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85 4 As Lyndon Johnson’s concern about the “explosion” in population and “growing scarcity” of world resources illustrates, by 1965 the U.S. government had shifted emphasis from the early 1950s, when the Paley Commission had rejected Osborn and Vogt’s ideas about overpopulation and resource depletion. Johnson offered a similar warning in his 1967 State of the Union address: “Next to the pursuit of peace, the really great challenge of the human family is the race between food supply and population.” From 1965 to 1967, Johnson oversaw a revolution in federal policy toward birth control and population planning. Together with a supportive Congress, he made the U.S. government the largest provider of birth control around the world.1 How did this evolution come about? A curious article on population by a former U.S. army general in 1966 in National Parks Magazine suggests the intertwined domestic and international problems driving heightened concern about population growth. In “Parks—or More People?” General William Draper pointed to domestic problems that he attributed to overpopulation, but then warned of an even graver international problem—one that “jeopardized the existence of civilization as we know it.” Massive overpopulation was causing food shortages and hunger in nations such as India. Fueled by public health measures and food aid programs, population growth was outstripping food production. Americans, Draper made clear, had something to fear from this.2 Draper was an expert in American foreign policy and economic aid. He had become aware of the population issue as chairman of a U.S. military committee, “Feed ’Em or Fight ’Em” Population and Resources on the Global Frontier during the Cold War “It may be that the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy.” —James Reston, New York Times, 1961 later known as the Draper Committee, set up by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 to assess U.S. foreign aid programs. The committee, he explained, quickly realized “that neither food production nor over-all economic development could keep pace with populations.” By 1966, Draper wrote, the problem had only expanded. Food production was increasing 1 percent a year, but populations were climbing at twice that rate. The result was widespread hunger and malnutrition. India, Draper stressed, faced “the prospect of a real famine this fall” and the likelihood of “mass starvation.”3 Many Americans shared Draper’s concerns. By the time of President Johnson’s 1965 reference to population growth and resource scarcity, ordinary citizens had become aware of the sea of poverty that surrounded the few prosperous nations of the world. In the 1960s, world hunger became the stuff of newspaper headlines, church charity campaigns, and college campus organizing. Humanitarian concern for their fellow human beings drove American concern in part, but the Cold War—as a general’s interest in population suggests—was also crucial. In its struggle with international communists from Moscow and Beijing, the United States could not afford to lose the allies, strategic ground, and resources of the third world. “Today’s struggle does not lie here,” President John F. Kennedy announced in Europe in early 1963, “but rather in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.” Overpopulation in these places, it was believed, created poverty and poverty created communism. At a time when Americans were beginning to send their sons, brothers, and husbands to Vietnam in increasing numbers, this was no idle worry.4 Although the Cold War’s shift to the third world, bolstered by important domestic concerns, formed the backdrop for the increased governmental concern about population growth and resource scarcity, there was nothing inevitable about the links between the Cold War in the third world and concern about population growth, much less environmental Malthusianism. William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn had warned that overpopulation in India and other nonwestern places threatened U.S. national security in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but they were mostly ignored. At that time, population, sex, and birth control were taboo subjects. Moreover, even those who did worry about thirdworld poverty had faith that technology-based economic development programs could work wonders. Indeed, in 1959, President Eisenhower did not act on the recommendations of the Draper committee. President Kennedy highlighted the problems of third-world poverty, but he, too, did little about population growth. All this had begun to change by the mid-1960s. Not only had third-world poverty emerged as a key national security issue but problems in Vietnam...

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