In 1906 W. E. B. Du Bois, then a young social scientist at Atlanta University, issued a forceful and elegant challenge to racial science with the release of The Health and Physique of the Negro American.1 In the pages of his book, Du Bois attacked the very foundation of America’s racial ideology, calling into question the legitimacy of the race concept at a time when science was being exploited in the service of racist ideas and practices, and ideas about racial difference were increasingly becoming part of natural science’s lexicon. Despite the boldness of the study and its importance as an act of intellectual protest, its contemporary impact was limited. As one commentator wrote, the usefulness of the work was not “realized” by African Americans at the time, and most whites were certainly “hostile to such a study” and its conclusions.2 Yet the book’s importance should not be judged simply on what might be perceived as its immediate impact. Instead, the work serves as a milestone in antiracist thinking and scholarship.
Du Bois’s early writings on race anticipated the work of Franz Boas and other Columbia University anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century on cultural relativism and their critiques of ideologies of racial inferiority.3 More important, however, Du Bois also anticipated the lines along which many geneticists and other natural scientists would, over the course of the twentieth century, struggle with the scientific and social meanings of race. Yet given the book’s limited readership, it seems unlikely that this impact was direct; it is doubtful that Theodosius Dobzhansky or Leslie Clarence Dunn, or other natural scientists working on concepts of genetic diversity more than two decades later, were aware of this document and of Du Bois’s early opposition to racial science. But in many ways The Health and Physique of the Negro American struggles with the central theme of Du Bois’s landmark 1903 study, The Souls of Black Folk: “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”4 And it is in the negotiation of this “problem” that The Health and Physique of the Negro American illustrates and predicts how the natural sciences would be put into service demarcating and defending the color line. Du Bois implicitly understood the danger of this but believed that through careful rebuttal he could reveal race for what it was: an unscientific expression of America’s racial mores.
The eighteen volumes of the Atlanta University series—all but the first two overseen by Du Bois—addressed a wide array of topics in African Americana. From The Negro Church to The Negro in Business to The Negro American Family, Du Bois and his Atlanta colleagues explored topics in black American life, utilizing what were then cutting-edge methodologies in the social sciences. Du Bois is remembered as a “founding father of American sociology,” and his classic work The Philadelphia Negro was pioneering in its interdisciplinary use of history, ethnography, and statistics.5 Du Bois’s motivation for such a grand project was a Progressive belief in the power of scientific knowledge; knowledge, he hoped, that if shared with the general public could have an emancipatory effect on racism’s stranglehold on the American zeitgeist. In the case of The Health and Physique of the Negro American, the clear target was on biological thinking in the area of human difference. “The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity,” Du Bois would later write. His “cure” for American racism “was knowledge based on scientific evidence,” and in this and much of his other early work he set out to utilize the scientific method in his fight against this American failing.6 The “scientific evidence” of eugenicists, anthropologists, and biologists would, of course, trump Du Bois’s own. Despite this, Du Bois hoped that the Atlanta studies would be a “comprehensive plan for studying a human group and if I could have carried it out as completely as I conceived it, the American Negro would have contributed to the development of social science in this country an unforgettable body of work.”7
To help accomplish this ambitious undertaking, Du Bois reached out to academic leaders to build his argument and philanthropists to fund the work. In 1905 Du Bois corresponded with, among others, the American Museum of Natural History anthropologist Clark Wissler asking for “a list of the best works on Negro anthropology and ethnology.” Wissler understood, as he wrote to Du Bois, that “the literature upon this subject is very incomplete and unsatisfactory” and recommended several books and articles, including the book The Races of Man by the French anthropologist Joseph Deniker.8 In Deniker, Du Bois found an education that must have shaped, to a great degree, his thinking about the meanings of race. Deniker was not a racial essentialist, and in his book he asserted that there were twenty-nine human racial groups, proposing that ethnicity was a more useful marker of understanding human biological and cultural diversity. For example, Deniker, considered whether “real and palpable groupings” of humans are “capable of forming what zoologists call ‘species,’ ‘subspecies,’ ‘varieties,’ in the case of wild animals, or ‘races’ in the case of domestic animals. One need not be a professional anthropologist to reply negatively to this question.” In Deniker’s judgment, “races, or varieties…are by no means zoological species; they may include human beings of one or of many species, races, or varieties.”9
In advance of the “Health and Physique” conference, Du Bois had sought funding for the project from numerous sources, including the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who had been a funder of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. In a long letter to Carnegie, Du Bois outlined the work of the Atlanta conferences “with a view of securing if possible your financial support for this work.” Du Bois lamented the fact that “so far this work has been carried on by small voluntary contributions,” and hoped that an infusion of funding would help “to enlarge its scope and improve its methods of research.” There is no record of a reply from Carnegie.10
In late May of 1906 Atlanta University hosted the conference whose proceedings would soon be edited into The Health and Physique of the Negro American. Among the conference participants were Franz Boas, who titled his talk “Negro Physique,” Du Bois, and R. R. Wright, of the University of Pennsylvania, who spoke on “Mortality in the Cities.” Eight months before the conference, Du Bois sought to foster a collaboration with Boas, writing to him that there is “a great opportunity here for physical measurement of Negroes. We have in Atlanta over 2,000 Negro pupils and students who could be carefully measured. We have not the funds for this—has Columbia any desire to take up such work?” Boas told Du Bois that he thought that there was nothing “particularly good on the physical anthropology of the Negro”; he rejected any proposed collaboration and request for support. Nonetheless, Boas was “very glad to hear” from Du Bois that he intended “to take up investigations on this subject.”11
Two days following the conference Boas would deliver the commencement address at Atlanta University, in which he confronted the issue of alleged black biological inferiority. “To those who stoutly maintain a material inferiority of the Negro race and who would dampen your ardor by their claims,” Boas declared, “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. The physical inferiority of the Negro race, if it exists at all, is insignificant when compared to the wide range of individual variability in each race. There is no anatomical evidence available that would sustain the view that the bulk of the Negro race could not become as useful citizens as the members of any other race. 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.” Boas’s caveat—“if it exists at all,” referring to the “physical inferiority of the Negro race”—is similar to the caveats expressed by other leading antirace thinkers, including Du Bois in The Health and Physique of the Negro American. That such a qualification was part of the attack on racial science suggests the tentative nature of this kind of thinking (after all, antirace thinking in a scientific guise was really barely a decade old at this point), and also the tentative nature of scientific thinking, which is almost always qualified.12
What makes The Health and Physique of the Negro American unique is that at a moment when the concept of race was being appropriated by science (in the service of racism), Du Bois was the first to synthesize a growing anthropologic literature arguing that race was not, in fact, a useful scientific category and that race was instead a socially constructed concept. Du Bois accomplished this by logically and rhetorically attacking the idea of race and by backing up these statements with scientific evidence of his own. Du Bois built his antirace concept argument in the following way. First, he began the book by writing that Americans talk about race in the way that they do because they know no better, and he centered his argument in the realm of scientific thought. Americans, Du Bois argued, “are eagerly and often bitterly discussing race problems” because they are behind the scientific times; they are not up-to-date on scientific advances regarding the understanding of human diversity.13 Second, Du Bois directly attacked the race concept, but he did so by first attacking the idea of whiteness, quoting the anthropologist William Ripley, who wrote that “it may smack of heresy to assert, in face of the teaching of all our textbooks on geography and history, that there is no single European or white race of men; and yet that is the plain truth.14 Du Bois also cited contemporary anthropological discourse to argue that Europeans were an intermediate people between the Asiatic and Negro races. While some anthropologists would have accepted such assertions, these ideas would have been offensive to many scientists at the time and odious to the vast majority of Americans.
Third, Du Bois extended his attack on race to the idea of a discrete black race generally and of an African American race specifically, writing, “The human species so shade and mingle with each other that…it is impossible to draw a color line between black and other races.” To this Du Bois adds, “But in all physical characteristics the Negro race cannot be set off by itself as absolutely different.”15 Du Bois also calls into question the idea of a “pure Negro,” highlighting that “the Negro-American represents a very wide and thorough blending of nearly all African people from north to south; and more than that…a blending of European and African blood.”16 Du Bois acknowledged that neither of these facts would be readily forthcoming in the United States. That because America was a racist society, “no serious attempt has ever been made to study the physical appearance and peculiarities of the transplanted African or their millions of descendants,” and that a racist society limits the way in which questions of race themselves could be studied.17 Or, as Du Bois himself put it, “scientific research seldom flourishes in the midst of a social struggle and heated discussion.”18 By arguing against common assumptions about how humanity was divided, Du Bois sought to bring attention to how human difference existed on a spectrum across the globe and could be organized in different ways.
Fourth, and finally, Du Bois attacked the race concept by examining quantitative data about (alleged) racial differences. Drawing on census data, public health data, military recruitment data (including data from records for U.S. Army recruitment, from the U.S. Census, and from the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission of 1863), and data and conclusions from previously published studies (some of which were used in support of the race concept), Du Bois cobbled together a vision of race and of African Americans contrary to how most Americans were thinking. In answer to the claims by nineteenth-century anthropologists, polygenists, and craniologists that Africans and African Americans had a smaller cranial capacity and hence inferior intelligence, Du Bois presented evidence that no differences in brain size or structure had been proven, and that variability within races is similar.19 Also, in looking at other physiognomic data, Du Bois acknowledged the significant variability within and between races.20 Finally, based upon analysis of his data, Du Bois concluded that disparities were not rooted in biological differences between groups. “If the population were divided as to social and economic condition, the matter of race” in predicting health disparities, Du Bois argued, “would be almost entirely eliminated.” Ultimately, poverty and “the conditions of life,” as Du Bois called them, were the real causes of health disparities. Du Bois believed that with “improved sanitary condition, improved education and better economic opportunities, the mortality of the race may and probably will steadily decrease until it becomes normal.” Drawing on his own research on Philadelphia’s African American community, Du Bois argued that differences in health between groups were “an index of social conditions” and anticipated what in today’s public health parlance would be called the social determinants of health—including poor nutrition, lack of access to clean water, and low socioeconomic status—being at the root of the disparities he identified.21
Several of Du Bois’s arguments against the race concept were made in direct response to the assertions of Frederick Hoffman, a statistician for Prudential Life Insurance Company and author of the racist tract Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, published in 1896. Hoffman’s work both embodied the fading ideas of social Darwinists (“the downward tendencies of the colored race” were leading it toward “gradual extinction”22) and the ascendant ideas of eugenics (“given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities”23). Though not a biologist, Hoffman marshaled statistics to “prove” a biological point in the service of the insurance industry—that black Americans were biologically inferior, that their racial traits consigned them to poverty and unhealthy living conditions, and that they therefore were uninsurable.24 He set out to make this point following passage of insurance antidiscriminatory statutes in several states. A Massachusetts law was the first, passed in 1884. Others, passed in the following decade, forbade insurance companies from discriminating in their distribution of benefits—blacks could no longer be given fewer benefits than whites if paying the same premiums.25
Du Bois had earlier answered Hoffman’s racist assertions in an 1897 review of the book in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. There he attacked Race Traits and its conclusions as having “doubtful value, on account of the character of the material, the extent of the field, and the unscientific use of the statistical method.”26 In The Health and Physique of the Negro American Du Bois responded more directly. The title—The Health and Physique of the Negro American—is an unambiguous retort to the title of Hoffman’s book. The two descriptive adjectives in Hoffman’s title, “traits” and “tendencies,” are suggestive of something negative, whereas “health” and “physique” in Du Bois’s title sound positive and healthful. Also, “traits and tendencies” indicates something inborn and permanent, while “health and physique” are things that are experienced and shaped by human beings, or “the conditions of life,” as Du Bois called them.27 By providing data illustrating the relationship between poverty and morbidity and mortality rates, Du Bois rejected Hoffman’s claim that blacks are “inherently inferior in physique to whites,” and that diseases such as tuberculosis, identified by Hoffman as a black disease, “is not a racial disease but a social disease.”28
With the advent of eugenics, racial science, which had for most of the nineteenth century been driven by work in anthropology, quickly became largely the domain of biology and genetics. During the course of the twentieth century many anthropologists, led by Boas, would move away from a biologized race concept just as biology and genetics embraced it.29 While Du Bois could not have predicted this (after all, the term “genetics” was coined by the biologist William Bateson the same year that Health and Physique of the Negro American was published), his writings suggest that he sensed what was to come for science and race in the twentieth century, and through this work he had hoped that intellect would prevail over ignorance and that the biologizing of race would be stopped. Looking back on this period in his life several decades later, Du Bois recalled that he “had too often seen science made the slave of caste and race hate.”30 Yet even as Du Bois set out to fight racism through scientific study, rationality, and a belief in justice, events in his own life and in the world around him would force him to rethink that course. In late September 1906, just a few months after the conference that launched The Health and Physique of the Negro American, Atlanta became ground zero for a brutal race riot, sparked by local newspaper reports of alleged assaults of white women by black men and caused by underlying racial tensions driven by the consolidation of and resistance to Jim Crow in Atlanta. The white mob was enormous—approximately 10,000 men, women, and children took to the streets.31 By the time the riot was quelled a few days later, over twenty black residents of Atlanta had been murdered, and many scores more had been beaten.32
After the riots, according to historians Dominic Capeci Jr. and Jack Knight, Du Bois “struggled with the profound impact of white brutality on his psyche and philosophy” and “his reliance on rationality.”33 Though Du Bois spent his lifetime fighting oppression, in the wake of the Atlanta riots his approach and style shifted. He would quickly abandon his faith in education, rationality, and science as an antidote to white violence and racism. The approach of Du Bois the social scientist or “organizational leader,” as Capeci and Knight call him, had not worked and gave way to Du Bois as “race propagandist” and “neoabolitionist,” who came to rely on rhetorical flourish and political effort in his lifelong fight against racism.34 In this role Du Bois emerged as the leading political voice for African Americans. Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis explains that “his chosen weapons were grand ideas propelled by uncompromising language” about America’s failings and successes.35 Du Bois also grew increasingly skeptical of science as an arbiter of truth and the power of truth to change hearts and minds. In the wake of this personal transformation Du Bois came to believe that racism was “not based on science, else it would be held as a postulate of the most tentative kind, ready at any time to be withdrawn in the face of facts.” Racism was instead simply a “passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved by neither argument nor fact. Only faith in humanity will lead the world to rise above its present color prejudice.”36 And so, despite his rational, science-based refutation of the biological race concept and of racial science more broadly, an increasingly cynical (or perhaps practical) Du Bois recognized that eugenics would triumph for the foreseeable future, building a biological and hereditarian argument for racial difference that flourished in scientific and popular thought in America. Yet when scientists did begin to rebuke race, they did it largely on the terms that Du Bois had laid out in his elegant study in 1906.
To be sure, throughout his career Du Bois would keep fighting against white supremacy in the guise of racial science and the social damage and intellectual anguish it wrought. Beginning in 1910, over the course of his almost twenty-five-year tenure at the helm of The Crisis, the NAACP’s official publication, Du Bois used his editorial authority to assail racial science. A 1915 “Opinion” restates a prominent theme from The Health and Physique of the Negro American, calling attention to the idea that “no race, as we know races, is an unmixed race. All so-called races are the result of mixtures.”37 A 1911 editorial stated “America is fifty years behind the scientific world in its racial philosophy.” The editorial implied that biology and race were divergent; “the deepest cause of misunderstandings between peoples is perhaps the tacit assumption that the present characteristics of a people are the expression of permanent qualities.”38
Du Bois would also twice debate the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. In 1927 Du Bois and Stoddard squared off on radio from New York City. They met again in 1929, this time in a public debate in Chicago with more than 4,000 in attendance. During the raucous debate Du Bois attacked the core beliefs and contradictions of white supremacy. Where “Nordics” like Stoddard sought to maintain racial purity, Du Bois noted that so-called Nordics had, through “exploitation,” “spread their bastards to every corner of land and sea.”39 When Stoddard maintained that segregation based on “racial difference” was “not discrimination; it is separation,” Du Bois attacked the very notion of race itself, harking back to his work in The Health and Physique of the Negro American. Du Bois sarcastically noted (given his own mixed-race ancestry) that he was “‘gladly…the representative of the Negro race,’ but was also equally capable of being ‘a representative of the Nordic race.’” Explaining the contradictions of America’s racial mores, Du Bois noted that when white supremacy denied his humanity it did so because of the color of his skin, but when he was deemed worthy in any way, most especially in areas of his intelligence, he was reminded of his white ancestry.40
By the 1930s Du Bois was not alone in his attack on racial science and on the race concept itself. He was joined that decade by a growing chorus of natural and social scientists who would, to varying degrees, embrace his stance on the matter. Yet while most of Du Bois’s writings expressed an unambiguous rejection of the biological race concept, there are contradictions on the topic in his writing. Despite his rebuke of eugenics, Du Bois, to some degree, embraced the spirit of that movement in his own work. Some have even suggested that he embraced a progressive eugenics, most evidenced in his writings on racial uplift. In fact, that W. E. B. Du Bois continued to struggle with shedding vestiges of the race concept points to how deeply embedded race was in America. That Du Bois implicitly understood the dangers of American racism and, to a great degree, was influenced by one of its most disgraceful racial theories only reinforces this notion.
Nowhere was his eugenic-mindedness more obvious than in his ideal of the “Talented Tenth,” a eugenic-sounding “best of the race” who were endowed with the characteristics to lead African Americans. This “metaphorical eugenics,” or “bioelitism,” as the contemporary critic Daylanne English called it, imbued Du Bois’s Talented Tenth “with an explicitly biological superiority.”41 But with an expansive definition of eugenics and heredity, and by cherry-picking examples of an alleged embrace of eugenics from The Crisis and selected other writings, it is easy to overstate Du Bois’s affinity for such ideas. Ultimately, those who would accuse Du Bois of harboring deep eugenic tendencies confuse his commitment to a class-based and elitist solution to the challenges facing African Americans with a bioelitist one.
Du Bois’s antieugenic thinking on the race concept was evident throughout his career. For example, in his 1938 book Black Folk: Then and Now, he wrote, “No scientific definition of race is possible,” and that “the most that could be asserted of race was that ‘so far as these differences are measurable they fade into one another.’” But at the same time, Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis observes that in that same book Du Bois also engaged in racial essentialism, writing that Negro blood is “the basis of the blood of all men.” This contradiction was, according to Lewis, intended to “function in the service of racial pluralism, for in validating an unknown and remarkable Negro past he envisaged a future in which all races could accept the cultural parity of one another’s history as well as the interdependence of their destinies.” Lewis concludes that Du Bois’s “rather mild racial essentialism” was itself an attack on contemporaneous race supremacy dogmas.42 Still others have noted that even as Du Bois’s rejection of a scientific race concept became more strident (in a Crisis article in 1911 and in his 1940 autobiography), this explicit rejection remained complicated by Du Bois’s pursuit of a unifying concept for persons of African descent in a racialized world.43
HISTORICIZING RACE
By the 1930s, as eugenical theory was becoming less palatable to both scientists and the general public, prominent academics joined Du Bois in attacking the race concept. The Columbia University historian Jacques Barzun, author of one of the first in a spate of academic books about race and racism published during the 1930s and early 1940s, called race “one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are everywhere spilled in reckless quantities.”44 Published in 1940, Race: Science and Politics by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict attacked racism, but noted “that to recognize Race does not mean to recognize Racism. Race is a matter of careful scientific study; Racism is an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another.”45 Benedict called race “a classification based on traits which are hereditary.”46 She belonged to a group of scholars, including the sociologist Robert Park and the economist Gunnar Myrdal, who, rather than emphasizing problems with the race concept, looked instead to race relations as playing the functional role in America’s racial calculus.47 What made Benedict such an important part of this movement were her assertions that science was not to blame for the problems of racism; politics was. She wrote, for example, that in order to understand race persecution, we do not need to investigate race; we need to investigate persecution.48 While there is a certain logical truth to this position, it abdicates scientists of the responsibility of how the race concept was utilized popularly and it ignores a long history of scientists supporting racism through their work. Benedict acknowledged as much, writing that “for the scientist, science is a body of knowledge; he resents its use as a body of magic.”49
Barzun’s 1936 text Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, like Du Bois’s work thirty years earlier, utilized both historical methods and the latest science to rebuke the race concept. A budding young historian at Columbia University, Barzun tackled the subject of race as American eugenics was in decline, the smoldering racial hatred of Nazism was fast making an impact on the European continent, and the movement for civil rights for African Americans was is in its earliest days.50 For Barzun the only possible argument in favor of the race concept “would be that no one race could possibly have been gifted with such a capacity for nonsense as the literature on the subject affords.”51
While Barzun’s interest was primarily in considering “racialism as a European phenomenon”—the book is infused with anticipation and fear of what Nazi racism was wreaking in Europe, from where Barzun had hailed—it also conveys an implicit understanding of how racial thought impacted African Americans.52 Barzun writes that “those human beings who have not lost their pigmentation are simply more clearly marked than others for discrimination; they wear a uniform that they cannot take off.” This social stigma, which Barzun points out was not unique to the American experience, highlights the fact that “the problems of colored populations…are not problems about a natural fact called race: they are problems of social life, of economic status, of educational policy, and of political organization.”53 Barzun also believed that the “race thinking,” as he called it in a letter to the sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, was endemic to Americans’ thinking across social, cultural, and economic spectrums. In Barzun’s estimation race thinking applied “to taxi drivers as well as to Nordics or Semites. In fact it will fit any labeled category. It is as common among football fans as among rabid nationalists and as such deserves a place as the root fallacy in all social antagonisms that are not based on direct competition for concrete goods.”54
Barzun, certainly one of the first authors to historicize the race concept, would go on to have a long and distinguished career as a historian. Race, his first book, was in general not reviewed kindly in either the social or natural scientific literature. Several reviewers acknowledged Barzun’s contribution in providing a broader context for the history of race but questioned his rejection of the race concept. Writing in the journal Man, the British social anthropologist Rosemary Firth wondered if “to deny any scientific reality to race at all…is to carry the valuable indictment of the popular absurdities of race thinking to an extreme, and thereby somewhat to weaken the otherwise good case” against its misuse.55 Even the American Historical Review, a distinguished journal for American historians, allowed the anthropologist Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History to review the book. Wissler, a member of the eugenicist Galton Society, was a steadfast believer in the biological race concept and an advocate of Nordic superiority. He argued that the main sources of human evolution were from Asia and Europe, “while the rest of the world was relegated to a marginal position.”56 Wissler was not particularly kind, writing, “Though the author [Barzun] regards this volume as a critical history of thought on race, it can hardly qualify as a calm weighing of evidence.”57 Wissler dismissed Barzun’s work as extreme and suggested that it was best read in conjunction with books “which defend the concepts of race purity.” Such an exercise, Wissler suggested, “may give perspective” on the subject. Barzun, angered by Wissler’s review, sent a letter to the editor of the American Historical Review defending the book and pointing out Wissler’s errors and misconceptions. Barzun seemed particularly irritated at the way Wissler, writing in the leading historical journal no less, criticized Race and defended the race concept by demeaning the historical craft and the ability of historical methods to evaluate science. In the letter to the editor, Barzun pointed out that “the basic questions he raises without stating them seem to be: whether ideas are real forces or mere illusions; whether their relation to biological or economic fact are subtle and complex or obvious and simple (Race being a simple First Cause for culture) and ultimately, whether the student of ideas has the right to be a pragmatic critic instead of a mechanistic materialist.”58
Race concluded with twelve objections to the race concept, which, very much in the mold of Du Bois’s earlier critique, included the concept’s general inconsistency, its elusiveness, its statistical fallacy, its fallacy of genetic predetermination, and its absolutism. Race could explain anything and everything, and Barzun noted that “in a real world of shifting appearance, race satisfies man’s demand for certainty by providing a small, simple, and complete cause for a great variety of large and complex events.”59 Barzun’s book and its critique of the race concept remain historiographically important for telling a modern reader where to look for the changing nature of the scientific foundation of the race concept. If anthropology was the arbiter of meaning for race in the nineteenth and through the earliest years of the twentieth century, then genetics, or “the problem of hereditary transmission,” as he called it, is “central in any future theory of race.”60
Barzun could claim genetics as the emerging authority on the race concept with confidence for several reasons. First, political events in Europe, specifically the rise of Nazism, had helped popularize the link between race and genetics in a way that not even the most fervent American eugenicists had thought possible—although they actively and without compunction sought out this role. To a significant degree, Nazi eugenic zeal was inspired by American eugenics. The publication of Madison Grant’s eugenic tract The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History might have preceded the rise of Nazism by more than a decade, but its ideas about Nordic racial purity influenced many Germans.61 In a letter to Grant, Hitler called The Passing “his Bible.”62 In 1933 the Eugenical News, the official newsletter of several eugenic organizations including the American Eugenics Society, noted the American influence on German sterilization policy: “To one versed in the history of eugenic sterilization in America, the text of the German statute reads almost like the American model sterilization law.”63 American philanthropists, including those of the Rockefeller Foundation, also gave scientific grants to German eugenicist researchers, both before and for several years after the rise of Hitler. And even as the world recoiled in horror at the ways in which the Nazis integrated eugenics into their political philosophy—mass sterilizations and concentration camps—American eugenicists continued to support their Nazi brethren. In 1935 Harry Laughlin accepted an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg for “being one of the most important pioneers in the field of racial hygiene.” The dean of the University of Heidelberg’s medical school later helped organize the gassing of thousands of mentally handicapped adults. Also in 1935, after a visit to Berlin, the head of the Eugenic Research Association, Clarence Campbell, proclaimed that Nazi eugenic policy “sets a pattern which other nations and other racial groups must follow if they do not wish to fall behind in their racial quality, in their racial accomplishments, and in their prospects for survival.” Finally, in 1937, American eugenicists distributed a Nazi eugenic propaganda film to promote the eugenic cause in the United States.64
Second, with the American eugenics movement in decline during the 1930s, there was an opportunity for new claims and room for new authorities on the biological race concept. Third (and this is more speculation than assertion), as a historian, Barzun was able to see the evolution of racial science—from its origins in prescientific folkways to anthropological to biological to genetic thinking—having covered more than a century of its presence in European and American social and intellectual thought in his book Race. Following the debates, discussions, and findings on race, Barzun would have seen that geneticists were quickly becoming the respected voice on this matter. Fourth, and finally, the changing technological, methodological, and ontological approaches in biology, evolutionary biology, and genetics were coalescing into what in the 1930s would become known as the evolutionary or modern synthesis and reshaping the way the biological sciences hypothesized, conceptualized, and analyzed human difference. It was from this modern synthesis that ideas about race would be reformulated into both the scientific and popular lexicons.