World War I and The Founding of Organizations
Osborn graduated from Princeton University in 1910 and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, for a postgraduate year. His family had made their fortune in the railroad business, and he went into the family business up until the outbreak of World War I, when he served in the American Red Cross in France as Commander of the Advance Zone for the last 11 months of the war. In 1928, he became a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History studying anthropology and population.
He was one of the founding members of the American Eugenics Society in 1926 and joined the Galton Institute in 1928, serving as its Secretary in 1931. He played a central role in the 1936 founding of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, a leading demographic research and training center. Osborn was one of the founding trustees of the Pioneer Fund in 1937, a charitable foundation charged with promoting eugenics.
According to J. Phillipe Rushton, Osborn was the first to point out that although African Americans scored lower than whites on the Army intelligence tests, those from five urban northern states scored slightly higher than whites from eight rural southern states did, demonstrating the influence of cultural factors on IQ scores.
In the following decades, Osborn remained skeptical of the hereditarian hypothesis of the variance in IQ scores found between racial groups. He suspected that environment played a greater role than genetics in the shaping of human beings, and thought eugenics should take place within groups (well-adapted families should be given the means to have more children) rather than between them (inferior races should be replaced).
An admirer of the reforms instituted in 1930s Sweden through the efforts of economist Gunnar Myrdal and his wife Alva Myrdal, Osborn emphasized the eugenic potential of extended state support in childcare, recreation, housing, nursery services, and education as a means of stimulating fertility among desirable populations. He argued that the aim of eugenics should be to ensure that every child was wanted. Osborn believed that in this system, which he called the "true freedom of parenthood," the parents most capable of rearing children would be likelier to have more.(Ramsden 2003)
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