On May 28,1912, Katherine Philips Edson took her seven-year-old son by the hand and headed for her local polling precinct. Women had recently won suffrage in California, and Edson went to exercise her new right. This was a special referendum election, and she needed to consider a number of very different issues. Should she support the creation of an Aqueduct Investigation Board? Should she allow the city to collect funds to erect a new city hall? On this day, the question on the ballot that interested her most was the one that she had played a role in crafting. It read, “Shall the ordinance providing for the tuberculin test to be applied to dairy cattle producing milk furnished to the City of Los Angeles, or its inhabitants, be adopted?” After casting her vote, she remained outside with her son at her side and attempted to persuade the electorate that they should vote in favor of the tuberculin ordinance because it protected the public, especially children, from tuberculosis. The Los Angeles Herald photographed her plea for pure milk and placed it on the front page of the evening edition. Much to Edson's dismay, however, the bill was resoundingly defeated.

For Massachusetts children, including those in the city of Lynn, December 8, 1908 was a date of particular importance. That day their fathers voted whether their city would accept the new state playground law. The law required cities and towns with over 10,000 residents to provide and maintain playgrounds for the “recreation and physical education of minors.” In Lynn, as in other cities, a high level of publicity surrounded the referendum. Editorials and front-page advertisements ran in the local papers, and posters hung in business windows. Even children participated. On election day, members of the Lynn Boys' Club paraded the streets wearing banners that proclaimed, “Vote for playgrounds for me.” The triumphant “yes” vote of 11,122 to 1,083 set a Lynn record for the first time the citizens had ever turned in a vote that reached five figures. By March 1909, thirty-nine Massachusetts cities and towns had held referendums; all but two agreed to impose the new law on themselves.

Hindsight allows present-day scholars to view the development of academic disciplines in a light that contemporaries would never have seen. Hence, from our perspective, Mary Furner's assertion that anthropology developed as a profession reacting against biology and the physical sciences makes sense, for we tend to celebrate the triumph of cultural anthropology as the coming of age of the discipline. However, this trajectory of professional development was not a necessary or predestined development. Rather, the eventual (if occasionally still embattled) predominance of culture over the categories of race, nation, and biology was only one of many possible outcomes. This paper investigates a different trajectory, one that most current scholars would hope has been relegated to the dustbin of history. It is still a cautionary tale, though, in that while the racial anthropology followed in this narrative did not survive World War II, its practitioners did enjoy a degree of prominence and influence that was much greater and longer than has been generally acknowledged by current accounts.