The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  During the 1930s Benedict did all the work of a senior scholar. She also ran the Columbia anthropology department, though without a title, since the university administration could not imagine a woman as departmental chair. Things worsened under Boas’s replacement, Ralph Linton, who disliked Benedict and soured the department’s atmosphere against her. (After she died, Linton flashed a Melanesian charm, bragging that he had used it to cause her death.)31 Old, exhausted, and ill, Boas still came to the department once or twice a week, but events in Germany increasingly preoccupied him. At first Benedict deplored his giving up “science for good works,” calling it a waste of scholarly energy. But as the Nazis stepped up their anti-Semitic persecution, she came to share Boas’s distress and joined his antiracist activism.32 Nazi violence awakened many an American intellectual, so Benedict’s antiracist work stands for a gathering tendency among scholars. More and more, Nazi anti-Semitism wrenched them away from the idea of a Jewish race, and even from drawing racial lines among any Europeans and their progeny.

  While on sabbatical in Pasadena in 1939, Benedict wrote Race: Science and Politics (1940), a book widely praised for its clear explanation of anthropology’s thinking about race but ultimately confused and confusing. In the first edition, Benedict speaks as an anthropologist sorting out for laymen the differences between race and racism. “Race,” Benedict explains on the foreword’s first page, “is a matter for careful scientific study; Racism is an unproved assumption.” The text carefully distinguishes hereditary, biological race from the learned behavior of culture and language. Culture does not depend on race, and Italians, Jews, and the British are not races. There is no such thing as Nordic civilization.33

  Given the continuing allure of scientific racism, Benedict is presenting a useful summary. But Race: Science and Politics is very much of a piece with its time, a statement crafted in the long shadow of the anthroposociology of Georges Vacher de Lapouge—whom Benedict confronts by name on the first page of the main text—and totally in the thrall of cephalic indices, Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans.34 She was trying to dig out of a very deep race hole, and she could get only halfway into clarity, as befit the confusions of her era.

  For all its fine intentions, this book contains predictable contradictions. As in the early twentieth-century ways of thinking about race, Race: Science and Politics hardly touches on non-Europeans. The “races” in question are mainly white, as though all Americans descended from Europeans and African Americans hardly counted. Benedict translates “white race” as Nordics and “other varieties” as “Alpines, Mediterraneans.” She says Europeans are too mixed to be separated by race, then continues to separate the three “subdivisions” of the Caucasian race as Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, as distinguished by hair texture, head form, skin pigment.

  This echoes William Z. Ripley in 1899, but with a difference that poses a problem: Benedict admits that none of these traits actually correlates with these subdivisions. So Ripley’s categories no longer apply. For Benedict, only three great races actually exist, “Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid.” They are most “definite,” but—oh-oh—Boas, she admits, has his doubts and sees just two: Mongoloid, which includes “Caucasic,” and Negroid.35 Later editions grew even murkier.

  After the United States entered the war in December 1941, Benedict revised Race by taking nonwhites more fully into account. Now Benedict speaks as the citizen of a belligerent power whose allies include Asians and Africans.36 Nazism has heightened her awareness of American racism, which she mentions in the foreword to the 1945 edition. By now “race” in her eyes includes African Americans as well as the descendants of Europeans.

  In all three editions of Race: Science and Politics, Benedict speaks as a Mayflower descendant, a stance Boas had actually recommended in order to lend her book an aura of disinterested fairness. In 1940 she writes as “those of us who are members of the vaunted races and descendants of the American Revolution.” In 1943 and 1945 she says, “We of the white race, we of the Nordic race, must make it clear that we do not want the kind of cheap and arrogant superiority the Racists promise us.”37 This assumed bond between author and readers harks back to the early 1900s, when New England ancestry was supposed to confer intellectual soundness and readers were thought to belong to the same elevated class. That would mean a narrower, rather than a wider, readership. With the war, however, widening the readership for antiracist thinking became more important.

  Between new editions of Race: Science and Politics, Benedict collaborated with a Columbia colleague, Gene Weltfish, on a 32-page, ten-cent pamphlet, The Races of Mankind (1943). Aimed at schools, churches, YMCAs, and USOs, Races of Mankind denounces racial chauvinism, quoting both racists and antiracist experts and explaining that “no European is a pure anything” and that “Aryans, Jews, Italians are not races.”

  Describing the actual existence of race as a meaningful category of analysis, Benedict and Weltfish were not willing to go as far as the literary critic Jacques Barzun and the anthropologist Ashley Montague. In 1937 Barzun had published Race: A Study in Superstition, whose title says it all.* Montague’s 1942 Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race called the idea of race “the witchcraft of our time.”38 Both these books sold well in multiple editions, but social scientists worldwide could not agree. (Even the antiracist UNESCO statement on race [1952] retained the notion that races actually do exist.)39 Benedict and Weltfish were writing from within the scientific mainstream, confused as it was at the time.

  For Benedict and Weltfish there were three and only three races: the Caucasian race (A), the Mongoloid race (B), and the Negroid race (C). Their map shows where these three races are located. (See figure 24.2, “Most people in the world have in-between-color skin.”) The Caucasoids are in northwestern Europe (not Mediterranean Europe); the Mongoloids occupy a semicircle in eastern Asia (but not Southeast Asia, Siberia, or Mongolia); Negroids are grouped around the Bight of Benin (not the rest of northern, Saharan, southern, or eastern Africa). Everyone else, presumably, has “in-between-color skin.” Attractive though it might be, this map leaves everything to be explained about race in America, where people from four continents were having sex and producing American babies.40

  Fig. 24.2. “Most people in the world have in-between-color skin,” in Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, Races of Mankind (1943).

  As if the peoples of the Western Hemisphere did not exist and belonged to no races, the map omits them entirely. A further explanation does not help: “American Indians are Mongoloid, though they differ physically both among themselves and from the Mongols of China. The natives of Australia are sometimes called a fourth primary race. They are as hairy as Europeans, and yet they live in an area where other peoples have very little body hair.”41 These glaring contradictions existed beside the pamphlet’s main points: “All Peoples Much the Same,” “Customs Not Racial,” “Character Not Inborn,” “Civilization Not Caused by Race,” and “Race Prejudice Not Inevitable.” Today the contradictions would seem to consign Benedict and Weltfish to the dustbin of racism. But such a judgment is too hasty. Within the context of their times, their antiracist main points needed badly to be made and even raised some hackles.

  Another main point—“What About Intelligence?”—created a brouhaha that got the pamphlet banned from USOs. To disprove the racial character of intelligence, Benedict and Weltfish include two pages from Otto Klineberg’s work and a table showing the much higher IQ scores of northern black men compared with those of southern white men. The aim was to illustrate a lesson—the crucial influence of environment on intelligence.42 But this lesson fared badly in Congress.

  Representative Andrew J. May of Kentucky, chair of the House Military Affairs Committee, barred the pamphlet’s distribution to the Army, because the Klineberg table assigned whites from his state of Kentucky lower scores than northern blacks. Here May spied “communistic” influence. But the publicity following his censorship made the pamphlet much more wide
ly known. It sold almost a million copies in a decade and was translated into French, German, and Japanese and inspired a comic book, a little movie, and a children’s book entitled In Henry’s Backyard (1948). Benedict admitted not having enjoyed the work on the two books on race, for both had called for synthesis rather than original scholarship. But they nevertheless made her—a nonspecialist in this field—an authority on race in America along the lines of the economist William Z. Ripley almost half a century earlier.

  Benedict’s books were meant to deny scientific legitimacy to the “races of Europe,” but other scholars still leaned the other way. In 1939, the Harvard anthropologist Carleton S. Coon (1904–81) published a successor volume to Ripley’s classic. In 1934 Coon’s former professor and now Harvard colleague Earnest Hooton had suggested an update, and the flattered Coon, then an assistant professor, took on the plum assignment after speaking with Ripley, who was still teaching economics at Harvard and up to his ears in analysis of railroads.43

  It was a weird undertaking. Coon began by trivializing Ripley’s taxonomy, dismissing him as “a lumper, not a splitter,” and one with only three criteria: cephalic index, stature, and pigmentation. This would not do for a twentieth-century physical anthropologist like Coon. The task took five years, and when finally published in 1939, Coon’s version of Races of Europe included a near-infinity of measurements and photographs of Europeans shown frontally and in profile, arrayed in categories called “Carpathian and Balkan Borreby-like types,” “Upper Palaeolithic Survivals in Ireland,” “The Alpine Race in Germany,” “Aberrant Alpine Forms in Western and Central Europe,” “Long-Faced Mediterraneans of the Western Asiatic Highlands,” etc., etc.

  Coon’s ideas about classification were more aesthetic than scientific, which he confessed in an anecdote about his rejection of one subject because the fellow did not look right. The person in question, a “consul of a European nation,” had “hardly any chin.” That would not do for the type he was supposed to represent. And so it went. Realizing that the book was ridiculous, Coon’s publisher tried unsuccessfully to suppress it before publication. The book remains an embarrassing, old-timey artifact.44

  AFTER ITS heyday among race theorists in the 1910s and 1920s, Anglo-Saxonism declined during the Great Depression and the Second World War. A new generation of social scientists had outgrown such blather on race. Now scholars were questioning the very meanings of any and all concepts of race and studying the troubling fact of racial prejudice.45* Ruth Benedict, along with Franz Boas and their like, were beginning to carry the day.

  Both Boas and Benedict supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and they battled for academic freedom at Columbia in the late 1930s, where an association with the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which Boas chaired, got them accused of harboring communist sympathies.46 Boas died before Benedict, holding a glass of wine and a freshly lit cigarette in his hands. He was about to announce “a new theory of race” when he keeled over dead at lunch in the Columbia faculty club in 1942.

  Benedict went on, using her knowledge of non-Western peoples in the Office of War Information during the Second World War, to explain foreign cultures to officials assigned to deal with them when peace returned. Her study of Japan led to The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a book analyzing Japanese culture that became her third best seller, in 1946. She died of a heart attack right at the start of the academic year in September 1948.

  Benedict’s role had been significant in popularizing new scientific views of race, altering, if not obliterating, the notion that Europeans belonged to different races and that the children of European immigrants posed insurmountable social problems. Hers was a critical transition away from “the races of Europe,” reinforced by fundamental changes in American life.

  25

  A NEW WHITE RACE POLITICS

  Though gratifyingly sensible, the fact that scholars changed their minds about the number of white races did not transform society as a whole. While anthropologists like Ruth Benedict were modifying the science of race, changes were occurring outside the ivory tower, even in the race-obsessed twenties. After publication of Henry Ford’s second “international Jew” article in 1920, for instance, Louis Marshall, a prominent German Jewish lawyer in New York, seconded by other well-educated, well-respected German Jews, telegraphed Ford that his articles constituted libel.1 The American Jewish Committee circulated a pamphlet by Marshall in November 1920 refuting Ford’s allegations. The English-born socialist John Spargo published a book-length refutation, The Jew and American Ideals, and a statement in newspapers across the country in January 1921. Under the banner “President Wilson Heads Protest against Anti-Semitism,” a shining list of Americans signed their names: William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, W. E. B. Du Bois, the settlement movement leader Jane Addams, the Columbia historian Charles A. Beard, the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, the Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, and many others.2

  Even more important, immigrants and their children were speaking for themselves, telling stories of their transit from outsider to American in picturesque terms. Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) and Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) came early. Many other autobiographies humanizing immigrants followed, including Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch, Paunch and Jowl (1923) and Anzia Yezierska’s The Bread Givers (1925). True, collegiate English departments were still loath to invite American writing of any sort into the canon of English literature, and these immigrants’ works did remain marginal as “minority” literature. But popular culture knew no such divide. America’s best-known immigrant in the mid-1920s was a movie star, Rodolfo Valentino. Though Valentino, born in the southern Italian Puglia region, the home of many an immigrant to the United States at the turn of the century, died at thirty-one in 1926, he remains an iconic figure.

  EVEN IN politics, a silver lining peeped through. While a Democratic Party fight over the 1924 anti-Klan plank had been long and hard, many a delegate, even from the South, had proved ready to denounce the Klan by name. The effort had failed, but by only one vote. The 1920 Democratic candidate for vice president, Franklin Roosevelt of New York, had coordinated the Smith forces, struggling about the floor of Madison Square Garden on crutches after a bout with polio. Four years later, Democrats did nominate the Catholic Al Smith. Fiction, as we have seen, also faced the question of “alien races,” as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

  “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?”

  “Why no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

  “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

  “Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we——”

  “Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

  “We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun….

  “This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and——” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “——And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”3

  But Tom Buchanan is no hero. He is nothing but a boor whose Nordic chauvinism signals his boorishness. The year after Lothrop Stoddard’s appearance in The Great Gatsby as “this man Goddard,” Fitzgerald’s friend and rival Ernest Hemingway published a novella entitled The Torrents of Spring:
A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race, quoting the title of Madison Grant’s book. But once again the meaning pokes fun, for the quotation appears as parody. Race hysteria has become the sign of the weak-minded. Or of hypocrites.

  Racists did their part to bring themselves down. David Stephenson, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan so powerful in Indiana, kidnapped and raped a white schoolteacher in 1925, mauling her to death—this atrocity after the Klan had made its reputation by attacking race mixing, loose women, Catholics, and Jews in a self-proclaimed moral crusade. Stephenson went to prison, and the Klan began to sputter out, weakened by increasingly effective opposition by antidiscrimination organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, creations of the same decade that had seen the refounding of the Klan.* The crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s shook things up even more.