The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Ford’s Dearborn Independent played a new role in American culture by spewing anti-Semitism and putting notoriously false documents into international circulation. In an era of mounting race talk, Henry Ford domesticated European anti-Semitism’s “the international Jew” in a manner worthy of Georges Vacher de Lapouge’s anthroposociology, even adding an English fillip. The ghostwriter of “Mr. Ford’s Own Page,” one W. J. Cameron, purveyed the beliefs of an obscure but persistent current in English and American religion, Anglo-Israelitsm. According to this sect, Anglo-Saxons were the real descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and England and the United States were the real Holy Land. This logic made Anglo-Saxons into the chosen people and “Modern Hebrews” into impostors. Jesus was not really Jewish; in fact, he was the Nordic ancestor of modern Germans, Scandinavians, and English people.41 Ford’s own obsessions imagined the Jews less as impostors than as the international financiers he believed to be building up the labor unions he hated in order to reduce competition and raise prices. That this made no sense whatever did not give him pause.42

  The Dearborn Independent ran its first series of anti-Semitic articles in 1920 and 1921. These pieces, collected in four volumes as The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1920–22), circulated internationally and, with German support, were translated into sixteen languages. The Dearborn Independent created additional mischief by publishing the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Originally published in Russia in 1917, this document was purported to be the minutes of a secret 1897 meeting of Jewish leaders planning to take over the world. The Dearborn Independent also gave an American twist to the European anthroposociological theory that the Jews had incited dumb Alpines into committing atrocities during the war. For Ford, the Jews were committing yet another crime by duping southern black people into migrating out of the South into his territory in the North.43 This new twist to the politics of race would soon bear fruit in the shape of changing definitions of race. For the time being, though, the “racial problem” still meant immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—white people.

  24

  REFUTING RACIAL SCIENCE

  Racial science roared on for decades in the United States, and it might have continued much longer but for European events. Not until Nazi Germany awakened American geneticists and social scientists to the import of their scholarship did many realize that what called itself racial science was merely prejudice. The passing from the scene of key figures also vitiated hereditarianism. George Horace Lorimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and Madison Grant, the eugenics mogul, both died in 1937. More important, figures with real scholarly bona fides started speaking up loud enough to be heard.

  Not that dissent had been lacking entirely. The reassessment had begun quietly as early as the First World War, when a cadre of Columbia University geneticists resigned from the prime eugenics organization, still called the American Breeders’ Association. In 1921 Franz Boas had published an article in the Yale Review questioning the racial interpretation of Army IQ tests, and in 1922 Walter Lippmann in the New Republic had denounced mental testers’ claim to measure permanent, intrinsic intelligence. That kind of mental testing, he wrote, “has no more scientific foundation than a hundred other fads, vitamins and glands and amateur psychoanalysis and correspondence courses in will power, and it will pass with them into that limbo where phrenology and palmistry and characterology and the other Babu sciences are to be found.”1

  But hard-minded IQ testers hung on, dismissing such objections as mere emotion and claiming that no Jewish critic could think objectively about racial matters.2 As noted earlier, the Johns Hopkins professor Herbert Jennings’s scrutiny of the anti-immigration material of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee revealed that data used to discredit immigrants from southern or eastern Europe had been misinterpreted and that, among immigrants, the Irish (now considered good Nordic “old immigrants”) were most likely to land in institutions. This was not what the House committee wanted to hear, and it buried these findings. Jennings published his views in two journals with limited circulation: the Survey, the journal of social and charity workers, and Science, which, was aimed at academicians. “It is particularly in connection with racial questions in man that there has been a great throwing about of false biology,” he concluded quietly.3

  African American social scientists also attacked Carl Brigham’s classification of soldiers’ test scores by race and nation. Horace Mann Bond, director of the School of Education at Langston University, a predominately black institution in Oklahoma, was a doctoral student of the distinguished Chicago sociologist Robert Park. In 1924 Bond refuted Brigham’s reasoning in the Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (edited by W. E. B. Du Bois), by showing that test scores correlated with funding for education. The key to test scores, therefore, lay not in race but in state policy, that is, in the environment.4 In Opportunity, the organ of the National Urban League, Bond added that if Brigham were correct that Nordics were smartest, then men from the South “with the purest racial stock of the so-called Nordic branch now existent in America” should have scored highest.* Instead, white southerners achieved a mental age of only twelve and a half, a year less than the overall national average.5

  Criticism of racial science continued with an article in the November 1927 issue of American Mercury by Raymond Pearl, a professor of biometry and vital statistics at Johns Hopkins. Pearl called eugenics “a mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical sociology, economics, anthropology, and politics, full of emotional appeals to class and race prejudices, solemnly put forth as science, and unfortunately accepted as such by the general public.”6

  Another change was in the air of academia. Earlier studies had taken for granted the factual existence of races (as in “races of Europe”). Therefore, studies of racial mental differences were considered interesting as scientific research topics that could be studied objectively. But by the late 1920s psychology and sociology had begun focusing on the subjective nature of racial differences in society. Soon race prejudice became a subject worth analyzing.7

  Here Robert Park, Bond’s dissertation adviser, pioneered. Park’s classic 1928 essay, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” emphatically separated race from culture. The migrant was to be seen as a person emancipated, enlightened, and even cosmopolitan. Recent immigrants to the United States were creating, not injuring, civilization. This migrant might be a man living “on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused.” But that was a good thing. Take as an example an emancipated Jew like the Berlin-born, South Carolina–raised novelist and critic Ludwig Lewisohn, who had published his autobiography Up Stream: An American Chronicle in 1922. For Park, Lewisohn bridged two cultures, offering the best example of “the processes of civilization and progress.”8 Here notions of change and promise replaced the frozen biological determinism of eugenics. E. A. Ross, who had trashed immigrants before the war, could by 1936 write, “Difference of race means far less to me now than it once did.”9 Even Vineland’s Henry H. Goddard was having second thoughts. Perhaps he had put too much faith in intelligence tests. In a 1927 article for Scientific Monthly he admitted that his feebleminded students who had tested badly should be allowed to live in the general population, even to have children.10

  NO VOICE for common sense spoke louder than that of Franz Boas, by the 1920s an elder statesman in his sixties who had been in the United States for forty years. When he arrived in 1887, anthropology had been dominated by Mayflower gentlemen in museums stockpiling ancient bones and artifacts. Boas had gone forward to train most mid-twentieth-century leaders of the field, many immigrant-descended Ph.D.s teaching in universities just at the point when anthropology was delivering new scientific truths about race. For Boas, scientific racism, especially the supposedly premier test of race, had never seemed sound. The unchanging cephalic index, he pointed out,
could, in fact, change quite quickly as a person’s environment changed. It was culture that mattered, and culture changed by generation. Culture, race, and language were three independent—and equal—qualities. Boas never gave up on the idea of race, but he continually opposed racism.11 By the early 1920s Alfred L. Kroeber, a former Boas student, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, pointed out that northern blacks scored higher than southern whites on the Army IQ tests.12 Another Boas student, Otto Klineberg (1899–1992), pressed the investigation in two important directions.

  The son of immigrants to Canada, Klineberg held a B.A. in philosophy from McGill, an M.A. in psychology from Harvard, an M.D. from McGill, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. Having entered the Boas circle in 1926, Klineberg soon realized, as did the anthropologists, that human behavior could not be abstracted from its cultural context. Throughout a long life of international experience—in his research, in UNESCO, and through professorships in Brazil and France—Klineberg continued to study racial differences, prejudices, and discrimination.13

  After discovering disparities in test scores between northwestern Kwakiutl Indians who lived on the reservation and those who lived off it, Klineberg tested Carl C. Brigham’s correlations in A Study of American Intelligence (1924) between race and IQ in Europe. In Italy, France, and Germany in the mid-1920s, he found no differences in the performance of Mediterraneans, Alpines, and Nordics.14 Returning to the United States in 1929, Klineberg was delighted to meet Brigham at a psychological meeting and eager to confront the older scholar: “I told him how pleased I was to meet him, since I had just completed research related to his study. His reaction rather took the wind out of my sails. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t stand by a word of that book.’”15

  Indeed, in 1930 Brigham published an article retreating from the claim that test scores represented “a single unitary thing” called “intelligence.”* Psychologists claiming to test “intelligence,” Brigham conceded, “have been guilty of a naming fallacy” (Brigham’s emphasis). Taking aim at his own book, A Study of American Intelligence, he called his methods “absurd,” adding that his and Yerkes’s methodology “with its entire hypothetical superstructure of racial differences collapses completely.” Looking back at his book, Brigham called it “one of the most pretentious of these comparative racial studies” and pronounced it “without foundation.”16 But the restricted circulation of Brigham’s article meant that A Study of American Intelligence carried on as a racist authority for many more years.

  Klineberg’s second major publication dealt another blow to racial science. Yerkes and the mental testers of the 1910s and 1920s had always claimed to test innate intelligence, not the influence of schooling or environment.† Northern black men scored higher than southern black men, and the longer black men had lived outside the South, the higher their scores. When some northern black men scored higher than southern white men, what might that portend?‡

  More and more anthropologists used Klineberg’s analysis to highlight the role of environment in intelligence and to weaken the biological determinism of racial science as applied also to non-blacks. Culture was gaining on race, sped along by German Nazi aggression. Then along came another student of Franz Boas.

  THE “FIRST Child” of her mother’s Vassar College class of 1885, Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948) was born in New York City to a life that promised upper-class ease. (See figure 24.1, Ruth Benedict.) Her father was a doctor, and both parents were Mayflower descendants. However, her father’s death when she was not quite two plunged her mother into financial distress and a long bereavement. Then a childhood bout of measles rendered Ruth partially deaf.

  Fig. 24.1. Ruth Fulton Benedict.

  Frequent moves followed in pursuit of paying employment for her mother, tantrums, and depressions blighted young Ruth Fulton’s childhood. Around 1900 the family ended up in Buffalo, where her mother worked as the city librarian, and Ruth and her younger sister, Margery, attended a tony Episcopal private school on scholarships. In the fall of 1905, thanks to the charity of strangers, the two sisters entered Vassar. One of the prestigious Seven Sisters eastern women’s colleges, Vassar prided itself on developing both brain and bosom.17 Certainly Ruth had plenty of the former; she and her sister followed their mother into Phi Beta Kappa. An English major, she continued to write and publish poetry for several more decades.*

  After graduating in 1909, Ruth Fulton embarked on the obligatory upper-class European tour, which included three months in Germany, two of them in Dresden.18 Returning to Buffalo, she joined the local Charity Organization Society as a “friendly visitor” to Polish and Italian families, teaching them “American behavior.” At twenty-four, realizing the arrogance and futility of this work, she joined her younger sister, now married to a minister, in Pasadena, California, and taught in girls’ high schools for two years.19 Teaching, too, however, failed to fulfill her intellectually or emotionally. At this point, Stanley Rossiter Benedict, the brother of one of her Vassar classmates, was courting her aggressively. They married in 1914.

  Three years older than his wife and another Mayflower descendant, Stanley Benedict had earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Yale in 1908. He was a single-minded, persistent, and rigid man who opposed her working outside their home. On vacations at Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire, Stanley was wont to race about in a motorboat; Ruth preferred paddling a canoe.20 Nor did home life suit her. Sitting about their suburban home while he commuted to Cornell Medical School in New York City, she wrote biographies of feminist authors that went nowhere. Houghton Mifflin’s rejection of her life of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1919 only steeled her resolve for further study, first a class with the philosopher John Dewey at Columbia, then more at the fledgling New School for Social Research.

  At the New School, Benedict studied gender in many different cultures with the wealthy and well-connected anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, a Columbia Ph.D. and a member of the Boas circle. Benedict’s abilities impressed Parsons, and she and another of Benedict’s New School instructors took her to meet Boas. Waiving the regular requirements, he admitted Benedict into Columbia’s Ph.D. program in anthropology during the spring of 1921. Benedict was thirty-three; Boas, sixty-three.21 The two remained close collaborators, running the Columbia Department of Anthropology together until his (forced) retirement in 1936.

  By the fall of 1922, Benedict was serving as Boas’s teaching assistant, often guiding Barnard undergraduates around the American Museum of Natural History. One such student was Margaret Mead (1901–78), who had moved to New York City to be near her fiancé, a student at the Union Theological Seminary. But Benedict’s enthusiasm for anthropology galvanized Mead. She became Mead’s mentor, and she and Boas persuaded Mead to switch from psychology to anthropology for graduate school, to do work “that matters.” The Benedict-Mead relationship steadily deepened, moving from teacher-student to colleague-colleague to friends, lovers, and lifelong intellectual collaborators. When Mead’s daughter was born in December 1939, Benedict was in California writing her book on race and had been separated from her husband for nine years. She crocheted booties and sent them to the baby.22 The bond between Mead and Benedict even outlasted Benedict’s death in 1948.23 Mead served as Benedict’s literary executor and published two books about her.24

  Looking back, Mead recalled Benedict as a “very shy, almost distrait [absentminded], middle-aged woman [she was thirty-four years old] whose fine, mouse-colored hair never stayed quite pinned up. Week after week she wore a very prosaic hat and the same drab dress…. She stammered a little when she talked with us and sometimes blushed scarlet.”25 Benedict always thought of herself as a misfit but also suspected that her deviance nourished her intellectual creativity.26 As Mead reports in her autobiography, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, Benedict was subject to depressions and migraines. She “expected the worst from people and steeled herself against it.”27

  And Benedict was indeed a misfit, but not one
of her own making. There was the question of gender: here was a Columbia professor with a Columbia doctorate who was not appointed assistant professor until 1931, after a dozen years of teaching, advising dissertations, and publishing a best-selling book. She had also served as editor of the Journal of American Folklore for seven years. In 1936 she finally rose to associate professor, but not to full professor until 1948, after being elected president of the American Anthropological Association.

  Outside of Columbia, by contrast, Benedict reigned as a leader in her scholarly field and as the public face of anthropology. She wielded enormous power both across the United States and especially among New York’s intelligentsia.28 In the 1920s she had begun an active career explaining anthropology to non-anthropologists, publishing articles in the Nation, the New Republic, American Mercury, Scribner’s, and Harper’s. Mead saw her as anthropology’s “press committee,” a one-woman popularizing force.29 No wonder she felt conflicted!

  Actually, Mead arrived first. Fifteen years younger than Benedict, Mead jumped onto best-seller lists in 1928 with Coming of Age in Samoa, a study of women’s adolescence stressing cooperation over competition, but also offering sexual titillation. Six years later, Benedict’s first book, Patterns of Culture, also thrived, particularly after publication of a cheap paperback edition in 1946. By the 1980s it had sold nearly two million copies and been translated into twenty-one other languages. Even today, Patterns of Culture introduces anthropology to the lay public by touting the importance of culture over biology and of culture as learned behavior, as “personality writ big.”

  The book describes three cultures, the Zuni of the American Southwest, the Kwakiutl of the American Northwest, and the Dobu of the Pacific Islands. Borrowing terminology from Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedict labels the Zuni as serenely Apollonian; the Kwakiutl she saw as violently Dionysian; and the Dobu were just plain paranoid.* Starkly contrasting behaviors, Benedict divides these groups according to culture, not by race. This message, then, focuses on the possibility of change, for culture, not transmitted biologically, changes over time, while race presumably is a permanent condition. Intriguingly, however, Benedict could not escape her own class and culture. She slips phrases into Patterns of Culture that place herself and her presumptive readers squarely in the Nordic column. Arguing generally against race prejudice in her introductory pages, she deplores the drawing of “the so-called race line” against “our blood brothers the Irish.” Across this imagined race line, French face off against Germans, “though in bodily form they alike belong to the Alpine sub-race.”30 Old habits of thought died hard, even within the Boas circle.