In 1914 William E. Burghardt Du Bois, then editor of the NAACP's The Crisis, published an obituary of a white anthropologist, one no doubt unfamiliar to Du Bois's black readers. “In the death of Dr. Alexander F. Chamberlain,” Du Bois explained, “the Negro race loses an honest man,” particularly due to his “excellent article on the contributions of the Negro race to civilization, first published in the Journal of Race Development.” According to Du Bois, “This article will soon be republished by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and should be in the hands of every colored person in the United States and every person who is unafraid of the truth.”Footnote 1 So impressed was Du Bois with Chamberlain's piece that he cited it regularly, judging it “the best thing on the subject that I know of and ought to be reprinted.”Footnote 2
The pioneer African American historian William H. Ferris shared Du Bois's opinion that Chamberlain's ideas mattered. In his The African Abroad, or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (1913) Ferris remarked that in his Journal of Race Development article, Chamberlain
brilliantly masses and marshals the facts of the native African's achievements in state building, commerce, domesticating animals, in art, music, and his priority in iron-smelting. As a whole, his article is the best defense and vindication of the Negro that has appeared since Abbe Gregoire wrote his famous Enquiry a century ago.Footnote 3
Anthropologists and historians credit Franz Boas, the renowned German émigré and Columbia University anthropologist, with establishing the ethnological and ideological challenges to white scientific racialist thought, especially social Darwinism, during the Progressive Era and beyond.Footnote 4 A broad range of writers associate him with first recording ethnographic data in the language of the indigenous populations, for defining post- or antievolutionist anthropology, and for disseminating the emerging concept of cultural relativism. Biographer Douglas Cole maintains that Boas “commanded the field of American anthropology by 1906, becoming the leading ethnologist, Americanist linguist, folklorist, and physical anthropologist.”Footnote 5 Certainly, Boas challenged evolutionist anthropology and pioneered ethnographic fieldwork methods and theories of cultural relativism but, as anthropologist Lee D. Baker observes in assessing “The Cult of Franz Boas,” Boas's antiracism was slow to evolve, not taking root fully until his publication of The Mind of Primitive Man (1911). Even then, Baker adds, “Boas was routinely equivocal when it came to discussions of racial equality.”Footnote 6 And as historian Andrew Zimmerman recently reminded us, “Boas … made plain that he believed in hierarchal differences in levels of ‘civilization’ between whites and blacks in the United States and between whites and practically all peoples of color globally. He just did not believe that these hierarchies were immutable or grounded in biology.”Footnote 7 In fairness to Boas, however, it is important to note that as early as 1894 he published “Human Faculty as Determined by Race,” an opening salvo against “race” as a determinant of human achievement and difference.Footnote 8 Historian Julia E. Liss identifies the World War I period as the “moment” of Boas's takeoff (along with Du Bois) as leading challengers to prevailing notions of racial hierarchies, especially white supremacy.Footnote 9
But Boas was far from a lone voice among the new discipline of anthropologists to crusade against racism in the World War I period. Important work by Alexander Francis Chamberlain (b. 1865), among others, charted the way, even if his and Boas's views diverged over time. This article argues that before his untimely death in 1914 and Boas's rise as a leading scientific spokesman of antiracism at Columbia, Chamberlain contributed as significantly as Boas to the fields of linguistic and cultural anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, comparative folklore, and Native American and African American culture, and to the cause of equality and justice for all humans. Chamberlain, Boas's long-neglected first doctoral student, subscribed to an antiracist cultural evolutionism, frequently and passionately condemning ethnocentrism and insisting on the “generic humanity” of all persons, of all races.Footnote 10 Close reading of Chamberlain's work suggests not that Boas's work mattered less, but rather that he was part of an emerging debate on the nature and meaning of race that informed social policy and shaped academic interests during the Progressive Era.
My argument is that Chamberlain was a leading Progressive Era social scientist and activist, one who used “science” to challenge racial hierarchies, to underscore all manner of African American achievement and culture, and who denounced Jim Crow-era forms of intolerance and aggression, including American imperialism and national chauvinism. Chamberlain has been virtually ignored by historians and social scientists, aside from a handful of psychologists. In fact today few anthropologists have even heard of him.
Whereas Boas's cultural determinism rarely translated into activism, Chamberlain was a consistent moralist, an idealist and reformer who understood the importance of using science to ameliorate the ills of the disadvantaged – Native Americans, African Americans, children, women, and the colonized. Though restrained in drawing conclusions from his scientific research, when agitating for change and social reform he proved outspoken, combative, and bold.Footnote 11 Committed to reform in several areas of life in Jim Crow America, Chamberlain challenged conventional understandings of race and culture at the height of scientific racism in Western thought, arguing, concurrently with Boas, that alleged race differences resulted from non-inherited forces: circumstance, contingency, environment, history, opportunity, and social construction. The two men worked at a time when “the bland pragmatism and racial attitudes of white anthropologists emerge as one important reason why the study of United States blacks was so largely avoided by anthropologists.”Footnote 12 Throughout his career Chamberlain merged literary, linguistic, and political analysis, advocating for and defending the importance and integrity of the contributions and folkways of aboriginal, indigenous, and minority peoples.
Psychologist Julia M. Berkman accurately describes Chamberlain as “A devout believer in the existence of common human traits … especially capable of synthesizing what he knew of each group in a way that established a bridge between otherwise distinct regions of the globe.”Footnote 13 Following Chamberlain's death, Miriam Van Waters, the pioneer American feminist and social worker, and Chamberlain's doctoral student at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, celebrated his cultural egalitarianism, remembering him as a “Stern champion of the human race, of man as human/Scorner of the petty pride of creed and skin and strength.”Footnote 14 Anthropologist Albert N. Gilbertson, whose doctoral thesis under Chamberlain focussed on Eskimo culture, recalled that “beneath diversities of culture he recognized the generic, fundamental, universal human traits.” His was a “generic, full-orbed humanity.”Footnote 15
Like Boas, Chamberlain also was an immigrant. He was born in Kenninghall, Norfolk, England, and when he was five his parents moved to upstate New York and then to Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. A superior student, he received the best education then available in Canada, studying modern languages (he later published in English, French, German, and Italian) and ethnology, graduating from the University of Toronto with high honors in 1886. The following year Chamberlain began graduate work at University College, Toronto, as fellow in modern languages. He also commenced studying the newly emerging field of anthropology.
Chamberlain established a close friendship with Sir Daniel Wilson, the University of Toronto's president and Canada's first professional archaeologist and anthropologist. Wilson was the first English-speaker to employ the term “prehistory.”Footnote 16 In his lectures Wilson challenged racial theories as explanations for cultural development, instead emphasizing culture contact as a determinant of cultural change. Wilson influenced Chamberlain greatly, encouraged him to investigate the linguistics of Native Canadian societies, and provided him an entrée into Toronto's Canadian Institute, thereby offering Chamberlain an early forum for research in archaeology and ethnology.Footnote 17
As a master's student, Chamberlain served as secretary of the Canadian Institute's Philology Section and presented papers on the linguistic origins of the Indian and Eskimo. His first publication, “The Relationship of the American Languages,” emphasized the importance of complex cultural forces in explaining language and folklore. According to Chamberlain, “too much attention cannot … be paid to those phenomena which are manifestly the product of the ‘working of like minds in a like state of culture.’”Footnote 18 He began fieldwork in the summer 1888 among the Algonquian Indians, the Mississauga of Scūgog Island, Ontario, and in 1890 with the Indians of Baptiste Lake.Footnote 19
In the summer 1890 Chamberlain joined David Boyle, the Canadian Institute's curator and Canada's first full-time professional archaeologist, in conducting field research in an ossuary in remote Addington County, Ontario. They stowed “tent, food, cooking utensils and spades” in a two-horse rig and traveled in rough terrain, covering sixty miles in four days. Boyle recalled that the party traveled “[u]p and down hills frightfully steep, over rocks acres in extent, across corduroy bridges and ‘swampaducts,’ skirting innumerable lakes – and all, it turned out, for nothing!” They uncovered only a few bone fragments. Chamberlain, however, used the trip to interview the chief of an Algonquian band on philology and tribal legend.Footnote 20 Based on Chamberlain's prodigious field research and the high quality of his master's thesis, Wilson recommended that Chamberlain come to Clark to work on his PhD under the supervision of Boas, then thirty-two years old (only seven years older than Chamberlain), and trained at the University of Kiel in physics and geography. Boas had joined Clark's faculty in 1888 to teach anthropology and was a relatively unknown scientist.Footnote 21
Chamberlain probably first communicated with Boas a year earlier when Chamberlain submitted two of his early research notes to Science (the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), where Boas then served as assistant editor. Responding to Chamberlain's “Eskimo and the Indian,” Boas faulted the younger scholar's methodology, informing him that “Fortuitous coincidences of sound … cannot be admitted as evidence of relationship.”Footnote 22 Nevertheless Boas found Chamberlain's work in Native American cultural studies impressive enough to recommend him to collect aboriginal folk tales in British Columbia for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS).Footnote 23 Summarizing that field research, Chamberlain proclaimed, “Rightly understood, the nature-creed of primitive man is my creed and your creed, the creed of every sane, healthy, thoroughly human soul.”Footnote 24 Such experiences forged Chamberlain's antiracialist understanding of humankind.
Like Boas, Chamberlain believed that observable racial differences largely derived from learning or social environment. Though he proposed studying the syncretism of African Americans and Native Americans, Chamberlain eventually decided to research along the lines of his earlier fieldwork on Indians. In mid-1890 he informed Boas that before enrolling in Clark he would revisit the Mississaugas “to collect some more material, & shall try to get some anthropological specimens.”Footnote 25 The following summer he conducted field research (including the anthropometric measurements of a hundred Indians) among the Kootenay of British Columbia and northern Idaho under the auspices of the BAAS.Footnote 26
Chamberlain entered Clark as fellow in anthropology in 1890. Founded in 1887, Clark was America's first research-oriented postgraduate institution, and its first university to recognize anthropology as a doctoral field. Led by president and noted child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, Clark was a communal, experimental, intellectually vigorous environment. Chamberlain considered the university under Hall's leadership “a tower of strength for the advancement and encouragement of the highest and noblest ideals of Science.”Footnote 27 By 1909, when Sigmund Freud came to lecture at Clark, the psychoanalyst's only trip to America, Hall already had included psychoanalysis in the school's curriculum.Footnote 28 He influenced Chamberlain's interdisciplinary research and teaching in anthropology generally, but especially in its relation to the emerging fields of pedagogy, psychology, and child development.Footnote 29
While a student at Clark, Chamberlain performed research in Boas's craniological and anthropological anatomy laboratory. Funded by the BAAS, they jointly compiled anthropometric measurements among the Kootenay, gathering a hundred pages of Native myths and legends, observing customs and habits, and collecting material for a proposed Kootenay dictionary. In addition, Boas and Chamberlain measured thousands of schoolchildren in Worcester and Toronto.Footnote 30 Their data identified no significant correlation between nationality and physical deviation, suggesting instead that “social atmosphere and environment” determined physical growth in children.Footnote 31 In 1891 Chamberlain, foreshadowing much of his later interdisciplinary and cross-cultural work, presented three lectures on “Relations between Anthropology, Linguistics and Psychology” and published a pamphlet, The Aryan Element in Indian Dialects, showcasing the “linguistic borrowings” between Native Americans and “their Aryan conquerors.”Footnote 32 A year later he presented these findings before the BAAS in Edinburgh, Scotland.Footnote 33
Chamberlain earned the first doctoral degree in anthropology conferred in the United States. His dissertation, The Language of the Mississaga Indians of Skūgog: A Contribution to the Linguistics of the Algonkian Tribes of Canada (1892) fit in the growing field of linguistic anthropology pioneered by the Swiss historical linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.Footnote 34 Chamberlain's thesis illuminated the evolution of the Mississauga's culture by examining its indigenous language and its component parts – phonetics, pronunciation, accents, syllabification, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, nomenclature, folklore, and mythology. The University of Pennsylvania's Daniel G. Brinton, who subscribed to the idea of the psychic unity of mankind and who held the first professorship in the United States in anthropology, served as the external examiner for Chamberlain's study. In 1892 the University of Chicago ethnologist Frederick Starr recognized Chamberlain as a rising young scholar, noting especially the significance of his exhaustive bibliographical work.Footnote 35
A faculty revolt by Clark professors in 1892 (a response to the meddling and mismanagement of the school by its founder, millionaire magnate Jonas G. Clark) inspired Boas, along with two-thirds of the faculty, to leave Worcester. This paved the way for Chamberlain to succeed his Doktorvater and to cement his ties to Hall. This launched Chamberlain's remarkably productive career at Clark, rising slowly in rank from lecturer (1892–1900) to acting assistant professor (1900–4) to assistant professor (1904–11), and to professor in 1911.Footnote 36 Aside from establishing himself as his generation's foremost authority on New World Indian linguistics generally, and on the Mississauga and the Kootenay specifically, he also became the bibliographer par excellence of anthropological literature.
In addition, Chamberlain, far more so that Boas, was an influential author, editor, and activist for social and racial reform and against imperialism. Following in the footsteps of Massachusetts Progressives who, before 1900, had prefigured much reform legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Chamberlain advocated equality on questions of gender and race, ever sensitive to the dynamics of the byproducts of culture contacts.Footnote 37 A confirmed feminist, Chamberlain believed that gender differences resulted largely from the subjection of females by males.Footnote 38 In 1906 the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, an African American newspaper, ran an unusual article, “Woman Compared to Man,” listing twenty categories that Chamberlain had identified in which women reportedly surpassed men. These included “She has greater genius in politics” and “She has greater vitality.”Footnote 39 In his anthropological and polemical writings Chamberlain also consistently espoused respect for different cultures. He opposed imperialism on moral grounds, comparing imperialism and its accompanying cultural assimilation to war between those with power and the powerless.Footnote 40
Methodologically Chamberlain, even more so than Boas, was a tireless collector of ethnological materials – words, beliefs, artifacts, and tales gleaned globally. This was important “classificatory work,” enabling Chamberlain to amass, list, and organize language and texts cross-culturally. He compiled myths, games, proverbs, rhymes, and vocabulary in order to unveil universal human traits that lay below surface cultural expression.Footnote 41
Like natural scientists of his day, Chamberlain's epistemological model was inductive, reaching generalizations about the cultural history of peoples drawn from particular facts and his analysis of various languages.Footnote 42 He believed that the anthropologist's role was to prove that all peoples were “generically human,” that differences between peoples were learned and culturally constructed. In 1903, for example, Chamberlain compiled a series of cultural maps of the US showing the rivers, cities, and towns that retained aboriginal names. His goal was to document the long-term cultural melding of Native American and modern American culture.Footnote 43 A year later Chamberlain prepared a detailed outline for the American Bureau of Ethnology on what he termed the five “Race-Stocks” of eastern Asiatic origins: the Asiatic, the Eurasiatic, the Asiatico-American (Bering Sea), the Malay, and the Eurasiatic (southern). Again underscoring the mixing of cultures, Chamberlain described the Asiatico-American (Bering Sea) race as people from the Amur to the Columbia Rivers, including many known today as paleo-Asiatic, Chukchi, Koryak, Kamchatka, and Yukaghir. “This stock has been intercontinental,” Chamberlain explained, “rather than Asiatic in its influence, but it has contributed to the mixture of races in Siberia and along the northeast coast down to Korea.”Footnote 44
Most notably Chamberlain edited the Journal of American Folklore, served as periodical literature editor for both American Anthropologist and the American Journal of Archeology, and coedited (with Hall) the Journal of Religious Psychology. In 1914, F. W. Hodge of the Bureau of American Ethnology remarked, “There is no doubt that Chamberlain was the most omnivorous reader of anthropological literature that ever entered the American field of research.”Footnote 45 In addition to his editorial work, Chamberlain also published two important books, The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought (1896) and The Child: A Study in the Evolution of Man (1900), as well as more than seven hundred articles, research notes, book reviews, and compilations. He also published a number of influential essays in reference works, including “North American Indians” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition, 1910).Footnote 46
The study of childhood ran through Chamberlain's work like a leitmotif and this aspect of his research has received much attention from previous scholars. In 1899 he wrote that “the science of the child would be helpless without the science of man, the story of the individual not half understood without the story of the race.”Footnote 47 He arrived at Clark when Hall was launching the child study movement and Chamberlain eagerly joined in conducting comparative research on children. In his two books on the topic Chamberlain interpreted child development as providing a metaphor for the evolution of humankind and the examination of “race in its larger characteristics and more general tendencies.”Footnote 48 His books joined anthropological and psychological perspectives on comparative and evolutionary aspects of child development. They charted developmental stages, childhood lore, and behavioral patterns with an eye toward explaining the cultural and biological evolution of humans. While Chamberlain's work included minimal theory, its value lay instead in “the breadth of his reading and the range of his information.”Footnote 49
Daniel G. Brinton welcomed Chamberlain's childhood research, reviewing The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought in Science. He praised the book's scope – “the family and folk-tales of all times and all peoples” – and its argument – the important role that the child “has played in the life and opinions of his elders, and what diverse powers he has exhibited or been credited with.” Brinton considered especially insightful Chamberlain's analysis of the role that the child played in the lives and opinions of elders and children's contributions as teachers, healers, actors, priests, and other societal figures across cultures. Though Brinton found Chamberlain's assessment of childhood romanticized and roseate, he nonetheless applauded the author and his book:
He is no gleaner of dry stubble, but delights in the literary and poetic sides of his inquiry, and brings under contribution the bards, the dramatists and the moralists of the world. His reading has been wide, and … in the originals of a dozen tongues; as we might expect from one who has already made his mark as a comparative linguist.Footnote 50
Ironically Boas, Chamberlain's Doktorvater and co-investigator, proved to be his severest critic. In a published critique of The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought Boas attacked his former student, charging that the book constituted a mere collection of raw material for the study of childhood and lacked scientific arrangement and analysis. According to Boas,
If scientific description was the author's aim it was incumbent upon him to arrange his material from certain points of view in a systematic way. If he desired by inductive methods to investigate certain phenomena it was his duty to array his facts for the purpose of finding the elements common to all of them. His book fills neither the one nor the other requirement.
Boas next accused Chamberlain of succumbing to “the common mistake of attributing any two phenomena that are somewhat alike to a common cause”; this error led him “to amass and to place side by side entirely heterogeneous material.” He feared that Chamberlain's book illustrated a larger methodological problem among anthropologists: “the dangers with which the comparative method of anthropological investigation that has come into vogue during the last quarter of a century is beset.”Footnote 51
Not cowed by his mentor, Chamberlain responded to Boas in kind, noting the “general dogmatic tone” of Boas's attack and adding, “Hardly does the present state of the science justify the cocksureness there displayed.” Boas attributed to him “a much more ambitious thesis than he really attempted, and has apparently seen efforts at connection and comparison where none such existed or were thought of.” Chamberlain then retorted to Boas, explaining that “all writers have not reached that eminence of synthesis and systematization on which he so conspicuously dwells.”Footnote 52 Brinton regarded Boas's harsh critique as well-founded if one considered Chamberlain's The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought “a contribution primarily to scientific literature.” Brinton, however, believed that Chamberlain “aimed first at a popular exposition and a literary presentation.” Brinton agreed, however, that “it is well to sound the alarm about too much popularizing at the expense of accuracy.”Footnote 53
More recently, social psychologist Floyd W. Rudmin, a close student of Chamberlain's work, has explained,
He did not accept the then prevalent recapitulation theory that individual child development had to follow species development, from animal origins, to backward savagery, to higher civilization. He claimed that adult socialization and advanced civilization were degenerate rather than progressive states, that children and primitive peoples were the creative source of diversity upon which progress depended, and that adults and “higher” civilizations had much to learn from children and primitive peoples.
Rudmin notes correctly that Chamberlain prefigured the findings of later developmental psychologists who maintain that cross-cultural differences in children increase with developmental age. In other words, “the mechanisms of enculturation are manifest in child rearing practices.”Footnote 54
In addition to his scholarship on child development, Chamberlain also was a polemicist – an unconventional, irreverent academic who shunned the cynicism, pretense, and conformity of his age. A devoted humanitarian, he chose to underscore mankind's positive traits, both in the present and in the past, not man's worst instincts. Writing, for example, in 1907, Chamberlain explained that in his opinion
neither treacherous war nor faithless love has at any period been the ideal of all races of man. The deeper social tradition and the individual conscience have always inclined man to deal honorably with friend and foe. Perfidious killing and lying have never had the unanimous approval of the generations that have preceded us.Footnote 55
An egalitarian, Chamberlain was ever sensitive to the dynamics and by-products of culture contact. In his anthropological and polemical writings he espoused respect for different cultures. His philosophy regarding children and so-called primitive peoples was, according to a colleague, “little short of nihilism”: people should be allowed to develop spontaneously.Footnote 56 In multi-ethnic Worcester, Chamberlain passionately campaigned (at times in four different languages) for reformist causes – prohibition, woman's suffrage, the single tax, labor unionism, international peace, and anti-imperialism. In doing so he often alienated those who opposed him. A friend described Chamberlain as a “restless reformer” with a “vehement, hair-trigger, hortatory character,” and prone to argue “on any topic, from Socialism to Shredded Wheat.”Footnote 57 Not only was he an early combatant in the first anthropology “wars” in academia, but Chamberlain also took on the popular press of his day.
“Principled activism and academics were interwoven throughout” Chamberlain's “career, sometimes with a touch of humor.”Footnote 58 On a field trip in British Columbia, for example, the teetotaling Chamberlain literally held to his guns when he encountered a bully who insisted that he drink alcohol.
He had reached a small mining town and had entered the rough hotel for a night's lodging. Around the bar was the usual crowd of cow-punchers and miners. One, apparently the bully, at the sight of the Doctor bellowed, “Hello Sky-pilot, come and take a drink.” It was declined, “What, you won't drink?” the fellow roared, “By G – , you will” and approached with a glass. The Doctor drew a small revolver, and pointing it, answered the man in his own way[.] “By G – , I will not drink. I will shoot you first.” He did not drink.Footnote 59
In another instance, in 1909, Chamberlain merged his commitment to temperance with his opposition to American imperialism. Writing in The Nation, he challenged those who doubted the ability of native Hawaiians to govern themselves, noting ironically that the Hawaiians had successfully enforced prohibition and defeated a move by white legislators to pass a pro-saloon bill. “Are the white men in Hawaii yet fit for self-government?” Chamberlain asked.Footnote 60
Chamberlain put his polemics into practice by entering politics. As chair of Worcester's Democratic City Committee (1904–5) and as alderman-at-large (1905) he generally mirrored the ideology of the city's reform Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar. Crusading in 1912 for equal suffrage, Chamberlain proclaimed, “We have begun conspicuously to reach the end of the servitude of the sex. I believe we can have no rule of the people unless the votes of those who are heard on every other question, be heard in the discussion of the highest questions of the land.”Footnote 61 A month later he denounced the saloon lobby as corrupt, criminal, immoral, and unpatriotic.Footnote 62 Though reluctant to draw conclusions from his scientific research, when agitating for political and social change Chamberlain proved bold, combative, and uncompromising.Footnote 63 Following Chamberlain's death, Louis Napoleon Wilson, Clark University's librarian, noted his deep interest in race and his commitment to Native Americans and African Americans. “In politics” Chamberlain “was a foe to all jobbery and ‘political pull,’” Wilson wrote, “and he was known as an uncompromising democrat.”Footnote 64
The Worcester Post described Chamberlain as “[i]ndependent and aggressive in his opinions,” one who “often came into disagreement with his fellow-men.”Footnote 65 Another journalist recalled,
Who that ever heard him can forget the straightening form, the kindling eye and the expressive face as he announced himself on the subjects of Temperance, Woman's Inherent Rights, the Negro question and a dozen other subjects in whose considerations he cared not a whit whether his hearers agreed with him or not[?]Footnote 66
The independent, Democratic-leaning Springfield Republican put it more pointedly. “He held high ideals of public duty, and preached them with an ardor and aggressiveness that made him somewhat unpopular, but everybody respected his purposes. He stood by his convictions, and was not afraid to stand alone.”Footnote 67
Chamberlain's strong stands against imperialism and white racism and for African American achievement often made him unpopular.Footnote 68 At a meeting in Canada in 1897 Chamberlain condemned “the evil of governmental interference with native tribes.”Footnote 69 As Berkman notes, a key part of Chamberlain's Weltanschauung was his understanding of “the symbiotic relationship between contacting cultures.”Footnote 70 And Chamberlain consistently applied that model in his analyses of contemporary unequal power relationships.
His studies of the cultural transfer of words and concepts between the so-called “lower” and “higher” races, and also between similar disadvantaged groups as African Americans and Native Americans, provided a largely ignored critique of American and European colonialism. Writing in 1913, for example, Chamberlain observed,
The attempts of the higher races to confer upon the lower the blessings of their own civilization reveal many humorous and many pathetic situations in which often the prejudice of the civilized teacher in favor of the inherited culture is greater than his wit and wisdom in overcoming the objections of his uncivilized pupils.
He noted, for example, how a missionary once meant to address American Indians as “Noble red-men, children of the forest!” but instead said “Great painted people, rabbits!” In another example, Chamberlain reported how missionaries in New Zealand insisted in teaching the Maoris to use manure to increase their agricultural production, unmindful of the fact that “to the Maoris all sorts of manure are tabu [sic], and they will not even use products of the field fertilized by such means.” Chamberlain added, “What strange notions of our civilization and its ideals primitive people must sometimes get from listening to the accounts of it given by such representatives!”Footnote 71
Such examples of cultural clash especially mattered in the late 1890s when the United States forcefully usurped Spain's colonial empire. Chamberlain highlighted the deleterious effect that imperialism by the so-called “higher races” had on the development of the “lower races.” He explained that when colonized by Western powers, the “lower races” almost universally “get the worst part of the bargain” – the “white man takes the fat of the land and expects the ‘savage’ to thrive on the lean.” By the end of the process Natives increasingly had to rely on the intruders, to the point where “there is not enough of their ancient heritage left to support them.” Chamberlain judged the “commercial exploitation of the ‘lower’ races … one of the chief crimes of the present age.”Footnote 72 He considered their exploitation “as inhuman as it has been for civilization to commercialize childhood. Both the childhood of the race and the childhood of the individual have a right to be free from the poison of money-making.”Footnote 73 Was the “improvement” of Egypt, under the auspices of European imperialists, worth the destruction of its archeological monuments? he asked.Footnote 74
Chamberlain found most troubling America's Spanish–American War-era occupation of the Philippines. Writing in The Nation in 1899, he attacked those who justified US entrée into the archipelago because the Filipinos were “merely savages.” Such rhetoric, Chamberlain said, “may suit the ignorant and indifferent minds among us.” Praising Filipino leaders Emilio Aguinaldo and José Rizal as freedom fighters, not enemies, Chamberlain celebrated the Filipinos, identifying bravery and valor in “their two months’ struggle against the power of the United States … part and parcel of their century-long battle to be free, from Spain, from us, from all the races of men who have sought to make them less than they hoped to be.” The Filipinos’ love of liberty, Chamberlain said, demonstrated their complexity as people; he considered their freedom struggle “too glorious for the world ever to forget.”Footnote 75 To call attention to the Filipinos’ humanity and, by inference, to their right to self-determination, Chamberlain published six “Philippine Studies” in the American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal documenting the Filipinos’ customs, etymology, folklore, and language.Footnote 76
In the third of these studies, Chamberlain employed linguistic analysis to defend the Filipinos from charges of backwardness by American imperialists. “The Tagals possess a written language (the alphabet is of Indian origin),” he explained,
in common use at the time of European discovery, but modified since by missionary influence, and a considerable literature in prose and in verse. The great majority of them are Christians of the Catholic faith, some sort of education is wide-spread among them, and many of them are as thoroughly educated as the average college-man of any civilized community.Footnote 77
Chamberlain thus drew upon his scholarship to challenge stereotypes of Filipino backwardness espoused by American expansionists.
In a passionate 1902 article, “The Contact of ‘Higher Races’ and ‘Lower’ Races,” Chamberlain further blasted the hypocrisy of the imperialists, including those in his adopted homeland, by imposing “might makes right” on helpless subject peoples. In so doing, the US had degraded itself. “Even America has been unable to resist the strain,” he wrote, “and has gone in for ‘the strenuous life,’ which has always[s] meant the enfeeblement of political and national morality.” Chamberlain condemned “the general assault of the white upon the colored races” worldwide, part and parcel of “a campaign of the stronger among the whites against the weaker,” which he considered “just as deplorable and unrighteous.” Poking holes in the argument that Americans would educate their colonial subjects, Chamberlain declared, “What the world wants is more men and women, not more machine-made Americans … Doing up education as if it were a prize package of chewing-gum belongs to the humbug side of Americanism.” “The net result of our folly in the Philippines,” he concluded, “will be for us to assume the role of Jupiter while the Malay is doomed to that of Tantalus.”Footnote 78
A dozen years later Chamberlain praised President Woodrow Wilson's plan for eventual Philippine statehood. “Filipino independence, the death knell to the false imperialism from which we and they have both suffered, is no longer a dream,” Chamberlain wrote:
The statesmanship of Woodrow Wilson has changed all that! In freeing the Philippines he will also set America free. We Anti-Imperialists would not be human, if we did not remember that we have kept the faith in spite of all obstacles. Let us rejoice that we shall soon see a new nation of free men and friends of America born in the East.Footnote 79
Chamberlain was even more outspoken in the cause of African American uplift than in his anti-imperialism, using his anthropological research to challenge racial stereotypes generally, to question perceptions of Negro inferiority, and to establish Negroes as equal members of humanity. Chamberlain had a special interest in the contemporary legal and social status of African Americans and their African forebears and he incorporated elements of their folk culture, history, and language into his teaching and writings. Describing his course offerings at Clark in 1908, Chamberlain noted that in treating the Negro in Africa and America he considered the black race “not a degenerate race, but a human race, like the others.”Footnote 80 Chamberlain's numerous publications document his early appreciation of and respect for examples of African American culture and folklore at a time when most writers dismissed them as examples of vaudeville-like Jim Crow humor. In 1914 Chamberlain's former student Albert N. Gilbertson observed that his mentor's work on the contributions of African Americans to human civilization provided “a wholesome antidote to the negrophobia so common in the land of his adoption.”Footnote 81
Chamberlain's writings on race and racial topics remain important and constitute the most neglected aspect of his research. His etymological and philological work illustrated the cultural transfer from the so-called lower to the allegedly advanced races. He also identified cultural cognates across cultures longitudinally. Native American words and ideas moved from tribe to tribe, from Indians to African Americans, and, most significantly, into the language, and hence the culture, of their European conquerors and American oppressors.Footnote 82
In 1899 in a Canadian Institute paper on the representation of nature in the folklore of the “so-called ‘lower races,’” Chamberlain challenged the idea of racial hierarchies, warning that the common belief that “primitive man is logical neither in his methods nor in his ideas” constituted a “libel upon humanity.” He argued that the “head of the race may have changed but the heart is in essence just the same.” Conceding that phenotypes of the various races evolve, and their conceptions of the universe differ, Chamberlain nonetheless insisted that all races shared a common desire “to seek for truth and to account for the phenomena of nature.” Whereas others identified child-like naivety in the folklore of “primitive races” like the Eskimo, he found rich complexity, “deep insight into the hidden things of nature and of man.”Footnote 83 Chamberlain suggested that in their observations of nature, Eskimo priests “were the first to discover its simple laws.” Chamberlain's bigger point was that contemporary anthropologists misrepresented so-called “primitive” races as inferior peoples. In fact, perceptions of nature by “primitive” races yielded rich, authoritative insights into understandings of the natural world unencumbered by modern theoretical boundaries.Footnote 84
As early as 1888, while a student in Toronto, Chamberlain published a short note in Science on the etymology of black southern English. “I would appeal to those acquainted with the negro dialect,” he wrote, “to publish short lists of words … which will be of great value in determining the ethnological relations of the ancestors of the present negro population of the United States.”Footnote 85 Two years later he printed a Louisiana Negro creation legend in the Journal of American Folklore. “The myth may be useful,” Chamberlain noted, “for comparison with other and similar legends.”Footnote 86 In 1891, while finishing his dissertation at Clark, Chamberlain presented a heavily documented paper at the Canadian Institute on contacts between Negroes and Indians. In order to comprehend the nexus between African and Native Americans, Chamberlain implored researchers to use the analytical tools of physical anthropology, philology, mythology, and sociology. After assessing the extant literature, he identified three avenues of future inquiry: intermarriage between the two ethnic groups, the social status of blacks among Indians, and the bidirectional transfer of folk culture between them.Footnote 87 In his cross-cultural essay “Race-Character and Local Color in Proverbs,” published in 1904, Chamberlain examined similarities and, more importantly, slight variations in forty-five proverbs across the English, Tsimshian Indian, Yoruba, and “Negro-English” languages.Footnote 88
In 1907 Chamberlain became editor of the “Scientific Notes on the Negro” section of Chicago's short-lived magazine Voice of the Negro, promising to publish archaeological, ethnological, psychological, and sociological material on the Negro's “contributions to the civilization of mankind.” In his first article in the series, Chamberlain documented an eclectic group of topics, including “Yam-culture” among the Ewe Negroes of German Togo-land and charges of chronic Negro “laziness.” “That the ‘laziness,’ so often charged up to the account of the Negro by his enemies, is not the producer of all the ills he is heir to is apparent to all students of primitive man and the development of human civilization,” Chamberlain wrote. He added, “To improve Negro agriculture, one needs not to attack the methods of cultivation, but to modify the cultivated products. Better seeds, or better useful plants, would mean more than better machinery of cultivation.”Footnote 89
Chamberlain's seminal article “The Negro Question in Africa and America” appeared in Voice of the Negro in 1907. He explained that the oft-cited “Negro problem” actually constituted “an African problem and an American problem, which must be settled, the one in accordance with the genius of Africa, the other in the true spirit of American democracy.” Attempts to address both problems with one solution – colonization – Chamberlain suggested, had failed. In his opinion,
All efforts for example, to reconstitute the American Negro as an African, and expatriate him to the Dark Continent, are [in] vain, for they do not take cognizance of the fact that the American Negro is growing up among us as an American, with American religious, social and political ideals, with mind and soul, in all their expressions, more and more American and less narrowly African. This can only signify but one thing, viz., that the Negro American must be treated as are all other Americans, without respect to race, color, creed or “previous condition of servitude.” And this can never be accomplished without his possession of full privilege as a citizen and of social equality on par with that of his fellow-citizens.Footnote 90
Chamberlain next explained essential differences in the cultural evolution of African Negroes and American Negroes.
He maintained that African blacks evolved culturally in localized, secluded pockets. Their geographical isolation resulted in a cultural trajectory that lacked the “favorable conditions which surrounded and stimulated the beginnings of the culture of the white race of the Mediterranean area.” Although many Westerners judged Africans culturally backward, Chamberlain, drawing on the scholarship of Boas, Henri Chatelain, and Leo Frobenius, accentuated not pathology, but African progress, vibrancy, and accomplishment.
Africans as a people were not physically inferior. Their crafts compared favorably with European ones. Africans possibly had invented iron smelting. Their cosmopolitan trade network proved Africans’ capacity for commerce. The complex political and administrative structures of some African societies disproved allegations of a lack of intellectual capacity. Chamberlain continued that
the Negro race in the Dark Continent … is neither essentially degenerate nor incapable of progress, and that, if allowed to develop in suit its native genius, under the inspiration of the African environment, with the sympathy of co-operation of the whites, but not as closely kept and over-watched wards, servants, or slaves, the centuries to come will see it justify its existence as one of the effective human races, by adding new and valuable contributions to mankind's store of things good, true and beautiful. There is no reason whatever to despair of the future of the Negro in Africa, if the white man will put away, in his dealings with him, the “big club” and the little mind.Footnote 91
Chamberlain further judged American Negroes to be “doing remarkably well for a people, who, less than a half-century ago were in absolute serfdom to the whites.” In light of their success in overcoming the burdens of southern slavery, “In all probability, the achievements of the Negroes in America are not paralleled, under similar conditions, in the whole range of human history.” Chamberlain found “no proof that the Negro race is so inferior to other human races, and to the white race in particular, that it must forever be treated as sub-human or non-human.” He concluded that “the only basis upon which the ultimate solution of the [Negro] problem can be expected is the recognition of the Negro as a man and an American.”Footnote 92
Four years later Chamberlain expanded this article for the Journal of Race Development. “The Contribution of the Negro to Human Civilization” was the piece that Du Bois touted in Chamberlain's obituary in The Crisis. Chamberlain addressed it to those “afflicted with acute Anglosaxonism and Negrophobia,” especially such infamous race baiters as North Carolina's Thomas Dixon Jr., Georgia's Thomas Watson, and Louisiana's William B. Smith, who, Chamberlain charged, denied “that the Negro has done anything decidedly and recognizably human during the long millenniums of his existence as a race.” As before, Chamberlain underscored the essential humanity of Africans and African Americans, extolling their contributions to world civilization in the arts, commerce, politics, and society. Looking to a post-racial future, Chamberlain predicted,
There shall, indeed, come a time when there will be no question of race, and when the loose threads of evolution will be gathered together in the skein of infinite beauty and loveliness. Such things must be. The ideal of the world's hopes is not the domination of so-called “lower” races by “higher,” not the “new nationalism,” or the “old imperialism,” but the humanity that was intended in the beginning and shall be in the end.Footnote 93
No cloistered academic, Chamberlain disseminated his antiracist arguments broadly. In 1911 he responded passionately to several New York Times editorials that accused a coalition of blacks, whites, and Socialists in the woman's suffrage movement of fomenting miscegenation. In a letter to the editor that the Times headlined “Hails Miscegenation: Anthropologist of Clark University Calls for Marriage of Blacks and Whites,” Chamberlain responded that
The day for emphasis of race-differences is already past and the era of reintegration begun for good and all. Historically and evolutionally, the existence of the various so-called races is a matter of incident or accident connected with the spread of mankind over the habitable earth. Their coming together again and the formation of one human race by the inclusion of all is the ultimate goal of human evolution. This final breed of mankind will comprehend the black man by the same right as the yellow, the red, the brown, and the white. The perpetual segregation of the negro in democratic America is, fortunately, as impossible as it is absurd, unjust, and unscientific.
Chamberlain then challenged the accusation that interracial mixing bred “cruel and treacherous mottled negroes.” In fact, he wrote, anthropologists celebrated “the gift to human civilization of mixed-bloods,” including such distinguished persons of African descent as Du Bois, Alexandre Dumas, Alexander Pushkin, and Booker T. Washington. “Let no one be fooled,” Chamberlain warned,
by the bugbear of “mottled negroes,” and let no one believe that anthropologists are of the opinion that the white race is going down to destruction through miscegenation. Together, racially, as well as individually, is the watchword of the future, and, as an anthropologist, no less than as a citizen of the Republic, I condemn such writings.Footnote 94
The Times responded by charging Chamberlain with encouraging the joining of “the races by blood and affection.” His “ideal man would be equal parts negro, Chinaman, Red Indian, Malay, and Caucasian,” the editor prophesized. To disprove and discredit Chamberlain, the journalist referred to “several millions of white Southerners who can tell him from observation precisely what sort of humanity the type of ‘mottled’ negro represents. His degenerate nature is evidenced in the crimes brought constantly to the attention of readers of news dispatches North and South.”Footnote 95
Almost on cue, “Southerner,” a native Alabamian, wrote to the Times, expressing “amusement” at Chamberlain's letter and his “posing as a scientist.” The writer dismissed Chamberlain's “many interesting theories regarding miscegenation, for they are nothing more, which would sound very well only for the misfortune that they are contradicted by fact.” “Southerner” continued that as someone residing in the North, Chamberlain “seldom comes in contact with the negro, whereas with me he is continually at hand. It logically follows that my observations should be slightly more authoritative than those of my Massachusetts brother.” As for Chamberlain's lack of discomfort with the so-called “mottled negro,” “Southerner” asked, “Has he ever visited a Southern jail? Has he attended a session of a criminal court in the South and heard confessions of the most heinous crimes? Has he ever had the opportunity of noticing the complexion of most negro vagrants?”Footnote 96
In its response to Chamberlain the Times editor quoted Tulane University anatomy professor Robert Bennett Bean's research on the size of Negro brains. Bean concluded that, on average, Negro brains were smaller than Caucasian brains. White supremacists, including those who justified segregation and extralegal violence directed at blacks, regularly cited Bean's findings as proof of the backwardness, if not the degeneracy, of African Americans. In a parting shot at Chamberlain, the Times quipped, “This outgiving from the anthropological savant of Clark University, however it may ingratiate him with the disciples of miscegenation, will not add luster to his reputation as a scholar.”Footnote 97 Chamberlain had the last word in this exchange, however. Reviewing one of Bean's books, he mocked his use of ear measurements as the “philosopher's stone for the discovery and the determination of human types.” Chamberlain gibed that he was “not yet prepared to swear by the ear as the supreme court of racial anatomy.”Footnote 98
As Chamberlain emerged as a leading champion of racial equality and anthropologist, he and Boas gradually parted ways. To be sure, the two men shared folklore, anthropometric data, and photographs; co-compiled the definitive book Kutenai Tales (1918); and worked together as leaders in the American Folklore Society.Footnote 99 In 1913, for example, while working on their Kootenay project, they interviewed an Indian boy whose testimony proved Chamberlain's argument that “Kutenai still appears … a language by itself.” Boas reported that he had spent a week with the Indian boy in New York “and I have gotten some quite interesting information out of him.”Footnote 100
But Boas, having mentored Chamberlain and having worked with him as a co-investigator, generally identified little value in his scholarship. According to Douglas Cole, from the start Boas found Chamberlain anthropologically naive and deficient in scientific training. Nevertheless he had willingly supervised and approved the Canadian's dissertation “but doubted that Chamberlain would make very much of himself.” Like Boas, Cole too thought little of Chamberlain, remarking, “Chamberlain did have a career as Boas's successor at Clark, but his contributions were neither permanent nor influential.”Footnote 101
A remarkable exchange between Chamberlain and Boas in the pages of Science illustrates what psychologist Jaan Valsiner identifies as a basic difference between the two ethnologists. In assessing ontogeny, Boas expected explication of both the process of emergence and observable outcomes, while Chamberlain, a collector, generally ignored underlying processes and focussed instead on outcomes.Footnote 102 In 1907, as tensions flared between anthropological folklorists and literary folklorists within the American Folklore Society, Boas complained that Chamberlain, as editor of the Journal of American Folklore, was “always looking for the curious, not for the ordinary material.”Footnote 103 The teacher replaced the former student as editor of the journal the following year.
Another explanation for the intellectual rift between Boas and Chamberlain lies in Chamberlain's belief in the classical nineteenth-century doctrine of the psychic unity of humankind (also termed independent development), first espoused by the German ethnographer and Boas's teacher Adolf Bastian. According to this liberal interpretation of humankind, all peoples, primitive and civilized, possessed similar capacity for cultural evolution and similarity. They were cerebrally interchangeable. Alleged primitive people lagged behind so-called civilized people not because of innate traits; rather, either their cultural evolution had been stunted by contact with external peoples, or their evolution had begun later than others. This progressive view of cultural evolution harkened back to the Enlightenment; by the twentieth century it influenced the doctrine of independent invention, the theory that cultural change can occur in several places independently, that if given the chance all peoples could create the same ideas of material culture. In contrast, starting in the 1890s Boas increasingly maintained that cultural diffusion, the borrowing and immigration of elements from one culture to another, often explained the similarity of cultural forms more usefully than their separate development along parallel evolutionary trajectories.Footnote 104
Chamberlain adopted the psychic unity of humankind from Brinton, whose influence on his dissertation he acknowledged more prominently than that of Boas. And despite Chamberlain's early field research with Canadian tribes and his anthropometric measurements of children, he, like Brinton, based his investigations largely on archival or library research (later anthropologists would disparage this method as “armchair anthropology”), not primary fieldwork.Footnote 105 Chamberlain described himself as Brinton's “disciple and pupil, from frequent correspondence and personal contact.”Footnote 106 He considered the linguist, folklorist, and archaeologist “a master-mind.”Footnote 107
Unquestionably, Brinton had a major influence on Chamberlain's research methods and scholarship. His early examination of the dialects of Canada, and the intercultural transfer of dialects due to contact and trade with other nationals, for example, challenged the theory that foreign dialects “contaminated” Canadian English, and he argued that folklore failed to provide evidence of the emerging “contamination theory” of linguistics. Instead, Chamberlain found that Canadian English developed parallel to United States English. Examples of the dialect appeared among eighteenth-century British Loyalists in both New England and Canada.Footnote 108
Chamberlain's work on Indian languages also assessed the linguistic exchange between Euro-Canadians and Indians. He discovered that Indian dialects had limited influence on the evolution of Canadian English. In 1902 he compiled a list that demonstrated that Canadian English adopted only 132 words from the Algonquian language and that fewer than forty words existed in contemporary dialects. When studying the influence of European dialects on Indian languages, however, Chamberlain found the reverse pattern. The Algonquians adapted the sounds of letters to mimic the language of those Europeans they first encountered.Footnote 109 In a later study Chamberlain identified the influence of Algonquian dialect in Anglo and mezzo-American Spanish geographic naming conventions. He went so far as to argue that Shakespeare drew upon Native American stories and legends in developing the character of Caliban in The Tempest.Footnote 110
Chamberlain also demonstrated cultural exchange between Indians and early North American settlers on more material levels. Settlers borrowed techniques from the indigenous populations to hunt and fish, as well as agricultural techniques to grow tobacco. Indians also introduced whites to the canoe and the game of lacrosse. Chamberlain further described how Indians and early settlers developed trade relations, so-called “trade languages,” for communicating along the incipient frontier marketplace. He even noted cultural exchanges between whites and Indians in the evolution of art. As Indians made contact with whites they gradually altered their artistic depictions of the natural world from geometric patterns towards what Chamberlain termed “a greater naturalistic execution.”Footnote 111
If, as this article maintains, Chamberlain possessed unusual intellectual reach and prefigured much later anthropological research, why does he remain relatively obscure, if not forgotten, among scholars of race, even among anthropologists?
First, in 1914 Chamberlain, then aged forty-nine, succumbed to undiagnosed gangrenic diabetes, a fatal condition unknown to him until just weeks before his death. By the time of his passing he had nearly completed a distribution map of South American aboriginal languages as well as a manuscript on Kootenay language and grammar.Footnote 112 He thus died mid-career before potentially important projects appeared – the distribution map of South American aboriginal languages and the book on Kutenai folklore authored by Boas but employing Chamberlain's early field texts.Footnote 113 He thus was struck down prematurely, before potentially important projects appeared and his reputation spread.
Second, unlike Boas, who, following his appointment to the first chair in anthropology at Columbia in 1899, trained numerous influential doctoral students, Chamberlain had few disciples. He mentored only two anthropology PhDs – Miriam Van Waters and Albert N. Gilbertson (both in 1913). Ironically, these were the last PhDs in anthropology awarded by Clark.Footnote 114 And despite Jonas Clark's noble dream of a university offering advanced study only, Clark foundered under his micro-management and shaky finances, G. Stanley Hall's undemocratic leadership, an unorthodox curriculum that privileged psychology, and an unclear mission. Though the school retained a “cult” following, Clark never established itself as a magnet for anthropology studies. In 1902 it righted itself and entered the academic mainstream by establishing an undergraduate college.Footnote 115 Anthropology always had been subordinate to psychology at Clark and, because of budget restraints during World War I, the school failed to replace Chamberlain. According to one careful student, “Chamberlain's work [thus] constituted both the beginning and the end of the (miniscule) ‘Clark tradition’ in anthropology.”Footnote 116
Third, Chamberlain's ethnographic research ranged comparatively and minutely across many diverse topics. His publications described more than analyzed, contributing to no discernible “school of thought,” and advanced few general theoretical explanations. Berkman notes that Chamberlain “was clearly more of a collector of information rather than a scientist who would unite observed details with general theoretical explanations.”Footnote 117 Valsiner agrees, stating that Chamberlain understated the relevance of his data and “may himself have contributed to the forgetting of his work by his reluctance to provide interpretations for his carefully collected empirical evidence.”Footnote 118 Chamberlain thus may have spread himself too thin in conducting research in several fields and restricted his overall impact on the field of anthropology.
Critics also fault Chamberlain's limited fieldwork. Regarding Boas's Kutenai book, anthropologist Melville Jacobs contends that the book contained little analysis of content or style. “Such archivist contributions served principally linguists and reconstructionist comparativists in folklore, but it was a fitting decision at a time when scholars lacked theories with which to justify other ways of arranging folklore materials.”Footnote 119 English professor Ralph Maud maintains that his 1891 trip to the Kootenays under Boas's supervision was Chamberlain's only field expedition to record tales and that Boas in fact found them unsatisfactory. In Kutenai Tales Boas noted almost dismissively that the texts Chamberlain recorded during his 1891 fieldwork were surprisingly brief. “It should be remembered,” he wrote, “that these were recorded in the first field expedition ever undertaken by Dr. Chamberlain, and that it requires a considerable amount of practice to record long tales. This accounts to a great extent for the fragmentary character of his notes.”Footnote 120 According to Maud, “it is almost as though” Boas “set out for the Kootenays four months after Chamberlain's death to get what his old student had failed to do.”Footnote 121
Fourth, Chamberlain's research method became outdated as late nineteenth-century anthropologists shifted theoretically from cultural evolutionism to cultural diffusionism to explain cultural change and similarity. Beyond this, Chamberlain's method quickly fell out of step with other anthropologists, led by Boas, who shifted from library and archival study to fieldwork, and to the replacement of surveys by intensive investigation.Footnote 122
Boas, who began teaching at Columbia in 1896, made his most important contributions after leaving Clark. He rejected cultural evolution as deductive, deficient in empirical grounding, presentist, and speculative.Footnote 123 Whereas Chamberlain collected and compared beliefs, customs, and vocabularies, Boas drew upon inductive ethnographic studies to espouse investigating the historical processes by which stages of culture develop.Footnote 124 He held white racism, not racial inferiority, responsible for racial inequality.Footnote 125 Anthropologist Regna Darnell supposes that Chamberlain's failure to follow his methodological lead, and rather that of Brinton, was “presumably a bitter disappointment to Boas.”Footnote 126 In 1903 his mentor criticized Chamberlain as “entirely a literary man, without much interest in extended field-work, with a marked interest in the curious rather than in the normal, a good bibliographer.”Footnote 127 Boas, a strident critic of Brinton, dismissed students or others who disagreed with him. He believed not only that Chamberlain's research suffered methodologically, but also that it catered to popular literary tastes, allegedly compromising the scientific method.Footnote 128
Ironically, scholars also have questioned the originality and importance of Boas's scholarship.Footnote 129 Starting in the 1940s, and most forcefully in 1963, anthropologist Leslie A. White challenged “the long-established adulation of Boas” by a cadre of his “worshippers,” enumerating many limitations and weaknesses in his work, most notably “Boas’ habit of presenting his inferences and intuitions as ‘proofs’” and “his penchant for conjectural history.” According to White, the German American scholar was more of a collector–recorder than an analyst–interpreter; he rarely generalized and commonly particularized; and Boas “confused the culture history of peoples with the evolution of culture.” Beyond this, White observed that Boas “cited the interpretations of others rather infrequently, and he disparaged more often than he approved or concurred in their views.”Footnote 130 Recently, historian Tracy Teslow has observed that by the early 1940s, Boas “was dismissed by many anthropologists, most notably his own students … as a diligent data collector but no theoretician, someone who failed to systematize his work, and who, in his relentless a-theoretical empiricism, actually stunted development of the culture concept and the field of anthropology.”Footnote 131
Notwithstanding the tension that surely marred their professional relationship, following Chamberlain's death Boas underscored his first student's commitment to understanding humankind. “His interests were not confined by the narrow limits of nationality,” Boas recalled,
but he felt himself one with all the members of mankind, and tried to understand the manifestations of the human mind in all its moods. His attitude was dictated by his convictions; for he held that the organic mental differences between the races of man are trifling as compared to the differences brought about by tradition and social environment. Not content with teaching what he thought, he tried to carry his convictions into practice in his participation in public life.Footnote 132
Later Boasians, however, either unaware of or unimpressed by Chamberlain's pioneer fieldwork with the Kutenai, the Mississauga, and thousands of schoolchildren, generally and unfairly have dismissed him as an “armchair anthropologist.”Footnote 133 In fact, in several fields Chamberlain anticipated later research, as Du Bois noted, work that certainly was on a par with and was as influential as Boas's early, pre-Columbia publications. That Chamberlain's scholarship mattered enough to Du Bois and others actively engaged in challenging racial stereotypes should make it count in our own assessments of how academic anthropology informed Progressive Era thinking on race, acculturation, and adaptation, and the promise of social science. And it also should remind us of the degree to which our understanding of Progressive Era racial thought is overly dominated by a certain hagiographic caricature of Boas.
In child development Chamberlain foreshadowed by decades research on the consecutive reconstruction of stories by children. In folklore studies he foreshadowed by a century the study of the cultural construction of emotions. In Native American studies he uncovered the creation of distinguished poetry and semiotic devices by American Indians and noted how American English borrowed words from several American Indian languages.Footnote 134 Chamberlain's 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica article on North American Indians tabulated and mapped tribes according to languages, regions of residence, migration origins, and populations. In doing so he antedated anthropologist George P. Murdock's late twentieth-century linguistic mapping, the basis of much contemporary cross-cultural research.Footnote 135
More generally, Chamberlain identified the impact that minority peoples made on the culture of those who came to dominate them. For example, he observed a correlation between religious revivals among aboriginal peoples at times of intercultural tension. Rudmin credits Chamberlain in 1892 with designing an experiment with bilingual Indian informants to study their onomatopoeic perceptions of nonsense syllables. “Note,” Rudmin explains, “that this work was done before the Gestalt theory of perceptual set and decades before studies of bilingual language switching.”Footnote 136 He adds that “Perhaps his most endearing contribution to anthropology was to develop that race is distinct from culture, that cultures should be classified by the languages the people speak, not by the physical characteristics of their bodies.” Rudmin argues correctly that many of Chamberlain's “ideas and observations were subsequently rediscovered, although no credit was given to them.”Footnote 137
Though he tended to romanticize those he considered the oppressed, Chamberlain used his scholarship to advance the cause of equality, freedom, goodwill, and racial tolerance. Like other academic social-scientist activists who championed Progressive reforms, Chamberlain believed that he could identify fundamental truths about human behavior and correct social problems. Determined to make ethnology “relevant,” he made important contributions to the intersection of culture, race, and reform. Trained in the science of humankind, Chamberlain came to stress the goodness of humanity. He made his greatest contributions as an activist in the cause of the unity of humans across time, place, and race – important concerns in his day and to ours as well.
