Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

By the middle of the 1920s, the National Research Council’s (NRC) race committees had transitioned from the study of white ethnics to the study of black-white differences, resulting in the formation of the Committee on the Study of the American Negro. In the wake of the anti-immigrant Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which closed the door to new immigration, and growing concern over how a demographically changing African American population would impact American society, the NRC felt a need to understand the “vital statistics of the Negro population.” Hence, it diverted the focus of its racial research to concentrate on issues related to American blacks. This new committee believed its scope of inquiry should “extend over all the biological and psychological aspects of the life of the full-blood Negro and of the mixed population.”¹

The genesis of the NRC Committee on the Study of the American Negro seems to have been an October 1925 letter to G. M. Stratton, then the chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology, from Robert Terry, a professor of anatomy at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Terry was a participant in several NRC race-related committees during the 1920s. As a physical anthropologist of some renown, he contributed to the debates on race through what he believed to be a “problem fundamental to the studies of the colored population of the United States: the physical constitution of the American Negro.”2 In his letter, Terry judges that “there is no more serious work to undertake than the study of the colored races under our government,” and that “there will be everlasting regret if the problems of the colored races are not taken up seriously and vigorously now.” Terry, fearful that miscegenation would somehow deprive researchers of an understanding of the “colored races,” hoped that the NRC would initiate research in the areas of “vital statistics of the Negro population,” “the reproductive period in the American Negro woman,” and the “study of somatological variation” among American blacks.³

A January 1926 letter to Stratton from A. E. Jenks outlined a genetically minded rationale for shifting resources to the study of black Americans. In his letter, Jenks expressed “hearty agreement with Dr. Terry’s suggestion for study of the Negro.” Jenks offered three reasons that reflected the continued impact of eugenic views of human difference on America’s racial debates: first, he suggested “there is the general opinion that such persons [African Americans] are less fit than the remainder of the nation” and that this was a problem unique to America (excepting “the newer governments in South Africa”); second, the populations of what he considered both pure and mixed blacks were in sufficient numbers to “secure the most convincing sets of data”; and, third, “while all our so-called racial groups should be studied, the ‘Negro’ is evidently hereditarily less like the large numbers of white groups than those white groups are like one another, so a comprehensive study of the Negro would probably contribute distinctly toward a knowledge of so-called hereditary race characters more than would an equally comprehensive study of some one white group.”⁴

Yet despite the eugenic influences behind the formation of the committee, the membership of the group reflected a diversity of opinions on matters of race. After all, antiracist and antieugenicist Franz Boas and the racist and eugenicist Charles Davenport were both members of the committee. Committee members also included E. A. Hooton, Aleš Hrdlička, T. Wingate Todd, and R. S. Woodworth.⁵ Furthermore, the committee sought to complement its work on this subject in the natural sciences with the expertise of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Correspondence from the committee recognized the SSRC’s expertise as “indispensible,” “since the biological characteristics of man do not depend solely upon descent but also upon social environment.”⁶ However, despite repeated attempts to nurture a collaboration between the two groups, no formal partnership was successfully developed between the NRC Committee on the Study of the American Negro and the SSRC.⁷

While the stated goals of the committee included “acting as a fact-finding, stimulative, and coordinating agency in the field of Negro research,” it seems as if it accomplished little during its three-year existence.8 This failure seems due, in large part, to a “lack of funds for the prosecution of research.”⁹ Only research that did not require financial support was undertaken by the committee, such as lists of universities and investigators that had research in progress on African Americans; a bibliography on research on African Americans; and the compilation of already existing vital statistics on African Americans.¹⁰

The one considerable success of this committee’s almost three years of work was the “Conference on Racial Differences” held at the National Academy in Washington, D.C., in February of 1928 under the joint auspices of the NRC and the Committee on Problems and Policies of the Social Science Research Council. The conference, “called to consider the coordination and facilitation of research on problems of racial differences and racial changes,” focused its efforts on “the Negro and the Immigrant in relation to whites and stocks of earlier introduction.” It was a “who’s who” of the natural and social scientists of the time.¹¹ Among the twenty-five attendees were distinguished academics including Franz Boas, E. A. Hooten, Fay-Cooper Cole, Raymond Pearl, and Melville Herskovits; eugenicists such as Charles Davenport, Robert Terry, and T. Wingate Todd; and representatives from foundations such as W. W. Alexander from the SSRC, Leonard Outhwaite from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, and Graham Taylor Jr. from the Commonwealth Fund.¹²

The conference was organized as a series of discussions held over a two-day period. Among the topics discussed were methodological challenges to measuring intelligence, disease, pathology, and anatomy among and between racial groups; the scientific meaning, if any, of “race” itself; the characteristics of the “African” body type; the potential dangers of racial hybridization; the sociological nature of black culture; and the origin of racial attitudes and prejudices.13 The proceedings were generally cordial, although it is possible that the transcript of the event deadened striking disagreements between participants on a host of subjects. When disagreement did arise, discussion always seemed circumspect and respectful. It was indeed an academic affair. Yet, reading through the proceedings of the conference offers a unique window into how men of science were struggling to understand and shape a common definition of human difference and how, ultimately, this struggle helped to endow the term “race” with biological and genetic meaning.

Fay-Cooper Cole, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, opened the proceedings with a discussion about the difficulties in studying and defining the term “race.” Through his work on Asian Pacific cultures (in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia), Cole was well aware of the methodological and practical challenges of using the term “race,” and he shared these frustrations with the scholars gathered at the conference.¹⁴ Given Cole’s wariness of the term “race” itself, it is interesting that he was chosen to open the proceedings, although no correspondence could be found that indicates that this was intentional one way or the other. Cole was particularly frustrated by two things: the fact that the term “race” was “frequently used in three or four ways in the same article” and that “while there is a great deal of confusion in the use of the word, apparently the general public thinks that those of us who are working in this field know what we mean by the term.”¹⁵ Cole’s candidness on this matter underscores the contradictions of even the most vehement proselytizers of the term and the word’s biological meaning: that in private discussions among colleagues some scientists could admit to their misgivings about the idea of race but in public, be it in scientific journals or popular print, the meaning of race seemed unambiguous. It is surprising that Charles Davenport, whose public statements were among the most influential in garnering support for a biological and genetic view of race during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, could be circumspect in private about the meaning of human difference.

Boas, the third speaker of the conference, spoke about “Changes in Immigrants,” a presentation that drew upon his well-known work in the area and concluded that “American-born descendants of immigrants differ in type from their foreign-born parents.”16 He described his findings that anthropometric measurements such as head form, stature, and facial width, once believed to be fixed by heredity, could instead vary by environment.¹⁷ These findings were revolutionary in anthropology and would come to have a significant impact on racial thinking more generally. By showing that the environment mediated intergenerational difference among immigrants, Boas’s work highlighted the importance of environmental factors in determining physical traits and challenged scientific theories about the permanence of racial traits.¹⁸

Boas argued in his talk that heredity was not solely responsible for an individual’s body type or phenotype. Instead, he believed that evidence showed that body type was influenced by both heredity and environment. Boas, also wary of the methodological efficacy of “race” (like Fay-Cooper Cole), warned of the shortcomings of using race to study heredity in human populations. Boas reminded his fellow attendees that “race, as we use the term, is composed of a great many different family lines,” and that in order to compare “a race in one environment with the same race in another social or geographical setting we must be certain that the same family lines are represented in both series.” In other words, “races” were not useful to the study of human heredity because racial groups are made up of diverse “family lines” or subpopulations.¹⁹ Boas was one of the first scientists to recognize that skin color, despite being the definitive trait for a race, was just one of many traits that defined populations and thus made using racial groups highly problematic in the study of complex patterns of heredity and the relationship between heredity and environment.

Boas also articulated what would soon become recognized among population geneticists as a fatal flaw in applying the race concept to the study of human heredity: that “family lines in all so-called ‘races’ may be much more different among themselves than family lines that happen to belong to two different races.”20 That Boas understood that populations within so-called races could be more dissimilar than populations between so-called races was an important intellectual jump in the long argument against racial thought, and Boas was among the first of a small group of scientists who began to apply this thinking to race in the 1920s and 1930s. Even as Davenport agreed with the spirit of Boas’s misgivings about race, he remained opposed to the specifics of the new approach to human diversity as articulated by Boas. In Davenport’s comments to Boas, he worried that the study of heredity was “even more complicated than he [Boas] has stressed,” and that “part of the difficulty, I suppose, lies in the definition of race or type.”²¹ Boas acknowledged his and Davenport’s (as well as many of the other conference attendees’) shared frustrations with “race,” saying that “we both, I believe, wish to discard the term ‘race’ and lay stress upon the family lines.”²² There is no recorded response by Davenport to this assertion in the conference proceedings.

Even with his reservations about the definition of race, ultimately Davenport believed in the concept, however muddled his approach. The differences between him and Boas, still to this day, generally define the lines along which racial and antiracial thinking persist: population versus typological thinking. The biologist Ernst Mayr frames the differences between the two men in this way: “All groupings of living organisms (including mankind) are populations that consist of uniquely different individuals.…Populations differ from each other not by their essences but only by the mean differences of statistical populations. Population thinking is an entirely different way of thinking from typological or essentialistic thinking.” Mayr tells us that for typologists, or essentialists, variety “consisted of a limited number of natural kinds (essences, types), each one forming a class, the components of which are essentially identical, constant, and sharply separated from the components of other such essences.” Variation by this way of thinking is “non-essential and accidental.” That is why a typologist looks at skin color and sees not only, for example, whiteness but also all the traits thought to be associated with that color. When it comes to differences in all species, a typologist does “not know how to deal with variation. This is particularly conspicuous in his treatment of the human races. For him, whites, blacks, Asians and so forth are types that invariably have certain racial characteristics.”²³ This is why in one breath Charles Davenport could agree with Boas that the definition of “race or type” caused biologists, geneticists, and anthropologists methodological difficulties, but in his next breath Davenport could ruminate on the specific effects racial hybridization would have on resulting generations.²⁴

It is fair to say that Mayr’s creation of the antipodes of population versus typological thought had a much more complex and nuanced dynamic within the evolutionary sciences, including population genetics. Discussions about variation dating back to Darwin were central to arguments about evolution, and central to the emergence of the evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s.25 However, this does not contradict the way fairly fixed ideas about typology undergirded arguments about variation, particularly in humans, within the biological sciences during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It wasn’t really until Theodosius Dobzhansky’s work on the evolutionary synthesis that ideas about variation in human populations would become more integrated into a population genetics worldview.

Davenport’s absolute adherence to typology without an understanding or application of population genetics to his work was quickly making him obsolete as a geneticist (although he managed to retain prominence as a eugenicist and some distinction as a geneticist into the early 1930s). Around him his field was quickly changing—his failure to completely embrace the chromosomal theory of heredity certainly did not help matters—as eugenical views of human and other organismal diversity were gradually being shown to be obsolete by work in the area of population genetics. During the 1920s geneticists Ronald A. Fisher, Sewell Wright, and J. B. S. Haldane, among others, developed the mathematic and theoretical foundations for the synthesis of Mendelism and Darwinism, and helped make a populationist view of organismal diversity possible.²⁶

However, even as geneticists and other scientists provided evidence that undermined racial typology, there were still those among this new breed who held fast to typological views of race. For example, R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection at once provided mathematic models undermining typology and dedicated several chapters in this now classic genetics text to eugenics. Fisher’s eugenic sentiments are unambiguous. “The most obvious requirement for a society capable of making evolutionary progress,” he wrote in his classic text, “is that reproduction should be somewhat more active among its more successful, than among its less successful members.” That Fisher could at once be the genius behind many of the mathematical models of modern population genetics and a eugenicist is in many ways similar to Raymond Pearl’s contradictory relationship with eugenics. Fisher was sympathetic to the ideas and worldviews of the eugenicists, he just thought that the methodology underlying their theory was wrong. His daughter and biographer explained Fisher this way: he “could never let pass what he believed to be wrong reasoning. He was known on other occasions to argue the case, even with someone who produced a correct answer, if the reasoning on which it was based was not sound.”27 Likewise, Edward East, the pioneering population biologist whose experimental work showed how Mendelian inheritance “could account for an almost continuous array of variation,” also authored the racist tome Mankind at the Crossroads. In the chapter “Racial Prospects and Racial Dangers,” East wrote in typological terms about the fixity of differences between black and white populations: “The Negro as a whole is possessed of undesirable transmissible qualities both physical and mental, which seem to justify not only a line but a wide gulf to be fixed permanently between it and the white race.”²⁸ According to the geneticist Bentley Glass, “No one went farther than East in lending his authority to racist and social prejudices.”²⁹ While this point is debatable—Davenport, after all, was also a classically trained geneticist who was a product of the same Harvard institute where East taught—East certainly was among the most prominent racists among the generation of geneticists who were helping to develop population genetics.

The contradictions and tensions between population thinkers and typologists were in evidence at the “Conference on Racial Differences,” and the conference may be unique as the first forum where these opposing viewpoints were debated and divergent views on race were shared in such an intimate way. What seems so remarkable about the conference is that it seemed, intentionally or not, to set the parameters for the debate about the biological meaning of race for the remainder of the twentieth century. And not just in the simplistic population-versus-typological approach that so dominated the conference. What still seems striking today is that despite almost eighty years of science, the debate has changed so little.

In addition to Fay-Cooper Cole and Franz Boas, the populationist position was promoted by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, a Boas acolyte and young assistant professor at Northwestern University, who spoke about “The Role of Social Selection in the Establishment of Physical Type.” In describing the emerging opposition to the race concept, Herskovits said that “the existence of a group of such heterogeneous descent and termed ‘Negro’ is due to the fact that we have a social definition of the word Negro, and we do not have the same meaning in mind when we use the word as the anthropologist who does when he speaks of the African Negro.”30 Herskovits also insisted that the social as well as the biological side of individuals must be recognized and studied.³¹ Yet despite Herskovits’s place in the populationist camp, his conclusions were somewhat contradictory and illustrate how a populationist thinker could also embrace typological arguments. On the one hand, for example, Herskovits argued in The American Negro: A Study in Race Crossing (published the same year as the conference) that race is a concept used “with amazing looseness” and recognized “how little we are able to define a word that has played such an important role in our political and social life.” But Herskovits also believed that his data showed that the American Negro was “a homogeneous population group, more or less consciously consolidating and stabilizing” due to both legal (antimiscegenation statutes) and social (segregation and racism) pressures. Herskovits did not, however, take the step that a pure typologist would have: he specifically did not regard the American Negro as a new race, no matter that his data showed that the population was homogeneous. Indeed, at the end of The American Negro Herskovits warned that to do so would be fallacious, and that such thinking, “translated into action in the field of race, too often makes for tragedy.”³² Part of Herskovits’s limitation was the nature of his methodology—by relying on self-reported genealogies his data could show the emergence of a homogeneous population. By allowing his study subjects to self-identify their race, Herskovits probably hoped to avoid the gross typological observations of some of his colleagues. Yet in doing so he was relying upon the observations and memories of individuals who were still a part of the American system of racialized thinking, even though they themselves could be its worst victims.

On the other side of the hereditarian spectrum were speakers like Raymond Pearl, whose talk on the “Incidence of Disease According to Race” argued that the “statistical characteristics of disease do have a rather definite correlation with race.”³³ So too did T. Wingate Todd expound on hereditarianism. Todd, an anatomist at Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve), spoke on “The Search for Specific African Body Features.” Todd’s research, blatantly typological in nature, argued that “the real distinction between our Whites and our Negroes is, then, in absolute dimensions.” And even as he used measurements to “subdivide our Negroes according to their white characteristics,” he also believed that “the American Negro is becoming homogeneous.”³⁴

Finally, the psychologist Joseph Peterson presented on “The Problems and Results of Negro Intelligence.” Peterson, a psychologist at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville (now part of Vanderbilt University), was, perhaps, the South’s most distinguished psychologist at that time, and he wrote extensively on issues pertaining to racial intelligence. At the time of his death in 1935 Peterson had even risen to become president of the American Psychological Association, the first professor from a southern university to hold that distinction.35 His 1923 book The Comparative Abilities of White and Negro Children studied over 3,000 white and black children from the South and concluded that white children performed better on intelligence tests.³⁶ Yet Peterson was hesitant to conclude that such results overtly indicated African American inferiority, and he also questioned the accuracy of the tests, writing that “work in this line has been premature and untrustworthy; nevertheless many testers have been ready with conclusions.” Moreover, Peterson was less concerned with this question than with using intelligence testing for what he called better adjustment, which was, in a sense, a “gentleman’s” way of articulating racism. Hoping to use testing to serve a beneficial social purpose, Peterson sought to use test results mainly for the “sort of self-control that the sound use of tests of any kind engenders.” In other words, he believed testing could lead to the “voluntary regulation of birth rate and elimination by eugenic methods within each race (or national) group of undesirable physical or mental traits, stronger in certain individuals than in others.”³⁷

Peterson’s views were not an anomaly in the field of intelligence testing. A 1934 survey of seventy-seven psychologists, thirty education scholars, and twenty-two sociologists and cultural anthropologists on the subject of race and intelligence included as subjects Peterson and other well-known leaders in the field like Charles Davenport (who is oddly classified as a psychologist), Jean Piaget, Carl Seashore, John Dewey, Franz Boas, Fay-Cooper Cole, E. A. Hooton, and Knight Dunlap. The survey found that most of those in the fields of education and psychology believed “race inferiority possible but not adequately demonstrated,” whereas most anthropologists and sociologists (65 percent) were “highly critical of the means used to demonstrate race inferiority and of the results obtained.”³⁸

At the conference, Peterson raised several questions that would vex the field of IQ studies for much of the twentieth century. Peterson, for example, suggested that “to determine the intelligence of Negroes is a rather difficult problem” because “we do not know exactly…what the Negro race is” and we “do not know what intelligence is.” He proposed, as he did in his books and published articles, that the intelligence testing that had so far been done on black Americans had “been of a casual nature”: “Someone happens to find it convenient in his academic position to do some Negro testing and goes out and gives tests that are used for whites. He gets certain data and compares those data of Negroes in one community with the norms of whites, and puts down the difference as a race difference.” Yet for all his skepticism about the nature of intelligence testing and of racial differences in intelligence, in the end Peterson’s perspective would help to shape the racialized IQ debates of the twentieth century. He might have questioned the scientific legitimacy of racial categories and the definition of intelligence, but he still came back to the question, “Is the great retardation of the Negroes due entirely to lack of opportunity or is it partly at least due to innate deficiencies?”39 And it was Peterson’s attempted solution to this question that was the most troubling actionable item to come out of the conference.

In the hope of developing a new methodology that could settle the question of innate differences in group intelligence, Peterson proposed an experiment whereby “complete control of the group of individuals selected as representatives of the races to be compared, complete control through a long period of years, including their entire school training.…If we could get an experiment like that going, and give the children of the compared races essentially the same sort of training throughout, then we should be able to throw some light on the question as to the degree of innateness of any differences found.”⁴⁰ Although there was little discussion of this item at the conference itself, Peterson’s proposed racial or IQ orphanage was among the research projects recommended for further study by the group. This project would be picked up by the Committee on Racial Problems, jointly formed in March 1928 by the NRC and SSRC to formally act on the conference’s recommendations.⁴¹

The conference closed with several proposals for “research on the scientific problems of race.” In addition to Peterson’s experiment, the conference sought support for a five-year study of comparative race pathology to be carried out by Raymond Pearl; Robert Terry’s proposal to utilize cadavers from the nation’s medical schools to address the need for anatomical data on race difference; Aleš Hrdlička’s proposal for a study of the physical anthropology of immigrants; a methodology to study the impact of heredity versus environment “to be applied to immigrants as well as Negroes”; a study examining the physical and cultural components of populations in the Americas, Caribbean, and Africa; and a “proposal for a study of ‘race-crossing’ in a large city and nearby rural community.”42

However, surviving records suggest that the Committee on Racial Problems focused its efforts almost exclusively on Peterson’s idea of creating racial orphanages to measure biological and environmental differences between black and white races. This may be partially explained by the fact that Knight Dunlap, chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology, referred one of the proposals from the conference—Raymond Pearl’s project “looking toward a 5-year study of comparative race pathology”—to the NRC Division of Medical Sciences. The remainder of the proposals were, according to minutes from the committee’s meeting on January 12, 1929, tabled, deemed unactionable, or recommended for further study.⁴³ The final report that the committee issued in April 1931 makes no mention of other projects resulting from the recommendations of the “Conference on Racial Differences.”⁴⁴

The efforts of the committee went solely toward the development of a second conference, May 25, 1930, that would explore the “feasibility of a plan for studying the comparative development of children of different races in the hope of throwing light on the contributions of heredity and environment in determining racial differences.”45 For reasons that remain unclear, Joseph Peterson, who proposed the racial orphanages, was not involved in the Committee on Racial Problems, nor in the 1930 Detroit conference. Instead, representing the Joint Committee on Racial Problems were the neuropsychologist Knight Dunlap, of Johns Hopkins, American Museum of Natural History anthropologist Clark Wissler, Columbia University psychologist R. S. Woodworth, Cornell University psychologist Madison Bentley, and sociologist Robert S. Lynd from the SSRC.⁴⁶ That the NRC thought that such a plan could be put into action reflected not only the prevailing racial views of the time but also, to a degree, the Progressive Movement’s concern for child welfare and social control. Under the Progressive banner, intervention in family life to protect a child was considered normal and necessary. However, by the 1930s, as the Progressive era gave way to the Great Depression and the New Deal, support for the construction of orphanages, let alone the proposed racial orphanages, was probably hard to come by. The era of orphanages would quickly come to a close with the rise of the New Deal welfare state.⁴⁷

Prior to the Detroit conference both Fay-Cooper Cole and Franz Boas offered their thoughts to Dunlap on the idea of a racial orphanage. Cole was very critical, writing that the “proposal is very interesting and one which would certainly yield valuable results, but it is not without serious objections.” Cole worried that the differences of care between white and black institutions could not be controlled for and would result in “differences in experiences.” He believed that this was because it would be impossible to “alter the experiences of the wardens and nurses so that they would react equally to black and white skins.”⁴⁸ Surprisingly, Franz Boas deemed the experiment “highly desirable.” He hoped “the committee in charge of this matter which has been in touch with the Negro problem and knows by personal experience the prospects and difficulties” would see it through. Boas also had hoped for a “Negro on this committee.”⁴⁹ In the end, neither of Boas’s suggestions seems to have been heeded.

The proceedings of the Detroit conference explored the methodological challenges of developing an experiment to “throw light on the influences of heredity and environment in producing the differences actually observed in present-day groups in health, vigor, mental achievements and social adjustments.” “Plan A” called for the development of an institution that would “receive” children at birth or in early childhood to provide “an environment superior of that of the private home.” In this controlled environment, researchers would be provided with an “opportunity for intensive study of development.” “Plan B” would see the construction of nursery schools “with influence brought to bear also upon the homes from which children were received.” It was hoped that in such a setting, the general environment of the student could be drastically improved, and also allow for “following development.” Finally, “Plan C” would follow black children placed in “superior negro foster homes, with special care to secure an adequate control group.”50 The group considered the challenges to all three plans, including the barriers to securing subjects; the barriers to securing orphanage staff; and the sampling problems faced by such an experiment.⁵¹ Ultimately, they worried about social and cultural biases, acknowledging that “a complete control of social and cultural factors would be pretty difficult.…A single accident, such as the introduction of cultural bias, might do a great deal to vitiate the experiment.”⁵² In the end, the idea for such an institution died quietly—the SSRC would soon after drop the matter and withdraw itself from the joint committee. The NRC initially appointed a committee to follow up on the idea of a racial orphanage, but that committee never took action on the idea.⁵³

Even though the racial orphanage experiment never moved beyond the planning stage, it nonetheless raises troubling issues about the intersection of race and scientific experimentation, and the role that federally funded science played in shaping the race concept. The proposed orphanage study also illustrates how racial ideology shaped research agendas, research protocols, and, of course, the interpretation of research data, much as it did for “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” a forty-year experiment examining the natural history of the disease in 399 untreated syphilitic African Americans living in Macon County, Alabama.⁵⁴ Both studies epitomize the way eugenic thinking about race corrupted those seeking to understand and address scientific questions and medical challenges.

With the dissolution of the NRC Committee on Racial Problems, the NRC’s careful attention to race difference, for the time being, came to a close. During the 1920s the four NRC committees on issues of race exemplified the changing scientific approach to race in the United States. First, as the committee’s work illustrates, there was a dramatic shift in how racial groups were defined during this period, from a broad definition that included both continental ancestry as correlated to skin color and ethnic, national, and religious affiliations to one that focused primarily on skin color. Second, the decade saw the emergence of large-scale research projects into the biological nature of racial differences between white and black Americans. These studies focused primarily on intellectual, pathological, and morphological differences between the two groups. Third, research sponsored by the committees sought to understand the biology of the children of black and white couples, or racial hybrids, as they were often called. And, finally, the decade witnessed the emergence of populationist thinking as an alternative to typological thinking, specifically as it concerned race difference.

Race Crossing in Jamaica, the culmination of more than two decades of Davenport’s research in the area of white-black differences, was a giant tome, an almost 500-page analysis of traits from stature to weight to intelligence between whites, blacks, and browns (hybrids). The book’s research was funded by a $10,000 gift to the Carnegie Institution of Washington by Wickliffe Draper, who would later gain notoriety as the founder of the Pioneer Fund.⁶⁰ Davenport had been courting Draper as early as 1923, discussing with him his interest in a “bequest for the advancement of eugenics.”⁶¹ It was not until 1926, however, that the two found common ground. In February 1926, Draper suggested Davenport might do “research work on the effect of miscegenation” and dedicate himself to the “popularization of the[se] results.”⁶² Draper’s money would be put to quick use, and Davenport was clearly excited about what he thought would be its impact, calling the work “of the greatest possible importance.”⁶³ “The more I think over your plans and the contribution you have made toward the study of the consequences of miscegenation the more enthusiastic I am over the prospect of getting something of great scientific and practical utility,” Davenport told Draper. Davenport outlined to Draper their agreement on how his funding would be used: “A study, in the most objective and quantitative way possible, of the inheritance of the traits of pure blooded Negroes, as found in the Western Hemisphere (specifically, probably, Jamaica and Haiti) and of white, as found in the same places with especial reference to the inheritance of the differential traits in mulatto offspring and the distribution of these traits in later generations.”⁶⁴

The basis of Davenport and Draper’s relationship was clear; both were deeply concerned that “the presence of the African negro in our country may be very fateful for its future, as its increase tends to overcrowd more and more the country to the detriment of the white race.”65 By the fall of 1926, Draper’s money was supporting Davenport’s research into race differences. The research was carried out in Jamaica by Morris Steggerda, then a graduate student in genetics at the University of Illinois.⁶⁶

The three theses of Race Crossing—first, that hybridization between blacks and whites results in “the production of an excessive number of ineffective, because disharmoniously put together, people”; second, that “a population of hybrids will be a population carrying an excessively large number of intellectually incompetent persons”;⁶⁷ and, third, that whites were superior in mental capacity to both blacks and browns—confirmed the thinking of many racial scientists and validated popular racist beliefs. Race Crossing’s significance also lay in its breadth of analysis. As one of the largest field studies of its kind to date, it endowed racial science with legitimacy and encouraged confidence in its results so much so that Davenport wrote in its pages, “The burden of proof is placed on those who deny fundamental differences in mental capacity between Gold Coast Negroes and Europeans.”⁶⁸

Reviews of the book were mixed. Writing in the journal Social Forces, the eminent Smith College sociologist Frank Hankins called the book “an extremely thorough anthropometrical study” that is “undoubtedly one of the very best contributions yet made to the difficult subject of race hybridism.”⁶⁹ Other reviewers were not as kind. Karl Pearson, writing in Nature, was especially critical of the book’s methodological shortcomings, specifically its data-collection methods.⁷⁰ Race Crossing’s most comprehensive critique came from Harvard scientist William Castle, an early pioneer in genetics and a former student of Davenport’s from his Harvard days.⁷¹ In 1924 Castle became one of the first geneticists to attack the idea that hybrids resulted in disharmonious crossings, arguing that such an idea was not supported by science but rather was an expression of personal views. Castle came to this conclusion through his own work on rabbits, which revealed no hybrid disharmonies. His findings in nonhuman species would be supported by wide-ranging studies on humans in Hawaii, Canada, and the United States published in the late 1920s.⁷²

Castle’s review of Race Crossing, which appeared in Science in 1930, was a crushing review of the book, arguing that Davenport’s conclusions were not supported by his own data. Castle pointed, for example, to the assertions that “the leg of the blacks is much longer than that of the whites” and that a cross between them would result in a disharmonious cross, “which would put them at a disadvantage.” In scouring the book Castle could find no data at all supporting Davenport’s “justification for the idea that the brown Jamaicans have dangerously disharmonious combinations of stature and leg-length.” In fact, Castle pointed out, this idea contradicted the book’s own data that “the reputed ‘much longer’ leg length of the blacks turns out to be on the average longer by five tenths of a centimeter!”73

Yet despite such negative reviews, the impact of Race Crossing and of Davenport’s position on miscegenation and black-white differences went far beyond academic circles. These ideas would be enduring—something Castle himself feared in his review of the book. “We like to think of the Negro as inferior,” Castle wrote, and “we like to think of Negro-white crosses as a degradation of the white race.” However, “the honestly made records of Davenport and Steggerda tell a very different story about hybrid Jamaicans from that which Davenport…tell[s] about them in broad sweeping statements.” Castle was resigned that such ideas “will be with us as the bogey men of pure-race enthusiasts for the next hundred years.”⁷⁴

That Davenport had become one of the foremost antiblack and antimiscegenation propagandists of the eugenic era should be no surprise, having argued in a variety of forums that “there is a constitutional, hereditary, genetical basis for the difference between the two races in mental tests.” He had also lectured on the “interesting tendency” in the United States of the “dominant race to apply to the hybrid the name of the subordinate or inferior race,” and called for the “study of the physical, mental and temperamental traits of Negro-white hybrids to the second and third generation.”75 Davenport worked hard to popularize the conclusions of Race Crossing. In the magazine The Scientific Monthly Davenport emphasized the genetic nature of race, writing that “genetical experimentation in hybridization has revealed” inherited traits can “recur in their pristine purity in later traditions.” This, of course, was a dire warning about the potential effects of racial hybridization, a fact that Davenport did not hide in the article, asking, “What is to be the consequence of this racial intermingling? “Especially we of the white race, proud of its achievement in the past, are eagerly questioning the consequences of mixing our blood with that of other races.” Davenport’s conclusions confirmed this fear—that while physically “there is little to choose between the three groups,” in intellectual capacity hybrids, or “browns” as he calls them, suffer from a “large burden of ineffective persons who seem to be muddleheaded or incapable of collecting themselves to do the task in hand,” and that a “population of hybrids will be a population carrying an excessively large number of intellectually incompetent persons.”⁷⁶

Davenport’s antimiscegenation science (embodied in Race Crossing) not only conformed to and confirmed the thinking of the time about race mixing but was also an important scientific retort to the mounting challenges against some state antimiscegenation statutes.⁷⁷ Perhaps nowhere was this more true than in Virginia, where, with advisement from Davenport, the eugenicist and white supremacist Walter Plecker, a Virginia public health official, helped shape Virginia’s antimiscegenation Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Davenport offered Plecker advice on antimiscegenation-related issues—including help calculating race mixture and suggesting a change to Virginia’s inheritance law that would prevent children from black-white relationships from inheriting land—all the while studiously trying to avoid intimate involvement with “the carrying out of that law” for fear of drawing the Carnegie Institution into “the matter of the administration of law in the State of Virginia.”⁷⁸

Davenport and Draper would have likely appreciated Race Crossing’s role in the antimiscegenation battle nearly twenty years after its publication (although they certainly would have been disappointed with the battle’s final outcome). The book and its conclusions were used by the defense in the landmark 1948 miscegenation legal challenge Perez v. Lippold, in which the California Supreme Court declared its state’s antimiscegenation statutes unconstitutional. The case was brought by a Los Angeles couple who were refused a marriage license by the county clerk of Los Angeles because they were members of different racial groups. In court arguments, the city’s defense relied on Race Crossing “as authority for the proposition that the progeny of mixed marriages are inferior to those of purebred marriages.”⁷⁹

Despite Race Crossing’s staying power in eugenic and racist circles, Wickliffe Draper was not pleased with the book’s limited popular impact. Draper would, in coming decades, turn his attention toward less-established scientists and other public figures who could help him with his racist program, funding in the 1930s, for example, the distribution of white supremacist Earnest Sevier Cox’s book White America to political figures across the country. Here Draper’s funding effort bore significant fruit: Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo pledged support to Cox’s and Draper’s cause of repatriating black Americans in Africa. In April of 1939, Bilbo introduced the Greater Liberia Act on the floor of the United States Senate, seeking to mandate the removal of all black Americans from the United States. Draper would eventually focus his efforts through the Pioneer Fund, set up in 1937 to assist in the education of white descendants of the original settlers of the United States, and, more significantly, to support hereditary and eugenic research. Through the fund, Draper would assist in the promotion of his racist views through scientific studies. Harry Laughlin, formerly part of Davenport’s Cold Spring Harbor group, became its first president. Over the course of the twentieth century, whether it was underwriting opposition to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, to anti-Semitic or antiblack causes, or funding studies to “prove” the inferiority of blacks and the biological soundness of white supremacy, the Pioneer Fund played a significant role in racial science.80

Those who would benefit from the Pioneer Fund’s largesse had an ongoing and significant impact on public debates about race, framed primarily as issues of race crossing and of black racial inferiority and white racial supremacy. However, beginning in the 1930s, eugenic racial scientists would come to have a diminishing impact on scientific debates about the race concept, particularly within genetics.⁸¹ Two related but separate discourses would take place over the remainder of the twentieth century; one by scientists involved in the emerging evolutionary synthesis who were struggling to reimagine how biology and the natural sciences defined race, and the other by paid scientific propagandists (including those by the Pioneer Fund) and their sympathizers in biology. The latter would steadfastly ignore an emerging scientific consensus on human genetic diversity and try to resurrect typologically based theories of human difference that were increasingly undermined by work in population genetics and evolutionary biology. The remainder of this book takes up debates within the biological sciences about the nature of the race concept. Pioneer Fund propagandists played only a limited role in these discussions, reacting largely to what would fast become a new genetical theory of race difference.