Amidst Taylor’s post-war return to Australia, the question of what happens to racial thinking after the 1945 slides into focus. Several historians such as Nancy Stepan argued racial science existed between 1850 and 1950, and Elazar Barkan argues the Second World War killed off the credibility of race science in Europe and the United States.84 The moral
imperative towards anti-racism in the lead up to and aftermath of the anti-Nazi war put international pressure on American and South African segregationists. At the same time the White Australia Policy was increasingly put under internal and external pressure as Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds and Gwenda Tavan have shown, by governments of post-colonial Asian nations, and public thinkers such as Taylor who’s view that the Immigration
Restriction Act and the fantasy of maintaining whiteness were increasingly anachronistic had garnered increasing agreement, in contrast to the 1920s.85 As most historians of race in the
twentieth century agree, the UNESCO statements on race in 1951 and 1952, and the global dissemination of their message that biological ideas of race were no longer legitimate or useful, marked a watershed point in the decline of the acceptance of biological determinism.86
The career of Reginald Gates, a plant geneticist and physical anthropologist at Kings College London between 1919 and 1942, and the subject of an article by Schaffer, provides a framework through which to measure discursive shifts on racial thinking in Britain and United States between the 1920s and 1960s. Convinced of ideas of racial difference, polygenism and the degenerative impact of miscegenation throughout his long career,
84 Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the Two World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992)
85 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne: Scribe, 2005)
30
Schaffer has charted Gates descent from being a mainstream racial scientist in the 1920s, to his expulsion from Howard University in the United States in 1948 for his racist views, and his increasing inability to get his race crossing research published in mainstream scientific journals.87
However, one of Gavin Schaffer’s central arguments in ‘Scientific’ Racism Again?’
(2007)is that earth shattering issues such as the Holocaust, Nazi eugenics and it’s
condemnation has distracted attention from what Kushner and others have highlighted as an incomplete move away from racial thinking, leading to an, ‘erroneous historical
understanding of the decline of race in British scientific and social discourse’. Just because people, politicians, and intellectuals in Britain denounced colonialism, segregation and racism in relation to the Nazis does not mean that scientific belief in race vanished during the interwar and war period.88 Schaffer highlighted the uneasiness of organisations such as the
British Eugenics society in the wake of mass Caribbean and South Asian immigration into Britain in the 1950s, with anxieties about miscegenation persisting behind the scenes.
At the same time William Tucker mounted a ground breaking exploration of the survival of scientific racism in the United States. In The Funding of Scientific Racism, Tucker examines Wycliffe Draper, a wealthy segregationist who’s Pioneer Fund, ostensibly an inoffensive think tank, funded pro-segregation scientific experts, a collection of scientific racists producing anti-miscegenationist literature, and campaigns to fight against the
American civil rights movement.89 Both Draper and the Eugenics Society in Britain believed
in the inferiority of blacks, and Reginald Gates was in contact with both organisations, and
87 Gavin Schaffer (2007). “‘Scientific’ Racism Again?”: Reginald Gates, the Mankind Quarterly and the
Question of “Race” in Science after the Second World War, Journal of American Studies, 41, pp 253-278
88 Ibid, see also, Tony Kushner, H. J. Fleure: a paradigm for inter-war race thinking in Britain, Patterns of Prejudice, 2008, 42:2, 151-166
89 William Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana:
31
was additionally one of the founders of the scientific racist Mankind Quarterly journal along with Robert Gayre and Henry Garrett in 1960.90
But there is a gap in scholarship on Gates post-war career. Schaffer has noted Gates associations with Anglo-American scientific racists, but this overlooks the fact that Gates was also heavily active in other circles. He gained funding and advice from numerous other
individuals such as the Wenner Gren foundation and Luigi Gedda, and he was constantly travelling during the 1950s from his base as a fellow at the Peabody Museum in
Massachusetts, conducting race crossing research in Cuba, Mexico, South Africa, India, but crucially also Japan and Australia, where he investigated East Asian interracial marriage and conducted anthropometric measurements.91
The work of Schaffer and Tucker on the survival and reinvention of post-war North Atlantic scientific racism gives us a springboard to explore what happened and what
encounters occurred when Reginald Gates, took his ideas and motives South and East throughout the 1950s. Exploring the research Gates conducted in the global south, on Asian and aboriginal intermarriage in Japan and Australia, utilising previously unused archival material, gives us a chance to revisit and complicate the idea that race drops out of history after World War Two. By juxtaposing his field work in the pacific with Taylor’s work in the 1920s, we can get a more nuanced history of racial thinking over a broad sweep of the
twentieth century.
As Tom Lawson argues in his work on the memorialisation of the holocaust in Australia, and the decimation and intermarriage of the aboriginal population of British governed Tasmania, British and Australian histories of race and genocide are very much
90 Gavin Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society, 1930-62, (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 91 On Luigi Gedda, see, Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man : Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy. (Nouvelle édition [en ligne]. Budapest : Central European University Press, 2011),
32
interlinked, and an Anglo-Australian framework can give us a window into both a more joined up and, ‘darker history’ of the British World.92