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Race and Anthropology – Part 4

Franz Boas

In Race and Anthropology – Part 1 I mentioned Franz Boas in passing, giving a preview of where the discusion was going. Here we’ll finally review in detail who Franz Boas was and what he did.

Franz Boas, from Wikipedia:

Franz Boas (/ˈfrɑːnz ˈboʊ.æz/; July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942)[2] was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the “Father of American Anthropology”[3][4] and “the Father of Modern Anthropology”.[5] Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. He applied the scientific method to the study of human cultures and societies; previously this discipline was based on the formulation of grand theories around anecdotal knowledge.

Although his grandparents were observant Jews, his parents embraced Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern German society.

Boas vocally opposed anti-Semitism and refused to convert to Christianity, but he did not identify himself as a Jew;[8] indeed, according to his biographer, “He was an ‘ethnic’ German, preserving and promoting German culture and values in America.”

Boas was appointed lecturer in physical anthropology at Columbia University in 1896, and promoted to professor of anthropology in 1899. However, the various anthropologists teaching at Columbia had been assigned to different departments. When Boas left the Museum of Natural History, he negotiated with Columbia University to consolidate the various professors into one department, of which Boas would take charge. Boas’ program at Columbia became the first Ph.D. program in anthropology in America.

In his 1907 essay, “Anthropology”, Boas identified two basic questions for anthropologists: “Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?”

Boas also presented himself as a role model for the citizen-scientist, who understand that even were the truth pursued as its own end, all knowledge has moral consequences. The Mind of Primitive Man ends with an appeal to humanism:

I hope the discussions outlined in these pages have shown that the data of anthropology teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own, that we should learn to look on foreign races with greater sympathy and with a conviction that, as all races have contributed in the past to cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be capable of advancing the interests of mankind if we are only willing to give them a fair opportunity.

Where Boas was at odds with Madison Grant, eugenics and race science:

His most important research in this field was his study of changes in body form among children of immigrants in New York. Other researchers had already noted differences in height, cranial measurements, and other physical features between Americans and people from different parts of Europe. Many used these differences to argue that there is an innate biological difference between races. Boas’ primary interest—in symbolic and material culture and in language—was the study of processes of change; he therefore set out to determine whether bodily forms are also subject to processes of change. Boas studied 17,821 people, divided into seven ethno-national groups. Boas found that average measures of cranial size of immigrants were significantly different from members of these groups who were born in the United States. Moreover, he discovered that average measures of cranial size of children born within ten years of their mothers’ arrival were significantly different from those of children born more than ten years after their mothers’ arrival. Boas did not deny that physical features such as height or cranial size were inherited; he did, however, argue that the environment has an influence on these features, which is expressed through change over time. This work was central to his influential argument that differences between races were not immutable.

Madison Grant mocked Boas’ result in The Passing of the Great Race, but the case that it was an outright fraud has only been made recently. In 2002 the raw data was reexamined and the results were not as Boas claimed. Wiki mentions the controversy but misrepresents the claims on each side. More on this later.

Boas did not try to claim that race and racial differences do not exist. He argued instead that race is plastic – that the observable differences are not immutable. This is the thin edge of the, “Race may exist, but it isn’t really important.” line of argument.

As the Wiki article notes, this is considered Boas’ “most important research”. This sentiment is echoed elsewhere by those who agree with him.

Wiki relates an anecdote concerning Boas’ strong identification with jews. Boas delivered a speech at a black university in Atlanta in 1906 in which he described several historic situations that had “brought different peoples into an unequal relation”:

the best example, for Boas, of this phenomenon is that of the Jews in Europe:

Even now there lingers in the consciousness of the old, sharper divisions which the ages had not been able to efface, and which is strong enough to find — not only here and there — expression as antipathy to the Jewish type. In France, that let down the barriers more than a hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough to sustain an anti-Jewish political party.

Boas’ closing advice is that Negroes should not look to Whites for approval or encouragement, because people in power usually take a very long time to learn to sympathize with people out of power.

French nationalists rightly recognize that the jews who happen to live in France consider themselves a separate people who care first and foremost for themselves as jews and jews in general. Just as Boas did. Europeans have long criticized jews for constituting a “nation within a nation.” European nationalists are today routinely pathologized and demonized for doing so.

Contemporary headlines reflect the fact that jews are the people in power today. Hollande vows to wipe out anti-Semitism, 2 Nov 2012:

“France will hunt down terrorism … by all possible means,” Hollande said during an emotional service on Thursday at the Ohr Torah school in Toulouse, where the four were shot dead by Al-Qaeda-inspired killer Mohamed Merah on March 19.

“My country will not be weak in fighting terrorism,” he said.

Pledging to “eradicate” anti-Semitism, Hollande promised all-out measures to ensure the security of Jews.

“Safeguarding their safety, their integrity and their dignity is a national cause…. It is not only the affair of Jews but of all French people.”

“Let us learn the lessons of this ordeal for humanity, for mankind,” he said, adding: “We shall never forget.”

In the US in the early 20th century, Boas sympathized with blacks, specifically as a jew, and collaborated with them against Whites.

One early reaction to the news of Boas’ cephalic index data fraud came from Sam Francis in 2002. Franz Boas – Liberal Icon, Scientific Fraud:

In political terms, if human beings have few or no “fixed characters” and are shaped by the social environment, then what we know as modern liberalism is in business. So is communism, which also assumes that human beings can be transformed by manipulating the social environment.

Francis’ conclusion:

Not only has a giant of modern social science—and a pillar of modern liberalism—tumbled from his pedestal, but the dogma that man is merely a blank slate, on which state bureaucrats and social engineers may scribble whatever ideologies they please, has toppled with him.

If that dogma really can be killed, then much of the tyranny and chaos it has helped create will die with it.

Ten years on I think it’s safe to say this was overly optimistic.

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Race and Anthropology – Part 3

Reading and commentary on Madison Grant’s views on eugenics (the Anglosphere equivalent of German Rassenhygiene, racial hygiene, previously discussed here and here) as well as his view of race as contrasted with nationality.

Excerpts from The Passing of the Great Race, Or, The Racial Basis of European History:

The value and efficiency of a population are not numbered by what the newspapers call souls, but by the proportion of men of physical and intellectual vigor. The small Colonial population of America was, on an average and man for man, far superior to the present inhabitants, although the latter are twenty-five times more numerous. The ideal in eugenics toward which statesmanship should be directed is, of course, improvement in quality rather than quantity.

Efforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes of the community, while most desirable, encounter great difficulties. In such efforts we encounter social conditions over which we have as yet no control. It was tried two thousand years ago by Augustus and his efforts to avert race suicide and the extinction of the old Roman stock were singularly prophetic of what some far seeing men are attempting in order to preserve the race of native Americans of Colonial descent.

Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement. He can breed from the best or he can eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization. The first method was adopted by the Spartans, who had for their national ideals military efficiency and the virtues of self-control, and along these lines the results were completely successful. Under modern social conditions it would be extremely difficult in the first instance to determine which were the most desirable types, except in the most general way and even if a satisfactory selection were finally made, it would be in a democracy a virtual impossibility to limit by law the right to breed to a privileged and chosen few.

Addressing historic dysgenics and making the case for a deliberate negative eugenic effort:

Experiments in limiting reproduction to the undesirable classes were unconsciously made in mediaeval Europe under the guidance of the church. After the fall of Rome social conditions were such that all those who loved a studious and quiet life were compelled to seek refuge from the violence of the times in monastic institutions and upon such the church imposed the obligation of celibacy and thus deprived the world of offspring from these desirable classes.

In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment and banishment, the free thinking, progressive and intellectual elements were persistently eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal, the servile and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe, but in Spain alone, for a period of over three centuries from the years 1471 to 1781, the Inquisition condemned to the stake or imprisonment an average of 1,000 persons annually. During these three centuries no less than 32,000 were burned alive and 291,000 were condemned to various terms of imprisonment and other penalties and 17,000 persons were burned in effigy, representing men who had died in prison or had fled the country.

No better method of eliminating the genius producing strains of a nation could be devised and if such were its purpose the result was eminently satisfactory, as is demonstrated by the superstitious and unintelligent Spaniard of to-day. A similar elimination of brains and ability took place in northern Italy, in France and in the Low Countries, where hundreds of thousands of Huguenots were murdered or driven into exile.

Under existing conditions the most practical and hopeful method of race improvement is through the elimination of the least desirable elements in the nation by depriving them of the power to contribute to future generations. It is well known to stock breeders that the color of a herd of cattle can be modified by continuous destruction of worthless shades and of course this is true of other characters. Black sheep, for instance, have been practically obliterated by cutting out generation after generation all animals that show this color phase, until in carefully maintained flocks a black individual only appears as a rare sport.

In mankind it would not be a matter of great difficulty to secure a general consensus of public opinion as to the least desirable, let us say, ten percent of the community. When this unemployed and unemployable human residuum has been eliminated together with the great mass of crime, poverty, alcoholism and feeblemindedness associated therewith it would be easy to consider the advisability of further restricting the perpetuation of the then remaining least valuable types. By this method mankind might ultimately become sufficiently intelligent to choose deliberately the most vital and intellectual strains to carry on the race.

Grant’s was a pragmatic vision of societal-scale improvement, with an explicit preference for quality over quantity, and the imagined improvements accomplished by curtailing the reproduction of problematic heritable human traits. Grant assumed popular support for this plan could be argued and won via appeal to a collective, democratic process.

As with the other accomplished racial thinkers previously discussed, the scandalized, negative image of Grant and his milieu visible through today’s judaized lens is distorted and false. Grant spelled out quite clearly who and what he favored, and why – and that opinion was favorably received. The next installment will explain how this was largely undone by jewish deception and fraud.

Grant’s vision was predicated on discrimination and exclusion, which any group requires to exist. This and the contemporary fearful response to it are discussed here.

Moving on to Grant’s distinction between race and nationality:

Nationality is an artificial political grouping of population usually centring around a single language as an expression of traditions and aspirations. Nationality can, however, exist independently of language but states thus formed, such as Belgium or Austria, are far less stable than those where a uniform language is prevalent, as, for example, France or England.

States without a single national language are constantly exposed to disintegration, especially where a substantial minority of the inhabitants speak a tongue which is predominant in an adjoining state and, as a consequence, tend to gravitate toward such state.

The history of the last century in Europe has been the record of a long series of struggles to unite in one political unit all those speaking the same or closely allied dialects. With the exception of internal and social revolutions, every European war since the Napoleonic period has been caused by the effort to bring about the unification either of Italy or of Germany or by the desperate attempts of the Balkan States to struggle out of Turkish chaos into modern European nations on a basis of community of language. The unification of both Italy and Germany is as yet incomplete according to the views held by their more advanced patriots and the solution of the Balkan question is still in the future.

Men are keenly aware of their nationality and are very sensitive about their language, but only in a few cases, notably in Sweden and Germany, does any large section of the population possess anything analogous to true race consciousness, although the term “race” is everywhere misused to designate linguistic or political groups.

It sometimes happens that a section of the population of a large nation gathers around language, reinforced by religion, as an expression of individuality. The struggle between the French-speaking Alpine Walloons and the Nordic Flemings of Low Dutch tongue in Belgium is an example of two competing languages in an artificial nation which was formed originally around religion.

The prevailing lack of true race consciousness is probably due to the fact that every important nation in Europe as at present organized, with the sole exception of the Iberian and Scandinavian states, possesses in large proportions representatives of at least two of the fundamental European subspecies of man and of all manner of crosses between them. In France to-day, as in Caesar’s Gaul, the three races divide the nation in unequal proportions.

In the future, however, with an increased knowledge of the correct definition of true human races and types and with a recognition of the immutability of fundamental racial characters and of the results of mixed breeding, far more value will be attached to racial in contrast to national or linguistic affinities. In marital relations the consciousness of race will also play a much larger part than at present, although in the social sphere we shall have to contend with a certain strange attraction for contrasted types. When it becomes thoroughly understood that the children of mixed marriages between contrasted races belong to the lower type, the importance of transmitting in unimpaired purity the blood inheritance of ages will be appreciated at its full value and to bring half-breeds into the world will be regarded as a social and racial crime of the first magnitude. The laws against miscegenation must be greatly extended if the higher races are to be maintained.

The coasts of the North Sea extending from Schleswig and Holstein into Holland are inhabited by a very pure Nordic type known as the Frisians. They are the handsomest and in many respects the finest of the continental Nordics and are closely related to the English, as many of the Post-Roman invaders of England either came from Frisia or from adjoining districts.

All the states involved in the present world war have sent to the front their fighting Nordic element and the loss of life now going on in Europe will fall much more heavily on the blond giant than on the little brunet.

As in all wars since Roman times from a breeding point of view the little dark man is the final winner. No one who saw one of our regiments march on its way to the Spanish War could fail to be impressed with the size and blondness of the men in the ranks as contrasted with the complacent citizen, who from his safe stand on the gutter curb gave his applause to the fighting man and then stayed behind to perpetuate his own brunet type. In the present war one has merely to study the type of officer and of the man in the ranks to realize that, in spite of the draft net, the Nordic race is contributing an enormous majority of the fighting men, out of all proportion to their relative numbers in the nation at large.

Grant distinguished distinct strains – Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean – within what others identify as a larger White/European/Caucasian continental-scale race. He observed that national boundaries tended to be shaped by common language and religion, and cut across race. He laments that the Nordic race suffers, mainly in war, under this arrangement.

Grant’s analysis of the nature of even greater racial distinctions in close proximity is grim:

Where two distinct species are located side by side history and biology teach that but one of two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the Negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the South; or else they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates. This is a disagreeable alternative with which to confront sentimentalists but nature is only concerned with results and neither makes nor takes excuses. The chief failing of the day with some of our well meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel.

Grant’s vision for the future was never fully realized, and his estimation of his sentimentalist contemporaries was too charitable. In the vacuum created by pathologizing and demonizing and thus eliminating Nordic champions like Grant, a wholly opposite “well meaning” kind has inherited the role of leadership. Today they demonstrate a vision based on a distinct preference for anything and everything not only non-Nordic, but more broadly non-White.

Image source.

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Race and Anthropology – Part 2

Reading from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, Or, The Racial Basis of European History:

xxviii INTRODUCTION TO FOURTH EDITION

“The Passing of the Great Race,” in its original form, was designed by the author to rouse his fellow-Americans to the overwhelming importance of race and to the folly of the “Melting Pot” theory, even at the expense of bitter controversy. This purpose has been accomplished thoroughly, and one of the most far-reaching effects of the doctrines enunciated in this volume and in the discussions that followed its publication was the decision of the Congress of the United States to adopt discriminatory and restrictive measures against the immigration of undesirable races and peoples.

Another of the results has been the publication in America and Europe of a series of books and articles more or less anthropological in character which have sustained or controverted its main theme. The new definition of race and the controlling role played by race in all the manifestations of what we call civilization are now generally accepted even by those whose political position depends upon popular favor.

There exists to-day a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in its turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics. Such beliefs have done much damage in the past and if allowed to go uncontradicted, may do even more serious damage in the future. Thus the view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man. Nor was a Syrian or Egyptian freedman transformed into a Roman by wearing a toga and applauding his favorite gladiator in the amphitheatre. Americans will have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.

Recent attempts have been made in the interest of inferior races among our immigrants to show that the shape of the skull does change, not merely in a century, but in a single generation. In 1910, the report of the anthropological expert of the Congressional Immigration Commission gravely declared that a round skull Jew on his way across the Atlantic might and did have a round skull child; but a few years later, in response to the subtle elixir of American institutions as exemplified in an East Side tenement, might and did have a child whose skull was appreciably longer; and that a long skull south Italian, breeding freely, would have precisely the same experience in the reverse direction. In other words the Melting Pot was acting instantly under the influence of a changed environment.

What the Melting Pot actually does in practice can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the racial mixture which we call Mexican and which is now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self-government. The world has seen many such mixtures and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value.

It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterize the higher races are of relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or primitive characters tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.

In the crossing of the blond and brunet elements of a population, the more deeply rooted and ancient dark traits are prepotent or dominant. This is matter of every-day observation and the working of this law of nature is not influenced or affected by democratic institutions or by religious beliefs. Nature cares not for the individual nor how he may be modified by environment. She is concerned only with the perpetuation of the species or type and heredity alone is the medium through which she acts.

Israel Zangwill popularized the Melting Pot meme:

Zangwill was born in London on January 21, 1864 in a family of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia, to Moses Zangwill from what is now Latvia and Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill from what is now Poland. He dedicated his life to championing the cause of the oppressed. Jewish emancipation, women’s suffrage, assimilationism, territorialism and Zionism were all fertile fields for his pen.

Zangwill married Edith Ayrton, a gentile feminist and author

The use of the metaphorical phrase melting pot to describe American absorption of immigrants was popularised by Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot,[3] a hit in the United States in 1909-10.

“Melting Pot celebrated America’s capacity to absorb and grow from the contributions of its immigrants.”[5] Zangwill, who had already left Zionism, was writing as “a Jew who no longer wanted to be a Jew. His real hope was for a world in which the entire lexicon of racial and religious difference is thrown away.”

After having for a time supported Theodor Herzl and the main Palestine-oriented Zionist movement, Zangwill broke away from the established movement and founded his own organization, called the Jewish Territorialist Organization in 1905. Its aim was to create a Jewish homeland in whatever possible territory in the world could be found (and not necessarily in what today is the state of Israel). Zangwill died in 1926 in Midhurst, West Sussex after trying to create the Jewish state in such diverse places as Canada, Australia, Mesopotamia, Uganda and Cyrenaica [[the eastern half of what’s called Libya today]].

Back to Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race:

In dealing with European populations the best method of determining race has been found to lie in a comparison of proportions of the skull, the so-called cephalic index. This is the ratio of maximum width, taken at the widest part of the skull above the ears, to maximum length. Skulls with an index of 75 or less, that is, those with a width that is three-fourths of the length or less, are considered dolichocephalic or long skulls. Skulls of an index of 80 or over are round or brachycephalic skulls. Intermediate indices, between 75 and 80, are considered mesaticephalic. These are cranial indices. To allow for the flesh on living specimens about two per cent is to be added to this index and the result is the cephalic index. In the following pages only long and round skulls are considered and the intermediate forms are assigned to the dolichocephalic group.

This cephalic index, though an extremely important if not the controlling character, is, nevertheless, but a single character and must be checked up with other somatological traits. Normally, a long skull is associated with a long face and a round skull with a round face

The use of this test, the cephalic index, enables us to divide the great bulk of the European populations into three distinct subspecies of man, one northern and one southern, both dolichocephalic or characterized by a long skull and a central subspecies which is brachycephalic or characterized by a round skull.

The first is the Nordic or Baltic subspecies. This race is long skulled, very tall, fair skinned with blond or brown hair and light colored eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the North and Baltic Seas and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of Aryan language and culture.

The second is the dark Mediterranean or Iberian subspecies, occupying the shores of the inland sea and extending along the Atlantic coast until it reaches the Nordic species. It also spreads far east into southern Asia. It is long skulled like the Nordic race but the absolute size of the skull is less. The eyes and hair are very dark or black and the skin more or less swarthy. The stature is distinctly less than that of the Nordic race and the musculature and bony framework weak.

The third is the Alpine subspecies occupying all central and eastern Europe and extending through Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs. The Armenoids constitute an Alpine subdivision and may possibly represent the ancestral type of this race which remained in the mouutains and high plateaux of Anatolia and western Asia.

The Alpines are round skulled, of medium height and sturdy build both as to skeleton and muscles. The coloration of both hair and eyes was originally very dark and still tends strongly in that direction but many light colored eyes, especially gray, are now common among the Alpine populations of western Europe.

While the inhabitants of Europe betray as a whole their mixed origin, nevertheless, individuals’ of each of the three main subspecies are found in large numbers and in great purity, as well as sparse remnants of still more ancient races represented by small groups or by individuals and even by single characters.

These three main groups have bodily characters which constitute them distinct subspecies. Each group is a large one and includes several well-marked varieties, which differ even more widely in cultural development than in physical divergence so that when the Mediterranean of England is compared with the Hindu, or the Alpine Savoyard with the Rumanian or Turcoman, a wide gulf is found.

In zoology, related species when grouped together constitute subgenera and genera and the term species implies the existence of a certain definite amount of divergence from the most closely related type but race does not require a similar amount of difference. In man, where all groups are more or less fertile when crossed, so many intermediate or mixed types occur that the word species has at the present day too extended a meaning.

Eye color is of very great importance in race determination because all blue, gray or green eyes in the world to-day came originally from the same source, namely, the Nordic race of northern Europe. This light colored eye has appeared nowhere else on earth, is a specialization of this subspecies of man only and consequently is of extreme value in the classification of European races. Dark colored eyes are all but universal among wild mammals and entirely so among the primates, man’s nearest relatives. It may be taken as an absolute certainty that all the original races of man had dark eyes.

One subspecies of man and one alone specialized in light colored eyes.

Blond hair also comes everywhere from the Nordic subspecies and from nowhere else. Whenever we find blondness among the darker races of the earth we may be sure some Nordic wanderer has passed that way.

It must be clearly understood that blondness of hair and of eye is not a final test of Nordic race. The Nordics include all the blonds, and also those of darker hair or eye when possessed of a preponderance of other Nordic characters. In this sense the word “blond” means those lighter shades of hair or eye color in contrast to the very dark or black shades which are termed brunet.

While the three main European races are the subject of this book and while it is not the intention of the author to deal with the other human types, it is desirable in connection with the discussion of this character, hair, to state that the three European subspecies are subdivisions of one of the primary groups or species of the genus Homo which, taken together, we may call the Caucasian for lack of a better name.

The existing classification of man must be radically revised, as the differences between the most divergent human types are far greater than are usually deemed sufficient to constitute separate species and even subgenera in the animal kingdom at large. Outside of the three European subspecies the greater portion of the genus Homo can be roughly divided into the Negroes and Negroids, and the Mongols and Mongoloids.

The environment of the Alpine race seems to have always been the mountainous country of central and eastern Europe, as well as western Asia, but they are now spreading into the plains, notably in Poland and Russia. This type has never flourished in the deserts of Arabia or the Sahara, nor has it succeeded well in maintaining its early colonies in the northwest of Europe within the domain of the Nordic long heads. It is, however, a sturdy and persistent stock and, while much of it may not be overrefined or cultured, undoubtedly possesses great potentialities for future development.

The Alpines in the west of Europe, especially in Switzerland and the districts immediately surrounding, have been so thoroughly Nordicized and so saturated with the culture of the adjoining nations that they stand in sharp contrast to backward Alpines of Slavic speech in the Balkans and east of Europe.

The Mediterranean race, on the other hand, is clearly a southern type with eastern affinities. It is a type that did not endure in the north of Europe under former agricultural conditions nor is it suitable to the farming districts and frontiers of America and Canada. It is adjusted to subtropical and tropical countries better than any other European type and will flourish in our Southern States and around the coasts of the Spanish Main. In France it is well known that members of the Mediterranean race are better adapted for colonization in Algeria than are French Alpines or Nordics. This subspecies of man is notoriously intolerant of extreme cold, owing to its susceptibility to diseases of the lungs and it shrinks from the blasts of the northern winter in which the Nordics revel.

The brunet Mediterranean element in the native American seems to be increasing at the expense of the blond Nordic element generally throughout the Southern States and probably also in the large cities. This type of man, however, is scarce on our frontiers. In the Northwest and in Alaska in the days of the gold rush it was in the mining camps a matter of comment if a man turned up with dark eyes, so universal were blue and gray eyes among the American pioneers.

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Race and Anthropology – Part 1

Madison Grant

A review of the roots of anthropology, the science of humanity, in the early 20th century.

The two main branches of anthropology – physical/biological/racial anthropology and cultural/social anthropology or ethnology – represent an outgrowth of two more general complementary poles of academic thought. As the Wikipedia page for Franz Boas describes, the:

distinction between science and history has its origins in 19th century German academe, which distinguished between Naturwissenschaften (the sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities)

Generally, [[the sciences]] refer to the study of phenomena that are governed by objective natural laws, while [[the humanities]] refer to those phenomena that have meaning only in terms of human perception or experience

This dichotomy in anthropology was then and remains today a divide between objective and subjective points of view. Right from the start anthropology became a battleground, with White/Aryan/Nordic racialists gravitating to the one side, and jewish anti-“racists” advocating the other.

Metapedia’s article on physical/biological/racial anthropology notes the jewish origins of the term “racism”:

The term racists was first coined in print by Leon Trotsky, a communist Jew and mass murderer, in a 1930 piece called the History of the Russian Revolution (translated into English in 1932).[2] He coined the term in a paragraph where he is mocking what he called “Slavophilism”, which Trotsky claims is the “messianism of backwardness”.[3] In the same breath, the paragraph on the so-called racists also speaks of “Teutonic jackasses”,[3] thus from the very beginning the term came from the mouth of a communist Jew in a thoroughly Europhobic context. He continues on in a 1933 piece about German socialism, speaking of racism.[4] The -ism itself was popularised largely due to Magnus Hirschfeld, a co-racialist of Trotsky and Sexual Bolshevist agitator in Berlin, in the 1934 work Racism.[5]

The champion of the Nordic side was Madison Grant:

Madison Grant (November 19, 1865 – May 30, 1937) was an American lawyer, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist. As a eugenicist, Grant was responsible for one of the most famous works of racial anthropology, and played an active role in crafting strong immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation polices in the United States. As a conservationist, Grant was credited with the saving of many different species of animals, founding many different environmental and philanthropic organizations, and developing much of the discipline of wildlife management.

Grant was born in New York City, New York, to Gabriel Grant, a well-known physician and American Civil War surgeon, and Caroline Manice. Grant was a lifelong resident of New York City. As a child he attended private schools and traveled Europe and the Middle East with his father. He attended Yale University, graduating early and with honors in 1887. He received a law degree from Columbia Law School, and practiced law after graduation; however, his interests were primarily those of a naturalist. He never married and he had no children.

Grant was a close friend of U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. Among other things he founded the Save-the-Redwoods League, helped found the Bronx Zoo, build the Bronx River Parkway, save the American bison, and create Glacier National Park and Denali National Park.

Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the “racial history” of Europe. The book had eight printings within twenty years and is considered one of the most influential and vociferous works of scientific racism and eugenics to come out of the United States. Coming out of Grant’s concerns with the changing “stock” of American immigration of the early 20th century (characterized by increased numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western and Northern Europe), Passing of the Great Race was a “racial” interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, revolving around the idea of “race” as the basic motor of civilization. He specifically promoted the idea of the “Nordic race” — a loosely-defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia — as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history.

Grant and his opinions on race were, in their own time, popular and celebrated. The sneer quotes in the text immediately above reflect the poisonous contemporary anti-“racist”/jewish influence over it’s original source, Wikipedia.

I think the most effective antidote to this poison is to read Grant’s own thoughts:

The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant character of the Alpines. Chivalry and knighthood, and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts, are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions, and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north.

As Metapedia notes:

One of his long-time opponents was the Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas and Grant were involved in a bitter struggle for control over the discipline of anthropology in the United States while they both served (along with others) on the National Research Council Committee on Anthropology after the First World War. Grant represented the “hereditarian” branch of physical anthropology at the time, and was staunchly opposed to and by Boas himself (and the latter’s students), who advocated cultural anthropology. Boas and his students eventually wrested control of the American Anthropological Association from Grant and his supporters and used as a flagship organization for his brand of anthropology. In response Grant founded the Galton Society with American eugenicist and biologist Charles B. Davenport in 1918 as an alternative to Boas.

Excerpts from The Passing of the Great Race, Or, The Racial Basis of European History:

PREFACE

European history has been written in terms of nationality and of language, but never before in terms of race; yet race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government.

Quite independently and unconsciously the author, never before a historian, has turned this historical sketch into the current of a great bio- logical movement, which may be traced back to the teachings of Galton and Weismann, beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century. This movement has compelled us to recognize the superior force and stability of heredity, as being more enduring and potent than environment. This movement is also a reaction from the teachings of Hippolyte Taine among historians and of Herbert Spencer among biologists, because it proves that environment and in the case of man education have an immediate, apparent and temporary influence, while heredity has a deep, subtle and permanent influence on the actions of men.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xiii

War is in the highest sense dysgenic rather than eugenic. It is destructive of the best strains, spiritually, morally and physically. For the world’s future the destruction of wealth is a small matter compared with the destruction of the best human strains, for wealth can be renewed while these strains of the real human aristocracy once lost are lost forever. In the new world that we are working and fighting for, the world of liberty, of justice and of humanity, we shall save democracy only when democracy discovers its own aristocracy as in the days when our Republic was founded.

Henry Fairfield Osborn.

December, 1917.

It will be necessary for the reader to divest his mind of all preconceptions as to race, since modern anthropology, when applied to history, involves an entire change of definition. We must, first of all, realize that race pure and simple, the physical and psychical structure of man, is something entirely distinct from either nationality or language. Furthermore, race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society, just as it has done throughout the unrecorded eons of the past and the laws of nature operate with the same relentless and unchanging force in human affairs as in the phenomena of inanimate nature.

The antiquity of existing European populations, viewed in the light thrown upon their origins by the discoveries of the last few decades, enables us to carry back history and prehistory into periods so remote that the classic world is but of yesterday. The living peoples of Europe consist of layer upon layer of diverse racial elements in varying proportions and historians and anthropologists, while studying these populations, have been concerned chiefly with the recent strata and have neglected the more ancient and submerged types.

Aboriginal populations from time immemorial have been again and again swamped under floods of newcomers and have disappeared for a time from historic view. In the course of centuries, however, these primitive elements have slowly reasserted their physical type and have gradually bred out their conquerors, so that the racial history of Europe has been in the past, and is to-day, a story of the repression and resurgence of ancient races.

The author also wishes to acknowledge his obligation to Prof. William Z. Ripley’s “The Races of Europe,” which contains a large array of anthropological measurements, maps and type portraits, providing valuable data for the present distribution of the three primary races of Europe.

The image above is purported to be of Grant at Yale in 1887. The source is Classify Madison Grant, where some commenters mock Grant for not looking Nordic enough.

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