Archive for the ‘race’ tag
Race, Art and Evolution
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These reconstructions of Java Man (Pithecanthropus), Neanderthal Man and Cro-Magnon Man were created around 1915 by Columbia University physical anthropologist J. H. McGregor for the American Museum of Natural History. They were designed not just to impress visitors with wonders of science, but also to promote the eugenic theories of the museum’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn. The images were reproduced in many biology textbooks to support a narrative of racial progress. Pen-wielding students often “repurposed” them to illustrate their own stories. |
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 presented 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.
Adventure! Domination! Biology!
These images both depict ceremonially scarred women, face on, naked at least to the waist. The one on the left is from a popular college textbook from the 1940s. The one on the right is from a Men’s Adventure magazine, otherwise known as a “sweat” or “armpit” pulp, from the 1950s.
In this article I suggest, despite their quite different contexts, these images served a common purpose. They invited the viewer to enter a protected sphere where fantasies of superiority and domination were reinforced and could be comfortably indulged.
H. W. Conn’s ‘Communistic’ Challenge to Eugenics
Between 1907 and 1914, 12 states passed eugenic sterilization laws.
As Paul A. Lombardo details so well in Three Generations, No Imbeciles, enactment of these statutes was driven by a realtively small number of lawmakers, self-promoting policy enthusiasts and a new class of bureaucrats, the directors of institutions for the “feebleminded.” These men, and they were all men, worked diligently and with few expressed doubts to overcome legal and cultural objections to coercive “asexualization” by positioning sterilization of the “socially inadequate” as an hygienic necessity no more violent than immunization.
By 1914, nearly a decade and a half after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work, and at least a year before studies at the Morgan lab and elsewhere challenged the efficacy of any eugenics program, the threat to progress represented by unmanaged reproduction was difficult to dispute.
But the eugenicists’ simple focus on ideal types and individual traits had its challengers.
After authoring Biology (1912), an innovative college level textbook, microbiologist and Wesleyan professor Herbert William Conn turned his attention to the grander task of subsuming eugenics within a broader and more social evolutionary ideology.
In Social Heredity and Social Evolution: The Other Side of Eugenics (1914) Conn wrote, “Eugenics is pointing out to us in no unclear light that, whatever may be its social value, the family organization as it exists to-day, at least, in modern civilization, is not adapted for breeding the best type of men.”
Conn, a proud family man, was sure this was wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
Modern Biology in the BSCS Era
Truman J. Moon’s Modern Biology, first published by Henry Holt and Company in 1921 as Biology for Beginners, started out strong. But after the Scopes trial of 1925, its author and/or publisher decided to trade science for sales. Over the next 30 years, the text progressively downplayed the topic of evolution in order to appease Christian fundamentalists. By 1956, the last references to human evolution disappeared from the book. Three years later, human evolution disappeared from Ella Thea Smith’s Exploring Biology too.
Evolution had been effectively censored from the two most popular textbooks in the country. And almost nobody had noticed.
Fortunately, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) was able to use its post-Sputnik mandate, and $6,000,000 Cold War dollars, to force evolution back into American biology textbooks by developing its own, setting a standard for science content its commercial competitors were forced to follow.
Or so the story goes.
Early scholarship (Grabiner and Miller, 1974; Skoog, 1979) told a more complicated tale, noting many exceptions to the neat narrative above. But repeated tellings turned this history into a simple parable which has become the popular and scholarly shorthand since. [1]
How “true” is this shorthand history? How useful? I thought it would be interesting to examine these questions by considering what happened to the book scholars consider the most notorious example of capitulation, Modern Biology, as it struggled to compete against the BSCS.
Read the rest of this entry »
