Boas wrote to his parents from New York, “Is it not terrible to have one’s heart in two places?” He wanted to stay in New York, to find a job in the United States, to marry and make a home with Marie, yet he yearned to see his family in Germany. Emotionally, he was pulled in two directions. “My desires are divided,” he admitted to his parents. “I would so much like to be with you but cannot leave yet.” Boas was also going through, as he described it, “an uncomfortable transition” of having to adjust to all that had happened during his absence. Foremost, he was trying to meet people who could help him find a position, to publish articles, to write his “big book” on the Eskimo, and to make his name known in a new country. With ever-mounting pressure coming from his family in Minden—particularly from his mother and his sister Toni—Boas countered that it would be irresponsible to leave the United States so soon after his arrival before he had attempted to establish himself.1
The question “What now?” pressed, as he wrote to his parents, “with irresistible force and the uncertainty in which I float does not let me rest.” The dilemma reverberated in his head: “I wish I knew how, where and when our future will show itself.” On his arrival from the Arctic, he had scarcely found Marie and embraced her when he began to worry: “Already when I was still at Lake George I became restless, to sit there doing nothing and mainly because of that I came back so quickly to start working for I must soon publish something.” After eight days at Alma Farm with Marie, Boas had returned to New York City on October 1, and the next day he went to see Jacobi “to discuss the future with him.” Boas wrote Marie, “Oh, I wish a position could be found for me very, very quickly and I could lead you home.” He added, “I am still hopeful, why should it not be possible for me?”2
In his room at Aunt Phips and Uncle Kobus’s house, Boas set about trying to make sense of his papers and notes that had gotten so “terribly mixed up towards the end.” He arranged his materials on a big wooden desk, “which once was Uncle Jacobi’s office table.” He requested that his parents send him “right away” the book about the polar regions and his excerpts from the books. Unsure of how many reports he had sent to the Berliner Tageblatt, Boas enumerated what he thought he had completed and expressed the desire to be “finished very soon in order to work on the scientific material undisturbed.” In his own estimation, he had, as he wrote to his parents, “not done much, 3 reports to Berlin, an English article. Now I am [occupied] with the maps and a lecture, which I shall give on the 5th of Nov. for $50”—the lecture to be for the Deutscher Gesellig-Wissenschaftlicher Verein von New York, the German Social-Scientific Association of New York. He concluded, “Today and tomorrow I shall really write in detail.”3
Paying heed to Jacobi’s suggestions, Boas left as soon as possible for his first trip to Washington DC. On October 14 he met with the Arctic explorer Emil Bessels and Otis T. Mason, the curator of the department of ethnology at the U.S. National Museum, who were both affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. Of Bessels, Boas wrote Marie, “I told him during the conversation that I wanted to stay here but we really did not discuss anything,” though Bessels proposed that the next day they would “create a ‘battle plan.’” Boas went to the Smithsonian Institution, “where I ‘hunted up’ the director of the Ethnographical division, Prof. Mason, who was very friendly and cordial. He asked me right away whether I would like to have my things published by the [Smithsonian], which I neither rejected nor accepted.” Because he was so frequently in Washington, Boas took a room in a boardinghouse for eight dollars a week, the same residence where Bessels rented an entire floor. “We two polar people,” Boas wrote his parents, “preside at both ends of the table.”4
Otis T. Mason aimed so eagerly to please Boas, but he was unable to do so. He had been hired as curator of the department of ethnology of the U.S. National Museum at the Smithsonian in 1884 to bring order to “the great collections piled in confusion in its halls.” Having only been on the job a few months by the time he met Boas, Mason had no idea where to find anything. Boas wrote Marie of his impatience with “the slowness that everything happens here, the wretched mix up in the museum.” Boas had hoped to gain access to the “Cumberland material.” He wrote Marie, “To look for [Charles Francis] Hall’s collections remained but a noble promise.” To his parents he remarked that Mason and he “ran around all morning unpacking crates.” To Marie he wrote, in utter frustration, “To hunt through the collection is hair-raising work since everything is distributed around.”5
Boas tried repeatedly to approach John Wesley Powell, director of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) of the Smithsonian Institution, about a position. Bessels advised, “Powell cannot make an offer until he knows his appropriation” from Congress, and he suggested that Boas should accept a low salary and thus not necessitate much of a reduction in Powell’s budget. On one occasion when Bessels took Boas to see Powell, Bessels turned to Boas just before entering the office and said that it would be better not to talk about a position because Powell had much on his mind. In addition to a job, Boas was also hoping that the BAE would publish the book he was writing on the Eskimo. Bessels asked Boas about his strategy: Would he talk with Powell only about the publication of his work, or would he also ask about a position? “I said I did not see any reason,” Boas replied, “why one should play hide and seek for any length of time, since I don’t care [for slithering] . . . about something like a serpent.”6
While Boas was gaining facility in his written English, his spoken English caused him challenges and, ultimately, embarrassment. In fact, he avoided speaking in English at public presentations, if at all possible. At the Anthropological Society of Washington, Boas had the secretary read his paper: “I do not want to lecture in English myself. There will probably be a lot of discussion of which I am a little afraid because of my lack of knowledge of the English language. But I cannot avoid taking part.” For his first lecture to the Deutscher Gesellig-Wissenschaftlicher Verein von New York, Boas spoke in German. He wrote his parents, “Now you want to know how my lecture came off.” He continued, “The hall was very large and quite full, about 300 people, men and women. Unfortunately, much too large for my voice so that those listeners further away did not understand me.” Following the lecture, he said, “I had to defend my skin against various questions, which I succeeded in doing pretty well.” In sum, he said, “I cannot really praise myself for the way it turned out because I spoke too quietly. I wish I had the opportunity to speak here another time in order possibly to correct my mistake.”7
Boas had strategized carefully about arranging for lectures to give him exposure to those who might be able to offer him a position. “I want to suggest to Uncle Jacobi,” Boas wrote Marie, as to “whether he could perhaps get me an invitation to a good University, perhaps Columbia College, to give a series of lectures about general earth science.” He added, “But only if at the same time the possibility existed to interest the administration.” With trepidation, he concluded, “Probably a big discussion will evolve, about which I am a little afraid since I know only so little English.” He met with Jacobi and Carl Schurz over lunch to plan for what “I should do about the Columbia lectures.” Jacobi, in turn, enlisted the assistance of Ogden N. Rood, chair of the physics department at Columbia. With the synopsis of Boas’s proposed lectures in hand, Rood solicited approval from Columbia College President Frederick Barnard. Rood wrote Jacobi, “Dr. Barnard was so pleased with the analysis of these lectures” that he hoped to gain the trustees’ consent to open the lecture series to the public for the first time. If the trustees refused, “the lectures will simply be under the auspices of the Engineering Society.” Marie and Aunt Phips helped him prepare. Marie found “the speech sounds a little stiff still, but quite readable,” but Aunt Phips said, “It does not sound stiff.” However, Boas did not trust his aunt’s judgment since she was “not unprejudiced.”8
Sadly, the first lecture was such a disaster that barely anyone came to the second. Months later, after he had returned to Germany, Boas wrote Marie, “Do you know why I was so hurt because my second lecture at Columbia College was so empty? Because it hurt my vanity, and I know that I cannot speak well. If I had known that my performance had been a good one, I believe it would not have mattered.” With a boost to his pride following a successful lecture in Berlin before the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (Geographical Society of Berlin) on May 2, 1885, Boas conveyed to Marie that in this instance he had “spoken really effectively.” He had “ignored” his notes and had guided himself “by the mood of my audience.” During his forty-five-minute presentation, “people listened to me attentively . . . and no one left.” In candor, he admitted, “I was terribly frightened at first, but quietly told of my trip, and brought in the results only now and then.” To his parents he wrote, “I am gradually learning to judge the feeling of the audience, whether they are listening attentively or not. The crackling of paper which people have in their hands is an indication of their feelings. On the other hand, if the eyes are suddenly turned to the lecturer and everyone sits up a bit indicates that they have become more attentive.” Boas admitted that he was still “frightened” of getting “stuck in the middle of a sentence and not [being] able to find the right words.”9
Making every effort to find employment in the United States, Boas shuttled back and forth between New York and Washington. Jacobi used his considerable influence to press Powell hard and Boas met with Powell repeatedly. Still, nothing was forthcoming other than opportunities for Boas to be published by the BAE. New York yielded only the disappointment of the two lectures at Columbia College. Through Jacobi’s connections, President of Johns Hopkins University Daniel Coit Gilman expressed an interest in helping Boas to “advance.” Boas traveled to Baltimore, where Gilman greeted him in “very friendly” fashion and showed him around, but nothing came of this either.10
Boas grew fatigued with the “visits [that] take so terribly much time,” and his family grew utterly impatient. They feared that he would take “a second-grade position” that would allow for “no opportunity to work,” and that the “deciding factor” for their son would be that “Marie lives here.” To his parents, Boas countered, “But I may not let your wish decide. It is completely taken for granted that I shall not make a decision without finding out what the conditions are in Germany. . . . You should not give yourselves over to illusions about the German conditions. Three years is the minimum that I see to reach Professorship.” Each letter from Minden brought more pressure and more demands that he come home. In sadness, he wrote, “You cannot imagine how heavy my heart feels when your letters arrive. . . . I am almost afraid to open them because I know only too clearly that your longing for me speaks out of them.” Boas was grateful to his father for his understanding: “I thank you dear father heartily for your words about the shape of my future. I am really happy that I am acting entirely according to your opinion and feel much less oppressed because of it.”11
Without Boas’s knowledge, his sister Toni had enlisted the aid of Boas’s mentor, Theobald Fischer, in persuading him to come back to Germany. She had sent copies of her brother’s letters so Fischer would know Boas’s thoughts. Sympathetic to Toni’s longing for her brother’s return, Fischer had responded to her first note that he had “urgently” advised Boas “to have a long stay in Washington to complement his studies.” By December Fischer apparently thought Boas’s stay in America had been quite long enough. He wrote Toni that he had advised Boas to return to Germany. Fischer remarked, “Your brother wrote me all sorts of rubbish, which he could only have gotten out of a Yankee newspaper or else from a progressive or social-democratic German one—namely that in Prussia under such a minister of education, he could not freely speak his thoughts and convictions, that he would not be hired because he is an Israelite.” Fischer regretted hearing such views from Boas: “Ideas so contrary to the truth, being spread by our lying press and hence the misled foreign press.” He was adamant Boas should return to see for himself “that the conditions are far different from the ones the anti-German side fools him into believing; that they are endlessly better than in the rotten Yankee Republic where the ruthless and unconscionable get the best of the bargain.” Fischer had invited Boas to attend the German geography conference in Hamburg, to “make himself known,” and to see for himself if he has cause “to judge our circumstances so unfavorably.” Then, if he was not able to find a position, Fischer continued, “there is still time to Yankeeize himself.” He concluded, “You are quite right, in the United States it’s all about the money bag, not the knowledge and intellectual ability.”12
Fischer wrote Boas that he had begun “to see our German relations through Yankee-glasses,” and that perhaps Boas had been deriving his opinions from “progressive newspapers.” He referred to a discussion they had had in Kiel concerning “the question of your conversion to Christianity, and I told you that I would consider such a move quite superfluous.” Fischer assured Boas that his being “an Israelite in relation to progress in an academic career will not for a moment be a hindrance.” With Boas’s “knowledge and talent,” Fischer stressed, he would succeed, “if you are a Jew or a Christian, no matter.” After providing a few examples of Jewish scholars who had been promoted to prestigious positions, Fischer continued, “If an Israelite performs accordingly and is pleasant as a person and as a colleague, for this is much appreciated by the departments . . . , no one cares about it if he’s an Israelite. . . . If Israelites complain of not getting ahead, then this is because of their personality, not their confession, neither would a Christian get ahead in such case.”13
While he condemned anti-Semitism, Fischer suggested that Boas look “soberly” at the behavior of the majority of his fellow believers. He continued, “You must arrive at the opinion that they indeed manage to offend even calm and level-headed people.” It would, however, take a long time to progress from a Privatdozent to a full professor since all the chairs were filled, save for in Berlin. Boas, he said, would certainly “be a professor . . . , but when will that be?” If Boas desired to marry soon and did not want “to wait for a number of years,” he should follow a different career path and attempt to find a job in an institute, such as the Justus Perthes Institute. Fischer concluded on a positive note: “When you are back, we will talk in detail about your plans. I think you will be astonished to see what progress we have made in almost 2 years of your absence.”14
Fischer’s opinion was squarely in accord with that of his mother and his sister. He wrote Toni, “You see my dear Miss, it would be best according to my feeling if your brother came back here.” Boas did not read Fischer’s views in this way. He wrote Jacobi, “I received the enclosed letter from Fischer today. You can see from it what the prospects in Germany are, and that not much is to be expected. When you have finished it please give it to Marie who will send it to Minden.” Jacobi urged Boas’s mother to have patience. Her son should be allowed a few months in the United States to write, publish, and make connections. Jacobi continued, “Franz is working industriously, of what success remains to be seen.” Jacobi said that Boas feared displeasing his family. He went on, “But I have encouraged him not to take this into consideration. I look at the issue matter-of-factly from the point of view that he ought to ensure a way to earn his living.” Jacobi noted, “Before Franz can achieve anything, he must make himself known,” and to accomplish this, he had to publish his work. “Some things are in print,” Jacobi said, “a large work will be printed by the government. Publications are his passport; without them he is between heaven and earth, he is nothing at all.” Pointedly, he stated, “This winter is important and should not be disrupted.” He should be allowed to take his time, to do his work, to try to find something in the United States, and if he doesn’t, then to look for his position in Germany. Clearly having discerned a mother’s jealousy for her son’s affections, Jacobi concluded, “He is still yours and will remain yours.”15 Sophie Boas admitted the family’s real anxiety: “The fear that he might want to establish his future altogether in America.” She characterized this possibility as a fate so hard that she could neither express her feelings, nor “know how I could stand it.” In a straightforward assessment of her son’s character, she wrote, “We would have to bear it for he has a stubborn head and does what he wishes.”16
Boas admitted to Jacobi that when he read “such a letter from home” about his “stubborn head,” he became even firmer “in the decision that I have reached.” He concluded, “Of course I do not deny that the desire to marry is another moving force in my actions, but not to such a degree that everything else depends on it.”17 In reply Jacobi counseled that, if one had money and wanted “to marry quickly, a delay of 24 hours is too long. But if he first needs to obtain a position . . . it just takes time.” Jacobi continued, “To be honest, I used to believe that you’d prefer a professorship” in Germany. He added, “If I were Franz Boas and had the prospect of a German professorship, I’d work for it. The fact that the German political situation was not congenial to me would not be sufficient reason to not want to take part in enduring and improving it. I don’t like everything here either.”18
Jacobi maintained that the time Boas spent in America was an investment in his future: “Even if the time would be ‘lost,’ i.e. lost from the standpoint of money, it pays for itself many times over by new experiences and viewpoints.” One needed experience to find a position in America. He continued, “To land in America [and] to embark again, would have been a folly. It takes months to learn the prospects and views.” Boas was making every effort to find a position in the United States and would not have to “reproach” himself later. Jacobi reflected, “What you are doing here, is also not lost on the other side. What you have in print, . . . you can now judge as well as your future readers.” Jacobi counseled, “As a fact, I would repeat what I have said to you and your mother, that one or two months here would not have made sense, 4 months allowed you to look around better. . . . And when you appear at the Geographical Congress, without having first been in Germany, you will be a novelty and moreover be able to debut with materials written in a foreign language.” Jacobi added a final suggestion: “And when you have made a decision, do not let yourself be browbeaten by each of the numerous incoming letters, and enjoy the humor, and the love of work.”19
His family in Minden continued to write unrelenting pleas for him to return home. In frustration, Boas responded, “I wish for an end to this American uncertainty.” Boas told his parents of his emotional turmoil over the “uncertain future and the longing for you.” He said, “I know quite certainly that when I am a half hour from here I shall have just as strong a longing for here, but right now I want to be with you.” To Marie, he wrote, “If I just did not have to hurry so to go to Germany. I cannot help it that it is so, and you know how I am drawn to my parents and sisters.” Pulled toward Minden, still Boas wandered the streets of Washington and looked longingly at “the little houses in which we may perhaps live.” In the next sentence, Boas recognized the “castles in the sky” that he might be building based on the “deceptive possibilities” of a job with the BAE.20
Finally, in January 1885, Boas resolved that he had to return to Minden by March. To Marie, he wrote, “I want and must be gone by March. . . . I had a letter from Toni today; I am almost desperate about the conditions that my efforts to stay here bring about at home.” Boas was torn asunder by his dual loyalties to his family in Germany and to his fiancée in New York, and by his desire for challenging and fulfilling work. In his letter to Marie, Boas continued, “It is quite possible that I might find a sufficient position in Europe but should I sacrifice all of my plans for work to this wish of my parents? It is more that I am their only son and the decision becomes more difficult for my parents who, as it now seems, never thought seriously that I would want to come here. But it would be just as hard for you—your mother and sisters and brothers—, if you go with me to Europe.” Boas fell back on the accepted notion that “it is the custom with us that the wife follows the husband; therefore, it would not be so bad with yours because it is expected.”21
If the employment opportunities were equal, Boas conceded, “I would surely decide on Europe.” However, he saw before him in America “a large field of work” and “a small one over there.” Boas continued, “You must feel how these thoughts fill my head, day and night and really leave me no quiet moment. I have stated it and shall hold by it, that I shall not bind myself here before I have seen the German conditions. But I cannot and do not wish to promise more. No matter how much it hurts, if I see that I am right in this, and I believe I am, I shall not go back to Germany unless I see that I cannot find a footing here from which I can build.” While his family insisted that he was swayed entirely from his desire to marry, Boas explained,
Marie, do you understand that I do not want to act only from that point of view, to be united with you soon? . . . You know how all my hopes are aimed at the time when I can finally lead you home. . . . I believe I am not conceited but I know what I am worth and what I can accomplish and therefore I also feel the duty to produce what I can even though the duty is hard. . . . I know what I want and shall do everything to accomplish what I want.
With combined anguish and determination, Boas concluded his letter, “The last two years have taught me a great deal, the last few months, even more! You do not know how it hurts me to cause hurtful hours for my dearest relatives, my parents and sisters, but I cannot change it.”22
To his parents, Boas wrote, “The few months since my return have really been the most upsetting of my whole life and unfortunately this unhappy time is not yet over.” Boas felt torn asunder by the emotional tensions and Marie often blamed herself. She felt that she was “the reason for these opposing struggles.” Boas hoped that his letter to his parents would convey “very clearly and directly what I want and on what principles I am handling” the decisions. Boas stressed the benefits of having the BAE publish his manuscript: “Having my ethnographic material published here is from the scientific point of view very good since I would not have it presented so well or with so many illustrations. I shall probably have more than 200 illustrations pertaining to ethnographic matters. 140 are already photographed and will then be drawn.”23
In despair, Boas wrote Marie, “You cannot imagine how terrible I feel about the many warnings from home, not to stay here. . . . I almost do not know whether I have lost all feeling for what is right and proper for children in relation to their parents.” Now with his father also pressuring him, he felt that, aside from Marie, no one supported his hope of finding employment in the United States. Boas continued, “I have told you and everyone so often that the work of a German professor does not satisfy my vision. I must have work in practical life in order to feel satisfied. . . . The way I see it, I am locked out of that possibility in Germany. Here it is presented to me. If I could only succeed in selecting a Geographical Science and places where it would be nurtured I would consider myself happy and I consider that in itself a worthwhile task.” Boas maintained that it would be “incomparably more difficult and in a smaller dimension” to find a position in Germany. He continued, “Here everything in our science lies in raw material. Therefore, there is much effort to be expended.” Boas concluded, “And finally I must always also point out my political convictions which simply cannot come to terms with the German situation. Does not this conviction, to be able to work and accomplish things to a very different degree, justify my right to try to lay the foundation for the future here? Tell me, dear love, whether I am right or not.”24
Boas wrote Jacobi, in the same vein, “Our science does not exist in this country as yet; it must be created, as you yourself have said. I recognize this as a worthwhile task, and I can envisage none of equal importance in Germany. I have long known that there is much to do along these lines here, I have just learned how much is to be done.” Boas continued, “My field is the Polar Regions, as a result of my last and only studies. Polar explorations at present have no future here as far as government support is concerned; I would try to get them sensibly under way. You may believe that this is too difficult for me, but I know how to use my resources and believe I could get it going. Under the assumption that I stay here, I have made the first trial steps; I have gotten after Bessels who has written a letter that I have prepared.” He asserted, “I am pretty tough, and carry out what I have developed in my head if it is at all possible. My aim would be to establish a society that would sponsor systematic arctic explorations and studies, that could be carried out with relatively small means, and would be truly scientifically planned.” Additionally, he would “study the geographical instruction in schools, and emphasize the lack of proper preparatory education of the teachers.” Boas had managed to interest Bessels in the project, but, he noted, “one can rely on him only if one is constantly driving him,” and, he reflected, “although Bessels is interested—after all polar exploration in moderation is the aim of his life—he will never achieve anything because he lacks decision and firmness.” Additionally, Boas said, “We do not see eye to eye”; therefore he could not count on Bessels to institute that which “I wish. He just complains about the impossibility to organize new expeditions but does not seek out new possibilities unless someone makes life miserable for him.”25
Boas contrasted his hopes for establishing a field for himself in the United States with the constraints that would be placed on him in Germany. “That is work that I desire,” he wrote, “and which I could not develop in such breadth as a German professor.” He continued with a critique of German academia and the political situation:
You do not know the snobbish aristocracy of the leading circles in Germany, and the great difficulties that are created for the young docents who wish to do more than to teach. And the problems here are incomparably greater and more worthwhile. These things prejudice me against a German professorship. And then there is the old reason that I have so often spoken to you about. I do not wish to keep my mouth shut about political matters and be damned to absolute subservience. I have often told you that scientific work alone does not satisfy me; I must be alive and creative.
Boas reflected, “I believe I have demonstrated by the preparations for my voyage that I am resolute enough to stick to my plans in order to accomplish something.” He admitted a fierce attachment to his ideas: “Such brain children as I have just described are naturally dear to the originator, and you can imagine that it would be a hard and costly decision to give them up.” In the penultimate paragraph of his January 18, 1885, letter to Jacobi, Boas wrote, “I have purposely said nothing so far about Marie. I need not state that to marry is my dearest desire. . . . It is true I had not formerly thought that waiting would be so difficult. But I state to you with certainty in Marie’s name and in mine that we will not sacrifice everything to an early marriage.” He framed his desire to marry within the scope of his desire to find a professional position: “I do not believe that I am conceited, but I feel that I can accomplish something; whether I have the capacity to organize something remains to be seen, but I hope so. Just because of my judgment of my own capacities I feel it a duty to accomplish something and will not let my deepest yearnings prevent their consummation.” He admitted that he would “prefer a poorly paid position here, that would give me opportunity to function according to my ideas to a better position in Germany.”26
The “unhappy theme [of] America-Europe” continued in the communications between Boas and his parents during his remaining weeks in the United States. On January 20, 1885, Boas wrote his parents, “There are no such positions which you designate as ‘First Class.’ They can only be a first step to other positions.” Boas continued, “I do not agree with you that a Professor, a German Professor is the most desirable of all because the circle of work of a Professor does not lie in the direction in which I want to work.” He concurred that the position of professor was most prestigious, but, he added, “I do not have the ambition to prefer a purely prestigious position over one which opens the way to a greater sphere of influence.” Yet again, Boas laid out his position: “If I could have in Germany, for instance, the directorship of an organization like [Justus] Perthes, I would take hold of it with both hands.” He continued, “Here I would accept a position at Johns Hopkins or Harvard University. Now you surely ask why I would take such a position here, which I would not consider my ideal in Germany. Because the conditions here are entirely different. Here geography is still in the making. With us it is finished or practically finished.” Because the field was still open, as Boas represented it, in the United States, “an American professor can accomplish more than a German.” This was, Boas said, the standpoint from which he was appraising “the conditions here and also the practical possibilities.”27
Boas spent most of February 1885 in Washington DC. He wrote his parents that he had “started an argument with a Mr. [George] Melville” in an article in the February 6, 1885, issue of the New York Evening Post. Melville had proposed an expedition to the North Pole, and Boas opposed the plans. Boas’s published opposition to Melville’s proposed expedition had to do both with Boas’s assessment of the weakness of Melville’s plans and with Boas’s need to establish his scholarly and expeditionary credentials. Melville responded to Boas’s letter in the February 17 issue of the New York Evening Post. Of this Boas wrote, “Melville’s reply is scandalously weak, and I want to give him a piece of my mind. I hope Science will accept it. How I must work hard these days to compose an article spiced with citations.” Science did accept Boas’s reply, in which he wrote, “In short, Mr. Melville’s theory cannot uphold itself, and a plan founded upon it cannot prove successful. We wish Mr. Melville might confine himself to the principle that every plan of advance towards the pole should be made according to former experiences, not vague theories.”28
Boas hoped in particular for openings in the Smithsonian and the U.S. Army Signal Office, the latter of which documented weather patterns and provided military information to the army in the time of war. Schurz was putting in “a good word for him at the [U.S.] Signal Office.” Boas had received an offer from the Smithsonian and the Signal Office to go to the McKenzie Delta for two to three years. In addition, the Signal Office was proposing to establish “an observation station in Davis Straits and may perhaps ask me to do it.” Boas wrote Jacobi, “The Signal Office has its civilian scientific staff, and I am competent to do the work, and should like to do it, if the matter with Powell falls through.” He added, “Of course I would not regard either position as permanent but would keep in mind the possibility of a university appointment.” With appropriations scheduled for March 4, Boas was still waiting to hear from Powell; and Boas was hoping that something would come of his discussion with Otis Mason about “the gaps” in the ethnological collection of the BAE. As his time in the United States was drawing to a close, Boas wrote Marie, “If I only knew some way out of this unhappy dilemma.” Boas was faced squarely with another period of separation from Marie. “Complaining,” he told her, “does not help. We must bite into the sour apple once more.”29
To his parents, he wrote, “You can really not realize how painful this winter has been for me. I am happy that it is coming to an end and that our constant longing can be satisfied.” In preparation for his trip to Germany, Boas was completing his work in Washington and anticipating the two lectures at Columbia College. He placed great weight on the lectures: “I shall know whether any chance exists to stay here or not.” He continued, “You can be quite easy about it. Your ‘stocks’ are very high, the ones for staying here are very low.” Boas delivered his lectures at Columbia College on March 2 and 3. Sadly, they were poorly delivered and poorly received. He departed for Germany March 10, 1885, on board the SS Donau. His mother met him at Bremerhaven and accompanied him home, where they arrived in the middle of the night. Four months earlier Boas had encouraged his family, “Be patient for a short time longer, then take the rope that pulls the ship into strong hands and in no time I shall be with you to tell you all my ‘heroic actions,’ which consisted mainly of eating seal. I hope in the meantime Minden will be quieted down concerning the ‘Historia Boasiana’ so that I can let myself be seen on the streets without danger.” His family had not been patient, but they had indeed pulled and pulled on the emotional ties that bound Boas to them until he relented and returned.30
Back in Minden he felt simultaneously at home and as if he had to relearn everything: “Sometimes it seems as though I had hardly been away, and again as though decades had elapsed.” The day after his return, Boas wrote Marie of his father’s arrival from Paris, “Oh, Marie if you had seen how the dear old father threw himself on me and cried like a child, and just could not quiet himself again. I thought my heart would burst from joy and sorrow.” The Marienstrasse house had been festooned with floral wreaths and garlands. Everyone in Minden was eager to greet him: “The day after my arrival all kinds of people, many of whom I do not know, sent flowers and wreaths as greeting.” In astonishment he wrote, “I receive letters of greeting from all over, and I am having trouble answering them.” The “Historia Boasiana” that he had referred in his letter to his parents in November had not died down. “I hesitate to go out in the street,” he wrote Marie. “People gape after me so and all kinds of strangers greet me.”31
Fischer invited Boas to Marburg to welcome him home. The next week Boas traveled to Marburg to talk with Fischer about his prospects for employment in Germany. He reported to Marie, “The academic career is even under the most favorable circumstances a lottery.” On April 11, 1885, Boas was in Hamburg attending the Fifth Deutscher Geographentag, the gathering of German geographers where Fischer had arranged for Boas to speak. He successfully delivered his paper “The Eskimos of Baffin Island” to rousing applause. Astounded by the welcome, Boas contrasted his reception in Germany to what he had experienced in the United States: “I have an altogether different position here than over there. There no one knew me, here I am well known. It is true I see no adequate reason for that but accept the fact with thankfulness. All the geographers of any significance come to me to be introduced, to wish me luck, and particularly to talk with me about my scientific plans.” He was ecstatic about the contacts he had made and wrote Marie that he had discussed his work over beer for more than an hour with the “chief methodologist among German geographers,” whom he identified as Hermann Wagner in a letter to his parents. He received invitations to speak at Halle, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Strasburg, and he received “support from all sides.” Boas wrote Marie, “I tell you all this because I know it will give you joy and because in a certain sense it can give us some confidence in the development of our future.” Exuberantly he added, “Dearest, you cannot imagine how much good this has done me after the vain efforts in America, and how it strengthens me. It is very hard if one finds no understanding of one’s whole strivings.”32
With pride and satisfaction, Sophie Boas wrote Jacobi of her son’s many successes during his month in Germany. He had returned from his trip to Berlin “very satisfied” and was “looking into the future with more courage and energy.” She wrote of his initial days in Minden, “When he arrived here . . . he was so downhearted and discouraged after all of his failures over there, that my heart bled for him.” She exuded, “Oh, my dear friend, I am so happy with this dear wonderful son. . . . His pleasant childlike temperament wins everyone’s heart. You must not laugh at me that I am taken in by him.” Boas spent his time in his study with the door firmly shut against distractions, she said: “He is working very hard all with brief interruptions, and we see him only at mealtime.”33
On April 20, 1885, Boas also sent a letter to Jacobi along with his mother’s, but while hers was jubilant, his was resigned and despairing. “It is a bitter thought for me,” he wrote, “that nothing has come of all the plans for reaching my scientific goals, and that I shall have to construct a new work for myself here. I do not believe that there is any chance to plan a future for myself in America from here. You know what drew me over there. Here I must live with my theoretical plans and confine myself to them exclusively.” From a political perspective, Boas observed, “I found conditions just as I had expected. All of Germany lies in the dust of Bismarck’s brutal power, and through him we have come to the point that we can proclaim: thank God that we have conquered all of our idealism and are now working for practical goals.” Boas was pleased in one respect: “I can be satisfied with my reception here in Germany.” He continued, “I do not know to whom I owe it that I am so well known in learned circles. Certainly not to myself for I have not written anything worthwhile. Probably Neumayer, Bastian, Virchow, and Fischer have spoken about me, and their interest has made me known. In this respect my path is smoother than over there, since I am well-known and my name has a good reputation. I must confess that recognition by scientists has been very encouraging after the many failures in America.” He concluded, “Even though one should have one’s own estimate of one’s accomplishments, the complete lack of success of all of one’s efforts is dispiriting.”34
Boas adopted the same strategy in Germany as he had in the United States: to give lectures to as many professional organizations as possible, to make contacts with as many people in positions to assist him as he could find, to write without respite articles and books, and to follow every possible lead for potential employment. On April 15 he spoke about the folklore of the Eskimos of Baffin Land before the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory), and his presentation was well received by Virchow and Bastian. On May 2 he lectured also in Berlin before an audience of four hundred at the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde and met two days later with the society’s vice president, Dr. Johann Wilhelm Reiß, who was “particularly friendly” to him and “was pushing” Boas for the position as secretary of the society.35
Boas wrote Jacobi, “I can be well satisfied with the outward honors that I received in Hamburg and now in Berlin, but I find it very inconvenient to be a well-known traveler.” He continued, “I have received an urgent invitation to become a Privatdozent in Halle, and they would like to have me in Berlin too. But after a quiet and factual discussion no one will guarantee me the probability [of] a position for many years to come.” As he said, “Some professors” had put Boas “in touch with a large Viennese geographical institute which is seeking an editor”: the Hölzel Institute. Boas was also able to talk at length with Bastian, as he wrote to Marie, “about the plans I had had for America, and he was very taken with them and would have wished that I had stayed over there.” In similar fashion, Boas wrote Jacobi that Bastian was “very sad that I do not wish to travel anymore,” but he added that he “wants to ship me off ‘with wife’ by main force.” Boas concluded, “If I do not have bad luck (although I seem to specialize in it) I may hope soon to have an adequate and secure position.”36
Boas traveled to Copenhagen to work with Hinrich [Heinrich] Rink on the translations of Eskimo folktales. Always straining to complete his projects quickly, he found the work with Rink “very strenuous.” As he wrote Marie, “I see with horror how slowly we progress.” Candidly Boas observed, “Actually I find old Rink rather dull. He can become enthusiastic about some things, just like a young man, but in general he is quite indifferent.” Just sixty-five years old, Rink, with his trembling hands and sunken face, gave “the impression of great age.” Boas wrote, “The poor devil said to me today, ‘Hurry and get your folk tales printed, I wish to live to see them.’” Six months later Boas wrote Marie, “The mythology of the Eskimo is finished, and the tales are almost all written out.” This was published in 1885 as “Die Sagen der Baffin-Land-Eskimos.” Simultaneously Boas was working on the manuscript on Baffin Land for Justus Perthes in Gotha. He told Marie, “The manuscript of the book for Perthes is beginning to grow. I am working very hard. I hope to be finished with all, including maps, by the end of June.” Baffin-Land was published in December 1885, by Petermanns Mitteilungen, and would serve as his Habilitationsschrift, or the formal document presented for his Habilitation.37
Surrounded by his family but nonetheless working alone in his study in Minden, Boas grew impatient with “the nature of my activities at present.” He wrote Marie, “This work is so unsatisfying. What does one accomplish sitting in a room all day and writing a book that at best four or five people will read? For me to work like this without being useful and without taking part in some actual activity I cannot stand. Of course, I must finish this old junk and I will have accomplished something worthwhile if I write a tolerable book. Then a few persons will leaf through it, two will read it with interest, a few with criticism and cursing because they have to report on it.” Nearing the completion of his book, Boas experienced “the same kind of stage fright as at a lecture, only in exaggerated form.” Boas was also meeting defeat in his efforts to find employment. “My hopes in Berlin [Geographical Society] are also shattered,” Boas wrote Marie, “and I do not know what I shall do next.” He bemoaned that all he could give her was “one disappointment after another.”38
In June 1885 Fischer found it “incomprehensible” that Boas hadn’t heard back from Vienna, particularly after the letter Fischer had written in support of Boas. By September Boas had heard that this position, at the Hölzel Institute, had also come to naught. Fischer reiterated his recommendation that Boas pursue the Habilitation, a process whereby one endeavored to prove that one was habilis, or “fit” to be a member of the faculty. Fischer continued, “The academic career is always some kind of lottery and causes quite a few qualms for someone who like you wants to get married and also isn’t in the position to make any large material sacrifices.” Fischer counseled Boas on how to pave the way to Habilitation with a specific university and stressed the importance of establishing rapport with faculty early on. It was important, Fischer remarked, to experience life at one’s university of choice for a while to get a feel for the place and to get to know potential colleagues. Referring to Alfred Kirchhoff of the University of Halle, who had offered to work with Boas, Fischer wrote that he would be “an exceptional teacher and mentor.” Also important, as Fischer stressed, Boas would find at the University of Halle a well-developed teaching environment for geography.39
Boas decided to take Fischer’s advice and to undergo the process for Habilitation in geography. He had been searching for months in both the United States and in Germany for a job, and he faced the stark realization that, at twenty-seven years of age, he was still dependent on his father to pay his expenses. As he wrote Marie, “Even if I don’t stay here it is better to come over there with some kind of title than just as a private person.” An individual who successfully completed this post-doctoral degree would advance, as Müller-Wille writes, to “Privatdozent, a prerequisite to get a Ruf, a call to a chair in a discipline as Ordinarius / Ordentlicher Professor or full professor at a German university.” The candidate for Habilitation was required to submit the Habilitationsschrift, the major published treatise, and several other publications for “internal or external evaluation by several assessors.” Müller-Wille continues, “Once accepted, the Habilitand presents a lecture at the Habilitationskolloquium before all professorial members of the faculty, who all vote on the outcome passing or failing the candidate. If successful the candidate is invited to hold the public Antrittsvorlesung or Praelectio, the inaugural lecture, to obtain the venia legendi, the authorization to lecture as a Privatdozent, usually an unpaid position.”40
Initially Fischer had counseled Boas to habilitate with Kirchhoff at the University of Halle and even suggested that Boas consider habilitating under Fischer himself at the University of Marburg. However, Fischer, along with Hermann Wagner at Göttingen and Alfred Kirchhoff at Halle, decided it was best to use Boas’s placement to strengthen the discipline of geography in Germany. All three advised Boas to habilitate at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. As Cole notes, “Preeminent in so many areas of learning, the senior Prussian university had only one professor of geography, the sixty-seven-year-old Heinrich Kiepert. . . . Aside from a strong cartographic concern, his interests never went beyond the lands of classical antiquity, and he remained unaffected, even disapproving, of new trends within the field. Notoriously unpleasant, he attracted few students.” When Boas settled on Berlin, Fischer wrote him, “I am happy that you have resolved to habilitate in Berlin. . . . It is the best prospect for you.” He added, “Failure seems to me absolutely inconceivable.”41
In his first meeting with Kiepert, Boas discovered his unpleasant nature: “I called on Kiepert and was unable to write for two days because I was so furious.” Boas continued, “The stupid ass appears to wish to take a completely negative stand. He declared that he would not be in a position to criticize my work, since he is a historical geographer and does not wish to have anything to do with the modern (naturwissenschaftlichen) [natural science methodology] environmental tendency. I should go to Helmholtz and Bastian. And he said it all in such a manner that I wanted to throw a fat volume, like the dictionary which lay under my nose, at his head.” Responding “in soft flute-like tones,” Boas expressed his confidence that Kiepert would be able to judge his works. “As he had no other excuse,” Boas remarked, “he said he would have no time before November and dismissed me until after October!” With an almost audible groan, Boas said, “If no one speaks for me, I certainly have no chance here.”42
Boas had many supporters who urged him on. “I have had a letter from Prof. Wagner in Göttingen,” Boas wrote Marie, “in which he urgently advises me to stick it out here.” Prof. Kirchhoff in Halle commiserated with Boas about Kiepert: “I understand your anger very well.” Sagely he advised, “Once you are qualified as a professor in Berlin, the old man will no longer be able to put difficulties in your way.” Fischer tried to soothe his edgy student by assuring him that if Kiepert tried to harm Boas, he would “only be hurting himself.” As a further balm to the nerves, Fischer suggested, “You needn’t waste your time about cramming on his whims; it’s completely useless.” Feeling like a sacrifice on the altar of the improvement of geography at Berlin, Boas wrote Marie, “Of course they are all glad if someone here squabbles with Kiepert in the interest of geography, but it does not please me to be the victim.”43
Boas had asked an assistant to find out what Kiepert said about him. He wrote Marie that Kiepert responded, “‘Bah, he just traveled about a bit with one family and imagines that he has done wonders. If that represents ethnological work a fine ethnography will come of it. And now he wants to write a fat book about it.’” As Boas progressed further in the process of Habilitation, Kiepert’s remarks, as reported to Boas, became more extreme. Boas reported to Marie that Kiepert said that “I did nothing on my trip but prove my incompetence, that I brought back no ethnographic material, that I made no observations about language, customs, and usages. But he knows that I have brought back much material in each of these fields. About my book he says that there is nothing scientific in it, nothing but gossip about seals, and that the last part in particular is worthless.” Boas said, “If no way can be found to throw Kiepert off the commission for my habilitation, I shall probably leave here in a hurry.”44
Saner minds prevailed. Fischer advised, “An important discipline at the country’s largest university . . . could not be left to drift because it suited one old man.” The distinguished geographers and allied scientists strategized to minimize Kiepert’s influence: “Bastian, Reiß, and Förster promised their support, and Neumayer introduced him to Wilhelm von Bezold, the university’s new meteorologist who reacted sympathetically. Since he would not formally apply for the Habilitation until the appearance of his Perthes book, his major qualifying piece, there was time to let these influences work in his favor.” Kiepert effectively disqualified himself from judging Boas’s work by writing, “I can only repeat what I have already imparted orally that over the whole subject to which your work belongs, I have absolutely no judgment to inspect your habilitation.” If the faculty assigned him this “task,” he would “reject” it, and they would have to refer Boas “to a real expert in this case . . . to our new meteorologist Prof. Betzold [sic] and the ethnographic part to Prof. Bastian.” At a February faculty meeting, von Bezold was named as Boas’s chief examiner; Kiepert, as “a subsidiary examiner.” Puzzling from afar, Marie asked what Kiepert had against Boas. “The chief thing,” Boas replied, “is common envy.” Boas was not alone: Kiepert had treated others who had tried to become habilitiert in the same way. Additionally, Kiepert had “very bad relations with the rest of the faculty with whom I am on good terms, so that he wants to get even with them through me. The chief thing though is that he fears I might take from him his few students.” Boas concluded, “The faculty knows the facts but has not the gumption to oppose Kiepert vigorously.”45
In the midst of this unpleasant academic wrangling, Boas was employed by Adolph Bastian at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. From mid-September to mid-December 1885, Boas helped to prepare for the move to the new museum building the following year and to catalogue and display the newly acquired “extensive collections made by Captain Adrian Jacobsen in British Columbia and Alaska.” Boas wrote Marie, “I am glad that I can at least support myself.” Perhaps with premature optimism, he added, “It is true that Papa still has to advance me money.” Working with a senior staff member “who changes his mind every day because the work bores him,” Boas despaired that the exhibit would be any good. He wrote Marie, “If only the exhibit will not again be changed (one seems here to have a predilection for unnecessary work) the public will be able to enjoy my tasteful work.” Bastian was able to find additional funds to hire Boas again in mid-January to continue work on the exhibit for the Northwest Coast Indians. Assigned “exclusively [to] Americana” artifacts, Boas held out hope that Bastian intended to keep him on permanently. However, by mid-March, Boas was frustrated with Bastian’s indecisiveness as to how long he would be employed at the museum.46
Boas began work at the museum in January 1886 with nine Bella Coola Indians. The Jacobsen brothers, Johan Adrian Jacobsen and Bernard Fillip Jacobsen, brought the Bella Coola to Germany and to Berlin at the behest of Carl Hagenbeck, the promoter of touring shows, or Völkerschauen (exotic peoples shows). Adrian Jacobsen had begun working for Hagenbeck, owner of an animal shop and zoo in Hamburg in 1878, when he brought a group of Sámi along with an ethnographic collection to Germany as a touring show. Subsequently Jacobsen brought three Patagonians, and in 1880 he brought eight Labrador Inuit, all of whom died of smallpox within the month of their arrival in Europe. After three of the Inuit died, “Jacobsen arranged for the others to be vaccinated against smallpox, but preventive measures proved to be too late. Between January 7th and 16th, all of the remaining Inuit died in Paris.” This experience cooled Hagenbeck and Jacobsen’s ardor for Völkerschauen. However, on his return from the Northwest Coast collecting expedition, Adrian Jacobsen told Hagenbeck of the “‘Longheads’ of Quatsino Inlet,” and Hagenbeck was enticed to undertake another touring show.47
Adrian Jacobsen had already signed a contract for a voyage to Siberia. His younger brother Fillip traveled to the Northwest Coast in British Columbia but was unable to complete an agreement with the Indians. Receiving news of his brother’s trouble, Adrian Jacobsen left Russia for the Northwest Coast, to help negotiate a travel agreement with nine Bella Coola men. In Victoria the Jacobsen brothers had met the Bella Coola, who had been traveling away from their home territory to find employment harvesting hops. The Bella Coola signed a contract with Adrian Jacobsen as the representative of Hagenbeck to perform in cities throughout Germany. Arriving in Bremen in mid-August 1885, the Bella Coola appeared first in Leipzig at Pinkert’s Zoological Garden in the third week of September. In their travels to thirteen cities throughout Germany, they put on shows for the general public, schoolchildren, and scientific societies for one year, seven days a week and at least eight hours a day, before they returned to the Northwest Coast. In addition to zoological gardens, the Bella Coola performed in a variety of venues, including “hotels, occasionally in exhibition rooms such as Castan’s Panopticum in Cologne, and Berlin’s Kroll’sche Etablissement.” In Halle they made an appearance before the Verein für Erdkunde, where “Carl Stumpf spent four sessions with the singer Nuskilusta recording his songs.” In Berlin, Virchow, Bastian, and Krause introduced the group to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte. At this meeting, as Boas wrote Marie, “I shall say a few words at the anthropological society about the language of the Bella Coola Indians, just to make myself heard again.”48
Boas “spent two strenuous weeks with the Indians” working on their language when they were in residence at the Kroll’sche Etablissement. While collecting “a lot of material” with the intent of making “quite a good study out of it,” Boas was at the mercy of their touring schedule. “Of course nothing is complete,” Boas wrote Marie, “and just now as I begin to perceive the soul of the language they are leaving.” After his initial meeting with the Bella Coola, Boas published an article, “Captain Jacobsen’s Bella Coola Indians,” in the January 25, 1886, issue of the Berliner Tageblatt. In a successful bit of archival sleuthing, Douglas Cole found this previously overlooked piece in the J. A. Jacobsen papers on file at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg. Significantly, Boas began his article by raising an ethical question about exhibiting foreign people, the concomitant health hazards for those exhibited, and the exhibitionism inherent in the displays: “‘It has long been the fashion for representatives of foreign tribes to be brought to Europe in order for us, as far as it is possible, to be shown their lives and customs. A friend of humanity might well reflect upon the admissibility of such exhibitions, when he sees the wretched Australian or the vigorous Eskimo waste away under the influence of a foreign climate—when some individuals are gazed at more in wonderment for their striking bodies than because they represent a vivid representation of the manners and customs of their people.’” As Cole clarifies in an endnote, Boas’s reference to “‘the wretched Australian or the vigorous Eskimo’” wasting away “is probably to the death of seven of eleven Terre del Fuegians”—not Australians—“shortly after one of Jacobsen’s Labrador Eskimos succumbed at Paris, all in 1881.”49
In his article on the Bella Coola, Boas discussed “‘a wonderful technique in the use of the carver’s knife and paintbrush and a finely developed artistic sense’” and the graceful moves of the dancers who transport the audience “‘into a foreign world whose outlook, whose customs, have taken a quite different course from ours, but which we must acknowledge as a high culture state.’” As if in anticipation of his research focus for decades to come, Boas wrote, “‘The performances are remarkably rich and give an admirable demonstration of how the religious and artistic element reaches everywhere into the social life of this remarkable tribe and is especially noticeable in the numerous festivals.’” Referring to the article on the language of the Bella Coola that he was preparing for Science (1886), Boas wrote Marie, “I must confess that it was not a pure scientific interest that enabled me to work with such energy with this people. I wanted more to present the Americans with something Indian, and possibly my work can become very useful to me.” He admitted that he had placed the article in Science to annoy Powell, whom Boas thought had done very little to assist him, and “to remind the Canadians of my existence.”50
In May 1886 Boas’s work for the Habilitation was “accepted by the faculty” at the University of Berlin, and he was “assigned a subject for a lecture, ‘About the Ice Conditions in the Arctic Ocean.’” At the end of May, he delivered his lecture:
In the Senate Hall of the university there were about 30 professors. I saw [Theodor] Mommsen, [Hermann von] Helmholtz, [Emil du Bois-]Roymond and other big shots. Then I was told to begin. I had previously hung up my map and spoke briskly for three quarters of an hour. When I was finished I was allowed to sit down between the men who had reviewed my work, Bezold and Kiepert. The dean opened the discussion and von Bezold asked for more detailed information on icebergs. Following that we discussed the interior of Greenland, rain and wind conditions in North America, the paths of storms over the Atlantic Ocean and Europe and with that Bezold was satisfied.
Expressing his displeasure, Kiepert remarked that Boas barely “touched on the field of geography,” and that for this reason, “he understood nothing of my lecture.” He asked “how the rivers of Siberia could melt so much ice.” Boas answered him and then was excused by the faculty: “Then after 2 minutes the dean sent me his calling card in which he asked me to visit him today and told me that I had been accepted.” To Marie he wrote, “So your dearest becomes Privatdocent.” With one more lecture for students on the canyons of Colorado, Boas completed the requirements for Habilitation. To please Marie, Boas sent her the printed invitation to the lecture. “The silly newspapers,” he related, “printed everything.” He continued, “I feel so free and light since the matter is over, it has oppressed me all winter. Particularly that I no longer hear the word, Kiepert.” On the same evening, the geographical society of Berlin met and Boas “was overwhelmed with congratulations, as though I had achieved some great success.” To his father he wrote, “All Berlin knew of my new title.”51
Boas had been worn down by his ceaseless efforts to gain recognition for his work and to find employment. He wrote Marie, “It seems to me as though I had become 5 years older in this year of my return.” He continued, “The constant disappointments and the sad experiences with so many persons don’t pass over one without leaving an imprint.” With all of his efforts “to get ahead . . . nowhere is there a sign of success.” As the culmination of all his challenging experiences, Boas remarked, “the unforgivable behavior of the tribe of professors has just strengthened my feelings and burning desire to get away from here.” He no longer knew “where all my beautiful and brave plans have gone to.”52
Marie began to feel that Franz was succumbing to the pressures from his family to remain in Germany. “You are wrong, my dearest,” Boas wrote Marie, “if you believe that the wishes of my family have any weight in my decisions, and when you believe that I let myself be influenced by them to reach any particular decision.” He pleaded with her not to say “that you must give up even the slightest part of your rights in me to anyone.” In a mirror image of his reasoned pleas to his family when he was in the United States, Boas wrote Marie that he could not leave right away: “In short I would throw away eight months here if I went over there now.” In an effort to ease the strain of Boas and Marie’s separation, Boas’s father had offered to send money for Marie’s passage in order, as he said, to have the pleasure of seeing them both together in Germany and to present them to their friends. Boas’s mother and sisters continued in the attempts to bring Marie to Berlin. Since Hete did not have room for Marie in her apartment, Boas’s mother proposed to rent a room in Berlin for herself and Marie in the early summer. In response to Marie’s letter, Boas wrote, “I too did not like the idea that Mama and you should rent a room and live here [in Berlin].”53
Boas wrote his parents, “I believe it would be useful for me to take advantage of the university vacation and go abroad, unless I should beforehand find a suitable connection or a beginning of a permanent position.” The pressures did not let up in Minden. Trying to explain to his family why he felt his place was not in Germany, he wrote to them, “I think from my experiences this year, you will see that I was correct in my judgment of conditions here.” Boas traveled to Minden over the Easter holiday and tried in person to convince his parents that he should go to America, rather than having Marie come to Germany. To Marie he wrote, “Believe me, the discussion this morning was difficult, but I could not give in and jeopardize our prospects, and so as things are here now, my coming over is the only sensible move. It is so difficult for my folks for they fear that which we desire, but they cannot say that I am wrong. It hurts me so to destroy their hopes to see us together here, but it cannot be otherwise. . . . They do not understand what draws me over there, what persuades me to prefer work in America to a German professorship.” He ended by saying, “Only Papa agrees with me.”54
The emotional crisis continued. “I was most unpleasantly surprised,” Boas wrote Marie, “that the old quarrel about America started again when I was in Minden.” In despair, Boas gave “up all hope of explaining to people,” either in Minden or Berlin, “why it is that I wish to go abroad and that it is possible to accomplish over there that which cannot be done here.” The response was always the same: “‘Yes, but when you are once a professor you will have enough free time to do what you wish.’” With clarity of purpose and tenacity of intent Boas wrote,
They cannot understand that I have other ideals than to have a lot of free time for myself. I want to accomplish something with my labors and it won’t help very much to give birth to many or few fat books or to let the students sleep in my classes or in someone else’s. On the other hand, I see in America the possibility of being able to bring it about that many will work for the sake of science, and also many other ways in which one can be much more useful. Oh, dearest, that must be joy-giving labor to watch how through one’s efforts and worries, the germs one has planted develop, and to have accomplished useful work, which has originated from one’s own spirit and labors. On this road, no labor is too great, no unpleasantness too repellent.
He concluded, “This kind of activity is virtually closed to me here, abroad there is opportunity, and that is why I am trying so hard to go to you.”55
During this time of his “divided desires”—from Baffin Land to St. John’s, Newfoundland, and then to New York in September 1884, to Germany in March 1885, and back to New York in July 1886—Boas had spent twenty-two months and twenty days in intense work. He had lived in constant frustration at not being able to realize his goal of obtaining a position. He wrote and published continuously. His articles appeared in the popular press and in scientific journals and transactions. His first book, Baffin-Land: Geographische Ergebnisse einer in den Jahren 1883 und 1884 ausgeführten Forschungreise (1885), was published in German by the prestigious Justus Perthes in Gotha. He completed his second book, The Central Eskimo, in 1885 and dedicated it to Bessels; it was published in English by the equally prestigious Annual Report of the BAE in Washington DC, in 1888.
During his isolated angst, Boas had despaired of spending time writing a massive tome that few people would read. Over a century after its publication, Müller-Wille assessed the importance of The Central Eskimo: “The 1888 monograph has been quoted over and over again and is often referred to as one of the major starting points of scientific endeavors regarding the peoples in the North American Arctic.” From September 1884 to July 1886, while in New York and Germany, Boas published twenty-nine works, five of them in English. Examining all of Boas’s works on the Arctic, Müller-Wille remarks, “There has been a neglected dimension of the considerable and important scientific opus that Boas had already published in German during the 1880s. In those publications he had already presented the origin and foundation of his own scientific approach to studying the relationship between Inuit and the Arctic environment.” Müller-Wille continues, “After his interlude in the United States in 1884–1885 Boas would pass the Habilitation in Berlin in June 1886. With that success Boas became very much embedded in and influenced by the concepts of modern geography, as it was understood in Germany at that time. This was more noticeable in his expanding research, publications, and evolving academic networks than has been generally understood by non-German reading scholars, mainly anthropologists, in North America, including those who analyzed Boas’ academic and scientific career extensively.”56
While Boas embraced modern geography, he did not feel that the established German geographers would grant him the intellectual breadth to develop his ideas. As he expressed it to Marie, “When I begin my scientific work in Germany I only get enemies and opposition since they stand in such contrast to the modern directions and direct their derision against certain leaders of today’s Ethnography and Geography.” While working on his publication for Perthes on Baffin-Land, he wrote Marie, “I wonder how the methodological paper will turn out; I myself find it very important, since it represents considerations that are very real to me.” However, he felt himself on new terrain and was unsure of the significance of his writing: “When one like me comes from exact science to a half historical field, one easily doubts whether the new work is at all worthwhile, whether scientifically it does not occupy a lower position than the physical striving to establish laws.” As he progressed in his work on Baffin-Land, Boas lamented even more about his position with respect to established science. He wrote Marie of “the unbearable yoke that burdens the young scientist here.” While the geographers were, as he said, “very encouraging to me,” he found that he did not “fit in their company.” The geographers with whom he spoke conveyed to him that he was too young to propound new works on the methodology of geography. Boas maintained that “the right to express his opinion must be given to the youngest when he believes that his views have matured.” Boas acknowledged, “Of course one must know what is going on in the whole field, to be modern one must steep oneself in the field, and that I do, but not for the sake of recognition from the fancy specialists. It is undoubtedly wrong that the carrying out of scientific work, here, is almost exclusively the privilege of the professors. My God, what nonsense that often brings to light!”57
On Christmas day Boas wrote Marie, “I no longer wish to compare to today the high hopes and plans with which I returned from the North, and with which I even came to Germany.” None of his dreams had been realized. He continued, “I now feel like the youngest in an order, who must sit out a time before he may open his mouth in the chorus of general wisdom. I shall now do nothing further than go along with the rest of my young colleagues along the old paths; in that way I shall probably best get ahead. I have gotten nothing for all my plans and works but a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders, and even for scientific problems that are close to my heart the quieting assurance that I am still too young.” He feared that he might one day become like the established geographers, that he would “be a member of the order founded on mutual admiration.” As he wrote, “The fault is in part mine. I do not have to have aims that lie outside of the usual fields, and no one can understand why I do not find a professorship the ideal of all activity.” When he had returned to Germany, he had spoken with his family about his plans and goals, but he had grown gradually more and more despondent: “I really only now notice when my parents and sisters ask me about details that I have given up almost everything.” On occasion Boas could ride a crest and hope again, “but the time will come when I can carry out my ideas and aims.” However, he kept his dreams to himself: “I no longer talk about it here.” He remarked upon his brother-in-law Rudolf Lehmann, who could “not understand in the least that I cannot be satisfied merely by working at my desk, but that I desire to share in the work of mankind.” Boas reflected, “It is only a matter of feeling and one can quarrel with no one about the value of one’s own activities.”58
On July 10, 1886, Boas departed for New York, after a brief stop in London, where he sought out the director of the Geological Survey of Canada, Alfred Selwyn. In June Boas had received a clipping from a Montreal newspaper that had raised his hopes about the possibility of his plans to continue ethnographic work in Canada: the Royal Society of Canada had recommended assisting “‘Dr. Boas of Berlin . . . in his further work on the ethnography of Canada.’” To his parents, Boas wrote, “At last I have found Selwyn and you may look forward in peace to the winter as I think the matter with Canada is hopeless.” Knowing nothing of the resolution of the Royal Society of Canada, Selwyn showed no regard for “the ethnographic work I am interested in and in which the society is interested.” Boas added, “Since he is chief, I suppose it is hopeless. . . . I am sure you are glad about this news; I, not at all.”59
In agonized anticipation he wrote Marie, telling her not to meet the steamer: “I must first see you alone. I guess we shall be able to bear those few hours.” Boas sailed into New York Harbor on July 27, 1886. He had come back to Marie, accompanied by his sister Toni, who had joined him on the SS Eider in Southampton. Just prior to his departure from London, Boas had written to his parents, “So farewell and my best greetings. Only three months and I shall be back.” But Boas was not to return ever again to live permanently in Germany. His family’s fears were realized as his and Marie’s dreams were fulfilled. Franz Boas found an expansive field of engagement and opportunities for work in the United States, but not without first making his way across the North American continent to the Northwest Coast, where he would meet two of the Bella Coola Indians, Alkinous and Itlkakuani, whom he had first encountered in Berlin. From Berlin to the Bella Coola and on to the Kwakiutl, Boas had found the rich field for his years of work to come.60