INQUIRY ON RACE

...In neither the formal nor any other sense of the word could Grant be so described...

...It will be news to all anthropologists that Madison Grant was a "distinguished anthropologist...

...A behind-the-scenes worker was Madison Grant, author of the notorious, best-selling The Passing of the Great Race (1916...

...The result has been, as Oscar Handlin points out, the virtual destruction of the popular conceptions of both race and nationality...

...Handlin also describes Harry Laughlin, "the expert eugenics agent" of the House Committee in Immigration and Naturalization, as "a highly qualified geneticist...

...Where ideas are wanting emotions can always be found to take their place, and in the discussions of race and nationality which we have had during the last century and a half, emotion masquerading as reason has played a dominant role...

...Laughlin was not a geneticist, but a eugenist, and if he was "highly qualified" it was as a confusionist...

...Among the latter are some who were the chief engineers of our immigration laws...

...Progress has been made and will continue to be made, but no one should lull himself into the belief that racism is no longer a serious problem...

...Happily, the first half of the Twentieth Century witnessed the emergence of a new kind of anthropologist, the scientist, and thanks largely to him the concepts of race and nationality have been taken out of the realms of belief or disbelief and placed in the realm of dispassionate inquiry...

...It is a subject about which one is likely to feel somewhat more deeply than the thinking one is called upon to devote to the subject...

...Meanwhile, Handlin has produced a delightfully readable book on an important subject...

...The tragedy, of course, is that during this very period when the idea of "race" was being destroyed by the anthropological wreckers, the worst atrocities in the history of humanity were being perpetrated by the Nazi variety of the human species in the name of "race...

...If writing books on "race" were to make one an anthropologist Grant might qualify, but he could qualify on no other grounds...

...Scientists have destroyed the popular conception of "race" to their own satisfaction, but the popular conception of "race" is still held by millions of the populace of the so-called civilized nations of the world...

...This is a charming and important essay and suggests that the problems upon which it touches would benefit from further attention...

...Nor was Grant a member of the staff of the American Museum of Natural History...

...I, at least, have never read a dull book on the subject of race and nationality, but I have read many bad ones...

...Except for these two slips Handling book is in every way thoroughly reliable, ably criticizing the writings and work of such persons as Grant and Laughlin...

...He was a friend of its president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who contributed a rather foolish preface to his book—on the title-page of which Grant is described as a trustee of the Museum...

...In a final chapter he opens up a new field for inquiry: the effects of returning sojourners in America to their homelands...

...Reviewed by Ashley Montagu THIS IS a rather attractively written book on a difficult but unfailingly interesting subject...

...In this book Handlin traces something of the development of the idea of "race" in American life and gives an account of the work of some of its little-known proponents...

...Credit should not be given such men for qualifications they did not possess...

...Handlin unaccountably describes Grant as "the distinguished anthropologist of the American Museum of Natural History...