Note: The following is excerpted from Steven Mosher’s book, Population Control—Real Costs, Illusory Benefits.

The first population bomber of the modern age was, by profession at least, ill-suited to the task. The Rev. Thomas Malthus, Anglican clergyman, predicted in 1798 that there would be standing room only on this earth by the Year of Our Lord, 1890.

A London talk by Benjamin Franklin had inflamed Malthus’ imagination. The American polymath had proudly proclaimed to his English audience that the population of their former colonies was growing at a rate of 3 percent a year. The good Parson, who fancied himself something of a mathematician, knew that this meant that America’s population was doubling every 23 years or so. He pondered this remorseless geometric progression during the long walks he was accustomed to take in the English countryside, becoming increasingly concerned about the staggering numbers—2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64—that would soon result. He imagined the boroughs filling up with people, until every available nook and cranny was choked with human misery. And how could this coming hoard of humanity possibly be fed, he wondered? How could sufficient grain be grown in the green fields he was passing, even if every moor, hedgerow and woodland was brought under cultivation? An arithmetic increase in the food supply—2, 4, 6, 8—was the best that could be hoped for. But with men multiplying geometrically and food only arithmetically, the number of people would inevitably outstrip the food supply. It was perhaps the very simplicity of the Parson’s notion that gave it such a strong grip on his mind. Better minds than his would soon fall prey to the same delusion.

Malthus published his speculations in 1798 in a tract called An Essay on the Principle of Population. Despite its scholarly sounding title, this was the original “population bomb.” It contained no images of exploding ordinance (these would be reserved for our less genteel age), but like its latter-day imitators it aroused great public concern by painting a picture of imminent catastrophe brought on by the unchecked growth in human numbers. Such a fate, Malthus argued, could only be avoided by stern, even pitiless, measures. The problem, as he saw it, was that the death rate in England was in marked decline. Before the advent of modern means of sanitation and medicine roughly 40 out of every thousand people had died each year. But as the Industrial Revolution spread, it brought better housing and nutrition for the poor, and provided the means for public authorities to underwrite public health and sanitation measures. The death rate had dropped to 30 per thousand and was still falling. Malthus proposed to undo all this:

All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. . . . Therefore . . . we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate [I.e., reject] specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.¹

These were strange, almost diabolical, views for a member of the Christian clergy to hold. Were his emotions in synch with his intellect? Did Malthus really mourn over baptisms, while celebrating funeral rites with a particular zest? His population control measures were denounced by many of his fellow Christians, who rejected them as an offense against charity, not to say common sense. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels weighed in as well, damning his theories as an "open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat," and Malthus himself as a "shameless sycophant of the ruling classes, terrified by Europe's burgeoning working class and the French Revolution.² His theories were embraced, however, by members of the British upper class. An increasingly barren lot themselves, they feared that the poor were becoming too prolific, not to mention too powerful at the polls and in the marketplace. These Malthusians, as they came to be called, helped to ensure that their founder’s “Essay on Population” was a commercial success, appearing in no fewer than six editions from 1798 to 1826. Population horror stories have sold well ever since.

Life spans lengthened and general health improved throughout the nineteenth century, but Charles Darwin gave the Malthusians something new to brood over. Not only were the poor too prolific, but by having all those children—most of whom, to make matters worse, now survived childhood—they were rapidly dumbing down the population. For the prosperous and privileged, who found themselves increasingly outnumbered by the great unwashed, this was the “survival of the fittest” in reverse. This view was given intellectual respectability by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin himself. In his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, Galton gave a pseudo-scientific gloss to what he saw as the declining genetic stock of the nation. To counter this “dysgenic” trend, he proposed an active policy of “eugenics,” a word he coined meaning “good births.” Eugenics would encourage more children from the fit, and fewer—or no—children from the unfit, with the ultimate goal of engineering the evolutionary ascent of man.

Such views were eagerly embraced by the secular humanists of the early twentieth century, who—as in our day—were busily thinking of ways to improve the natural man at the same time that they reduced his numbers. Malthus, in particular, proved a fit precursor to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who also opposed helping the poor. Philanthropy, she wrote, following the good Reverend, merely bred and perpetuated “constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.”³ Such aid supported, at a “terrific cost to the community,” a “dead weight of human waste.”⁴

But while Malthus was content to wait for plague, pestilence, and putrification to check human numbers (he opposed contraception and abortion), Sanger, not one for half-measures, wanted to stop the “unfit” from conceiving children in the first place. She stated forthrightly, “We cannot improve the race until we first cut down production of its least desirable members.”⁵ She hoped to accomplish this aim through the promotion of birth control, but sterilization was a good option for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t contracept. The government should get involved, she believed, in providing a monetary incentive to coerce “the ever increasing and numerous dependent, delinquent and unbalanced masses” into being sterilized.⁶ “[A]sk the government to first take off the burdens of the insane and feeble-minded from your backs,” she urged. “Sterilization for these is the remedy.”⁷

Setting up the American Birth Control League (as Planned Parenthood was first called), Sanger sought to put her beliefs into action.⁸ To ensure “the elimination of the unfit,” she opened birth-control clinics in America targeting the poor and the disabled.⁹ Since the “unfit” lived abroad too, she spread her eugenic beliefs throughout the world through population control, which would ensure eugenic “quality” over mere population quantity.¹⁰ Sanger often compared humanity to a garden, which required the proper soil, fertilizer, and sunlight. "Do not forget this," she advised, "you have got to fight weeds."¹¹

Her project attracted the notice of those who considered themselves “fit”—and who does not? In particular, however, the wealthy eugenicists of Sanger’s day threw themselves into the eugenic project with gusto. Sanger’s goal, in her own words, was “to create a race of thoroughbreds.”¹² Although she failed in this venture, as Hitler would fail even more spectacularly after her, she did manage to round up quite a stable of wealthy supporters. These with names like Rockefeller, Duke, Scaife, Lasker, Sulzberger and Dupont, were easy marks for Sanger’s arguments because they prided themselves on being the product of superior bloodlines.¹³ In reality, most of Sanger’s “thoroughbreds” had no great natural gifts; but for the accident of inherited wealth, would have had merely middle-class prospects.

The Nazis took active measures to purify the blood lines and improve the stock of the “superior” Aryan race that went well beyond anything that most eugenicists, even in their darkest moments, had envisioned. The entire eugenics project went into eclipse, its advocates heatedly denying that they had ever meant any such thing as Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, etc. For all that, population “quality” remained a concern of the population control community and, carefully disguised, would gradually over time creep back into its discourse. When John D. Rockefeller 3^rd drew up the draft charter of the Population Council in 1954, for example, he included a paragraph calling for the promotion of research so that “within every social and economic grouping, parents who are above the average in intelligence, quality of personality and affection, will tend to have larger than average families.” Thomas Parran, a former surgeon general and one of the few Catholics in Rockefeller’s circle, objected that “Frankly, the implications of this, while I know are intended to have a eugenic implication, could readily be misunderstood as a Nazi master race philosophy.”¹⁴ The paragraph was quietly dropped.

But while Rockefeller and others could easily be shamed into silence on the need to remodel humanity, the horror of the Holocaust did not prevent them from talking publicly about the continuing need to reduce human numbers. After World War Two the U.S. and other developed countries had sent many medical and aid workers overseas, and these “benevolent, but much mistaken men,” as Malthus had scornfully called them, were successfully eliminating many of the infectious diseases which had long plagued the developing world. While birthrates remained high, mortality rates were falling. The populations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia were beginning a period of rapid growth, as Europe and America had a few decades before. With the help of Rockefeller and other men of great wealth, controlling this growth was soon to be placed on the national agenda.

The Dilettante and the Huckster

Population growth seems to arouse a primal fear in the wealthy, who somehow feel threatened by the poor in their numbers. How else to explain the epiphany experienced by John D. Rockefeller 3^rd, grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and one of the wealthiest men in the world, when he encountered the impoverished masses of the developing world. A dilettante who had never held a steady job,¹⁵ he made extended journeys to Asia and Africa after the war. He came away convinced that Western efforts to check what he saw as runaway population growth must take precedence over economic development.¹⁶ He had found the cause that would consume his life. The peasant societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America would never be the same.

Rockefeller’s efforts to win over his fellow Rockefeller Foundation trustees to his new passion failed, however. The majority believed (correctly, as history would show) that Western technology, particularly American agricultural know-how, would enable the peoples of the world to continue to feed themselves. They rejected his controversial proposal to develop new birth control methods and export these to the developing world. Denied access to the family fortune, Rockefeller used his own money—a sure sign of the true believer—to set up the Population Council in 1952. The council posed, and still poses, as a neutral, scientific organization, but its purpose in Rockefeller’s mind was clear—to control global population growth. Although his brother Nelson worried about the negative impact that these fringe activities might have on his own political career, the family as a whole supported the Rockefeller scion’s efforts, although whether this was from shared conviction or simply to help him find himself is not clear. The family attorney opined that “My own feeling is that he [Rockefeller 3^rd] has the time to do it and that one of the things that he most needs is some activity which will occupy his full time five days a week. It seems to me that if he works at this conscientiously for a year or two he might make a consequential dent in the problem . . .”¹⁷ In fact, he was to work as the President, later as the Chairman, of the Population Council for the next quarter century. And as for the “dent” in humanity that this produced, it was considerable.

Unlikely as it sounds, the dilettante threw himself into his new role as the world’s first population control technocrat with almost evangelical fervor. He gathered the best minds on the subject together, and trained more, building a global network of population experts who shared his anti-natal views. He funded research to find easier, more reliable and, above all, more permanent ways of contracepting and sterilizing the poor. He established regional centers for demographic training and research in Bombay (1957), Santiago (1958), and Cairo (1963), and national centers in many countries, understanding these as stepping stones to instituting full-scale population control programs. Such centers and the experts they produced, explained Frederick Osborn, his right-hand man at the Council, “stimulated recognition of the dangers of the too-rapid growth of local population.”¹⁸ No doubt they did, since this was precisely why they were set up in the first place.

As time went on, Rockefeller got increasingly involved in “action programs” as well, providing grants for the purchase of contraceptives, as well as technical personnel to actually oversee their distribution in developing countries. He helped to set up national family planning programs in South Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Ceylon, and elsewhere. But the most important thing that he did, using his own funds and those of like-minded super-rich, was to work quietly behind the scenes to help convince the U.S. federal government, with its deep pockets, to sign on to his agenda.

Rockefeller would not have succeeded without the help of a man, Hugh Moore, whom he came to detest. The irrepressible Moore had money, too, but unlike the “old money” of the Rockefellers he had made it himself, peddling the idea of a paper cup into a multimillion dollar manufacturing concern—the Dixie Cup Company—whose product was familiar to every American. And Moore’s epiphany on population did not come while on a Grand Tour to Asia, but in a distinctly pedestrian way—while reading a book.

The book was The Road to Survival, a hell-bent-for-leather account of the dangers of overpopulation written by William Vogt, the national director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.¹⁹ As Moore read how population growth was “the basic cause of future wars” and “the spread of tyranny and communism,” alarm bells went off in his head. Moore credited Vogt “for really waking me up,” and then and there decided to make population his sole concern.²⁰ He formed the Population Action Committee and called for immediate mobilization against the impending crisis. “Who among us,” he used to shout at meetings, “will come up with a plan for starting a CONFLAGRATION?“²¹ According to his biographer, Lawrence Lader, Moore’s “methods were often designed purposefully to stimulate controversy and thereby focus public attention. With time running out, people have to face raw facts. . . . A warning should be shouted from the rooftops.”²² Moore believed that people needed to be scared, really scared, in order to become aware of the disaster that loomed before them. And what better way to scare them than with an image of a bomb, and talk of an explosion.

The bomb had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the early Fifties the Soviets had it too, and the Cold War was in full swing. America anguished over the thought of bombs—their explosive power no longer expressed in tons, but megatons—ready to lay waste to the world. Moore deliberately played on these fears with a pamphlet called The Population Bomb,” which he mailed to 1,000 leaders in business and the professions.²³ It declared that “Today the population bomb threatens to create an explosion as disruptive and dangerous as the explosion of the atom, and with as much influence on prospects for progress or disaster, war or peace.” The coming “population explosion” would be the mother of all calamities, leading to widespread famine and crushing tax rates, the spread of communism and the scourge of war, plus every other imaginable environmental and social ill in between. All this was written in what Lader calls a “whiplash phraseology [that] stung a dormant public.” Eager to convince others of the correctness of his cause, Moore inflated future human numbers to justify his radical plan to restrict human fertility. The hype was nowhere more evident than on the booklet’s cover. It featured a drawing of a world teeming with humanity, with standing room only on all continents. (Africa, already the prime target of the population controllers, was front and center.) Coming out of the North Pole was a lit fuse. A pair of scissors with long, sharp blades was poised to give it the snip. The scissors were labeled “population control.”

The controversy sparked by the publication of the pamphlet delighted the huckster in Moore. Over the next decade and a half, he mailed, free of charge, hundreds of thousands of copies of the booklet to every group of politicians, educators, officials, journalists and people of influence he could think of. One and a half million copies later, this relentless promoter had made the “population bomb” the doomsday metaphor of choice. He had engraved the image of mushroom clouds of people, boiling up from the surface of the planet in an unconstrained frenzy of procreation, on the consciousness of most Americans. He had convinced many that “population control” would stop the spread of Communism. And he had captured the imagination of a young butterfly expert by the name of Paul Ehrlich, who later asked to borrow the title for his own book on the dangers of overpopulation.

Rockefeller was one of the first to receive a copy of The Population Bomb, along with a letter of explanation from Hugh Moore. “We are not primarily interested in the sociological or humanitarian aspects of birth control,” Moore wrote. “We are interested in the use which Communists make of hungry people in their drive to conquer the earth.”²⁴ Rockefeller and his circle were predictably offended by both Moore’s crude style and his alarmist rhetoric. Frederick Osborn worried that Moore’s “Madison Avenue techniques” might “set the [population control] movement back ten years,” and urged that distribution of the pamphlet be halted.²⁵ Low-key and scientific-minded, Rockefeller fretted that phrases like “population explosion” and “population bomb” might create an atmosphere of panic. One can almost hear Moore chuckle, since panic was precisely what he was trying to provoke, seeing it as the surest way to massive government intervention.

Rockefeller, too, was convinced that the federal government needed to get involved in population control, but it was the outspoken Moore who paved the way. When his old friend, William H. Draper, was appointed by President Eisenhower to chair a committee to study foreign aid, Moore seized his chance.²⁶ He saturated the Wall Street financier and other committee members with material on the dangers of overpopulation, arguing that economic aid was being nullified by population growth.²⁷ When the Draper Report appeared in 1959, it was the first official government report to endorse population control.²⁸

In 1961, as the U.S. Congress was considering a major foreign aid bill, Moore launched an advertising campaign in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Time magazine. Among the earliest ads were two designed to put the nation’s first Catholic president, who had earlier rejected the Draper Report, “on the spot,” in Moore’s phrase. The full-page ads were headlined an “Appeal to President Kennedy,” and called for the federal government to address the “population explosion.”²⁹ Draper, at Moore’s urging, returned to Washington and undertook a one-man lobbying campaign for the cause. With Rockefeller and his colleagues also working behind the scenes to encourage federal intervention, these wealthy men were about to impose their will on the U.S. Congress. It would in turn impose its will on the world.

You can read more in Steve's book, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, available here.

Endnotes