Textbook History

Prior to World War II, America’s protectors thought its innocence could be guarded at its gates. Citizen biologists saw their country’s borders as kind of cartographic diaphragm, not entirely reliable in individual instances, but adequate to the task of containing the pool of potential breeders.

But conflict had led to contact, and contact had led to fear. Like the physicist’s “gadget,” biology’s “bomb” was conjured to protect the national body from penetration.

Right: Cartoon reprinted in “The Population Bomb: Is Voluntary Human Sterilization the Answer” (c. 1961), a pamphlet published by Dixie Cup magnate Hugh Moore.

The “population bomb” was made as real and scary to school children in the 1960s as the H-bombs that drove them under their desks.

True, from the publication of George W. Hunter’s A Civic Biology in 1914 on, students had been taught that America had a “population problem.” But for the first four decades of the twentieth century, that problem wasn’t runaway growth, it was “differential reproduction.” Pre-war biology textbooks in fact warned that total population would level off by 1970 (see graph below), and when it did, the “quality” of the population would begin to decline if present fertility trends continued. The threat wasn’t one of too many babies. The threat was that too many babies were being born to the ‘wrong’ people – the poor, the criminal, the so-called ‘feeble-minded,’ the swarthy and the black.

As E. E. Stanford fussed in his 1940 biology textbook, Man & the Living World, “Families of professional and business classes of supposedly intellectual rating are not replacing themselves, while those of farmers, laborers, and above all, ‘reliefers’ still maintain increase” (722).

But by the war’s end, Stanford’s worry was decidedly out of fashion, a quaint relic, a Zeppelin in a jet age.

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[Updated for clarity 2010.07.13]

Alfred C. Kinsey’s 1926 An Introduction to Biology was the first American high school biology textbook organized not against concepts of progress, control and exploitation, but rather unity, interdependence and conservation. Kinsey stressed the “ecologic relations of organisms,” believing it “a mistake to test the importance of knowledge by its known, dollars-and-cents application” (v-vi). Where other textbook authors focused on the history of vertebrates culminating with human dominance, Kinsey focused on the behavior of insects culminating with balance in nature. Still, the author made sure he didn’t come off as some kind of odd-duck bug lover. In his textbook, Kinsey promoted biology, at least as practiced by a taxonomist like himself, as a rugged sport, full of adventure and manly camaraderie, an antidote to the sissifying effects of the lab and the city.

One might suggest Kinsey was compensating for something. And more than a few have. [1]

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[Revised 2010.02.14]

It is hard to deny that Haeckel’s embryos are an “icon of evolution,” true even if “icon” now evokes Jonathan Wells’ “travesty” of a book (see Matzke). The embryos were reproduced in a majority of high school and college biology textbooks from the mid-1930s through at least the 1960s (See table). Generations of students took away the incorrect but easy to accept and generally cool idea that we pass through a fish-like stage, complete with gill slits, on our way to becoming human.

Creationists, forever seeking advantage, took a 1997 journal article challenging the residual utility of Ernst Haeckel’s iconic embryos (Richardson et al.) and fashioned it into a pointy stick to poke their favorite straw man, the “scientific elite” (Pennisi, 1997; Behe, 1998; Wells, 1999; Freeman, 2001a,b; Ojala, 2004). With fresh charges of “fraud” and “fake,” these anti-evolutionists pricked a few scientists and historians. But the “prickees” fought back, and with context and nuance on their side, made quick work of the critics (Hopwood, 2006; Blackwell, 2007; Richards, 2009). Charges of fraud against Haeckel are as old as the drawings themselves, the defenders noted, just another out of date argument in the creationists’ pitiful quiver of half-truths and rhetorical manipulations.

Thrust. Parry.

But we must be careful: creationist attacks tend to generate simplified and emotional responses that can constrain critical thinking.

Haeckel’s “icon” was and remains a potent and problematic image (see Ken Miller and Joe Levine’s note). Though it is true that Haeckel’s “schematic” illustrations gave way to better representations starting in the late 1940s, biology textbooks continued to present embryos, always vertebrates, side-by-side or in a comparative grid. It’s an arrangement that was designed to communicate Haeckel’s belief that embryonic development and evolutionary history were linked and that evolution was progressive. It is easy to argue that it still does, despite the disclaimers authors usually offer.

What is most curious is that the rise in popularity of Haeckel’s embryos happened just as biologists were distancing themselves from the kind of broad morphologically-based conjecture the “icon” was designed to support. Less than 20% of early American biology textbooks (1907-1932) included all or part of Haeckel’s original grid. But by the 1940s and into the 1950s, upwards of 60% of high school textbooks featured copies or close variations of the 1874 original.

How do we explain this?

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The 1930s were a time of remarkable innovation in the development of high school biology. As the subject grew in popularity to become the standard 10th grade science in the United States, textbook authors and publishers, in a wild race to define the curriculum and carve out market share, introduced new organizational structures and integrating schemes almost annually.

In the years following the 1925 Scopes trial, authors and publishers found that a few simple linguistic tricks were all that were necessary to keep community objections to the adoption of their textbooks to a minimum. Most found that if they substituted a weak synonym for the word ‘evolution’ – racial development, progressive development, development or change – and fudged a bit when discussing the origin of the human species, they could get on to saying whatever it was they wanted to say.

Scopes barely slowed them down.

An analysis of 9 popular textbooks published during the 1930s show that, in general, space devoted to the topic of evolution greatly increased. A couple of these textbooks – Fitzpatrick and Horton’s Biology (1935), Kroeber and Wolff’s Adventures With Living Things (1938) and Smith’s Exploring Biology (1938) – were as “evolutionary” as any published in the twentieth century.

A careful examination suggests that fundamentalist objections to the teaching of evolution had only a minor impact on the structure and content of high school biology textbooks in the 1930s. Looking past the trivial, these books tell a dramatic story of growing discomfort – spurred by a faltering “Dust Bowl” economy at home and the rise of fascist regimes overseas – with a biology-based defense of existing race, class and gender relationships explicit in Progressive era texts, and to biology’s claim that its role was in large part to help “improve,” control and exploit the natural world.

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I’M AN APE MAN

The sculpted busts of “early man” by J. H. McGregor, and the paintings of Neanderthal flint workers and Cro-Magnon artists by Charles R. Knight, alchemized imaginary beasts of centuries past into icons of progress that carried the imprimatur of science (Moser 1998). But the narrative they supported was conflicted from the start. Created between the years 1915 and 1920 under the guidance of Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, the images were designed to both celebrate scientific progress and alert visitors to the museum’s “Hall of the Age of Man” of an impending eugenic crisis. Osborn believed humans had reached an evolutionary peak in the caves of Lascaux, but that racial mixing was threatening to drag the species back (Clark 2008, Rainger 1991).

It was a downer of story, and the visiting public, or at least the white public, happily skipped past it. Instead they saw in Knight and McGregor’s images visual confirmation of their own racial, cultural and scientific superiority.

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The “Nervous Icon” has mesmerized me for nearly three years (see Parts I, II and III).

I first spotted the image in the early textbooks of George W. Hunter, including A Civic Biology (1914), famous as the central exhibit in the Scopes trial. It stood out because it gave off such a curiously anachronistic aura in Hunter’s otherwise proudly “modern” works. Once struck, I started seeing the thing everywhere. I found variations in at least eight competing twentieth century American high school textbooks. And moving back in time, I uncovered dozens of instances published in the century prior.

The database associated with this article now links to more than 100 instances of the Nervous Icon.

Michael Sappol from the U.S. National Library of Medicine has helped me contextualize this image and track its history. Sappol believed the image was of European origin. But the earliest example I had been able to find was from Calvin Cutter’s 1847 Anatomy and Physiology, a book published in Boston. An identical (or nearly identical) image appeared a few years later in T. S. Lambert’s 1854 Human Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene, published in Hartford. The earliest example I could find printed outside the United States appeared in Dionysius Lardner’s 1855 The Museum of Science and Art Vol. VIII, published in London.

Finally, after a concentrated weekend of sleuthing, I’ve discovered a European relative. A twin really.

The image at the top-right is from Lecciones de Historia Natural: Zoología, Volume 1 by Agustín Yáñez y Girona, a book published in Barcelona in 1844. What is most exciting about this find is that close examination suggests the image is not a re-engraved variation, typical for illustrations that crossed the Atlantic at the time, but instead an impression made from the same master used to print Calvin Cutter’s 1847 variation. Girona and Cutter’s images were either printed from the same woodcut or were printed from plates that were mechanically or electro-mechanically reproduced from a common original. In other words, printed from stereotyped or electrotyped copies. Very unusual given the dates, and very interesting given the subject, particularly if the plates were electrotyped (so interesting in fact that if I can prove the case I plan to write a journal article about it).

I found Lecciones de Historia Natural by following a path opened by the discovery of another Spanish text, Atlas del Novisimo Manual de Anatomia General y Descriptiva by José de Prada é Irizar and Melchor Sánchez de Toca, printed in Madrid, also in 1844.

Though Girona and Cutter’s Nervous Icon (version 1.0 in the database) does not appear in Atlas del Novisimo Manual de Anatomia General, the volume does include variations that would later appear in U.S. texts. More interesting to me was the armature employed for the illustration of the human muscular system (pictured third from the left above). It matches the silhouette of the Nervous Icon almost exactly. And that brought me back to the source I cited in Part II.

Almost all modern full-body anatomical illustrations are children of Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 masterpiece, De Humani Corporis Fabrica. The Nervous Icon is no exception. But to paraphrase Paul Theerman of the National Library of Medicine, it is not a “direct quotation.” Nonetheless, the Icon’s anonymous engraver most certainly referenced Vesalius’ Fabrica or his Anatomia or one of the many copies produced over the intervening two and a half centuries, like Felix Platter’s 1583 De Corporis Humani Structura (the source of images one and two above). All the pieces are there: the silhouette, the brain, the left hand with its downward pointing index finger. True, some of the parts in the Icon are reversed relative to these sources, but that’s to be expected. As print historian Terry Belanger explained in an email to me, “reversed copies of original cuts are common, and indeed are a tipoff that they are in fact copies.”

Still the question remains, how old is the Nervous Icon proper? Does it pre-date the era of stereotyping, electrotyping and iron presses? Is there an intermediary between Vesalius and Agust’n Y‡–ez y Girona, or was the Nervous Icon a mid-1840s creation; perhaps one of the first anatomical illustrations made available through mechanically copied plates? And if that’s so, what made this image, which Belanger notes would have been relatively easy to copy, worth all the trouble?

The Vesalius illustration of the brain comes from Historical Anatomies, published by the National Library of Medicine.
All other images digitized by Google.

“The Nervous Icon” is my name for an illustration of the human nervous system that found its way into dozens of anatomy, physiology and biology textbooks published between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. I began tracing its history in The Nervous Icon – Part I, where I touched on the issues of artistry, copyright, and mechanical reproduction in science textbooks. I followed up a month later in The Nervous Icon – Part II, where I went “over my head” into the history of encyclopedias and the tension caused by the conflict between the assumption that cultural artifacts were the property of the dominating imperialist power and the imperatives of the emerging global marketplace.

As I said then, “big stuff for a blog.”

I thought I had pinned down the icon’s source, a popular encyclopedia published in London in 1855, The Museum of Science and Art, edited by the “scandal-plagued but well-connected … Dionysius Lardner.”

But though it helped me tell a story, I was too quick to conclude that Lardner likely commissioned the drawing. The modern encyclopedia (or cyclopedia or dictionary) was by Lardner’s day already a 127-year old enterprise (Ephraim Chambers’ 1728 Cyclopaedia being the first) whose managers were well known for mining images rather than creating them. Though I had been unable to find an earlier conveniently scanned version online, I should have suspected one existed.

Of course that has turned out to be true.

An older “Nervous Icon,” mature and perfectly scribed, can be found in Calvin Cutter’s Anatomy and Physiology, published in Boston in 1847 (third stereotype edition). With the exception of the truncated leader lines pointing to key features, Cutter’s illustration is identical in every way to Lardner’s, which was printed in London a decade later.

Not to make the same mistake twice, let me state that it is probable Cutter, like Lardner, did not commission the icon, but rather picked it up from a previously published source. But while the question of the icon’s origin still intrigues me, hours of online searching and two-and-a-half years of additional research have uncovered the trial heads of a few more interesting paths.

First, while it is likely that Cutter’s “Nervous Icon” was lifted from an even earlier source, a bigger story may be the one suggested by the notable divide in style between textbooks published before 1840 and those published after 1845. The earlier ones are mostly text, the later ones are often chock-a-block with illustrations. Why is that? Second, this style change seems to signal a shift in publishing influence, from London to New York. Third, there are the interesting connections between the concepts of profit, partiotism and piracy in eighteenth century America that the history of priting and publishing surface. And finally, there are the many paths of Calvin Cutter, who, in addition to being the author of five very popular standard-setting anatomy and physiology textbooks, was also a physician, a widely-traveled public lecturer, an abolitionist, a gun-runner, a twice-wounded war surgeon, a POW, a husband to two heretical proto-feminists and the father of the first female casualty of the American Civil War.

Where to begin?

Well, starting at the end, and for anyone who might like to get a jump on things, Calvin Cutter’s 1845 book, Anatomy and Physiology: Designed for Academies and Families, is available online (the link leads to an 1847 “third stereotype edition.” I’ll have more on stereotyping and electrotyping in a future post). Biographical sketches of Calvin Cutter can be found here, here and here. The last one includes a brief bio of Cutter’s second wife, Eunice Powers Cutter. A bio of Cutter’s daughter Carrie, a battlefield nurse who died at 19, can be found here. More info is easily found online. There is a 1982 biography, Calvin Cutter: Zealot on the Path of Justice and Reform, 1807-1872, but I’m having trouble tracking down a copy.

To supplement this essay, in all of its parts, I have created a database of instances of “The Nervous Icon” as they appeared in textbooks from 1845 through 1956. The few notes attached to these images hint at stories yet to come. Again, to get a jump on things, interested readers might also want to check out historian Adrian Johns book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. From Johns I have learned that piracy in the United States was once defended on patriotic grounds, framed as “retrofitting the cultural products of monarchies for readers in a republic” (303-04). Seems there is nothing new about our world of MP3s and sampling. In the early 1800s it took only a couple of days for hot titles fresh off the boat from England to be reset, printed, bound, distributed and offered for sale on the streets of New York or Philadelphia.

Finally, a great number of eighteenth century events, including but not limited to the history of popular science, the development of modern education, and maybe even the American Civil War, would have followed quite different trajectories had it not been for advances in printing technology, specifically the invention of electrotyping around 1840. This London text from 1841, The Dictionary of the Art of Printing, introduces the process and includes a couple of early examples. My ignorance of this history, despite a background in graphic arts, plagued Part I and Part II of this essay. Hopefully. Part III is better. Now I guess it is on to Part IV, Part V and probably Part VI.

Damn, this thing keeps opening doors.

Well, I just spent a fair portion of Thanksgiving morning updating the Textbook History database of Eugenics in College Biology Textbooks. In addition to correcting more than a few embarrassing misspellings and broken links, I’ve added commentary on two later editions of Biology by Claude A. Villee (1967 and 1972), the second edition of General Biology by Gairdner B. Moment (1950), and the first edition of Biology: A Full Spectrum (1973) by Gairdner B. Moment and Helen M. Habermann.

It remains striking how unwilling Harvard professor Villee was to give up on eugenics. Moment too, but Villee far more so. In the 1972 edition of Biology the author comes off as downright cranky about having to abandon the term. But though Villee finally dropped eugenics from the index and text, he didn’t abandon the idea entirely. Where the discussion of eugenics had been in his 1967 text, at the close of the chapter titled “Inheritance in Man,” the author simply substituted two modern sounding but not really so modern sub-sections – “Factors Changing Gene Frequencies: Differential Reproduction” and “Evolution: The Failure to Maintain Genetic Equilibrium” (718). Forget isolation or drift, for Villee, evolution, for better or for worse, was driven by that boogeyman of eugenics, “differential reproduction.” His citing of Earnest. A. Hooton, Carleton. S. Coon (786) and Franz Weidenreich (789) betrayed a continued affection for the concept of “racial development.”

For additional discussion on Villee, see The Eugenic Zombie in a Graveyard of Textbooks, specifically the article’s last section.

MAD magazine was a rare treat when I was a young teenager, a little expensive and difficult to acquire on a regular basis, but a standard newsstand pickup ahead of road trips and summer weeks away. At the time, the early 1970s, MAD was hitting its highest circulation numbers. Yet its humor always felt weirdly out of step, recycled, even a bit reactionary. Of course that’s partially why I liked it. It was creepy anthropology, a moist record of the guilty id of my older siblings and younger aunts and uncles, subversive if a little toothless.

The magazine had its culturally relevant bits, like Don Martin’s ononmonpidic explosions and Sergio Aragones’ slapstick marginals, but on balance MAD was weighed down by filler of a sensibility that went out with Eisenhower.

Then there was Alfred E. Neuman.

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During the first decades of the twentieth century, WASP elites in the U.S. got themselves into quite a tizzy about sex and race. Metaphysical threats, like the death of “virgin forests,” the “darkening tide” of immigration and the dreaded “white plague” of Tuberculosis, combined with economic threats, like the new permanent income tax, to create a culture open to and fully capable of funding the promotion of public policies and “scientific” solutions that promised to freeze the status quo. Chief among these solutions was the “science” of eugenics.

Eugenics, with some forced sterilization laws here, a few anti-miscegenation laws there, was pitched as a kind of a cure-all for society’s ills, a permanent solution to the problems of alcoholism, pauperism, venereal disease, sexual licentiousness and the general problem of numbers. Several well-publicized studies of female college graduates indicated that fertility among upper class whites had fallen below replacement levels. Democracy can be a drag when one is in the minority.

RIGHT: March 30, 1913 announcement of the establishment of a Board of Scientific Directors for the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. ©The New York Times.

In the teens, eugenics proved a smart path to patronage. According to Daniel J. Kevles, author of In the In the Name of Eugenics, “the science of human biological improvement provided an avenue to public standing and usefulness.” Charles Davenport’s success in securing a major donation from Mary Harriman, widow of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, to fund the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor demonstrated to other researchers and academics how they too might cash in.

Given the hot enthusiasm for the topic, particularly in the years leading up to World War I, it is no real surprise that biology textbook authors got in on the action. But the fact that they stayed on board for the next six decades, is, well, kind of scary!

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[Updated 2011.07.30 to include and weight all editions of Woodruff]

I’d been trying for a couple of months to kick out an article on a curious college biology textbook, The World of Life by Wolfgang F. Pauli (who should not be confused with the more famous physicist, Wolfgang E. Pauli). Published in 1949, The World of Life had long fascinated me, particularly its final unapologetic climax chapter, “Human Genetics and Eugenics” (click image to view). The whole thing just seemed so remarkably wrong; a tortured post-World War II effort to “save” eugenics, as if it were an adorable baby being thrown out with that nasty Nazi bathwater.

But I worried that The World of Life was an exception, a weird one-off a decade or more out of step, not really worth deep examination. Before I could write confidently, I realized I had to know how Pauli’s text fit into the history of college biology education in the twentieth century.

So it was off to AbeBooks (again!), credit card in hand. Before you could say “security code,” I was anticipating the arrival of nearly a dozen book-filled “bubble-lopes.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long to find out I was on to something.

The very first of my new acquisitions, Biology: And Its Relation to Mankind (1949) by A. W. Winchester, told me Pauli’s text was no exception. The subsequent arrival of Biology: The Human Approach (1950 – later titled Biology) by Harvard professor Claude A. Villee, a text which identified feeble-mindedness as “the biggest single eugenic problem” (461), suggested a trend: Contrary to received wisdom, biologists did not drop eugenics like a hot stone after World War II. Instead, as I wrote in a previous article, a few college textbook authors “doubled down and began to defend the ideology with more aggressive rhetoric and moments of near-pornographic spectacle.”

Counter-intuitive. Interesting. Compulsion-triggering.

Now, in addition to 82 American high school biology textbooks, I own or have sourced 38 college-level biology textbooks. Though the college collection is considerably smaller and perhaps not quite as complete and coherent as the high school collection, I am fairly confident it is representative.

I hope to add a couple context bullet points and write a few longer articles referencing this collection soon (perhaps on topics other than eugenics, which I admit has sort of taken over Textbook History lately). But I thought I’d get this draft database out there, including my somewhat subjective “Eugenics 0-5″ rating. I’ve included links to public domain texts, related articles and available biographical information on authors.

See Database: Eugenics in College Biology Textbooks

Also see Eugenics in 20th Century High School Biology Textbooks.

* The chart above reflects a eugenics score of “1″ for the popular Foundations of Biology by Lorande Loss Woodruff (see page 297), published in 7 editions through 1946 (though only the 1922 and 1937 editions have been directly reviewed). A score of “2″ would not substantially alter the shape of the college trendline, but would amplify it through 1946, thereby decreasing the relative drama of the post-war bump.

A weird thing happened in the years right after World War II: new college-level biology textbooks, rather than dropping the subject of eugenics, doubled down and began to defend the ideology with more aggressive rhetoric and moments of near-pornographic spectacle.

Biology: And Its Relation to Mankind by Baylor graduate and Stetson University (later Colorado State College/UNC) professor Albert M. Winchester, was published in 1949 – four years after the discovery of Nazi death camps supposedly marked the end of eugenics.

Yet Winchester’s textbook presented one the harshest defenses of eugenics published in the United States during the twentieth century.

And it was no outlier (WARNING: Disturbing photo below the fold).

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Ellsworth Huntington was one of the early twentieth century’s most prolific science writers. The author of 28 books, contributor to 29 others and author of more than 240 articles, [1] Huntington was a climatic determinist who held that geography was the “basis for history.” [2] Civilization according to Huntington owed its rise to the weather. He suggested his superior “Teutonic stock” was a natural consequence of the same atmospheric conditions that cause thunderstorms.

But Huntington was worried. He felt he had solid statistical evidence that as his race took on what he thought was its evolutionary obligation to dominate it faced two serious threats: the physically and morally debilitating effects of the tropics and tropical women on WASPs who worked abroad, and the productivity-sapping effects of luxuries like central heating on those who worked at home.

Initially Huntington proposed simple mechanical solutions to these “problems,” like a housing unit that would artificially cycle its internal barometric pressure, and by this action keep his fellow New Englanders charged up wherever they lived. But in the 1920s, with his academic career stalled, Huntington’s ideas began to darken. In 1934 he accepted the presidency of the board of directors of the increasingly nativist American Eugenics Society. By 1935 he was applying his writing talents to the development of that group’s “catechism,” a chilling book titled Tomorrow’s Children.

Huntington was an odd duck, criticized even in his day for possessing an “overheated imagination” that saw patterns in data where none existed and forced facts to fit predetermined conclusions. So why bother studying a man who labored as a lowly Research Associate at an insulting salary at Yale for nearly the entirety of his professional life?

Huntington was a fantasist with little peer support, but his popularity demonstrates how adept he was at framing a folk-science that, to borrow a phrase from Jerome Ravetz, provided America’s ruling class “comfort and reassurance in the face of the crucial uncertainties of the world of experience.” [3] In Huntington we see a metaphor for a nation. Once a jaunty optimist who saw continued cultural domination as a minor engineering challenge, Ellsworth Huntington joined a generation that grew increasingly inclined to promote coercive social policies as it rationalized the rejection of its stumbling personal advances as accumulating proof that the species was in decline.

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