The History of White People
Page 52
* French anthropologists like Jean-Louis-Armand de Quatrefages and like-minded Americans envisioned fundamental changes in the population of Germany since the Middle Ages. W. S. Sadler—a health advocate, Seventh-Day Adventist, and cranky Chicago psychiatrist who had studied in Vienna with Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler—adopted this view in Long Heads and Round Heads, or What’s the Matter with Germany (1918). The infusion of round-headed Alpines into Germany changed the racial balance and provides “the real explanation of the unparalleled brutality, the shocking atrocities, and otherwise inexplicably barbarous behavior of the German armies in the present European conflict.”
* The Turner Diaries (1978), the wildly popular, dystopian, white nationalist novel by William Luther Pierce, leader of the National Alliance, is set in a ruined world in which Jews have incited blacks into fiery rebellion.
* The defeated anti-Klan plank read,
We condemn, as opposed to the genesis of free government, secret political societies of any kind whatsoever, wherever any such society undertakes to destroy free political action and fosters racial and religious hatreds.
We denounce its activities as contravening the spirit, if not the letter of the Constitution, and as a pregnant menace to the perpetuity of American institutions.
We declare that no member of such a society can justly claim to be a disciple of Thomas Jefferson.
We pledge the Democratic Party to oppose the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, or any similar organization which undertakes to control or interfere with free political action or due process of law.
* The National Urban League had been founded by an interracial group of social workers and philanthropists in 1911 to find jobs and housing for black southerners migrating to the North.
* One of Brigham’s most trenchant academic critics was Truman Lee Kelley, a professor of statistics and education at Stanford, where he was a colleague of Louis Terman, one of the more enthusiastic testers of the era. Kelley’s Interpretation of Educational Measurement (1927) criticized the technique of comparing tests administered to a large population of whites lacking “racial homogeneity” and then lumping the results of several different tests together to produce a single set of grades. Kelley also questioned the prevalence of scores of zero or 100.
† Race theorists also adopted the European anthroposociologists’ theory that “selective” migration explained differences between head shapes in the country and those in the city—that superior, long-headed Europeans chose to migrate out of the country, leaving broad-headed laggards. Although Boas had demonstrated the malleability of head shape, the idea of selective migration held on into the 1920s. When the Army IQ tests showed that African Americans in cities and in the North scored higher than African Americans in the country and in the South, race theorists explained that the smarter ones—or those with more “white blood”—migrated out of the South and out of the countryside. Klineberg’s results in his Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration (1935) disproved both contentions, effectively knocking the selective migration theory into the dustbin.
‡ Klineberg’s table of IQ scores by race and region: median scores whites: Mississippi (41.25); Kentucky (41.50); Arkansas (41.55); Georgia (42.12); median scores negroes: Pennsylvania (42.00); New York (45.02); Illinois (47.35); Ohio (49.50).
* During the 1920s, before she gained a permanent appointment in Columbia’s anthropology department, Benedict published poetry under the pseudonym Anne Singleton, but she set the pseudonym aside in the 1930s.
* Benedict pioneered the culture and personality school of anthropology. In Patterns of Culture she had used her own research on the Zuni, Boas’s on the Kwakiutl, and Reo Fortune’s on the Dobu. Fortune was Mead’s second husband. Benedict got along well with all three of Mead’s husbands.
* Barzun felt the need for a new edition in 1965 because “the idea it treats of, although repeatedly killed, is nevertheless undying.” He deplored the endless measuring and ranking of races as a “waste of intellect.”
* In 1946 the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science, which had published Francis A. Walker and E. A. Ross’s anti-immigrant screeds, devoted the whole issue of March 1946 to the topic “Controlling Group Prejudice.”
* The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been founded in 1909–10, and the Anti-Defamation League grew out of the Leo Frank trial in 1913.
* Kallen had first used cultural pluralism ideas while teaching at Harvard in 1906 or 1907, but these ideas did not appear in print until 1915. Kallen went on to a fine academic career. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison before moving to New York City as a founder of the New School for Social Research in 1919. Active as an international citizen and supporter of Zionism, he continued teaching at the New School until his death in 1974.
* The independent nation of Slovenia lies between Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. Its Adriatic port is Trieste, its largest city Ljubljana, where Adamic went to high school.
† Adamic revised Dynamite in 1934, to further acclaim. His first book, Robinson Jeffers: A Portrait, just a pamphlet on the reclusive California poet, was published by the bookstore of the University of Washington in Seattle in 1929. It appears in My America.
* Adamic seems not to have been aware of the round of cultural pluralism that Horace Kallen had initiated in 1915.
* DuBois lived to 101 and continued serving human rights into the late 1980s. She joined the Southern Christian Leadership Council, where she conducted Quaker dialogues in the mid-1960s.
* Adamic died distraught in his New Jersey farmhouse in 1951 after having been red-baited and criticized for his unwavering support of Josip Tito in Yugoslavia. Adamic’s death was judged a suicide, but doubts remain as to its cause.
† Americans All, Immigrants All ignored Native American Indians, East Indians, West Indians, and Puerto Ricans.
* Discrimination against African American airmen was a major theme of a little-noticed war novel from 1948, James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, in which the commander, realizing the justice of the black men’s demands for an end to segregation, nevertheless sides with the more numerous, antiblack whites to avoid confrontation.
† In his 1941 annual message to Congress, Roosevelt outlined four freedoms owed everyone in the world: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
‡ In its editorial deploring Lindbergh’s speech, the New York Times doubted “whether a religious group whose members come from almost every civilized country and speak almost every Western language can be called a ‘race.’”
* And there Ben Capra fell out of history. The rest of his life is not known.
† Movie stars routinely changed their names (or had them changed) into something more Anglo-Saxon sounding, hence Kirk Douglas (born Issur Demsky), Anne Bancroft (born Anna Maria Italiano), Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Cansino), George Burns (born Nathan Birnbaum), Alan Alda (Alphonso D’Abruzzo), and Fred Astaire (Frederick Austerlitz).
‡ Capra won an Academy Award (his second) for directing for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which was nominated for three other Academy Awards. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won for best screenplay. Capra also directed The Negro Soldier, intended to raise the morale of African Americans in the segregated U.S. armed forces.
* Elite institutions were not always thrilled at the prospect of hordes of veterans invading their campuses. The president of the University of Chicago envisioned institutions like his “converted into educational hobo jungles.”
* The Levitt family was Jewish, but its first suburban community, “Strathmore-at-Manhasset,” barred Jews. William Levitt noted, “No one realizes better then Levitt that an undesirable class can quickly ruin a community.”
† Rule number 7 long required that Miss America contestants “be of good health and of the white race.” The first African American contestant was Cher
yl Brown, Miss Iowa, in 1970.
* Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955) does not include black Protestantism as a constituent of American religion. In September 1965 Herberg published an article in National Review criticizing the civil rights movement for “deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery….”
* The 1948 civil rights plank enraged southern Democrats, who walked out of the convention and formed their own States’ Rights (“Dixiecrat”) Party with J. Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, as its presidential candidate.
* Members of the NOI exchanged their “slave names” for “X,” which stood for the loss of their unknown African families and names. After Malcolm X left the NOI and made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964, he took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
* Agnew resigned the vice presidency after being indicted for bribery, becoming the first to leave office under the threat of criminal conviction.
† In 1965 Vivian Malone (1942–2005) became the first African American to graduate from the University of Alabama. James A. Hood (b. 1943), had entered with her in 1963, but left the university with an ulcer after a few months of harassment. He earned a doctorate in education from the university in 1997.
‡ Novak went on to honors. Since 1978 he has held the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He received the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, awarded at Buckingham Palace, in 1994 and delivered the Templeton address in Westminster Abbey.
* Glazer is featured in Arguing the World, a film about the Jewish New York intellectuals who attended the City College of New York in the 1930s and 1940s and became leading American public intellectuals. Having started out as Trotskyites, they often became strong anticommunists in the 1950s and 1960s and leading neoconservatives following the turmoil of the 1960s.
* In 1965 Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, also known as “The Moynihan Report,” which added African Americans to the literature of degenerate families. From 1973 to 1975 he served as U.S. ambassador to India and in 1976 was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served four terms.
* Nathan Glazer published the first full-length denunciation of affirmative action in 1975, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy. By 1997 he had come around to a grudging acceptance of multiculturalism (provided it was temporary) in We Are All Multiculturalists Now.
* Killers of the Dream includes a sequence of mistaken racial identity reminiscent of Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie, when young Lillian’s mother rejects a child initially thought white but discovered to be colored.
* After her stint as black, Grace Halsell passed as an Indian and later annoyed Zionists with her commentary on Israel.
* Twenty-first-century holdouts could still cling to idealized notions of white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestantism, as in the case of the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004).
* Genes hold DNA and RNA (whose functions are only now being understood), the recipe for proteins that activate themselves in response to the environment. Not that the genome consists only of genes. Ninety-seven percent of the genome is a mixture of various sorts of DNA summed up as junk DNA whose purpose, if it has one, remains mysterious.
* Strictly speaking, the human genome that had been sequenced was not “the” genome of every human being, for despite a similarity of 99 percent of our genes from one person to another, each individual’s genome is unique. The genome that Celera mapped was that of a particular individual, its founder, Craig Venter. Therefore “the” human genome that Celera owns is that of a particular white American man. Mapping a complete human genome now costs nearly $100,000, so few are likely to know themselves to this degree, and Venter’s gene sequence will represent the normal for some time to come.
* According to Anne Fausto-Sterling, Neil Risch and his colleagues even use Blumenbach’s term “Caucasian” for the European and Middle Eastern group.
* The methodologies used, the tracing of Alus and SNPs, do not explain whether Alus and SNPs play any active role in human behavior.
* In an odd way, the weird theories of the mid-twentieth-century Nation of Islam (NOI) held a grain of truth within a nutty overall scheme. According to the NOI, a crazed black scientist had turned black people into whites through selective breeding as a punishment for wickedness. No such scientist existed, but whiteness out of blackness actually occurred over the course of thousands of years and residence in different climates.