Luschan, Felix von b.August II, 1854; Hollabrunn,Austria d. February 7, 1924; Berlin, Prussia
Leading physical anthropologist of Germany who conducted extensive research on eugenics in the United States involving about 800 African Americans. In 1914 Luschan traveled to Australia to conduct fieldwork.
In Sydney, Luschan spoke on eugenics before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, but his visit ended abruptly in August when war erupted in Europe. Luschan, an Austrian who directed Berlin’s Museum fur Volk- erkunde (Ethnological Museum), feared internment by the Australians and fled to Hawaii. While waiting for passage to California, Luschan organized the anthropological collection of the Honolulu Museum and measured contemporary adult males. When Luschan finally arrived in San Francisco, he was penniless. During his stay in the United States, Luschan delivered lectures and conducted research at sixteen American universities, including the universities of Chicago and Illinois; visited museums; and traveled widely, including a trip to the Grand Canyon where he marveled at Native Americans. In February 1915 Luschan addressed the American Anthropological Association on the subject of convergency, arguing that physical and cultural characteristics were related, not independent, variables. While in America, Luschan also conducted a little-known research project on Negroes before returning to Germany via Norway in April 1915.His American lectures underscored Luschan’s commitment to a nonracialist vision of the human species. At the University of Illinois, for example, Luschan criticized American polygenists for justifying slavery and other forms of racial discrimination. He insisted that humans shared innumerable characteristics with one another. Luschan informed Americans that the essential unity of mankind eliminated race as a factor in social relations. People of various races had more in common genetically than the idea of “race” implied.
Pulsing through the veins of white Southerners, then, were all kinds of blood, including African blood. Environment, Luschan maintained, determined the peculiar condition and progress of races.In another lecture, however, Luschan argued that heredity, not environment, held the key to understanding mental and bodily qualities, mental diseases, and criminality. Convinced that most persons were ignorant of the science of inherited traits, he praised the research in applied genetics conducted at agricultural experimental stations attached to America’s land grant universities. Heredity was more than the mere collection of data, Luschan said. For twenty years scientists had distinguished between the transmittance of what he termed “normal” racial and other bodily and mental characteristics, and the transmittance of abnormal, pathological qualities such as mental and physical diseases. In his American lectures, Luschan cited examples from the human, plant, and animal worlds to illustrate recessive and dominant characteristics and how certain characteristics recurred over time.
To strengthen his research on eugenics, Luschan collected data on African Americans. To facilitate his research, he wrote to Booker T. Washington, asking for help in identifying a large number of black families with members spanning several generations. Years prior to this Luschan had conducted similar research on 320 Greek families on the Island of Crete. Washington recommended 10 American cities where Luschan might begin longitudinal studies. He found willing subjects in Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Virginia.
Luschan measured their fingers and nostrils, coded skin colors of hundreds of children, and analyzed numerous photographs of black youth. At Virginia’s Hampton Institute, Luschan tested black students from within the same families to measure the influence of heredity. While on campus he also presented an illustrated lecture on heredity.
Elsewhere in the United States 13 teachers responded to Luschan’s questionnaires and summarized the racial characteristics of 814 black pupils.Upon returning to Germany, Luschan published his findings on American blacks. Among other things, they showed that blacks were not dying off due to competition with whites; black men posed no sexual threat to white women; and Jim Crow laws segregated the races in public but they obviously mingled privately. The mulatto population was skyrocketing. Based on his admittedly unscientific research method, Luschan concluded that more than 75 percent of the 4,000 schoolchildren he studied came from mixed African European ancestry. White Americans’ arbitrary racial classification based on a drop of black blood was ludicrous, he wrote. Luschan considered racial mixing commonplace and unproblematic. American Negroes and Africans in Germany’s colonies generally benefited from the infusion of “white” blood, he maintained.
Luschan insisted that while there was nothing inherently inferior about American Negroes or mulattoes, there nonetheless were inferior Negroes and mulattoes, much as there were inferior whites. All races, he said, had inferior elements. Committed fully to eugenics, Luschan emphasized the importance of eliminating what he termed inferior people among American Negroes by isolating them and preventing them from reproducing. Defining “racial hygiene” broadly, he favored elevating inferior blacks “at all costs in terms of health, morals, and intellect.” Once “inferior” elements in America’s black population had been improved, Luschan predicted that blacks would no longer pose a danger to whites. Most Negroes could be educated and would become useful citizens, he wrote, and they deserved equality with Caucasians. Luschan admired the vocational school model introduced at Hampton and perfected at the Tuskegee Institute, comparing these institutions favorably to Germany’s best technical schools. In them blacks received necessary skills and lessons in morality.
All in all, Luschan commended the progress African Americans had made since emancipation.In 1919 Luschan complained to his former colleague Franz Boas that his research on American blacks had largely been ignored, assuming that his findings were too “pro-black” for conservative Americans and Germans. Three years later, in Volker, Rassen, Sprachen (People, Races, Languages, 1922), Luschan again commented favorably on American blacks. Though Negroes had made great strides educationally and contrasted positively with whites in morals and public health, anti-Negro prejudice remained rampant. White Southerners were obsessed by fears of miscegenation. Luschan predicted that whites would segregate blacks, isolating them in a “pure
Negro Republic... freeing the rest of the Union of this unwanted element” (Rusch 1986, 451). He considered the “Negro question” America’s most troubling issue, one with no answer in sight.
John David Smith
See also Eugenics and Euthanasia
References and Further Reading
Luschan, Felix von. “Die Neger in den
Vereinigten Staaten.” Koloniale Rundschau 1 (January 1915): 504-540.
Rusch, Walter. “Der Beitag Felix von Luschans fur die Ethnographie.“ Ethnographisch- Archaologische Zeitschrift 27 (1986): 439-453.
Smith, John David. “Anthropologist Felix von Luschan and Trans-Atlantic Racial Reform.” Munchner Beitrage zur Volkerkunde 7 (2002): 289-304.