In the twentieth century, Americans began to understand the world and its challenges in terms of population. Though the concept had emerged much earlier, only in the twentieth century did anticolonial nationalism and the global spread of census-making transform all of the world's people into members of national populations that together constituted a global population. U.S. philanthropists, businessmen, and diplomats began to see in national and global population dynamics—whether growth, decline, or imbalance—a threat to the country's economic hegemony and national security. Their anxieties fueled the rapid growth of demography—the social science of human population—funding the establishment of population research and training centers at universities in the United States and overseas. Aiming to stem the tide of population growth, nongovernmental organizations based primarily in the United States leveraged demographic research to legitimate the establishment of family planning programs throughout the Global South in the 1950s; over the next decade, a number of governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America promulgated their own policies aimed at reducing birth rates.
Most efforts to shape population originated outside of governments, pursued—as Matthew Connelly has shown—by “a constellation of public and private agencies,” primarily from the United States, that did not “hav[e] to answer to anyone in particular.”Footnote 1 This article shows how, in a decolonizing world increasingly organized on the basis of national sovereignty, private U.S. actors, and eventually the U.S. government, called on the power of science—demography—to control populations across international borders. It demonstrates that U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations, primarily the Population Council and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, promoted the rapid growth of demography in order to put their population control projects on the foreign policy agenda of the U.S. government and on the nation-building and economic development agendas of countries in the Global South.
This argument disrupts the linear narrative that implicitly structures most existing histories, namely that population control programs responded to clear evidence from demography that rapid population growth posed a danger to the economic development of individual countries and the environmental integrity of the world as a whole.Footnote 2 Instead, ideas of overpopulation originated outside of demography, with demographic research following but never providing more than ambivalent support for population control. It was therefore less the content of the science and more the way in which U.S. businessmen and philanthropists promoted, framed, and communicated it that facilitated the operation of U.S. power beyond U.S. borders.
Existing histories of population control document what population control agencies did on the ground.Footnote 3 This article examines how those agencies marshaled demography to legitimate their activities and to enlist the participation of the U.S. government and of governments in target countries throughout the Global South. Histories of demography have recognized the field's personal and institutional connections to eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century and have suggested that demographers adapted their theoretical models to serve the needs of population control in the second half of the century.Footnote 4 However, their authors too frequently assume that population data transparently revealed rapid growth and that population growth necessarily signaled overpopulation. Feminist scholars have expressed more skepticism about the concept of overpopulation, recognizing that such claims typically attribute the world's problems to its most vulnerable citizens, poor and nonwhite women.Footnote 5 They often hesitate, however, to critique the demographic underpinnings of overpopulation, leaving room for its recovery as a meaningful concept.Footnote 6 Feminist scholarship that does reveal demography's complicity in population control has not yet accounted for the field's power to project its vision onto the world.Footnote 7
This article draws on archival research in the papers of U.S. demographers, their private patrons, and the United Nations, and on oral history interviews with demographers and population controllers conducted over the past fifty years.Footnote 8 It proceeds in three sections. The first documents the interwar development of demography in the United States, arguing that the field's agenda was shaped by the needs of its patrons: private philanthropies and the New Deal welfare state. The second section examines how demography's postwar patrons internationalized the field. It documents the construction of the idea of global overpopulation, revealing that it originated outside of demography, among American businessmen, philanthropists, and diplomats who viewed population growth in the Global South as a threat to U.S. global economic hegemony and national security. It also demonstrates that, through the patronage of these actors for demography, demographers became complicit in promoting the idea of overpopulation to the U.S. government and integrating population control into the country's foreign policy portfolio. The third section explores how U.S.-based philanthropies fostered the growth of demography in the United States and used it as a vehicle to promote population control as a key element of nation-building and economic development in the Global South, leading many developing countries to fund family planning programs aimed at slowing population growth. What emerges from this history is a story about how U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations used science to mobilize the U.S. government and sovereign governments worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century in support of their own agendas.
Demography in the United States
Demography coalesced as a scientific endeavor in the United States between the world wars, when biologists, statisticians, sociologists, and economists began to use their expertise to advocate for and against such population-related political projects as immigration restriction, eugenics, and birth control legalization.Footnote 9 The field began as an uneasy coalition that tenuously bridged opposing political views, but by the mid-1930s, most of the scientists who identified as demographers espoused birth control legalization as a vehicle for eugenics and eschewed the intra-European racism that had underpinned calls to restrict immigration.Footnote 10 These scientists never discussed what they meant by “population,” implicitly defining a population as any human aggregate for which data existed. Because they relied on data produced by governments, the populations with which they worked followed political and administrative boundaries: countries, states, counties, and cities. Analysts could also subdivide populations into whatever categories structured the data. In the United States, the census classified people by race and nativity, both highly politicized categories that were central to social scientific analysis.Footnote 11
Demography's patrons, each with their own motives, played as much of a role in the development of the field and the establishment of its interdisciplinary institutions as did demographers themselves. In 1922, newspaper magnate Edward Scripps created the country's first population research center at Miami University in Ohio.Footnote 12 Having recently traveled to Asia, where he attributed the dire poverty he witnessed to overpopulation, Scripps worried that population growth would generate extreme poverty in the United States as well. He hired scientists to address the issue before it was too late. In 1928, following Scripps's death, the Milbank Memorial Fund, a public-health–oriented charity based in New York, became demography's primary sponsor. Its leaders hoped that including the distribution of birth control in the Fund's public health efforts would reduce the rate of poverty by reducing the number of people born into poverty. Birth control was still controversial, however, and there was little empirical evidence to suggest that it prevented even conception, much less poverty. In hopes of producing such evidence, the Fund sponsored the establishment of the Population Association of America (PAA—demography's professional organization in the United States), Population Literature (the first journal devoted to population science, now titled Population Index), and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University (OPR—the first demography graduate training program in the United States).Footnote 13
Early demographers hailed from a variety of institutional and disciplinary origins. The PAA exhibited the most diversity, including statisticians Alfred Lotka and Louis Dublin from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; sociologist Warren Thompson and agricultural economist Pascal Kidder Whelpton of the Scripps Foundation; Johns Hopkins University biologists Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed; and eugenicists Frederick Osborn and Frank Lorimer. OPR was less diverse. Directed by Frank Notestein, a young economist, it included sociologists Dudley Kirk and Irene Taeuber, and trained a steady trickle of economics graduate students—most recruited from the Census Bureau—who received generous fellowships from Milbank.
The disciplinary heterogeneity that characterized the PAA extended to the theoretical approaches its scientists took to human population. While some understood population in Malthusian terms, others viewed population through an older mercantilist lens.Footnote 14 In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus contended that inevitable imbalances between food supply and population would doom those who could not control their sexuality to a life of poverty and misery.Footnote 15 Though influential, this theory never fully displaced the reigning mercantilist perspective, which conceived of population growth as the primary source of a country's economic dynamism and geopolitical strength.Footnote 16 Malthusian and mercantilist thought co-existed comfortably across the nineteenth century, with most Americans and Western Europeans viewing large families as the source of both individual poverty and national power.Footnote 17
Malthusianism and mercantilism began to chafe against one another at the beginning of the twentieth century. By that point, the limits of Earth's capacity to support humanity had become apparent, and Malthusians began to argue that the world's human population would soon reach a breaking point.Footnote 18 The solutions they recommended, however, focused no more on reducing population quantity than on increasing what contemporaries termed population quality: the proportion of a country's population that was white as opposed to nonwhite, native-born as opposed to foreign-born, educated as opposed to uneducated, and middle-class or wealthy as opposed to poor. The term “population quality” signaled eugenics, and supporters of such eugenic policies as immigration restriction and sterilization of and birth control for the poor often presented their programs as solutions to Malthusian problems.Footnote 19 Mercantilists, though no less enthusiastic about eugenics, saw the imbalance between people and food as a local problem specific to densely settled parts of Europe and Asia. They worried that food scarcity would inspire countries in these regions to leverage the geopolitical power generated by their large populations to forcibly seize territory in less densely settled regions.Footnote 20
Although the PAA initially included scientists from both Malthusian and mercantilist camps, the work of younger and quantitatively oriented social scientists came to predominate. Their new mathematical approaches, developed by Lotka at MetLife and readily adopted by Thompson and Whelpton at Scripps and by Notestein and his students at OPR, promoted a mercantilist view of population. They demonstrated that, although national populations continued to grow in the aggregate in North America and Western Europe, birth rates had fallen, signaling an imminent slowing of the rate of population growth.Footnote 21 At the same time, growth rates were increasing in the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe and South and East Asia due to falling death rates, portending an imminent shift in the global balance of power. These findings alarmed American demographers, set off a depopulation panic in the UK, and stimulated the passage of pronatalist policies in France and Italy.Footnote 22 They also inspired family planning programs throughout the British Empire, which aimed at limiting population growth in the colonies so as to preserve metropolitan power.Footnote 23 In 1929 Warren Thompson even proposed the redistribution of land from countries with slower population growth rates to those with more rapid population growth rates as a way to head off the next world war.Footnote 24
Demography grew and gained public legitimacy during the Great Depression, when the U.S. government turned for advice to quantitative social scientists, especially demographers. The United States had carried out decennial censuses since 1790 for the purpose of apportioning Congressional representation.Footnote 25 As the federal government increased its responsibility for stimulating economic growth and ensuring social welfare in the 1930s, planners and policy makers sought information, not only about how many people lived in the country at a given moment, but also about how many people to expect in the near future. The Hoover Administration's landmark 1933 study, Recent Social Trends, included a volume on population trends authored by Thompson and Whelpton, and the U.S. government requested regular forecasts of future population change from the Scripps Foundation throughout the 1930s.Footnote 26 The New Deal state hired demographers into existing agencies, such as the Bureau of the Census and the Department of Agriculture, and into new ones, such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.Footnote 27 The PAA held its 1935 meeting in Washington, DC, aiming to further the federal government's reliance on demography and demographers.Footnote 28
Patronage from the Milbank Fund and the federal government helped to solidify demography as a distinct field of research in the 1930s. Milbank funded graduate training in demography at OPR while the federal government provided jobs, not just for OPR graduates, but also for graduates of the sociology departments at the Universities of Chicago, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, whose training took the quantitative approach to social science that increasingly characterized demography.Footnote 29
Demography's public and private patrons had divergent goals. The field's public patrons saw future population as a key input in social and economic planning, something the government could plan for, but not something that the government could or should explicitly direct.Footnote 30 The New Deal state viewed population in neither Malthusian nor mercantilist terms, but rather as an independent variable to be measured, monitored, and even predicted. Milbank, on the other hand, sought demographic knowledge that the Fund could use to shape future population growth in a eugenic direction. It had both mercantilist and Malthusian aims, including promoting birth control use among the poor in order to increase population quality while simultaneously encouraging large families among the white middle class to increase population quantity. When the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941, demographers employed by the federal government were working on data collection and population forecasting, while the demographers of OPR and the Scripps Foundation were pursuing research sponsored by Milbank on the determinants of childbearing behavior and decisions about family size, and particularly on how to influence those behaviors in the direction of eugenic pronatalism.Footnote 31
Constructing Overpopulation
American demographers turned their attention to population in other parts of the world during World War II, at the request first of the League of Nations and then of the U.S. Department of State. Although data for much of the world were sparse, OPR's demographers determined that the world's population was growing, and they developed a new theory to explain and predict that growth. Known as demographic transition, it superseded both Malthusian and mercantilist population paradigms, describing population growth as a natural and temporary concomitant of modernization. Yet American businessmen, philanthropists, and diplomats, fearing that population growth in other parts of the world—particularly Asia and Latin America—could undermine U.S. global political and economic hegemony, co-opted demography and demographers in the decade following the war in order to promote U.S. government intervention into population growth in the Global South.
When American demographers began to consider population in other parts of the world, they focused on collecting data and predicting future population growth, not on the consequences of that growth. They had no desire to control it. Outside of North America and Western Europe, however, population statistics proved hard to find. The data around which demographers had developed their analytic methods were produced primarily for the purpose of democratic self-government, and simply did not exist in countries with other forms of government, including the colonial territories of countries that made regular metropolitan censuses, namely the UK, France, and the Netherlands.Footnote 32 In the first decade after World War II, U.S.-based demographers worked closely with the Department of State and the United Nations (UN) Population Commission and Population Division to promote census-making around the world, an effort not just to produce more detailed data but also to extend democracy and the kind of economic planning that had become the hallmark of the New Deal state.
In the absence of complete data, demographic transition theory gave demographers a heuristic tool with which to estimate and project population. The theory held that all countries would go through a process of social and economic modernization, which would have predictable demographic consequences: first, mortality rates would fall as sanitation and food security improved; then birth rates would fall when achievement replaced kinship as the organizing principle for social institutions. Whereas large families were an asset in pre-modern societies, which demographers equated with agrarian economies, they were a liability in modern societies, which demographers equated with industrial economies. According to demographic transition theory, death rates in modernizing societies would always fall before birth rates, producing a brief period of rapid population growth. American demographers did not expect this growth to present a Malthusian dilemma, however; modern industrial societies could support more people at a higher standard of living than could pre-modern agrarian societies.Footnote 33
For demographers, this modernizationist paradigm displaced both Malthusianism and mercantilism. According to demographic transition theory, modernization broke societies out of the supposed Malthusian trap, substituting fossil fuel for organic fuel, thereby increasing food availability well beyond human needs. It also generated self-perpetuating economic growth and substituted industrial weaponry for human might, endowing a country with war power far beyond what its population numbers would suggest. Modernization and demographic transition therefore rendered irrelevant both the Malthusian tension between population and food supply and the mercantilist equation between population growth, economic dynamism, and military power.
Demographic transition theory generated a powerful critique of imperialism and the bifurcation of the global economy between the industrial countries of North America and Europe and the countries of primary production in other parts of the world. Princeton demographers Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis contended that the demographic transition had stalled in the countries of the Global South, leaving them stuck at the point of maximum population growth: colonial governments and multinational corporations had introduced some public health measures that reduced death rates, while simultaneously suppressing the industrialization that would have triggered modernization and full demographic transition.Footnote 34 In the absence of modernization, Notestein and Davis feared, growing populations would remain poor and continue to grow, becoming ever more vulnerable to natural disasters and economic shocks, and ever more reliant on food imports and foreign aid. They recommended decolonization, together with development assistance, as the fastest and most reliable route to modernization, which (they expected) would alleviate poverty. Notestein and Davis recognized that modernization would temporarily fuel further population growth, but they did not view population growth per se as a problem. The problem, in their view, was the growth of poor rural populations, subordinated within the global economy and often dependent for their livelihoods on a single natural commodity.
American businessmen and philanthropists disagreed with the demographers’ prescription, which would have interfered with their influence in and access to countries of primary production. They instead rallied around the Malthusian thought of eugenicist Guy Irving Burch, who argued in the 1945 self-published Population Roads to Peace or War that the world's human population had already exceeded the planet's natural limit. Burch took inspiration from the racist and anti-immigrant eugenicist writers of the earlier part of the century, who had mobilized Malthusian arguments to advocate for the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. Even as demographers warned of impending depopulation in the 1930s, Burch instead predicted a “population explosion,” claiming that growing numbers of immigrants would soon arrive on U.S. shores.Footnote 35
Republished in 1947 as Human Breeding and Survival, Burch's book melded Malthusian and mercantilist perspectives, contending that population growth made countries simultaneously poor and powerful and therefore territorially aggressive. Burch described global population growth as the primary threat to the realization of the Four Freedoms described by President Franklin Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address. Human Breeding and Survival perpetuated the interwar conflation of population quantity and quality, recommending that the UN address the problem of global population quantity by reducing the birthrates of the world's poor and nonwhite, thereby also increasing what Burch saw as the world's population quality. Burch maintained that only strict (selective) population control worldwide could preserve the fragile postwar order.Footnote 36
Burch's calls for global population control attained a louder mouthpiece with the 1948 publication of two bestselling books, Road to Survival by William Vogt and Our Plundered Planet by Fairfield Osborn. These books expanded the environmental dimension of Burch's Malthusianism, contending that global population growth threatened the fragile natural ecosystems on which the global capitalist economy depended.Footnote 37 A wide range of recent scholars have credited them with launching the postwar environmental movement and turning world population growth into an environmental issue.Footnote 38 By describing population growth in countries of primary production as a threat to the ongoing extraction of natural resources for U.S. industry, these books caught the attention of heads of U.S. corporations, who also led the country's largest philanthropies.
As a result of the public concern about global population growth sparked by these books, Princeton's OPR acquired a new patron, the Rockefeller Foundation. Established in 1913 by Standard Oil co-founder John Davison Rockefeller, the Rockefeller Foundation's board of trustees included presidents of major universities, directors of prominent corporations, and several diplomats, most notably John Foster Dulles, who would become Secretary of State in 1953. Because the same men who ran the foundation also ran the country's major corporations and its foreign policy, the philanthropic projects it pursued around the world aimed to strengthen U.S. global leadership for the benefit of U.S. business.Footnote 39
Notestein's views on population growth began to change in 1944, when the Rockefeller Foundation made its first grant to OPR, instantly replacing Milbank as the Office's largest patron.Footnote 40 Social scientists affiliated with the foundation expressed skepticism about Notestein and Davis's expectation that decolonization and development aid would trigger modernization, thereby providing for growing populations and eventually leading to the establishment of small-family norms.Footnote 41 Likely in response, Notestein very quickly began to revise his own view of the relationship between poverty, economic development, and population growth. In his new formulation, imperialism and economic exploitation dropped out of the equation. Now, population growth itself blocked modernization and perpetuated poverty in agrarian societies.Footnote 42 Davis also began to change his tune, adopting the Malthusian perspective advocated by Burch, Vogt, and Osborn, that human population growth had exceeded the planet's natural limit.Footnote 43 He began to make this argument in 1948, the same year that he relocated from Princeton to Columbia and began accepting research funds from Fairfield Osborn's Conservation Foundation. Historians of population control have pointed to Davis to suggest that demographic research supported the contention that population growth threatened the natural environment, but he was one of a very small number of demographers ever to make that claim.Footnote 44 Even though population data for much of the world remained incomplete, Notestein and Davis began to recommend population control in the second half of the 1940s. Neither man ever gave up his belief that economic development would eventually slow population growth rates. However, realizing that the American philanthropists who had the resources to promote economic development abroad lacked the will to do so, they turned to other means of addressing the rapid population growth that they believed resulted from incomplete demographic transition.Footnote 45
Notestein and Davis expected that U.S.-led efforts to reduce birth rates in supposedly pre-modern societies would encounter technological, political, and cultural barriers. The technological barrier was that all birth control methods in existence at the time—condoms, diaphragms, and spermicides—disrupted sexual activity, rendering them unpalatable and difficult to use. In political terms, people across the Global South expressed deep suspicion of the United States and its motives in encouraging lower birth rates. Culturally, interwar research on birth control use in the United States had suggested that people would not want to have smaller families until they had alternative sources of economic security.Footnote 46 In other words, even if people had access to birth control, they would not use it until they had begun to experience the benefits of economic development. Although demographers had done research on the motivations for childbearing in the United States, they had no idea what lay behind decisions to have children or not in other countries.Footnote 47 They do not seem to have realized that the birth control technologies available at the time had already begun to make their way around the world. Eugenics movements had sprung up on every inhabited continent during the first half of the century, generating support and demand for family planning among elites in many of the countries of concern to American demographers.Footnote 48
In 1952 Notestein joined with John D. Rockefeller 3rd (grandson of the founder of Standard Oil and the Rockefeller Foundation) to establish the Population Council, a nonprofit organization that leveraged demography to pursue and legitimate overseas population control. Still in existence today, it funds biomedical research to develop new and simpler contraceptives and demographic research to determine how to promote their use, and provides technical assistance to overseas family planning programs.Footnote 49 The Population Council widened the scope of the Milbank Fund's interwar eugenic project to the global level. Milbank trustee Frederick Osborn (first cousin of Fairfield) ensured continuity between the agendas of the two organizations. Osborn served as secretary of the American Eugenics Society (AES) for much of the twentieth century and had convinced the Fund to support eugenically oriented demographic research between the world wars.Footnote 50 As a personal friend of John D. Rockefeller 3rd and a close associate of Notestein, Osborn helped found the Population Council and became its second president, serving from 1957 to 1959.Footnote 51 During that period, the Population Council made regular grants to the AES. The Council prescribed the same solution for the problem of national underdevelopment after World War II that Milbank had prescribed for individual poverty in the United States between the wars: family planning.Footnote 52 Though an independent nongovernmental organization, the Council operated in the service of the corporately endowed philanthropies that provided the vast majority of its funding, first the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and then the Ford Foundation.Footnote 53
The work of the Population Council was made much easier by the activities of Hugh Everett Moore, a businessman who popularized the idea that overseas population control could avert the global spread of communism. Moore had made his fortune by inventing the Dixie Cup. After reading Vogt's Road to Survival and Burch's Human Breeding and Survival, Moore initiated a correspondence with Burch that lasted until Burch's death in 1951.Footnote 54 Although population data remained sparse in much of the world, Burch convinced Moore that U.S. aid to developing countries “could cause an explosion in world population which could easily bankrupt the United States in its efforts to support the large increase in population to prevent these areas from becoming communistic.”Footnote 55 He warned that “in your lifetime and mine we (certainly our children) are faced with a tremendous world population explosion and also with an immediate atomic explosion.” For Burch, these were connected: population growth would exacerbate geopolitical tensions, making the world more vulnerable to nuclear war. He conceded that it might be possible to delay the atomic explosion, but maintained that “if the population explosion continues (we are really already in it), the atomic explosion cannot be suppressed indefinitely.”Footnote 56 At the urging of Northern California eugenicist and land developer Charles Goethe, who described population control as “insurance against excessive taxation, as well as against the future of any business,” Moore allied himself with Burch's Population Reference Bureau, an organization that sought to shape public opinion in favor of eugenics and population control.Footnote 57
Moore spread Burch's concern to the business, philanthropic, and diplomatic communities with a pamphlet titled “The Population Bomb.”Footnote 58 Produced in conjunction with Ellsworth Bunker, former president of the National Sugar Refining Company and former U.S. ambassador to Argentina and Italy, and Will Clayton, founder of the world's largest cotton-trading company and former Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, “The Population Bomb” updated Human Breeding and Survival for the nuclear age. It blamed underdevelopment on excess procreation and cautioned that poverty would seed communist revolution and ultimately lead to nuclear war. It portrayed overseas population growth as an existential threat to U.S. business interests and national security. Moore contended that protecting U.S. interests did not merely require collecting population data for other countries; it required controlling population growth in other countries to prevent communist revolution and the nationalization of industry and resources that would inevitably follow. Moore, Bunker, and Clayton mailed their “Population Bomb” to professional and social networks that comprised what Inderjeet Parmar has termed “the East Coast foreign policy Establishment.”Footnote 59 Fourteen years later, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich would build on Moore's pamphlet in a bestselling book of the same title, merging Burch and Moore's warnings about the global spread of communism with Vogt and Osborn's concern about the destruction of the natural environment.Footnote 60 But while Ehrlich's book kept Malthusianism at the forefront of the American popular imagination, it was Moore's modernizationist arguments, backed up by demographic research commissioned by his supporters, that convinced the government to get involved.
“The Population Bomb” was not grounded in demographic research; rather, it inspired the research that would eventually support its claims. The pamphlet convinced World Bank President Eugene Black that loans would be wasted on countries with high rates of population growth.Footnote 61 But he recognized that he could not simply send “The Population Bomb” to leaders of developing countries to explain why the World Bank would not approve a loan: Moore's pamphlet very clearly laid out the U.S. interest in overseas population control and had the potential to deeply offend readers in the Global South. Instead, Black sought a different pamphlet, one that would advocate population control in the interests of developing countries, explaining that economic development could not proceed in the context of rapid population growth. When he requested such a pamphlet from Notestein, however, Notestein replied that he could not produce it because he had no empirical evidence that rapid population growth prevented economic development.Footnote 62 In fact, most countries that had already “developed” had experienced substantial population growth along the way as a result of the demographic transition that accompanied modernization. Black responded by arranging for the World Bank to make a grant to OPR to carry out a study that would produce the evidence he sought.Footnote 63
The grant resulted in the 1958 publication of Population Growth and Economic Development in Low Income Countries, authored by OPR demographer Ansley J. Coale and CIA economist Edgar M. Hoover. Coale had been one of Notestein's first graduate students at Princeton, where a grant from Milbank paid for his education.Footnote 64 Notestein oversaw Coale's work on the World Bank study. The following year, Notestein became president of the Population Council and Coale succeeded him as director of OPR. The Coale–Hoover Report—as the study was informally known—focused on India, which had a well-developed census infrastructure and, therefore, plentiful demographic data. As the world's largest democracy bordering the world's largest communist country, India played a critical role in the Cold War. U.S. experts hoped it would become a model for free-market development.Footnote 65 Its newly independent government participated willingly in the study. Malthusian economists Gyan Chand and Radhakamal Mukerjee, who had served on India's National Planning Commission before independence and continued in an advisory role afterward, had already begun to interpret India's widespread poverty in terms of overpopulation rather than colonial misrule.Footnote 66
The Coale–Hoover Report did not exactly support the claims made by Moore and his colleagues in “The Population Bomb,” but advocates for population control referred to it as if it did. Because Coale and Hoover could not wait for the accumulation of empirical evidence regarding the relationship between population growth and economic development in India, they used simulation. Coale projected population growth thirty years into the future under a variety of hypothetical fertility rates, and Hoover projected economic growth for each population scenario. As a simulation, its outcome depended entirely on its assumptions. The model assumed that, with fewer children, households saved more, fueling investment, capital accumulation, and economic development. As a result of those assumptions, the study found that after thirty years, per capita national income would be 40 percent higher if birth rates fell by half.Footnote 67 The study did not show that population growth would prevent economic growth, only that a reduction in birth rates could enhance it. Nonetheless, the Population Council and even Coale himself presented the study as evidence that “continued high fertility is an impediment if not a total barrier to economic and social development.”Footnote 68
The Coale–Hoover Report sounded the final death knell for the mercantilist view of population, according to which more people meant more productivity, more commerce, and therefore more wealth. Coale and Hoover instead emphasized per capita income as the key metric of economic development. In the 1950s, nobody knew how population size affected per capita income, and the Coale–Hoover study did not investigate the question. Later research would find that the answer depended on a country's social and economic institutions and its place in the global political and economic order.Footnote 69 In their study, however, Coale and Hoover assumed in advance that additional people did not increase national income (the numerator of the per capita calculation) enough to compensate for their addition to the population (the denominator). Under their modernizationist paradigm, population growth was a liability, even for countries that had not reached the Malthusian limit of carrying capacity or food availability. Whereas the New Deal state had taken future population as a given and aimed to plan economic growth around it, the Coale–Hoover Report took the economy as given, suggesting that economic development instead required population control. India's leaders had already signed on to this modernizationist vision, integrating family planning into the country's first five-year plan and requesting assistance for it from the Population Council.Footnote 70 The government's embrace of family planning made it seem possible that India and other developing countries could achieve the Coale–Hoover Report's low birthrate and high economic growth scenario.
Moore worked quickly to bring the results of the Coale–Hoover Report to the U.S. government's attention, hoping to put international population control on the foreign policy agenda. The same year that the report came out, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created a commission to evaluate the military aid program. Moore immediately reached out to the commission's chair, General William Henry Draper Jr., sending him a copy of “The Population Bomb” for every member of the commission and pointing him to Population Growth and Economic Development in Low Income Countries.Footnote 71 When the Draper Committee issued its final report in 1959, it recommended that the United States provide developing countries with assistance in reducing their birth rates.Footnote 72 Eisenhower may have privately believed that overseas population growth posed a threat to national security, but he refused to commit government resources to defusing that threat.Footnote 73 The Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States had announced that they would oppose any government program to promote birth control anywhere in the world.Footnote 74 Conceding that birth control was not the responsibility of government, Eisenhower called on private philanthropies to fill this role.
Eisenhower's response frustrated his science advisor, chemist George Kistiakowsky, who saw Eisenhower's refusal to act as an example of religion dictating policy when he felt that science should take the lead.Footnote 75 When Kistiakowsky left the White House in 1961, he orchestrated a study of world population by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), funded by the Population Council, deciding in advance that it would endorse Draper's recommendation that the U.S. government intervene in overseas population growth.Footnote 76 The panel Kistiakowsky appointed did little other than reproduce the results of the Coale and Hoover study. The NAS report, published in 1963, described population growth as the primary barrier to economic development worldwide and called on the government to support and further the research and intervention activities of the Population Council.Footnote 77
The NAS report accomplished Kistiakowsky's objective. Eager to demonstrate his responsiveness to scientific evidence and his independence from the Vatican, President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would offer family planning assistance to any country that requested it.Footnote 78 Moore and Draper remained unsatisfied. They began to take out full-page advertisements in such prominent newspapers as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, publicizing the findings of the 1958 Coale–Hoover Report and the 1963 NAS report. They formatted some ads as direct appeals to President Kennedy (and later to President Johnson); others urged the public to pressure their representatives and senators.Footnote 79 This strategy worked. In 1965 Senator Ernest Gruening (D-AK) and Representative Morris Udall (D-AZ), both associates of Moore and Draper, introduced bills into Congress to make overseas population control a function of the State Department and domestic family planning a duty of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.Footnote 80 When Congress renewed the Food for Peace Act in 1966, it included a provision allowing surplus currencies that accrued through the program to fund family planning and required that countries receiving aid through the program actively work toward food self-sufficiency (either by increasing agricultural production or by controlling population or both).Footnote 81 Over the course of the 1960s, Moore and Draper stepped up their advertising campaign in order to increase U.S. government expenditure on overseas population control through the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID). Largely as a result of their efforts, USAID's population control budget expanded from $10 million in 1965 to nearly $125 million in 1972.Footnote 82 In response to lobbying by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the UN officially took up the cause of population control in 1969, establishing the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA, now the UN Population Fund).Footnote 83 In its early years, the United States supplied the majority of its budget.
Enlisting Other Countries
By the mid-1960s, the philanthropic project of using demography to shape population growth had converged with the governmental project of using demography to plan economic growth, and both had widened their scopes from the United States to the world as a whole. The next challenge was to convince the leaders of countries in the Global South that they should request family planning assistance, either from the U.S. government or from the Population Council or other nongovernmental organizations.
To answer that challenge, the Population Council, together with its primary sponsor the Ford Foundation, used demography as a tool to transform population control from an American strategy for maintaining economic hegemony and preventing the global spread of communism into a nation-building and economic development strategy of governments around the world. In some countries, they had little work to do. Indian nationalists had begun using family planning for nation-building purposes in the latter part of the colonial period. The birthrate in Japan had dropped dramatically with the postwar legalization of abortion. In other countries, the Population Council and the Ford Foundation took two approaches simultaneously. First, they brought students from target countries to the United States to complete graduate degrees in demography, with the idea that they would return home and use their training to convince their governments that only family planning could unlock the door to economic development.Footnote 84 Second, they launched population control programs in developing countries under the guise of demographic research, then used the results of that research to convince local governments to expand the programs. The lack of reliable census data for many of these countries legitimated overseas demographic research and the recruitment of international graduate students for U.S. demography programs. Both approaches required that the Population Council and the Ford Foundation invest in American demography, which grew tremendously in size and influence as a result.
Demography had already begun to expand before the Population Council and the Ford Foundation stepped in. After World War II, it spread from Princeton and the Universities of Chicago and North Carolina to the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley.Footnote 85 Most demographers at this time held degrees in sociology or economics and took more interest in quantitative analysis than social theory.Footnote 86 While the vast majority were male, the field attracted a relatively large number of women who held undergraduate degrees in mathematics or statistics.Footnote 87 Demography may have seemed more promising for these women than math or the natural sciences, as it offered job opportunities in government and research at a time when most universities reserved faculty positions for men. Many male demographers of the postwar period had served in the military between college and graduate school or had taken time away from graduate school to serve.Footnote 88 Nearly all American demographers were white, but they did not necessarily come from families of means. Unlike other social scientific fields at the time, demography offered generous graduate fellowships, first from the Milbank Fund and later from the Population Council and the Ford Foundation.
In the 1960s, the Ford Foundation began to sponsor the establishment of university-based population research and training centers akin to Princeton's OPR.Footnote 89 It did not create demography out of whole cloth, as it did with area studies in the 1950s and as the Rockefeller Foundation had done with molecular biology in the 1930s.Footnote 90 But as with area studies—for which the Ford Foundation had created interdisciplinary centers at U.S. universities to train experts in the history, languages, and politics of the various parts of the world that might pose security risks to the Cold War United States—Ford took a center-based approach to demography, locating it between, rather than within, university departments. As the Rockefeller Foundation had done with molecular biology, Ford focused its resources on universities with existing strengths in the relevant disciplines, establishing its first population research and training centers at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Chicago, and North Carolina.
The population research and training centers of the 1960s were strongly international organizations. Faculty members frequently flew in and out of the country for research, graduate recruiting, and consulting on overseas family planning projects.Footnote 91 At any given time, half of the students in a population center might have come from abroad. The official rationale for recruiting these students was to teach population accounting and thereby advance census-making and vital registration in countries that lacked the governmental infrastructures necessary to produce demographic data. These demographic techniques formed the core of the training offered in U.S. population centers. But the centers also trained students to understand the challenges facing their countries through a modernizationist lens: as “population problems” that family planning could solve. The Ford Foundation pursued a similar program in economics, establishing fellowships for students from Latin American countries, with the expectation that they would return home to promote policies that would benefit U.S. business interests.Footnote 92
U.S. population centers formed relationships with universities in other parts of the world, developing large-scale research projects and international collaborations and building pipelines for students.Footnote 93 In some cases, international graduates of U.S. universities established demography training programs in their home countries, also with funding from the Ford Foundation.Footnote 94 The UN established stand-alone institutes for international demographic training in Chembur, India (1956), Santiago, Chile (1957), and Cairo, Egypt (1963), with funding from the Population Council. The Council staffed the centers and supplied their teaching materials, so these too became vehicles for educating technocrats from developing countries in the modernizationist population paradigm.Footnote 95 Throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the UN mandate to collect demographic data opened doors for the promotion of family planning.Footnote 96
Perhaps the most prominent international student to train at a U.S. population center during this period was Mercedes Concepcion, now known as the “mother of Asian demography.”Footnote 97 Born in 1928 as the youngest of five children, she had been encouraged by her physician father to attend the University of the Philippines and pursue a career. After completing an undergraduate degree in chemistry, Concepcion went to Australia with a Colombo Plan fellowship to study biostatistics. On her return to the Philippines, she took a position at the UN Statistical Training Center that had just opened at the University of the Philippines. The Center's first Filipinx faculty member, Concepcion was also younger than most of its graduate students.Footnote 98
Concepcion began meeting American demographers in 1955 and within ten years had become a demographer herself. She first met Philip Hauser, who would later direct the University of Chicago's Ford-funded Population Research and Training Center, when he spoke on population at the Philippine Statistical Association. Later that year, Concepcion attended the UN Seminar on Population Problems in Asia and the Far East, directed by Pascal Whelpton of the Scripps Foundation and sponsored by the Population Council. She was the only woman among twenty students. Not long after that, Dudley Kirk, Demographic Director of the Population Council, invited Concepcion to pursue a Ph.D. in demography in the United States as a Population Council fellow. Recognizing that Princeton had the country's most esteemed demography program, Concepcion asked to go there, but Princeton had not begun to admit women. Instead, she studied with Hauser at the University of Chicago.Footnote 99 Concepcion returned to the Philippines in 1960 to teach, mailing her dissertation, chapter by chapter, to Hauser over a period of three years. Finally, in early 1963, Hauser admonished her, “young lady, you'll have to finish. You will sit down, and in two weeks I want you to return that dissertation, and you will graduate in June of this year.” She did.Footnote 100
In 1964, the Ford Foundation established a Population Institute at the University of the Philippines and named Concepcion its director.Footnote 101 It was a highly unusual position for a woman at that time, when U.S. universities still largely barred women from holding faculty positions, not to mention center directorships. Concepcion was immensely talented, but it was her Filipina background that allowed her to transcend the gender barrier. The leaders of the Ford Foundation and the Population Council felt that local scientists would have more authority to prescribe population control to heads of state in the Global South than would American scientists.Footnote 102
Concepcion delivered on their expectation. As director of the Population Institute, she organized population-related events and published articles about population growth in local newspapers to raise public awareness. In 1968, President Ferdinand Marcos appointed Concepcion to direct a government committee on “the population problem.” The outcome could have been predicted in advance: Concepcion's committee recommended that the government provide family planning services in order to ensure that “each Filipino could partake of the fruits of national progress.” That is, it designated family planning integral to nation-building and economic development. Marcos signed the proposed policy—the Population Act—into law in 1971. The family planning program it established received the majority of its funding from USAID and UNFPA.Footnote 103
Overall, the Population Council did not encounter as much resistance to its family planning initiatives as its founders had expected. Elites in many developing countries already knew about birth control.Footnote 104 In addition to using contraceptives to produce their own small families, they often saw family planning as a way to control poverty and defuse the threat to their political power posed by growing numbers of poor, rural, indigenous, or otherwise disadvantaged citizens. Whereas India's middle-class birth control advocates had focused on securing contraceptives for their own use before independence, after 1947 they turned their attention to promoting birth control among the poor.Footnote 105 Indian family planning programs primarily targeted agricultural populations, who came to seem superfluous as the government turned its attention to industrialization.Footnote 106 Conversely, early family planning programs in Peru, led by the urban middle class, targeted rural-to-urban migrants.Footnote 107 In Jamaica, the seeds of the postcolonial government's family planning program had been sown during the colonial period by members of the mixed-race nationalist middle class, who sought to control the reproductivity of poor Afro-Jamaican women in order to demonstrate their own capacity to rule an independent nation.Footnote 108 These are just a few examples of the ways in which U.S.-led efforts to control population quantity in developing countries dovetailed with nationalist efforts in those countries to control population quality.
In addition to promoting the idea that family planning could stimulate economic development, the Population Council and the Ford Foundation brought new contraceptives into developing countries, packaged as part of demographic research projects. In the 1960s, the Population Council funded the development of a new type of intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD) called the Lippes Loop.Footnote 109 The Loop was a flexible plastic squiggle that cost pennies to produce and could be inserted by staff with only minimal training, after which it would prevent pregnancy indefinitely. The Population Council officially promoted the Loop and other IUDs as tools to help couples achieve their small-family desires. But it recognized that IUDs could also prevent couples from achieving their large-family desires. As one participant in a Population Council conference put it, “once the damn thing is in the patient cannot change her mind. In fact, we can hope she will forget it's there and perhaps in several months wonder why she has not conceived.”Footnote 110 The Population Council only promoted what it described as voluntary family planning programs, but the IUD blurred the boundary between voluntary family planning and coercive population control. Because medical professionals control IUDs’ insertion and removal, feminist technology scholars have referred to the devices as “imposable” contraceptive technologies, in contrast to the Pill, which users control.Footnote 111 For the Population Council, the challenge was convincing women to accept IUDs in the first place and convincing governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to make IUDs widely and cheaply available to their citizens.
Fertility surveys facilitated the accomplishment of both objectives. A fertility survey asks people detailed questions about their childbearing history, attitudes toward family size, and experience with contraception. In the 1960s these surveys served three functions. In conjunction with new demographic methods, fertility surveys produced the kind of population data that were not readily available for many countries.Footnote 112 They also served as population control interventions, educating participants about contraception, and they produced information that American philanthropists used to generate international support for the spread of new contraceptive technologies.
Demographers undertook fertility surveys in the mainland United States and in the Caribbean in the 1950s, but the Caribbean surveys served a different function than did those in the mainland. Although the Population Council funded both types (Caribbean surveys received additional funding from the Conservation Foundation), the differences between them resembled the differences between interwar demography sponsored by the U.S. government for planning purposes and that sponsored by Milbank for eugenic purposes. Whereas mainland surveys aimed simply to better predict future childbearing so that it could be planned for, fertility surveys in the Caribbean included intervention programs that explicitly aimed to reduce the size of poor families.Footnote 113 Mainland surveys only interviewed women because demographers needed to know their childbearing intentions, not those of their husbands or other men, to model future population growth.Footnote 114 Caribbean surveys, on the other hand, included men as well as women because, before the development of the birth control pill and the IUD, contraception required the cooperation of both partners.
When the IUD became available in the early 1960s, the Population Council changed its approach to fertility surveys, launching a program titled Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Contraception, or KAP for short.Footnote 115 By 1970, approximately 400 KAP surveys had been completed in at least fifty countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.Footnote 116 KAP surveys focused exclusively on women and on piquing their interest in getting an IUD as a way to improve their family's socioeconomic circumstances and contribute to the economic development of their country.Footnote 117 KAP surveys accompanied IUD-based family planning programs and followed up on propaganda distributed through mass communication channels. These communications aimed to instill a small-family norm, not to provide contraceptive information to people who already desired small families.Footnote 118
Population control was the primary purpose of KAP surveys, but demographers also used them to estimate birth and death rates in countries whose governments did not collect or publish such data. That is, population control projects produced evidence of rapid population growth in the Global South as much as they responded to it. To produce such evidence, OPR demographers invented a kind of demographic alchemy: complex mathematical methods for calculating vital statistics from sparse and sketchy data.Footnote 119 Known as indirect estimation methods, these tools allowed demographers to generate complete demographic data from the kinds of questions that interviewers could ask of a small sample of women in a fertility survey.
Given that population growth rates in much of the Global South in this period were estimates at best, the Population Council rarely pointed to high birth rates to pressure governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to establish family planning programs. Indeed, it appeared that birth rates had already begun to fall precipitously in East Asia, where data were more widely available. Instead, the Council pointed to high levels of demand for family planning. As evidence of demand, Council leaders cited the proportion of survey respondents who expressed approval of family planning and the proportion who indicated that they wanted no more children. Demographers had discovered the challenges of measuring attitudes toward childbearing and contraception between the wars.Footnote 120 Yet they made little effort to ensure that KAP surveys accurately measured the attitudes of respondents. Questionnaires used vague language to assess approval of family planning, telling women that “nowadays, some married couples do something to keep from getting pregnant too often or having too many children,” and then asking “generally speaking, do you approve or disapprove of their doing this kind of thing?”Footnote 121 Critics complained that the surveys had been written 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” and were delivered “at a very high speed” to “illiterate women” by “poorly trained interviewers.”Footnote 122 Interviewers—typically local middle-class women, many of whom supported the eugenic aims of their own countries’ family planning programs—often found themselves “instruct[ing] the respondents concerning the meanings of the questions and … direct[ing] them to relevant responses when possible.”Footnote 123 Some respondents supplied the answers they thought interviewers wanted to hear, while others refused to answer altogether, lied outright, or even ridiculed interviewers.Footnote 124 Interviewers and analysts coded survey responses into a standard set of answers, eliminating these forms of resistance from the data and from the historical record.Footnote 125 Council leaders expected to find low levels of demand for family planning and therefore likely aimed to inflate estimates.Footnote 126 While actual demand probably exceeded the Council's expectations, it was almost certainly lower than KAP data suggested.
Previous scholars have recognized that fertility surveys served population control functions through local survey interviewers, who educated respondents about birth control and promoted small-family norms.Footnote 127 They have not adequately explained, however, how these studies scaled up, effecting population control at the level of a whole country. Fertility surveys were small and nonrepresentative, generally reaching only easily surveyed segments of a country's population. I do not doubt that fertility surveys aimed to influence the childbearing behaviors of the people who participated in them, but the vast majority of people did not participate. These surveys therefore had their largest effects on birth rates not through their direct interactions with participants, but by producing data that the Population Council could use to demonstrate high levels of demand and “unmet need” for family planning services and thereby convince governments in target countries to expand the family planning programs the Council had initiated.Footnote 128
The results of KAP surveys provided scientific support for a resolution drafted by the Council's communications director (and later president), Bernard Berelson, signed at Rockefeller's request by twelve heads of state in 1966, and presented to the UN on Human Rights Day, classifying access to family planning services as a human right.Footnote 129 Tellingly, the resolution framed this right in the context of high national birth rates and the desire to slow global population growth, not the desire to provide families with greater reproductive autonomy. It nonetheless legitimated the international population control efforts of U.S.-based foundations and the U.S. government, and it pressured the governments of other countries to accept their assistance. By leveraging demographic training and strategically communicating demographic research, the leaders of the Population Council and the Ford Foundation had put their population control projects on the nation-building and economic development agendas of many developing countries and had enlisted the assistance of the United Nations.
However, while the Council's efforts largely succeeded in establishing population control programs and policies in Asian and Caribbean countries, and even in some Latin American countries, they did not meet the same acceptance worldwide. French-speaking countries generally did not participate in Council programs and sent many fewer students to the United States for training. Demographers from these countries typically trained in France, in a pronatalist tradition that generally eschewed American ideas about population growth and economic development.Footnote 130 Latin American economists and demographers in the late 1960s systematically discredited the Coale–Hoover thesis that had underpinned family planning as a route to economic development, arguing that population control could not substitute for structural change.Footnote 131 International resistance to U.S.-led population control efforts peaked at the UN's 1974 World Population Conference, where Indian representative Karan Singh famously stated that “development is the best contraceptive.”Footnote 132 By that point, however, 125 countries had established government-sponsored family planning programs.Footnote 133 Some of them, notably Peru, abandoned their support for population control after the conference and pursued redistributive measures instead.Footnote 134 Others, such as India and China, stepped up their coercive population policies as a means of addressing internal poverty and political opposition, even as they rejected population control as a means of equalizing wealth and resources internationally.Footnote 135
In the decades following World War II, American demography and global population control developed in tandem. Their connection was not straightforward, however, nor were their aims overdetermined by what historians tend to describe as the obvious threat of rapid population growth. Demography had emerged between the wars in the United States to serve the different needs of its two primary patrons: the New Deal state, which sought to use predictions of future population growth to plan economic development, and the Milbank Memorial Fund, which sought to use analysis of childbearing attitudes and behavior to influence future population growth in eugenic directions. Both projects went international after the war. U.S. demographers worked with the UN to expand the collection of demographic data and with the Population Council and Ford Foundation to influence the future growth of the world's populations in ways that would aid American business interests and promote U.S. national security and global power.
But influencing population growth in other countries required that U.S.-based organizations work with, not against, national sovereignty. The Population Council and the Ford Foundation could not simply impose population control in other countries. They could not even suggest it too enthusiastically. Instead, they funded the training of demographers from target countries, who learned to integrate population control into their countries’ nation-building projects, and sponsored fertility surveys that produced evidence of rapid population growth and unmet need for family planning, putting pressure on governments in the Global South to meet that need. In the process, they stimulated the meteoric rise of demography as the interdisciplinary social science of human population. Sociologist Agnes Riedmann has described demography as a “science that colonizes.” This article, by contrast, has demonstrated that demography was more specifically a postcolonial science, one that that helped U.S. philanthropies promote U.S. interests in a decolonizing world.
The population control programs of the mid-twentieth century were not simply an overzealous response to a clear and present danger. During this period, demographic data for much of the world remained sketchy. American businessmen and philanthropists worried about population growth overseas because the mercantilist paradigm, still alive and well at the end of World War II, cast human numbers as a source of geopolitical strength. It was the mid-century modernizationist paradigm, which redefined national success in terms of per capita national income, that transformed population growth into a burden for the countries experiencing it rather than their rivals and converted population control into an economic development strategy. But demography did not provide unequivocal support for population control. Instead, population control advocates marshaled demography as an ally for their project by strategically framing and communicating its findings.
In the second half of the twentieth century, U.S.-based foundations advanced American interests by putting those interests on the nation-building agendas of decolonizing and developing countries worldwide. They did so by appealing to science as the ultimate and universal arbiter of the natural world, the global economy, and the international order. But science was never a neutral arbiter of those things. As a major source of funding for science of every kind, U.S. philanthropies shaped the scientific knowledge that served as a foundation for the postwar world order and controlled how and where it traveled.
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