The History of White People (26 page)

E
merson died in 1882, but his cold formulations did not die with him. Such crabbed views of American ancestry, appearance, and masculinity rolled on well into the future and actually seem mild when compared with the mean-spirited school of “American anthropology.” Emerson was aware of the toxic racial thinking of his time and rejected the worst of it.

From the eighteenth century onward, racial schemes have flourished, each offering a different number of races, even a different number of Caucasian races. Emerson had to make sense of this from his perch in Concord, and, thoroughly Anglicized, he perforce looked not to his own country or to the European continent. He chose, rather, to seek reinforcement for his ideas in Great Britain, specifically in Sharon Turner’s monumental, multivolume
History of the Anglo-Saxon
s, which had popularized the foundational concept of racial “traits,” and in the work of his Scots: the geologist Robert Chambers and the physician-anthropologist Robert Knox. Their ideas struck Emerson as cleaner and of much finer provenance.

This had to do in part with the fact that most racial thought in the United States served to justify slavery and, as such, was pretty mean-spirited. This was uncongenial to Emerson, who leaned toward abolitionism. But had he been determined to denigrate black people, he might have looked to those widely respected American scholars who were eagerly consolidating a white supremacist “American school” of anthropology.

S
AMUEL
G
EORGE
M
ORTON
(1799–1851), the most revered American anthropologist among them, began as the hardworking son of an immigrant Quaker family from Ireland. His merchant father died in Samuel’s childhood, and his mother followed in 1817, when Samuel was eighteen. When a rich uncle in the old country offered to finance his higher education, Morton seized the opportunity. He earned an M.D. degree in 1820 from the University of Pennsylvania and spent time in Edinburgh and Paris, the leading European centers for medical education. Along the way, Morton grew enamored with phrenology, then enjoying a great vogue as science.
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His University of Edinburgh M.D., awarded in 1823, and his European contacts did much to burnish a growing international reputation. Back home in Philadelphia, Morton gradually established himself in the city’s medical community and scholarly societies. As a professor of anatomy between 1839 and 1843 at the University of Pennsylvania, the best medical school in the United States, Morton reached a wide audience of leading American medical doctors and anthropologists.

Skulls ruled the day in American anthropology, an enthusiasm that would lead seamlessly into the fetish of craniometry early in the twentieth century and on into intelligence testing during the First World War and beyond. Morton owned a lot of skulls. At his death in 1851, his collection comprised 918 human skulls (51 more were still in transit), 278 crania of other mammals, 271 of birds, and 88 of reptiles and fish: a collection worthy of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.
^1
†
Morton had diligently measured each human skull along twelve different axes—up and down, sideways, back and forth, in, around, and interior volume—and written up his findings in widely praised studies of American Indians (
Crania Americana
, 1839) and ancient Egyptians (
Crania Ægyptiaca
, 1844). Morton’s fame stemmed from his measurements of cranial capacity, which he judged to predict intellectual ability according to race.
*

On this basis Morton ranked American Indians as a separate race somewhere midway between white and black people, thereby proving conclusively the existence of racial difference—to his own satisfaction as well as to that of his contemporaries.
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Morton also possessed some Inuit skulls. What was to be deduced about their race? Not knowing how to answer that, he simply set them aside, just as European racial theorists had alternately expelled and accepted Lapps in jiggering European racial identity.

Clearly, these were tortured calculations, none more so than Morton’s classification of different socioeconomic strata of ancient Egyptians as different races in
Crania Ægyptiaca.
He counted most Egyptians as Caucasian but a minority as Negro, while at the same time dividing them into three further types—“Pelasgic,” “Semitic,” and “Egyptian.” Those three were suspiciously stereotypical as white, Jewish, and black racial lines. Much of this echoed Winckelmann on the beauty and symmetry of ancient Greeks and Petrus Camper’s concept of the facial angle. At the top of Morton’s heap were large crania and straight facial angles, denoted as Pelasgic, or Greek: the “symmetry and delicacy of the whole osteological structure” make the Pelasgic “familiar to us in the beautiful models of Grecian art.”

And near the bottom were skulls Morton categorized as Semitic types resembling, he says, “Hebrew communities” characterized by “comparatively receding forehead, long, arched, and very prominent nose” and, in sum, a “strong and often harsh development of the whole facial structure.” The Semitic race, he contends, ought not to be accorded much respect, having been “admitted into Egypt only upon sufferance.” All smaller skulls belonged to slaves, dumber, darker-skinned examples of the Egyptian type. They interest Morton even less than his Semitic types and rate hardly any description. So much for Jews and Africans in Morton’s Egypt.
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For Morton and his many admirers (including Robert Knox in Scotland and Arthur de Gobineau in France), the greatness of ancient Egypt seals the permanence of racial hierarchies, the very bedrock of nineteenth-century racial theory. Like that of the ancient Greeks, deemed very similar to nineteenth-century Gentile northern Europeans, ancient Egypt’s glory is linked to the superiority of white people, Americans included. Never mind puzzling details. What looked like wooly hair in ancient Egyptian depictions Morton deems wigs worn by Egyptians over their real hair, which surely was straight and light-colored, like that of “the fairest Europeans of the present day.” (Why Egyptians would wear wooly-haired wigs does not rate an explanation.) Plunging forward, Morton pronounces the cranial formation of ancient Egyptians—at least the better-dressed and more pompously buried Egyptians—identical to that of the “modern white man.”
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Why did Morton’s equations of prominent ancient Egyptians and the “modern white man” make sense to race theorists? The answer has everything to do with the wealth and power of nations of their own time. Again and again, racial hierarchies set the poor and powerless at the bottom and the rich and powerful at the top. The early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber says it well. While the nobility believe their superiority grows out of their “underived, ultimate, and qualitatively distinctive
being
,” no one in favored circumstances wants to admit the chanciness of privilege. “The fortunate man,” Weber says, “is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he ‘deserves’ it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others…. Good fortune thus wants to be ‘legitimate’ fortune.”
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Innate qualities are needed to prove the justice—the naturalness and inalterability—of the status quo. In the United States, in Samuel George Morton’s Philadelphia, where the buying and selling of laborers extended into the nineteenth century, that often turned into a justification for African slavery.
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M
ORTON’S WORK
on skulls earned him enormous prestige in the United States and in France, where he impressed even Paul Broca, the most prominent French anthropologist, who was also a polygenesist. An 1861 controversy in French anthropology over French and German head sizes echoed Morton’s notions of racial superiority. All the prominent anthropologists of the time assumed that brain size correlated with intelligence. Here lay a problem. Bigger bodies house bigger heads, and bigger heads house bigger brains. German bodies (even of professors) were bigger than French bodies; therefore German brains were bigger than French brains. What were French anthropologists to do? Were Germans simply smarter? Even French anthropologists who accepted a correlation between head size and intelligence when applied to other people reckoned uneasily that the correlation did not always hold.
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The debate was never resolved, only rendered trivial with the passage of time. Skulls kept their pride of place in anthropology and, with them, the owner of a world-class collection. So firmly did Morton personify the American school of anthropology that a visit with him became obligatory for ambitious young scientists. Two key visitors were Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz.
^‡

J
OSIAH
N
OTT
(1804–73), scion of a prosperous South Carolina family, received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania after undergraduate study at the College of South Carolina. An accomplished surgeon and founder of the University of Alabama School of Medicine, the agnostic Nott loved annoying traditional believers. As a polygenesist, he disputed the account of creation in Genesis in his first major publication,
Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races
(1844). The races were created separately, Nott argues, well before the beginning of biblical time.
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For Nott and others in the American school of anthropology, multiple creations had to mean that the history in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, or Torah) applies only to white Westerners. Nonwhite peoples had separate histories, told, presumably, in their own various books of Genesis. This view enjoyed international currency.

Though he lived in Mobile, Alabama, in the deepest South, Nott kept up with the latest in European anthropology. Reading Gobineau’s pessimistic, 1,000-page
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
(1853–55), Nott exclaimed that he had “seldom perused a work which has afforded [him] so much pleasure and instruction.”
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Right up front in his dedication to the Saxon king George V of Hanover, Gobineau proclaimed convictions—“that the racial question over-shadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races…”—bound to entrance Nott.
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Like many other racists, Gobineau had seemingly mastered the multilingual contents of entire libraries to formulate a universal truth that energetic races, certainly the Aryan, create national greatness. In turn, Aryan prosperity was fated to attract inferior races. Just as inevitably, the races would mix; the superior race would degenerate, and the nation would collapse in revolution. According to Gobineau, this inexorable process of race degeneration explained the catastrophic (to him) revolutions of 1848.

Gobineau took the concept of an Aryan “race” out of the obscure scholarship of philologists studying dead languages like Sanskrit and, eventually, made it familiar. In the 1780s William Jones, a British linguist, had discovered a resemblance between Sanskrit and classical Greek and Latin. Other scholars, such as Franz Bopp in Berlin, Friedrich Schlegel in Paris and Berlin, and Max Müller in Oxford, elaborated the relationship between languages and peoples in the early nineteenth century. They postulated the existence of a proto-Indo-European language that had spawned Indo-European languages spoken widely, from the Indian subcontinent to western Europe.

Thus, the nineteenth-century rage for races turned languages into peoples, and the word
arya
, meaning “noble” or “spiritual” in Sanskrit, came to be applied to an imagined, superior race of
Aryans
. Some resistance to the conflation of language and race did arise. Müller of Oxford, the leading English-speaking comparative philologist, ultimately backed away from the often anti-Semitic identification of Aryan with a race rather than a language, but his awakening came too late. Racial extremists like Gobineau had already applied the term to the idea of a superior race, dooming it to a racial future.
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Even so, the term “Aryan” did not enjoy wide popularity until the early twentieth-century English publication of Gobineau’s
Essai
. Nor was Aryan the most useful concept Josiah Nott discovered in Gobineau’s work.

Rather, Nott found two essential points: first, races are unequal, and, second, race mixing is therefore bad. He heartily endorsed both sentiments long before Gobineau’s
Essay
gained other adherents. For several years after its publication in 1853, Gobineau’s
Essay
went largely unread and, when read, was not particularly appreciated. In a personal letter to Gobineau, Alexis de Tocqueville, Gobineau’s mentor, denounced the work as promoting “spiritual lassitude” because its racial determinism deprived individuals of free will and destroyed any motivation to improve.
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