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Race as a Scientific Hot Potato:a Review of The Retreat of Scientific Racism

Randoif Arguelles

Elazar Barkan. The Retreat ofScientific Racism: Changing Concepts ofRace in Britainand the United States between the World Wars. New York: Cambridge University Press,1992. Pp. xiv, 381.

Aprofessor of rhetoric once told me jokingly that the easiest way to win anargument is to compare your opponent to Hitler. Ironically, some historians ofscience have contended that this is precisely the reason for the decline of once-

prevalent theories of racial hierarchies in the biological and social sciences. According tothis argument, the atrocities committed by the Nazi party during and immediatelypreceding the Second World War—atrocities motivated by the belief in the inherentsuperiority of the Aryan race—so repulsed the rest of the world that biological and socialscientists in the United States and Great Britain abandoned their own theories of innateracial traits and hierarchies. Under this explanation, argued by such scholars as LeonPoliakov, Thomas F. Gossett, Nancy Stepan, Michael Banton, and Hamilton Cravens (1,note 1), controversial scientific arguments for the superiority of certain races and thecorresponding inferiority of others finally lost their currency as the result of politicalpressures and shifting public sentiment against Nazism. Such views credit the fortuitousrise of right-minded political influences—namely, opposition to Nazism—withdisabusing scientists of wrong-headed scientific theories—namely, scientific racism.

Elazar Barkan finds this view too simplistic. Global politics, he claims, did havean influence on the judgments of the scientific community, but previous historians haveoverplayed its significance. More accurately, says Barkan, changes in the nature of thescientific disciplines, changes in the composition of the scientific community, and thepersonal histories of the scientists active during the interwar years were in factresponsible for scientific racism’s fall from grace (2). Thus, unlike previous historians, inaddition to politics, Barkan brings sociological and psychological factors to bear in hisanalysis. More importantly, Barkan notes, this convergence of sociological, political, andpsychological causal dynamics on the scientific thought of the interwar years preceded therise of Nazism. Barkan’s fuller account is cogent, insightful, and thought-provoking.

Barkan argues that a general pattern can be discerned in the American and Britishscientific communities’ shift away from scientific racism. First, discord occurred amongthe scientists themselves with respect to the interwar era’s commonly accepted racialtypologies and race-based theories of human behavior. According to Barkan, the

reification of race had been in vogue since the nineteenth century, and was first

articulated in the writings of Count Arthur de Gobineau (15-16). Barkan contends that by

the 1920s and 1930s, the lack of solid empirical evidence and the absence of

epistemological foundations for scientific racism led inevitably to competing theories ofrace, which in turn led to scientists questioning the ontological status of race itself.

Second, in the midst of this disagreement over the nature and function of racial

hierarchies, a new breed of scientists joined the professional ranks. These scientists

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enjoyed a peculiar dual status: that of simultaneous insider and outsider in the scientificcommunity (9). They were insiders in terms of their professional expertise and position,but outsiders with respect to some characteristic that placed them in an ethnic, gender,geographical, or political minority within their professional peer group. Thus, Jews,women, immigrants, and leftists figure largely in Barkan’s account. As insiders, they hadsufficient professional credibility to challenge the scientific status quo. As outsiders, theyhad a vested interest in promoting egalitarianism within the scientific community andsociety in general—or at least tended towards egalitarianism more readily than their old-stock, “mainline” colleagues (177). Barkan does not go so far as to say that these insider-outsider scientists were the only ones in their profession arguing against racialhierarchies. He does claim, however, that they were the first to offer a unified public frontfor anti-racist views (280). This touches upon the third component of Barkan’s thesis: thatfrom 1933 to 193$ the retreat of scientific racism moved from an intra-disciplinarydiscussion to a full-fledged public discourse when these insider-outsider scientists took itupon themselves to disseminate their anti-racist analyses in a public forum (10-11, 279).Borrowing a term from Michel Foucauk, Barkan marks this transformation of thescientist into a politically active “universal intellectual” as the beginning of the end ofscientific racism.

The book is organized into three parts, each corresponding to the various stages bywhich the reification of racial hierarchies in science became undone. Within each section,Barkan covers the material in a similar fashion, examining relevant secondary sourcesand surveying in detail the published works and private correspondence of the Americanand British scientists who involved themselves in the ongoing discussions surroundingrace.

Part One examines the various conceptions of race entertained by British andAmerican anthropologists. Barkan’s discussion of racial theories in British anthropologytraces the professionalization of the discipline—from annchair ethnologists to physicaland cultural anthropologists working in the field—as much as it discusses concepts ofrace. According to Barkan, the field of British anthropology was too diffuse forpractitioners within the discipline to arrive at a consensus on the function or importanceof race. By contrast, the American anthropological community was more clearly definedinto two camps: the racists, best exemplified by the theories of Charles BenedictDavenport and his eugenicist Galton Society; and the egalitarians, led most prominentlyby the German-born Franz Boas and his students, including Alfred Kroeber and MargaretMead. Barkan notes, however, that even an egalitarian such as Boas did not think toquestion the reality of racial categories. Boas argued for a basic equality among variousracial types, not against racial types as valid scientific categories. Nevertheless, Barkancontends that even in this climate of institutionalized scientific racism, the discrediting ofrace as a valid causal dynamic in human behavior and differentiation had begun. Heargues that the “theoretical chaos” of British anthropology “left the door open to theexplicit rejection of racism” (65). Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Boas and his followers’managed to distinguish physical anthropology from cultural anthropology, initiating thenovel view that race might be a function of society, not heredity (78).

Part Two of The Retreat of $cientfic Racism discusses the debates andcontroversies surrounding race in the biological sciences. Since anthropologists failed toarrive at a consensus on how to define race, let alone how to utilize racial categories in

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their work, Barkan contends that the task then fell to biologists to expound the nature andmeaning of racial categories and hierarchies (137). In this chapter, he focuses ongeneticists such as the liberal egalitarian Herbert Spencer Jennings and the conservativeegalitarian Raymond Pearl, biometricians such as Karl Pearson (the inventor of thecorrelation coefficient R in quantitative analysis), the racist Charles Davenport, and JulianHuxley, a convert to the egalitarian camp. Barkan’s main point in this section is that bothracist and egalitarian biologists in Britain and America “presented hypotheses divorcedfrom scientific data” (142). for instance, in a re-evaluation of data collected onimmigrants by racist biologist Harry H. Laughlin, Herbert Spencer Jennings criticizedLaughlin’s statistical interpretations, offering his own politically motivated egalitariantake on the evidence (199-201).’ The hope that biology could settle the disputes over thefunction and relevance of race was dashed, for, as Barkan notes, “Science could lenditself as easily to either a racist or an anti-racist interpretation, whether by biologists orsocial scientists. ... [TJhe evolution of anti-racism in science was not inevitable” (228).

Part Three of this monograph deals with the repercussions that resulted from alack of a unified scientific front: from the ashes of this scientific agnosticism arose thephenomenon in the late 1930s of scientists as political activists. The insider-outsiderscientists (discussed above) took it upon themselves to oppose racism in a public forumas well as within their respective academic disciplines, even though this practice wasgenerally discouraged by the British and American scientific communities (11). Here,Barkan treads on more familiar ground, since the political activities of scientists in thelate 1930s—most notably, Franz Boas in the United States—are well documented.Barkan does not dispute that politics played a large role in the discrediting of scientificracism. In fact, he maintains that “political beliefs had a greater impact in attitudes towardrace than did scientific commitments” (343). But he also maintains that the politicalactivities of scientists, even the opposition to Nazi racism, would not have been possibleif the social and biological scientific disciplines had not been in disagreement over basicissues regarding race. This third section of the book is perhaps the weakest. Barkan doesnot succeed in convincing the reader that the debate among scientists successfully movedfrom an elite discussion to a full-fledged public discourse.

The influence of the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn is readily apparent inBarkan’s work.2 Scientific disciplines, argues Kuhn, are not merely defined by virtue of a

rigorous methodology (i.e., reasoned hypotheses based on the strength of sufficientempirical evidence). Rather, a scientific discipline is founded on an accepted paradigmthat determines, in part, what counts as empirical evidence in the first place. Astrology, or

the movements of planets and stars, for example, no longer constitutes a ‘fact’ in thecurrent paradigm utilized by scientists who seek to explain the behavior of human beings.

Furthermore, at times, the application of a given scientific paradigm will produce a

paradoxical or contradictory conclusion. When this happens enough times, Kuhn

contends, a scientific revolution occurs, and the old paradigm is supplanted by a new one

Nor did Jennings try to discredit the study’s basic premise of biological foundations for so-called

“undesirable characteristics” (p. 199).2 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions, 2d edition (Chicago: Chicago University Press,

1970). What follows is an admittedly cursory treatment of Kuhn’s theory, but a full exegesis and critique of

Kuhn’s work is beyond the scope of this review.

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which can successfully account for these discrepancies. Kuhn’s approach challenges thosewho claim that scientific inquiry can and should proceed on purely objectivist grounds.Though Barkan does not say so explicitly, the organizational structure of hisaccount of scientific racism suggests just such an approach to science. Tn a sense,Barkan’s monograph is a history of race as a scientific hot potato. Barkan contends that

the job of elucidating the concept race passed from the purview of anthropology tobiology precisely because anthropologists could not make it fit into the nascent paradigmsof physical or cultural anthropology. But neither could the biologists accommodate thetroublesome concept within their newly emerging paradigms of genetics (Mendelianlism)and biometrics. Thus, given this lack of fit within any of these paradigms, scientists wereultimately forced to wield race as a political concept, not a scientific one.3

Barkan’s work also suggests the influence of the Annates school of intellectualhistory, especially the writings of Lucien Febvre. febvre favored a biographical approachto history in which the protagonists were constrained by the “mental equipment” of theirsocial and intellectual milieu. Roger Chartier observes that “[iJntellectual biography asdone by febvre ... locates its heroes simultaneously as witnesses and as products of thecollective conditioning that limits free and individual invention.”4 Barkan employs thesesame methods, demonstrating how British and American anthropologists and biologistsarrived at invalid or contradictory conclusions, constrained as they were by the untenableracial typologies of their era. We see that, as in the work of Febvre and the Annatesschool, the emphasis in Barkan is on the agency of the creator of the intellectual product,constrained though he or she may be by his or her social context and mental equipment.Also along Annales lines, Barkan denies that there can be any coherent notion of“progress” in the history of ideas. “I focus on centers and elites within the scientificcommunity,” he writes, “but at the same time seek to avoid whiggish or synoptictreatment: I do not present science in terms of preordained progress, nor do I build anedifice of a coherent body of knowledge about race” (7). Thus, Barkan does not subscribeto the notion that the scientific community grows increasingly enlightened with everynew generation of researchers, nor does he argue that new scientific discoveries wouldhave disabused scientists of their racism without appeal to a social context.

Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of Barkan’s book is his extensiveresearch into the archival and manuscript collections of various anthropologists andbiologists active during the interwar period. From Barkan’s research into these publishedand unpublished papers, which comprise the bulk of Barkan’s source material, surprisingnew revelations emerge. For example, the distinguished Johns Hopkins biologistRaymond Pearl, one of the more prominent anti-racist scientists of his time, turns out tobe in fact a closet bigot. Barkan shows in an examination of Pearl’s privatecorrespondence that Pearl, a critic of eugenics, was actually a fairly devout anti-Semite(see 210-220). As we might expect, the investigation into the private lives of thescientists afforded by this sort of archival research gives the reader much insight into how

The relationship runs both ways. True, the lack of fit between race and the physical anthropologyparadigm led to the discrediting of race as a construct of that paradigm. But most likely the lack of fit ofracial concepts led to the rejection of the physical anthropological paradigm itself.Roger Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History (1982), 13-46. Quote on p. 22.

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a scientist’s private life affected his or her public actions (and vice versa). In Pearl’s case,

the evidence now suggests that his putative egalitarianism was due more to a

disagreement about scientific details than to a progressive, anti-racist world view with

which he had been previously credited.There is an interesting consequence, however, to Barkan’s method of sco

uring

personal papers for explanations of a scientist’s professional opinions. As Carl Degler

notes in his review of this book, Barkan’s research results more in an analysis of the ideas

of selected scientists than in a study of the interaction of racial concepts in the larger

society.5 Thus, although Barkan acknowledges that “[iJdeas or individuals exist only as a

part of a discourse,” his analysis tends to devote far less attention to thoseother parts of

the discourse within which the individual scientists operated. The readermight question,

as Degler does, whether the work being considered is one of collective biography or

intellectual history (traditionally construed).In the end, however, Barkan succeeds in convincing the reader, first, of the

inadequacy of traditional accounts which cite the reaction to Nazism as the mechanism by

which racism lost its appeal in the scientific community. He quotes throughout the book

from the published works of anti-racist anthropologists and biologists that predate the rise

of Nazism, effectively demonstrating that the seeds of scientific discontent regarding

racial typologies existed at least a decade before the Nazi rise to power could have

motivated the change. Second, Barkan’ s account of the shift in scientific racism from a

biological concept to a cultural concept to a political stance is innovative and cogent—

though one cannot help but wonder how much convincing any reasonably intelligent

modem reader really needs to be persuaded that race is in fact entirely a social construct.

After all, Barkan’s post-UNESCO Declaration audience will most likely approach this

book from a historical vantage point wherein the reification of race has already been

largely discredited.A significant and irksome, though not fatal, weakness of the book is po

or editing

and occasionally awkward syntax. The following is but one example: “This was

especially strong in Britain, had caused much turmoil in the discipline and may have

postponed the decline of racial typologists who maintained an appearance of legitimacy,

being one approach among a cluster of schools” (120). While the attentive reader could

probably get past such instances of clumsy prose and discern the author’s meaning, bad

writing such as this does not befit a professional monograph published by a respectable

university press.6According to Henrika Kuklick, there are only about five other historia

ns who do

work on the same material covered in The Retreat ofScientific Racism.7 Here we consider

related works by three of those five authors (thereby surveying an impressive 60 percent

of the field). Though each of these three books overlaps in some respect with Barkan’s

Carl N. Degler, review of The Retreat of Scientific Racism, in Journal ofAmericanHistory 80 (June

1993), 313.6 Other reviewers have made the same comment. See August Meier, re

view of The Retreat ofScienttfic

Racism in History ofEducation Quarterly 33, 3 (1993), 416-7, and Vernon Williams, review of The Retreat

ofScientific Racism, in American Historical Review 98 (February 93), 137-8.

Henrika Kuklick, review of The Retreat ofScientific Racism in Journal ofInterdisciplinary History 24, 4

(1994), 757-8.

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book, each emphasizes rather different aspects in the history of race within scientificthought.Carl Degler’s book In Search of Human Nature: the Decline and Revival ofDarwinism in American Social Thought highlights the role of biologically basedexplanations of human behavior. Degler arrives at many of the same conclusions asBarkan, and Degler himself points out as much in his review of Barkan’s monograph.8Like Barkan, Degler concludes that biological explanations for race and racial hierarchiesgave way to cultural explanations, and that scientific racism—based as it was onbiological causation—first fell into disrepute before the political pressures againstNazism were felt.9 But this is where the similarities end. Degler’s book more explicitlyfocuses on two theories: social Darwinism, a crude biological explanation of humanbehavior no longer in vogue, and sociobiology, a sophisticated biological explanation ofhuman behavior currently in practice. Degler’s explication—adulation, in fact—ofsociobiology comprises the bulk of the book. One reviewer of In Search of HumanNature suggested that perhaps Degler’s stint as a fellow at the Stanford Center forAdvanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences partially motivated his “uncheckedenthusiasm” for sociobiology.1° Degler proposes that “the biological sciences continue tothrow fresh light on the nature of human beings in relation with the remainder of theanimal world.” Thus, he gives biology more credence than does Barkan, who felt racialhierarchies were invkbous insofar as they were linked to biological explanations.Peter Kuznick’ s Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930sAmerica addresses the topic of Barkan’s third section, but beyond a common theme, thetwo works have little in common. 12 Kuznick’s purpose is to show that, contrary topopular belief, the American scientific community was not politically aloof. Kuznick’srevisionist thesis contends that in 1930s America, “a remarkable transformation occurredin the inner world of scientists—the beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that defined theirsocial identity and sense of purpose.”3 This transformation encompassed a small groupof influential scientists who became radicalized and in turn radicalized significantportions of the scientific community, adopting radical social critiques and sympathizingwith the Soviet “experiment.”4 Barkan, on the other hand, has little use for an extendeddiscussion of what constituted radicalism in the American scientific community. He findsit enough to note that leftists participated in the anti-racist discourse of the 1930s. It isinteresting, though, to compare these two starkly different accounts. Since neitherauthor’s thesis excludes the other, the absence of a discussion about anti-racism theoriesin Kuznick and the absence of a discussion of Soviet influences on scientists in Barkan

g Carl N. Degler, In Search ofHuman Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Degler, reviewof The Retreat ofScientific Racism, 313.See Degler, In Search ofHuman Nature, Part H.

S. fass, review of In Search ofHuman Nature, in Reviews in American History 20 (1992), 235-241, esp. 237 ff.Degler, In Search ofHuman Nature, 327.12 Peter J. Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).‘ Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory, 253.14 David E. Wright criticizes Kuznick for defining activism too narrowly and for overstating his case. SeeDavid E. Wright, “The Political Awakening of American Science,” Reviews in American History 16(December 1988), 612-6.

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force one to wonder if either story is comprehensive enough to satisfactorily account for

the movement of scientists into the political forum in the 1930s.David Hollinger’ s collection of conference papers and essays Science, Jews

, and

Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History is one

of the latest additions to the historiography of the scientific community and scientific

thought.’5 In contrast to Kuznick’s book, which approaches a theme ostensibly shared

with Barkan from an entirely different tack, Hollinger’s work, which focuses largely on

the later World War II and Cold War eras, resonates quite deeply with Barkan’s. One of

Hollinger’s goals in the book is to “analyze the use of science as a weapon in a sequence

of cultural conflicts,”6 a goal he shares with Barkan, who analyzes anthropology and

biology as weapons in the cultural conflicts over race. Another common area of inquiry is

the infusion of Jews—outsiders—into academia. Both authors conclude that once Jews

achieved enough of a critical mass within the ranks of professional scholars and

scientists, they contributed to the decline in the influence of Protestant Christianity

(Hollinger’s concern) and racism (Barkan’s concern) in American society.’7 Ironically,

Hollinger’s book, which does not concern itself with race at all, closely mirrors the

purpose and conclusions of Barkan’s.Despite the various differences in detail, these works by Barkan, Degle

r, Kuznick,

and Hollinger all resemble each other in one significant respect. Each acknowledges the

importance of the historicity of scientific pronouncements. As Barkanrightly points out,

“[iJf popular opinion holds that science has its own determinism and that it is applied in a

coherent manner as a result of its substance and objectivity, historical records suggest

otherwise” (228). Barkan notes that scientific data could lend itself toeither a racist or

anti-racist interpretation, and so which side of the question the scientist chose to alight

upon depends a great deal on his or her personal history and social context. What Barkan

and other historians of science working in a post-Annales tradition have made evident is

that the history of science is a nexus of biography, intellectual, cultural, political, and

social history, and that those historians who engage in its practice must beattentive to its

multiplicity.’8

Randof Lagumbay Arguettes earned a B.A. in philosophy in May 1994 from the University of Catfornia,

Berkeley and an M.A. in U.S. historyfrom San Francisco State University in May 1998. In the fall of 1998,

he wilt begin doctoral studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he intends to study U.S.

intellectual and Asian American history.

David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1996).

16 Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, xi.17 See Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, Chapter Two,

“Jewish Intellectuals and the De

Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century.”

1$ I would like to thank Alexandra Puerto, who read an earlier draft of this article, and Marijoy Ganzon,

who believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself.