The following is excerpted from “Changing the World: Clark University’s Pioneering People, 1887–2000” (Chandler House Press, 2005), by former president Richard P. Traina.
Often called the “Father of Anthropology,” Franz Boas might more accurately be thought of as the father of systematic or academic anthropology—rescuing the infant field from the hands of amateurs. But Boas not only established the credibility of anthropology as a field of serious, professional study, he assumed a major role in the history of ideas. Further, as a social activist, he brought his disciplined study to bear on a major issue in American society—racial prejudice—and consequently helped redirect the dynamic of race relations. Boas was, throughout his life, a provocative and controversial figure.
Boas came to Clark in 1888, staying for four important years before taking responsibility for the physical anthropology exhibit at the famous Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. His appointment at Clark, at age 30, was his first academic position having been lured by President Hall’s promise of a well-outfitted laboratory, an ample library and plenty of time to do research. What could Hall have seen in Boas that caused his avid pursuit of the young scholar?
Trained as a geographer at major universities in his native Germany, Boas had become disenchanted with the environmental determinism that then dominated the field. He meanwhile developed an interest in both linguistics and what came to be known as physical anthropology, which led him to live with and study Eskimos for 15 months when he was 25 years old. It was a defining experience: from that point on, he believed that “the idea of a ‘cultured’ individual is merely relative.” In an age when racial and cultural bias was rampant in the intellectual life of Europe and North America, Boas was headed in another direction. Clearly, the liberalism he inherited from his family in Germany and their experiences with anti-Semitism provided insights that influenced the direction of his scholarly pursuits. More important was his dedication to systematic research.
A year before coming to Clark, while he was an assistant education editor for Science magazine, Boas became involved in what must have seemed to many an esoteric, even if angry, controversy. He was arguing strenuously against the Smithsonian Institution’s practice of general categorization of materials as though everything could be “neatly boxed.” Boas was a “particularist,” believing very strongly that the special context of each individual cultural item needed to be explained—otherwise the public would have an overly simplified idea of scientific inquiry and learning. The practice of general classification also lent itself, he believed, to the perpetuation of attitudes of racial and cultural superiority.
What Hall had seen in Boas was an independent, original thinker, fully prepared to defy conventional wisdom and the intellectual establishment. Hiring Boas was an act of daring, not unlike many of Hall’s appointments. If the young scholar’s autonomous spirit were not enough to set him apart, Boas was also Jewish at a time when anti-Semitism was rife in academe.
Boas did not disappoint Hall. He made one of his marks at Clark by mentoring the first-ever doctoral degree recipient in anthropology in the United States, Alexander Chamberlain, who subsequently continued on the Clark faculty after Boas departure. Boas, with Chamberlain’s assistance, embarked on a research program that was to stir up some furious opposition in the local community and press. They undertook a longitudinal study of school children in Worcester, measuring them for height, weight and head size on a regular basis, attempting to determine patterns of growth. Detecting minimal differences early and increasing differences among children as they matured, Boas fashioned an environmental interpretation—as opposed to one attributing differences to heredity. The results seemed to show that healthier environments produced healthier children. Combining his Eskimo and Worcester experiences, Boas was closing in on an idea that many found disturbing: racial types are not static, and so-called racial differences were more attributable to environment than to heredity. Not surprisingly, Boas opposed tests of general intelligence believing that they could never really uncover mental capacity and that, with all their inadequacies, they were too often used to justify racist ideas.
The intellectual and academic worlds, at the time dominated by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants with conservative notions of race, were hardly friendly to Boas’ ideas. But with increasing energy and courage, he began to fight bigotry against African-Americans, as well as southern and eastern Europeans and Asians in a period of heightened racism and anti-immigration sentiment. At Columbia University, which he joined in 1896, he sharpened his professionalism as an anthropologist and used his conceptual research skills to reveal flaws in what he saw as “pseudo-scientific” racist arguments. During the first decade of the new century, Boas published three key articles on the subject of race, heredity and cultural environment. The third article was first presented at the famous 1909 gathering of behavioral scientists at Clark University. Boas summed up the issue this way: “There is no reason to believe that one race is by nature so much more intelligent, endowed with greater will-power, or emotionally more stable than others that the difference would materially influence its culture…. I believe that the present state of our knowledge justifies us to say that while individuals differ, biological differences between races are small.”
During the earliest years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), its leaders turned to Boas for credible support. He spoke at National Negro and NAACP conferences and wrote for the association’s publication, Crisis. In 1911, he published The Mind of Primitive Man, an attack on all fronts of racial prejudice, undermining the research done by others to support racist theories. As one colleague later wrote, “he gave firm scientific support for tolerance toward racial and cultural differences, in terms so well reasoned and documented that much of what he stood for has moved into common thought, its source unsuspected by most of those who follow it.” Although Boas died in 1942, it could be said that he took the nation from the Plessey versus Ferguson U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1896, supporting the “separate but equal” doctrine, to the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954, declaring that “separate is inherently unequal.”
While he became an American citizen during his time at Clark University, Boas remained devoted to German culture—which he later ardently distinguished from “Nazi culture,” Even before World War I, he mocked the notion of “the blond superman,” calling ir “Nordic nonsense,” In 1933, he wrote an article tiled “Aryans and Non-Aryans,” which was distributed by the anti-Nazi underground in Germany and was subsequently translated into English and Spanish. Later in the decade, he led an effort to bring to the United States German Jewish scholars who had been dismissed from their universities in Germany.
Franz Boas was a symbol for his era—contending constructively with major challenges in American society by joining a scholarly career of integrity with dedicated social activism. Along the way, he mentored a number of major figures in anthropology, among them Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits, Leslie Spier and John Swanton, His legacy continues to ripple on through others. It is fair to say that he created the discipline of anthropology and helped launch the enduring scholarship that continues to shape our thinking into the 21st Century. But his legacy in grappling with issues of race and culture is equally powerful. As Marshall Hyatt, one of his biographers, has written, “racism, of course, outlived Boas. What he left to America were the intellectual weapons to combat it and the recognition of the urgency of the task.”
