“I doubt if there has ever been a moment in the world’s history when an international conference on race character and betterment has been more important than the present,” said Henry Fairfield Osborn, the noted paleontologist and American Museum of Natural History president, in his opening remarks to the Second International Congress of Eugenics.1 The congress, held at the museum in September of 1921, was a gathering of prominent American and European eugenicists who came together to promote and popularize a eugenical vision of the world. To Osborn and his heredity-minded colleagues, eugenics was a social movement that could have a profound impact upon human populations through the improvement of genetic stock. Said Osborn, “To know the worst as well as the best in heredity; to preserve and to select the best—these are the most essential forces in the future evolution of human society.”2
Charles Davenport gave one of the keynote speeches at the congress. In it he reinforced the idea that “not only our physical but also our mental and temperamental characteristics have a hereditary basis.”3 Consequently, Davenport hoped that “the study of racial characters will lead men to a broader vision of the human race and the fact that its fate is controllable.”4 The museum event was eugenics in its prime; it was an articulation of racial theories that, during the first third of the twentieth century, impacted far beyond the narrow confines of the academic circles where eugenics was widely celebrated. A strange mix of proceedings characterized the events at the museum, and ideas about eugenics—both its social and its scientific meanings—were on prominent display.
Presentations at the congress were delivered by such rising stars in genetics as Sewell Wright and L. C. Dunn. Although Wright did present at the congress, he never embraced eugenics. His biographer, William Provine, believes that though Wright “had no theoretic objections to eugenics,” he “never published on eugenics” and “steered clear of the subject.” Part of Wright’s resistance “was his belief that human heredity was very complicated and little understood, giving little scientific basis for a eugenics movement at that time.”5 Dunn briefly flirted with eugenics in the 1920s but quickly dropped any association with the movement, displeased with its methodology and unnerved by its overtly prejudiced mission.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, a father of modern genetics, had been an early participant in the eugenics movement as a member of the Committee on Animal Breeding of the American Genetics Association. Morgan, however, was uncomfortable with the eugenic conception of race, and in correspondence with Charles Davenport, he pointed out that human races share more genes in common than not. In 1915, a full six years before the congress, Morgan officially resigned from the committee, citing “reckless statements and the unreliability of a good deal that is said” by eugenicists.6
But the vast majority of those who attended the congress were committed eugenicists who would stay with the movement until its dying days two decades later. Charles Davenport, the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and president of the Eugenics Education Society of Great Britain, were the two most prominent eugenicist luminaries at the congress. The divide between eugenics and genetics had begun to develop in the previous decade. But eugenicists did make some important advances in the study of human heredity. Alexander Graham Bell, remembered best for inventing the telephone, was at the congress as an exhibitor. At the crossroads of eugenics and genetics, Bell’s presentation examined “the relation between age of fathers at death, age of mothers at death and longevity of the offspring.” Bell’s data was an attempt to examine complex intergenerational traits in a hereditary context. However, it was when eugenicists began making claims about the genetic nature of personality traits, intelligence, and complex social behavior that many geneticists left the movement, realizing, as Thomas Hunt Morgan had six years earlier, that such claims were not based on scientific study but on speculation rooted in social beliefs.7
The museum itself figured prominently in the congress. Not only were its president, several distinguished members of its Board of Trustees, and members of its curatorial staff involved in the planning and execution of the congress, but also many in the museum community were fervent eugenicists who considered the meeting “the most important scientific meeting ever held in the Museum.”8 Osborn persuaded the Board of Trustees, with little opposition, to host the congress. The museum’s 1921 Annual Report highlights their institutional position on the congress: “Inasmuch as the World War left the finest racial stocks in many countries so depleted that there is danger of their extinction, and inasmuch as our own race is threatened with submergence by the influx of other races, it was felt by all present and especially by our foreign guests that the American Museum of Natural History had rendered a signal service in providing for the reception and entertainment of the large number of distinguished men and women who attended the Congress.”9
Opposition to Osborn and the museum’s eugenic position didn’t arise until two years later, following the publication in 1923 of the third edition of the eugenic tome The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant. Grant, a museum trustee and close friend of Osborn’s, raised the ire of another museum trustee, the banker Felix Warburg. Warburg was outraged by both Osborn’s laudatory introduction of Grant’s book and the anti-Semitism infusing the work. Osborn was a notorious anti-Semite and an active booster of Nazi Germany, once writing to a colleague who had recently resigned from the Galton Society for its increasing anti-Semitism that “the only way to learn the truth about Germany is to spend a summer there and freely mingle with these wonderful people who have so much to teach us.” Warburg requested that the Board of Trustees investigate Osborn’s anti-Semitism and his work with Grant, and described the ideas contained in The Passing as “scandalous” and “shameful.” A committee of trustees investigated the matter but decided that Osborn’s and Grant’s ideas were opinions—not scientific statements—and wrote that “there was no need for anyone to feel offended.” Osborn, it should be mentioned, later made an “enthusiastic” trip to Nazi Germany. In 1934 Osborn received an honorary degree at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.10
The museum, one of the world’s leading institutions for anthropological thought, was heavily entangled in the racial debates of the times. Early in the century, Columbia University professor Franz Boas, a former museum curator who went on to international renown as the world’s preeminent anthropologist, had attempted to move the museum away from typological racial thought. Unable to initiate the institutional change he sought, Boas left for Columbia University in 1905. During the ensuing decades the museum remained split between the racists and a growing stable of more progressive anthropologists, until the mid-1920s, when it began to move slowly toward Boasian anthropology.11
Boas’s position on race was not popular at the second congress. Earlier in 1921, in an essay titled “The Problem of the American Negro,” published in the Yale Review, Boas offered a sharp rebuff of the thinking of the eugenicists and white supremacists who gathered at the museum to discuss eugenics. Where eugenicists and racists like Madison Grant believed that “moral, intellectual and spiritual attributes are as persistent in nature as physical characters and are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation,” and that races were the units of this intergenerational legacy, Boas countered that “when we talk about the characteristics of the race as a whole, we are dealing with an abstraction which has no existence in nature.”12 Boas believed the idea of race disregarded “the variability of individuals” and in doing so neglected “the differences from the ideal picture in bodily form and make-up among the persons that compose each people.”13 Boas was at once arguing against racial typology and hereditary notions of racial difference and also maintained that insights in neither biology nor psychology could offer “justification for the popular belief in the inferiority of the Negro race.” In Boas’s estimation, racial prejudice was social in nature and was “founded essentially on the tendency of the human mind to merge the individual in the class to which he belongs, and to ascribe to him all the characteristics of his class.”14 Upon the publication of the Yale Review essay, Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wrote to Boas expressing his “hearty and sincere thanks for [the] splendid article.” White considered the essay “not only as a genuine scientific treatise of great merit but as a distinct contribution to the problem not of the Negro alone but of the welfare of America.”15
Early in his career Boas had embraced the biological race concept, although he did so with a bit of an egalitarian streak. In an 1896 lecture called “The Races of Man,” Boas acknowledged the then commonly held belief that “the brain of the Negro does not grow and develop as long as that of the white man. In this he is decidedly at a disadvantage.” But Boas insisted that “we must not interpret the fact as meaning that the Negro cannot attain a culture such as the one which we now possess.” Boas also recognized early on that despite what he believed to be the general superiority of whites to blacks, “there will be a vast number belonging to both races who will be equal in all aptitudes” and that therefore “we must take care not to overestimate the amount of this difference.”16 Just eight years later Boas, invited by W. E. B Du Bois to deliver the commencement address at Atlanta University, offered a changed vision of race difference to the graduates: “To those who stoutly maintain a material inferiority of the Negro race and who would dampen your ardor by their claims, you may confidently reply that the burden of proof rests with them, that the past history of your race does not sustain their statement, but rather gives you encouragement.…That there may be slightly different hereditary traits seems plausible, but it is entirely arbitrary to assume that those of the Negro, because perhaps slightly different, must be of an inferior type.”17 Boas spent his career developing alternative theories to the dominant racial discourse, “lines of thought” that anthropologist Lee Baker calls “inimical to the consensus about racial inferiority held by people in the mass media, the academy, southern state legislatures, and each branch of the federal government.”18
As much as Boas and his antiracist contemporaries sought to utilize science as a force for altering the racialized status quo, racial thinking in the early 1920s remained firmly dominated by eugenics and other variants of racist thought. The proceedings at the second congress at the American Museum of Natural History were an example of this continued dominance in American scientific and social thought. The public’s access to this thinking was through a temporary eugenics exhibition held in conjunction with the congress. The exhibit, which ran from September 22 through October 22, 1921, drew between 5,000 and 10,000 visitors, according to museum estimates, and took up space on two museum floors.19 In the Hall of the Age of Man, where the “principle meetings of the Congress were held,” the exhibit focused mainly on “early man and his culture.” The design of this segment of the exhibit was simple—it integrated well with the museum’s overall approach to natural history and seemed to try hard not to offend noneugenically minded visitors to the congress. The permanent collection on display in the hall included anthropoid skulls and heads. For the congress these specimens were shown in “new positions for the purpose of coordinating and emphasizing geological history of the human species.” The temporary exhibit included displays showing “Man’s Place Among the Primates” and “The Most Ancient Human Races.”20
The first-floor exhibition space, held in both the Darwin and Forestry halls, was quite different. There the tools and data of eugenics were on display. The exhibit, as described by attendee Harry Laughlin, “comprised mainly embryological and racial casts and models, photographs, pedigree charts and tables, biological family histories and collective biographies…maps and analytical tables demonstrating racial vicissitudes, anthropometric instruments, apparatus for mental measurements, and books and scientific reprints on eugenical and genetical subjects.”21 Eighteen thematically organized booths were filled with 131 exhibits. The attendees were “college and university professors, investigators in scientific institutions, physicians and field workers in institutions for the socially inadequate, statisticians and research departments of the great life insurance companies, scholars and authors of independent means.…”22 Indeed, they were a distinguished group.
Examples of the booths’ topics were “Eugenical Organization,” “Human Heredity,” “Anthropometry,” and “Mental Testing, Psychiatry.” One booth, designated “Genetics and Heredity,” sought to secure genetics at the center of eugenic theory, speaking of it as “an important foundation factor in eugenics or the improvement of the human race through a knowledge of heredity and its application to selection and fecundity.”23
Race was a theme in all the booths. Two separate booths on the “Races of Man”—booths dealing specifically with race as a black-white issue—were prominent in the conference exhibition. One “race” booth explored “the history of the origin and development of races and the analysis of the…determination of the hereditary nature of specific traits.” The other “race” booth focused on the “elementary qualities” of races and their role in human progress.24 Other booths touched on black-white racial dynamics. Dr. Thomas Garth of the University of Texas, Austin, presented his research under the title “Curves Showing Racial Differences in Mental Fatigue.” Garth’s research showed that black students fatigued more quickly when working on mental tasks as compared with whites.25
Another University of Texas at Austin faculty, the zoologist Theophilus S. Painter, presented an exhibit called “The Chromosomes of Man.” Painter, one of the world’s leading geneticists at the time and a pioneer in Drosophila studies, exhibited pictures of chromosomes of a white and of a black man alongside each other so as to show that they were “alike in general form and in number.” This photographic display, however, intended something different; it was presented to illustrate a subtle, if not significant, difference between black and white genes.26 These genetic differences were further highlighted in the presentation by Dr. A. H. Schultz of the Department of Embryology, Carnegie Institution of Washington. Dr. Schultz’s exhibit, “Comparison of White and Negro Fetuses,” examined the “racial differences during prenatal development of man.”27 Measuring the alleged differences in fetal development between the races, according to Schultz, could visually show just how different blacks were from whites. In the exhibit, finger, leg, thigh, and arm shape and length were all different between the two fetuses. The brain was smaller and the face larger in the black fetuses.
One of the congress’s headliners, American Museum trustee Madison Grant, was the vanguard of early twentieth-century racial science. His books sold widely, and his influence was felt beyond the confines of academic eugenics. Author of The Passing of the Great Race—one of the most infamous eugenic texts of the era—was a successful corporate lawyer who dabbled in zoology and anthropology and held positions in these fields, including time spent as the head of the Wildlife Conservation Society of the Bronx Zoo. Grant’s work as a naturalist propelled him to the forefront of the American conservation movement. He was one of the founders of the Save the Redwoods League in California and successfully lobbied the government to make Mount McKinley into a national park.28 Grant was also head of the overtly anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic Immigration Restriction League (later renamed the Eugenics Immigration League) and a member of the Galton Society and the Committee on Eugenics.29 Grant believed his work in conservation and eugenics to be closely related; both were, he wrote in a letter to Osborn, “attempts to save as much as possible of the old America.”30
At the second congress, The Passing of the Great Race was on display as Exhibit 51—“the principal feature of this exhibit consisted of enlarged copies of the several maps which appeared in the exhibitors book.”31 Grant’s work, now known for the influence it would have on Nazi ideology, “enjoyed considerable vogue in the nineteen-twenties.”32 It is not hard to see why the Nazis embraced Grant’s work. The Passing argued that the successes and failures of the civilizations of Europe could be correlated to the amount of a nation’s Nordic “blood.” Grant surmised that both Europe and America were facing imminent demise because their Nordic bloodlines were fast becoming contaminated by the genetic stock of inferior races. In The Passing Grant noted, surely to Hitler’s later delight, that “only in a few cases, notably in Sweden and Germany, does any large section of the population possess anything analogous to true race consciousness.”33
Grant extended his opprobrium to the “darker races” of man. It is in these passages of The Passing where the unmistakable rankness of racial theory grounded in emerging eugenic ideas about the biology of race difference can be found. To Grant and his eugenically minded colleagues, it was non-Nordic racial groups in Europe who presented the most immediate threat. Nevertheless, the fear of diluting the white race with black blood was unmistakable. Grant feared black-white racial amalgamation was creating a “population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates.”34 But the perceived threat from blacks was not as real as the possibility of the amalgamation of blood from white immigrants. After all, black-white miscegenation was already illegal in most states, and culturally proscribed in the rest. Moreover, Grant deemed blacks incapable of threatening the Nordic race, writing, “Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species, and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within. Progress from self-impulse must not be confounded with mimicry or with progress imposed from without by social pressure, or by the slavers’ lash.”35 Finally, Grant believed that blacks were a “valuable element” in European and American societies, worth being preserved as a “servient race.” Any attempt at social equality, he concluded, “will be destructive to themselves and to the whites.”36
To these pernicious thoughts about blacks Grant applied his eugenic conviction. That is, that “the great lesson of the science of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of physical predispositions and impulses.”37 Grant’s race-centered worldview asserted that “race lies to-day at the base of all the phenomena of modern society.”38 This outlook, one that combined a view that accepted race as based in biology, transmitted at the level of the gene, with a belief that racial problems dominate the political and social landscape, was the intellectual force behind eugenics. Its impact on American racial thought was explicit, and its consequences enduring. And its application to black Americans was neither accidental nor indirect. But because he was not a scientist and because his ideas may have been publicly distasteful to some, Grant is often cast as an outsider compared with more “mainstream” eugenicists like Charles Davenport or Harry Laughlin. To the contrary, Davenport and Grant were close allies in the movement, both socially and politically. Davenport worked with Grant on anti-immigrant campaigns and Grant was a funder of and a fundraiser for Davenport’s work at Cold Spring Harbor, introducing him to the New York City social fundraising circuit, where, historian Elazar Barkan notes, “bigotry and racism was a popular recreation.”39
In addition to the exhibition and booth presentations at the congress, 108 papers were presented during the six-day meeting. Presentations were given on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from “The Effects of Inbreeding on Guinea Pigs,” presented by Sewell Wright, a leading geneticist, to a paper titled “Individual and Racial Inheritance of Musical Traits” by Carl E. Seashore of the National Research Council. Many of the event’s papers confirm that eugenics was not just about race in the context of immigration. These presentations, like many of the booth exhibits, highlighted the emerging new language of a genetic racial science, specifically as it would apply to black Americans. And while many of the papers dealt generally with the race concept, almost 10 percent dealt in a direct way with black-white differences.
R. Bennett Bean, a leading anatomist and physical anthropologist at the University of Virginia, who made seeking to quantify black-white differences in physiognomy his life’s work, presented a talk titled “Notes on the Body Form of Man.” Bean had published widely on the nature of the relationship between the physical and mental inferiority of black Americans for several decades. Trained at Johns Hopkins under the leading anatomist Franklin Mall, Bean quickly established himself as a leading authority of black and white anatomical differences and published widely on the subject. Through a series of papers during the first decade of the twentieth century, Bean argued that black brain structure revealed significant differences between blacks and whites in cognitive ability.40 Bean believed that these differences made blacks and whites “fundamentally opposite extremes in evolution.”41 American Medicine, a leading medical journal, editorialized in support of Bean’s thesis, writing that “no amount of training will cause that [black] brain to grow into the Anglo-Saxon form,” and suggested that his studies proved “the anatomical basis for the complete failure of Negro schools to impart the higher studies.” In 1909, Franklin Mall, Bean’s medical school mentor, sought to verify Bean’s measurements of black and white brains, and could find no significant differences between black and white brain structures. “I have now had considerable experience in the dissection of the Negro and have yet to observe that variations are more common in the Negro than in the white,” Mall wrote in a rebuttal in the American Journal of Anatomy.42 Still, Bean’s ideas about racialized anatomy quickly became the scientific and popular norm, while Mall’s work had little impact.43
In “Notes on the Body Form of Man,” presented at the second congress, Bean compares stature and sitting height in groups he labeled American whites, Negroes, and Filipinos in an attempt to show a hierarchy of physical differences between races. According to Bean’s data and analysis, blacks are consistently “discernible by reason of the lower index.” Bean includes a long description of the striking physical differences between blacks and other groups and describes what he believes is “the true Negro,” a person having “a shortened torso and relatively long legs.” The data presented, however, do not represent this “true Negro,” since “the records are of Africans with a large admixture of European blood.”44 It is on this point, at the intersection of physiology and blood, that Bean’s typology becomes eugenic in nature and is thus used to suggest the permanence of racial bloodlines.
Several other presentations at the congress offered fresh support for a geneticization of the black-white divide. The distinguished anthropologist E. A. Hooton presented a paper titled “Observations and Queries as to the Effect of Race Mixture on Certain Physical Characteristics.” Hooton, who spent his entire teaching career at Harvard University and was associated, but never closely affiliated with, the eugenics movement, wrote about the morphological differences between major racial groups and “observed” the effects of racial hybridization in crosses between blacks and whites.45 “Distribution and Increase of Negroes in the United States,” by W. F. Willcox, an economics professor at Cornell, and “The Problem of Negro-White Intermixture and Intermarriage,” by Frederick Hoffman, an actuary for the Prudential Insurance Company of America and author of the racist tract Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, explored the demographic trends of African Americans. Willcox claimed in his essay that while in the South the birth rate for blacks exceeded their death rate, in the North the reverse was true. Thus, the increase in the northern black population was due entirely to immigration.46 Willcox believed that urbanization was killing America’s blacks at a high rate, and that their rate of growth as a population would decline rapidly, to the point that “20,000,000 should be accepted as the maximum limit of the Negro population of the United States at the end of the century.”47 Willcox’s data and conclusions suggested, as did Hoffman’s earlier conclusions in Race Traits and Tendencies, that blacks as a group were deteriorating, or as Hoffman put it, “The colored race was on a downward grade,” leading toward “extinction,” a conclusion the distinguished sociologist and leader W. E. B. Du Bois called “absurd.”48 This decline would be attributed, in both Willcox’s and Hoffman’s work, to biological, and not environmental factors.49
In his speech opening the eugenics congress, Henry Osborn articulated the new scientific language of race and racism. Osborn expressed this emerging ideological consensus on race, saying, “The reason that these races are so stable and maintain their original character so stoutly is that the most stable form of matter which has thus far been discovered is the germ plasm on which heredity depends.”50 Eugenic research throughout the 1920s continued to integrate this idea into its political advocacy, increasingly in the area of black-white difference. The language of science and the language of heredity were integrated into the American zeitgeist to become the intellectual justification behind the pernicious ideology of American racism. In the remainder of the 1920s, with eugenics at its most popular and powerful, the followers of the movement continued the work begun by Francis Galton in the 1860s. Charles Davenport, of course, led the way, helping to lay a foundation for a century of research into black-white differences by eugenicists and geneticists, as well as by other fields drawing on their scientific findings. While Galton laid out the theoretical basis for the relationship between heredity and black-white differences, Davenport developed methodologies to test and measure these differences.
Davenport’s connection between his study of black-white differences and his involvement in this issue as a policy maker became only more pronounced during the 1920s. His research into black-white differences in Jamaica, for example, grew into an international research project that, in 1928, was published as Race Crossing in Jamaica. The work was funded by Wickliffe Draper, whose interest in racial science would, in the 1930s, grow into his founding of the Pioneer Fund, an organization that still funds racial research today. Davenport and other eugenicists would also continue to research other areas of black-white differences, including a study proposed by the National Research Council to look at the educability of black children as compared with white children by setting up “identical” but separate orphanages to test for racial difference.51
The 1920s also saw the beginnings of a comprehensive response to racial science by geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists, as well as by social scientists, who would come to play an increasingly important role in developing research in support of or, alternatively, in challenging the accuracy and assumptions of racial science. At the National Research Council of the National Academies, a series of committees were formed to study race that today provide insight into the evolving race concept and the scientists deeply involved in negotiating its meanings. It is also in these committees that we can see the deepening of eugenicists’ interest in the nature of the social and biological differences between blacks and whites, an interest that had been overshadowed by eugenics’ attention to immigration and ethnicity.