Reminiscences: The Role of Foundations, the Population Association of America, Princeton University and the United Nations in Fostering American Interest in Population Problems

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

“…This experience, together with the 1950 Communist victory in China's long‐running civil war, further solidified Notestein's opinion of the dire threat posed by population growth and the potential for new contraceptive technologies to reduce that threat (Szreter ). By 1952, however, it had become apparent that the Rockefeller Foundation was not willing to support the development of new contraceptives or their overseas application, despite Rockefeller's succession to the position of chairman (Notestein and Osborn ). That spring, Rockefeller called a meeting of experts at his family's Williamsburg Inn that laid the foundation for the establishment of the Population Council (National Academy of Sciences ).…”

“…Between the wars, scientists and their patrons participated in political debates about populations that focused both on their size and on what contemporaries referred to as their “quality”: the relative balance between wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated, white and nonwhite, foreign‐born and native‐born (Lovett ; MacNamara ; Allen ; Schneider ; Soloway ). Advocates and opponents of the population projects of the time—birth control legalization, immigration restriction, and eugenics—debated the effects such programs would have on national populations, calling on the new and still largely inchoate field of “population science” for support (Hodgson ; Notestein and Osborn ). Scientists themselves entered these debates, marshaling analysis of population data to argue for or against various population‐oriented political agendas (for example, Dublin and Lotka ; East ; Kuczynski ; Pearl ).…”

The Significance of the Milbank Memorial Fund for Policy: An Assessment at Its Centennial

“…A member of the Fund's board, Thomas Cochran—a prominent banker at the J.P. Morgan Company—insisted that each of its projects in public health should include birth control services. Kingsbury, a friend and neighbor of Margaret Sanger, the pioneer birth control advocate, eagerly agreed (Kiser 1971; Notestein 1971).…”

“…He found that birth control had not increased the proportion of persons whom he considered to be unfit in this population. Moreover, in 1938 a researcher on the staff of the Fund publicly protested the deletion from a report by a committee appointed by the federal government of a statement disassociating the Fund from eugenicists (Notestein 1971).…”

Carving up Population Science

“…An important element in their founding was a common determination to erect boundaries that clearly differentiated population science from non-science -from a mere technique of administration or tool of birth control politics and propaganda. Frank Notestein [(1971): 70] recollected that in the early days of the PAA, 'we went to organizational lengths beyond all lengths to keep out all but the purest of the academically pure'. The biologist Raymond Pearl hijacked the 1927 population conference from which the IUSIPP emerged, from the birth control activist Margaret Sanger, after having convinced her of the value of a purely scientific meeting.…”