Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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Negotiating the Problems of Population: Demography, Ecology, and Family Planning in the Post-war United States

January 1, 2010

The subject of population has long proven controversial, so much so that the demographer Charles Westoff once described it as a "dirty word."[1] Its study and control has been associated with birth control activism, eugenics, even racial genocide. My research is focused on the ways in which the discipline of demography emerged and developed in association with social and political movements, and how its members negotiated the stigma that resulted from these associations. The success of demography has depended upon its perceived utility to policy, and yet this, in turn, has demanded that it stand apart as an objective science. Population has also existed as a site of intense contest, struggle and negotiation between disciplines, and as demography evolved as a social science in the United States, its members sought to discredit and distance themselves from the biological study of population dynamics. Particularly important to the discipline was the Population Council, founded by John D. Rockefeller 3rd in 1952. It was a professional organization that functioned to balance these two elements, walking a thin line that emphasized policy usefulness while retaining scientific credibility.

Between Quality and Quantity: The Population Council and the Politics of 'Science-making' in Eugenics and Demography, 1952- 1965

January 1, 2001

The Population Council is one of the leading demographic organizations of the post-war era and was a powerful force in the reconstruction of post-war population studies in the United States. It is thus of critical importance to my attempt to understand the relationship between demography and eugenics in Britain and the United States. Regarding this relationship, an analysis of the Population Council records and the papers of John D. Rockefeller 3rd allow us insights into two closely interrelated processes, that of the institutionalization of demography in the United States as a social science, becoming both an intensely rigorous and "hard" discipline, yet one of the most practical and policy oriented areas of expertise; and the transition in the official eugenic position, that is of the American Eugenics Society (AES), from a conservative and biologically determinist, "mainline" eugenics, to a more "environmentally friendly," welfare and democracy-oriented, "social" or "reform" eugenics.

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