The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  * Paul Broca became the most enthusiastic French anthropometrist in the middle of the nineteenth century. But in the 1870 era of sharp military conflict between France and a newly united Germany, Broca pulled back from the association of long-headedness, Teutonic race, and enterprise. Now taking note of the close relationship between science and jingoism, Broca pointed out that the greatest scientific admirers of dolichocephaly came from northern Europe. They had relegated France to the brachycephalic zone out of racial chauvinism.

  * Even though both these skulls, brachycephalic as well as dolichocephalic, came from the Netherlands, anthropologists usually classified the Netherlands as dolicho-blond territory.

  * No biological bases existed then, and none exist now, for cleanly differentiating the peoples of the world. Before the age of DNA testing, anthropological classification depended upon two kinds of observations: first, measurement, such as cephalic index; second, observation of outward appearance. Neither reveals the history of biological descent, whether of individuals or of groups. Today’s DNA tests offer probabilities and similarities far more reliable than the observations and measurements of Ripley’s time. Although often presumed infallible, DNA testing measures probabilities, not actual fact, and forensic processes include sloppiness and mistakes. In a 1997 Sciences article entitled “Bred in the Bone?” Alan H. Goodman analyzes the mistaken DNA racial identification of a black woman killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

  * Chesnutt predicted that wealth would open the route to equal treatment in the public sphere.

  * The captions read, “SCANDINAVIA. Teutonic types. 55: Vaage, index 75. 56: Hedalen, index 76. 57: Jøderen. 58: Norwegian. Lapps. 59: Stature 1.46 m. Index 87.5. 60: Index 87.5. Stature 1.43 m.”

  * The National Geographic ’s reviewer of The Races of Europe found Ripley’s separate treatment of Jews anti-Semitic, because it treated Jews as though they did not fully belong in Europe.

  * “Racist” here does not refer to people of color, who were not part of Ripley’s concern. He spoke the lexicon of biological racial difference—with regard only to people now considered white.

  * Had he sought a Saxon identity, the Westphalian Franz Boas might have been considered a Saxon. Given the continual remapping of kingdoms and provinces in the German-speaking lands, any relationship between western (“Lower”) Saxony and Westphalia had to be vague. Having actually grown up in Germany and not being much of a Teutomaniac, he pressed no such claim.

  * Maurice Fishberg, an immigrant from southwest Ukraine, taught medicine at his alma mater, New York University. After several papers on the Jews of New York City, he published The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment in 1911, in which he contended, like Boas, that Jewish physiognomy varied widely and that Jews were not physically different from other Europeans. His unnamed New York Times reviewer remained unconvinced, wondering why, if “the Jewish race” is not pure, “Jews and Jewesses from quite different quarters of the globe resemble one another so markedly.”

  * It should be noted, however, that Clarence C. Gravlee, Richard L. Jantz, and Corey S. Sparks reexamined Boas’s immigrant study in 2001 and 2003 and concluded that the changes Boas found were too slight and contradictory to sustain his claims for a possible change in “type.”

  * The aftermath of the European revolutions of 1848 had sent hundreds of liberal-minded Germans into exile. They retained their progressive ideals as “Forty-eighters,” much as the revolutionaries of 1968 identified themselves according to their activist year.

  † Zangwill said his experience as president of a committee to rescue Russian Jews from the pogroms and resettle them in the United States inspired the play.

  * Disraeli’s “Young England” novels are Vivian Grey (1827), The Young Duke (1831), Contarini Fleming (1832), Henrietta Temple (1837), Venetia (1837), Coningsby, or the New Generation (1844), Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), and Tancred, or the New Crusade (1847).

  * Another representative American opinion maker, Horace M. Kallen, quite aptly termed Roosevelt “a drum-major and a prophet.”

  * There was a gap. Fredrick Jackson Turner’s election in 1910 signaled a hiatus in the Teutonist idea. Turner espoused a “frontier thesis,” making the American frontier, not medieval Germans in their forests, the wellspring of American identity. Like Crèvecoeur, Turner envisioned Americans as a mixture of northern Europeans—still only northern Europeans—but as a mixture occurring in the Western Hemisphere rather than in Emerson’s version of England. Such views placed Turner outside the club of pure Teutonists.

  † Harold Hardraada (1015–66), king of Norway, also Harald III Sigurdsson, led an international life, in Norway, Scotland, and England and in Russia, Sicily, and Bulgaria, perhaps even in Jerusalem. Attempting to enforce his claim to the English throne, he died in battle at Stamford Bridge, Yorkshire, England, at the hands of the English king Harold II. Less than a month later Harold II died at Hastings, and William of Normandy became king of England.

  * When Roosevelt and others spoke of “native Americans” at the turn of the twentieth century, they excluded people not of northern European descent. Indians, Negroes, Asians, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe did not count as “native Americans.”

  * Ross belonged to the mass of progressives like Roosevelt who termed the opponents of involuntary sterilization—such as social workers, immigrants, and African Americans—“sentimentalists.”

  † For publicly criticizing the power of corporations and unrestricted immigration, Ross had run afoul of Mrs. Leland Stanford, a founder of the university. She forced President David Starr Jordan to fire Ross in 1900.

  * While cherishing “climatic adaptability” as a dimension of race superiority, Ross laments the debility of hardy northerners once they move to warmer places.

  * Ross did not agree, however, with other anthropologists (e.g., Sir Arthur Keith in England) that war served eugenic purposes. According to Ross, modern warfare had become so industrialized that it no longer served manly ends. In the twentieth century, warfare was more like “an extra-hazardous branch of engineering” with little material payoff.

  * The IWW manifested a split between its leadership and its rank and file. The latter consisted of a mix of races and ethnicities, varying by location and industry, while the leadership consisted largely of Irish Americans.

  * In 1900 the $1,311.72 balance of the fund was turned over to the New York Public Library for the purchase of books on “economic subjects.”

  * Although Lowell appears here as a link in the degenerate-family chain leading to eugenic sterilization, she played a much broader role in the history of social work in New York State. A founder of the New York Charity Organization Society and the Consumers’ League of New York and other organizations devoted to poor and working-class women, she was pro-labor and anti-imperialist. Lowell formulated social work’s theoretical basis in her book Public Relief and Private Charity (1884).

  * The belief that poor whites descended from antisocial English indentured servants was widely accepted well into the twentieth century. As late as 1941, the Harvard-educated Mississippi Delta planter William Alexander Percy described the “river rat” of the lower Mississippi River as a descendant of English debt prisoners. Percy characterized the Anglo-Saxon river rat of “pure English stock” as “illiterate, suspicious, intensely clannish, blond, and usually ugly…the most unprepossessing [breed] on the face of the ill-populated earth.” Like many elite white southerners, Percy blamed racial violence on these poor whites, whom he considered inferior to “the Negro.”

  * Jordan’s eugenic publications include The Religion of a Sensible American (1909), Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit (1910), and The Heredity of Richard Roe: A Discussion of the Principles of Eugenics (1911). Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit is still in print, for sale for $19.50 through the Forbes Magazine book club. Two high schools and two middl
e schools in California are named for Jordan.

  * Goddard also served as the first football coach at the University of Southern California.

  † Clark, then headed by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, was at its peak as an institution dedicated to the ideals of German scholarship. Franz Boas was leaving Clark as Goddard was receiving his doctorate. Like many of the men interested in race and heredity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Goddard was another Yankee who loved the outdoors. Although married for many years, he had no children.

  ‡ The child-study movement professionalized social-gospeler impulses and plugged them into the vast spread of childhood institutions as all the states mandated compulsory education between 1880 and 1918.

  * The Cold Spring Harbor institution serves currently as a center of research on the human genome.

  † In Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883) Galton praised the founding study of hereditary degeneracy, “The Jukes.”

  * Pearson, with his own example of a degenerate family, mentions “a certain bad stock as far back as 1680” that was still producing “drunkenness, insanity, and physical breakdown” in 1900, proof that “this law of inheritance is as inevitable as the law of gravity, we shall cease to struggle against it.” In National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1905), Pearson also declared, “Lunacy is one of the things which we may quite definitely accept as an inherited character.”

  * Binet died in 1911, before the great American vogue in intelligence testing and the controversies it aroused. He had never meant his tests as means to rank adults.

  † “Morons” were rated as smarter than “imbeciles,” who, in turn, were considered more intelligent than “idiots.”

  * Even early on, however, the book’s positive reception contained a hint of reservation regarding Goddard’s assumption that intelligence was a single Mendelian unit trait.

  † Goddard’s reasoning regarding feeblemindedness (though not by that name) reappears as the source of social ills and defective human beings in the best-selling analysis of intelligence and human destiny of the late twentieth century: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

  * Vasectomy for men, tubal ligation for women. The earliest vasectomy had been performed in Chicago in 1897.

  * Between 1907 and 1956, 60,166 people had been sterilized as mentally deficient, insane, or epileptic. California led the way with 19,998; Virginia followed with 6,811, North Carolina with 4,777, Michigan with 3,597, and Kansas with 3, 025.

  * In his course on biology as a social weapon, the Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould administered the Army test for illiterates to fifty-three of his students. The students did very well: thirty-one scored A; sixteen scored B; but six scored C, placing them at what Gould called the intellectual borderline and fit only for buck private duties.

  * Not everyone agreed with Goddard. Public Health Service M.D.s at Ellis Island regarded his Binet-inspired tests skeptically; they altered or ignored them as they thought necessary.

  * Grant’s and Gould’s own books fared differently among the general public. Grant’s Passing of the Great Race became a sensation, whereas Gould’s America: A Family Matter (1922), which argued, according to Yerkes’s foreword, “for pure-bred races,” never gained a large following.

  * Lapouge called 70 percent of northern Germans and 70 percent of Americans, but only 20 percent of southern Germans, dolichocephalic (i.e., superior). He located the highest proportion of dolichocephalics—85 percent—in Spain, but he would have dismissed them as Mediterraneans rather than Nordics. His next highest proportions of dolichocephalics were in England and Scandinavia, where they were safely Nordic.

  * After the war Americans embraced intelligence testing more enthusiastically than people in other countries, but mental testing took place largely in the private sector. Yerkes complained in 1941 of the U.S. military’s neglect: “Germany has a long lead in the development of military psychology…. The Nazis have achieved something that is entirely without parallel in military history…. What has happened in Germany is the logical sequel to the psychological and personnel services in our own Army during 1917–1918.”

  * Herbert Johnson (ca. 1880–1947), a Nebraskan, drew for the Saturday Evening Post from 1915 until his death. A stout foe of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies, Johnson saw the New Deal as “Government in Business,” an octopus strangling honest business.

  * The 1882 ruling In re Ah Yup declared Chinese not to be white, and therefore not eligible for naturalization under the 1790 Naturalization Act. Although the language of the 1790 act deemed only free white (males) eligible, the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 made black people eligible for naturalized citizenship. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 enacted the prohibition against Chinese naturalization into federal law. The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated with the government of Japan in 1907 permitted the entry of Japanese gentlemen—scholars, diplomats—but prohibited the immigration of working-class Japanese.

  * Dan McGann, with an Irish name, now stands for the real American.

  † In 1977 then governor Michael Dukakis signed a declaration removing “any stigma and disgrace” from Vanzetti and Sacco, because of the shoddy conduct of their trials.

  * Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was born in Lithuania and immigrated to the United States when she was seventeen.

  * A summer 2004 North Country Radio reading list included Roberts’s best-known novel, Northwest Passage. A list of suggested reading for the August 2005 Prairie Home Companion cruise recommends “any of the historical novels by Kenneth Roberts.”

  * In 1915 vigilante Georgians raided a prison, kidnapped Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jewish businessman, and lynched him.

  * Grant’s fellow students in Dresden included the future Saturday Evening Post editor Horace Lorimer.

  * Karl Pearson, Galton’s successor in statistics and eugenics in London, embodied this appropriation of science. Preaching empire and racial cleansing in the name of science in National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1905), Pearson said, “[M]y view—and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation—is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races.”

  † Gobineau, like the other infamous Aryan chauvinist Adolph Hitler, evidently had brown hair and brown eyes.

  * Oscar Levy (1866–1946), a German living in Oxford, had edited an English translation of the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche in 1911 and is connected to the publication of the anti-Semitic and fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  † Lapouge also shared with Grant and other Nordic race chauvinists an enthusiasm for the outdoors and healthy, natural living.

  * The agrégation is a French postcollegiate qualification for secondary school and college teaching. Its difficulty and prestige vary by field, from the equivalent of an American master’s degree to the equivalent of an American doctorate.

  * The French classifier of races Joseph Deniker used “Nordic.” Grant would have been aware of Deniker’s work, well respected in Europe but not well known in the United States.

  * The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century achieved broad popular and critical success, going into three editions in its first year and selling some 100,000 copies by the outbreak of the war. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Albert Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, and many other intellectuals lavished praise on Chamberlain’s book. Despite Chamberlain’s belief that Germanic greatness required no supposedly scientific proof, Shaw called it “a masterpiece of really scientific history.”

  † The English topped Lapouge’s chart with 80 percent dolichocephalic and 25 percent pure Homo Europæus. Lapouge considered France “denordicized” after the French Revolution’s uprising of the servile
, brachycephalic, Alpine masses. According to this theory, the revolution killed off the aristocracy, members of the Nordic race, and doomed France to mediocrity.