Intellectuals and Race (5 page)

Intellectuals on opposite ends of the spectrum in different eras have been similar in another way: Both have tended to ignore the long-standing warning from statisticians that correlation is not causation. One race may be more successful than another at a particular endeavor, or a whole range of endeavors, for reasons that are neither genetic nor a result of the way the society in which they live treats them. As noted in
Chapter 2
, there are many historic, geographic and demographic reasons for groups to differ from one another in their skills, experiences, cultures and values— whether these are different social, national or racial groups.

The mid-nineteenth century sensation created by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had ramifications far beyond the field of biology. The idea of “survival of the fittest” among competing species was extended by others into competition among human beings, whether among different classes or different races. The research of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911) culminated in a book titled
Hereditary Genius
, which established that high achievers were concentrated in particular families.
Correlation was treated as causation, with genetics being proclaimed to be the reason for the achievement differential.

Similar reasoning was applied to races. As a later scholar said of Galton: “He believed that in his own day the Anglo-Saxons far outranked the Negroes of Africa, who in turn outranked the Australian aborigines, who outranked nobody.” Again, correlation was treated as causation, leading to eugenics— a term Galton coined— to promote the differential survival of races. He said, “there exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”
³

Whatever the validity of Galton’s assessments of the relative achievements of different races in his own time, profound changes in the relative achievements of different races over the centuries undermine the theory of genetic determinism. China was, for centuries, technologically, economically, and in other ways more advanced than any country in Europe. The later reversals of the relative positions of the Chinese and Europeans in the modern era, without any demonstrable changes in their genes, undermine Galton’s genetic arguments, as other major reversals of the positions of other racial groups or subgroups would undermine the later genetic determinism of other intellectuals.

This is not to say that there were no great differences in achievements among different races, either within societies or between societies, as of a given time, nor that all such differences reversed over time, though many did. But once the automatic link between genetics and achievement is broken, it ceases to be a weighty presumption, even in the case of groups that have never been leaders in achievement. Whatever non-genetic factors have been able to produce profound differences in other situations cannot be ruled out
a priori
for any group, and therefore it remains a question to be examined empirically in each particular case— that is, if science is to be something more than an incantation invoked to buttress an ideology and silence its critics.

Much empirical evidence of large and consequential differences among racial or ethnic groups, as well as social classes, accumulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Studies of the histories of families, as well as the spread of mental testing, and sociological studies of differences
in crime rates and educational achievements among children from different backgrounds, even when attending the same schools, added weight to the case made by those promoting genetic determinism. Contrary to later verbal fashions, these were not simply “perceptions” or “stereotypes.” These were painstakingly established facts, despite the serious problems with the inferences drawn from those facts— such as Madison Grant’s sweeping pronouncement, “race is everything.”
⁴

The Progressive era in early twentieth century America was perhaps the high-water mark of “scientific” theories of racial differences. The increasing immigration from Europe, and especially the shift in its origins from Northern and Western Europe to Eastern and Southern Europe, raised questions about the racial quality of the new people flooding into the country. The beginning of the mass migrations of American blacks from the South to the Northern cities, and their concentration in ghettos there, raised similar questions during the same era. Empirical data on group differences in crime rates, disease rates, mental test scores, and school performances fed all these concerns.

Two huge compilations of empirical data in early twentieth century America stand out particularly. One was the huge, multi-volume report of the federal immigration commission headed by Senator William P. Dillingham and published in 1911. This report showed, among other things, that with children who attended elementary school three-quarters of the school days or more, 30 percent of native-born white children had been denied promotion to the next grade, compared to 61 percent of native-born black children and 67 percent of the children of immigrant Polish Jews.
⁵
The other huge source of data about differences among racial or ethnic groups during this period was the mental testing of more than 100,000 soldiers by the U.S. Army during the First World War.
⁶
The proportions of soldiers with different ancestries who exceeded the American national norms on mental tests were as follows:
⁷

Men from Italy, Poland and Russia scored consistently at or near the bottom among immigrants from Europe on various mental tests, with American blacks scoring at the bottom among soldiers as a whole, though scoring only marginally lower than these Southern and Eastern European immigrants on these tests.
⁸
Among the civilian population, the same groups scored at or near the bottom in mental test scores, though in a slightly different order. Black children attending schools in Youngstown, Ohio, scored marginally higher on IQ tests than the children of Polish, Greek and other immigrants there.
⁹
In Massachusetts, a larger proportion of black school children scored over 120 on the IQ tests than did their schoolmates who were children of Polish, Italian or Portuguese immigrants.
¹⁰
During this era, Northern blacks had somewhat higher IQs than Southern blacks.
¹¹

Another curious fact, which received much less attention at the time, was that the Army tests in the First World War showed white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scoring lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania.
¹²
However, the black population as a whole was overwhelmingly concentrated in the South at that time, which may explain why the Army tests showed blacks scoring below the immigrants that they scored above in civilian tests conducted where they both went to the same schools in the North.

Again, none of this was simply a matter of “perceptions,” “stereotypes,” or “prejudices.” Differences among racial, ethnic and regional groups were very real, sometimes very large and very consequential. What was at issue were the
reasons
for those differences. Moreover, the reasons for such differences that were acceptable to intellectuals changed radically over the generations, much as their support for the First World War and their later pacifism marked drastic changes on that subject.

During the early twentieth century, demonstrable differences among groups were largely attributed to heredity and, during the late twentieth century, these differences were largely— if not solely— attributed to environment, including an environment of discrimination. Nevertheless, the same
general
vision of society prevailed among those who called themselves Progressives at the beginning of the twentieth century and those who called themselves liberals later in that century, however disparate their views on race were between these two eras. Theirs was the vision of the anointed as surrogate decision-makers in both periods, along with such corollaries as an expanded role for government and an expanded role for judges to re-interpret the Constitution, so as to loosen its restrictions on the powers of government.

Progressive-era intellectuals took a largely negative view of the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as of American blacks in general. Because such a high proportion of the immigrants from Poland and Russia were Jews during this era, Carl Brigham— a leading authority on mental tests, and creator of the College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Test— asserted that the Army test results tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”
¹³
H.H. Goddard, who had administered mental tests to immigrant children on Ellis Island, declared: “These people cannot deal with abstractions.”
¹⁴
Another giant of the mental-testing profession, L.M. Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and creator of a decades-long study of people with IQs of 140 and above, likewise concluded from his study of racial minorities in the Southwest that children from such groups “cannot master abstractions.”
¹⁵
It was widely accepted as more or less a matter of course during this era that blacks were incapable of mental performances comparable to whites, and the Army mental test results were taken as confirmation.

The Progressive era was also the heyday of eugenics, the attempt to prevent excessive breeding of the “wrong” kind of people— including, though not limited to, particular races. Eugenicists feared that people of lower mental capacity would reproduce on a larger scale than others, and thus over time bring about a decline in the average IQ in the nation.
¹⁶
The New Republic
lamented “the multiplication of the unfit, the production of a horde of unwanted souls.”
¹⁷

In Britain, as in the United States, leaders and supporters of the eugenics movement included people on the left, such as John Maynard Keynes, who helped create the Cambridge Eugenics Society, as well as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, Sidney Webb and Julian Huxley. Sidney Webb said, “as a nation we are breeding largely from our inferior stocks.”
¹⁸
But eugenics was by no means exclusively a movement on the left, nor one without opponents on the left. Supporters of eugenics also included conservatives, among them both Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.
¹⁹

In America, among those to whom pioneer birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger took her message was the Ku Klux Klan. Madison Grant’s book
The Passing of the Great Race
, expressing fears of a loss of hegemony by whites in general and Nordics in particular, was a landmark book of its era. It was not only a best seller in the United States, it was translated into French, Norwegian and— most fatefully— German. Hitler called it his “Bible.”
²⁰

Despite its international influence,
The Passing of the Great Race
offered extremely little evidence for its sweeping conclusions. The great bulk of the book was a historical account of Alpine, Mediterranean and Nordic peoples in Europe and of the Aryan languages. Yet most of Madison Grant’s sweeping conclusions and the policies he recommended were about America— about the “inferior races among our immigrants,”
²¹
about the need for eugenics
²²
and for “laws against miscegenation.”
²³
He asserted that “Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within.”
²⁴
Yet, as Grant himself said, “the three main European races are the subject of this book,”
²⁵
which contained virtually no factual information about blacks, but only opaque pronouncements. Even Grant’s rankings of European groups are essentially pronouncements, with little or no empirical evidence or analysis, despite an abundance of miscellaneous and often arcane information.

What
The Passing of the Great Race
did have was a great display of erudition, or apparent erudition, using numerous technical terms unfamiliar to most people— “brachycephalic skulls,”
²⁶
“Armenoids,”
²⁷
“Paleolithic man,”
²⁸
the “Massagetæ,”
²⁹
“Zendavesta,”
³⁰
the “Aryan Tokharian language,”
³¹
and the “Miocene” and “Pliocene” eras,
³²
as well as such
statements as “The Upper Paleolithic embraces all the postglacial stages down to the Neolithic and includes the subdivisions of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian and Azilian.”
³³
But this all served as an impressive backdrop for unrelated conclusions.

Among Madison Grant’s conclusions were that “race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society.”
³⁴
He also deplored “a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life,” when that is used “to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.”
³⁵
He feared “the resurgence of the lower races at the expense of the Nordics”
³⁶
and the “prevailing lack of true race consciousness” among the latter.
³⁷
He saw the immigrants arriving in America as the “sweepings” of the “jails and asylums” of Europe.
³⁸
More generally, he said: