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

by Robert Wald Sussman

Ford disliked the British, and as World War II approached, he refused to provide aircraft engines to Britain. He continued to sell engines and vehicles to the Nazis, however, until 1941. He opposed the U.S. entry into the war. Hitler boasted of Ford’s support and had a large photograph of Ford on his office wall (Brace 2005). He awarded Ford by presenting him with the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle on Ford’s seventy-fift...

Other U.S. industrialists who were decorated by Hitler included Thomas Watson of IBM and James D. Mooney of General Motors. Watson’s punch card technology had enabled Hitler to establish his rearmament program and to carry out his identification and attempted elimination of Jews. Watson had supported Nazi Germany against his anti-Nazi countrymen in the United States, had made it possible for Hitler to conduct commercial interactions despite international boycotts, and had...

Mooney was an avid Nazi supporter, and General Motors provided moral and financial support to Hitler. It also provided trucks, armored cars, tanks, jet fighter planes, and other war equipment to the Nazis well into the ...

All of these received American funding, especially from the Rockefeller Foundation (Higham 1983; Black 2003).

In an attempt to save German science and medicine, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to fund German government research institutions.

Beginning in 1922, the foundation awarded hundreds of fellowships to German scientists and institutions. Since U.S. and German relations were still uneasy at that time, most of these were administered through the foundation’s Paris office (Weindling 1989). By 1926, the foundation had given the equivalent of $4 million to German research. Even some German scientists were complaining about the Rockefeller Foundation’s control over German science (Weindling 1988).

For example, Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil of New Jersey shipped fuel to Nazi Germany through neutral Switzerland after the United States had entered the war.

Rockefeller-owned Chase Bank was doing millions of dollars of business in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor, with the full knowledge of its Manhattan office (Higham 1983).

International Business Machines (IBM) began contributing to Davenports’ eugenics research during his research on ...

By 1933, IBM had adapted the technology used in the Jamaica study for general use by Hitler’s Reich, and in 1934 IBM opened a million-dollar factory in Berlin. At the factory opening, the manager of the German subsidiary, Willi Heidinger, standing next to a representative of T. J. Watson, the president of IBM, “emotionally declared that population statistics were key to eradicating the unhealthy, inferior segments of German society” (Black 2003, 309).

IBM custom-designed the systems that created national identification card files for people designated as unfit and helped locate European Jews and other “undesirables.” The punch card programs enabled the Nazis to trace family trees, index bank accounts and other property, organize eugenic campaigns, and even manage extermination in death camps (Black 2001).

“With IBM as a partner, the Hitler regime was able to substantially automate and accelerate all six phases of the 12-year Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination.… There was an IBM customer site in every concentration camp.” Indeed, IBM data processing became the key to Nazi persecution of “unfit” people and “races.” And it should not be forgotten that IBM generated massive profits as it took over the organization and systematization of the Nazi eugenics programs.

IBM New York understood from the beginning in 1933 “that it was courting and doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi Party.

The company leveraged its Nazi Party connections to continuously enhance its business relationship with Hitler’s Reich, in Germany and throughout Nazi-dominated Europe” (Black 2001, 9). IBM’s U.S. top officials were aware of what was happening during the twelve-year reign of the Third Rei...

The company owner, Thomas Watson, was a highly decorated businessman in the United States and was a financial supporter and clos...

However, his business interests in Nazi Germany were becoming extremely profitable, and he was very sympathetic to the Nazi racist goals. He was a staunch supporter of both Mussolini and Hitler, and although he was not particularly driven by fascism, he recognized its profitability. As Black (2001, 69) has stated: “Thomas Watson and IBM had separately and jointly spent decades making money any way they could.… To a supranational, maki...

eugenicists, we know that some of them, such as Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and some of the IBM executives, were.

In fact, Henry Ford merged his German assets with the IG Farben chemical cartel in Germany (Sutton 1976). IG Farben had business contracts with companies around the world, including Standard Oil, DuPont, Alcoa, Bayer, and Dow Chemical.

Higham (1983) labeled this interconnected group of international corporate giants The Fraternity. These included First National Bank (affiliated with J. P. Morgan), National City Bank, and Rockefeller’s Chase National Bank, as mentioned above. These banks had connections with Hitler’s Reichsbank and the Bank for International Settlements of Switzerland. For example, in 1944, T. H. McKittrick, the American president of the bank, held an annual meeting of bankers from Germany, Japan, Italy, Britain, and America to discuss millions of dollars’ worth of gold that had been sent to the bank by the Nazi government for use by Nazi leaders during and after the war.

McKittrick, a Nazi supporter, was enamored of both Hitler and Mussolini and, interestingly, like many of the eugenicists of the t...

The gold had been looted from European national banks after German takeovers or was Reichsbank gold that had been melted down from teeth fillings, eyeglass frames, cigarette cases and lighters, and wedding ri...

J. P. Morgan and Union Bank of New York were owned by Brown Brothers and the Harriman family. Union Bank was intimately linked to the German industrial empire of steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, who had helped Hitler rise to power.

The bank was managed by Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of the two Bush presidents. Prescott Bush was a strong supporter of Hitler, funneled money to him through Thyssen, and made considerable profits in dealings with Nazi Germany (Pauwels 2003).

The Fraternity also included Standard Oil, Davis Oil Company, Texas Company (Texaco), Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Chrysler.

Other well-known American companies with strong interconnections with Nazi Germany were DuPont, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, General Electric, Gillette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, and Coca Cola (Pauwels 2003).

Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy.

Stocking (1968, 232–233) summarizes the importance of Boas’s use of culture: Focusing only on those aspects of the change having specifically to do with the culture idea, one might say that it involved the rejection of simplistic models of biological and racial determinism, the rejection of ethnocentric standards of cultural evaluation, and a new appreciation of the role of unconscious social processes in the determination of human behavior. It implied a conception of man not as a rational so much as a rationalizing being.… Boas did not … offer a definition of anthropological “culture.” But what he did do was to create an important portion of the content in which the word acquired its characteristic meaning.… By changing the relation of “culture” to man’s evolutionary development, to the burden of tradition, and to the processes of human reason, transformed it into a tool quite different from what it had been before. In the process he helped to transform both anthropology and the anthropologist’s world.

Although eugenics had an upper hand in U.S. science into the 1920s and early 1930s, and Nazism had the upper hand into the 1940s, eventually the anthropological concept of culture and the insight it provided into human behavior would provide the evidence needed to show that the biological determinism and simplified genetics of eugenicists and Nazis was devoid of any scientific credibility. Unfortunately, some of this biological determinism and oversimplified genetics has crept back into biology and anthropology.

The leaders of the eugenics movement understood the implications of Boas’s views and the threat they posed to the eugenics agenda. They energetically went after him. In fact, Madison Grant had a long-standing “cold war” with Boas. As we have seen, Grant was a social Darwinist and anti-Semitic. He believed in the superiority of the Aryans and emphasized the dangers to civilization of the dilution of Aryan blood. Grant also idolized Ernst Haeckel, who was a staunch follower of Gobineau. Boas, on the other hand, was mentored by Rudolf Virchow, Haeckel’s main nemesis in Germany (Weindling 1989; Marks 2012).

The National Research Council and the Early History of American Physical Anthropology The NRC was a federal agency established in 1916 to coordinate the country’s scientific resources in the interests of national security and preparedness in anticipation of the U.S. entering the war in Europe. The council was chaired by a longtime acquaintance of Grant’s, astronomer G. E. Hale, and was funded mainly by reliable eugenics funders, the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Of the twenty-seven committees representing the various fields of American science, the eugenicists especially wanted to control two: the psychology and anthropology committees. They were successful in their endeavors. Robert Yerkes was put in charge of psychology and William H. Holmes, past president of the AAA and head curator of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian, was named chair of anthropology.

He next contacted President Woodrow Wilson to demand that something be done about Boas. After an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department found that Boas had not broken any laws, they were unable to remove him from the Columbia faculty, though funding for the Anthropology Department was limited for many years (Spiro 2009).

With the Boasians out of the way, the Grantians were in control of the NRC and their racist policies could now be pursued without resistance.

As Spiro (2009, 328–329) states: “Within ten years of 1924, scientific racism was a discredited doctrine in the United States, and the Grantians were being pushed down the path towards irrelevance. One of the reasons, of course, was the prodigious influence of Franz Boas and the cultural anthropologists.”

Other historians have noted the profound importance of Boas and his anthropological concept of culture in changing attitudes toward biological determinism and human biological and behavioral variation. For example, historian Thomas F. Gossett (1965, 418) wrote: “It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history.”

Obviously, it was not Boas and the anthropological concept of culture alone that led to the downfall of eugenics as conventional wisdom in American (and Western European) science, academics, and popular thinking.

It took both ideological changes and a number of events to accomplish this. However, as I will argue, the ancient view of polygenism, which finally won out over the alternative explanation of monogenism at the turn of the twentieth century, could not be dethroned from either science or popular thought without an alternative paradigm. Strict biological determinism and eugenics reigned in the United States and Europe from the 1900s to the early 1930s and culminated in the 1940s with its logical climax in Nazism. However, by the 1930s and into the 1940s, both the more than 500-year-old theories of monogenism (degeneration) and polygenism (pre-Adamites) and the newer eugenics theories were no longer tenable. What led to the final downfall of these theories and to the ultimate shift to an entirely new paradigm for at least most scientists and an intelligent populace?

We have made major strides against the age-old myths of polygenism, eugenics, and “scientific” racism. However, have we completely shed certain underlying fifteenth-century, Western European, white American views of racist eugenics and the biological basis and fixity of certain complex human behavioral traits?

Have we accepted the scientific findings of the 1950s reflected in the UNESCO statements? Has the importance of environmental influences on these factors been completely understood?

Have the profound implications of the anthropological concept of culture been misunderstood and indeed trivialized, even within anthropology? I believe that in some fashion, polygenics, eugenics, and anti-environmentalism are still with us today, especially in two venues: in the new scientific racism and in claims by modern biologists and anthropologists that such complex human behavioral and cognitive characteristics as manic depression, schizophrenia, alcoho...

Each gene is only a single player in an amazingly complex drama involving nonadditive interactions of genes, proteins, hormones, food, and life experiences and affecting a variety of cognitive and behavioral functions. An assumption that a single gene can mediate the development and operation of a human cognitive and behavioral function can lead to unwarranted conclus...

It is interesting to note that even scientists often hold onto certain paradigms very conservatively and find it difficult to accept new evidence, even when the old paradigm is no longer tenable (Kuhn 1962). This is worthy of note because one of the goals of empirical science is to constantly test all theories in an attempt to disprove them. Scientific hypotheses should be developed in such a way that they can be disproven, and the goal of the scientist is to constantly attempt to find ways to disprove them—

not just to look for evidence that fits a particular hypothesis and ignore or reject any evidence that does not fit that hypothesis.

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) had recently published an article on race in the Harvard Educational Review (1969). Jensen was a professor of educational psychology at University of California, Berkeley. In his article, he argued that general intelligence was a simple genetic trait, an absolute measurable quantity referred to as the g factor; that this biological quantity could be measured by IQ tests; that this factor was heritable; that race was a biological reality in humans; that there were real, genetic differences in intelligence among presumed human races; that the intelligence of blacks was congenitally inferior to that of whites; and that because of these factors, it was futile to attempt to use compensatory and enrichment programs in any effort to improve the congenitally inferior intelligence of blacks (Jensen 1969).

Jensen received his PhD in psychology from Teachers College at Columbia in 1956 (Brace 2005). He had once believed that environmental factors were more important in explaining differences in intelligence than genetic factors. However, he spent a year (1966–1967) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where he met the physicist and Nobel laureate William Shockley (1910–1989). The two men became very close friends and Shockley converted Jensen to his own beliefs about race.

In 1965, Shockley was invited to deliver an address at the first annual Nobel Conference, a conference on Genetics and the Future of Man that was held in the United States but was authorized by the Nobel Foundation. At that conference, Shockley revealed his racist ideology. He claimed that social policies were allowing genetic defectives to proliferate. Reverting to the old Humeian, Kantian, Mortonite, and eugenics views, he assumed that the first European inhabitants of the original thirteen states were the most competent peoples and that African Americans were the least capable but were producing the most offspring.

Furthermore, he said, environmental intervention could not improve the lot of African Americans. Attempts to provide better education or better health care were also hopeless. To Shockley’s mind, only by systematic reduction of the African American population by steril...

This would lead to survival of the fittest, and the fittest were the original Europe...

Racial discrimination was not prejudice, he claimed, but was justified based on statistics: “Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and pro...

As Tucker (2002, 143) has summarized: “The fact that Shockley had done no research on genetic differences was of no consequence; he was a Nobel laureate, saying what the Draper clique wanted desperately to hear and eager to proselytize, and they quickly set out to exploit the opportunity presented by Shockley’s prestige through a public relations campaign in which the physicist was not only an enthusiastic participant but often the chief strategist.”