A Wealth of Thought

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Boas Franz. A Wealth of Thought

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A Wealth of Thought

Franz Boas on Native American Art

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Osborn, Grant, and others reflected the growing racism which was to become truly destructive after World War I. During the late teens and twenties, the Ku Klux Klan became powerful in both the South and the North, anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism ran rampant, universities imposed quotas limiting the number of Jewish students, psychologists developed intelligence testing which “proved” the mental inferiority of nonwhites, and Congress passed several bills restricting immigration in order to curb the masses of darker-skinned southern and eastern European “races” flooding into the United States.

Throughout all this, Franz Boas kept challenging the scientific basis of racist theories and presenting new information to resist such ideas. Thus, the 1927 publication of Primitive Art was not merely an intellectual exercise meant to argue against esoteric evolutionistic art history. It also embodied an antiracist statement. By the 1920s, Boas’s ideas had been disseminated in a university context, and thus were generally accepted by the profession of anthropology (in part because so many university anthropologists had been trained by Boas).42 Yet the racist attitudes that anthropologists had managed largely to eliminate from their profession still prevailed among the American public. Primitive Art actually came out during some of the darkest years in the history of American race prejudice.43 All the manifestations in American society of racialist thinking and policy that had early been reinforced by science were still prevalent, even if anthropology itself no longer supported them.

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