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

Abstract

The world's population grew dramatically in the twentieth century, rising from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to just over 6 billion in 2000, with 75 percent of that growth occurring after 1950. As population grew, it became the subject of a new science, demography, and the target of numerous interventions aimed at limiting its growth. While histories of global population have suggested that demography was integral to the creation of fertility control policies and programs (Connelly 2008; Hoff 2012; Robertson 2012; Bashford 2014), only a handful have explicitly examined this relationship (Hodgson 1988; Demeny 1988; Szreter 1993; Greenhalgh 1996). Demography and population control were in fact co-produced and deeply imbricated with each other in the twentieth century: as policymakers increasingly turned to scientific expertise for guidance and authority (Porter 1995), advocates of fertility control drew heavily on demography to track population growth and to justify intervention (Demeny 1988). But that is only the beginning of the story. Reading the twentieth-century demography journal literature alongside the archives of the scientists who wrote it and the individuals and organizations that sponsored them indicates that American advocates of population control also provided the funding and institutional support that established demography as an interdisciplinary scientific field in the 1920s and 1930s and that stimulated its enormous growth after World War II, both in the United States and elsewhere. Through direct patronage, projects aimed at limiting fertility gave rise to the science that guided and legitimized them. Historians of science have long recognized patronage as a critical component of scientific activity because of the substantial costs associated with the demands of research and dissemination of ideas (Biagioli 1990; Coben 1976; Findlen 1993; Shapin 1974). The institutions that cover the costs also exert influence over which research questions get asked and which methods investigators employ to answer them. To the extent that funding agencies use the results of science to make policy recommendations or to determine future grants, they provide what Bruno Latour (1987) calls “positive modalities”: citations of scientific claims that move those claims “downstream” toward general acceptance as fact. In the case of demography, I will argue that patrons also moved their own potentially controversial projects downstream toward public and policy acceptance through the science they funded. An older literature examining private patronage for the social sciences in the United States between the world wars (Fisher 1993; Lagemann 1992; O'Connor 2007) and a newer literature exploring government funding for the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century (Rohde 2013; Solovey 2013) have both drawn attention to this cyclical relationship of legitimation. The more recent literature demonstrates, moreover, that the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War prompted massive government funding for the social sciences and directed their research toward defense and national security, as was the case also in the natural and physical sciences. The history of demography in the United States spans the interwar and postwar periods and bridges the divide between private and public patronage for the human and social sciences. As I will argue here, the philanthropies that funded demography in the first half of the century played a critical role in securing government funding in the later period. Within scientific fields, communities of practice tend to be bounded by language (Gordin 2015), and demography is no exception. Demographers will notice a parallel with fertility regimes, which map onto linguistic borders (Coale and Watkins 1986). I focus here on anglophone demography, as the English-language demography literature is the largest, has the broadest geographic reach, and has historically had the closest ties to global population control organizations. Francophone demography, by contrast, developed in distinct institutional and political settings. Its primary sponsor was the pronatalist French government, and comparative research has demonstrated that francophone demography has long emphasized problems of low fertility in contrast to the emphasis on high fertility in anglophone demography (Marshall 2013, 2015). By the mid-twentieth century, most demographic research was published in either English or French. Among anglophone demographers, this article focuses on US-based actors for three reasons. First, although demography was an active field of research in Europe between the wars and globally after World War II, the majority of English-language articles were written by scientists either based or trained in the United States. Second, the lion's share of funding for anglophone demography worldwide, both between and after the wars, came from US sources. Finally, US philanthropies and later the US government were the largest sponsors of birth control worldwide in the twentieth century, funding research and family planning programs in many parts of the world and promoting the development of population policy at national and international levels (Connelly 2008; Caldwell and Caldwell 1986; Donaldson 1990; Harkavy 1995). Therefore, the history of anglophone demography is both a global history and a US history: the US-based actors I discuss were at the center of global scientific, philanthropic, and policy networks. This article combines archival research into the institutional arrangements of twentieth-century demography with computational analysis of the content of anglophone demography journals. I use institutional archives to describe how demography coalesced between the world wars when population-oriented scientists in a variety of fields attracted patronage from individuals and organizations in the United States that sought to engineer the domestic population through eugenics, birth control legalization, and immigration restriction. In the first few decades after World War II, archival sources indicate that the field grew dramatically, largely on the initiative of new and more powerful patrons who aimed to control global population through the promotion of family planning in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I then use topic modeling, an algorithmic form of textual analysis, to assess how these institutional arrangements manifested themselves in the demographic literature. Results suggest that demographers began to take a distinctive and coherent approach to population research in the period before World War II that differed from the approach of other social scientists studying population and indicate that, both before and after the war, articles by demographers or in demography journals meshed with the concerns of the field's funders about fertility and how to control it to a greater extent than did population-oriented scholarship in the other social sciences. Together, archival research and computational textual analysis demonstrate that demography's patrons played a key role in the field's establishment and development, providing the financial support and institutional structure necessary for producing research that, in turn, informed patrons’ population projects, legitimized them in the eyes of the public, and put them on the policy agendas of the United States, the United Nations, and governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. To argue, as I do here, that demography's patrons helped to develop the field between the world wars is to contend that demography did not exist prior to the end of World War I. To be sure, governments have been collecting population data and using them to analyze vital processes since at least the seventeenth century (Emigh, Riley, and Ahmed 2016). Before the 1920s, however, this activity, known as “political arithmetic” or “vital statistics,” was an administrative, not a scientific one (Szreter 2015). By the 1920s, scientists had begun to analyze population data, but they did so as statisticians, biologists, sociologists, or economists; no one yet called him- or herself a “population scientist” or “demographer.”1 Demography emerged at the intersection of these fields in the late 1920s, when population-oriented practitioners of each one began to identify themselves and one another as members of a coherent field, first described as “population science” and later termed “demography.” In the United States, emergent population scholars included insurance actuaries Louis Dublin and Alfred Lotka, biologists Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed, vital statisticians Walter Willcox and Frank Notestein, and sociologists Warren Thompson and William Ogburn. Despite their disparate fields, these men began to see their work turning on similar questions and drawing on similar methods to explore the dynamics of population. Their exchanges were facilitated by a small set of patrons, the most prominent being newspaper magnate Edward Scripps, the Milbank Memorial Fund, and the retired businessman Frederick Osborn. 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 2007; MacNamara 2014; Allen 1991; Schneider 1990; Soloway 1990). 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 1991; Notestein and Osborn 1971). 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 1925; East 1923; Kuczynski 1928; Pearl 1940). Individuals and organizations that sought to harness the intellectual power of this emerging science to their own population agendas facilitated its coalescence by hiring demographers and underwriting the establishment of the institutions that would make their aspirational professional identity a reality: professional associations, journals, and university departments. Concerned about the geopolitical implications of population growth in East Asia, Edward Scripps established the first university-based population research center, the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, in 1922 at Miami University in Ohio (Payne 2005). He envisioned his foundation as a place where young scientists could devote themselves full time to research on population, free of the burden of teaching (Thompson 1923). The problem was finding appropriate men for the job, as nobody at that time had the right expertise. Scripps's first hire was sociologist Warren Thompson, who had not previously worked on Asia but had recently completed a dissertation analyzing vital rates in the United States and Europe (Thompson 1915). His second hire was Pascal Whelpton, who had a background in agricultural economics but no experience with population (Thompson 1965). Scripps's choice of relatively inexperienced scientists indicates his intention to develop a new field rather than further an established one. In carrying out the work for which they were hired, Thompson and Whelpton began to codify the new field. After Scripps's death in 1926, their research program continued with support from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the Milbank Memorial Fund. The Milbank Memorial Fund, a public health–oriented philanthropy based in New York City, began to invest in population research in 1928. Although the Fund had already begun to improve public health and reduce mortality in the rural New York communities in which it worked (Fox 2006), board member Thomas Cochran had grown frustrated with the continual outlay of resources to improve the health of an expanding poor population in the United States. He suggested that the Fund's money could be better spent distributing birth control, reducing the incidence of poverty by reducing the fertility of the poor (Kiser n.d.). This proposition was controversial, as birth control remained illegal in many states. Cochran's plan signaled the beginning of convergence between what had previously been two separate political programs: birth control legalization and eugenics. Birth control advocates had initially emphasized the right of individuals and couples to control their fertility, not the potential for birth control to improve the “quality” of the population (Baker 2011). Meanwhile, the eugenics movement had concentrated on government-mandated sterilization (Kevles 1985; Stern 2005). Eugenicists initially opposed the legalization of birth control, which was much more widely used among the professional middle classes, whose fertility they hoped to promote, than among the poor, whose fertility they hoped to suppress (Baker 2011). But public support for eugenic sterilization programs was beginning to wane as genetic research suggested that their success would require the sterilization of “seemingly-normal” individuals who were thought to carry recessive genes for such antisocial traits as poverty and criminality (Pearl 1919), and as fascist governments in Europe increased the scope of their sterilization programs. American eugenicists turned to birth control as a more socially acceptable means of engineering population. Birth control advocates eagerly welcomed them to the fold, as eugenics had more popular support and scientific credibility at the time than did birth control (Baker 2011). However, there was as yet no empirical evidence that the legalization and spread of birth control would have any effect on population size or composition at the aggregate level. For this reason, the board of the Milbank Memorial Fund decided to launch its contraceptive efforts by establishing a research division, which it did in 1928. Following Scripps's example, the Milbank Memorial Fund hired young scientists, beginning with Frank Notestein, who had recently completed a Ph.D. at Cornell University under the direction of Milbank trustee Walter Willcox. In 1931, Notestein was joined by Clyde Kiser, who was then finishing a dissertation in sociology at Columbia University. The Milbank Memorial Fund was demography's most generous patron before World War II. In 1927, it provided funds for a World Population Conference, which laid the groundwork for the establishment of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP, now the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population or IUSSP). The IUSIPP fostered an international network of population scientists, with representatives from North and South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia (IUSSP 1985). The Milbank Memorial Fund paid the bulk of the IUSIPP's operating expenses during its first decade and funded the 1931 establishment of the Population Association of America (PAA), which remains demography's professional association in the United States (Hodgson 1991). When PAA began its first journal, Population Literature (subsequently Population Index) in 1935, the Milbank Memorial Fund footed the bill. Milbank sponsored annual conferences on population beginning in the 1930s, and its journal, The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, was a major outlet for demographic research until the early 1970s. In the 1930s, Milbank patronage for demography expanded under the influence of trustee Frederick Osborn. The long-term secretary of the American Eugenics Society, Osborn viewed demography as a potential ally in the Society's efforts to disassociate American eugenics from European fascism. Osborn publicly repudiated the overt racism that had characterized the eugenics practiced by other US organizations, such as the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor (Allen 1986; Grossner 1967), though he clung to socioeconomic status as a proxy for genetic quality (Osborn 1935a, 1935b; Ramsden 2008). What was unique about Osborn's eugenic program was that it aimed to put the means of eugenic selection into the hands of the public through the universal availability of birth control. To ensure that the public would use this power appropriately, Osborn hoped to create an environment of social control that would encourage the wealthy and well-educated to choose large families and the poor and less-educated to choose smaller families. Osborn viewed the emerging science of demography as a resource for identifying and manipulating the factors associated with individual childbearing decisions and promoted it as a scientific basis for his eugenic program (Osborn 1933, 1959). Demographers, like other scientists of their time, incorporated the basic tenets of eugenics into their worldviews and scholarship. However, as Italian and German demographers began to provide scientific support for their governments’ fascist and, in the latter case, ultimately genocidal population programs (Ipsen 1996; Kühl 1994), the field began to split along national lines, with demographers in the United States and the United Kingdom describing the work of their Italian and German colleagues as ideological rather than scientific (Glass 1935). The US and UK delegations of IUSIPP officially boycotted planned conferences in Rome in 1931 and Berlin in 1935, opening a rift that nearly destroyed the organization (Pitt-Rivers 1931; Lorimer 1935; MacKellar and Hart 2014). But American and British demographers did not abandon eugenics altogether. Instead they embraced Osborn's version (termed “reform” eugenics by Daniel Kevles [1985]), represented in the UK by C. P. Blacker, as a more respectable alternative. This new eugenics program also afforded access to patronage. The Eugenics Society of Great Britain, of which Blacker was secretary, then provided nearly all of the funding for the UK's Population Investigation Committee (Grebenik 1991), and Osborn became an important advocate for demography in the United States. Osborn's patronage blurred the boundaries between demography and its funders. Osborn often presented himself as a population scientist and has been described as such both by his contemporaries and by more recent scholars. He was a founding member and later a president of PAA, but held neither an advanced degree nor an academic affiliation nor a post in a statistical organization, at a time when such credentials were becoming increasingly important. Although he did co-author some publications with demographer Frank Lorimer, Osborn gained access to the field less through his intellectual contributions than through his ability to secure funding on its behalf, for which Notestein dubbed him “Demography's Statesman” (Notestein 1969). Osborn's involvement in the PAA and his close personal and working relationships with Frank Lorimer, Frank Notestein, and other demographers resulted in frequent contact between demographers and their patrons. Osborn seems to have devoted little of his own substantial wealth to demography, but, serving on the board of several philanthropic organizations, he was adept at linking funders to projects. In 1936, he arranged for the establishment of the Office of Population Research (OPR), an interdisciplinary research and graduate training center for demography, in Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. OPR received no institutional support from Princeton, but funding from Milbank supported the OPR's operations and provided graduate fellowships (Poole 1935a, 1935b, 1936; OPR 1939). Osborn selected Notestein to direct OPR, and his staff consisted entirely of other young scholars: Irene Taeuber, who had completed a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Minnesota in 1931; Henry Shryock Jr., who was finishing a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin; and Dudley Kirk, then a graduate student at Harvard University. Osborn coordinated the work of OPR with that of the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Scripps Foundation. In the late 1930s, he secured a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, of which he was also a trustee, for a study involving all three research centers on the social and psychological correlates of childbearing, known informally as the Indianapolis Study. Fertility in the United States had declined precipitously during the Great Depression, and Osborn expected the results of the Indianapolis Study to inform policies that would stimulate population growth by increasing the fertility of only the middle and upper classes. In Notestein's words, Osborn “did an enormous amount of mining of resources” and “practically forced us into the Indianapolis Study” (Van Der Tak 2005, v.1: 12). Between the world wars, a small group of population-oriented scientists and the individuals and institutions that funded them began to build the interdiscipline that we now know as demography. Practitioners shared with their funders anxieties about population size and composition at the national and global levels and a belief that science held the solutions. Together they fashioned demography nearly whole-cloth. Certainly, established scientists such as Raymond Pearl were instrumental in drawing the attention of potential funders to the nascent field, and more senior scholars such as Alfred Lotka and Robert Kuczynski contributed demography's methodological foundations. But as patrons established the new field's institutions, they hired young scientists to direct them. Even though older scientists led the PAA and the IUSIPP in their early years, it was the young scientists whose work came to characterize the field (Hodgson 1991). Frank Notestein was only 34 years old when he became director of the world's only demography graduate training program, a position through which he quickly came to be recognized as the world's foremost authority on population. As topic modeling will demonstrate, Notestein and other young demographers were taking a new approach to population research and focusing their scholarship on questions of fertility and contraception—the issues at the intersection of birth control legalization and eugenics—to a greater extent than were social scientists who were not affiliated with the institutions established by demography's interwar patrons. By funding young scientists, demography's patrons nurtured a generation of scholars attuned to their particular issues; by building disciplinary institutions around them, patrons endowed their clients with scientific authority. During and after World War II, demography acquired powerful new benefactors who globalized the field and encouraged it to focus on slowing rapid population growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the parts of the world that were becoming the focal points of the Cold War. Postwar patrons sponsored a remarkable expansion of demography, funding new population research centers, not just at US universities, but also in Asia and Latin America. They sponsored the publication of demography journals and provided graduate fellowships to expand the field by recruiting promising students. By the late 1960s, they had helped demography secure the patronage of the US government, which stimulated further expansion. Concern with the rate of population growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—and efforts to halt it—were new in the postwar period. Population had traditionally grown very slowly in those regions, with high mortality balancing high fertility, and data were largely unavailable to demographers in the US and Europe. During the war, OPR entered into contracts that expanded its demographers’ horizons. First, the League of Nations, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, commissioned studies on the demographic past and future of Europe (Griffith 1941). In the course of this research, OPR demographers coined the phrase “demographic transition” to describe a pattern they noticed occurring at different times in most of the countries they examined: mortality decline followed by fertility decline with rapid growth in between, all driven by modernization (Kirk 1944; Davis 1945; Notestein 1945). Several demographers had previously advanced elements of what would come to be known as demographic transition theory (Hodgson 1983; Szreter 1993; Kirk 1996), but in their wartime work OPR staff articulated the theory for the first time and formalized it as a basis for population projections (Notestein et al. 1944). During World War II, OPR also contracted with the US Department of State to acquire and analyze demographic data for “the major non-European regions of the world so that it could be in a position to supply information promptly on any section of the world” (OPR 1942). The agreement allowed for the pooling of resources and research between State Department and League of Nations projects. OPR demographers discovered that, in parts of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, mortality was beginning to decline, resulting in population growth. Unlike in the European countries they had analyzed, this mortality decline was not a result of modernization or industrialization, but rather of imperialism (Notestein 1944; Davis 1944). Colonial governments had provided a modicum of relief from famine, disease, and violence, reducing mortality enough to produce sustained population growth. But colonial governments also blocked and even reversed industrialization in these areas, preventing the economic development that would have stimulated the demographic transition (Hodgson 1983). Writing in 1944, Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis, both at OPR, warned that continued population growth outside of the demographic transition framework would swell the number of people living on the margins of subsistence, leaving the populations of poor countries more vulnerable to economic shocks and natural disasters and increasing the vulnerability of the world to violent unrest. Initially, Notestein and Davis argued that birth control was neither necessary nor sufficient to slow population growth in colonial territories. They recognized that the European and American middle classes had begun to limit the size of their families at a time when birth control was rudimentary and generally illegal, using such well-known and universally available techniques as abstinence and withdrawal. They also noticed that, as condoms, diaphragms, and spermicides became more readily available between the wars, they were not used to any great extent in Europe or the United States by the poor or by rural dwellers, who lacked the socioeconomic incentives for small families that had motivated fertility control among the urban middle classes (Stix and Notestein 1940). Notestein and Davis reasoned from the experience of Western Europe and the United States that reducing fertility would require the economic development that would complete the demographic transition. Absent economic development, the spread of modern contraceptives would have little effect (Notestein 1944; Davis 1944, 1945). Attributing high fertility to the poverty perpetuated by continued imperialism and economic domination by the countries of Europe and North America, Notestein and Davis recommended political and economic independence and the development of indigenous middle classes and civil societies as the most rapid route to fertility decline. Within just a few years, however, Notestein and Davis began to shift their analysis, describing poverty as the result of rapid population growth rather than its cause, and suggesting that the right contraceptive technology could reduce fertility in advance of economic development (Davis 1946, 1950a, 1950b; Notestein 1948, 1950). This new perspective, the emergence of which has been well described and explained by Hodgson (1983, 1988) and Szreter (1993), suggested that an as-yet-nonexistent new form of birth control could provide a relatively quick and cheap solution to the problem of rapid population growth—and the poverty that was now seen as its effect rather than its cause—that did not require any change in existing social, political, or economic structures. The shift coincided with investments in demography by a new patron, John D. Rockefeller 3rd, and helped demography to attract the support of the Ford Foundation, which was just beginning its work in international development. John D. Rockefeller 3rd (grandson of Standard Oil and Rockefeller Foundation founder John Davison Rockefeller) had long been interested in the legalization of birth control, following in the footsteps of his father, who had funded the scientific and political activities of Margaret Sanger and Clarence Gamble through the Bureau of Social Hygiene, the National Committee on Maternal Health, and the National Research Council's Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (Harr 1988, pp. 455, 459). Between the wars, the Rockefeller Foundation, of which Rockefeller became a trustee in 1931 and chairman in 1952, had supported demography only indirectly, through funding for the American and British Eugenics Societies (Harr 1988; Grebenik 1991). By the late 1930s, Osborn, a friend of Rockefeller's father and a trustee of the Rockefeller Institute, had begun to impress upon Rockefeller the close relationship between birth control, eugenics, and demography (Harr 1988, p. 457). In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation made its first grants in demography, just over $17,000 to the Scripps Foundation and $200,000 to OPR (Rockefeller Foundation 1944). Rockefeller Foundation officials took Notestein and his OPR colleague Irene Taeuber on a tour of East Asia in 1948. 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 po