William Z. Ripley

MA, Columbia University PhD, Columbia University Harvard University Faculty

Adolf Hitler did not need the imprimatur of a respected Ivy League professor to convince a large swath of the German populace that he, and they, were blessed to be members of the master race. The question is: Who inspired Hitler to think there even was such a thing as a master race? Answer: A respected Ivy League professor! Or two! Sure, Germany had a history of self-lovin’ braggadocio. But let’s face it: when you’re looking to push an agenda of racialist hate and nativist resentment, it never hurts to have a seal of approval from authoritative foreign (and, therefore, “objective”) sources, who come equipped with prestigious academic credentials.

Herr Hitler? Meet William Zebina Ripley.

In 1890 Ripley earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering at MIT, followed by a master’s (1892) and a doctorate (1893) from Columbia. This was back in the day when you could knock off a PhD in less time than it takes Twenty-First-Century Man to make sense of the latest iTunes update—probably because a) there was so much less to know in ye olden days, and b) iTunes alone is more complicated in 2016 than the entire world corpus of engineering knowledge was in 1893.

After receiving his PhD, Ripley taught sociology at Columbia, then moved on to teach economics at MIT and then at Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his academic life. Indeed, despite having started as an undergrad in engineering, despite his advanced degrees in sociology, Ripley went on to become a noted economist, helping Teddy Roosevelt sort things out between the railroads and Big Coal, settling strikes, rationalizing the nation’s rail system, advocating for corporate transparency, and much more.

But before his rebirth as an economist, in 1899, while still at Columbia, Ripley wrote a book—as one does—to pay for his children’s college education. It was The Races of Europe, and it proposed race as the lens through which human history should be viewed. It put forward a classification system that divided Europeans into three racial groups, Teutonic, Mediterranean, and Alpine, based on geography and—in a made-up term that must have formed a single word forty yards long in German—“cephalic index,” a.k.a. skull shape and size.

It was nonsense, of course, and not just by today’s standards. There were sociologists, anthropologists, biologists, and nonignorant civilians of Ripley’s day who correctly insisted that there is no scientific definition of “race,” no way to delineate where one alleged race ends and another begins, and no reason to impute inherent mental, moral, or physical characteristics to these imaginary entities. Nonetheless, Ripley’s ideas were picked up by others in the nascent discipline of scientific racism. Among the picker-uppers was another Ivy man, Madison Grant, who in his book, which elaborated upon Ripley’s, substituted “Nordic” for “Teutonic,” declared it the best of all possible races, tossed in a pinch of eugenics, and—once “Nordic” was swapped out for “Aryan”—it was “Auf wiedersehen, science,” and “Guten Tag, Adolf!”

Ripley moved on from bullshit racial theories to legitimate economic ones, for which he was widely praised when he exited this vale of tears in the early 1940s. Did his eulogizers praise The Races of Europe? Oh, who cares. What’s important is that the book was a hit in its day. It surely, as intended, helped put his kids through school—as, indirectly, it helped put millions of other people’s kids in death camps.