Richard Nixon: A Message On Population
In 1969, the United States President Richard Nixon issued to Congress a ‘Message on Population’.
Prior to the 1960s, population growth in the US was generally viewed not only as necessary and inevitable, but in fact desirable. The idea that America’s best interests may not lie in continued population growth only began to be publicly discussed in the latter decades of the twentieth century.
From the 1960s, people began to critically examine the notion that all population growth is desirable. Several public interest groups were established and population issues joined environmental and social issues on the public agenda.
Richard Nixon’s ‘Message on Population’ to Congress referred to the expectation of the time that the US population might exceed 300 million by the year 2000.
In it he wrote:
This growth will produce serious challenges for our society. I believe that many of our present social problems may be related to the fact that we have had only fifty years in which to accommodate the second hundred million Americans. In fact, since 1945 alone some 90 million babies have been born in this country. We have thus had to accommodate in a very few decades an adjustment to population growth which was once spread over centuries. And now it appears that we will have to provide for a third hundred million Americans in a period of just 30 years.
One outcome of Nixon’s message was a passage in the 1970 Public Health Service Act, providing family planning services for low-income women and men. Another was the creation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, chaired by John D. Rockefeller III. In 1972, the Commission released a multi-volume study of US population growth and its impacts.
The Rockefeller Commission’s most widely cited recommendation read as follows:
Recognizing that our population cannot grow indefinitely, and appreciating the advantages of moving now toward the stabilization of population, the Commission recommends that the nation welcome and plan for a stabilized population.
At the time of writing, the population of the United States is 342 million.
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