Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  On the morning of Monday, 31 May 1909, in the lecture theatre of the Charity Organization Society building, not far from Astor Place in New York City, three pickled brains were displayed on a wooden bench. One of the brains belonged to an ape, another was the brain of a white person, and the third was a Negro brain. The brains were the subject of a lecture given by Dr Burt Wilder, a neurologist from Cornell University. Professor Wilder, after presenting a variety of charts and photographs and reporting on measurements said to be relevant to the ‘alleged prefrontal deficiency in the Negro brain,’ reassured the multiracial audience that the latest science had found no difference between white and black brains.1

  The occasion of this talk – which seems so dated and yet so modern – was in some ways historic. It was the opening morning of a three-day ‘National Negro Conference,’ the very first move in an attempt to create a permanent organisation to work for civil rights for American blacks. The conference was the brainchild of Mary Ovington, a white social worker, and had been nearly two years in the making. It had been conceived after she had read an account by William Walling of a race riot that had devastated Springfield, Illinois, in the summer of 1908. The trouble that flared in Springfield on the night of 14 August signalled that America’s race problem was no longer confined to the South, no longer, as Walling wrote, ‘a raw and bloody drama played out behind a magnolia curtain.’ The spark that ignited the riot was the alleged rape of a white woman, the wife of a railway worker, by a well-spoken black man. (The railroads were a sensitive area at the time. Some southern states had ‘Jim Crow’ carriages: as the trains crossed the state line, arriving from the North, blacks were forced to move from interracial carriages to the blacks-only variety.) As news of the alleged rape spread that night, there were two lynchings, six fatal shootings, eighty injuries, more than $200,000 worth of damage. Two thousand African Americans fled the city before the National Guard restored order.2

  William Walling’s article on the riot, ‘Race War in the North,’ did not appear in the Independent for another three weeks. But when it did, it was much more than a dispassionate report. Although he reconstructed the riot and its immediate cause in exhaustive detail, it was the passion of Walling’s rhetoric that moved Mary Ovington. He showed how little had changed in attitudes towards blacks since the Civil War; he exposed the bigotry of certain governors in southern states, and tried to explain why racial troubles were now spreading north. Reading Walling’s polemic, Mary Ovington was appalled. She contacted him and suggested they start some sort of organisation. Together they rounded up other white sympathisers, meeting first in Walling’s apartment and then, when the group got too big, at the Liberal Club on East Nineteenth Street. When they mounted the first National Negro Conference, on that warm May day, in 1909, just over one thousand attended. Blacks were a distinct minority.

  After the morning session of science, both races headed for lunch at the Union Square Hotel close by, ‘so as to get to know each other.’ Even though nearly half a century had elapsed since the Civil War, integrated meals were unusual even in large northern towns, and participants ran the risk of being jeered at, or worse. On that occasion, however, lunch went smoothly, and duly fortified, the lunchers walked back over to the conference centre. That afternoon, the main speaker was one of the black minority, a small, bearded, aloof academic from Fisk and Harvard Universities, called William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.

  W. E. B. Du Bois was often described, especially by his critics, as arrogant, cold and supercilious.3 That afternoon he was all of these, but it didn’t matter. This was the first time many white people came face to face with a far more relevant characteristic of Du Bois: his intellect. He did not say so explicitly, but in his talk he conveyed the impression that the subject of that morning’s lectures – whether whites were more intelligent than blacks – was a matter of secondary importance. Using the rather precise prose of the academic, he said he appreciated that white people were concerned about the deplorable housing, employment, health, and morals of blacks, but that they ‘mistook effects for causes.’ More important, he said, was the fact that black people had sacrificed their own self-respect because they had failed to gain the vote, without which the ‘new slavery’ could never be abolished. He had one simple but all-important message: economic power – and therefore self-fulfilment – would only come for the Negro once political power had been achieved.4

  By 1909 Du Bois was a formidable public speaker; he had a mastery of detail and a controlled passion. But by the time of the conference he was undergoing a profound change, in the process of turning from an academic into a politician – and an activist. The reason for Du Bois’s change of heart is instructive. Following the American Civil War, the Reconstruction movement had taken hold in the South, intent on turning back the clock, rebuilding the former Confederate states with de facto, if not de jure, segregation. Even as late as the turn of the century, several states were still trying to disenfranchise blacks, and even in the North many whites treated blacks as an inferior people. Far from advancing since the Civil War, the fortunes of blacks had actually regressed. The situation was not helped by the theories and practices of the first prominent black leader, a former slave from Alabama, Booker T. Washington. He took the view that the best form of race relations was accommodation with the whites, accepting that change would come eventually, and that any other approach risked a white backlash. Washington therefore spread the notion that blacks ‘should be a labour force, not a political force,’ and it was on this basis that his Tuskegee Institute was founded, in Alabama, near Montgomery, its aim being to train blacks in the industrial skills mainly needed on southern farms. Whites found this such a reassuring philosophy that they poured money into the Tuskegee Institute, and Washington’s reputation and influence grew to the point where, by the early years of the twentieth century, few federal black appointments were made without Theodore Roosevelt, in the White House, canvassing his advice.5

  Washington and Du Bois could not have been more different. Born in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, the son of northern blacks, and with a little French and Dutch blood in the background, Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which he described as a ‘boy’s paradise’ of hills and rivers. He shone at school and did not encounter discrimination until he was about twelve, when one of his classmates refused to exchange visiting cards with him and he felt shut off, as he said, by a ‘vast veil.’6 In some respects, that veil was never lifted. But Du Bois was enough of a prodigy to outshine the white boys in school at Great Barrington, and to earn a scholarship to Fisk University, a black college founded after the Civil War by the American Missionary Association in Nashville, Tennessee. From Fisk he went to Harvard, where he studied sociology under William James and George Santayana. After graduation he had difficulty finding a job at first, but following a stint at teaching he was invited to make a sociological study of the blacks in a slum area in Philadelphia. It was just what he needed to set him off on the first phase of his career. Over the next few years Du Bois produced a series of sociological surveys – The Philadelphia Negro, The Negro in Business, The College-Bred Negro, Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans, The Negro Artisan, The Negro Church, and eventually, in the spring of 1903, Souls of Black Folk. James Weldon Johnson, proprietor of the first black newspaper in America, an opera composer, lawyer, and the son of a man who had been free before the Civil War, described this book as having ‘a greater effect upon and within the Negro race in America than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’7

  Souls of Black Folk summed up Du Bois’s sociological research and thinking of the previous decade, which not only confirmed the growing disenfranchisement and disillusion of American blacks but proved beyond doubt the brutal economic effects of discrimination in housing, health, and employment. The message of his surveys was so stark, and showed such a deterioration in the overall picture, that Du Bois became convinced that Booker T. W
ashington’s approach actually did more harm than good. In Souls, Du Bois rounded on Washington. It was a risky thing to do, and relations between the two leaders quickly turned sour. Their falling-out was heightened by the fact that Washington had the power, the money, and the ear of President Roosevelt. But Du Bois had his intellect and his studies, his evidence, which gave him an unshakeable conviction that higher education must become the goal of the ‘talented tenth’ of American blacks who would be the leaders of the race in the future.8 This was threatening to whites, but Du Bois simply didn’t accept the Washington ‘softly, softly’ approach. Whites would only change if forced to do so.

  For a time Du Bois thought it was more important to argue the cause against whites than to fight his own color. But that changed in July 1905 when, with feelings between the rival camps running high, he and twenty-nine others met secretly at Fort Erie in Ontario to found what became known as the ‘Niagara movement.’9 Niagara was the first open black protest movement, and altogether more combative than anything Washington had ever contemplated. It was intended to be a nationwide outfit with funds to fight for civil and legal rights both in general and in individual cases. It had committees to cover health, education, and economic issues, press and public opinion, and an anti-lynching fund. When he heard about it, Washington was incensed. Niagara went against everything he stood for, and from that moment he plotted its downfall. He was a formidable opponent, not without his own propaganda skills, and he pitched this battle for the souls of black folk as between the ‘soreheads,’ as the protesters were referred to, and the ‘responsible leaders’ of the race. Washington’s campaign scared away white support for Niagara, and its membership never reached four figures. Indeed, the Niagara movement would be completely forgotten now if it hadn’t been for a curious coincidence. The last annual meeting of the movement, attended by just twenty-nine people, was adjourned in Oberlin, Ohio, on 2 September 1908. The future looked bleak and was not helped by the riot that had recently taken place in Springfield. But the very next day, William Walling’s article on the riot was published in the Independent, and Mary Ovington took up the torch.10

  The conference Ovington and Walling organised, after its shaky start discussing brains, did not fizzle out – far from it. The first National Negro Conference (NNC) elected a Committee of Forty, also known as the National Committee for the Advancement of the Negro. Although predominantly staffed by whites, this committee turned its back on Booker T. Washington, and from that moment his influence began to wane. For the first twelve months, the activities of the NNC were mainly administrative and organisational – putting finance and a nationwide structure in place. By the time they met again in May 1910, they were ready to combat prejudice in an organised way.11

  Not before time. Lynchings were still running at an average of ninety-two a year. Roosevelt had made a show of appointing a handful of blacks to federal positions, but William Howard Taft, inaugurated as president in 1909, ‘slowed the trickle to a few drops,’ insisting that he could not alienate the South as his predecessor had done by ‘uncongenial black appointments.’12 It was therefore no surprise that the theme of the second conference was ‘disenfranchisement and its effects upon the Negro,’ mainly the work of Du Bois. The battle, the argument, was being carried to the whites. To this end, the conference adopted a report worked out by a Preliminary Committee on Organisation. This allowed for a National Committee of One Hundred, as well as a thirty-person executive committee, fifteen to come from New York and fifteen from elsewhere.13 Most important of all, funds had been raised for there to be five full-time, paid officers – a national president, a chairman of the Executive Committee, a treasurer and his assistant, and a director of publications and research. All of these officeholders were white, except the last – W. E. B. Du Bois.14

  At this second meeting delegates decided they were unhappy with the word Negro, feeling that their organisation should campaign on behalf of all people with dark skin. As a result, the name of the organisation was changed, and the National Negro Conference became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).15 Its exact form and approach owed more to Du Bois than to any other single person, and this aloof black intellectual stood poised to make his impact, not just on the American nation but worldwide.

  There were good practical and tactical reasons why Du Bois should have ignored the biological arguments linked to America’s race problem. But that didn’t mean that the idea of a biological ladder, with whites above blacks, would go away: social Darwinism was continuing to flourish. One of the crudest efflorescences of this idea had been displayed at the World’s Fair in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1903, lasting for six months. The Saint Louis World’s Fair was the most ambitious gathering of intellectuals the new world had ever seen. In fact, it was the largest fair ever held, then or since.16

  It had begun life as The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of President Jefferson’s purchase of the state from the French in 1803, which had opened up the Mississippi and helped turn the inland port of Saint Louis into America’s fourth most populous city after New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The fair had both highbrow and lowbrow aspects. There was, for instance, an International Congress of Arts and Sciences, which took place in late September. (It was depicted as ‘a Niagara of scientific talent,’ though literature also featured.) Among the participants were John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, Woodrow Wilson, the new president of Princeton, the anthropologist Franz Boas, the historian James Bryce, the economist and sociologist Max Weber, Ernest Rutherford and Henri Poincaré in physics, Hugo de Vries and T. H. Morgan in genetics. Although they were not there themselves, the brand-new work of Freud, Planck, and Frege was discussed. Perhaps more notable for some was the presence of Scott Joplin, the king of ragtime, and of the ice cream cone, invented for the fair.17

  Also at the fair was an exhibition showing ‘the development of man.’ This had been planned to show the triumph of the ‘Western’ (i.e., European) races. It was a remarkable display, comprising the largest agglomeration of the world’s non-Western peoples ever assembled: Inuit from the Arctic, Patagonians from the near-Antarctic, Zulu from South Africa, a Philippine Negrito described as ‘the missing link,’ and no fewer than fifty-one different tribes of Indians, as native Americans were then called. These ‘exhibits’ were on show all day, every day, and the gathering was not considered demeaning or politically incorrect by the whites attending the fair. However, the bad taste (as we would see it) did not stop there. Saint Louis, because of the World’s Fair, had been chosen to host the 1904 Olympic Games. Using this context as inspiration, an alternative ‘Games’ labelled the ‘Anthropology Days’ was organised as part of the fair. Here all the various members of the great ethnic exhibition were required to pit themselves against each other in a contest organised by whites who seemed to think that this would be a way of demonstrating the differing ‘fitness’ of the races of mankind. A Crow Indian won the mile, a Sioux the high jump, and a Moro from the Philippines the javelin.18

  Social Darwinist ideas were particularly virulent in the United States. In 1907, Indiana introduced sterilisation laws for rapists and imbeciles in prison. But similar, if less drastic, ideas existed elsewhere. In 1912 the International Eugenics Conference in London adopted a resolution calling for greater government interference in the area of breeding. This wasn’t enough for the Frenchman Charles Richet, who in his book Sélection humaine (1912) openly argued for all newborn infants with hereditary defects to be killed. After infancy Richet thought castration was the best policy but, giving way to horrified public opinion, he advocated instead the prevention of marriage between people suffering from a whole range of ‘defects’ – tuberculosis, rickets, epilepsy, syphilis (he obviously hadn’t heard of Salvarsen), ‘individuals who were too short or too weak,’ criminals, and ‘people who were unable to read, write or count.’19 Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son and from 1911
to 1928 president of the British Eugenics Education Society, didn’t go quite this far, but he advocated that ‘superior’ people should be encouraged to breed more and ‘inferior’ people encouraged to reproduce less.20 In America, eugenics remained a strong social movement until the 1920s, the Indiana sterilisation laws not being repealed until 1931. In Britain the Eugenics Education Society remained in business until the 1920s. The story in Germany is a separate matter.

  Paul Ehrlich had not allowed his studies of syphilis to be affected by the prevailing social views of the time, but the same cannot be said of many geneticists. In the early stages of the history of the subject, a number of reputable scientists, worried by what they perceived as the growth of alcoholism, disease, and criminality in the cities, which they interpreted as degeneration of the racial stock, lent their names to the eugenic societies and their work, if only for a while. The American geneticist Charles B. Davenport produced a classical paper, still quoted today, proving that Huntington’s chorea, a progressive nervous disorder, was inherited via a Mendelian dominant trait. He was right. At much the same time, however, he campaigned for eugenic sterilisation laws and, later, for immigration to the United States to be restricted on racial and other biological/genetic grounds. This led him so much astray that his later work was devoted to trying to show that a susceptibility to violent outbursts was the result of a single dominant gene. One can’t ‘force’ science like that.21

  Another geneticist affiliated to the eugenics movement for a short time was T. H. Morgan. He and his co-workers made the next major advance in genetics after Hugo de Vries’s rediscovery of Mendel in 1900. In 1910, the same year that America’s eugenic society was founded, Morgan published the first results of his experiments on the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. This may not sound much, but the simplicity of the fruit fly, and its rapid breeding time, meant that in years to come, and thanks to Morgan, Drosophila became the staple research tool of genetics. Morgan’s ‘fly room’ at Columbia University in New York became famous.22 Since de Vries’s rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900, the basic mechanism of heredity had been confirmed many times. However, Mendel’s approach, and de Vries’s, was statistical, centring on that 3 : 1 ratio in the variability of offspring. The more that ratio was confirmed, the more people realised there had to be a physical, biological, and cytological grounding for the mechanism identified by Mendel and de Vries. There was one structure that immediately suggested itself. For about fifty years, biologists had been observing under the microscope a certain characteristic behaviour of cells undergoing reproduction. They saw a number of minute threads forming part of the nuclei of cells, which separated out during reproduction. As early as 1882, Walther Flemming recorded that, if stained with dye, the threads turned a deeper colour than the rest of the cell.23 This reaction led to speculation that the threads were composed of a special substance, labelled chromatin, because it coloured the threads. These threads were soon called chromosomes, but it was nine years before H. Henking, in 1891, made the next crucial observation, that during meiosis (cell division) in the insect Pyrrhocoris, half the spermatozoa received eleven chromosomes while the other half received not only these eleven but an additional body that responded strongly to staining. Henking could not be sure that this extra body was a chromosome at all, so he simply called it ‘X.’ It never crossed his mind that, because half received it and half didn’t, the ‘X body’ might determine what sex an insect was, but others soon drew this conclusion.24 After Henking’s observation, it was confirmed that the same chromosomes appear in the same configuration in successive generations, and Walter Sutton showed in 1902 that during reproduction similar chromosomes come together, then separate. In other words, chromosomes behaved in exactly the way Mendel’s laws suggested.25 Nonetheless, this was only inferential – circumstantial – evidence, and so in 1908 T. H. Morgan embarked on an ambitious program of animal breeding designed to put the issue beyond doubt. At first he tried rats and mice, but their generations were too long, and the animals often became ill. So he began work on the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. This tiny creature is scarcely exotic, nor is it as closely related to man. But it does have the advantage of a simple and convenient lifestyle: ‘To begin with it can thrive in old milk bottles, it suffers few diseases and it conveniently produces a new generation every couple of weeks.’26 Unlike the twenty-odd pairs of chromosomes that most mammals have, Drosophila has four. That also made experimentation simpler.