Michael Schudson's critique of Donna Haraway ["Paper Tigers," LF, August] raises pertinent concerns regarding the nexus between history and cultural studies and demonstrates how neglect of the past can lead to interpretive bias and error. Especially relevant here is his reference to Franz Boas who, in more ways than Schudson recounts, stands in refutation of Haraway's argument.
Schudson correctly argues that the attack on scientific racism predated the 1940s and that Boas was instrumental in that crusade. The 1920s, however, is also too late a date to fix as the embarkation point for this assault. Boas began his work in this area in 1894, in "Human Faculty as Determined by Race," an address delivered before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Arguing that race did not determine an individual's intelligence, Boas constructed a foundation for his later critiques by cautioning that scientists could not prejudge any individual's mental ability on the basis of skin color alone. This early attack paved the way for much of Boas's subsequent work on race theory which led to the transition in racial thought, in which "science" switched sides, becoming a weapon for egalitarianism and equal rights rather than a tool for racists. Boas's contribution led directly to Gunnar Myrdal's assessments in The American Dilemma and later to the Supreme Court's evaluation of social scientific research in its landmark Brown v. the Board of Education decision.
Boas is also useful in undermining the monolithic picture Haraway paints of the American Museum of Natural History. As curator of the Jesup Expedition there, Boas was frequently caught in a web of political factionalism that spilled over into arguments over methodologies of artifact display and other aspects of museum administration. Consistent in all these intellectual skirmishes was a tension between amateur scientists and the new class of professional anthropologists, of whom Boas was the leading light. These constant battles belie the notion that everyone employed at the museum shared a common vision of the purpose and outcome of displays. Moreover, they reveal that one of Haraway's major assumptions--namely that the administrators were most concerned with how the museum depicted the relation of man to nature--was actually a point of ideological contestation among museum directors, curators, and other officials.
MARSHALL HYATT, PH.D. THE DALTON SCHOOL NEW YORK, NY --
Schudson's critique is based on an inaccurate triumphalist history of Thirties liberalism. According to Schudson, Henry Fairfield Osborne's eugenic ideas were discredited during the Thirties, at which time liberal thought prevailed among the elites. Schudson therefore concludes that Haraway's account of the Hall of Mammals sheds little light on the role of the American Museum of Natural History after the early Twenties.
If the elites of the Thirties overwhelmingly rejected eugenics and embraced liberalism, it is hard to understand why the U.S. government turned away Holocaust refugees--sending shiploads back to Europe to their deaths--or why government officials refused to bomb rail lines to the death camps. Among the economic and cultural elite of that era were numerous public figures who were openly anti-Semitic or who praised fascist regimes: Henry Ford, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Henry Luce. Also in the Thirties the Supreme Court upheld sterilization laws that spread to twenty-six states.
The sadder story is that racist views like Osborne's were not widely discredited until pictures of death-camp victims were published after World War II. Furthermore, when the museum board voted to discontinue funding for the development of Osborne's dioramas in the Forties, it was not because it repudiated Osborne's racism but because it decided that evolution was not a central area of biology! Many of Osborne's exhibits, with their ideological messages intact, were retained into the 1980s.
The death-camp movies triggered a revulsion against hereditarianism and biologism that lasted barely two decades. The return of scientific racism, the crude popularization of sociobiology, and the fetishization of genetic determinism have long since eclipsed the anthropological relativism and environmental determinism of the Fifties and Sixties. Contrary to the bright picture Schudson paints, Henry Fairfield Osborne's views--as well as many of his dioramas--live on.
VAL DUSEK ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE --
Michael Schudson replies: Professor Dusek is right to point out anti-Semitism among influential Americans in the Forties and later. Which is all the more reason to give credit where credit is due and acknowledge that leading opinion in the social sciences had become antiracist by the Thirties. Cultural relativism dominated anthropology by then--and has ever since. Jews, higher education outcasts in l920, were significant figures in academic and literary life within two decades. As for recent days, Dusek surely would not rate Jensen, Shockley, and the like as influential as, say, Justices Warren, Marshall, and Brennan. In l940, as today, liberal pluralism had enemies, but it also had won an honored place.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)