Social demography and eugenics in the interwar United States

This article explores the relationship between eugenics and demography in the United States in the interwar era. In focusing on the founding of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems and the Population Association of America, it shows how early population scientists contested and negotiated the boundaries of the population field. The article maps the shifting focus away from biological interpretations of population dynamics toward the social, in part as a reaction to the rise of Fascist population research and policy. However, it also shows how social demography was closely intertwined with a "social eugenics" that attempted to ensure human betterment through methods more consistent with New Deal policymaking. This, the article argues, contributed critical intellectual and material resources to the development of social surveys of fertility behavior and contraceptive use, surveys that are more commonly perceived as having undermined eugenics through challenging the biologically deterministic assumptions upon which it was based. Copyright 2003 by The Population Council, Inc..