Earnest Hooton

Race

Hooton used comparative anatomy to divide humanity up into races, describing the morphological characteristics of different "primary races" and "subtypes." In 1926, the American Association of Physical Anthropology and the National Research Council organized a Committee on the Negro, which focused on the anatomy of black people. Among those appointed to the Committee were Hrdlička, Earnest Hooton and eugenist Charles Davenport. In 1927, the committee endorsed a comparison of African babies with young apes. Ten years later, the group published findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology to "prove that the negro race is phylogenetically a closer approach to primitive man than the white race." Hooton played a key part in establishing the racial stereotypes about black athleticism and black criminality of his day in terms of an anthropological framework. Hooton was one of the first to attempt to develop mathematically rigorous criteria for race typology.

At the same time, Hooton maintained that no scientific basis existed correlating mentality with racial variation. "Each racial type runs the gamut from idiots and criminals to geniuses and statesmen. No type produces a majority of individuals from either end of the scale. While there may be specific racial abilities and disabilities, these have not yet been demonstrated. There are no racial monopolies either of human virtues or of vices." While advocating eugenic sterilizations of those deemed "insane, diseased, and criminalistic", he emphasized there was no justification to correlate such "degeneracy", as he termed it, with race.

Anthropologist Pat Shipman presents Hooton's work as representing a transition in anthropology away from its 19th-century stereotypes about race and its fixation over cranial measurements. In that context, she writes, Hooton maintained an "oversimplistic mode of thinking about human types and variability" while at the same time he moved to eliminate unfounded racial biases and pseudoscience. His remarks in a 1936 conference dealing with immigration, for example, included a ten-point summary of the current scientific consensus about race which, in retrospect, parallel the points raised ten years later in UNESCO's landmark The Race Question.

The "Hooton Plan"

In 1943, Hooton had an article entitled "Breed War Strain Out of Germans" published in the New York newspaper PM. In the article he proposed four measures with an objective to "destroy German nationalism and aggressive ideology while retaining and perpetuating desirable German biological and sociological capacities". Hooton wrote these measures as follows:

1. Execute or imprison for life all leaders of the Nazi party; permanently exile all professional army officers.
2. For a period of 20 years or more utilize the bulk of the present German army as rehabilitation labor units in devastated areas of the Allied Nations in Europe and elsewhere. These laborers should not be treated as prisoners of war or convicts but as paid employees (supervised and restricted as to movement from the area of their work). They might be allowed the privilege of naturalization upon evidence of good behavior. The single men should be permitted to marry only women of the country of their abode or naturalization.

The families of the men already married should remain in Germany for a period of years, but might eventually be permitted to join the fathers. The latter should not be allowed to return to Germany. The objects of this measure include reduction of the birth rate of "pure" Germans, neutralization of German aggressiveness by outbreeding, and denationalization of indoctrinated individuals.

1. Break up the German Reich into several states (probably its original component states), permitting each, after a suitable interval of supervision and government by the Allied Nations, to choose its own form of non-Fascist government. The object of this measure is to destroy the national framework of unified German aggression.
2. During the period of supervision and occupation of the several states by armies and civilian staffs of the Allied Nations, encourage members of these groups to intermarry with the German women and to settle there permanently. During this period encourage also the immigration and settlement in the German states of non-German nationals, especially males.

Hooton on African Americans (1930–1940)

Hooton derided "the legal fiction that 'all men are born free and equal'" as "one of the most stupendous falsehoods ever uttered by man." In Up From the Ape, however, he also argued that intelligence testing, in its infancy at the time, did not yet provide a scientifically rigorous basis for comparing the relative mental capabilities of humanity's geographic divisions:

Until we know exactly how to distinguish a race and exactly what intelligence tests test, we shall have to hold in suspension the problem of racial mental differences. That such differences exist I have not the slightest doubt; that with our present methods they can be summarized quantitatively so that we are justified in assigning one race a position of superiority as contrasted with another, I deny.

The chapter from Up From the Ape that discusses this subject in the context of the alleged inferiority of sub-Saharan Africans was reproduced in 1932 under the title "Is the Negro Inferior" in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Hooton on the Celtic Race in Ireland

Hooton led the examinations of skulls found in Ireland by the "Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland" (1932–36), with Clarence Wesley Dupertuis and Helen Lucerne Dawson, that was sponsored by the Irish Free State government.

Quotations

• "The fitness of any man to live in any community depends on his ability to fall in with its ways. If he is very unadaptable, he is a criminal. He is not blond or dark. He is not tall or short. He is not German or Irish. He is a man who has been woven into American social fabric, who thinks as his fellow citizens do about accepted institutions and who conduct himself as they do. By his deeds is he to be judged: not by his looks or his geographic origin." —(New York Times, 1936).
• "There is no anthropological ground whatever for selecting any so-called racial groups, or any ethnic or national group, or any linguistic or religious group, for preferment of condemnation. Our real purpose should be to segregate and eliminate the unfit, worthless, degenerate and anti-social portion of each racial and ethnic strain in our population, so that we may utilize the substantial merits of the sound majority, and the special and diversified gifts of its superior members." —(New York Times, 1936).
• "It is not until genetics is so far advanced that we can apply its findings to the human race that such measurements as those made by me acquire real scientific Value. There is no superior or pure races in the world." —(New York Times, 1934).

Criticism

E.B. Reuter, a sociologist and contemporary of Hooton, criticized Hooton for using circular logic when he ascribed the physical traits of criminals to cause criminality.

Sherwood Washburn, who studied under Hooten, credited him as an engaging, sharp teacher but wrote that his research methods were "not compatible with genetics" and he was often "simply incorrect."

Hooton believed that the world's problems were fundamentally biological, and that improvement would only come when the breeding of the biologically inferior was controlled. He considered the environment, but minimized its importance. These views, coupled with the concept of pure races (Nordic, for example) in the 1930s and 40s led to severe criticism.