Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

“There is, unquestionably, a larger popular interest in races and racial traits now than ever before,” claimed Charles Davenport in 1921. A biologist by training, Davenport was the leader of the American eugenics movement during the first three decades of the twentieth century and wrote and lectured widely on the subject. “For some people race seems to be equivalent to European country of origin,” declared Davenport, echoing in his statement what at the time was a race concept that conflated skin color with nationality. Those, for example, of Italian, Polish, and German descent were popularly and often scientifically believed to belong to Italian, Polish, and German races. Davenport also described how the “Immigration Bureau recognizes ‘races or peoples’ such as Hebrew” and how “the U.S. census has classified the population by ‘mother tongue,’” which, he asserted, was “biologically slightly more significant than country.” In recognition of these seeming contradictions, Davenport worried that “ultimately little attention is paid to the question: what is a race and how do you define any particular race.” “There would seem to be a need for a reconsideration of the idea of race and the definition of particular races,” Davenport asserted, concluding that “men of science are looked to for such clearer ideas and definitions.”¹ It would be from the eugenics movement, led in Britain by Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century and in the United States by Davenport during the first three decades of the twentieth century, that “men of science” would address the challenge of defining this problematic concept.

While ideas about biological distinctiveness were a part of the racial lexicon since the early nineteenth century, eugenics offered a scientific explanation for racial difference. Eugenicists correlated certain negative and deviant social behaviors—including criminality, insanity, and feeblemindedness (a term that captured any number of mental disorders)—with particular ethnic and racial populations, and claimed these behaviors to be inherited via the gene.2 In the first three decades of the twentieth century eugenicists and their supporters applied such ideas about racial difference to immigration, reproductive, and racial policies. The geneticization of race—the idea that racial differences can be understood as genetic distinctions in appearance and complex social behaviors between so-called racial groups—came about in the wake of the eugenics movement.

Eugenicists differed on how best to repair what they saw as a dysgenic society filled with what they believed to be genetically unfit groups, including most prominently immigrants from eastern and central Europe, who were outreproducing Americans of northern European ancestry. Whereas positive eugenicists sought to increase breeding among the American social elite, negative eugenicists, in contrast, discouraged breeding among the lower classes.³ During the heyday of the eugenics era in America, popular culture and policy enactments were dominated by the theories of negative eugenicists. Positive eugenics was the terrain primarily of socialist intellectuals who believed that eugenics would facilitate the emergence of a socialist utopia in the United States.⁴

Sterilization laws across America were inspired by negative eugenic sentiment, and in 1907 the state of Indiana established the country’s first sterilization law. By the early 1930s over twenty-nine other states would pass similar laws, leading at that time to the sterilization of approximately 30,000 so-called feebleminded Americans. That figure would rise to total more than 63,000 sterilizations by the 1960s.⁵ Criminals and those accused or convicted of sexual offenses were the primary concern of these eugenic enactments. Advocates of criminal sterilization wrote, “Criminals should be studied for evidence of dysgenic traits that are germinal in nature. Where found in serious degree parole should not be granted without sterilization.”⁶

In the first three decades of the twentieth century eugenicists and many geneticists promoted the idea that mental and physical traits differed hereditarily by race. They also claimed that race crosses were harmful.7 Well-respected geneticists wrote openly that “miscegenation can only lead to unhappiness under present social conditions and must, we believe, under any social conditions be biologically wrong.”⁸ In the late 1920s Davenport wrote, “We are driven to the conclusion that there is a constitutional, hereditary, genetical basis for the difference between the two races [whites and blacks] in mental tests. We have to conclude that there are racial differences in mental capacity.”⁹ In their influential text Applied Eugenics, Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, who endorsed segregation as a “social adaptation,” wrote that “the Negro race differs greatly from the white race, mentally as well as physically, and that in many respects it may be said to be inferior when tested by the requirements of modern civilization and progress.” Moreover, they suggested that “Negroes, both children and adults, have been found markedly inferior to white in vital capacity.…Differences in temperament and emotional reaction also exist, and may be more important than the purely intellectual differences.”¹⁰ Through eugenics, genetics gave race and racism an unalterable permanence; neither education, nor change in environment or climate, nor the eradication of racism itself could alter the fate of African Americans or those labeled as belonging to nonwhite races.

There were, to be sure, even in the eyes of the most racist thinkers, exceptions to black genetic inferiority. But eugenicists and other scientific racists explained these “aberrations” by noting that genetic material from white ancestry set them apart. W. E. B. Du Bois’s success was, for example, attributed to the blood he inherited from his white ancestors.¹¹ In this context, it is not hard to see how eugenics provided a modern scientific language, rooted in the burgeoning field of genetics, that both proffered and buttressed contemporary racial theories. The legacy of eugenics therefore is not simply about sterilization laws, anti-immigration statutes, or its impact on Nazi racial theory. Those events, important issues in their own right, have been explored by numerous historians.¹² Ultimately, eugenics in an immigrant and ethnic context was about social control. But in a black versus white context eugenics was also about defining (with the latest scientific theory and jargon) the nature of the social and biological differences believed to be reflected by skin color.

Galton, founder of eugenics, published his first essay in the field, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1865. Interestingly, when Galton wrote the Macmillan’s article he had not yet even coined the term “eugenics.”¹⁴ The article focused primarily on his early ideas about how human traits passed between generations, on which Galton wrote, “Our bodies, minds and capabilities of development have been derived from them [our forefathers].” In the late nineteenth century the secrets of heredity had not yet been revealed except for the relatively obscure work of the monk-scientist Gregor Mendel, whose laws of heredity would not be rediscovered until the first years of the twentieth century.

As the scion of a prominent family that included his maternal grandfather, the great physician, inventor, and naturalist Erasmus Darwin, and his cousin, the celebrated naturalist and architect of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, Galton believed biological heritage to be of profound importance in his life. Through eugenics, he theorized that heredity exerted a singular influence on all the social characteristics of humankind. With such bloodlines, it seems no coincidence that Galton’s “inquiries into hereditary genius…show the pressing necessity of obtaining a multitude of exact measurements relating to every measurable faculty of body or mind, for two generations at least, on which to theorize.”15 With this information Galton hoped to improve the world through selective breeding. Karl Pearson, Galton’s star pupil, a famed eugenicist himself, and founder of the Galton Laboratory at the University of London, summarized what he believed to be Galton’s vision of a eugenic world: “Democracy—moral and intellectual progress—is impossible while man is burdened with the heritage of his past history. It has bound mankind to a few great leaders; it has produced a mass of servile intelligences; and only man’s insight—man breeding man as his domesticated animal—can free mankind.”¹⁶

From a very young age, according to biographer Raymond Fancher, Galton’s parents, “who collected and saved documents as evidence…regarding Francis’s precocity in their diaries,” had high intellectual expectations for young Francis, and he was “cast firmly in the role of family academic from the time of his first glimmerings of scholarly aptitude.”¹⁷ The young Galton’s intellectual feats were self-recorded in a letter to his older sister when he was four: “I am four years old and can read any English book. I can say all the Latin Substantives and Adjectives.…I can cast up any Sum in addition and can multiply by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 7, 8, 9, 10.”¹⁸ Tutored by his older sister until he was five, Galton was educated at prep schools until sixteen, when he became an apprentice to William Bowman, a young surgeon.¹⁹ Galton began his academic medical training in 1839 at King’s College, London, but at the urging of his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton left King’s in 1840 to pursue mathematics and classics at Cambridge.²⁰ After three years at Cambridge, having failed to qualify for honors, Galton left for London to continue his medical studies. But that, too, Galton left incomplete, never becoming licensed, and his departure from medical training brought his “formal” academic career to an end.²¹

Galton, according to Fancher, spent much of the next six years living “the life of the idle rich,” going on “a carousing tour of Egypt and the Middle East,” where he practiced his hunting and shooting skills.²² His transformation into a man of science, according to one apocryphal account, suggests that his life began to take shape only after a London phrenologist suggested he could build character and strength through military service in the British colonies. With money from his family inheritance, Galton set out to explore and map regions of what is now Namibia in southwestern Africa. For that effort, in 1854, Galton was awarded a gold medal from the Royal Geographic Society.²³

Galton’s time on the African continent, according to historian Daniel Kevles, “exemplified the joining of foreign adventure with scientific study,” and certainly shaped his attitudes toward Africa, Africans, and the descendants of that continent.24 In his memoir, Memory of My Life, Galton’s earliest connections between race and breeding are unequivocal. Of his encounter with the Damara people in southern Africa, Galton wrote that they “were for the most part thieving and murderous, dirty, and of a low type; but their chiefs were more or less highly bred.”²⁵ Galton’s assessment of African intelligence was also severe. Of his visits with the Herero people in southern Africa Galton wrote, “Whatever they may possess in their language, they certainly use no numeral greater than three. When they wish to express four, they take to their fingers.…They puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for the ‘units.’” But Galton, like many of his contemporaries, expressed his views about race through science, and as his eugenical ideas took shape, his social prejudices became scientific ones. Galton’s personal observations about Africans would, in the coming years, evolve into more careful scientific thinking on the subject. His racism would also be obvious in many of his writings, including his two seminal works, Hereditary Talent and Character and Hereditary Genius.²⁶

Galton accepted the idea that physical and social traits were associated, despite his not having any evidence to support this point.27 Galton extended this idea to human racial types, writing in his 1865 essay on heredity in Macmillan’s, “Mongolians, Jews, Negroes, Gipsies, and America Indians severally propagate their kinds; and each kind differs in character and intellect, as well as in colour and shape from the other four.”²⁸ In the Macmillan’s article Galton paid careful attention to blacks, suggesting, for example, “the Negro has strong impulsive passions, and neither patience, reticence nor dignity.” Galton also maintained that “the Negro” is “warmhearted, loving towards his master’s children and idolized by the children in return. He is eminently gregarious, for he is always jabbering, quarrelling, tom-tom-ing and dancing. He is remarkably domestic, and is endowed with such constitutional vigour, and is so prolific that his race is irrepressible.”²⁹ It would be easy to dismiss these racist musings as simply a reflection of Victorian views on race, which prevailed among both British and Americans at this time. Some have even argued that Galton’s writings on Africans and blacks “occupied only a minuscule fraction of his writings on human heredity.” But Galton’s attention to race, specifically as it concerned blacks, was, in fact, significantly developed and nuanced, and as the founder of a movement of which the “betterment of the race” was a core principle, Galton’s writings on this matter would have been read widely with considerable effect on the shaping of eugenics.³⁰

In mid to late nineteenth-century England, Galton probably had few direct interactions with persons of African ancestry. Galton’s experiences with blacks came from his earlier travels in Africa and what we must assume to be his limited contact with the few blacks living in London at the time. The black population of London shrank during the latter part of the eighteenth and into the first several decades of the nineteenth century following the ending of the slave trade in 1807 and the subsequent absorption of Africans and their descendants into English society.³¹ Great Britain itself was certainly not immune to the struggles around issues of slavery that had plunged the United States into civil warfare during the time Galton began to spell out his eugenical theories in his writings. The impact of both domestic and international racial conflict would be significant on Galton’s thinking in this area.³²

On the effect of slavery on Britain’s views of black Africans, Sir Richard Burton, the renowned nineteenth-century British adventurer and explorer, declared, “Before the Wilberforcean age, he was simply a Negro. That trade which founded in Liverpool, and which poured five million pounds of sterling into the national pocket, marked him to the one class a Man and a Brother, to the other a Nigger.”³³ Views of blacks would change little after the emancipation of African slaves in Great Britain in 1807. In 1849, an anonymous author published an essay in Fraser’s Magazine titled “The Nigger Question.” The writer believed the typical black to be the lowest of the human species and wrote of their future, “Decidedly you will have to be servants to those that are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you; servants to the whites, if they are (as what mortal can doubt they are?) born wiser than you.”³⁴ In the succeeding issue of Fraser’s the philosopher John Stuart Mill offered a challenge to racist theories, writing that racial differences between blacks and whites were produced by circumstance, not nurture. Just a year earlier, Mill had written about the nature of the racist argument, stating, “Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of human conduct and character to inherent original natural differences.”³⁵

Galton, who joined the Ethnological Society of London in the early 1860s, was likely influenced by debates at the society on the origin of human races.36 At that time, its members were arguing about the scientific legitimacy of a polygenic view of mankind—whether or not blacks and other racial groups were actually a distinct species. In 1863, for example, the president of the society, in an address called “The Negro’s Place in Nature,” argued in favor of a polygenic view, concluding that blacks were a distinct race, were intellectually inferior to whites, and that European civilization was “not suited to the Negro’s requirements or character.”³⁷ Polygenic theories were popular on both sides of the Atlantic at this time, driven largely by the efforts of Samuel Morton and the American School of Anthropology.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Britain’s colonial involvement in Africa grew deeper, justified in large part by such anthropological and biological ideas. Galton’s prejudices against Africa were on full display as he weighed in on the colonization debate in an essay published in the Edinburgh Review in 1878. He hoped for Africa that “men of other races than the negro, such as the Chinese coolie,” would “emigrate, and, by occupying parts of the continent…introduce a civilisation superior to that which at present exists.”³⁸ On the interplay between politics and race on the African continent, Galton suggested, “The recent attempts by many European nations to utilise Africa for their own purposes gives immediate and practical interest to inquiries that bear on the transplantation of races. They compel us to face the question as to what races should be politically aided to become hereafter the chief occupants of that continent.”³⁹ Ultimately, in Galton’s mind, the inferiority of Africans predetermined that outcome as he expected that “it may prove that the Negroes, one and all, will fail as completely under the new conditions as they have failed under the old ones, to submit to the needs of a superior civilisation to their own; in this case their races, numerous and prolific as they are, will in course of time be supplanted and replaced by their betters.”⁴⁰ It is worth considering whether the British sociologist Michael Banton was correct in concluding that “the imperialist philosophy could ever have taken such a hold upon the nation’s mind had it not been for the development of certain anthropological and biological doctrines.”⁴¹

Galton was a prolific author, and his writings helped him popularize the study of the betterment of racial groups through eugenics. In his first book-length work, Hereditary Genius, published in 1869, Galton’s primary concern was “whether or no genius be hereditary,” and claimed “to be the first to treat the subject in a statistical manner.”42 The book received mixed reviews in both the scientific and popular press. Writing in Nature, Alfred Russel Wallace, who, along with Charles Darwin, is jointly credited with uncovering the mechanisms of evolution, wrote that those “who read it without the care and attention it requires and deserves, will admit that it is ingenious, but declare that the question is incapable of proof.” The London Daily News embraced the book, writing that “Galton undertakes to show, and to a large extent undoubtedly succeeds in showing, that genius is equally transmissible, and that ability goes by descent.” Both the London Times and the Saturday Review were unflattering in their reviews. The Times reviewer wrote, “Galton is a little too anxious to array all things in the wedding garment of his theory, and will scarcely allow them a stitch of other clothing.” The Saturday Review’s assessment suggested that Galton “bestowed immense pains upon the empirical proof of a thesis which from its intrinsic nature can never be proved empirically.”⁴³ Galton’s attraction to studying questions of heredity was influenced, in large part, by the work of his cousin Charles Darwin. While Galton had accepted Darwinian evolutionary theory, he searched for alternative methods by which evolution occurred. Whereas Darwin theorized that evolution was gradual and continuous, Galton believed it to be abrupt and discontinuous.⁴⁴ Some have even speculated that modern theories of heredity, including eugenics, were launched to either challenge or complete Darwin’s theory of evolution.⁴⁵

In a chapter in Hereditary Genius with the title “The Comparative Worth of Different Races,” Galton proposed that “every long-established race has necessarily its peculiar fitness for the conditions under which it has lived.”46 It is therefore at the level of racial groups that intelligence will have its most significant impact. “Among animals as intelligent as man, the most social race is sure to prevail, other qualities being equal,” suggested Galton.⁴⁷ In measuring the “worth of races,” Galton made “use of the law of deviation from an average,” a law that was both the centerpiece of eugenics and also represented Galton’s lasting contribution to the field of mathematical statistics. Only the “Australian type” made out worse than the “African negro,” the former considered by Galton to be one grade below the residents of the African continent and their descendants.⁴⁸

Galton introduces the reader to “comparative racial worth” by comparing “the negro race with the Anglo-Saxon, with respect to those qualities alone which are capable of producing judges, statesmen, commanders, men of literature and science, poets, artists, and divines.”⁴⁹ While Galton acknowledged “the negro race is by no means wholly deficient in men…considerably raised above the average of whites” (citing as proof, for example, Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution), he concluded that “the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.” Galton also cited a statistic suggesting “the number of negroes of those whom we should call half-witted is very large.” Recalling his own visit to Africa, Galton remarked that “the mistakes the negroes made in their own matters, were so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like, as frequently to make me ashamed of my own species.”⁵⁰ Galton’s rhetoric on this subject offers no statistical “proof” or data for these assumptions, yet reading his observations about the “lowest” or “highest” races, one is struck by the language of statistical certainty permeating his writing.

Fourteen years later, with the publication of Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, Galton expanded his hereditary focus to also include physical, social, and mental traits. Although he had been writing about the idea of eugenics for the almost two decades since the publication of his MacMillan’s essay, in Inquiries Galton first offered a definition for his burgeoning field of investigation. Early in the text of the book, he introduced eugenics simply as “the cultivation of race.”⁵¹ Just below the definition, however, in an extended footnote, Galton notes the Greek origins of the word and shares with the reader his enduring vision for the field, writing that “we greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.”⁵²

In Inquiries Galton wrote with conviction about what he believed to be the “fact” that “the very foundation and outcome of the human mind is dependent upon race, and that the qualities of races vary, and therefore that humanity taken as a whole is not fixed by variable, compels us to reconsider what may be the true place and function of man in the order of the world.”53 To satisfy that conviction, Galton used the pages of Inquiries to begin to develop a program (that is, of course, eugenics) by which to improve different races of humanity. “My general object has been to take note of the varied hereditary faculties of different men, and of the great differences in different families and races,” wrote Galton. He hoped to use this information to investigate the “practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable.”⁵⁴ For Galton, his supporters, and many of his peers, eugenics was a utopian method through which to breed better humans. A reviewer in Science noted and endorsed the utopian nature of Galton’s proposed method, writing, “If we want human stock to grow better through voluntary effort, we must undertake to study and improve pre-natal and ancestral influences yet more than we try to better the influences of education.”⁵⁵

Ultimately, however, the language and content of eugenics could be about using the scientific method for advancing and preserving white supremacy. Where Hereditary Genius established a eugenic hierarchy of races, Inquiries offered explanations for why this was so and why it would stay this way. Galton believed that “so long as the race remains radically the same, the stringent selection of the best specimens to rear and breed from, can never lead to any permanent result.” Galton likened the struggle to improve a low race through noneugenic means to “the labour of Sisyphus in rolling his stone uphill; let the effort be relaxed for a moment, and the stone will roll back.” Instead, the only way to improve a low race was by allowing only “the few best specimens of that race…to become parents, and not many of their descendants can be allowed to live.”⁵⁶ This chilling passage, the spirit of which was adapted in the 1930s by the Nazis as part of their Final Solution, is the eugenic extreme. Similarly, this new scientific view of race was adopted and perpetuated by Galton’s acolytes, by racists, and by white supremacists on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a century.

It is fairly easy to show through documentary evidence how Galton theorized about racial differences and, more specifically, about what he believed were black and white racial differences. There is more than sufficient evidence illustrating this point. However, even more important than his eugenical thinking about blacks is to recognize that Galton and his eugenic followers fundamentally changed the meaning and study of race and racism. If the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan is right, and “Galton changed the study of heredity by changing the meaning of the word ‘heredity,’” then we must also consider how Galton and his eugenicist disciples also changed the study of race by changing the meaning of the word “race.”57 Schwartz Cowan argues that “heredity,” prior to Galton and eugenics, was “a word which had long been poorly, if not vaguely, defined.”⁵⁸ Prior to Galton’s writings, words like “inheritance” and “hereditary” were used to generally describe intergenerational legacies. But according to Cowan, “the passage from ‘inheritance’ to ‘heredity’ meant passing from an extremely flexible definition, one which was so vague as to be of little scientific value, to an extremely concrete definition, one which may have been overly rigid but which was nonetheless quantifiable, explorable and researchable.”⁵⁹

Galton’s writings exerted a similar influence on race, and, as with his impact on the study of heredity, he and a generation of eugenicists redefined the term and its study. If eugenics was, at its core, about quantifying heredity, then through the lens of eugenics, race became the most important quantifiable human trait to study in a hereditarian context.60 Galton was not alone in believing that the “survivorship of the fittest” would occur at the level of race. The term “race” itself had long been the subject of debate among the nineteenth century’s anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers. Whereas nineteenth-century anthropology failed to offer a lasting scientific vision of racial difference through the theory of polygeny—polygeny posited a divine hierarchy of separate creations, a theory that contradicted the Bible—eugenicists found a way to quantify and reify racial attitudes without undermining or challenging accepted religious mores. Galton’s success was in developing mathematical methods to study human diversity in the context of heredity. Galton called eugenics “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.”⁶¹ By pairing heredity and race under the banner of eugenics, Galton was able to redefine how race was employed in a scientific context.

Nineteenth-century anthropologists, including most prominently Samuel Morton, based theories of racial distinctiveness on measurable and observable physical traits. Their approach to measuring human difference was typological, under the belief that traits like cranial capacity and skin color were correlated with specific intellectual and behavioral characteristics. Eugenicists took a different approach; they shifted to seeing and measuring race as a reflection of unseen differences they attributed to heredity, an area of study they would help to create in the final decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. This shift, from the seen to the unseen, which in today’s genetic parlance would be from the phenotypic to the genotypic, was the eugenicists’ most significant contribution to redefining the meaning of race. By the early twentieth century, as genetics became the field through which to study heredity, eugenicists helped to geneticize the study of human diversity.

Rooting human variation in blood or in kinship is a relatively new way to categorize humans. The idea gained strength toward the end of the Middle Ages as anti-Jewish feelings, which were rooted in an antagonism toward Jewish religious beliefs, began the long evolution into anti-Semitism, which rationalized anti-Jewish hatred as the hatred of a people. For example, Marranos, Spanish Jews who had been baptized in the Church, were still considered a threat to Christendom because they could not prove purity of blood to the Inquisition. Despite an outward acceptance of Christ, a Jew would always be a Jew.⁶²

During the Enlightenment, ideas of this type took root and were more directly applied to explaining the diversity of humankind. The integration of social and cultural notions of personhood into a belief in static human communities came to fruition at this time, driven in part by the experiences with new peoples during colonial exploration, the need to rationalize the inferiority of certain peoples as slavery took hold in a protocapitalist world, and the development of a modern scientific taxonomy that provided a new type of language to assess and explain human and organismal diversity.

The progenitor of modern taxonomic classification, Swedish botanist and naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, devised his Systema Naturae (1735), in which “all living forms” are classified by “genus” and “species.” Linnaeus defined species as “fixed and unalterable in their basic organic plan,” while varieties within the species could be caused by various external factors such as climate or temperature. Linnaeus divided the human species into four groups: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeaeus. And to these groups (he did not refer to them as races) he ascribed both physical and behavioral characteristics. Members of Americanus were “reddish, choleric, and erect; hair black…wide nostrils…obstinate, merry, free…regulated by customs.” Those of Asiaticus were “melancholy, stiff; hair black, dark eyes…severe, haughty, avaricious…ruled by opinions.” Africanus were “black, phlegmatic…hair black, frizzled…nose flat; lips tumid; women without shame, they lactate profusely; crafty, indolent, negligent…governed by caprice.” Finally, those of the Europeaeus category were “white, sanguine, muscular…eyes blue, gentle…inventive…governed by laws.”63

Linnaean taxonomy was infused with judgments of inferiority and superiority. The idea of a “Great Chain of Being”—a vision of the universe that in a hierarchical fashion ranked forms of life from the simplest to the most complex—is reflected in Linnaeus’s characterization of human diversity. This Great Chain of Being “was the conception of the plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century,” according to Arthur Lovejoy, and was accepted “without question” by “many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men.”⁶⁴ The integration of human diversity into the Great Chain also reflected “the growing influence of a certain type of thinking, which presumed that each species had qualities of behavior or temperament that were innate.” Linnaeus’s own experience with different peoples was limited primarily to reports from others who had spent time in the colonies. The perceptions of these observers, according to anthropologist Audrey Smedley, “flowed into the scientific establishment and fueled its speculations.”⁶⁵

Out of this Enlightenment mix of exploration, colonization, science, and slavery emerged a modern notion of race. But this Great Chain lacked a unifying term to connote the innate sense of being (referring to both physical and social traits) in populations of peoples that Linnaeus and others beginning in the fifteenth century were trying to describe, first throughout Europe and eventually to define and rank the peoples on the continents the Europeans colonized. Scholars are in general agreement that etymologically “race” was a latecomer to Romance and other Western languages, and that it originated in the Middle Ages as a term used primarily in domestic animal breeding to describe breeding lines or groups of animals bred for similar uses. Yet its use then, as now, remained confused and often contradictory. It could be a term simply to describe a group of people united by common characteristics, or it could be used when classifying different human groups, sometimes even in place of the term “species.” It was thus not unusual to see the term describe different things: the white race, the race of Englishmen, the human race, or its use to describe family lineage.66

And it is from this etymological disorder that the term “race” was introduced into the natural sciences in 1749 by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, in Natural History. Buffon saw clearly demarcated distinctions between the human races that, he believed, were caused by varying climates.⁶⁷ On the one hand, Buffon recognized the unity of mankind as a species, and the ability of humans to thrive while breeding between races. Buffon wrote, “The Asiatic, the European, and the Negro produce equally with the American. Nothing can be a stronger proof that they belong to the same family, than the facility with which they unite to the common stock.” And Buffon also believed that while “the blood is different” between peoples, “the germ is the same.” Thus, despite outward differences in physical type, and even differences in the blood, Buffon believed that the “germ” of humanity was ultimately identical. Nevertheless, Buffon’s climatological theory of difference was infused with notions of European superiority. In Natural History he wrote, “As if, by any great revolution, man were forced to abandon those climates which he had invaded, and return to his native country, he would, in the progress of time, resume his original features, his primitive stature, and his natural color.” To Buffon, this natural state of humanity was derived from the European, a people that “produced the most handsome and beautiful men” and represented the “genuine color of mankind.”⁶⁸

The impact of German scientist Johann Blumenbach’s racial classifications, developed toward the end of the eighteenth century in his book On the Natural Variety of Mankind, continue to have a significant impact on the idea of race in modern times. Whereas Linnaeus suggested four racial types, Blumenbach offered five: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. Blumenbach’s addition, noted paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, “radically changed the geometry of human order from a geographically based model without explicit ranking to a double hierarchy of worth oddly based upon perceived beauty and fanning out in two directions from a Caucasian ideal.” Even though Blumenbach “stoutly defended the mental and moral unity of all peoples,” his “racial geometry” was imbued with a sense of white superiority.69 And while racial differences were fast becoming part of the scientific vernacular, prejudice and discrimination based on skin color both preceded and complemented scientists’ providing a vocabulary to racial ideology.

Galton had no way to directly measure the “unseen” differences he attributed to racial difference. However, his theory of heredity assumed them to be real reflections of the physical and social differences that he claimed he could measure. In Inquiries into Human Faculty Galton wrote that “we cannot but recognise the vast variety of natural faculty, useful and harmful, in members of the same race, and much more in the human family at large, all of which tend to be transmitted by inheritance.”⁷⁰ Galton’s methods of measuring racial difference ultimately differed little from the anthropological and typological approaches that preceded him. After all, the technologies of genetics were still a few decades away when Galton began theorizing on heredity. But what Galton did do was shift thinking about difference itself to a hereditarian worldview. While “race” remained a term with a multitude of definitions, Galton and the eugenicists succeeded in simultaneously quantifying the study of race through eugenics—Galton and his colleagues developed statistical methods to measure mental, physical, and social traits that their data showed varied by racial groups—and, paradoxically, using the term “race” in a multitude of ways that were often contradictory.

Thus, given the term’s etymological and scientific history, that the inconsistent use of the term “race” is universal in the eugenic literature should not be surprising. In an 1878 article Galton wrote, “The negro may himself disappear before alien races, just as his predecessors disappeared before him; or the better negro races may prevail and form nations and exclude the rest.”71 Galton, of course, contradicts himself. In the first part of his definition he defined the negro as a race, but then wrote about “the better negro races.” Are we then to assume that Galton meant that “race” can be used to define a whole group as well as its subgroups? Are there better and worse races within a single race? In Inquiries into Human Faculty Galton tries to address these contradictions, what he calls “our ethnological ignorance,” noting “the absence of a criterion to distinguish between races and sub-races…makes it impossible to offer more than a very off-hand estimate of the average variety of races in the different countries of the world.” Galton suggests that “on the average at least three different recognised races were to be found in every moderately-sized district on the earth’s surface.”⁷² Galton goes on to define races in a surprisingly heterogeneous way, one that seemingly contradicts the absolute terms in which he spoke about blacks and Africans more generally. For example, on the diversity of races in Africa he writes “that an invasion of Bushmen drove the Negroes to the hills.…Then an invasion of a tribe of Bantu race supplanted the Bushmen, and the Bantus, after endless struggles among themselves, were…pushed aside…by the incoming Namaquas, who themselves are a mixed race. This is merely a sample of Africa, everywhere there are evidences of changing races.”⁷³ But just as surely as Galton wrote of the diversity of races in Africa, he could write just a few pages later that the industrious “yellow races of China” would become a colonizing force in Africa and “extrude hereafter the coarse and lazy Negro from at least the metaliferous regions of tropical Africa.”⁷⁴ As much as Galton redefined race in a hereditary context, the nature of human diversity precluded him from providing a clear and consistent definition for race itself. Eugenics as a whole suffered from this problem—eugenic literature is rife with multiple definitions and explanations for the nature and meaning of race and how eugenic policy should address these differences.⁷⁵

For Galton, race improvement was “so noble in its aim” that it rose to the level of “religious obligation.”76 By proposing methods for breeding a better race, Galton sought just that. Another of Galton’s lasting contributions to the study of race was his proposal to use twins to understand hereditary differences, a research program he began in earnest in 1875.⁷⁷ Galton outlined his method for twin studies in Inquiries into Human Faculty in 1883, proposing that twins offer “means of distinguishing between the effects of tendencies received at birth, and of those that were imposed by the special circumstances of their after lives.”⁷⁸ By studying twins who were “closely alike in boyhood and youth” to “learn whether they subsequently grew unlike, and, if so, what the main causes were,” and, conversely, to study “the history of twins who were exceedingly unlike in childhood, and learn how far their characters became assimilated under the influence of identical nature,” Galton hoped to show the primary impact of nature (versus nurture) on humanity.⁷⁹