Several prominent families are responsible for funding and promoting eugenics in America. Namely the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, and Osborn families. Two families, the Rockefellers and the Osborns, are particularly significant. John D. Rockefeller senior contributed a large amount of money to develop Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the early 1900s, which housed the eugenics records office from 1910 to 1944. Rockefeller influence also spread overseas to Germany, where the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Eugenics, Anthropology, and Human Heredity resided. Much of the money used to run these facilities came directly from Rockefeller. These institutes became centers for Nazi eugenics programs during the reign of Adolf Hitler.
In 1932, the third international eugenics conference was held in New York City. The conference was hosted by Henry Fairfield Osborn. It was during this conference that an honored guest from Germany attended. Ernst Rüdin was elected by the conference attendees as president of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. Rüdin went on to craft the policies that governed Adolf Hitler’s genocide programs, at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute.
Fredrick Henry Osborn, the cousin of Henry Fairfield Osborn, praised the Nazi eugenics programs as a vital experiment. Osborn wrote in 1937 “The German sterilization program is apparently an excellent one, although it is generally doubted whether equal or better results might not have been obtained by a voluntary rather than a compulsory system. Taken altogether, recent developments in Germany constitute perhaps the most important experiment which has ever been tried.”
The influence of the Rockefeller family continued in 1945, when John D. Rockefeller Jr donated the land in which the United Nations stands in New York City. With the founding of the United Nations, the Rockefeller family heralded a new beginning for eugenics under the guise of population control.
In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III, the oldest son of John D. Rockefeller Jr, founded the population council. Population Council’s stated goal is to seek better understanding of the problems related to population. The first president of the council was Fredrick Henry Osborn, who was appointed by Rockefeller himself. Osborn was a prominent eugenicist who helped found the American Eugenics Society, which is now called the Society for the Study of Social Biology. Osborn headed the AES from 1946 to 1952, when he began to place greater emphasis on population control, rather than eugenics, signaling the shift in post-World War II eugenics.
Frank Notestein was one of the most prominent individuals who made the study of population an institutional practice. He was a member of the American Eugenics society, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Notestein also served as president of John D. Rockefeller’s Population Council, after Fredrick Osborn stepped down. He was also the first director of the United Nations population division, from 1946 to 1948. In a 1969 paper written by Notestein title The Problem with population Control, he outlined a strategy to depopulate target populations. Notestein admits that economic monetization will bring the birth rate down automatically, however, he goes on to state that more drastic measures must be taken, because in his opinion this method would not be fast enough. He writes “Given existing preferences in family size, governments must go beyond voluntary family planning. To achieve zero rate of population growth, governments will have to do more than cajole, they will have to coerce…. to impose more drastic changes on a large scale implies many risks, not least to the regime that undertakes them.
The price for this type of population control may well be in the institution of a totalitarian regime.”
