Moral Combat
Page 14
When she was thirty-one, Benedict went back to school, studying educational philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia University before taking a class in 1919 on sex and sex roles across different societies, taught by the feminist sociologist-turned-anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons at the New School for Social Research. In a paper she wrote for that course, Benedict argued that women ought to be free to have sex exactly as they chose and with whomever they wished, marriage notwithstanding. That she also believed fervently in passionate love between two people was clear there as well as in her journal entries; no fan of casual sex was Benedict, but she was indignant at the societal and legal rules that made it difficult to liberate oneself from “the perpetual lock and key of marriage,” especially one that was loveless.31 Her interest in anthropology deepened as she discovered how it offered a way to explore such intimate matters in depth. Turning her sights to doctoral work, she received admission at Columbia, then a vibrant center of new thinking in anthropology, and obtained a PhD in anthropology under Franz Boas in 1923. After a long search for a permanent job, in 1931 and at the age of forty-four (and separated from her husband), Benedict received an appointment as an assistant professor at Columbia.
Benedict and Boas had common intellectual interests and a shared commitment to social justice. Boas, a German-born Jew who had immigrated to the United States a few years before joining the Columbia faculty in 1896, was the foremost anthropologist of his day. He famously promoted the concept of culture, teaching that environment was a far more important influence on human behavior than biology and race. As an organic set of learned beliefs, customs, and morals, cultures were not closed or static systems, immobile over time; rather, they were fluid, dynamic, and ever-changing. Cultures varied widely across the globe, not because some ethnic groups were more intelligent or physically stronger but because local histories and circumstances varied, leading to seemingly boundless variations on human beliefs and behaviors. Boas and his students were the modernists of their field, questioning principles that others believed to be absolute givens and acknowledging unlimited variety. They critiqued universal truths and theories that promoted a fixed model of human progress toward enlightenment, liberation, and beneficence; the horrors of their own age showed the folly of that model. Instead, they stressed the messiness and fascinating complexity of cultural development in all of its variety, seeing the makeup of societies as the product of chance rather than of intentional design. So-called primitive peoples received a measure of respect as complex social builders who may well be more sophisticated in their ordered webs than supposedly more evolved civilizations. Human development was anarchic, in the most enthralling way.32
Benedict shared this way of thinking about human cultures, and she set out her views in Patterns of Culture, published in 1934. The work sought to persuade the American public that “primitive” cultures were in no way inferior to supposedly more sophisticated civilizations. She focused on three different cultures: the Pueblos (particularly the Zuni) of the American Southwest, the Dobuans of Melanesia, and the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Coast. She argued that every culture had its more and less intelligent people, its more and less physically robust populations—genes and hereditary traits varied within cultural groups as much as, if not more than, beyond them. But environmental and historical factors were far more important in determining a person’s makeup than were any inherent natural traits such as skin color. Rules such as those pertaining to sexual behavior were shaped by cultural patterns rather than dictated by divine law, and so, she extrapolated, there was little to fear from the loosening of those rules among younger generations in contemporary America: “The minor changes that occasion so much denunciation today, such as the increase of divorce, the growing secularization in our cities, the prevalence of the petting party, and many more, could be taken up quite readily into a slightly different pattern of culture,” she noted. They would soon come to seem “traditional” and “would be given the same richness of content, the same importance and value, that the older patterns had in other generations.” Rather than despise such differences across cultures, “wisdom consists in a greatly increased tolerance toward their divergencies.”33
The interest and tolerance that Benedict directed toward “divergencies” stretched over many subjects, including sexual behavior. “The whole question of sex and sex differences has been a passion with me throughout my life,” Benedict wrote in a 1936 letter to her close friend Margaret Mead, and that appeal certainly came out in her work.34 In fact, Benedict regularly sounded an appreciative note when comparing other cultures’ attitudes toward sex with those of mainstream Americans, which she not so subtly critiqued. The Zuni might look as “Puritanical” as our own repressive culture, but the Zuni people had “no sense of sin,” carried no “guilt complexes,” and did not frown upon sex as “a series of temptations to be resisted with painful efforts of the will.” They disapproved of chastity and delighted in sex, conveying on the whole a much healthier attitude toward it than did most Americans. Where Americans moralized and tsk-tsked, the Zuni way of commending a good man was to say, “Everybody likes him. He is always having affairs with women.” For the sexually healthy culture, Benedict concluded, “sex is an incident in the happy life,” rather than a source of shame.35 Benedict’s call for cross-cultural understanding was plainly tied up with a tolerant attitude toward sexual diversity and a skepticism toward religious ideas like sin that produced guilt and shame.
While Benedict was hardly the first to make this cross-cultural argument, Patterns of Culture put the idea and its implications into clear, digestible prose. The book became an influential tool for conveying this theory of culture’s influence, over and against models of biological determinism: it was widely reviewed, and it transformed how many Americans understood both their own culture and others. Social scientists as well as many members of the wider public embraced this paradigm shift toward understanding the power of culture to shape moral codes, and they understood the implication that America’s own moral codes were no less rooted in culture than those of the Pueblos and the Dobuans. All value systems had developed out of a rich repertoire of possibilities and choices, and none could be considered objectively right or wrong. Readers came to accept, if not appreciate, Benedict’s message: persons could remain wedded to their own value systems, but it was arrogant to presume one’s system to be divine truth and blithely moralize against others’ values, whether having to do with sex or other ethical matters Benedict drew out in the book. When, a few years after its initial publication, the book came out as a twenty-five-cent paperback, it was a best seller. As one observer later noted, Benedict’s ideas “truly became ‘common coin’ in the American psyche.”36
In 1939, as Benedict worked to popularize theories of human culture, Boas inaugurated a campaign to improve the way that American schools and teachers taught students the concept of race. That year, Boas had conducted a study, funded by the American Jewish Committee, which found that 20 percent of school textbooks were presenting eugenic ideas about the immutability of race, and superior and inferior races, that scientists had rejected decades before. Boas’s study repeatedly found texts in geography, history, biology, civics, and other subjects that promoted the white race’s superiority, with statements like, “Civilization has been developed and history has been made chiefly by the white race.”37 White supremacist assumptions permeated popular culture and much else besides, but Boas hoped these findings would stoke outrage in American readers aware that the German government was forcing that nation’s schools to teach false Nazi theories of racial superiority. Surely such doctrines had no place in American taxpayer-funded public schools. Indeed, they were profoundly detrimental to the vital role of education in strengthening American democracy.
Determined to change how schools thought about race, Boas publicized his findings as widely as he could. He produced a pamphlet titled Can You Name Them?, asking readers to see if they could identify the nation
alities of the men featured on the pamphlet’s cover based on physical appearances alone; of course, he intended the answer to be no, as the pamphlet focused on disproving popular misconceptions about racial characteristics and the “false dogma” of racial traits that had been used “to justify political domination” and “led to merciless persecution of minorities.”38 Boas mailed the pamphlet to major newspapers across the country, including African American papers such as the Chicago Defender, and many ran stories covering his efforts. With other like-minded anthropologists, he also worked through various media—public speeches, pamphlets, exhibits, and radio programs, for instance—to teach teachers how to think more accurately about race. They were open regarding their goal of undermining “racism,” a recent term that they defined as “the attempt of individuals of one group to dominate another group based on false racial theories.”39 Teaching students about the role of culture as a force shaping human diversity would undermine false racial theories, lessening the prejudiced assumptions many people held about people who were physically unlike themselves.
Through Boas, Benedict grew convinced that public schools were a crucial place to intervene against racism. She joined the Commission on Intercultural Education of the Progressive Education Association, which aimed to help teachers and school administrators create programs to instill tolerance across ethnic groups. She worked to improve the curricula of intercultural education, a model created by well-meaning educators but one she felt was superficial in its handling of the real plight faced by groups such as Jews and African Americans. In 1940, she published Race: Science and Politics, a book she hoped would, like Patterns of Culture, reach a wide audience and help readers understand how scientists like her and Boas thought about race—and the implications for reducing racism. Benedict also wrote a resource guide for secondary school teachers called Race and Cultural Relations: America’s Answer to the Myth of a Master Race, telling readers, “No subject you study in school today is more fraught with consequences than this subject of race.”40 Benedict did not merely support equality of access and opportunity for all Americans, regardless of race; her anti-racism was part of a larger critique of the standing social order, one she shared with many other anthropologists, who argued that much more needed to change and that resources ought to be more equally distributed. It is not difficult to see why some to her political right were beginning to wonder if she were a Communist.
At that time, anthropological thinking about race was thoroughly in opposition to the ideas that still held sway at the time, especially in the South—ideas whose exponents wished to guard at all costs. And one of the chief grounds on which they made their case was sex.
IT WAS AS A RESULT of these efforts to popularize the new anthropological thinking about race that Ruth Benedict found herself in 1944 at the center of a public controversy over the pamphlet she cowrote with her fellow Columbia anthropologist Gene Weltfish, also a former student and then colleague of Boas. They had written The Races of Mankind at the request of two organizations: the United Service Organizations (USO), a nongovernment association created to support and raise the morale of military officers and their families, and the Public Affairs Committee of the US Office of War Information, a distributor of information and propaganda relating to America’s role in the war. USO officials intended to distribute the pamphlet to armed services personnel, hoping to encourage them as they fought the Japanese alongside nonwhite allies in the Philippines and Solomon Islands; the pamphlet would also work to counter Nazi theories of a “super race” and perhaps reduce racial prejudice in the soldiers’ own ranks.
The pamphlet was a short document whose basic message was that racial differences are only skin deep and that economic and educational factors—not race—explain cultural and social disparities between different groups. It cited a range of scientific, social, and educational research to prove that there were no “superior” and “inferior” races among humans. Distinctions that are purely physiological, such as skin color and hair texture, do not map onto intelligence or morality, the two wrote; all peoples are much the same in those areas, until one takes into account social, cultural, economic, and other factors that bring difference of opportunity into being. Indeed, intelligence tests performed on US soldiers during World War I showed higher scores for African Americans living in the North than white men from the South, readers learned. While there were, indeed, “races,” these meant little in light of the fact that “all the peoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin.” The biblical story that recounted Adam and Eve as the biological parents of the entire human race “told centuries ago the same truth that science has shown today”: that all are brothers, and their very bodies represented “the record of their brotherhood.”41
Popular misconceptions to the contrary, in fact, the races that did exist were not really “pure” at all. Humans in earlier historical eras had regularly bred across cultural and ethnic lines—which meant, the authors explained, there was neither an unadulterated white race nor a pure black race. “Race mixture” had been produced “since before history began.” Moreover, “no one has been able to show that this is necessarily bad.” Different cultures might make such mixing “a social evil,” and in such a culture, “sensible people will avoid contributing to it by grieving if their children make such alliances. We must live in the world as it is.” Yet there were “no immutable laws of nature” that rendered race mixing injurious.42 German Nazis who believed in the purity and superiority of blue-eyed Aryans as a race had it all wrong—but then, so too did American whites who believed their own race was pure and superior to the black race. The further implication was clear: if races were not pure, nor even meaningful categories of differentiation, there was no inherent reason beyond societal disapproval that people could not love, marry, and reproduce across racial lines.
Easy to read and sold for ten cents, the tract was considered “a masterpiece of popularization of scientific knowledge,” according to its editor and the secretary of the Public Affairs Committee.43 Its enthusiastic promoters hoped it would be a tool to overcome race prejudice and its attendant ills, and its initial reception seemed promising. Like earlier interventions by Boas and Benedict, the pamphlet received an enthusiastic response among educators. When it appeared in print in October 1943, the New York City Board of Education recommended it to teachers for use in their continuing drive for tolerance, while the Detroit public school administration delivered the pamphlet and an accompanying educational poster series to every school in the district. The success of the pamphlet, along with the version produced for children, In Henry’s Backyard, was impressive enough that the American Council on Education tapped Benedict to study “the treatment accorded religious and racial matters in basic teaching materials used in our public schools and colleges.” The National Conference of Christians and Jews funded the study.44
Cover of The Races of Mankind (1943), a pamphlet that drew great ire from white Southern leaders incensed at its premise of racial equality and the acceptability of race mixing.
But the public reception concealed trouble brewing behind the scenes. Even before publication, the pamphlet attracted apprehension in the USO, the organization that had set out to sponsor it. The USO president, Chester Barnard, wrote a five-page, single-spaced letter rejecting the prepublication manuscript on the ground that its distribution would be a “political effort” subject to interpretation as subversive. “The doctrine of equality of race runs directly counter not only to social practice in large sections of the country, but also to definite legal [proscriptions].… Distribution of such material on a large scale by an organization such as the USO will inevitably be regarded as an effort to change governmental policy.” The chair of the Public Affairs Committee responded that while the USO could choose what literature to distribute, Barnard’s rationale would “restrict the educational policy of any organization to limitations imposed by the most ignorant, the least trained, and the noisiest part of
the public it seeks to serve.”45
The Public Affairs Committee persisted in publishing the pamphlet, submitting it to various USO member agencies despite Barnard’s concern. The initial run of thirty thousand copies in October 1943 proved not enough; second and third printings produced more pamphlets. The orders were staggering: the Army and Navy Division of the YMCA immediately ordered seventy thousand copies, the Rosenwald Fund ordered eleven thousand, and the US Army ordered fifty-five thousand copies for its orientation courses.
And then, suddenly, the pamphlet became the center of a public storm that would reach all the way to both chambers of Congress. In January, USO president Barnard ordered an end to its distribution by USO units to the armed forces, considering it “too controversial” for servicemen. Critics denounced this decision; as one writer mocked, “Perhaps Mr. Barnard and his board consider racial truths too heady a wine for the men who are ready to fight and die for the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter.” Another noted, “if you happen to believe that the earth is flat you will find every book on geography ‘controversial.’… I fear that epithet is used by people who don’t like to have the facts presented.” Infuriated by the seeming cowardice on display in Barnard’s decision, scientists and other public figures protested the USO’s action, while other orders for the pamphlet poured in: the National CIO War Relief Committee announced its intent to mail copies of the pamphlet to all servicemen in the United States and, it hoped, overseas, as “one of the best answers to Hitler’s Aryan creed.”46 A fourth printing of the pamphlet produced a hundred fifty thousand copies in January, and a fifth added a hundred thousand more pamphlets two months later.47