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Rockefeller Supports Eugenics

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of population growth, he warned, "cuts across all the basic needs of mankind and ... frustrates man's achievement of his higher needs."9

Rockefeller Supports Eugenics JDR III grew up surrounded by eugenicists, race theorists and Malthusians at the Rockefeller Foundation such as Frederick Osborn, Henry Fairchild and Alan Gregg. For John D. III, it seemed only natural that he and others of his "class" should decide which elements of the human species survived, in order that they could have "life as we want it to be." They saw it as being a bit like culling herds of sheep for the best of breed.

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The logic of human life for the family was simple: supply and demand. As Jameson Taylor expressed it,

For Rockefeller, the proper care of sheep ... requires nothing more than an equalization of supply with demand. If supply-i.e., food, water and space-cannot meet demand, supply must be increased and demand must be decreased. The Rockefeller Foundation has used this two pronged approach to great effect. The supply shortage has been addressed by ... advanced medical practices and increased crop yields. The demand problem has been solved by culling the herd via birth control and abortion.10

For most Americans and for most of the world, the idea that the leading policy circles of the United States Government, acting on the behest of some of its wealthiest families and most influential universities, would deliberately promote the mass covert sterilization of entire population groups was too far-fetched to accept.

Few realized that individuals with names such as Rockefeller, Harriman, banker J.P. Morgan Jr., Mary Duke Biddle of the tobacco family, Cleveland Dodge, John Harvey Kellogg from the breakfast cereal fortune, Clarence Gamble of Proctor & Gamble, were quietly funding eugenics as members of the American Eugenics Society. They had also been financing experiments in forced sterilization of "inferior people" and various forms of population control as early as World War I. Their counterparts in the English Eugenics Society

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