1. For overviews of post–World War II Malthusianism, see Critchlow, Donald T., Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Hoff, Derek, “Are We Too Many? The Population Debate and Policymaking in the Twentieth-Century United States” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2006)Google Scholar; Connelly, Matthew, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, Mass., 2008)Google Scholar; Harkavy, Oscar, Curbing Population Growth: An Insider’s Perspective on the Population Movement (New York, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Linnér, Björn-Ola, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-war Population-Resource Crises (Isle of Harris, UK, 2003).Google Scholar

2. Thomas Robert Malthus, Population: The First Essay (1798; reprint, with a foreword by Kenneth E. Boulding, Ann Arbor, 1959).

3. For example, draft language of Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 State of the Union Address insisted, “We cannot successfully wage war on poverty abroad or at home if we are indifferent to the unprecedented increase in man’s numbers. As the National Academy of Sciences has declared, this problem is no less grave for the technically advanced nations than for the less developed” (Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas [hereafter LBJ Library], National Security Files, Subject Files, Box 38, Folder “Population”). For a scholarly example of the perceived commonalities between the problem in the developing and developing worlds, see Boulding, Kenneth E., The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: The Great Transition (New York, 1964), 121–25.Google Scholar

4. Ehrlich, Paul R., The Population Bomb (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

5. For the food aid–population tie-in, see Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 221–28. Johnson told his adviser Joseph Califano Jr., “I’m not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems” (221).

6. For the integration of federal family planning programs into the 1960s War on Poverty, see Critchlow, Intended Consequences, chap. 3. Late in its tenure, reflecting much internal disagreement on population matters, and in lieu of a formal commission proposed by John D. Rockefeller, the Johnson administration convened an internal population task force to take stock of family planning and population issues. Its report, Population and Family Planning: The Transition from Concern to Action: Report of the President’s Committee on Population and Family Planning (Washington, D.C., November 1968), called for the expansion of family planning and population research programs. Archival records of this committee may be found in LBJ Library, White House Central Files (hereafter WHCF), Federal Government Operations, Box 382, Folder “FG 659 Committee on Population and Family Planning (I).” Johnson’s personal interest in the population movement grew as his administration waned. For example, U.S. Aid administrator William Gaud wrote Johnson in February 1968, “When I saw you in Austin a couple weeks ago, you emphasized the importance of doing everything we can in the area of family planning” (LBJ Library, WHCF, Welfare, Box 2, Folder “1/1/68–2/29/68”). Johnson also signed the UN’s “World Leader’s Statement Declaration on Population” (1967) and even asked Secretary of State Dean Rusk to urge the Soviets to do so (Dean Rusk to LBJ, 9 October 1967, LBJ Library, National Security Files, Subject Files, Box 38, Folder “Population”). Yet the administration was reluctant to take significant additional action. See, for example, Phillip Hughes, Deputy Director Bureau of the Budget, to Harry McPherson, Special Counsel to the President, 1 February 1967, LBJ Library, WHCF, Legislation, Box 164, Folder “LE/WE.” For more on the internal debates within the White House, see LBJ Library, WHCF, Welfare, Box 2, and Office Files of White House Aids, Files of Ervin Duggan, Box 12, Folder “John D. Rockefeller 3rd Proposal on Population Comm.”

7. This phrase is the title of Connelly’s excellent chapter 7 in Fatal Misconception and originally comes from an article by the president of the Population Council (Berelson, Bernard, “Beyond Family Planning,” Studies in Family Planning 1 [February 1969]: 1–16).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. “Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth,” 18 July 1969, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1969 (Washington, D.C., 1971), 529.

9. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population and the American Future (Washington, D.C., 1972).

10. For a review of the declining interest in population matters, see Maher, T. Michael, “How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection,” Population and Environment 18 (March 1997): 339–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Overseas population growth continued to be a matter of high-level discussion. In 1975, President Ford approved National Security Study Memorandum 200, which maintained that global population growth was “a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures.” But little action came of its directives. See Mumford, Stephen D., The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy (Research Triangle Park, N.C., 1996).Google Scholar

11. The most recent and best examination of this long campaign is Connelly, Fatal Misconception.

12. Critchlow, Intended Consequences; and Beck, Roy and Kolankiewicz, Leon, “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History,” Journal of Policy History 12 (January 2000): 123–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

13. For example, Critchlow concluded in Intended Consequences that the “continuing decline in the American birthrate belied the urgency of the [Rockefeller] commission” (148).

14. In addition, several scholars, most recently Connelly in Fatal Misconception, have argued that the population movement’s lingering eugenic mind-set eroded its political capital. My own work suggests that while eugenic ideas did survive as a motivating force on the modern population movement, they were less important that other impulses, such as a genuine concern with ecological crisis and a philanthropic desire to lessen poverty and hasten development in the Third World.

15. For example, during hearings on the population commission legislation, Lewis Butler, an assistant secretary at HEW, testified before the House Subcommittee on Government Operations that “we are on the threshold of another period of rapid growth” (quoted in “Testimony by the Honorable Lewis H. Butler, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, before the Executive and Legislative Reorganization Subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations, Nov. 19, 1969,” Richard Nixon Presidential Materials, National Archives II, College Park, Md. [hereafter Nixon Papers], WHCF, Subject Files, FG 275, Commission on Population Growth and the American Future [hereafter Nixon Commission Papers], Box 1, Folder “FG 275 4/1/70–8/31/70 Oversize Attachment 2973 November 1969.” See also Conrad Tauber, Associate Director, Bureau of the Census, to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1 July 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Room, Washington, D.C. (hereafter DPM Papers), Box 295, Folder “Population: General 1969 3.” Such predictions of pending growth were off the mark, but only by a few years. The birthrate would actually bottom out in 1976, at 1.7, before turning back upward. See Teitelbaum, Michael S. and Winter, Jay M., The Fear of Population Decline (New York, 1985), 159.Google Scholar

16. For an example of the widespread assumption that “at some point the population of the United States will have to stop growing,” see the comments of Herman Miller, the head of the population division of the U.S. Census Bureau, in Heinemann, H. Erich, “Babies vs. the GNP,” New York Times, 3 June 1970.Google Scholar

17. The 1968 platform may be read online at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25841.

18. “Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth,” 524.

19. Nixon appointed as the U.S. representative to the United Nations Population Fund General William Draper, a Malthusian whose 1959 report on military preparedness and foreign aid helped spur federal intervention in the family planning issue. Draper seems to have had Nixon’s ear. John R. Brown III, White House staff assistant, told Moynihan on 3 February 1970: “The President noted that he feels Draper has been right on this issue for years” (Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 4/1/70–8/31/70 Oversize Attachment 2973 February 1970”).

20. Reston, James, “Washington: Who Said ‘Love Makes the World Go Round’?” New York Times, 21 January 1970Google Scholar, observed that “it is interesting that the population question is being faced more directly by a conservative administration than by any before it.”

21. The population policy leaders in Congress were Senators Joseph Clark (D-Pa.) and Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska), though they lost their reelection bids in 1968; Senator Joseph Tydings (D-Md.); Senator Ralph Yarborough (D-Tex.), the liberal chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare and its Health Subcommittee; Senator Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare; Senator Alan Cranston (D-Wyo.); Representative James Scheuer (D-N.Y.), who would emerge as the primary leader in Congress on population during the 1970s; and Representative Morris Udall (D-Ariz.), whose brother Stewart was Kennedy’s and Johnson’s secretary of the interior.

22. Chester Finn to Moynihan, 14 July 1969, DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Family Planning 1969 3”: “One reason for the reorganization and expanded family planning services promised in our population Message is because we need to seize the initiative from Senator Tydings.”

23. These included Lee Dubridge, Nixon’s scientific adviser; Robert Finch, secretary of the Department of Heath, Education, and Welfare until 1970; and Arthur Burns, a counselor to Nixon who was former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Eisenhower and later chairman of the Federal Reserve. According to U.S. News and World Report, DuBridge stated that “it would be very desirable as a goal in this country to reduce the population growth-rate to zero” (“How to Control Population: Interview with President’s Science Adviser,” 19 January 1970, 49). Finch testified in 1971 to the Commission on Population Growth that in order to reduce the average number of children per family to two, a “sustained Federal effort is essential; occasional actions are no longer sufficient” (Jerry Lipson and Diane Wolman to Commissioners, 14 September 1971, “The Commission’s National Public Opinion Survey, and the New York Hearing,” Records of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, 1970–1972, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, National Archives II, College Park, Md. [hereafter Records of the Commission on Population Growth], Box 5, Folder “September,” 2). Burns advocated creating a population commission early in the administration and was charged with studying the merits of it. See Alexander Butterfield to Burns, 2 April 1969, in Nixon Papers, WHCF, Subject Files, FG 96, 97, 98, and 99, Box 1, Folder 22, “FG 99 Committee on Population and Family Planning.”

24. Lipson and Wolman, “The Commission’s National Public Opinion Survey,” 6.

25. “Family-Planning Breakthrough,” New York Times, 11 January 1971. The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, Public Law 572, 91st Cong., 2nd sess. (24 December 1970), followed through on most of the requests in Nixon’s special message. See “Statement on Signing the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970,” 26 December 1970, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1971), 1156–57. The law consolidated and expanded a scattered array of family planning programs by creating two new agencies in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare: the National Center for Population and Family Planning and the National Center for Family Planning Services. In addition, the act provided for increased family planning services through direct federal grants to providers, increased research and manpower training in the population field, and enhanced population education. Congress, though, consistently underfunded it.

26. Untitled press release from the Office of Senator Joseph D. Tydings, 18 June 1970, Joseph Tydings Papers, University of Maryland Special Collections, College Park (hereafter Tydings Papers), Series 6, Box 12, Folder “Press Releases—Obscenity; Population; Post Office; Public Works (1965–1970).” See also the next year’s S.J. Res. 108, introduced 2 June 1971; H.J. Res. 789 was introduced in the House on 19 July 1971. Many lawmakers were public Malthusians. In Look magazine, for example, Senator George McGovern (D-S.Dak.) wrote: “The world is running out of food. That is a fact of life, and of death” (“We Are Losing the Race Against Hunger,” 7 March 1967).

27. The bills were S. 3632 and H.R. 16668. For descriptions, see ZPG National Reporter (the newsletter of the organization Zero Population Growth), May 1970. (I read this copy in the Records of the Wilderness Society, Conservation Collection, Denver Public Library [hereafter, Wilderness Society Records], Box 43, Folder 18.) The bulletin was initially called the ZPG Communicator, became the ZPG Newsletter in September 1969, and was finally renamed the ZPG National Reporter in February 1970.

28. The idea of a national population commission had been floating around for some time, and to some degree it was an extension of President Johnson’s Committee on Population and Family Planning. Early in Nixon’s presidency, the White House debated the merits of creating a commission and generally concluded that such a body would give the president the upper hand on the population issue while, as one staffer put it, “absorbing much of the political animosity that ‘population’ creates.” Chester Finn Jr. to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1 April 1969, Nixon Papers, WHCF, Subject Files, FG 96, 97, 98, and 99, Box 1, Folder 22, “FG 99 Committee on Population and Family Planning.”

29. Moynihan claimed authorship in his “The Most Important Decision-Making Process,” Policy Review 1 (Summer 1977): 92. Robert Finch also helped draft the special message. See Charles Westoff to Finch, 30 March 1971, Records of the Commission on Population Growth, Box 1, Folder “1971 Meeting.”

30. The hearings were House Committee on Government Operations, Executive and Legislative Reorganization Subcommittee, Establishing a Commission on Population Growth, and Related Matters: Hearings on S. 2701 to Establish a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future and Related House Bills, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 19 and 20 November 1969.

31. The New Republic concluded that “the problem as it is officially defined is essentially one of accommodating the growth by intelligent planning and use of available resources, and of curbing only the addition of ‘unwanted children’ to the domestic population” (“Unwanted People,” 2 August 1969, 7).

32. Moynihan to Nixon, 12 March 1970, DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 2.”

33. “The White House Press Conference of Dr. Daniel P. Moynihan,” 4 June 1970, DPM Papers, Box 295, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 5.”

34. Senator Bob Packwood (D-Ore.) expressed fears that the commission would be merely technocratic and concerned only about the logistical issues of population growth. He wrote to Moynihan on 28 April 1970, “It is my sincere hope that those concerned over the population problem will be as well represented as those merely interested in aspects of the population growth” (DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 3”).

35. House Committee on Government Operations, Establishing a Commission on Population Growth, 33. Udall had earlier noted, “President Nixon says we ought to start preparing for the next 100 million Americans. I say: let’s see if we can’t slow down the assembly line” (Udall to Stewart Brandborg, Executive Director of the Wilderness Society, 31 July 1969, Wilderness Society Records, Box 43, Folder 14).

36. The text of Udall’s bill, H.R. 10515, appears in House Committee on Government Operations, Establishing a Commission on Population Growth, 24–29. As the Senate had already passed commission legislation, however, Udall did not fight for his bill. He testified: “I would prefer to incorporate in this [legislation] my congressional finding and statement of national policy that our goal is stabilization of population. But since the President has taken really unprecedented leadership here in urging this … I would say let’s go ahead and pass it and get it out, even though I would prefer more far-reaching action” (46).

37. Moynihan had the primary responsibility of vetting possible commissioners. See William H. Timmons to Representative John McCormack (Speaker of the House), 9 March 1970, DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 2.”

38. Moynihan to John D. Ehrlichman, 1 June 1970, DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 4.” Recommendations and requests to serve from members of the population community, academia, the federal family planning bureaucracy, and politicians deluged the White House, which exacerbated the usual party politics. The best documents detailing the various nominees are “Single Political Recommendations,” Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 4/1/70–8/31/70 Oversize Attachment 2973 March 1970,” and Moynihan to Nixon, 5 March 1970, in DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 2.” Moynihan complained in May to the president, “It is just one awful struggle to get anyone approved who is not a solid no-nonsense Republican” (Moynihan to Nixon, 8 May 1970, Nixon Commission Papers, Box 1, Folder “FG 275 4/1/70–8/31/70”). Washington Star reporter Carl Rowan accused the White House of stalling and playing it safe despite the clear mandate for “more than a tea-and-crumpets commission.” Rowan reported that “the foot-dragging comes about because Daniel P. Moynihan, the presidential counselor in charge of this matter, reportedly is having potential commission members investigated and checked out the way Supreme Court nominees ought to be.” Rowan also accused the White House of turning the selection of members into a patronage machine for GOP donors. Rowan, Carl, “What Has Become of the Population Commission?” Sunday Evening Star, 24 May 1970.Google Scholar The historian Gareth Davies told me that Rowan’s charges were likely inaccurate—it was Harry Flemming who would have insisted on the investigation of potential members.

39. After his defeat in the 1970 elections, Tydings was replaced by Senator Alan Cranston (D-Wyo.). The other congressional members on the commission were Senator Robert Packwood (R-Ore.); Representative John Blatnik (D-Minn.), who was replaced a year later by Representative James Scheuer (R-N.Y.); and Representative John Erlenborn (R-Ill.).

40. The members included business leaders (one of them Puerto Rican), a labor leader, an Hispanic lawyer and activist, a Ford Foundation economist, who oversaw the foundation’s overseas population work, several additional social scientists, an African American college president, a housewife, a Catholic scholar, a social worker, and two college students.

41. Westoff, Charles F., “The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future: Its Origins, Operations, and Aftermath,” in Sociology and Public Policy: The Case of Presidential Commissions, ed. Komarovsky, Mirra (New York, 1975), 47–48.Google Scholar According to Moynihan, the “public” members, as opposed to the academics, were stacked with Republicans. See Moynihan to Harry Fleming, 20 April 1970, DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 2.”

42. On Scranton, see Moynihan to Nixon, 12 February 1970, DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 4.” For Moynihan’s thoughts on Rockefeller, see Moynihan to Nixon, 5 March 1970, in DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 2.”

43. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, An Interim Report to the President and the Congress (Washington, D.C., 1971), 24.

44. For a balanced overview of the Catholics’ engagement with the population issue, see Critchlow, Intended Consequences, chap. 4. For an excellent treatment of the maintenance of Catholic leaders’ antiabortion consensus throughout the tumultuous 1960s, see McGreevy, William, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003), chap. 9Google Scholar. The creation of federal family planning programs in the mid-1960s had already engendered a backlash from the Catholic Church. Widespread optimism regarding a possible change in the church’s position on birth control had dissipated abruptly with Pope Paul VI’s 1968 statement, Humanae Vitae, which defended the traditionally defined nuclear family and reaffirmed the church’s long-standing opposition to all forms of birth control. See Wills, Garry, “Is Our Civilization Oversubscribed?” National Review, 16 June 1970, 631–32.Google Scholar In the late 1960s, the developing battle over abortion rights (and then the legalization of abortion in several states) crystallized Catholic opposition to population policy, further politicizing and weakening support for population control.

45. During the mid- to late 1960s, the radical Garrett Hardin and other population activists worked with leaders of the women’s movement to spur the creation of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), founded in 1969. The records of Zero Population Growth at their Washington, D.C., offices (the organization is now called The Population Connection), though undoubtedly inflating the group’s importance, reveal that it took the lead in several lawsuits that helped liberalize abortion at the state level, bussed in abortion advocates to pack state legislative hearings on abortion, and secured a number of state resolutions in favor of population stabilization. The national ZPG organization officially endorsed the repeal of abortion restrictions in 1969. Moreover, local chapters were heavily involved in the abortion issue. I spoke on the connection between the population control and abortion rights movements in “Was Roe v. Wade Population Policy? Rethinking the Connection between the Population and Abortion Movements,” paper presented at the Social Science History Association Annual Conference, November 2005, Portland, Ore. See also Hoff, , “Are We Too Many?” 308–10; Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 269–70Google Scholar; and Critchlow, Intended Consequences, 135–37.

46. “Statement about Policy on Abortions at Military Base Hospitals in the United States,” 3 April 1971, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1971 (Washington, D.C., 1972), 500.

47. Reacting to the backlash rhetoric of crisis, for example, a few African American leaders used the word “genocide” to describe federal family planning programs. More moderate leaders shied away from such incendiary language—and the implication that population policy was the eugenic ghost in the closet—but nonetheless worried that family planning programs primarily targeted minorities. Hence the president of the New York Urban Coalition wrote in 1971, “Neither can we fail to believe that ‘population control’ will firstly be aimed at those groups with the least power—namely, the poor and people of color.” Eugene Callender, draft of “Population Control and Black Survival,” 28 September 1971, Rockefeller Family Archives, John D. Rockefeller III Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, N.Y. (hereafter JDR III Papers), Series 3, Subseries 4, Box 67, Folder 443, “Population Interests, Background Materials, 1969, 1970–1971.”

48. Ehrlichman’s handwritten note in Nixon Papers, White House Special Files, White House Central Files, Confidential 1969–1974, Box 1, Folder 9. The author thanks Professor Shelley Hurt for bringing this document to my attention.

49. For this interpretation of policymaking in the Nixon White House, see Schulman, Bruce J., The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2001)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

50. Federal efforts at population redistribution had begun with the New Deal, and calls for a new policy to shape internal migration returned to the fore during the Johnson administration, primarily due to Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman’s efforts to highlight rural depopulation—a phenomenon many saw as the equally destructive flipside of the urban crisis.

51. From the end of World War II through the late 1960s, the total U.S. population grew 30 percent, while the coastal population grew 80 percent. This estimate comes from Flippen, John Brooks, “Containing the Urban Sprawl: The Nixon Administration’s Land Use Policy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26 (Winter 1996): 197–207Google Scholar, which offers a good entry point into the growth policy issue.

52. For example, Senator Karl Mundt (R-S.Dak.) proposed the formation of a Commission on Balanced Economic Development to investigate potential policies to influence the geographic location of industry (“The Race for Survival,” New York Times, 7 July 1969). A plethora of organizations, from the National League of Cities to the National Governors’ Conference, came out in favor of new migration policies to address both concentration in the nation’s major urban areas and the depopulation of rural America. See Duane Elgin to the commissioners, 1 July 1971, “Past Precedents for Population Distribution Policies,” Records of the Commission on Population Growth, Box 4, Folder “July.”

53. Moynihan to Dr. Martin Anderson, 18 July 1969, DPM Papers, Box 228, Folder “[Correspondence] May–Dec. 1969 A.” For additional evidence of how Moynihan thought about population in geographic terms, see in the same folder his letter to Representative John B. Anderson (R-Ill.), 16 July 1969.

54. Moynihan, Daniel P., “Toward a National Urban Policy,” Public Interest 17 (Fall 1969): 14.Google Scholar

55. “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” 22 January 1970, Public Papers of Richard Nixon, 1970, 14. Of course, the suburbs were growing much faster than the central cities. National Goals Research Staff, Toward Balanced Growth: Quantity with Quality (Washington, D.C., 1970), estimated that since 1960, the former had grown 28 percent and the latter just 1 percent (43).

56. The drive for national growth policy also fell victim to bureaucratic turf battles and tensions between rural and urban interests. See Flippen, “Containing the Urban Sprawl”; Sundquist, James L., Dispersing Population: What America Can Learn from Europe (Washington, D.C., 1975), 12–16Google Scholar; and Rome, Adam, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2001), 236–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a review of the failure of distribution policy that blames America’s decentralized politics, see Sundquist, James L., “A Comparison of Policy-Making Capacity in the United States and Five European Countries: The Case of Population Distribution,” in Population Policy Analysis, ed. Kraft, Michael E. and Schneider, Mark (Lexington, Mass., 1978), 67–80.Google Scholar

57. The most thorough account of Nixon’s cooling toward environmentalism is Flippen, J. Brooks, Nixon and the Environment (Albuquerque, 2000)Google Scholar. The quotation appears on p. 102.

58. Moynihan to Phillip Berry, 2 July 1970, DPM Papers, Box 294, Folder “Population: Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1970 4.” Also see Berry’s letter to Nixon, 9 April 1970, in which Berry complained that “the solutions discussed in [Nixon’s population] message aim toward accommodating expected growth” but “fall far short of a real anecdote for such growth.”

59. Conversation 700–10, 3 April 3, 1972, Nixon Presidential Materials, The White House Communications Agency Sound Recordings Collection (hereafter Nixon Tapes). I also listened to the tapes cited in this article on Nixontapes.org.

60. Paul Ehrlich and John R. Holdren, “Impact of Population Growth,” JDR III Papers, Series 3, Subseries 4, Box 69, Folder 460, “National Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Environmental Issues, 1971.”

61. “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” 22 January 1970, 10.

62. Flippen, Nixon and the Environment, 102.

63. Ibid. Nixon tended to think about a trade-off between a cleaner environment and jobs. In 1971, with the election drawing nearer and the economy muddling through a sluggish recovery, jobs increasing won out. For Nixon’s economic calculus of the 1972 elections (and successful efforts to orchestrate an artificial boom in 1972), see Matusow, Allen J., Nixon’s Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars and Votes (Lawrence, Kans., 1998)Google Scholar, chap. 7.

64. For example, Nixon argued in 1971: “This concentration of population growth in already crowded areas is not a trend that we wish to perpetuate. This administration would prefer a more balanced growth pattern—and we are taking a number of steps to encourage more development and settlement in the less densely populated areas of our country” (“Special Message to the Congress on Special Revenue Sharing for Urban Community Development,” 5 March 1971, Public Papers of Richard Nixon, 1971, 396).

65. “Toward National Growth Policy: Population Distribution Effects,” Progress Report of the National Goals Research Staff, 23 March 1970, Records of the Population Commission, Box 4, Folder “March Meeting,” 4; see also 12–13. Nixon had formed this group within the White House and instructed it to report on “what kind of a nation we want to be as we begin our third century.” See “Statement by the President upon Announcing the Establishment of the Staff within the White House,” 13 July 1969, reprinted in National Goals Research Staff, Toward Balanced Growth, 219.

66. All quotations are from National Goals Research Staff, Toward Balanced Growth, 60.

67. I first saw the term “market knows best demography” in Marc Linder, The Dilemmas of Laissez-Faire Population Policy in Capitalist Societies: When the Invisible Hand Controls Reproduction (Westport, Conn., 1997), 16. Linder used the term to apply specifically to the new household microeconomics that treats children as consumer durables. I use the term more broadly to apply to the whole constellation of overlapping pro-market and pro-population-growth positions. Separately, a crucial treatment (and rejection) of the principles described in this section was Paul Demeny’s 1986 address as the outgoing president of the Population Association of America (Paul Demeny, “Population and the Invisible Hand,” Demography 23 [November 1986]: 473–87).

68. To be sure, scholars have noted challenges to the prevailing anti-population-growth viewpoint. In particular, historically minded demographers have described the development of demographic “revisionism,” that is, a more optimistic posture regarding population growth, especially in the Third World. However, studies on these matters generally ignore the links between revisionism and broader economic debates. Moreover, they tend to incorrectly date the intellectual transformation to the 1970s rather than the 1960s. For example, Susan Greenhalgh, “The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (January 1996), concluded: “During the mid-1970s, the sense of crisis that had created a strong demand for demographers’ services in the past began to wane. In the third world, income levels were rising and birth rates falling, putting to rest both popular and governmental fears about a ‘population bomb’” (52). Greenhalgh then lists perhaps the most famous example of the new demographic revisionism: the Reagan administration’s statement at the 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City that population growth did not necessarily hinder development. She also cites the influence on the Reagan administration of Julian Simon, the leading pro-population-growth economist of the 1980s and 1990s. (Simon argued that people are the “ultimate resource” in both the poor and rich nations and that population growth has controlled the rate of economic progress in human history.) Indeed, many other scholars are content, as they basically ignore the 1960s, to practice this Simon-centrism when briefly noting the rise of population optimism. For example, see Otis Graham Jr., “Epilogue: A Look Ahead,” Journal of Policy History 12 (January 2000): 159.

69. The classic statement of the earlier view was Coale, Ansley J. and Hoover, Edgar M., Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries: A Case Study of India’s Prospects (Princeton, 1958)Google Scholar. For a critical examination of this paradigm, see Connelly, , Fatal Misconception, 207–13Google Scholar.

70. One leading work along these lines was Hirschman, Albert O., The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven, 1958)Google Scholar. Also important was Boserup, Ester, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. The development debate led several experts to newly posit the strong possibility of a historical link between population growth and economic growth—and the idea that economic growth in the Western world has been fastest during the periods of the most rapid population growth. Douglass North and Robert Thomas concluded in a famous essay: “In capsule form our explanation is that changes in relative product and factor prices, initially induced by Malthusian population pressure, and changes in the size of markets induced a set of fundamental institutional changes which channeled incentives towards productivity-raising types of economic activity” (North, Douglass C. and Paul Thomas, Robert, “An Economic Theory of the Growth of the Western World,” Economic History Review, n.s., 23 [April 1970]: 1).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71. Hayek, Friedrich, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, 1960)Google Scholar, chaps. 2 and 23. Population social scientists sustained Hayek’s position. A 1960 conference, “Natural Resources and Economic Growth,” convened by Resources for the Future and the Committee on Economic Growth of the Social Science Research Council, signaled the new consensus downplaying the economic importance of natural resources. Stanford’s Moses Abramovitz, a pioneer of modern growth theory, summarized the proceedings when he noted, “An important theme that recurs in the papers before the Conference is that, in the course of economic development, natural resources have become of smaller importance than they used to be” (Abramovitz, Moses, “Comment,” in Natural Resources and Economic Growth: Papers Presented at a Conference Held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 7–9, 1960, ed. Spengler, Joseph J. [Washington, D.C., 1961], 9)Google Scholar. As economists argued that raw materials were tangential to economic growth, they also insisted that market forces would assure the future availability of nearly all resources.

72. Barnett, Harold J. and Morse, Chandler, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability (Baltimore, 1963), 11.Google Scholar

73. A good entry into the early human-capital debate is the series of essays in the supplement “Investment in Human Beings,” Journal of Political Economy 70 (October 1962)Google Scholar.

74. Schultz’s links to the population community are detailed in the Records of the Population Council, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, N.Y., Box 39, Folder 560, “Schultz, Theodore W, 1956–1966.”

75. For example, the leading economist Simon Kuznets argued that the ability of societies to invest in human capital upset traditional assumptions about the effects of population growth on capital formation. See Kuznets, Simon, “Population and Economic Growth,” Proceedings of American Philosophical Society 111 (June 1967): 178–84Google Scholar.

76. The original human-capital theorists were conservative labor economists associated with the Second Chicago School, but their findings ironically offered theoretical support for the Great Society’s social investment programs. See O’Connor, Alice, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, 2001), 140–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Less well known is that the rise of human-capital theory was closely connected to the population debate. The link stretched back to prewar demography, when the eugenic emphasis on population “quality” spurred interest in measuring the economic value of investment in population “improvement.” See Dublin, Louis I. and Lotka, Alfred J., The Money Value of Man, rev. ed. (New York, 1946)Google Scholar. Essays on the history of human-capital theory, for example, Kiker, B. F., “The Historical Roots of the Concept of Human Capital,” Journal of Political Economy 74 (October 1966): 481–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, often mention the theoretical work of Dublin and Lotka but ignore the broader interest in population “quality” that informed it.

77. Paul Demeny, “Population and the Invisible Hand.”

78. Gary Becker, who remains today a leading family economist, offered a crucial early statement of these ideas in “An Economic Analysis of Fertility,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries (Princeton, 1960), 209–31Google Scholar. See also Schultz, Theodore, “The Value of Children: An Economic Perspective,” Journal of Political Economy 81 (March–April 1973): S2–S13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of the new microeconomics of fertility, which holds that it “must engage in considerable conceptual contortion to convert children into commodities,” see Linder, The Dilemmas of Laissez-Faire Population Policy, 15–26 (the quotation is on p. 19). See also Blake, Judith, “Are Babies Consumer Durables? A Critique of the Economic Theory of Reproductive Motivation,” Population Studies 22 (March 1968): 5–25Google ScholarPubMed, which stressed women’s psychological and situational motives for childbirth.

79. In Easterlin’s view, the 1950s Baby Boom was traceable to the fact that the children of the Depression years grew up poor but then, after World War II, did better in young adulthood than their parents had. This “relative affluence” compared to their parents translated into optimism about their economic futures and lots of babies. Writing during the 1960s, when fertility rates fell from their Baby Boom highs, Easterlin’s economic-demographic feedback model predicted further declines: the large crop of children born in the 1950s would face hard economic times, in part because there were so many of them. As a result, Baby Boomers would not expect as high a standard of living as their parents and would respond by having fewer children. A short statement of this thesis was Richard Easterlin, The American Baby Boom in Historical Perspective, National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper No. 79 (New York, 1962), reprinted from the December 1961 issue of the American Economic Review.

80. Easterlin also insisted on a historical link between population and economic growth in both the developing and developed words. See Easterlin, Richard A., Wachter, Michael L., and Wachter, Susan M., “Demographic Influences on Economic Stability: The United States Experience,” Population and Development Review 4 (March 1978): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which concluded that “upsurges in population growth had an important role—through their feedback effects on aggregate demand—in prolonging economic expansion” (5). For Easterlin’s doubts on the “population explosion” paradigm, see his Growth Triumphant: The Twenty-first Century in Historical Perspective (Ann Arbor, 1996), 9–10. It should be noted, however, that Easterlin also argued here that conservatives’ anxiety about slowing population growth or even stability is as overblown as the fear of overpopulation was a generation ago (Growth Triumphant, chap. 9).

81. The stress on the individual also critiqued the state-centered thrust of the family planning movement. Market-knows-best demographers not only assumed that government family planning programs at home and abroad were inefficient and ineffective. They also noted that nations pursuing vigorous population-control programs tended to be those with high levels of state economic planning. Hence they suggested that instead of concentrating on family planning programs, nations worried about population growth should concentrate on freeing the market.

82. For a typical statement of the prevailing wisdom, see Ohlin, Goran, Population Control and Economic Development (Paris, 1967)Google Scholar. Thereafter, Ohlin actually moved into the anti-Malthusian camp.

83. Commenting on a series of papers in the May 1971 American Economic Review, Paul Demeny wrote, “It is wholly unsatisfactory to argue that ‘people’ behave rationally in the interest of their children” (Schultz, T. Paul and Demeny, Paul, “Discussion,” American Economic Review 61 [May 1971]: 421)Google Scholar. Then again, it is notable that all three of the papers downplayed population problems.

84. Beck and Kolankiewicz, “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat,” offered a typical comment: “Business groups always have defined one end of the growth issue spectrum as they pushed for ever more population growth” (126). Yet the business community never organized in any meaningful way to reverse the Malthusian craze, perhaps because for a time American business did not wish to be seen as anti-environmental. Neo-Marxists argue that business is sometimes in favor of population policies because they seek to regulate the future labor supply, hold back the mob, and cut welfare spending. This argument has a certain logic to it, but there is little evidence that American capital ever organized around a coherent population policy. While American business was divided on the population question, there is little doubt that, as Critchlow concluded, “big business’s assumption that expanding population was equated with economic growth was seen [by population activists] as a serious obstacle to population control” (Intended Consequences, 18).

85. See “Birth Control: Businessmen Back It,” Business Week, 15 May 1965, 34.

86. Quoted in Viederman, Stephen and Sollitto, Sharmon, “Economic Groups: Business, Labor, Welfare,” in Population Policy and Ethics: The American Experience, ed. Veatch, Robert M. (New York, 1977), 330.Google Scholar

87. This statement appeared on page 2 of the June 1970 issue of Fortune, previewing Lawrence A. Mayer, “U.S. Population Growth: Will Slower Be Better?”

88. “A Population Policy?” Wall Street Journal, 23 March 1971. See also Welles, John G., “The Economy Doesn’t Need More People,” Wall Street Journal, 22 April 1970.Google Scholar

89. The shift also filtered into the mass media. In Newsweek, for example, Henry Wallich, a Yale economist who had served on Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers (and whom Nixon would later appoint to be a Federal Reserve Governor), wrote: “Everybody has his pet prescription for curing society’s ills. A peculiarly misguided one has surfaced recently—zero population growth. If this wholesale misanthropy prevails, we are in trouble. … If large parts of our country are polluted, it is not because we are too numerous, but because we pollute. The way to stop that disgrace is not to stop having children, but to start cleaning up” (“Henry C. Wallich on Population Growth,” Newsweek, 29 June 1970, 70).

90. Buckley, William F., “The Birth Rate,” National Review, 23 March 1965, 231.Google Scholar

91. Editorial blurb accompanying Theodore Sturgeon, “The Avalanche,” National Review, 27 July 1965, 634. The supplement also included Alan F. Guttmacher’s “How Births Can Be Controlled.”

92. Sturgeon, “The Avalanche,” 636.

93. Ibid.

94. Pyrrho, “What Exit for Asia?” National Review, 27 July 1965, 640.

95. For Clark’s pro-populationism, see his Population Growth and Land Use (London, 1967). Clark served on the Vatican’s Commission on Population (1964–66), which resulted in Humanae Vitae, the reaffirmation of the church’s traditional anti–birth control position.

96. Clark, Colin, “World Power and Population,” National Review, 20 May 1969, 481–84.Google Scholar

97. Clark, Population Growth and Land Use, 274.

98. Friedman, Milton, “The Market v. the Bureaucrat,” National Review, 19 May 1970, 507Google Scholar.

99. Moses, Robert, “Bomb Shelters, Arks, and Ecology,” National Review, 8 September 1970, 939.Google Scholar

100. For example, the Population Bulletin argued in February 1970: “The larger, the more complex and the more crowded a society is—and the more its resource base is subjected to intensely competing demands—the more numerous and restrictive are the laws and regulations required for its governance” (quoted in National Goals Research Staff, Toward Balanced Growth, 42).

101. Moynihan’s comments on television quoted in “The Drive to Stop Population Growth,” U.S. News and World Report, 2 March 1970, 38.

102. For example, see Parsons, Jack, Population versus Liberty (London, 1971).Google Scholar

103. S.J. Res. 108, with twenty-six co-sponsors, was introduced on 2 June 1971 by Senators Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Robert Taft (R-Ohio); H.J. Res. 789 was introduced in the House on 19 July 1971. I found discussion of these resolutions in Coalition for a National Population Policy, untitled October 1971 report, Wilderness Society Records, Box 43, Folder 19.

104. Due to fear of upsetting Catholics, “Government efforts to set an official goal of stabilizing the United States population ground to a halt Nov. 23 when the Senate Labor and Public Welfare decided not to consider the issue this year” (National Journal, 4 December 1971, 2401). See also Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Subcommittee on Human Resources, Declaration of U.S. Policy of Population Stabilization by Voluntary Means, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 5 August, 5, 8, and 14 October, and 3 November 1971.

105. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population and the American Future, chap. 4 (“The Economy”) and chap. 5 (“Resources and the Environment”).

106. Importantly, the commission argued that a reduction in “unwanted” children would be nearly sufficient to bring about population stabilization. This of course disappointed the radicals who held that Americans’ desire for so many “wanted” children was the core of the problem.

107. Ibid., 141–47 (“Compilation of Recommendations”). Internal debate on immigration produced a stalemate on that issue, resulting in support for the status quo. See Critchlow, Intended Consequences, 164. Westoff, “The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,” reported that the commission discovered that if the birthrate averaged 2.0, zero population growth could be reached with no changes to immigration at almost the same speed as with a birthrate of 2.1 and a reduction in immigration (55).

108. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population and the American Future, chap. 3.

109. John D. Rockefeller III wanted to release the final report to the press in three separate sections, so that no one issue or finding dominated the discussion. Antiabortion members of the commission, led by Representative John Erlenborn, were apparently amenable to the three-section strategy but, because the full commission was to advocate the full legalization of abortion, insisted on issuing a dissenting statement on abortion. In February 1972, however, White House staff met with commission members to “emphasize the President’s desire for a single report” but “met with resistance.” Ray Waldmann, Staff Assistant to President Nixon, to Ken Cole, 22 February 1972, and Waldmann to Cole, 23 February 1972, Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1/1/71 (1 of 2).”

110. The White House put off meeting with commission members. See John D. Rockefeller III to Ehrlichman, 2 and 17 March 1972, in Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1/1/71(2 of 2)”; and John D. Rockefeller III to Nixon, 7 April and 19 March 1972, JDR III Papers, Box 30, Series 3, Subseries 2, Folder 138, “Famous People, 1972–1977.”

111. Abortion had already been a contentious issue within the commission, which at one point tabled its discussion of abortion for fear of splintering. White House files reveal plenty of letters from Americans excoriating the commission’s pro-abortion stance and newspaper clippings about Catholic leaders with similar concerns. For example, see the exchange between Waldmann and the County Attorney from Nobles County, Minnesota, Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1/1/71(1 of 2)”; and the newspaper clippings about James McHugh, director of the Family Life Bureau of the U.S. Catholic Conference, ibid., Folder 2 of 2. Critchlow, Intended Consequences, 164–73, provides an excellent summary of the commission’s entanglement with the ascendant abortion politics of the early 1970s.

112. See the unsigned memo reviewing five options and several drafts of the president’s comments on the commission’s final report in Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1/1/71 (1 of 2).”

113. Waldmann and Gergen, “Statement on Report of Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,” 24 March 1972, Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1/1/71 (2 of 2).”

114. “Draft Statement on Population Commission: Draft: Buchanan, 3/29/72,” Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1/1/71 (2 of 2).”

115. All quotations are in ibid.

116. Nixon Tapes, Conversation 697-29, 30 March 1972.

117. Critchlow, Intended Consequences, 167–70.

118. Nixon Tapes, Conversation 699-1, 31 March 1972. The MIT study was Meadows, Donella H. et al. , The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. Kissinger’s response was hilarious and emblematic of conservatives’ antipathy to the academic establishment. Kissinger answered the president by explaining that academic life was fraught with insecurity and that college professors became like the teenagers they taught. He suggested that intellectuals were easily manipulated and that in the second Nixon administration, the president should mollify them by giving “them the illusion they’re participating in something … not because they can contribute a goddamn thing,” but because it would be dangerous to have all the writers criticizing the nation.

119. Dale, Edwin L. Jr., “A Nixon Economic Adviser Doubts Overpopulation,” New York Times, 29 March 1970Google Scholar.

120. Nixon Tapes, Conversation 700-10, 3 April 1972.

121. See JDR III to Nixon, 7 April 1972, Nixon Commission Papers, Box 2, Folder “FG 275 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1/1/71 (2 of 2).”

122. “Statement about the Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,” 5 May 1972, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Richard Nixon, 1972 (Washington, D.C., 1974), 576–77.

123. Collier, Peter and Horowitz, David, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York, 1976), 376.Google Scholar

124. Nixon Tapes, Conversation 720-12, 5 May 1972.

125. This task force included representatives from Nixon’s Domestic Council, the Council of Environmental Quality, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Office of Science and Technology. It is not clear from the archival record how often this group met.

126. Various documents surrounding these films are in Nixon Commission Papers, Box 3, Folder “Gen FG 275 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1/1/73.”

127. Leonard Laster, Office of Science and Technology, to Edward E. David Jr., Nixon Commission Papers, Box 3, Folder “Commission on Population Growth Oversize Attachment 14264.”

128. See Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Economic Aspects of Population Change, vol. 2 of Commission Research Reports, ed. Elliott R. Morss and Ritchie H. Reed (Washington, D.C., 1972). One of these essays, by the Duke economist Joseph Spengler (then entering his sixth decade as a published participant in the population debate), espoused the traditional position that a smaller population would, in sum, yield significant economic benefits, and he dipped into the new ecological economics by identifying limits of the “biosphere.” The other three papers, however, ranged from neutral to supportive of population growth and certainly cut against the “overpopulation” paradigm that had launched the commission. Harvey Leibenstein wrote: “The economies of scale and employment stimulation advantages of population growth more or less counterbalance the loss due to the dilution of difficult to substitute natural resources. Another advantageous factor is that a younger population contains more ‘human capital’ per person” (“The Impact of Population Growth on the American Economy,” 51). See also Edmund S. Phelps’s essay “Some Macroeconomics of Population Leveling.”

129. As Richard Easterlin maintained in “Comment,” in Economic Aspects of Population Change, ed. Morss and Reed, “In the case of pollution, the causal role of population seems vastly exaggerated” (46). In “Demographic Changes and American Economic Development: Past, Present and Future,” in the same volume, Allen C. Kelley argued: “A population policy justified noticeably by its favorable impact on pollution reduction may not only be unjustified, but also undesirable. The most appropriate ‘economic’ policy in the area of population is a neutral position regarding an economically desirable family size” (11). Phelps maintained, in the spirit of Barry Commoner, that technology, not population, was primarily responsible for pollution.

130. Kelley, “Demographic Changes and American Economic Development,” 31. Kelley also stated: “Neither economic theory, nor the empirical studies in the area of economic demography, as yet provide a sufficiently firm basis for concluding that a reduction in the average American family size will have a quantitatively significant effect on the pace of material advancement” (15).

131. Easterlin, Richard, “Comment,” in Economic Aspects of Population Change, ed. Morss, and Reed, , 45.Google Scholar

132. C. F. Westoff, “Further Reflections on Population Policy,” 17 September 1971, JDR III Papers, Series 3, Subseries 4, Box 67, Folder 443, “Population Interests, Background Materials, 1969, 1970–1971.”

133. John D. Rockefeller III to the President and Congress of the United States, 27 March 1972, reprinted in Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population and the American Future, 4.

134. “Extended Outline for Chapter 1,” JDR III Papers, Series 3, Subseries 4, Box 71, Folder 471, “National Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population Distribution, 1971.”