Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice is the second volume of Rosemary Zumwalt’s two-volume biography of the influential anthropologist. Her first volume, subtitled The Emergence of an Anthropologist, ends with the joy Boas’s family experienced when he secured his first stable academic appointment at Columbia University, and the grief they felt in the wake of the tragic loss of their youngest child. Zumwalt reveals joy and loss, dogged determination, and “icy enthusiasm” for truth and justice as she meticulously mines the historical record of personal and professional correspondence. Unlike other biographers of Boas, Zumwalt demonstrates how Boas’s personal and professional, and intellectual and emotional sides of his life were inexorably linked. Although her chapters are generally chronological, she tactically and productively develops themes around how Boas developed the Department of Anthropology at Columbia and attempted to develop a school in Mexico, trained specific cohorts of students, and how the two world wars profoundly impacted his life.
As Zumwalt explains: “I have written this biography of Franz Boas as an intimate view of Boas’s vision for anthropology, his stubborn commitment to the rightness of his approach, his consuming preoccupation with his work . . . and his scarcely concealed and burning passion for science and for moral equity” (xix). Zumwalt writes in a way that makes you feel like you hear directly from Boas, his wife, or many students and colleagues that he corresponded with during the first forty years of the twentieth century. In Boas’s distinctive voice, Zumwalt reveals his passion and love for his wife, work, students, colleagues, and family, and his passion and love of truth, justice, and music. She also captures how intense, disciplined, and laser-focused he was on just about everything.
Zumwalt also uncovers a distinctive view of how the four-field approach to anthropology developed in the first decades of the twentieth century. She documents Boas’s early interest in the intersections of anthropometry, language, folklore, ritual, and art. She also documents how he deployed his many graduate students. When students came to Columbia to study anthropology, they would be assigned a problem or set of problems Boas was interested in. So, it was as if he had a bevy of assistants pursuing his interests. For example, as late as the 1930s, he guided Eleanor Phelps, Carolyn Adler Lewis, and Marcus S. Goldstein in physical anthropology dissertations -- long after Boas stopped conducting anthropometric studies himself. One important contribution this biography makes is to document every graduate student Boas worked with throughout his career, most with significant biographical sketches showing the student’s remarkable depth, breadth, and diversity.
In chapter 1, “Building Anthropology at Columbia,” we learn how bureaucratic institution-building can be, even back then. We also witness the advent of Boas’s decades-long struggle with President Nicholas Murray Butler. Columbia was deeply in debt, so it could not fund the department sufficiently, hence Boas did much of the fundraising himself. He tapped his networks at the American Museum of Natural History, including banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff, who decided to pull his funding for an Asian studies scholar because “citizens of Jewish faith are, by tacit understanding, kept out of the Government of Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the [American] Museum of National history and other leading communal corporations, prejudice is being kept alive against the Jewish population” (27). Boas identified more as a German than as a Jew, as we see throughout his life, and responded to Schiff that “I feel strongly there is no ground for the charge that there is a discrimination against the appointment of Jewish professors in Columbia,” and rattled off several examples. Schiff dryly and wryly responded that he meant a Jew “who had not actually left the Jewish community,” had not been “called into the faculty or teaching staff of Columbia.” Implying the well-assimilated German Jews like Boas and his ilk at Columbia had left New York’s culturally specific Jewish community (28). After setback after setback, Boas cobbled together graduate and undergraduate instruction, trained loyal graduate students, and did some groundbreaking research during the first decade of the twentieth century. He was frustrated and complained that his “hopes and aspirations have gone to pieces,” as Zumwalt elegantly summarizes, “through the seeming permanence of the present and the fog of the future, Boas could not see the lasting contributions that had resulted from his struggles” (39).
In chapter 2, “Boas and his Early Students,” we learn that one of his first graduate students was William Jones, a member of the Sac & Fox Nation. He attended Hampton Institute and Phillips Academy in Andover, New Hampshire. He finished his undergraduate degree at Harvard, then completing his dissertation in 1904. Emblematic of how Boas truly cared for his students, he continued to secure funding for him, but it was not enough. George Dorsey of the Field Museum hired him to do ethnographic work in the Philippines, and Boas was furious and pleaded with philanthropists to fund his proper work. Tragically, Jones was murdered by his informants. Boas wrote that “it was the hardest blow in my life,” and he had “hardly the courage to do anything these days” (52). Grief and the tragic, violent loss of loved ones bedeviled Boas throughout his life. For the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, Boas trained some of the most influential anthropologists, including Alfred Kroeber, Frank Speck, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, and Fay-Cooper Cole. Zumwalt calls this his “early cohort,” and all were men, only one was a woman.
Zumwalt titled chapter 3 “Race and the Quest for Social Justice.” Early in his career, Boas used evidence-based science to debunk notions of racial inferiority and superiority. In 1894, he gave his Vice-Presidential address to the anthropology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled “Human Faculty as Determined by Race,” where he first challenged the notion of white superiority. For the next decade or so, he would hone his line of reasoning that the environment played an important role in outcomes and that there was no meaningful difference between the races. His most significant contribution was his 1911 book, The Mind of Primitive Man, which remained in print until 2015 and was translated into a half-dozen languages. She frames this chapter with a discussion of Vernon Williams, who describes “the Boasian Paradox,” which consists of Boas being a gallant crusader for truth, justice, and equality. At the same time, he was shackled to late nineteenth-century epistemologies where Black people were still different and somewhat inferior to whites. Boas becomes an important scientist and public intellectual who explicitly challenges white supremacy. W. E. B. DuBois even invites him to give the Commencement address at Atlanta University and then to address the NAACP.
“Folklore and Ruins in Mexico and Puerto Rico” is the title of chapter 4. In 1906, Franz Boas developed elaborate plans for an International School of American Archeology and Ethnology in Mexico. It involved schools and countries as patrons and protectors, various exchanges, and commitments by Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the Hispanic Society, the Prussian Government, and the United States of Mexico. He launched this research institute in 1910. It was only possible because of Boas’s shrewd negotiations and dogged determination. Unfortunately, it could not be sustained through the Mexican Revolution which began in 1914. Once the school became untenable, Boas immediately looks east to Puerto Rico, partnering with the New York Academy of Science and focusing on collecting folklore.
In chapter 5, “Conflict, War, and Censure,” Zumwalt poignantly captures a defining moment in Boas’s life, when he writes an open letter in The Nation entitled “Scientists as Spies” in the wake of the First World War. Throughout the war, Boas was a pugnacious pacifist and often wrote in papers and periodicals radical statements that flew in the face of the loyalty test President Butler proffered for all faculty, which led to the firings or resignations of several influential faculty committed to academic freedom. Zumwalt argues that Boas was not fired “because Boas’s sterling reputation in Europe burnishes his value, Butler tolerated from Boas that which he would not from others whom he held in lesser esteem” (193).
While publishing some of the last research from the International School, Boas discovered that the Office of Naval Intelligence contracted some of his U.S. colleagues to survey the coast for German submarine stations. This infuriated Boas, and he wrote in The Nation a scathing rebuke, explaining that any archeologist who uses “science as a cover for political spying…prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist” (203). The American Anthropological Association councilors quickly censured Boas. “Breaking along partisan and institutional” lines, the vote was 20 in favor and 10 opposed; the Washington and Boston contingents ganged up against the New Yorkers (204). “All who opposed him viewed him as unpatriotic, a German sympathizer—or as many referred to him, ‘a Hun’–and some maintained that he was a traitor” (205). The censure had long-term implications at Columbia, the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the National Research Council. For practical, political, and financial reasons, “Boas drew in his wings, turned away from Columbia, and faced Barnard” (223).
Zumwalt titled chapter 6 “Preponderance of Women Students.” The President and the Dean of faculty greatly reduced the funding of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia. Boas focused his teaching on the women of Barnard, in part to protest the meager funding from Columbia. Eventually, a pipeline developed, and more and more women came to pursue their Ph.D. under Boas at Columbia. “The results were the astounding success of women in anthropology and a change in its texture and scholarship” (231). The cohort he taught between the wars included Margaret Mead, Gladys Reichard, Gene Weltfish, Ruth Benedict, and Ruth Bunzel. Melville Herskovits, Leslie Spier, and Manuel Gamio were also part of this inter-war cohort.
Chapter 7, entitled “Loss and Loneliness,” begins with the tragic hit-and-run killing of his beloved wife Marie in 1929, which came on the heels of losing his daughter to polio in 1924, and his son in 1925, whose car hit an ongoing train. In February 1930, Gladys Reichard wrote to Alfred Kroeber, “His spirit seems to be broken. Can you imagine Boas without spirit?” (276). Zumwalt does a superb job of describing how Boas dealt, or I suppose, did not deal, with the profound grief, loss, and loneliness. With all the attention to mental health and self-care right now, Zumwalt breaks your heart as she describes Boas spiraling out of control into a grief-driven depression. In 1931, he was elected President of the AAAS, and it seems that focusing on his work and students was the only things that could dull the pain of his grief and loss.
Boas’s last cohort of students, 1931-1943, was his largest and most diverse. Zumwalt describes this generation of students in chapter 8, “The Last Cohort of Boas’s Students.” This cohort includes Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, Louis Eugene King, Frederica de Laguna, Ruth Landes, and Ashley F. Montague.
In 1933, the New York Times reported that Nazi students gathered around the square in front of the university where Boas received his degrees some fifty-two years prior and burned a pile of books authored by Marx, Einstein, Freud, and, yes, Franz Boas. “In the 1930s, Boas was laser-focused on organizing systematic scientific research on matters pertaining to race to counter the ’Nordic nonsense’” (360).
As the Nazis gained power, Boas’s identity as a German and a Jew became an unbearable contradiction.
On August 27, 1933, Boas wrote an open letter to Paul von Hindenburg, the President of the Third Reich. “Have I not heard with my own ears over and over again, ‘Jew, die like a dog?’” Boas explained that “I have always proudly called myself a German. Today, it is almost to a point that I have to say I am ashamed to be a German” (363). The responses to the letter ranged from support to offense. As the Nazis began firing nearly every Jew in prominent professions, Boas worked tirelessly using his networks and got to work “Rescuing Scientists,” the title of Zumwalt’s ninth chapter.
In November 1935, Boas was informed by President Butler that he was retiring him. For the previous six years, Boas had contemplated retirement, but the department was still in the seemingly perpetual state of precarity, and he did not want to risk lines not being replaced. He was seventy-seven years old. In her final chapter, aptly titled “After Retirement,” she writes that Boas was particularly bitter because he was expecting his full pay of $12,000 but only received half of his salary. He was supporting family members in Germany and needed his entire salary. Although Ruth Benedict was heir-apparent to lead the department, the administration went with Ralph Linton, and the department was split between the old and new Boasians. Boas continued to do research and use his office, and he received many honors and accolades for his work rescuing scientists, promoting academic freedom, and advancing race relations. He declined most of these honors but accepted an honorary degree from Howard University. He received birthday wishes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, and Orson Welles. “While luminaries and intellectuals lauded and feted Boas, Butler removed the honorific title of Professor Emeritus in Residence, reduced Boas’s salary, and stipulated that Boas vacate his office at the end of 1941-42” (419). Boas gave so much to Columbia and the department but left on very bitter terms. His fiercely loyal students and close colleagues supported him to the end. On a bitterly cold afternoon, December 21, 1942, Boas hosted a luncheon honoring Paul Rivet at Columbia’s faculty club. With a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in another, Boas, as Rivet recounted, said with conviction to him that “‘One shouldn’t cease to repeat that racism is a monstrous error or an impudent lie.’” “Without complaint, we saw him tip backwards, a few groans, and a great brain had ceased to think” (426). Many of his colleagues viewed this as a perfect way for Boas to pass away—fully lucid, without suffering, and among friends.
Although Zumwalt deftly describes the impact Boas and his students had on the field and society more generally, she also describes Boas as a loving husband, a faculty member frustrated with the administration, a middle-class man who still struggled to meet all of his obligations, an esteemed scholar who was insecure of his minority status, and someone who struggled with bouts of grief and depression who just used it to work harder. In short, she humanized the so-called father of American anthropology so that we recognize many facets of Boas in ourselves or other anthropologists we know.
Zumwalt’s first volume is 416 pages long; her second is 574 pages and one hell of a Covid-19 quarantine project. Boas’s complex and multifaceted life cannot be fully described in a thousand pages. Still, Rosemary Zumwalt has written the most comprehensive and detailed biography of him to date, and I bet ever. Most importantly, she does it without being pulled into the intellectual, political, and usually polarizing debates, lionizing or disparaging his contributions to anthropology and society.
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[Review length: 2544 words • Review posted on October 13, 2023]