The History of White People (11 page)

A
reader might sensibly wonder why the social sciences, the criminal justice system, and, indeed, much of the English-speaking world label white people “Caucasian.” Why should this category have sprung from a troublesome, mountainous, borderland just north of Turkey, from peoples perpetually at war with Russia in the present-day regions of Chechnya, Stavropol Kray, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, and Georgia? The long story begins in Göttingen, Lower Saxony, in 1795, and the better-known part of it belongs to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. (See figure 6.1, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.)

Blumenbach (1752–1840) was born into a well-connected, academic family in the east central German region of Thuringia. Recognized as a prodigy by age sixteen in 1768, he delivered a flattering address to an influential audience on the occasion of the local duke’s birthday, thereby opening the way to further recognition. Seven years later, his 1775 Göttingen doctoral dissertation,
De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind)
, only fifteen pages long in revision, was the fruit of a year’s study with an older professor who owned an extraordinarily large and disordered natural history collection.
De generis humani
went into several editions and made Blumenbach both a medical doctor and an instant star in the German academic firmament.
*
Now in his mid-twenties, he quickly joined the faculty of the Georg-August University at Göttingen, the most prestigious center of modern education for young German nobles. Much sought after as an intellectual mentor, Blumenbach taught a bevy of aristocrats and other privileged men, including three English princes, the crown prince of Bavaria, and the scholarly, aristocratic brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt.
¹

Fig. 6.1. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1825,
Katalog, Commercivm Epistolicvm J. F. Blvmenbachii.
Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen, Germany.

The university in Lower Saxony (whose capital was Hanover) offered not only the most up-to-date scholarship but also an opening to the educated, English-speaking world, for Hanoverians ruled Britain in the eighteenth century. Thus Göttingen’s situation accounts for a good part of the rapid spread of Blumenbach’s ideas.
^†

Maintaining the status of a world-renowned scholar demanded more than profound thinking on important topics such as the place of humankind in nature. It also required influential contacts, honors, the backing of strong institutions, and something to show off—for instance, a collection of skulls or a royal garden. In the two generations preceding Blumenbach, the greatest European naturalists had tended royal gardens—Carolus Linnaeus in Uppsala, Sweden, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in Paris, France, offer two prominent examples. In a sense, Blumenbach’s garden was his collection of human skulls. And he knew how to cultivate his learned connections.

Scholarly networking explains Blumenbach’s dedication of the third edition of
On the Natural Variety of Mankind
to the immensely rich and powerful English wool merchant naturalist Sir Joseph Banks (1740–1820), someone he hardly knew. Blumenbach thanks Banks fulsomely for skulls and other precious scientific items and for his hospitality in London in 1792. As president of the Royal Society, Banks ruled the natural history establishment of the day, dominating worldwide scientific exploration.
²
Blumenbach’s dedication to Banks was intended to cement this tie between a humble researcher in Göttingen (still a provincial town compared with London and Paris) and a sovereign in Europe’s scientific kingdom. For Blumenbach, corresponding with Banks not only bolstered his standing as a scientist with international connections; it also eased the way for requests to Banks for exotic skulls and other specimens Banks controlled.

Among Banks’s many sponsorships was his support of the collection of the unique plant and animal specimens gathered during Captain James Cook’s second voyage (1772–75) to the bay in newly discovered Australia that Cook named Botany. Blumenbach coveted these rare specimens for his collection, but without success. In 1783 he initiated a correspondence (in French) with Banks, sending him information on German plants. Blumenbach soon joined the legions of pilgrims to Banks’s home and his vast scientific collection. In a 1787 letter back to Blumenbach, Banks explains the impossibility of sending Blumenbach a skull from the South Sea, because Petrus Camper in the Netherlands has an earlier claim.
³
But Blumenbach was not easily deterred. By dint of persistent correspondence in French and then in English, he finally wangled a South Seas skull out of Banks, who sharply reminded Blumenbach of the difficulty of wresting body parts from native peoples. At any rate, continuing to flatter the most powerful figure in late eighteenth-century natural history, Blumenbach proclaimed the South Seas skull as representative of a new variety—the Malay—and placed it between the beautiful Caucasian and the ugly Mongolian. Thus Blumenbach’s 1795 dedication to Banks both cemented a western European alliance and made an offering to a god of science. By the end of his life Blumenbach owned Europe’s greatest collection—he called it his “Golgotha”—245 whole skulls and fragments and two mummies.
⁴
*

Blumenbach was no firebrand. He worked along strictly scientific lines of the time, advancing the burgeoning science of human taxonomy in two important aspects. First, he eliminated the popular and long-standing classification of monsters (including diseased people) as separate human varieties, a category that had appeared even in the otherwise solid work of Linnaeus.
^†
Second, he used what he and his peers saw as a complete and scientific means of classification: in addition to the now commonly accepted index of skin color, he factored in a series of other bodily measurements, notably of skulls.

Unlike Petrus Camper, Blumenbach measured skulls in a number of ways, inaugurating a mania for ever more elaborate measurement. Placing scores of human skulls from around the world in a line and measuring the height of the foreheads, the size and angle of the jawbone, the angle of the teeth, the eye sockets, the nasal bones, and also Camper’s facial angle, Blumenbach came up with what he called the
norma verticalis
.
⁵
(See figure 6.2, Blumenbach’s
norma verticalis
.) Adding skin color to the
norma verticalis
, he classified the single species of human beings into four and then five “varieties.” As we shall see, such meticulous measurement endowed the “Caucasian” variety with an unimpeachable scientific pedigree.

The first edition of
On the Natural Variety of Mankind
(1775) has many strengths. For one thing, it corrects a serious misconception about differences between various peoples. Climate, Blumenbach says—reasonably but in contradiction to others—produces differences in skin color, so that dark-colored people live in hot places and light-colored people live in cold places, a fact noted in antiquity but subsequently acknowledged only intermittently in the scholarly literature. He reminds readers that all individual human bodies contain lighter and darker places. The genitals, for instance, of light-colored people may be dark, and outdoor work darkens even people with light skin. Poor people who work outside become darker, and European skin becomes lighter in winter: “our own experience teaches us every year, when in spring very elegant and delicate women show a most brilliant whiteness of skin, contracted by the indoor life of winter.” If those women are careless and go into the summer sun and air, they lose “that vernal beauty before the arrival of the next autumn, and become sensibly browner.”
⁶

Fig. 6.2. Blumenbach’s
norma verticalis:
Ethiopian, female Georgian, Asian,
The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach,
trans. Thomas Bendyshe, 1865.

Blumenbach also cautions against drawing conclusions about whole peoples on the basis of only a small sample, a warning unfortunately not heeded, as the world of anthropology invariably continued to speak of human “types” embodied in the image of one single person. Take as an example the aforementioned Kalmucks of the northeastern Caucasus and western Asian regions, says Blumenbach. Well aware of the stereotype of Kalmucks as epitomes of ugliness, he warns us quite properly that one traveler’s drawing of an ugly Kalmuck’s skull cannot sustain conclusions about the group as a whole.

Blumenbach imagines that another traveler might describe Kalmuck men as beautiful, even as symmetrical, and conclude that their young women “would find admirers in cultivated Europe.”
⁷
Blumenbach’s allusion to young women’s sexual attractiveness to European men evokes a gauge common among European travelers and scholars as far back as François Bernier in the seventeenth century. The French naturalist Buffon, for instance, pronounced Kalmucks the ugliest of peoples, the women as ugly as the men, but Circassians and Georgians the beautiful wives of eastern sultans.
⁸

As we are seeing, Kalmucks remained salient exemplars of homeliness well into the nineteenth century. However, photographs from William Z. Ripley’s 1899
Races of Europe
and Corliss Lamont’s
Peoples of the Soviet Union
of 1946 show two rather ordinary Kalmucks and a handsome one. (See figure 6.3, Ripley’s Kalmucks, and figure 6.4, Lamont’s Kalmyk Sailor.) Thus assumptions about the beautiful or the ugly pertained more to ideas than to actual physical appearance. As we have also seen regarding Circassians, Caucasians, and Georgians, the notion of their surpassing beauty became codified more by repetition than by any circulation of actual images of real people.

Like other race theorists, Blumenbach walked a tightrope between contradictions. On the one hand, he held fast to the prominent role that culture and climate play in determining outward appearance. Even so, he believed that certain groups maintain their distinctive physical and cultural characteristics over successive generations. Among the people of Europe, say, the Swiss retain their open countenance; the Turks remain manly and serious; the people of the far north keep their simple and guileless look; and, despite long residence among Gentiles, “the Jewish race presents the most notorious and least deceptive [example], which can easily be recognized everywhere by their eyes alone, which breathe of the East.”
⁹
This last statement, delivered as scientific fact, turns up throughout racial science, deathless as the worship of the beautiful Caucasian/Circassian/Georgian.