The Eugenics Review

"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, 115-126

From B.K. Eakman's The Cloning the American Mind