My third cousin was a Nazi.
I do not mean my cousin was unusually disciplined, although that was almost certainly true. Nor do I mean that he was ill-tempered, or that he held conservative political views, although he did. I don't even mean that he didn't like democracy or had a penchant for betraying his relatives for the good of a glorious cause, despite all of the above being unfortunately quite true.
No, I mean that my cousin Manfred was a card-carrying member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Not only that, Manfred was a proud member of the Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS, the hand-picked, thoroughly vetted, 100% Aryan elite who would father the next generation of perfect Germans and lead the Thousand Year Reich to victory over the decadent, mongrel-inhabited democracies of the West.
I first learned of Manfred, the literal black sheep of the family, when I around ten or eleven. I had just finished a book about the escape from Colditz Castle, a daring prison break by Allied officers, and was telling Mum all about it, when she mentioned that we'd had several relatives over in Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden, our ancestral cities, before World War II broke out.
I was, of course, fascinated; I'd read a child's version of Daniel Boorstin's history of America and knew in an abstract way that the typical American wasn't all that many generations removed from the Old World, but it had never occurred to me that my family had such close connections to anyone in Europe. Learning that someone with my blood lived in glamorous, beautiful Germany was incredibly exciting, and I was disappointed when Mum gently explained that the reason we hadn't kept in touch with these exotic kinfolk was because they had had the misfortune to live in a part of Germany that had been conquered by Communist Russia, not the Western Allies, and thus were off-limits. My uncle Lou had tried to track them down just after V-D Day when he was stationed in Europe, only to be told that getting a pass into the Russian zone was out of the question.
Worse, even if Lou had managed to find the relatives, it was doubtful that he would have been welcomed with open arms. The last time any of the American branch of the family had seen the German relatives had been just before the war, and it had not gone well, thanks largely to Manfred. Mum's aunt Helena, called Lenie, had been widowed and remarried in the mid-1930s, and had decided to take her new husband over to meet the family. While in Karlsruhe, Manfred, good little SS officer that he was, figured that these Americans were up to no good, cousins or no, and had set out to prove it. He had spent their visit being perfectly pleasant in public and going through their possessions when their backs were turned, and was keeping notes for his superiors on who they saw, what they said, and where they went.
Nice guy, no?
Manfred's parents were loyal Germans, but they were also civilized folk who were disgusted by their son's behavior. Lenie, who was almost as oblivious to sinister undercurrents as her niece Betty, had been having such a good time that she'd been seriously contemplating extending her visit by a few weeks, but once her cousins told her what Manfred had been doing, she and her husband decided that getting away from Manfred trumped any pleasure they might have gotten from a few extra days in Hamburg or Berlin or Munich. They kept their original tickets, sailed for America on schedule, and were safely back in Pittsburgh when all hell broke loose about a week after they got home -
Oh, you mean I didn't mention that all this took place about a year after Neville Chamberlain had brought "peace with honor" home from a summit conference with Manfred's beloved Fuehrer? Or that I have a faded sepia postcard in Lenie's handwriting saying "Having wonderful time, may stay through September"?
Or that the postcard is dated August 8, 1939?
Whether Manfred survived the war, died gloriously for his Fuehrer, or froze to death during Operation Uranus is unknown, but given how the SS were recruited, trained, and indoctrinated, the odds that he lived to see the Thousand Year Reich end 988 years early are not good. What he might have said if Lou, a technical sergeant in one of the tank destroyer battalions that had liberated Dachau, had shown up in Karlsruhe will forever remain unknown, but I can't imagine that it would have gone well.
Is it any wonder that I'm just the tiniest bit obsessed with mid-century Germany?
Unlike my late and unlamented Nazi relative, I find the concept of a master race bewildering and more than a little grotesque; I've known smart, talented people of every race, creed, color, religion, and ethnic background, and I've yet to see any evidence that me being a WASP makes me inherently better than any of them. If anything, my British and German ancestry has left me prone to bad sunburns, heart disease, and mood swings that might have manifested as bipolar disorder in one of my uncles, none of which square with being a member of a superior race. Add in that I'm nearsighted, somewhat forgetful, and was born with only one kidney, and there's even less evidence that I belong anywhere near the top of the evolutionary pyramid.
Alas, there are people who would disagree with this assessment; anyone who reads the news is painfully familiar with how many seemingly ordinary Americans would have made common cause about the inherent inferiority of one group or another with Manfred if they'd known him. Belief in a master race, in the natural superiority of those with pale skin and British or German descent, is an old and dishonorable tradition with deep, deep roots in American culture. That it's nonsensical and scientifically ludicrous doesn't seem to matter much to a lot of people, and as much as the younger generation seems either unaware of or actively revolted by this, all too many people in our glorious mess of a country are still convinced that the paler the skin, the better the person.
Tonight I bring you two books that exemplify this sad and sorry strain in our national consciousness. One is a turn of the century novel that somehow became the launching pad for an entirely new art form, while the second is a recent work of scholarship that distorted statistics to prove a point:
The Trilogy of Reconstruction, by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. - one of the greatest, most influential films ever made appeared soon after the beginning of the Great War in Europe. Based on a popular novel, its director, D.W. Griffith, had taken an enormous risk by shooting a single long, coherent story instead of the then-standard single reel suitable for inclusion in a nickelodeon. He'd lavished money on appropriate props and costumes, and used innovations like smash cuts, plausible characters, and realistic sets.
Needless to say, the studio was terrified; this film resembled nothing so much as Griffith's earlier flop Judith of Bethulia, another long, innovative story film, and there was no guarantee that Griffith's latest effort would be any more successful. Griffith, supremely confident, pooh-poohed their concerns, sent out the reels containing his new movie to theaters across the county, and waited.
Of course Griffith was right. The Birth of a Nation appeared in 1915 to rapturous reviews and record-smashing box office, two hour running time notwithstanding. No less a figure than President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it "lightning in a bottle," and within weeks of release The Birth of a Nation had set a new standard for cinematic entertainment that has endured for almost a century.
Alas for history, the story told by this groundbreaking film is not an uplifting tale of human triumph, or a penetrating examination of ordinary life. It's not even an exciting action adventure story about heroes prevailing over impossible odds. No, The Birth of a Nation has the dishonor to be the very first film to glorify the blot on American life known as the Ku Klux Klan. And just in case anyone thinks that Griffith, like all directors, exaggerated certain elements of the source material to increase the excitement and entertainment factor of his film…not so much. If anything, the original novel, part of a trilogy about the Reconstruction era, is worse.
Thomas F. Dixon, Jr., was an unlikely candidate to have written a book advocating white supremacy. The son of a reluctant slaveholder who had inherited his chattel and been so concerned for their welfare that he refused to sell them for the colossal sum of $100,000, he was an ordained minister, a playwright, attorney, and member of the North Carolina state legislature who made a fortune on the lecture circuit. He'd served congregations in Boston (where his flock offered to double his salary if he stayed) and New York (where he rubbed elbows with John D. Rockefeller and Teddy Roosevelt), was friends with future President Woodrow Wilson, and was by all accounts an intelligent, personable, talented man.
He was also a raging, unrepentant, lifelong white supremacist and bigot.
This seems to have stemmed from his childhood during Reconstruction. He claimed to have witnessed Federal troops confiscating land from innocent Southern farmers and brutalizing their families, and was deeply affected by the story of a Confederate widow who pleaded for help after her daughter claimed to have been raped by a freedman. The local Klan, which briefly included his father and his uncle, promptly avenged the daughter by means of that time-honored tradition called "lynching," and young Thomas grew up believing that the Klan was not the oppressor of former slaves and enforcer of bigotry, but the only thing standing between the average white Southerner and chaos.
This belief led directly to Dixon's career as a lecturer and novelist. His standard speech focused on the plight of the (white) working man and the mistreatment of the South by the evil federal government during Reconstruction, and he delivered it so well that he was widely regarded as one of the finest lecturers in the country. He had a huge following, especially in (surprise!) the South, and when he happened to see a play based on Uncle Tom's Cabin during one of his tours, Dixon was so outraged by what he saw that he "wept at [the] misrepresentations of southerners" as cruel masters who beat, raped, and exploited their slaves. Then and there, he vowed to tell "the true story" of Reconstruction as a counterweight to Harriett Beecher Stowe's vile slanders.
The result was his first novel, 1902's The Leopard's Spots. A tale of racial purity and the evils of miscegenation, it mixed several characters from Uncle Tom's Cabin (including the brutal overseer Simon Legree), a sympathetic view of the Klan, and a whole heap of distorted history into a book that quickly became a bestseller. Highlights included the following tasty little passage about the fate of a black man who had been unfortunate enough to express the wish to kiss a white woman:
When the sun rose next morning the lifeless body of Tim Shelby was dangling from a rope tied to the iron rail of the balcony of the court house. His neck was broken and his body was hanging low--scarcely three feet from the ground. His thick lips had been split with a sharp knife and from his teeth hung this placard:
"The answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to Negro lips that dare pollute with words the womanhood of the South. K. K. K."
Isn't just…something? Even though our "something" is almost certainly not what Dixon intended?
The sequels, The Clansman (1905) and The Traitor (1907), continued this delightful story by presenting blacks as generally inferior, "mulattoes" as grotesque white wannabes who would invariably revert to savagery no matter how well educated or intelligent, the Klan as chivalrous knights who defended the honor of all white women, and black men as slavering rapists who were a clear and present danger to the noble, pure, and high-minded Southern lady. As Dixon put it in 1905,
"No amount of education of any kind, industrial, classical or religious, can make a Negro a white man or bridge the chasm of centuries which separate him from the white man in the evolution of human nature."
Strangely enough, Dixon was opposed to slavery, possibly due to his father's influence, but believed in strict racial segregation as a means of protecting (white) civilization, (white) womanhood, and the (white) Southern way of life. He also opposed anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, which put him at odds with the new, improved Klan that sprang up in the wake of
The Birth of a Nation; he pointed out that, after all, Jesus' own mother was Jewish, and that Catholic churches did much good work educating new Americans and helping them become good, loyal citizens.
That doesn't make Dixon a liberal with a single hideous blind spot - far from it, as his anti-socialist trilogy The One Woman, Comrades, and The Root of Evil amply proves. It also does not mean that he believed in gender equality, as he saw wife and motherhood at the side of a strong, protective (white) man as the highest aspiration for any (white) woman, or that he was a fan of the new Biblical criticism that sprang up during the Progressive era. His brother Amzi Clarence Dixon, another minister, was the author of the pamphlets called The Fundamentals that did so much to spark the battle between conservative and mainline Christianity that continues to this day, and though I have been unable to discover Thomas Dixon's own views on the subject, it's doubtful that he found much to disagree with in his brother's magnum opus.
Alas for Dixon, popularity did not translate to lasting wealth. Despite continuing to churn out novels, plays, and film scripts until 1939, when he suffered a stroke, he had managed to make and lose more than one fortune over the years, and was reduced to taking a job as a court clerk to bring in a steady income toward the end of his life. He died in 1946 and was buried under a gravestone that calls him "the Most Distinguished Son of His Generation." If one replaces "Distinguished" with "Bigoted," the inscription is not far from the truth, which is more than one can say for Dixon's allegedly historical books.
What this relic of the Old South would have thought if he'd lived to see President Truman integrate the Armed Forces one year later is probably best left to the imagination.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray - standardized testing has always been controversial in American life. Originally developed as a way to weed out men unsuitable for Army service, such tests purport to be accurate measurements of the taker's intelligence, job aptitude, fitness for higher education, and suitability for entry into professional training, and their influence over the American educational system has only increased in recent years.
That standardized tests all too frequently measure nothing but how well an individual can take the test, or that they are noticeably biased toward white, middle class males despite all efforts to correct for gender, class, or race, or that they are less than accurate at predicting how well their takers will do in school or in life, count for little; the standardized test has an aura of scientific objectivity that has proved resistant to any and all efforts to dethrone it from its place in American life. Statistics abound showing that the SAT doesn't predict how well a student will do in college, or that IQ tests have little to do with creativity or ability to succeed, but that hasn't kept state after state from requiring more and more testing of more and more children.
Worse, certain types of tests have been misused to support public policies that run against core American values like equality, individualism, and community. Figures showing that certain groups (usually those with dark skin, working class or poor backgrounds, or XX chromosomes) aren't are smart as others (usually those with pale skin, wealthy families, and penises), or that one group is "naturally" better at math/childcare/spatial relationships/sports/what have you than another, are accepted by the press and public regardless of how little relation they bear to reality. The most famous recent example is probably the infamous "unmarried women over thirty are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than marry" cover on Newsweek, but there are plenty of others. It seems that no matter how much money we pour into education or social programs, the result of these tests is always the same: white males (and sometimes Asian teenagers) are at the top, with everyone else following behind. And since the results are based on science, it must be true!
Such was the spin that the press put on 1994's controversial bestseller, The Bell Curve. Written by a Skinnerian psychologist, Richard Herrnstein (who died just before the book was published), and a political scientist from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray, this book did much to shape the racial debate during the mid-1990s, and continues to exert an outsized influence on the national discourse to this day.
Based on what was purported to be rigorous statistical analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth and the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery beginning in the 1980s, The Bell Curve described a grim but seemingly unarguable truth: that certain ethnic and racial groups scored higher on intelligence tests than others, that the lower the IQ the greater tendency toward anti-social behavior, and that these differences seemed to be inherited. Worse, this seemed to prevail no matter how much money was poured into enrichment programs for those from poor or uneducated backgrounds; individuals from such families inevitably scored lower on IQ tests, and thus were doomed to a life of limited success, were at greater risk of breaking the law, and likely would birth future generations of equally unfortunate progeny.
There was more. The United States, with its emphasis on self-improvement and belief that anyone who worked hard, studied, and applied him/herself could succeed, was in denial of these simple scientific facts. In particular, public policy had been set up to encourage low-IQ Americans (who were almost all from the lower, darker-skinned social classes - fancy that!) to breed and/or immigrate to these fabled shores, while high-IQ Americans were having fewer and fewer children to carry on their intelligence and keep the intellectual engines of the country going. The end result would be an America closer to certain highly stratified Latin American countries than the land of the free, with fortified communities of the wealthy and intelligent (almost all of whom would be either white or Asian) surrounded by "the menace of the slums" teeming with dark-skinned, poor, stupid proles.
To avoid this dire fate, the authors recommended that immigration be reduced to prevent further reduction in the national IQ, the abolition of affirmative action programs that favored the less intelligent on racial grounds, and a change in social policy to encourage intelligent women to have more children and average or below women to have less. As Herrnstein and Murray wrote:
"We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women."
That these "wrong women" were almost certainly working class or poor blacks and Hispanics, of course, went without saying.
Despite this controversial thesis, or perhaps because of it, The Bell Curve shot straight to the top of the bestseller lists. The mainstream press decried many of its conclusions without much in the way of analysis of the underlying data, possibly because the average journalist lacked the necessary training. At the same time, those actually did check Herrnstein and Murray's work were frequently chided for "censorious political correctness" and a refusal to face the uncomfortable fact that there were indeed racial differences in intelligence.
That Herrnstein and Bell had refused to submit their book to peer review before publication somehow never came up. After all, 52 college professors had signed a statement published in the Wall Street Journal supporting Herrnstein and Murray's conclusions, so clearly the naysayers were merely outliers, politically correct activists who refused to accept clear statistical proof when it was right before their eyes. Even a statement from the respected American Psychological Association stating clearly that Herrnstein and Murray were wrong, that there was no evidence at all supporting their conclusion that some races were more intelligent than others, and that the jury was still very much out on just what intelligence was, let alone how best to measure it, did little to keep The Bell Curve from the bestseller lists. Its assertions about race and class were (and still are) quoted by conservatives every single time liberals attempted to point out that even Herrnstein and Bell had had to admit that children from low-IQ backgrounds who were adopted and raised by high-IQ families tended to have higher IQ's than their biological parents, which shouldn't have followed if IQ really were so dependent on heredity.
That Herrnstein and Murray's conclusions were remarkably similar to those set forth in long-discredited studies of "crime-ridden families" like the Jukes and the Kallikaks rarely made it into public discussions of their book. Isn't that odd?
The same held true when trained sociologists began taking a closer look at the raw data:
- Michael Hout of UC-Berkeley might run an analysis restoring certain factors that Herrnstein and Murray had corrected for, like the effect of education, and come to the conclusion that Herrnstein and Murray had dramatically overstated the effect of heredity (by as much as 74% for blacks!), but that didn't make it into popular magazines or newspaper articles.
- Economist Sanders Korenman of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NABE) ran a similar analysis in 1995 showing that Herrnstein and Murray exhibited "significant bias" in their failure to correct for socioeconomic status, but by then the book was no longer hot news, so very few news outlets covered it.
- William J. Mathews pointed out that the AFQT was designed to measure success in the military, not overall intelligence. This made it an achievement test that scored takers' knowledge rather than innate intelligence…not that this was ever mentioned in the controversy, except in passing.
- It turned out that much of the research Herrnstein and Murray used in their book was funded by the Pioneer Fund, an entity which has been repeatedly accused of promoting scientific racism. Worse, seventeen of the researchers cited in the bibliography had earlier contributed to the Mankind Quarterly, an anthropological journal of dubious reputation for its consistent support of scholarship purporting to prove the genetic superiority of whites...not that the average reader would ever learn this from the newspapers.
So much for "the liberal press."
MIT professor Noam Chomsky came closest to exposing the bias behind Herrnstein and Murray's allegedly objective study when he pointed out that Herrnstein in particular had been claiming as far back as 1972 that America was a pure meritocracy rather than a society with significant racial, class, and educational problems. He also stated that the idea that IQ is largely based on inheritance is "meaningless," that there was virtually no evidence of any genetic link, and that Herrnstein and Murray had pretty much ignored the substantial body of evidence that - you knew this was coming - environmental factors such as the quality of education, poverty, and family income were crucial in determining differences in IQ. As he put in 1995:
"There's an easy solution to the problem [of low IQ]: simply bring here millions of peasants driven from the country in China…and radically reduce [Bell Curve advocate] Browne's income…while Black mothers are placed in Manhattan high rises and given every advantage. Then the Asian influx will raise the IQ level; and as serious inquiry demonstrates, the fertility rate of Blacks is likely to drop while that of the children of the journalistic elite, Harvard psychology professors, and associates of the American Enterprise Institute will rapidly rise. The problem is solved."
Alas, Chomsky's modest proposal was never put into effect, although it would have been fascinating to watch, say, Charles Murray's children grow up in a slum.
Murray himself has remained defiant in the face of every critic, whether from the Left or the Right; he opposed the No Child Left Behind law not on the grounds that standardized tests are invalid, but on the grounds that it is little more than "educational romanticism [which] asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top." He is firmly convinced that too many people go to college anyway, and that we should devote our resources to the academically gifted rather than those with limited futures, lest the Republic be lost in the "menacing slums" of unintelligent people with less than milky complexions. He also wrote a study purporting to prove that social welfare programs don't work, which was quoted frequently during the welfare reform debates of twenty years ago, and has been supported by such worthy right-wing organizations as the Manhattan Institute, the Bradley Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute.
None of the above has prevented Murray from enjoying a successful career as lecturer, author, and political pundit. The American Enterprise Institute bestowed the Irving Kristol Award on him four years ago, and he continues to contribute op-eds to The New Republic, Commentary, The Public Interest, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Washington Post. He's even shared his expertise with the legislative bodies of other countries, such as the United Kingdom, which may be why certain ultra-conservatives there are now agitating for "reforms" designed to gut the National Health Service and other social welfare programs that have allowed the average Briton to live far better than his/her ancestors during the halcyon days when Charles Dickens railed against child labor and lack of public education.
Ironically enough, Murray now opposes the SAT as a bunch of bunk, even though he earlier credited his own high tests scores with his acceptance at Harvard. Perhaps it's simply that the tests have allowed far more of those allegedly low-IQ people into Harvard...like, say, the current inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Just a thought.
%%%%%
So...have any of you read Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.'s, masterful novels? Thrown a copy of The Bell Curve into a trash compactor? Wondered why or how standardized tests became so important? Run into Charles Murray at an academic conference? Come share your anecdotal, non-scientific experiences on this calm summer night....
%%%%%
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule