Road to Survival had impressed Sanger, who alluded to it in her speeches. The book had led Moore to become one of Planned Parenthood’s chief benefactors. Largely at his suggestion, she hired Vogt as national director of PPFA in May 1951. It may have been a bigger step than he realized. Vogt had been an environmental advocate who thought that nature could be safeguarded through population control. Now he was a population-control advocate who believed that reducing birth rates would protect ecosystems along the way. The means had become the end.
PPFA had deteriorated during Sanger’s convalescence, becoming so disorganized that its affiliates were in open revolt; Vogt, ever energetic, seemed like the man to bring it back. In the year after he arrived he hired researchers and staff, traveled thousands of miles to visit Planned Parenthood clinics, increased coordination between branch offices and headquarters, and, with money from Moore, moved its main office to a more suitable space. He set a goal of doubling the group’s activity in ten years. Its officials and members were enthusiastic about his performance, with PPFA president Eleanor Pillsbury saying, “There is no one in the United States better qualified.” Sanger and Vogt, though, were growing at odds.
While Sanger was recuperating from her first heart attack, she had been contacted by a longtime acquaintance, Katharine McCormick. A wealthy feminist who was the first woman to receive a science degree from MIT, McCormick had previously spent her philanthropic efforts on a futile effort to cure her husband’s schizophrenia. When he died, she reached out to Sanger, asking where her millions could do the most good for birth control. Galvanized by the opportunity, Sanger spent the summer of 1952 in McCormick’s house, poring over scientific literature. Both women focused on the work of Gregory Pincus, a medical researcher who had left academia to form his own for-profit laboratory. Funded by the drug company G. D. Searle, Pincus had spent five years trying to develop a synthetic version of the steroid cortisone. Another company had beaten him to the punch, and Searle had dropped him. Pincus knew that steroids could suppress ovulation, and thought that this could lead to a human contraceptive. In June 1952 the two women rode in McCormick’s chauffeured limousine to Pincus’s modest, one-story laboratory in Worcester, Massachusetts. McCormick was so pleased that she gave him a $10,000 check on the spot.
Vogt objected. Pincus, he said, was a discredited researcher who had lost out in both academia and industry. Whatever he did in that small, private laboratory wasn’t real science; actual research required teams of M.D.s in clinical settings. Even if Pincus somehow came up with a contraceptive, neither he nor PPFA had the money or facilities to test it properly. In addition, Vogt didn’t believe that an oral contraceptive could be produced cheaply enough to be used in poor countries. Other organizations, including the new Population Council, were sponsoring laboratory research. Vogt proposed that Planned Parenthood focus instead on education and clinics and raising public awareness, though he also agreed, in February 1954, to appoint a new research head to collaborate with Pincus. Hoping to please Sanger, Vogt chose John Rock, a retired Harvard Medical School professor of obstetrics and gynecology.
It didn’t work. Sanger told friends that Vogt had “lost his mind”: Rock was a devout Roman Catholic. Vogt told her, accurately, that Rock had been a birth-control advocate since the 1930s, but Sanger remained suspicious. To calm the waters, McCormick told Sanger, inaccurately, that Rock was no longer Catholic. Then she visited Vogt in New York. The meeting did not go well. Vogt dismissed Pincus as a hack and McCormick herself as a dabbling society lady. She knew that she had more scientific training than Vogt and was infuriated that he hadn’t even bothered to visit Pincus in Worcester. It can’t have helped that Vogt, who had been given an honorary doctorate by Bard in 1953, was asking people to call him “Dr. Vogt.” McCormick stomped from the meeting. Nobody in PPFA, she wrote to Sanger, “is really concerned over achieving an oral contraceptive. It is to me vague and puzzling—really mystifying.”
Later that year McCormick gave Pincus $50,000 to build an animal-testing facility. When Vogt complained about the cost, McCormick paid another visit to New York. Infuriating to her, Vogt never bothered to explain his reasons for objecting to Pincus’s work.*4 Instead, he took the occasion to make a sales pitch: Would she fund another expansion of the New York offices? It is possible that he was beginning to feel defensive. In a time dominated by the Cold War, Vogt’s attacks on capitalism were making him a pariah. The Conservation Foundation, which he had helped to found, had just ejected him from its advisory council and removed Road to Survival from its recommended reading list. Whatever the cause of Vogt’s condescension, McCormick responded by taking PPFA out of the loop as Pincus and Rock tested birth-control pills in Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Contraceptive research being illegal in much of the United States, the work was conducted in secret. Pincus announced his first successes at a Planned Parenthood meeting in Japan in 1955. Sanger, though exhausted by the voyage to Tokyo, was beaming. Vogt wasn’t even in the room.
Because he had the loyalty of Planned Parenthood employees, Vogt was able to hang on for another few years. But he was torn between the organization’s simultaneous demands that he keep the U.S. affiliates running while establishing a global program of population control. The breaking point occurred when Hugh Moore, impatient with Vogt’s caution, helped organize the World Population Emergency Campaign to launch a crash program to reduce human numbers by sending out cadres of trained fieldworkers equipped with subsidized contraceptives and specially printed brochures. To entice Sanger, the campaign transformed the PPFA’s annual meeting into a “World Tribute to Margaret Sanger.” Julian Huxley was the master of ceremonies. The luncheon, held in the Waldorf Astoria, simultaneously marked the end of Planned Parenthood’s mission to empower individual women and Vogt’s career in the organization. New blood was needed, Vogt was told. He was fired in September 1961.
There was, perhaps, some consolation. Two years before, Vogt had married for the third time. Six years younger than Vogt, Johanna von Goeckingk had been born in Brooklyn. Her German father died when she was young, and her Slovakian mother went to work as a seamstress in Holyoke, Massachusetts. A good student, Johanna went to Radcliffe College, Harvard’s all-female sister school, where she was editor of the school yearbook and president of the campus Christian club. After graduation she moved to Manhattan, where she was a department-store manager. During the war she found a job with the State Department and then, after the war ended, with the new United Nations. She left to work for the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America. Presumably that is where she met Vogt. One can imagine a scenario—an affair, discovery, divorce—but Vogt’s papers, picked through after his death by a loyal assistant, are silent about what transpired. All that is known is that Marjorie moved to California and that Bill and Johanna were married on December 26, 1959. She was fifty-one; he was fifty-seven.
Johanna von Goeckingk, 1929 Credit 82
Every indication is that the marriage was happy; Vogt at last may have found the right match for his obsessive, obdurate temperament. They even had a house in the country. That was lucky for him, for his life was entering a difficult period. After he was shown the door by Planned Parenthood, the Conservation Foundation gave him a temporary job as a researcher. In some ways, the position was a mismatch: Vogt was an activist by nature, an alarm-ringer who sought to disturb; the Conservation Foundation was a scholarly clearinghouse for environmental information. In other ways, though, the new job was perfect: it offered a chance to return to his old interest in Latin America.
Eighteen months after leaving Planned Parenthood, Vogt went to Mexico and El Salvador. He hadn’t been to either place in sixteen years. In seven weeks of travel, he did see “small and encouraging signs of conservation progress.” But mostly nothing had changed: “Ecologically triggered disaster, which may well find a forerunner in political explosions, lies not many years or decades ahead, for much of Latin America.”
Under the aegis of the Conservation Foundatio
n, Vogt visited Central America three times in an effort to create a network of concerned scientists there—a small, Hispanophone version of IUPN. Associated with a U.S.-sponsored institute in Panama, the initial meeting brought together eighteen Central American and Mexican officials and scientists. Vogt was the only outsider, but he still managed to dominate the room. Growing population, he said, was leading to environmental ruin.
The urgency was there, but the polio was catching up with him. He couldn’t travel as readily as he had in the past. Seeing Vogt’s difficulties, the Conservation Foundation’s president, Samuel Ordway, gave him a permanent job in 1964 as its executive secretary. The conditions were that Vogt permanently sever all ties to Planned Parenthood and obtain Ordway’s approval for anything he wrote for the public. Ordway didn’t believe capitalism was incompatible with conservation; he vetoed Vogt’s request to print his Latin American report in Reader’s Digest. Vogt’s papers are full of unpublished manuscripts from this time.
He managed to slip the leash long enough to write an article attacking foreign aid—“We Help Build the Population Bomb”—in The New York Times Magazine in 1965. But the article provoked little reaction. A year later he testified to the U.S. Senate against a foreign-aid bill. “There are many parts of the world where, lacking effective population control, we might better spend nothing on foreign aid since there we are literally exacerbating misery and destruction of the human habitat.” Some of the senators feigned interest, he thought, but nothing happened. He was still shouting from the stage, but the audience wasn’t there.
Why wouldn’t they listen? The ecology was so clear, the implications so unavoidable. It was bewildering to Vogt.
The Senate was his last public appearance. He still maintained his easy baritone, but elsewhere the years were having their way. His once-bushy hair, gone from gray to white, was thin and straw-like; his collar sagged around his neck. It was easier for him to sit than stand. He had the bitterness of someone who didn’t expect to be taken seriously. He struggled from his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to the Midtown offices of the Conservation Foundation. He didn’t make it to work every day. At home, his wife was suffering from cancer.
Johanna died in January 1967. Vogt was devastated. Presumably his emotional state contributed to the stroke he suffered soon after. The canes were replaced with a wheelchair. He couldn’t go to the office, which couldn’t accommodate wheelchairs. He retired, age sixty-five, like one was supposed to do, though he had never intended it.
Hoping to rekindle the flame, Vogt wrote a sequel to Road just as he was being pushed out of Planned Parenthood. People! Challenge to Survival was widely reviewed, but in the marketplace it disappeared without a trace. Credit 83
He didn’t know what to do with his time. He had always been a fluent writer. Now the words came slowly, his shaking hands stabbing at his manual typewriter, the letters half hit and jagged on the paper. He couldn’t go birding, except maybe for looking at the ragged Vs from his window as the geese went up and down the Hudson River in the spring and fall. Western civilization, he told acquaintances, was possessed by dementia economica: the insane substitution of “limited symbols—such as dollars, pesos, colones, lempiras, and quetzales—for such reality as topsoil, fertility, soil metabolism, available water, protein, and complex interdependencies within the ecosystem—including man.” The symbols said that humanity was doing well, when actually “environmental deterioration is being accelerated.”
In years past The New York Times had published two or three of his letters almost every year. They stopped taking his letters. In May 1968, he wrote dourly to the Baltimore Evening Sun about Robert Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, who was then running for president. There is something wrong with a man with ten children, Vogt said. An Associated Press reporter, remembering Vogt’s name, telephoned him. Vogt didn’t back down. Maybe he was pleased to have someone seeking his opinion. He said he wouldn’t vote for Kennedy. “The last thing this country needs is more people,” he told the reporter. “And the next to last, in my opinion, is a president of the United States who sets such a bad example.” The comments were swiftly disavowed by Planned Parenthood. A month later, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. A month after that, on July 11, 1968, Vogt killed himself in his apartment. He left a note whose contents were never released.
There were no younger heirs; Vogt’s estate went in its entirety to his mother, still living on Long Island. The obituaries were few and short. There was no memorial service. Who would give the eulogy? Vogt must have suspected this would happen. Maybe he thought it was the prophet’s fate to die without honor.
The Swerve
Vogt spent his last days in the belief that all of his efforts had been futile. Humankind was making an idiot’s march to destruction, resolutely deaf to his entreaties to change course. But none of this was true, at least in the way he seems to have imagined. Within years of his death his ideas had become part of the mental furniture of most educated Westerners. But in a different way it was all true: he had failed comprehensively. He had spent decades in the belief that a blind alley was an exit, setting back humanity’s course, and his own.
It was not true that he had failed, because in May 1968, just days after Vogt’s attack on Bobby Kennedy, the Sierra Club published The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist. When Ehrlich entered the University of Pennsylvania he had befriended some upperclassmen who were impressed by his refusal to wear the freshman beanie, then a demeaning tradition. Not wanting to join a fraternity in his sophomore year—another custom—Ehrlich had rented a house with his friends. They passed around books of interest, including Road to Survival. It helped push Ehrlich into ecology and population studies. When Ehrlich taught at Stanford, he talked about his ideas on population and the environment, which were mainly Vogt’s ideas. Students mentioned Ehrlich to their parents. He was invited to speak to alumni groups, which in turn put him in front of bigger groups. After hearing him on the radio, the head of the Sierra Club asked Ehrlich to write a quick book, hoping—“naively,” Ehrlich told me—to influence the 1968 presidential election. The Ehrlichs produced a manuscript in three weeks, basing it on his lecture notes. The publisher told them that joint bylines didn’t sell; Paul’s name alone would be on the book.
Published in May 1968, The Population Bomb attracted little initial notice. No major newspaper reviewed it for five months. The New York Times gave it a one-paragraph notice almost a year after its release. In February 1970, twenty months after publication, Ehrlich was invited onto The Tonight Show, a late-night talk show, then enormously popular. The invitation was a fluke; Johnny Carson, the comedian-host, was leery of serious guests like university professors because he feared they would be pompous, dull, and opaque. Ehrlich proved to be affable, witty, and blunt. Thousands of letters poured in after his appearance, astonishing the network. The Population Bomb shot up the best-seller list. Carson invited Ehrlich back in April, a week before the first Earth Day. For more than an hour he spoke about population and ecology to an audience of tens of millions. It was the moment that Vogt had dreamed of for decades.
Suddenly Vogt’s ideas were everywhere. As Ehrlich put it, “No effort to expand the carrying capacity of the Earth can keep pace with unbridled population growth.” Others—many others—echoed his words. If humankind continued to exceed its limits, the biophysicist John Platt warned in 1969, “we are in the gravest danger of destroying our society, our world, and ourselves in any number of different ways well before the end of this century.” On the first Earth Day, in 1970, eighty-two-year-old Hugh Moore distributed hundreds of thousands of handbills about population and free audio tapes featuring Ehrlich. For the occasion he unveiled a new slogan: “People pollute.” Its implication was clear: more people = more pollution. The ecologist Garrett Hardin summed up by proposing an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity.”
These ideas were burnished with a sheen of digital
precision in The Limits to Growth (1972), the Hubbert-inspired book by an MIT-based research team that had used computer models to predict that rising population and consumption would lead to catastrophe. Or, to use the team’s italicized jargon: “The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.” Population growth, the team emphasized, “must stop soon.” An amazingly influential tract, The Limits to Growth eventually sold 12 million copies in thirty-seven languages and stimulated passionate argument around the world. My experience, I suspect, was typical; Limits was assigned reading in my college ecology, economics, and political science classes.
Carried on the wave of population alarm, organizations from the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council to the World Bank, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, and the Hugh Moore–backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization established a program to reduce fertility in poor places. It was the public-private network envisioned by Julian Huxley at Fontainebleau, joined in a common effort to save the world from the menace of overpopulation.
As a rule, anti-population campaigns were proposed by natural scientists: biologists, in the main, but also physicists and engineers. Opposition came from social scientists—anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and demographers. Anthropologists observed that, once again, rich people in one place were trying to reorder the lives of poor people in another place with little knowledge of their cultures. Sociologists pointed out that the intellectual justification for spending billions on family-planning programs was shaky—it tacitly depended on the notion that couples in the Third World were somehow too stupid to know that having lots of babies was a bad idea or, if they did know, had no idea how to avoid having them. Economists attacked the programs as intrusive, poorly planned interventions with perverse incentives. Demographers noted that the United States had gone from having, in Malthus’s time, the highest fertility rate ever seen to having, in the twentieth century, one of the world’s lowest. And this happened before the pill, before effective IUDs, before safe abortions, in an era when birth control was illegal.