Frederick Henry Osborn Papers, American Philosophical Society

Frederick Henry Osborn was an administrator, humanist, and scientist. This collection includes letters, diaries, reports, speeches, drafts of articles and books, oral history interviews, and photographs. There are diaries and letters for his service in Europe with the American Red Cross during World War I. There are some letters and documents, such as patent applications and plans for inventions, from his "business career" period prior to 1928, after which he became a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History studying anthropology and population. This study led to his later important contributions to the redirection of eugenics study in the U.S. and the reorganization of the American Eugenics Society. His other related organizational work and publications relating to human and population genetics are also documented in this collection. There is significant material (letters, diaries, reports) related to Osborn's World War II contributions as the chairman of the Civilian Committee on Selective Service in 1940, and as head of the Morale Branch of the U.S. Army (later, the Information and Education Division of Special Services) in 1941. Also included are important documents, especially his diary, from his work as deputy representative on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the U.N. Commission for Conventional Armaments. His letters, writings, and speeches relating to foreign policy are extensive, spanning the period from the 1940s until his death, much of it from the Vietnam War years. The correspondence with Kathleen Harris is particularly rich in this respect. There is family correspondence reflecting his dynamic philosophy of life, with long series of letters to his parents (1917-1945) and to his children and grandchildren. His later civic and regional interests, as a long-time resident of Garrison, N.Y., are evidenced in the work he did on the Palisades Interstate Park Commission.

Background note

Frederick Osborn

The respectable face of eugenic research in the post-war period, Frederick Osborn was raised in an environment of wealth, social power, and intellectual privilege. From youth, he stood out from the crowd. At 6'8" tall, confident and well-spoken, Osborn adopted his family's ethic of public involvement leavened with philanthropy, enjoying success in business, the military, and public life, and played an important part in reviving and reorienting the eugenics movement in the years following World War II.

The grandson of the railroad tycoon, William Henry Osborn, and nephew of Henry Fairfield Osborn, the paleontologist and Director of the American Museum of Natural History, Frederick Osborn was descended from New York's merchant elite on both his paternal and maternal sides. After graduating from the Browning School in New York City, he took his bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1910, and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, for a postgraduate year before entering into business. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Osborn set out to make a career as a railroad man, reviving the flagging Detroit, Toledo, and Ironton Railroad and working his way from Treasurer to President in the span of half a decade.

Osborn took leave from the railroad to enlist in the army during the First World War, and when refused, he joined the Red Cross instead, serving in France as Commander of the Advance Zone during the last eleven months of the conflict. When he returned to business in 1919, he sold his share in the railroad to Henry Ford at considerable profit and entered into partnership with two friends from the Red Cross in the firm G.M.P. Murphy and Co., which specialized in industrial management and later in stock brokerage. His business interests, however, were highly diversified and he maintained a hand in several other corporations, particularly in the oil industry, serving as officer or member of the board.

During the 1920s, Osborn became increasingly interested in the fields of anthropology and population studies, perhaps with the encouragement of his uncle. He became one of the founding members of the American Eugenics Society in 1926, an organization founded to promote eugenic education in the general public, and was associated with the Society throughout its existence. He was also began an active association with the Galton Society in 1928, serving as its Secretary in 1931. The year that he joined the Galton Society marked the end of his business career, as Osborn decided to retire to devote himself to science and the public welfare.

Osborn represented a distinct strain of reformed eugenics, and is credited by later eugenicists with providing the "American movement with a program that abandoned the race- and class-consciousness of an earlier period and that tied eugenics closely to science" (Social Biology 16, 1969, 58). Elected president of the AES in 1946, he convened a meeting to discuss the reconstitution of the Society, steering it away from "propagandizing" on social policy and toward becoming a forum for the discussion of eugenic ideas with a "well-informed audience," and toward promoting scientific studies of population. One of the most tangible fruits of his impact on the society was the new journal launched in 1954, the Eugenics Quarterly, which, after an acrimonious debate, changed its name in 1970 to Social Biology.

A trustee of Princeton, as his father was before him, Osborn was also active in promoting study of the social issues surrounding population. He was instrumental in founding the Office of Population Research as part of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1936, an organization devoted to the study of population issues. He also served as trustee to the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Social Sciences Research Council.

From the 1930s onward, Osborn was regularly drawn into public life, and his experiences in the public realm both shaped and were shaped by his scientific interests. An advocate of an activist foreign policy and an ardent anti-isolationist, he volunteered for the war effort even before America entered the war. His administrative and organizational skills made him a valuable asset, and in August 1940 he was selected by Franklin Roosevelt to chair the Civilian Advisory Committee on Selective Service. Five months later he took over as Chair of the Army Committee on Welfare and Recreation, responsible for information and education services for military personnel, and in September 1941, he was commissioned as Brigadier General and appointed Chief of the Morale Branch of the War Department. His efforts were well regarded. By the war's end he had earned promotion to Major General and had been awarded a bronze star in Paris, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Selective Service Medal, and was made Honorary Commander in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

After the war, Osborn continued to pursue his joint interests in public policy and population policy. His military experiences further strengthened his belief in an activist position on the world stage, and he assumed a hard line position, though not extremist, with respect to the Soviet Union. A supporter of the Marshall Plan and moderation in reconstructing Germany and Japan, he was he was appointed Deputy to the U.S. Representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission in March 1947 (resigning in 1950), and he served for a year on the U.N. Commission for Conventional Armaments beginning in 1948. With John D. Rockefeller, he was also co-founder of the Population Council in 1952, promoting birth control and population planning internationally. He remained active in public life into the 1970s, opposing the war in Vietnam, largely because he felt it flummoxed American foreign policy while the Soviets consolidated their position in Eastern Europe and Asia. He held a dim view of the prospect of unchecked population growth in the third world

From middle age through the end of his long life, Osborn was active in civic affairs on a more local level, as well as international, including taking part in the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, the Olana Preservation Society (Olana was home of the artist, Frederick Church), and the New York Governor's Committee to Study the Sale of Liquor to Minors, 1956-1957. He married Margaret Schiefflin, a descendent of John Jay, in 1916, with whom he had two sons and four daughters. Frederick Osborn died in 1981 at the age of 92.

Scope and content

Frederick Osborn's Papers chart the shift in the American eugenics movement onto a more "scientific" footing and into closer communion with population studies, and at the same time, they illuminate the link between population science and foreign and public policy in the post-war United States.

Correspondence forms a relatively small part of the Osborn Papers, although several files are revealing of Osborn's attitudes toward public affairs. Osborn's service in the Red Cross during the First World War is reflected in two very interesting reports he filed from the field in 1918, and there is some material to document his work as Chief of the Morale Branch of the War Department during the Second World War.

Much of Osborn's correspondence and work on behalf of the American Eugenics Society is housed with that collection, however the Osborn Papers include a wealth of other materials on eugenics and population studies. There are several files relating to the Association of Research in Human Heredity, previously the Eugenics Research Association, and Osborn's part in folding the Association in 1950, 10 folders relating to the Pioneer Fund (1937-1954), and eight folders for the Princeton Conference on Population Genetics and Demography (1967).

Several of Osborn's essays and speeches also flesh out his thought on eugenic themes, including the notes marked "Concerning Eugenics," which lay out Osborn's ideas on the future of eugenics in American life, his essays "Social morality in a period of diminishing population" (1935); "Statement on eugenics and the family" (1940); "Human heredity and the modern environment" (1941); "Where do we stop?" (1961); "Crisis in world population" (1967); "The future of human heredity" (1969); "On population and fertility" (1970), and a small number of his lectures. His paper with Carl Bajema, "The eugenic hypothesis," is a tidy summary of his views, and was published in Social Biology.

Foreign policy was a particular concern of Osborn's during the post-World War II years, and materials relating to his views on America's responsibilities internationally are salted throughout the collection. Of particular interest in this regard is his exchange with Douglas Burden, a violent anti-communist who felt that Osborn was too forgiving of the welfare state, and Osborn's speeches dealing with atomic diplomacy, "absolute weaponry," foreign policy, and "Social Science and the Problems of Government" (1955). His correspondence with Kathleen Harris is similarly revealing of how Osborn viewed the, mixing an ardent anti-communism with an opposition to the Vietnam War and a disdain for American politicians, and a dismal view of the future impact of unchecked population growth for the future of the world. His long-time colleague, Frank Lorimer, echoes many of the same sentiments in his work the "Conditions of Civilization." More formally, Osborn retained copies of his speeches relating to atomic energy and atomic weaponry in the late 1940s and to "U.S. and Russian Ideology" (1947). His diaries for 1948 include his experiences with the United Nations commissions dealing with the nuclear weaponry.

Osborn's military experiences are documented in his diaries from the First and Second World Wars (which are also supplied in typescript) and in several folders marked "United States Army Information and Education Division." Perhaps more informative are several speeches stemming from his role with the Morale Branch of the War Department.

Finally, the collection contains approximately 0.5 linear feet of correspondence between Osborn and his family, mostly his parents, which provides insight into Osborn's "philosophy of life."

Administrative information

Restrictions

None.

Provenance

Gift of Alice Osborn Breese, daughter of Frederick Henry Osborn, 1983 (accession number 1961-635ms).

Preferred citation

Cite as: Frederick Henry Osborn Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Additional information

Related material

The Records of the American Eugenics Society (575.06 Am3) contain include important correspondence of Osborn while he was president. Osborn appears as a correspondent in numerous other collections.

A second collection of Frederick Osborn Papers is housed in the Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University (AC #001). The material there relates exclusively to his activities as a trustee and as member of various advisory committees at Princeton.

References

Osborn, Frederick, "History of the American Eugenics Society," Social Biology 21 (1974), 115-136. Call no.: 575.05 Eu43.

Osborn, Frederick, The Future of Human Heredity; An Introduction to Eugenics in Modern Society (N.Y.: Weybright and Talley, 1968). Call no.: 575.01 Os1f

Osborn, Frederick, The Human Condition; How Did We Get Here & Where are We Going (N.Y.: Garrison, 1968). Call no.: 573 Os1h

Lorimer, Frank and Frederick Osborn, Dynamics of Population; Social and Biological Significance of Changing Birth Rates in the United States (N.Y.: MacMillan, 1934). Call no.: 312.73 L89d