Encyclopedia of Race and Racism - UNC Charlottejmarks/pubs/Enc race Sci Racism Hist.pdfformally define the European subspecies as having long, flowing blond hair and blue eyes, regardless

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism

VOLUME 1

a–f

John Hartwell MooreEDITOR IN CHIEF

SS

SAINT MARTIN DEPORRESSEE Porres, Martin de, St.

SANTA BARBARA PLANSEE El Plan de Santa Barbara.

SCIENTIFIC RACISM,HISTORY OFScientific racism is the act of justifying inequalitiesbetween natural groups of people by recourse to science.It is the result of a conjunction of two cultural values orideologies: (1) that natural categories of the human spe-cies exist and are of different overall worth; and (2) thatscience provides a source of authoritative knowledge.These ideas arose separately, but at about the same timein the late seventeenth century.

The rise of science in the seventeenth century chal-lenged the authority of other forms of knowledge—suchas revelation and meditation. In particular, two newforms of knowledge came to assume privileged positions:mathematical generalization (most famously embodied inthe work of Sir Isaac Newton [1642–1727]), and empiri-cal demonstration or experiment (in the works of earlyscientists such as Galileo, William Harvey, and RobertHooke). Along with newly emerging standards of truth

and validity came public authority, and with this publicauthority came the usurpation of that authority in thegray zone of ‘‘pseudoscience,’’ usually only distinguish-able as such in retrospect.

The term pseudoscience refers to any work thatappeals to the authority of science despite being meth-odologically flawed or incompetently reasoned, even ifcarried out by credentialed scientists. Such misrepresen-tations are usually caused by a conflict of interest,whether it be personal ambition, class or financial inter-ests, or ideological commitment.

Racism, the attribution of inferiority to large naturalgroups of people, is a relatively recent idea. To the extentthat ancient peoples held various groups in different degreesof regard, this was predicated on nonracial features—suchas the ability to speak Greek, dignified behavior, or valor—and to the extent that they recognized differences of phys-ical appearance, these carried no codes of social rank (Isaac2004; Snowden 1948) and each was considered to be alocal variation, not a continental quintessence. The conceptof race was a product of the rise of scientific biologicaltaxonomy, which is the formal clustering of animals ana-lytically into groups, along with a parallel dissolution oflarge groups of animals into their constituent smallergroups. Scientific racism, then, being predicated on newlyemerging concepts of science and of race, must be regardedas a Euro-American product of the last three centuries. Thisobviously does not mean that group hatreds have notexisted elsewhere and at other times, but only that theyhave usually not been based upon a theory of race and werenot considered to be validated by science; they thus falloutside the scope of scientific racism.

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Early taxonomic practice relied on an intellectualframework that was largely intact since the time of theancient Greeks. Real, existing creatures, human or other-wise, were considered to be deviants or degenerates froman ideal form, whose true nature was perfect, transcen-dent, and otherworldly. As applied to people, thisinvolved specifying features that were not necessarilyaccurate descriptors, but rather represented the under-lying form or essence of which real people were simplyimperfect embodiments. Thus, the Swedish botanist-physician Carl (Carolus) Linnaeus (1707–1778) couldformally define the European subspecies as having long,flowing blond hair and blue eyes, regardless of the factthat most of them did not actually possess these charac-teristics. His purpose was to describe the idealized formthat underlay the observable variation. Likewise, hisdescriptions of Africans as lazy or Asians as greedy wasintended to be a statement of their basic natures, notnecessarily an empirically based generalization.

Clearly Linnaeus was inscribing popular or folk prej-udices upon the continental groups he was formally defin-ing. To some extent he recognized this, as he grouped theLapps, or Saami, (Scandinavian reindeer-herders) withinthe European subspecies; he consciously strove to roman-ticize the Saami, even as they were commonly ‘‘othered’’ inboth popular and scholarly minds. Human taxonomy thusserved to formalize social ideologies about sameness anddifference.

By the end of the eighteenth century, German zool-ogist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbachhad jettisoned the personality and cultural traits used byLinnaeus in favor of only physical traits. However, he alsomodified the Linnaean system by ranking, rather thansimply listing, the races (Gould 1998). Moreover, scholarsat this time began to apply the previously informal term‘‘race’’ (which had been used by the French naturalistCount de Buffon to refer to a local strain of people) tothe formal Linnaean subspecies. The result was a parallel

usage of the term, in which groups of people, diverselyconstituted, could be called ‘‘races,’’ and their essencescould be defined in accordance with whatever they weretaken to be. Concurrently, the natures of large continental‘‘races’’ could stand as formal taxonomic entities. Thus,races could exist within races, or they could crosscut otherraces. Because the attributes of the Irish, Italians, or Jewswere Platonic essences taken to be inscribed in the verycores of the people in question—by virtue of simply beingborn into the group—it did not much matter what anindividual representative looked like or acted like. Thesewere not so much group-level generalizations, which havealways existed as folk taxonomies, but group-level scien-tific definitions, which were something new.

THE ORIGINS OF RACES

A French scholar named Isaac de la Peyrere published acontroversial hypothesis in 1655. He suggested that cer-tain biblical passages were consistent with multiple divinecreations of people, of which the story related in Genesiswas only one. These ‘‘Pre-Adamites’’ were the progeni-tors of the most divergent forms of people, who mightthereby be considered to be different in both nature andorigin, as they were the product of different creative actsby God. La Peyrere was subsequently invoked as thefounder of a school called polygenism, which gained pop-ularity in the nineteenth century as American scholarsincreasingly sought to justify the practice of slavery byrecourse to science (although that had not been La Peyr-ere’s intent).

As the slavery debate crystallized in America andEurope, the scientific issues centered on whether raceshad a single origin (monogenism) or separate origins (poly-genism). Monogenists tended to invoke a literal reading ofthe Book of Genesis in support of abolitionist politics,which also necessitated the development of explanationsfor the emergence of human physical diversity since thetime of Adam and Eve. They thus tended to be biblical

SOURCE: Reprinted from systema Naturae, 10th ed., 1758.

Subspecies of Homo sapiens, rearranged from Linnaeus

American European Asian African

Color Red White Yellow BlackTemperament Irascible, impassive Hearty, muscular Melancholy, stern Sluggish, lazyFace Thick, straight, black hair; broad nose; Long blond hair, Black hair, Black kinky hair, silky skin, short harsh appearance; chin beardless blue eyes dark eyes nose, thick lips, females with genital flap, elongated breasts Personality Stubborn, happy, free Sensitive, very smart, creative Strict, contemptuous, greedy Sly, slow, careless Covered by Fine red lines Tight clothing Loose garments GreaseRuled by Custom Law Opinion Caprice

Table 1.

Scientific Racism, History of

2 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACE AND RACISM

literalists, social liberals, and early evolutionists, a fusion ofideologies that may seem incongruous from a modernstandpoint. Polygenists rejected biblical literalism in favorof textual interpretation, yet they held to a strictly creation-ist view of human origins in which people are as they alwayshave been. This view was used to support the oppression ofpresumably inferior peoples.

The linkage of these ideas can be seen in the writingsof the Count de Buffon, whose Histoire Naturelle was oneof the most widely owned and read works of the FrenchEnlightenment. A monogenist, Buffon surveyed humandiversity in 1749 and included a stinging digression onthe treatment of Africans:

They are therefore endowed, as can be seen, withexcellent hearts, and possess the seeds of everyhuman virtue. I cannot write their history with-out addressing their state. Is it not wretchedenough to be reduced to servitude and to beobliged to labor perpetually, without beingallowed to acquire anything? Is it necessary todegrade them, beat them, and to abuse themworse than beasts? Humanity revolts against theseodious oppressions which have been put intopractice because of greed, and which would havebeen reinforced virtually every day, had our lawsnot curbed the brutality of masters, and fixedlimits to the sufferings of their slaves. They areforced to labor, and yet commonly are not evenadequately nourished. It is said that they toleratehunger easily, that they can live for three days ona portion of a European meal; that however littlethey eat or sleep, they are always equally tough,equally strong, and equally fit for labor. How canmen in whom there rests any feeling of humanityadopt such views? How do they presume toattempt to legitimize by such reasoning thoseoppressions that spring solely from their thirstfor gold? But let us abandon those callous men,and return to our subject.

In 1766, speculating on the origins of animal diver-sity, Buffon used the diversity and interfertility of thehuman species as a key argument both for monogenismand microevolution:

The Asian, European, and Negro all reproducewith equal ease with the American. There can beno greater proof that they are the issue of a singleand identical stock than the facility with whichthey consolidate to the common stock. The bloodis different, but the germ is the same.

The polygenist position underwent a revival in themid-nineteenth century, however, as the American CivilWar loomed. In England, the Ethnological Society ofLondon, founded in 1842, was torn apart as polygenistsleft to form the Anthropological Society of London in

1862. A similar schism took place in France, with theformation of Paul Broca’s Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris.Ultimately, the Darwinian naturalists would side with themonogenist ‘‘ethnologists’’ against the polygenist ‘‘anthro-pologists,’’ whose societies and cause would become obso-lete before the end of the century (Stocking 1987).

CRANIAL SIZE AND SHAPE

There is a crudely materialist proposition that identifiesthe qualities of one’s mind by the features of one’s brain.While this affords a theoretical basis for modern neuro-physiology, it also has proved very easy to overvalue. Inpractice, this overvaluation has ranged from the estima-tion of intelligence based on the size of the brain toinferences of personality from the bulges on particularparts of the skull (phrenology). Indeed, the most prom-inent nineteenth-century craniologist, Dr. Samuel GeorgeMorton (1799–1851) of Philadelphia, was also an avidphrenologist.

Morton amassed a large collection of skulls fromNative Americans, and subsequently from other peoplesas well. While his analytical tools were primitive, he never-theless was able to establish a scientific, anatomical basisfor the fundamental difference and alleged relative inferi-ority of the nonwhite races by the 1830s. That difference,he said, lay in the inferior quality (due to the inferior size)of their brains.

One key question addressed at this time was whetherthe prehistoric architectural and cultural features of theMidwest could reasonably be ascribed to the ancestors ofthe local Indians, or whether they could be attributedinstead to a mysterious, cranially distinct and intellectuallysuperior people. It was not until the latter half of thecentury that careful archaeological excavations would settlethe question of ‘‘who built the mounds’’ with clear evidenceof cultural continuity: They were built by Native Ameri-cans, not by Vikings, Egyptian emigrants, or anyone else.

Other anatomists discovered other features of theheads of non-Europeans that seemed to explain or rein-force their inferiority. The cranial or cephalic index,devised by the Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius, meas-ured the shape of the head. When applied to the peoplesof the world, the Europeans appeared more brachyce-phalic (broad-headed) than the Africans, who were doli-chocephalic (long-headed).

Josiah Nott, who had studied anatomy with Mortonand went on to become one of the leading physicians inMobile, Alabama, developed the theory of the fundamentalcraniological difference and inferiority of the African, andexplicitly tied it to the slavery question. His principal work,Types of Mankind (1854), written with the diplomatGeorge C. Gliddon, found considerable popularity in theSouth.


ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACE AND RACISM 3

Certainly the most prestigious American involved onthe scientific polygenist side was the Harvard naturalistand Swiss emigre Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). Agassizwrote a preface to Nott and Gliddon’s volume and lentscientific credibility to the entire enterprise through hisadvocacy of their work and politics. In France as well, theleading anatomist, Paul Broca (1824–1880), was also theleading craniologist and polygenist.

Darwinism should have put the lie to the polygenism-monogenism question once and for all, because interbreed-ing made all people one species, and taxonomic entities atany level were now seen to be related by common descent.Thus, all humans had to have a common origin. Never-theless, versions of polygenism invoking parallel evolutionwere revived in the twentieth century by the Germananatomist Hermann Klaatsch (who held that the races wereparticularly related to different species of great apes), theCanadian botanical geneticist R. R. Ruggles Gates (whoconsidered the question of interbreeding irrelevant), andthe American anthropologist Carleton Coon (who heldthat different races evolved into Homo sapiens separatelyfrom different races of Homo erectus).

THE RADICAL CRITIQUE

OF EGALITARIANISM (I)

The same year that Nott and Gliddon published Types ofMankind, a disaffected French nobleman published an orig-inal and brilliant synthesis of contemporary conservativepolitics and racist scientific thought. His name wasCount Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), and his Essaisur l’inegalite des races humaines (Essay on the inequalityof the human race) (1854) would serve as a model forthe leading racist writers of the next two generations.

Gobineau’s goal was to justify the existence, and toemphasize the necessity, of the declining ancient socialorder by producing a unified theory of race and civiliza-tion. Observing that civilizations had risen and fallen, heasked why. His answer was that civilizations rise as afunction of the intellects of their individual members,or, more specifically, of their leaders, and that civiliza-tions fall as that elite blood is dissipated through inter-breeding with the masses. Steering a course between themonogenists and polygenists, he argued that, irrespectiveof Adam and Eve, races since biblical times have beenstable strains. Citing the craniometric work, Gobineauargued that the white intellect is higher than the black oryellow, and that, within the white race, the Aryans are theintellectually superior subrace. Of his ten identifiablecivilizations, Gobineau attributed at least seven to Aryanblood, and found no civilization at all in sub-SaharanAfrica. An American edition of Gobineau was supervisedand prefaced by Josiah Nott.

There was, of course, no alternative theory of civili-zation, and as curious as Gobineau’s thesis was, it wastightly argued. Past civilizations, and by implication, thefate of the present one, were governed by the purity ofblood of the aristocracy, whose position in the social orderwas ordained by nature. Social change and mobility, aswell as social equality, were contrary to nature. The futureof civilization lay in the recognition of the unequal abil-ities of races, and in the preservation of the social hier-archy from which it sprang. It is worth noting thatGobineau was nearly an exact contemporary of Karl Marx(1818–1883), whose considerably more erudite writingslay on the other end of the political spectrum, promotinghuman equality regardless of biology, real or imaginary.Gobineau’s argument would be reiterated and adapted inthe writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) in Europe (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,1899) and Madison Grant (1865–1937) in America (ThePassing of the Great Race, 1916).

SOCIAL DARWINISM

In his own lifetime, Gobineau’s racial theory of civiliza-tion was eclipsed by the arrival of Darwinism, whichseemed to imply a much more unstable biological nature

Dr. Samuel George Morton. A prominent nineteenth-centurycraniologist, Morton studied the skulls of Native Americans anddetermined that their brains were smaller than those of whites.EMMET COLLECTION, MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH DIVISION

OF ART, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC

LIBRARY, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.



than Gobineau supposed. And yet there was an attractioninherent in Gobineau’s scientific rationalization for thearistocracy. As the social and economic power of theancient aristocracy was replaced in the nineteenth centuryby a newer aristocracy—that of capitalist entrepreneurs—Gobineau’s ideas were blended with Darwin’s to con-struct a powerful rationalization for the emergence of thenew elite. This was embodied in English philosopherHerbert Spencer’s phrase ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ and cameto be known as ‘‘social Darwinism.’’

The argument of social Darwinism was rooted inVictorian ideas of progress. Because civilization was anobvious improvement over savagery and barbarism, just asscience was an obvious improvement over superstition andreligion, it was reasonable to ask (as Gobineau did) whatthe engine of progress was. To Spencer, it was not ‘‘race’’per se, but unfettered competition. Competition led todifferentiation and specialization, which led to overall com-plexity and improvement, not only in the natural world,but also in the social and political worlds. If the oldaristocracy was in decline, it was not a threat to civilization,but a consequence of it. The aristocrats were losing out tothe emergent class of tycoons, moguls, and robber barons,who had taken over the leadership of civilization. The

masses still had little, and deserved little, in this theory,but competition replaced race as the impetus for progress.

Within the class structure of Anglo-American society,social Darwinism was only tangentially a racial theory, forit had little formal recognition of race. It retained the goalof justifying the social hierarchy by recourse to nature, butthe hierarchy it justified was differently composed. Thenouveau riche were now the vanguards of progress andcivilization, and it was neither clear nor relevant whethertheir endowments were innate, lucky, or simply the prod-uct of hard work. The ultimate goal of social Darwinismwas simply to get government off the backs of the peo-ple—or at least of the rich people—by removing or resist-ing limits on their power and control, as reflected in socialreforms like child labor laws and collective bargaining.

The principal American exponent of social Darwinismwas the Yale political scientist William Graham Sumner(1840–1910). Sumner aggressively taught and wrote onbehalf of the survival of the fittest, and he maintained that‘‘if we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have onlyone possible alternative, and that is the survival of theunfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter isthe law of anti-civilization.We have our choice between thetwo, or we can go on, as in the past, vacillating between thetwo, but a third plan—the socialist desideratum—a planfor nourishing the unfittest and yet advancing in civiliza-tion, no man will ever find.’’

Unsurprisingly, some of the most well-known tycoonsof the era—most notably, John D. Rockefeller and AndrewCarnegie—were attracted to the theory. It encoded a Puri-tan ethic of advancement through hard work, justified theirown social position, and supported their business practices.That it was also a shamelessly self-serving appeal to naturein support of avarice was not lost on its critics.

There was a darker racial side to social Darwinism,however. While the theory was constructed to justify thenewly emerging class structure in Europe and America, itcould also be applied to the relative ranking of the colon-ized nations, who had apparently not yet risen above astate of savagery or barbarism. A militaristic version ofprogress-via-competition, easily understood as a justifica-tion for genocide, could be found in diverse social Dar-winian writings, such as those of the German ErnstHaeckel and the Frenchman Georges Vacher de Lapouge.The pre-Darwinian evolutionist Robert Chambers hadwritten in 1844: ‘‘Look at the progress even now makingover the barbaric parts of the earth by the best examples ofthe Caucasian type, promising not only to fill up the wasteplaces, but to supersede the imperfect nations alreadyexisting.’’ According to this theory, if the people overthere were less perfect, if they had not progressed as farin the struggle that is life’s history, then they were simplystanding in the way of the glorious future of the species,

Herbert Spencer, c. 1900. English philosopher Herbert Spenceris credited with coining the phrase ‘‘survival of the fittest.’’ERNEST H. MILLS/GETTY IMAGES



which was emanating from Europe. The English paleon-tologist William J. Sollas put it this way in his 1911 book,Ancient Hunters: ‘‘Justice belongs to the strong, and hasbeen meted out to each race according to its strength; eachhas received as much justice as it deserved. . . . It is notpriority of occupation, but the power to utilize, whichestablishes a claim to the land. Hence it is a duty whichevery race owes to itself, and to the human family as well,to cultivate by every possible means its own strength . . .[lest it incur] a penalty which Natural Selection, the sternbut beneficent tyrant of the organic world, will assuredlyexact, and that speedily, to the full’’ (Bowler 1995;Sommer 2005). It was precisely this kind of bio-politicalrhetoric that set the American politician William JenningsBryan, a staunch pacificist and isolationist, againstDarwinism.

CIVILIZATION AS CULTURE

Darwinism had actually already been rescued from socialDarwinism through the conceptual innovation of a Quakerscholar, Edward B. Tylor. In his Primitive Culture (1871),Tylor set out a program for a ‘‘reformer’s science,’’ based onthe conceptual divorce of a people’s biological or racialfeatures from their learned or behavioral features. He calledthese latter aspects ‘‘culture, or civilization’’ and the sciencehe called ‘‘anthropology.’’

Culture/civilization was, to Tylor, ‘‘that complexwhole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired byman as a member of society.’’ Since all peoples hadroughly the same mental powers (a doctrine known as‘‘the psychic unity of mankind’’), but some simply hadnot come as far as others in the trajectory of civilization,and had thus not acquired its maximum benefits, onecould reasonably conclude that a rational and humaneapproach to other peoples was not to dispossess themand kill them, as the militaristic social Darwinians wouldhave it, but to civilize them. Tylor thus substituted ethno-centrism for the racist genocidal ideas of the militaristsocial Darwinians, which was certainly an improvement.

Somewhat later, a young German-born anthropolo-gist named Franz Boas would spearhead a move to recon-ceptualize culture as something that all peoples had, notto greater or lesser degrees, but equally. All culturesprovided a particular way of seeing the world, of thinkingand communicating about it, with rules governing theinteraction of its members and a means for extracting thenecessities of life. While ‘‘culture’’ was still put forward asa contrast to ‘‘race,’’ representing learned knowledge,there was no longer a forward march to culture (quacivilization); there were only different individual cultures,each successfully permitting its members to cope, under-stand, and reproduce.

Anthropology thus became reinvigorated as the fieldthat studied cultures, some of which were modern or‘‘civilized,’’ but whose properties were located externallyto the bodies of the people, the biological organisms. Thus,as Franz Boas forcefully articulated in his 1911 classic, TheMind of Primitive Man, race was not a determinant ofcivilization; rather, social processes and events—the vaga-ries of history—were.

INTELLIGENCE

Anthropology had little to offer in the way of marketableskills or products, however. Psychology, on the otherhand, grew rapidly in size and prestige with the develop-ment of standardized mental tests, or psychometrics.Initially developed by the Frenchman Alfred Binet as away of identifying schoolchildren who might requirespecial attention, the intelligence test was imported intoAmerica in the early part of the twentieth century, prin-cipally by Lewis Terman of Stanford and Robert Yerkesof Yale. They modified the original interpretation of theresults, however, by believing that the number they gen-erated (an ‘‘intelligence quotient,’’ or IQ) was a measureof overall mental output, minimally affected by the con-ditions of life and set by heredity.

Giving a large battery of such tests to American sol-diers in World War I, psychologists concluded that Amer-icans were ‘‘feeble-minded’’—that is to say, stupid—and inimminent danger of becoming more so. In addition, testsgiven to immigrants showed that feeble-minded peoplewere arriving on American shores in large numbers. Infact, the only people who seemed to do consistently wellon these tests were urban, acculturated, wealthy Englishspeakers. Cultural biases in the tests were widely acknowl-edged, such as a question asking which path was best to taketo get from here to there. Samoans picked the prettiestpath, while the ‘‘correct’’ answer was actually the shortestpath. Privileging American efficiency is reasonable butarbitrary, and thus hardly a valid way to estimate anyone’sraw intellectual powers.

The inheritance of intelligence—or more precisely ofits opposite, feeble-mindedness—was shown ‘‘scientifi-cally’’ to be due to a single major recessive allele byCharles Davenport, the most prominent human geneticistin America. Feeble-mindedness seemed to be most prom-inently associated with poor people and especially withpoor people from outside of northern Europe. It was to befound especially commonly in nonwhites, poor whitesof the South, and in the poor immigrants arriving inAmerica in large numbers from southern and easternEurope early in the twentieth century. Feeble-mindednesswas diagnosable from several key behavioral features,Davenport explained in his 1911 textbook on humangenetics: ‘‘the acts of taking and keeping loose articles,



of tearing away obstructions to get at something desired,of picking valuables out of holes and pockets, of assaultinga neighbor who has something desirable or who hascaused pain or who is in the way, of deserting familyand other relatives, and of promiscuous sexual relations.’’

With such a loose set of phenotypes as a guide, thefeeble-mindedness allele could obviously be identified verywidely. Family studies seemed to show that it was indeedinherited simply. The most famous of these was a study ofthe pseudonymous Kallikak family, published by the psy-chologist Henry H. Goddard in 1912. Tracing back twosides of a family to a single eighteenth-century progenitor,Martin Kallikak, Goddard purported to show that the hun-dreds of modern descendants through his dalliance with a‘‘nameless feeble-minded tavern girl’’ were mainly feeble-minded burdens on society; while those modern descend-ants through Martin’s Quaker wife, Rachel, were solidcitizens. The clear implications were that feeble-mindednessis everywhere, is transmitted genetically, and if only thetavern girl had never bred, the social problems caused byher descendants would never have come to exist.

In fact, most of the fieldwork of the Kallikak studywas carried out by Goddard’s assistants, who gave intelli-gence tests to some of the people they interviewed, butused surrogate estimators of intelligence in other cases.Goddard’s book candidly noted that these surrogatesranged from interpreting the way dead ancestors weretalked about to just looking at people:

The father, a strong, healthy, broad-shoulderedman, was sitting helplessly in a corner. Themother, a pretty woman still, with remnants ofragged garments drawn about her, sat in a chair,the picture of despondency. Three children,scantily clad and with shoes that would barelyhold together, stood about with drooping jawsand the unmistakable look of the feeble-minded.Another child, neither more intelligent nor betterclad, was attempting to wash a few greasy dishesin cold water. The deaf boy was nowhere to beseen. On being urgently requested, the motherwent out of the room to get him, for he was notyet out of bed. . . . A glance sufficed to establishhis mentality, which was low. . . . The fatherhimself, though strong and vigorous, showed byhis face that he had only a child’s mentality.

The shoddiness of the research upon which the strongconclusions were founded did not prevent the results frombeing widely disseminated in the genetics and psychologyliterature for decades. In fact, when challenged on the ques-tion of how he could know that the tavern girl was feeble-minded when he didn’t even know her name, Goddardconsulted his field worker and then publicly responded witha barefaced lie to the effect that her name was indeedknown, but had been deliberately concealed.

THE EUGENICS MOVEMENT

The take-home message of the Kallikaks was that anounce of genetic prevention was worth the proverbialpound of cure—if only something had been done aboutthe tavern girl, society would have been spared the bur-den of her feeble-minded degenerate descendants. Bothsides of the Kallikak family were white (indeed, they wereAnglo-Saxon) so racism was not an overt issue, but iffeeble-mindedness was a unitary phenomenon with asingle cause, then the Kallikak conclusions would havesignificant implications for global feeble-mindedness.

An Englishman named Francis Galton had been work-ing on mathematical approaches to heredity, particularly tothe heredity of intelligence, since the mid-nineteenthcentury. Thomas Malthus had famously founded the sci-ence of demography at the turn of the century with theargument that the human population was increasing in sizefaster than its resource base, which entailed a gloomy fore-cast for the distant future. But fertility rates were not equalacross all economic strata, and the poor were outbreedingthe rich. While this might seem to necessitate the develop-ment of social programs for the poor, Galton saw things ina more pessimistic light. If the poor were outbreeding therich, and if one believed the poor were genetically inferiorto the rich, then the future could only hold catastrophe forthe entire species. Indeed, the very existence of the prolificpoor seemed to be a subversion of the natural order, if itwere believed they were genetically inferior to the rich.Galton’s cousin, Charles Darwin, had devised a theory toaccount for the diversity of life on earth that was premisedon ‘‘the fittest’’ surviving and breeding disproportionately.If the human species were being led by the prolific poor,that would seem to go against the history of life on earth.

Clearly something needed to be done. People, Galtonargued, must take control of their own genetic future. Thepoor must be discouraged from breeding, and the rich mustbe encouraged to breed. Galton called for the scientificcontrol of human breeding, a plan he called ‘‘eugenics.’’It is the first of many ironies of the eugenics movement thatGalton died without issue.

The eugenics movement gained scientific credibility,and international popularity, after the rise of Mendeliangenetics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Acrossdiverse political systems, eugenics implied a utopian, scien-tific approach to impending social problems. Eugenics wasadopted and integrated into diverse national traditions: InEngland, it involved biometry and class; in America, itinvolved genes and race; in Germany, the metaphor ofnational illness and health prescribed a movement of ‘‘racehygiene;’’ while in Latin America the focus was more onpublic sanitation.

The eugenics movement inherited from the socialDarwinists the idea that natural hierarchies were at the



root of social hierarchies in human societies. However,the eugenicists tied their ideas to the emerging science ofgenetics, and they sought active government intervention inthe problems they perceived, which was quite antithetical tothe social Darwinists’ laissez-faire political goals. But thesocial landscape had changed. The first decade of the twen-tieth century had seen an enormous rise in the number ofpoor immigrants into the United States from Italy andeastern Europe. In an era without federal assistance forthe poor, they lived in crime-ridden urban slums.

An International Congress in 1912 stimulated muchinterest in the eugenics movement. In America, its lead-ing exponent was Charles Davenport, whose 1911 book,Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, was the first major text ofhuman genetics in America. Davenport tackled many ofthe same problems as Franz Boas, whose book The Mindof Primitive Man was published the same year. But whereBoas saw biology as largely irrelevant to the past or futureof civilization, Davenport saw things quite differently.Civilizations rose and fell on account of their genes,and one’s lot in life was determined by one’s genes.Phrenologists and craniologists had justified their infer-ences on the grounds that the brain was the seat ofthought and was contained within the skull, whose fea-tures could therefore stand as surrogate measures for thequality of one’s thoughts. Davenport’s eugenics tookthis one step further, for it was the genes that determinedthe structure of the brain and skull, and thus of the qualityof the thoughts they contained. Like phrenology, then,there was a seductively materialist, if stunningly crude,logic to it.

Davenport’s friend, a Yale-educated lawyer andamateur naturalist named Madison Grant, syncretizedDavenport’s genetics with Gobineau’s racism and articu-lated a political platform for social change based onmodernscience. For Grant the problem was genetics; in particular,racial genetics. What concerned him most was the relativequality of the impoverished Italians and Jews immigratingin large numbers and living in crime and squalor. Grantcontrasted the ‘‘Nordic’’ northern European to the ‘‘Med-iterranean’’ southern European (a distinction drawn by theanthropologist William Z. Ripley in his 1899 The Races ofEurope), and found the Nordic to be superior in body andmind; indeed (as per Gobineau), he found the Nordic‘‘race’’ to be the fountain of all civilization. This interpre-tation of the past led to a nightmarish projection for thefuture, when one considered the flood of dirty, swarthy,unfit, and prolific poor people now entering America—worse even than the poor Irish immigrants of the previousgeneration.

In his 1916 bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race,Madison Grant articulated a solution that would emptythe jails, balance the budget, and send America on the

path to world leadership. It involved the scientific controlof reproduction, with the main goal being the widespreadapplication of surgical sterilization for men and women.In chilling terms, he explained:

A rigid system of selection through the elimina-tion of those who are weak or unfit—in otherwords, social failures—would . . . enable us to getrid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hos-pitals, and insane asylums. . . . [Sterilization] canbe applied to an ever widening circle of socialdiscards, beginning always with the criminal, thediseased, and the insane, and extending graduallyto types which may be called weaklings ratherthan defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worth-less race types.

Grant’s book was criticized by a few scholars, such asFranz Boas, but was well received in the scientific com-munity generally. When the American Eugenics Societywas formally incorporated in the 1920s, Madison Grantwas one of its directors, and most of America’s leadingbiologists served on its advisory board under him. Grantand the eugenicists had two principal political goals forthe short term: a program for sterilizing the poor, and onefor restricting the immigration of ‘‘alien scum,’’ as theyliked to call the non-northern European immigrants.

In addition to the scientific community, Grant’s1916 book was well received across a diverse politicalspectrum. Theodore Roosevelt, with whom Grant hadworked in founding the New York Zoological Society,wrote him a letter of effusive praise. (After reading the1925 German translation, so did Adolf Hitler.)

By the late 1920s, the eugenicists had had consid-erable success in the United States. In 1924, Congressenacted a major restriction of the immigration of Italiansand eastern European Jews. Two years later, the SupremeCourt decided that the state of Virginia had the right tosterilize Carrie Buck, a poor white woman, against herwill. Basing their ruling on the latest science, which hadconvinced them that America was destined to be‘‘swamped with incompetence’’ unless action was taken,the Court ruled 8 to 1 that ‘‘three generations of imbe-ciles are enough.’’

American sterilization laws were enacted at the statelevel, though often half-heartedly. Thirty states actuallysterilized people over the next few decades, with Californialeading the way (sterilizing more than 20,000 citizens), andeleven other states each sterilizing more than 1,000 citizens.Europe provided more fertile ground for a state that wantedto subsume reproduction to its perceived scientific needs,and the emergence of a racist totalitarian government inGermany gave German eugenicists a chance to take themovement to its logical conclusion.



THE DECLINE OF EUGENICS

IN AMERICA, AND ITS RISE

IN GERMANY

American biologists, particularly geneticists, were reluc-tant to criticize the eugenics movement. In the first place,two of the most powerful biologists in America wereamong its leaders: Charles Davenport of the Cold SpringHarbor Laboratory, and Henry Fairfield Osborn of theAmerican Museum of Natural History. In the secondplace, the biologists were themselves products of theirown era and class, and they thus often shared the valuesand prejudices of the eugenics movement. And finally,even if one did feel that Madison Grant overstated the casefor genetics, he was nevertheless an advocate for the field.

The fruit fly geneticist (and later, Nobel laureate)Thomas Hunt Morgan, who worked in the same build-ing as Franz Boas at Columbia University, was the onlymajor figure in his field who played no part in theAmerican Eugenics Society. But even Morgan refrainedfrom using his scientific stature to criticize the eugenicsprogram. The bacterial geneticist Herbert Spencer Jen-nings of Johns Hopkins University found that the statis-tics presented by the eugenicists to Congress in the early1920s, ostensibly showing that American immigrantsfrom southern Europe were more prone to crime thanthose from northern Europe, had been improperly ana-lyzed. He alerted the American Eugenics Society’s presi-dent, the Yale economist Irving Fisher, but was dissatisfiedwith the Society’s lack of interest in the scientific mistakesit had presented to Congress, and he quietly resigned anddissociated himself from the Society. In 1927, his col-league Raymond Pearl published the first critique ofeugenics program by an American biologist.

Prior to the publication of Pearl’s 1927 article, the onlycritiques of eugenics had been published by people outsidethe mainstream of modern biological science. The journalistWalter Lippman had taken on the IQ testers in an angryseries of articles in the New Republic in 1922–1923. Con-servative Christians, especially Catholics, objected to gov-ernmental intervention in reproduction, which they took tobe the affairs of God. Social scientists objected to theeugenicists’ naıve genetic theory of history and civilization,while civil libertarians objected to their insistence on theperceived needs of the state taking precedence overthe individual’s civil rights, especially the right to privacy.The famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, who had defendedmodern biology in the 1925 trial of John T. Scopes forteaching evolution, savaged modern biology the followingyear for its devotion to eugenics. In the literary magazineThe American Mercury, Darrow argued that ‘‘amongst theschemes for remolding society this is the most senseless andimpudent that has ever been put forward by irresponsiblefanatics to plague a long-suffering race.’’

The American Mercury was edited by the Baltimore-based journalist and critic H. L. Mencken, who calledeugenics ‘‘mainly blather’’ in his column in the BaltimoreSun in May 1927. He prevailed upon his friend andfellow Baltimore intellectual Raymond Pearl to write uphis reservations about eugenics, publishing them underthe title ‘‘The Biology of Superiority’’ in November1927. Pearl acknowledged the social prejudices under-lying the research, and exposed the flimsy science backingit up. Since Pearl was a respected biologist, his articlecaused a sensation and was picked up by the majornews services. Of course, publicly challenging the powerstructure of the scientific community was not without itsrisks, and Pearl found that his offer of a professorship atHarvard was quickly retracted.

Other critiques by biologists soon came out, notablyby the American geneticist Hermann Muller (‘‘The Dom-inance of Economics over Eugenics,’’ 1932). These schol-ars, however, did not necessarily dispense with the foolishlyutopian view of a state-guided, scientific approach to love,marriage, and procreation, based on popular prejudices;they merely rebelled against the ways in which the ideaswere being implemented at the time. Pearl himself believedthat Jews, after centuries of life in crowded ghettoes, hadbecome better adapted to urban life than non-Jews, and heurged that strict quotas be placed on their admission tomedical schools, lest their ranks in the professional classesswell excessively at the expense of ordinary Americans.Muller, for his part, tried to convince Josef Stalin to imple-ment a state-sponsored program of eugenic breeding, andbarely escaped the Soviet Union with his life in 1937.

It was in Germany that eugenicists were given theopportunity to work with the state most closely to imple-ment their ideas. Adolf Hitler had found inspiration inthe compatibility between his political goals and thewritings of Madison Grant and the eugenicists. He hadread the genetics textbook by Eugen Fischer, Erwin Baur,and Fritz Lenz, who advocated the same social prejudicesas their American counterparts. When Hitler came topower in 1932, he promoted like-minded scholars.Eugen Fischer became the director of the Kaiser WilhelmInstitute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugen-ics, and he implemented the Nazi policies with suchenthusiasm that Franz Weidenreich, a distinguished anat-omist who had been forced to emigrate because of hisancestry, later suggested in the pages of the journal Sci-ence that he be tried as a war criminal.

In 1934, the prestigious journal Zeitschrift fur Morpho-logie und Anthropologie published a special volume in Fisch-er’s honor. In the preface to the volume, two of Fischer’sformer students wrote, ‘‘We stand upon the threshold of anew era. For the first time in world history, the FuhrerAdolf Hitler is putting into practice the insights about the



biological foundations of the development of peoples—race, heredity, selection. It is no coincidence that Germanyis the locus of this event: German science provides the toolsfor the politician.’’ Among the essays that followed werecontributions from two Americans, Raymond Pearl andCharles Davenport.

The sterilization laws enacted by the Nazis in 1935were modeled on the state laws in America, which hadbeen drafted by Charles Davenport’s assistant, the geneti-cist Harry Laughlin. As a result, Nazi-controlled Heidel-berg University awarded Laughlin an honorary doctoratein 1936. By then, however, any formal association withthe Nazis was sufficiently embarrassing that Laughlinwas discouraged from traveling to Germany to accept itin person.

The Nazis were mobilizing the full force of the modernindustrial state in support of the eugenic program, and thedoctrines of human progress culminating in the Nordicrace, that had been promoted for decades in the name ofscience. The people who felt the full brunt of their efficienttechnologies in the 1940s were almost precisely the groupsinitially targeted by Madison Grant in 1916: criminals, thediseased, ‘‘weaklings,’’ and ‘‘worthless race types’’. In prac-tice, this meant Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others.Moreover, the sterilization advocated by the scientists wascostly and time consuming. To deal with people who were

not deemed worthy of reproducing, a hail of bullets or avial of poison gas was assuredly a more efficient and cost-effective means. If they were not worthy of breeding, whyshould they be worthy of living?

American support for eugenics waned in Americawith the accession of the Nazis in Germany. Certainlythe stock market crash and the ensuing Depressionshowed how weakly biological endowments counted incomparison to the life-determining effects of economicsand culture. By the end of the 1930s, the CarnegieFoundation had withdrawn its long-standing supportfor the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor,and full-length criticisms of racist science began to appearin England and America, notably We Europeans (1935)by the biologist Julian Huxley and anthropologist AlfredCort Haddon; Race: A Study in Superstition (1937) by thehistorian Jacques Barzun; and Man’s Most DangerousMyth (1942) by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu.

America was not without its deep scientific racistissues, however. Respected anatomists such as Milo Hell-man and Adolph Schultz found a relative primitivenessand apishness in the teeth and skeletons of blacks. Thephysical anthropologist Earnest Hooton of Harvardstruggled mightily to differentiate his science from thatof his German counterparts, but he was not very success-ful and clung to theories of genetically based criminalityand eugenics long after most American scientists hadabandoned them. In a study that continued for decades,medical practitioners in Tuskegee, Alabama, studiedblack men infected with syphilis and monitored thecourse of the disease without treating them. In much ofAmerica, where segregation was a fact of life, the inherentinferiority and lesser value of black lives (and NativeAmerican lives) was widely taken for granted.

THE REFORMATION OF PHYSICAL

ANTHROPOLOGY AND HUMAN

GENETICS

At the end of World War II, the sciences of physicalanthropology (as the study of human physical diversity)and human genetics lay largely in tatters, and both fieldshad to be reinvented. James Neel provided the inspira-tion for rebuilding human genetics into a science thatfocused on real genes rather than imaginary ones, onmedical rather than social pathologies, and on the avail-ability of voluntary services for the sake of the familyrather than coerced procedures for the good of the stateor race. As a founding ancestor, Charles Davenport wasquietly buried and Archibald Garrod, who had discov-ered the Mendelian basis of a metabolic disease in 1902,was installed in his place.

In physical anthropology, Sherwood Washburntook the lead in outlining a new physical anthropology

Dr. Eugen Fischer. Fischer, who considered that racial mixingwas a threat to European culture, became director of the KaiserWilhelm Institute of Anthropology and Genetics. ARCHIV ZUR

GESCHICHTE DER MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT, BERLIN

DAHLEM.



that focused on adaptation rather than classification,evolution rather than typology, real human breedingpopulations rather than abstract agglomerated races, andcommon themes of ancient humanity rather than divisivethemes of contemporary biological chauvinism. A newerscientific approach to human variation would see thehuman species, in the words of British physical anthro-pologist Joseph S. Weiner, ‘‘as constituting a widespreadnetwork of more-or-less interrelated, ecologically adaptedand functional entities.’’

The rooting of Nazi ideology in the science of raceattracted the attention of the fledgling United Nations,which commissioned an international panel of scholars todraft a formal statement summarizing the (nonthreaten-ing) science of race. The anthropologist Ashley Montaguemerged as its principal framer, and the UNESCO State-ment on Race was issued in 1950. In twenty-one para-graphs, this statement articulated a view of race in whichthe cultural forces shaping a human being were far stron-ger than any biological differences. Thus, ‘‘each grouparbitrarily tends to misinterpret the variability which

occurs as a fundamental difference which separates thatgroup from all others,’’ and ‘‘so far as temperament isconcerned, there is . . . evidence that whatever group dif-ferences of the kind there might be are greatly over-ridden by the individual differences, and by the differ-ences springing from environmental factors.’’ Further,‘‘for all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much abiological phenomenon as a social myth. . . . Lastly, bio-logical studies lend support to the ethic of universalbrotherhood; for man is born with drives toward co-operation, and unless these drives are satisfied, men andnations alike fall ill.’’

This language proved too radical for the senior gen-eration of racial scholars, however, and they askedUNESCO to have the document re-drafted. UNESCOcapitulated to the pressure, and produced another State-ment on Race in 1951. This second statement focusedprincipally on genetics and weakened many of the moreforceful assertions of the first. Among the complaintsforcing this change was one submitted by the aged formerNazi, Eugen Fischer.

The scientific turmoil at UNESCO, however, wasperipheral to racial issues in America. To some extent thekey decisions in the civil rights movement of the 1950s,such as Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), drewinspiration from a generation of Boasian anthropologicalthought. Ultimately, issues of relative natural endow-ments and of the pattern and distribution of humanbiological differences were deemed to be red herrings;the heart of the matter was the guarantee of constitution-ally based freedoms to all parts of American society.

THE RADICAL CRITIQUE

OF EGALITARIANISM (II)

There was an inevitable backlash to the liberalization ofracial thought in the post-Nazi era. As the cold waremerged, a dark secret emerged with it. Back in the1930s, before America and Germany had gone to war,many Americans held sympathy for Nazi racial views.After all, there was a great deal of continuity betweenGerman racial science and its American counterpart. Theprincipal enemies of the Nazis in those days were not theAmericans, but the Communists, so many young intel-lectuals set against Nazi racism naturally tended to grav-itate to those who were the strongest opponents of theNazis—that is, to the Communists. By the 1950s theNazis had been officially routed, and America’s newenemies were now the Communists, and consequentlymany middle-aged intellectuals who had worked for ega-litarian ideals in their youth were now saddled with anembarrassing Communist past.

In 1943 the USO (United Service Organizations) hadcommissioned a pamphlet by anthropologists to explain

Ota Benga in the Bronx Zoo, 1906. Ota Benga, a Congolesepygmy, was put on display at the Bronx Zoo after first coming tothe United States to be featured in the anthropology exhibits atthe St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. ªWILDLIFE CONSERVATION

SOCIETY.



race to GIs, and to show them what they were ostensiblyfighting for. It was written by two Boasians at ColumbiaUniversity, Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, and wascalled ‘‘The Races of Man.’’ After extensive distribution ofthe pamphlet, a group of southern Congressmen, led byRepresentative Andrew J. May of Kentucky, had it with-drawn and declared subversive for its strongly egalitarianmessage. A few years later, after Benedict had died, Welt-fish was summoned to testify about her Communist pastby the House Un-American Activities Committee, afterwhich she was summarily fired by Columbia University. Asimilar fate befell Ashley Montagu, the principal author ofthe original UNESCO Statement on Race, who was firedfrom his position at Rutgers University.

There were also scientists who opposed school integra-tion and the overall goals of the civil rights movement,believing that their positions were validated scientifically.By the early 1960s, however, this group had shrunk to asmall, if shrill, minority. Back in 1937, a textile magnatenamedWickliffe Draper had set up a philanthropic endow-ment to support the scientific study of human differences,with a nod towards proving the superiority of the whiterace. The first president of Draper’s Pioneer Fund was theeugenicist Harry Laughlin. By the early 1960s, the PioneerFund was supporting psychometric studies purporting todemonstrate the lack of intelligence of blacks. Draperhelped underwrite the formation of a journal, theMankindQuarterly, which began publication in 1960 as an outlet forunrepentant racists who felt left out of the liberalizedacademic mainstream.

The journal’s editor was an obscure Scottish noble-man, Robert Gayre, and his associate editors were a psy-chologist named Henry Garrett and a geneticist namedRuggles Gates. Garrett had testified against school integra-tion and had become convinced that the civil rights move-ment was the result of a conspiracy of Jews, communists,and anthropologists, all drawing inspiration from FranzBoas. Gates was trained as a botanical geneticist, andbecause plants commonly profligate outside the acceptedtaxonomic boundaries of their species, he rejected the inter-breeding criterion as evidence of human unity and becamethe last academic advocate of species status for human races.His bookHuman Ancestry (1948) came with a foreword byhis friend Earnest Hooton, who politely disavowed all theideas that followed.

TheMankind Quarterly, edited by Gayre, Garrett, andGates, caused a sensation with its first issue. The physicalanthropologists Geoffrey Harrison, Juan Comas, and San-tiago Genoves angrily denounced it in the mainstreamscientific literature. An eastern European anthropologistresigned from Mankind Quarterly’s editorial board upondiscovering its ideological stance; as a Dachau survivor hefound the response unsatisfactory and condescending, and

therefore criticized the journal, only to be sued by Gayreand Garrett for associating them with Nazi ideologies.

Other prominent segregationists worked to promote ascientific case for their cause. In 1962, Wesley CritzGeorge, an anatomist from the University of North Caro-lina, authored a study commissioned by the governor ofAlabama, called ‘‘The Biology of the Race Problem,’’ osten-sibly demonstrating the inferiority of black intelligence.The work was assiduously promoted by a propagandist,businessman (founder of Delta Airlines), and sometimehistorian named Carleton Putnam, whose own segregation-ist book, Race and Reason (1961) echoed Garrett’s ideasabout the insidious egalitarian cabal of Jews, communists,and anthropologists.

Putnam’s work was roundly condemned by theAmerican Anthropological Association at its 1961 meet-ing. The leading evolutionary geneticist of the era, Theo-dosius Dobzhansky, also weighed in harshly. Dobzhanskywas in an ideal position to criticize the work, for he wasnot Jewish, not an anthropologist, and an emigre fromthe Soviet regime. Nevertheless, Putnam and the segre-gationists had a valuable ally within the anthropologicalcommunity—Putnam’s cousin, the University of Penn-sylvania anthropologist Carleton Coon, who was also thesitting president of the American Association of PhysicalAnthropologists.

Coon’s own book, The Origin of Races (1962), wasbeing cited by the segregationists even before publication.It purported to demonstrate that Africans had evolvedfrom Homo erectus into Homo sapiens 200,000 years afterEuropeans had, which explained their innate backward-ness. The scholarly reviews were mixed, with varyingdegrees of deference paid to Coon’s stature in the schol-arly community, much querying about the possibility ofseparate races evolving in parallel across a species boun-dary, and much private speculation about Coon’s polit-ical allegiances and motives. Coon maintained a publicposture of being apolitical, but he was privately assistingthe segregationists.

At the end of the decade, a major beneficiary of thePioneer Fund, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, pub-lished an article in the Harvard Educational Review thatrhetorically asked, ‘‘How much can we boost IQ andscholastic achievement?’’ and answered, predictably, notvery much at all. Jensen and his British counterparts, CyrilBurt and Hans Eysenck, were the most prominent remain-ing proponents of the view that intelligence was principallyinnate and unalterable. Burt’s studies of identical twinsseparated at birth and subsequently reunited seemed tosupport these ideas, but by the late 1970s it had becomeclear that Burt was, to put it mildly, an eccentric scientistwhose twins and collaborators were largely products of hisimagination. Jensen’s and Eysenck’s arguments relied



heavily on their misinterpretation of a statistic from gene-tics called ‘‘heritability.’’ Prominent geneticists (such asRichard Lewontin and Luca Cavalli-Sforza) and psycholo-gists (such as Steven Rose and Leon Kamin) rose to showthe flaws in their reasoning.

Around 1970, Jensen was joined in his crusade byWilliam Shockley, a Stanford University Nobel laureatein physics who parlayed the invention of the transistorinto a bully pulpit for his ideas on the inferiority ofblacks and the merits of the discarded ideas of eugenics.Shockley also believed that women should have anopportunity to be fertilized by the highest-quality spermavailable, and, along with a California tycoon and vision-ary named Robert Graham, he started a Nobel-laureatesperm bank. Unfortunately for them, most Nobel lau-reates were smart enough not to want anything to dowith Shockley or his ideas, and the sperm bank neverproduced a Nobel baby (Plotz 2005).

While the present discussion has focused on Euro-American scientific racism, the ideas were also influentialto various degrees elsewhere, and the place where theyremained in force the longest as formal state policy was inthe former British colony of South Africa. Colonial powersthere took pains to manipulate the archaeological record,permitting them to deny the attribution of architecture andmetallurgy to the ancestors of the local indigenous people.Much scholarly literature in South Africa prior to WorldWar II employed a crude racialized ideology. After WorldWar II, however, with the passage of the laws collectivelyknown as ‘‘apartheid,’’ the South African government cameto use more anthropologically sophisticated ideas aboutcultural diversity to rationalize its policies for moving dis-possessed blacks to reservations, or homelands. The polit-ical transition in the 1990s fostered public reflection on therelationship between European science and anti-Africanracism. Some acknowledgment of the Africans’ earlyencounters with science was made when the French agreed,in 2002, to repatriate the remains of Sarah Baartman, aKhoe woman who had toured Europe on display and beendissected upon her death by the greatest anatomists of theage, with her remains kept in theMusee de l’Homme in Parisfor two centuries. Instrumental in the negotiations was thephysical anthropologist Phillip Tobias, who had foughtagainst apartheid and its science. Ironically, the apartheidgovernment had also opposed evolution, which has nowbeen embraced by the new government.

SCIENTIFIC RACISM SINCE

THE 1970s

One of the ironies about the controversy surrounding thepublication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), bythe Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson, was that itcame with no overt political agenda. Its arguments came

from theoretical ecology, its data were from animalbehavior, and it said nothing about race, except to raisethe possibility that racism (or xenophobia, a Davenport-like neologism meaning ‘‘fear of strangers’’) might beinnate. It made rash generalizations about human natureand presented an overly biologized view of human behav-ior. Observers were justifiably outraged when a protesterpoured water on Wilson during a scientific meeting, butprobably more outrageous was Wilson’s own naivete innot realizing that scientific pronouncements abouthuman behavior are invariably politicized.

Two decades later, this became evident once again,when the Harvard hereditarian psychologist RichardHerrnstein collaborated with conservative political theo-rist Charles Murray on The Bell Curve. This work made acase against social programs directed at the poor, on thegrounds that the poor were irremediably stupid, asattested by their low IQs, which the authors claimedare genetically fixed. The Bell Curve reiterated ArthurJensen’s arguments (and errors) of the preceding gener-ation, and it cited not only the work of several PioneerFund beneficiaries, but several articles published in theMankind Quarterly as well, hardly a mainstream or rep-utable source. Conservative political activists quickly rec-ognized the value of the book in invoking nature tojustify social inequality, just as William Graham Sumnerhad done a century earlier.

Another quirk of The Bell Curve was its citations of thework of a Pioneer Fund beneficiary, the Canadian psychol-ogist PhilippeRushton. In addition, a pre-emptive appendixdefended Rushton’s work as ‘‘not that of a crackpot or abigot’’ and ‘‘plainly science.’’ Rushton envisions a racialspectrum in which natural selection has produced innatelylarge-brained, law-abiding, civilized, and under-sexualizedAsians; innately small-brained, criminalistic, primitive, andlicentious Africans; and Europeans as a happy medium.TheBell Curve’smild characterization of these bizarre ideas is notsimply an understatement, but is more likely just a simplefalsehood (Graves 2002; Lieberman 2001). Rushton had hiswork reprinted in a digested form and sent to the member-ship lists of the American Anthropological Association, theAmerican Sociological Association, and other academicorganizations, with the financial assistance of the PioneerFund, of which he was subsequently made president.

The Bell Curve came as a shock to scholars of humandiversity, who thought they had seen the last of theseideas back in the 1960s. It drove home forcefully thelesson that, because the political stakes are high, thescientific study of human diversity requires constant vig-ilance to prevent its corruption by those who would usescience to make people’s lives more miserable (whichwould seem to provide an argument against science gen-erally, if that is indeed its result). Consequently, the



American Anthropological Association and the AmericanAssociation of Physical Anthropologists adopted publicposition statements on race, updating the old UNESCOstatements.

At century’s end, another version of scientific racismbriefly surfaced again. Where the body and mind arecommonly juxtaposed against one another, and theminds of whites are taken to be superior to those ofblacks, a corollary might be that the bodies of blacksare superior to those of whites. Buffon had respondedin the eighteenth century to the popular rumor thatblacks were considered more physically hale than whites,and thus more fit for manual labor, while the spectacularsuccess of Jack Johnson in boxing and Jesse Owens intrack in the twentieth century suggested an innate phys-ical superiority of ‘‘the black athlete’’—if one took themnot as exceptional, gifted, and well-trained individuals,but as gross avatars or symbols. Paradoxically, as anato-mists studied Jesse Owens’ legs looking for marks of

black superiority, they found none; indeed, they foundhis feet to be rather ‘‘white’’ (Hoberman 1997).

The gradual entry of blacks into American professio-nal sports, and the opening up of athletics as a professionalvenue, produced a new crop of excellent black athletes anda new wave of scientific racism to account for their success.The prominence of black football players was accompa-nied by the underlying sentiment that they could never-theless not succeed at a ‘‘thinking’’ position such asquarterback. The African-American quarterback DougWilliams subsequently led the Washington Redskins tothe National Football League championship in the 1988Super Bowl. The prominence of black baseball playersraised the question of their absence from the managerialranks in 1987, to which Al Campanis, an executive for theLos Angeles Dodgers, casually responded that perhapsblacks lacked the intellectual abilities for managing (headded that black swimmers also lacked the necessarybuoyancy for elite status in that sport). In 1975, Frank

Saartjie Baartman. Officials stand next to a plaster cast of Saartjie Baartman during a ceremony to mark the return of Baartman’sremains to South Africa in 2002. AP IMAGES.



Robinson had become the first black manager in themajor leagues, and in 1992 and 1993 Cito Gaston wouldlead the Toronto Blue Jays to consecutive World Seriesbaseball championships.

Nevertheless, the prominence of blacks in basketball inthe 1990s renewed pseudo-scientific suspicions that theywere innately endowed, as a group, with athletic prowess.These views were summarized by a journalist namedJon Entine, whose book Taboo: Why Blacks DominateSports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk about It was publishedin 2000. Entine’s answer to black ‘‘domination’’ was racialgenetic superiority, and his explanation of the ‘‘fear’’ was anupdated version of the old anthropological-Jewish-communist conspiracy. Like all the previous variations onthe theme of genetically embedded racial hierarchies, thisone was also overtaken by social and historical events—inthis case, the collapse of the United States Olympic basket-ball team in 2004 and the emergence of basketball starsfrom other parts of the world.

SEE ALSO Boas, Franz; Chamberlain, Houston Stewart;Eugenics, History of; Exploitation; Galton, Francis;Genocide; Great Chain of Being; Holocaust; IQ andTesting; Jensen, Arthur; Morton, Samuel George;Racial Hierarchy; Slavery, Racial.

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Jonathan Marks

SCOTTSBORO BOYSThe Scottsboro Boys case remains one of the mostfamous examples of racial injustice in the U.S. Southduring the Jim Crow era. What began with a lie toldby two young white women in Alabama to avoid accu-

sations of prostitution, ballooned into perhaps the mostinfamous legal case involving race in the 1930s, garneringnot only national, but also international attention, andeven the participation of the U.S. Communist Party.While the accusations landed nine black youths unfairlyin prison for years (much of the time under death sen-tences), the case would commence a slow improvementfor African Americans caught up in the southern judicialsystem, especially for black men accused of the ultimatecrime against the repressive racial order of the Jim CrowSouth—the rape of a white woman.

The case of the Scottsboro Boys began on March 25,1931. It was near the height of the Great Depression and anestimated 200,000 Americans were living then as virtualvagabonds on the nation’s railroads, hopping freight carsfrom place to place in a desperate search for work. That day,a group ofwhite rail-riders walked into Stevenson, Alabama,claiming some black men had assaulted and thrown themoff a Memphis-bound freight train. Authorities promptlystopped the train and pulled off nine young black men. Theassault charges they faced quickly grew much more seriouswhen two female rail-riders, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price,accused the black youths of raping them.

The rape of a white woman by a black man was themost serious offense imaginable under Jim Crow. Indeed,thousands of black men were lynched (i.e., extra-legallyexecuted) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-tury in the U.S. South after having been accused ofraping a white woman. Even worse, for a white womanto point the finger at a black man for rape was tanta-mount to conviction in the eyes of many white South-erners, and the offense considered so grave that in manylocalities the alleged perpetrator faced a mob-organizedexecution (usually by hanging) because an outraged whitepopulace could not wait for justice through normal legalchannels, where blacks accused of lesser offenses againstJim Crow usually were dealt with. Virtually all whiteSoutherners in the 1930s, to varying degrees, saw AfricanAmericans as barely civilized and believed that black mensecretly lusted after white women. They were quite readyto believe any accusation of rape leveled by a whitewoman against a black man and to deal with suchoffenders as uncivilized brutes who needed to be doneaway with quickly for the good of society.

Hence, when the Scottsboro Boys (as the nine youngmen became known)—OlenMontgomery, Clarence Norris,Haywood Patterson, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson,Charlie Weems, Eugene Williams, and brothers Andrewand Leroy (Roy) Wright—were taken to Scottsboro, theseat of Jackson County, in far northeastern Alabama, forincarceration and trial, many white Southerners congratu-lated themselves for what they saw as a moderate, evenenlightened response to the gravest of crimes. (Although

Scottsboro Boys


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