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1502 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 OCTOBER 2015 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 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1503 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. OCTOBER 2015