On the morning of Monday, 31 May 1909, in the lecture theatre of the Charity Organization Society building, not far from Astor Place in New York City, three pickled brains were displayed on a wooden bench. One of the brains belonged to an ape, another was the brain of a white person, and the third was a Negro brain. The brains were the subject of a lecture given by Dr Burt Wilder, a neurologist from Cornell University. Professor Wilder, after presenting a variety of charts and photographs and reporting on measurements said to be relevant to the ‘alleged prefrontal deficiency in the Negro brain,’ reassured the multiracial audience that the latest science had found no difference between white and black brains.1
The occasion of this talk – which seems so dated and yet so modern – was in some ways historic. It was the opening morning of a three-day ‘National Negro Conference,’ the very first move in an attempt to create a permanent organisation to work for civil rights for American blacks. The conference was the brainchild of Mary Ovington, a white social worker, and had been nearly two years in the making. It had been conceived after she had read an account by William Walling of a race riot that had devastated Springfield, Illinois, in the summer of 1908. The trouble that flared in Springfield on the night of 14 August signalled that America’s race problem was no longer confined to the South, no longer, as Walling wrote, ‘a raw and bloody drama played out behind a magnolia curtain.’ The spark that ignited the riot was the alleged rape of a white woman, the wife of a railway worker, by a well-spoken black man. (The railroads were a sensitive area at the time. Some southern states had ‘Jim Crow’ carriages: as the trains crossed the state line, arriving from the North, blacks were forced to move from interracial carriages to the blacks-only variety.) As news of the alleged rape spread that night, there were two lynchings, six fatal shootings, eighty injuries, more than $200,000 worth of damage. Two thousand African Americans fled the city before the National Guard restored order.2
William Walling’s article on the riot, ‘Race War in the North,’ did not appear in the Independent for another three weeks. But when it did, it was much more than a dispassionate report. Although he reconstructed the riot and its immediate cause in exhaustive detail, it was the passion of Walling’s rhetoric that moved Mary Ovington. He showed how little had changed in attitudes towards blacks since the Civil War; he exposed the bigotry of certain governors in southern states, and tried to explain why racial troubles were now spreading north. Reading Walling’s polemic, Mary Ovington was appalled. She contacted him and suggested they start some sort of organisation. Together they rounded up other white sympathisers, meeting first in Walling’s apartment and then, when the group got too big, at the Liberal Club on East Nineteenth Street. When they mounted the first National Negro Conference, on that warm May day, in 1909, just over one thousand attended. Blacks were a distinct minority.
After the morning session of science, both races headed for lunch at the Union Square Hotel close by, ‘so as to get to know each other.’ Even though nearly half a century had elapsed since the Civil War, integrated meals were unusual even in large northern towns, and participants ran the risk of being jeered at, or worse. On that occasion, however, lunch went smoothly, and duly fortified, the lunchers walked back over to the conference centre. That afternoon, the main speaker was one of the black minority, a small, bearded, aloof academic from Fisk and Harvard Universities, called William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.
W. E. B. Du Bois was often described, especially by his critics, as arrogant, cold and supercilious.3 That afternoon he was all of these, but it didn’t matter. This was the first time many white people came face to face with a far more relevant characteristic of Du Bois: his intellect. He did not say so explicitly, but in his talk he conveyed the impression that the subject of that morning’s lectures – whether whites were more intelligent than blacks – was a matter of secondary importance. Using the rather precise prose of the academic, he said he appreciated that white people were concerned about the deplorable housing, employment, health, and morals of blacks, but that they ‘mistook effects for causes.’ More important, he said, was the fact that black people had sacrificed their own self-respect because they had failed to gain the vote, without which the ‘new slavery’ could never be abolished. He had one simple but all-important message: economic power – and therefore self-fulfilment – would only come for the Negro once political power had been achieved.4
By 1909 Du Bois was a formidable public speaker; he had a mastery of detail and a controlled passion. But by the time of the conference he was undergoing a profound change, in the process of turning from an academic into a politician – and an activist. The reason for Du Bois’s change of heart is instructive. Following the American Civil War, the Reconstruction movement had taken hold in the South, intent on turning back the clock, rebuilding the former Confederate states with de facto, if not de jure, segregation. Even as late as the turn of the century, several states were still trying to disenfranchise blacks, and even in the North many whites treated blacks as an inferior people. Far from advancing since the Civil War, the fortunes of blacks had actually regressed. The situation was not helped by the theories and practices of the first prominent black leader, a former slave from Alabama, Booker T. Washington. He took the view that the best form of race relations was accommodation with the whites, accepting that change would come eventually, and that any other approach risked a white backlash. Washington therefore spread the notion that blacks ‘should be a labour force, not a political force,’ and it was on this basis that his Tuskegee Institute was founded, in Alabama, near Montgomery, its aim being to train blacks in the industrial skills mainly needed on southern farms. Whites found this such a reassuring philosophy that they poured money into the Tuskegee Institute, and Washington’s reputation and influence grew to the point where, by the early years of the twentieth century, few federal black appointments were made without Theodore Roosevelt, in the White House, canvassing his advice.5
Washington and Du Bois could not have been more different. Born in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, the son of northern blacks, and with a little French and Dutch blood in the background, Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which he described as a ‘boy’s paradise’ of hills and rivers. He shone at school and did not encounter discrimination until he was about twelve, when one of his classmates refused to exchange visiting cards with him and he felt shut off, as he said, by a ‘vast veil.’6 In some respects, that veil was never lifted. But Du Bois was enough of a prodigy to outshine the white boys in school at Great Barrington, and to earn a scholarship to Fisk University, a black college founded after the Civil War by the American Missionary Association in Nashville, Tennessee. From Fisk he went to Harvard, where he studied sociology under William James and George Santayana. After graduation he had difficulty finding a job at first, but following a stint at teaching he was invited to make a sociological study of the blacks in a slum area in Philadelphia. It was just what he needed to set him off on the first phase of his career. Over the next few years Du Bois produced a series of sociological surveys – The Philadelphia Negro, The Negro in Business, The College-Bred Negro, Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans, The Negro Artisan, The Negro Church, and eventually, in the spring of 1903, Souls of Black Folk. James Weldon Johnson, proprietor of the first black newspaper in America, an opera composer, lawyer, and the son of a man who had been free before the Civil War, described this book as having ‘a greater effect upon and within the Negro race in America than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’7
Souls of Black Folk summed up Du Bois’s sociological research and thinking of the previous decade, which not only confirmed the growing disenfranchisement and disillusion of American blacks but proved beyond doubt the brutal economic effects of discrimination in housing, health, and employment. The message of his surveys was so stark, and showed such a deterioration in the overall picture, that Du Bois became convinced that Booker T. Washington’s approach actually did more harm than good. In Souls, Du Bois rounded on Washington. It was a risky thing to do, and relations between the two leaders quickly turned sour. Their falling-out was heightened by the fact that Washington had the power, the money, and the ear of President Roosevelt. But Du Bois had his intellect and his studies, his evidence, which gave him an unshakeable conviction that higher education must become the goal of the ‘talented tenth’ of American blacks who would be the leaders of the race in the future.8 This was threatening to whites, but Du Bois simply didn’t accept the Washington ‘softly, softly’ approach. Whites would only change if forced to do so.
For a time Du Bois thought it was more important to argue the cause against whites than to fight his own color. But that changed in July 1905 when, with feelings between the rival camps running high, he and twenty-nine others met secretly at Fort Erie in Ontario to found what became known as the ‘Niagara movement.’9 Niagara was the first open black protest movement, and altogether more combative than anything Washington had ever contemplated. It was intended to be a nationwide outfit with funds to fight for civil and legal rights both in general and in individual cases. It had committees to cover health, education, and economic issues, press and public opinion, and an anti-lynching fund. When he heard about it, Washington was incensed. Niagara went against everything he stood for, and from that moment he plotted its downfall. He was a formidable opponent, not without his own propaganda skills, and he pitched this battle for the souls of black folk as between the ‘soreheads,’ as the protesters were referred to, and the ‘responsible leaders’ of the race. Washington’s campaign scared away white support for Niagara, and its membership never reached four figures. Indeed, the Niagara movement would be completely forgotten now if it hadn’t been for a curious coincidence. The last annual meeting of the movement, attended by just twenty-nine people, was adjourned in Oberlin, Ohio, on 2 September 1908. The future looked bleak and was not helped by the riot that had recently taken place in Springfield. But the very next day, William Walling’s article on the riot was published in the Independent, and Mary Ovington took up the torch.10
The conference Ovington and Walling organised, after its shaky start discussing brains, did not fizzle out – far from it. The first National Negro Conference (NNC) elected a Committee of Forty, also known as the National Committee for the Advancement of the Negro. Although predominantly staffed by whites, this committee turned its back on Booker T. Washington, and from that moment his influence began to wane. For the first twelve months, the activities of the NNC were mainly administrative and organisational – putting finance and a nationwide structure in place. By the time they met again in May 1910, they were ready to combat prejudice in an organised way.11
Not before time. Lynchings were still running at an average of ninety-two a year. Roosevelt had made a show of appointing a handful of blacks to federal positions, but William Howard Taft, inaugurated as president in 1909, ‘slowed the trickle to a few drops,’ insisting that he could not alienate the South as his predecessor had done by ‘uncongenial black appointments.’12 It was therefore no surprise that the theme of the second conference was ‘disenfranchisement and its effects upon the Negro,’ mainly the work of Du Bois. The battle, the argument, was being carried to the whites. To this end, the conference adopted a report worked out by a Preliminary Committee on Organisation. This allowed for a National Committee of One Hundred, as well as a thirty-person executive committee, fifteen to come from New York and fifteen from elsewhere.13 Most important of all, funds had been raised for there to be five full-time, paid officers – a national president, a chairman of the Executive Committee, a treasurer and his assistant, and a director of publications and research. All of these officeholders were white, except the last – W. E. B. Du Bois.14
At this second meeting delegates decided they were unhappy with the word Negro, feeling that their organisation should campaign on behalf of all people with dark skin. As a result, the name of the organisation was changed, and the National Negro Conference became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).15 Its exact form and approach owed more to Du Bois than to any other single person, and this aloof black intellectual stood poised to make his impact, not just on the American nation but worldwide.
There were good practical and tactical reasons why Du Bois should have ignored the biological arguments linked to America’s race problem. But that didn’t mean that the idea of a biological ladder, with whites above blacks, would go away: social Darwinism was continuing to flourish. One of the crudest efflorescences of this idea had been displayed at the World’s Fair in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1903, lasting for six months. The Saint Louis World’s Fair was the most ambitious gathering of intellectuals the new world had ever seen. In fact, it was the largest fair ever held, then or since.16
It had begun life as The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of President Jefferson’s purchase of the state from the French in 1803, which had opened up the Mississippi and helped turn the inland port of Saint Louis into America’s fourth most populous city after New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The fair had both highbrow and lowbrow aspects. There was, for instance, an International Congress of Arts and Sciences, which took place in late September. (It was depicted as ‘a Niagara of scientific talent,’ though literature also featured.) Among the participants were John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, Woodrow Wilson, the new president of Princeton, the anthropologist Franz Boas, the historian James Bryce, the economist and sociologist Max Weber, Ernest Rutherford and Henri Poincaré in physics, Hugo de Vries and T. H. Morgan in genetics. Although they were not there themselves, the brand-new work of Freud, Planck, and Frege was discussed. Perhaps more notable for some was the presence of Scott Joplin, the king of ragtime, and of the ice cream cone, invented for the fair.17
Also at the fair was an exhibition showing ‘the development of man.’ This had been planned to show the triumph of the ‘Western’ (i.e., European) races. It was a remarkable display, comprising the largest agglomeration of the world’s non-Western peoples ever assembled: Inuit from the Arctic, Patagonians from the near-Antarctic, Zulu from South Africa, a Philippine Negrito described as ‘the missing link,’ and no fewer than fifty-one different tribes of Indians, as native Americans were then called. These ‘exhibits’ were on show all day, every day, and the gathering was not considered demeaning or politically incorrect by the whites attending the fair. However, the bad taste (as we would see it) did not stop there. Saint Louis, because of the World’s Fair, had been chosen to host the 1904 Olympic Games. Using this context as inspiration, an alternative ‘Games’ labelled the ‘Anthropology Days’ was organised as part of the fair. Here all the various members of the great ethnic exhibition were required to pit themselves against each other in a contest organised by whites who seemed to think that this would be a way of demonstrating the differing ‘fitness’ of the races of mankind. A Crow Indian won the mile, a Sioux the high jump, and a Moro from the Philippines the javelin.18
Social Darwinist ideas were particularly virulent in the United States. In 1907, Indiana introduced sterilisation laws for rapists and imbeciles in prison. But similar, if less drastic, ideas existed elsewhere. In 1912 the International Eugenics Conference in London adopted a resolution calling for greater government interference in the area of breeding. This wasn’t enough for the Frenchman Charles Richet, who in his book Sélection humaine (1912) openly argued for all newborn infants with hereditary defects to be killed. After infancy Richet thought castration was the best policy but, giving way to horrified public opinion, he advocated instead the prevention of marriage between people suffering from a whole range of ‘defects’ – tuberculosis, rickets, epilepsy, syphilis (he obviously hadn’t heard of Salvarsen), ‘individuals who were too short or too weak,’ criminals, and ‘people who were unable to read, write or count.’19 Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son and from 1911 to 1928 president of the British Eugenics Education Society, didn’t go quite this far, but he advocated that ‘superior’ people should be encouraged to breed more and ‘inferior’ people encouraged to reproduce less.20 In America, eugenics remained a strong social movement until the 1920s, the Indiana sterilisation laws not being repealed until 1931. In Britain the Eugenics Education Society remained in business until the 1920s. The story in Germany is a separate matter.
Paul Ehrlich had not allowed his studies of syphilis to be affected by the prevailing social views of the time, but the same cannot be said of many geneticists. In the early stages of the history of the subject, a number of reputable scientists, worried by what they perceived as the growth of alcoholism, disease, and criminality in the cities, which they interpreted as degeneration of the racial stock, lent their names to the eugenic societies and their work, if only for a while. The American geneticist Charles B. Davenport produced a classical paper, still quoted today, proving that Huntington’s chorea, a progressive nervous disorder, was inherited via a Mendelian dominant trait. He was right. At much the same time, however, he campaigned for eugenic sterilisation laws and, later, for immigration to the United States to be restricted on racial and other biological/genetic grounds. This led him so much astray that his later work was devoted to trying to show that a susceptibility to violent outbursts was the result of a single dominant gene. One can’t ‘force’ science like that.21
Another geneticist affiliated to the eugenics movement for a short time was T. H. Morgan. He and his co-workers made the next major advance in genetics after Hugo de Vries’s rediscovery of Mendel in 1900. In 1910, the same year that America’s eugenic society was founded, Morgan published the first results of his experiments on the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. This may not sound much, but the simplicity of the fruit fly, and its rapid breeding time, meant that in years to come, and thanks to Morgan, Drosophila became the staple research tool of genetics. Morgan’s ‘fly room’ at Columbia University in New York became famous.22 Since de Vries’s rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900, the basic mechanism of heredity had been confirmed many times. However, Mendel’s approach, and de Vries’s, was statistical, centring on that 3 : 1 ratio in the variability of offspring. The more that ratio was confirmed, the more people realised there had to be a physical, biological, and cytological grounding for the mechanism identified by Mendel and de Vries. There was one structure that immediately suggested itself. For about fifty years, biologists had been observing under the microscope a certain characteristic behaviour of cells undergoing reproduction. They saw a number of minute threads forming part of the nuclei of cells, which separated out during reproduction. As early as 1882, Walther Flemming recorded that, if stained with dye, the threads turned a deeper colour than the rest of the cell.23 This reaction led to speculation that the threads were composed of a special substance, labelled chromatin, because it coloured the threads. These threads were soon called chromosomes, but it was nine years before H. Henking, in 1891, made the next crucial observation, that during meiosis (cell division) in the insect Pyrrhocoris, half the spermatozoa received eleven chromosomes while the other half received not only these eleven but an additional body that responded strongly to staining. Henking could not be sure that this extra body was a chromosome at all, so he simply called it ‘X.’ It never crossed his mind that, because half received it and half didn’t, the ‘X body’ might determine what sex an insect was, but others soon drew this conclusion.24 After Henking’s observation, it was confirmed that the same chromosomes appear in the same configuration in successive generations, and Walter Sutton showed in 1902 that during reproduction similar chromosomes come together, then separate. In other words, chromosomes behaved in exactly the way Mendel’s laws suggested.25 Nonetheless, this was only inferential – circumstantial – evidence, and so in 1908 T. H. Morgan embarked on an ambitious program of animal breeding designed to put the issue beyond doubt. At first he tried rats and mice, but their generations were too long, and the animals often became ill. So he began work on the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. This tiny creature is scarcely exotic, nor is it as closely related to man. But it does have the advantage of a simple and convenient lifestyle: ‘To begin with it can thrive in old milk bottles, it suffers few diseases and it conveniently produces a new generation every couple of weeks.’26 Unlike the twenty-odd pairs of chromosomes that most mammals have, Drosophila has four. That also made experimentation simpler.
The fruit fly may have been an unromantic specimen, but scientifically it turned out to be perfect, especially after Morgan noticed that a single white-eyed male suddenly occurred among thousands of normal red-eyed flies. This sudden mutation was something worth getting to the bottom of. Over the next few months, Morgan and his team mated thousands and thousands of flies in their laboratory at Columbia University in New York. (This is how the ‘fly room’ got its name.) The sheer bulk of Morgan’s results enabled him to conclude that mutations formed in fruit flies at a steady pace. By 1912, more than twenty recessive mutants had been discovered, including one they called ‘rudimentary wings’ and another that produced ‘yellow body colour.’ But that wasn’t all. The mutations only ever occurred in one sex, males or females, never in both. This observation, that mutations are always sex-linked, was significant because it supported the idea of particulate inheritance. The only physical difference between the cells of the male fruit fly and the female lay in the ‘X body’. It followed, therefore, that the X body was a chromosome, that it determined the sex of the adult fly, and that the various mutations observed in the fly room were also carried on this body.27
Morgan published a paper on Drosophila as early as July 1910 in Science, but the full force of his argument was made in 1915 in The Mechanism of Mendelian Inheritance, the first book to air the concept of the ‘gene.’28 For Morgan and his colleagues the gene was to be understood ‘as a particular segment of the chromosome, which influenced growth in a definite way and therefore governed a specific character in the adult organism’. Morgan argued that the gene was self-replicating, transmitted unchanged from parent to offspring, mutation being the only way new genes could arise, producing new characteristics. Most importantly, mutation was a random, accidental process that could not be affected in any way by the needs of the organism. According to this argument, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was logically impossible. This was Morgan’s basic idea. It promoted a great deal of laboratory research elsewhere, especially across the United States. But in other long-established fields (like palaeontology), scientists were loath to give up non-Mendelian and even non-Darwinian ideas until the modern synthesis was formed in the 1940s (see below, chapter 20).29 There were of course complications. For example, Morgan conceded that a single adult characteristic can be controlled by more than one gene, while at the same time a single gene can affect several traits. Also important was the position of a gene on the chromosome, since its effects could occasionally be modified by neighbouring genes.
Genetics had come a long way in fifteen years, and not just empirically, but philosophically too. In some senses the gene was a more potent fundamental particle than either the electron or the atom, since it was far more directly linked to man’s humanity. The accidental and uncontrollable nature of mutation as the sole mechanism for evolutionary change, under the ‘indifferent control of natural selection,’ was considered by critics – philosophers and religious authorities – as a bleak imposition of banal forces without meaning, yet another low point in man’s descent from the high ground he had occupied when religious views had ruled the world. For the most part, Morgan did not get involved in these philosophical debates. Being an empiricist, he realised that genetics was more complicated than most eugenicists believed, and that no useful purpose could be achieved by the crude control techniques favoured by the social Darwinist zealots. Around 1914 he left the eugenics movement. He was also aware that recent results from anthropology did not support the easy certainties of the race biologists, in particular the work of a colleague whose office was only a few blocks from Columbia University on the Upper West Side of New York, at the American Museum of Natural History, located at Seventy-ninth Street and Central Park West. This man’s observations and arguments were to prove just as influential as Morgan’s.
Franz Boas was born in Minden in northwestern Germany in 1858. Originally a physicist-geographer, he became an anthropologist as a result of his interest in Eskimos. He moved to America to write for Science magazine, then transferred to the American Museum of Natural History in New York as a curator. Small, dark-haired, with a very high forehead, Boas had a relaxed, agreeable manner. At the turn of the century he studied several groups of native Americans, examining the art of the Indians of the north Pacific Coast and the secret societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, near Vancouver. Following the fashion of the time for craniometry, he also became interested in the development of children and devised a range of physical measurements in what he called the ‘Cephalic Index.’30 The wide diversity of Boas’s work and his indefatigable research made him famous, and with Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, he helped establish anthropology as a respected field of study. As a consequence he was called upon to record the native American population for the U.S. Census in 1900 and asked to undertake research for the Dillingham Commission of the U.S. Senate. This report, published in 1910, was the result of various unformed eugenic worries among politicians – that America was attracting too many immigrants of the ‘wrong sort,’ that the ‘melting pot’ approach might not always work, and that the descendants of immigrants might, for reasons of race, culture, or intelligence, be unable or unwilling to assimilate.31 This is a not unfamiliar argument, even today, but in 1910 the fears of the restrictionists were rather odd, considered from this end of the century. Their anxieties centred upon the physical dimensions of immigrants, specifically that they were ‘degenerate’ stock. Boas was asked to make a biometric assessment of a sample of immigrant parents and children, an impertinence as controversial then as it would be scandalous now. With the new science of genetics making waves, many were convinced that physical type was determined solely by heredity. Boas showed that in fact immigrants assimilated rapidly, taking barely one or at most two generations to fall in line with the host population on almost any measure you care to name. As Boas, himself an immigrant, sharply pointed out, newcomers do not subject themselves to the traumas of emigration, an arduous and long journey, merely to stand out in their new country. Most want a quiet life and prosperity.32
Despite Boas’s contribution, the Dillingham Commission Report – eighteen volumes of it – concluded that immigrants from Mediterranean regions were ‘biologically inferior’ to other immigrants. The report did not, however, recommend the exclusion of ‘degenerate races,’ concentrating its fire instead on ‘degenerate individuals’ who were to be identified by a test of reading and writing.*33
Given the commission’s conclusions, the second book Boas published that year took on added significance. The Mind of Primitive Man soon became a classic of social science: it was well known in Britain, and the German version was later burned by the Nazis. Boas was not so much an imaginative anthropologist as a measurer and statistician. Like Morgan he was an empiricist and a researcher, concerned to make anthropology as ‘hard’ a science as possible and intent on studying ‘objective’ things, like height, weight, and head size. He had also travelled, got to know several different races or ethnic groups, and was highly conscious that, for most Americans at least, their contact with other races was limited to the American Negro.
Boas’s book begins, ‘Proud of his wonderful achievements, civilised man looks down upon the humbler members of mankind. He has conquered the forces of nature and compelled them to serve him.’34 This statement was something of a lure, designed to lull the reader into complacency. For Boas then set out to question – all but eradicate – the difference between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ man. In nearly three hundred pages, he gently built argument upon argument, fact upon fact, turning the conventional ‘wisdoms’ of the day upside-down. For example, psychometric studies had compared the brains of Baltimore blacks with Baltimore whites and found differences in brain structure, in the relative size of the frontal and orbital lobes and the corpus callosum. Boas showed that there were equally great differences between the northern French and the French from central France. He conceded that the dimensions of the Negro skull were closer to those of apes than were the skulls of the ‘higher races,’ but argued that the white races were closer to apes because they were hairier than the Negro races, and had lips and limb proportions that were closer to other primates than were the corresponding Negroid features. He accepted that the average capacity of the skulls of Europeans was 1560 cc, of African Negroes 1405 cc, and of ‘Negroes of the Pacific’ 1460 cc. But he pointed out that the average cranial capacity of several hundred murderers had turned out to be 1580 cc.35 He showed that the ‘primitive’ races were quite capable of nonimpulsive, controlled behaviour when it suited their purposes; that their languages were just as highly developed, once you understood the languages properly; that the Eskimos, for example, had many more words for snow than anyone else – for the obvious reason that it mattered more to them. He dismissed the idea that because some languages did not have numerals above ten, as was true of certain native American tribes, this did not mean that members of those tribes could not count above ten in English once they had been taught to speak it.36
An important feature of Boas’s book was its impressive references. Anthropological, agricultural, botanical, linguistic, and geological evidence was used, often from German and French language journals beyond the reach of his critics. In his final chapter, ‘Race Problems in the United States,’ he surveyed Lucca and Naples in Italy, Spain and Germany east of the Elbe, all of which had experienced large amounts of immigration and race mixing and had scarcely suffered physical, mental, or moral degeneration.37 He argued that many of the so-called differences between the various races were in fact ephemeral. Quoting from his own research on the children of immigrants in the United States, he explained how within two generations at the most they began to conform, even in physical dimensions, to those around them, already arrived. He ended by calling for studies to be made about how immigrants and Negroes had adapted to life in America, how they differed as a result of their experiences from their counterparts in Europe or Africa or China who had not migrated. He said it was time to stop concentrating on studies that emphasised often imaginary or ephemeral differences. ‘The similarity of fundamental customs and beliefs the world over, without regard to race and environment, is so general that race [appears] … irrelevant,’ he wrote, and expressed the hope that anthropological findings would ‘teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilisation different from our own.’38
Boas’s book was a tour-de-force. He became very influential, leading anthropologists and the rest of us away from unilinear evolutionary theory and race theory and toward cultural history. His emphasis on cultural history helped to fashion what may be the single most important advance in the twentieth century in the realm of pure ideas: relativism. Before World War I, however, his was the only voice advancing such views. It was another twenty years before his students, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in particular, took up the banner.
At the same time that Boas was studying the Kwakiutl Indians and the Eskimos, archaeologists were also making advances in understanding the history of native Americans. The thrust was that native Americans had a much more interesting culture and past than the race biologists had been willing to admit. This came to a head with the discoveries of Hiram Bingham, an historian with links to Yale.39
Born in Honolulu in 1875, Bingham came from a family of missionaries who had translated the Bible into some of the world’s most remote languages (such as Hawaiian). A graduate of Yale, with a Ph.D. from Harvard, he was a prehistorian with a love of travel, adventure, exotic destinations. This appetite led him in 1909 to Peru, where he met the celebrated historian of Lima, Carlos Romero, who while drinking coca tea with Bingham on the verandah of his house showed him the writings of Father de la Calancha, which fired Bingham’s imagination by describing to him the lost Inca city of Vilcabamba.40 Although some of the larger ancient cities of pre-Columbian America had been recorded in detail by the Spanish conquerors, it was not until the work of the German scholar Eduard Seler in the late 1880s and 1890s that systematic study of the region was begun. Romero kept Bingham enthralled with his account of how Vilcabamba – the lost capital of Manco Inca, the last great Inca king – had obsessed archaeologists, historians, and treasure hunters for generations.
It was, most certainly, a colourful tale. Manco Inca had taken power in the early sixteenth century when he was barely nineteen. Despite his youth, he proved a courageous and cunning opponent. As the Spanish, under the Pizarro brothers, made advances into the Inca lands, Manco Inca gave ground and retreated to more inaccessible hideouts, finally reaching Vilcabamba. The crunch came in 1539 when Gonzalo Pizarro led three hundred of ‘the most distinguished captains and fighting men’ in what was by sixteenth-century standards a massive assault. The Spaniards went as far as they could on horseback (horses had become extinct in America before the Spanish arrived).41 When they could go no farther as a mounted force, they left their animals with a guard and advanced on foot. Crossing the Urumbamba River, they wound their way up the valley of the Vilcabamba to a pass beyond Vitcos. By now, the jungle was so dense as to be all but impassable, and the Spaniards were growing nervous. Suddenly they encountered two new bridges over some mountain streams. The bridges were inviting, but their newness should have made Pizarro suspicious: it didn’t, and they were caught in an ambush. Boulders cascaded down on them, to be followed by a hail of arrows. Thirty-six Spaniards were killed, and Gonzalo Pizarro withdrew. But only temporarily. Ten days later, with a still bigger party, the Spaniards negotiated the bridges, reached Vilcabamba, and sacked it. By then, however, Manco Inca had moved on. He was eventually betrayed by Spaniards whose lives he had spared because they had promised to help him in the fight against Pizarro, but not before his cunning and courage had earned him the respect of the Spaniards.42 Manco Inca’s legend had grown over the intervening centuries, as had the mystery surrounding Vilcabamba. In fact, the city assumed even greater significance later in the sixteenth century after silver was discovered there. Then, in the seventeenth century, after the mines had been exhausted, it was reclaimed by the jungle. Several attempts were made in the nineteenth century to find the lost city, but they all failed.
Bingham could not resist Romero’s story. When he returned to Yale, he persuaded the millionaire banker Edward Harkness, who was a member of the board of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a friend of Henry Clay Frick and John Rockefeller, and a collector of Peruvian artefacts, to fund an expedition. In the summer of 1911 Bingham’s expedition set out and enjoyed a measure of good fortune, not unlike that of Arthur Evans at Knossos. In 1911 the Urumbamba Valley was being opened up anyway, due to the great Amazonian rubber boom. (Malaya had not yet replaced South America as the chief source of the world’s rubber.)43 Bingham assembled his crew at Cuzco, 350 miles southeast of Lima and the ancient centre of the Inca Empire. The mule train started out in July, down the new Urumbamba road. A few days out from Cuzco, Bingham’s luck struck. The mule train was camped between the new road and the Urumbamba River.44 The noise of the mules and the smell of cooking (or the other way around) attracted the attention of a certain Melchor Arteaga, who lived alone nearby in a run-down shack. Chatting to members of Bingham’s crew and learning what their aim was, Arteaga mentioned that there were some ruins on the top of a hill that lay across the river. He had been there ‘once before.’45 Daunted by the denseness of the jungle and the steepness of the canyon, no one felt inclined to check out Arteaga’s tip – no one, that is, except Bingham himself. Feeling it was his duty to follow all leads, he set out with Arteaga on the morning of 24 July, having persuaded one other person, a Peruvian sergeant named Carrasco, to accompany them.46 They crossed the roaring rapids of the Urumbamba using a makeshift bridge of logs linking the boulders. Bingham was so terrified that he crawled across on all fours. On the far side they found a path through the forest, but it was so steep at times that, again, they were forced to crawl. In this manner they climbed two thousand feet above the river, where they stopped for lunch. To Bingham’s surprise, he found they were not alone; up here there were two ‘Indians’ who had made themselves a farm. What was doubly surprising was that the farm was formed from a series of terraces – and the terraces were clearly very old.47 Finishing lunch, Bingham was of two minds. The terraces were interesting, but no more than that. An afternoon of yet more climbing was not an attractive proposition. On the other hand, he had come all this way, so he decided to go on. Before he had gone very far, he realised he had made the right decision. Just around the side of a hill, he came upon a magnificent flight of stone terraces – a hundred of them – rising for nearly a thousand feet up the hillside.48 As he took in the sight, he realised that the terraces had been roughly cleared, but beyond them the deep jungle resumed, and anything might be hidden there. Forgetting his tiredness, he swiftly scaled the terraces – and there, at the top, half hidden among the lush green trees and the spiky undergrowth, he saw ruin after ruin. With mounting excitement, he identified a holy cave and a three-sided temple made of granite ashlars – huge stones carved into smooth squares or rectangles, which fitted together with the precision and beauty of the best buildings in Cuzco. In Bingham’s own words, ‘We walked along a path to a clearing where the Indians had planted a small vegetable garden. Suddenly we found ourselves standing in front of the ruins of two of the finest and most interesting structures in ancient America. Made of beautiful white granite, the walls contained blocks of Cyclopean size, higher than a man. The sight held me spellbound…. Each building had only three walls and was entirely open on one side. The principal temple had walls 12 feet high which were lined with exquisitely made niches, five high up at each end, and seven on the back. There were seven courses of ashlars in the end walls. Under the seven rear niches was a rectangular block 14 feet long, possibly a sacrificial altar, but more probably a throne for the mummies of departed Incas, brought out to be worshipped. The building did not look as though it had ever had a roof. The top course of beautifully smooth ashlars was left uncovered so that the sun could be welcomed here by priests and mummies. I could scarcely believe my senses as I examined the larger blocks in the lower course and estimated that they must weigh from ten to fifteen tons each. Would anyone believe what I had found? Fortunately … I had a good camera and the sun was shining.’49
One of the temples he inspected on that first day contained three huge windows – much too large to serve any useful purpose. The windows jogged his memory, and he recalled an account, written in 1620, about how the first Inca, Manco the Great, had ordered ‘works to be executed at the place of his birth, consisting of a masonry wall with three windows.’ ‘Was that what I had found? If it was, then this was not the capital of the last Inca but the birthplace of the first. It did not occur to me that it might be both.’ On his very first attempt, Hiram Bingham had located Machu Picchu, what would become the most famous ruin in South America.50
Though Bingham returned in 1912 and 1915 to make further surveys and discoveries, it was Machu Picchu that claimed the world’s attention. The city that emerged from the careful excavations had a beauty that was all its own.51 This was partly because so many of the buildings were constructed from interlocking Inca masonry, and partly because the town was remarkably well preserved, intact to the roofline. Then there was the fact of the city’s unity – house groups surrounded by tidy agricultural terraces, and an integrated network of paths and stairways, hundreds of them. This made it easy for everyday life in Inca times to be imagined. The location of Machu Picchu was also extraordinary: after the jungle had been cleared, the remoteness on a narrow ridge surrounded by a hairpin canyon many feet below was even more apparent. An exquisite civilisation had been isolated in a savage jungle.52
Bingham was convinced that Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba. One reason he thought this was because he had discovered, beyond the city, no fewer than 135 skeletons, most of them female and many with skulls that had been trepanned, though none in the town itself. Bingham deduced that the trepanned skulls belonged to foreign warriors who had not been allowed inside what was clearly a holy city. (Not everyone agrees with this interpretation.) A second exciting and strange discovery added to this picture: a hollow tube was found which Bingham believed had been used for inhalation. He thought the tube had probably formed part of an elaborate religious ceremony and that the substance inhaled was probably a narcotic such as the yellow seed of the local huilca tree. By extension, therefore, this one tube could be used to explain the name Vilcabamba: plain (bamba) of Huilca. Bingham’s final argument for identifying the site as Vilcabamba was based on the sheer size of Machu Picchu. Its roughly one hundred houses made it the most important ruin in the area, and ancient Spanish sources had described Vilcabamba as the largest city in the province – therefore it seemed only common sensical that when Manco Inca sought refuge from Pizarro’s cavalry he would have fallen back to this well-defended place.53 These arguments seemed incontrovertible. Machu Picchu was duly identified as Vilcabamba, and for half a century the majority of archaeological and historical scholars accepted that the city was indeed the last refuge of Manco Inca, the site of his wife’s terrible torture and death.54
Bingham was later proved wrong. But at the time, his discoveries, like Boas’s and Morgan’s, acted as a careful corrective to the excesses of the race biologists who were determined to jump to the conclusion that, following Darwin, the races of the world could be grouped together on a simple evolutionary tree. The very strangeness of the Incas, the brilliance of their art and buildings, the fantastic achievement of their road network, stretching over 19,000 miles and superior in some ways to the European roads of the same period, showed the flaws in the glib certainties of race biology. For those willing to listen to the evidence in various fields, evolution was a much more complex process than the social Darwinists allowed.
There was no denying the fact that the idea of evolution was growing more popular, however, or that the work of Du Bois, Morgan, Boas, and Bingham did hang together in a general way, providing new evidence for the links between animals and man, and between various racial groups across the world. The fact that social Darwinism was itself so popular showed how powerful the idea of evolution was. Moreover, in 1914 it received a massive boost from an entirely new direction. Geology was beginning to offer a startling new understanding of how the world itself had evolved.
Alfred Wegener was a German meteorologist. His Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans) was not particularly original. His idea in the book that the six continents of the world had begun life as one supercontinent had been aired earlier by an American, F. B. Taylor, in 1908. But Wegener collected much more evidence, and more impressive evidence, to support this claim than anyone else had done before. He set out his ideas at a meeting of the German Geological Association at Frankfurt-am-Main in January 1912.55 In fact, with the benefit of hindsight one might ask why scientists had not reached Wegener’s conclusion sooner. By the end of the nineteenth century it was obvious that to make sense of the natural world, and its distribution around the globe, some sort of intellectual explanation was needed. The evidence of that distribution consisted mostly of fossils and the peculiar spread of related types of rocks. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had stimulated an interest in fossils because it was realised that if they could be dated, they could throw light on the development of life in bygone epochs and maybe even on the origin of life itself. At the same time, quite a lot was known about rocks and the way one type had separated from another as the earth had formed, condensing from a mass of gas to a liquid to a solid. The central problem lay in the spread of some types of rocks across the globe and their links to fossils. For example, there is a mountain range that runs from Norway to north Britain and that should cross in Ireland with other ridges that run through north Germany and southern Britain. In fact, it looked to Wegener as though the crossover actually occurs near the coast of north America, as if the two seaboards of the north Atlantic were once contiguous.56 Similarly, plant and animal fossils are spread about the earth in a way that can only be explained if there were once land connections between areas that are now widely separated by vast oceans.57 The phrase used by nineteenth-century scientists was ‘land bridges,’ convenient devices that were believed to stretch across the waters to link, for example, Africa to South America, or Europe to North America. But if these land bridges had never existed, where had they gone to? What had provided the energy by which the bridges had arisen and disappeared? What happened to the seawaters?
Wegener’s answer was bold. There were no land bridges, he said. Instead, the six continents as they now exist – Africa, Australia, North and South America, Eurasia, and Antarctica – were once one huge continent, one enormous land mass which he called Pangaea (from the Greek for all and earth). The continents had arrived at their present positions by ‘drifting,’ in effect floating like huge icebergs. His theory also explained midcontinent mountain ridges, formed by ancient colliding land masses.58 It was an idea that took some getting used to. How could entire continents ‘float’? And on what? And if the continents had moved, what enormous force had moved them? By Wegener’s time the earth’s essential structure was known. Geologists had used analysis of earthquake waves to deduce that the earth consisted of a crust, a mantle, an outer core, and an inner core. The first basic discovery was that all the continents of the earth are made of one form of rock, granite - or a granular igneous rock (formed under intense heat) – made up of feldspar and quartz. Around the granite continents may be found a different form of rock - basalt, much denser and harder. Basalt exists in two forms, solid and molten (we know this because lava from volcanic eruptions is semi-molten basalt). This suggests that the relation between the outer structures and the inner structures of the earth was clearly related to how the planet formed as a cooling mass of gas that became liquid and then solid.
The huge granite blocks that form the continents are believed to be about 50 kilometres (30 miles) thick, but below that, for about 3,000 kilometres (1,900 miles), the earth possesses the properties of an ‘elastic solid,’ or semi-molten basalt. And below that, to the centre of the earth (the radius of which is about 6,000 kilometres – nearly 4,000 miles), there is liquid iron.* Millions of years ago, of course, when the earth was much hotter than it is today, the basalt would have been less solid, and the overall situation of the continents would have resembled more closely the idea of icebergs floating in the oceans. On this view, the drifting of the continents becomes much more conceivable.
Wegener’s theory was tested when he and others began to work out how the actual land masses would have been pieced together. The continents do not of course consist only of the land that we see above sea level at the present time. Sea levels have risen and fallen throughout geological time, as ice ages have lowered the water table and warmer times raised them, so that the continental shelves - those areas of land currently below water but relatively shallow, before the contours fall off sharply by thousands of feet - are just as likely to make the ‘fit.’ Various unusual geological features fall into place when this massive jigsaw is pieced together. For example, deposits from glaciation of permocarboniferous age (i.e., ancient forests, which were formed 200 million years ago and are now coalfields) exist in identical forms on the west coast of South Africa and the east coast of Argentina and Uruguay. Areas of similar Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks (roughly 100—200 million years old) exist around Niger in West Africa and around Recife in Brazil, exactly opposite, across the South Atlantic. And a geosyncline (a depression in the earth’s surface) that extends across southern Africa also strikes through mid-Argentina, aligning neatly. Finally, there is the distribution of the distinctive Glossopteris flora, similar fossils of which exist in both South Africa and other faraway southern continents, like South America and Antarctica. Wind is unlikely to account for this dispersal, since the seeds of Glossopteris were far too bulky to have been spread in that way. Here too, only continental drift can account for the existence of this plant in widely separated places.
How long was Pangaea in existence, and when and why did the breakup occur? What kept it going? These are the final questions in what is surely one of the most breathtaking ideas of the century. (It took some time to catch on: in 1939, geology textbooks were still treating continental drift as ‘a hypothesis only.’ Also see chapter 31, below.)59
The theory of continental drift coincided with the other major advance made in geology in the early years of the century. This related to the age of the earth. In 1650, James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, using the genealogies given in the Bible, had calculated that the earth was created at 9:00 A.M. on 26 October 4004B.C.* It became clear in the following centuries, using fossil evidence, that the earth must be at least 300 million years old; later it was put at 500 million. In the late nineteenth century William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), using ideas about the earth’s cooling, proposed that the crust formed between 20 million and 98 million years ago. All such calculations were overtaken by the discovery of radioactivity and radioactive decay. In 1907 Bertram Boltwood realised that he could calculate the age of rocks by measuring the relative constituents of uranium and lead, which is the final decay product, and relating it to the half-life of uranium. The oldest substances on earth, to date, are some zircon crystals from Australia dated in 1983 to 4.2 billion years old; the current best estimate of the age of the earth is 4.5 billion years.60
The age of the oceans has also been calculated. Geologists have taken as their starting point the assumption that the world’s oceans initially consisted entirely of fresh water, but gradually accumulated salts washed off the continents by the world’s rivers. By calculating how much salt is deposited in the oceans each year, and dividing that into the overall salinity of the world’s body of seawater, a figure for the time such salination has taken can be deduced. The best answer at the moment is between 100 and 200 million years.61
In trying to set biology to one side in his understanding of the Negro position in the United States, Du Bois grasped immediately what some people took decades to learn: that change for the Negro could only come through political action that would earn for a black skin the same privileges as a white one. He nevertheless underestimated (and he was not alone) the ways in which different forms of knowledge would throw up results that, if not actually haphazard, were not entirely linear either, and which from the start began to flesh out Darwin’s theory of evolution. Throughout the twentieth century, the idea of evolution would have a scientific life and a popular life, and the two were not always identical. What people thought about evolution was as important as what evolution really was. This difference was especially important in the United States, with its unique ethnic/biological/social mix, a nation of immigrants so different from almost every other country in the world. The role of genes in history, the brainpower of the different races, as evolved, would never go away as the decades passed.
The slow pace of evolution, operating over geological time, and typified by the new realisation of the great age of the earth, contributed to the idea that human nature, like fossils, was set in stone. The predominantly unvarying nature of genes added to that sense of continuity, and the discovery of sophisticated civilisations that had once been important but had collapsed encouraged the idea that earlier peoples, however colourful and inventive, had not become extinct without deserving to. And so, while physics undermined conventional notions of reality, the biological sciences, including archaeology, anthropology, and geology, all started to come together, even more so in the popular mind than in the specialist scientific mind. The ideas of linear evolution and of racial differences went together. It was to prove a catastrophic conjunction.