Editor
The fall issue of The Social Contract is excellent. I confess I was a little surprised by the opening sentence of your statement of purpose, which placed the origins of the population movement at just over two decades ago. I have on my bookshelves books published on the population issue in 1948 by William Vogt, Fairfield Osborn and Robert C. Cook.
I put Vogt on the platform at a meeting on natural resources which I organized while still an official of the CIO to discuss the population issue. His audience was composed of public officials and liberal representatives of organizations indisposed to think there was a population problem.
Vogt became chairman of Planned Parenthood-World Population in the late 1960s and served in that capacity until the family planners ousted the population people.
Hugh Moore was another member of our group. He financed much of the work of the Population Reference Bureau, which Bob Cook has resuscitated, beginning around 1948. Cook and he coined the expression the population explosion, which preceded the population bomb by some twenty years.
You can even go back further than that to the organization of the Population Reference Bureau in 1929. I also have on my shelf Margaret Sanger's My Fight for Birth Control published in 1931, which shows that at that time the birth control people were concerned with population stabilization, and not merely voluntary parenthood.
Again, I think The Social Contract is invaluable. Keep up the good work.
Anthony Wayne Smith
Attorney at Law
District of Columbia and New York
[Editors note Since receiving this letter we have been advised that Mr. Smith died on Feb. 29, 1992.]