December 4, 2018 • 48 mins
For some people, racism isn’t enough. They aren’t satisfied with just hating someone because of their appearance. They need a scientific justification for their bigotry. In episode 36, Robert is joined by podcast pioneer Josh Clark (Stuff You Should Know, The End of the World) to discuss the long, long chain of scientific racism.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, Hello everyone, I'm Robert Evans and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Now, my guest today who was coming
in cold to our topic is Josh Clark, post of
End of the World, a new podcast on the Stuff Network.
Uh and Stuff you Should Know. Uh not new podcast
(00:22):
on the Stuff Network, the flagship podcast. You could say,
how are you doing, Thank you very much for having
me on. I'm doing great. It's great to have you on.
So you're a bit of a science buff, would that
be fair to say? Sure? Yeah, I like science as
much as the next guy. Well, today I have prepared
a special topic for you, and it is about the
science of racism. Yeah, so we're gonna have us a
(00:44):
fun talk. Are you familiar with phrenology? I am. I.
I'm a professional phrenologist that turns out actually unsettling. I am.
I've always wanted like one of the original like phrenology busts.
You can get like knockoffs of them, but you can
just tell it to knock off a modern one, But
to find an original one that somebody used to actually
(01:05):
like diagnose things is I would love to have that. Well,
we're going to talk a lot about where some of
those busts came from. Would you tell me what your
knowledge of you know, explain to the audience sort of
what you understand as phrenology is or was phrenology From
my understanding is you could determine things about an individual
(01:25):
based on bumps on their head that are in their skull,
the shape of their skull, um just basically feeling the
person's skull. You could glean information about their character, um,
their heritage, all sorts of stuff. And of course it
was just complete in total hog quash. Yeah, and that
is a good cliffs notes of phrenology. But the real
(01:46):
story of this science, and it was seen as a
science for a long time, is much deeper and is
inextricably connected to racism, both in the past and today.
And so that's what we're gonna be talking about today.
So I wanted to get started with a little bit
of back ground though on just sort of the evolution
of scientific racism, which started out a lot earlier than
I think most people would expect. Uh, it's a long,
(02:07):
long chain and it really kicks off in the third
century b c with a guy you've probably heard of
named Aristotle. Often called the father of Western philosophy, Aristotle
was also the father of using pseudoscientific rhetoric to justify
being addict to people that he thought weren't as good
as he is now. By the time he started laying
down his theories on natural science, the whole idea of
science itself was pretty new, and Aristotle was one of
(02:29):
the first people to try and create a biological taxonomy
of animals, sorting them into categories and species. This is
fine and obviously a major underpinning of biology today, but
Aristotle couldn't resist taking his research beyond, you know, the
fact that wolves and dogs looked like they might be related,
and extending it to creating taxonomies of governments and of
human beings. So I'd like to read a quote from
(02:50):
a Washington Post article titled Aristotle father of scientific racism.
Quote In the first book of his politics, written in
the three d SPC, Aristotle uses these taxonomies to justify
the exclusion of certain people from civic life, while condemning
the predominant method of acquiring slaves in his day capturing
prisoners in war. Aristotle argues that some people are, by nature,
(03:11):
rather than circumstances, fit to be slaves. For that some
should rule and others should be ruled is a thing
not only necessary but expedient from the hour of their birth.
Some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. Not
only were some people slaves by nature, but it was
clear that for them quote slavery is both expedient and right.
He wrote. So that's Aristotle three, um, and you can
(03:34):
see how. You can see why Aristotle was a popular
philosopher among some of the Confederate intellectual nobility in the
eighteen sixties. I think it's obvious where that comes from.
So Aristotle's ideal society would have had a strict hierarchy.
Each type of human fulfilled a certain role and contributed
to a perfect hole as long as nobody got too
big for their bridges and decided, for example, that they
(03:56):
didn't really want to be a slave. Um. So it's
not fair to call arist Attle a racist in the
same way we think of a guy like David Duke,
Because obviously the idea of whiteness hadn't been invented yet.
Aristotle's categories weren't based on anything We recognize as race
by the modern sort of definitions of racism. But it
had an impact on everything that descended after it, and
it was sort of the start of a chain of
(04:17):
scientists really trying to find ways to justify the biases
in their cultures using sort of scientific method that was,
you know, evolving in their day. Carolus Linnaeus, an eighteenth
century naturalist known as the father of taxonomy, sorted human
beings too, but unlike Aristotle, he sorted them into different
races rather than just dividing up society into different classes
(04:37):
of people. Linnaeus believed that the four varieties of human
being were European, American, Asiatic, and African. Petras Camper, a
Dutch anatomy professor in the late eighteenth century, considered Greeks
to be the highest form of human being because of
their statues were really sexy. So he ranked different varieties
of human being by how far their faces varied from
Greek statutes, which is kind of a whimsical added you
(05:00):
towards racism, that's the one you come up with him
and do a little twiral and celebration after these guys
statues are so hot, they must be the perfect human beings.
Look at those ads. Yeah. Uh. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a
German scientist, invented the phrase Caucasian in seventeen. He believed
Caucasians were the quote original race of human being and
(05:22):
also the most beautiful. In the mid eighteen hundreds, and
American anthropologist named Samuel Morton theorized that intelligence and brain
sized were linked. So it was into this sort of
intellectual atmosphere that Franz Joseph Gall was born in seventeen
fifty eight. Have you ever heard of Gall? Yeah, but
I don't know what he did. I just heard the name.
He did some good, very useful stuff in terms of
(05:43):
like studying the brain, and so he was one of
the first guys to really lockdown that the brain was
sort of the locust of thought and whatnot, because that,
you know, was a controversial idea for a while. That's
a big one. He unfortunately made a couple of intellectual
leaps too far. He came to believe that the brain
had multiple agans that were each responsible for different personality traits.
On one hand, knowing what we know now about say
(06:04):
the hippocampus and memory, or the frontal lobe and thought,
you know, it might seem like he wasn't that far
off from the truth, considering he was working in eighteen
o five. But he leapt from that to claiming that
the different shapes of human skulls correspond into the shapes
of the brain inside, and so you could determine aspects
of a person's character without knowing that person, just by
(06:25):
measuring their head. So that isn't that a trend that
we're starting to see here. It's basically like, um, you
start out scientifically maybe or with a with a good idea,
and then it just takes a hard left turn to
but I think you look differently from me, and therefore
I'm superior to you. Yeah, you start out being like, oh, wow,
dogs and people are different things, so we should try
(06:46):
to figure out like how to categorize them. And then
you're like, well, but this guy who has to clean
up everything in the street and doesn't get to do
what he wants has to be different from me. Otherwise
it's terrible that I'm making him do this. So he's
got to be a different kind of thing too. Absolutely, yeah,
I think that's how it works. So in eighteen hundred,
Frands Joseph Gall invented cranioscopy, a method of determining someone's
(07:08):
personality by measuring their head. Cranioscopy would eventually come to
be known as phrenology. Uh, this is there, we go,
We're into it now. Gall and his early followers in
Europe weren't motivated primarily by racism. It didn't appear to
be much of a factor at all. In the early
days of their research. The early phrenologists and Gall focused
mostly on criminals. During a lecture tour across western Europe,
(07:31):
he visited prisons and quote gave the most convincing proofs
of his ability to discover at first sight such malefactors, thieves,
and men of particular talents as were amongst the convicts
and prisoners. So he's going into jails and being like, oh,
you can tell by this guy's head that he was
destined to do the stuff that he's you know, and
look at the size of those knuckles too. I wouldn't
trust the knuckles alone, let alone his head shots. Now,
(07:54):
you see, knuckles seems like a more reasonable thing to measure,
because if someone's got real callous knuckles, they're probably doing
too much punching, right, you know, it's interesting that he
went and looked at criminals. I mean, I guess if
you're trying to separate the good from the bad, um,
that's a good place to start his prison. But from
what I understand, that eventually kind of translated over to
(08:16):
a lot of the fields of forensic science, like the
basis of forensic science. I think phrenology was one of
the forensic sciences A regional Yeah, I mean, he isn't
really one of the very first people looking at crime
and criminals and the causes of crime in a scientific way. Unfortunately,
he's sort of working backwards from Okay, this guy is
a murderer, and he's got a head shaped like this,
(08:36):
which means anybody with a head that has a bump
here has a murder lobe in their brain. You know that.
That's what we call over generalizing in the scientific community. Yeah,
you know, we didn't start out being good at science.
It's it's been a bit of a learning process for
the whole species. It's fair to say that. So racism
crept slowly into Gaul's work as his ideas evolved. He
(08:57):
began to classify certain groups of Asian people as inclined
to quote theft and ruse by the shapes of their skulls.
Several groups of Indians, like subcontinental Indians, were described as
inherently quote cruel, superstitious, and stupid. Gall's protege, Johan Spurzheim,
came to believe in the destructiveness of Caribbean islanders. Now,
the Catholic Church was an early opponent of Gall's ideas,
(09:19):
not because they were concerned about the racism, but because
they thought that the idea of the human mind having
a physical location was horribly offensive and probably inspired by
the devil. So the Catholic churches on the right side
of this, but for the wrong reasons. It sounds right, Yeah,
so it sounds like the Catholic Church. Yeah, while there
are reasons for doing so differed. Mainstream scientists at the
time also offered a great deal of resistance to Gall's ideas,
(09:41):
mainly because he was unable to present any sort of,
you know, empirical proof for anything that he said. Uh So,
a lot of scientists are pointing out the problems in
his research as he starts off, So I'm sure he
retorted with, well, look at the shape of your head.
You wouldn't know anything. You're clearly too dumb to understand
my ideas. You've got the head of an idiot, I
can tell look at that bump. So yeah. Gulls science
(10:04):
picked up the name phrenology and almost immediately became known
as a haven for con artists and Charlottean's who would
travel from town to town in Europe, offering, for example,
to advise parents on what type of thing their children
should go to school to specialize in based on the
shape of their skull. They would also testify and whether
or not a condemned man should be shown leniency, so
you could essentially say like, oh, you know, this might
have been a crime of passion because he doesn't have
(10:26):
the skull of a murderer, or, as was probably more
often the case, this guy should stay in prison forever
because the shape of his skull means he can't be rehabilitated.
We can tell that he's just got the brain of
a criminal. It's the size of a watermelon and the shape. Now.
Gall was eventually run out of Austria as a result of,
you know, the fact that phrenology acquired a reputation as
(10:47):
a conman science. He moved to France and eighteen o five,
and in eighteen o eight, the Institute of France subjected
phrenology to a scientific committee, which concluded that it was
basically hogwash. Now, one source I've read said that was
secretly because the Emperor Napoleon hated phrenology, And this source
says that Napoleon hated phrenology because he let Gall phrenologize
(11:07):
his head, and Gall apparently concluded that Napoleon was not
as great as Napoleon thought he was. That's not the
smartest phrenology move you could have gotten. You really should
probably flatter Napoleon, right, you can come across that one
bump you keep to yourself when you're when you're feeling
Napoleon's head, Yeah, eighteen o five, He's a really good
guy to be on the good side of. Now, it
(11:30):
is possible that that's not fair to Napoleon. I found
a book written by the wife of the governor of
Paris at the time, and she spent a significant amount
of time in Napoleon's company and also met Gall. Her
explanation of why Napoleon soured on phrenology seems a lot
more reasonable, and she also has a story of Gall
trying to diagnose her son, So I'm going to read
some of her writing. Quote as to Dr Gall, he
(11:51):
Napoleon despised him and had no faith in his system.
He was just then beginning in France to acquire a
great reputation, which he has left behind him. I had
reached Dr Gall in his arrival in France, for as
the wife of the Governor of Paris, I thought it
my duty to show attention to a man who was
reputed to have made great and useful discoveries in science.
One day, when he was dining at my house, I
requested him to examine the head of my little son,
who was then six weeks old. The child was brought in,
(12:13):
his cap was taken off, and the doctor, after an
attentive examination of his little head, said, in a solemn voice,
this child will be a great mathematician. This prediction has
certainly not been verified. My eldest son, on the contrary,
possesses a brilliant and poetic imagination. It is possible that
he might have been a mathematician had he been forced
into that study. But certainly the natural bent of his
mind would never have led him to calculations in the
(12:35):
solution of problems. So according to this lady, Napoleon basically
hated phrenology because he thought it was going to lead
to something terrible, and in fact, if her depiction is accurate,
Napoleon actually kind of predicted what's going to come next.
In the story, she quotes Napoleon as saying, quote, a
man like Dr Gall is good for something. At least,
(12:56):
I think I shall establish for him a professor's chair,
so that he may teach his system in all of
the basically colleges of Paris. Uh. It may then be
ascertained as soon as a child comes into the world
what he is destined to be, and if he should
have the organs of murder or theft very strongly marked,
he may be immediately drowned, as the Greeks used to
drown the crooked legged and the hunchbacked. So essentially, Napoleon
said that Gall's ideas were destructive of order in law,
(13:18):
that they would lead to children being judged before they'd
done anything and punished for the shape of their skulls.
Basically like like a nineteenth century minority report. Yeah, exactly, exactly,
so woke. Napoleon did not get on board phrenology. That's
that's impressive. I had no idea. Yeah, you know, he's
not a dumb man and clearly saw some problems in
this science, which will become clearer as we continue to
(13:40):
talk about its history. So the first country where gall
saw success with phrenology then was not Austria, where he
was educated, or France where he came to live. It
was England. The early eighteen hundreds were a time of
wild expansion in the British Empire. The British East India
Company conquered huge swaths of India and Southeast Asia, and
spread from the east to the west coast of Canada.
(14:01):
The Empire grew by leaps and bounds, and as it
did and needed a good way to justify its dominance
over increasingly vast chunks of humanity. Phrenology was seen as
establishing scientifically the inferiority of British colonial subjects, particularly at
first the Irish, because obviously the shapes of Irish people
skulls mean that they need to be run by the British.
(14:21):
Other great minds of Europe jumped on phrenology and the
chance to justify colonialism. Doctor Jean Bordon concluded that it
was Europe's destiny to educate and conquer the quote less
intelligent races, many of which he considered intermediates between humans
and apes. Hubert Laverne, a prominent nineteenth century physician, built
on the methods pioneered by Dr Gall to establish the
quote immutability of the Jewish type. As the eighteen twenties
(14:44):
roared on, the Phrenological Journal warned that British soldiers ought
not marriy members of more primitive races in their domains,
lest they, you know, essentially weaken the intellect of the
British people. By the late eighteen twenties, the science of
phrenology found a second welcoming home in the United States.
In the early eighteen thirties, abolition had caught on like
wildfire in Europe and was starting to catch on in
(15:05):
parts of the United States. Great Britain Band slavery in
eighteen thirty three, so American slave owners were eager for
a science that could justify their continued subjugation and you know,
enslavement of African people's. They also were looking for a
science that could sort of justify their extermination of the
Native Americans, and obviously, phrenology offered them a really good
(15:26):
excuse to do that, because you know, if you're saying
on one end that all human beings are human beings,
then it's horrible to do all the things that we
were doing. But if if some people, by their skulls
just can't reason or whatever, then yeah, it's reasonable that
you would you would have to hold them in bondage.
So I think it's the I think, if I mean
cutting for a second, think exact same thing that was
(15:48):
being done prior to science. Um, I'm making scare quotes
um coming into justify subjugation and colonization. Before that, it
was that um, Native Americans that were being encountered by
explorers in the fifteenth century and sixteenth century, they didn't
have souls, they weren't humans. So this is just a
(16:08):
variation on that theme with kind of like a scientific
gleam to it. You know, like the Irish have a
certain kind of head, so the British can subjugate them,
or the Spanish can subjugate the Seminoles. It's the exact
same thing. It's just science based rather than you know,
religious based. Yeah, and that that's sort of what was
necessary in this era because this is really a time
(16:31):
when religion is less and less sort of the You
can't justify your political actions of your nations just by religion,
you know. It's it's too late in the game to
justify a crusade essentially that way. And so if you
look at like the spread of the British Empire, when
the East India companies first started taking land in India,
they weren't conquering land. They were basically saying that, like,
(16:52):
well know, these princes have asked for our help, so
in exchange for lending them use of our military, we're
getting certain rights. And as the British Empire did more
and more just straight up conquering, you know, they needed
some sort of reason to justify it. And so, yeah,
this is in a way, it's very true that um
people have always found a way to sort of push
aside the humanity of the people they screw over. But
(17:15):
this was a way to do that while still pretending
that we're getting more enlightened and we're we're on board
with science. Um Plus, it was new and shiny. It
dazzled a lot of people's mind. It's very shiny, and
instead of like, you know, it didn't seem hateful when
some doctor takes out a skull and explains to you
why an Irishman is different from an Englishman, or why
(17:36):
a Cherokee is different from a Caucasian American. You know
that doesn't seem hateful, which I think a lot of
people were starting to feel guilty about hate, and being
able to sort of justify it with science was attractive.
So Francis gall died in leaving his protege Spurzheim as
the head of the phrenology movement. Spurs Time traveled to
(17:58):
the United States in eighteen thirty two to lecture American
thinkers on this exciting new science that would give them
a reason to keep their slaves beyond the fact that
they just didn't like working. Americans took to phrenology like
a bat takes to sleeping upside down. Spurs Time's lectures
were wildly popular among the intellectual set. Phrenology was not
accepted wholesale, though, as this poem written in a local
newspaper makes clear, quote, great man of skulls, I must
(18:22):
let loose my pin against you. More's the pity, for
surely you have played the deuce among the noodles of
the city. I won't malignantly assail your fame and say
you mean to joke us. But faith, I can't make
header tail of all this mystic hocus pocus. Yeah, I
missed the days when people through shade and poems in
the neaper, in the newspaper. Whatever happened to that. Uh,
(18:45):
it may have just been this for this particular person
at one time. That Yeah, I don't know. I feel
like there was an age where you could where people
really appreciated a good poem or limerick, and that was
It does seem like the middle of the twenties century
was the last time funny joking rhymes were popular, like
(19:06):
Alan Sherman songs and stuff like that. You know. Yeah,
it's just I guess now we have rapped. Maybe that's it,
Like hip hop took the place right, but it's not jokey.
Yeah really, you know, Yeah, it's a jokey aspect or
the whimsical aspect of it that that is really newspaper centric. Yeah,
any poets out there listening, start contributing political poems to newspapers.
(19:29):
Bring it back to the public life. Now we're going
to get back when talk about sort of how phrenology
continued to spread across the United States and how it
was used to justify both sides of America's abolition debate.
And then we're going to get into a number of
other horrifying things, including the growing bone industry that was
created by sort of phrenologies peculiarities. But first, speaking of industries,
(19:53):
it's time for some ads and we're back. So we
just read a cheeky little poem about Phrenologe and we
talked about sort of how spurs him. The protege of
phrenologies and venture Gaul, you know, had traveled to the
United States to start lecturing. He did that in eighteen
thirty two. But he he didn't last long. He died
(20:14):
in Boston a few months after he arrived in America.
And his death was yeah, well, I mean it was
eighteen thirty two. People died for no reason back then,
or or the Irish found out what he'd been saying
about them. He didn't make it out of Boston a lot. Yeah,
Boston's a bad place to talk about how Irish people
have bad skulls. And the same man who told Napoleon
he was like, man, well this is his protegee. But yeah,
(20:37):
I'm sure Napoleon didn't like this guy either, um So
spurs Time's death in Boston was sort of seen as
spurring the phrenology movement to popularity in the United States.
The entirety of Harvard Medical Schools teaching staff showed up
at his funeral. He was called a prophet. In general,
there was an attitude that phrenology was a scientific leap,
akin to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Now people really
(21:00):
up this seriously, and scientists took this seriously. At this point,
these ideas haven't really spread to the common man much, right.
This is just something that like, especially in America, educated
people are really into. Now. With gall and Spursheim dead,
the phrenology movement temporarily lacked a figurehead, and so instepped
doctor Charles Calledwell, a slave owner from Kentucky who fell
in love with phrenology while visiting Paris in the eighteen twenties.
(21:22):
Despite being a doctor, Caldwell didn't actually have a medical
practice for the last fifty years of his life. Unlike
doctor's galland Spursheim, he did no actual research. Primarily, he
lectured about phrenology, and when he lectured about phrenology, he
was mainly lecturing about why black people should be owned
by white people. Thanks to called Well, American phrenology took
off like a bullet in the eighteen thirties and forties.
(21:43):
Uh Here's how. An article I found in the Historical
Journal by James Poskett described Dr. Caldwell's life as a
phrenological advocate. Every spring, Charles Caldwell set off from his
hometown in Kentucky, traveling down the Mississippi River by paddle
steamer before finally arriving in New Orleans. Once there, he
would unpack his election of phrenological busts, ready to begin
his annual lecture tour at the New Orleans Lyceum. The
(22:05):
Governor of Louisiana listed attentively, whilst the local organizing committee
praised Calledwell for his highly intellectual and interesting exposition of
the philosophy of the human mind. Following Caldwell's initial tours
in the eighteen twenties, white Southerners took an increasing interest
in phrenology. Called Well even complained of competition from a
tenerant lecturers in Louisiana. Local enthusiast in Alabama also printed
(22:26):
an account of a Negro boy exhibiting exceptional mathematic ability.
Despite describing the young slave as a living wonder, the
authors proceeded to offer the boy's skull as a valuable
acquisition to any phrenological collection. One phrenologist even admitted to
acquiring the skull of a slave who had been struck
on the head with an axe by his master. In
the South, phrenology and violence when hand in hand. So
(22:49):
even at this point in the eighteen twenties, people who
get interested in phrenology are picking out living slaves like
this little black boy who's apparently good at math, and saying, oh,
we should take his skull when he dies while he's
still alive, sort of marking out that, like, oh, that
would be an interesting skull to measure. It's further com
modifying people's bodies because of sort of the value of
(23:11):
these skulls as scientific aids or whatever. I'm starting to
see where you're going, and I'm getting a little uncomfortable. Yeah,
none of these podcasts ever go in a good direction. Uh,
and this one is going to be no exception to that.
It's it just gets more and more terrible. I mean,
as a little bit of a spoiler, we wind up
at the Rwandan genocide. So yeah. In eighteen thirty eight,
(23:33):
on a trip back to Paris, doctor Caldwell met a
French phrenologist named Pierre du Mortier. Now do Martier had
just spent three years traveling around the world and collecting skulls.
He and called Well spent long days hanging out at
the muse A dephrenology in Paris, feeling for bumps on
the skulls of dead Tahitians and Africans and assorted other
non white people's. They made wild pronouncements about what these
bumps meant about the characteristics of these races. Most excitingly,
(23:55):
from a standpoint of outrageous racism. Calldwell found that areas
in the top and back of the skull of Africans
which corresponded he said, to veneration and cautiousness were enlarged
in Africans. During an exchange of letters, one of his
colleagues noted, quote, they are slaves because they are tamable.
Called Well replied, depend upon it, my good friend. The
(24:16):
Africans must have a master. Now, doctor Calledwell, is evidence
of a type of asshole that I don't think we
talk about quite enough. When we talk about slavery in
the United States, usually slaveholders are just portrayed as like
wildly cruel, whip happy bigots, almost comedically monstrous individuals. And
while what was going on was monstrous in every case,
I think it's important that we remember that a lot
(24:38):
of these slave owners were mild mannered people who found
ways to justify owning human beings. It was clearly important
to doctor Calledwell that he'd be seen as kind, generous,
and almost parental to the people he owned. In letters
to his abolitionist friends, he wrote things like, my slaves
live much more comfortably than I do. So called Well
(24:58):
was someone who was not comfortable with owning another human being.
He needed this sort of science as a justification for
his slavery. He needed to feel like what I'm doing
isn't wrong, what I'm doing is necessary. Yeah, that's that's
an important nuance, because nobody wants to feel like a
bad guy. You know, none of these people are mustache
(25:18):
twirling villains. They want to feel like a good person.
I think that's important to understand if you understand how
this lasted so long in the United States. I think
another way to put it to is that their conscience
has started nagging at them. Yeah, I think you're right.
I think a guy like called Well, clearly educated enough,
something about this must have bothered him, which is why
I think he would have sought out phrenology and found
(25:41):
it almost like a breath of fresh air as he
starts to realize how messed up the system of slavery is.
And I should note that a lot of doctor Calledwell's
abolitionist friends were phrenologists. To the two things were not
mutually exclusive, and actually many abolitionists in America were phrenologists
as well, and in fact justified their abolitionism via frenolog
g One such man was George Comb. He was a
(26:03):
friend of doctor Caldwell, a phrenologist, but he was an abolitionist.
During the nineteenth century, combs books on natural science actually
outsold Charles Darwin's. The reason you haven't heard about Comb
is that he wrote heavily about phrenology, which we now
know his nonsense. Uh. He and called Well we're friends,
or at least friendly, and they wound up on opposite
sides of the slavery issue. So comman Calledwell wrote many
letters to each other, actually debating, you know whether or
(26:25):
not it was okay to keep slaves. So we have
evidence of how their ideas on the matter evolved over time.
We know that Calledwell attempted to convince his friend that
Africans were born to be slaves. I'm going to quote
from paper titled Phrenology, Correspondence and the Global Politics of Reform.
Quote invoking the idea of an omnipotent creator common to
Southern arguments against abolition, Calledwell suggested to Comb that by
(26:48):
original organization and therefore radically and irredeemably, the African is
an inferior race. Nothing short of the power that made
them can never raise them to an equality with the Caucasian.
For Caldwell, it was the large animal organs low kid
at the back of the head which rendered Africans unfit
for freedom. In a long letter to Comb on this subject,
Caldwell drew repeated parallels between animals and slaves, writing that
(27:08):
by good pasture and feeding, you may increase the size
of your horses and cows, but you cannot bestow upon
them the bulk of the rhinoceros or the elephant. In
another letter, Caldwell's wrote that he found the difference between
Africans and Caucasians to be much greater than the difference
in organization between the dog and the wolf, or between
the fox and the jackal. Yet they are acknowledged to
differ in species. Abolitionists could not hope to change either
(27:30):
the Ethiopian skin or the leopard spots. In conclusion, called
Will argued, the Africans must have a master. Now what's
interesting about this to me is that Comb didn't disagree
with Caldwell in any of his scientific conclusions about the
skulls of people who weren't white. Comb was just as
racist as his friend. But where Caldwell saw Africans as
unfit for freedom, Comb saw them as so inherently docile
(27:53):
and simple minded that it was cruel to keep them
as slaves, writing quote, the qualities which make them submit
to slavery are a guarantee that, if emancipated and justly
dealt with, they would not shed blood. So there's this
debate we have in the United States about our founding fathers,
most of whom were not abolitionists, and many of whom
were slave owners, most of whom were slave owners. On
one hand, there are people who say that any slave
(28:14):
owner was a bad person and this is my attitude.
Other people will argue that while everyone was very racist
back then, and you can't judge people three years ago
by the terms of modern morality, and I think called
Well and Comb's argument proves that you can grow up
in a racist age and believe racist things because those
are the popular beliefs of the era, and still wind
up on the right side historically of an issue like slavery.
(28:37):
Comb was a racist, but he's still opposed slavery. Called
Well was a racist too, but he supported slavery because
I think he was just a worse person than Comb.
So yeah, I don't know. That's that's an interesting moral
point to me, the way that you can kind of
see the inherent moral character in both people. So despite
both growing up in a racist era and both growing
(28:58):
up sort of enthrall to these ideas, Comb still had
enough of a decent person inside him. He was like, no,
slavery is just not okay, right, right, I think, you know,
like it's it's kind of a prickly um topic of
conversation whether you can hold people in an era accountable
when everybody in an era was, you know, thought a
(29:20):
certain way, and you were raised to think a certain way,
but I think it is particularly with slavery. It's, um,
it's such a horrific concept in such a horrific thing
in reality as well that the very fact that there
was such a thing as abolitionists, there were such a
thing as people who were opposed to slavery in the
context of a slave holding era of United States, I
(29:44):
think you can't hold the people who were ardent slaveholders
accountable or anybody who held slaves accountable for holding slaves. Yeah,
and especially when you start talking about like the guys
who founded the country, you know, most of them were
slave owners, but not all of them. Was the guy
who wrote common sense, Thomas Payne. Thomas Payne was a
lifelong abolitionist, was never okay with slavery. And so it's
(30:08):
not a matter of the fact that like, well, no,
they all believed this thing, because you know, I'm sure
Thomas Payne would not qualify as woke on racial issues
by twenty first century standards, but he had He was
clearly a good person because he wasn't willing to accept
this system. Um. And you have a guy like Benjamin
Franklin who did own slaves for a period of time
(30:28):
and then, as an older man, had a friend who
ran essentially a home for orphaned children, and he met
a couple of young black children at that home and
realized that he had been wrong his entire life and
became an abolitionist near the end of his life. Um
so again, Yeah, even within these guys, like you can
see who was a decent person and not. And it's
(30:50):
the people who came around on the issue who recognized that,
you know, whatever else they might may have believed, it's
not okay to own people. What do you think that
isn't in somebody that even amid everybody else thinking that
something is fine or acceptable or right or whatever you
want to call it, that you can still see that
something's wrong when it's actually wrong. Like what is that?
(31:11):
Is that how you're raised? Are you born with that
level of character? What do you think of it? I
don't know. That's a really fascinating and an important question.
You know. The morality is to an extent dependent upon
the time. Like you look at um World War two, uh,
and it's clear that one side was better than the other,
even though both sides were willing to consider civilians an
(31:32):
acceptable target in warfare, which is not a thing that
we think is okay today. But you know, it's a
matter of like what one side was fighting for versus
what the other side was fighting for, and the Allies
were fighting for something a lot better. I don't know.
It's tougher when we go further back in time, and
you know, you talk about like the Roman Empire, where
it was just accepted that like, oh no, when you
sack a city, you burned that city to the ground.
(31:52):
The women are going to get raped, the young men
are going to get killed. That's just how we do war.
And then you run into a guy like Spartacus. He's
a really fat stating case because he's one of these
clear examples you've get of someone with a really strong
and really modern moral compass a couple of thousand years ago,
because he's leading the slave revolt against the Roman Empire,
and he and all of the people who are in
(32:13):
the revolt have been horrifically brutally treated by the Romans,
and yet as they're beating these Roman legions and rampaging
through Italy, he refuses to attack Roman towns. He refuses
to let his army sack towns or punish the people
who had been holding them as slaves. He's just trying
to escape, which is yes, some people, some people have
that enough of I don't know what it is. Yeah, yeah,
(32:36):
I guess if we could answer that, we would be
pretty far along. We would be philosophers like Aristotle, and
thus we would also be racists faces on the status.
I do think there's something about like when you talk
about a guy like Benjamin Franklin who was willing to
admit that he'd been wrong and taking part in a
(32:56):
bad system his whole life and try to change it
once he realized he'd been wrong. I think one aspect
of being a good person is being willing to admit that.
Number one, there's no privileged position in history. Just because
something is normal and accepted by your culture doesn't mean
it's okay. And also that just because you've done something
your whole life doesn't mean you have to defend it reflexively.
(33:18):
You can recognize your mistakes and try to be better.
I don't know, I think that's an important aspect. Yeah,
So phrenology, we're talking about Caldwell and Combe, who were
both wound up on different sides of the abolition argument,
in spite of the fact that they were both phrenologists.
Phrenology you wound up to also have an impact on
US policy towards Native Americans in the eighteen thirties and forties,
(33:40):
a time when the US was expanding rapidly and taking
away a lot of land it had previously promised to
Native tribes. People didn't want to feel like they were
bad for supporting the government stealing land from Native people,
so they needed a justification for why the US government
was continually screwing over Native Americans. Enter Samuel Morton. Now.
Morton was the author of an eighteen thirty nine book
(34:01):
called Crania Americana, which included detailed drawings of skulls and
assessments of the mental capacities of the various peoples of
North America. Now, the article includes an excerpt from Crania America,
and it's pretty racist. It looks like what you'd expect
from a pre Civil War text book, but somehow it's
even worse than I would have guessed. I don't know
if you're gonna be able to see this over the webcam. Yeah,
(34:21):
just to describe this for the readers, this is a
page that has the top appears to be a picture
of a Greek or Roman statue clearly representing a Caucasian.
The middle picture is a very offensive caricature of a
black man, and then the bottom is a monkey, And
the clear inference is that the skulls of the black
man and the monkey are more similar than they are
(34:42):
to the skulls of the white man. Well. Plus also
just even how it's laid out on the page with
the Caucasian statue at the top exactly, there's a lot
of a lot in that visual right there. Yeah, and
then there's even more racist drawings of black people to
the right of it. It's very racist. Uh, it is
like the picture of scientific racism. So Morton and Crania
(35:04):
Americana divided North America's human beings into four separate species,
including whites, Native Americans, and Africans. He rejected the idea
that people's environment and culture might have any impact on
the way they looked or think, and instead decried that
when it came to Native Americans quote, the structure of
his mind appears to be different from that of the
white man. I found a lovely article on this on
(35:26):
Vassar University's Real Archaeology blog. Quote. His study of schools
concluded that Native American minds were different from that of
the white man, and was cited in articles targeted at
Western settlers and encountering Native Americans. One article stated that
Native Americans were adverse to cultivation, slow and acquiring knowledge.
This view of Native American existence in society is not
conducive to industrialization and progress helped justify Andrew Jackson's Indian
(35:50):
removal policies and allowed Western settlers to continue taking land
of Native Americans. Now, this is the point at which
phrenology starts to spread outside of educated slave owners arguing
with their northern friends and trying to like, you know,
and spreads to the common man. So the average guy
on the street starts to get especially the average white
(36:10):
guy on the street, starts to get an understanding of
phrenology at this point. We did a two part episode
on the Trail of Tears starring Andrew Jackson, and he
was a huge prism for that kind of thinking into
into popular culture in America because he was a huge
populist president. But one of the platforms that he used
(36:31):
to justify the removal of Native Americans was that they
were getting in the way of forward progress. Of the
United States. There was all about pushing westward and starting
to build railroads and using the timber for industry and money,
and the Native Americans were doing nothing with this land,
so we need to just move them and and move
(36:51):
through them exactly. And you can see how phrenology would
be useful in terms of making that argument in a
way that doesn't make you feel like a terrible person
for making it, because it's one thing to have to say,
you know, oh, they don't want the same kind of
progress we want, because then you have to argue about, well,
you know what aspects of there maybe is is maybe
the way they're doing it, you know, better than the
way we're doing it. Why is our way right? And
(37:13):
instead you're saying no, no, no, no. Because of these physical,
scientific reasons, they're not capable of civilizing themselves, and so
it's our duty to push them. And this is what
the science says. So yeah, this is very much sort
of And again it's not to say Andrew Jackson would
have been nice to the Cherokee or any other Native
(37:34):
tribes if phrenology hadn't come around, but it gave it
provided an ideological justification for what was happening, which I
do think is important. Now I read one article from
a Cambridge PhD student that defined Crania Americana Morton's book
as undoubtedly the most important work in the history of
scientific racism. With its detailed illustrations and scientific appearance, Crania
(37:55):
Americana was exactly the kind of work necessary to make
phrenology and the entire idea of race bay science go
viral across the world for the very first time. Quote
Within a few years, Crania Americana had been read in Britain, France, Germany,
Russia and India. James Cowls Pritchard, the founding father of
British anthropology, described it as exemplary, whilst Charles Darwin considered
(38:15):
more than an authority on the subject of race. Later
in the nineteenth century, other European scholars produced imitations with
titles including Crania Britannica and Crannia Germanica. So only a
few copies of this book wherever printed. Morton paid the
modern equivalent of around fifty dollars to even have a
run of his book printed, and the copies cost around
two months wages for an average person, so only institutions
(38:38):
were able to afford these books, but the whole idea
behind Crannia Americana was too good for the yellow press
to ignore. Cheap dime store magazines and newspapers ran spreads
on it, including crude copies of Morton's illustrations. So this
is how, for the first time, phrenological science spread to
the common man and the common woman. Quote in eighteen forty,
(38:59):
the Ladies were Post a Tory, a magazine from Methodist
women in Ohio, quoted Morton in an article entitled Man.
The author described Native Americans as adverse to cultivation and
slow and acquiring knowledge. For white settlers living to the west,
this was exactly what they wanted to hear. Crania Americana
was published just as the remaining Shawnee peoples of Ohio
were forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River. Yeah, so
(39:22):
it's worth noting that phrenology was not initially accepted by
the European literati. The scientific establishment continued to Harvard doubts
about whether or not it was nonsense, but the sheer
popularity of newsletters and journals in that era, and the
expansion of the global post through which people at Caldwell
and Comb could work out their ideas without pesky peer review.
Meant that ideas behind phrenology spread through the common classes
(39:43):
even when they met with resistance from the scientific establishment.
It's a little bit like how the Internet has affected
the spread of misinformation. You know, prior to this era
where you can send a letter to France and know
that you're going to get a letter back, ideas only
spread if you were to get your books published in
Universe season the universe. Other universities would buy that book
and there'd be lecturing tours. Now people can spread their
(40:06):
ideas via mail and via newsletters, and so people who
are living on the prairie in the middle of nowhere
can get a magazine with drawings of different people's skulls
and read about this thing that you know, fifty years
ago would never have gotten off of Harvard's campus. Plus also,
and right then seeing that picture, seeing that smart people
that we venerate and pay lots of money to our
(40:27):
saying these things immediately exonerated any feelings of guilt that
that person might have had about how they felt or
how they were treating these people whose land they were stealing.
Exactly exactly. It's this kind of thing where and I
think this is a really important dimension that we don't
often get to history. We hear about the terrible things
that happened, but you know, people who are watching the
(40:47):
forced relocation of the Native Americans, the white settlers, who
would have seen aspects of the trail of tears. Some
of those people may have been sociopaths, but most of them.
You watch human being suffering that way, and it does
something to you. You need a lot of justification to
sort of ignore the terrible things that you're seeing. Um.
I think it's the same with slavery. Now we're going
(41:09):
to uh continue to talk about sort of how phrenology
spread through the post and how it became a global
science and wound up being sort of one of the
underpinnings of the idea of colonialism. But first we're going
to talk about products and services. So yeah, here's some
ads and we're back. Those were some lovely ads. Uh
(41:38):
oh yeah, yeah, yeah, really good. Better than phrenology. I'm
gonna go ahead and say that all of the products
that support us are better than phrenology, which is a
low bar. So let's get back into it. Phrenology was
not initially accepted by European you know scientists. The high
ranks of sort of like the British loved it, but
out on the continent it was not very popular this
(42:00):
sientific establishment. Harvard Grave doubts about whether or not it
was nonsense, but the sheer popularity of newsletters and journals
in that area in the mid eighteen hundreds and the
expansion of the global post allowed it to spread like wildfire.
And in fact, when phrenology adherents were forced to defend
their super new, super racist science, they often argued that,
in essence, how could it be bullshit if it was
so popular, I'd like to read another quote from that
(42:22):
historical journal article and phrenology in the post quote. For
these nineteenth century materialists, the global was also a guarantee
of truth. Com made this explicit when he challenged Thomas Stone,
one of the foremost critics of phrenology in Edinburgh, to
explain how a false science could have so quickly spread
over Europe and taken root in Asia and America. According
to Comb, nothing but the force of truth could account
(42:44):
for the emergence of phrenology as a global science. If
people are talking about it. It's got to be true, right, Yeah,
it's always worked with science. You get the people talking
and it just becomes true, exactly, exactly. That's why Twitter
has been the greatest tool for the spread of truth
in in human history. Yeah, and it's hilarious, but it
actually is true. In reality, it is true. And really,
(43:05):
I mean it's true that people's minds do work that
way because someone will see on Facebook a post that's
been shared a hundred thousand times about how m s
thirteens hiding in this migrant caravan, or something like we're
all sitting on the frontier reading our newspapers about how
one group's inferior to us, so we can feel better
about how we lock them up. Yeah, exactly like that.
People don't change. We just get like three percent smarter
(43:28):
every hundred and twenty years, or we we trance. We
go from one group to another. Okay, all right, this
group went through this horrible struggle that lasted forever and
then they were you know, beaten up and mistreated by everybody.
But now we think they're okay, let's move on to
the next group and do the same thing to them.
Rather than learn from just one group that that that
extrapolates onto every human being. Yeah, and that is that
(43:52):
is an uncomfortable reality. Like, it's not that people learn
in mass that racism is wrong. It's that they learned like, oh,
it's wrong to be raceist against the Irish, and then
they learn it's wrong to be racist against the Germans,
and then eventually they learn, oh it's wrong to be
racist against black people, but they're still racist against or
you know, maybe maybe they move beyond racist and say,
(44:13):
you know, people who live in this country are you know,
but it has nothing to do with race or whatever.
But yeah, getting people to see other people as human
beings is a big, long, uphill battle. Uh, that's been
going on. I wonder. I mean, I'd like to think
that we're eventually going to run out of others and
finally everybody will fall under, you know, the umbrella of acceptance,
(44:36):
general acceptance. I mean, I feel like if aliens show
up and they're the kind of aliens we can beat
in a fight, that might really deal the deathblow to
racism once we have another intelligent species to be racist against. Like, yeah, well,
there's nothing that gets a country together better than war,
you know, nothing gets people under the nationalists of flags
and then war. Does you know, I think if there
(44:57):
were an alien war, yes, the whole globe would come together. Yeah, exactly,
and that would be the end of one type of
racism and the beautiful beginning of a new kind of racism. Yeah. So, now,
as phrenology became a global science, it started to pick
up in popularity on the continent. They hadn't liked it
(45:19):
when you know, Gaul had been sort of going around
and measuring the skulls of convicts very much for you know,
the reasons that Napoleon stated. But they really came to
like it when it provided a justification for why Europeans
should rule Africa. That's kind of what the Europeans started
being like, Oh, okay, maybe this is true. Since we
feel like we should own everything in this continent and
(45:39):
this science seems to justify why we should own everything
in this continent, maybe we're okay with phrenology now. So,
phrenology had a mixed impact on slavery. You can really
make a good case that it further to abolition even
more than it furthered the cause of slavery. It's it's
a muddled issue, um, it definitely had a negative issue
on sort of American policy towards Native Americans, clear, but
(46:00):
phrenology had a very one sided impact on the birth
of colonialism. Because, after all, if science had proved that
some people were meant to be ruled and others to rule,
what argument could you make against the British empire scooping
up every last sliver of land they could find. Now,
when we come back on Thursday, we're going to talk
about another nation who had a love affair with phrenology, Belgium.
We're going to trace how this quirky little skull measuring
(46:22):
science helped cause one of the worst genocides in the
twentieth century to actually justified Nazi sterilization methods. And of
course we're going to talk about how capitalism and phrenology
combined to make an industry out of stealing the bones
of non white people. So that's coming up on Thursday. Josh,
you got any plug doubles you wanna plug on down
the plugging town? Sure? Yeah, you can check out s
(46:46):
Y s K podcast on Twitter and Instagram. You can
check me out. I'm Josh um Clark. I say um
a lot, So it's in my Twitter and Instagram handle.
And I started a hashtag for my series The End
of the World with Josh Clark, which you can get
everywhere you get podcasts. It's hashtag e O t W
Josh Clark. I do feel like UM is the comma
(47:06):
of the podcasting industry. Oh yeah, I just did it now.
And I wouldn't be able to get through an episode
without quite a few moms. So no, I don't know
how we would. No, No, it's it's necessary. It's better
than silence, but easier than words. All right, I'm Robert
Evans and this has been Behind the Bastards. We will
be back Thursday with part two. Until then, you can
(47:28):
find these sources for this episode on our website Behind
the Bastards dot com. You can find me on Twitter
at I right, okay, I have a book you can
find on Amazon dot com averef History of Vice. You
can find our t shirts at the public Behind the Bastards.
You get shirts, you can get phone cases, you can
get coffee mugs, you can get wraps for your hum Vy,
you can get painted coats for your machine guns. None
(47:51):
of those things you're shaking your head on. Some of these, No,
Sophie well, you can get stickers. You can put a
sticker on anything so you can cover your hum vy
and sticker, so someone by a hundred and fifty stickers,
and coda humphy and then all right, that's that's the episode.
I'm Robert Evans, and until next time, I love about
of you. H m
Mmm, Hello everyone, I'm Robert Evans and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Now, my guest today who was coming
in cold to our topic is Josh Clark, post of
End of the World, a new podcast on the Stuff Network.
Uh and Stuff you Should Know. Uh not new podcast
(00:22):
on the Stuff Network, the flagship podcast. You could say,
how are you doing, Thank you very much for having
me on. I'm doing great. It's great to have you on.
So you're a bit of a science buff, would that
be fair to say? Sure? Yeah, I like science as
much as the next guy. Well, today I have prepared
a special topic for you, and it is about the
science of racism. Yeah, so we're gonna have us a
(00:44):
fun talk. Are you familiar with phrenology? I am. I.
I'm a professional phrenologist that turns out actually unsettling. I am.
I've always wanted like one of the original like phrenology busts.
You can get like knockoffs of them, but you can
just tell it to knock off a modern one, But
to find an original one that somebody used to actually
(01:05):
like diagnose things is I would love to have that. Well,
we're going to talk a lot about where some of
those busts came from. Would you tell me what your
knowledge of you know, explain to the audience sort of
what you understand as phrenology is or was phrenology From
my understanding is you could determine things about an individual
(01:25):
based on bumps on their head that are in their skull,
the shape of their skull, um just basically feeling the
person's skull. You could glean information about their character, um,
their heritage, all sorts of stuff. And of course it
was just complete in total hog quash. Yeah, and that
is a good cliffs notes of phrenology. But the real
(01:46):
story of this science, and it was seen as a
science for a long time, is much deeper and is
inextricably connected to racism, both in the past and today.
And so that's what we're gonna be talking about today.
So I wanted to get started with a little bit
of back ground though on just sort of the evolution
of scientific racism, which started out a lot earlier than
I think most people would expect. Uh, it's a long,
(02:07):
long chain and it really kicks off in the third
century b c with a guy you've probably heard of
named Aristotle. Often called the father of Western philosophy, Aristotle
was also the father of using pseudoscientific rhetoric to justify
being addict to people that he thought weren't as good
as he is now. By the time he started laying
down his theories on natural science, the whole idea of
science itself was pretty new, and Aristotle was one of
(02:29):
the first people to try and create a biological taxonomy
of animals, sorting them into categories and species. This is
fine and obviously a major underpinning of biology today, but
Aristotle couldn't resist taking his research beyond, you know, the
fact that wolves and dogs looked like they might be related,
and extending it to creating taxonomies of governments and of
human beings. So I'd like to read a quote from
(02:50):
a Washington Post article titled Aristotle father of scientific racism.
Quote In the first book of his politics, written in
the three d SPC, Aristotle uses these taxonomies to justify
the exclusion of certain people from civic life, while condemning
the predominant method of acquiring slaves in his day capturing
prisoners in war. Aristotle argues that some people are, by nature,
(03:11):
rather than circumstances, fit to be slaves. For that some
should rule and others should be ruled is a thing
not only necessary but expedient from the hour of their birth.
Some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. Not
only were some people slaves by nature, but it was
clear that for them quote slavery is both expedient and right.
He wrote. So that's Aristotle three, um, and you can
(03:34):
see how. You can see why Aristotle was a popular
philosopher among some of the Confederate intellectual nobility in the
eighteen sixties. I think it's obvious where that comes from.
So Aristotle's ideal society would have had a strict hierarchy.
Each type of human fulfilled a certain role and contributed
to a perfect hole as long as nobody got too
big for their bridges and decided, for example, that they
(03:56):
didn't really want to be a slave. Um. So it's
not fair to call arist Attle a racist in the
same way we think of a guy like David Duke,
Because obviously the idea of whiteness hadn't been invented yet.
Aristotle's categories weren't based on anything We recognize as race
by the modern sort of definitions of racism. But it
had an impact on everything that descended after it, and
it was sort of the start of a chain of
(04:17):
scientists really trying to find ways to justify the biases
in their cultures using sort of scientific method that was,
you know, evolving in their day. Carolus Linnaeus, an eighteenth
century naturalist known as the father of taxonomy, sorted human
beings too, but unlike Aristotle, he sorted them into different
races rather than just dividing up society into different classes
(04:37):
of people. Linnaeus believed that the four varieties of human
being were European, American, Asiatic, and African. Petras Camper, a
Dutch anatomy professor in the late eighteenth century, considered Greeks
to be the highest form of human being because of
their statues were really sexy. So he ranked different varieties
of human being by how far their faces varied from
Greek statutes, which is kind of a whimsical added you
(05:00):
towards racism, that's the one you come up with him
and do a little twiral and celebration after these guys
statues are so hot, they must be the perfect human beings.
Look at those ads. Yeah. Uh. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a
German scientist, invented the phrase Caucasian in seventeen. He believed
Caucasians were the quote original race of human being and
(05:22):
also the most beautiful. In the mid eighteen hundreds, and
American anthropologist named Samuel Morton theorized that intelligence and brain
sized were linked. So it was into this sort of
intellectual atmosphere that Franz Joseph Gall was born in seventeen
fifty eight. Have you ever heard of Gall? Yeah, but
I don't know what he did. I just heard the name.
He did some good, very useful stuff in terms of
(05:43):
like studying the brain, and so he was one of
the first guys to really lockdown that the brain was
sort of the locust of thought and whatnot, because that,
you know, was a controversial idea for a while. That's
a big one. He unfortunately made a couple of intellectual
leaps too far. He came to believe that the brain
had multiple agans that were each responsible for different personality traits.
On one hand, knowing what we know now about say
(06:04):
the hippocampus and memory, or the frontal lobe and thought,
you know, it might seem like he wasn't that far
off from the truth, considering he was working in eighteen
o five. But he leapt from that to claiming that
the different shapes of human skulls correspond into the shapes
of the brain inside, and so you could determine aspects
of a person's character without knowing that person, just by
(06:25):
measuring their head. So that isn't that a trend that
we're starting to see here. It's basically like, um, you
start out scientifically maybe or with a with a good idea,
and then it just takes a hard left turn to
but I think you look differently from me, and therefore
I'm superior to you. Yeah, you start out being like, oh, wow,
dogs and people are different things, so we should try
(06:46):
to figure out like how to categorize them. And then
you're like, well, but this guy who has to clean
up everything in the street and doesn't get to do
what he wants has to be different from me. Otherwise
it's terrible that I'm making him do this. So he's
got to be a different kind of thing too. Absolutely, yeah,
I think that's how it works. So in eighteen hundred,
Frands Joseph Gall invented cranioscopy, a method of determining someone's
(07:08):
personality by measuring their head. Cranioscopy would eventually come to
be known as phrenology. Uh, this is there, we go,
We're into it now. Gall and his early followers in
Europe weren't motivated primarily by racism. It didn't appear to
be much of a factor at all. In the early
days of their research. The early phrenologists and Gall focused
mostly on criminals. During a lecture tour across western Europe,
(07:31):
he visited prisons and quote gave the most convincing proofs
of his ability to discover at first sight such malefactors, thieves,
and men of particular talents as were amongst the convicts
and prisoners. So he's going into jails and being like, oh,
you can tell by this guy's head that he was
destined to do the stuff that he's you know, and
look at the size of those knuckles too. I wouldn't
trust the knuckles alone, let alone his head shots. Now,
(07:54):
you see, knuckles seems like a more reasonable thing to measure,
because if someone's got real callous knuckles, they're probably doing
too much punching, right, you know, it's interesting that he
went and looked at criminals. I mean, I guess if
you're trying to separate the good from the bad, um,
that's a good place to start his prison. But from
what I understand, that eventually kind of translated over to
(08:16):
a lot of the fields of forensic science, like the
basis of forensic science. I think phrenology was one of
the forensic sciences A regional Yeah, I mean, he isn't
really one of the very first people looking at crime
and criminals and the causes of crime in a scientific way. Unfortunately,
he's sort of working backwards from Okay, this guy is
a murderer, and he's got a head shaped like this,
(08:36):
which means anybody with a head that has a bump
here has a murder lobe in their brain. You know that.
That's what we call over generalizing in the scientific community. Yeah,
you know, we didn't start out being good at science.
It's it's been a bit of a learning process for
the whole species. It's fair to say that. So racism
crept slowly into Gaul's work as his ideas evolved. He
(08:57):
began to classify certain groups of Asian people as inclined
to quote theft and ruse by the shapes of their skulls.
Several groups of Indians, like subcontinental Indians, were described as
inherently quote cruel, superstitious, and stupid. Gall's protege, Johan Spurzheim,
came to believe in the destructiveness of Caribbean islanders. Now,
the Catholic Church was an early opponent of Gall's ideas,
(09:19):
not because they were concerned about the racism, but because
they thought that the idea of the human mind having
a physical location was horribly offensive and probably inspired by
the devil. So the Catholic churches on the right side
of this, but for the wrong reasons. It sounds right, Yeah,
so it sounds like the Catholic Church. Yeah, while there
are reasons for doing so differed. Mainstream scientists at the
time also offered a great deal of resistance to Gall's ideas,
(09:41):
mainly because he was unable to present any sort of,
you know, empirical proof for anything that he said. Uh So,
a lot of scientists are pointing out the problems in
his research as he starts off, So I'm sure he
retorted with, well, look at the shape of your head.
You wouldn't know anything. You're clearly too dumb to understand
my ideas. You've got the head of an idiot, I
can tell look at that bump. So yeah. Gulls science
(10:04):
picked up the name phrenology and almost immediately became known
as a haven for con artists and Charlottean's who would
travel from town to town in Europe, offering, for example,
to advise parents on what type of thing their children
should go to school to specialize in based on the
shape of their skull. They would also testify and whether
or not a condemned man should be shown leniency, so
you could essentially say like, oh, you know, this might
have been a crime of passion because he doesn't have
(10:26):
the skull of a murderer, or, as was probably more
often the case, this guy should stay in prison forever
because the shape of his skull means he can't be rehabilitated.
We can tell that he's just got the brain of
a criminal. It's the size of a watermelon and the shape. Now.
Gall was eventually run out of Austria as a result of,
you know, the fact that phrenology acquired a reputation as
(10:47):
a conman science. He moved to France and eighteen o five,
and in eighteen o eight, the Institute of France subjected
phrenology to a scientific committee, which concluded that it was
basically hogwash. Now, one source I've read said that was
secretly because the Emperor Napoleon hated phrenology, And this source
says that Napoleon hated phrenology because he let Gall phrenologize
(11:07):
his head, and Gall apparently concluded that Napoleon was not
as great as Napoleon thought he was. That's not the
smartest phrenology move you could have gotten. You really should
probably flatter Napoleon, right, you can come across that one
bump you keep to yourself when you're when you're feeling
Napoleon's head, Yeah, eighteen o five, He's a really good
guy to be on the good side of. Now, it
(11:30):
is possible that that's not fair to Napoleon. I found
a book written by the wife of the governor of
Paris at the time, and she spent a significant amount
of time in Napoleon's company and also met Gall. Her
explanation of why Napoleon soured on phrenology seems a lot
more reasonable, and she also has a story of Gall
trying to diagnose her son, So I'm going to read
some of her writing. Quote as to Dr Gall, he
(11:51):
Napoleon despised him and had no faith in his system.
He was just then beginning in France to acquire a
great reputation, which he has left behind him. I had
reached Dr Gall in his arrival in France, for as
the wife of the Governor of Paris, I thought it
my duty to show attention to a man who was
reputed to have made great and useful discoveries in science.
One day, when he was dining at my house, I
requested him to examine the head of my little son,
who was then six weeks old. The child was brought in,
(12:13):
his cap was taken off, and the doctor, after an
attentive examination of his little head, said, in a solemn voice,
this child will be a great mathematician. This prediction has
certainly not been verified. My eldest son, on the contrary,
possesses a brilliant and poetic imagination. It is possible that
he might have been a mathematician had he been forced
into that study. But certainly the natural bent of his
mind would never have led him to calculations in the
(12:35):
solution of problems. So according to this lady, Napoleon basically
hated phrenology because he thought it was going to lead
to something terrible, and in fact, if her depiction is accurate,
Napoleon actually kind of predicted what's going to come next.
In the story, she quotes Napoleon as saying, quote, a
man like Dr Gall is good for something. At least,
(12:56):
I think I shall establish for him a professor's chair,
so that he may teach his system in all of
the basically colleges of Paris. Uh. It may then be
ascertained as soon as a child comes into the world
what he is destined to be, and if he should
have the organs of murder or theft very strongly marked,
he may be immediately drowned, as the Greeks used to
drown the crooked legged and the hunchbacked. So essentially, Napoleon
said that Gall's ideas were destructive of order in law,
(13:18):
that they would lead to children being judged before they'd
done anything and punished for the shape of their skulls.
Basically like like a nineteenth century minority report. Yeah, exactly, exactly,
so woke. Napoleon did not get on board phrenology. That's
that's impressive. I had no idea. Yeah, you know, he's
not a dumb man and clearly saw some problems in
this science, which will become clearer as we continue to
(13:40):
talk about its history. So the first country where gall
saw success with phrenology then was not Austria, where he
was educated, or France where he came to live. It
was England. The early eighteen hundreds were a time of
wild expansion in the British Empire. The British East India
Company conquered huge swaths of India and Southeast Asia, and
spread from the east to the west coast of Canada.
(14:01):
The Empire grew by leaps and bounds, and as it
did and needed a good way to justify its dominance
over increasingly vast chunks of humanity. Phrenology was seen as
establishing scientifically the inferiority of British colonial subjects, particularly at
first the Irish, because obviously the shapes of Irish people
skulls mean that they need to be run by the British.
(14:21):
Other great minds of Europe jumped on phrenology and the
chance to justify colonialism. Doctor Jean Bordon concluded that it
was Europe's destiny to educate and conquer the quote less
intelligent races, many of which he considered intermediates between humans
and apes. Hubert Laverne, a prominent nineteenth century physician, built
on the methods pioneered by Dr Gall to establish the
quote immutability of the Jewish type. As the eighteen twenties
(14:44):
roared on, the Phrenological Journal warned that British soldiers ought
not marriy members of more primitive races in their domains,
lest they, you know, essentially weaken the intellect of the
British people. By the late eighteen twenties, the science of
phrenology found a second welcoming home in the United States.
In the early eighteen thirties, abolition had caught on like
wildfire in Europe and was starting to catch on in
(15:05):
parts of the United States. Great Britain Band slavery in
eighteen thirty three, so American slave owners were eager for
a science that could justify their continued subjugation and you know,
enslavement of African people's. They also were looking for a
science that could sort of justify their extermination of the
Native Americans, and obviously, phrenology offered them a really good
(15:26):
excuse to do that, because you know, if you're saying
on one end that all human beings are human beings,
then it's horrible to do all the things that we
were doing. But if if some people, by their skulls
just can't reason or whatever, then yeah, it's reasonable that
you would you would have to hold them in bondage.
So I think it's the I think, if I mean
cutting for a second, think exact same thing that was
(15:48):
being done prior to science. Um, I'm making scare quotes
um coming into justify subjugation and colonization. Before that, it
was that um, Native Americans that were being encountered by
explorers in the fifteenth century and sixteenth century, they didn't
have souls, they weren't humans. So this is just a
(16:08):
variation on that theme with kind of like a scientific
gleam to it. You know, like the Irish have a
certain kind of head, so the British can subjugate them,
or the Spanish can subjugate the Seminoles. It's the exact
same thing. It's just science based rather than you know,
religious based. Yeah, and that that's sort of what was
necessary in this era because this is really a time
(16:31):
when religion is less and less sort of the You
can't justify your political actions of your nations just by religion,
you know. It's it's too late in the game to
justify a crusade essentially that way. And so if you
look at like the spread of the British Empire, when
the East India companies first started taking land in India,
they weren't conquering land. They were basically saying that, like,
(16:52):
well know, these princes have asked for our help, so
in exchange for lending them use of our military, we're
getting certain rights. And as the British Empire did more
and more just straight up conquering, you know, they needed
some sort of reason to justify it. And so, yeah,
this is in a way, it's very true that um
people have always found a way to sort of push
aside the humanity of the people they screw over. But
(17:15):
this was a way to do that while still pretending
that we're getting more enlightened and we're we're on board
with science. Um Plus, it was new and shiny. It
dazzled a lot of people's mind. It's very shiny, and
instead of like, you know, it didn't seem hateful when
some doctor takes out a skull and explains to you
why an Irishman is different from an Englishman, or why
(17:36):
a Cherokee is different from a Caucasian American. You know
that doesn't seem hateful, which I think a lot of
people were starting to feel guilty about hate, and being
able to sort of justify it with science was attractive.
So Francis gall died in leaving his protege Spurzheim as
the head of the phrenology movement. Spurs Time traveled to
(17:58):
the United States in eighteen thirty two to lecture American
thinkers on this exciting new science that would give them
a reason to keep their slaves beyond the fact that
they just didn't like working. Americans took to phrenology like
a bat takes to sleeping upside down. Spurs Time's lectures
were wildly popular among the intellectual set. Phrenology was not
accepted wholesale, though, as this poem written in a local
newspaper makes clear, quote, great man of skulls, I must
(18:22):
let loose my pin against you. More's the pity, for
surely you have played the deuce among the noodles of
the city. I won't malignantly assail your fame and say
you mean to joke us. But faith, I can't make
header tail of all this mystic hocus pocus. Yeah, I
missed the days when people through shade and poems in
the neaper, in the newspaper. Whatever happened to that. Uh,
(18:45):
it may have just been this for this particular person
at one time. That Yeah, I don't know. I feel
like there was an age where you could where people
really appreciated a good poem or limerick, and that was
It does seem like the middle of the twenties century
was the last time funny joking rhymes were popular, like
(19:06):
Alan Sherman songs and stuff like that. You know. Yeah,
it's just I guess now we have rapped. Maybe that's it,
Like hip hop took the place right, but it's not jokey.
Yeah really, you know, Yeah, it's a jokey aspect or
the whimsical aspect of it that that is really newspaper centric. Yeah,
any poets out there listening, start contributing political poems to newspapers.
(19:29):
Bring it back to the public life. Now we're going
to get back when talk about sort of how phrenology
continued to spread across the United States and how it
was used to justify both sides of America's abolition debate.
And then we're going to get into a number of
other horrifying things, including the growing bone industry that was
created by sort of phrenologies peculiarities. But first, speaking of industries,
(19:53):
it's time for some ads and we're back. So we
just read a cheeky little poem about Phrenologe and we
talked about sort of how spurs him. The protege of
phrenologies and venture Gaul, you know, had traveled to the
United States to start lecturing. He did that in eighteen
thirty two. But he he didn't last long. He died
(20:14):
in Boston a few months after he arrived in America.
And his death was yeah, well, I mean it was
eighteen thirty two. People died for no reason back then,
or or the Irish found out what he'd been saying
about them. He didn't make it out of Boston a lot. Yeah,
Boston's a bad place to talk about how Irish people
have bad skulls. And the same man who told Napoleon
he was like, man, well this is his protegee. But yeah,
(20:37):
I'm sure Napoleon didn't like this guy either, um So
spurs Time's death in Boston was sort of seen as
spurring the phrenology movement to popularity in the United States.
The entirety of Harvard Medical Schools teaching staff showed up
at his funeral. He was called a prophet. In general,
there was an attitude that phrenology was a scientific leap,
akin to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Now people really
(21:00):
up this seriously, and scientists took this seriously. At this point,
these ideas haven't really spread to the common man much, right.
This is just something that like, especially in America, educated
people are really into. Now. With gall and Spursheim dead,
the phrenology movement temporarily lacked a figurehead, and so instepped
doctor Charles Calledwell, a slave owner from Kentucky who fell
in love with phrenology while visiting Paris in the eighteen twenties.
(21:22):
Despite being a doctor, Caldwell didn't actually have a medical
practice for the last fifty years of his life. Unlike
doctor's galland Spursheim, he did no actual research. Primarily, he
lectured about phrenology, and when he lectured about phrenology, he
was mainly lecturing about why black people should be owned
by white people. Thanks to called Well, American phrenology took
off like a bullet in the eighteen thirties and forties.
(21:43):
Uh Here's how. An article I found in the Historical
Journal by James Poskett described Dr. Caldwell's life as a
phrenological advocate. Every spring, Charles Caldwell set off from his
hometown in Kentucky, traveling down the Mississippi River by paddle
steamer before finally arriving in New Orleans. Once there, he
would unpack his election of phrenological busts, ready to begin
his annual lecture tour at the New Orleans Lyceum. The
(22:05):
Governor of Louisiana listed attentively, whilst the local organizing committee
praised Calledwell for his highly intellectual and interesting exposition of
the philosophy of the human mind. Following Caldwell's initial tours
in the eighteen twenties, white Southerners took an increasing interest
in phrenology. Called Well even complained of competition from a
tenerant lecturers in Louisiana. Local enthusiast in Alabama also printed
(22:26):
an account of a Negro boy exhibiting exceptional mathematic ability.
Despite describing the young slave as a living wonder, the
authors proceeded to offer the boy's skull as a valuable
acquisition to any phrenological collection. One phrenologist even admitted to
acquiring the skull of a slave who had been struck
on the head with an axe by his master. In
the South, phrenology and violence when hand in hand. So
(22:49):
even at this point in the eighteen twenties, people who
get interested in phrenology are picking out living slaves like
this little black boy who's apparently good at math, and saying, oh,
we should take his skull when he dies while he's
still alive, sort of marking out that, like, oh, that
would be an interesting skull to measure. It's further com
modifying people's bodies because of sort of the value of
(23:11):
these skulls as scientific aids or whatever. I'm starting to
see where you're going, and I'm getting a little uncomfortable. Yeah,
none of these podcasts ever go in a good direction. Uh,
and this one is going to be no exception to that.
It's it just gets more and more terrible. I mean,
as a little bit of a spoiler, we wind up
at the Rwandan genocide. So yeah. In eighteen thirty eight,
(23:33):
on a trip back to Paris, doctor Caldwell met a
French phrenologist named Pierre du Mortier. Now do Martier had
just spent three years traveling around the world and collecting skulls.
He and called Well spent long days hanging out at
the muse A dephrenology in Paris, feeling for bumps on
the skulls of dead Tahitians and Africans and assorted other
non white people's. They made wild pronouncements about what these
bumps meant about the characteristics of these races. Most excitingly,
(23:55):
from a standpoint of outrageous racism. Calldwell found that areas
in the top and back of the skull of Africans
which corresponded he said, to veneration and cautiousness were enlarged
in Africans. During an exchange of letters, one of his
colleagues noted, quote, they are slaves because they are tamable.
Called Well replied, depend upon it, my good friend. The
(24:16):
Africans must have a master. Now, doctor Calledwell, is evidence
of a type of asshole that I don't think we
talk about quite enough. When we talk about slavery in
the United States, usually slaveholders are just portrayed as like
wildly cruel, whip happy bigots, almost comedically monstrous individuals. And
while what was going on was monstrous in every case,
I think it's important that we remember that a lot
(24:38):
of these slave owners were mild mannered people who found
ways to justify owning human beings. It was clearly important
to doctor Calledwell that he'd be seen as kind, generous,
and almost parental to the people he owned. In letters
to his abolitionist friends, he wrote things like, my slaves
live much more comfortably than I do. So called Well
(24:58):
was someone who was not comfortable with owning another human being.
He needed this sort of science as a justification for
his slavery. He needed to feel like what I'm doing
isn't wrong, what I'm doing is necessary. Yeah, that's that's
an important nuance, because nobody wants to feel like a
bad guy. You know, none of these people are mustache
(25:18):
twirling villains. They want to feel like a good person.
I think that's important to understand if you understand how
this lasted so long in the United States. I think
another way to put it to is that their conscience
has started nagging at them. Yeah, I think you're right.
I think a guy like called Well, clearly educated enough,
something about this must have bothered him, which is why
I think he would have sought out phrenology and found
(25:41):
it almost like a breath of fresh air as he
starts to realize how messed up the system of slavery is.
And I should note that a lot of doctor Calledwell's
abolitionist friends were phrenologists. To the two things were not
mutually exclusive, and actually many abolitionists in America were phrenologists
as well, and in fact justified their abolitionism via frenolog
g One such man was George Comb. He was a
(26:03):
friend of doctor Caldwell, a phrenologist, but he was an abolitionist.
During the nineteenth century, combs books on natural science actually
outsold Charles Darwin's. The reason you haven't heard about Comb
is that he wrote heavily about phrenology, which we now
know his nonsense. Uh. He and called Well we're friends,
or at least friendly, and they wound up on opposite
sides of the slavery issue. So comman Calledwell wrote many
letters to each other, actually debating, you know whether or
(26:25):
not it was okay to keep slaves. So we have
evidence of how their ideas on the matter evolved over time.
We know that Calledwell attempted to convince his friend that
Africans were born to be slaves. I'm going to quote
from paper titled Phrenology, Correspondence and the Global Politics of Reform.
Quote invoking the idea of an omnipotent creator common to
Southern arguments against abolition, Calledwell suggested to Comb that by
(26:48):
original organization and therefore radically and irredeemably, the African is
an inferior race. Nothing short of the power that made
them can never raise them to an equality with the Caucasian.
For Caldwell, it was the large animal organs low kid
at the back of the head which rendered Africans unfit
for freedom. In a long letter to Comb on this subject,
Caldwell drew repeated parallels between animals and slaves, writing that
(27:08):
by good pasture and feeding, you may increase the size
of your horses and cows, but you cannot bestow upon
them the bulk of the rhinoceros or the elephant. In
another letter, Caldwell's wrote that he found the difference between
Africans and Caucasians to be much greater than the difference
in organization between the dog and the wolf, or between
the fox and the jackal. Yet they are acknowledged to
differ in species. Abolitionists could not hope to change either
(27:30):
the Ethiopian skin or the leopard spots. In conclusion, called
Will argued, the Africans must have a master. Now what's
interesting about this to me is that Comb didn't disagree
with Caldwell in any of his scientific conclusions about the
skulls of people who weren't white. Comb was just as
racist as his friend. But where Caldwell saw Africans as
unfit for freedom, Comb saw them as so inherently docile
(27:53):
and simple minded that it was cruel to keep them
as slaves, writing quote, the qualities which make them submit
to slavery are a guarantee that, if emancipated and justly
dealt with, they would not shed blood. So there's this
debate we have in the United States about our founding fathers,
most of whom were not abolitionists, and many of whom
were slave owners, most of whom were slave owners. On
one hand, there are people who say that any slave
(28:14):
owner was a bad person and this is my attitude.
Other people will argue that while everyone was very racist
back then, and you can't judge people three years ago
by the terms of modern morality, and I think called
Well and Comb's argument proves that you can grow up
in a racist age and believe racist things because those
are the popular beliefs of the era, and still wind
up on the right side historically of an issue like slavery.
(28:37):
Comb was a racist, but he's still opposed slavery. Called
Well was a racist too, but he supported slavery because
I think he was just a worse person than Comb.
So yeah, I don't know. That's that's an interesting moral
point to me, the way that you can kind of
see the inherent moral character in both people. So despite
both growing up in a racist era and both growing
(28:58):
up sort of enthrall to these ideas, Comb still had
enough of a decent person inside him. He was like, no,
slavery is just not okay, right, right, I think, you know,
like it's it's kind of a prickly um topic of
conversation whether you can hold people in an era accountable
when everybody in an era was, you know, thought a
(29:20):
certain way, and you were raised to think a certain way,
but I think it is particularly with slavery. It's, um,
it's such a horrific concept in such a horrific thing
in reality as well that the very fact that there
was such a thing as abolitionists, there were such a
thing as people who were opposed to slavery in the
context of a slave holding era of United States, I
(29:44):
think you can't hold the people who were ardent slaveholders
accountable or anybody who held slaves accountable for holding slaves. Yeah,
and especially when you start talking about like the guys
who founded the country, you know, most of them were
slave owners, but not all of them. Was the guy
who wrote common sense, Thomas Payne. Thomas Payne was a
lifelong abolitionist, was never okay with slavery. And so it's
(30:08):
not a matter of the fact that like, well, no,
they all believed this thing, because you know, I'm sure
Thomas Payne would not qualify as woke on racial issues
by twenty first century standards, but he had He was
clearly a good person because he wasn't willing to accept
this system. Um. And you have a guy like Benjamin
Franklin who did own slaves for a period of time
(30:28):
and then, as an older man, had a friend who
ran essentially a home for orphaned children, and he met
a couple of young black children at that home and
realized that he had been wrong his entire life and
became an abolitionist near the end of his life. Um
so again, Yeah, even within these guys, like you can
see who was a decent person and not. And it's
(30:50):
the people who came around on the issue who recognized that,
you know, whatever else they might may have believed, it's
not okay to own people. What do you think that
isn't in somebody that even amid everybody else thinking that
something is fine or acceptable or right or whatever you
want to call it, that you can still see that
something's wrong when it's actually wrong. Like what is that?
(31:11):
Is that how you're raised? Are you born with that
level of character? What do you think of it? I
don't know. That's a really fascinating and an important question.
You know. The morality is to an extent dependent upon
the time. Like you look at um World War two, uh,
and it's clear that one side was better than the other,
even though both sides were willing to consider civilians an
(31:32):
acceptable target in warfare, which is not a thing that
we think is okay today. But you know, it's a
matter of like what one side was fighting for versus
what the other side was fighting for, and the Allies
were fighting for something a lot better. I don't know.
It's tougher when we go further back in time, and
you know, you talk about like the Roman Empire, where
it was just accepted that like, oh no, when you
sack a city, you burned that city to the ground.
(31:52):
The women are going to get raped, the young men
are going to get killed. That's just how we do war.
And then you run into a guy like Spartacus. He's
a really fat stating case because he's one of these
clear examples you've get of someone with a really strong
and really modern moral compass a couple of thousand years ago,
because he's leading the slave revolt against the Roman Empire,
and he and all of the people who are in
(32:13):
the revolt have been horrifically brutally treated by the Romans,
and yet as they're beating these Roman legions and rampaging
through Italy, he refuses to attack Roman towns. He refuses
to let his army sack towns or punish the people
who had been holding them as slaves. He's just trying
to escape, which is yes, some people, some people have
that enough of I don't know what it is. Yeah, yeah,
(32:36):
I guess if we could answer that, we would be
pretty far along. We would be philosophers like Aristotle, and
thus we would also be racists faces on the status.
I do think there's something about like when you talk
about a guy like Benjamin Franklin who was willing to
admit that he'd been wrong and taking part in a
(32:56):
bad system his whole life and try to change it
once he realized he'd been wrong. I think one aspect
of being a good person is being willing to admit that.
Number one, there's no privileged position in history. Just because
something is normal and accepted by your culture doesn't mean
it's okay. And also that just because you've done something
your whole life doesn't mean you have to defend it reflexively.
(33:18):
You can recognize your mistakes and try to be better.
I don't know, I think that's an important aspect. Yeah,
So phrenology, we're talking about Caldwell and Combe, who were
both wound up on different sides of the abolition argument,
in spite of the fact that they were both phrenologists.
Phrenology you wound up to also have an impact on
US policy towards Native Americans in the eighteen thirties and forties,
(33:40):
a time when the US was expanding rapidly and taking
away a lot of land it had previously promised to
Native tribes. People didn't want to feel like they were
bad for supporting the government stealing land from Native people,
so they needed a justification for why the US government
was continually screwing over Native Americans. Enter Samuel Morton. Now.
Morton was the author of an eighteen thirty nine book
(34:01):
called Crania Americana, which included detailed drawings of skulls and
assessments of the mental capacities of the various peoples of
North America. Now, the article includes an excerpt from Crania America,
and it's pretty racist. It looks like what you'd expect
from a pre Civil War text book, but somehow it's
even worse than I would have guessed. I don't know
if you're gonna be able to see this over the webcam. Yeah,
(34:21):
just to describe this for the readers, this is a
page that has the top appears to be a picture
of a Greek or Roman statue clearly representing a Caucasian.
The middle picture is a very offensive caricature of a
black man, and then the bottom is a monkey, And
the clear inference is that the skulls of the black
man and the monkey are more similar than they are
(34:42):
to the skulls of the white man. Well. Plus also
just even how it's laid out on the page with
the Caucasian statue at the top exactly, there's a lot
of a lot in that visual right there. Yeah, and
then there's even more racist drawings of black people to
the right of it. It's very racist. Uh, it is
like the picture of scientific racism. So Morton and Crania
(35:04):
Americana divided North America's human beings into four separate species,
including whites, Native Americans, and Africans. He rejected the idea
that people's environment and culture might have any impact on
the way they looked or think, and instead decried that
when it came to Native Americans quote, the structure of
his mind appears to be different from that of the
white man. I found a lovely article on this on
(35:26):
Vassar University's Real Archaeology blog. Quote. His study of schools
concluded that Native American minds were different from that of
the white man, and was cited in articles targeted at
Western settlers and encountering Native Americans. One article stated that
Native Americans were adverse to cultivation, slow and acquiring knowledge.
This view of Native American existence in society is not
conducive to industrialization and progress helped justify Andrew Jackson's Indian
(35:50):
removal policies and allowed Western settlers to continue taking land
of Native Americans. Now, this is the point at which
phrenology starts to spread outside of educated slave owners arguing
with their northern friends and trying to like, you know,
and spreads to the common man. So the average guy
on the street starts to get especially the average white
(36:10):
guy on the street, starts to get an understanding of
phrenology at this point. We did a two part episode
on the Trail of Tears starring Andrew Jackson, and he
was a huge prism for that kind of thinking into
into popular culture in America because he was a huge
populist president. But one of the platforms that he used
(36:31):
to justify the removal of Native Americans was that they
were getting in the way of forward progress. Of the
United States. There was all about pushing westward and starting
to build railroads and using the timber for industry and money,
and the Native Americans were doing nothing with this land,
so we need to just move them and and move
(36:51):
through them exactly. And you can see how phrenology would
be useful in terms of making that argument in a
way that doesn't make you feel like a terrible person
for making it, because it's one thing to have to say,
you know, oh, they don't want the same kind of
progress we want, because then you have to argue about, well,
you know what aspects of there maybe is is maybe
the way they're doing it, you know, better than the
way we're doing it. Why is our way right? And
(37:13):
instead you're saying no, no, no, no. Because of these physical,
scientific reasons, they're not capable of civilizing themselves, and so
it's our duty to push them. And this is what
the science says. So yeah, this is very much sort
of And again it's not to say Andrew Jackson would
have been nice to the Cherokee or any other Native
(37:34):
tribes if phrenology hadn't come around, but it gave it
provided an ideological justification for what was happening, which I
do think is important. Now I read one article from
a Cambridge PhD student that defined Crania Americana Morton's book
as undoubtedly the most important work in the history of
scientific racism. With its detailed illustrations and scientific appearance, Crania
(37:55):
Americana was exactly the kind of work necessary to make
phrenology and the entire idea of race bay science go
viral across the world for the very first time. Quote
Within a few years, Crania Americana had been read in Britain, France, Germany,
Russia and India. James Cowls Pritchard, the founding father of
British anthropology, described it as exemplary, whilst Charles Darwin considered
(38:15):
more than an authority on the subject of race. Later
in the nineteenth century, other European scholars produced imitations with
titles including Crania Britannica and Crannia Germanica. So only a
few copies of this book wherever printed. Morton paid the
modern equivalent of around fifty dollars to even have a
run of his book printed, and the copies cost around
two months wages for an average person, so only institutions
(38:38):
were able to afford these books, but the whole idea
behind Crannia Americana was too good for the yellow press
to ignore. Cheap dime store magazines and newspapers ran spreads
on it, including crude copies of Morton's illustrations. So this
is how, for the first time, phrenological science spread to
the common man and the common woman. Quote in eighteen forty,
(38:59):
the Ladies were Post a Tory, a magazine from Methodist
women in Ohio, quoted Morton in an article entitled Man.
The author described Native Americans as adverse to cultivation and
slow and acquiring knowledge. For white settlers living to the west,
this was exactly what they wanted to hear. Crania Americana
was published just as the remaining Shawnee peoples of Ohio
were forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River. Yeah, so
(39:22):
it's worth noting that phrenology was not initially accepted by
the European literati. The scientific establishment continued to Harvard doubts
about whether or not it was nonsense, but the sheer
popularity of newsletters and journals in that era, and the
expansion of the global post through which people at Caldwell
and Comb could work out their ideas without pesky peer review.
Meant that ideas behind phrenology spread through the common classes
(39:43):
even when they met with resistance from the scientific establishment.
It's a little bit like how the Internet has affected
the spread of misinformation. You know, prior to this era
where you can send a letter to France and know
that you're going to get a letter back, ideas only
spread if you were to get your books published in
Universe season the universe. Other universities would buy that book
and there'd be lecturing tours. Now people can spread their
(40:06):
ideas via mail and via newsletters, and so people who
are living on the prairie in the middle of nowhere
can get a magazine with drawings of different people's skulls
and read about this thing that you know, fifty years
ago would never have gotten off of Harvard's campus. Plus also,
and right then seeing that picture, seeing that smart people
that we venerate and pay lots of money to our
(40:27):
saying these things immediately exonerated any feelings of guilt that
that person might have had about how they felt or
how they were treating these people whose land they were stealing.
Exactly exactly. It's this kind of thing where and I
think this is a really important dimension that we don't
often get to history. We hear about the terrible things
that happened, but you know, people who are watching the
(40:47):
forced relocation of the Native Americans, the white settlers, who
would have seen aspects of the trail of tears. Some
of those people may have been sociopaths, but most of them.
You watch human being suffering that way, and it does
something to you. You need a lot of justification to
sort of ignore the terrible things that you're seeing. Um.
I think it's the same with slavery. Now we're going
(41:09):
to uh continue to talk about sort of how phrenology
spread through the post and how it became a global
science and wound up being sort of one of the
underpinnings of the idea of colonialism. But first we're going
to talk about products and services. So yeah, here's some
ads and we're back. Those were some lovely ads. Uh
(41:38):
oh yeah, yeah, yeah, really good. Better than phrenology. I'm
gonna go ahead and say that all of the products
that support us are better than phrenology, which is a
low bar. So let's get back into it. Phrenology was
not initially accepted by European you know scientists. The high
ranks of sort of like the British loved it, but
out on the continent it was not very popular this
(42:00):
sientific establishment. Harvard Grave doubts about whether or not it
was nonsense, but the sheer popularity of newsletters and journals
in that area in the mid eighteen hundreds and the
expansion of the global post allowed it to spread like wildfire.
And in fact, when phrenology adherents were forced to defend
their super new, super racist science, they often argued that,
in essence, how could it be bullshit if it was
so popular, I'd like to read another quote from that
(42:22):
historical journal article and phrenology in the post quote. For
these nineteenth century materialists, the global was also a guarantee
of truth. Com made this explicit when he challenged Thomas Stone,
one of the foremost critics of phrenology in Edinburgh, to
explain how a false science could have so quickly spread
over Europe and taken root in Asia and America. According
to Comb, nothing but the force of truth could account
(42:44):
for the emergence of phrenology as a global science. If
people are talking about it. It's got to be true, right, Yeah,
it's always worked with science. You get the people talking
and it just becomes true, exactly, exactly. That's why Twitter
has been the greatest tool for the spread of truth
in in human history. Yeah, and it's hilarious, but it
actually is true. In reality, it is true. And really,
(43:05):
I mean it's true that people's minds do work that
way because someone will see on Facebook a post that's
been shared a hundred thousand times about how m s
thirteens hiding in this migrant caravan, or something like we're
all sitting on the frontier reading our newspapers about how
one group's inferior to us, so we can feel better
about how we lock them up. Yeah, exactly like that.
People don't change. We just get like three percent smarter
(43:28):
every hundred and twenty years, or we we trance. We
go from one group to another. Okay, all right, this
group went through this horrible struggle that lasted forever and
then they were you know, beaten up and mistreated by everybody.
But now we think they're okay, let's move on to
the next group and do the same thing to them.
Rather than learn from just one group that that that
extrapolates onto every human being. Yeah, and that is that
(43:52):
is an uncomfortable reality. Like, it's not that people learn
in mass that racism is wrong. It's that they learned like, oh,
it's wrong to be raceist against the Irish, and then
they learn it's wrong to be racist against the Germans,
and then eventually they learn, oh it's wrong to be
racist against black people, but they're still racist against or
you know, maybe maybe they move beyond racist and say,
(44:13):
you know, people who live in this country are you know,
but it has nothing to do with race or whatever.
But yeah, getting people to see other people as human
beings is a big, long, uphill battle. Uh, that's been
going on. I wonder. I mean, I'd like to think
that we're eventually going to run out of others and
finally everybody will fall under, you know, the umbrella of acceptance,
(44:36):
general acceptance. I mean, I feel like if aliens show
up and they're the kind of aliens we can beat
in a fight, that might really deal the deathblow to
racism once we have another intelligent species to be racist against. Like, yeah, well,
there's nothing that gets a country together better than war,
you know, nothing gets people under the nationalists of flags
and then war. Does you know, I think if there
(44:57):
were an alien war, yes, the whole globe would come together. Yeah, exactly,
and that would be the end of one type of
racism and the beautiful beginning of a new kind of racism. Yeah. So, now,
as phrenology became a global science, it started to pick
up in popularity on the continent. They hadn't liked it
(45:19):
when you know, Gaul had been sort of going around
and measuring the skulls of convicts very much for you know,
the reasons that Napoleon stated. But they really came to
like it when it provided a justification for why Europeans
should rule Africa. That's kind of what the Europeans started
being like, Oh, okay, maybe this is true. Since we
feel like we should own everything in this continent and
(45:39):
this science seems to justify why we should own everything
in this continent, maybe we're okay with phrenology now. So,
phrenology had a mixed impact on slavery. You can really
make a good case that it further to abolition even
more than it furthered the cause of slavery. It's it's
a muddled issue, um, it definitely had a negative issue
on sort of American policy towards Native Americans, clear, but
(46:00):
phrenology had a very one sided impact on the birth
of colonialism. Because, after all, if science had proved that
some people were meant to be ruled and others to rule,
what argument could you make against the British empire scooping
up every last sliver of land they could find. Now,
when we come back on Thursday, we're going to talk
about another nation who had a love affair with phrenology, Belgium.
We're going to trace how this quirky little skull measuring
(46:22):
science helped cause one of the worst genocides in the
twentieth century to actually justified Nazi sterilization methods. And of
course we're going to talk about how capitalism and phrenology
combined to make an industry out of stealing the bones
of non white people. So that's coming up on Thursday. Josh,
you got any plug doubles you wanna plug on down
the plugging town? Sure? Yeah, you can check out s
(46:46):
Y s K podcast on Twitter and Instagram. You can
check me out. I'm Josh um Clark. I say um
a lot, So it's in my Twitter and Instagram handle.
And I started a hashtag for my series The End
of the World with Josh Clark, which you can get
everywhere you get podcasts. It's hashtag e O t W
Josh Clark. I do feel like UM is the comma
(47:06):
of the podcasting industry. Oh yeah, I just did it now.
And I wouldn't be able to get through an episode
without quite a few moms. So no, I don't know
how we would. No, No, it's it's necessary. It's better
than silence, but easier than words. All right, I'm Robert
Evans and this has been Behind the Bastards. We will
be back Thursday with part two. Until then, you can
(47:28):
find these sources for this episode on our website Behind
the Bastards dot com. You can find me on Twitter
at I right, okay, I have a book you can
find on Amazon dot com averef History of Vice. You
can find our t shirts at the public Behind the Bastards.
You get shirts, you can get phone cases, you can
get coffee mugs, you can get wraps for your hum Vy,
you can get painted coats for your machine guns. None
(47:51):
of those things you're shaking your head on. Some of these, No,
Sophie well, you can get stickers. You can put a
sticker on anything so you can cover your hum vy
and sticker, so someone by a hundred and fifty stickers,
and coda humphy and then all right, that's that's the episode.
I'm Robert Evans, and until next time, I love about
of you. H m
Behind the Bastards News
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Robert Evans
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