Boasian Critiques of Race in The Nation, by Franz Boas, et al., edited by Alex Golub and Angela Chen, with an introduction by Richard Handler

Abstract

This series of 7 essays by Franz Boas, his students and those in his circle of liberal New York City intellectuals, appeared in The Nation in 1925. Boas had for years been fighting against the rising tide of scientific racism that triumphed with the passage of the Johnson Immigration Bill in April 1924, the second such bill in three years to restrict entrance to the U.S. on the basis of race. But Boas continued his work as a public intellectual, critiquing the “myth” behind the bill and mobilizing his colleagues to do the same. In these essays, Boas and his students—Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovits and Alexander Goldenweiser—rehearsed the main tenets of the Boasian consensus: that race “antagonism” is not instinctive; that American racial categories could not be correlated with fixed biological facts; that “civilization” included “contributions” from all peoples (not just the “Nordics”); that there was no relationship between a people’s cultural achievements and the biology of the group; and that such sciences as eugenics were little more than rationalizations of commonsense prejudices (as Sapir put it, the “heated desire” of racists “subdued to the becoming coolness of a technical vocabulary”). The series is rounded out by the inclusion of essays by the Columbia-trained historian Harry Elmer Barnes (who published several standard textbooks on American and Western civilization), the popular historian Hendrik Willem van Loon (whose children’s book, The Story of Mankind, won the first Newberry Medal in 1922), and the journalist and travel writer Konrad Bercovici, whose romantic appreciation of peoples scorned by proponents of the Nordic myth is evident in his contribution.