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

by Robert Wald Sussman

Through these writings, there was a popular belief in France that three racial strains inhabited the country: Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans. The light-skinned, tall, blond Nordics were assumed to be the descendants of ancient Germanic tribes, the originators of all civilization, and the only peoples capable of leadership. Gobineau’s Essai expressed these popular myths vividly and inserted these views into the popular science of the day.

In 1876, he met German musician Richard Wagner (1813–1883), who was impressed by his work, as was Friedrich Nietzsche (1812–1883) (Engs 2005). In fact, Wagner and Gobineau became close friends and Wagner used Gobineau’s theories of racial inequality, anti-Semitism, and Aryan superiority as scientific backing for his own racial theories of culture. Wagner “set the foundations, between 1848 and 1850, of the anti-semitic apocalypse.

Just before the turn of the twentieth century, many of Gobineau’s (and Kant’s) views were introduced to German readers by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) in his Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) (first written in German in 1899, translated into English in 1910). Chamberlain was the son-in-law of the German composer Richard Wagner (Montagu 1997; Smedley 1999). The anti-Semitic, racist Wagner had brought Gobineau’s views to the German public (Stein 1950).

Chamberlain was highly influenced by Immanuel Kant and wrote two volumes on Kant’s work (Chamberlain [1905] 1914). Like Kant, Chamberlain was a virulent anti-Semite, claiming that Jews had an inherent morally defective character.

His anti-Semitism became a core of Nazi racial philosophy (Oakesmith 1919, Montagu 1997). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Pan-German League, a movement of radical German elitists, joined the Gobineau Society in using the popularity of Chamberlain and Gobineau to disseminate Aryan racial theories and popularize nationalist versions of racial anthropology.

Though he was not himself a Social Darwinist (see Weinstein 2012), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) is often thought of as the source of this ideology. Spencer was a social philosopher who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in 1864 after reading The Origin of Species: “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection,’ or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life” (Spencer 1864, 444).

Eugenics, both the term and the movement behind it, was the brainchild of Francis Galton (1822–1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin’s; the two shared a common grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Like Darwin, Galton was born into a wealthy family. The Galtons were highly successful gun manufacturers and bankers. Francis had entered medical school, but upon his father’s death, he inherited enough wealth to travel and to dabble in his scientific interests without having to earn a living (Brace 2005).

In his lifetime, he made contributions in geography, meteorology, biology, psychology, criminology, and statistics. He also was an explorer and inventor. He was knighted in 1909. Some saw him as a genius and a prolific scientist and believed he had been a child prodigy (a belief Galton shared). Others, however, saw him as an egocentric snob (Brace 2005), a mediocre intellect, a sham and a villain (Graves 2001), and a spiritual fascist (Medawar 1975; Bulmer 2003).

Darwin ([1871] 1874, 130) had written in The Descent of Man: “We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.… Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”

However, Darwin believed that any hopes of changing these practices were unlikely and utopian and would not be possible until the laws of inheritance were thoroughly known (Paul 1995).

Galton, on the other hand, believed that controlled breeding of humans was not only doable but a highly desirable goal. He spent his professional career, from the 1870s until his death in 1911, investigating and writing about the potential and possibilities of eugenics. Galton did not lim...

He believed that the average “negro” intellectual standard was two grades below that of extant “Anglo-Saxons,” and he saw the intellectual standard of the latter as two grades below ...

These views of the Mendelian inheritance of behavioral characteristics and intelligence were used to discriminate among individuals and ethnic and racial groups; environmental solutions were left out of the picture.

In 1907, President Woodrow Wilson, who supported the eugenics effort, helped Indiana adopt legislation making sterilization of certain “undesirable” individuals compulsory. More than thirty states adopted such laws.

Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws prohibiting anyone who was “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from marrying. Charles B. Davenport, the biologist who influenced Goddard, received his PhD at Harvard in 1892 and then taught at Harvard (1891–1899) and the University of Chicago (1899–1904).

He also served as director of the summer school of the Biological Laboratory of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, from 1898 to 1923 (Riddle 1947). Davenport bec...

The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) opened there in 1910, after Davenport had convinced Mrs. Mary W. Harriman (the widow of E. H. Harriman who had recently inherited her husband’s Union Pacific Railroad fortune) of the need for such an office and had gained ample funding from her for its establishment and operation. Davenport was the director and he appointed Harry H. Laughlin (1880–1943) as superintendent.

Harriman was among the single largest individual donors to U.S. eugenics causes. She donated seventy-five acres adjacent to the experimental evolution station for the ERO (Engs 2005).

After 1916, the ERO was funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Allen 1986, 2011). Michael Barker (2010) has characterized the board of trustees of Carnegie Corporation as dedicated to the umbrella organization that oversaw Andrew Carnegie’s various philanthro...

permanent improvement of the race can only be brought about by breeding the best.… We have in this country the grave problem of the negro, a race whose mental development is, on the average, far below the average of the Caucasian.… May we hope at last that the negro mind shall be as teachable, as elastic, as original, and as fruitful as the Caucasians? Or must future generations, indefinitely, start from the same low plane and yield the same meager results? Prevailing opinion says we must face the latter alternative. If this were so, it would be best to export the black race at once. (Davenport to Billings 1903, quoted in Black 2003, 38)

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).

It is interesting to note also that in 1912, the current, former, and future U.S. presidents William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson were active supporters of the eugenics movement.

Early the next year, Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter dated January 3, 1913, wrote: My dear Mr. Davenport: I am greatly interested in the two memoirs you have sent me. They are very instructive, and, from the standpoint of our country, very ominous. You say that these people are not themselves responsible, that it is “society” that is responsible. I agree with you if you mean, as I suppose you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stocks, physically and morally.… Some day we will realize that the prime duty[,] the inescapable duty[,] of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.

By 1912, Davenport’s textbook Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911) and a few others such as those of Nott and Glidden and Gobineau had become widely used in biology, psychology, and social science departments in American and European universities. Eugenics courses appeared in both the most prestigious and the smallest universities in the United States and in high schools. Black (2003, 75) states that “eugenics rocketed through academia, becoming an institution virtually overnight.” By 1914, some forty-four colleges and universities offered eugenics instruction. By 1928, that number had grown to 376, reaching some 20,000 students annually (Cravens 1978). Eugenics became a top-down model of “education reform” for these educators (Stoskepf 1999). A more recent analysis of forty-one high school biology textbooks used through the 1940s revealed that nearly 90 percent of them had sections on eugenics (Selden 1999).

goals of the eugenics movement were: (1) the promotion of selective breeding; (2) the sterilization and castration of the “unfit”; (3) the use of intelligence testing to identify mentally deficient individuals and to identify differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups (dubbed racial psychology); and (4) limiting the immigration of various ethnic and racial groups (Degler 1991). In the following years, they vigorously pursued this agenda.

The ECUSA then began to solicit general membership, and by 1924 there were 1,200 members. Funds also were being raised from major donors such as George Eastman and John D. Rockefeller Jr. using the argument that eugenics would decrease the need for charities (Spiro 2009).

Selective Breeding Apart from migration, there is only one way to get socially desirable traits into our social life, and that is by reproduction: there is only one way to get them out, by preventing their reproduction by breeding. (Davenport and Laughlin 1915, 4)

In his original conception of eugenics, Galton developed the basic views of selective breeding for this movement. As mentioned in chapter 2, the strategy included both “positive eugenics,” in which the fittest members of society would be encouraged to have more children, and “negative eugenics,” which discouraged or disallowed the propagation of the unfit.

Restriction of marriages between certain types of individuals began even before the eugenics movement and before Darwinism an...

With Darwin’s theories, Mendelian genetics and Weismann’s experiments, eugenicists had modern science to justify such marriage restrictions and push for their expansion.

In 1919, distinguished geneticists Edward M. East and Donald F. Jones, like Davenport, believed that admixture of an inferior stock with a superior one led to a lowering of the superior stock (Farber 2011). Reverting to the philosophy of Hume and Kant, they wrote (East and Jones 1919, 253): “In reality the Negro is inferior to the white. This is not hypothesis or supposition; it is a crude statement of actual fact.

The Negro has given to the world no original contribution of high merit. By his own initiative in his original habitat, he has never risen.… In competition with the white race, he has failed to approach its standard.”

The anti-miscegenation law of Virginia is an excellent example of this racist motivation. As a prelude to the law, in 1916, Alexander Graham Bell, an avid eugenicist and chairman of ERO’s board of scientific advisors, suggested that the United States Bureau of the Census begin assisting the ERO in its efforts to collect data on family lineages by adding father’s and mother’s names to individual records.

In 1925, the American Journal of Public Health considered the Virginia law “the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the most important eugenical effort that has been made in the past 4,000 years” (quoted in Black 2003, 174).

Sterilization of the “Unfit” Sterilization of those deemed unfit, either physically, mentally, socially, or racially, was one of the major weapons of eugenics in their “war against the weak” (Black 2003).

Even before 1900, sterilization was used as a means of controlling crime. The first recommendation for sterilization was made at the Cincinnati Sanitarium in 1887 as a punishment and as a way of controlling criminal proclivities (Degler 1991).

However, because eugenicists saw crime as one of those unitary genetic characteristics that defined the unfit, it soon became obvious that sterilization was also justified as a general practice to prevent the propagation of unfit individuals, family lineages, ethnic groups, and races. Furthermore, it was generally believed that the feeble-minded and other unfit individuals would breed with no regar...

The New Jersey law was signed by eugenics enthusiast Woodrow Wilson, who was governor at the time.

Other sterilization laws were passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia (1933), Norway (1934), Sweden (1934), Finland (1935), Estonia (1936), and Iceland (1938), and Denmark made its voluntary program compulsory in 1934.

These laws corresponded with deteriorating economic conditions worldwide (Paul 1995). The German law was based, essentially word for word, on Laughlin’s model sterilization law (Brace 2005). By the end of World War II in 1945, Germany had sterilized approximately two million people without their consent (Chase 1977).

By the end of World War II, the Nazis had exterminated over six million people.

Grant approved of slavery and echoed the segregation policies of the American South and the earlier views of Nott and Shaler: “As long as the dominant imposes its will on the servient race and as long as they remain in the same relation to the whites as in the past, the Negroes will be a valuable element in the community but once raised to social equality their influence will be destructive to themselves and to the whites. If the purity of the two races is to be maintained they cannot continue to live side by side and this is a problem from which there can be no escape” (Grant 1918, 87–88).

Grant’s views were simple: recent immigrants into the United States from southern and eastern Europe, especially Poles, Italians, and Jews, were decidedly inferior, physically, mentally, and morally to those who had entered the country in earlier times. Those earlier immigrants, the Nordics, were now on the verge of being outnumbered by the massive influx of these inferior types (Degler 1991).

In addition, it was necessary to segregate African Americans and Native Americans from the white population to prevent mongrelization and degradation. Unlike Gobineau, however, Grant did not have an entirely pessimistic view of the future. He offered instead the rational, efficient, and “scientific” remedy of eugenics and anticipated the rise of fascism, the fall of democracy, and the return of power to the patricians.

addition, he foresaw a program of birth control that could reduce the number of offspring of the undesirable classes. Anti-miscegenation laws and segregation of the races would reduce the possibility of mongrelization and protect the purity of the Nordic race, and sterilization on a massive ...

When one reads Grant’s (1918, 47) assessment of eugenics, it is no wonder that Hitler saw Passing of the Great Race as his bible: “This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution to the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which...

Spiro (2009) sees Grant as combining seven disciplines (wildlife management, anthropology, paleontology, the study of race suicide, Aryanism, eugenics, and genetics)...

Scientific racism involves three basic axioms: (1) The human species is divided into distinct, hierarchical subspecies and/or races, with the Nordic race at the top of the hierarchy; (2) intellectual, moral, temperamental, and cultural traits of each race are immutable and correlated to, and inherited with, immutable physical traits, and the genes for these traits are unaffected by the environment; (3) the mixture of races always results in reversion to ...

The average mental age of white American adults as indicated by these tests was just above thirteen, a score just above the mental age limit that intelligence testers had been using for years to define feeble-mindedness. In fact, according to the logic of the test, 47 percent of the whites who were tested would be considered morons, as would 89 percent of African Americans. The scores of European immigrants could be graded by their country of origin. The average mental age of immigrants from many countries was in the moron range, and darker peoples from southern Europe and Slavs from Eastern Europe were less intelligent than the more fair-skinned people from Western and northern Europe. The average mental age of Russian immigrants was 11.34, for Italians it was 11.01, and for Poles it was 10.74. Blacks were at the bottom of the scale with an average mental age of 10.41 (Gould 1996; Zenderland 1998).

Brigham reported that test results showed that more recent immigrants were less intelligent than earlier ones. This could have been interpreted as related to the fact that earlier immigrants had become more familiar with the English language and American culture, but instead, it was linked to the idea that more recent immigrants were drawn more and more from less competent and “degenerate” segments of the European population (Brigham 1923; Brace 2005).