"...the reasons advanced must be generally acceptable reasons. Let's stop telling anyone that they have a genetically inferior genetic quality, for they will never agree. Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care, and perhaps our proposals will be accepted. It seems to me that if it is to progress as it should, eugenics must follow new policies and state its case anew, and that from this rebirth we may, even in our own lifetime, see it moving at last towards the high goals which Galton set for it."
Frederick Osborn in The Eugenics Review 1956/57 p. 22
"The Office of Population Research was founded in 1936 when Frederick H. Osborn '10, a charter trustee of Princeton, formerly a trustee at the Milbank Memorial Fund, used his good offices with both of these institutions to persuade the University to found a program in teaching and research in population, and the Milbank Fund to provide much of the initial financing. Osborn, later a major general during World War II, appointed to study and foster improvement in the morale of the armed services, had a deep interest in population matters, as well as in his alma mater."
From A Princeton Companion
"The Office of Population Research at Princeton University is the oldest population research center in the country. Founded in 1936, it has trained more than a hundred students who received doctoral degrees and more than a hundred others who received one-year professional training. Many of these alumni occupy important professional positions in developing countries; others are on university faculties in this country and abroad."
From the OPR's Web site
"Even before 1945, various American publications--peer-review journals, memos, and periodicals--reveal that millions of dollars were poured into eugenics research and policy studies in this country, much of it directly referencing [Ernst] Rudin and his Nazi colleagues. Funding for these projects over the years has since come from private foundations, primarily the Rockefeller Foundation, individual "benefactors," the National Institutes of Health, and other government agencies. At the forefront of such effort in the United States has always been the American Eugenics Society(AES) Research shows an enormous overlap of membership in the early American Eugenics Society and the Population Council, the latter established in the 1950s by John D. Rockefeller III and General Frederick Osborn, who was also an AES president. Remember that in the 1950s, the memory of Htler's mass extermination and Ernst Rudin's part in it were fresh. It is odd, therefore, that despite that, copious editorial comments appeared in the organization's publication, Eugenics Quarterly(later changed to Social Biology) hawking a concept called "negative eugenics" and urging the use of what the authors called "eugenic propaganda" to promote public support for measures designed to detect and remove "the heavy burden of the socially inadequate and other defective hereditary types." (p. 171)
According to the now renamed AES periodical Social Biology, in an excellent article on the history of the organization by former AES co-founder and president Frederick Osborn(5), the society held a conference in 1961 on the teaching of eugenics to medical students at Rockefeller Institute in New York City. The conference was jointly sponsored with the Population Council, which paid for travel expenses, and the National Institutes of Health. Publicity given to the AES by those conferences, the periodical says, resulted in "large numbers of individual inquiries on hereditary defects" as well as additional sponsorships.[...] Between 1960 1nd 1970, writes Osborn, the society stengthened its position as a center for bringing together various disciplines havving a common interest in "human evolution." The intent to link birth control and eugenics in America is found in the older December 1961 Eugenics Quarterly, in which policies for "influencing the future course of evolution" were urged, beginning with "eugenic birth selection based on voluntary controls"
In 1964, the annual workshop-conference was ainaugrurated, called the Princeton Conferences. At the third of these Princeton Conferences, not only were demographers, "behavioral geneticists," anthropologists, and psychiatrists in attendance, but a computer specialist attended. By November 1969, the Fifth Princeton Conference took the bold step of going under the title "Genetic Reconstruction of Human Populations." Remember that by then, the periodical Eugenics Quarterly had sanitized its name to Social Biology. By 1970 Rockefeller Center was more or less serving as a hub for discourse in behavioral eugenics."
p. 172 Footnote 5:
Frederick Osborn, "History of the American Eugenics Society," Social Biology, vol. 21 no. 2 Summer 1974, 115-126From B.K. Eakman's
The Cloning the American Mind
Frederick Osborn "reformed" eugenics by proposing that eugenicists conceal their true goal, which was, and is, to control human evolution by limiting marriage and parenthood to the superior stocks. He believed that less than ten percent of the population were worthy to have children. But he proposed that eugenicists never mention their conviction that most children should never have been born. Eugenicists were to assert instead a hypocritical concern for the welfare of the children of the inferior. This is the origin of Planned Parenthood's oft repeated slogan "Every child a wanted child". In reality, the eugenicists hope to manipulate the social and economic climate so that children unwanted by the eugenicists will be miserable and their miserable parents will "spontaneously" cease to want them. Ceasing to have children due to manipulation by eugenicists is called "voluntary unconscious selection" or, in other words, "CHOICE".This project is laid out in the Galton lecture, "Galton and Mid Century Eugenics" which Osborn delivered in 1956*
"The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters ... We must ask ourselves, what have we done wrong?"I think we have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in human nature. People simply are not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character was formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation. We have asked whole groups of people to accept this idea and we have asked individuals to accept it. They have constantly refused and we have all but killed the eugenic movement ... they won't accept the idea that they are in general second rate. We must rely on other motivation. ... it is surely possible to build a system of voluntary unconscious selection. But the reasons advanced must be generally acceptable reasons. Let's stop telling anyone that they have a generally inferior genetic quality, for they will never agree. Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care, and perhaps our proposals will be accepted."
From "Galton and Mid Century Eugenics" by Frederick Osborn, Galton Lecture 1956, in Eugenics Review, vol. 48, 1, 1956
I've no idea what this link has to do with Osborn's eugenics theories, though I've included it in the event it proves relevant.
(More on The Pioneer Fund, from a site with an axe to grind