The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism

Chapter 4. Anthropology Days, the Construction of Whiteness, and American Imperialism in the Philippines

189 Inquiries into the nature of “race” and “difference” began with early European characterizations of Native Americans as “Indians,” children of nature who possessed the conflicting qualities of stoicism, courage, cruelty, cunning, and ignorance. Debate ensued over the nature and origin of difference with monogenists assuming a common descent for humankind and one human species. Polygenists proposed multiple lines of descent and the development of separate human species. Some believed blacks to be subhuman, and they were stereotyped as such in grotesque cartoons and minstrel shows. In the early nineteenth century, American scholars embarked on linguistic studies of Native American tribes to determine the course of divergence. By 1842 they founded the American Ethnological Society.1 Scientific rationalizations for the construction of difference began soon after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, an influential treatise that sparked evolutionary theory. Lewis Henry Morgan, an early American anthropologist, suggested three evolutionary stages with concomitant moral characteristics. He claimed that “primitive” societies were also promiscuous ones; while “barbarians” moved toward the “civilized” stage characterized by monogamy. Morgan advocated selective breeding between whites and Native Americans to improve the stock of the latter. The scientific revolution of the nineteenth century Chapter 4. Anthropology Days, the Construction of Whiteness, and American Imperialism in the Philippines gerald r. gems gems 190 thus assumed racial, social, and religious qualities that soon drifted into pseudoscience that purported to rationalize human differences. In the first half of the nineteenth century, phrenologists, such as Samuel G. Morton, studied the bumps and protrusions of the skull to determine mental capacity and levels of intelligence, and physiognomists analyzed facial features to ascertain one’s character. Stereotypes became rationalized, justified, and entrenched. While the phrenologists and polygenists lost credibility by midcentury , Morgan assumed the presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1879, the first anthropologist to hold the esteemed position. Thereafter, cultural anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, contended with the evolutionists in an ongoing debate over the nature of the human species.2 The Concept of Whiteness Over the last two decades anthropologists and historians have asserted the concept of whiteness as a social and historical construct. Whiteness meant more than skin color. It included the adherence to a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (wasp) middle-class value system, with its particular tenets of morality, discipline, and work ethic. The attainment of whiteness accorded an ethnic group particular rights and privileges as well as social respect. Nonwhites who failed to obtain the necessary standards faced ostracism and ridicule. Marked by their “difference,” such groups became “Others,” situated at lower positions on the hierarchical racial ladder. Religious differences also fostered suspicions and distrust as Catholics and Jews brought alternative rituals and practices, and a seeming loyalty to a countervailing theocracy. Nativists assumed that Catholics’ greatest allegiance lay with the pope, and therefore, they could never adhere to the American constitutional proviso of the separation of church and state. While German Jews readily assimilated, but did not gain full acceptance in the mainstream culture, their eastern European, Orthodox brethren faced greater hurdles in American society. Yiddish culture subjected all Jews to the wasp gaze of Anthropology Days and American Imperialism in the Philippines 191 difference. A New York Times report of 1893 described Jewish neighborhoods as “perhaps the filthiest place on the western continent. It is impossible for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or the dirt and stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be.”3 Eugenicist Madison Grant further emphasized the racial connotations in 1916 when he declared that “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew,” and a clear pollution of the white gene pool.4 Blacks, originally imported as slaves, occupied the lowest rung of the social order. A Supreme Court case of 1857 had determined that “Negroes (were) beings of an inferior order with no rights which any white man was bound to respect.”5 But in the South, where slave bodies had greater monetary value, Irish laborers undertook the most grueling tasks. As late as 1874 an African American doctor described the Irish in derogatory terms. These people are remarkable for open, projecting mouths...