The Panda’s Thumb (17 page)

Down's theory for trisomy-21 lost its rationale—even within Down's invalid racist system—when physicians detected it both in orientals themselves, and in races lower than oriental by Down's classification. (One physician referred to “Mongol Mongolians” but that clumsy perseverance never took hold.) The condition could scarcely be due to degeneration if it represented the normal state of a higher race. We now know that a similar set of features occurs in some chimpanzees who carry an extra chromosome probably homologous with the twenty-first of humans.

With Down's theory disproved, what should become of his term? A few years ago, Sir Peter Medawar and a group of oriental scientists persuaded several British publications to substitute Down's syndrome for Mongolian idiocy and mongolism. I detect a similar trend in this country, although mongolism is still commonly used. Some people may complain that efforts to change the name represent yet another misguided attempt by fuzzy-minded liberals to muck around with accepted usage by introducing social concerns into realms where they don't belong. Indeed, I do not believe in capricious alteration of established names. I suffer extreme discomfort every time I sing in Bach's St. Matthew Passion and must, as an angry member of the Jewish crowd, shout out the passage that served for centuries as an “official” justification for anti-Semitism: Sein Blut komme über uns und unsre Kinder—“His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Yet, as he to whom the passage refers said in another context, I would not change “one jot or one tittle” of Bach's text.

But scientific names are not literary monuments. Mongolian idiocy is not only defamatory. It is wrong on all counts. We no longer classify mental deficiency as a unilinear sequence. Children with Down's syndrome do not resemble orientals to any great extent, if at all. And, most importantly, the name only has meaning in the context of Down's discredited theory of racial reversion as the cause of mental deficiency. If we must honor the good doctor, then let his name stand as a designation for trisomy-21—Down's syndrome.

THE
V
ICTORIANS LEFT
some magnificent, if lengthy, novels. But they also foisted upon an apparently willing world a literary genre probably unmatched for tedium and inaccurate portrayal: the multivolumed “life and letters” of eminent men. These extended encomiums, usually written by grieving widows or dutiful sons and daughters, masqueraded as humbly objective accounts, simple documentation of words and activities. If we accepted these works at face value, we would have to believe that eminent Victorians actually lived by the ethical values they espoused—a fanciful proposition that Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians
put to rest more than fifty years ago.

Elizabeth Cary Agassiz—eminent Bostonian, founder and first president of Radcliffe College, and devoted wife of America's premier naturalist—had all the right credentials for authorship (including a departed and lamented husband). Her
Life and Correspondence of Louis Agassiz
turned a fascinating, cantankerous, and not overly faithful man into a paragon of restraint, statesmanship, wisdom, and rectitude.

I write this essay in the structure that Louis Agassiz built in 1859—the original wing of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz, the world's leading student of fossil fishes, protégé of the great Cuvier (see essay 13), left his native Switzerland for an American career in the late 1840s. As a celebrated European and a charming man, Agassiz was lionized in social and intellectual circles from Boston to Charleston. He led the study of natural history in America until his death in 1873.

Louis's public utterances were always models of propriety, but I expected that his private letters would match his ebullient personality. Yet Elizabeth's book, ostensibly a verbatim report of Louis's letters, manages to turn this focus of controversy and source of restless energy into a measured and dignified gentleman.

Recently, in studying Louis Agassiz's views on race and prompted by some hints in E. Lurie's biography
(Louis Agassiz: a life in science)
, I encountered some interesting discrepancies between Elizabeth's version and Louis's original letters. I then discovered that Elizabeth simply expurgated the text and didn't even insert ellipses (those annoying three dots) to indicate her deletions. Harvard has the original letters, and a bit of sleuthing on my part turned up some spicy material.

During the decade before the Civil War, Agassiz expressed strong opinions on the status of blacks and Indians. As an adopted son of the north, he rejected slavery, but as an upper crust Caucasian, he certainly didn't link this rejection to any notion of racial equality.

Agassiz presented his racial attitudes as sober and ineluctable deductions from first principles. He maintained that species are static, created entities (at his death in 1873, Agassiz stood virtually alone among biologists as a holdout against the Darwinian tide). They are not placed upon the earth in a single spot, but created simultaneously over their entire range. Related species are often created in separate geographic regions, each adapted to prevailing environments of its own area. Since human races met these criteria before commerce and migration mixed us up, each race is a separate biological species.

Thus, America's leading biologist came down firmly on the wrong side of a debate that had been raging in America for a decade before he arrived: Was Adam the progenitor of all people or only of white people? Are blacks and Indians our brothers or merely our look-alikes? The
polygenists
, Agassiz among them, held that each major race had been created as a truly separate species; the
monogenists
advocated a single origin and ranked races by their unequal degeneration from the primeval perfection of Eden—the debate included no egalitarians. In logic, separate needn't mean unequal, as the victors in Plessy vs. Ferguson argued in 1896. But, as the winners in Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education maintained in 1954, a group in power always conflates separation with superiority. I know of no American polygenist who did not assume that whites were separate
and
superior.

Agassiz insisted that his defense of polygeny had nothing to do with political advocacy or social prejudice. He was, he argued, merely a humble and disinterested scholar, trying to establish an intriguing fact of natural history.

Despite these brave words, Agassiz ends this major statement on race (published in the
Christian Examiner
, 1850) with some definite social recommendations. He begins by affirming the doctrine of separate and unequal: “There are upon earth different races of men, inhabiting different parts, of its surface…and this fact presses upon us the obligation to settle the relative rank among these races.” The resulting hierarchy is self-evident: “The indomitable, courageous, proud Indian—in how different a light he stands by the side of the submissive, obsequious, imitative negro, or by the side of the tricky, cunning, and cowardly Mongolian! Are not these facts indications that the different races do not rank upon one level in nature.” Finally, if he hadn't made his political message clear by generalization, Agassiz ends by advocating specific social policy—thus contravening his original pledge to abjure politics for the pure life of the mind. Education, he argues, must be tailored to innate ability; train blacks in hand work, whites in mind work.

Since these “eminently marked” dispositions are submissiveness, obsequiousness, and imitation, we can well imagine what Agassiz had in mind.

Agassiz had political clout, largely because he spoke as a scientist, supposedly motivated only by the facts of his case and the abstract theory they embodied. In this context, the actual source of Agassiz's ideas on race becomes a matter of some importance. Did he really have no ax to grind, no predisposition, no impetus beyond his love for natural history? The passages expurgated from
Life and Correspondence
shed considerable light. They show a man with strong prejudices based primarily on immediate visceral reactions and deep sexual fears.

The first passage, almost shocking in its force, even 130 years later, recounts Agassiz's first experience with black people (he had never encountered blacks in Europe). He first visited America in 1846 and sent his mother a long letter detailing his experiences. In the section about Philadelphia, Elizabeth Agassiz records only his visits to museums and the private homes of scientists. She expunges, without ellipses, his first impression of blacks—a visceral reaction to waiters in a hotel restaurant. In 1846 Agassiz still believed in human unity, but this passage exposes an explicit, stunningly nonscientific basis for his conversion to polygeny. For the first time, then, without omissions:

The second set of documents comes from the midst of the Civil War. Samuel Howe, husband of Julia Ward Howe (author of
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
) and a member of President Lincoln's Inquiry Commission, wrote to ask Agassiz his opinion about the role of blacks in a reunited nation. During August 1863, Agassiz. responded in four long and impassioned letters. Elizabeth Agassiz bowdlerized them to render Louis's case as a soberly stated opinion (despite its peculiar content), derived from first principles and motivated only by a love of truth.

Louis argued, in short, that races should be kept separate lest white superiority be diluted. This separation should occur naturally since mulattoes, as a weak strain, will eventually die out. Blacks will leave the northern climates so unsuited to them (since they were created as a separate species for Africa); they will move south in droves and will eventually prevail in a few lowland states, although whites will maintain dominion over the seashore and elevated ground. We will have to recognize these states, even admit them to the Union, as the best solution to a bad situation; after all, we do recognize “Haity and Liberia.”

Elizabeth's substantial deletions display Louis's motivation in a very different light. They radiate raw fear and blind prejudice. She systematically eliminates three kinds of statements. First, she omits the most denigrating references to blacks: “In everything unlike other races,” Louis writes, “they may but be compared to children, grown in the stature of adults, while retaining a childlike mind.” Second, she removes all elitist claims about the correlation of wisdom, wealth, and social position within races. In these passages, we begin to sense Louis's real fears about miscegenation.

Third, and of greatest significance, she expunges several long passages on interbreeding that place the entire correspondence in a different setting from the one she fashioned. In them, we grasp Louis's intense, visceral revulsion toward the idea of sexual contact between races. This deep and irrational fear was as strong a driving force within him as any abstract notion about separate creation: “The production of half-breeds,” he writes, “is as much a sin against nature, as incest in a civilized community is a sin against purity of character…. I hold it to be a perversion of every natural sentiment.”

This natural aversion is so strong that abolitionist sentiment cannot reflect any innate sympathy for blacks but must arise because many “blacks” have substantial amounts of white blood and whites instinctively sense this part of themselves: “I have no doubt in my mind that the sense of abhorrence against slavery, which has led to the agitation now culminating in our civil war, has been chiefly if unconsciously fostered by the recognition of our own type in the offspring of southern gentlemen, moving among us as negros [
sic
], which they are not.”

But if races naturally repel each other, how then do “southern gentlemen” take such willing advantage of their bonded women? Agassiz blames the mulatto house slaves. Their whiteness renders them attractive; their blackness, lascivious. The poor, innocent young men are enticed and entrapped.

How a previous generation of gentlemen overcame their aversion to produce the first mulattoes, we are not told.

We cannot know in detail why Elizabeth chose her deletions. I doubt that a conscious desire to convert Louis's motives from prejudice to logical implication prompted all her actions. Simple Victorian prudery probably led her to reject a public airing of any statement about sex. In any case, her deletions did distort Louis Agassiz's thought and did render his intentions according to the fallacious and self-serving model favored by scientists—that opinions arise from dispassionate surveys of raw information.