Population Planning Research Articles

Linguists and the Official Language Movement

The 'U.S. English' organization provides a model success story for modern entrepreneurial political movements. The group was started in 1983 as an offshoot of the restrictionist Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR); its founders were former U.S. Senator S. I. Hayakawa and FAIR founder John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist with a background in the environmentalist and population control movements. Its goals were to establish English as the official language of the United States, and to oppose bilingual education and, more generally, the provision of bilingual services in the public or private sector. In six years, U.S. English has built a national membership of between 250,000 and 350,000, relying primarily on sophisticated direct-mail solicitations sent out under the names of a distinguished advisory board.' With an annual operating budget of $7 million, it has been able to mount legislative or electoral campaigns in almost forty states.2 The movement first attracted extensive national attention in 1986, when an official-language amendment was passed by 73 percent of the California electorate. In 1988, similar measures were passed by the voters of the states of Arizona (where it received 51% of the vote), Colorado (61%), and Florida (84%). In all, 17 states have declared English their official language, and bills are pending in at least eight more.3 Official-language

The politics of birth control, 1920-1940: the impact of professionals.

Before the 1920s, a birth control movement arose in the United States out of socialist, feminist, and other radical groups concerned with women's rights and sexual freedom. After 1920 the birth control movement became gradually transformed into a respectable, nonradical reform cause, the recipient of large grants from big business, with women's rights secondary to an overriding concern with medical health and population control. This transformation was achieved through the professionalization of the birth control movement-that is, its takeover by professional experts, almost all male, in place of the radical amateur women, fighting for their own interests, who initiated it. The article examines two groups of professionals who were particularly influential in this transformation: doctors and academic eugenists. The former made birth control a medical issue, held back the development of popular sex education, and stifled a previously developing feminist approach to women's birth control needs. The later contributed racism to the birth control movement, helping to transform it into a population control movement with racist and anti-feminist overtones. Both groups, while they made contributions to the technology of contraception, simultaneously held back the spread of birth control by transforming the campaign for it from a popular, participatory cause to a professional staff lobbying operation.

An historical sketch of the American population control movement.

This paper critically examines the fundamental premises and historical background of the American population control movement and shows how the theories of Thomas Malthus became interwoven with those of the eugenics movement during the first four decades of this century. After World War II, the concern of eugenicists with “race betterment” and with halting multiplication of the “unfit” was replaced by claims that the world was gravely menaced by a “population explosion.” This thematic shift was consistent with the economic and political aims of American financiers and industrialists after 1945, and many of them, as indicated in this paper, became leading figures of the Population Establishment. The author has proceeded with the belief that a rationally planned economy based upon collective ownership of wealth by the working class can furnish goods and services in abundance, while eradicating unemployment, starvation, and oppression. An end to economic exploitation would greatly expand health care facilities and educational opportunities, and demographic problems could be studied and solved within the context of constructing a society that served, rather than pillaged, its members. Today, the goal of intelligent planning of births, at both the family level and the collective level, is blocked by the continuing existence of capitalism. For that reason, exposition of scientific alternatives to present-day world population control plans is preceded by the urgent task of analyzing the complex interplay between those plans and the present system of exploitation and oppression. In her conclusion, the author briefly reappraises the theories of Malthus, which have consistently shaped the decisions made by the Population Establishment. Like Malthus' assertions at the dawn of the industrial era, contemporary neo-Malthusian pronouncements ultimately rest upon assumptions that economic and social irrationalities are invincible and eternal. As the author indicates, neither capitalist society nor plans of action that seek to prolong its existence can offer solutions for today's pressing problems of famine and impoverishment.