The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  The census of 1880 had indicated a decline in the native white American birthrate. Since Walker firmly linked immigration to reproduction, he blamed native white Americans’ “decay of reproductive vigor…out of the loins…of our own people” on the pernicious influence of slovenly foreigners. True, he conceded, native white demographic stagnation did owe something to “luxurious habits,” “city life,” boardinghouse “habits unfavorable to increase of numbers,” and the Civil War’s toll on native white bodies. Succeeding racist and eugenicist thought would consistently echo the baleful effects of city life and war, both enemies of the health of “the race.”* But never mind, most trouble lay with the “monstrous total of five and a quarter millions” of recent foreign arrivals.12 They posed the threat of racial endangerment.

  Nativism and its cold-blooded, stock-breeding lexicon increased in volume, as during the 1890s Walker and others railed ever more stridently against the evils of immigration. “Degradation” joined “stock” as a leitmotif. In 1895 two articles entitled “The Restriction of Immigration” repeated “degradation” and “degraded” six times and “ignorant and brutalized peasantry” twice. “Loins” appeared often, too, euphemistically attached to both Anglo-Saxon and immigrant, as in the loins of “beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.” Phrases destined for greatness.

  LIKE SAM HOUSTON, Walker contrasted old and new immigrants, but his chronology betrayed slipperiness between good (“old” pre–Civil War German and Irish) and bad (“new” immigrants arriving later on). Yes, the immigration problem had first appeared in the 1850s with the “degraded peasantry” needed to build the railroads and canals. Look, he warned, how the influx had reduced native whites’ fertility. Clearly native-born Americans had begun to “shrink” from competition with early Irish. Now it was happening all over again, only somehow the “old” Irish immigrants were becoming Americans and, inexorably, failing demographically, too.*

  Without much explanation, Walker admitted the Irish immigrants into the American fold as northern Europeans. With Americanization came demographic failure, so that the Irish as Americans were, in their turn, “shrinking” from competition with Italians and no longer reproducing mightily. But this time the Americanization process had come to a halt. Walker thought the new immigrants, unlike the old ones, had to remain inherently repulsive.13 In no way could these new hordes evolve like northern Europeans; they would inevitably “degrade” American citizenship.

  For Walker, cheap, easy transatlantic transportation was partly to blame for lowering the caliber of immigrants. In the old days, only the brave and enterprising ventured across the seas. But now “Hungarians, Bohemians, Poles, south Italians, and Russian Jews,” from “every foul and stagnant pool of population of Europe,” could reach the United States with ease. These “vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions,” lacked all “the inherited instincts and tendencies” of native (white) Americans. Walker did not hold back: “Their [the new immigrants’] habits of life, again, are of the most revolting kind.”

  Moreover, and most significantly for Walker, these “masses of alien population” created problems spanning politics, the economy, and demography: laboring for low wages, they offered a harvest of ignorant workers ripe for demagogues. Lured into labor unions, they could easily be “duped” into going on strike. Such immigrant radicalism threatened the very health of American democracy.

  The themes trumpeted by Walker and seconded by Lodge—New England superiority, reproductive competition, and labor radicalism—expressed a deeply conservative ideology that perverted Darwinian natural selection and feared worker autonomy. These notions would enjoy great longevity in the new language of truth: racial science. Supposedly rigorous and attentive to natural laws, racial science supplied the theory and praxis of difference among Europeans (as well as the descendants of Africans) in the United States. No longer stigmatized as inherently different, Irish and Germans entered a second enlargement of American whiteness to become constituent parts of the American. For now there were newcomers to toil at hard labor and be stigmatized as racially inferior.

  15

  WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY AND THE RACES OF EUROPE

  Francis Amasa Walker’s famous cliché “beaten men from beaten races” played well in white race science, but Walker was hardly out there alone crying in the wilderness. Scores of others—men like the author and lecturer John Fiske and scholars from high academia, like the era’s leading sociologist, Edward A. Ross, and the pioneering political scientist Francis Giddings of Columbia—joined Walker in pushing northern European racial superiority over new immigrant masses. At the other end of the spectrum, the American Federation of Labor also drew the line against the new immigrants as “beaten men of beaten races.”1 But Walker, who was to die in 1897, stood highest in influence, practically dictating how Americans would rank white peoples for decades, a period that introduced William Z. Ripley.

  Originally from Medford, Massachusetts, William Z. Ripley (1867–1941), like Walker and Lodge, advertised his New England ancestry: his middle name, Zebina, he said, honored five generations of Plymouth ancestors.* Ripley contrasted “our original Anglo-Saxon ancestry in America” with that of “the motley throngs now pouring in upon us,” and, like Walker, he attended to his manly and nattily dressed appearance.2 (See figure 15.1, William Z. Ripley.) With Ripley it was smart minds in handsome bodies all over again—and, one might add, education and connections.

  After gaining a bachelor’s degree in engineering from MIT, Ripley took a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia, writing a dissertation on the economy of colonial Virginia. After two years’ lecturing at MIT and Columbia, Ripley found himself at somewhat loose ends in 1895. He needed a better-paying job, and an aging Francis Walker needed a scientific classification of American immigrants. Walker chose Ripley, his favorite student, and Ripley seized this opportunity to codify the gaggle of immigrants.3*

  Ripley later said that The Races of Europe took nineteen months of work. To a scholar these days that seems not very long. Working with his suffragist wife, Ida S. Davis, and librarians at the Boston Public Library, Ripley synthesized the writings of hundreds of anthropologists.4† John Beddoe in England and Joseph Deniker and Georges Vacher de Lapouge in France proved especially helpful. European anthropologists had been compulsively measuring their populations for decades, offering Ripley tens of thousands of detailed measurements, charts, maps, and photographs. Ripley used them all. Such exhaustive scholarship, together with the “Ph.D.” attached to Ripley’s Anglo-Saxon name on the title page, endowed The Races of Europe with a glowing scientific aura.

  Ripley’s work first reached the public as a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1896. Earlier in the century the Lowell Institute had offered its podium to likely speakers on race such as George Gliddon (Josiah Nott’s collaborator) and Louis Agassiz (soon to join the Harvard faculty). The New York publisher Appleton issued the lectures serially in Popular Science Monthly and then published a generously illustrated book in 1899.*

  Fig. 15.1. William Z. Ripley, professor of economics, Harvard University, ca. 1920.

  Weighing in at 624 pages of text, 222 portraits, 86 maps, tables, and graphs, and a bibliographical supplement of more than two thousand sources in several languages, the sheer heft of The Races of Europe intimidated and entranced readers, blinding most of them to its incoherence. Ripley himself may have been blinded by the magnitude of his task, aiming as he did to reconcile a welter of conflicting racial classifications that could not be reconciled. (See figure 15.2, Ripley’s “European Racial Types.”) In this table Ripley presents “traits” he considered important—head shape, pigmentation, and height—along with the multiple taxonomies posited by various scholars.

  One glaring taxonomic dilemma appears in the inclusion of “Celtic,” in parentheses, beneath “Alpine.” Anthropologists had long struggled to sort out the relatio
nship between ancient and modern Celts, between the Celtic regions of Europe such as Ireland and Brittany, and between ancient and modern Celtic languages such as Gaelic. Was France a Celtic nation? Yes and no. French Republicans embraced their nation’s revolutionary heritage, identifying with such glorious ancient Celtic heroes as Vercingetorix, the tragic protagonist of Caesar’s Gallic War.5 Royalists like Alexis de Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont, in contrast, proudly claimed descent from Germanic conquerors. Beaumont, we remember, gave his French protagonist in Marie the Frankish name Ludovic rather than the more familiar French Louis.

  Ripley’s parenthesis does not solve the Celtic problem, and he stoops to insert Georges Vacher de Lapouge (a cranky, reactionary librarian at a provincial French university whom we will encounter again later) into the list of authorities. Ripley thereby conferred a measure of scientific recognition, although Lapouge’s fanatic Aryan/Teutonic chauvinism destroyed his standing in France. Questionable scholarship aside, Ripley had set out to transcend “the current mouthings” of the racist lunatic fringe, and his thoroughness inspired confidence for years. Ordinary readers judged his book scientific, and anthropologists hailed his methodology.

  Fig. 15.2. “European Racial Types,” in William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (1899).

  NOTHING EVER got truly settled in race science, but Ripley came close. How many European races were there? Ripley says three: Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. What criteria to use? Following accepted anthropological science, Ripley chooses the cephalic index (the shape of the head; breadth divided by length times 100), “one of the best available tests of race known.”6 Add to that information about height and pigmentation, and he has nailed each of the three white races:

  Teutonics: tall, dolichocephalic (i.e., long-headed), and blond;

  Alpines: medium in stature, brachycephalic (i.e., round-headed), with medium-colored hair;

  Mediterraneans: short, dolichocephalic (i.e., long-headed), and dark.

  The cephalic index was not new. In fact, a real European scholar, the Swedish anthropologist Anders Retzius, had invented it in 1842, coining the terms “brachycephalic” to describe broad heads and “dolichocephalic” to describe long heads. The technique quickly took hold in Europe, where researchers took to measuring heads by the tens of thousands.

  Anthropologists loved the cephalic index because it seemed to measure something stable, and race theorists demanded permanence. Heads supposedly remained constant across an endless succession of generations. Concentration on the head was not new. A skull, we recall, had inspired Blumenbach’s naming white people “Caucasian.” Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott had backed up their assertions of white supremacy with Mrs. Gliddon’s drawings of skulls. France’s Paul Broca, his generation’s most renowned anthropologist, also based his race theories on skull measurements.

  Retzius and other fans of the cephalic index had no trouble linking head shape with “racial” qualities such as enterprise, beauty, and, of course, intelligence. Theorizing from old skulls, they envisioned primitive, ancient, Stone Age Europeans—often identified as Celts—as brachycephalic and also dark in color. Accepted theory soon held that long-headed dolichocephalics had invaded Europe and conquered these primitive, broad-headed people. A lot of the old natives were still around, people considered backward, such as the brachycephalic Basques, Finns, Lapps, and quite a few Celts; they were still assumed to be primitive natives, like peasants and other supposedly inert groups.*

  Following the English anthropologist John Beddoe, Ripley gingerly notes “the profound contrast which exists between the temperament of the Celtic-speaking and the Teutonic strains in these [British] islands…. The Irish and Welsh are as different from the stolid Englishman as indeed the Italian differs from the Swede.”7 This idea of temperament as a racial trait was based on a perversion of Darwinian evolution. With a perfectly straight face anthropologists reasoned that evolution operated on entire races (not individuals or breeding populations), that races had personalities, and that physical measurements of heads betokened racial personality.

  Over time the cephalic index both dominated as a symbol of race and became a two-edged sword when color was added to it. Long-headed people, “dolichocephalics,” for instance, should be light and Teutonic (good) or dark and Mediterranean (bad). Alpines (maybe middling, maybe bad) were supposed to be brownish and brachycephalic. These correlations counted as “harmonic” correspondence. Rather than deal with people who did not fit the pattern, such as blond Alpines, race-minded anthropologists them deemed “disharmonic” and then just ignored them. Perfectly “harmonic” Mediterraneans with long heads and dark hair, eyes, and skin also faded from view, because anthropologists judged them to be obviously inferior and therefore of scant interest.

  At first all this measuring of heads meant little to most Americans. Slavery and segregation had seen to it that race resided most obviously in skin color, or at least in physical appearance or ancestry that could be classified as black or white. But up-to-date experts stuck to their guns, proffering scientific explanation via visuals. (See figure 15.3, Ripley’s brachycephalic and dolichocephalic skulls.) A caption at the lower left reads, “Brachycephalic type. Index 87. Zuid-Beveland, Holland,” and refers to photographs on the left. On the lower right, “Dolichocephalic type. Index 73. Zeeland, Holland” refers to photographs on the right.* These images were intended to show the difference between a long, dolichocephalic skull with a cephalic index of 73 and a round, brachycephalic skull with a cephalic index of 87.

  Fig. 15.3. Brachycephalic and dolichocephalic skulls, in William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (1899).

  Since ordinary readers rarely encountered skulls in everyday life, and Ripley badly wanted them to understand, he added photographs of racial “types” along with their cephalic indices for further clarification. (See figure 15.4, Ripley’s “Three European Racial Types.”)

  The three types are ranked vertically, with the Teutonic inevitably at the top, the Mediterranean inevitably at the bottom, and the Alpine in the middle. The Alpine type’s cephalic index is noted as 88, that is, brachycephalic, and the Mediterranean type’s as 77, that is, dolichocephalic, and the hair and eye color of both types is noted. The two dolichocephalic Norwegian Teutonic types are simply “pure blond,” although, inexplicably, the hair color of the man on the right seems as dark as that of the brachycephalic Austrian and the Sicilian.

  The four men depicted as embodiments of the “Three European Racial Types” have no names. Anthropologists of the era saw no need for names. They dealt in ideal “types” that stood for millions of presumably interchangeable individuals.

  Fig. 15.4. “The Three European Racial Types,” in William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (1899).

  RIPLEY’S 624 pages do contain a great deal of information—unfortunately, much of it is contradictory. He recognizes early on that his three racial traits—hair color, height, and cephalic index—are not reliably linked in real people. Short people can be blond; blond heads can be round; long heads can grow dark hair. He admits—and laments—that such complexity destroys any notion of clear racial types. Even his limited number of traits produced an infinity of races and subraces, a taxonomical nightmare.*

  To further undermine notions of racial permanency, Ripley concedes that mixture and environment, which most anthropologists preferred to ignore, also affect appearance. Faced with such complexity and so many unknowns, Ripley was, he says, “tempted to turn back in despair.” But he could not let go.8 He did, however, turn his back on the American South, where people white in appearance were discriminated against as Negroes. The U.S. Supreme Court had taken that matter up in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Homer Plessy, a man who looked white, had been ejected as black from a newly designated white-only car. He sued and lost when the court ruled for segregation. The African American novelist Charles Chesnutt remarked on the “manifest absurdity of classifying men fifteen-sixteenths white as black,” but,
absurd or not, that was long to hold true.9* Ripley hardly cared. What happened in the South was less important than how to classify the immigrants pouring into the North. To unravel black and white would have hopelessly snarled his system.

  Additional conceptual problems haunt the book’s organization. Definitions—who counts as European people and what constitutes European territory—conflict from one chapter to the next. Ripley is not sure where Europe and its races begin and end. While he dismisses Blumenbach’s notion of a single Caucasian race, The Races of Europe reaches past the territory of the Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races into Russia, eastern Europe, and western Asia as far as India. Africans appear in the chapter on Mediterranean race. Supposedly the Teutonic race belongs in Scandinavia and Germany; the Mediterranean race, in Italy, Spain, and Africa; and the Alpine race, in Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the Netherlands. Yet another, separate chapter wonders whether Britons originated in the Iberian Peninsula, given that Irish legend names the Spanish king Melisius as the father of the Irish. More taxonomical strangeness was to come.

  AS NOTED, Ripley’s three-race system excludes many Europeans, such as Jews, Slavs, eastern Europeans, and Turks. Lapps present the usual quandary: they obviously live in Europe, but they do not look the way anthropologists wanted Europeans to look. Linguists did not face this problem; they put Lapps with Magyrs, Finns, and other speakers of Finnic languages. No problem there. But Ripley rejects this linguistic classification because the Lapps lack beauty: “The Magyrs, among the finest representatives of a west European type,” he says, “are no more like the Lapps than the Australian bushmen.” (See figure 15.5, Ripley’s “Scandinavia.”) The captions under photos of Lapps list only height (4’ 9½” and 4’ 8”) and high cephalic indexes (both 87.5) as confirmation that Lapps are too short in stature and too broad of head.10* Piling it on, Ripley adds an unnamed German anthropologist’s insult that “they [Lapps] are a ‘pathological race.’” Actually, rather than documenting pathology, these photographs demonstrate a Scandinavian variety trumped by racial science’s obsession with purity.