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2. The Attack of Pseudoscientific Racism
- University of Nebraska Press
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27 chapter two The Attack on Pseudoscientific Racism I think the whole concept of race isn’t worth the price of admission.— Melville J. Herskovits in the Chicago Daily News, December 1944 I n the aftermath of World War I the Boasian attack on racial hierarchy and the emphasis on an environmental and cultural view of human development sparked a counterattack by biological determinists . Moreover, the rising tide of nativist sentiment provided support for promoters of racial hierarchy.∞ Biological determinists denounced cultural anthropologists like the Boasians for neglecting ‘‘the biological aspect of anthropology and specifically the problem of the di√erential racial makeup of the contemporary American population.’’≤ Many scientists questioned anthropology’s status as a science, as some anthropologists began to move away from biological studies of humans and reject the value of a biological race concept. Therefore the biological determinists sought to revive physical anthropology by supporting a renewed emphasis on it and its analysis of racially determined human characteristics .≥ This debate would provide the opportunity for Herskovits to conduct research into the physical anthropology of African Americans. The conflict between racialists and culturalists was played out in the National Research Council (nrc), formed in 1916 to coordinate scienti fic research in the interest of American military preparedness and national defense and principally backed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Rockefeller Foundation. Following World War I the first major institutional attempt to study race was made by the nrc’s Committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migrations (csphm), formed in 1922 to finance anthropometric studies of race di√erences that The Attack on Pseudoscientific Racism 28 would promote immigration restriction. Robert M. Yerkes, the Yale psychologist in charge of the army’s World War I intelligence tests, and Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History, dominated this committee. Both Yerkes and Wissler were members of the Galton Society, an exclusively white Protestant organization formed by the eugenicist anthropologist Charles B. Davenport and the racist author Madison Grant.∂ The csphm generally supported studies that investigated biological and not environmental influences and thereby succeeded in postponing the ascendance of the cultural school of anthropology.∑ During the early 1920s biological determinists, led by members of the Galton Society, and environmental determinists, led by Boas, competed to dictate the direction of anthropological studies. Until the mid-1920s the biological determinists exercised the major influence in anthropology . After that, cultural anthropologists were in the ascendant but faced significant resistance from eugenicists and bio-anthropologists who relied on ‘‘simplistic Mendelianism and biometrics.’’∏ In this atmosphere dominated by nativists, eugenicists, and racists, foundation support—mediated by the nrc—for cultural anthropology dried up, while studies in archaeology and physical anthropology were readily funded. Consequently, such prominent cultural anthropologists as Ralph Linton, Fred Eggan, and Herskovits began their careers in other fields—Linton and Eggan with studies in archaeology and Herskovits in physical anthropology.π Boas responded to the eugenicists’ move against cultural anthropology by using the nrc programs to buttress his own interpretive position . He encouraged his students to participate in ‘‘a coordinated attack on the problem of the cultural factor in racial di√erences’’ and helped three of them—Margaret Mead, Otto Klineberg, and Herskovits—gain funding from the nrc’s Fellowship Program in the Biological Sciences, established in 1923.∫ Mead’s study of adolescents in Samoa, Klineberg’s study of African American migrants’ tested intelligence, and Herskovits’s anthropometric study of African Americans all helped undermine previously held assumptions about race. Mead and Klineberg demonstrated that adolescence and intelligence were strongly influenced by environment and culture, not race, and Herskovits revealed the inadequacy of the very concept of race when discussing Americans of African descent.Ω These studies—generated in part by the traditionalists’ attack on cultural [3.87.209.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:53 GMT) The Attack on Pseudoscientific Racism 29 anthropology—helped to strengthen the ‘‘cultural interpretation of mental di√erences’’ and undermine the racial interpretation.∞≠ In April 1923, while putting the finishing touches on his dissertation, Herskovits submitted a fellowship application to the nrc on the problem of physical and psychological variability within a racially mixed population .∞∞ In applying for a grant to do an anthropometry study, Herskovits deviated from his dissertation’s focus on East African cultural anthropology. In fact, Herskovits never even took an anthropometry class at Columbia.∞≤ So his decision to pursue physical anthropology and study racial mixing was clearly in...