† In 1855, when Nott and Hotze were preparing their version of Gobineau’s Essai , Tocqueville was proposing Gobineau to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, to which Tocqueville and his traveling companion Beaumont had been elected in the 1830s. Tocqueville disliked Gobineau’s Essai , but was fond of Gobineau personally.
* The theme of Aryan beauty runs through Gobineau’s thousand pages of text. Gobineau and Emerson seem to have been echoing each other in their paeans to the blond barbarian Leviathan with his red and white complexion, broad shoulders, great height, and utter fearlessness and their conviction that Anglo-Saxons stemmed from Scandinavia and conserved the vital Aryan essence.
† An unsigned review in Putnam’s Monthly of January 1856 discusses Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races with care. The reviewer regrets Holtz’s (and Nott’s) emasculation of Gobineau’s original, while disagreeing, as had Tocqueville, with Gobineau’s fatalism. The reviewer concludes that the translation is worth reading. Gobineau’s great vogue came with the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Teutomania of German nationalists like Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Madison Grant. When a new English translation of Gobineau was published in 1915, it, rather than Nott’s, found a growing and appreciative audience of nationalists and eugenicists. No English editions of Gobineau’s Essai appeared between 1856 and 1915.
* George Gliddon had come to the United States for the second time on a similar quest, but he never found steady work and became one of Nott’s permanent dependents.
* In 1868 the Democratic nominating convention met in New York City. Seymour emerged as the party’s presidential candidate but lost to Ulysses S. Grant in the general election.
† In 1892 New York City razed the Five Points slum for the creation of Columbus Park at Mulberry and Bayard Streets in lower Manhattan. This area, a magnet for successive waves of immigrants, is currently known as New York’s Chinatown, previously Little Italy, which remains only a tourist destination.
* Among Lodge’s rare dissenters stood John Hammond Moore, a historian from Mississippi, who objected that Lodge’s sloppy methodology deprived the South of standing, which it surely did.
* “The race” would seem to indicate the human race, but its meanings in their contexts often pointed toward only middle-and upper-class whites of English descent. Walker’s demographic anxieties pertained merely to white Americans; he did not include others as Americans. Describing the American population of 1790—when Indians still lived in the Northeast and one-fifth of the enumerated population descended from Africans—Walker said that “(leaving the Africans out of account) it was all of European stock.” The terminology of “stock”—as in better or poorer—evaluated people as creatures whose whole value emerged in metaphors of animal breeding.
* Walker’s theory of a demographic driving-out survived until its refutation in 1945 in W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole’s The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups .
* Neither of Ripley’s parents, however, bore the name Zebina.
* Ripley told the New York Times reporter that he had needed the extra money for his children’s education.
† In his preface Ripley says that his wife performed such “a goodly share” of the book’s preparation that he wanted to include her name on the title page. This did not occur.
* Two other seminal racist works also appeared in 1899: Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (translated as Foundations of the Nineteenth Century ), and Georges Vacher de Lapouge, L’Aryen: Son rôle social, translated into German in 1939, but not English. A now forgotten, then aspiring American racist scholar, Carlos C. Closson, translated Lapouge’s shorter work on the Aryan.
* Paul Broca became the most enthusiastic French anthropometrist in the middle of the nineteenth century. But in the 1870 era of sharp military conflict between France and a newly united Germany, Broca pulled back from the association of long-headedness, Teutonic race, and enterprise. Now taking note of the close relationship between science and jingoism, Broca pointed out that the greatest scientific admirers of dolichocephaly came from northern Europe. They had relegated France to the brachycephalic zone out of racial chauvinism.
* Even though both these skulls, brachycephalic as well as dolichocephalic, came from the Netherlands, anthropologists usually classified the Netherlands as dolicho-blond territory.
* No biological bases existed then, and none exist now, for cleanly differentiating the peoples of the world. Before the age of DNA testing, anthropological classification depended upon two kinds of observations: first, measurement, such as cephalic index; second, observation of outward appearance. Neither reveals the history of biological descent, whether of individuals or of groups. Today’s DNA tests offer probabilities and similarities far more reliable than the observations and measurements of Ripley’s time. Although often presumed infallible, DNA testing measures probabilities, not actual fact, and forensic processes include sloppiness and mistakes. In a 1997 Sciences article entitled “Bred in the Bone?” Alan H. Goodman analyzes the mistaken DNA racial identification of a black woman killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
* Chesnutt predicted that wealth would open the route to equal treatment in the public sphere.
* The captions read, “SCANDINAVIA. Teutonic types. 55: Vaage, index 75. 56: Hedalen, index 76. 57: Jøderen. 58: Norwegian. Lapps. 59: Stature 1.46 m. Index 87.5. 60: Index 87.5. Stature 1.43 m.”
* The National Geographic ’s reviewer of The Races of Europe found Ripley’s separate treatment of Jews anti-Semitic, because it treated Jews as though they did not fully belong in Europe.
* “Racist” here does not refer to people of color, who were not part of Ripley’s concern. He spoke the lexicon of biological racial difference—with regard only to people now considered white.
* Had he sought a Saxon identity, the Westphalian Franz Boas might have been considered a Saxon. Given the continual remapping of kingdoms and provinces in the German-speaking lands, any relationship between western (“Lower”) Saxony and Westphalia had to be vague. Having actually grown up in Germany and not being much of a Teutomaniac, he pressed no such claim.
* Maurice Fishberg, an immigrant from southwest Ukraine, taught medicine at his alma mater, New York University. After several papers on the Jews of New York City, he published The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment in 1911, in which he contended, like Boas, that Jewish physiognomy varied widely and that Jews were not physically different from other Europeans. His unnamed New York Times reviewer remained unconvinced, wondering why, if “the Jewish race” is not pure, “Jews and Jewesses from quite different quarters of the globe resemble one another so markedly.”
* It should be noted, however, that Clarence C. Gravlee, Richard L. Jantz, and Corey S. Sparks reexamined Boas’s immigrant study in 2001 and 2003 and concluded that the changes Boas found were too slight and contradictory to sustain his claims for a possible change in “type.”
* The aftermath of the European revolutions of 1848 had sent hundreds of liberal-minded Germans into exile. They retained their progressive ideals as “Forty-eighters,” much as the revolutionaries of 1968 identified themselves according to their activist year.
† Zangwill said his experience as president of a committee to rescue Russian Jews from the pogroms and resettle them in the United States inspired the play.
* Disraeli’s “Young England” novels are Vivian Grey (1827), The Young Duke (1831), Contarini Fleming (1832), Henrietta Temple (1837), Venetia (1837), Coningsby, or the New Generation (1844), Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), and Tancred, or the New Crusade (1847).
* Another representative American opinion maker, Horace M. Kallen, quite aptly termed Roosevelt “a drum-major and a prophet.”
* There was a gap. Fredrick Jackson Turner’s election in 1910 signaled a hiatus in the Teutonist idea. Turner espoused a “frontier thesis,” making the American frontier, not medieval Germans in their forests, the wellspring of American identity. Like Crèvecoeur, Turner envisioned Americans as a mixture of northern Europeans—still only northern Europeans—but as a mixture occurring in the Western Hemisphere rather than in Emerson’s version of England. Such views placed Turner outside the club of pure Teutonists.
† Harold Hardraada (1015–66), king of Norway, also Harald III Sigurdsson, led an international life, in Norway, Scotland, and England and in Russia, Sicily, and Bulgaria, perhaps even in Jerusalem. Attempting to enforce his claim to the English throne, he died in battle at Stamford Bridge, Yorkshire, England, at the hands of the English king Harold II. Less than a month later Harold II died at Hastings, and William of Normandy became king of England.
* When Roosevelt and others spoke of “native Americans” at the turn of the twentieth century, they excluded people not of northern European descent. Indians, Negroes, Asians, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe did not count as “native Americans.”
* Ross belonged to the mass of progressives like Roosevelt who termed the opponents of involuntary sterilization—such as social workers, immigrants, and African Americans—“sentimentalists.”
† For publicly criticizing the power of corporations and unrestricted immigration, Ross had run afoul of Mrs. Leland Stanford, a founder of the university. She forced President David Starr Jordan to fire Ross in 1900.
* While cherishing “climatic adaptability” as a dimension of race superiority, Ross laments the debility of hardy northerners once they move to warmer places.
* Ross did not agree, however, with other anthropologists (e.g., Sir Arthur Keith in England) that war served eugenic purposes. According to Ross, modern warfare had become so industrialized that it no longer served manly ends. In the twentieth century, warfare was more like “an extra-hazardous branch of engineering” with little material payoff.
* The IWW manifested a split between its leadership and its rank and file. The latter consisted of a mix of races and ethnicities, varying by location and industry, while the leadership consisted largely of Irish Americans.
* In 1900 the $1,311.72 balance of the fund was turned over to the New York Public Library for the purchase of books on “economic subjects.”