The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea

by Robert Wald Sussman

Ultimately, approximately 400 delegates and speakers attended the congress from America, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Japan. These included some of the most respected, financially powerful, well-known, and influential politicians, academics, university administrators, and scientists of Europe and America. Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, who was president of the Eugenics Society of London from 1891 to 1928, was appointed president of the meeting. Winston Churchill represented the king. Members of the ABA Committee on Eugenics, including David Starr Jordan, Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, and Bleecker Van Wagenen, the secretary of that committee, were vice-presidents, as was Alfred Proetz, the founder of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, Germany’s leading race theorist of the time, and the “founder of eugenics as a science in Germany” (Black 2003, 262).