalist policies known to the world.”65
Despite the repressive nature of Ceauşescu’s pronatalism, Population Council demogra-
pher Paul Demeny, himself a defector from communist Hungary,66 praised Romania’s popula-
tion policies as a shining example of how a government can use policy to influence population
62
“U.N. Press Release SG/SM/2064 POP/101: Text of Address by Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to
United Nations World Population Conference,” Aug. 19, 1974,folder 16, box 12, series 273; “The World
Population Conference Meets in Bucharest in August,” 1974,folder 8, box 10, series 971; Particia A. Taylor,
“World Population Conference 1974: What Happens when Politicians and Demographers Meet? (Princeton
Alumni Weekly),” n.d.,“Bucharest,” box AD30, accession 2.
63
Ralph Townley, Bernard Berelson, May 15, 1974,“Bucharest,” box AD30, accession 2; Berelson also
arranged for Oscar Harkavy, head of population projects for the Ford Foundation, to attend the official
conference as a “Distinguished Guest,” Ralph Townley, Bernard Berelson, June 26, 1974,“Bucharest,” box
AD30, accession 2.
64
Gail Kligman, “Political Demography: The Banning of Abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania,” in Conceiving
the New World Order, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Teitelbaum and Winter, see n. 55.
65
Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 2.
66
Demeny had been a government statistician in Hungary. He defected during a 1957 conference in Geneva,
and the Population Council helped him emigrate to the U.S. as a Council fellow at Princeton University’s
Office of Population Research, where he completed a Ph.D. in economics in 1961. For details, see “Paul
Demeny, Interview with Jean Van Der Tak for the PAA Oral History Project,” June 8, 1988, url: http:
//[Link]/Research/Projects/PAA/oralhistory/PAA_Presidents_1977- [Link], url:
[Link]

528
growth. He explained that “individual fertility decisions,” which produced a birth rate of
14 per thousand members of the Romanian population in 1966, had been “found socially
inadequate and inconsistent with an aggregate population target identified as desirable by
the end of the century.” In response, he continued, the government had “moved to modify
individual behaviour and to make it conform to the perceived public interest” by altering the
social environment in which individual fertility decisions were made.67 Demeny’s language
described Romania’s population policies using the exact same language Population Council
staff had used in their calls for population polices aimed at reducing population growth in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America over the twenty years of the Council’s existence.
Demeny’s description of Romanian population policies highlights the fine distinction
made by the Population Council and other members of the population establishment be-
tween voluntarism and coercion. Whereas other observers have described Romanian policies
as oppressive, denying individuals and couples the ability to make choices regarding their
childbearing by barring their access to birth control and abortion,68 Demeny characterized
Romanian population policies as having “operated on the price and availability of con-
traceptive methods and abortion;. . . seeking to modify existing fertility norms and values;
and. . . introduced incentive schemes rewarding desired fertility behaviour and penalizing be-
haviour held socially undesirable.”69 Demeny used a market-oriented language of voluntarism
within the context of supply and demand to elide the coercive effects of economic incentives
and penalties, as the Population Council did in the policies recommended to governments in
the global south.70
67
Paul Demeny, “Population Policy on the World Agenda – 1984,” Aug. 28, 1974,“Bucharest,” box AD30,
accession 2, 8.
68
See, for example, Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania,
see n. 65, and the 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu.
69
Demeny, “Population Policy on the World Agenda – 1984,” see n. 67, 8-9.
70
For a discussion of Population Council thought on economic incentives, see Berelson, “Beyond Family
Planning,” see n. 255.

529
7.3.1 Toward a World Population Plan of Action

The 1974 conference centered on a policy document known as the Draft World Population
Plan of Action. This document had been developed over the previous few years by the
U.N. Population Commission in consultation with a Committee of Experts, which included
members from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, India, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, Sweden, Thailand, the U.S. (Frank Notestein and Conrad Taeuber), West Germany,
and Yugoslavia; consultants Charles Westoff (U.S.), Léon Tabah (France), and Carmen Miró
(Panama, director of U.N. population research center in Santiago, Chile); and representatives
of the U.N. Population Division, the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, the U.N. Food
and Agriculture Organization, UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Health Organization, and
the World Bank.71 In its draft phase, the Plan was the focal point of debates between two
U.S.-based factions in the planning committee; at the conference, it became the focal point
of debates between the U.S. and its allies and the rest of the world.
As a first step toward drafting the World Population Plan of Action, the Population
Commission and its advisors reviewed the recent literature on the relationship between pop-
ulation and development and conducted a survey of governments on population trends and
problems in all countries of the world. They agreed at the outset on three points:

first, as with other socio-economic policies, the ultimate goal of population policy
in a country is to promote the development of the country and the well-being of
its people; second, population policy attempts to achieve this common goal by
affecting population variables; and third, in order to affect population variables,
population policy needs to include measures and programmes belonging to a
variety of sectors.72

That is, population policies were policies in any sector aimed at influencing population
variables with the ultimate goal of promoting economic development and well-being at both
71
“Report of the Advisory Committee of Experts on the World Population Plan of Action on its Third
Meeting,” Feb. 25, 1974,“World Population Plan of Action 1974,” box AD24, accession 2; “Advisory Com-
mittee of Experts on Global Population Strategy,” June 19, 1972,folder 2, box 17.
72
“Progress of Work on the Technical Background Study to the World Population Plan of Action, Prepared
by the United Nations Secretariat,” June 26, 1973,folder 5, box 17, 6.

530
individual and aggregate levels. This statement suggested that population policy was to
focus on the planning of population rather than planning for population. However, the
planning of population was not to be an end in itself, but rather a means to increased
well-being and economic development.
The literature review and government survey revealed that the consensus that had rapidly
formed around the Coale-Hoover model following the 1958 publication of Population Growth
and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries was beginning to break down, with
more recent empirical studies challenging the model in some of the ways described in the
previous section. One such challenge was recognition that high levels of poverty and inequal-
ity in countries of the global south meant that “a decline in fertility would not necessarily
increase the flow of realized household savings,” which, in the Coale-Hoover model, provided
the basis for capital accumulation.73 Another was the attribution of of unemployment and
under-employment in the global south to such issues as land tenure, the seasonal nature of
single-crop economies, discriminatory trade practices, and the emphasis on investment in
capital-intensive (rather than labor-intensive) industries.74
The survey sent to all governments of the world (not just U.N. members) asked 26 ques-
tions to ascertain how heads of state interpreted various demographic indicators. These
questions asked whether the current rate of population growth of the country was “generally
satisfactory,” “too high, needs to be moderated,” or “too low, needs to be raised,” and asked
the same question about fertility rates.75 It also asked whether each country had “a serious
problem of sterility or subfecundity,” whether “illegitimacy” was considered “a serious prob-
lem in your country,” whether “the effective age at marriage of women in your country” was
considered to be too low, and whether “polygamy” was considered “a serious problem in
your country.”76 It did not elaborate on how illegitimacy or polygamy might be problematic,
73
“Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of Experts on Programmes in Demographic Aspects of Economic
Development, on its meeting held at United Nations Headquarters from 29 June to 3 July 1970,” Oct. 15,
1970,folder 5, box 17, 8.
74
Ibid.
75
See n. 72, 12.
76
Ibid., 13.

531
reflecting the assumption of the questionnaire’s authors that the mere existence of illegiti-
macy or polygamy were problematic. The questionnaire asked whether a country considered
its mortality rates (general and infant) too high, whether migration had “caused serious
imbalances in the sex and age distribution of your country,” whether dependency ratios were
too high, and whether “the regional distribution of the population of your country” was
adequate.77 It also asked about the adequacy of systems of demographic data collection and
which types of demographic research would “make a significant contribution to the proper
formulation of population related policies in your country.”78
When the Population Commission cross-tabulated survey results with existing population
policies, it found that, of the 223 countries of the world, 125 had government-sponsored fam-
ily planning programs, and an additional 22 allowed the operation of private family-planning
organizations. Of those with government-sponsored family planning programs, 40% consid-
ered their fertility rates too high and 9% considered their fertility rates too low. Of those
that neither sponsored family planning programs nor allowed for the operation of private
family-planning organizations, 13% considered their fertility rates too high and another 13%
considered theirs too low. All of the governments that did not sponsor family planning pro-
grams but did allow for the operation of private family-planning organizations considered
their fertility rates satisfactory.79 These findings suggested that, while many governments
sponsored family planning programs with the goal of reducing fertility rates considered to
be excessive, others provided family planning as part of broader health programs or simply
to facilitate the achievement of desired family size, without any population control intent.
As the Population Commission and its Committee of Experts drafted the World Pop-
ulation Plan of Action, three positions emerged. The first, described by its opponents as
“hardline” was represented by the U.S. government: William Henry Draper Jr., who had been
77
See n. 72, 14-15.
78
Ibid., 16-17.
79
Most countries that considered their fertility rates excessive also considered their growth rates excessive,
but there were some countries that considered their fertility rates excessive but did not consider their growth
rates excessive; these countries sought to reduce both mortality and fertility. ibid., 18.

532
appointed U.S. delegate to the U.N. Population Commission in 1969 by President Nixon, and
Philander P. Claxton Jr., Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Population Matters.
The second, which I will call “voluntarist,” was represented by the Population Council and
the U.S.-based demographers involved in drafting the Plan. Both positions were grounded
in the economic overpopulation discourse and viewed population control as a stimulus to
modernization. I call the third position “oppositional” in reference to its opposition to the
economic overpopulation discourse. This position represented a diversity of objections to
the economic overpopulation discourse and will be discussed in greater detail below.
Draper and Claxton’s hardline position called for replacement-level fertility by 1980 in
“developed countries” and by 1990 in all countries, and described “the demographic transi-
tion from high birth rates to low birth rates” as “an essential part of the humane process of
modernization.”80 It demanded that all governments make all forms of birth control read-
ily available to their citizens at minimal cost. Claxton also recommended that “the United
Nations, national governments, private organizations, and the mass media cooperate in main-
taining and expanding world dissemination of news and information on population matters
and family planning, the effects of population growth upon the lives of men and nations, and
methods of fertility control,” and recommended that “population subjects and family life
and sex education be included in all educational and training programs for adults, including
women’s educational activities, vocational education, functional literacy training, worker’s
education, community development projects, and agricultural extension services,” effectively
turning all of these programs into vehicles for small-family propaganda.81
Frank Notestein and Bernard Berelson feared that Claxton and Draper’s approach would
generate massive opposition among several U.N. member states, particularly those that
sought to augment their population growth rates, such as Brazil and Romania. Berelson
informed Claxton that he had sensed that “a political ‘backlash’ has emerged in the past
few years that needs to be taken seriously,” reflected in the work of Latin American social
80
Philander P. Claxton Jr., “World Population Plan of Action — Draft,” June 13, 1973,folder 5, box 17.
81
Ibid., 15-16.

533
scientists and the Concerned Demographers. As a result of this backlash, Berelson cautioned
that “further ‘pushing’ by the United States on population issues or perceived ‘pushing’ may
be seriously counterproductive.”82 He anticipated that delegates to the 1974 conference —
particularly those from Eastern Europe and Latin America — would express “skepticism
about the effect of population growth on economic development — that is, about some of
the fundamental issues that we have more or less taken for granted.”83 What was particularly
troubling to Berelson was that he expected this skepticism not “only from the ideologues
on one side or another but from respectable and responsible people,” including Harvard de-
mographer Simon Kuznets, who had recently called attention to the fact that the experience
of the global south in the 15 years since the publication of Coale and Hoover’s report had
not borne out its theoretical relationship between population growth and economic develop-
ment. Kuznets and others also emphasized “the need to take account of the distribution of
wealth and income, and of the inadequacy of definitions of development which stop at the per
capita or average level,” thereby pointing out the limits of Coale and Hoover’s analysis.84
Berelson saw it as his task in the time leading up to the conference to ensure that these
“respectable and responsible people” were “reinformed and reconvinced” of the necessity of
population control.85 However, as the U.N. Population Commission’s literature review had
demonstrated, more recent research would not be particularly convincing.
Instead of relying on this research, Berelson and Notestein sought to achieve a political
consensus about the role of population control in development programs. This goal of con-
sensus informed the voluntarist position they brought to the drafting meetings. Berelson
expressed his hope that the conference would be an opportunity “to work out a greater
convergence on population issues between the developed and the developing world on the
82
Bernard Berelson to Philander P. Claxton Jr., July 12, 1973,“World Population Plan of Action 1974,”
box AD24, accession 2.
83
Thomas K. Burch to Bernard Berelson, Oct. 27, 1972,“World Population Year – Preliminary Docu-
ments,” box AD24, accession 2.
84
Ibid.
85
Bernard Berelson to W. Parker Mauldin and Thomas K. Burch, Oct. 24, 1972,“World Population Year
– Preliminary Documents,” box AD24, accession 2.

534
one hand, and between the capitalist and the socialist worlds on the other – and, indeed, to
converge all four positions into a single generally accepted one.”86 Notestein saw the World
Population Plan of Action as the first step in this endeavor, and recommended that the
Population Commission “put forward a connected document that forestalls some arguement
[sic] by keeping things in perspective and proportion” by incorporating the “relevant truth”
embedded in each of “the world’s major ideological houses.”87
In contrast to those in the U.S. who advocated compulsion, Notestein argued that “peace-
ful social change seldom comes by a forced disregard of deeply-laid values,” and suggested
that the Plan contextualize demographic action points within those values, rather than set-
ting them in opposition.88 He emphasized the importance of avoiding “giving gross offense
to major sectors of the world,”89 and recommended that the Plan “de-fuse opposition by
stressing national and individual voluntarism.”90 In contrast to recommendations by such
figures as Paul Ehrlich and William Draper Jr. that “death control” — that is, public health
efforts aimed at reducing mortality — be suspended until fertility rates declined, Notestein
emphasized the importance of improved health, both for its own sake and for the sake of
increasing productivity and “eroding the fatalism” that prevented the uptake of family plan-
ning services.91 He accepted Davis’s contention that many people worldwide continued to
want more children than would produce a replacement level of fertility, but he also argued
that, in every society, there are some people who want fewer children, and that empowering
them to achieve this goal would not only help them, but would also lay the foundation for
the emergence of a small-family norm.92 He argued that the relationship between values
and behavior is not unidirectional: “values mediate human behavior” but “innovative be-
86
Berelson to Jr., July 12, 1973, see n. 82.
87
Frank W. Notestein to Riad Tabbarah and Octavio Cabello, July 1, 1972,folder 5, box 17, 2.
88
Ibid., 2-3.
89
Ibid., 11.
90
Ibid., 3.
91
Frank W. Notestein to Riad Tabbarah and Octavio Cabello, July 1, 1972,“World Population Plan of
Action 1974,” box AD24, accession 2, 4.
92
Notestein to Tabbarah and Cabello, July 1, 1972, see n. 87, 5.

535
havior changes values.”93 He also advocated the provision of “public education directed to
emphasizing the advantages to parents and children of the smaller family in helping them to
meet the changing needs of the modern world,” indicating the persistence of his individual
framework for understanding childbearing.
By 1972, possibly reflecting the influence of the Concerned Demographers, Notestein had
returned to his earlier view that “programs of social-economic development. . . represent the
most important complex of factors needed to set the stage for the solution of the world’s
most difficult demographic problems.”94 However, he also continued to recommend that
demographic variables be acted upon directly through programs aimed at reducing both
mortality and fertility rates, though he contended that family planning programs need not
— in fact should not — divert resources from economic development.95 He explained,

if the choice lay between a program of development on the one hand and a
program to foster contraceptive practice and sterilization on the other, there
can be little doubt that the former would foster the more rapid reduction of
fertility. But that is not the choice. A national family planning program, even a
reasonably adequate one, costs less than 2 per cent of any decent developmental
budget.. . . The proposal is not for family planning instead of development. It is
development made more effective through a one or two per cent contribution to
family planning.96

With this statement, Notestein reincorporated his 1944 recommendations for development
into the Population Council’s efforts to promote family planning as a mechanism of devel-
opment.
The way Notestein dealt with countries whose governments sought to augment popu-
lation demonstrates that, despite his compromise approach and the lip service he paid to
voluntarism and national sovereignty, his ultimate goal and that of the Population Council
was, in fact, population control. Some countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America,
where population was still relatively sparse, aimed to increase population in order to provide
93
Notestein to Tabbarah and Cabello, July 1, 1972, see n. 87, 6.
94
Ibid., 3.
95
Ibid., 4.
96
Ibid., 5.

536
the labor necessary to exploit natural resources. In the drafting of the World Population
Plan of Action, Notestein emphasized his conviction that “there are very few Less Developed
Countries that would benefit economically from an increased rate of population growth per
se.” He also recommended “demographic education” for these countries, that needed to “be
made to understand the tremendous growth that lies ahead” as a result of expected mortality
reductions.97 With this statement, he dismissed pronatalism as ignorant and misguided and
reasserted the economic overpopulation discourse. He acknowledged that population policies
should be set by sovereign governments, but recommended that even countries that consid-
ered their populations too small implement family planning along with efforts to reduce
mortality.
By the time of the World Population Conference, the U.N. Population Commission and
its Committee of Experts had finalized a Draft World Population Plan of Action and a
Background Report explaining the rationale behind the Draft Plan. Both documents were
strongly influenced by Notestein and Berelson’s voluntarist approach to population control,
but also contained elements of the hardline approach and evidence of opposition. Reflecting
the economic overpopulation discourse, the Background Report stated that rapid popula-
tion growth diverted investment from capital and continued to emphasize “a rapidly growing
population in agriculture in relation to available land resources” as the major cause of of
unemployment, even though the Population Commission’s literature review had also indi-
cated other factors.98 As a concession to the opposition view, the proponents of which asked
that the Draft Plan not represent population growth as “the cause of under-development,”
the Background Report stated that “population growth is not necessarily an obstacle to
development and lower population growth rates do not automatically bring about faster
development.”99
The Background Report emphasized economic development as the rationale for reducing
97
Notestein to Tabbarah and Cabello, July 1, 1972, see n. 87, 7.
98
See n. 73, 9-10.
99
“Extract from Report of the Seventeenth Session of the Population Commission,” 1973,folder 5, box 17.

537
population growth and stated that “population policies are constituent elements of socio-
economic development policies, never substitutes for them.”100 In other places, however, it
reversed ends and means. The Report stated that “the reproductive goals of the family
are formulated in the socio-economic context in which the family finds itself and cannot be
effectively changed without changing that socio-economic context,” suggesting that social
and economic changes were the means to fertility reduction.101 It even recommended specific
forms of economic investment as promoting population control. For example, it stated that
“although in certain cases it may be more economic to locate new industries in rural areas
rather than move the population to the cities,” it recommended against this pattern of
development, as moving people to cities was expected to have a stronger negative effect on
fertility, but did not take into account the adequacy of urban infrastructure to serve the
needs of new urban migrants. Similarly, the Report cautioned that “the increased economic
activity of women may have very little effect on fertility if it occurs under circumstances that
are readily combined with child rearing, such as in village cottage industries,” and instead
recommended that women be integrated into the economy in ways that are incompatible
with childbearing so as to reduce their fertility.102 Such suggestions indicate that reducing
population growth was a goal in and of itself for some members of the Population Commission
and its Committee of Experts, belying their statement that population policies were intended
as a means of improving living conditions.
The Draft Plan continued to insist that reductions in fertility and population growth
“tend to facilitate economic and social improvements,” and continually attributed numerous
national and international issues — such as maternal mortality, unemployment, and inter-
national labor migration — to high fertility or population growth.103 As a concession to
the hardline faction, it still contained quantitative demographic targets, though ones that
100
“Draft World Population Plan of Action,” Aug. 19, 1974,“World Population Plan of Action 1974,” box
AD24, accession 2, 7.
101
See n. 71, 6.
102
See n. 73, 13.
103
“Background Document to the Draft World Population Plan of Action,” Feb. 7, 1974,“World Population
Plan of Action 1974,” box AD24, accession 2, 6.

538
allowed for considerably more growth than did those originally proposed. The Draft Plan
specified a population growth target for the year 1985 of 2.0% in “the less developed coun-
tries” and less than 1.7% for the world as a whole. It also included quantitative goals for
mortality reduction, specifying that, by 1985, no country should “have an expectation of
life at birth of less than 50 years or an infant mortality rate of more than 120 per thou-
sand live births.” It also called for the elimination of morbidity and mortality differentials
within countries.104 Reflecting the voluntarist position, the Draft Plan avoided any language
of compulsion, for example stating that “countries which have a very high birth-rate may
consider taking action compatible with the principles and objectives of this Plan. . . to re-
duce these rates by about 5 to 10 per 1,000 before 1985.”105 It also included suggestions for
structural changes to the institution of childbearing reminiscent of those proposed earlier
by Kingsley Davis. The Draft Plan recommended that efforts to reduce fertility be focused
“at the extremes of female reproductive ages,” that member states establish a minimum
age at marriage of no less than 17 years for women, and that “socio-economic measures be
undertaken that would minimize the reasons for polygamous practices.”106 Such suggestions
sought to idealize marriage practices prevalent in the global north — monogamous unions
among adults who planned their childbearing — and use population policy to spread those
practices to the global south.

7.3.2 In Bucharest

Between the writing of the Draft Plan in January of 1974 and the opening of the World Pop-
ulation Conference in August, the economic overpopulation discourse suffered a considerable
setback. In May 1974, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Estab-
lishment of a New International Economic Order, which attributed the continuing gap in
104
“Report of the Secretary-General on the Draft World Population Plan of Action,” Jan. 23, 1974,“World
Population Plan of Action 1974,” box AD24, accession 2, 10.
105
Ibid., 13, emphasis added.
106
Ibid., 13.

539
living standards between “developed” and “developing” countries not to population growth
but to “the remaining vestiges of alien and colonial domination, foreign occupation, racial
discrimination, apartheid and neo-colonialism in all its forms.” The Declaration stated that
“it has proved impossible to achieve an even and balanced development of the international
community under the existing international economic order,” which “is in direct conflict with
current developments in international political and economic relations,” and called for “co-
operation between all the members of the international community on the basis of sovereign
equality and the removal of the disequilibrium that exists between them.”107 The omission
of population from the Declaration suggests a consensus among its writers that structural
inequality in the global economy and continuing political and military domination of the
global south by the global north were responsible for the apparent underdevelopment of the
global south and for the increasing economic division between the industrial and agricultural
parts of the world.
The preceding years had been a tumultuous time for the global economy. Global cur-
rency convertibility based on a gold-backed U.S. dollar, established at the Bretton Woods
conference in 1944, had broken down in 1971 when the U.S. abandoned the gold standard.
The 1973–1974 OPEC oil embargo had demonstrated just how much market power small
countries could exercise through control of raw materials and the formation of cartels. It had
demonstrated limits to the geopolitical power of countries in North America and Europe and
also suggested that limits of natural resource supplies were looming. The Declaration of a
New International Economic Order emphasized national sovereignty over natural resources
and economic activities and aimed to limit the power of multinational firms, recognizing
“the right to nationalization or transfer of ownership [of natural resources and economic
activities] to its nationals.”108 The Declaration also recognized the necessity of government
intervention into markets to protect weaker partners in international trade, calling for a
107
United Nations, “A/RES/S-6/3201: Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic
Order” (May 1, 1974).
108
Ibid.

540
 just and equitable relationship between the prices of raw materials, primary com-
modities, manufactured and semi-manufactured goods exported by developing
countries and the prices of raw materials, primary commodities, manufactures,
capital goods and equipment imported by them with the aim of bringing about
sustained improvement in their unsatisfactory terms of trade and the expansion
of the world economy.109

It emphasized “the need for all States to put an end to the waste of natural resources, includ-
ing food products,” re-defining the withholding of food aid by surplus-generating countries as
“waste.”110 With these points, the Declaration established a social, political, and economic
explanation of global poverty and inequality that challenged the biological explanation of-
fered by the economic overpopulation discourse.
Perhaps emboldened by this Declaration, when the World Population Conference began,
delegates from several parts of the world and from U.N. specialized agencies rejected the focus
of the conference on planning of population rather than planning for population. Whereas
opposition to the economic overpopulation discourse had been contained during the drafting
process, at the conference, it took center stage. As indicated above, opposition was not a
unified stance. Attention to how members of the hardline and voluntarist factions described
the opposition can reveal the multiplicity of positions it comprised. Philander Claxton
described opposition to the Draft Plan as “a concerted, five pronged attack by Algeria,
supported by a few African Countries; Argentina, supported by three or four Latin American
countries; an Eastern European group of eight socialist countries; the People’s Republic
of China, and the Holy See.”111 The diversity of the opposition suggests the difficulty of
mapping population thought either along the lines of First, Second, and Third Worlds,
or according to a north/south or a developed/developing binary. Despite the diversity of
opposition, opponents generally sought to eliminate the economic overpopulation discourse
from the World Population Plan of Action, to emphasize economic development as a driver of
fertility decline, and to de-emphasize the role of family planning programs in the development
109
United Nations, “A/RES/S-6/3201: Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic
Order,” see n. 107.
110
Ibid.
111
Philander Claxton Jr., “The World Population Conference: An Assessment,” n.d.,folder 15, box 29, 2.

541
process.
Some of the opposition positions were clearly religious or ideological. The Holy See
focused on the sanctity of human life, opposing the family planning response to the economic
overpopulation discourse and proposing the use of more labor-intensive production processes
to substitute for capital and employ larger populations.112 The U.S.S.R. and its allies in
Eastern Europe argued that the economic discourse of overpopulation applied only under
capitalism. Echoing Marx and Engels’s response to Malthus, described in Chapter One,
representatives of these countries stated that “there is no such thing as a ‘population problem’
in the abstract; each mode of production (feudalism, capitalism, socialism) has its own laws
of population.”113 Delegates from China made no mention of population control initiatives
recently enacted in their own country, and dismissed the idea of a “population explosion”
as an “absurd theory concocted by the Super-Powers” in order to preserve their global
hegemony.114 To the extent that the delegates from China did acknowledge the existence of
a “population problem,” they attributed it to “the aggression and plunder of the imperialists,
colonialists, and neo-colonialists, and particularly the superpowers,” asserting their country’s
opposition to both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.115 The Chinese delegation supported population
growth in Latin America and Africa, with the expectation that such growth would allow
countries there to protect themselves against the aggression of the superpowers.116
The remaining countries expressing opposition viewpoints differed mainly over the va-
lence of population growth, not over the cause of or solution to global poverty and inequality.
The francophone countries of Africa, together with Albania, Argentina, Cuba, Peru, and
Romania, argued that “so called population problems are actually problems of inequality
of world wealth and resources resulting from the present world economic order and ‘super-
112
“Population Growth in the Plan of Action,” Sept. 30, 1974,“Post-Bucharest,” box AD24, accession 2, 3.
113
W. Parker Mauldin, “Highlights of the Conference,” n.d.,“Bucharest,” box AD30, accession 2, 3.
114
Quoted in ibid.
115
Quoted in Paul Demeny, “Bucharest, Mexico City, and Beyond,” Population and Development Review
11, no. 1 (1985): 99-100.
116
Mauldin, “Highlights of the Conference,” see n. 113, 6.

542
consumption’ in the developed countries.”117 Rather than posing a threat to political stability
or economic development, they contended that growing populations could readily be accom-
modated by “agricultural and industrial development under a proper social structure, and
a redistribution of world wealth from the rich to the poor,” as recommended in the Decla-
ration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.118 Representatives of
the Population Council described the African faction as having inserted into the Plan “the
language of French Marxism to assert that the root cause of the difficulty [of poverty] lay in
exploitation, maldistribution of income, and unfortunate institutional structures.”119 Many
of these delegates viewed rapid population growth as “a positive force for economic and
social development, particularly because it provides sufficient labor for development and a
youthful age structure for progressiveness.”120 Notably, Brazil did not join in this argument,
despite its earlier contentions that its relatively small population limited its ability to fully
exploit its natural resources.121
In contrast to the pro-growth group, Egypt, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Yugoslavia,
and many of the remaining countries of Latin America and Africa conceded that popula-
tion growth could hinder economic development under some circumstances, but attributed
population growth to “poverty, poor health, high mortality, and lack of education.”122 They
argued that the most effective solution to these population problems was rapid economic de-
velopment through the establishment of the new international economic order, including “a
more equitable distribution of the world’s resources” through direct transfers, development
assistance, and revised terms of trade.123 A delegate from Guatemala called for “an end. . . to
wide publicity campaigns aimed at imposing one-sided and fanatic views on common peo-
ple,” arguing that “population policies should be a component of development policies, and
117
Mauldin, “Highlights of the Conference,” see n. 113, 4.
118
Ibid., 4.
119
See n. 112, 4.
120
Mauldin, “Highlights of the Conference,” see n. 113, 4.
121
Ibid., 6.
122
Ibid., 4.
123
Ibid., 4.

543
not a substitute thereof.”124 The leader of India’s delegation famously asserted that “devel-
opment is the best contraceptive,” pithily rephrasing Notestein and Davis’s 1944 assessment
of the situation in the global south.125
Opposition to the economic discourse of overpopulation and its family planning solution
also came from the U.N.’s specialized agencies. The International Labour Organization
continued to advocate for migration programs as a solution to problems of global poverty
and uneven population growth. At Bucharest, its director-general called for “a cessation of
generalized anti-natalist policy suggestions,” arguing that questions of population required
“a more subtle, geographically selective and less panicky treatment.”126 Henry R. Labouisse,
executive director of UNICEF, argued that family planning services should form a part of
comprehensive health care programs. He urged that national family planning programs “be
placed within the context of a whole range of activities aimed at improving the health,
nutrition, and well being of children already in the family as well as the health, the status
and the educational level of women.”127 In response to suggestions that “death control”
measures were exacerbating “the population problem,” Labouisse cited the tenet of mid-
century demographic transition theory that “when parents have a reasonable certainty that
the children they want will survive as healthy individuals, they will be strongly motivated
to limit the total number of their children.”128
None of the meeting’s participants contested the fact that population was growing, nor
did any challenge U.N. projections indicating that the world’s population would be more
than 6 billion by the end of the century. However, while proponents of the hardline and
voluntarist positions described these projections as “a matter of alarm,” proponents of op-
position positions viewed the projections as neutral data.129 Indeed, Ansley Coale described
124
“U.N. Press Release POP/119: Population Conference Hears Statements by 23 Governments, One Lib-
eration Movement at Six-Hour Meeting,” Aug. 27, 1974,folder 8, box 10, series 971.
125
Demeny, “Bucharest, Mexico City, and Beyond,” see n. 115, 100.
126
“U.N. Press Release POP/120: Representatives of 12 United Nations Bodies and Other Organizations
Address World Population Conference as Debate Nears End,” Aug. 27, 1974,folder 8, box 10, series 971.
127
See n. 62, 2.
128
Ibid., 2.
129
W. Parker Mauldin, “Outline of Report on the World Population Conference and Tribune, Bucharest,

544
the efforts of members of the opposition as being aimed at “diluting any reference to rapid
population growth as a serious problem” in the revised Plan of Action. Similarly, while most
delegates approved of family planning as an important component of health care programs
and a tool to advance reproductive autonomy, proponents of opposition positions challenged
the contention of the hardline and voluntarist positions that family planning was a critical
engine of economic development.
Although the major tensions at the Conference were between the opposition on one
side and hardline and voluntarist positions on the other, tensions between the hardline and
voluntarist factions remained. Coale, a representative of the voluntarist faction, described the
hardline position taken by the U.S. delegation as giving “ammunition to those who asserted
that ‘family planning’ is being pushed as a substitute for social change.”130 In effect, he and
others affiliated with the Population Council worried that, by adopting the sense of alarm
that had permeated the work of Moore and Draper’s Population Crisis Committee, the U.S.
delegation — led by Draper and Claxton — was undermining the more measured stance of
the Population Council and discrediting population control altogether.
In Bucharest, representatives of the opposition positions succeeded in revising the Draft
Plan to better reflect their own concerns. The final version of the World Population Plan
of Action, adopted by all 135 member states without a vote, emphasized planning for pop-
ulation rather than planning of population. In contrast to the Draft Plan, which listed its
explicit aim as “to affect population variables,” the final Plan listed as its explicit aims “to
help co-ordinate population trends and the trends of economic and social development.”131
It also aimed “to expand and deepen the capacities of countries to deal effectively with their
national and subnational population problems and to promote an appropriate international
response to their needs by increasing international activity in research, the exchange of in-
1974,” n.d.,“Bucharest,” box AD30, accession 2.
130
Demeny, “Population Policy on the World Agenda – 1984,” see n. 67, 2.
131
C. Chandrasekaran, “World Population Plan of Action,” Sept. 30, 1974,“Post-Bucharest,” box AD24,
accession 2, 2.

545
formation, and the provision of assistance on request.”132 In effect, the Plan emphasized the
need for countries with the capacity to do so to help countries with rapidly-growing popula-
tions plan for population growth rather than slow it down. The Plan emphasized this point
in its call for “universal solidarity in order to improve the quality of life of the peoples of the
world.”133
The final Plan was based in interwar demographic transition theory and sounded quite
similar to the recommendations made by Notestein and Davis in 1944–1945, stating that
“the basis for an effective solution of population problems is, above all, socio-economic trans-
formation.”134 It called for “a more equitable distribution of wealth” on a global scale.135
Delegates to the Conference rejected the longstanding claims of U.S.-based scientists, ac-
tivists, and policy makers that poverty in the global south was a result of rapid population
growth, inserting into the final Plan of Action the statement that “the present situation of
the developing countries originates in the unequal process of socio-economic development
which has divided peoples since the beginning of the modern era. This inequality still exists
and is intensified by the lack of equity in international economic relations with the conse-
quent disparity in levels of living.”136 It continued that “efforts made by developing countries
to speed up economic growth must be viewed by the entire international community as a
global endeavour to improve the quality of life for all people of the world, supported by a
just utilization of the world’s wealth, resources and technology in the spirit of the new inter-
national economic order.”137 The final Plan made frequent mention of the new international
economic order, and echoed its language in the statement that

true development cannot take place in the absence of national independence and
liberation. Alien and colonial domination, foreign occupation, wars of aggres-
sion, racial discrimination, apartheid, neo-colonialism in all its forms, continue
132
Quoted in Jr., “The World Population Conference: An Assessment,” see n. 111, 5.
133
Quoted in ibid., 5.
134
Quoted in ibid., 2.
135
Mauldin, “Highlights of the Conference,” see n. 113, 1.
136
Quoted in ibid., 1.
137
Quoted in Chandrasekaran, see n. 131, 3.

546
 to be among the greatest obstacles to the full emancipation and progress of the
developing countries and all the peoples involved.138

The final Plan retained the Draft Plan’s measures to provide technical assistance and training
to demographers and statistical offices in countries that needed such assistance.139 As for
population as a variable, the Plan explicitly stated that “policies whose aim is to affect
population trends must not be considered substitutes for socio-economic development policies
but integrated with those policies to facilitate the solution of certain problems. . . and promote
a more balanced and rational development.”140
Revisions to the Draft Plan removed all quantitative population growth targets and
timelines for achieving them. In its final version, the Plan stated that “countries which
consider their birth rates detrimental to their national purposes are invited to consider setting
quantitative goals and implementing policies that may lead to the attainment of such goals
by 1985.”141 It immediately continued by stating that “nothing herein should interfere with
the sovereignty of any government to adopt or not to adopt such quantitative goals,”142
and emphasized that “every state has the right to determine and promote demographic
policies and measures which it considers most suitable without any outside interference.”143
Amendments that had been proposed at a May meeting of the Economic Commission for
Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), calling for replacement fertility by 1985 in “developed
countries” and by 2000 worldwide, were roundly rejected at the August conference. In its
final version, the Plan stated that “family planning and related services should aim not only
at prevention of unwanted pregnancies but also at elimination of involuntary sterility or
subfecundity to enable couples to achieve their desired number of children.”144
The final Plan made a nod to the importance of preserving environmental integrity, but
138
Quoted in Chandrasekaran, see n. 131, 4.
139
Ibid., 7.
140
Quoted in Jr., “The World Population Conference: An Assessment,” see n. 111, 3.
141
“U.N. Press Release POP/126: World Population Conference, Meeting at Bucharest 19-30 August,
Approves Plan of Action Stressing Need for Development,” Sept. 3, 1974,folder 8, box 10, series 971.
142
Quoted in Jr., “The World Population Conference: An Assessment,” see n. 111, 4.
143
Mauldin, “Highlights of the Conference,” see n. 113, 1.
144
Quoted in Jr., “The World Population Conference: An Assessment,” see n. 111, 8.

547
without suggesting population control as a solution. It stated that “the demand for vital
resources increases with growing population and with growing per capita consumption,” but
did not suggest that growth in either the population or the living standards of any countries
be limited. Instead, it called for “attention. . . to the just distribution of resources and to the
minimization of wasteful aspects of their use throughout the world,” a fairly direct allusion
to the much higher per-capita levels of resource use in the global north than in the global
south.145
The only point on which all delegates to the World Population Conference agreed was the
importance of improving the rights and status of women, which economists had begun to see
as critical to economic development independent of its effect on fertility.146 The revision of the
Draft Plan expanded the section on women’s status and gender equality from one paragraph
to six. In contrast to the Draft Plan, which recommended gender equality as a means
of reducing fertility, the final Plan urged “full participation of women in the educational,
social, economic, and political life of their countries on an equal basis with men,” as a
prerequisite for economic development regardless of fertility, and promoted the availability
of birth control and abortion as a route to equality, rather than equality as a route to
the uptake of contraception and abortion, making equality rather than fertility decline the
ultimate goal.147 Delegates agreed that women and couples should have the right to “decide
freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children,” even as they contested the
suggestion that family planning could be “an engine of change to speed the development
process.”148 The final Plan of Action emphasized women’s social, political, and economic
rights, stating that “women have the right to complete integration in the development process
particularly by means of an equal participation in educational, social, economic, cultural and
145
Quoted in Jr., “The World Population Conference: An Assessment,” see n. 111, 6, emphasis in the
original.
146
Mauldin, “Highlights of the Conference,” see n. 113, 4; for a review of the economics literature on gender,
see Nancy Folbre, “New Perspectives on Households and Economic Development,” Journal of Development
Economics 22 (1986): 5–40.
147
Mauldin, “Highlights of the Conference,” see n. 113.
148
Ibid., 4.

548
political life.” The Plan continued that “the necessary measures should be taken to facilitate
this integration with family responsibilities which should be fully shared by both partners,”
emphasizing that the work of bearing and raising children should not fall only to women,
and that women’s responsibilities in these areas should not limit their participation in other
areas.149
The 1974 U.N. World Population Conference dealt a decisive blow to the economic over-
population discourse and to population control as a legitimate form of international inter-
vention by governments and non-governmental agencies. Demographers affiliated with the
Population Council described the conference as having been “captured,” both procedurally
and ideologically, by “the Third World.”150 They conceded that the final Plan had some
sound points, but complained that these points had “to be diligently extracted from even
more fruity double talk cliches, special pleading, allocations of blame, flat misstatements of
fact, and other assorted forms of nonsense.”151 Notestein was particularly offended by the
revisions made to the Draft Plan, as he had worked so hard to soften the approach of the
U.S. government by arguing that population control should be an element of development
planning rather than a substitute for it. In a private note to Berelson, he complained that
“if the B.S. as distributed in that conference could be used as fertilizer, the world would have
no food problems.”152 Demeny described the focus on socioeconomic issues at Bucharest as
“a conference on, say, railroad transportation where most speakers insist on discussing gen-
eral disarmament.”153 U.S. political scientists Jason Finkle and Barbara Crane described the
conference as “an ideological confrontation over the structure of the international economic
order, with population issues pushed into the background.”154 These comments suggest that,
149
Quoted in Jr., “The World Population Conference: An Assessment,” see n. 111, 6.
150
Mauldin, “Outline of Report on the World Population Conference and Tribune, Bucharest, 1974,” see
n. 129.
151
“The Plan of Action,” Sept. 30, 1974,“Post-Bucharest,” box AD24, accession 2, 2.
152
Frank W. Notestein, “Uninhibited Notes on Bucharest – Not for Publication,” Sept. 12, 1974,folder 13,
box 29.
153
Demeny, “Population Policy on the World Agenda – 1984,” see n. 67, 2.
154
Jason L. Finkle and Barbara B. Crane, “Ideology and Politics at Mexico City: The United States at the
1984 International Conference on Population,” Population and Development Review 11, no. 1 (1985): 1.

549
while proponents of the hardline position viewed the conference as one about population and
proponents of the opposition position viewed the conference as one about economic devel-
opment, proponents of the voluntarist position had attempted to discuss population in the
language of economic development, and had been frustrated in this effort.

7.3.3 The Population Tribune: Rockefeller’s Reversal

In Bucharest, the Population Tribune — the shadow conference for representatives of scien-
tific and nongovernmental organizations — paralleled the debates of the official conference.
As one of six “distinguished lecturers,” John D. Rockefeller III gave a much-anticipated
speech, in which he announced that his understanding of population had changed over the
40 years since he had first told his father that birth control would be his major philanthropic
focus.155 He admitted that, despite the suggestion of interwar demographic transition the-
ory that “industrialization had led to low birth rates,” when he established the Population
Council in 1952, “family planning seemed simpler and more direct” a route to alleviating
poverty in the global south.156 But he had come to see that his approach was not working:
“the absolute number of people in poverty has continued to grow” over the period of time
that the Population Council had promoted family planning, suggesting that “the programs
that have been undertaken have proved inadequate when compared to the magnitude of the
problems facing us.”157 He therefore called for “a deep and probing reappraisal of all that has
been done in the population field. . . so that the years ahead may yield the results mankind
so desperately wants.”158
Rockefeller told his audience that he had come to recognize “that rapid population growth
is only one among many problems facing most countries, that it is a multiplier and intensifier
of other problems rather than the cause of them.” He did not suggest that family planning
155
John D. Rockefeller III to Carmen Miró, Feb. 22, 1974,folder 134, box 22, record group IV3B4.7.
156
John D. Rockefeller III, “Population Growth: The Role of the Developed World,” 1974,folder 134, box
22, record group IV3B4.7, 2.
157
Ibid., 3.
158
Ibid., 3.

550
should be abandoned, but urged governments “to place population policy solidly within
the context of general economic and social development.”159 He also contended that such a
development plan “must be indigenous — created by the country and executed on the basis
of its own initiative and wisdom.”160 He acknowledged that there “should be much greater
attention than in the past to more equitable distribution of the fruits of progress throughout
all levels of society,” potentially including land reform.161 He argued that continued economic
growth would be necessary to alleviate poverty, but critiqued the way in which “results
are measured in numerical rather than human terms,” and suggested that “growth should
be pursued not for its own sake, but to meet basic human needs for jobs, food, shelter,
health, education.”162 Regarding the distribution and differential consumption of the Earth’s
resources, Rockefeller acknowledged “a responsibility implicit in the good fortune of the
industrialized and the resource-rich nations to assist in broadening the choices available to
the poor nations,” without imposing the will and values of their own countries on other
countries.163
In contrast to Paul Ehrlich’s call to cut food aid to “overpopulated” countries, Rockefeller
urged “the people of food-rich nations” to “substantially cut their own diets to help others,”
and expressed the hope that the governments of food-exporting nations would “promote such
sacrifices and waive trade considerations” if food supplies reached critically low levels in the
global south.164 Also in contrast to the rhetoric of Zero Population Growth, which called
for limits on reproduction in order to sustain high levels of consumption, Rockefeller asked
people in the countries of the global north to “moderate their levels of consumption.”165 He
concluded by calling for equal social, political, economic, and educational rights for women
worldwide, just as his Commission on Population Growth and the American Future had rec-
159
III, “Population Growth: The Role of the Developed World,” see n. 156, 4.
160
Ibid., 5.
161
Ibid., 5.
162
Ibid., 6.
163
Ibid., 7.
164
Ibid., 8.
165
Ibid., 8.

551
ommended for the United States. Whereas the Population Council and other members of the
population establishment had previously promoted family planning as a route to improving
women’s status, Rockefeller now echoed Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake in arguing that
“provision of contraceptive information and services alone simply is not enough and will not
be enough until women have alternatives to prolonged child-bearing and child-rearing.”166
The staff of the Population Council, particularly president Bernard Berelson and pres-
ident emeritus Frank Notestein, were aghast at Rockefeller’s Bucharest speech. Council
trustee W. David Hopper of the World Bank received a frantic phone call from Bucharest,
imploring him to stop Rockefeller from making such comments.167 In a private note to Berel-
son, Notestein interpreted Rockefeller’s speech to mean “he’s given up on birth control,”
and went on to speculate that “the right-to-lifers and the priests and the communists are
all greatly pleased” because “obviously he’s joined their side.” This reading was different
than that of delegates from other countries, who described Rockefeller’s speech as “a diver-
sionary tactic,” and “a sophisticated pushing of the capitalist line.”168 Indeed, the text of
Rockefeller’s speech did not sound much different from the official voluntarist position the
Population Council and its affiliates took at both the official Conference and the Population
Tribune. What Notestein recognized in Rockefeller’s speech, however, was an admission that,
although the Population Council paid frequent lip service to broader development goals, it
had pursued population control as an end in itself. Notestein declared Rockefeller’s speech
to be “thoughtless and childish” and to have “undo[ne] much of the effort” of the Population
Council.169
Notestein’s reading was correct: Rockefeller’s speech did signal the culmination of a shift
in his understanding of and approach to population that had begun with the final report of
the PGAF Commission. In the early 1970s, Rockefeller had started to back away from many
166
III, “Population Growth: The Role of the Developed World,” see n. 156, 9.
167
Joan Dunlop, “Population Council April Staff Meeting: Closing Comments of Mr. Hopper,” Apr. 24,
1975,folder 491, box 72, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5.
168
Bernard Berelson, “Memorandum to the File: World Population Conference, Bucharest – JDR’s Speech,”
Sept. 4, 1974,“Bucharest,” box AD30, accession 2.
169
Frank W. Notestein to Bernard Berelson, 1974,“Post-Bucharest,” box AD24, accession 2.

552
of his charitable commitments, in part because he could not supply as much money as he had
in the past, but also in part because he felt that his work was not having the results he had
hoped. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 reduced the amount of money Rockefeller had available
for charitable donations and, in response, he reduced his annual support for the Population
Council from over $400,000 to $250,000.170 Between 1970 and 1973, he resigned all of his
organization chairmanships, including Lincoln Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the
Population Council, explaining that “it will be in the best interests of those organizations
for younger men and women to take over the leadership — people with fresh ideas and ap-
proaches who are prepared to give time and thought to the responsibilities and opportunities
that lie ahead.”171 He nonetheless remained a member of the Population Council’s board of
directors.
Recognizing that his approach to population — both in the U.S. and globally — was
“not working,” and at the insistence of his wife and other associates that he needed more
female perspectives, in 1972 Rockefeller hired Joan Dunlop, who was then working at the
Fund for the City of New York, as his personal assistant for population matters. Dunlop
had not attended college and had no previous experience with population, which Rockefeller
viewed as an advantage. The first assignment he gave her was to “take a year and go around
and go to meetings and listen to people and tell me what you think is wrong” with his
approach to population.172 Rockefeller’s wife, Blanchette Ferry Hooker, instructed Dunlop,
in Dunlop’s interactions with Rockefeller, to “consider [her]self to be his equal” and to “tell
him the truth” about his population work.173
170
It is unclear how much Rockefeller’s annual contribution to the Population Council was prior to 1970.
After the Tax Reform Act he informed Berelson that he would “do my best – maybe a total of $400,000”
in terms of his annual contribution to the Population Council, suggesting that he had been contributing
more previously. John D. Rockefeller III to Bernard Berelson, Feb. 21, 1973,folder 478, box 71, sub-series 4,
series 3, record group 5, 2; Rockefeller’s 1973 contribution to the Population Council amounted to $250,000.
John D. Rockefeller III to Bernard Berelson, Oct. 23, 1972,folder 478, box 71, sub-series 4, series 3, record
group 5, 3.
171
III to Berelson, Oct. 23, 1972, see n. 170, 1.
172
“Joan Dunlop, Interview with Rebecca Sharpless for the Population and Reproductive Health Oral
History Project,” Apr. 14, 2004,url: [Link]
[Link], 5.
173
Ibid., 5.

553
 Dunlop noticed that, while much of the Population Council’s rhetoric and activity fo-
cused on women as the targets of family planning and population control, women “were
being treated as objects and a means to an end,” a “vehicle” for the technological solution of
contraception, with their own lives, desires, and aspirations never considered. Dunlop rou-
tinely received anonymous notes from women who worked at the Council describing the ways
in which they were discriminated against within the organization, and noticed the “palpa-
ble” level of racism in the field of population control.174 Adrienne Germain, who eventually
became assistant to Bud Harkavy, director of the Ford Foundation’s Population Office, was
told in her initial interview, “I really don’t think that we can even consider you for this
job because you’re married.” Despite the fact that Germain had a B.A. in sociology from
Wellesley College and had done graduate work at Berkeley with Kingsley Davis and Judith
Blake, her interviewer (not Harkavy) told her, “you’ll just work with us for a year or two
and then you’ll go and have babies.”175 While such sexist practices were common through-
out the professions and in academia, in this instance they belie the claims of the Population
Council and the Ford Foundation’s population programs that their activities were aimed at
improving women’s status and autonomy.
After being turned away from the Ford Foundation, Germain took a job as a research
assistant at the Population Council, where she was one of only three women in professional
positions (Dunlop worked for Rockefeller, not for the Population Council).176 She found
that her male colleagues, in their speech and writing, “never referred to women as real
people.” Instead, “they referred to contraceptive acceptors or users or postpartum cases.”177
Germain pointed out to Bernard Berelson that, although family planning programs focused
on women as the agents of reproduction, by asking them to have fewer children than their
partners wanted, and fewer children than may have been required for their own economic
security, these programs were putting women at risk of both poverty and domestic violence,
174
See n. 172, 6.
175
Paraphrased by Germain, see n. 239, 18.
176
Ibid., 20-21.
177
Ibid., 21.

554
risks that the directors of these programs never acknowledged.178
Germain found that “the so-called population money” was the only source of interna-
tional funding available to assist women in the global south. These funds provided only
contraception (and sometimes abortion), when what women really needed was access to ed-
ucation and employment to protect themselves — both economically and physically — when
they did have fewer children than their partners wanted, as well as access to health care for
themselves and their families.179 She criticized the ways in which family planning services
were delivered in the global south, with programs offering no other health services, not be-
ing integrated in any way into existing health care systems, and not dealing with any other
aspect of women’s lives.180 In 1972, Bud Harkavy of the Ford Foundation offered Germain
the job as his assistant on the basis of a critique she had written of Berelson’s “Beyond
Family Planning” article.181 By that time, Germain had gotten divorced and had returned
to Berkeley to complete her M.A. in demography, so the Ford Foundation no longer had to
worry that she would leave to have babies. Harkavy himself was a close friend and colleague
of Berelson, but by that point had begun to consider the value of alternative perspectives.
At the Ford Foundation, only one other woman was working on any of the Foundation’s
international programs.
Germain and Dunlop met in 1973.182 After their first conversation, Dunlop reported to
Rockefeller that the population control movement “was shot through with unintended sexism
and racism,” and that good new ideas were not being funded because money was controlled
by three men — Reimert Ravenholt at USAID, Bud Harkavy at the Ford Foundation, and
Bob Bates at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — and ideas were controlled by another three
men — Bernard Berelson at the Population Council, Ronald Freedman at the University
of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, and Ansley Coale at Princeton University’s Office
178
See n. 239, 24.
179
Ibid., 48.
180
Ibid., 53.
181
Ibid., 25, 54.
182
Ibid., 45.

555
of Population Research — all of whom were resistant to new approaches.183 Rockefeller
saw his 1974 Bucharest speech as a chance to insert some new ideas into the population
field, and assigned its writing to Dunlop, who recruited Germain to assist her.184 When
Berelson learned that Dunlop and Germain were writing Rockefeller’s Bucharest speech, he
complained that “it would just set back the field who knows how many years.” Rockefeller
responded that Dunlop’s and Germain’s ideas were the ones he wanted to present.185
The 1974 U.N. World Population Conference and John D. Rockefeller III’s speech at
the shadow Population Tribune were watershed moments in the history of global population
thought and population policy. They signaled the refusal of governments in the global south
to accept population control programs in lieu of a more equitable system of international
trade, and the recognition of one of the most powerful and prominent U.S. philanthropists
that population control programs had failed to meet their stated goal of stimulating economic
development in the global south and promoting well-being worldwide.

7.4 From Bucharest to Mexico City

7.4.1 Recovering From Bucharest

Philander Claxton Jr. and William Henry Draper Jr. returned from Bucharest with a very
different perception of the outcome of the conference and the future of population control
than did Rockefeller. Claxton continued to view global population control as necessary
to protect U.S. national and economic security, and was not disheartened by the changes
rendered to the World Population Plan of Action at the Bucharest conference. He declared
its adoption a “triumph for international cooperation under U.N. auspices.”186 He felt that
the final Plan “contains all the necessary provisions for effective family planning programs
183
See n. 172, 7-8.
184
See n. 239, 49.
185
Ibid., 50.
186
“Bucharest and the Future: Conference for Non-Governmental Organizations on the World Population
Conference,” Oct. 10, 1974,folder 15, box 29.

556
and population growth control programs at national and international levels,” and “lacks
only plain statements of quantitative goals with time frames for their accomplishment.”
This lack did not worry him, as he was confident that such goals would be established
either individually by member states or in future U.N. documents.187 He acknowledged that
“although the results were not ideal and there were disappointments,. . . the fact that the
World Conference on this difficult and delicate subject was held at all was an outstanding
achievement.”188 His subsequent actions, however, suggest that he was, in fact, concerned
about maintaining ongoing support for the U.S. government’s population activities abroad.
Draper, together with former Senator Joseph Tydings, on behalf of the Population Crisis
Committee, wasted no time in writing to President Gerald Ford — who had been sworn
in just before the Bucharest conference — and to all U.S. Senators and Representatives,
to restore the credibility of the economic overpopulation discourse after the damage it had
sustained in Bucharest. In these letters, Draper and Tydings rehashed the then-familiar
narrative of increasing population growth, pointing to the rate of growth as evidence of
impending overpopulation. With feigned incredulity, they informed Senators and Represen-
tatives that “it is almost unbelievable, but nevertheless true, that in the past 35 years the
world population has doubled from two billion to four billion people.” To emphasize the
import of these numbers, they described the growth in another way: “as many have been
added in one long generation as in the previous long history of the human race!” Draper and
Tydings connected this population growth to future global poverty and strife by warning that
“if unhappily this should happen again and double to eight billion in another generation,
the resulting starvation and poverty and probable world conflicts would make life hardly
worth living even for our own grandchildren.”189 Perhaps because such growth was beyond
the bounds of U.N. population projections, they bolstered their argument with reference to
the Malthusian relationship between population and food, stating that population growth in
187
Jr., “The World Population Conference: An Assessment,” see n. 111, 11.
188
Ibid., 1.
189
William H. Draper Jr. and Joseph D. Tydings, “Letter to U.S. Senators and Representatives about
population,” Nov. 29, 1974,folder 15, box 29.

557
the “food deficit countries of the global south” averaged 2.5% per year, “and adds 65,000,000
annually who have to be fed.”190 Draper and Tydings urged the recipients of their letters to
step up U.S. activities aimed at population control in the global south, calling for “active
and increased American leadership” to implement the World Population Plan of Action, and
warning that “increasing starvation, privation and poverty are inevitable” if the Plan were
not implemented quickly.191 They informed Ford that “your personal intervention and your
world leadership in dealing with these two problems [population and food] can make the
difference between reasonable success and probable failure.”192 Such statements came from
within the economic overpopulation discourse, and clearly aimed to preserve its credibility,
despite its rejection by much of the world at the World Population Conference.
Claxton reconvened the Commission for Observance of World Population Year, which
former President Nixon had created just before his resignation. The original purpose of
the Commission had been to publicize World Population Year and the World Population
Conference; Nixon had not intended it to continue meeting after the Conference. Members of
the population establishment had been shocked that, of the 20 people Nixon appointed to the
Commission, only one — Frank Notestein — had expertise in demography or family planning.
Other members of the Commission included former Secretary of Agriculture and current
Vice-Chairman of the Ralston-Purina Company Clifford Hardin; Mrs. Norman Armitage,
president of the National Federation of Republican Women; Helene Drown, a close friend
of Pat Nixon; Edward Cole, president of General Motors; Audubon Society president Elvis
Stahr; CBS president Aruthur Taylor; and professional track star Leah Seneth O’Neal.193
As an example of their work, one broadcast sponsored by the Commission that aired just
before the beginning of the conference described the conference as “130 nations trying to
find the right path towards lowering the fertility rate, particularly in the lesser developed
190
William H. Draper Jr. and Joseph D. Tydings to Gerald Ford, Nov. 29, 1974,folder 15, box 29.
191
Ibid.
192
Ibid.
193
“Intercom: The International Newsletter on Population and Family Planning,” July 1, 1974,“Bucharest,”
box AD30, accession 2; “White House Press Release,” July 11, 1974,folder 1, box 15.

558
countries where overbreeding is a way of life.”194 It neither defined “overbreeding” nor linked
it to economic development, instead calling on the familiar racialized trope of the inherent
“backwardness” and hyper-sexualization of the world’s non-white denizens and on fears of
being outnumbered by them. The broadcast urged its audience “to give this your serious
thought; to recognize the vital importance of the World Population Conference about to
take place.” It aimed to stimulate public support for U.S. intervention in global population
dynamics, stating “for once, we ask you not to scream about what our own government
spends — because the money that Uncle Sam puts into this program is an investment not
only in world stability but in a livable future for your grandchildren, their grandchildren,
and beyond.”195
Following the conference, Claxton tasked the Commission to promote the World Popu-
lation Plan of Action as a success and a mandate for further U.S. efforts to slow population
growth in the global south. The Commission specifically attempted to counter reports in
the popular press that the Bucharest conference had failed in its goal of setting worldwide
population policies.196 The Commission designated October 24 — United Nations Day — as
“World Population Day.”197 For 1975, it organized a series of conferences on food and pop-
ulation under the auspices of the American Assembly, and a series of conferences sponsored
by land-grant universities.198 The Commission also worked with the National Science Foun-
dation and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit Services to stage four exhibitions
on population and related matters during 1975.199 The Commission’s publicity work focused
on April 1975, which it asked President Ford to designate as “World Population Month.”200
The Commission recommended to the U.S. Postal Service that it issue a special stamp for
194
“Jefferson Pilot Broadcasting: World Population,” Aug. 15, 1974,folder 15, box 29.
195
Ibid.
196
See n. 246, 5.
197
LaRue R. Lutkins to Frank W. Notestein, Aug. 22, 1974,folder 15, box 29.
198
“National Commission for the Observance of World Population Year: Fourth Meeting,” Nov. 13,
1974,folder 15, box 29, 2-3.
199
Ibid., 3-4.
200
Helene Drown to Charles H. Crutchfield, Jan. 27, 1975,folder 16, box 29.

559
1975 with the theme of “Population Control” or “Food and Population.”201
In November of 1974, the Commission wrote to Caspar Weinberger, then Secretary of
the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, urging him to “use the authority of his
office to encourage the principal population, education, and research officials of the Depart-
ment. . . to initiate a broad program of support for population education” at all levels.202
As part of the ongoing efforts to promote “population education,” members of the Com-
mission prepared a pamphlet titled “Facts and Fictions about the Population Problem,”
which listed 11 “population fictions” and explained why each was untrue. This idea was
proposed by Claxton, who recognized that “while there is little difficulty identifying basic
demographic information, considerable disagreement exists as to the implications of the facts
and what should be done about them.”203 The fictions included the idea that larger popu-
lations have greater productivity; that countries with vacant land needed to increase their
populations; that economic development, industrialization, and increased living standards
would automatically reduce fertility; that people in “developing countries” needed children
for old age security; that family planning is too expensive and not rapid enough a solution
to “the population problem;” that family planning programs have failed; that a birthrate of
two children per couple will immediately end population growth; and that the World Pop-
ulation Conference had failed to produce international consensus on the need for a slowing
of population growth. The pamphlet countered these “fictions” by pointing to population
momentum and dependency ratios, and by arguing that “the experience of Europe and the
U.S. in the last century is a bad guide for the developing world in the last quarter of this
century,” because population was growing in the global south much more rapidly than it ever
had in the global north and because “Europe had a superior industrial base and a kinder
geography and climate to start with than does the developing world today.”204
201
“National Commission for the Observance of World Population Year, Third Meeting,” Oct. 15,
1974,folder 15, box 29, 5.
202
Clifford M. Hardin to Caspar Weinberger, Nov. 15, 1974,folder 15, box 29.
203
See n. 201, 3.
204
“Facts and Fictions about the Population Problem,” 1974,folder 15, box 29, 2.

560
 Frank Notestein, who did not contribute to the drafting of the pamphlet, critiqued its de-
mographic inaccuracies. In reference to a statement comparing age structure in populations
with high fertility to age structure in populations with low fertility, Notestein commented
that “there is no repairing the present statement. It must be redrafted from the beginning if
the Commission is not to become a laughing stock for the knowledgable [sic].”205 In response
to the pamphlet’s statement that “the Conference aroused world consciousness and greatly
raised its level to population problems as a major determinant of both the crisis and the
solution of the human condition,” Notestein stated “alas, I fear it did not.” He continued
that “there is considerable evidence that the Arabian and African worlds are tending to
put the issue on the back burner.”206 He warned his fellow members of the Commission
for Observance of World Population Year that “we will not help our image abroad or our
reputation for candor by putting forward a view that other participants do not recognize as
real.”207 Commission member Helene Drown also expressed her concern that “it would be
tragic if we were accused of brainwashing instead of informing, of bias instead of fairness, of
coercion instead of encouragement, of selling propaganda instead of prompting awareness,
and of dictating and alarming instead of providing inspiration and hope.”208 The activities
of the Commission suggest frantic last-ditch efforts by Claxton and Draper to shore up the
economic overpopulation discourse.

7.4.2 The Passing of the Population Generation

During the 1970s and early 1980s, many of the men who had played prominent roles in
the population establishment left the scene, and the key organizations funding demography
and global population intervention changed their approach. Hugh Moore died in 1972 and
205
Frank W. Notestein, “Comments on ‘Facts and Fictions about the Population Problem’,” 1974,folder
15, box 29.
206
Ibid.
207
Ibid.
208
Drown to Crutchfield, Jan. 27, 1975, see n. 200.

561
General William Henry Draper Jr. died at the end of 1974.209 Bernard Berelson had, in 1973,
asked to retire from his position as Population Council president. Rockefeller finally granted
this request after he returned from Bucharest, replacing Berelson on an interim basis with
family planning expert W. Parker Mauldin and organizing a sub-committee of the Board of
Trustees, led by W. David Hopper of the World Bank, to review the Council’s status and
recommend a course for the future.210 Berelson remained on the Council’s board.
Hopper was an agricultural economist dedicated to planning for population rather than
population engineering. Although he strongly supported family planning programs, he rec-
ognized that they played only a small role in improving the living standards of the world’s
people. As part of his dissertation research, he had moved to India with his wife, purchased
six acres of land, and “tried to cultivate it along the directions of the agricultural economists
in the West,” which resulted in “a miserable failure.” When he returned to the University of
Chicago to defend his dissertation he “just squeaked through” because “much of his thesis
ran directly contrary to accepted academic wisdom in the field.”211
Hopper’s review of the Population Council’s activities and his recommendations for the
future generated discussion about the fact that, from its establishment, the Population Coun-
cil had used the word “population” as a shorthand for population control through the provi-
sion of birth control. He demonstrated that, although the Council had originally described
itself as “a group devoting itself to the scientific study of population in its many interrela-
tionships” as “a help to all others engaged in furthering the well-being of man,” its activities
had focused very narrowly on fertility reduction.212 He stated that, for the Population Coun-
cil, “the population ‘problem’ was fundamentally a question of controlling human fertility,”
such that “ ‘population’ activities became synonymous in the public mind with family plan-
209
James W. Riddleberger and J. George Harrar, “Letter to Friends of the Population Crisis Committee,”
Jan. 7, 1975,folder 452, box 68, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5.
210
John D. Rockefeller III, “Sample Population Council Letter,” Oct. 10, 1974,folder 491, box 72, sub-series
4, series 3, record group 5.
211
Joan M. Dunlop, “Population Council Search Committee’s Meeting with David Hopper on January 26,”
Jan. 30, 1974,folder 491, box 72, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5.
212
W. David Hopper, “The Population Council: A Review,” May 9, 1975,folder 491, box 72, sub-series 4,
series 3, record group 5.

562
ning, birth prevention or birth control. ‘Population’ programs became fertility reduction
activities, and the ‘population’ policies of nations were considered coincident with efforts to
permanently equate national birth and death rates by the development of family planning
delivery and motivation programs.” As a result, the Council had come to be viewed, both
by observers and by staff, as “essentially a family planning agency.”213 Hopper attributed
recent declines in the Population Council’s funding to the global perception of it as a U.S. or-
ganization working toward U.S. interests, and suggested that “its attractiveness to potential
grantors would be enhanced if the international, especially developing country membership
of the Council’s governing Board and staff were expanded.”214 At that point, around 90%
of the Council’s funding came from John D. Rockefeller III, the Rockefeller Foundation, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Scaife/May (Mellon) family, USAID,
and UNFPA.215
Hopper recommended that the organization return to what he viewed as its original
mission, particularly if it was to gain international support and legitimacy. This proposal
was met with approbation by the Population Council’s staff, who argued that Hopper had
misinterpreted the Council’s original mission: according to Council staff, the organization
had always been a family planning agency, but had to use the language of “population” to
avoid opposition from various antagonists of family planning, particularly in the 1950s. They
argued that, “at the time the Council was created birth control and family planning were
simply not talked about.” For that reason, they contended, “the whole question was a sub
rosa one and the early reports of the Population Council don’t mention it,” but “underneath
concern with the birth rate was absolutely basic.”216 Archival materials from the Council’s
founding, discussed in Chapter Four, certainly support this view.
Following Hopper’s report, the board of directors appointed a new president, George
Zeidenstein, who had been nominated by Dunlop. Notestein and Berelson strongly opposed
213
Hopper, see n. 212.
214
Ibid.
215
Hopper, see n. 212; Warwick, see n. 154, 58.
216
See n. 27.

563
this choice, most likely because Zeidenstein lacked training or expertise in demography or
family planning. Notestein and Berelson both resigned from the Council’s Board of Trustees
following Zeidenstein’s appointment.217 Zeidenstein, born in 1929, was a graduate of Har-
vard Law School. After ten years as a corporate and securities lawyer on Wall Street, he
had resigned from his job to work with voter registration drives for African Americans in
Mississippi and Arkansas in the early 1960s. He later worked in Nepal as Country Director
for the Peace Corps, and in Bangladesh as a representative of the Ford Foundation.218 In
Bangladesh, he met Adrienne Germain, who by then had focused her career on develop-
ment programs centered on women’s rights and women’s economic activities in South Asia.
After Berelson’s resignation as president of the Population Council, Germain recommended
Zeidenstein to Dunlop, who nominated him to the Board of Trustees.219
In 1976, after consulting with Population Council staff (both in New York and over-
seas) and trustees, Zeidenstein wrote a document outlining the future course of the Council.
He began with the premise that “concern with human welfare must underlie all of the
Council’s programmatic efforts.”220 He continued by acknowledging that many countries
had high fertility rates, but argued that it “is a problem mainly in relation to the dis-
position and consumption of resources, inequities in the distribution of capital, income and
social and economic opportunities, and inadequate realization of the full potentials of women
and men.”221 For that reason, he urged that “to our long-standing emphasis on population
growth, we must add related concerns with economic, social, and cultural factors such as
217
I have been unable to discover the objections of Notestein and Berelson to Zeidenstein’s appointment,
but Notestein wrote to Rockefeller, “I am so completely out of sympathy with the decision at our last meeting
that my continuation (on the board) would only embarrass you, our other colleagues, and myself.” Frank W.
Notestein to John D. Rockefeller III, Oct. 27, 1975,folder 15, box 13; Rockefeller responded that “for me to
be a party to something which appears so counter to your thinking and judgment makes me very sad,” but
explained that “each of us in the last analysis has to do what we believe is right and sound which accounts
for Joan Dunlop’s and my recommendation to the Trustees, and now your resignation.” John D. Rockefeller
III to Frank W. Notestein, Oct. 31, 1975,folder 15, box 13; Berelson tendered his resignation a few months
later. John D. Rockefeller III to Bernard Berelson, Apr. 8, 1976,folder 15, box 13.
218
Caitlin Gullickson, “Guide to George Zeidenstein Papers (FA263),” Nov. 11, 2010.
219
See n. 239, 65-66.
220
George Zeidenstein, “Future Directions of the Population Council,” June 9, 1976,folder 477, box 71,
sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5, 3.
221
Ibid., 4.

564
resources, income and capital, consumption, productivity, the roles and status of women,
health, education, housing, employment, social security, and institutional structures; and we
should pay greater attention to issues related to migration, urbanization, and mortality.”222
Zeidenstein’s document stated that the Council’s policy decisions would no longer be made
centrally by U.S.-oriented experts, but would, in the future, take into account “the views
of people from countries in which the Council works.”223 He stated the goal of “recruiting
a larger proportion of our trustees from nations other than the United States” and making
Council staff, both in New York and overseas, more internationally representative.224
Zeidenstein restructured the Council, keeping its technical assistance division but turn-
ing its biomedical division into a Biomedical Research Center and turning its demographic
division into a Center for Policy Research, under the direction of former demographic direc-
tor Paul Demeny.225 In contrast to the demographic division’s previous research on reducing
fertility, Zeidenstein proposed that the Center for Policy Research “should investigate im-
portant interrelationships between existing and anticipated development processes, policies,
and programs and demographic behavior.”226 The Center was to be staffed by “an interdisci-
plinary group of researchers, drawn primarily from the social sciences,” including “economics,
sociology, political science, public administration, demography, systems analysis, operations
research, anthropology, and social psychology.”227 This list signals the Council’s shift from
a narrow focus on fertility to a broader focus on socioeconomic development. Zeidenstein
indicated his hope that the Center would “be able to develop and maintain strong interaction
with the Council’s international programs, and hence be in close touch with perceived needs
of policymakers,” and “establish cooperative ties with research centers in the developing
world.”228 He also emphasized that the Center’s research activities would include a variety
222
Zeidenstein, see n. 220, 4.
223
Ibid., 13.
224
Ibid., 13.
225
Ibid., 5.
226
Ibid., 7.
227
Ibid., A-3.
228
Ibid., A-3.

565
of scales of analysis, not only the “micro-analyses focused on the household level that have
been attracting an increasing amount of research input recently,” exemplified by the fertility
research of the 1950s and 1960s.229 Zeidenstein recognized the importance of families and
of social institutions between the level of the family and the country in fertility and other
population dynamics. The Journal Population and Development Review, which the Popula-
tion Council had launched in 1975 “to advance knowledge of the interrelationships between
population processes and socioeconomic development and to provide a forum for discussion
of related issues of public policy,” would fall under the editorship of the Council’s Center for
Policy Research, with the directive “to pay particular attention to the needs of policymakers
in developing countries.”230
According to Zeidenstein’s plan for the Council’s future, the Center for Biomedical Re-
search would focus on four areas. The first was the development of methods of “fertility
regulation” (including contraception, sterilization, and abortion) that are “more effective
and accessible, and that require less costly and sophisticated delivery systems,” such as the
ones promoted by Reimert Ravenholt of USAID and described in Chapter Six.231 In par-
ticular, Zeidenstein sought new forms of long-term contraception — including implants and
vaginal rings, both of which would be developed under Population Council auspices in the
next few decades — and non-surgical methods of abortion and sterilization. The second fo-
cus was application of the existing basic knowledge of reproduction. The third was research
on the safety and health effects of currently-available methods of contraception. Previous
research had focused on the efficacy of these methods, but with this new research area, the
Population Council would investigate the long-term safety of systemic contraception meth-
ods, as well as geographically-specific issues in the areas the Council’s programs served.232
The fourth area would be the internationalization of the field of reproductive biomedicine,
attracting to the field scientists who could develop family planning interventions sensitive to
229
Kirk, “Proposals for Board of Trustees Meeting of May 13, 1959,” see n. 116, A-7.
230
Zeidenstein, see n. 220, A-11.
231
Ibid., B-2.
232
Ibid., B-4.

566
the needs of their own societies. Through this initiative, Zeidenstein also hoped to increase
the proportion of women in reproductive biomedicine. In addition to providing fellowships
for training, the Population Council would train scientists in its own laboratories, which
Zeidenstein hoped would “help to internationalize our method-development effort, even at
the laboratory stage.”233 These new research foci demonstrate Zeidenstein’s concern with
meeting the health and family planning needs of the Council’s constituents worldwide, in
contrast to the Council’s earlier overriding concern with reducing fertility.
Rockefeller strongly approved of Zeidenstein’s plans for the Council’s future. In his annual
report to the Board of Trustees for 1977, Rockefeller stated that his views on population
had “matured” with his recognition just before Bucharest that “the fundamental purpose
of population programs is human welfare, not fertility decline,” and that “any significant
lowering of birth rates cannot be achieved by technology or propaganda or force.”234 In
general, Zeidenstein aimed to make Population Council staff and leadership less male, less
white, and less American. As part of this initiative, he restructured the organization to offer
a “career ladder” for secretaries, typists, and clerks to move into paraprofessional positions,
including grant administration, logistic support for field staff, and budget work.235
Similar changes began to occur at the Ford Foundation beginning in 1979, when Mc-
George Bundy retired as president. Bundy was replaced by Frank Thomas, who had been
raised in poverty in New York City by a single mother from Jamaica. One of Thomas’s
first acts as president was to state that the programs of the Ford Foundation would be re-
oriented around the core value of nondiscrimination — specifically citing gender and race
— and to invite anyone who did not share this value to leave the Foundation.236 In the
early 1980s, Thomas appointed Germain head of the Ford Foundation’s Bangladesh office,
where she attempted to turn the population program into a reproductive health program
233
Zeidenstein, see n. 220, B-6.
234
John D. Rockefeller III, “Introduction to Annual Report of the Population Council — Final Draft,”
Apr. 4, 1977,folder 493, box 73, sub-series 4, series 3, record group 5.
235
Zeidenstein, see n. 220, C-5.
236
See n. 239, 67-68.

567
that included maternal and child health along with contraception and menstrual regulation
(abortion was illegal in Bangladesh).237 In the first years of her work in Bangladesh, she
raised the ire of the U.S. government by making grants to USAID programs to add health
care services to their family planning offices, as these were the services being requested by
their clients and were unavailable elsewhere.238 Germain also shifted the focus of the Ford
Foundation’s agriculture programs from cash crops grown by men for the global market to
food crops grown by women for local consumption, and promoted the diversification of the
rural economy.239 Together with Zeidenstein, Germain helped Muhammad Yunus secure the
funding to establish the Grameen Bank, one of the first microlenders.240
John D. Rockefeller III died in a car accident in 1978, and Bernard Berelson passed
away in 1979. In 1980, Reimert Ravenholt resigned from USAID as a result of consider-
able opposition by anti-abortion groups.241 Frank Notestein died in early 1983.242 These
deaths and retirements, and the institutional changes they precipitated at the Population
Council and the Ford Foundation helped to bring the activities of the U.S.-based popu-
lation establishment into line with the needs of the countries in which they operated, as
expressed at the 1974 World Population Conference. In contrast to the U.S. Department of
State, where Philander Claxton dug in his heels and refused to acknowledge his defeat at
Bucharest, the Population Council and the Ford Foundation responded by changing their
population-oriented programs to better suit the needs of their clients. Yet, ironically, just
at the moment when the population establishment was beginning to recognize the global
complexities surrounding population issues, they faced a new threat: conservative backlash
against any attempts to intervene in reproductive issues, whether intended to stimulate
economic development or to increase reproductive health and autonomy.
237
See n. 239, 73.
238
Ibid., 75-76.
239
Ibid., 76-77.
240
Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. ibid., 77.
241
Warwick, see n. 154, 51.
242
“Princeton University Press Release,” Feb. 21, 1983,folder 3, box 13.

568
7.4.3 Mexico City

In 1984, the U.N. again held its decadal World Population Conference, this time with the
goal of assessing progress on the World Population Plan of Action adopted in Bucharest
in 1974. Recommendations drafted beforehand included increasing funding to UNFPA and
encouraging member states to consider population policies in their development programs.
The U.S. government participated actively in drafting these recommendations. However, at
the conference itself, the U.S. delegation took a stance completely at odds with the previous
twenty years of foreign and domestic policy related to population and family planning, stat-
ing that “population growth is, of itself, a neutral phenomenon” and that “the relationship
between population growth and economic development is not necessarily a negative one.”
Rather, growing population was a danger only in the context of “governmental control of
economies” or “economic statism.”243 The U.S. delegation recommended that “those devel-
oping countries experiencing population pressures should reduce government interference in
their economies in order to promote economic growth and thereby reduce fertility” because
“population control programs alone cannot substitute for the economic reforms that put a
society on the road toward growth.”244 The delegation concluded that there was “no global
population crisis that require[d] drastic forms of intervention by governments.”245
On the surface, this new U.S. stance seemed to be in line with the interwar demographic
transition theory championed by leaders from Asia, Africa, and Latin America in 1974, as it
contended that development was, in fact, the most effective contraceptive — as the Indian
delegation had contended at the previous conference. However, the “economic reforms that
put a society on the road toward growth” recommended by the U.S. delegation in 1984 were
those associated with neoliberal market fundamentalism rather than the reforms associated
with the new international economic order that had held so much promise a decade earlier.
Neoliberalism — which David Harvey defines as “a theory of political economic practices
243
Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 2, 11.
244
Ibid., 1, 11.
245
Ibid., 11, emphasis in the original.

569
that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual en-
trepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
private property rights, free markets, and free trade246 — was not the only right-wing U.S.
ideology on display in Mexico City. The U.S. delegation also announced that U.S. funds
could no longer be supplied to organizations that performed or counseled abortion.247 Led
by James L. Buckley (brother of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.), an un-
dersecretary of state in the Reagan Administration with strong pro-life credentials, the U.S.
delegation stated that “the United States does not consider abortion an acceptable element
of family planning programs.” This statement precipitated a new alignment with the Vat-
ican, whose delegation proceded to propose that abortion be excluded from the forms of
family planning recognized by the U.N., though it had originated in the rise of evangelical
Christianity in the U.S. rather than the political power of Catholicism.248 As a corollary of
this policy, USAID ceased funding the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).
USAID had previously been one of IPPF’s largest donors, but IPPF had become a target
of the growing political opposition to abortion rights in the U.S. The Pathfinder Fund dis-
continued its abortion-related activities in order to maintain support from USAID.249 The
policy also threatened U.S. support for UNFPA, requiring that UNFPA eschew support for
abortion in order to continue receiving funds from the U.S., its largest donor. U.S. funds had
already been restricted from the direct support of abortion by the 1973 Helms Amendment
to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, but the new policy was much more restrictive. The
timing of the conference only months before the U.S. presidential election, at which Reagan
would be up for re-election, certainly contributed to this stance.
The U.S. position at the 1984 conference was a sharp reversal of its position at the 1974
conference, where the U.S. delegation had pushed hardest for the adoption of quantitative
demographic targets and deadlines for meeting those targets. Prior to 1984, the U.S. govern-
246
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
247
Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 1.
248
Ibid., 13.
249
Ibid., 18.

570
ment had been the strongest proponent of population limitation worldwide, and the largest
source of funds for population research and control. USAID had population offices in more
than 40 countries and provided funds to family planning programs in more than 90 countries.
Multilateral efforts of the UN, the World Bank, and the International Planned Parenthood
Federation were all spearheaded by U.S.-based leaders.250
Between 1974 and 1984, the geopolitical situation had again shifted. Attempts by coun-
tries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to establish commodity cartels on the OPEC model
had failed, and the growing economic differences between countries in the global south had
begun to undermine political-economic solidarity among them. Their indebtedness to the
countries of the global north — mainly the U.S. — forced them to acquiesce with the struc-
tural adjustment mandates of the International Monetary Fund, which required privatization,
deregulation, free trade, and the dismantling of social welfare programs.251 Following their
assertion in the 1974 World Population Plan of Action that population programs must be
designed in the context of development planning, heads of state in the global south had
begun to welcome family planning assistance — both monetary and technical — from the
UNFPA, non-governmental agencies, and bilateral agreements with countries in the global
north. Having adopted its one-child policy in 1979, China sent a 27-member delegation to
Mexico City in 1984 to promote family planning and population control policies worldwide,
also representing a sharp reversal from its 1974 position that “population is not a problem
under socialism.”252
In its preparations for the conference, the U.N. Population Division attempted to mini-
mize opportunities for political debate by specifying that discussions at the conference were
to remain “within the framework of the existing WPPA [World Population Plan of Action],
the principles and objectives of which continue to be fully valid.”253 The organizers decided
not to hold a shadow conference for nongovernmental organizations, as had been done in
250
Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 9.
251
Ibid., 3.
252
Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 5; Demeny, “Bucharest, Mexico City, and Beyond,” see n. 115, 99.
253
Quoted in Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 5.

571
Bucharest, to avoid disruption and additional politicization of the conference. Mexico City
was selected as the venue because Mexico had joined the population control bandwagon
after 1974. The U.N. Population Commission viewed it as “an example for other countries
that may be at earlier stages of population policy development,” and hoped that Mexico
would “provide diplomatic leadership for the developing countries and promote a smooth
conference.”254 However, the conference’s proximity to the U.S. facilitated attendance by
American journalists and lobbyists, turning it into a venue for U.S. electoral politics.
The strongest opposition to the U.S. position came not from the delegations from other
countries, but from the U.S.-based demographers and population activists present at the
Conference. Finkle and Crane speculate that delegates from other countries were not terribly
worried about the U.S. position because they recognized its motivation in the upcoming U.S.
election, and assumed it would be undermined by intense opposition within the U.S.255 As
a strong signal of this opposition, six members of Congress flew to Mexico City to hold a
press conference “to air their dissatisfaction and to decry the lack of consultation between
the Executive Branch and Congress in formulating the position.”256 Following the Mexico
City conference, Congress approved a $50 million increase to the USAID population budget
for fiscal year 1985, bringing it to $290 million.257
Although observers within the U.S. and worldwide were dismayed by the position taken
by the U.S. delegation at Mexico City, they were not surprised, as the Reagan Administration
had unofficially circulated a statement of the position prior to the conference. This statement
was heavily influenced by the work of University of Illinois economist Julian Simon, who was
an advisor to the Reagan Administration. Over the previous decade, Simon — introduced
in Chapter Six — had become the most vocal neoliberal critic of both economic and envi-
ronmental overpopulation discourses, championing the free market as the mechanism that
254
Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 7.
255
Between June and September 1945, 245 editorials opposed the official U.S. position. 37 supported it and
20 were mixed. ibid., 15 and note 59.
256
Ibid., 15.
257
Ibid., 20.

572
could most effectively balance populations, economies, and natural resources. In 1980, Si-
mon challenged Paul Ehrlich to what is now one of the most well-known scientific bets.258
Arguing that if resources were becoming increasingly scarce as a result of population growth
— as Ehrlich and other proponents of the environmental overpopulation discourse argued
— scarcity would be reflected in rising prices for those resources. Following this logic, he
proposed a bet to Ehrlich: Ehrlich could choose a portfolio of $200 worth of any five metals,
totaling $1,000. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the metals increased over the next ten
years, Simon would pay the difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich would pay the difference.
Ehrlich, together with his colleagues John Holdren and John Harte, selected chromium, cop-
per, nickel, tin, and tungsten, all of which had seen dramatic increases in their nominal prices
during the 1970s.259 Over the next decade, the price of all five metals fell, even as the world’s
population grew from 4.5 billion to 5.3 billion; in 1990 Ehrlich paid $576.07 to Simon.260
Historian Paul Sabin has detailed the historically-specific reasons for the fall in the price of
these metals, demonstrating that the effects of economic, technological, and political factors
were stronger than that of population growth. While Simon’s victory in this well-publicized
bet suggests that population growth has little direct impact on the price of metals, observers
— particularly those looking to vindicate neoliberal approaches to governance — drew much
more sweeping conclusions, arguing that Simon’s victory “proved” environmental regulation
and population control unnecessary. Sabin has suggested that the 1980 presidential election
in the United States was a popular referendum on conservation (Carter) versus growth (Rea-
gan), with Reagan’s sweeping victory signaling a public preference for growth rather than
conservation.261
Reagan’s 1984 statement was also influenced by the work of economist P.T. Bauer, who
published a collection of essays, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion, in 1981,
inveighing against what he called the “myth” of the “population explosion” as a barrier to
258
Sabin, see n. 13.
259
Ibid., 135.
260
Ibid., 181.
261
Ibid.

573
economic development.262 However, in contrast to the overpopulation critics of the previous
decade, who attributed poverty in the global south to the inequities of international trade,
Bauer attributed it to deficient “aptitudes, aspirations, and attitudes” on the part of the
poor themselves. Just as dependency theorists, world systems theorists, and other critics of
the economic overpopulation discourse had dismissed population as a red herring — arguing
that economic development was being prevented by other obstacles — Bauer too dismissed
population as irrelevant to development, arguing that the market would reduce population
growth, and that its discipline would cure the character deficiencies that, he believed, perpet-
uated poverty. He theorized that “if rapid population growth should substantially threaten
living standards, this would induce people to modify their reproductive behavior.”263 Reagan
echoed these economists in a televised presidential debate in October 1984, stating that the
“population explosion” had been “vastly exaggerated — over-exaggerated.”264
The Mexico City conference signals the final dissolution of the economic overpopulation
discourse. While the older Malthusian attribution of individual poverty and societal mis-
ery to population growth continues to appear in journalism,265 the specific framing of high
fertility rates in countries of the global south as a barrier to social, economic, and political
“modernization” had been abandoned by its last proponent, the U.S. government. By the
1980s, neoliberal observers in the U.S. no longer needed high fertility to explain poverty and
global inequality and thereby elide the effects of imperialism and economic domination; they
could now simply blame the poor themselves, as Bauer did in Equality, the Third World, and
Economic Delusion. But, as described in Chapters Four and Five, the field of demography
had expanded considerably during the postwar period as a result of the financial support and
legitimacy it had accrued from its patrons and clients, to whom it had offered intellectual
262
T.W. Hutchison, “Review of Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion by P.T. Bauer,” Eco-
nomica 49, no. 194 (1982): 212.
263
Quoted in Paul Demeny, “Review of Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion,” Population
and Development Review 8, no. 1 (1982): 192.
264
Quoted in Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 28, note 75.
265
See, for example, Kenneth R. Weiss, “Fertility Rates Fall But Global Population Explosion Goes On,”
Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2012, part of a five-part series.

574
support for the economic overpopulation discourse. The final part of this section discusses
how demography adapted to its new political environment.

7.4.4 Demography After 1984

In response to the circulated draft of the Reagan Administration’s 1984 statement, demogra-
pher Michael S. Teitelbaum, as chair of the Public Affairs Committee of the PAA, appeared
before Congress to protest the government’s stance, arguing that the author of the Reagan
Administration’s statement was “either unaware of 50 years of demographic research, or de-
liberately ignored it.”266 However, Teitelbaum himself seems to have been unaware of much
of the demographic research produced over the preceding 50 years. With the signal excep-
tion of Coale and Hoover’s Population Growth and Economic Development in Low Income
Countries (1958), much of the demographic research of the half-century prior to the Mexico
City conference challenged the economic overpopulation discourse rather than supporting it.
Following the Mexico City Conference, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) returned
to the question of the relationship between population growth and economic development,
which it had first addressed in 1963, as discussed in Chapter Four. This time, the NAS Work-
ing Group on Population Growth and Economic Development and the Population Committee
represented a new generation of demographers. Although it included Ronald Freedman of
the University of Michigan and Charles Westoff of OPR, it also included several younger
demographers, most notably Ronald D. Lee, a Berkeley demographer who had completed
his M.A. in demography with Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake at Berkeley before going to
Harvard to study with Nathan Keyfitz for his Ph.D.; University of Pennsylvania demogra-
pher Samuel H. Preston, a former student of Ansley Coale at OPR; and Jane Menken, a
Princeton demographer who had also studied with Ansley Coale, but whose research focused
heavily on women’s reproductive health and the role of women in economic development.
266
Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 27, note 60.

575
Menken and Preston were in 1984 both recent presidents of the PAA.267
In its review of recent scholarship on the relationship between population growth and
economic development, the NAS group found that, although “common sense” and theoretical
studies had suggested that rapid population growth would impede economic development,
over the period from 1960 to 1985, “developing countries have achieved unprecedented levels
of income per capital [sic], literacy, and life expectancy,” despite equally unprecedented levels
of population growth.268 Moreover, with the exception of parts of Africa, food production
worldwide had increased more rapidly than population from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s,
while the real price of food had declined.269 The members of the NAS Population Committee
argued that “simple correlations between population growth and per capita income. . . provide
little insight into the causal impact of a policy-driven decline in fertility,” something that
had been largely ignored in the scientific literature.270 As discussed in Chapters Four and
Five, after the 1958 publication of Ansley Coale and Edgar Hoover’s Population Growth and
Economic Development in Low Income Countries, which was widely interpreted as providing
empirical evidence for the economic overpopulation discourse first articulated by Notestein
in 1947, demographers had largely focused their attention on how to reduce fertility in
the global south, neglecting to examine the social, economic, and political consequences of
fertility reduction in agrarian societies.
The report of the NAS Population Committee, published in 1986, validated the Reagan
Administration’s position that population growth, in and of itself, was socioeconomically neu-
tral. The Committee found that there was no hard and fast relationship between population
growth and economic development; rather, the socioeconomic consequences of population
growth or fertility decline depended on a host of structural and institutional factors. The
report also supported the contentions of demographers in the 1970s, described in Chapter
267
[Link]
268
National Research Council, Population Growth and Economic Development: Policy Questions (Wash-
ington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1986), 4.
269
Ibid., 20.
270
Ibid., 7.

576
Six, that population growth does not automatically lead to resource depletion and envi-
ronmental degradation, explicitly invoking Barry Commoner’s method — also described in
Chapter Six — for decomposing changes in pollution levels into the amounts produced by
population growth, rising per-capita consumption levels, and technological changes, point-
ing to “economic activity in the developed countries” as the major culprit.271 The report
called for regulation and conservation rather than population control as a means of protect-
ing environmental quality. One such solution it recommended was a “market in pollution
rights.”272 The recommendation, along with the suggestion that market forces would lead
to resource substitution as non-renewable resources grew increasingly scarce, echoed the op-
timism of earlier generations of demographers about the ability of the market to allocate
scarce resources. However, the report did not share the neoliberal market fundamentalism
of the Reagan Administration and its economic advisors, arguing that “perfectly functioning
markets are no guarantee against starvation when there are extreme disparities of wealth.”273
The NAS report is representative of a shift that began to occur within demography after
1974 and picked up pace after 1984. The Population Council’s new journal, Population and
Development Review (PDR), became an outlet for demography scholarship that did not fit
the traditional mold, as represented by the journals Population Studies and Demography,
discussed in Chapter Five. Edited by Paul Demeny, PDR devoted considerably less space
to quantitative analysis than did either of the other journals — roughly 10% of journal con-
tent, as compared to 30% for Population Studies and 50% for Demography. It also devoted
substantially less space to studies of fertility and more space to research on economic develop-
ment and issues specific to the global south, reflecting Zeidenstein’s goal of internationalizing
population research.274 New journals also joined the scene, including Population and En-
vironment, established in 1980, and Population Research and Policy Review, established in
271
National Research Council, Population Growth and Economic Development: Policy Questions, see n. 268,
37.
272
Ibid., 36.
273
Ibid., 34.
274
[Link]

577
1982.
Beginning after 1974, the PAA began to elect presidents whose research focused on areas
other than fertility, or whose research on fertility did not fit neatly into the family planning
model. These included Judith Blake (1981) and Richard Easterlin (1978), both strong op-
ponents of family planning as a route to economic development, as discussed in Chapters
Four and Five; Evelyn Kitagawa (1977) and Charles B. Nam (1979), who studied mortality;
and Sidney Goldstein (1976) and Reynolds Farley (1988), who worked on migration and
urbanization. In 1986, Paul Demeny served as president of PAA, signaling an ongoing con-
nection between the Population Council, the PAA, and the field of demography. By 1974,
the U.S. government had taken over the majority of funding for population research centers
at U.S. universities, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and USAID. After 1984,
NIH became the main funder of demography research, with fertility studies funded by the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and mortality studies funded
by the National Institute of Aging. The field has also acquired new foundation funders,
including Gates and Hewlett.
After 1974, the passing of the first generation of demographers, combined with the reori-
entation of the organizations that served as demography’s major patrons and clients, seems
to have created an institutional environment more open to a variety of research topics and
approaches, in which scholars have more autonomy vis-a-vis their funders. Demographer
Dennis Hodgson has described the 1950-1984 period as one of intellectual “orthodoxy,” in
which views that contradicted what I have called the economic overpopulation discourse
were marginalized within the field. This dissertation has aimed to reveal the specific mecha-
nisms and relationships through which demography’s patrons and clients exercised influence
over the intellectual content of the field, and this chapter and the end of the previous one
have detailed the empirical and political challenges to overpopulation discourses and the
institutions that protected them.

578
Conclusion

Between 1970 and 1984, the economic overpopulation discourse succumbed to the accumula-
tion of empirical anomalies and direct political attack, from both progressive and conservative
critics. Many countries of the global south experienced both fertility decline and economic
growth, without the benefits of modernization promised by demographers, modernization
theorists, and the governmental and inter- and non-governmental agencies that promoted
family planning worldwide as the solution to poverty, inequality, and strife. Demography
graduate students, concerned that their field might be doing more harm than good in the
world, laid bare the U.S.-based interests served by global population control and their in-
fluence on demographic scholarship. Although the Concerned Demographers had disbanded
and largely joined the faculty ranks of the field before the 1974 U.N. World Population
Conference, delegates from the global south made similar critiques, rejecting population
control as a poor substitute for the real economic reforms embodied in the recently-adopted
Declaration of a New International Economic Order.
Following the 1974 conference, population interests within and close to the U.S. govern-
ment — most prominently Philander Claxton and William Draper Jr. — tried to shore up
the economic overpopulation discourse and promote continued U.S. government efforts to
control population growth in the global south. In contrast, the Population Council and the
Ford Foundation changed their approach, aiming to align their population programs with
the needs of those in the countries they sought to help rather than the desiderata of U.S.
geoeconomic and geopolitical hegemony. This transition was facilitated by the resignations
of Frank Notestein and Bernard Berelson at the Population Council and the retirement of
McGeorge Bundy at the Ford Foundation. These resignations, along with the deaths of
several central figures in this story, broke up the tight white male network that characterized
the field of demography and its relationship to its patrons and clients, which had allowed
patrons and clients considerable leverage over the content of the field.

579
 After Bucharest, several nongovernmental organizations engaged in the provision of fam-
ily planning services shifted their focus from population control to reproductive health. This
new agenda, however, was threatened in 1984, when the U.S. delegation to the World Pop-
ulation Conference in Mexico City announced what has come to be known as the “Mexico
City Gag Rule” — the prohibition on U.S. government funding to organizations that perform
or counsel abortion anywhere in the world. This new law — which, in the years since 1984,
has been repealed by every Democratic U.S. President and reinstated by every Republican
U.S. President — reflected the growing strength of the religious right wing of the Republican
Party in U.S. politics. Facilitating this antiabortion victory was the simultaneous growth of
neoliberal market fundamentalism, which held that markets could adequately allocate scarce
resources among growing populations and moderate population growth, much as demogra-
phers and eugenicists had argued throughout the twentieth century. However, in contrast
to demographers and eugenicists, many of whom had recommended the public provision of
birth control, abortion, and some public services (including education and school lunches),
as well as a measure of government control in markets for reproduction and environmental
goods, neoliberals promoted privatization, deregulation, and the elimination of social welfare
provisions.
In its statement that “population growth is, of itself, a neutral phenomenon” the Reagan
administration echoed earlier critiques of the economic overpopulation discourse.275 How-
ever, while the critiques of the 1970s had originated in radical politics and were therefore
accompanied by proposals for measures to promote greater equality, redistribution, and fair
international trade, those of the Reagan administration originated in neoliberalism and were
accompanied by calls for structural adjustment. Whereas the economic overpopulation dis-
course had naturalized poverty in the global south as a function of high fertility, neoliberal
theory naturalized it as an outcome of market forces.

275
Finkle and Crane, see n. 154, 2.

580
 Conclusion
In 2011, economist and demographer David Lam gave a presidential address to the Popula-
tion Association of America titled “How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons
from 50 Years of Extraordinary Demographic History.” His address covered the second half
of the period discussed in this dissertation, but offered a very different narrative. In effect,
Lam told demography’s success story: After World War II, falling mortality in the global
south produced rapid population growth, which threatened to outpace food production, pre-
vent economic development, and deplete the world’s resources. However, even as population
grew, per-capita food production increased, non-energy commodity prices fell, and popula-
tion growth rates declined. Lam attributed the world surviving “the population bomb” to
three economic factors (market responses, innovation, and globalization) and three demo-
graphic factors (urbanization, fertility decline, and investment in children).276 His story was
one of triumphant modernization undeterred by rapid population growth.
While Lam explored how the world survived the population bomb, this dissertation has
examined how the population bomb was built in the first place: which discursive circuits
were connected and by whom to turn population growth into an economic and environmental
threat after World War II. In doing so, I have traced the material history of the postwar
concept of overpopulation from its interwar components to its dissolution in the 1980s. The
concept includes elements with very long histories, and pieces of it continue to exist in certain
domains, including public opinion, population genetics, population ecology, biodemography,
the environmental movement, and reproductive health. However, the configuration of over-
population specific to the postwar period — the one that entered the popular imagination
during the Cold War — becomes identifiable only in the 1920s, and fades from view begin-
276
David Lam, “How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons from 50 Years of Extraordinary
Demographic History,” Demography 48, no. 4 (2011): 1231–1262.

581
ning around 1980. The previous seven chapters have described not the intellectual origins
of the concept, but rather how it took form as a particular socio-technical assemblage, and
then how it traveled between scientific, governmental, philanthropic, and public domains,
incorporating and shedding various elements, before ultimately falling apart.
I have distinguished this inquiry from earlier studies of population thought and politics
by interrogating two assumptions typically made by the existing literature. The first is the
assumption that the postwar concept of overpopulation was more or less the same as — or
simply an updated version of — Malthusian thought. The second is that evidence or credible
predictions of population growth transparently signaled impending disaster. The story began
by challenging the former assumption: Chapters One through Three demonstrated that,
prior to World War II and particularly during the interwar period, population growth was
multivalent. It could signal poverty and weakness at the individual level and wealth and
power at the national level. Population growth also remained multivalent after World War
II. Although this story has focused on narratives of impending overpopulation, narratives
of depopulation continued into the postwar period, in both the global north and the global
south. French demographers and the French government were very concerned about the
possibility of absolute population decline in France and its colonies (and former colonies),
and Brazil’s leaders attributed their country’s poverty to lack of the requisite population
to adequately exploit natural resources. If population growth is not inherently dangerous,
it then remains to examine how enough people came to believe in the inherent danger of
population growth to make this perception dominant in U.S. public opinion and domestic
and foreign policy from the 1950s through the 1970s, which is the topic of Chapter Fours
through Six. Chapter Seven examines how the perception lost its dominance during the
1980s.
This story demonstrates that a relatively small number of men — and an even smaller
number of women — were in large part responsible for the crystallization and perpetuation
of the postwar overpopulation discourses. Of course, while these men had the power to bring

582
overpopulation discourses to the attention of publics and policy makers, the stabilization of
the discourses also required the work of many other human and nonhuman actors. Universi-
ties, scholarly journals, and the mass media endowed certain ideas with authority. The actual
growth of population, degradation of the environment, and existence of poverty provided the
evidence overpopulation discourses cited. The Cold War heightened anxiety about global
political unrest. The economy as a new statistical object that could be measured provided
something to measure against population growth. Demographic transition theory and the
cohort component projection method predicted and projected future population growth, but
also opened space for the “natural” growth associated with demographic transition theory to
go awry. Fertility surveys linked individual reproductive activities to aggregate population
growth. IUDs offered the promise of control over other people’s fertility. This overpopula-
tion assemblage gained further support from citizens of the U.S. and the global south who
believed and repeated it, and from the U.S. government, the U.N., and governments in the
global south, all of which developed policies on the basis of it.
However, this story also demonstrates that the assemblage would not cohere indefinitely
and points to the factors that precipitated its dissolution after the mid-1970s. Many of
its key proponents died. New empirical evidence from the global south demonstrated that
fertility decline and economic growth did not necessarily trigger the “modernization” that
was supposed to alleviate poverty and improve living standards. Evidence that environmental
deterioration was outpacing population growth pointed to other causes. Religious opponents
of birth control and abortion gained political power. New ideologies of the free market
obviated the necessity of government involvement in population or the environment. Those
whose fertility was deemed dangerous resisted control.
When I began research for this project, I expected to trace the formation and circulation
of ideas, which I did. I tracked the logistic law of population growth, demographic transition
theory, the cohort component projection model, mainstream and free-market eugenics, and
the economic and environmental overpopulation discourses. What I did not expect, however,

583
was that — in the archives, oral histories, datasets, and publications that form the corpus
for this study — I would actually witness these ideas being passed between people and
institutions, circulated through the press and scientific publications, embedded in survey
instruments, enshrined in policy, and enacted on bodies. I found that information travels with
less friction when communicated directly from person to person, and that money lubricates
the spread of ideas, for example through the purchase of newspaper space or the funding
of research and the communication of its results. When General William Henry Draper Jr.
recommended to President Eisenhower in 1959 that U.S. foreign aid programs should include
population control, he did not pull that idea from a vacuum or from pre-existing common
knowledge of the dangers of population growth, as other scholars have suggested. Rather, as
I describe in Chapter Four, Draper recommended population control to Eisenhower because
Moore had brought it to Draper’s attention, sending him descriptions by the Population
Reference Bureau of Coale and Hoover’s 1958 Population Growth and Economic Development
in Low-Income Countries to bolster his claims. The Coale-Hoover study had been funded
by World Bank president Eugene Black; the Population Reference Bureau was funded by
the Population Council (and by other organizations through the Population Council), a
nongovernmental organization established by John D. Rockefeller III. Many of these men
knew each other and traveled in the same circles, though it was always clear who worked for
whom.
I do not wish to argue that overpopulation was a conspiracy masterminded by John D.
Rockefeller III or anyone else. Clearly, postwar overpopulation discourses contained multiple
elements, some with long histories, and required the work of many people, institutes, and
things to make them cohere. Rockefeller’s ideas were not shared by everyone else in the pop-
ulation establishment. Indeed, the divergent and conflicting approaches taken by Rockefeller
and Moore likely generated more support, credibility, and publicity for overpopulation dis-
courses than either approach would have generated on its own. Nonetheless, I was surprised
to find that the circulation of overpopulation discourses could be traced to personal and

584
institutional links involving a very small number of people, and I have sought to highlight
these links in the narrative. I was also surprised to find that the people I identified as the
points of exchange were mostly not demographers but rather their patrons and clients.
The heavy reliance of overpopulation discourses not on demographers but on their pa-
trons and clients suggests that postwar overpopulation discourses depended on demographic
theories, data, and analyses (including population projection), but were neither reducible
to nor overdetermined by the field of demography. This interdisciplinary science emerged
from the intersection of twentieth century population change and political anxieties about
that change. Population change provided would-be demographers with something to mea-
sure, theorize, and analyze; political anxieties about population change provided would-be
demographers with patrons to fund their work and give it institutional legitimacy, and with
clients to mobilize their work and bolster its authority. Demography, in turn, produced sci-
entific justification for the political projects of its patrons and clients, whether those projects
were the legalization of birth control and abortion, eugenics, immigration restriction, prona-
talism, the government provision of family planning services, or financial incentives to limit
family size.
Future research for this project will include examination of additional archives related to
demography’s patrons, clients, and antagonists, and interactions between these actors and
demographers. In particular, I plan to examine the records of the Population Investigation
Committee, the Ford Foundation, Hope Eldridge’s investigation by the House Un-American
Activities Committee, and Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance of demographers dur-
ing the Cold War. I also plan to read more of the Spanish-language demography literature
of the 1960s and 1970s, and to examine the role of the Catholic Church in the construc-
tion, maintenance, and dissolution of the postwar overpopulation discourses in the U.S. and
globally.
In the period since 1984, demographers have focused increasing attention on three new
population trends. First, mortality in the global south has failed to decline to the levels

585
achieved in the global north, as a result of continuing poor living standards and lack of access
to safe water and effective medical care.277 Second, fertility has fallen below replacement in
many countries of Europe and East Asia, producing concern about the social and economic
consequences of a top-heavy age structure.278 Third, with mortality stabilizing and fertility
falling, migration plays a larger role in population change (at sub-global levels), though it
remains much more difficult to measure, model, or predict than mortality or fertility.279
The new concept of “replacement migration” has emerged to describe the desirability of
welcoming more immigrants to countries with very low fertility to fill in the bottom of the
age pyramid.280
These new trends suggest considerable slowing of the rate of population growth, though
natural increase at the global level is still positive, a result of population momentum. World
population reached 7 billion in 2011. The U.N. World Population Prospects for 2010 pro-
jected a population of just over 10 billion in the year 2100 as its medium variant.281 In 2012,
the U.N. revised the projection upward to nearly 11 billion in the year 2100.282 Demogra-
phers continue to keep the end of population growth in their sights, even though recent trends
suggest it may result from very low fertility in some countries and relatively high mortality
in others, rather than low mortality and replacement fertility everywhere. However, other
277
Davidson R. Gwatkin, “Indications of Change in Developing Country Mortality Trends: The End of an
Era?” Population and Development Review 6, no. 4 (1980): 615–644.
278
Fred R. Harris, ed., The Baby Bust: Who Will Do the Work? Who Will Pay the Taxes? (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
279
For a new approach to modeling migration, see Andrei Rogers, Multiregional Demography: Principles,
Methods and Extensions (New York: Wiley, 1995).
280
D.A. Coleman, “Replacement Migration, or Why Everyone is Going to Have to Live in Korea: A Fable
for Our Times from the United Nations,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 357
(2002): 583–596.
281
United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision: Volume I, Compre-
hensive Tables (New York: United Nations, 2011), url: [Link]
pdf/WPP2012_Methodology.pdf (accessed 04/14/2015).
282
United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, the 2012 Revision: Volume I, Compre-
hensive Tables (New York: United Nations, 2013), url: [Link]
pdf/WPP2012_Methodology.pdf (accessed 04/14/2015); these population projections continue to rely on the
cohort component projection method, but employ statistically sophisticated methods of fitting future fertility
and mortality curves for each country, United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, the
2012 Revision: Methodology of the United Nations Population Projections and Estimates (New York: United
Nations, 2014), url: [Link]
(accessed 04/14/2015).

586
observers have continued to express anxiety about global population growth.
In July 2012, The Los Angeles Times published a five-part series by Kenneth R. Weiss
and Rick Loomis on rapid population growth in Asia and Africa.283 The series — in which the
authors link population growth to poverty, hunger, unrest, and environmental degradation
— hits notes of the postwar overpopulation discourses, though there are also differences:
now, concern about unrest focuses on young Muslim men rather than communists, and
concern about the environment focuses on climate change rather than resource depletion.
In contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, when the supply of contraceptive drugs and devices
provided by the Population Council, USAID, and the International Planned Parenthood
Federation exceeded demand, today demand exceeds supply, a result of cutbacks to family
planning programs and the ongoing inadequacy of health care in many parts of the world.
The authors acknowledged that fertility rates were falling, but argued that they were not
doing so rapidly enough, and that economic growth was exacerbating the environmental
devastation wrought by population growth. This series, like the postwar overpopulation
discourses, individualizes and naturalizes systemic social, political, and economic problems,
attributing them to the biology of population rather than the global political and economic
order.
Perhaps the most visible new overpopulation discourse is that of the Anthropocene, the
name proposed by geologists to describe the current geological era, in which human activ-
ity is the most powerful driver of biogeochemical activity.284 The Anthropocene designation
usefully calls attention to the effects of certain human activities on the Earth, altering not
just its land, water, and atmosphere, but also its very substance. However, the concept also
threatens to naturalize the human influence on the environment and to collapse distinctions
between such activities as pre-industrial agriculture and the extraction and burning of fossil
fuels.285 It also elides the interests that are advanced by and therefore promote the activities
283
[Link] (accessed 4/14/2015).
284
Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspective,” Philosophical Transac-
tions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 842–867.
285
Andreas Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth,” Jacobin (Mar. 30, 2015), url: [Link]

587
that have the strongest detrimental impact on the environment.286 By attributing recent bio-
geochemical trends to humanity and its expansion, rather than to specific human activities,
the Anthropocene revives the spectre of population growth as a threat to the natural world
and to human survival, and renews the temptation of the per-capita solution of population
control.287
Previous research has demonstrated that the practice of population accounting facilitates
the calculation of per-capita measures of social, economic, political, and environmental goods
and bads. This dissertation has teased out an important political implication of per-capita
measures: they can suggest per-capita causes of and solutions to social problems. These
solutions work well under certain theoretical assumptions. For example, if economic output
is fixed, then reducing population will increase per-capita output. If per-capita carbon
emissions are fixed, then reducing population will reduce aggregate carbon emissions. Per-
capita formulations of these problems or their solutions often obscure the inaccuracy of these
assumptions and thereby misidentify the sources of the problems. They also elide inequality
and the role of inequality in producing the very problems they attempt to explain. This
dissertation has suggested that inequality matters in very concrete ways: those who have
the ear of presidents or the money to fund scientific research have the power to shape the
world according to their vision — or at least have considerable influence over how others
perceive the world.

com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/ (accessed 04/15/2015).

286
Oreskes and Conway, see n. 57.
287
Angus and Butler, see n. 186.

588
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