The Racial World of Aleš Hrdlička Inaugural‐Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie der Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München vorgelegt von Mark Andrew Brandon aus Aurora, Illinois, United States 2020 Referent/in: Prof. Dr. Michael Hochgeschwender Korreferent/in: Prof. Dr. Ursula Prutsch Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 9. Juli 2020 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank my dissertation director, Professor Michael Hochgeschwender, for seeing the merits of my proposal and giving me the opportunity to complete it. His advice has always been precisely appropriate. I also want to thank the Amerika-Institut at Ludwig-Maximilians University for its generosity in helping to fund my research at the Smithsonian Institution in the United States. I also wish to thank the kind people attached to the Smithsonian and its Anthropological Archives. Thank you to Stephen Loring of the Museum of Natural History for supporting my project, taking the time to meet with me when I was in Washington, and letting me have a look at what was once Hrdlička’s office. Many thanks to Douglas Ubelaker, who shared some of his own works on Hrdlička with me. Thank you as well to Gina Rappaport at the Anthropological Archives; I still cherish the coffee mug. Thank you Caitlyn Haynes for finding a few sources for me that were very important to this study. I really loved every minute I spent at the Anthropological Archives. There are some special people from my homeland that I wish to thank. Among the dead are my parents, Mark and Diane Brandon, who taught me the fine balance between playing by the rules and at the same time not believing most of what the high and mighty say. Among the living is my sister, Joy Courtright, who is one of the most spontaneously loving, generous, and empathetic people I know; and also my friend since third grade, Bruce Cassell, whose common sense and good humor have always kept me from wandering too far into academic gibberish. On this side of the ocean, there is another set of soulmates, who have shared the immigrant experience with me for around 20 years now. These are especially Tony Laue, Joel Head and Chris Montoni. This dissertation would not have been possible without our long, and always interesting, conversations. There are now thousands of students all around the world who have taken my difficult history courses at some institution of higher learning in various places in the Czech Republic. Many of my ideas, as well as the ability to articulate them, came not only from preparing lectures, but also from listening to students, trying to understand their thinking, and discussing with them. Thank you. For Mark, Max, and Otto CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER I: THE FAITH OF ALEŠ HRDLIČKA .................................................................... 12 CHAPTER II: EUGENICS ............................................................................................................. 38 CHAPTER III: RACE DIVINATION ........................................................................................... 63 CHAPTER IV: HOW THE CZECHS BECAME WHITE ........................................................ 96 CHAPTER V: WHAT ARE THE CZECHOSLOVAKS RACIALLY? .................................. 125 CHAPTER VI: “PUBLIC OPINION IS A POWERUL WEAPON,” 1914-1943 .................... 161 CHAPTER VII: THE MUSEUM OF MAN ................................................................................ 205 CHAPTER VIII: THE LAST GREAT RESERVE OF THE WHITE RACE ......................... 239 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................. 279 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................... 283 ABSTRACT: „DIE RASSISCHE WELT VON ALEŠ HRDLIČKA“ ..................................... 308 1 INTRODUCTION In 1898, Aleš Hrdlička published a pioneering study called Anthropological Investigations on One Thousand White and Colored Children of Both Sexes. In his research for the book, he carefully measured, as the title explains, 1,000 white and “colored” children.1 He measured and recorded such physical features as the height, weight, and the length and breadth of the head of each child. Altogether he measured 908 white and 92 “colored” boys and girls.2 The “colored” children were especially important because he wanted to document physical differences between blacks and whites. He believed that the data in this book would help scientists identify racial boundaries by physical characteristics. His observations, he claimed, made it possible to “state for the first time the physical differences in all parts of the body between the white and the colored children.”3 Elsewhere in the book he announced, “we have obtained some remarkable differences in the measurements of the white and the negro subjects.”4 Hrdlička’s anthropometric study of orphans exposes a crucial problem that was central to his idea of race. It is also a critical tool of analysis in the following chapters. Hrdlička believed that measurable somatic features divided black from white, and that the truest way to separate humans into groups was according to their distinguishing physical marks. He built much of his professional career on the assumption that such measurements could objectively distinguish the borders between races. The key problem is that all of the racial and national “identities” that Hrdlička cared the most about were inherently ambiguous, malleable, and unmeasurable. Both race and nation are creations 1 The context suggests that Hrdlička used “colored” as a synonym for “black” and “negro.” He usually claimed to believe in three main races: “White,” “Black,” and “Yellow-Brown,” which he also called “Caucasoid,” “Negroid,” and “Mongoloid,” so the term “colored,” besides sounding offensive to the modern ear, adds one more exception to his already imprecise terminology. 2 Aleš Hrdlička, Anthropological Investigations on One Thousand White and Colored Children of Both Sexes, The Inmates of the New York Juvenile Asylum, With Additional Notes on One Hundred Colored Children of the New York Colored Orphan Asylum (New York: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck, Crawford Co., 1898), 11. 3 Ibid, 6. 4 Ibid, 58. 2 of the human imagination, and their meanings depend on specific historical contexts; neither is a measurable biological category. Despite his enthusiasm, Hrdlička’s 1898 study of New York orphans did not help to delimit clear physiological categories of black and white. It is essential to notice that for the study, he went to two different institutions to get his measurements. He found his white subjects at the New York Juvenile Asylum, but for “colored” children, which he considered some of “the most important measurements,” he went to the New York Colored Orphan Asylum, a separate establishment.5 This means that the real decisions about which children belonged in what race were made before Hrdlička got there. Whoever decided the fate of the city’s orphans already knew how to distinguish between the races, probably without the science of anthropometry. Someone had already sent the “colored” children to the “colored” orphanage. Long before Hrdlička showed up with his calipers, someone else had already decided which children were white and which were black. Hrdlička simply trusted that the children in the Colored Orphan Asylum were really “colored” and measured them as such. What Hrdlička really documented were fleeting cultural biases, not permanent biological categories. For the rest of his life, he meticulously measured cultural whims, but he authoritatively publicized them as distinct categories found in the “natural” world. In reality, his own research often revealed that the borders between races were very blurry, the opposite of what he hoped. Of course, there were always a few individuals who fit easily into popular stereotypes of black and white, but the real problem, which Hrdlička never solved, was how to classify those whose racial profile seemed neutral or mixed. Even at the orphanages in 1898, he had to admit that according to his own measurements the black and white children were more alike than he had expected. “The differences between the white and the colored children,” he conceded, were “not as well defined” as he had anticipated.6 Instead of questioning his premise; however, he 5 Ibid, 3. 6 Ibid, 19. 3 discounted this lack of confirming data in a manner that became habitual throughout his life; he simply insisted that forthcoming evidence would soon vindicate his presumptions. More data, he speculated, would show that the differences were more pronounced. The black and white children would seem more physically different, he conjectured, “if we had sufficient numbers of the colored subjects.”7 To make matters even more unclear, some children in the orphanages appeared “mixed” to Hrdlička. For example, in comparing blacks and whites he noted, “the hair of the pure negro child is quite lusterless and as a rule either curly or wavy, by far more frequently the former than the latter. The proportion of wavy hair increases largely in mixed subjects and the same is true about luster of the hair.”8 By acknowledging the existence of mixture, Hrdlička recognized that many children could not be simply white or black; there was instead a scale of variation between the two. The problem