Existing comment:
1899: The Races of Europe:
This popular book by the economist William Z. Ripley classifies Europeans as compromising three distinct races: "Teutonic," "Alpine," and "Mediterranean." Ripley relies on Anders Retzius's long- accepted cephalic index head-measurement standard as a basis for his work. He wins a prestigious award from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain for his work, and his ideas pave the way for later efforts by scientists and writers such as Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, and Carleton Coon.
1911: Undermining the cephalic index:
Studying the skull shape of immigrants and their American-born children, Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas finds that this feature can vary from one generation to the next. His work undermines the wide use of the cephalic index as a stable marker of race. Boas shows that the human form is more susceptible to environmental factors than most people at the time believe.
"The old idea of absolute stability of human types must... evidently be given up, and with it the belief of the hereditary superiority of certain types over others."
-- Franz Boas, "The Instability of Human Types" (1911)
1916: Anthropology and real estate:
Ales Hrdlicka, head physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, classifies Indians on Minnesota's White Earth Reservation as "mixed-blood" or "full-blood" based on a test that involves "drawing with some force the nail of the forefinger over the chest." He claimed that the skin of mixed-blood Indians reddens more deeply than that of full-bloods. Hrdlicka combines his results with observations of skin color, hair form and other physical features -- ignoring his subjects' own notions about blood and self-identification. His data will be used in numerous court cases in which "blood status" is an issue in defending the sale of Indian lands to whites, including most of the White Earth Reservation.
"There is no question that there are today already retarded peoples, retarded races, and that there are advanced and more advanced races, and that the differences between them tend rather to increase than to decrease."
-- Ales Hrdlicka, American University Lecture 27 (1921)
1916: The Passing of the Great Race:
After reading New York lawyer Madison Grant's 1916 book on the decline of the American people due to immigration, Adolf Hitler sends the author a fan letter, writing that The Passing of the Great Race is his "Bible." Grant warns against mixing between "Nordics" and other Europeans, and promotes eugenics, a program aimed at bettering humanity through selective reproduction.
"We Americans must realize that.. the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America an 'asylum for the oppressed' [is] sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow out national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all 'distinction of race, creed, or color,' the type of native American of colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo."
-- Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916) |