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Since the mid-nineteenth century, school boards, scientists and social reformers have used textbooks to promote a wide range of idiosyncratic ideas, all promising to maintain the social order and control that most unruly of bodies, the pubescent teenager.

– THE STORIES TEXTBOOKS TELL –

Julian Huxley, Eugenics and Longtermism

Julian Huxley

Evidently, the “new” cause of tech millionaires and billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk is the survival of our species, at any cost, until it reaches a “transhuman” plane. Once reached, humans, or I guess post-humans, will push out into the universe physically and virtually for the next 10e100 years, and perhaps beyond.

Yes, it sounds like bad science fiction or dorm room philosopy, but this idea, labeled “longtermism,” is being lustily promoted by a few very serious thinkers, including Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, and Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and has managed to attract, as of 2023, at least $46 billion in committed funding.

Émile P. Torres, a one-time acolyte and now very public critic, calls longtermism “quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.” According to Torres, longtermism is “straight out of the playbook” of Julian Huxley, who carried his thinly veiled faith in eugenics to his death in 1975. And longtermerists are not even veiled.

Textbook History’s Scandalous Hits

Textbook History started as a journal of social history as filtered through twentieth century American biology textbooks. Inspired by the work of Jim Endersby, John Rudolph, Donna J. Drucker, and Ronald L. Numbers, among other notable historians, it has evolved into an exploration of the intersection of popular history, popular science and popular culture since the industrial revolution.

It can get a little weedy. So, I thought I’d provide a short sampler of the more approachable stories found here.

Students of popular culture (with a dash of academic cred) are invited to dig into the Piltdown hoax, the masturbation panic of the nineteenth century, eugenic pornography, the racist origins of Alfred E. Neuman, and everyone’s favorite, girl Nazis with whips.

The (even) geekier stuff can wait.

– Ron Ladouceur

Textbook Reconstruction

May 11, 2022

Carpetbagger and KKK Cartoon Reconstruction was a decade-plus (1863-1877) effort by the U.S. government to manage the readmission to the Union of states that had rebelled during Civil War, with specific demands by Congress to enfranchise and empower the 4,000,000 formerly enslaved people who resided in those states. It succeeded, but only temporarily. Under Federal watch, black men gained the right to vote, and, according to historian Eric Foner, an estimated 2,000 served in public office, including the U.S. Senate, through the nineteenth century. [1] But by 1900, through ongoing campaigns of terror and voter suppression, black Americans in the South were effectively disenfranchised.

In the decades leading up to and following this disenfranchisement, American history textbooks, academic histories and popular histories constructed a narrative that provided white citizens absolution by positioning Reconstruction as a “tragic era” of “scalawags” and “ignorant negroes” manipulated by invaders from the North, “carpetbaggers,” who “swarmed” South after the Civil War to pillage and humiliate.

This essay traces the development of this “tragic” narrative through a review of American history textbooks published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on two series: one written by the husband and wife team of Joel Dorman and Esther Baker Steele of Elmira, New York, and a second authored by Susan Pendleton Lee of Richmond, Virginia.

To Conserve Man

December 22, 2021

Bison from Civic Biology To our Rachel Carson-tuned ears, the word conservation means allowing nature to hold sway, to designate areas as wetlands, protected habitats and forever wild, to be humble and accept that nature is usually smarter than we are. But to biology textbook authors in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, influenced by the eugenic ideas of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and others, conservation meant something else entirely. It meant first, preserving select symbols of American virility, like the redwood tree, the bison, and most importantly, their own “great race,” and second, managing the rest of nature – forests, water resources, wildlife, and soil – so that it could be exploited maximally without collapse.

This ideology entered the classroom, briefly, in the mid-1920s with Benjamin Gruenberg’s Biology and Human Life (1925) [1] and George W. Hunter’s New Civic Biology (1926). [2] The two books were similar in structure (even though their authors’ politics were quite different). Both ended with linked chapters on conservation leading to a closing call for eugenic management. But the high school classroom proved a poor platform for “human conservation,” as it was called. [3] New Civic Biology along with other harsh economic biologies published in the early 1920s [4] gave way in the market to less didactic works. [5] Scholars often attribute this shift to the effect of the Scopes trial and the chilling effect it had on a bold or matter of fact presentation of evolution. But with education through the tenth grade now compulsory in all states, biology teachers, facing classrooms full of not just college-bound students but students from across the economic spectrum, may simply have preferred not to present lessons that referred to some of those students as “parasitic on society” (Hunter, 1926, 399). [6]

But in college classrooms it was another story.

Pre- and Post-Scopes Textbooks (Finally) Come Into View

Updated December 7, 2021. (Originally published as “Pre-Scopes Textbooks Coming Into View,” January 18, 2019)

After a 96-year embargo (thanks, Sonny Bono), copyrighted works from the early- and mid-1920s are finally entering the public domain. As of January 1, 2022, this list will include textbooks and other works by prominent biologists and educators published in 1926, including Samuel. J. Holmes, George W. Hunter, Truman J. Moon, and Alfred Kinsey (yes, that Alfred Kinsey – see related article).

Why is 1926 so important? It was the year after the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial. Publishers, spooked by the possible loss of sales in the south (and everywhere else evangelicals held sway) encouraged authors to edit their texts in response. For an overview, I encourage you to read Adam R. Shapiro’s article on the topic … and mine. But now that you can do your own primary document research, I encourage you to examine these textbooks for yourself.

Gairdner B. Moment: How the Cold War Pushed an Almost Revolutionary Off the Rails

June 26, 2021

Gairdner B. Moment, a professor of biology at Goucher College from 1932 to 1970, was a textbook pioneer, the first author to use the term “Darwinian Synthesis,” [1] and the rare author in the 1940s to forward ecological awareness, not eugenic management, as the purpose of his profession. He did this with the publication General Biology for Colleges in 1942.

But then World War II happened. Biology, following physics and chemistry, muscularized its curriculum and began reasserting its claim as the central agent in the maximization of natural resources, including human resources, in a newly interconnected world.

Moment was caught in the wave and taken by its undertow.

An almost revolutionary in 1942 on the order of Rachel Carson or Marston Bates, by the 1960s, Moment devolved into a reactionary critic of the emerging culture of environmentalism he had helped spawn, and is remembered today as the scientist who wanted grizzly bears eliminated.

How Are We Going to Control These Kids? Biology Textbooks in the 1940s

July 31, 2019. (Originally published in longer form as “Biology Textbooks in the 1940s: If Not Eugenics, What?” – January 22, 2019).

The 1940s were a pupil-poor and scientifically unsettled time for U.S. secondary school biology textbook authors and publishers. The economic depression of the preceding decade led directly to a reduction in both birth rates and absolute births. Between 1940 and 1947, the number of students eligible for high school biology decreased by more than 13%. [1] Making matters worse, World War II interrupted the free flow of scientific information right as new ideas about evolution, eugenics and race were coming into focus, forcing (or encouraging) authors to rely on old information or kind of wander around.

This created an odd market where idiosyncratic works by authors on soapboxes competed for a share of a shrinking audience with barely revised reprints of out-of-date texts and encyclopedic works that purportedly instructed students how to “adjust” to life. Only a few of these weird creatures would survive the decade.

Of the 16 new or revised high school biology textbooks published during the 1940s, only two managed to successfully navigate the harsh environment. The first, the perennially popular (and pandering) Modern Biology by Truman J. Moon, Paul B. Mann and James H. Otto, first published in 1921, gained a strong foothold in the market with revised editions in 1926, 1933 and 1938. It’s unlikely rival, Exploring Biology, started life as the kitchen table project of a small-town high school teacher named Ella Thea Smith and her illustrator husband, Marion Cox. By the end of the 1950s, these two textbooks would command 75% of the market. [2]

Discovered! Ella Thea Smith’s First Textbook

Updated September 25, 2018 – Text now searchable

Smith, Ella Thea. 1932(?). Biology: The Science of Life. Unpublished. Salem, Ohio: Salem Historical Society.

NOTE: Comparison of this typewritten biology textbook from 1932 to its contemporaries, and to Smith’s published version (Exploring Biology 1938), would be useful to anyone studying the history of the teaching of evolution, health, alcohol, eugenics and other key topics in biology.

—

Ella Thea Smith graduated in 1920 from the University of Chicago with a degree in Botany. She returned that year to her hometown of Salem, Ohio, where she would teach biology until her retirement in the early 1950s. Evidentially, Smith was so dissatisfied with the biology textbooks then approved for use in her district that she wrote her own.

Smith’s typewritten, mimeographed and string bound textbook, Biology: The Science of Life, was first used in classrooms in 1932, and was revised by Smith several times over the next few years. The copy offered here was discovered in 2007 misfiled under the title “workbook” at the Salem Historical Society. At the time, this was the only known copy. A second has since been located.

Download Textbook

The Science of Life by Ella Thea Smith

Henry Fairfield Osborn and the Tragic Legacy of Piltdown Man

Revised February 4, 2018

According to Henry Fairfield Osborn, Piltdown man, the famous fake [1], was proof that Darwin’s theory of natural selection was wrong, and that modern humans did not need trace their ancestry through Africa. To bolster his arguments, Osborn, who was president of the American Museum of Natural History from 1908 to 1935, turned the considerable resources of his institution toward the development of a wide range of compelling visual materials – reconstructions, painting, charts, graphs and photos – that illustrated his story of evolution. He then distributed these materials freely to textbook publishers and the popular press.

The consequences were tragic.

By flooding the market, Osborn, with sympathetic textbook authors and a socially conservative public as accomplices, advanced a racialized theory of evolution that resisted countervailing evidence for decades, survived Piltdown’s fall in 1953, and tainted the teaching of biology in high schools and colleges well into the 1970s.

This photo of the skull reconstructions of Java, Piltdown, Neanderthal, and Cro-Magnon men (as they were listed in the text) are from Ruth A. Dodge’s 1952 revision of the venerable Smallwood biology textbook series, which traced its history back to 1916. This would be the last textbook to picture Piltdown. Revealed as a fraud in 1953, and as you can see, neatly X-ed out with pencil by an anonymous student sometime after.

Eugenics in High School and College Texts Graphed

June 26, 2014

Eugenics stopped being a topic of credible scientific inquiry in the United States around the time T. H. Morgan’s lab began publishing Drosophila-based genetic data in 1915, or at the latest, when the Carnegie Foundation began to pull funding from the Eugenic Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor in the later 1930s. But its legacy as part of the biology curriculum was much longer-lived than is commonly assumed.

The charts below track the relative priority of the topic of eugenics in the American biology curriculum based on direct examination of 83 high school biology textbooks and 43 college-level biology textbooks published in the United States between 1904 and 1973. (See database).

Tracing the history of the promotion of eugenics in American biology textbooks reveals several surprises.

First, despite the eugenic horror of World War II, the topic of eugenics remained a fixture of a majority of biology textbooks into the 1960s. Second, while the decade between 1925 and 1935 represented the peak of enthusiasm for eugenics in textbooks, this enthusiasm diminished only gradually over the following 30 years. Third, while a few high school textbook authors began to actively counter eugenic claims starting around 1938, college textbook authors continued to present eugenics without disclaimer. Lastly, no college textbook failed to mention eugenics from the mid-1940s on. Forgive the double negative, but what this means is that after World War II, college-level textbooks featured eugenics more routinely than they had in years prior.

The Eugenic Zombie in a Graveyard of Textbooks

August 7, 2011

During the first decades of the twentieth century, WASP elites in the U.S. got themselves into quite a tizzy about sex and race. Metaphysical threats, like the death of “virgin forests,” the “darkening tide” of immigration and the dreaded “white plague” of Tuberculosis, combined with economic threats, like the new permanent income tax, to create a culture open to and fully capable of funding the promotion of public policies and “scientific” solutions that promised to freeze the status quo. Chief among these solutions was the “science” of eugenics.

Eugenics, with some forced sterilization laws here, a few anti-miscegenation laws there, was pitched as a kind of a cure-all for society’s ills, a permanent solution to the problems of alcoholism, pauperism, venereal disease, sexual licentiousness and the general problem of numbers.

March 30, 1913 announcement of the establishment of a Board of Scientific Directors for the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. ©The New York Times.

March 30, 1913 announcement of the establishment of a Board of Scientific Directors for the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. ©The New York Times.

Several well-publicized studies of female college graduates indicated that fertility among upper class whites had fallen below replacement levels. Democracy can be a drag when one is in the minority.

In the teens, eugenics proved a smart path to patronage. According to Daniel J. Kevles, author of In the In the Name of Eugenics, “the science of human biological improvement provided an avenue to public standing and usefulness.” Charles Davenport’s success in securing a major donation from Mary Harriman, widow of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, to fund the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor demonstrated to other researchers and academics how they too might cash in.

Given the hot enthusiasm for the topic, particularly in the years leading up to World War I, it is no real surprise that biology textbook authors got in on the action. But the fact that they stayed on board for the next six decades, is, well, kind of scary!

Eugenics in 20th Century College Biology Textbooks

Updated 30 July 2011

I’d been trying for a couple of months to kick out an article on a curious college biology textbook, The World of Life by Wolfgang F. Pauli (who should not be confused with the more famous physicist, Wolfgang E. Pauli). Published in 1949, The World of Life had long fascinated me, particularly its final unapologetic climax chapter, “Human Genetics and Eugenics” (click image to view). The whole thing just seemed so remarkably wrong; a tortured post-World War II effort to “save” eugenics, as if it were an adorable baby being thrown out with that nasty Nazi bathwater.

But I worried that The World of Life was an exception, a weird one-off a decade or more out of step, not really worth deep examination. Before I could write confidently, I realized I had to know how Pauli’s text fit into the history of college biology education in the twentieth century.

So it was off to AbeBooks (again!), credit card in hand. Before you could say “security code,” I was anticipating the arrival of nearly a dozen book-filled “bubble-lopes.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long to find out I was on to something.

The very first of my new acquisitions, Biology: And Its Relation to Mankind (1949) by A. W. Winchester, told me Pauli’s text was no exception. The subsequent arrival of Biology: The Human Approach (1950 – later titled Biology) by Harvard professor Claude A. Villee, a text which identified feeble-mindedness as “the biggest single eugenic problem” (461), suggested a trend: Contrary to received wisdom, biologists did not drop eugenics like a hot stone after World War II. Instead, as I wrote in a previous article, a few college textbook authors “doubled down and began to defend the ideology with more aggressive rhetoric and moments of near-pornographic spectacle.”

Counter-intuitive. Interesting. Compulsion-triggering.

Now, in addition to 82 American high school biology textbooks, I own or have sourced 38 college-level biology textbooks. Though the college collection is considerably smaller and perhaps not quite as complete and coherent as the high school collection, I am fairly confident it is representative.

THE RELATIVE PRIORITY OF THE TOPIC OF EUGENICS IN AMERICAN COLLEGE-LEVEL AND HIGH SCHOOL BIOLOGY TEXTBOOKS 1904 – 1964

The orange trendline traces the relative priority of the topic of eugenics in American college-level biology textbooks published between 1904 and 1964 (based on the table below).* The yellow trendline traces the relative priority of the topic in high school textbooks published during the same era (see related article). Consistently throughout the twentieth century, college texts were as eugenic as their high school counterparts, with a notable increase in the boldness of their presentation of the topic, both in relative and absolute terms, in the years immediately following World War II.

I hope to add a couple context bullet points and write a few longer articles referencing this collection soon (perhaps on topics other than eugenics, which I admit has sort of taken over Textbook History lately). But I thought I’d get this draft database out there, including my somewhat subjective “Eugenics 0-5” rating. I’ve included links to public domain texts, related articles and available biographical information on authors.

See: Database: Eugenics in College Biology Textbooks

Also see: Eugenics in 20th Century High School Biology Textbooks.

* The chart above reflects a eugenics score of “1” for the popular Foundations of Biology by Lorande Loss Woodruff (see page 297), published in 7 editions through 1946 (though only the 1922 and 1937 editions have been directly reviewed). A score of “2” would not substantially alter the shape of the college trendline, but would amplify it through 1946, thereby decreasing the relative drama of the post-war bump.

Ellsworth Huntington’s Fantastic Stories of Racial Superiority and Relative Humidity

April 17, 2011

Ellsworth Huntington was one of the early twentieth century’s most prolific science writers. The author of 28 books, contributor to 29 others and author of more than 240 articles, [1] Huntington was a climatic determinist who held that geography was the “basis for history.” [2] Civilization according to Huntington owed its rise to the weather. He suggested his superior “Teutonic stock” was a natural consequence of the same atmospheric conditions that cause thunderstorms.

But Huntington was worried. He felt he had solid statistical evidence that as his race took on what he thought was its evolutionary obligation to dominate it faced two serious threats: the physically and morally debilitating effects of the tropics and tropical women on WASPs who worked abroad, and the productivity-sapping effects of luxuries like central heating on those who worked at home.

Initially Huntington proposed simple mechanical solutions to these “problems,” like a housing unit that would artificially cycle its internal barometric pressure, and by this action keep his fellow New Englanders charged up wherever they lived. But in the 1920s, with his academic career stalled, Huntington’s ideas began to darken. In 1934 he accepted the presidency of the board of directors of the increasingly nativist American Eugenics Society. By 1935 he was applying his writing talents to the development of that group’s “catechism,” a chilling book titled Tomorrow’s Children.

Huntington was an odd duck, criticized even in his day for possessing an “overheated imagination” that saw patterns in data where none existed and forced facts to fit predetermined conclusions. So why bother studying a man who labored as a lowly Research Associate at an insulting salary at Yale for nearly the entirety of his professional life?

Huntington was a fantasist with little peer support, but his popularity demonstrates how adept he was at framing a folk-science that, to borrow a phrase from Jerome Ravetz, provided America’s ruling class “comfort and reassurance in the face of the crucial uncertainties of the world of experience.” [3] In Huntington we see a metaphor for a nation. Once a jaunty optimist who saw continued cultural domination as a minor engineering challenge, Ellsworth Huntington joined a generation that grew increasingly inclined to promote coercive social policies as it rationalized the rejection of its stumbling personal advances as accumulating proof that the species was in decline.

Biology’s Bomb: Graphing “Explosive” Population Growth in Cold War Textbooks

January 29, 2011

Cartoon reprinted in "The Population Bomb: Is Voluntary Human Sterilization the Answer" (c. 1961), a pamphlet published by Dixie Cup magnate Hugh Moore.

Cartoon reprinted in “The Population Bomb: Is Voluntary Human Sterilization the Answer” (c. 1961), a pamphlet published by Dixie Cup magnate Hugh Moore.

Prior to World War II, America’s protectors thought the country’s innocence could be guarded at its gates. Citizen biologists saw the nation’s border as kind of cartographic diaphragm, not entirely reliable in individual instances, but adequate to the task of containing the pool of potential breeders.

But conflict had led to contact, and contact had led to fear. Like the physicist’s “gadget,” biology’s “bomb” was conjured to protect the national body from penetration.

The “population bomb” was made as real and scary to school children in the 1960s as the H-bombs that drove them under their desks.

True, from the publication of George W. Hunter’s A Civic Biology in 1914 on, students had been taught that America had a “population problem.” But for the first four decades of the twentieth century, that problem wasn’t runaway growth, it was “differential reproduction.” Pre-war biology textbooks in fact warned that total population would level off by 1970 (see graph below), and when it did, the “quality” of the population would begin to decline if present fertility trends continued. The threat wasn’t one of too many babies. The threat was that too many babies were being born to the ‘wrong’ people – the poor, the criminal, the so-called ‘feeble-minded,’ the swarthy and the black.

As E. E. Stanford fussed in his 1940 biology textbook, Man & the Living World, “Families of professional and business classes of supposedly intellectual rating are not replacing themselves, while those of farmers, laborers, and above all, ‘reliefers’ still maintain increase” (722).

But by the war’s end, Stanford’s worry was decidedly out of fashion, a quaint relic, a Zeppelin in a jet age.

What Can a Google Ngram Tell Us About Eugenics, Biology and Science Textbooks In General?

December 31, 2010

I’ve been playing around with the new Google Ngram Viewer, an amazing application that allows searches within the text of the 5 million or so books Google has scanned to date. The Ngram Viewer allows users to enter multiple words or phrases and a date range, and then returns a graph of the use of those words or phrases relative to all the words published during the years specified. Though the tool has been reviewed as something of a time-suck or toy, applied using the very specific language of the social application of biology, I think it shows itself to be a pretty darn cool thing.

The chart above compares the frequency of the use of the word ‘eugenics’ in all books scanned by Google between the years 1905 and 1970 (blue line) with the relative priority of the topic of eugenics in American classrooms based on this author’s study of 80 high school biology textbooks (orange line).

A few fast searches turned up some interesting correlations and relationships: a cross in the popularity of the words ‘eugenics’ and ‘genetics’ in 1934; the rise and decline of eugenic-era terms ‘euthenics,’ ‘dysgenic’ and ‘feeble minded’ and the subsequent post-World War II popularity of the phrase ‘population explosion’; and the relative instances of the phrases ‘Kallikak family,’ ‘Juke family’ and ‘Nam family’, which revealed in a click data scholars might have spent years painstakingly counting.

The ‘eugenics’ curve was particularly interesting to me, as I had published a graph just last February based on the results of a survey that tracked the relative priority of the topic of eugenics in 80 American high school biology textbooks. Frankly, I was somewhat amazed by how closely my graph and Google’s paralleled one another.

Let me offer a couple of caveats before drawing any conclusions.

First, the vertical axis for both graphs is arbitrary. I ‘normalized’ the relative heights. Second, my graph is based on a subjective analysis of importance of eugenics in biology textbooks, while the Google graph is based on a hard word count of all texts published. Still, I think these parallel lines offer some interesting, if only suggestive, insights into a couple of questions asked about biology textbooks.

Assuming its okay to ‘normalize’ the vertical axis, what first jumps out is the obvious shift of 5 to 7 years between the height of popularity of the topic of eugenics in all texts and its popularity in biology textbooks. The second thing that pops is the apparent reluctance by authors to let go of eugenics, even as general interest in the topic began to wane dramatically starting in the late 1930s.

I hesitate to make too much of this, as a similar Ngram built using the word ‘evolution’ did not match my survey of the relative value of that topic in high school biology textbooks quite as neatly.

Still, something, don’t you think?

Eugenics in 20th Century High School Biology Textbooks

February 10, 2010

The chart below tracks the relative priority of the topic of eugenics in the American high school biology curriculum. It is based on review of 80 textbooks published between 1907 and 1969. Though there are exceptions, as a rule, textbooks first published in the years prior to 1938 were generally more eugenic than average in their later editions, and textbooks published from 1938 on were generally less eugenic than average in their later editions. Further, with the exception of Moon (first published in 1921), only the less eugenic Smith and Kroeber and Wolff texts survived into the 1960s.

A couple of additional observations:

Scopes: As the chart indicates, the Scopes-era anti-evolution movement in the United States correlated with the peak of eugenic fervor in American biology textbooks. However, the movement was indiscriminate. Any textbook that contained an explicit mention of human evolution, whether that particular text promoted eugenics or not, was subject to censorship – from the most harshly eugenic, like William Atwood’s 1922 Civic and Economic Biology, to the sweet, like Gilbert Trafton’s wonderful 1923 Biology of Home and Community. The latter, though it featured no eugenic language, generated controversy in North Carolina. Despite after the fact claims from creationists, eugenics does not seem to have concerned early fundamentalists.

The Rise of Nazism and World War II: Though Raymond Pearl criticized eugenics as far back as 1927, and the Nazi application of harsh negative eugenic measures pushed liberal scientists like Julian Huxley and Hermann Muller to frame a softer reform eugenics in the mid-1930s, the data demonstrate no sharp drop in the presentation of the topic through the 30s, 40s and 50s, only a gradual decline. This supports Wendy Kline’s claim from Building a Better Race (2001) that the eugenics movement was not “weak and discredited after 1930,” as many scholars contend, but had worked its way deeply into the popular consciousness.

Evolution vs. Eugenics: Though the topics of evolution and eugenics were tightly wed in the economic and civic biologies published from 1914 through the latter 1920s, textbooks with the strongest and most up to date presentation of evolution (Smith, Kroeber and Wolff) were significantly less eugenic than popular textbooks with poorer evolutionary content (Smallwood, Curtis and particularly Moon).

Moon: As with the data tracking the relative priority of the topic of evolution (see chart), the popular Moon text skews the results (see related article). Combined, the data suggest that though conservative regions of the country may have taken issue with the teaching of the topic of evolution, the teaching of eugenics, which discouraged mating across race and class lines, was less controversial.

See – Database: Eugenics in High School Biology Textbooks

Haeckel’s Embryos in High School and College

Revised 14 February 2010

It is hard to deny that Haeckel’s embryos are an “icon of evolution,” true even if “icon” now evokes Jonathan Wells’ “travesty” of a book (see Matzke). The embryos were reproduced in a majority of high school and college biology textbooks from the mid-1930s through at least the 1960s (See table). Generations of students took away the incorrect but easy to accept and generally cool idea that we pass through a fish-like stage, complete with gill slits, on our way to becoming human.

Creationists, forever seeking advantage, took a 1997 journal article challenging the residual utility of Ernst Haeckel’s iconic embryos (Richardson et al.) and fashioned it into a pointy stick to poke their favorite straw man, the “scientific elite” (Pennisi, 1997; Behe, 1998; Wells, 1999; Freeman, 2001a,b; Ojala, 2004). With fresh charges of “fraud” and “fake,” these anti-evolutionists pricked a few scientists and historians. But the “prickees” fought back, and with context and nuance on their side, made quick work of the critics (Hopwood, 2006; Blackwell, 2007; Richards, 2009). Charges of fraud against Haeckel are as old as the drawings themselves, the defenders noted, just another out of date argument in the creationists’ pitiful quiver of half-truths and rhetorical manipulations.

Thrust. Parry.

But we must be careful: creationist attacks tend to generate simplified and emotional responses that can constrain critical thinking.

Haeckel’s “icon” was and remains a potent and problematic image (see Ken Miller and Joe Levine’s note). Though it is true that Haeckel’s “schematic” illustrations gave way to better representations starting in the late 1940s, biology textbooks continued to present embryos, always vertebrates, side-by-side or in a comparative grid. It’s an arrangement that was designed to communicate Haeckel’s belief that embryonic development and evolutionary history were linked and that evolution was progressive. It is easy to argue that it still does, despite the disclaimers authors usually offer.

What is most curious is that the rise in popularity of Haeckel’s embryos happened just as biologists were distancing themselves from the kind of broad morphologically-based conjecture the “icon” was designed to support. Less than 20% of early American biology textbooks (1907-1932) included all or part of Haeckel’s original grid. But by the 1940s and into the 1950s, upwards of 60% of high school textbooks featured copies or close variations of the 1874 original.

How do we explain this?

Kroeber and Wolff’s Excellent Adventures

November 5, 2009

Published in 1938, Adventures With Livings Things was one of the most comprehensive, most far-sighted American high school biology textbooks of the century. It was also one of the most challenging. And in terms of commercial success and influence, perhaps one of the most disappointing.

Authored by accomplished New York City educators Elsbeth Kroeber and Walter H. Wolff – she the sister of famed anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and he an intellectually ambitious department chair at DeWitt Clinton High School – Adventures (1938) delivered a solid corrective to the grossly anthropomorphic and depressingly deterministic textbooks of the 20s and 30s. It was one of the first of a wave of biology textbooks authored during the “Nazi years” that actively countered class and race prejudice and worked to undercut popular and institutional enthusiasm for eugenics. Other notable texts of this ilk include Smith’s Exploring Biology (also 1938) and Bayles and Burnett’s Biology for Better Living (1941).

ADVENTUROUS INDEED

Kroeber and Wolff’s brave book signaled its attack on the standard narrative and common conceits right from its opening pages.

Instead of the usual run of plants and animals from simplest to complex leading to “man,” the crown of creation and a creature apart, Adventures started with “man,” situated the species firmly within an interdependent biological space, and then moved with haste “down” through 150 pages of apes, reptiles, fishes, insects, invertebrates, to the “invisible” organisms and two brief chapters on plants on its way to the main body of the book, a nearly 500 page unit-based “unity of life” biology.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Kroeber and Wolff closed with another 150 pages on the “great generalizations of biology:” the unity of all living things, balance in nature, geological and organic change, the interplay of heredity and environment, evolution by the accumulation of very small changes, and finally, the potential of science to drive progress.

To understand how radical this was one need only compare Adventures With Living Things to the most popular textbooks at that time: Moon’s Biology, Smallwood’s New Biology, Baker and Mills’ Dynamic Biology and Curtis, Caldwell and Sherman’s Biology for Today. None of these texts devoted more than a few dozen pages to the “great generalizations.” All twisted and edited themselves to accommodate the concerns of textbook committees and school boards fearful of community objections to the teaching of reproduction and human evolution. Many contained startling race-based proofs of evolutionary “progress.” And all promoted eugenics without qualification. In fact, Moon’s text, which became Modern Biology in 1947, would continue to promote eugenics, calling it a “young science,” well into the 1960s.

However, Adventures With Living Things never gained much commercial traction. Though it was used in classrooms throughout New York City, no doubt because its authors had some influence there, it appears never to have generated much interest beyond the boroughs.

Why?

The Case of the Disappearing Darwin

May 15, 2009

It’s a powerful symbol of capitulation: the straight on, serious portrait of Charles Darwin, the wizened, white bearded author of the Origin of Species and father of modern biology, was stripped from the frontispiece of a popular high school textbook, replaced by, of all things, a cartoon of the human digestive tract. According to New York Times writer Susan Jacoby, the insidious nature of the fundamentalist campaign to censor biology textbooks after the Scopes trial of 1925 is “literally illustrated” by this act. In 1921, Darwin was there. By 1926, he was gone. As were all mentions of his theory of evolution.

As with any myth, this one contains a few kernels of truth.

Yes, Darwin did grace the frontispiece of the 1921 edition of Truman J. Moon’s Biology for Beginners. Yes, his portrait was replaced in 1926 by a cartoon of the digestive tract. And yes, by the 1933 edition, the word evolution was gone, not to reappear until after a federally funded effort directed by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) drove all publishers to modernize their texts in the 1960s.

But this story skips lightly over a few complicating facts.

First, Moon replaced the portrait of Darwin with a portrait of Louis Pasteur (full text) in 1924, the year before Scopes. Second, Moon changed his text little between 1924 and editions and revisions published into the early 1930s. And third, though the word evolution did disappear from Moon’s textbook, the number of pages devoted to the subject – under the label “racial development” – actually grew considerably – from 17 pages in 1921, to 68 in 1933. Early scholarship, including Peter Miller’s 1966 honors thesis, “Darwin and the Textbooks,” and Judith Grabiner and Peter Miller’s 1974 article, “Effects of the Scopes Trial,” noted these nuances. However, in repeated retellings, the story has been simplified, and critical information has been lost.

Ella Thea Smith’s ‘Exploring Biology’

March 22, 2009

Ella Thea Smith was the author of the second most popular high school biology textbook in the United States in the 1950s, Exploring Biology. At the height of its popularity it commanded roughly 25% of the market. Exploring Biology was first published in 1938, and was revised in 1943, ’49, ’54, ’59 and ’66. It featured many firsts.

The 1938 edition featured extensive treatments of the topics of human evolution and reproduction. Though her publisher expected the book to do poorly in the south, it was approved for use in the Atlanta (GA) school district as well as many other areas in the country. By the 1960s her textbook was in use in every state.

The 1943 edition featured a comprehensive section on race based on Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s “The Races of Mankind,” a pamphlet that was commissioned, produced, but then “notoriously” suppressed by the US Army. Interestingly, Smith’s ’43 text, with its section on race intact, was reprinted under paper cover for use by the US Marines in 1945.

The ’49 edition of Exploring Biology was the first American textbook to feature a discussion of the modern synthesis, reflecting the influence of one of Smith’s readers, paleontologist and synthesis architect George Gaylord Simpson. Smith in turn would serve as a reader, and at one low point, a critical morale booster for Simpson during the time he was writing Life, his breakthrough 1957 college biology textbook.

And between 1959 and 1961, Smith served on the steering committee of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), the group credited for “reintroducing” the topic of evolution in its three 1963 textbooks, the Yellow, Blue, and Green Versions. Ironically, it was a BSCS textbook, the Yellow Version, also published by Harcourt, Brace, and World, which supplanted Smith’s work, though Exploring Biology remained in use in classrooms into the 1970s.

Smith’s impressive achievements, though noted in passing by several scholars (Miller, 1966; Grabiner and Miller, 1974; Skoog, 1979), have never received the attention they deserve. Perhaps this is because Smith’s work does not fit well with a conventional narrative, popular since the mid-1970s, that textbooks published after the Scopes trial of 1925 became progressively “less scientific” as authors and publishers capitulated to complaints by fundamentalist Christians and other conservative cultural forces and progressively eliminated references to evolution and other controversial topics. This narrative suggests that textbooks published between 1926 and 1963 do not reflect then current science, or perhaps more importantly, the social views of scientists.

A thorough discussion of this topic can be found in the article “Ella Thea Smith and the Lost History of American High School Biology Textbooks,” published in the 9.08 edition of the Journal of the History of Biology. Also see the compiled list of minor errors discovered in the article by the author subsequent to publication and their corrections.