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lar
in many cases the relative insignificante of
major figures may
reflect the fact that I am dealing with a pattern of thought that
has been rejected. The men we remember today tend to be those
The present essay attempts to draw together severa] of the themes considered so farthe polygenist tradition of racial thought, the
reemergent tradition of social evolutionism, and the preanthropological conception of culture, all in the context of Darwinian
biological evolutionismin order to delineate the major outlines
of the late nineteenth-century image of the dark-skinned savage.
Again, there are issues of rnethod that may not escape the notice of the
critica] reader. In treating late nineteenth-century American social
scientific thought, I have drawn on a nurnber of figures whose
present social scientific reputation is virtually nil, and have relegated such major figures as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen to
footnotes. This refiects the methocl of the stucly from which this
essay derives, which, as I have already indicated, was based on a
general sampling of social scientific thought. In it, many of the
figures we remember today were reduced to a much lesser degree
of prominencea result that may have important implications for
the methodology of intellectual history, in which thc staning
point is of ten the representative man, conccived in Einersonian
terms, rather than the represen tative sample. On the other hand,
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Daniel Brinton, for instance, would revea] a rather complex picture in which of ten very favorable evaluations of American
Indian
capacity coexisted with the rather bleak racial pessimism of the
passages which I have quoted below. Similarly, if one were to
treat evolutionism as a whole in tercos of the questions it was
trying to answer, rather than in tercos of the problems
it posed
for Boas, the difference in focus would produce a much more
complex picture.1
Beyond these qualifications, there is an obvious
methodological asymmetry which requires comment. In treating the first generation of
evolutionists, I have in fact relied on rather traditional intellectual
historical assumptions, and have choseri three representative men.
In tenns of their subsequent infiuence on the pattern of thought
I am re-creating, I think the choice is defensible.
But for the further history of anthropology, it would certainly be worthwhile
to attempt a systematic analysis of Victorian evolutionary thought
in all its aspects over the whole period of its
importante, and not
sirnply its manifestations in late nineteenth-century American
racial thought. Within the complexities cf evolutionary thought
I suspect one might discern a rough, but suggestive, Kuhnian
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HE perspectives of history are manifold. If close-bent analysis reveals polygenist survivals in late nineteenth-century racial
thought, a backward step brings into focus the network of evolutionary belief in which they were entangled. Turn-of-the-century
social scientists were evolutionists almost to a man, and their ideas
on race cannot be considered apart from their evolutionism. To
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the gorilla.
But a racial hierarchy was not all that Darwin borrowed from
anthropology. He borrowed also from the social evolutionary
theories of his contemporaries E. B. Tylor, John McLennan, and
Sir John Lubbock, who had shown that man had risen to civilization "from a lowly condition to the highest standards as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals, and religion." 5
As we have already seen, the proximate origin of this social
evolutionism is to be found in the later eighteenth-century study
of "conjectural," "theoretical," or "natural" history. As the result of the extension to humanistic studies of Cartesian assumptions
of the uniformity of the laws of nature, it became widely accepted
in the first haif of the eighteenth century that the advancement of
human knowledge proceeded naturally, gradually, and inevitably
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I8
RACE, CULTURE, .
EVOLUTION
II9
of specific cultural elements or institutions such as human marriage. But if none of these characterizations is without real basis,
all are subject to important qualification."
Although Tylor salvaged the comparative method, he did not
salvage it in pristine form. Eighteenth-century social evolutionists
had generally assumed that all human races could ascend the evolutionary scale to the top, but there were many Victorians who,
though ardent social evolutionists, no longer made this assumption.
By the beginning of the climactic period of European expansion,
polygenist notions of racial hierarchy seemed to have been borne
out by the failure of many native peoples to adapt to white civiliztion, and even by their extinction in the face of its advance.
Franklin Giddings reflected the change in bis suggestion that there
was "no evidence that the now extinct Tasmanians had the ability
to rise. They were exterminated so easily that they evidently had
neither the power of resistance nor any adaptability." 17
In this context the term "unilinear," however applicable to
eighteenth-century writers whose thinking was heavily conditioned by the Chain of Being, is not fully adequate to describe the
social evolutionism of the Victorians. Despite frequently dogmatic
"unilinear" manifestations, their evolutionism is perhaps better
called "integrative" or "pyramidal." In its broadest sense it was
more a generalization about the overall course of the past development of mankind as a whole rather than a description or a prediction of the course of development in particular human groups.
Social evolution was a process by which a multiplicity of human
groups developed along lines which moved in general toward the
social and cultural forms of western Europe. Along the way
different groups had diverged and regressed, stood still, or even
died out, as they coped with various environmental situations
within the limits of their peculiar racial capacities, which their
different environmental histories had in fact created. The progress
of the "lower races" had been retarded or even stopped, but the
general level had always advanced as the cultural innovations of
the "superior" or "progressive" races were diffused through much
of the world. The process is perhaps best illustrated in Morgan,
who argued that his sequence of seven stages was "historically
true of the entire human family, up to the status attained by each
branch respectively." He went on to argue that "the most ad-
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had to be studied indirectly, he proposed to borrow the "comparative method" as well as the substantive arguments of ethnologists: "When we come to consider the case of savages, and through
them the case of prehistoric man, we shall find that, in the great
interval which lies between such grades of mental evolution and
our own, we are brought far on the way toward bridging the
psychological distance which separates the gorilla from the gentleman." Compare this phrasing to Bagehot's quip about Adam
Smith, and one has a sense of the changed significance of the
comparative method in the post-Darwinian
The Darwinian context also affected folklore studies in the
same period. In discussing Tylor's work in this area, the editor
of the Journal of American Folklore, W. W. Newell, suggested
that it was "to Edward B. Tylor [that] comparative anthropology, on the moral side, that science which undertakes to
investigate the development of the human mind, through its various stages of animal, savage, and civilized life, owes more than to
any other man." Tylor had not in fact spoken of an animal stage,
but in an evolutionary context, his work was so interpreted. The
study of folklore, which constituted a large part of Tylor's anthropology, was not infrequently associated with a mental evolution extending from modern upper-class, western European man
back to a subhuman level. In discussing the origin of animal
myths, Charles Edwards argued that their evolution had proceeded
"concomitantly with that of the mind and body of man" from
a point in the Pliocene, "when the ancestors of the races of apes
and the races of men were one and the same race." 20
At this point it should be evident that when Darwin, in the
peroration to The Descent of Man, linked himself to Fuegian and
baboon, he in effect placed the Fuegians and other living savages in
a chain which ran from ape to European, and in which the racial
hierarchy of nineteenth-century polygenism and the cultural
hierarchy of the eighteenth-century historians became part and
parcel of one scheme of universal organic evolution. Thus when
the Victorian epigoni of Condorcet and Adam Ferguson used the
adjectives "savage" or "barbarous" or "uncivilized," the connotations were no longer what they had been before i800. Along with
"primitive" and "lower," these terms were now applied to "races"
rather than "nations" or "peoples," and the imputation of inferior-
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ity, although still in the first instance cultural, was now in most
cases at least implicitly organic as well. Darwinian evolution,
evolutionary ethnology, and polygenist race thus interacted to
support a raciocultural hierarchy in tercos of which civilized men,
the highest products of social evolution, were large-brained white
men, and only large-brained white men, the highest products of
organic evolution, were fully civilized. The assumption of white
superiority was certainly not original with Victorian evolutionists;
yet the interrelation of the theories of cultural and organic evolution, with their implicit hierarchy of race, gave it a new
rationale.
Some of the further implications of that rationale can be
illuminated by considering the work of the slightly later generation of evolutionary social scientists active in the United States
between 1890 and 19 1 o. These decades were the period in which
the social sciences were established as subjects of graduate and
undergraduate study in American universities, and in which the
major professional journals and organizations were founded. This
was also a period which saw the beginnings of a widespread
reaction against certain aspects of evolutionist thought. Sociologists were emerging from the spell of Herbert Spencer's "organic
analogy." Some anthropologists were even criticizing the theory
of social evolution itself. But aside from this small group of
critical anthropologists who were shaping the modern position
on the problem of race and culture, the bulk of social scientific
thinking in this area was still carried on largely in an evolutionary
tradition which can best be called Spencerian. Sociology, fathered
by Comte and nurtured by Spencer, was coextensive in origin
and still to a great extent in subject matter with social evolutionismso much so that the revolt against Spencer took place largely
within the unconscious warp of evolutionary thought. Elsewhere
in the social sciences, the impact of Darwinism and the tradition
of the comparative method had by no means exhausted themselves.
Indeed, in some writers evolutionism seemed to have entered a
phase in which, hardened into dogma, it was given an almost
rococo elaboration in its application to specific aspects of human
social life.21
Among the anthropologists of evolutionism's later rococo
phases, the "psychic unity of man," which for Tylor had been
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simply baggage from the eighteenth century, was hailed as a "discovery" of Victorian ethnology; indeed the "grandest fact of all"
those it had uncovered. But even more than in Tylor and Morgan,
"psychic unity" was quite a different thing than it had been in
the eighteenth century or was to be again for the anthropologists
of the anti-evolutionary reaction. Daniel Garrison Brinton and
John Wesley Powellafter Morgan's death the two most important American anthropologistswere such dogmatically unilinear
evolutionists that they argued that any cultural similarity whatever
between two peoples "should be explained by borrowing or by
derivation from a common source only when there are special,
known, and controlling reasons indicating this." When these were
absent, "the explanation should be either because the two peoples
are on the same plane of culture, or because their surroundings
are similar." But if Brinton carried "independent invention"
almost to its logical extreme, he found the doctrine compatible
with an almost polygenist approach to racial differences. In the
same address in which he avowed the "psychical unity of man,
the parallelism of his development everywhere and in all time,"
he went on emphatically to deny that "all races are equally endowedor that the position with reference to civilization which
the various ethnic groups hold today is one merely of opportunity
or externalities." On the contrary, no racial group could "escape
the mental correlations of its physical structure." Nor did
Powell's psychic unity include the "power to make inductive
conclusions in opposition to current and constant sensuous perceptions"; this was an acquisition of "civilized culture," which was
the unique contribution of the Aryan race.22
If Brinton sensed a contradiction between the idea that human
minds were everywhere so similar that they necessarily reacted in
identical fashion to the same stimuli, yet so fundamentally different that some of them were disqualified by a "peculiar mental
temperament which has become hereditary" from participation
in "the atmosphere of modern enlightenment," it did not seem to
bother him. In practice, such contradiction might be minimized
by arguing that the same environmental differentiation which had
created human races from a single human species had "superadded" to a common human nature temperamental "procfivities"
peculiar to each race." Or it might be smoothed over almost
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had been won. During this period the chasm between conscious
intelligence and animal instinct was smoothed over from two
directions: by demonstraiing on the one hand the continuity of
instinctive behavior from the animal level up to the human, or on
the other, the continuity of conscious processes from the human
down to the animal. As McGee viewed it, mental evolution
began on an animal level where mind was completely "instinctive." From there it advanced to a still largely instinctive savage
mentality, to barbaric minds which were "measurably similar in
their response to environmental stimuli," to civilized minds which,
though well beyond instinct, were still alike in response, and
finally to the mind of enlightened man, which was "essentially
ratiocinative." Coming back down the ladder one might trace
"psychic homologies" between "higher culture grades and lower,
and from people to people and tribe to tribe down to the plane
of the lowest savagerywhere the lines cease for lack of data,
leaving the lowly mind in a state even more suggestively akin to
that of the subhuman organism than is the lowest human skeleton
to that of the highest anthropoids." Here again we find cultural
evolutionism providing a mental gradation in living man which
could fill the gap between animal instinct and human reason in
the same way that a similar physical gradation filled the fossil gap
between anthropoid and human skeletons.25 But in this process
the attenuation of the principie of psychic unity would seem to be
completed. Savage mind, which for Tylor was still eminently
ratiocinative, even if on erroneous premises, now was largely
governed by a process which until recently had been conceived
as the antithesis of human mentality.
By the time McGee wrote, however, psychologists were
already theorizing about the instinctive element in the behavior
of civilized man. Many of them did so largely in terms of an interpretation of mental evolution which was in a loose way implied
in McGee's schemethe "recapitulation" hypothesis, adopted
brainchild of President G. Stanley Hall of Clark University. Just
as biologists assumed that the human embryo recapitulated in its
growth the prior physical evolutionary history of its ancestors,
so Hall assumed that the developing individual human mind
recapitulated in its postnatal development the prior mental history
of the human race. On this basis, the "genetic psychology" of
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man could be studied by applying what was in effect the "comparative method" of Victorian ethnology. Using questionnaires
for the intensive study of the mental phenomena of childhood,
Hall simultaneously culled the world's ethnographic literature for
information about the mental life of savages. The data of modern
childhood suggested inferences about mn's evolutionary past; the
data of contemporary savagery helped explain the psychological
development of twentieth-century white children. Hall interpreted this development as the slow unfolding of a mass of instincts
which were the gradual Lamarckian acquisition of man's evolutionary experience, and which underlay and occasionally disrupted
the phylogenetically more recent rational consciousness of civilized adults. Hall's own recapitulationist studies were greatly
augmented by those of his students; from their first appearance in
the 189os until about 1915 these formed a large part of the substance of the American Journal of Psychology and the Pedagogical
Seminary, two of the several publications which Hall founded.2
With its germanic overtones and its dogmatic instinctualism,
Hall's recapitulationism was too heady a brew for many American
social scientists. But if they could not all accept the idea that
instinct was superior to reason because "it regulates conduct in the
interest of the species at every point," most of them nevertheless
spoke of mental and social evolution in terms which were given
their most systematic formulation in recapitulationist theory. The
idea that the mental processes of savage man were similar to those
of civilized children had long been and still was a commonplace.
So also was the related notion that mental development in the
"lower races" carne to a gradual halt in early adolescence, whether
or not this was explained in polygenist terms as a result of the
closing of their cranial sutures. And what was essentially "recapitulationist" thinking was also evident in the widely held
belief that, like the child, savage man was distinguished from
civilized adult in the more automatic, instinctive, or irrational
character of his response to environmental stimuli.27 That such
"recapitulationist" ideas were widespread must have been due in
no small measure to the influence of Herbert Spencer.
However their thinking about evolutionary processes differed
from Spencer's, and whatever the variations among themselves,
for most turn-of-the-century social scientists the substance of
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AUN
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the Wawanga and the property relations of the Dyaks were always in a separate universe of discourse from like institutions of
his own culture." 31
With some qualifications, I think that most of these generalizations about evolutionism continue to hold for the "Reform Darwinists" of the progressive era, for the "questioners" who foreshadowed the "end of American innocence," for the critics who
led "the revolt against formalismr in American social thought.
These men were relativists in many respects, but by and large
they were not in this period cultural relativists. To the critics of
Social Darwinism, democracy was still the highest manifestation
of human evolutionary progress, even if that progress was no
longer automatic and its current state left much to he desired.
The fact that cultural progress was a goal to be achieved by
human effort rather than the inevitable outcome of deterministic
laws made the idea of conscious creative control of man's physical
and social environment more important to Spencer's reform Darwinist critics than it had been to Spencer himself.32
But whatever the changes in their image of man's present
state and future prospects, their assumptions about the course
he had traveled were still much the same. The lower stages of
human society were still thought of as based on the automatic
and the higher stages on the conscious mental functions. As
Franklin Giddings put it,
From the standpoint of the observer of animal and primitive human
societies it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish a line of demarcation between the more highly organized bands of animals . . . and
the simplest bordes of human beings, like Bushmen or Australian
Blackfellows. No one can say when, in the development of man from
brute, sympathy ceased to be the chief stuff or substance of the social
relationship, and thoughts in the form of inventions and knowledges
began to assume that important place.
If he could not pinpoint the change, Giddings had no doubt that
animal and primitive human societies were "sympathetic or nonreflective" and that "progressive human societies" were "reflective societies." Similarly, James M. Baldwin distinguished between the "instinctive or gregarious group," the "spontaneous
or plastic group," and the "reflective or social group proper,"
which was based on "intelligent acts of cooperation." And we
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with "civilized," then by extension, "savage" and "barbarian" implied "dark-skinned." Thus J. M. Cattell argued in 1903 that "a
savage brought up in a cultivated society will not only retain his
dark skin, but is likely also to have the incoherent mirad of his
race." 34
In turn-of-the-century evolutionary thinking, savagery, dark
skin, and a small brain and incoherent mirad were, for many, all
part of the single evolutionary picture of "primitive" man, who
even yet walked the earth.
Although sornewhat varied in character, the last five essays have all
dealt with aspects of the interrelation of race, culture, and evolution in nineteenth-century anthropological thought. The focus
now shifts to a problem much closer to the present: the role of
Franz Boas in defining the modern social scientific orientation to
human differences. That Boas had a great deal to do with this
is a commonplace to those at all familiar with American social
science prior to 1940. Yet perhaps because it has been so much
taken for granted and is so closely tied to the most basic conventional wisdom of the social sciences, the exact character of Boas'
contribution is not well understood. Nor does a recent historical
treatment of racial thought in America, in which Boas appears as
a kind of mythical hero figure carrying the torch of reason into an
irrational racial darkness, do much to clarify the situation.'
Within anthropology itself, there are various tendencies that tend to
obscure the nature of Boas' contribution. A decade after his
death, he carne under serious criticism from a generation of anthropologists who, almost unconsciously taking for granted many
of his fundamental contributions, were preoccupied with his failure to treat all the questions of their current interest at the level
of sophistication to which they had arrivedalmost half a century after Boas' major work was largely accomplished. No doubt
the infusion of British social anthropology into the American
discipline in the last three or tour decades has contributed to ths
'33