Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority (review)

62CIVIL WAR HISTORY For those historians who are concerned about the usable past Lannie's work enhances the understanding of an important dimension of current reality. Although sometimes afflicted by the frequent use of lengthy quotations and by a propensity toward too much detail, here is a relevant book free from bias or polemic. Walter G. Sharrow Canisius College Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority. By John S. Haller, Jr. (University of Illinois Press, 1971. Pp. xii, 228. $7.50.) This work fills a major gap in the history of scientific attitudes toward race in the United States. The rather depressing story of how science gave credence to popular beliefs in white superiority and non-white inferiority was carried up to the Age of Darwin by William Stanton, then picked up again in 1900 by I. A. Newby. Now John Haller has dealt with the critical intervening period between the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and the rediscovery of Mendel's law of heredity in 1900. Haller's study is thorough and detailed. We learn how anthropologists , physicians, evolutionary philosophers, and sociologists all contributed to the intellectual assault on non-white humanity. Especially valuable is his exposition of the complex subject of anthropometry and his discussion of the importance of the physical measurements of racial types in the Union army taken by representatives of the United States Sanitary Commission during the war. He shows that the Sanitary Commission 's measurements and comparisons become a prime source for racist anthropologists of the post-Civil War era. [See Civil War History , Dec., 1970. Ed.] Although Outcasts from Evolution is a useful addition to the literature , it is not as good a book as one might have hoped for. It is written in a somewhat awkward and difficult style and will be heavy sledding for a reader unfamiliar with the jargon of nineteenth-century physical anthropology . The author, for example, often fails to go much beyond direct quotation in his explanation of technical concepts. The organization is topical and somewhat arbitrary: each chapter is a self-contained unit, and there is only the slightest trace of a larger argument progressively developed from chapter to chapter. The book is bound to suffer by comparison with William Stanton's The Leopard Spots, dealing with the same subject during the preceding era. Stanton, unlike Haller, makes science and scientists come to life through elegant writing, biographical detail, the use of graphic anecdotes, and a partially chronological pattern of organization that serves as the vehicle for a sustained and cumulative historical argument. In one respect, however, Haller may have relied too heavily on Stanton. He accepts uncritically the latter's conclusion that antebellum scientific racism had no influence on the proslavery and secessionist arguments. A survey of the political speeches and writ- BOOK REVIEWS63 ings of the antebellum South actually reveals a considerable willingness to make use of some aspects of the "scientific" case for black inferiority. Another minor lapse is revealed in Haller's reference to David Croley's Civil War pamphlet, Miscegenation. He seems unaware that the pamphlet was not a serious contribution to the discussion of racial mixture but rather a clever hoax designed to discredit the Radical Republicans. A more serious failing results from Haller's tendency to blur distinctions between what might be called the "hard" and "soft" varieties of racist thought. In his discussion of the views of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the Harvard geologist and scientific publicist, we are told first of Shaler's belief that blacks could and should be uplifted to citizenship by a slow and careful process of education (p. 175). Haller concludes the section on Shaler, however, by lumping him with those who believed that "the so-called 'inferior races' and 'stocks' remained outcasts from the evolutionary struggle, restricted from participation because of innate racial characteristics that were unresponsive to environmental influences." (p. 187) Either Shaler was inconsistent and ambivalent or Haller has tried to force his views into the strait jacket of "hard" racism, with its prediction of black extinction, when in fact Shaler belonged to the comparatively optimistic, paternalistic school. In general, Haller has made racist opinion of the...