91 (An American Dilemma : the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy)

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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 9*
merits for racial diflFerences based on the primitive people’s lack of culture.’*^
The outlines of a radically environmentalistic sociology were being drawn
by W. G. Sumner, W. 1. Thomas and C. H. Cooley. The early research on
intelligence pronounced that there were considerable racial differences but
it had already encountered some doubts as to validity.® Improved techniques
in the fields of anatomy and anthropometry had begun to disprove earlier
statements on Negro physical traits.**
The last two or three decades have seen a veritable revolution in scienti-
fic thought on the racial characteristics of the Negro. This revolution has
actually a much wider scope: it embraces not only the whole race issue even
outside the Negro problem, but the fundamental assumptions on the nature-
nurture question. The social sciences in America, and particularly sociology,
anthropology, and psychology,^® have gone through a conspicuous develop-
ment, increasingly giving the preponderance to environment instead of to
heredity.
In order to retain a proper perspective on this scientific revolution, we
have to recall that American social science is not many decades old. The
biological sciences and medicine, firmly entrenched much earlier in American
universities, had not, and have not yet, the same close ideological ties to
the American Creed. They have been associated in America, as in the rest
of the world, with conservative and even reactionary ideologies.^® Under
their long hegemony, there has been a tendency to assume biological causa-
tion without question, and to accept social explanations only under the
duress of a siege of irresistible evidence. In political questions, this tendency
favored a do-nothing policy. This tendency also, in the main, for a century
and more, determined people’s attitudes toward the racial traits of the
Negro. In the years around the First World War, it exploded in a cascade
of scientific and popular writings with a strong racialistic bias, rationalizing

Cooley challenged Gabon’s hereditary explanation of racial genius in 1897. (Charles
II. Cooley, ‘^Genius, Fame and the Comparison of Races,” Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science [May, 1897], pp. 317-358) }
see Chapter 6, Section 3.
Several scientists, for example, had criticized much of the early research on brain and
skull diiferences. One of the most notorious of the exposes was that of Robert B. Bean by
Franklin P, Mall. Bean was a Southern student of Mall’s in the latter’s laboratory at Johns
Hopkins. In an elaborate study of Negro skulls and brains, he attempted to show that the
skulls were smaller than the skulls of white men, and that the brains were less convoluted
and otherwise deficient. After Bean published his findings (Robert B. Bean, ‘*Some Racial
Peculiarities of the Negro Brain,” American Journal of Anatomy [September, 1906],
pp. 27-432), Mall repeated the measurements on many of the same specimens and found
that Bean had completely distorted his measurements and conclusions. (Franklin P. Mall,
“On Several Anatomical Characters of the Human Brain, Said to Vary According to Race
and Sex, With Especial Reference to the Weight of the Frontal Lobe,** American Journal
of Anatomy [February, 1909], pp. 1-32), Bean’s sample, too, was grossly inadequate^ it
consisted of 103 Negroes and 49 whites in the Baltimore morgue who had been unclaimed
at death.

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