Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

The final report of the Joint Commission on Racial Problems capped more than a decade of efforts by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences to grapple with the scientific and sociological meanings of race in America. In his final report in 1931, committee chairman and Columbia University psychologist Robert S. Woodworth described a plan to build racial orphanages to study the biological, psychological, and sociological meanings of race in controlled environments. According to the report, this “comprehensive study of child development in different races would be an important contribution to the study of race differences.” The orphanages, one white and one black, would provide an “excellent environment, with opportunities for scientific study, organized to receive a sample of negro children, for example, soon after birth, and to retain them for several years at least.”¹ Though this study was never funded, it is not coincidental that at the same time the notorious “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” was in its earliest stages (interestingly, a small study in England in the 1970s found that black and white children raised together in an orphanage did, in fact, have different outcomes in IQ scores—the black children’s mean IQ was slightly higher²). Both studies assumed significant roles for federally sponsored science and both assumed that traits unique to blacks and whites were worthy of study and expense.

During the 1920s the National Research Council convened, in Washington, D.C., a series of investigatory committees to study the biological and social aspects of race difference in the United States and sponsored research to that effect. Beginning with the Committee on Race Characters in 1921 and ending with the Committee on Racial Problems in 1928, four separate National Research Council (NRC) committees brought together prominent geneticists, biologists, eugenicists, anthropologists, psychologists, medical doctors, and others to explore the impact of human difference on the United States’ social, political, and economic systems. While the racial groups studied by the NRC changed over the course of the decade (a shift from European ethnics to African Americans), an interest in the way human difference was shaping 1920s America remained strong throughout.

At the outset of the 1920s, the Committee on Race Characters studied the assimilation of European immigrants into American society. In 1921, Clark Wissler, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a member of the Committee on Race Characters, wrote in urgent support of funding NRC projects in this area “since the most complex situation confronting our nation today is the assimilation and Americanization of the large and diverse racial groups now present in our population.”3 The Committee on Racial Problems focused instead on race as primarily an issue of black-white differences.⁴ This evolution, from the study of white ethnics to blacks, from concerns about immigration’s impact on the racial character of the United States to concerns over a demographically changing African American population, is unmistakable when examining the NRC committees’ records and indicates both the shifting priorities of a changing nation and continued attention to long-standing antiblack prejudices.

The biological and sociological assumptions about racial difference that drove the work of the NRC race committees during the 1920s were not the only efforts to pathologize black Americans, nor were eugenic and other scientific manifestations of racial science the only components of white supremacist thought. Sociologists and other social scientists also developed nonbiological rationales for the inferiority of African Americans and other racial groups. For example, social scientists claimed the black personality to be damaged, a theory embraced by both sides of the political spectrum. On the one hand, as historian Daryl Michael Scott argues, conservatives utilized findings of a damaged black psychology to “justify exclusionary policies and to explain the dire conditions under which many black people live.” On the other hand, liberals “seeking to manipulate white pity…used damage imagery primarily to justify policies of inclusion and rehabilitation.”⁵

Racist cultural depictions of African Americans also fueled the belief that they were not fit for citizenship. In the early decades of the twentieth century, literary and cinematic nostalgia for the plantation South helped popularize derogatory images of African Americans. For example, Thomas Dixon’s novels, which included the best-selling The Clansman, surely reflected and influenced many whites’ views of blacks. The Clansman, later made into D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation, according to historian Philip Dray, “combined technical and artistic brilliance with a controversial rendering of Reconstruction that rehashed many of the most enduring and painful Southern myths about black Americans.” President Woodrow Wilson, who had federalized Jim Crow segregation during his administration, hosted both Dixon and Griffith as guests at the White House to screen the film.6

African American intellectuals were prominent among those who responded to the growing chorus of racist thinking and action at this time. This same period saw the formation of civil rights groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (1909) and the National Urban League (1910).⁷ African American intellectuals played a prominent role in responding to antiblack attacks. Kelly Miller, dean of Howard University in Washington, D.C., in response to Thomas Dixon’s popular antiblack tirade The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900, asserted the common humanity of all peoples, writing that “since civilization is not an attribute of the color of skin, or curl of hair, or curve of lip, there is no necessity for changing such physical peculiarities.”⁸

The attention to black-white differences by eugenicists and the consequent changes to ideas about race and black-white differences occurred at a time of considerable upheaval in African American history. A eugenic position on racial matters must be seen in this context. When the historian Rayford Logan wrote in 1957 that the time from the end of the nineteenth century through World War I was “the nadir” of race relations in the United States, he was referring to the disenfranchisement of African Americans across the American South, the rise of the Jim Crow system of segregation, an escalation in racial violence against African Americans, including lynching and race riots, and the migrations of more than one million blacks out of the South and into segregated northern cities.9 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were difficult and changing times for African Americans and for America’s racial mores more generally. Writing in 1920, at the end of this period, a frustrated W. E. B. Du Bois lamented that “instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and human brotherhood America has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as the black and brown and yellow peoples are concerned.”¹⁰ The advent of Jim Crow laws across the American South in the 1890s institutionalized white supremacy, effectively nullifying whatever progress had been made toward racial reconciliation during the era of post–Civil War Reconstruction.¹¹

Huge demographic shifts also affected African American communities and their relationship with fellow citizens. In all, from the turn of the century through the beginning of World War II, more than one million African Americans moved out of the Deep South.¹² Historian Nell Painter writes that the movement of blacks from South to North during the early twentieth century represented “both immigration and freedom” to African Americans. For those who wanted a life other than Jim Crow’s, change brought with it hope, but not always opportunity. And this Great Migration from South to North, from rural to urban, from the Deep South to the upper South, and from farmland to industrial, would come to have an important impact on the nation’s racial calculus as formerly disenfranchised southern blacks gained the vote in their new northern homes.¹³ These migrations surely forced the federal government to take new notice of the black community and helped lay a foundation for a civil rights movement for African Americans.¹⁴

The National Academies took careful note of this demographic shift and other phenomena it believed fell under the rubric of racial research, and it assigned a committee to investigate their impacts on “interbreeding” between whites and blacks, the fertility rates of black-white racial crosses, the birth rates and death rates of these crosses, and the variables that might be influencing the results.¹⁵

The NRC was an ideal institution for the bold and large-scale studies that would be proposed, and in some cases funded, through its various committees on race. As a division of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the NRC shared in its scientific prestige and benefited from its political muscle. The NRC had its origins in 1916 when the NAS helped coordinate nongovernmental scientific and technical resources with military agencies as the United States prepared for entry into World War I. As early as 1863, the Civil War had “brought about the organization of the National Academy for the assistance of the Government.”16 A May 11, 1919, executive order by President Woodrow Wilson officially incorporated the National Research Council as a division of the NAS. The articles of organization of the NRC state its purpose as follows: “To promote research in the mathematical, physical and biological sciences, and in the application of these sciences to engineering, agriculture, medicine and other useful arts, with the object of increasing knowledge, of strengthening the national defense, and of contributing in other ways to the public welfare.”¹⁷ In addition to its study sections and committees, postdoctoral fellowships and grant funding helped round out the work of the NRC. Between 1919 and 1933 the NRC funded approximately 850 fellows.¹⁸

The work of the NRC was underwritten both by government funds and by significant monies from the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, institutions that also funded eugenics and other forms of racial science at the time.¹⁹ As historian Roger Geiger has noted, these relationships underscored the NRC’s role as the nexus “for private, elite authority over American science in the 1920s.”²⁰ To this group—a gathering of “the elite of American science, the heads of the philanthropic world, research directors and corporate leaders of the major research-based firms of the day, and certain key figures from public life”—the direction of American science under the administration of the NRC was entrusted.²¹

The importance of philanthropy to eugenics was recognized in the earliest days of the movement. Just after the turn of the century the Harriman estate was the first to fund Charles Davenport’s exploits at Cold Spring Harbor. At a 1914 conference sponsored by the Kellogg family, the relationship between philanthropy and eugenics was highlighted. At the conference, Leon J. Cole, a geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, presented a paper with the title “Biological Eugenics: Relation of Philanthropy and Medicine to Race Betterment” that called for special study of “what medicine and philanthropy are doing for the race” and endorsed studying this research problem “from our knowledge of general biological laws.”22 Cole, in whose name an endowed chair lives on at the University of Wisconsin, recognized the importance of philanthropy in furthering the integration of eugenics into the American landscape. And while he understood that “it might seem odd that philanthropy and medicine should be classed together,” he believed that they had the following in common: “The one tends to relieve the want, the other the suffering, and both often to prolong the life of the recipient.”²³

The Carnegie Institution’s interest in issues of race and eugenics dated back to the turn of the century. Davenport’s first major eugenic project, the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, also known as the Department of Experimental Biology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, received the foundation’s financial largesse and institutional support beginning in 1903.²⁴ In 1913, the Carnegie Institution published Davenport’s first book on black-white differences, Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses.²⁵ Finally, the Carnegie Institution funded the Eugenics Record Office, for which Carnegie provided $474,014 for its operating budget between 1918 and 1939.²⁶

At the turn of the century, knowledge was quickly becoming, like land and capital, an important resource in the American economy.²⁷ The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations both backed the development of racial science through what historian Ellen Lagemann has called “the politics of knowledge.”²⁸ Through their ability to “exercise significant influence on decisions about public problems,” determining how and what information “experts would communicate with nonexperts,” and by controlling “who could and would gain entrance to the knowledge-producing elites that emerged and proliferated as the United States became a more nationally and bureaucratically organized society,” in Lagemann’s analysis, wealthy foundations became a vehicle to “define, develop, and distribute knowledge.”²⁹

While the foundations benefited many, there were also those who expressed concern about concentrating control of knowledge in the hands of a few powerful groups. Much in the same way that monopolies in the production and distribution of oil and steel were attacked, critics also assailed the construction of “cultural empires” in the world of ideas.30 Still others have suggested that philanthropy has been the “American equivalent of socialism,” intending to relieve class tension.³¹ In the case of eugenics and the funding of racial science, however, the impetus was less about relieving class and racial tensions than about solidifying them.

It should come as no surprise then that having played such a significant part in the development of eugenics, these foundations, especially Carnegie, both believed in and sought to preserve white supremacy.³² The funding of eugenics and other racial scientific initiatives through the NRC was a significant way for foundations to support and bolster this point of view. Beginning in 1917 the Carnegie Corporation provided significant grants toward NRC activities.³³ In August of 1919, the Carnegie Corporation approved a $5 million grant to be a permanent guarantee of income “for general expenses [that] would make the Council a going concern, and enable it to secure additional contributions.”³⁴ That same year the Rockefeller Foundation promised $500,000 for five years for postdoctoral awards funded from the NRC.³⁵

The Division of Anthropology and Psychology, formed in October 1919, undertook all racial research at the NRC during the 1920s. In a description of the NRC’s mission, the Division of A&P (as it is referred to in NRC correspondence), was directed to coordinate the research activities at the NRC in related fields, to train students in these fields, to foster research in anthropology and psychology, and to “act in an advisory capacity on research projects within our fields, when such counsel is requested by duly constituted agencies.” That racial research took place under the direction of this division rather than the Division of Biology and Agriculture seems meaningful only in the context of the research generated by the two committees: the Division of Biology and Agriculture, organized officially in 1919, grew out of an NRC committee on agriculture, and thus most of its research was focused on agricultural biology. Research in marine biology, as well as a project on radiation biology, also fell under the aegis of the Division of Biology and Agriculture, whereas human biological and sociological research fell under the control of the Committee on A&P.³⁶

It would not be fair to conclude that the racial research projects at the NRC during the 1920s themselves altered the ways in which scientists and the public understood the biology of human difference. Indeed, the committees’ work more likely reflected a growing consensus among mainstream scientists that genetics and biology could be used to test prevailing social ideas about difference. However, that this line of work took place under the imprimatur of the National Academies certainly amplified its impact for three reasons: because of the National Academies’ status in American science and politics, because the NRC committees funded racial scientific research, and because the NRC became a hothouse for emerging ideas in the area of racial science throughout the decade.

Two A&P committees focused on the study of race in America during the first half of the 1920s: the Committee on Race Characters and the Committee on Human Migration. In 1923 A. E. Jenks, the chairman of the Committee on Race Characters and a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, wrote to Robert M. Yerkes on Yerkes’s acceptance of membership on the committee. Yerkes, a comparative psychologist, is best remembered for his primatology research and for the development of U.S. Army mental tests used “for the classification of men in order that they may be properly placed in the military service.”37 Although the army limited its use of the tests after World War I, this testing was a watershed, opening the door to mass IQ testing in schools and business and shifting the public’s perception to one that embraced such testing as an accurate measurement of innate intelligence.³⁸ The army tests were used in defense of racial segregation and were also cited in support of immigration restriction in the early 1920s.³⁹

In his letter to Yerkes, Jenks identified the “need for scientific knowledge (about races) for the benefit of the national strength and well-being,” and believed that his committee was poised to “make contributions” toward that end. Jenks offered his a priori assessment of racial difference to Yerkes, admitting that he believed “the so-called races greatly differ” in ways that were primarily genetic in origin. Jenks also did not identify specific racial groups in his assessment of group difference. Rather, he was interested, as the committee’s funding patterns would later show, in a general understanding of the racial matters of the nation. Jenks outlined six “measurable matters” by which races differed: (1) “physically as breeding animals, due to gametic differences”; (2) “physically in susceptibility to certain diseases”; (3) “temperamentally, due, perhaps, to differences of balance between the action of the glands of internal secretions”; (4) “psychically in pathologic reactions, due originally, perhaps, to unhappy racial experiences”; (5) “both physically and psychically in capacities and attitudes…due to heredity, and to geographic, human and cultural environment, etc.”; and (6) “in America, psychically in instinctive and often also in deliberate racially-normal reactions to many fundamental phases of characteristic American life, due to such varied things as history, content of education, ideals, etc.”40

While Jenks’s description of the nature of race difference offered a variety of explanations, ultimately it was biological and genetic reasons that would receive the most attention by the committee. In the foreword to the committee’s “Research Outline” of 1923, the committee laid out its goal: “It should be the purpose of racial researchers to arrive at the facts as to the existing race traits, to measure the traits of each race studied so that in due time it may be known what characteristic strengths and weaknesses for America the various races possess.”⁴¹ Furthermore, the committee acknowledged that until this point, “though races are exhibited before all eyes, they are not defined scientifically, but almost entirely subjectively.…The result is much confusion, disagreement and often bitterness.”⁴²

The committee outlined six research projects, based primarily on the recommendations of Paul Popenoe, to begin the scientific study of race difference.⁴³ The proposed studies, “Study of Normal Race Traits in a Selected Few Races,” “Typical Pure-Blood Races for Research,” “Other Pure-Blood Groups,” “Mixed-Blood Groups,” “The Old-Line American Groups,” “The Negro,” and “The Assembling of Existing Race Data,” complemented each other in an attempt to examine a range of races from an “unbiased observation of facts, from the presentation of the facts in unevasive language without exaggeration or argument, and from the inevitable conclusions to be drawn from the facts.”⁴⁴ The proposed studies were organized to examine race traits as distinctly physical, intellectual, moral, and social entities. Because the studies were based on the idea that races shared bloodlines, the methodology suggests that the traits under study were hereditary (through genes) in origin. The committee’s report implies as much, stating that “it is the intention in these studies of the normal race traits to produce model studies in race traits, and also in human heredity.”⁴⁵

The studies also reveal a great deal about how race was defined in the early 1920s. Pure-blood races included “the Mexican race,” “the south Italian race,” the Russian Jewish race,” and “the Finnish race,” while unidentified mixed-blood groups were considered a by-product of racial “hybridization” that in America “is going on in larger and more complex way[s] than elsewhere in the world.”46 The project on “The Negro” acknowledged only a cursory understanding of individuals grouped under that racial banner. Its proposal, for example, stated that “no race group is less authentically and commonly understood in America than the Negro.”⁴⁷ Project organizers also expressed interest in studying what it called the three classes of blacks: “those of pure African descent,” those who shared “Negro and general white ancestry” (“those commonly known as mulattoes”), and “those of accurately ascertained bi-racial parentage—as Negro X Chinese, Negro X Indian, Negro X Swede.”⁴⁸ The distinction made between mulattoes and biracial blacks would suggest that in the early 1920s race and nationality, at least for the time being, were one and the same.

Nowhere is eugenics mentioned in these proposals. However, the research clearly followed a eugenic paradigm for racial studies, suggesting that eugenic ideas were, in fact, barely indistinguishable from mainstream studies of race. That so many of the scientists involved in the NRC race committees were themselves eugenicists or displayed eugenic leanings suggests that eugenics was an adjunct to most fields in the natural and social sciences. The work of the NRC race committees, their research proposals, funding patterns, and committee composition support eugenics as much more than just a complement to modern anthropological and biological thought. Indeed, eugenic views of race defined how difference was studied at this time. Evidence from the NRC committees illustrates how the role of eugenics was much more fundamental to the 1920s era of racial studies—including anthropology—than has been previously acknowledged. Other books have limited or overlooked the role of eugenics in the construction of racial thought in the United States. This is due, it seems, to the way scholars have previously defined the eugenical impact on racial studies; that is, as a political program that sought to guide human evolution through reproductive and immigration restrictions rather than as a scientific worldview that helped to define the way in which human difference was viewed, studied, and politicized.⁴⁹

Despite the Committee on Race Characters’ far-reaching set of research goals, as of 1923 its projects had received no funding. To address this shortcoming, the NRC established the Committee on the Scientific Problems of Human Migration, with Yerkes as its chair. A small grant of $5,000 from the Russell Sage Foundation helped the committee prepare its work, which was loosely defined as the “formulation of a research program on problems of immigration.”50 Subsequent grants, totaling $145,910, funded the work of the committee through 1928, when it was discharged. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial funded all but $10,000 of the committee’s work.⁵¹ Like the Committee on Race Characters, this new NRC committee advocated the importance of a scientific understanding of racial difference, but did so explicitly within the context of race intermixture or racial amalgamation.

The committee claimed that through vigorous scientific research it could “check the premature, shortsighted, impressionistic, and dangerous speculations of certain publicists” on the matter of the biology of race.⁵² The targets of such comments were popular writers like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whose best-selling books gained notoriety during this period for their racist assertions concerning the nature of racial differences.⁵³ It is interesting that many of the members of the committee were avowed eugenicists, including most prominently Charles Davenport. That Davenport and other eugenicists issued such a strong statement against racist popularizers seems hypocritical, especially given the intellectual and institutional cover eugenicists like Davenport and Henry Osborn gave to men like Stoddard and Grant throughout their careers. Nonetheless, it was in the interest of academics like Davenport and Yerkes to distance themselves from such extremists when it was expedient, especially if it was done to attract foundation funds and federal dollars to what they wanted to be perceived as legitimate scientific research.

The approach of this committee to the study of the relationship between immigration and race is recorded in fascinating detail in the transcripts of a one-day conference held on the subject of “racial intermixture” February 17, 1923. Among the participants were the psychologist Raymond Dodge, eugenicist and biologist Charles Davenport, geneticist Raymond Pearl, psychologist Robert Yerkes, embryologist Frank Lillie, biologist Samuel J. Holmes, and anthropologist Clark Wissler. The composition of the committee, leaning heavily toward the biological and genetic, again illustrates how questions of race under the NRC A&P banner were framed, in large part, in a biological context. Also of importance from this conference was that despite the committee’s intended focus on general race questions, most of its discussion concerned black-white differences.

The three most significant pieces of the committee’s discussion are the seeds of what would become Charles Davenport’s Race Crossing in Jamaica; a detailed outline of Raymond Pearl’s studies of race in Baltimore; and a proposal to “carefully prepare and present to the Secretary of Commerce a plan for the alteration and improvement of the tabulation and publication of the fundamental records of births and deaths of this country, to the end that the splendid mass of material which exists and is constantly accruing may be utilized for biological study.”54 The group discussed how “mental, temperamental, and behavior differences in races is particularly important in estimating the effects of race intermixture.” The committee acknowledged that “the fundamental problems of race intermixture are not different in principle from those of any other aspect of human inheritance,” and that “the entire subject of genetics must be made to contribute its results.”⁵⁵ Interest in black-white race mixture was justified because it was “the most conspicuous instance of race intermixture in America.” The committee recognized that despite “practically no Negro immigration at the present time,” “secondary migration” of African Americans “within the nation, as from country to town, from South to North, etc.,” could have an impact on the American racial landscape. One committee member, considering this matter urgent, believed that black and white migration from the rural South to the urban South and North would “tend to increase race mixture. The more you get the blacks diluted among the whites, the more there will be this crossing going on.”⁵⁶

One of the most interesting passages from the conference transcript comes from Charles Davenport, who, in the first decade of the twentieth century, had published several books and papers on the subject of race and went so far as to suggest that “as the term is employed by geneticists,” racial groups “may be said to belong to different elementary species.”57 Yet at the 1923 conference meeting, Davenport instead argued that “pure races do not occur in human beings,” and even suggested an alternative definition—a segregate group—for some human populations. A segregate group, rather than a racial group, would have experienced “more out-crossing” and “less endogamy,” which, in turn, makes it a “less pure race.”⁵⁸ Davenport characterized the populations of central Europe, for example, as largely a segregate group rather than a racial one. And although Davenport did not believe that in the wake of immigration “races are going to become altogether extinct and that all mankind will become mixed in one homogenous group,” his ideas of segregate populations seemed to anticipate the emergence of the idea of ethnicity as a category that would gradually supersede race for European immigrants to the United States.⁵⁹

As far as the biological effects of racial intermixture, Davenport advocated for investigations into physical, temperamental, and mental differences produced by racial amalgamation. He was concerned specifically about segregate groups arising from black and white mixture, noting that “we see the defects in the mixture of the Negro-white—the offspring often have the push and determination of the white but the intelligence of the Negro; they are dissatisfied with themselves and with the world; they do not have ability to better their conditions.”⁶⁰ At the conference, in order to study these effects, Davenport suggested Jamaica and Bermuda as potential locales with accessible “records of white-Negro matings.”⁶¹ Davenport would spend much of the rest of the decade collecting data and developing theories about the nature of black-white interbreeding in his work on race crossing in Jamaica.⁶²

Raymond Pearl, the prominent Johns Hopkins School of Public Health biostatistician and geneticist, was a major beneficiary of the Committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migration’s generosity. Pearl’s studies of what he called “racial pathology (as indicated in colored and white) from the autopsy and clinical records of the Johns Hopkins Hospital” were funded by the committee. The committee funded Pearl’s study for a year in the amount of $6,000 beginning in July 1923.⁶³ Seeking to investigate links between the “nature, degree, and etiology of lesions, weight of organs, clinical history, etc., in relation to race, especially European and American stocks, and the Negro,” Pearl’s research program produced eight papers on three topics related to race pathology: race and alcoholism, race and cancer, and race and tuberculosis.⁶⁴

Pearl was an aberration in the eugenics movement: he was one of the first dues-paying members of the Eugenics Research Association, a member of Davenport’s inner circle, and his work provided more mainstream “evidence” for scientific racism. Yet Pearl sometimes publicly opposed racism, worked with NAACP president Walter White, and, at times, opposed the eugenics movement itself.65 Among Pearl’s papers are two sets of surviving correspondence with White: a friendly exchange in 1933 in which White asked Pearl to serve on a committee studying Harlem Hospital, and a letter to White from Pearl relaying the results of a study he was about to present at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists showing that “innate fertility” between blacks and whites “appears to be identical.”⁶⁶ Pearl’s opposition to eugenics was rooted not in its core canon but in what he believed was its sometimes inappropriate scientific claims. Thus, his opposition to eugenics as science could exist alongside his own personal racism and anti-Semitism. Pearl believed that eugenics was a social movement, but believed genetics to be an academic discipline.⁶⁷ This would account for Pearl’s pressure on the committee to develop better methods to study human diversity.

Rankled by the methods and conclusions of some eugenics research as early as 1922, Pearl dismissed Charles Davenport’s research on the matter of racial hybridization. In November 1922, Pearl responded to a letter from Yerkes seeking his analysis of a paper published by Davenport in 1917 titled “The Effects of Race Intermingling.” Yerkes asked Pearl whether he thought Davenport’s conclusion in this paper—that racial hybrids result in “bad hereditary combinations”—was accurate.⁶⁸ “I think the statement of Davenport’s which you quote,” countered Pearl, “actually rests upon very little except a priori reasoning.”⁶⁹ In a follow-up letter, Yerkes notes that he “had the feeling as I read Davenport’s article that he was expressing wishes rather than facts.”⁷⁰ Pearl’s very public break with the eugenics movement came in 1927. In an article published in H. L. Mencken’s magazine American Mercury, Pearl attacked who he believed to be the scientific charlatans who had filled the study of genetics and human differences with “emotional appeals to class and race prejudices, solemnly put forth as science, and unfortunately accepted as such by the general public.” Pearl also bemoaned the propaganda and scientific “phases” of the study of human traits as “almost inextricably confused so that the literature of eugenics has largely become a mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical” study.⁷¹

Yet despite his role as the curmudgeon of the eugenics movement, his sometimes public opposition to the class and racial presumptions of eugenics, and his insistence on improving the methods of eugenic study, Pearl’s work would strengthen and further the cause of racial science. In the late 1920s, for example, Pearl published a series of seminal articles in The Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine about pathology and race difference. In those articles on necropsy studies on cancer patients in Baltimore County, Pearl’s data shows that cancer rates are higher in whites compared with blacks and that “the susceptibility to malignancy of the different organ systems of the body is a more diffuse and widely scattered phenomenon in the white race than it is in the colored.”72 From this data Pearl concluded that “malignancy is, in certain respects, a different condition in the white race from what it is in the colored race,” thus reinforcing the popular notion that black and white biology were fundamentally different.⁷³ Pearl did not always think this way. Just a year earlier, in 1927, Pearl believed it “possible that these differences in the biologic and physical environment play a significant part in determining the observed differences in cancer incidence in these two broad racial groups. The main point to be kept in mind for the present is that the evidence so far reviewed permits no final conclusion as to whether the greater susceptibility of the whites than of the colored to cancer finds its origin in inherited racial differences, or in purely environmental differences.”⁷⁴

His data on the “site of primary carcinomas” show that “what cancer colored persons have tends to appear primarily either in the alimentary tract or in the reproductive organs, and not in the other organ systems, more constantly and regularly than is the case with white people.”75 This led Pearl to a curious conclusion: “White people are further along on the evolutionary pathway in respect to cancer than the Negro.”⁷⁶ To come to this conclusion Pearl would have had to believe the following: cancers of the alimentary tract and reproductive organs (more prevalent in blacks) were somehow more primitive, and, therefore, the sites of cancers in whites somehow represented an evolutionary advance. In a paper called “Evolution and Mortality,” also published in 1928, Pearl compared “biologically classifiable deaths” over four years between humans in London, England, and São Paulo, Brazil, and between reptiles, birds, and mammals at the London Zoological Garden. Here he found confirmation of his cancer-evolutionary hypothesis.⁷⁷ Regardless of whether the data showed an increase or a decrease in death rate by organ system between lower and higher order of animals, Pearl concluded that this represented an evolutionary advancement. And he placed this in a racial context by “showing” that the causes of death by organ system in men in São Paulo (whom he calls a more primitive population, “from both a general evolutionary viewpoint and from that of public health and sanitation, than that of England and Wales”) fit nicely between the men of London (“a high product of human evolution”) and lower order animals.⁷⁸

Given Pearl’s membership on the committee, it should come as no surprise that careful attention to methods was part of the group’s work. An important item from the proceedings of the committee was its focus on the need for “improvement in method, devising and perfecting tools for the solution of the problems” related to migration and race. In its various proceedings the committee recommended careful attention to investigating methodological issues, primarily those related to deficiencies in the biological and psychological study of race and migration. At the committee’s 1923 conference, Pearl spoke of the importance of refining methods of studying race, stating that “whatever problem we undertake, or the committee undertakes, must be studied either with already existing materials of a statistical character, or else it must be done with materials yet to be collected. It is not easy to get really critical material on these problems.”⁷⁹

Of the sixteen projects funded by the committee between 1923 and 1926, almost all of them sought to improve the epistemological approach to the study of race. Among the committee’s priorities in this area were the consideration of what qualitative characters were needed in the study of physical inheritance, and what race stocks would be “readily accessible” for experimentation. Also, the committee hoped to develop methods to better understand “human inheritance through the study of family strains.”80 Attention to psychometric methods also furthered racial studies. Grantees sought to develop an “effective means of measuring mental, motor, and emotional traits.” The application of this information to race crossing was considered a priority. Among the studies funded supporting these lines of research were Joseph Peterson’s “Comparative Psychological Study of Negroes and Whites” (funded between 1924 and 1927) and Carl Brigham’s “Internationalizing or Universalizing Mental Measurements” (funded between 1923 and 1926). Finally, Clark Wissler’s “Behavior of Physical Traits in Race Intermixture” (funded between 1923 and 1926) was designed to perfect a technique for the “study of human physical traits in pure and mixed groups and to measure the physical characteristics of Negroes, Indians, Japanese, Hawaiians, Whites, and crosses.”⁸¹

That committee members sought to develop methodologically sound studies for “estimating the effects of race intermixture” in an attempt to distinguish their brand of racial science from years of work by eugenicists in the same area seems a moot point given the committee’s makeup; nearly all committee members were eugenicists in some form, and Davenport was the titular head of the movement. But their desire to develop scientifically rigorous methods was more than just political and scientific expedience (though this was certainly part of their calculus). It would seem that committee members were genuinely interested in refining the biological and psychological study of race. We see this in the nature of the studies funded by the committee and the papers published as a result of this research, and we see this in the discussions, correspondence, and reports of the committee. Ultimately, the focus on methodology illustrates the ways in which these NRC committees were part of the scientific reimagination of race differences during this time.

In addition to shaping debates on race and immigration, the work of these NRC committees on race matters during the 1920s also had a lasting effect on the methods utilized in some disciplines of the social and natural sciences. Raymond Pearl’s work, for example, was part of a larger trend in demography that sought to develop a more robust understanding of the changing nature of populations.⁸² Additionally, the work of Clark Wissler and other committee members had a marked impact on the field of human intelligence testing.⁸³ In his final report of the Committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migration, Wissler outlined what he considered the many achievements of the committee’s research program: “a series of tests to minimize language handicaps in mental measurements; a special group of tests for rating and analyzing mechanical aptitude; some fundamental pioneering in the analysis of personality…; an attempt to reach the fundamental psycho-neural responses…; an effort to develop an approach to organic differences in peoples through data as to pathology; and an attempt to test out qualitative anthropometric characters as a method in the analysis of mixed races.”⁸⁴