Postwar America was fertile ground for a resurgent Malthusianism. Between 1900 and 1960, the world’s population doubled, and after World War II, a growing cadre of social scientists expressed grave concern that the planet might not withstand another doubling, in a mere thirty years. Especially in the late 1960s—as mass environmentalism emerged, the U.S. population crossed the 200-million mark, global population growth rates peaked, and India endured drought and famine—an American Malthusianism that had been percolating since the late 1940s simmered to the surface.Footnote ¹ Now infused with an ecological sensibility, this doomsday population discourse emphasized pollution and the prospect of environmental collapse more than simply the supply of natural resources and food (the dominant paradigm since the British pastor Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on Human Population).Footnote ² The natural scientists, birth-control advocates, foundation officials, and radical economists who shaped this postwar Malthusianism generally assumed that the developing world faced the most urgent population problems. However, most of these experts also insisted that every nation faced population-induced crises in the long run.Footnote ³ The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich expressed this viewpoint in the most famous population treatise since Malthus—The Population Bomb (1968)—sparking the organized “zero population growth” movement in the United States.Footnote ⁴

To some degree, the U.S. government had incorporated Malthusian concerns ever since the Truman administration’s “Point Four” foreign aid program, which assumed that population-growth-induced resource scarcity bred communism. But state action came haltingly. Neither President Eisenhower nor Kennedy believed that direct action to combat population growth, whether domestic or international, fell within the proper purview of government policy. President Johnson spoke forcefully about what he saw as the global population crisis; and his administration promoted the inclusion of family planning training and education in overseas USAID programs and, most dramatically, made food aid to India dependent on progress on the population front.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, the Johnson administration launched federally sponsored family planning programs as part of its War on Poverty. Still, Johnson never seriously considered assertive policies to decelerate domestic population growth, and his administration stalled on even the modest proposal of creating a national commission to study population issues.Footnote ⁶

From 1969 to 1972, however, disparate actors in the federal government embraced the new Malthusianism and elevated the population-policy debate far beyond the birth-control programs that had emerged in the mid-1960s. Cresting concerns about overpopulation among the general public and expert frustration that global population growth rates were unaffected by two decades of accelerated family planning aid had combined to create a sense that the moment had arrived to move “beyond family planning.”Footnote ⁷ Lawmakers sympathetic to the population movement now considered not merely managing domestic population growth and its supposed consequences (for example, by stepping up environmental protection), but intervening comprehensively to “control” this growth. Americans’ faith in liberal individualism and puritanical resistance to public debate about sex and reproduction prevented draconian measures, such as capping the allowable number of children per family. Nonetheless, the state had several tools at its disposal, including creating tax disincentives for large families and early marriage, legalizing abortion, dramatically increasing access to family planning, and reducing immigration.

The Nixon administration initially jumped on the population bandwagon. In a special 1969 message on population drafted by his urban affairs adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the president framed the issue in both foreign and domestic terms, calling population growth “one of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century.”Footnote ⁸ At Nixon’s urging, Congress created the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, chaired by philanthropist and leading Malthusian John D. Rockefeller III, to investigate all facets of the population problem. The commission’s final report, issued in 1972, called for a series of policies designed to encourage population stabilization.Footnote ⁹

Yet even before the commission’s report, the “overpopulation” critique was rapidly exiting stage right from the administration. Then Nixon all but ended the possibility of state intervention to slow population growth when he perfunctorily thanked the commission for its labors but rejected its final report. Behind the scenes, his administration ensured that the commission’s recommendations never saw the legislative light of day.

The events surrounding the ineffectual population commission are worth studying in their own right as a window into policymaking in the Nixon White House. More broadly, this essay examines a crucial moment in the centuries-old debate about population, natural resources, and the economy that recent global energy, food, and climate crises have spotlighted once again. In particular, these pages illuminate the emergence of a new political economy of population in the United States—a widespread embrace of population growth that survives to this day. It is true that some anxiety about population growth remained in the 1970s, when talk of a “zero-sum society” thrived, some liberals questioned the virtue of “growth,” broadly defined, and oil flowed less freely. By any measure, however, unease with “overpopulation”—especially domestic U.S. overpopulation—dwindled dramatically after 1972 among policymakers, journalists, and the general public.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, by the late 1970s, most policymakers had traded in overpopulation fears for an unabashed embrace of steady population growth, at least in regard to American demographic trends. This article thus explores the major reversal in the modern U.S. population debate from prevailing skepticism to prevailing optimism about population growth.

Moreover, the pages below demonstrate the connection between this reversal and the broader revival of laissez-faire economic ideas that dominated the American political economy in the final third of the twentieth century. Put another way, new optimism about the benefits of population growth not only responded to but also contributed to the resurgence of conservative political economy. More specifically, as I examine the course of the population issue in the Nixon White House within the context of shifting social science expertise, I argue that two developments drove the turnaround in the American population debate. First, the Nixon administration helped defuse the “population bomb”: it narrowed the scope of the overpopulation critique by concentrating on the shibboleth of potentially altering the geographic distribution of Americans rather than on the possibility of addressing aggregate growth. In doing so, President Nixon came to reject the goal of zero population growth. In part, this refutation simply revealed an instinctual defense of economic growth, given that some in the population-control movement called for a radical brake on economic activity. However, the administration’s dismissal of an overpopulation problem also reflected the second development that spurred an about-face in population thought: the ascendancy of a new pro-population-growth economics that had been building momentum among social scientists since the early 1960s.

My account challenges the conventional wisdom on the demise of the domestic overpopulation critique. (The story told in these pages is explicitly a domestic one, and the reader should bear in mind that the discussion about population growth in the United States took place against the backdrop of continued efforts by both the U.S. government and the philanthropic sector to reduce birthrates in the “developing” nations.)Footnote ¹¹ The small literature that addresses the waning of 1960s Malthusianism, led by Donald Critchlow’s excellent history of family planning and abortion policy and an article in this journal, Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz’s “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization,” emphasizes two main factors during the Nixon years.Footnote ¹² The first is shifting demographic fundamentals: the clamor for population control took place during a unique interregnum when a significant slowdown in U.S. aggregate population growth seemed possible. The birthrate of American women declined from 1960 to 1967, briefly increased in 1968 and 1969, and then dropped again from 1970 to 1972, slipping below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. This declining birthrate, scholars reasonably conclude, undercut calls for population control.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, the dramatic and surprising rise in immigration that followed the 1965 Immigration Act was just gathering steam; it was not clear during the late 1960s that immigration would increase to the dramatic extent that it has since then. Second, existing accounts emphasize how the population issue was sucked into the vortex of America’s “culture wars.” In this interpretation, the new battle over abortion rights was paramount, both for politicizing the population issue and for creating an organized constituency (the “pro-life” movement) that considered birth control and population control anathema.Footnote ¹⁴

In accounting for the trajectory of the population issue in recent decades, the demographic and cultural analyses illuminate much of the story but are insufficient. To begin with, the role of the declining birthrate in reducing concern about overpopulation has been exaggerated. Many demographers, lawmakers, and the Nixon administration predicted that birthrate declines would be short-lived and that a new Baby Boom was just around the corner.Footnote ¹⁵ And in any event, most participants in the debate were not surprised that the birthrate was decreasing; they knew that populations cannot grow indefinitely. Even population alarmists had long conceded that, the Baby Boom aside, American fertility was likely to resume its historic pattern of decline.Footnote ¹⁶ The question was never whether the U.S. (or world) population would stabilize but at what level, when, and at what cost along the way. The “culture wars” argument is also important. As we will see, Nixon distanced himself from the report of his population commission in part because he opposed its advocacy of legalized abortion and was mindful of criticism from the Catholic Church. Moreover, a stepped-up battle over immigration during the 1970s reinforced the politicization of the population growth issue and, as Beck and Kolankiewicz suggest, drove many environmentalists away from the population issue out of fear of being branded anti-immigrant and racist.

However, the scholarly stress on cultural fissures slights the vital role that broader shifts in economic ideas played in remaking the American population debate—before the culture wars entirely engulfed it. Most accounts of the rise and fall of the overpopulation issue focus on the 1970s, when the transition was most evident, and thus miss the critical developments of the 1960s. That decade witnessed the emergence of a conservative critique of Malthusianism and a concomitant veneration of population growth. Historians have not yet explored in detail the evolution of conservative ideas regarding demographic expansion in the United States, but they were paramount to the vanishing anxiety about “overpopulation.” As with so much of what took place in 1960s America, a veneer of liberal success on the population issue temporarily masked a budding and ultimately even more successful conservative response.

NIXON’S BRIEF BOUT OF MALTHUSIANISM

The election of Richard Nixon was initially unsettling to advocates of population control; notwithstanding the mention in the GOP’s 1968 platform of the “menace” of the “world-wide population explosion,” his views on these matters were inchoate.Footnote ¹⁷ However, Nixon assumed the presidency as popular and media concern about “overpopulation” crested, and his initial response was in step with the public’s mood. In his 1969 message on population, in which he called for a commission, Nixon stated, “I believe that many of our present social problems may be related to the fact that we have had only fifty years in which to accommodate the second hundred million Americans.”Footnote ¹⁸ The president predicted that the additional 100 million people expected by the end of the twentieth century would cause further economic and social strains. Nixon indicated elsewhere that he was serious about combating international population growth,Footnote ¹⁹ and neither government officials nor the press saw any reason to doubt his commitment.Footnote ²⁰

At this juncture, four factors had tipped the scales in the administration in favor of population alarmism. Most obviously, popular apprehension was peaking. Second, the congressional movement for population control remained bipartisan and vibrant. The late 1960s saw the introduction of dozens of pieces of family-planning legislation, and although several congressional Malthusians were Republican (e.g., Rep. George H. W. Bush),Footnote ²¹ the White House wanted to “seize the initiative” from Democratic leaders.Footnote ²² Third, the population establishment, and especially the Population Council (founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1952, and still an important organization today), continued to highlight what it saw as the overpopulation problem and to lobby aggressively for federal spending on family planning programs and population education. The Republican Rockefeller enjoyed good contacts with several members of the administration friendly to family planning.Footnote ²³ Fourth, the Cold War sustained the notion that the United States had to put its own population house in order as an example to Third World nations. For instance, Donald Rumsfeld, who headed Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity before becoming his counselor, noted that Nixon and his three predecessors had all supported efforts at easing overseas population growth for national security reasons. Rumsfeld eventually testified to the commission that “the credibility of this [presidential] support hinges in part upon the degree of responsibility we in the United States display in population affairs here at home.”Footnote ²⁴ Commenting on the landmark population legislation of the Nixon era—the 1970 Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, which greatly extended federal support for birth control programs—the New York Times concluded: “Perhaps most important of all, the family planning bill demonstrates to a sometimes skeptical international public that the United States intends to practice at home what it has been preaching to the world with increasing urgency in recent years.”Footnote ²⁵

A vocal minority in Congress promoted even more aggressive population policies. In 1970, for example, Senator Joseph Tydings (D-Md.), one of the issue leaders since the mid-1960s and a sponsor of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, introduced a joint resolution declaring it to be the official policy of the federal government to “develop, encourage, and implement, at the earliest possible time, the necessary policies, attitudes, social standards and actions which will, by voluntary means consistent with human rights and individual conscience, stabilize the population of the U.S. and thereby promote the future well-being of this nation and the entire world.”Footnote ²⁶ That same year, Senator Bob Packwood (D-Ore.) and Representative Pete McCloskey Jr. (R-Calif.) introduced bills to eliminate tax deductions for all but the first two children.Footnote ²⁷

But the policy window was not that wide. Most lawmakers were content to merely study the population issue, and in 1970 they turned their attention to perhaps the most famous—or infamous—legacy of the population issue during the Nixon years: the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.Footnote ²⁸ Nixon’s point person on population was his domestic policy adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the maverick Democrat (and future senator) who had written the well-known “Moynihan Report” on the African American family in Kennedy’s Department of Labor. Moynihan was the main author of Nixon’s population message,Footnote ²⁹ and in 1969 he steered the commission’s enabling legislation through Congress.Footnote ³⁰

The legislation did not clarify whether the commission was charged with recommending policies simply to adjust American society to population increase or in fact to slow down this increase. House amendments pointed the commission in a more radical direction, but Nixon’s population message—and his advisers—predominantly thought in terms of planning for population increase rather than arresting it.Footnote ³¹ Moynihan, for example, advised the president that “the first function of the Commission is to chart the expected growth of the population between now and the year 2000 in terms of numbers and location, and the resources of the public sector that will be required to deal with this anticipated growth.”Footnote ³² Indeed, Moynihan revealed his technocratic approach to the issue at a press conference on June 4, 1970. Here he told reporters, “By and large, the average cat food company knows more about the demographic structure of the American public and what it is likely to be than does the city of Chicago. We don’t have any forward thinking this way and we are trying to build it into our concerns, medicine and aging and things like that.”Footnote ³³ At the other end of the spectrum, advocates of population reduction bemoaned what they saw as the commission’s narrow mission.Footnote ³⁴ Representative Morris Udall (D-Ariz.), among others, complained about the “implied assumption that these other 100 million Americans, this additional population, is inevitable, that we simply accept it and begin to plan for how we are going to take care of it. I don’t think we ask the ultimate question if we make that assumption.”Footnote ³⁵ Udall also introduced more forceful legislation that would have made population stabilization the official policy of the United States, but it received only perfunctory debate.Footnote ³⁶

During the first half of 1970, a small group within the administration led by Moynihan selected the commission’s members.Footnote ³⁷ The process quickly became politicized, and in June an exasperated Moynihan complained to John Ehrlichman (the Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs), “With any luck we may yet appoint a Population Commission. That is, after the FBI has gone through its pathetic inquiries into the prospect that a Negro doctor had an Aunt whose girlfriend slept with a Communist.”Footnote ³⁸ In addition to Senator Tydings and three other members of Congress, all of whom were deeply concerned with population growth,Footnote ³⁹ the commission included a politically correct mix of representatives from various interest groups.Footnote ⁴⁰ “Politically,” its research director concluded, “the group was conservative by college student standards, liberal by national and White House standards. By no stretch of the imagination could the group be characterized as radical.”Footnote ⁴¹ Moynihan’s first choice for chair was William Scranton, the former governor of Pennsylvania whom liberal Republicans had drafted in 1964 to unsuccessfully challenge Barry Goldwater (at the time he was a vice chairman of the Urban Institute), but Moynihan also approved of the final selection of John D. Rockefeller.Footnote ⁴²

In March 1971, the commission’s interim report used safe language—and a common moderate critique of population growth rooted in aesthetic (rather than scarcity) concerns—to warn against the dangers of continual population increase. Rather than sounding the resource-exhaustion alarm, that is, this report maintained that population growth acted “as an intensifier or multiplier of many problems impairing the quality of life in the United States.”Footnote ⁴³ As the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future gathered steam, the Nixon administration began to pull away from even this moderate, quality-of-life-centered response to the population question, setting the stage for a collision.

THE URBAN CRISIS AND “BALANCED GROWTH”

As Donald Critchlow has shown, the development of a contentious abortion politics in the United States goes far in explaining the eventual dénouement of the Malthusian moment.Footnote ⁴⁴ Individuals who today would be called “cultural conservatives” increasingly rejected the zero population growth movement, seeing it, correctly, as tied to the movement to legalize abortion.Footnote ⁴⁵ And the abortion-related backlash against population policy filtered into the White House. In April 1971, Nixon issued an order insisting that military bases follow state abortion laws, declaring that abortion was an “unacceptable form of population control.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet abortion was just one of several issues that reshaped population politics. Before a showdown over abortion at the very end of the commission’s life, the White House had reduced the urgency of the zero population growth critique by thinking about population problems primarily in terms of controversial social-demographic issues surrounding the American city (and not, therefore, in terms of aggregate population growth).

On one level, the conceptual links between the population and urban debates were poverty and social decay. During the mid-1960s, and especially after the Watts uprising in Los Angeles, a so-called urban-crisis captured policymakers’ imaginations. The population debate overlapped with this (racialized) urban crisis because several hot-button social issues with demographic overtones (for example, rising teenage pregnancy) were seen primarily as urban problems. The purported connection between population growth and the urban crisis, therefore, injected a fresh dose of racial politics into a population discussion already tainted and racialized via the unfortunate legacy of eugenics.Footnote ⁴⁷

On another level, however, the population and urban debates linked through the paradigm of controlling “growth.” Because urban and suburban growth accounted for most of the overall population growth in 1960s America (as they did throughout the twentieth century), population controllers and urban planners shared overlapping goals. The former wanted to reduce aggregate population growth, and the latter sought a national growth policy that would reduce urban densities or at least induce “balanced growth” between the city, suburb, and countryside.

Within a Nixon White House engaged in the quest for a national urban policy, the question “Where shall they live?” subsumed the question “How many of them shall there be?” In other words, the administration stressed the geographic distribution of the population—in particular, the increasing concentration of Americans in and around major cities—rather than aggregate growth. That the administration thought about population primarily in terms of geographic location was revealed in a June 1971 meeting of Nixon’s Domestic Council. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, scribbled two notes under the agenda heading of “population” for this meeting: “what growth among poor” and “where will growth be in U.S.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Because of the historical racialization of poverty discourse in the United States, critics of the administration and of the population movement dismissed the population–urban crisis link as race baiting (even though the anxiety about “growth among the poor” was always expressed in race-neutral terms). Moreover, given that one interpretation of Nixon labels him “Tricky Dick”—a clever schemer who undermined policy goals by publicly endorsing them while simultaneously letting his henchmen destroy them—it is tempting to surmise that the administration’s emphasis on population location was a clever way of dooming the population issue through controversy, even as it scored short-term political gains.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, the emphasis on the question “Where will they live?” should be seen against the backdrop of not only the urban crisis but also of a broad bipartisan movement to develop a comprehensive “growth policy” for the United States.

The quest for a national growth policy fused demographic and environmental planning; proposals for government-induced population redistribution reflected a long-standing belief that more efficient distribution of the U.S. population would protect the land.Footnote ⁵⁰ More specifically, “growth policy” in the 1960s implied measures to minimize the damage to landscapes that resulted from the nation’s explosive postwar economic growth (and from the localized nature of land-use planning). Advocates of a national growth policy acknowledged the sheer growth of the aggregate population, but their primary concern was the deleterious effects of distribution, for example the “sprawl” created by the expanding megalopolises concentrated along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.Footnote ⁵¹ Hence, many proposals for a national growth policy included efforts to subsidize population relocation.Footnote ⁵² The campaign for growth policy united liberals, who opposed the ecological effects of urban sprawl, and conservatives, who focused on the social ills of the city.

Within Nixon’s inner circle, Daniel Patrick Moynihan personified the connections between growing fears of an urban crisis, the drive for growth policy, and the broader population debate. Moynihan chaired the White House’s informal Urban Affairs Council, and it was no coincidence that he subsequently spearheaded the population issue; indeed, after Nixon’s special message on population, Moynihan noted that “many of the points the President makes are closely linked to concerns of the Urban Affairs Council.”Footnote ⁵³ In a 1969 Public Interest article, “Toward a National Urban Policy,” Moynihan wrote: “The federal government must assert a specific interest in the movement of people, displaced by technology or driven by poverty, from rural to urban areas, and also in the movement from densely populated central cities to suburban areas.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In his 1970 State of the Union address, Nixon called for a national “growth policy” to “create a new rural environment which will not only stem the migration to urban centers, but reverse it.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The congressional drive for such a policy began with promise but ultimately failed, primarily because of the overwhelming antipathy to government planning in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet although the question “Where will they live?” was embedded in an ultimately futile policy campaign, it exerted significant influence over the course of the population debate, deflecting attention away from the traditional discourse centered on aggregate population growth, the economy, and the environment. Nixon explicitly moved toward the position that the “population problem” was primarily one of location. According to historian J. Brooks Flippen, Nixon signed the 1970 Family Planning Act only reluctantly. “Concerned with conservative objections and now questioning whether the problem was distribution and not growth,” Flippen wrote, “Nixon initially resisted the new proposal.”Footnote ⁵⁷

True, concerns about the geographic location of the population are compatible with a preference for a smaller aggregate population. Nevertheless we may reasonably conclude that within the Nixon White House, the demographic aspects of the “urban crisis” and the interest in population location crowded out the overpopulation critique. Moynihan, for example, vaguely approved of a slower aggregate rate of domestic population growth but advised Nixon to emphasize population redistribution away from the cities as the solution to the “population problem.” In February 1970, the president of the Sierra Club, Phillip Berry, met with Nixon and urged him to pursue aggressive policies to promote national population stabilization. Moynihan followed up with a letter to Berry that revealed the extent to which the White House defined the population issue in geographic terms. This letter is worth quoting at length:

Nixon himself increasingly thought about the population issue in terms of the city, though his analysis of urban population growth contained more of the racial rhetoric that always hovers over population matters in the United States than it did concerns about urban planning. In a taped discussion with Ehrlichman about the commission, Nixon bluntly stated that many people thought about population control in terms of controlling the “Negro masses.” After Nixon then suggested that individuals not using birth control “are the people that shouldn’t have kids,” the conversation immediately turned to Black migration patterns, and Nixon expressed wonderment that the African American population of San Francisco had reached 30 percent due to black in-migration and white flight.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nixon’s casual racism here is not noteworthy. The point is that he thought about population in terms of the increasing concentration of Americans, and especially African Americans, in cities. There is no evidence that Nixon saw the issue of population location as a way to divert attention from the question of aggregate growth (or as a way to create more conservative suburban voters!). Yet Nixon must have known that throughout the twentieth century, calls for government-sponsored population redistribution usually went nowhere, especially after the waning of the New Deal’s relocation programs. And he likely knew that Malthusians deemed geographic redistribution a “dangerous pseudosolution to the population problem,” as Paul Ehrlich put it.Footnote ⁶⁰

Not only the racial and geographic-distribution aspects of growth policy but also the evolving macroeconomic discourse surrounding it deflated the overpopulation issue. Early in his tenure, President Nixon had flirted, if not with anti-economic-growth thought, then at least with themes of balance and scarcity. “The time has come for a new quest,” Nixon stated in his 1970 State of the Union address: “a quest not for greater quantity of what we have, but for a new quality of life in America.”Footnote ⁶¹ By late 1970, however, in response to recession and the Left’s assault on the growth ideal, Nixon returned to the robust celebration of economic growth that dominated the postwar political economy. Nixon’s retreat to growthism included a disdain for the zero population growth movement, which, he erroneously assumed, uniformly called for the cessation of economic growth as well. In 1971, the president specifically told a group of environmentalists that he opposed zero population growth.Footnote ⁶² In part, this stance simply reflected Nixon’s growing antipathy to environmentalism, which he had dismissed by telling the Sierra Club’s Berry that “All politics is a fad.”Footnote ⁶³ Nixon and his staff also assumed that population growth and economic growth were concomitants—and thus that zero population growth would lead to unemployment. Because of the perceived tight link between population and economic growth, Nixon’s renewed emphasis on economic growth vitiated support for population control.

Nixon’s call for “balanced growth” continued to incorporate population concerns, but only the locational concerns stressed by the White House—not a slower rate of population growth or more stress on the quality of life.Footnote ⁶⁴ Accordingly, Nixon’s bureaucracy combined the pursuit of balanced growth, couched in geographic terms, with a minimization of the overpopulation problem. In March 1970, Nixon’s National Goals Research Staff (NGRS) reported internally that the United States could handle the population growth expected by the end of the century, even if the potential environmental effects were indeed worrisome. “There is no present need for incentives to reduce population growth in the US,” the group concluded.Footnote ⁶⁵ In its main report, Toward Balanced Growth: Quantity with Quality, the NGRS argued that the “question of population size in the United States is not Malthusian” but rather one of paying the price for the problems created by affluence (“congestion and contamination”). The report also suggested that zero population growth would be achieved without any government action. It concluded that among the various decisions facing the nation on population, “One which appears not to be urgent is that of overall size of the population—even after the effects of a considerable amount of immigration are taken into account.” As for the question of population redistribution, however, the NGRS labeled it “a different matter, and one to be taken seriously regardless of what may be the upper limit of the population size.” Accordingly, the only population policies called for in Toward Balanced Growth concerned geographic redistribution. The report advocated subsidizing population relocation to “alternate growth centers” and “new towns.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Well before the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future issued its 1972 final report, therefore, the Nixon White House had changed the tenor of the population issue. Its emphasis on the urban crisis put the question of population location ahead of the question of aggregate growth. No national population distribution policy emerged, and along the way Nixon rejected zero population growth doctrine. This rejection was in some measure a reaction against the environmentalists who promoted the doctrine. The White House, however, was not simply recoiling against radicalism. It was also increasingly imbibing a new celebration of population growth percolating among conservative economists.

TOWARD A “MARKET-KNOWS-BEST” DEMOGRAPHY

In the 1930s, when the birthrate slumped in the industrialized nations and threatened to eventually snuff out population growth, John Maynard Keynes famously argued that higher birthrates would spur economic recovery. During the 1930s, American economists sympathetic to Keynes’s broader anti–laissez-faire project developed a new demographic-economic doctrine that broke from Keynes on the specific question of population growth but still used Keynes’s new economics of consumption. The emergent doctrine, which I label Stable Population Keynesianism, held that Keynesian policies, especially the promotion of mass consumption, would render population growth economically irrelevant. The state, not the stork, would sustain economic growth, leaving society to enjoy the environmental and aesthetic benefits of a smaller population.

During the 1960s, Stable Population Keynesianism was eviscerated by the development of a basket of pro-population-growth and pro-market ideas that one scholar has termed “market-knows-best” demography.Footnote ⁶⁷ This process was in step with the overall decline of Keynesianism in the United States. Market-knows-best demography was not the exclusive domain of conservatives. But guided by the central laissez-faire premise that the invisible hand produces socially optimal results, the doctrine was constitutive of the political “New Right” and the new classical economics that swept American politics in the 1970s. Indeed, market-knows-best demography articulated many themes amenable to the New Right’s worldview: faith in the market, the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship, and unabashed celebration of economic growth. Many leaders of the late twentieth-century conservative intellectual movement would subsequently draw on aspects of market-knows-best demography.

Historians’ focus on the brief popular fascination with “population bomb” sentiment and the cultural battles that weakened the overpopulation critique has obscured the rising optimism regarding population growth that occurred concurrently—indeed previously.Footnote ⁶⁸ Historians also generally paint the rise of population optimism as a counterattack against the zero population growth movement. It was that, to be sure, but pro-population views matured concurrently with the movement. Through the 1960s, anxiety about the economic consequences of population growth remained the norm among economists. A growing minority, however, expressed optimism about population growth in both the developed and less-developed nations. Their market-knows-best demography conceded that population growth can sometimes entail short-term costs (at least when rapid) but maintained that is usually a long-term net good. Market-knows-best demography boils down to five propositions: first, population growth creates economies of scale and hence economic growth. Second, demographic density propels innovation. Short-term population pressure induces creative responses to maintain living standards, and higher population densities encourage the diffusion of information, technology, and skills; lower per capita infrastructure costs (for example, in transportation); and allow industries to reap the benefits of clustering. Moreover, more people equal more geniuses. Third, individual fertility decisions serve the common good. Fourth, even if a healthy economy amid a stable population is theoretically possible (as Stable Population Keynesianism insists), the state cannot be relied upon to make the necessary adjustments. Fifth, population growth advances human liberty.

Market-knows-best demography matured within four specialized debates. The first, overlapping with the broader postwar evolution of economic growth theory, entailed a rejection of the previously prevailing idea that rapid population growth in the developing world stunted incomes due to an excess of dependent children who drained savings into unproductive investment.Footnote ⁶⁹ During the 1960s, doubts emerged about whether high fertility produced the shortages of savings and capital purported by the pessimists, and optimists concluded that increased family size motivates families to positively change economic behavior.Footnote ⁷⁰

The second specialized debate concerned natural resources. By the 1960s, many economists downgraded the importance of natural resources to modern skills-based economies and, separately, suggested that market forces obviate resource scarcity. This debate revealed the developing links between modern conservative ideas and population optimism. For example, Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who remains a hero to antistatist conservatives, argued in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) that natural resources could in fact become more plentiful.Footnote ⁷¹ In a classic cornucopian statement from 1963, two resource economists concluded, “Nature imposes particular scarcities, not an inescapable general scarcity.”Footnote ⁷²

Also fostering a more optimistic posture toward population growth was the maturation of human-capital theory, which holds that investment in people, via education, training, etc., unleashes economic growth.Footnote ⁷³ Led by the University of Chicago’s Theodore Schultz (also an official at the Population Council),Footnote ⁷⁴ human-capital theorists claimed that population growth promotes the expansion of intermediary institutions (e.g., schools) that enhance human capital.Footnote ⁷⁵ Moreover, they insisted that the public investment necessitated by rapid population growth is not economic deadwood but in fact is contributive of economic growth. Schultz was not a conservative activist, but he espoused the basic tenets of the “Second Chicago School,” the vigorous advocates of limited government and markets who have reigned at the University of Chicago for the past half century. Schultz’s work on human-capital theory reveals not only an unexplored connection between the population debate and a major component of economic thought since the 1960s but also the affinities between population optimism and an unbridled faith in markets.Footnote ⁷⁶

The fourth and final debate concerned the microeconomics of fertility—that is, not the consequences of population growth but its causes. Here market-oriented economist-demographers argued that fertility decisions at the micro family level result in macro efficiencies for society. In short, they located an “invisible hand of fertility.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Human-capital theorists, especially Chicago’s Gary Becker, Jacob Mincer, and Theodore Schultz, were innovators of what economists often refer to as “new household economics.”Footnote ⁷⁸ This school of thought did not have an immediate influence on the mainstream population debate, but it would eventually provide an essential plank in pro-population-growth thought. The central idea of the new household economics was that parents are rational actors who weigh the costs and benefits of having children. (The theory largely ignored the reality that the act of producing babies is usually pleasure, not work, and sometimes immune to rational calculation!) In particular, well-off parents treat children as “consumer durable goods” that provide them with “psychic income.” Families thus increasingly prefer to have a few “high quality” children—those on whom they can lavish human capital, whether in the form of better education or piano lessons—rather than many “low quality” children. Higher incomes, in other words, translate into spoiled children, not additional siblings.

Since the 1960s, perhaps the single leading figure in the economics of American fertility has been the economist Richard Easterlin. Building on the consumption theories of Milton Friedman, the dean of the Chicago School—above all, the argument that expected lifetime earnings, not immediate income, guide an individual’s consumption habits—Easterlin posited a cyclical theory of American fertility based upon “relative expectations” or “potential income.” In short, population growth rates naturally adjust to the economic environment, a conclusion that cuts against concerns about overpopulation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Individual households rationally maximize their numbers of children, and the end result is a socially optimal population. True to the broader philosophy of the Chicago School, any externalities associated with children (e.g., pollution effects) were deemed marginal.

Apart from their work on fertility, the new household economists also praised the broader economic virtues of population growth.Footnote ⁸⁰ And whether they focused on population growth’s inducement of harder work, technological innovation, or reduced fertility, all the economists discussed in this section stressed the motivations and initiative of the individual—a stress that dovetailed with the ascendant New Right’s stress on the entrepreneur.Footnote ⁸¹ This is not to say that market-knows-best demography became dominant in the late 1960s. A majority of economists remained convinced of population growth’s adverse capital-absorbing tendencies, and some even incorporated the metaphors from the new radical ecological economics.Footnote ⁸² Others rejected the assumptions of the new household economics.Footnote ⁸³ Still, the rejection of market-knows-best demography increasingly came from an old guard of economist-demographers with links to the population movement. Just when population doomsdayism was enjoying its day in the sun, pro-population-growth views were bubbling to the surface.

THE CONSERVATIVE PRESS AND THE POPULATION ISSUE

The American business community and the business press were more favorable to Malthusian ideas during the late 1960s than is often assumed.Footnote ⁸⁴ Some business leaders continued to espouse the traditional “chamber of commerce” view in favor of population growth (and implicitly the cheap labor they imagined it engendered). Others, such as the retired CEOs serving on Planned Parenthood’s Commerce and Industry Committee, maintained that rapid population growth led to diminishing economic returns.Footnote ⁸⁵ Even the CEO of the Gerber baby food company favored zero population growth, stating that his company was “not in the least alarmed at the possibilities of population limitation”!Footnote ⁸⁶ Moreover, the business press offered ample support for zero population growth. In June 1970, for example, the editors of Fortune magazine concluded that experts “tend to agree that the birth rate must drop if we are to avoid a ‘popullution’ problem.”Footnote ⁸⁷ During the height of the population commission’s work, the Wall Street Journal did express libertarian concerns about population policy, suggesting that Americans “ought also to talk about how the quality of life might be affected by, to take the extreme example, having a computer or a bureaucrat decide who is and who is not allowed to have a child.” And yet the Journal concluded, “It seems clear to us that some measures to limit population will be needed.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Organs of the conservative movement were quicker to embrace the new pro-population-growth ideas. Conservative intellectuals had begun the 1960s supporting the general consensus that domestic population growth represented a challenge. Even before the formation of the commission in 1970, however, they had largely reversed course and adopted pro-population-growth themes. The shift can be clearly traced in the pages of the National Review.Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1965, William F. Buckley Jr. argued in the pages of his magazine that population growth was about to outstrip human ingenuity: “Solutions for today and tomorrow are perhaps not so difficult to contrive—send tractors to India, and hybrid corn to Egypt. But the day after tomorrow?” And Buckley warned his readers that the United States was not immune from the population dilemma. “The fact of the matter is that a solution must be found,” he wrote. “That old dog Malthus turned out to be very substantially correct in his dire predictions, and there seems to be no point in waiting until the United States is like India before moving in on the problem.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Buckley was thus hopeful that the Catholic Church would reverse its position on birth control.

Also in 1965, the National Review printed a supplement called “The Population Explosion,” which yielded nothing in apocalyptic rhetoric to the liberal doomsday literature of the era. In the lead article, “The Avalanche,” as the editors summarized it, “A science fiction novelist takes a hard look at the earth’s skyrocketing birthrate and admits it portends horrors even he finds hard to imagine.”Footnote ⁹¹ The author identified as the true science fiction of the era the food optimism promulgated by the “nutritional technological cohorts—the algae-and-yeast boys, the ranch-the-oceans fellows, and the transmutation-of-petrochemicals-into-proteins enthusiasts.”Footnote ⁹² “The Avalanche” also proffered the typical Cold War–inspired, libertarian argument against population growth: that it would engender big government and Sovietize the United States. “The very presence of these new masses of humanity [in the United States], the weight of their parents’ votes and, so soon, their own, makes bigger bureaucracy—bigger Big Brother bureaucracy—so probable that without a miracle it is a certainty.”Footnote ⁹³ Another article in the supplement, meanwhile, affirmed the traditional view that population growth stunted capital formation and economic growth.Footnote ⁹⁴

Yet just a few years later, even as the population scare achieved critical mass, the National Review rejected the overpopulation critique and printed the conservative economists who argued that population growth expanded the market—and that the market would solve any ecological dilemmas. These included the Australian economist Colin Clark, an early critic of the prevailing wisdom regarding economic development who argued that the world could feed at least 40 billion people. Clark maintained that technological innovation was a function of population.Footnote ⁹⁵ And he reached deep into the intellectual toolkit of populationists, articulating the militaristic and mercantilist view that the U.S. needed continual population growth to remain a world power.Footnote ⁹⁶ Further, Clark argued that population expansion enhanced liberty. In contrast, Clark contended, nations with stable populations had less mobility and freedom and more expensive government.Footnote ⁹⁷

Milton Friedman, one of the leading economists of the American neoliberal revival, echoed the notion that population growth not only grew the economy but also reduced the size of government. In a 1970 National Review piece on the new environmentalism, Friedman wrote, “[The] growth of population and improvements in transportation and communication have greatly widened the scope for effective competition and so have reduced the need for governmental concern with monopolist behavior.”Footnote ⁹⁸ One final example of the new libertarian embrace of population growth came from Robert Moses, the famous urban planner who did more than any other to build (and some say ruin) modern New York City. By the 1960s, Moses was out of favor with the establishment, and he turned against the New Left and its social planners with vigor. Failing to recognize that the vast majority in the population movement embraced a laissez-faire approach to population, in the sense that they had no more ambitious goal than eliminating unwanted fertility, Moses wrote in the National Review: “The planners already predict drastic regulation of the population by law to insure a future stable, comfortable, balanced society and economy. This consummation will be arrived at on the basis of scientific, impartial, unbiased study of long-haired, bewhiskered, sideburned experts who will of course be completely divorced from politics.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Proponents of population control continued to argue that population growth eroded freedom.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless, conservatives, who increasingly captured the discussion of “liberty” in the United States, effectively built a libertarian case in favor of population growth. Their views represented a shift from the 1950s and 1960s, when many conservatives argued that population growth would lead to Big Government. And if Moynihan’s case is indicative, it seems that many liberals drifting rightward toward neoconservatism were similarly unimpressed by the possibility of state-directed demographic management. Appearing on “Face the Nation” in early 1970, Moynihan noted that “[t]here is no government in history that has ever had any effect whatever on population.” He continued, “One of the nice things about people is that they don’t pay too much attention to Government … particularly with respect to the number of children they have.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

NIXON SPURNS THE POPULATION COMMISSION

It is against the backdrop of this inchoate conservative critique of the (over)population issue that we return to the dénouement of this issue in the Nixon years. The interim report released by the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, in March 1971, was well received in the press and stirred few feathers in the administration.Footnote ¹⁰² That summer, Sen. Tydings (who had just lost his seat) and Milton Eisenhower launched a group called the Coalition for a National Population Policy, and lawmakers continued to advocate a resolution calling for population stabilization.Footnote ¹⁰³ However, the administration was increasingly thinking about the population issue in terms of geographic redistribution and the urban crisis, and the president specifically rejected the goal of zero population growth. Abortion politics were becoming more salient, and according to the National Journal, doomed the population stabilization resolution floating in Congress.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In addition, the conservatives in the White House would have been aware of conservative intellectuals’ growing disdain for population control.

The contours of the commission’s final report, Population and the American Future, were well known before its official release in the spring of 1972. As it argued that population stabilization would yield environmental and modest economic benefits,Footnote ¹⁰⁵Population and the American Future called for a series of antinatalist policies.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These included population and sex education in schools, the liberalization of abortion laws, passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, more access to contraception, and stepped-up enforcement of existing immigration restrictions.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In addition, the commission proposed a series of measure to promote the geographic redistribution of the American population.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Initially, the White House and the commission each sought to control the diffusion of the commission’s findings.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ During March and April, however, the Nixon administration moved toward outright rejection of the body, stonewalling Rockefeller’s designs for a successful launch of Population and the American Future.Footnote ¹¹⁰ To be sure, abortion politics were central to the White House’s posture and the ultimate “fiasco” surrounding the commission’s final report.Footnote ¹¹¹ The scholarly emphasis on abortion politics, however, belies the importance of several other factors surrounding the White House’s treatment of the commission, including the new conservative economic ideas about population growth and intra–Republican Party politics.

In March, the White House debated a full range of options for responding to the commission’s final report—from issuing no response at all to praising but dissenting on the abortion issue to attacking on all fronts.Footnote ¹¹² At least two teams drafted the president’s potential statement upon receiving Population and the American Future. One was written by Ray Waldmann, a White House staffer, and David Gergen, the longtime editor of US News & World Report, who served as an adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. The Waldmann-Gergen draft praised the commission for its work, insisted that “questions related to population and economic growth are among my [the president’s] concerns,” encouraged further dialogue on population matters, and reaffirmed support for the Equal Rights Amendment. But it stressed the president’s firm opposition to “unrestricted abortion rights.”Footnote ¹¹³ The other draft was written by Patrick Buchanan, the conservative television commentator and sometime candidate for president who was then a young Nixon speechwriter.Footnote ¹¹⁴

More than anyone in the Nixon White House, Buchanan seems to have engaged the new pro-population-growth economics and the libertarian critique of population control. Buchanan did still assume that rapid population growth would place a “drain upon limited economic and material resources.” He thus pointed to the moderating birthrate—not pro-population-growth theorists—to label “a chimera” the idea that “the American people are in danger of procreating themselves into poverty.” Profiting from the new conservative toolkit of population ideas, however, Buchanan also cast doubt on the entire basket of economic assumptions guiding the population commission. He wrote that “the central conclusion of the commission—that there is nothing to gain from an expanding population—is clearly open to challenge. Just as the commission has enumerated arguments for this novel view—so powerful arguments can be marshaled on behalf of its antithesis.” Elsewhere in this draft Buchanan wrote, “Malthusian specters, like the old soldier of the barracks ballad, as often as not just fade away.”

The Buchanan draft directly challenged several other recommendations of the population commission. It argued that the federal government should assume no role in sex education, and it stated that Nixon was “utterly opposed to abortion.” Buchanan also cleverly tried to steal the “quality of life” argument back from opponents of population growth. He argued that while one child might promote happiness for some people, “To other middle- or lower-income couples from religious or ethnic or racial minorities, the good life may reside in many children and few material possessions.” Finally, the Buchanan draft tried to marginalize the Rockefeller commission. It thanked the group for beginning a national conversation about population but suggested that it had offered “deeply controversial recommendations.” It also averred that in a sprawling democracy, population issues were too important to be decided by a commission or even by the president.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Nixon’s growing disdain for the commission and the population issue—and support for the Buchanan position—was evident in the days leading up to the publication of the final report. In a conversation with Ehrlichman on March 30, 1972, Nixon said that Buchanan was the only one capable of writing a speech “to kick that population commission in the ass.” The new political calculus surrounding abortion was principal here. Nixon summed up the issue this way: “Those who vote for abortion, except for a few fanatics, are not going to vote for Nixon because he comes out for abortion. Those who are against abortion, however, feel so strongly about it from a moral standpoint that they sure as hell will vote against Nixon because of that issue.” Ehrlichman echoed the president’s reasoning: “The people that are pushing for zero population growth, like the Sierra Club and others, are never going to be pro-Nixon. … The people who are offended by abortion can be won over.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Nixon’s observations came amid a public relations battle between antiabortion Catholic leaders and the proabortion forces marshaled by Rockefeller and the population lobby. On March 15, the National Catholic Welfare Conference excoriated the commission for walking into an “Ideological Valley of Death.” Rockefeller, for his part, met with Catholic leaders, secured the support of the Protestant National Council of Churches, and had his allies at major newspapers write favorable editorials about the commission. Critchlow’s account of the politics surrounding the population commission convincingly suggests that Nixon’s accurate assessment of abortion politics circa 1972 and his trepidation about supporting the commission were both part of his developing “Catholic Strategy” to win reelection in 1972.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Apart from the abortion issue, Nixon also voiced his disdain for the general antigrowth thrust of the population movement. In a conversation with Henry Kissinger on March 31, Nixon brought up the recently published Malthusian bestseller The Limits to Growth, which he referred to as the “MIT computer study.” (The book used a crude computer and even cruder analysis of variables such as the food supply and energy use to predict the collapse of world systems within a century.) “What is the reason, Henry,” Nixon asked, “for the total negativism of people in the intellectual community? What in the heck is the reason for it? May I ask why? You know these people well.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ At the same time, Nixon’s economic advisers were embracing pro-population-growth positions. For example, Hendrick Houthakker, one of the economists on Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, downplayed overpopulation in a speech at American University and called population control a “simple-minded idea” and a “panacea.” “As far as I am aware,” Houthakker maintained, “it has not been demonstrated that there exists any close casual relation between the growth of per capita gross national product and the growth of population, and there is no obvious reason why there should be. The use of facile biological analogies obscures the fact that man is a producer as well as a consumer.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Nixon chose the milder response to the commission, but the tapes reveal that he would have preferred the much stronger Buchanan draft that forcefully refuted the economic logic of population pessimists. This is not to say that Nixon came to a great intellectual awakening after reading social science or the National Review. His turn against population control partially reflected a perception that radical environmentalists supported the cause, not a well-formed theory about the benefits of population growth. And the decision to soft-pedal the rejection of the commission resulted in part from a desire to appease Nelson Rockefeller, the powerful Republican governor of New York and brother of John D. Rockefeller III—or, more precisely, to appease the liberal, eastern, Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party. On April 3, 1972, Nixon and Ehrlichman discussed the potential results of issuing Buchanan’s strong statement. Ehrlichman informed the president that in his many conversations with Nelson Rockefeller, the latter had frequently expressed his appreciation of the White House for appointing his brother chair of the commission. Ehrlichman told Nixon that it was “as if Nelson were trying to find some healthy activity for his brother.” Ehrlichman noted that “the proposal that’s coming to you is that you blast them out of the water.” He confided, however, “I’m awfully afraid of the effect on our relationship with Nelson if we tee off on this commission.” The president agreed, suggesting that they “treat with kid gloves” all issues other than abortion.Footnote ¹²⁰

The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future issued its majority report on March 27, 1972. The White House delayed comment, during which time the taped conversations just described took place. The delay prompted several pleading letters from John D. Rockefeller III, who sensed correctly that Catholic leaders were pressuring the White House to denounce the report.Footnote ¹²¹ On May 5, Nixon released his official statement, which, after bland words of thanks, included the now-familiar statement against unrestricted abortion rights (as well as against contraception for adolescents).Footnote ¹²² That same day, Nixon greeted Rockefeller and several members of the commission at the White House, but he failed to invite them to sit on the Oval Office sofa, as was customary on such occasions.Footnote ¹²³ During this polite but perfunctory meeting, Nixon asked questions only about overseas population growth.Footnote ¹²⁴

Nixon’s statement effectively tabled the issue of domestic population growth. The White House did form an interagency task force to study the commission’s finding.Footnote ¹²⁵ But it blocked the distribution of a film the Department of Health and Human Services had made on population issues and refused to participate in a network television documentary on the commission called “Doom or Boom,” which aired in January 1973.Footnote ¹²⁶ It was thus anticlimactic when the task force’s chair wrote the White House that the “Commission’s primary recommendation, namely ‘that the nation welcome and plan for a stable population’ seems premature and is not adequately supported by the arguments set forth in the report.”Footnote ¹²⁷