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The Progressive Origins of Eugenics Critics: Raymond Pearl, Herbert S. Jennings, and the Defense of Scientific Inquiry1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Michael Mezzano
Michael Mezzano
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Extract

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, a succession of popular books decried the impact that “new” immigrants were having on the United States. Fearing that the racial quality of the American people was being eroded by the large number of immigrants that had been arriving in the previous decades, the books clamored for radical restrictions on the number of immigrants the country should admit. These books reflect the pervasiveness of the belief that new immigrants were biologically inferior to older immigrants and native-born Anglo-Saxons. This belief, in turn, was rooted in a theory of permanently fixed racial identities that had been circulating throughout Europe and the United States for decades, despite cautions of professional scientists who argued that these theories were not “proven.” Yet non-scientists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were the ones who enjoyed widespread public authority on such complex scientific theories as heredity, genetics, and eugenics because they explained these difficult subjects in easily understandable terms–despite the fact that they grossly over-simplified the theories. Simultaneously, they raised shrill cries that these new arrivals thus threatened the “superior” racial stock of America. The anti-immigrant wave that Grant, Stoddard, and others fanned was based on what Grant described as “the science of race,” which he claimed proved “the immutability of somatological or bodily characters.”

Type
Essays: Graduate Research Forum
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 83 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2005

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References

2 Grant, Madison, The Passing ofthe Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, 2nd ed. (1918, repr. New York, 1970), xix.Google Scholar Also, Jacobsen, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.

3 Boas and Grant had a notable exchange in The Forum in 1925, where Boas insisted that it was nearly impossible to speak of racially determined characteristics because over thousands of years, all the population groups within Europe had mixed.Grant, Madison, “America For the Americans,” The Forum 74 (September 1925): 346–55Google Scholar, and, Boas's reply, “This Nordic Nonsense,” The Forum 74 (October 1925): 502–11.Google ScholarBoas, Franz, “What Is a Race?” The Nation 120, (January 28, 1925): 89–91Google Scholar. For Hrdlicka, see Ales Hrdlicka to Irving Fisher, November 27, 1923, Ales Hrdlicka Papers, box 24, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. For historical treatments of Boas, seeStocking, George W. Jr, ed., The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Gossett, Thomas, Race: The History of An Idea in America (1963, repr. New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Williams, Vernon, Rethinking Race: Franz Uri Boas and His Contemporaries (Lexington, 1996)Google Scholar; Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Barkan, Elazar, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar.

4 Haller, Mark, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (1963, repr. New Brunswick, 1984).Google ScholarDaniel Kevles notes that there was actually a “Coalition of Critics” that ranged from social workers, churches, and social scientists, who consistentiy combated eugenical theories.Kevles, Daniel, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York, 1985).Google ScholarSee alsoMehler, Barry, “A History of the American Eugenics Society, 1921–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1988)Google Scholar; Ludmerer, Kenneth, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore, 1972)Google Scholar; Stepan, Nancy, “Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, Chamberlin, J. Edward and Gilman, Sander, eds., (New York, 1985), 97–120Google Scholar; Kühl, Stefan, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Cravens, Hamilton, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Philadelphia, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1955, repr. New Brunswick, 1992)Google Scholar.

5 Glass, Bentley, “Geneticists Embattled: Their Stand Against Rampant Eugenics and Racism in America During the 1920s and 1930s,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 130 (March 1986): 130–54.Google ScholarPubMedBarkan. The Retreat of Scientific Racism; Barkan, Elazar, “Reevaluating Progressive Eugenics: Herbert Spencer Jennings and the 1924 Immigration Legislation,” journal of the History of Biology 24 (Spring 1991): 91–112.Google ScholarPubMedGossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, also places Boas at the forefront of the movement to discredit racial and eugenic science. Williams, Rethinking Race; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, andPickens, Donald, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, 1966).Google ScholarZeidel, Robert, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commission, 1900–1927 (DeKalb, 2004)Google Scholar, shows the Progressive Era's hallmark of expert participation in addressing immigration problems using careful investigation of conditions in Europe.

6 Some of the more relevant works on the Progressive Era for this essay are Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politicr, Rodgers, Daniel, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998).Google ScholarChambers, John Whiteclay, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, 2000)Google Scholar.

7 Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991).Google ScholarIn 1926 Smith College Sociologist Frank Hankins published a book in which he declared that, yes, there were racial differences, but that they were differences of degree, not of kind. He closed his book echoing the simple, appealing idea that eugenics offered to great numbers of people, but which in its extreme form became dangerous and malicious: “This is not a question of pre-serving the Anglo-Saxon stock.…It is solely a question of encouraging or maintaining the multiplication of the more able, regardless of race.” Hankins, Frank, The Racial Basis of Civilisation: A Critique of the Nordic Doctrine (New York, 1926), 375Google Scholar.

8 Stepan, Nancy and Gilman, Sander, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, LaCapra, Dominick, ed. (Ithaca, 1999): 72–103Google Scholar, quoted on 77., Maienschein, Transforming Traditions in America Biology, 1880–1915 (Baltimore, 1991)Google Scholar; Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution.

9 Lippmann, Walter, “The Mental Age of Americans,” The New Republic 32 (October 25, 1922): 213–15Google Scholar; Stoddard, Lothrop, The Revolt Against Civilisation (New York, 1925), emphasis in originalGoogle Scholar.

10 Lewis, David Levering, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York, 2000), quote on 97Google Scholar, Chicago debate described on 235–37. Matthew Pratt Guterl also describes Du Bois's opposition to Stoddard and other “Nordic supremacists”–he features a chapter on Madison Grant as well–but notes interestingly that Stoddard and Du Bois ultimately shared an aristocratic faith in power of birth and heredity.Guterl, Matthew Pratt, The Color of Race in America: 1900–1940 (Cambridge, 2001), 144Google Scholar.

11 , Glass, “Geneticists Embattled”; Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (1976, repr. Baltimore, 1997), esp. chapter 4Google Scholar; Pauly, Philip, Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton, 2000), esp. 220–23Google Scholar; Allen, Garland, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” Osiris 2nd series, 2 (1986): 225–64CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

12 Davenport's biography is slightly hazy on European training. Charles Rosenberg, in No Other Gods, devotes a chapter to Davenport's work in eugenics, but mentions nothing of any time spent in Europe receiving scientific training. Garland Allen's entry on Davenport in American National Biography mentions Davenport meeting Karl Pearson and Francis Galton in London in 1899 (where he first became exposed to biometry), but the chronology he lays out suggests that Davenport did not spend any considerable time there learning the methods and processes of biometry; Allen notes that in 1899 Davenport left Harvard University to go to the University of Chicago, which he left in 1904 for Cold Spring Harbor.Allen, Garland E., “Davenport, Charles Benedict,” American National Biography Online, February 2000Google Scholar, http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13–00392.html. Access Date: Monday, July 15, 07:58:23 EDT 2002. Morris Steggarda's tribute to Davenport in the Eugenical News after the latter's death in 1944 also mentions nothing of any specific training in England.Steggarda, Morris, “Dr. Charles B. Davenport and his Contributions to Eugenics,” Eugenical News 29, (March 1944): 3–7.Google ScholarPearl and Jennings, on the other hand, received institutional support from their respective universities to travel to Europe and study methods, and there is correspondence in both of their manuscript collections that places them in Europe for extended amounts of time.

13 Calendar of the University of Michigan, 1901–1902 (Ann Arbor, 1902), 108–09Google Scholar; Calendar of the University of Michigan, 1902–1903 (Ann Arbor, 1903), 107–09Google Scholar; Calendar of the University of Michigan, 1903–1904 (Ann Arbor, 1904), 117–18Google Scholar, all at the Bentley Historical library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

14 , Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 40.Google Scholar

15 Pearl to Jacob Reighard, December 3, 1905, Jacob Reighard Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

16 Pearl to Jennings, October 8, 1905, Raymond Pearl Papers, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA [hereafter APS].

17 Jennings's criticisms of Davenport's work has been detailed by Glass, “Geneticists Embattled”; Barkan, “Reevaluating Progressive Eugenics.”

18 Jennings to Mary Louise Burridge, February 10, 1895; Jennings to Burridge, February 24, 1895, both in the Herbert Spencer Jennings Papers, APS.

19 Philip Pauly raises a point that makes the usage of “interdisciplinary” here somewhat problematic. Describing Davenport's work, he notes, “The common problem in these studies was that by the scientific standards of the 1910s, they were overly interdisciplinary, involving a mix of what were recognizably biological, medical, psychological, and sociological assertions.” This opened Davenport, he notes, to attacks from practitioners in each of these fields, which prompted Davenport to shift his focus to race in the 1920s. In Pearl's and Jennings's cases, as is described below, I use “interdisciplinary” in a narrow sense to include different sub-fields of biology, for instance, cytology and embryology., Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life, 224.Google Scholar

20 Jennings to Jacob Reighard, December 29, 1895, Reighard Papers.

21 A brief survey of reviews of Pearl's, Jennings's, and Davenport's work shows that the latter's work is more often criticized as problematic and methodologically flawed. For instance, seeDavenport, Charles, The Feebly Inhibited: Nomadism, or The Wandering Impulse reviewed by Thorndike, E. L. in Science 43 (March 24, 1916): 427–29Google Scholar; Davenport, Charles, Naval Officers, Their Heredity and Development reviewed by Bernard, L. L., American Journal of Sociology 25 (September 1919): 241–42Google Scholar; Jennings, Herbert Spencer, Prometheus or Biology and the Advancement of Man reviewed by Reuter, E. B., American Journal of Sociology 31 (March 1926): 692Google Scholar; “Homo Sapiens” reviews of Raymond Pearl, Studies in Human Biology andStoddard, Lothrop, Racial Realities in Europe in The American Mercury 4 (February 1925): 252–53Google Scholar.

22 Pearl to Jennings, January 13, 1908, Pearl Papers, APS. In 1927, Pearl said the notion that “like produced like” was “a profound fallacy,” and it became the center of his critique of the eugenics movement. SeePearl, Raymond, “The Biology of Superiority,” The American Mercury 12 (November 1927): 261.Google ScholarInHeredity and Relation to Eugenics (1911, repr. New York, 1972)Google Scholar, Davenport used the example of mental defectives to declare “Two mentally defective parents will produce only mentally defective offspring” (emphasis in original, 66). He also claimed that pneumonia is partly inherited because of “a weakening of a natural or acquired resistance” (165).

23 Jennings to Pearl, July 30, 1907; Pearl to Jennings, August 7, 1908, Pearl Papers, APS, emphasis in original.

24 Cooke, Kathy, “From Science to Practice, or Practice to Science? Chickens and Eggs in Raymond Pearl's Agricultural Breeding Research, 1907–1916,” Isis 88 (March 1997): 62–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Pearl to Jennings, January 13, 1908, Pearl Papers, APS.

26 Jennings to Pearl, February 11, 1908, Pearl Papers, APS.

27 Jennings to Pearl, February 11, 1908; also Pearl to Jennings March 17, 1909, Pearl Papers, APS.

28 Davenport, Charles, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 222.Google ScholarIt was a short step from this to the oft-quoted declaration of Madison Grant that the cross between any white and a non-white was, like the one-drop rule, a non-white.Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race, 18Google Scholar.

29 The two key public pieces of criticism by Pearl and Jennings are Raymond Pearl, “The Biology of Superiority,” andJennings, Herbert Spencer, “‘Undesirable Aliens’: A Biologist's Examination of the Evidence Before Congress,” The Survey 51 (December 15, 1923): 309–12, 364.Google ScholarSee also, Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society, 19Google Scholar.

30 Although historian Hamilton Cravens notes that Davenport's position within the “New Biology” was as a pioneer in experimentalism, he is attentive to divisions within the biological sciences; i.e. the different methods of obtaining scientific knowledge, whether by observation, experimentation, or statistical study, and comments as well on Davenport's lack of rigorous experimentalism. Of Davenport, as part of the group of new biologists, Cravens notes, “With the possible exception of Davenport, all of these men had sound professional reputations and taught at major American universities; their statements conferred legitimacy and prestige upon eugenics.” , Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution, 51.Google Scholar

31 Pearl to Jennings, July 9, 1910, Jennings Papers. Charles Davenport, Inheritance in Canaries: A Study in Mendelism reviewed byHeron, David in Biometrika 7 (April 1910): 403–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Pearl to Jennings, November 12, 1909; Jennings to Pearl November 15, 1909, in Pearl Papers.

33 Pearl to Jennings March 1, 1910; and see also Pearl to Jennings April 11, 1913, Pearl Papers.

34 Conklin, Edwin, “Some Recent Criticisms of Eugenics,” Eugenical News 14 (May 1928): 64Google Scholar; , Pearl, “The Biology of Superiority,” 260Google Scholar; , Glass, “Geneticists Embattled.”Google Scholar

35 Maienschein's, Jane book, Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880–1915 (Baltimore, 1991)Google Scholar, does an excellent job in tracing the domestic and international influences on biological research in the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and devotes much space to Conklin's contribution to an epistemic shift within biology from a descriptive-based morphology to a rigorous experimentalism.