Charles Merriam, the ‘dean’ of the U.S. social sciences, made a sales pitch for funding a unified approach to the social sciences as a means of social engineering and control. This appealed to the oligarchy. Merriam saw immense possibilities in directing human evolution. The control of sexual relationships and of reproduction and child-rearing plays a primary role in how humans can be organised to fit into economic processes.
The National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS), founded in 1921, pioneered sexology. CRPS was originally funded by the Bureau of Social Hygiene. The latter was founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to study numerous social problems, including those of sexuality and birth control, operating from 1913 to 1940. Paul Warburg, scion of the international banking family, was among the funders.673 Funding of CRPS was assumed by the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1931. It was here that the sciences of reproduction and sexology were defined.674 With Rockefeller funding, there was a major shift from biological research to social research. ‘This culminated in the 1940s with the NRC/CRPS providing extensive sponsorship for Alfred Kinsey’s pathbreaking research on human sexuality’.675
In 1936, Earl Zinn, executive secretary of CRPS, left to take up a position with the Yale University Institute of Human Relations. The institute was funded with $4.5 million from the Rockefeller Foundation for its first decade (1929–1939), with the purpose of ‘integrating scientific knowledge of human behaviour, with rational control of behaviour as the ultimate goal’.676 The concept of ‘social medicine’ had been introduced from Europe as a method of ‘human engineering’;677 the premise being that medicine would not only look at the individual’s physical health, but at man’s ‘entire social and economic environment’.678
Social medicine had arisen when ‘Radical clinicians like Jules Guérin in revolutionary Paris in 1848 and Rudolf Virchow in Prussia believed that medicine should adopt a new social scientific profile along with a consciousness of social responsibility and play a political role in the emergent modern state’.679 Developments in France and Prussia influenced the formation of the National Association for Social Science in Britain in 1856, which included physicians. The intentions were noble and have contributed immeasurably to human welfare in considering the impact of social and economic conditions on the causes of ill-health. The problems start, depending on one’s perspective, when such projects are co-opted and re-directed by the oligarchy, whose system of economics cause the problems that they subsequently claim to be trying to solve. Moreover, the turn of events reflected the materialistic Zeitgeist of the time, where society was seen as a ‘mechanistic model’, a ‘physical machine’, ‘redefining life, labour and language in terms of the functional discourse of scientific rationality in a modern capitalist society’.680
Yale’s University Health Service became ‘a laboratory for psychological, sociological, and economic studies of patients conducted by students and experts of law, medicine, and sociology’. Data was analysed by a team of ‘sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, economists, and biologists on the Institute staff’.681
The aim was to determine what readjustments needed to be made between the individual and the environment.682 The oft-cited ideal of the institute was ‘human happiness’;683 an elusive ideal that remains the basis of political and religious utopias, generally culminating in the guillotine of the Jacobins, the firing squads of the Bolsheviks, and the Kool-Aid of Jim Jones. When asked by a wealthy Yale alumnus, the Institute’s director Milton Winternitz attempted a definition of ‘happiness’ as ‘the degree to which the psychophysical organism becomes adapted to its environment…’684
Largely thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation, an initial $7.5 million was raised to establish the Institute.685 The ideology of the Institute continues to influence, for example, Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies,686 presently headed by Jacob S. Hacker, a board member of The American Prospect, The American Century Foundation, and the Economic Policy Institute; liberal-progressive think tanks.687