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Reviews of Books
frequent production accidents due to inexperience, relatively poor product quality, and an inability to manufacture the technically most demanding products. These
weaknesses were trumped by its newfound identification
with national security and national pride. Steen devotes
considerable attention to the multiplicity of efforts
undertaken by the different branches of the federal government to support the American industry, and at the
same time place obstacles in the way of Germany’s
return to dominance in the synthetic organic chemicals
industry. Even the powerful American textile industry
endorsed high protective tariffs. They benefited from
lower prices for dyes and the seizure of German property, including intellectual property in the form of many
chemical industry patents.
By 1930, the American synthetic organic chemicals
industry, now stronger and more capable thanks in part
to U.S. government measures and protection, was beginning to enjoy other advantages in relation to its erstwhile German model and rival. American universities
continued to expand graduate training and research, a
trend begun before the war. New products derived from
petroleum and natural gas complemented American
strengths in natural resources, as well as mass production and chemical engineering. A booming automobile
industry created a large and expanding domestic market
for the industry’s products. No longer simply competing
with German industry at its own game, Americans were
moving in new directions that would enable the industry
to flourish for decades.
A brief review can scarcely do justice to the complexity and nuances of this story, which is critical to the history of American industry in the twentieth century. Its
telling needs to comprehend and convey technical matters, both legal and scientific, but in a way that remains
accessible to the non-specialist and that never loses sight
of the larger historical forces in which they are
embedded. Sufficient detail must be included without
obscuring the larger picture. Steen’s book, with its seamless interweaving of business and political history with
the history of technology and science, meets these challenges convincingly, and in a way that merits the attention of historians.
JOHN E. LESCH
University of California, Berkeley
TRACY TESLOW. Constructing Race: The Science of Bodies
and Cultures in American Anthropology. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii, 399. $99.00.
In her provocative history of American anthropology
and race from World War I to 1950, Tracy Teslow
investigates the evolution of anthropologists’ understanding of race and how the discipline influenced popular ideas about the concept. While most historians of
twentieth-century anthropology have emphasized the
role of the discipline in undermining racial hierarchy
and the race concept, Teslow argues that anthropologists’ work reinforced the use of race as a scientific
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
concept in academia and helped perpetuate traditional
attitudes about race among the public. Based on
research in the American Museum of Natural History
papers, the Ruth Fulton Benedict papers, the Races of
Mankind Collection, other relevant archival collections,
and key anthropological texts, the author analyzes the
work of several influential American anthropologists,
notably Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Harry Shapiro, and
Ashley Montagu. While Teslow acknowledges that these
anthropologists rejected the notion of pure races and
racial hierarchy and emphasized environment and culture in shaping human endeavor, she shows that they
also continued to study racial categories, thus reinforcing the concept of race. Thus, Teslow argues that
“physical anthropologists in the twentieth century promoted a vision of race rooted in bodies and cultures, a
vision that shaped popular perceptions of race in America for generations” (3).
Teslow also analyzes popular museum exhibitions and
mass market publications written by anthropologists and
finds, similarly, that they reinforced the notion of race
as a scientific concept. For example, she examines the
Field Museum of Natural History’s Races of Mankind
exhibition in Chicago in 1933, which was incredibly popular, drawing over three million visitors in its first year.
The author observes that this exhibition “literally cast in
bronze an anthropological compromise, presenting a
rigid racial typology, in individual racial figures, along
with a racialized peon to the idea of unity within
diversity” (114). While the popularity of the exhibit and
the role of anthropologists in creating it would appear
to lend credence to Teslow’s argument, her conclusion
that the final exhibition was dictated less by
“anthropological concerns,” than by “questions of willpower, institutional power, and money” (134), undercuts
her argument that anthropologists were fundamental in
reinforcing the public’s traditional attitudes about race.
Teslow then turns to physical anthropologist
Harry Shapiro, assistant curator of physical anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History from
1926 to 1990, who like her other protagonists had a
muddled notion of race. Although he embraced Boas’s
culture concept, Shapiro nonetheless continued to
employ the tools of racial anthropology, that is, anatomical measurements, to categorize humans into racial categories.
Teslow shows that the two mid-twentieth-century
anthropologists most associated with attacks on the race
concept, Ruth Benedict and Ashley Montagu, were
unwilling or unable to jettison the category of race.
While both mounted frontal attacks on racism and racial
prejudice, they “frequently retained essentialist and biologically determinist notions of race” (228). In Race: Science and Politics (1940), Benedict accepted the notion
that race was a scientific concept and that race was
passed down biologically. Furthermore, in 1943, Benedict and anthropologist Gene Weltfish published a very
popular pamphlet, The Races of Mankind, which
spawned an exhibition in Detroit that “reified the races
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Canada and the United States
presented and legitimated the practice of racial classification” (275).
Perhaps the most anti-racist book published by an
anthropologist during this era was Ashley Montagu’s
Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942).
Although this work was a powerful attack on the use of
the race concept to justify oppression and division, it
acknowledged the existence of five races. Indeed, in the
1964 edition of the book, Montagu still recognized four
divisions of humanity, based largely on physical differences.
In 1950, United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a statement
on race, which declared, “‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth” (305). Although this
seemed to be a definitive renunciation of the scientific
value of the race concept, Teslow shows that this statement, written by cultural anthropologists and other
social scientists, engendered a strong critique by physical
anthropologists and geneticists, who issued their own
statement on the subject, which defended the use of
race as a scientific concept.
Teslow provides a careful analysis of anthropologists’
writings and museum exhibits to show that the discipline, while attacking racism and racial hierarchy, nonetheless reinforced the race concept. However, in a
couple of areas, her argument is unconvincing, with
some of her conclusions outdistancing her evidence. In
discussing anthropologists’ refusal to reject the race concept, Teslow glosses over the large differences between
physical and cultural anthropologists in their articulation
and understanding of the race concept. In fact, the tension was so great that the leading journal of physical
anthropology refused to publish an obituary upon the
death of Franz Boas in 1942. Research in The Franz
Boas Papers, which Teslow neglected, may have helped
delineate the intellectual tensions between cultural and
physical anthropologists about race. Moreover, she
undercuts her argument that anthropological discourse
shaped popular attitudes about race when she rightly
concludes that “the creation of both race and culture in
anthropology were . . . constrained . . . most critically,
by the sociopolitical environments in which problems of
diversity are framed and solutions devised” (351–352).
Nonetheless, Teslow has made a valuable contribution
to our understanding of the anthropological discourse
about race. This work should stimulate further study of
the history of social science and its impact on race in
America.
JERRY GERSHENHORN
North Carolina Central University
RUBEN FLORES. Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting
Pot and Civil Rights in the United States. (Politics and
Culture in Modern America.) Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 353. $45.00.
In this ambitious, well-researched and well-written
(though occasionally repetitive) volume, Ruben Flores
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examines the mutual interaction between John Dewey’s
pragmatism; Mexico’s post-revolutionary reforms in education between 1920 and 1940; the work of Americans
inspired by the Mexican example, particularly its efforts
to use education to integrate its diverse populations into
a unified society; and the impact of these developments
on the post World War II decisions that ended the segregation of Spanish-speaking children in the public
schools of California, Texas, and Arizona.
Dewey’s belief that educational systems should reflect
the experiences of children reached Mexico in a variety
of ways, notably through the work of Moisés Sáenz, who
received a master’s degree under his direction, and his
own visit to the country in 1926. The cultural relativism
of Franz Boas, Dewey’s Columbia University colleague
under whom Manuel Gamio studied, was also influential.
The Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) employed
both Gamio and Sáenz. In his Forjando Patria (1916),
Gamio envisioned the post-revolutionary blending of
Indian and European to create a powerful nation. José
Vasconcelos, the first head of SEP, later wrote La Raza
Cósmica (1925), in which he predicted the triumph of
mixed-race Latin America over British America. These
and other works of the era thus heralded a cultural and
ethnic melting pot, though, according to Flores, Mexicans used this term less frequently than Americans.
The vehicle for this change was the three-part rural
educational system in Mexico created after 1920. The
first of these was the cultural mission, initially based in
Mexico City but later in the countryside, which propagated the ideal of national integration; the rural normal
school, which prepared future teachers to disseminate
the ideal; and the rural school, or casa del pueblo, some
ten thousand of which were built during the 1920s.
Although they were aware of shortcomings in the
educational program, progressive-minded social scientists in the United States still found components that
might be emulated in their own country. As Loyd L.
Tireman wrote in 1948, “‘the rural school has ceased to
be a place where children and adults learn the alphabet,
and has been converted into a broader thing of transcendent social importance which embraces the entire
community. . . and which teaches all people . . . how to
lead a better life. Henceforth, the rural schools of Mexico will work for the advent of a . . . more equitable and
juster society than anywhere else’” (123).
Flores devotes much attention to Tireman, a psychologist based in New Mexico, and to George I. Sánchez,
who became professor of philosophy and education at
the University of Texas. Both men studied the Mexican
school system during visits in the 1930s and wrote extensively on the subject. Tireman borrowed from the Mexican system for his San José Experimental School near
Albuquerque and a subsequent school at Nambé, a
Spanish-speaking community near Santa Fe. Also
included in Flores’s purview is a study of the work on
cultural change in Mexico by anthropologist Ralph L.
Beals.
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