 Rob DeSalle works at the American Museum of Natural History in Molecular Systematics, Microbial Evolution, and Genomics. He has curated several exhibitions and a permanent hall at the museum. He is a co-author with Ian Tattersall of Four Books on Human Evolution and the Idea of Race. In his presentation, Dr. DeSalle will outline the role of the American Museum of Natural History in hosting the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921. He will describe the key features and exhibits of the Congress, as well as its importance to the overall eugenics movement in the United States and abroad. Dr. DeSalle also emphasizes the pseudoscientific characteristics of eugenics and scientific objections to its core principles. Dr. DeSalle ends with a discussion of how institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History have come to terms with their eugenic legacies. Today, I'm going to talk about the role of the American Museum in the Second Congress of Eugenics that was held in New York City in September of 1921 at the American Museum. I first want to give you the outline of my talk. I'm going to give a brief history of the museum until 1921. I'm going to talk about the genesis of the Congress at the museum. I'm going to talk about the participants at the Congress, why the Congress was held at the M&H and individual rejection of eugenics that stemmed from the Congress. The museum was established in 1869, or at least the idea of it was established in 1869 by Albert Bickmore, a student of Louis Agassiz at Harvard University. The museum got its charter in 1971 and the governor of New York, John Thompson, signed off on the act of incorporation for the museum. The first building built for the museum is this building that we see here. And it was dedicated by President Ruthford B. Hayes who presided at the public opening. The museum has always had a strong set of ideals and they have established since the very beginning of the museum this twin pronged objective for education and for science. In 1881, Morris K. Jessup became the president of the museum to push this agenda forward at the museum. He, of course, is famous for the Jessup expeditions that collected anthropological items all over the world. In 1895, Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist was hired at the museum and in 1902, the Jessup North Pacific Expedition was carried out. 1906, and this is important for understanding the individual rejection, Franz Boas moved to Columbia University. And in 1908, Jessup died and Henry Fairfield Osborn became the fourth president of the museum. Osborn is important because of his role as president of the museum and a major organizer of the second Congress. But he's also important because of an exhibition or a hall that he mounted called The Hall of the Age of Man where the talks for the second Congress were given. It was opened in 1911 and had a long run. It was closed in 1965. The exhibit, as he says in this piece from the pamphlet for the hall, the exhibit is arranged in an educational manner so as to present very simply, very truthfully and very clearly our actual knowledge and not to confuse a visitor with theories or speculations. Osborn felt strongly that this hall was going to be very scientific, which in retrospect is sort of ironic because he was promoting a very unscientific idea in the body of eugenics. In that hall were these famous Osborn night restorations. There were three of them and I'm showing you two here. The third was the Stag Hunters of the New Stone Age. These murals now hang in the stairwell that leads up to the fourth floor of the museum to the actual hall where the Hall of the Age of Man was installed and where the eugenics talks were given at the second Congress. So this is the state of the museum in 1921. It spreads from Central Park West at the top of the diagram, at the top of the postcard to Columbus Avenue at the bottom and it ran along 77th Street, those of you who know the layout of the museum. Half of the museum hadn't been built at that point in time and the, again, Osborn, pushed very hard for the Congress to be at the museum for several reasons. Before I tell you those reasons, I wanna talk about the genesis of the Congress at the museum. The coverage for the conference or for the Congress was very intense. Articles appeared in Science Magazine and in Natural History Magazine. And in essence, the museum and the organizers of the conference were very hot on the idea that they were able to bring in delegates from the United States Public Health Service and delegates from 11 states. These individuals were unusual attendees of scientific conferences. What we know about the conference and the Congress at the museum comes from three documents. A document in the eugenics review by C.C. Little, a document by Harry Loughlin that described the exhibits that were shown at the Congress and a document by Davenport, who was authored or edited the volume that held the talks for the meetings. Loughlin, who edited the exhibition part of the proceedings, was superintendent of the eugenics record office in Cold Spring Harbor. And his book-sized account of the 131 exhibits is rich with the description of many of the exhibits that were in the exhibition hall. He also turns out to be the expert eugenic agent for the Committee on Immigration for the United States House of Representatives. He did this from 1921 to 1931. He was instrumental in producing the Johnson Act, which later was used to exclude the immigration of Jews attempting to flee Nazi Germany. Davenport, who edited the talks part of the summaries, was a strong supporter of Mendelian genetics at first, and he became a mainstay at the biological laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor. And this Congress was a major project of his, in addition to his role at Cold Spring Harbor. C.C. Little is really transparent about what happened or what they wanted to happen at the Congress. And the Congress was officially authorized by the National Research Council at Washington, and Osborne and Davenport were set as the chairpersons of the Congress. The general committee also met about a year and a half before the September 1921 proceedings, and Woodward, R.S. Woodward was named the president of the, was presided over this meeting, and he was the president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. And from the start, it was planned to hold the Congress in conjunction with an exhibition, which is very important for understanding the role of the museum. For the, in Osborne's, I'm sorry, in Little's words, for this most excellent purpose, Miss Harriman, with her characteristic generosity, gave $2,500. It cost to put on this exhibition. And the curator at the museum, Clark Whistler, and his assistant, L.V. Coleman, were in charge of the exhibition. Little is, again, very transparent about how the Congress was organized, and makes it clear that it was organized around four sections, human and comparative heredity, eugenics in the family, human racial differences, and eugenics in the state. And each of these four areas had their own set of talks and their own set of exhibits. This is a diagram of the floor plan of the first floor of the American Museum of Natural History. It's not too important, but this is the floor plan of what was on site in 1921. And you can see from this diagram that visitors would have, the attendees would have entered through this door on 77th Street. This red line is where the group photo was taken, that I'm gonna talk about in a second. You would walk through this hall, which is currently the hall of Northwest Indigenous people, to the theater where the main talks were given, where the three major addresses of the Congress were given. And as you came in, you would go to the right to get to where the exhibition was and all of the exhibits were in this part of the museum. You would climb to the fourth floor of these stairwells and then the fourth floor, you would then walk into the hall of the age of man. This is a layout of the floor plan for the exhibition. Basically it was a set of alcoves with different topics occupying each one of the alcoves. It was a interesting organization. And to me, it looks more like a poster session at a scientific meeting than everything. The difference was, though, that the public was invited. Something that hardly ever happens in modern scientific meetings. And C.C. Little explained of this arrangement and of the exhibits in the exhibition, that the Congress, this was an integral part of the Congress, this eugenics exhibition. And it was there to educate the general public in convincing that eugenics was not just a bunch of hoo-ha. The participants at the Congress are also incredibly interesting. This is the group photo that was taken outside of the museum on 77th Street on the last day of the Congress. Just to give you some orientation on the far left is H.H. Loughlin, the author of the summary of talks for the Congress and on the far right was C.C. Little, the author of the eugenics review summary of the meeting. C.B. Davenport is also shown near the middle. He was the editor of the exhibition summary and Henry Fairfield Osborn is standing next to Major Darwin. The first evening's talks were given in the beautiful lecture hall that had recently been constructed by the museum in the 19-teens. And in this lecture hall, about 400 participants listened to an address of welcome by Osborn, a talk entitled Aims and Methods of Eugenical Societies by Major Leonard Darwin and Research in Eugenics by Charles B. Davenport. These were received quite well by the public and by the scientific community as both Osborn and Darwin's talks in prose were published in the Science Magazine. Just to give you an idea of the kind of talks that were presented at the Congress, this is the first section that started at 11 a.m. on the second day of the Congress. And some names here should be really familiar. T. H. Morgan and H. J. Muller are two names that in particular are important as we'll see here in a second. Morgan and Muller, in addition to scientists like Calvin Bridges and Sue Wright and R. A. Fisher were also in attendance. Osborn extended an invitation to William Bateson, but he declined because of the theoretical nature of eugenics. He was more interested in the empirical ideas about nature. Franz Boas, who had stayed in contact with Osborn, is not known whether he was invited. More than likely he was not, but Osborn was encouraged to invite Franz Boas. The names on this list are and other names of scientists who attended this meeting are pretty amazing. Sue Wright, for one, who went on to develop major ideas in population genetics and R. A. Fisher. Fisher's presence should not be surprising as in his book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, he made it very clear that his leanings were eugenical in the last five chapters of that book. And other famous scientists were, gave talks in these beginning sessions. And again, they were invited and asked to give talks because the organizers wanted to validate the science of eugenics with these really good genetic scientists like Thomas Hunt Morgan and H. J. Muller. The academic institutions represented are varied. There were six so-called Ivy League institutions with representatives at the Congress and two museums, of course, the AMNH and the Smithsonian. The exhibits were, again, the major reason that the museum was involved in the Congress with exhibit titles like personal beauty and racial betterment, racial differences in human fetuses, racial differences in mental fatigue, display of the rising tide of color against white world supremacy, and statuette of the average white American white soldier. You can kind of get a sense for the racialist and racist nature of the exhibits that were in the exhibition hall. These are some examples of the exhibits themselves on the upper left is an exhibit of racial differences in fetuses, the racial differences in male and mental hygiene are shown in the bottom middle, and the average white American soldier is shown in the middle also. There's also work by bridges that talked about the differences in chromosomes between whites and blacks. Kind of a sad statement of the racism of the science of the time. There were many exhibits on animal and plant breeding, and these were made to be included by the organizers because of the idea that if we can do it in animals and plants, we can certainly do it in humans. There were governmental agencies, as I pointed out earlier, who mounted little exhibits. There were several companies. There were non-governmental agencies and publishers who had several publications on the subject of eugenics were also allowed to show exhibits. The individuals at the Congress, however, focused more on human traits. Racial hygiene was apparently a big issue with the exhibitioners, and the area of racial hygiene was the most populated with exhibits. Human traits and intelligence were the next most, and this is not too surprising, I think, that these exhibits were focused on these kinds of topics. The most egregious of the exhibitions was run by Madison Grant, who was a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History. He had written a book called The Passing of the Great Race, and he decided to mount an exhibition discussing or advertising what he had said in the book. Osborn had written an enthusiastic introduction to the book, and this demonstrated Osborn's inherent antisemitism and racism. A fellow AM&H trustee, a German-born banker, Felix Warburg, was so irate with this book and with Osborn's writing an introduction to it that he called for an examination and academic investigation into Osborn's behavior. Unfortunately, the Board of Trustees, who took care of this issue, concluded that there was no need for anyone to feel offended. Again, a sign of the inherent racism and antisemitism that was part of the time. The reason that the Congress was held at the AM&H should be obvious. There were three goals that little promulgated in his article in Eugenics Review. One was that they needed to dispel the idea that eugenicists knew too little of the foundation of their science, and that's why they invited all these geneticists and other scientific participants. Second was that it approved nontraditional relationships between the sexes, but the third, with that little outline, was that the public in some ways considered eugenicists as fattice and that eugenics was a giant joke that would be best ignored. What they wanted was for eugenics to become a full-fledged discipline and they wanted to change the public perception of eugenics needed to be corrected. And the organizing committee, Osborn and Davenport in Laughlin, reasoned that the AM&H, because of its educational and exhibition prowess, was a perfect place to do this. The Congress at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City did, was met with some individual rejection. There I show you pictures of Boas Muller and Morgan. Boas, an anthropology professor at Columbia University. Muller, at the time, was at the University of Texas. And Morgan, a well-known scientist at Columbia University. Muller denounced the American eugenics movement as sexist racist and based on spurious elitism, even after attending the Congress and publishing a paper in the proceedings of the Congress. Morgan stated that eugenics was based on reckless statements and the unreliability of a good deal that is said in the ideas of eugenics. And France Boas, with his famous dangerous sword quote, said that eugenics is not a panacea that will cure human ills. It is rather a dangerous sword that may turn its edge against those who rely on its strength. All three of these scientists were very stringently anti-eugenics. This quote from Boas comes from a 1916 paper where he soundly criticized eugenics as a non-science. He also, Boas also made this statement, without a selection of standards, eugenic practice is impossible. But if we read the history of mankind right, we ought to hesitate before we try to set our standards for all time to come for they are only one phase in the development of mankind. But Boas was trying to tell us from this 1916 quote that occurred well before the Congress that eugenics is one of those disciplines with no real standards. And the sad part of its execution at the American Museum of Natural History is that it was given to the public as science. More than just telling us that eugenics was not science, what Boas is telling us here is that eugenics is dangerous because it has no standards. And as scientists we need to avoid any endeavor that purports to be scientific and to treat them as scientific would put such endeavors and those who consider them scientific in the crosshairs of history. Boas was very sensitive to the fact that eugenics explained so little that was real science, that it was a sword, a bad way of doing science or even a bad way of considering how science could be done. Scientific institutions have a duty to remain scientific and not to be lured into pseudoscience. This is what I think happened in the case of eugenics. Eugenics went on from 1921 and the Congress which kind of validated eugenics and the American Museum is responsible for some of that. Institutions, having a duty, this would include taking a stand against insidious movements like eugenics. As individuals though, and I want to conclude with this, we have a lot to learn from the anti-sentennial of the Second Congress as to what not to do, but more to learn about what we need to do from scientists like Boas, Morgan and Muller who resisted it. Thank you.