In February 1947 eighteen academics from Howard University in Washington, DC signed a petition calling for the dismissal of one of their colleagues, a Canadian-born British biologist by the name of Reginald Ruggles Gates. The petition, addressed to the dean of liberal arts, accused Gates of teaching racist theory in the university, doctrines “long since repudiated by objective scientists but associated with Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gobineau and even Hitler.”Footnote 2 The letter writers charged that Gates was guilty of “violating the principles and ideals of the academic profession” and was in doing so “ignoring … a substantial body of scientific knowledge in direct contravention of the position he has assumed.”Footnote 3 In particular, it was Gates's opposition to miscegenation (“racial” mixing) between black and white populations that had finally triggered this petition against his presence at Howard.Footnote 4 In a traditionally black university, such opposition to integration was interpreted as a racist belief in black inferiority. The petition read, “Most of our students are callow but not sufficiently so to accept without protest one who tells them in the classroom that they are inferior.”Footnote 5
Gates described the petition against him as “astonishing.” Dismissing the signatories as non-scientists, he accused them of operating a political agenda against his work.Footnote 6 In particular, Gates believed that Jews had conspired to achieve his removal from the university, “stir[ring] up enmity in order to serve their own ends.” In a letter to the president of the university, Gates summed up his experience at Howard: “I have learned in this brief period the form and methods that Jewish propaganda can take.”Footnote 7
Gates agreed to terminate his fellowship at the end of the term and left without further incident.Footnote 8 He remained a believer in Jewish conspiracy throughout his career and went on to blame the machinations of world Jewry for his declining reputation as a scientist.Footnote 9 However, Gates's problem was not Jewish opposition (though after a lifetime of unwavering conspiratorial anti-Semitism he had few Jewish fans) but that his thinking on “racial” biology had, in the space of a few years, become controversial, bordering on taboo.Footnote 10 This article will explore the final years of Reginald Gates's career as a biologist from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1962. It will examine the changing fortunes of this intransigent and unwavering “racial” scientist and focus on his role in the establishment of the Mankind Quarterly journal in 1960. Building on recent studies into the continuation and funding of post-war scientific racism, it will argue that the decline of Gates provokes wider questions about changing Anglo-American thinking on “race” in the post-war period and on the relationship between science and society.Footnote 11 In particular, this essay will use Gates's experience to consider Walter Jackson's description of a dominant post-war “liberal orthodoxy” in American scientific “racial” study.Footnote 12
First, however, it is important to understand more about Gates's career and his intellectual Weltanschauung. Having been educated in Canada and the USA, Gates's first major academic post was as reader in botany at King's College London after the end of the First World War. In 1921 he won a chair at King's, where he remained until 1942. Gates decided to see out the war in the USA, taking a research position at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. After his ill-fated spell at Howard, he retained a research fellowship in the biology department at Harvard between 1950 and 1954.Footnote 13 After this, he continued to write and research, engaging in his final years in a series of international field trips and projects.
Among historians of science Gates has a reputation for being a hardliner on the issue of “race.” Throughout his career he maintained a belief in the presence and importance of mental and physical “racial” differences between populations. In his first major work on the subject, Gates argued that “racial” qualities were evident in modern national populations. “Even after a thousand years of intermarriage, separate racial traits may still be traceable in the modern Englishman.”Footnote 14 He argued that white people were mentally superior to black, perhaps “due to the greater concentration of certain hormones in [white people's] blood.”Footnote 15 Crucial to Gates's analysis was the idea that “races” (especially black and white “races”) must not mix together:
Where evolution has been going on independently in these races for such long periods, and some races have progressed far beyond others, both mentally and culturally, it is folly to suppose that crosses between a progressive and a primitive race can lead to a desirable result from the point of view of the advanced race, or even of the primitive race.Footnote 16
Mixing between “races,” Gates argued, would lead to disastrous mental and physical consequences in the offspring:
A hybridised people will tend to be restless, dissatisfied, and ineffective; the high death rate in middle life may be due to bodily maladjustments, and much of the crime and insanity to the inheritance of badly adjusted mental and temporal differences.Footnote 17
Gates never moderated these views or wavered from his belief in “racial” difference, which he continued to champion right up to his final work.Footnote 18 Ultimately, his thinking on “race” centred around two core beliefs: firstly, that black and white must be kept apart; and secondly, that Jews were a malign and dangerous “race,” hell-bent on undermining the “racial” integrity of the Western world. In particular, Gates was ever convinced that Jews were conspiring to inflict blackness on white America. His views on Jews and the segregation issue come across clearly in his 1944 commentary on the work of American psychologist Otto Klineberg. Gates argued,
It is a curious fact, which presumably has some devious psychological explanation, that the bulk of biological writers who take the role of apologists for the Negro and attempt to decry the existence of any racial differences are themselves of Jewish stock.Footnote 19
In the 1920s Gates's views did not alienate him from British academic scientific communities. As a professor at one of England's foremost colleges, Gates was anything but a marginal figure and his views on “race” were mainstream.Footnote 20 When the British Journal of Experimental Biology was created in 1923 its editorial board consisted of Britain's leading biologists, many of whom (like Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane and Lancelot Hogben) became the leading reformers of “racial” theory in the 1930s and 1940s and sharp critics of Gates. In 1923, though, Gates was welcomed onto the editorial board of this new journal as a respected scientific colleague.Footnote 21
Likewise, when leading British scientists met together in 1934 at a joint event co-hosted by the Institute of Sociology and the Royal Anthropological Society to discuss the issue of “race” in science, Gates was a leading contributor.Footnote 22 However, by the time of the “Race and Culture” conference it was clear that most of Gates's academic colleagues were moving away from his stance on the “race” issue. The conference minutes highlight that Gates's views on miscegenation and essential “racial” mental differences were now very much a matter of dispute as other scholars highlighted culture as the defining factor of difference. For example, anatomist and anthropologist Grafton Elliot Smith used the forum to argue that “the acquisition of culture is not due so much to innate qualities as to historical circumstances and quite arbitrary factors.”Footnote 23 Raymond Firth endorsed this idea, noting that “inter-racial aversion is a cultural product, not an innate disposition.”Footnote 24 This emphasis on culture generated new hostility to the use of “race” as a scientific concept. Thus J. B. S. Haldane contended that whilst some human characters were to his mind “innate,” “race” was not a usable concept when considering European populations.Footnote 25
Gates did not alter his outlook in the face of these critiques. He used the conference to express his belief that different populations around the world were actually different species of animal:Footnote 26 “If the same criteria of species were applied to mankind as to other mammals, it appears that the White, Black and Yellow types of man at least would be regarded as belonging to separate species.”Footnote 27 Whilst Grafton Elliot Smith reasoned that it was “important not to fall into the common error of confusing race with nationality,” Gates countered with the seemingly opposite idea, that “the migrations and mingling of types has produced many new races, a process which is now going on more rapidly than ever before.”Footnote 28
Although Gates had some support at the conference, his “racial” conservatism was increasingly the minority opinion.Footnote 29 Opposition to Gates's thinking at the “Race and Culture” gathering was symptomatic of a wider change. Put simply, during the 1930s and 1940s the great majority of biologists moderated their thinking on “racial” matters whilst Gates did not. Many historical accounts have rightly emphasized a sea change in scientific thinking on “race” in reaction to Nazism. For example, Elazar Barkan, in his revealingly titled “Retreat of Scientific Racism,” has argued that “After World War Two the painful recognition of what had been inflicted in the name of race … contributed to the decline and repudiation of scientific racism in intellectual discourse.”Footnote 30 Similarly, Nancy Stepan dates “racial” science as a phenomenon that existed between 1850 and 1950.Footnote 31
Scholars have been quite correct to observe that the revelation of Nazi “racial” genocide was a bitter blow to scientists who wished to continue to think “racially.”Footnote 32 However, even before the horrors of the war and the Final Solution, many Western scientists had reformed or even retracted their belief in “race” in ideological opposition to Nazism.Footnote 33 In Britain, Huxley and Haddon's We Europeans began a new trend in scientific anti-racism, soon followed by other scholarship, notably from the famous biologists J. B. S. Haldane and Lancelot Hogben.Footnote 34 In the conclusion of We Europeans the authors were unequivocal about the political ideology behind their critique of “racial” thinking. Science must refuse, they argued, “to lend her sanction to the absurdities and horrors perpetrated in her name. Racialism is a myth, and a dangerous myth at that.”Footnote 35 Looking back, Huxley recalled the conscious agenda of We Europeans: “It gave me a particular satisfaction to put this scientific spoke into Hitler's wheel, and to do something to stop his irrational anti-Semitism from spreading into Britain under Oswald Mosley's influence.”Footnote 36
The continuation of Gates's career after the Second World War in America poses a challenge to scholars like Jackson who have emphasized a post-Nazism decline of “racial” science. After the war there was doubtless substantial political pressure on Anglo-American academics to repudiate “racial” theory. As Jackson has argued, the battle against Hitler's Reich created an atmosphere where “moralistic rhetoric permeated the political culture”; especially as regards “racial” matters.Footnote 37 In America, challenges to southern segregation grew as a result of the ideological challenge to Hitler but also amid an increased militancy amongst returning black soldiers, who had gained new anti-“racial” consciousness from their experiences outside the USA. The onset of the Cold War further accelerated US challenges to “racial” segregation. There was a growing belief that if America was to be at the centre of a new international community she would first have to put her own “racial” affairs in order.Footnote 38
It is possible to see the effects of these political pressures on post-war American politics, notably in Truman's establishment of a special Presidential Committee on Civil Rights in 1946.Footnote 39 In a departure from fifty years of American policy, the committee called for the “elimination of segregation” and challenged the scientific validity of “racial” categorization.Footnote 40 It recorded, “Most prejudice cannot survive real understanding of the great variations among people in any one group; or of the scientific findings which establish the equality of groups, and disprove racist nonsense.”Footnote 41
This challenge to “racial” ideology reflected an international post-war trend epitomized in the UNESCO statements on “race” in 1950 and 1952. These two statements, the first signed by a prominent array of international social scientists, the second by a similarly impressive list of physical anthropologists and geneticists, were clearly designed to set a new agenda in the study of population differences.Footnote 42 Crucially, both aimed to undermine the concept of “race.” They argued that “for all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”Footnote 43 Difference, the UNESCO committees concluded, was a matter of life chances and cultural exposure: “In short, given similar degrees of cultural opportunity to realize their potentialities, the average achievement of the members of each ethnic group is about the same.”Footnote 44
Whilst these bold and unequivocal statements did much to epitomize and drive forward post-war scientific rejections of racism it would be a gross exaggeration to argue that scientific “racial” thinking died in the committee rooms of the presidential committee or UNESCO. The defeat of Nazism did not beckon a scientific refutation of “race” as a concept. More accurately, the end of the war and the revelation of Nazi “racial” genocide led to a deeper politicization of scientific “racial” study and analysis.Footnote 45
The political ideology of scientists in the USA was all important in setting the tone of post-war debates about “race.” In a series of key courtroom battles between 1951 and 1954, the NAACP led petitions against segregated education in the southern states. In these trials the political motivations of the scientists called as expert witnesses were obvious.Footnote 46 Ultimately, anti-“racial” science played a defining role in the Supreme Court's dismissal of the “separate-but-equal” principle in education in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case. Here the evidence of various social scientists, notably Kenneth B. Clark, was crucial in shaping the court's conclusion that segregation necessarily had a detrimental effect on black students and was thus unconstitutional.Footnote 47
The scientific evidence of Clark and his bedfellows should not be seen as representing a scientific consensus but instead as one side of a political debate. The experts used in the Brown case and the UNESCO contributors stood on one side of a political post-war “racial” agenda which orientated around the issues of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, desegregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. On the other side of the “race” debate, polar political beliefs drove other scientists to call for a continuation of “racial” classification in science.Footnote 48 Simply, the battleground of this ostensibly scientific issue actually had little to do with biology or any other scientific discipline; it was a matter of politics. Kohn almost understates the case when he argues that “the eclipse of the race concept was the result of history as well as logic.”Footnote 49
Gates's career after the war thus needs to be understood in the context of his political beliefs. As an anti-Semite (who could muster little sympathy over the Holocaust), a fierce supporter of American segregation and a friend of apartheid, Gates's politics made him a pariah in most post-war Anglo-American scientific circles. With some difficulty he did find new reservoirs of support for his research by aligning with the politically like-minded. However, as a scientist who had spent his whole career within the scientific mainstream, Gates found his level of isolation and the hostility shown to him by other scholars distressing and infuriating.
Revealingly, Gates did not see himself as a political protagonist but as an objective scientist. From his own perspective he was a balanced and neutral researcher, under attack from non-scientific, politically motivated forces. Gates's failure to comprehend the political dimension of his science is epitomized in his acceptance of a position at Howard and even more by his “astonishment” at falling foul of this institution. One might have thought that a historically black university was not the place for a biologist who believed in white supremacy. One might have similarly considered that Howard would not, as an institution, associate with a character like Gates.
The issues surrounding Gates's appointment and dismissal highlight something of the nature of the change in thinking on “race” that took place after the Second World War. Howard since 1867 had been committed to the education of all students without regard to their “race.”Footnote 50 However, in the face of endemic prejudice against mixed-“race” education Howard had become in effect a “negro university.”Footnote 51 By the 1940s Howard set out to lead the field in “negro” studies and thus decided on the appointment of several new experts in “negro” affairs.Footnote 52 In 1943 the university appointed African history expert William Hansberry. In 1944 Howard bankrolled new black history and social affairs projects led by W. E. B. Du Bois and Munro N. Work.Footnote 53 It seems likely that the university may have perceived Gates's interest in “negro” families as a similar project only to discover later the unsavoury nature of his conclusions.Footnote 54 It was an easy mistake for Howard to make. Like Hansberry, Gates was a close associate of Harvard anthropologist E. A. Hooton. How could the university know that the two men (both researching “negroes”) would reach such different conclusions? Their training and academic pedigrees were not dissimilar. Ultimately, the difference that isolated Gates, and later Ellinger, at Howard lay not in their scientific background so much as in their politics.
Gates's complaint (that it was non-scientists that had driven him from the university) was valid in many ways.Footnote 55 Of the academics that called for his dismissal in the petition there were four historians, five linguists, five social scientists, an anthropologist, a mathematician, a philosopher and an economist.Footnote 56 Partly Gates was a victim of the university structure at Howard which grouped together “natural sciences” (including botany and zoology) within the College of Liberal Arts.Footnote 57 This perhaps exposed Gates's work to the attention of different colleagues who would (and did) challenge his “racial” reasoning with non-biological arguments. It is revealing that the scientific research on “race” that Gates was attacked for ignoring came from disciplines (psychology and social science) that were not familiar within his definition of science.Footnote 58
In this context it is arguable that the conflict between Gates and the “liberal-arts” professors at Howard represented a wider trend and change. After the UNESCO dismissal of “race” as a biological phenomena, social scientists and psychologists like Klineberg and Montagu assumed authority for explaining “race,” now recast as it was as a social construct.Footnote 59 Nowhere is this passing of authority more evident than in the Brown case. Here and in earlier trials it was leading sociologist Kenneth Clark who played the defining role as “race” expert. Thus the challenge to Gates at Howard can be seen as symptomatic of a wider passing of authority on “racial” matters from biology to social science.Footnote 60
If Gates's demise at Howard is understood in this way then his decision to work at the institution becomes easier to understand. It seems that Gates was surprised to discover that his views on “race” were not considered by his new colleagues to be scientifically valid. With a complete lack of political awareness, Gates seemingly agreed to work at a black university in order to locate some living data for his 1948 study Pedigrees of Negro Families.Footnote 61 It was only after his falling out with Howard that Gates seems to have realized that his decision to use black students as anthropological data could be perceived as contentious. A 1950 letter from anatomist Howard Cummins commiserated with Gates on his problems at Howard, concluding, “It is no wonder that you could not indicate the institutional source of material published in Pedigrees of Negro Families, though unlike one of the reviewers I do not consider the omission a fault.”Footnote 62 Until the petition was raised, Gates did not think that his patronizing and dismissive attitude towards black people would be a problem at Howard. After all, as he informed the dean, he had “the greatest sympathy for the Negro people.”Footnote 63
After his departure from Howard, Gates continued to have difficulty coming to terms with his growing estrangement from the scientific mainstream. He perceived himself and his bedfellows as honourable scientists who were victims in a political war, which had started with the UNESCO statements and continued in the Brown ruling. Gates was far from the only scientific racist who saw conspiracy in the new state of affairs. Jackson has noted that many southern thinkers believed that the anti-segregation writings of Gunnar Myrdal were part of a wider communist conspiracy to undermine the United States.Footnote 64 Similarly, Newby has argued that scientific racists commonly perceived themselves as “martyr[s] to academic freedom.”Footnote 65
Gates's belief in political conspiracy increased amid the growing frequency with which his articles and funding requests were rejected by American scientific bodies. His correspondence from the 1950s highlights the problems that he was having disseminating his new scientific research. In this period a range of prestigious scientific journals including the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Science and the Journal of the American Society of Human Genetics repeatedly refused to publish his work.Footnote 66 Gates never accepted rejections lightly and engaged in a series of acrimonious appeals and challenges to editorial decisions. His letter (after initial rejection) to the editor of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology is typical of many written by Gates in this period. He was, he wrote, “outraged” by the rejection decision. He went on, “I have published some 320 papers in the scientific journals of at least eight different countries, but I have never been treated like this.”Footnote 67 In response, the journal editor, a W. W. Howells, told Gates (on his second resubmission of his article), “I rejected your paper twice which would be enough for most people.”Footnote 68 After yet another failed attempt to appeal his rejection by the American Society of Human Genetics, Gates informed the editor, Herluf Strandskov, that he would not accept that the decision was an academic one. He told Strandskov, “My experience as an editor and writer is much greater than yours.”Footnote 69
It is possible to see two main reasons for these editorial decisions to reject Gates's work. Whilst Gates always perceived rejection in terms of political conspiracy, it is arguable that his scientific fall from grace came about as a result of his scientific methods as well as his politics. During the inter-war period, scientific approaches to the study of population analysis had drastically changed and Gates had not kept up. This article has already argued that Gates was marginalized by the ascendancy of social science in “racial” study. However, even within his own area of expertise, Gates's work was increasingly dismissed as methodologically outdated.
The 1930s saw the ascendance of genetics (over biometrics) as the primary framework for understanding population difference.Footnote 70 Arguments raged between these two schools of thought concerning the “passing on” of hereditary characteristics over generations, forming part of a larger debate concerning the relationship between heredity and evolution. The biometricians asserted that inheritance could be understood in terms of continuous variations (analysed by statistics), whilst the new study of genetics, built around the rediscovered theory of Mendel, argued that inheritance occurred through discontinuous characters which were unpredictable and could only be explained by the nascent science of genetics.Footnote 71 This debate in itself constructed new rules of scientific engagement.Footnote 72 Above and beyond these disputes, all increasingly agreed that population difference was a complicated business, not suited to crude observation of groups with the naked eye.Footnote 73
This new climate of sophisticated analysis posed a major problem for Gates's work. Although he paid lip service to the principles of genetics most of Gates's conclusions about population difference continued to be based in simple observations, best described as physical anthropology. It was thus his technique, perhaps as much as any political agenda, which led to the rejection of much of Gates's research in the 1950s. Letters from the rejecting journals confirmed as much. For example, one editor's explanation for rejecting a 1951 article by Gates contended that “the whole thing rests on a handful of cases subjectively described and interpreted, and does not represent intensive scientific work.”Footnote 74
Some of the scholars who remained friendly towards Gates gently tried to persuade him that his techniques were behind the times. H. J. Fleure, a politically moderate British geographer and anthropologist, tried to help Gates get his work into mainstream publications in the 1950s (seemingly more out of personal loyalty than scholarly admiration).Footnote 75 Whilst clearly not wanting to hurt his friend's feelings, Fleure gently criticized Gates's science in their correspondence. Congratulating him on his 1953 research into “racial” crossing, Fleure cautioned, “I confess to a little hesitation about hypothesising gene-patterns to account for inheritances observed because I fancy we can ultimately hypothesise a pattern for any facts observed and I don't know that this is in the interests of science.”Footnote 76 Five years later he told Gates, “As you know I am deeply convinced that genes and their recombinations are a better line of biological interpretation than the old one of subdividing humanity into big required blocks on the basis of colour of hair, important as these are.”Footnote 77
Other sympathetic colleagues like Hooton at Harvard voiced similar concerns.Footnote 78 However, Gates would not (maybe could not) change his methodological ways. As a result his post-war reputation was characterized by the idea that he was primarily an observer rather than a scientist. His obituary in The Times sympathetically dismissed Gates's importance in just these terms:
It has been said that Ruggles Gates was by outlook an observer or describer and a systematist, that he experimented but was not an experimentalist, having little capacity for setting up and ruthlessly testing a scientific hypothesis, and that he lacked critical faculty … He had a strong faith in what a good microscope revealed to his eye, and had little sympathy with or understanding of theoretical principles which question “facts.”Footnote 79
Nonetheless, it would be inappropriate to view Gates's decline in science without reference to his political isolation. Just as Gates's politics had seen him driven from Howard in 1948, it also played the major role in hampering his ability to gain other academic positions and publish his research. Publishers became exasperated with Gates's allegations of conspiracy and particularly with his obsessive anti-Semitism. In 1949 Gates wrote to the British-based journal Nature complaining about its negative review of Pedigrees of Negro Families. The journal's response to Gates's ranting was typical of many in the period. The editor told him, “Your letter of April 1 was most offensive. The accusations it contains are so preposterous that I shall not trouble to deny them. I would, however, have liked the opportunity to publish your views on the Jews in the States.”Footnote 80 Similarly, the chairman of the editorial board of the US-based journal Science concluded a long trail of acrimonious correspondence with Gates by dismissing him as “a lone voice which, we are sure, is crying in the wilderness.”Footnote 81 Ultimately Gates's beliefs, cemented in outdated practice, ensured that by the mid-1950s he was a highly controversial figure. The kind of leading international universities in which he had spent nearly all of his career no longer wanted to be associated with his brand of “racial” science. In a sheepish letter, Hooton politely asked Gates to stop using Harvard notepaper in his correspondence.Footnote 82
However, the description of Gates as “crying in the wilderness” was not entirely accurate. As the 1950s went on, he found comfort amongst old friends and some interesting new ones. The famous British palaeontologist Arthur Keith shared a long run of correspondence with Gates in the post-war period. Keith was a well-respected figure in British science. He had been conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons between 1908 and 1914 and continued to lead a research centre for the organization (at Buckston Browne Farm) until his death in 1954. Keith was well known amongst the general public and had been knighted for his services to science in 1922. Like Gates, he bemoaned the decline of “race” in biological and anthropological analysis and believed that Jews were largely responsible for shaping this scientific change.
In a fascinating batch of correspondence from the early 1950s, Arthur Keith lamented with Gates about the power of Jewish influence: “I am altogether with you about the Cuckoo race and now understand Hitler's attitude.”Footnote 83 Keith clearly shared Gates's conspiratorial belief that Jews were suppressing their research. “The chosen race wants all races to mix – leaving it out free to exploit the amalgamated mass. The C[hosen] R[ace] takes more and more power here: it is in charge of our R[oyal] A[nthropological] I[nstitute] … at least strong enough to suppress a paper I wanted to publish.”Footnote 84
Keith also keenly felt his isolation in the new post-war scientific atmosphere. He told Gates, “Our social anthropologists talk a language I don't understand and anthropology … is dead in Britain.”Footnote 85 Two years later, only months before his death, an eighty-eight-year-old Keith sent his friend a final letter: “My colleagues in anatomy, with whom I used to stand quite high now consign my writings and advisings to the W[aste] P[aper] B[asket]. And it is some years since the Anthrop[ological] Inst[itute] let me know that I and all I stand for are on the ‘shelf’.”Footnote 86
There is a strong element of defeatism about Keith's correspondence in this period. A man well into his eighties, he clearly felt that the battle of “race” had been lost and that his time had passed. Gates, however, showed few signs of surrender. Prolific to the end, he began to pursue new avenues for his scientific output. This determination to continue saw him carry out new field research in India and Africa in the late 1950s. It also brought him into contact with a band of similarly minded “racial” scientists, all determined to combat the political implications of the UNESCO statements and the Brown ruling.
Some scholars have argued that Brown triggered a renaissance of scientific racism, that the effectiveness in court of anti-“racial” analysis from Clark and others in the case motivated pro-segregation forces to challenge the decision armed with their own scientific evidence.Footnote 87 Resisting the implementation of school desegregation, southern education boards united with leading academic scientific racists in an attempt to overturn Brown with science. As Newby has argued, “they became convinced that social science was the Achilles heel of the Brown ruling … A challenge based on science … might succeed where those using states' rights and constitutional literalism had failed.”Footnote 88 In the Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education case of 1963 and the Evers v. Jackson Municipal Separate Schools District case of 1964, the segregationists tried and failed to force a legal revision of the science behind the Brown ruling.Footnote 89 These new alliances between segregationists and scientific racists did not end in the courtroom. Faced with the growth of the civil rights movement and rising international hostility towards the idea of “racial” division, scientific racists and their backers attempted to argue their case through new publications, most notably the Mankind Quarterly journal.
The Mankind Quarterly was designed as an objective foil to the folly of UNESCO and post-“racial” science.Footnote 90 It was conceived as a result of correspondence between Gates and other disgruntled “racial” conservatives, most notably a little known Scottish anthropologist named G. R. Gayre.Footnote 91 Gayre had been removed from his post at the University of Saugor in India, as part of what he believed was a post-independence attempt to get rid of all foreign academics.Footnote 92 In terms of world view he was a carbon copy of Gates, although he lacked his fame and success. In initial correspondence with Gates, Gayre told him, “on all major points I am entirely of your opinion.”Footnote 93 In particular, Gayre shared Gates's hostility to the new post-war UNESCO position on “race” and was equally determined to preserve the concept in science. Describing the folly of the scientific anti-racists, he told Gates,
Your work stands as a monument of common sense and scientific objectivity – but these people just ignore monuments and like a howling mob flow round and past them, and the educated public, who are not skilled in anthropology and human-genetics, assume from the shouting that the slogans represent the facts, and so the whole of thinking for a generation is conditioned by them.Footnote 94
Gayre also shared Gates's belief that conspiracy was preventing their academic voices from being heard. Like Gates, Gayre struggled to secure employment and publications after his departure from Saugor and attributed his failures to an anti-“racial” plot. His letters highlight the extent to which he perceived that he and Gates shared the same problems and agenda:
you and I are not persona grata with those who dominate selection boards these days. We are labelled as “racialists” and the whole political and ethical powers of the universities are to be organised to ban us, and our pernicious teachings.Footnote 95
Gayre's reading of the situation was largely accurate. Both Gates and himself were increasingly marginalized (and their “racial” views mostly despised) in academic circles. But neither Gayre nor Gates were inclined to simply vanish into academic obscurity. Both felt that science was being grossly misled and both felt the need to continue the debate about the importance of “race” and heredity. It was in this frame of mind that the Mankind Quarterly was born with the vital assistance of the retired Colombia psychology professor Henry Garrett, himself a favourite expert witness of the pro-segregation lawyers.Footnote 96
Under the editorship of Gayre (with Gates and Garrett as honorary associate editors) the Mankind Quarterly set out to counter the post-UNESCO synthesis on “race.” Gayre explained in his first editorial that the journal had been created to challenge “the decided tendency to neglect the racial aspects of man's inheritance for the social.”Footnote 97 Time and again, the founders of the Quarterly explained that the goal of the journal was to provide an objective response to the politicization of scientific “racial” issues. It is clear that they perceived themselves as sober scientists battling against the corruption of their disciplines. This perspective was clearly expressed by Gates in his final work, The Emergence of Racial Genetics:
A scientific approach to racial questions, free from sentiment, propaganda or bias, may lead to a more reasonable attitude to the problems which agitate considerable sections of mankind. This need for a calmer approach to problems of race on the part of civilised peoples as well as more primitive tribes makes it desirable that a journal should exist in which the problems of racial origin and racial relationships can be quietly discussed, without rancour or bigotry and with the primary aim of elucidating facts.Footnote 98
Nowhere was the Mankind Quarterly's self-perception of objectivity more evident than in the indignant response of the journal to criticism from other scientific publications. Attacks on the Quarterly's stance on “race” came quickly, notably from Current Anthropology in 1961.Footnote 99 Juan Comas accused the Mankind Quarterly of reintroducing “scientific” racism in the famous article from which my title here is borrowed. In response Gayre produced his own leading article, under the banner “The Mankind Quarterly Under Attack.”Footnote 100 His defence of his journal highlights the Quarterly's claims to occupy an objective middle ground. As the title of Gayre's article suggests, it was the other scientists who were “attacking.” Those in the Mankind Quarterly merely wished for an end to polemical studies of “race” and a return to objective academic discourse. In this spirit Gayre told his readers that the attack against the Mankind Quarterly “has its nearest parallel in that which faced Charles Darwin from the entrenched forces of scientific and philosophical dogmatism and error in the last century.”Footnote 101 Presenting the Quarterly as a bastion of fairness and good science, he concluded his defence, “we are certain that in the long run, an objective adherence to the broad facts of ascertained scientific investigation will justify the work of the MANKIND QUARTERLY.”Footnote 102
However, the Mankind Quarterly was anything but objective. Its goals and agenda were deeply political to the extent that Tucker has dismissed the journal as “a desperate lobbying campaign.”Footnote 103 The disparity between the reality and the editors' assertions of impartiality can be read in two ways. Claims of objectivity could be seen as a shallow and dishonest cloak for a political agenda. Certainly, what Gayre wrote in private about the goals of the journal differed significantly from his public desire to provide an objective forum for discussion. The Mankind Quarterly, he told Gates in one letter, “will help things a good deal for all of us – as it means that there is something in which we can hit back.”Footnote 104 However, it is perhaps a mistake to dismiss entirely the sincerity of the Quarterly's belief in its own lack of bias. In post-war “racial” science it was extremely difficult to separate politics from scholarly opinion.Footnote 105 With this in mind it could be argued that the Mankind Quarterly was no less objective on “race” than any other scientific publication in the period. The Mankind Quarterly's grievance, that the UNESCO perspective on “race” was built on politics and not science, was valid. As has been argued here, the post-war rejection of “race” cannot be understood without reference to opposition to Nazism and segregation, which doubtless drove the UNESCO agenda.Footnote 106 This does not mean, however, that the Mankind Quarterly was objective. Just as other scientists were driven by a political desire to discredit “race,” those scholars involved with the Quarterly were politically determined to emphasize its continued importance. Whilst claiming to be unbiased and objective, the Mankind Quarterly was riddled with political agenda. In fact, it owed its very existence to the American pro-segregation lobby.
Gates himself made strong contacts with various American pro-segregation organizations after the Second World War. In 1955 he joined the mailing list of the Jackson Citizens' Council, presumably sharing their goals of resisting integration, especially intermarriage, and opposing “the pseudo scientific brainwashing” on “racial” equality.Footnote 107 Despite their shared political agenda, Gates decided that it was better not to actually join pro-segregation organizations, presumably in order to protect his ability to speak out on “racial” issues as an “impartial” scientific observer. A letter from the chief of the Association of Citizen Councils of Mississippi highlights their clandestine relationship with Gates. It told him, “You cannot imagine how much it means to us to have the sympathetic understanding of men like yourself … You are correct, I think, in feeling that you can be more helpful by not becoming a member.”Footnote 108 Gates was happy enough to voice an opinion on the segregation issue, only he wanted to emphasize his own ideological impartiality as he did so. Presumably he considered that his lack of political affiliation added credence to his campaigning. For example, when Gates wrote to the New York Times in 1956 (criticizing “racially” integrated education as “contrary to self determination”) his lack of affiliation enabled him to present his case as cold-headed, academic and unbiased.Footnote 109 Keeping his cards close to his chest, Gates was maybe also mindful that direct ties with pro-segregation organizations would put an end once and for all to his chances of securing employment in most American universities. Nonetheless, by 1958 Gates was receiving major funding support from wealthy individuals within the pro-segregation lobby who were well aware of the political benefits of Gates's scientific output.Footnote 110
Similarly, the Mankind Quarterly was secretly funded by pro-segregation money from the outset, although Gayre did not admit to it.Footnote 111 A letter from Garrett to Gates in 1960 revealed that the $2,500 required to start the journal had been provided by a reclusive textile baron from New York, Wickliffe Draper.Footnote 112 The donation fits a pattern of other monies given away by the millionaire. Draper secretly funded the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission's fight against the Civil Rights Act to the tune of nearly $215,000.Footnote 113 Even more revealing, he donated to numerous scientific projects, seemingly where he perceived that they might help to prove white supremacy.Footnote 114 It was in this context that Draper helped to create and sustain the Quarterly. Funding for the journal was secured through the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), an organization created by Draper to support scientific racism in a range of guises.Footnote 115 Tucker has described the Mankind Quarterly as “the house organ of the group,” noting that at one point members of the IAAEE were in fact entitled to a free copy of the journal.Footnote 116
It is revealing that the Mankind Quarterly editorial team seemingly saw no contradiction between their expressed goal, of neutralizing the political corruption of scientific “race” debates, and taking the segregationist shilling. Whilst Gayre, Gates and Garrett were quite right to complain that “racial” science had become embroiled in politics, their failure to identify their own role as political protagonists says much about the inability of science to detach itself from society.Footnote 117 Put simply, for the editors of the Mankind Quarterly, the problem was not really that politics had influenced science; it was that science was gripped by the wrong kind of politics. Thus their journal was conceived and run to settle the score, as a mouthpiece for the prejudices of those “racially” minded scientists who were having such little luck securing publications elsewhere. Like its creators, the Mankind Quarterly was marginalized and much maligned outside the world of southern segregationists, and, like them, the journal determinedly continued to champion white–black segregation and criticize Jewish power, whilst claiming to be politically neutral.
The initial editions of the Mankind Quarterly reveal its clear political goals. From the outset, the journal sought to champion and defend segregation. Articles openly expressed this political agenda. One contributor argued in the opening edition,
There is ample evidence to indicate that social instability is inevitable whenever attempts are made to create multi-racial communities, and a number of apparently insoluble situations already exist in Africa and the United States. In view of the instinctive character of the antagonisms inherent in the multi-racial community, there appear to be good grounds for preventing the establishment of communities of this kind in the future and for attempting to solve the problems of existing communities by resolving them into separate societies on a racial basis.Footnote 118
Opinions of this kind underpinned every edition of the journal and no attempt was made to disguise their political implications.Footnote 119 The Mankind Quarterly openly courted the apartheid regime in South Africa and vigorously defended American segregation.Footnote 120 Pro-segregation views were accompanied by repeated assertions of black inferiority. In one article Garrett argued, “In the nearly 6000 years of recorded history, the African has never constructed an alphabet, created a science or literature, or built up a civilisation.”Footnote 121 This black inferiority meant that segregation was the only logical solution for the happiness of both “races.” In the words of another contributor to the Mankind Quarterly:
In schools balanced in terms of race not only would the white child be denied the normal challenge of studying among his intellectual peers but also the Negro child would be denied the opportunity of success and achievement among his mental equals.Footnote 122
Whilst the anti-Semitism that was so important to Gates's world view was nowhere near as prominent in the pages of the Quarterly, it did simmer beneath the surface. In particular, two articles considering “The Jewish Role in the American Elite” kept an anti-Semitic agenda present in the journal, even as it played second fiddle to the segregation issue.Footnote 123 It seems that the Quarterly's editorial team believed that anti-Semitism was not a productive or acceptable terrain of struggle. Having earlier voiced similar views to Gates concerning the Jewish role in desegregation, Garrett modified both his language and tone in later publications on the issue.Footnote 124
The Mankind Quarterly did not allow itself to be distracted from its main aim, to give voice to those scholars who supported segregation and apartheid and saw conspiracy and deception in post-war anti-racist theory.Footnote 125 As such, its primary significance was its vigorous ideological opposition to post-UNESCO scientific “racial” deconstruction and to the civil rights battle against segregation. Science was merely the battleground here in what was ultimately a political struggle.Footnote 126 Just as the political racists were fighting against an unstoppable wave of anti-“racial” ideology in the post-war Western world, so their scientific sympathizers were similarly swimming hard against the tide.
If the Mankind Quarterly can be described as successful in any way its success was only that it kept going at all. In terms of scientific credibility and influence it could not be described as any more than a marginal, fringe journal, that generally only attracted hostile and dismissive attention from wider scientific communities.Footnote 127 It is revealing that very few Anglo-American scholars agreed to be associated with the journal. Gayre realized as much when he wrote to Gates, telling him, “we are the only British people [on the Board of the Mankind Quarterly]! I think this is quite significant.”Footnote 128 This lack of British presence becomes even more notable when it is considered that neither Gayre nor Gates had lived or worked in the UK in the previous twenty years. Whilst there were more US academics on the board, they represented a grumpy residuum of mainly old, marginal voices.Footnote 129 Only within an ideological context can one understand why so few serious academics from the English-speaking world agreed to be associated with the journal; such an association was a strong political statement, and one which the great majority of affiliated academics were unwilling to make in this period. There may have been some truth in Gayre's complaint that many of those whom he had expected to join the journal suffered at the last moment from “cold feet.”Footnote 130
Just as political factors drove the creators of the Mankind Quarterly to the fringes of academic and social culture it was a political constituency which kept the journal going, both financially and intellectually. Pro-segregation funding and the dedication of a few determined scientists ensured that the Mankind Quarterly battled on against its many opponents to survive as a scientific publication.Footnote 131 Soon, however, it had to manage without its most famous founder; Gates died of a heart attack on 12 August 1962.
Gates's obituary in the Mankind Quarterly, written by Gayre, speaks volumes of the agenda that Gates and the journal had shared. Gayre's tribute to Gates painted him almost as a martyr to the Quarterly's political struggle. He was, Gayre wrote, “too good a scientist, and too honest a man, to trim his sails … to the current blast of sociologically – and often politically – orientated thinking.”Footnote 132 Instead, just like the journal itself, Gates remained “uninfluenced by those sudden changes which have marred our present generation of anthropological thinkers.”Footnote 133 Ultimately Gayre lamented that Gates's final years were marred by the “heresy hunt directed against him as well as his colleagues in the Mankind Quarterly.”Footnote 134
Whilst Gates had added real intellectual muscle to the Mankind Quarterly, his death did not imperil the existence of the journal. Had Gayre (the administrative driving force) or Garrett (who secured the funding) been lost at such an early stage it may have been a different matter but Gates, missed as he certainly was by the journal's remaining editors, was expendable. Although he was an important international scholar in his day, after the war Gates carried little in the way of academic clout (even if he carried more than others in the Mankind Quarterly). Fortunately for Gayre and his team, the survival of the journal was not dependent on support in the academic community; indeed it had little to do with it. As has been argued here, the survival of the Mankind Quarterly was rooted in post-war politics. The journal could rely on benefactors, contributors and subscribers who saw value in a “scientific” publication which would defend and legitimize segregation, apartheid and the continuation of “race” as a usable social category. Hounded out by most universities, unable to publish their work and labelled as racists by their peers, the writers of the Mankind Quarterly were happy to oblige.
Through the pages of the Quarterly scientific racism would survive the slings and arrows of post-UNESCO academic criticism to fight another day. Primarily existing as a political organ in American “race” battles, it is perhaps unsurprising that the journal ultimately moved in 1978 from its initial base in Britain to the US, where white supremacist Roger Pearson assumed the editorship.Footnote 135 In its new home the Quarterly has continued to work on the scientific margins to relegitimize the idea of “racial” difference, still doggedly fighting against UNESCO, Brown and everything after.Footnote 136
