Read an Excerpt
The State and the Stork
The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
By DEREK S. HOFF
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-34762-2
Chapter One
Foundations
Thus in the beginning all the World was America," wrote Enlightenment philosopher John Locke in the Second Treatise of Government (1690). To be an American in the seventeenth century was to live unfettered by tradition in sparse settlements amid a vast and foreboding wilderness. Emerging from a near barbarous condition, the first European settlers in America saw a steadily rising number of inhabitants as a cause for celebration, a hallmark of security and progress toward a higher stage of civilization. A century later, French adventurer turned New York farmer J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur echoed Locke's depiction of America as a latter-day Eden. "The American is a new man," he pronounced in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), one free from the stifling social hierarchies of Europe who could advance from roughly mannered immigrant to prosperous and virtuous yeoman farmer in a mere generation. Crèvecoeur believed that it was America's natural bounty that drove this rapid social, material, and demographic progress. He proposed that in the US, "nature opens her broad lap to receive the perpetual accession of new comers, and to supply them food." And when Europeans traveled to America, he remarked, their imaginations, "instead of submitting to the painful and useless retrospect of revolutions, desolations, and plagues ... wisely spring forward to the anticipated fields of future cultivation and improvement, to the future extent of those generations which are to replenish and embellish this boundless continent."
Crèvecoeur had witnessed remarkable demographic changes in America. The colonial population, after a sluggish first few decades, was doubling every twenty-five years by the middle of the seventeenth century. Colonial birthrates were exceptionally high, even by the worldwide standards of the era, and far exceeded those of Europe. In 1700, the European-American population was still just 250,000, but as remarkable growth continued through the eighteenth century, the population swelled to 2.8 million in 1780. In sharp contrast, Native Americans were decimated by diseases that European Americans introduced, and their numbers east of the Mississippi River shrank from perhaps two million in 1492 to 250,000 in 1750.
Different views on these demographic changes informed the intellectual and political debates in the young United States. From colonial times to the Civil War, millions of European Americans celebrated the dramatic expansion of the white population and associated it with the colonies' and then young nation's remarkable economic progress. These celebrants included the common farmers who moved westward and the railroad boosters who recruited them and promoted new towns in the name of democratic settlement. Some American intellectuals, too, looked favorably upon population growth. Drawing on the "classical liberalism" of Enlightenment theorists John Locke and Adam Smith, these optimists assumed that maximizing human freedom and choice, especially in the realm of the market, would unleash societal changes and technological innovations that would outpace resource pressures stemming from demographic expansion.
Yet many learned Americans harbored deep reservations about growth. Another strain of Enlightenment thought permeating Early America, what scholars today call "republicanism" or sometimes "civic humanism," theorized that democracy demanded virtuous and public-oriented citizens. Its followers feared that a rising population was fraught with peril and heralded the kind of fully settled, commercial-and manufacturing-based, deeply inegalitarian, and morally decrepit European society from which the colonists had fled. Ideas about population were not a perfect proxy for party affiliation, but whereas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans tended to imbibe republicanism's aversion to population growth, John Adams's Federalists and later the Whig Party tended to embrace liberalism's celebration of it—and hoped to keep it confined to America's great cities rather than seeing it disperse across the West.
Thus Americans had engaged in substantial population debates long before the Rev. Thomas Malthus argued in An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798) that population growth doomed human societies by overwhelming natural resources. (Although Malthus published the first edition anonymously, and it was little read, he made no attempt to hide his authorship. The revised 1803 edition with Malthus's official imprimatur enjoyed a much greater readership.) The Essay, as important as it is to the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and to the development of modern demography, did not usher in an intellectual sea change. Nonetheless, an examination of Americans' reactions to Malthus offers an illuminating window into pre- Civil War politics. Malthus initially had more detractors than supporters in the US, but many of the former agreed with his basic assumptions even as they questioned their applicability to American circumstances. In the Early Republic, nationalistic pride in a swelling population continued to mix with unease that such growth would lead the young nation to turn its back on the low-population-density agrarianism at the core of its identity and instead embrace manufacturing and "luxury," which would produce corruption and vice. During the middle of the nineteenth century, foundational questions surrounding slavery dominated politics and became the primary prism through which Americans thought about population. Northern and southern elites both hoped for population growth in their respective regions but also used Malthusian premises to claim the superiority of their civilization and labor systems. By the 1840s, many white Americans believed in their "Manifest Destiny" to spread "Anglo-Saxon" Christian civilization across the entire North American continent. As it drove American territorial expansion, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny superficially celebrated population growth but also revealed dread of what unending increase might produce without the social safety valve of geographic expansion.
In contrast to the prevailing scholarly assumption that Americans almost universally celebrated population growth before the Civil War, this chapter shows how debates about democracy, slavery, and westward expansion revealed deep-seated ambivalence about the nation's seemingly endless growth. And it highlights the surprising breadth and continuity of population concerns from the colonial era to the Civil War. This chapter also introduces two topics important for the rest of the study. First, it introduces the apprehension of population-induced natural-resource scarcity—and the competing technological optimism—that would animate the American population debate long after Revolutionary-era ideologies faded. Second, it reviews the theories of Malthus and the other leading classical economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whose ideas, two centuries later, remain the starting point for serious discussion of population, resources, and the economy.
Population in Colonial and Revolutionary America
After suffering through an initial high-mortality deathtrap, many colonists celebrated the demographic paradise that whites enjoyed in the New World. Colonial promotional literature portrayed a biblical land of milk and honey with high fertility, low mortality, and rapid population growth. Historian Susan Klepp writes in her study of fertility in Early America that, before the Revolution, men and women alike "were exuberant about the 'teeming,' 'flourishing,' or 'big' pregnant body. Large families were part of a bountiful natural order that celebrated abundance, especially of sons. Women's essence was found in their productivity." In the eighteenth century, population ideas also reflected the spread of science, as theorists anticipated modern demography by envisioning a natural science of human numbers. The Reverend Ezra Stiles, a Yale College president who believed that colonial population expansion augured national greatness, declared, "the laws of human increase and degeneracy are as properly a subject of systematical Science, as botany, the theory of agriculture, or raising and improving stock."
Demographic discourse during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries overlapped with the republicanism that sprang from the Enlightenment and swept across British America. The product of an era when representative democracy was a radical and tenuous experiment, republican ideology harked back to ancient Greece and Rome and claimed that a republic's survival demanded a virtuous citizenry dominated by independent yeoman farmers. Virtue, however, was continually threatened by human avarice and corruption; early republicans believed that commerce and especially manufacturing, while beneficial to a point, brought out the worst traits in people and ultimately led to the production and consumption of virtue-sapping "luxuries." Therefore, many elite British North Americans wished to delay manufacturing in the New World for as long as possible. They argued that their mobile and predominantly agricultural social order was infinitely preferable to Europe's stagnant and "settled" societies, where the industrial revolution had created surplus pools of labor doomed to toil in debauched factories and cities. In short, republicans worried about population growth because manufacturing naturally followed it. Thomas Jefferson and other republican proponents of an agricultural economy did promote the small-scale manufacturing of "coarse" household goods such as chairs and tables, but they wished to prevent a pell-mell rush into the domestic production and consumption of nonessential luxuries. Only later, when the size and geographic scope of markets exploded in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, would an active citizenry and the "spirit of commerce" replace Spartan simplicity and virtue as republican ideals.
Widespread rejection of mercantilism, a nationalistic and pro-population growth economic philosophy in vogue among the European powers, further reinforced skepticism of population increase. Mercantilism sought to maximize exports, minimize imports, and hoard silver and gold. Its proponents not only viewed people as the building blocks of national power and wealth but also assumed that an export-driven economy could thrive only by preserving a pool of surplus (and hence poorly paid) workers, so as to keep production costs low.
Republican ideology postulated that societies pass through several phases, progressing from the primitive to the commercialized, usually the four stages envisioned by Scottish theorist Adam Smith: hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. Population growth propels progress from one stage to the next because the need to increase food production necessitates social changes. Smith and classical liberals writing in his tradition welcomed the final stage because they believed that market-based societies enhance individual freedom and social peace. Republicans conceded that societies get richer as they progress but worried that the end point comes with significant costs: populous societies are forced to develop manufacturing to employ their human surpluses, resulting in excessive inequality and cultural decay. "Manufacturers are founded in poverty," Benjamin Franklin wrote.
American intellectuals, then, needed to reconcile pride in their swelling numbers with the republican fear of surging toward the final, crowded, and depraved stage of social development. Population dispersal offered a potential solution to this dilemma. Well before the creation of the nation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison articulated one of the most crucial elements of the budding American political economy: internal migration westward would alleviate the threat that population increase posed to the democratic experiment. Republicans maintained that North America was sufficiently vast and underpopulated to remain agricultural for generations to come, especially if free trade allowed farmers to export crop surpluses. (Colonists believed that Native Americans lived at such an early stage of development that contact and competition with Europeans could produce only two possible outcomes: assimilation or extinction.) As historian Drew McCoy observes in his classic study of republican political economy, the essence of Jeffersonianism was the promotion of development across space rather than time; westward expansion would stall the progression through the social stages that ended in corruption and decay.
British Americans who thought about population in geopolitical terms, though, tended to celebrate their rising numbers. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, writes historian Patricia Cohen, "colonial promoters recognized that a reputedly large and growing population signified the vitality of a colony and made it less vulnerable to attack." In his 1751 essay "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind," Benjamin Franklin correctly estimated that the colonial population was doubling every twenty years, even more rapidly than widely assumed. "People increase faster by Generation in those Colonies, where all can have full Employ, and there is Room and Business for Millions yet unborn," Franklin observed. He predicted that in another century, more English people would live in the colonies than in England, even if immigration came to a halt. Franklin admired the English and loved the empire, but he attributed many of England's problems to its supposed "fully settled" maturity. He gloomily suggested that the mixture of prodigious population growth in the colonies and slower growth in England augured conflict unless American commerce enjoyed free rein.
In fact, the population of England and Wales declined from 1720 to 1750 and then increased 15 percent from 1750 to 1770, whereas the colonial American population doubled between 1720 and 1750 and then nearly doubled again from 1750 to 1770. (The mother country, however, still enjoyed a large lead in absolute numbers in 1770: 7.5 million to America's 2.3 million.) Colonial American population growth was unimaginable to most Europeans, and indeed Franklin's estimates feature prominently in Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. One of Franklin's goals, therefore, was to convert fear of colonial expansion into rejoicing that such expansion would further augment England's imperial power. Edmund Morgan, one of Franklin's leading biographers, writes that Franklin "took it as a given that the wealth of any country lay in the numbers of its people, and proceeded to show (before Malthus was born) that the growth of population was governed by economic opportunity, that economic opportunity in America would for a long time be almost unlimited because of the unique abundance of land, that population in America increased accordingly, by natural propagation, far more rapidly than population in England and more rapidly than English manufacturers would be able to supply. It was therefore unnecessary and unwise to restrain American manufacturing, unwise to do anything to discourage economic opportunity and growth within the empire."
Franklin is also well known for anticipating scientific racism and eugenics. He desired the preservation not only of the British Empire but also of an empire of Englishmen, a reactionary goal given the ethnic diversity of the colonies. Franklin disliked the immigration to the colonies of African slaves and also Germans (the latter with their "swarthy Complexion"). "This will in a few Years become a German Colony," he lamented in 1749 after observing several thousand German immigrants arrive at Philadelphia's docks. Like many in this era, Franklin assumed that human population growth followed the same biological laws as plants and animals. In a line Malthus echoed, Franklin wrote, "There is in short, no Bound to the prolific Nature of Plants or Animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each others Means of Subsistence." This model of ceaseless competition drove his zero-sum racial thinking. Morgan calls Franklin the "first spokesman for a lily-white America."
As Franklin predicted, conflict rooted in a shared belief that people equals power contributed to the onset of the American Revolution. After the global Seven Years' War (1756–63), the British government's alarm at the demographic gap between mother country and colony helped solidify the crown's developing hard-line policies. "And how are we to rule them?" an English official asked in 1766 as he predicted another quick doubling of the colonial population. England's effort to restrain colonists' expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains and preserve peace with Native Americans through the Proclamation of 1763 and additional treaties was a major irritant to the colonists because it limited the opportunities many saw as the core attraction of the colonies. Early plans for a political union among the colonies pointed to population growth and the resulting gains in power for America as a reason such a union would work. Subsequently, Samuel Adams and other revolutionaries justified their campaign on the grounds that the colonists' increasing numbers would allow them to withstand a long war and made their long-term dominance inevitable. Just before the Revolution, colonists even revised Franklin's projection of when the British in American would outnumber the British in England, moving the date up by a quarter century to 1825. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence immortalized Americans' pride in their rising numbers and also emphasized the necessity of geographic dispersal. The Second Continental Congress listed among its grievances against King George III: "He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither; and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The State and the Stork by DEREK S. HOFF Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
