RACISM AND SOCIAL DARWINISM IN AMERICA

Darwinist Racists’ Inhuman Policies

Social Darwinism provided support for racists and imperialists in other countries too, not just Britain. For this reason it spread quickly through the whole world. At the head of those subscribing to the theory came U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the foremost proponent and implementer of the programme of ethnic cleansing applied against the Native Americans under the name of "forced relocation." In the book The Winning of the West, he founded the ideology of massacre, maintaining that a racial war to the finish with the Indians was inevitable.25 His greatest prop was Darwinism, which gave him the chance to define the natives as a backward species.

As Roosevelt had foreseen, none of the treaties with the Native Americans were respected, and this too was provided a false justification under the "backward race" theory. In 1871, Congress disregarded all the treaties made with the Native Americans and decided to exile them to dead lands where they could await death. If the other side were not perceived as human beings then how could the treaties made with them have any validity?

Roosevelt also proposed that the above mentioned racial war represented the culminating achievement of the spread of the English speaking peoples (Anglo-Saxons) over the world.26

One of the foremost proponents of Anglo-Saxon racism, the American evolutionist and Protestant clergyman Josiah Strong, employed the same logic. He once wrote these words:

Then will the world enter upon a new stage of its history - the final competition of races for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. If I do not read amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition will be "survival of the fittest"? 27

The foremost of the racists who used Social Darwinism to justify themselves were the enemies of the blacks. Their racist theories, which divided the races into levels and defined the white race as the most superior and the black race as the most primitive, enthusiastically embraced the concept of evolution. 28

The most prominent of the evolutionary racist theoreticians, Henry Fairfield Osborn, wrote in an article headed The Evolution of Human Races that "The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old-youth of the species Homo Sapiens." 29

According to this logic blacks were not human beings at all. Another of the best-known proponents of evolutionary racist thought, Carleton Coon put forward, in his book The Origins of Race, published in 1962, that the black and white races were two different species which had split from each other back in the Homo Erectus period. According to Coon, the whites had evolved further following this separation. The supporters of discrimination against blacks employed this so-called scientific explanation for a long time.

The existence of a scientific theory which supported it rapidly increased racism in America. W. E. Dubois, known for being against racial discrimination, stated that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line". According to him, that the problem of racism should have emerged in such a widespread manner in a country which wants to become the world's greatest democracy, and which from some points of view has accomplished this, is not the least important of paradoxes. The abolition of slavery has not sufficed for the establishment of brotherhood between black and white people. He thought that official discrimination, set up in a short time, has in our day turned into an ipso facto and legal situation, a way out of which is still being sought. 29

The emergence of the first racial discrimination laws, known as the "Jim Crow Laws," (Jim Crow was one of the derogatory names for blacks used by the whites) also happened at this time. Blacks were definitely not treated like human beings, and were despised and treated with contempt everywhere: furthermore this was not the attitude of a few racist individuals but that determined by the American state by its own laws. Immediately after the first law approving racial segregation on railways and trams was passed in Tennessee in 1875, all the Southern states implemented segregation on their railways. "Whites Only" and "Blacks" signs were hung up everywhere. Actually, all of these just meant the granting of official status to a situation which already existed. Marriage between different races was forbidden. Under the law, segregation was compulsory in hospitals, prisons, and graveyards. In practice, this included hotels, theatres, libraries, and even lifts and churches. The field where segregation was most sharply felt was in schools. This was the practice which had the heaviest effects on the blacks and was the greatest obstacle in the face of their cultural development.

The practice of racial segregation was accompanied by a wave of violence. There was a swift rise in the number of black lynchings. Between 1890 and 1901 some 1,300 blacks were lynched. As a result of these implementations blacks rose up in several states.

Racist thought and theories accompanied this period. Shortly after, American biological racism would express itself in the results arrived at by R. B. Bean's method of skull measurement, and under the pretence of protecting the people of the new continent from a wave of uncontrolled migration, a particular kind of American racism arose. Madison Grant, author of the book The Passing of the Great Race (1916) wrote that the mixing of the two races will open the way to the emergence of a more primitive race than the inferior species, and he wanted inter-racial marriages to be banned. 31

He also wanted inter-racial marriages to be banned.

Racism existed in America before Darwin, as it did in the whole world. But as we have seen, Darwinism gave racist views and policies apparent support in the second half of the 19th century. For example, as we have seen in this chapter, when racists put forward their views they used the claims of Darwinism as slogans. Ideas which before Darwin had been regarded as cruel, now began to be accepted as natural law.

 

 The Extermination of the Aborigines

The natives of Australia are known as aborigines. These people who had lived on the continent for thousands of years suffered one of the biggest exterminations in history with the spreading of European settlers over the country. The ideological basis of this extermination was Darwinism. Darwinist ideologues' views of the aborigines formed the theory of the savagery these people suffered.

In 1870 Max Muller, an evolutionist anthropologist from the London Anthropological Review, had divided human races into seven categories. Aborigines appeared at the bottom, and the Aryan race, that of the white Europeans, at the top. H. K. Rusden, a famous Social Darwinist, had this to say about the aborigines in 1876:

The survival of the fittest means that might is right. And we thus invoke and remorselessly fulfil the inexorable law of natural selection when exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races… and we appropriate their patrimony coolly. 32

And in 1890 the Vice-President of the Royal Society of Tasmania, James Barnard, wrote: "the process of extermination is an axiom of the law of evolution and survival of the fittest." There was therefore, he concluded, no reason to suppose that "there had been any culpable neglect" in the murder and dispossession of the Aboriginal Australian. 33

As a result of these racist, ruthless, and savage views nourished by Darwin, a terrible massacre was begun with the aim of exterminating the aborigines. Aboriginal heads were nailed over station doors. Poisoned bread was given to Aboriginal families. In many parts of Australia, aborigine settlement areas disappeared in a savage manner within 50 years. 34

The policies aimed at aborigines did not end with massacres. Many members of the race were treated like experimental animals. The Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. held the remains of 15,000 people of various races. 10,000 Australian aborigines were sent by ship to the British Museum with the aim of seeing whether or not they were the "missing link" in the transition from animals to human beings.

Museums were not just interested in bones, at the same time they kept brains belonging to aborigines and sold them at good prices. There is also proof that Australian aborigines were killed to be used as specimens. The facts below bear witness to this ruthlessness:

A death-bed memoir from Korah Wills, who became mayor of Bowen, Queensland in 1866, graphically describes how he killed and dismembered a local tribesman in 1865 to provide a scientific specimen.

Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney for 20 years from 1874, was particularly heavily involved. He published a museum booklet which appeared to include Aborigines under the designation of "Australian animals". It also gave instructions not only on how to rob graves, but also on how to plug up bullet wounds in freshly killed "specimens".

A German evolutionist, Amalie Dietrich (nicknamed the 'Angel of Black Death') came to Australia asking station owners for Aborigines to be shot for specimens, particularly skin for stuffing and mounting for her museum employers. Although evicted from at least one property, she shortly returned home with her specimens.

A New South Wales missionary was a horrified witness to the slaughter by mounted police of a group of dozens of Aboriginal men, women and children. Forty-five heads were then boiled down and the 10 best skulls were packed off for overseas. 35

The extermination of the aborigines continued in the 20th century. Among the methods employed in this extermination was the forcible removal of aborigine children from their families. A news story by Alan Thornhill, which appeared in the 28 April 1997 edition of the Philadelphia Daily News, recounted this method used against the aborigines in this way:

Aborigine Families Recount Seizures

Associated Press - Aborigines living in Australia's remote northwest deserts used to smear their light-skinned children with charcoal, hoping to keep state welfare agents from taking them away. "The welfare just grabbed you when they found you," one of the stolen children reported, many years later. "Our people would hide us, paint us with charcoal."

"I was taken to Moola Bulla," said one cattler worker who was stolen as a child. "We were about 5 or 6 years old." His tale was one of thousands heard by Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission during its heart-wrenching inquiry into the "stolen generation." From 1910 until the 1970s, some 100,000 aboriginal children were taken from their parents... Light-skinned aboriginal children were seized and handed out to white families for adoption. Dark-skinned children were put in orphanages.36 

Even now, the pain is so great that most stories were printed anonymously in the commission's final report, "Bringing Them Home." The commission says the actions of the authorities at that time amounted to genocide as the United Nations defines it. The government has refused to follow the inquiry's recommendation that a tribunal be set up to assess compensation payments for the stolen children.

As we have seen, the inhuman treatment, massacres, cruelty, savagery, and exterminations carried out were all justified by Darwinism's theses of "natural selection," "the fight for survival," and "the survival of the fittest."

All these terrible things the Australian natives suffered were just one small part of the catastrophes Darwinism has brought to the world.

Ota Benga

After Darwin claimed in The Origin of Species that human beings had developed from a common ancestor they shared with monkeys, the search for fossils to support this scenario began. But some evolutionists believed that "half-monkey half-man" creatures might be found not only in the fossil record, but also living in various parts of the world. At the beginning of the 20th century the searches for the "missing link" were the cause of many acts of savagery. One of these was the story of the pigmy Ota Benga.

Ota Benga was captured in the Congo by an evolutionist researcher called Samuel Verner in 1904. This native, whose name meant "friend" in his own language, was married and the father of two children. But he was chained like an animal, put in a cage, and sent to the U.S.A. There, the evolutionary scientists put him in a cage with various species of monkey at the St. Louis World Fair and exhibited him as "the nearest link to man." Two years later they took him to Bronx Zoo in New York and displayed him with a few chimpanzees, a gorilla called Dinah and an orang-utan called Dohung as "man's oldest ancestors." The evolutionist director of the zoo, Dr. William T. Horniday, gave long talks about the pride it gave him to have the "missing link," and visitors treated Ota Benga in his cage just like an animal. An edition of the New York Times printed at the time described the visitors' attitudes:

There were 40,000 visitors to the park on Sunday. Nearly every man woman and child of this crowd made for the monkey house to see the star attraction in the park–the wild man from Africa. They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering, and yelling. Some of them poked him in the ribs, other tripped him up, all laughed at him.37

The 17 September 1906 edition of the New York Journal said that this was being done to prove evolution, but attacked it as a great injustice and cruelty in these words:

These men, without thought and intelligence have been exhibiting in a cage of monkeys, a small human dwarf from Africa. Their idea, probably, was to inculcate some profound lesson in evolution.

As a matter of fact, the only result achieved has been to hold up to scorn the African race, which deserves at least sympathy and kindness from the whites of this country, after all the brutality it has suffered here…

It is shameful and disgusting that the misfortune, the physical deficiency, of a human being, created by the same Force that puts us all here and endowed with the same feelings and the same soul, should be locked in a cage with monkeys and be made a public mockery.38

The New York Daily Tribune also gave space to the subject of Ota Benga's being exhibited in the zoo for the purposes of demonstrating evolution. The Darwinist zoo director's defence was completely unscrupulous:

The exhibition of an African pygmy in the same cage with an organ outing at the New York Zoological Park last week stirred up considerable criticism. Some persons declared it was an attempt on the part of Director Hornaday to demonstrate a close relationship between Negroes and monkeys. Dr. Hornaday denied this. "If the little fellow is in a cage," said Dr. Hornaday, "it is because he is most comfortable there, and because we are at a loss to know what else to do with him. He is in no sense a prisoner, except that no one would say it was wise to allow him to wander around the city without some one having an eye on him."39

Ota Benga's being exhibited in the zoo with gorillas like an animal led to unease in various circles. A number of foundations applied to the authorities to have the practice stopped, stating that Ota Benga was a human being and that his being treated in that way was a great cruelty. One of these applications appeared in the New York Globe of 12 September 1906 in this way:

Editor of the Globe:

Sir - I lived in the south several years, and consequently am not over fond of negro, but believe him human. I think it a shame that the authorities of this great city should allow such a sight as that witnessed at the Bronx Park - a negro boy, on exhibition in a monkey cage...

This whole pygmy business needs investigation...

A.E.R.

New York, Sept. 12 40

Another application asking Ota Benga to be treated like a human was as follows:

Man and Monkey Show Disapproved by Clergy

The Rev. Dr. MacArthur Thinks the Exhibition Degrading

"The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African" said Dr. MacArthur "Instead of making a beast of this little fellow, he should be put in school for the development of such powers as God gave to him."

Dr. Gilbert said he had already decided that the exhibition was an outrage and that he and other pastors would join with Dr. MacArthur in seeing to it that the Bushman was released from the monkey cage and put elsewhere.41

The end result of all this inhuman treatment was Ota Benga's suicide. But here the problem was greater than that of one human being losing his life. This event was a clear example of the cruelty and savagery that Darwinist racism could mean in practice.

The Eskimos and the Implementation of Racism

The famous arctic researcher Robert Peary brought a group of Pole Eskimos to New York in 1897. The youngest of this group was a child called Minik. The group, which included Minik and his father, were exhibited for a long time at the American Museum of Natural History. During that time, Minik's father lost his life through sickness. Minik remained alone and unprotected in New York. And one day Minik saw that his father's skeleton was being exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History as "an example of the species." Although he asked for his father's body, the museum authorities turned the request down.

Another point worthy of note regarding Minik's life was Robert Peary, the researcher who brought the Eskimos to America, held racist views. Although he lived among the Eskimos, Peary openly thought that these people were not equal to him. According to Peary, Eskimos and Negroes were members of inferior races. Although they were strong, intelligent, and trustworthy people who provided for their families, they were not as good as the white man… One time he wrote the following piece of insolence: "I have often been asked: 'of what use are Eskimos to the world? They are too far removed to be of any value for commercial enterprises; and, furthermore, they lack ambition. They value life only as does a fox, or a bear, purely by instinct."1 His purpose in bringing Eskimos to America was explained by a researcher on the subject: "What were Peary's reasons for bringing these six Eskimos to New York? …Perhaps these six Eskimos were just specimens; much like the skulls and skeletons he had collected earlier, but more interesting because blood still coursed in their veins. …He had also felt a morbid affinity for the bodies of other Eskimos he knew by name, which he had exhumed the year before from their fresh graves and carted off south to grace the halls of the museum."2

Minik, Ota Benga, and many other people whose names are not known, suffered inhuman treatment, in this and other ways, at the hands of so-called 'scientists" who looked on some races as "inferior."