The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal

by Ron Rosenbaum

  What happened was this: In September 1950, Sheldon and his team descended on Seattle, where the University of Washington had agreed to play host to his project. He’d begun taking nude pictures of female freshmen, but something went wrong. One of them told her parents about the practice. The next morning, a battalion of lawyers and university officials stormed Sheldon’s lab, seized every photo of a nude woman, convicted the images of shamefulness and sentenced them to burning. The angry crew then shoveled the incendiary film into an incinerator. A short-lived controversy broke out: Was this a book burning? A witch hunt? Was Professor Sheldon’s nude photography a legitimate scientific investigation into the relationship between physique and temperament, the raw material of serious scholarship? Or just raw material—pornography masquerading as science?

  They burned a few thousand photos in Seattle. Thousands more were burned at Harvard, Vassar and Yale in the 1960s and 1970s, when the colleges phased out the posture-photo practice. But thousands more escaped the flames, tens of thousands that Sheldon took at Harvard, Vassar, Yale and elsewhere but sequestered in his own archives. And what became of the archives? Lanier didn’t know, but he said they were out there somewhere. He dug up the phone number of a man who was once the lawyer for Sheldon’s estate, a Mr. Joachim Weissfeld in Providence, R.I. “Maybe he’ll know,” Lanier said.

  At this point, the posture-photo quest turned into a kind of high-speed parody of The Aspern Papers. The lawyer in Rhode Island professed ignorance as to the whereabouts or even continued existence of the lost Sheldonian archives, but he did put me in touch with the last living leaf on the Sheldon family tree, a niece by marriage who lived in Warwick, Rhode Island. She, too, said she didn’t know what had become of the Sheldon photos, but she did give me the name of an eighty-four-year-old man living in Columbus, Ohio, who had worked very closely with Sheldon, one Roland D. Elderkin—a man who, in fact, had shot many of the lost photos himself and who promised to reveal their location to me.

  The Mystery Solved

  With Roland D. Elderkin, we’re now this close to the late, great Sheldon himself. “There was nobody closer,” Elderkin declared shortly after I reached him at his rooming house in Columbus. “I was his soul mate.”

  Elderkin described himself a bit mournfully as “just an eighty-four-year-old man living alone in a furnished room.” But he once had a brush with greatness, and you can hear it in his recollection of Sheldon and his grand project.

  To Elderkin, Sheldon was no mere body-typer: he was a true philosophe, “the first to introduce holistic perspective” to American science, a proto-New Ager. Elderkin became Sheldon’s research associate, his trusty cameraman and a kind of private eye, compiling case histories of Sheldon’s posture nudes to confirm Sheldon’s theories about physique and destiny. He also witnessed Sheldon’s downfall.

  The Bonfire of the Nude Coed Photos in Seattle wasn’t Sheldon’s only public burning, Elderkin told me: “He went through a number of furors over women. A similar thing later happened at Pembroke, the women’s college at Brown.” In each case, the fact that female nudes were involved kindled the flame against Sheldon. Toward the end, Sheldon became a kind of pathetic Willy Loman-esque figure as he wandered America far from the elite Ivy halls that had once housed him, seeking a place he could complete the photography for his Atlas of Women.

  Rejected and scorned, out of fashion with academic officialdom, Sheldon is still a hero to Roland D. Elderkin. And so when Sheldon died in 1977, “a lonely old man who did nothing his last years but sit in his room and read detective stories,” Elderkin said, “there was nobody else to carry on.” It fell to Elderkin to find a final resting place for the huge archives of Sheldon’s posture nudes.

  It wasn’t easy, he said. Elderkin went “up and down the East Coast trying to peddle them” to places like Harvard and Columbia, which once welcomed Sheldon but now wanted nothing to do with nude photos and the controversy trailing them. “That’s how I found out about the burning at Pembroke,” Elderkin recalled. “I was trying to get someone at Brown to accept them, and he said, ‘That filth? We already burned the ones we had.’”

  “And you know where they are now?” I asked incredulously. “Hersey and Lanier said they didn’t know.”

  “Sure I do,” he said. “I was the one that finally found a home for them.”

  And then he told me where.

  BEFORE WE PROCEED to the location of the treasure itself, it might be wise to pause and ponder the wisdom of opening such a Pandora’s Box. With scholars like Hersey alleging eugenic motives behind Sheldon’s project, with the self-images of so many of the cultural elite at stake, would exposure of the hidden hoard be defensible? Is there anyone, aside from lifelong Sheldon disciples, who will step forward to defend Sheldon’s posture photos?

  Of course there is: Camille Paglia.

  “I’m very interested in somatotypes,” she said. “I constantly use the term in my work. The word ectomorph is used repeatedly in Sexual Personae about Spenser’s Apollonian angels. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do: to reconsider these classification schemes, to rescue them from their tainting by Nazi ideology. It’s always been a part of classicism. It’s sort of like we’ve lost the old curiosity about physical characteristics, physical differences. And I maintain it’s bourgeois prudery.

  “See, I’m interested in looking at women’s breasts! I’m interested in looking at men’s penises! I maintain that at the present date, Penthouse, Playboy, Hustler, serve the same cultural functions as the posture photos.”

  With these words ringing in my ears, I set out to see if I could open up the Sheldon archives.

  The Secret Is Bared

  Down a dimly lit back corridor of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, far from the dinosaur displays, is a branch of the Smithsonian not well known to the public: the National Anthropological Archives.

  Although it contains a rich and strange assortment of archival treasures, it’s particularly notable for the number of Native Americans who travel here to investigate centuries-old anthropological records, poring over them in a cramped, windowless research room whose walls are hung with stylized illustrations of tribal rituals painted by one Chief Blue Eagle. It was here that my quest for another kind of tribal illustration—the taboo images of the blue-blood tribe, the long-lost nude posture photos—culminated at last.

  In 1987, the curators of the National Anthropological Archives acquired the remains of Sheldon’s life work, which were gathering dust in “dead storage” in a Goodwill warehouse in Boston. While there were solid archival reasons for making the acquisition, the curators are clearly aware that they harbor some potentially explosive material in their storage rooms. And they did not make it easy for me to gain access.

  On my first visit, I was informed by a good-natured but wary supervisor that the restrictive grant of Sheldon’s materials by his estate would permit me to review only the written materials in the Sheldon archives. The actual photographs, he said, were off-limits. To see them, I would have to petition the chief of archivists. Determined to pursue the matter to the bitter end, I began the process of applying for permission.

  Meanwhile, I plunged into the written material hoping to find answers to several unresolved mysteries. Although I did not find substantiation in those files for Hersey’s belief that Sheldon was actively engaged in a master-race eugenic project, I did find stunning confirmation of Hersey’s charge that Sheldon held racist views.

  In Box 43 I came across a document never referred to in any of the literature on Sheldon I’d seen. It was a faded offprint of a 1924 Sheldon study, “The Intelligence of Mexican Children.” In it are damning assertions presented as scientific truisms that “Negro intelligence” comes to a “standstill at about the tenth year,” Mexican at about age twelve. To the author of such sentiments, America’s elite institutions entrusted their student bodies.

  Another box held clues to the truth behind Nora Ephron’s tale about smoki
ng and organ size. It turned out to be true that a research arm of the tobacco industry had sponsored studies on the relationship between masculinity and smoking, and that the studies had involved Sheldonian posture photos of Harvard men—although there is no evidence that the criterion of masculinity was the “obvious one” referred to by Ephron. I located a fascinating report on this research in a December 1959 issue of the respected journal Science, a report titled “Masculinity and Smoking.” According to the article, and contrary to the rumor, it is “not strength but weakness of the masculine component” that is “more frequent in the heavier smokers.” Here, perhaps, is the most profound cultural legacy of the Sheldonian posture-photo phenomenon: the blueprint for the sexual iconography of tobacco advertising. If, in fact, heavy smokers looked more like Harvard nerds than Marlboro men, why not use advertising imagery to make Harvard nerds feel like virile cowboys when they smoked?

  Finally and most telling, I found a letter nearly four decades old that did something nothing else in the files did. It gave a glimpse, a clue to the feelings of the subjects of Sheldon’s research, particularly the women. I found the letter in a file of correspondence between Sheldon and various phys-ed directors at women’s colleges who were providing Sheldon with bodies for the ill-fated Atlas of Women. In this letter, an official at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, was responding to Sheldon’s request to rephotograph the female freshmen he had photographed the year before. Something had apparently gone wrong with the technical side of the earlier shoot. But the official refused to allow Sheldon to reshoot the women, declaring that “to require them to pose for another [nude posture photo] would create insurmountable psychological problems.”

  Insurmountable psychological problems. Suddenly the subjects of Sheldon’s photography leaped into the foreground: the shy girl, the fat girl, the religiously conservative, the victim of inappropriate parental attention. Here, perhaps, Naomi Wolf has a point. In a culture that already encourages women to scrutinize their bodies critically, the first thing that happens to these women when they arrive at college is an intrusive, uncomfortable, public examination of their nude bodies.

  THREE MONTHS LATER, I finally succeeded in gaining permission to study the elusive posture photos. As I sat at my desk in the reading room, under a portrait of Chief Blue Eagle, the long-sought cache materialized. A curator trundled in a library cart from the storage facility. Teetering on top of the cart were stacks of big, gray cardboard boxes. The curator handed me a pair of the white cotton gloves that researchers must use to handle archival material.

  The contents of the boxes were described in an accompanying “Finder’s Aid” in this fashion:

  BOX 90 YALE UNIVERSITY CLASS OF 1971

  Negatives. Full length views of nude freshmen men, front, back and rear. Includes weight, height, previous or maximum weight, with age, name, or initials.

  BOX 95 MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE PHOTOGRAPHS

  Negatives. Made in 1950. Full length views of nude women, front, back and rear. Includes height, weight, date and age. Includes some photographs marked S.P.C.

  Among the other classes listed in the Finder’s Aid were: the Yale classes of ‘50, ‘63, ‘64, ‘66 and ‘71; the Princeton class of ‘52; Smith ‘50 and ‘52; Vassar ‘42 and ‘52; Mount Holyoke ‘53; Swarthmore ‘51; University of California ‘61 and ‘67; Hotchkiss ‘71; Syracuse ‘50; University of Wisconsin ‘53; Purdue ‘53; University of Pennsylvania ‘51, and Brooklyn College ‘51 and ‘52. There were also undated photos from the Oregon Hospital for the Criminally Insane (which I could not distinguish in any way from the Ivy League photos). All told, there were some 20,000 photographs of men—9,000 from Yale—and 7,000 of women.

  In flipping through those thousands of images (which were recently transferred to Smithsonian archives in Suitland, Md.), I found surprising testimony to the “insurmountable psychological problems” that the Denison University official had referred to. It took awhile for the “problems” to become apparent, because, as it turned out, I was not permitted to see positive photographs—only negatives (with no names attached).

  A fascinating distinction was being exhibited here, a kind of light-polarity theory of prurience and privacy that absolves the negative image of the naked body of whatever transgressive power it might have in a positive print. There’s an intuitive logic to the theory, although here the Sheldon posture-photo phenomenon exposes how fragile are the distinctions we make between the sanctioned and the forbidden images of the body.

  As I thumbed rapidly through box after box to confirm that the entries described in the Finder’s Aid were actually there, I tried to glance at only the faces. It was a decision that paid off, because it was in them that a crucial difference between the men and the women revealed itself. For the most part, the men looked diffident, oblivious. That’s not surprising considering that men of that era were accustomed to undressing for draft physicals and athletic-squad weigh-ins.

  But the faces of the women were another story. I was surprised at how many looked deeply unhappy, as if pained at being subjected to this procedure. On the faces of quite a few I saw what looked like grimaces, reflecting pronounced discomfort, perhaps even anger.

  I was not much more comfortable myself sitting there in the midst of stacks of boxes of such images. There I was at the end of my quest. I’d tracked down the fabled photographs, but the lessons of the posture-photo ritual were elusive.

  “THERE’S A TREMENDOUS lesson here,” Miss Manners declares. “Which is that one should have sympathy and tolerance for respectable women from whose past naked pictures suddenly show up. One should think of the many times where some woman becomes prominent like Marilyn Monroe and suddenly there are nude pictures in her past. Shouldn’t we be a little less condemning of someone in that position?”

  A little less condemning of the victims, yes, certainly. (I speak as one myself, although it turned out that my photo was burned in the Yale bonfire of the late 1970s.) But what about the perpetrators? What could have possessed so many elite institutions of higher education to turn their student bodies over to the practitioners of what now seems so dubious a science project?

  It’s a question that baffles the current powers that be at Ivy League schools. The response of Gary Fryer, Yale’s spokesman, is representative: “We searched, but there’s nobody around now who was involved with the decision.” Even so, he assures me, nothing like it could happen again; concerns about privacy have heightened, and, as he puts it, “there’s now a Federal law against disclosing anything in a college student’s record to any outsider without written permission.”

  In other words, “We won’t get fooled again.” Though he is undoubtedly correct that nothing precisely like the posture-photo folly could happen again, it is hard to deny the possibility, the likelihood, that well-meaning people and institutions will get taken in—are being taken in—by those who peddle scientific conjecture as certainty. Sheldon’s dream of reducing the complexity of human personality and the contingency of human fate to a single number is a recurrent one, as the continuing IQ controversy demonstrates. And a reminder that skepticism is still valuable in the face of scientific claims of certainty, particularly in the slippery realms of human behavior.

  The rise and fall of “sciences” like Marxist history, Freudian psychology and Keynesian economics suggests that at least some of the beliefs and axioms treated as science today (Rorschach analysis, “rational choice” economics, perhaps) will turn out to have little more validity than nude stick-pin somatotyping.

  In the Sheldon rituals, the student test subjects were naked—but it was the emperors of scientific certainty who had no clothes.

  Postscript to “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal”

  A minor furor erupted upon publication of this story in The New York Times Magazine, with alumni of all the implicated colleges besieging their alma maters with demands to know the disposition of their posture nudes. Within a week, The Washington Post reported t
hat the Smithsonian had come to an agreement with Yale for the swift incineration of the nearly ten thousand Yale photos I’d uncovered. In a flash, they were reduced to ashes. When I relayed this news to a cynical friend of mine, his reaction was, “When does the federal bureaucracy ever take swift action? Everything, no matter what, no matter for whom, takes forever. But when a few Yalies get their naked butts exposed….”

  —The New York Times Magazine

  January 15, 1995