Louis Agassiz

Harvard University Professor Cornell University Lecturer

By the time the Swiss-born Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz reached the age of thirty, in 1837, he was already an eminent scientist: an ichthyologist (fish man), paleontologist (fossil man), and the first to propose that vast swaths of Europe had once been covered by ice (geology and glaciology man). Man, what a man!

He sailed to the United States in 1846 to study the New World’s fish, fossils, and rocks, and to present a lecture series entitled (spoiler alert) “The Plan of Creation as Shown in the Animal Kingdom.” Several prestigious American institutions, brandishing thick wallets and offering impressive academic appointments, immediately went a-courting this charismatic European star scientist. Harvard, looking to rebrand itself from a modest little college for the production of clergymen into a heavyweight university, won his heart,^* anointing him professor of zoology and geology, and, for good measure, launching the Lawrence Scientific School (now the John A. Paulson^* School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), with Agassiz as chief.

An impressive researcher, writer, collector of natural specimens, institution builder (he founded Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology), as well as a leading educator (many of his students became influential teachers and researchers), Agassiz profoundly influenced the development of American science. But there was a problem. Several, actually.

Louis Agassiz was a racist.*

And he was, to put it calmly, religious. He took Genesis literally, at least as it applied to the origin of fair-skinned humans and their animal buddies. In a word—although the word hadn’t been coined yet—he was a creationist. He wrote profusely on the subject of “polygenism,” the theory that God created whites and blacks as separate species, with very different physical attributes, intellectual capabilities, and so on. Whites, of course, were superior to blacks in all ways, because that’s how God rolls. This cast of mind led him to abominate his contemporary Darwin and cast aspersions on the theory of evolution.

Aside from incessantly writing and lecturing about black people’s inferiority, Agassiz went to the trouble of demeaning them whenever possible. He hired photographers in the United States and Brazil to take pictures of naked slaves and other black people—“specimens”—in humiliating poses. And of course he did what he could to keep blacks (not to mention Italians and Jews) from enrolling at Harvard.

To recap: Agassiz was a Bible-belting, science-denying, hate-dripping racist crackpot who leveraged his legitimate scientific standing and Harvard authority to foist twisted, backward, utterly unscientific views on the world (and pave the way for what we now call “scientific racists” like William Z. Ripley and Madison Grant) while throwing shade at the most important scientific theory of the nineteenth century and its creator, Charles Darwin.

By the time he shuffled off this mortal coil,* in 1873, he was unquestionably the nation’s foremost scientist. Things were named for him, including several species, a big chunk of Canadian landscape that was once a glacial lake, and an elementary school near Harvard that in turn gave its name—his name—to the surrounding neighborhood. Agassiz’s genuine scientific work is undisputed to this day. His reputation as an all-around human being has not fared so well.^*

Here’s a fine example of this. Stephen Jay Gould^* writes a book, The Mismeasure of Man, that includes a great deal of material confirming just how much of a racist Agassiz was. A student at the lovely, diverse Agassiz School in Cambridge reads the book and is scandalized to learn the true character of the man behind his school’s name. The student goes public with the issue and finds that many others, kids and adults alike, are equally outraged. A local movement arises, culminating in an official name change in 2002.

Now it’s called the Maria L. Baldwin School, after the woman who was the institution’s beloved principal from 1889 to 1922. She, unlike Agassiz, is understood to have been a thoroughly good and decent person.

As you may have guessed, Maria L. Baldwin was black.