OBLIGACIONES DEL CONTRATISTA

The leaders of the eugenics movement understood the implications of Boas’s views and the threat they posed to the eugenics agenda. They ener- getically went after him. In fact, Madison Grant had a long- standing “cold war” with Boas. As we have seen, Grant was a social Darwinist and anti- Semitic. He believed in the superiority of the Aryans and emphasized the dangers to civilization of the dilution of Aryan blood. Grant also idolized Ernst Haeckel, who was a staunch follower of Gobineau. Boas, on the other hand, was mentored by Rudolf Virchow, Haeckel’s main nemesis in Germany (Weindling 1989; Marks 2012). But Grant did not use a scien- tifi c argument to criticize Boas’s fi ndings that the most “immutable” of he- reditary traits, skull shape and cephalic index, were susceptible to environ- mental infl uence, fi ndings that challenged the basis of eugenics theory.

Early German “anthropologists,” like Virchow, were attempting to estab- lish the idea that all people were cognitively comparable, to provide the validity of the concept of the psychic unity of mankind. Early German “Darwinists,” like Haeckel, dehumanized non- Western Eu ro pe ans in order to connect them more closely to the apes. Haeckel’s form of Darwinism was at odds with Virchow’s anthropology and ethnology, and it under- mined the assumptions of the psychic unity view of mankind that would make Virchow’s anthropology possible (Marks 2010a, 2012). Haeckel and, later, Nazi biologists actually emphasized the continuity of par tic u lar living and fossil apes with modern human “races” in their polygenic theories of human variation.

For example, around 1918, as a joke, Francois de Loys, a Swiss geolo- gist and explorer working in Venezuela, took a picture of a recently de- ceased pet spider monkey that was propped up and posed to look like a

“primitive ape.” Around 1929, in a series of scientifi c and pop u lar papers, George Montandon, a Swiss/French physician, anthropologist, ethnolo- gist, and Nazi sympathizer, perpetuated this “joke,” giving the dead pet monkey the scientifi c name Ameranthropoides loysi and claiming that it verifi ed the polygenic scheme of Haeckel and the Nazis in which each of the four presumed races of humans had in de pen dent evolutionary histo- ries. In this scheme, “whites” were derived from chimpanzees, black Afri- cans from gorillas, and Asians from orangutans. Montandon claimed that with the discovery of A. loysi, the “missing link” between Native Ameri- cans and the apes was identifi ed, thus providing further evidence and sup- port for this polygenic theory from the sixteenth century that had more recently been regurgitated by the Nazis (Urbani and Viloria 2008).

Grant’s vs. Boas’s Anthropology

The rivalry between Boas and Grant epitomizes the major differences in racial theory during the early 1900s. It also gives us an outline of the his- tory of anthropology at that time, especially physical anthropology. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the wake of the demise of Lamarck- ism and of the idea that environment could infl uence behavior, the follow- ers of eugenics claimed victory. Grant (1916, 14), sounding very much like the authors of the past (and of the more recent tome The Bell Curve [Herrnstein and Murray 1994]), claimed, for example: “It has taken us fi fty years to learn that speaking En glish, wearing good clothes, and going to school and to church, does not transform a negro into a white man.” When Boas’s Changes in Bodily Form appeared, Grant countered that it was motivated by immigrant Jews like Boas who were attempting to over- emphasize the power of environmental infl uences in order to downplay the reality of their inferior heredity. In Passing of the Great Race (1916), Grant emphasized the inferiority of blacks and Jews and the dangers of miscegenation between inferior races and Nordics.

It is interesting to note that Boas and Grant shared a number of charac- teristics. They both believed in the power of science to improve human- kind. They both lived in New York City and were associated with the American Museum of Natural History. They both loved the Pacifi c North- west. For Boas this was the site of most of his fi eldwork on indigenous peoples, and for Grant it was the site where he hunted indigenous big game. However, Grant was born into a very rich, aristocratic American family, whereas Boas, although he came from an upper- middle- class German

Physical Anthropology in the Early Twentieth Century 167

family, was an immigrant Jew. Spiro (2009, 278– 279) characterizes the differences in the views of the two men:

Boas preached with increasing vigor and confi dence against racial preju- dice, and consciously and actively worked to thwart the dangerous infl u- ence of Grant (“that charlatan”) and his disciples. . . . He denied that there was any correlation between physical characteristics of a population and its mental or moral traits. The latter, he asserted, were created by the “cul- ture” in which the individual was raised, not by his or her germ plasm. [He] opposed every facet of Grant’s eugenic program. . . . [To Grant it was clear] that the root of Boas’ hostility lay in the fact that he was a Jew . . . and that Boas “naturally does not take stock in my version of anthropology which relegates him and his race to the inferior position that they have occupied throughout recorded history.”

The two men intellectually battled each other throughout their lives (Grant died in 1937 and Boas in 1942). In his excellent book Defending

the Master Race, Spiro does an exceptional job of tracing this “cold war”

between Boas and Grant. Boas began his lifelong attack against eugenics in earnest with his two 1911 volumes. The earliest and most direct attack was in Changes in Bodily Form. Grant countered this volume with a num- ber of nasty letters to infl uential editors and politicians explaining that Boas’s conclusions were absurd and absolutely at variance with scientifi c anthropology. He wrote to President William Howard Taft explaining that because of the im mense antiquity of the races, it was not possible that their physical characteristics could change in one generation due to environmen- tal factors. To a congressman he accounted for Boas’s “silly” claims by re- minding him that “Dr. Boas, himself a Jew, in this matter represents a large body of Jewish immigrants, who resent the suggestion that they do not belong to the white race” (quoted in Spiro 2009, 199).

Grant believed that even if Boas’s anthropometric mea sure ments were correct, all they proved was evidence of immoral immigrant mothers hav- ing illicit affairs with American- born men. He wrote to one clergyman that Jews “like rats, have formed a race able to survive the gutter conditions which quickly destroy higher types” (quoted in Spiro 2009, 299) and that Boas’s work was misleading and should be ignored.

Later in 1911, The Mind of Primitive Man appeared. As stated above, in this book, Boas laid out his claims that mental aptitude was not deter- mined by heredity, that any race could achieve civilization given the proper

environmental conditions, that there was more variation within races than between them, and that environment accounted for most of the dif- ferences that did exist between races. He also introduced the anthropo- logical concept of culture. This was Boas’s most pop u lar and widely read book; one of his students later referred to it as “a Magna Carta of race equality” (Spier 1959, 147). In 1933, it was placed on the Nazi’s list of books to be burned. Grant realized the danger of this volume to eugenics and, in a 1912 letter to Osborn, he wrote that somebody must publish something “to counteract the evil effects of Boas propaganda” (quoted in Spiro 2009, 300).

That somebody turned out to be Grant himself. Four years later, in 1916, Grant published The Passing of the Great Race. Although, this book reiter- ated polygenecists’ history and summarized eugenicists’ views of the time, it was also certainly stimulated by Grant’s rage over and fear of Boas’s antiracist, anti- eugenics writings. Davenport and Laughlin (1917, 10– 11) reported in EN that Passing would fi nally discredit and silence “certain anthropologists, like Boas,” who attempted to deny the inherited, fi xed mental differences between the races. But Boas was not silenced. He fol- lowed Grant’s book with anti- polygenic articles and reviews of the Pass-

ing in Scientifi c Monthly (1916) and New Republic (1917). In the fi rst he

wrote that most human personality traits, such as criminality and alcohol- ism, were determined by environment and not heredity and that instead of being a “panacea that will cure human ills,” eugenics was “a dangerous sword.” In the New Republic review, he criticized the book as being naïve, dogmatic, and dangerous. Grant responded in his fourth edition of Pass-

ing that this kind of bitter opposition to his book was expected by those

of inferior races who refused to believe that their nature was determined by “fi xed inherited qualities . . . which cannot be obliterated or greatly modifi ed by a change of environments” (quoted in Spiro 2009, 300).

Grant’s book was im mensely pop u lar among academics, politicians, pol- icy makers, and the public. It essentially defi ned, pop u lar ized, and adver- tised the views of much of America about racism and eugenics. It was the conventional wisdom of the day. Passing was so pop u lar among academ- ics that Boas was a lone voice against eugenics, Madison Grant, and his colleagues and supporters.

Boas was not deterred. Although many of the leading scientists, includ- ing anthropologists, were eugenicists, either actively or passively, at that time, Boas continued to train students and to attract colleagues who were to become devoted to fi ghting American eugenics and, later, its logical

Physical Anthropology in the Early Twentieth Century 169

extension, Nazi racism. Boas began to amass a cadre of supporters who were well- trained scholars and who had compiled a massive amount of data that could be used to join the assault against eugenics and the fi fteenth- century views of polygenics. These included many anthropologists who earned their PhDs studying under Boas: A. L. Kroeber (PhD 1901), Robert Lowie (1908), Edward Sapir (1909), Alexander Goldenweiser (1910), Paul Radin (1911), Leslie Spier (1920), Ruth Benedict (1923), Melville Her- skovits (1923), Margaret Mead (1929), and Ashley Montagu (1937). As Spiro (2009, 302) notes, “By the early 1920s, the members of the fi rst gen- eration of Boas’s students were devising the intellectual weapons and amassing the ethnographic data they would need to combat the disciples of Grant.” Boas had a signifi cant infl uence on his students, as a teacher, a theo- rist, and as a person, especially with regard to his interest in races (Barkan 1992). Colleagues also were beginning to join Boas in his fi ght against eugenics, including a fellow Columbia University professor, psychologist Otto Klineberg. Physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička (1869– 1943) also supported Boas in a number of ways, mainly because of his personal ven- detta against Grant and not for shared scientifi c beliefs (see later in this chapter).

Thus, in the early de cades of the twentieth century, the 500- year- old de- bate between the polygenecists and the monogenecists still persisted, with only slight variations on the original themes. The adherents to polygenics still were obsessed with the classifi cation of races and the superiority of one race over others. Monogenecists were convinced that the environment (culture) played an important role in the development of complex human behaviors and that races were socially constructed myths. As Spiro (2009) points out, the former were generally the older generation of amateur physi- cal anthropologists who were mainly aristocratic WASPs with no academic affi liation or were associated with a museum. The new proponents of envi- ronment and culture were a younger generation of anthropologists who were professionally trained and held positions in academia. However, as at the beginning of this long- lasting debate, this was still somewhat of a religious battle between native and mainly wealthy Christian Protestants against Jews and other recent immigrants into the United States, who used education as a means to support themselves. After all, with the exception of Kroeber, Benedict, and Mead, all of the Boas students mentioned above were Jewish (Spiro 2009).

Many of these new professionals did most of their work in cultural rather than physical anthropology. I believe this was directly the result of

the foothold that eugenics had at that time on all of the biological sciences and especially on physical anthropology (as mentioned above, a similar split had occurred between Haeckel and Virchow earlier in Germany). The big four of eugenics, Davenport, Grant, Osborn, and Laughlin, all considered themselves to be doing real anthropology, following the tradi- tions of the earlier American Anthropological School of the Mortonites, in contrast to the culturally oriented, Boas- infl uenced group with ties to the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which had been established in 1902 (Spiro 2009). The eugenicists dominated this discipline in the early 1900s. It is in this context that they established the Galton Society in 1918, a racially oriented anthropological or ga ni za tion that they hoped would serve as a rival to the AAA. Eugenicists looked at cultural anthropology as unscientifi c and trivial. Osborn said of the Boasians in 1908 that “much anthropology is merely opinion, or the gossip of natives. It is many years from being a science” (quoted in Spiro 2009, 303).

To counter this approach, cultural anthropologists focused on profes- sionalizing anthropology, making it a true social science discipline in which practitioners were trained with a specifi c methodology and a unique para- digm. With this in mind, Boas began to train students in his type of anthro- pology. He and his followers then focused on turning the AAA into an or ga ni za tion of university-trained, professionally qualifi ed scholars. Be- fore this, the membership was composed mainly of wealthy, untrained hobbyists. Slowly Boas’s strategy began to pay off. In 1907, Boas became president of the AAA and his former PhD students soon also attained leadership positions in the association. By 1910, the AAA was a respected society of academic anthropologists and Boasians were in the majority. Graduate programs in anthropology were established at several universi- ties, and by 1912 twenty men had received doctorates in anthropology (Patterson 2001). By 1915, the association’s journal, American Anthro-

pologist (AA), was in the hands of Pliny Goddard (a relative of Henry

Goddard who was an ally of Boas’s [Zenderland 1998]) and Robert Lowie (Boas’s student and staunch supporter). Eugenics and biological determin- ism were replaced with the concept of culture within the pages of the journal, and the culture paradigm was becoming dominant within the profession, though, as we have seen, not yet in other scientifi c disciplines or among the public (Stocking 1968; Degler 1991; Spiro 2009). By 1928, an additional thirty- three men and nine women had been awarded PhD degrees in anthropology; fi fteen of these men and seven of the women had been supervised by Boas at Columbia (Patterson 2001; Barker 2010).

Physical Anthropology in the Early Twentieth Century 171

A. L. Kroeber (1876– 1960), who took up the fi ght against the eugeni- cists, further emphasized the importance of the concept of culture in un- derstanding human nature, behavior, and society. He expanded and fur- ther defi ned the concept. Writing mainly in AA, he noted the lack of understanding of the concept of culture among eugenicists and biolo- gists. In a letter to Boas he wrote: “Consequently, the sense always crops up in their minds that we are doing something vain and unscientifi c, and that if only they could have our job they could do our work for us much better” (quoted in Degler 1991, 83). This combination of a failure to un- derstand the concept of culture and the idea that biologists could do a better job than social scientists in understanding human behavior is still common today in some fi elds of biology. For example, E. O. Wilson (1998, 183– 185), the found er of sociobiology and evolutionary psychol- ogy, recently stated:

Advanced social theorists . . . are equally happy with folk psychology. As a rule they ignore the fi ndings of scientifi c psychology and biology. . . . In short, social scientists have paid little attention to the foundations of hu- man nature, and they have had almost no interest in its deep origins. . . . Believing it a virtue to declare that all cultures are equal but in different ways, Boas and other infl uential anthropologists nailed their fl ag of cul- tural relativism to the mast. . . . This scientifi c belief lent strength in the United States and other Western Societies to po liti cal multiculturalism. . . . It holds that ethnics, women, and homosexuals possess subcultures deserv- ing of equal standing with those of the “majority.” . . . So, no biology.

Wilson (1998, 188, 190, 193) continues, “Enough! . . . It is time to call a truce and forge an alliance. . . . If social scientists choose to select rigorous theory as their ultimate goal, as have the natural scientists . . . that means nothing less than aligning their explanations with those of the natural sciences. . . . To summarize . . . [behavior is guided] by innate operations in the sensory system and brain. They are rules of thumb that allow or- ganisms to fi nd rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environ- ment. They predispose individuals to view the world in a par tic u lar innate way and automatically make certain choices as opposed to others.”

The problem here is that Wilson does not seem to understand the pro- found infl uence that culture has on these so- called innate ways and auto- matic choices. In most cases, it is the par tic u lar history of the individual within his/her culture and only very loosely his ge ne tic background or any

fi xed action pattern (or instinct) that leads to a par tic u lar reaction to any stimulus. This misunderstanding leads Wilson and many sociobiologists into thinking that people generally react similarly to similar stimuli or at least that they should do so and that if they don’t, they are not acting naturally— not adhering to so- called human universals (see Brown 1991 and Gillette 2011, for example). These human universals are often de- fi ned by Western Eu ro pe an and American cultural values and mores. Thus, human universals become those that best fi t the culture of those that defi ne them. In this sense, culture defi nes biology rather than the other way around.

For example, one might say, as many sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists do, that humans are inherently violent, especially men (see Wrangham 1996). However, this observation tells us little about human nature and variation in human behavior. Variation in the expression of violence or peacefulness among and within different cultures and among individual men and women is enormous (Fry 2006, 2013; Pim 2010; Suss- man and Marshack 2010; Sussman and Cloninger 2011). Hom i cide sta- tistics vary greatly in New York, London, and Tokyo, for example, and are not related to innate biological or ge ne tic differences in the populations who live in those places. In order to explain this variation, we must under- stand cultural and subcultural as well as individual and family differences. Saying that humans are by nature homicidal is uninformative.

Kroeber (1916) turned Weismann’s debunking of Lamarckism on its head and used it to defend the concept of culture. He claimed that if ac-