Frederick Osborn

Major General Frederick Henry Osborn (21 March 1889 – 5 January 1981) was an American philanthropist, military leader, and eugenicist. He was a founder of several organizations and played a central part in reorienting eugenics in the years following World War II away from the race- and class-consciousness of earlier periods. The American Philosophical Society considers him to have been "the respectable face of eugenic research in the post-war period."(APS, 1983)

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.

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