The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  The most “dissimilar” for Ross are the “Hebrews,” polar opposites of “our” pioneer breed. Jews are “undersized and weak-muscled.” Shrinking from outdoor activity and screaming at the slightest injury, they cannot be made into Boy Scouts, iconic symbols of hardy young manhood. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, the outdoors functioned as the symbolic Nordic setting, whereas inferior races were thought to inhabit the teeming city slums where they could perpetually stay indoors.

  For Ross, Jewish shortcomings, however prominent, were not permanent or innate. Granted, it would take eons for Jews to turn into pioneer stock, he hinted, but that time might eventually arrive.13 Kenneth Roberts disagreed: to him immigrant shortcomings were inborn and permanent, and he defined immigration in terms of race.

  Quotas should therefore severely limit the numbers of immigrants of certain races, never mind nationality. Like Carl C. Brigham in A Study of American Intelligence, Roberts used the increasingly fashionable term “Nordic” to designate a superior race. In turn, Brigham’s book leans on the authority of the prominent eugenicist Madison Grant, who inserted the term “Nordic” into public discourse in Passing of the Great Race. Roberts knew Madison Grant and his acolyte Lothrop Stoddard personally and echoed their warnings directly. In Why Europe Leaves Home, Roberts quotes, cites, and recommends both Grant and Stoddard and makes Grant’s Nordic a household name.14

  OBITUARIES OF Madison Grant (1865–1937) remembered this quintessential patrician racist as a pioneering conservationist, which was true.15 His New England Puritan descent ever in evidence, Madison Grant considered American nature his patrimony, and in many ways it was. (See figure 22.2, Madison Grant.) He saved various endangered species, ranging from California redwood trees to American bison, and founded the Bronx Zoo. Along with Theodore Roosevelt—his longtime correspondent, fellow outdoors enthusiast, and book blurber—Grant played an active role in the Boone and Crockett Club of wealthy New Yorkers interested in the early phases of conservation. Without this club and Grant in particular, Glacier National Park, Everglades National Park, and Olympic National Park might not have come into being. Grant’s education at Yale (his family’s institution), enhanced by four years of study in Dresden, allowed him to read European anthropology in its original languages.16* He was an accomplished man, but his accomplishments led him in odd, even pernicious, directions. His understanding, for instance, of animals and trees took Grant to the conservation of the races through eugenics and immigration restriction. As a prime hereditarian of the 1910s and 1920s, Grant exerted enormous influence at Cold Spring Harbor’s Eugenics Record Office.

  Fig. 22.2. Madison Grant.

  William Z. Ripley’s Races of Europe lay at the foundation of Grant’s science. And Grant did consider his work brutally, objectively scientific, even at the cost of rejecting fundamental American values. The introduction to his pessimistic masterwork, The Passing of the Great Race (1916; 4th edition, 1921) warns, “[T]his generation must completely repudiate the proud boast of our fathers that they acknowledged no distinction in ‘race, creed, or color’ or else the native American must turn the page of history and write: ‘FINIS AMERICAE.’”17 To Grant, the melting pot might have worked in the olden days of Nordic immigrants—who for Grant and Roberts now include the Catholic Irish—but the current surge of non-Nordic immigrants dooms the melting pot to “absolute failure.”18 No more melting pot, and no more democratic human rights. The “sentimentalists” must be put down along with the alien races.

  Resolutely hereditarian, The Passing of the Great Race combines the commonplaces of degenerate-family studies, Galtonian eugenics, race suicide, history, and polygenesis (rejection of the idea of the same origin for people of all races).19 One remedy for race deterioration came from his eugenics colleague Harry Latimer. One might, Grant muses, designate the

  least desirable, let us say, ten per cent of the community. When this unemployed and unemployable human residuum has been eliminated together with the great mass of crime, poverty, alcoholism and feeblemindedness associated therewith it would be easy to consider the advisability of further restricting the perpetuation of the then remaining least valuable types.

  By progressively “eliminating” inferior types, “the most vital and intellectual strains” could finally be chosen “to carry on the race.”20 Grant and other eugenicists envisioned negative eugenics as the glorious future of evolution. If this sounds Nazi-like, it most certainly was, and Nazis in Germany took lessons from Grant.

  Grant, Ripley, and all the other Teutonists fetishized height. Once again, the Sardinians are racially “dwarfed,” like “the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.” Perhaps, Grant admits, some peoples he includes among his Nordics may actually be short. To explain this departure from theory, he surmises that the natural height of the Irish, and even some English, may be lowered by the continued existence of “a considerable population of primitive short stock”—“primitive stock” always being short and dark. His example of the influence of “primitive short stock” on Nordics contrasts Englishmen of different “races” that happen to coincide with class difference: “the Piccadilly gentleman of Nordic race and the cockney costermonger of the old Neolithic type.” Hair and eye color count, but skin color less so in The Passing of the Great Race, because skin color is unreliable. Pure Nordics have “absolutely fair skin,” making the Nordic “the white man par excellence.” But, unfortunately, many real Nordics, even Scandinavians, may not be sufficiently pale.21

  Short Englishmen, swarthy Nordics, and poor whites in the U.S. South or London’s East End all compromise Grant’s tortured attempt at a coherent hereditarian classification. Grant also rejects the notion of the Kentuckian as the quintessential Nordic American popularized by Theodore Roosevelt’s professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. No better than poor whites—whether “crackers” or the shiftless whites of Georgia, the Bahamas, and Barbados—Kentuckians lack even the excuse of living at low altitudes, when high altitudes were thought to foster superior races. More befuddlement follows. Grant reckons that the Cumberland Mountains should favor “men of the Nordic breed,” but mountains of the South were notorious for producing degenerate families. Lacking an answer, Grant seems to shrug and walk away, concluding, “There are probably other hereditary forces at work there as yet little understood.”22

  Grant may have sunk into obscurity, but the biggest name in American letters, Theodore Roosevelt, loved the first edition of The Passing of the Great Race, going so far as to supply a blurb proclaiming it “a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize…. It shows a fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail. It is the work of an American scholar and gentleman.”

  Academic reviews were also largely positive, though criticism did arise from liberals and Jews, both easily brushed off because of their origins. Franz Boas grasped the danger of a spiteful, racist account coming from an author with sound scientific credentials. Credentials be damned, Boas condemned Grant’s work as “practically a modern edition of Gobineau” based on “dogmatic assumptions.” Boas recognized the fanciful nature of Grant’s maps, which had dazzled most other reviewers.23 Young Horace Kallen’s negative review prompted Grant to dismiss it as the work “of a Jew and just what [he] expected from the followers of Boas.”24 So cavalier a dismissal sufficed to tamp down dissent during the heyday of the blond, long-headed Nordic.

  Fig. 22.3. John Singer Sargent, Apollo and the Muses, 1921, blond Apollo, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  The dolichocephalic (long-headed), light-haired “dolicho-blond” embodies Grant’s beau ideal, a figure now practically forgotten but one cutting quite a swath in the 1920s. According to Grant, Nordics have not only given the world civilization, enterprise, and bravery; they also possess heavenly beauty:
the gods of lovely ancient Greece were, of course, blond. In 1921, the same year the best-selling revision of The Passing of the Great Race appeared, the American society painter John Singer Sargent depicted ancient Greeks and their gods as quintessential dolicho-blonds in Apollo and the Muses, a mural in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (See figure 22.3, Sargent, Apollo and the Muses, blond Apollo.) Even Sargent’s horses are blond. (See figure 22.4, Sargent, Apollo and the Muses, blond horses.)

  Fig. 22.4. John Singer Sargent, Apollo and the Muses, 1921, blond horses, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  Without equivocation, Grant maintains that no artist depicting the crucifixion “hesitates to make the two thieves brunet in contrast to the blond Saviour,” perhaps because the great artists of the Renaissance, Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, “were all the Nordic type.”25 The astonishing version of history in The Passing of the Great Race advances the then accepted explanation for the fall of Rome: dolicho-blond Roman patricians committed race suicide by not having children, by marching off to war, and by leaving their slaves at home to breed freely.26 It was not for nothing that Grant and David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s president and a leading peace advocate, worked together on committees at the Eugenics Record Office. Jordan, for instance, deplored the war in Europe for wreaking “unparalleled havoc in the best racial elements in each nation concerned…thereby exhausting the near future and entailing impoverishment, both physical and mental.”27

  23

  ANTHROPOSOCIOLOGY: THE SCIENCE OF ALIEN RACES

  “These books are all scientific.” So insists F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925). A former Yale football star and member of a secret society, Tom, now thirty and immensely rich, lives in posh “East Egg” on the north shore of Long Island, well insulated from most of American life.1 To him and others of his ilk, Lothrop Stoddard (“Goddard”) figures as a purveyor of “scientific stuff” that has “been proved.”

  Buchanan has a point, for all these race theoreticians cheerfully called upon scientific research, often European. Following this scholarship into obscure nooks and crannies may seem odd today, but in the early twentieth century, it surged to the fore in a seductive mix of eugenics’ degenerate families and Ripley’s cephalic-index-driven race classification. Thus The Passing of the Great Race grows directly out of a body of work inspired by Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), a French scholar mentioned earlier as an inventor of “anthroposociology” who was a librarian at the Universities of Montpellier, Rennes, and Poitiers and author of the anti-Semitic L’Aryen: Son rôle social (1899).

  In theory, anthroposociology analyzes the relationship between human bodies and society. But for Lapouge, Ammon, Beddoe, Grant, and other anthroposociologists, heredity—conceived of as racial heredity—was everything. Environment, class status, individual variation, migration, and wealth, on the other hand, counted for naught, as determined by their science of unit traits.* In the United States in the 1920s, such pernicious ideas made sense to racial thinkers whose dogma meshed nicely with that of the German National Socialists. The Nazis adopted Lapouge as an iconic philosopher, styling him as a count or a marquis, whether or not his family in Poitiers was actually aristocratic.2

  Lapouge, in turn, had proclaimed himself the acolyte of another French racist of uncertain nobility, Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), whose masterwork remained largely unread for decades. A prolific author, Gobineau had published his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) in two volumes in 1853–54 to near-complete silence—only like-minded racists savored the book.3 Another pessimistic racist, Gobineau interpreted history as the rise and fall of the blond, blue-eyed Aryan race: Aryans rose out of racial genius, but the race mixing that inevitably follows economic development brought it down.† When Gobineau excoriated race mixing, he meant the mixing of different races of whites.

  Gobineau and Lapouge both abhorred race mixing, though they gave it different meanings. For Gobineau, race mixing meant the mating of Aryans with non-Aryans; for Lapouge, it meant the mating of dolicho-blonds with brachy-browns. Lapouge even went so far as to predict a conflict of the races over cephalic indices: “I am convinced that in the next century people will slaughter each other by the millions because of a difference of a degree or two in the cephalic index.”4 Today these head-shape theories seem bizarre, confusing, and muddled. But it was all perfectly rational to them, for Lapouge, like Gobineau, observed race mixing in modern France and despaired. Their theories enjoyed increasing credibility.

  Gobineau cannot be counted as a classic anti-Semite, for he admired Jews as he appreciated blacks, in a stereotypical fashion. As a racist thinker, Gobineau could have been a great deal meaner. As we have seen, applause came to Gobineau from Mobile, Alabama, in the 1850s, when Josiah C. Nott sponsored an edited translation under the title The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races. When Lapouge flattered himself to be the “first prophet of the Nordic race after Gobineau,” he was ignoring the mid-nineteenth-century American racists’ translation. Lapouge’s ignorance is understandable, for the Nott translation, like the original, went largely unnoticed at the time. Who could have known that such arcane weirdness would flourish in the twentieth century as science?

  Gobineau’s great breakthrough in the English-speaking world came long after his death when a Dr. Oscar Levy, whose motives remain obscure, sponsored a new and more faithful translation, published in London and the United States.* It was this 1915 translation that brought Gobineau to the attention of racists in the United States and made “Aryan” a favorite racist term. Like Gobineau, Lapouge believed that two antagonistic races lived in France—long-headed (dolichocephalic) Nordic/Aryan aristocrats and round-headed (brachycephalic) Alpine peasants.5

  Such racist theory swirled throughout the West, with oceans no barrier. Madison Grant and William Z. Ripley shared an enthusiasm for Lapouge’s anthroposociology. The bibliography of Ripley’s Races of Europe cites Lapouge twenty-five times, and Lapouge’s statistics appear repeatedly in Ripley’s tables.6 In February 1908, Ripley gave his Huxley lecture in New York to Grant’s patrician Half Moon Club. By 1912 Grant was in regular correspondence with Lapouge, whom he called, in wild exaggeration, “the most distinguished anthropologist in France.”7†

  Glimpsed in a certain light, Lapouge did seem impressive. He had published eighty-seven articles collected in three books. In the early 1890s his work appeared in the respected journal Revue d’anthropologie, edited by Paul Topinard, who had inherited the considerable intellectual prestige of Paul Broca’s French school of anthropology.8 The influential Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner cited Lapouge in the notes and bibliography of his widely read social Darwinist book Folkways.9 There ended Lapouge’s scholarly glory, for he twice failed competitions for the agrégation* and was never able to secure a professorship. By the mid-1890s, Lapouge was limited to publication in obscure, provincial journals. His best-known book, L’Aryen, sold only 430 of the 1,000 copies printed and was never translated into English.10 Germanophilic anthroposociology and lack of judgment cost him dearly at home.

  By the turn of the twentieth century, Lapouge was totally marginalized in France. His racist screed L’Aryen appeared during the uproar over the Dreyfus Affair, and his strident anti-Semitism alienated him from the French social science mainstream of Emile Durkheim.11 Henceforth, Lapouge influenced only American hereditarians in the 1920s and Nazi Germans in the 1930s. Eugenicists around Grant invited Lapouge to join their Galton Society in 1920 and to present a paper at the highly publicized Second Eugenics Conference at the American Museum of Natural History in 1921. Even Margaret Sanger, the much admired feminist advocate of birth control, extended a hand by inviting Lapouge to participate in the Sixth International Birth Control Conference in New York in 1925.12 Lapouge, in turn, arranged the French publication of Grant’s Passing of the Great Race. Le Déclin de la grande race, published in 1926 a
nd featuring a long introduction by Lapouge, flopped. Of the 2,000 copies printed, a mere 1,000 were sold. Only in Nazi Germany did Lapouge remain an intellectual hero. German schools used selections of his and Gobineau’s work as readings in the French language. L’Aryen came out in a German edition as late as 1939.

  No wonder Hitler’s Nazis admired L’Aryen. It contained, as a summation, a long section on “the Jew” as the Aryan’s primary competitor for world domination. (Lapouge did not envision competition from people of color as much of a problem. Perhaps in the distant future the Japanese and the Negroes of the United States and the Caribbean might constitute a danger, but not very soon.)13 These seventeen pages on the Jewish menace repeat every anti-Semitic canard: Jews are smart and have bamboozled the ignorant brachy-brown masses with tales of democracy; Jews are a bastard population; Jews have chased out the Nordics; Jews are specialized for parasitism and incapable of productive work; Jews lack military spirit, etc., etc., etc. Page after page of Lapouge’s calumny ends with the defeat of Jewish domination, for, he maintains, Jews have no gift for politics; in any event, increasing numbers are converting to Christianity.

  Ultimately for Lapouge as for Grant, brachycephalic Alpines pose the biggest problem because they multiply rapidly, “covering the earth with their docile and mediocre posterity.”14 In the United States, a toxic mix of Lapougian anthroposociology, degenerate-family studies, and attacks on the Jews came together in the circle of Madison Grant.