Gene Weltfish

Gene Weltfish in 1952.

Gene Weltfish(bornRegina Weltfish) (August 7, 1902 – August 2, 1980) was an Americananthropologistand historian working atColumbia Universityfrom 1928 to 1953. She had studied withFranz Boasand was a specialist in the culture and history of thePawnee peopleof the Midwest Plains. Her 1965ethnography,The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture,is considered the authoritative work on Pawnee culture to this day.

She is also known for the 1943 pamphlet for theU.S. Army,calledThe Races of Mankind,which she co-wrote withRuth Benedict.It was intended to educate military personnel about the cultural differences among the peoples of the world in preparation for their fighting with a variety of allies from other cultures. The authors stated that perceived differences between theracesare cultural rather than biological. Among the data used in the text was an IQ study from World War I, which found higher scores among some northern Blacks in the United States forces than among some southern Whites. The pamphlet was not widely circulated within the Army, and by the early 1950s, it was banned as subversive.

Engaged in social activism during the 1940s, Weltflish attracted the attention of theFBI,which suspected her (and others on the Left) of being acommunist.In 1952 and 1953 she was called to Congress for questioning by two of theSenate sub-committeesdedicated to investigating "un-American activity" during the1950s red scare.Two weeks before appearing at a 1953 hearing, in which she refused to answer questions from staffer attorneyRoy Cohnand SenatorJoseph McCarthyas to whether she was a communist, her 16-year appointment at Columbia was terminated. She wasblacklistedand unable to find an academic position for nearly a decade. During her last decade in academia full-time, she taught atFairleigh Dickinson University.She continued to teach part-time after retirement.

Biography

Regina Weltfish was one of two daughters; she was born in 1902 into a German Jewish family inNew York City'sLower East Side.She grew up speaking German as her first language, taught by a German governess hired by her grandfather. Her father, to whom she was very close, died when she was 13. Encouraged by her grandmother, she went to the synagogue daily to say thekaddishfor him during the first year after his death, an honor and responsibility traditionally reserved for a son.Without a father, the family was in a difficult economic situation. Because her father had diedwithoutawill,the state managed his estate and kept it in trust. Weltfish's mother had to submit formalnotarizedpetitions for every disbursement. To help the family, at 14 Weltfish started working as a school clerk and attended high school in the evenings.

Education

Graduating fromWadleigh High School for Girls in 1919, Weltfish enteredHunter Collegewhere she majored in journalism. She transferred toColumbia University'sBarnard College,where she minored in philosophy underJohn Dewey.She graduated from Barnard in 1925 and enrolled in Columbia's graduate program inanthropology.She had already taken courses withFranz Boasduring her senior year and continued to study with him as her adviser.

During this time, she married fellow graduate studentAlexander Lesser,who also studied with Boas and became an anthropologist studyingSiouan-speaking tribes. They were married for 15 years. Their daughter Ann was born in 1931.The two did their first field work together in Oklahoma, working onSiouankinship systems.

Happening to meet Henry Moses, aPawneein New York, Weltfish decided to study his tribe as the subject of her dissertation. She traveled to the reservation in Oklahoma, where tribal members still mostly spokePawnee language.Weltfish had not previously studied that language but learned it during her years of studies. She focused on the study of aesthetics and craftsmanship, learning the art ofbasket-making,which was practiced exclusively by Pawnee women. Her doctoral dissertation from Columbia was titledThe Interrelation of Technique and Design in North American Basketry.She completed her dissertation in 1929, but did not formally receive herPh.D.until 1950. At that time Columbia modified its policy requiring that grad students pay to publish dissertations (at a cost of $4,000) and began accepting copies ofmimeographedtheses.

Career at Columbia University

In 1935 Weltfish was invited by Boas to teach at Columbia. She stayed on a year-to-year appointment until 1953.Among her students at Columbia wasEleanor LeacockandVera Mae Green.Columbia University never granted Weltfishtenure,most likely because of a long-standing practice of discrimination against women. In 1938 Ruth Benedict was the first woman to achieve tenure at Columbia but did not receive a full professorship until 1948, months before her death.She intervened on behalf of Weltfish at a board meeting, when the trustees were considering terminating the younger woman's employment.

The Races of Mankind

One of Weltfish's minor works, co-written with Ruth Benedict, had a surprisingly great effect. Published in 1943,The Races of Mankindwas a pamphlet intended for American troops. It set forth, in simple language with cartoon illustrations, the scientific case against racist beliefs.The publication of this pamphlet and the subsequent political furor that it caused during the 1950s, when it was decried as a piece of socialist propaganda, attracted the attention of anti-Communist authorities.

The authors recounted some results ofIQ tests,which were first administered to theAmerican Expeditionary Force(AEF) inWorld War I.At a time when whites generally believed they were mentally superior to blacks, "Southern Whites" scored below "Northern Negroes" in the IQ test. Weltfish and Benedict argued that "The difference....[arose] because of differences of income, education, cultural advantages, and other opportunities," since southern schools spent only a fraction of the amount spent on education in the North. This statement provoked outrage among some in the military, which had many Southerners as career officers and troops. Weltfish and Benedict devoted most of pamphlet to explaining that perceived differences in group mental abilities vary in accordance with social and cultural factors, not biological ones.

The pamphlet represented the Boasian way of thinking about race, which later became the standard view in anthropology and was endorsed with a 1948 UNESCO declaration. At the time, its contention that race was socially constructed was politically controversial, especially in the American South, where white Democrats had long maintainedJim Crow,racial segregation,disfranchisementof blacks, andwhite supremacy.

More than 20 years later, Weltfish explained why she wrote the pamphlet:

"During the first four years of my graduate training at Columbia,Hitlerrose to power in Germany, bolstering his heinous operations with racist theories developed from distorted anthropology. The books of Franz Boas were burned in Germany. In 1942, after [Boas'] death, Ruth Benedict, my senior colleague in the Anthropology Department, and I felt that we should carry the banner on the race question. In 1943, Ruth Benedict and I collaborated on a pamphlet, "The Races of Mankind,"published by the Public Affairs Committee. The pamphlet was originally written at the request of theU.S.O.for distribution to the men in the armed forces who had to fight side by side with allies such as theHuksin the Philippines and theSolomon Islanders."The Races of Mankind"was used, not only for orientation by the army, but in the de-Nazification program in Germany after the war."

— (Memo by Weltfish, October 24, 1967, quoted in Pathe 1989:375)

Some far-right political groups in the US still consider Weltfish's work to be part of aconspiracyby Boas and his students to eliminate the study of race in psychology and anthropology in "preparation for the defeat of 'White Civilization' by the Jews".

Blacklisted during the McCarthy period

In 1953 Weltfish lost her position at Columbia University after 16 years of employment as an adjunct lecturer.The FBI had been interested in her political activities for some time, and in 1944 the head of the Anthropology departmentRalph Linton,who had replaced Boas in 1937, reported her to theFBIfor alleged communist sympathies. The FBI investigated Weltfish's activities, noting her political engagement in theCongress of American Women,her signatures on civil rights petitions, and her appearance on the radio stationWNBC.The FBI had classified the Congress of American Women, of which Weltfish was once president, among subversive organizations in the 1940s after its spokeswomen criticized some of PresidentHarry S. Truman's foreign policies.

In 1952 Weltfish was quoted in theDaily Workeras repeating a claim made by Soviet critics that the US Army had usedgerm warfarein theKorean War.Shortly thereafter she wassubpoenaedto appear in the fall of 1952 before theMcCarran Senate Judiciary Committee,where she was questioned. She refused to answer questions about her political affiliations, but when asked about theDaily Workerarticle, she said that she had been misquoted.

In 1953 SenatorJoseph McCarthy'sSenate Committee on Governmental Operationswas conducting hearings to determine whether un-American literature was being purchased by American libraries. Weltfish was called in for questioning regarding her role in writing the pamphlet,The Races of Mankind,which the committee had declared to be subversive. Two weeks before she was scheduled to appear, Weltfish was told by the trustees of Columbia that her employment contract would not be renewed at the end of the year.The university said she was being dismissed based on the university's adoption of a new policy against the prolonged use of annual contract-based lecturers.But, the university promoted other lecturers affected by the change to tenured positions rather than dismissing them. Weltfish maintained that she was fired because she was a woman. Later historians have concluded that she was fired because the trustees saw her as a political liability, who could threaten funding, in the tense and charged environment during the years of the red scare.

On April 1, 1953, Weltfish was questioned by theUnited States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Securitystaffed byRoy Cohnand consisting of senatorsJoseph McCarthy,Karl Mundt,John McClellanandStuart Symington.Weltfish responded negatively to the committee's demands that she name colleagues with communist sympathies. Asked about her own political position she refused to answer, invoking theFifth Amendment.Weltfish simply said that "she thought of herself as a good American and acted on issues as her conscience and knowledge dictated".When asked about the nature of the claim made in the pamphlet that some northern blacks had scored higher on intelligence tests than southern whites, Weltfish responded that particular data set was from the US Army's records.

Having lost her employment at Columbia, Weltfish was effectivelyblacklistedand remained unable to find a teaching position for the next eight years.The Nebraska andBollingen Foundationsgave her some financial support, which allowed her to study museum materials from the Pawnee collection at theUniversity of Nebraska.Based on this and her previous field work, she wroteThe Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture(1965) about Pawnee history and ethnography.

Later years

In 1961 Weltfish was hired atFairleigh Dickinson Universityin New Jersey, where she worked until 1972, having reached themandatory retirementage of 70.After her retirement from Fairleigh Dickinson, Weltfish continued teaching as a part-time faculty member at theNew School for Social ResearchandManhattan School of Musicin New York City, and as a visiting professor atRutgers UniversityinNew Brunswick, New Jersey.At Rutgers, she participated in a new program ingerontology.She died on August 7, 1980, just 5 days short of her 78th birthday.

Selected publications

• 1930a. "Prehistoric North American Basketry Techniques and Modern Distributions".American Anthropologist32:454-495.
• 1930b. "Coiled Gambling Baskets of the Pawnee and Other Plains Tribes".Indian Notes and Monographs7:277-295. Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation.
• 1931a. "Pottery Implements of the Ancient Basket-Makers".Plains Anthropologist33:263.
• 1931b. "White-on-red Pottery from Cochiti Pueblo".Plains Anthropologist33:263-264.
• 1932a. "Preliminary Classification of Prehistoric Southwestern Basketry".Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections,Vol.87, No.6.
• 1932b. "Problems in the Study of Ancient and Modern Basket-Makers".American Anthropologist34:108-117.
• 1932c. "Composition of the Caddoan Linguistic Stock". (Coauthor Alexander Lesser)Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections,Vol.87, No.6.
• 1936. "The Vision of Fox Boy, a South Band Pawnee Text, with Translations and Grammatical Analysis".International Journal of American Linguistics9:44-75.
• 1937.Caddoan Texts: Pawnee, South Band Dialect.Publication of the American Ethnological Society, Vol.17.
• 1943.The Races of Mankind.(Coauthor Ruth Benedict), The Public Affairs Committee, New York.
• 1953.The Origins of Art.Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, Indiana.
• 1956. "The Perspective for Fundamental Research in Anthropology".The Philosophy of Science23:63-73.
• 1958a. "The Linguistic Study of Material Culture",International Journal of American Linguistics24:301-311.
• 1958b. "The Anthropologist and the Question of the Fifth Dimension", InCulture in History,edited by Stanley Diamond. Columbia University Press, New York.
• 1959. The Question of Ethnic Identity, an Ethnohistorical Approach.Ethnohistory6:321-346.
• 1960.The Ethnic Dimension of Human History: Pattern or Patterns of Culture?inSelected Papers, Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences,edited by Anthony C. Wallace. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
• 1965.The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture.Basic Books, New York.
• 1971. "The Plains Indians: Their Continuity in History and Their Indian Identity". InNorth American Indians in Historical Perspective,Edited by Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie. Random House, New York.

See also

• Eleanor Leacock
• Vera Mae Green

External links

• Inventory of the Gene Weltfish Pawnee Field Notes, 1935 at the Newberry Library
• The Races of Mankindat the Internet Archive (registration not required)