The Mismeasure of Man Read online

  All American culture heroes embraced racial attitudes that would embarrass public-school mythmakers. Benjamin Franklin, while viewing the inferiority of blacks as purely cultural and completely remediable, nonetheless expressed his hope that America would become a domain of whites, undiluted by less pleasing colors.

  I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we … darken its people? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?* (Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751).

  Others among our heroes argued for biological inferiority. Thomas Jefferson wrote, albeit tentatively: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind” (in Gossett, 1965, p. 44). Lincoln’s pleasure at the performance of black soldiers in the Union army greatly increased his respect for freedmen and former slaves. But freedom does not imply biological equality, and Lincoln never abandoned a basic attitude, so strongly expressed in the Douglas debates (1858):

  2.1 The unilinear scale of human races and lower relatives according to Nott and Gliddon, 1868. The chimpanzee skull is falsely inflated, and the Negro jaw extended, to give the impression that blacks might even rank lower than the apes.

  There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

  Lest we choose to regard this statement as mere campaign rhetoric, I cite this private jotting, scribbled on a fragment of paper in 1859:

  Negro equality! Fudge! How long, in the Government of a God great enough to make and rule the universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to quip, so low a piece of demagogism as this (in Sinkler, 1972, P. 47).

  I do not cite these statements in order to release skeletons from ancient closets. Rather, I quote the men who have justly earned our highest respect in order to show that white leaders of Western nations did not question the propriety of racial ranking during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this context, the pervasive assent given by scientists to conventional rankings arose from shared social belief, not from objective data gathered to test an open question. Yet, in a curious case of reversed causality, these pronouncements were read as independent support for the political context.

  All leading scientists followed social conventions (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3). In the first formal definition of human races in modern taxonomic terms, Linnaeus mixed character with anatomy (Systema naturae, 1758). Homo sapiens afer (the African black), he proclaimed, is “ruled by caprice”; Homo sapiens europaeus is “ruled by customs.” Of African women, he wrote: mammae lactantesprolixae—breasts lactate profusely. The men, he added, are indolent and annoint themselves with grease.

  The three greatest naturalists of the nineteenth century did not hold blacks in high esteem. Georges Cuvier, widely hailed in France as the Aristotle of his age, and a founder of geology, paleontology, and modern comparative anatomy, referred to native Africans as “the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government” (Cuvier, 1812, p. 105). Charles Lyell, the conventional founder of modern geology, wrote:

  2.2 An unsubtle attempt to suggest strong affinity between blacks and gorillas. From Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 1854. Nott and Gliddon comment on this figure: “The palpable analogies and dissimilitudes between an inferior type of mankind and a superior type of monkey require no comment.”

  2.3 Two more comparisons of blacks and apes from Nott and Gliddon, 1854. This book was not a fringe document, but the leading American text on human racial differences.

  The brain of the Bushman … leads towards the brain of the Simiadae [monkeys]. This implies a connexion between want of intelligence and structural assimilation. Each race of Man has its place, like the inferior animals (in Wilson, 1970, p. 347).

  Charles Darwin, the kindly liberal and passionate abolitionist,* wrote about a future time when the gap between human and ape will increase by the anticipated extinction of such intermediates as chimpanzees and Hottentots.

  The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Causasian, and some ape as low as a babon, instead of as at preent between the negro or Australian and the gorilla (Descent of Man, 1871, p. 201).

  Even more instructive are the beliefs of those few scientists often cited in retrospect as cultural relativisits and defenders of equality. J. F. Blumenbach attributed racial differences to the influences of climate. He protested rankings based on presumed mental ability and assembled a collection of books written by blacks. Nonetheless, he did not doubt that white people set a standard, from which all other races must be viewed as departures (see essay 4 at end of book for more information about Blumenbach):

  The Caucasian must, on every physiological principle, be considered as the primary or intermediate of these five principal Races. The two extremes into which it has deviated, are on the one hand the Mongolian, on the other the Ethiopian [African blacks] (1825, P. 37).

  Alexander von Humboldt, world traveler, statesman, and greatest popularizer of nineteenth-century science, would be the hero of all modern egalitarians who seek antecedents in history. He, more than any other scientist of his time, argued forcefully and at length against ranking on mental or aesthetic grounds. He also drew political implications from his convictions, and campaigned against all forms of slavery and subjugation as impediments to the natural striving of all people to attain mental excellence. He wrote in the most famous passage of his five-volume Cosmos:

  Whilst we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation than others—but none in themselves nobler than others. All are in like degree designed for freedom (1849, p. 368).

  Yet even Humboldt invoked innate mental difference to resolve some dilemmas of human history. Why, he asks in the second volume of Cosmos, did the Arabs explode in culture and science soon after the rise of Islam, while Scythian tribes of southeastern Europe stuck to their ancient ways; for both peoples were nomadic and shared a common climate and environment? Humboldt did find some cultural differences—greater contact of Arabs with surrounding urbanized cultures, for example. But, in the end, he labeled Arabs as a “more highly gifted race” with greater “natural adaptability for mental cultivation” (1849, p. 578).

  Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of natural selection with Darwin, is justly hailed as an antiracist. Indeed, he did affirm near equality in the innate mental capacity of all peoples. Yet, curiously, this very belief led him to abandon natural selection and return to divine creation as an explanation for the human mind—much to Darwin’s disgust. Natural selection, Wallace argued, can only build structures immediately useful to animals possessing them. The brain of savages is, potentially, as good as ours. But they do not use it fully, as the rudeness and inferiority of their culture indicates. Since modern savages are much like human ancestors, our brain must have developed its higher capacities long before we put them to any use.

  Preevolutionary styles of scientific racism: monogenism and polygenism

  Preevolutionary justifications for racial ranking proceeded in two modes. The “softer” argument—again using inappropriate definitions from modern perspectives—uph
eld the scriptural unity of all peoples in the single creation of Adam and Eve. This view was called monogenism—or origin from a single source. Human races are a product of degeneration from Eden’s perfection. Races have declined to different degrees, whites least and blacks most. Climate proved most popular as a primary cause for racial distinction. Degenerationists differed on the remediability of modern deficits. Some held that the differences, though developed gradually under the influence of climate, were now fixed and could never be reversed. Others argued that the fact of gradual development implied reversibility in appropriate environments. Samuel Stanhope Smith, president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), hoped that American blacks, in a climate more suited to Caucasian temperaments, would soon turn white. But other degenerationists felt that improvement in benevolent climes could not proceed rapidly enough to have any impact upon human history.

  The “harder” argument abandoned scripture as allegorical and held that human races were separate biological species, the descendants of different Adams. As another form of life, blacks need not participate in the “equality of man.” Proponents of this argument were called “polygenists.”

  Degenerationism was probably the more popular argument, if only because scripture was not to be discarded lightly. Moreover, the interfertility of all human races seemed to guarantee their union as a single species under Buffon’s criterion that members of a species be able to breed with each other, but not with representatives of any other group. Buffon himself, the greatest naturalist of eighteenth-century France, was a strong abolitionist and exponent of improvement for inferior races in appropriate environments. But he never doubted the inherent validity of a white standard:

  The most temperate climate lies between the 40th and 50th degree of latitude, and it produces the most handsome and beautiful men. It is from this climate that the ideas of the genuine color of mankind, and of the various degrees of beauty ought to be derived.

  Some degenerationists cited their commitments in the name of human brotherhood. Etienne Serres, a famous French medical anatomist, wrote in 1860 that the perfectability of lower races distinguished humans as the only species subject to improvement by its own efforts. He lambasted polygeny as a “savage theory” that “seems to lend scientific support to the enslavement of races less advanced in civilization than the Caucasian”:

  Their conclusion is that the Negro is no more a white man than a donkey is a horse or a zebra—a theory put into practice in the United States of America, to the shame of civilization (1860, pp. 407—408).

  Nonetheless, Serres worked to document the signs of inferiority among lower races. As an anatomist, he sought evidence within his specialty and confessed to some difficulty in establishing both criteria and data. He settled on the theory of recapitulation—the idea that higher creatures repeat the adult stages of lower animals during their own growth (Chapter 4). Adult blacks, he argued, should be like white children, adult Mongolians like white adolescents. He searched diligently but devised nothing much better than the distance between navel and penis—“that ineffaceable sign of embryonic life in man.” This distance is small relative to body height in babies of all races. The navel migrates upward during growth, but attains greater heights in whites than in yellows, and never gets very far at all in blacks. Blacks remain perpetually like white children and announce their inferiority thereby.

  Polygeny, though less popular, had its illustrious supporters as well. David Hume did not spend his life absorbed in pure thought. He held a number of political posts, including the stewardship of the English colonial office in 1766. Hume advocated both the separate creation and innate inferiority of nonwhite races:

  I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.* No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences.… Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people without education will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly (in Popkin, 1974, p. 143; see Popkin’s excellent article for a long analysis of Hume as a polygenist).

  Charles White, an English surgeon, wrote the strongest defense of polygeny in 1799—Account of the Regular Gradation in Man. White abandoned Buffon’s criterion of interfertility in defining species, pointing to successful hybrids between such conventionally separate groups as foxes, wolves, and jackals.* He railed against the idea that climate might produce racial differences, arguing that such ideas might lead, by extension, to the “degrading notion” of evolution between species. He disclaimed any political motivation and announced an untainted purpose: “to investigate a proposition in natural history.” He explicitly rejected any extension of polygeny to “countenance the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind.” White’s criteria of ranking tended toward the aesthetic, and his argument included the following gem, often quoted. Where else but among Caucasians, he argued, can we find

  … that nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of brain.… Where that variety of features, and fulness of expression; those long, flowing, graceful ringlets; that majestic beard, those rosy cheeks and coral lips? Where that… noble gait? In what other quarter of the globe shall we find the blush that overspreads the soft features of the beautiful women of Europe, that emblem of modesty, of delicate feelings … where, except on the bosom of the European woman, two such plump and snowy white hemispheres, tipt with vermillion (in Stanton, 1960, p. 17).

  Louis Agassiz—America’s theorist of polygeny

  Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that intellectual emancipation should follow political independence. American scholars should abandon their subservience to European styles and theories. We have, Emerson wrote, “listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds” (in Stanton, 1960, p. 84).

  In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the budding profession of American science organized itself to follow Emerson’s advice. A collection of eclectic amateurs, bowing before the prestige of European theorists, became a group of professionals with indigenous ideas and an internal dynamic that did not require constant fueling from Europe. The doctrine of polygeny acted as an important agent in this transformation; for it was one of the first theories of largely American origin that won the attention and respect of European scientists—so much so that Europeans referred to polygeny as the “American school” of anthropology. Polygeny had European antecedents, as we have seen, but Americans developed the data cited in its support and based a large body of research on its tenets. I shall concentrate on the two most famous advocates of polygeny—Agassiz the theorist and Morton the data analyst; and I shall try to uncover both the hidden motives and the finagling of data so central to their support.* For starters, it is obviously not accidental that a nation still practicing slavery and expelling its aboriginal inhabitants from their homelands should have provided a base for theories that blacks and Indians are separate species, inferior to whites.

  Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), the great Swiss naturalist, won his reputation in Europe, primarily as Cuvier’s disciple and a student of fossil fishes. His immigration to America in the 1840s immediately elevated the status of American natural history. For the first time, a major European theorist had found enough of value in the United States to come and stay. Agassiz became a professor at Harvard, where he founded and directed the Museum of Comparative Zoology until his
death in 1873 (I occupy an office in the original wing of his building). Agassiz was a charmer; he was lionized in social and intellectual circles from Boston to Charlestown. He spoke for science with boundless enthusiasm and raised money with equal zeal to support his buildings, collections, and publications. No man did more to establish and enhance the prestige of American biology during the nineteenth century.

  Agassiz also became the leading spokesman for polygeny in America. He did not bring this theory with him from Europe. He converted to the doctrine of human races as separate species after his first experiences with American blacks.

  Agassiz did not embrace polygeny as a conscious political doctrine. He never doubted the propriety of racial ranking, but he did count himself among the opponents of slavery. His adherence to polygeny flowed easily from procedures of biological research that he had developed in other and earlier contexts. He was, first of all, a devout creationist who lived long enough to become the only major scientific opponent of evolution. But nearly all scientists were creationists before 1859, and most did not become polygenists (racial differentiation within a single species posed no threat to the doctrine of special creation—just consider breeds of dogs and cattle). Agassiz’s predisposition to polygeny arose primarily from two aspects of his personal theories and methods:

  1. In studying the geographic distribution of animals and plants, Agassiz developed a theory about “centers of creation.” He believed that species were crated in their proper places and did not generally migrate far from these centers. Other biogeographers invoked creation in a single spot with extensive migration thereafter. Thus, when Agassiz studied what we would now regard as a single widespread species, divided into fairly distinct geographical races, he tended to name several separate species, each created at its center of origin. Homo sapiens is a primary example of a cosmopolitan, variable species.