Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

If Francis Galton was the theoretician of eugenics, then Charles Davenport was its engineer and American torchbearer. In the United States, from the turn of the twentieth century until his death at age seventy-seven in 1944, Davenport was both the public and academic face of eugenics.¹ Through his writings, speeches, and indefatigable advocacy on behalf of eugenic doctrine, Davenport established himself as the doyen of the American eugenics movement. Though Davenport lived just long enough to witness his field in decline in the United States (and its horrific successes on the European continent), during his lifetime he oversaw an expansion of eugenic ideas into both social and scientific spheres that are salient still today.

A New Yorker by birth who prided himself in his colonial birthright, Davenport was the last of eleven children. His father, Amzi Davenport, a real estate man, traced his family line in a multivolume genealogy to eleventh-century England but was more recently descended from Congregationalist ministers in both England and New England.2 Davenport’s love of science was imparted by his mother, Jane, so much so that he dedicated his first book to her, writing an inscription that read, “To the memory of the first and most important of my teachers of natural history—my mother.”³ Davenport’s passion for science took him to Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. in biology in 1892 and afterward became an instructor there. He departed Harvard for the University of Chicago in 1899, taking a position as an assistant professor, where he stayed on until the opening of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1904. Davenport’s success in persuading the Carnegie Institution of Washington to endow Cold Spring with ten million dollars as a laboratory for the study of evolution marked what one biographer noted was Davenport’s early signs “of being an energetic organizer.”⁴ This attribute would help Davenport prosper throughout his long career.

Davenport is most often remembered for seeking to quantify the heritability of social and mental traits as they varied by group, and for the way in which he linked questions of heredity with the challenges of immigration. As the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for almost forty years, Davenport built the infrastructure of American eugenics at his beachfront laboratory on the north shore of Long Island. From there he oversaw an expansion in the study of “the germinal differences that affect not only form and color and details of physical features but also instincts and temperament.” In a speech in 1920, Davenport warned, “It is not sufficient that a community or a state should purge itself of the ‘inferior strains.’ It must guard itself against the immigration into the community of persons carrying bad germ plasm.”⁵

In the years before the passage of the anti-immigrant Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which radically limited the entry of legal immigrants into the United States, eugenicists like Davenport and his colleagues Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and Harry Laughlin stoked anti-immigration fervor by intensely lobbying public and political interests with eugenic rationales for a closed-door policy. American nativism would reach a peak in the 1920s, declining once the doors to most immigrants were firmly shut in the wake of Johnson-Reed. The rise of anti-immigrant fervor in the United States dated back to at least the 1880s, which saw the beginnings of an explosion of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The challenge to the old order, brought about by these new immigrants, would stoke nativism and anti-immigration fervor for decades to come. In 1882, for example, 1.2 million souls turned up on America’s shores, more than 80 percent of whom had begun their journeys in southern or eastern Europe, prompting one nativist to worry that America was allowing “every nation to pour its pestilential sewage into our reservoir.”⁶

It is no coincidence that the rise of eugenics corresponded closely with the social transformations brought about by immigration, both real and perceived, that occurred during these times. By the early years of the twentieth century, the work of eugenicists would offer scientific rationales and solutions to the fears of a white elite that was concerned about its and the nation’s decline. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History and an ardent eugenicist, lobbied Congress to pass sweeping immigration restrictions. In May of 1924, for example, just a few weeks before the passage of the act, Osborn wrote to Congressman Albert Johnson, cosponsor of Johnson-Reed, congratulating him on the success of the bill in committee, which he believed to be “one of the most important steps taken in the whole history of our country.” To Osborn and other supporters, this legislation would spread “throughout the country appreciation of the sacred duty of every American citizen to maintain the character of our country though elevating the character of its people.”7 Osborn had been in contact with Johnson on immigration matters for at least five years prior to the passage of the 1924 act, and his thinking on this matter changed over time. In a December 1919 exchange with nativist and eugenicist Madison Grant, Osborn chastised Grant for his narrow views on immigration, which included quotas by trade and occupation. Osborn suggested instead that “the men, women, and children whom we desire to admit to this country will be tested by their character, their physical health, their willingness to work and their unqualified loyalty.” For those who were disloyal to the United States, Osborn proposed immediate deportation. Furthermore, Osborn opposed limiting entrance to select races and proposed instead that eugenics standards could be successfully applied to “men of whatever race.”⁸ Just a few years later, Osborn’s ideas began to take on a nativist tone, urging that a sentinel force be used to prevent undesirables. Osborn wrote to Congressman Johnson in 1922, “My ideas about the future of America are derived not from reading but from personal observation.…I think that there are good and desirable immigrants to be found in every country. But all these countries are now striving to keep the desirable people at home, and are sending the undesirables, especially the Jews, to America. This is why it would pay the United States to have observers at all consulates abroad.”⁹

The impact of the push to integrate eugenic theory into American immigration policy by Osborn and others was considerable, and the consequences of this pursuit had measurable damaging effects on both immigrants to the United States and eventually on those who died in the Nazi genocide against the Jews in Europe. Federal immigration restrictions were, as such, buoyed by eugenicist sentiment. Harry Laughlin, the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, appeared before Congress several times in the early 1920s promoting the belief that immigration was foremost a “biological problem.” As Davenport’s number two at the laboratory, Laughlin fervently promoted the eugenics cause, maintaining, for example, that recent immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were afflicted “by a high degree of insanity, mental deficiency, and criminality.”10 In his testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Laughlin pleaded with the congressmen to restrict immigration so America would be allowed to “recruit and to develop our racial qualities.”¹¹ Laughlin believed that the “American Race”—a race of white people from northern and western Europe—was being polluted by a high rate of “inborn social inadequacy” from new immigrants. To be sure, eugenics was not the only catalyst behind immigration restriction legislation. Nationalistic fervor, anti-Semitism, and a more general anti-immigration predilection all combined to advance the restrictive legislation. But eugenics was, in many ways, the most compelling ideology generating support for the bill, particularly because the anti-immigrant prejudices of many in Congress were consistent with eugenic pronouncements on the subject. Science has been a source of tremendous authority in twentieth-century American social and political thought. Scientific claims were used by activists to either bolster or discredit reform efforts. Eugenicists worked hard to capitalize on the rhetorical power of science and its authority in their claims about immigrants.¹² Harry Laughlin, for example, during his congressional testimony in 1923, backed his eugenical vision with what he called scientific facts and criticized attacks on his work as being biased “because its conclusions are displeasing.”¹³

Davenport was involved in lobbying on behalf of immigration restriction. In correspondence with Congressman Johnson, cosponsor of the 1924 immigration act, Davenport paid careful attention to the impact of the Johnson-Reed Act on black immigrants from other parts of the Americas. “Could you tell me in a word,” Davenport wrote, “whether there is some treaty requirement that makes it necessary to admit Negro immigrants from the West Indies, Brazil and other parts of the Americas.…I believe you will recognize the undesirability of admitting thousands of alien Negroes from any source.”14 Johnson replied, “To date, Negroes have been admitted because of the wording of the Naturalization Act which admits to naturalization free white persons and African Negroes.”¹⁵

The relationship between eugenics, race, and immigration in the 1920s was complex, and scholars have examined how the Johnson-Reed Act, in addition to effectively closing America’s immigration doors, also played a role in reconceptualizing racial categories.¹⁶ This redrawing differentiated and ranked Europeans based on their “desirability.” Non-European immigrants, including Japanese, Chinese, and Mexicans, were considered unassimilable into American society.¹⁷ Some scholars have suggested that following the passage of Johnson-Reed, the decrease in European immigrants post-1924, along with the migrations of African Americans from the Deep South to the upper south, north, and west, forced black-white racial issues to the forefront.¹⁸

While eugenicists post-1924 did systematically pay more attention to black-white differences, the idea that the Johnson-Reed Act produced a new racial binary between black and white both overstates the racialized status of white ethnics and fails to acknowledge the longer history and power of the black-white racial binary throughout American history.19 A new racial alchemy certainly developed during the twentieth century—influenced to varying degrees by social, cultural, political, and economic changes—but this binary was not novel to the twentieth century, nor did it take on a radical new form post-1924. Indeed, evidence from legal history shows that the black-white binary was legally maintained long before the passage of Johnson-Reed, and even long before the consolidation of segregation through passage of Jim Crow laws in the 1890s. An 1851 ruling in Alabama, for example, defined an individual as black “as long as one of his or her great-grandparents was a ‘Negro.’”²⁰ The “Redemption” of the South in the late 1870s and 1880s marked a postemancipation transition to reducing the rights of black citizens. Following the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, the nation abandoned the attempt to guarantee freedmen and -women their civil rights and relinquished control of the political infrastructure to white southerners.²¹ The Jim Crow laws of the 1890s legally consolidated the disenfranchisement of African Americans. Furthermore, evidence from the Commonwealth of Virginia shows how eugenics was put in service of the black-white divide as early as 1900, and continued in practice through at least the 1950s.²²

In the second decade of the twentieth century much of Davenport’s research in this area suggested a scientific curiosity about the nature of human diversity, albeit driven by a desire to flesh out these differences in a biological context. But beginning in the latter part of that decade there was a fundamental shift toward asking social questions about human difference, and, as he did in the context of debates about national origin and immigration, Davenport also came to these research questions with the hope of influencing national and regional political debates. Maybe this change would occur in Davenport because the scientific question concerning the genetic nature of skin color would be satisfactorily answered for the eugenicists, and Davenport and others could instead focus on the policy implications of their studies. Or, maybe, as concern diminished in the wake of Johnson-Reed about the eugenic impact of white ethnics on American society, Davenport and others could dedicate more of their resources to the black-white racial binary.

Either way, Davenport’s fascination with black-white differences appeared early in his writings, and throughout his long career he struggled with the nature of human variation in a biological context. An undated address titled “A Biologist’s View of the Negro Problem,” probably delivered sometime in the second or third decade of the twentieth century, confirms Davenport’s social prejudices toward blacks in his application of eugenic doctrine to racial difference. “For the present in North Carolina, I am informed these advantages are designed for white persons only,” Davenport wrote referring to eugenics, “but for the sake of the progress of society, that socially inadequate persons with darker skin also shall be segregated and kept in happiness but kept from reproducing their kind.” “Pity the people that has to depend on laborers, operators, and domestics upon the feebleminded!” he lamented. Finally, he concluded that “as the worst grade is eliminated and a higher grade takes their place at the bottom of the social scale, we shall have our unskilled labor and housekeep service performed by persons who are able to give better service.…Thus, then, by eliminating the undesirable and socially inadequate strains without rigard [sic] to color the state may hope to rise an efficiency, morality, and the happiness of the whole people.”²³

But Davenport’s views of blacks and race went far beyond this straightforward application of eugenic doctrine to segregation. From early in his career, Davenport’s attitudes toward black Americans were much more than conformity to the racism of the times; indeed, a significant portion of his eugenic research program would examine black-white differences.24 As early as 1906, Davenport was considering the nature of these differences, particularly in the context of offspring between whites and blacks, and between those whom he repeatedly refers to as mulattoes. In a November 1906 letter written to Aleš Hrdlička, the first curator of physical anthropology at the United States National Museum (which became the Smithsonian), Davenport sought “information concerning the offspring of two mulattoes.” He was interested in both the skin color produced by this mating but also wanted to know if mulattoes were fertile and if their children were “vigorous.”²⁵ Hrdlička’s response seems to have whetted Davenport’s appetite for research in the area. “The question of mixed-blood of whites and Negroes and of their progeny,” Hrdlička wrote, “still awaits scientific investigation.”²⁶ Throughout his long career Davenport would repeatedly revisit this line of inquiry.

Davenport’s first known published effort to explore the issue of black-white differences came in 1910 in two articles that appeared in the American Naturalist. Cowritten with his wife, Gertrude, a former graduate student in zoology, “Heredity of Skin Pigmentation in Man” sought to “provide a more extended, less biased treatment” of “the phenomena of inheritance of human skin color.”27 The essay is written, save one short passage, as a dispassionate and objective exploration of this research problem. It is heavy on data, with numerous figures, and concludes that “skin color in negro X white crosses is not a typical ‘blend’ as conceived by those who oppose the modern direction of research in heredity, but that…the original grades of heavy and slight melanogenesis segregate in the germ cells.”²⁸ The Davenports’ conclusion that skin color was a Mendelian trait that segregated was part of an effort by eugenicists and geneticists to lay claim to unanswered questions about the nature of human heredity. Historian of science William Provine suggests that as Mendelians helped uncover mechanisms of heredity through plant and animal crosses, they believed that the laws of inheritance could also be studied through their experimental work, including “an objective appraisal of race mixture in humans.”²⁹ The Davenports’ study was the first serious effort in this area by Mendelians.

There are three pieces of evidence, however, that suggest that the Davenports’ interest in this research problem was also motivated by their social views, by the racial mores of the times, and, ultimately, by an intent to further the development of the modern science of race and racial difference. First, by “showing” that skin color was a Mendelian phenomenon, the Davenports and other eugenicists and racists biologized race in a modern genetic context. Their paper is one of the earliest examples of a racial characteristic coming under the scrutiny of genetics research and, as such, was a direct intellectual descendant of Galton’s research program concerned with redefining race in a hereditary and biological context. If skin color followed Mendel’s laws, then, as Davenport would argue in future papers, other traits associated with race must also be genetically heritable. Furthermore, in making a case for Mendelian segregation, Davenport also provided fodder for racial segregation. The Davenports’ evidence that blacks who were light skinned would have offspring that “will show the various intermediate grades due to diverse combinations of the black and white units” confirmed racist beliefs (backed up by biological laws) about the indivisibility of blackness. Genetics thus supported the rationale behind segregation and antimiscegenation laws.³⁰ Eugenicists Paul Popenoe and Rosewell Hill Johnson wrote in support of antimiscegenation laws in their seminal text Applied Eugenics, calling these laws “desirable.” The authors worried that the “disharmonies” produced by interracial matings would produce offspring that “will usually be inferior to those resulting from a better-assorted mating.”³¹ In correspondence four years before the publication of Applied Eugenics, Davenport wrote to Popenoe highlighting his findings that skin color was a Mendelian trait.³²

Second, the data analyzed by the Davenports was provided by H. E. Jordan, a noted eugenicist and racist and professor of histology and embryology at the University of Virginia. In his research Jordan addressed “the eugenic aspect of the Negro question” and suggested that the “pure Negro” was inferior to the mulatto because of mulattoes’ white blood. He determined to solve “our Negro problem” by “conserving the present mulatto stock and employing it as a leaven in lifting the colored race to a higher level of innate mental and moral capacity.” The introduction of white blood would (somehow) predispose these offspring to “know their place.”33

Davenport and Jordan corresponded for nearly ten years, from 1906 through 1914, on a variety of eugenic topics, including their work on what Jordan repeatedly referred to as “the study of the Negro problem.”³⁴ In a July 1913 letter to Davenport, Jordan describes the receipt of a Phelps Stokes University of Virginia fellowship to study this “problem” and seeks Davenport’s cooperation in this area of work. In an August 1913 letter, Davenport agrees, writing that it “would be a fine thing if we could demonstrate the heredity of such matters as serve to differentiate the two races; such as the alleged difference to resistance to cancer; to tuberculosis…to educability; to sex control. Then there might be something definite to say about the consequences of miscegenation.”³⁵

The Davenports never made their own explicit claims in the American Naturalist paper about the relationship between the social and physical traits of those under study. They instead let Professor Jordan express those connections. In the article the Davenports introduced Jordan’s observations and data, writing, “We may now consider the pedigrees of skin color collected by Dr. Jordan.” Quoting Jordan, they described the “pedigrees” of his study subjects: “One man is a minister, one principal of the colored school, one a thriving merchant, and one a barber, and all seem considerably above the grade of morality and intelligence of the ordinary stupid and irresponsible Negro.” In private correspondence a year later, Jordan proposed to Davenport a study of “the relative mental capacity of Negro, mulatto and white school children,” asking him, “Don’t you think this is a very important field of work?”36 In his reply Davenport concurred, and he would go on to address this question nearly fifteen years later in Race Crossing in Jamaica. The Davenports concluded their discussion of Jordan’s data and deductions by telling the reader that “those who know Dr. Jordan will appreciate the better the great weight to be given his conclusion.”³⁷ The Davenports, after all, had to have been aware of Jordan’s position on the nature of mulattoes and of his pioneering work bridging the worlds of eugenics, science, and racism. Trading on Jordan’s reputation and expertise in matters of race, science, and society bolstered the Davenports’ own credentials in the scientific study of black-white differences. The American Naturalist paper was one of the first papers published in the twentieth century conflating science and sociology in the study of race.

Third, and finally, Davenport published widely on the nature of black and white mating throughout his long career. Davenport followed his initial foray into the study of race with the publication of his first book on the subject, Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses, published in 1913 by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The study, funded by E. H. Harriman, who several years earlier had endowed the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, was conducted in Jamaica and Bermuda. Davenport’s conclusions were nearly identical to his earlier work in this area, though he did pay more careful attention to several of the issues mentioned in the American Naturalist essay, including “passing” for white by individuals with “a certain dilution with white blood” and the “matter of great social moment” of “the possibility of a reversion in the offspring of a white-skinned descendant of a negro to the brown skin color.”³⁸

In a 1917 essay published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society titled “The Effects of Race Intermingling,” Davenport again addressed the challenges of studying race, and also articulated policies to deal with America’s racial diversity. Davenport’s definition of race is especially worth noting, for it was, like Galton’s, both confusing and inconsistent. Davenport offered what he called a modern geneticists’ definition of race—that is, “a more or less pure bred ‘group’ of individuals that differs from other groups by at least one character, or, strictly, a genetically connected group whose germ plasm is characterized by a difference, in one or more genes, from the other groups.” Davenport’s example suggests that every small group of individuals who shared similar traits was its own race. He cites “the blue-eyed Scotchman” who belongs to a “different race from some of the dark Scotch.” (Despite this distinction, Davenport refers to the race of Scotch just a page later, prompting the reader to consider whether he is now conflating the blue-eyed and the dark Scotch or is still maintaining them as distinct groups.) Davenport even goes as far as suggesting that “as the term is employed by geneticists,” racial groups “may be said to belong to different elementary species.”39 This definition, if applied willy-nilly, as its spirit suggests, would make it impossible to quantify difference between any group. The consequences of this approach highlight Davenport’s inability to use the race concept consistently and with discrete meaning. Davenport’s own studies of the heredity of skin color that recognized that traits were not fixed in a race contradicted such assertions.

“The Effects of Race Intermingling” also highlighted what Davenport believed to be the greatest danger to the sanctity of races—miscegenation. In Davenport’s view the offspring of such relations would, “despite the great capacity that the body has for self adjustment,” fail to “overcome the bad hereditary combinations.” Davenport believed that the hybridization of races was a threat to the social and political fabric of America, so much so that Davenport worried it would weaken the nation. Only through a program that restricted immigration, promoted “selective elimination,” and sponsored “eugenical ideals” (i.e., acknowledging that “miscegenation commonly spells disharmony”) would “our nation take front rank in culture among the nations of ancient and modern times.”⁴⁰

Into the 1920s Davenport continued to struggle with a “scientific” definition of race. In a 1921 lecture he affirmed the role that scientists would play in developing this definition, writing that the “larger popular interest in races and racial traits now more than ever before” necessitated “a reconsideration of the idea of race and the definition of particular races.” In that same speech Davenport illustrated the eugenic consequences of what he referred to as “hybridization between a dominant and a subordinate race” and, as such, offered scientific legitimacy to the development of antimiscegenation laws that were, in the 1920s, being passed by southern legislatures.⁴¹ By 1929, when Davenport cowrote Race Crossing in Jamaica, his opus on race and genetics, his research had confirmed for him what he had been moving toward for almost twenty years, that there existed “fundamental differences in mental capacity between…Negroes and Europeans.”⁴²

In the Jim Crow era there were manifold ways of enforcing America’s racial customs, and the diffusion of eugenic thought into laws across the American South was complemented by the dissemination of eugenic ideas into extralegal racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. It was discovered in 1923, for example, that the historian and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard was advising the Ku Klux Klan on matters of race. Stoddard’s bile-filled popularization of eugenic rhetoric, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, argued that the colored peoples of the world—yellow, brown, and black—were on the verge of overwhelming white supremacy through rapid population growth, the demise of colonialism, and poor white breeding practices. Stoddard reserved special antipathy for the black peoples of the world, writing that at “first glance we see that, in the negro, we are in the presence of a being differing profoundly not merely from the white man but also from those human types which we discovered in our surveys of the brown and yellow worlds. The black man is, indeed, sharply differentiated from the other branches of mankind.” Not only were blacks distinct from other nonwhite groups, they also had “no historic pasts. Never having evolved civilizations of their own, they are practically devoid of that accumulated mass of beliefs, thoughts, and experiences which render Asiatics so impenetrable and so hostile to white influences.…The negro, on the contrary, has contributed virtually nothing. Left to himself, he remained a savage, and in the past his only quickening has been where brown men have imposed their ideas and altered his blood.” Finally, Stoddard’s antimiscegenation rhetoric asserted that “crossings with the negro are uniformly fatal.”43

In January 1923 Stoddard was exposed by the magazine Hearst’s International to have been offering advice to, and been a member of, the Ku Klux Klan. The article included reprints of letters confirming Stoddard’s relationship with the Klan. In addition, the Hearst’s article reprinted a letter imploring members of the Klan to read Stoddard’s book: “Any white man that reads this book will have the fear of God put into him over the race question. Every Klansman should read it, and be able to quote the high spot.” In a letter to Henry Osborn soon after the article’s publication, Stoddard described his disdain at “the radical-Jew outfit” who “has determined to ‘get me’ and discredit me if possible.” “Through the theft of some papers from the correspondence files of ‘The Searchlight,’ the organ of the KKK,” Stoddard continued, “they have discovered that I have been advising the leaders of that organization on racial and radical matters.”⁴⁴