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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [39], (1) Lines: 0 to 47 ——— 13.97739p ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: Eject [39], (1) chapter 2 The Search for Boas’s Successor The lengthy process of replacement of the aging Franz Boas in the Columbia University department of anthropology was significant in Ruth Benedict’s career as well as in anthropological history. The history of these deliberations during the 1930s has been recounted in the biographies of Benedict and in studies of the Columbia anthropology department (see especially Caffrey 1989; Goldfrank 1978; Linton and Wagley 1971; MacMillan 1986; Modell 1983; Silverman 1981). Benedict commented on the episode in her letters to Margaret Mead while Mead was doing fieldwork during these years, letters that were still closed to researchers at the time of the previous studies, and they add information about her own role in the search for a successor that differs from previous reports and add her interpretation of several aspects of the process. Franz Boas had been appointed to Columbia in 1896 as a lecturer nine years after he had immigrated to the United States with a doctorate in physics and fieldwork in geography and ethnology, nine years in search of support for his innovative ideas and a position from which to project them. When he was appointed lecturer in anthropology at Columbia, the university, like all other American universities, had no anthropology department. Lecturers in anthropology at Columbia were supervised by a committee chaired by James McKean Cattell, an experimental psychologist. Cattell and Boas in the same years sat on a committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where they were also in a position to further academic anthropology . A department of anthropology was established at Columbia in 1899, placed in the Faculty of Philosophy where psychology also was situated, and Boas was appointed professor. Two part-time lecturers continued teaching anthropology in the new department; Boas named one of his own students, Clark Wissler, a lecturer beginning in 1905 (Darnell 1998a:158, 246). Boas’s position was a joint appointment with the American Museum of Natural History (amnh), where he was made assistant curator the same year he began teaching at Columbia. Boas wanted to make use of the collections of the 39 The Search for Boas’s Successor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [40], (2) Lines: 47 to ——— 9.39995p ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [40], (2) museum and its sponsorship of research in the training of anthropologists. He also wanted to bring the classification of ethnological collections in line with changing concepts in the discipline; however,the president of the amnh, Morris K. Jessup, along with other anthropological museum directors of the period, stressed their mission to make exhibits understandable to the public. Boas had written in an exchange of letters in Science in 1887 with Otis T. Mason , curator of ethnology at the National Museum in Washington dc, that the way the museum grouped and labeled specimens imposed unscientific classification (Darnell 1998a:141; Stocking 1968:155). Boas resigned from the amnh in 1905 over this issue and other differences, but he continued to depend on the museum and the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington dc,for support of field research and publication for himself and his students. The president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, who held that post from 1902 until 1945, that is, until after Boas’s retirement, was supportive of Boas in the early years but became less so with the approach of World War I. Boas had been brought up in a liberal and enlightened German Jewish intellectual environment. He was outspoken as a pacifist as well as a critic of several influential scientists. He compounded anti-Semitic prejudice against himself by writing, in a letter to the New York Times, a protest to the anti-German furor that was whipped up during World War I and, in the same letter, criticizing the imperialism of the United States at the time of the Spanish-American War (Boas 1916, in Stocking ed. 1974:331). Butler...

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