Post on 29-Apr-2023
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What Is Race?: UNESCO, mass communication and
human genetics in the early 1950s
Jenny Bangham
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany
Abstract
What Is Race? Evidence from Scientists (1952) is a picture book for school children
published by UNESCO as part of its high-profile campaign on race. The 87-page,
oblong, soft-cover pamphlet contains bold, semi-abstract, pared-down images
accompanied by text, devised (so it declared) to make scientific concepts ‘more easily
intelligible to the layman’. Produced by UNESCO’s Department of Mass
Communication, the picture book represents the organization’s early-postwar
confidence in the power of scientific knowledge as a social remedy and diplomatic
tool. In keeping with a significant component of the race campaign, What Is Race?
presented genetics as the route to an enlightened, scientific, non-prejudiced
understanding of race. This article seeks to explain the book’s management,
aesthetics and framing in the context of postwar disciplinary and international
politics. Viewing UNESCO’s race campaign as a high point for an internationalist
ideology of mass education, the article also analyses the visual and literary arguments
of What Is Race? and proposes that the enduring image of genetics as technical and
neutral knowledge was in part shaped by UNESCO’s efforts to communicate
scientific authority to an apparently ‘popular’ audience.
Keywords
genetics, mass communication, popularization, race, UNESCO
Corresponding author:
Jenny Bangham, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstr. 22,
14195, Berlin, Germany. Email: jbangham@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
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Introduction
Skimming over advertisements for corsets, cornflakes and whiskey, readers browsing
the 18 May 1953 issue of Life magazine may have chanced upon a series of bold,
semi-abstract images (Figure 1) under the headline ‘How The Races of Man
Developed’ (1953: 101). The feature’s sub-heading declared: ‘U.N.’s scientific
pictures show what races are, how they originated, and how they became
intermingled’, and was juxtaposed with caricatures of Gregor Mendel (complete with
crucifix, habit, and pea plant) and Adam and Eve (whose identities were signified by
an apple tree). The images had been abstracted from a picture book recently
published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) that aimed to make scientific concepts intelligible to ‘people of secondary
school age … and on up to adult education classes’.1 The picture book, called What Is
Race? Evidence from Scientists (UNESCO, 1952c) was one element of a high-profile
campaign by UNESCO that sought to undermine racial prejudices through the
dissemination of ‘scientific facts’.2 The Life feature conveyed both a central argument
of What Is Race?—that genetics offered fundamental insights into race and human
origins—and the book’s premise: that scientific facts could be communicated through
pictures.
The race campaign had been organized by UNESCO’s Social Sciences Department
in collaboration with its Department of Mass Communication, which was responsible
for promoting ‘peace and human welfare’ through the ‘production and distribution of
articles, films and broadcasts’ (UNESCO, 1949: 44–5). Taking as its initial impetus
the United Nation’s (UN’s) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which
stipulated rights and freedoms to all people regardless of race,3 the UN Social and
Economic Council had requested that UNESCO initiate a ‘programme of
disseminating scientific facts designed to remove what is commonly known as racial
1. Diana Tead, 'To Jacob Bronowski', July 13, 1951, 323.1, UNESCO. 2. Brodersen, Arvid, and Otto Klineberg. ‘Memo: Project on Dissemination of Scientific Facts Regarding Race’, March 25, 1949. 323.1. UNESCO. 3. ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. UN General Assembly, December 10, 1948. 217 A (III). For work on how the UN’s concern with equality also cohered with a US-led modernisation agenda see Hazard (2012) and references therein.
Figure 1: First page of the Life feature article ‘How the Races of Man Developed’. The abstract
human figures depict Adam and Eve, signified by the apple tree, with an arrow indicating the
passing of time to the present day; the image’s caption reads: “Early man, symbolized here by Adam
and Eve, was probably [a] dark skinned progenitor of the world’s races”. Gregor Mendel is signified
by a monastic habit, hat and crucifix, and by his attention to a pea plant that he is apparently
pollinating with a stick; the image’s caption reads: “Genetics’ founder was 19th Century abbot
named Gregor Mendel. Growing peas in his monastery garden, Mendel discovered how
characteristics are transmitted from generation to generation and explained for the first time the
nature of heredity”. Juxtaposed, the images and text argue that genetics offers the potential to study
the common origins of mankind and the differences between the races. Source: Life, May 18, 1953:
101.
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prejudice’.4 UNESCO’s confidence in scientific expertise as a remedy for prejudice
was tied to the United Nation’s defining agenda for a new world order (Amrith and
Sluga, 2008; Sluga, 2010). Faith in science as an instrument for the promotion of
social harmony cohered broadly with a ‘scientific humanism’ that had taken shape in
Europe during the interwar period and had been consolidated during wartime
discussions about the future United Nations (Petitjean, 2008).5 Seen as neutral and
objective, science was framed as having the potential to be both diplomatic tool and
social remedy, offering a mode of knowledge production that would allow people in
diverse parts of the world to understand one another. At its foundation, UNESCO—
the consummate paternalistic postwar international institution—embodied a mode of
scientific humanism that promoted the teaching of objective social and natural
science for world citizenship (Gilman, 2003; Hazard, 2012; Miller, 2006).6 In the
words of the organization’s first Director General: ‘science and the scientific way of
thought is as yet the one human activity which is truly universal’ (Huxley, 1947).7
A central aim of UNESCO’s race campaign, therefore, was to fashion a neutral
science capable of reforming race and of being mobilized and understood around the
world (Haraway, 1992: 197–203). Following the organization’s own narrative,
UNESCO’s campaign, and especially its published ‘statements’ on race, feature as a
major milestone in the history of race science.8 As described elsewhere, UNESCO’s
intellectual work to purify expert knowledge on race went in several mutually
dependent directions (e.g. Brattain, 2007; Gil-Riano, 2014; Gormley, 2009). One
path, articulated in the 1950 statement on race and supported especially by
sociologists and cultural anthropologists, was to shift attention away from the term
‘race’, and to focus on an exclusively ‘social’ realm of culturally determined ‘ethnic
groups’ (UNESCO, 1952b; Teslow, 2014). Another, in a formulation by biologists
and physical anthropologists, was to limit the scope of the term ‘race’ and claim that
it was a purely ‘biological’ concept that should ‘never’ be confounded with national,
4. “Resolution of Economic and Social Council on ‘The Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities’”, October 28, 1949. 323.1. UNESCO. 5. For scientific humanism, see: Harman (2003), Mayer (2005), Smith (2003) and Sommer (2014). For science and social and economic planning, see McGucken (1978) and Werskey (1978). 6. For more on how UNESCO’s image of neutrality was made and promoted through its own organizational structures, see Rangil (2011) and Selcer (2009). 7. For Huxley’s influence on UNESCO (and its limits) see Sluga (2010). 8. Stepan (1982); for more recent historiography reflections on this paper, see the Isis special issue ‘Relocating race’, edited by Suman Seth, and Reardon (2004).
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religious or cultural groupings (UNESCO, 1952b: 11).9 Accordingly, a second
statement, published in 1952, particularly emphasised race as the exclusive preserve
of expert biologists.10 As one UNESCO participant put it: ‘Serious errors […] are
habitually committed when the term ‘race’ is used in popular language: the terms
should never be used when speaking of [national and linguistic] groups’.11 Going
further, for an influential group of biologists involved in the UNESCO campaign,
genetics was to be the route to an enlightened, race science.12 The study of genetics was
meant to shift attention away from racial typologies and onto population dynamics,
and—cohering with UNESCO’s commitments to ‘unity in diversity’ (UNESCO,
1949: 11)—promise access to deep commonalities that tied the peoples of the world
together. This argument is encapsulated neatly by the cover design of What Is Race?
(Figure 2): genetics was to be both unifying and universal.
UNESCO’s claims for genetics were not self-evident. Much human heredity research
had been part of, and made possible by, two world wars, the large-scale
administration of colonised people, and modern bureaucratic technologies of public
health.13 But despite this, and notwithstanding the perceived discrediting of the field
through its association with eugenics and Nazi race science (Kevles, 1995), genetics
was established in the postwar decade as a seemingly purified, universally applicable
and politically neutral way of understanding human difference and ancestry. This
redemptive public framing helped to shape a marked postwar expansion of research
on human heredity (e.g. Lindee, 2014) and promote the agendas of the ‘modern
synthesis’, an influential intellectual project to knit together perspectives from
palaeontology, taxonomy, botany and genetics into a single coherent evolutionary
9. Although this paper deals with work done to formulate biology as a diplomatic tool, the campaign was also concerned with psychology, sociology and the study of culture. Indeed the whole episode can also be seen as part of a mid-century project to delineate ‘biological’ and ‘social’ realms of expertise. 10. Throughout this article I refer to the first statement as the ‘1950 statement’, and the second as the ‘1952’ statement (the publication of the second was significantly delayed, and was/is often referred to as the ‘1951’ statement). When referring to the text of the second statement I cite UNESCO (1952b). 11. Mourant, A.E. ‘Revisions to Statement on Race’, 1951. PP/AEM/A.317. Mourant Archive. 12. The undermining of racial typologies had a longer history, see Tilley (2014) and Teslow (2014). 13. For example, the collection and study of data on human heredity and diversity was made possible by growing colonial, national and international infrastructures for public health, closely tied to interests in eugenics (Bashford and Levine, 2010), and by the development blood transfusion infrastructures (Bangham, 2013; Schneider, 1995).
Figure 2: Back and front covers of What Is Race? Evidence from Scientists, together explicitly link the
human chromosomes (depicted in side a circular representation of a cell) to three “major races” (shown
here as three differently coloured abstract figures), to the origins of mankind (at the time understood to
have occurred in India). Writing to a colleague, Tead described the covers: “three little men of each
race holding hands, and all connected with one enlargement of a cell with chromosomes swimming
around—no, not swimming, chromosomes don’t swim”. (Tead, 1951c). Source: What Is Race? Paris:
UNESCO, 1952. Reproduced with permission from UNESCO, Paris.
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narrative.14 The image of genetics as a neutral way of articulating human difference
has been enduringly influential as well as the focus of much dispute (Gannett, 2001;
Reardon, 2004). The picture book What Is Race?—translated into French as Qu’est-ce
qu’une race? des savants répondent (1952a)—is part of the story of how that framing was
produced.
In this article, then, I do not revisit UNESCO’s lengthy and sometimes bitter
negotiations to produce an scientific consensus on race, or the conflicting intellectual,
disciplinary, political and moral commitments of the organisation’s appointed experts
(e.g. Brattain, 2007; Gormley, 2009; Hazard, 2011; Müller-Wille, 2007; Selcer,
2012). Rather, by focusing on What Is Race? I reflect on the ways that scientific—
especially genetic—knowledge about race was framed as expert and neutral, and how
that knowledge was communicated to non-specialist, or ‘popular’, audiences.15
Underlining the significance of this work for UNESCO, an internal memo declared:
The public believes that race differences are important, and race
prejudice is widespread. Scientists generally regard race as unimportant,
and see no scientific justification for race prejudice. It will be the task of
this convention to reduce the gap between popular and scientific
knowledge in this respect.16
What kinds of communication were considered appropriate to this task? How did the
design and visual language of What Is Race? function? How did the book—which the
Department of Mass Communication hoped would be legible to people around the
world—attempt to establish genetics as socially and politically neutral while
simultaneously fit to be mobilised to serve a UN vision for world governance?
The first section of the article deals with the first and second statements on race, with
the aim of highlighting some of the careful strategic work by UNESCO organisers to 14. The phrase ‘modern synthesis’ was Julian Huxley’s (1942), later the first Director General of UNESCO; see e.g. Mayr and Provine (1980) Smocovitis (1992). For more on the place of humans in the synthesis, see Smocovitis (2012). 15. I use ‘popular science’ and ‘popularization’ as actors’ terms. Though aware of the rich array of tools we now have for analyzing the work of actors and media of science communication (e.g. Daum, 2009; Secord, 2004), this paper historicises the articulation, ambitions and deployment of a classic diffusionist model of scientific expertise and its dissemination to a passive public. See Bensaude-Vincent (2009) for a broad-ranging history of notions of science and the public. 16. Brodersen, Arvid, and Otto Klineberg. ‘Memo: Project on Dissemination of Scientific Facts Regarding Race’, March 25, 1949. 323.1. UNESCO.
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make these statements authoritative and credible. Section two turns to the bold, semi-
abstract, graphical style of What Is Race? and—by contextualising it in relation to
other graphic traditions of the period—explores how its visual language functioned.
Section three discusses the structure of the visual and textual arguments of the picture
book—especially with respect to the privileged place of genetics—and makes some
preliminary comments on its reception in English-speaking journals and magazines.
Section four turns to the ways that the images in the book were transposed into other
media, including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) programme Race and
Colour (1952). The programme’s reception highlights a tension in the UNESCO race
campaign in its attempt both to elevate race to a new standard of scientific objectivity
and to make the scientific understanding of race transparent and universal.
1. Mass communication
The race campaign was something of an experiment for the Department of Mass
Communication. Seen as a crucial component of UNESCO’s machinery for
promoting peace, the department aimed to facilitate the ‘free flow of information’
internationally, and to produce and distribute articles, films and broadcasts on
educational, scientific and cultural subjects. To this end, the department
commissioned a great deal of research on what it called ‘techniques of
popularization’ (UNESCO, 1948: 44–47), including such topics such as ‘The
Popularization of Science Through Cheap Books’ by editor of Penguin Science News,
John Crammer and ‘The Popularization of Science Through Books for Children’ by
author Annabelle Williams-Ellis. Using UNESCO’s Courier newsletter, the
Department circulated such reports to publishers in the hope that it would promote
principles of effective science education in nations and cultures around the world.17
For the Department of Mass Communication the first statement on race was a great
success. Four months after its publication, UNESCO’s clippings service estimated
that internationally it had yielded ‘133 news stories, 62 articles and editorials, 6 full
reportages’ and ‘another 50 to 75 mentions of the Statement in the Press’.18 In
17. Beeby to J.L. Crammer, Division of Science and Its Popularization”, May 7, 1949, UNESCO, 7.21 18. For a detailed account of its mixed reception among the US press see Hazard (2012, Chapter 2).
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addition, the statement had been “commented upon in the ‘UNESCO World
Review’, where it was ‘safe to say that it was heard in some 80 different countries and
territories’. The episode had apparently ‘shown what can be done by Mass Comm.
by disseminating information when a subject is really newsworthy and has dramatic
appeal’.19 The Department also went ahead with a plan to publish a series of
pamphlets by distinguished scholars that would ‘lend themselves to wide diffusion’.20
The resulting series, Race Question in Modern Science, was aimed at an ‘educated public
already familiar with the major themes of culture and science’, an aspiration reflected
in the pamphlets’ sober and muted design and their absence of pictures.21 Titles
included Race and Psychology (1951) by Otto Klineberg, Race and Biology by Dunn (1951)
and Race and History (1952) by Claude Levi-Strauss.
But although UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communication claimed success, its
Social Sciences Department was troubled. The 1950 statement had provoked a
highly critical response from sections of the academic community, especially some
geneticists and physical anthropologists, who felt that their own areas of expertise had
been unjustly circumscribed. After a few months, the head of the Social Sciences
Department, Alfred Métraux, decided that the statement’s many detractors were
damaging its scientific authority, and convened a meeting to produce a second
statement, framed as a ‘clarification’, this time involving principally physical
anthropologists and biologists. Stung by the attacks on the first statement, Métraux
worried about the ‘very delicate relationship between the old statement (1950) and
the new one’, and debated how best to present the second as authoritative without
undermining the credibility of the first. Resolving eventually that the second
statement would simply speak for a different range of academic specialties, he
decided that instead of a press release, it would be published first in two major
scientific journals: American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA) and the British
journal Man.
19. Douglas H. Schneider, ‘To Max McCullough’, January 4, 1951, 323.1 (094.4), UNESCO. 20. ‘Resolution of Economic and Social Council on “The Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities”’, c. 1949, 323.1, UNESCO. 21. Emile Delaveney, ‘To Department of Mass Communication, from Head, Documents and Publications Service’, March 15, 1951, 323.1 (094.4), UNESCO.
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Métraux cautiously sent around several drafts of the document to its authors to check
and double check its content. He also sent it to a far wider range of academics than
simply those who had been at the meeting, and was dismayed to obtain a range of
opinions so extensive that he ‘lost hope of publishing a document which will rally all
scientists’ (Hazard, 2012: 56). Resigned to this becoming the very opposite of a single
authoritative statement, Métraux decided to use the specialist Race Question in Modern
Science series to publish the first and second statements together alongside nearly 60
additional responses from scientists around the world. These appeared later in 1952
in the 100-page pamphlet The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry (UNESCO, 1952b). In
sum, the genre of the ‘statement’ was unable to bear the weight of the diverse
disciplinary and conceptual commitments of the many academic communities
invested in race science, resulting in more equivocal, discursive pieces for UNESCO’s
specialist audiences. When this phase of the campaign was finally over, Métraux
confided in US geneticist Leslie Dunn that the process had made him ‘harassed and
sick’.22
The specialist race pamphlets were very successful, and were later translated into 13
languages and printed in more than 300,000 copies for college-educated and
specialist audiences (Duedahl, 2008). But in keeping with UNESCO’s commitments
to basic education, members of the Social Sciences Department felt the need for a
publication accessible to a much wider audience, including schoolchildren. The idea
for a picture book arose when Dunn submitted a manuscript to the Race Question
series that the department ‘too popular’ for the ‘scientific level of the series’. They
passed it to Diana Tead in the Department of Mass Communication, who
delightedly wrote to Dunn explaining that she would like to use it as the basis for a
‘popular programme of scientific information on race’. It would be a ‘copiously
illustrated book’, and in this new guise, translated into ‘as many languages as
possible’ and offered to ‘commercial and educational publishers’ around the world.23
Tead compiled the text of the book largely from Dunn’s manuscript, also drawing
material from the specialist UNESCO pamphlets Race and Psychology by Otto
Klineberg, and Race and Culture by Michel Leiris. Dunn remained a consultant
throughout the project, with Tead sending him drafts and proofs to check.
22. Alfred Métraux, ‘To Dunn’, February 15, 1952, 323.1 (094.4), UNESCO. 23. Diana Tead, ‘To Dunn’, 8 March 1951, 323.1, UNESCO.
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Despite Tead’s enthusiasm, the path to the picture book’s publication in its eventual
form was arduous, and in the US the book met with a political controversy that
almost derailed its publication. The first edition of the book was called What Science
Says About Race (UNESCO, 1951), and it arrived in the country amid loud and public
anti-communist criticism of UNESCO within the Senate and among sections of the
general public (Duedahl, 2008; Hazard, 2012: 29). What Science Says About Race was
given only limited distribution before the State Department asked for it to be
withdrawn, claiming that it contained ‘inaccurate and misleading information about
the race problem in the United States’ (quoted in Brattain, 2007: 1407). Several in
UNESCO believed that the State Department wished to set a precedent of approving
the organization’s publications in the future, and the controversy escalated when
Tead’s background was checked by the State Department and she almost left
UNESCO in protest. In the meantime, the book’s content was revised in consultation
with Dunn and was finally reprinted at the Imprimerie Georges Lang in Paris under its
new name and priced at 1$, 5 shillings or 250 francs. The differences between the
editions were relatively slight, but in a qualification aimed to reassure US critics that
its content would not pass judgement on national issues, What Is Race? was given a
new preface that explained that the book did not ‘claim to cover the field of … race
relations’, but aimed to ‘present, in a popular way, certain essential information
about the biological aspects of race’ [my emphasis] (UNESCO, 1952c: 4). The episode
appears to have challenged and ultimately affirmed UNESCO’s judgement that the
facts of ‘biology’ were sufficiently neutral to function as a diplomatic tool.
The sequence of management strategies taken by UNESCO shows that although
those in the organization might talk of the ‘free flow of information’, ‘science’ as a
singular hegemonic authority, and ‘scientists’ as a unified body, the handling of
experts and the publicity statements were highly complex. Attempts to produce and
maintain credibility resulted in controversies over genre, scope and timing. This
careful management continued as the Department of Mass Communication
assembled the picture book for publication.
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2. Images for an international public
To illustrate the book Tead chose Paris-based US painter and magazine illustrator
Jane Eakin.24 Working for New Yorker and Life magazines, Eakin’s humorous cartoons
were pared-down line caricatures and her paintings were naturalist and faintly
impressionist. So it was a striking departure for Eakin to produce the images for
UNESCO. Printed with a restricted palette—using the UNESCO blue as a
background colour (referring to UNESCO’s own flag), and red as an occasional spot
colour—its most striking characteristic is its bold, highly abstracted figurative forms,
and its diagrammatic illustrations. These, so the preface explains, were devised to
make scientific concepts ‘more easily intelligible to the layman’ (UNESCO, 1952c: 4).
The style of Eakin’s What Is Race? images are resonant of some of the best known and
visually striking educational books for children published during that period: those
produced by the Isotype Institute in Britain. Part of a longer tradition of visual
statistics, Isotype (International System Of Typographic Picture Education) had first
been conceived in relation to beliefs about education, social harmony and science
that were closely aligned with principles later adopted by UNESCO. The principles
of this graphical technique had been formulated by Otto Neurath as a system for
educating the public on the latest sociological and economic research at the
Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Economy and Society) in 1920s
Vienna. Working with graphic designer Gerd Arntz and art graduate Marie
Reidemeister, Neurath developed a visual language for rendering social information
in a graphical form, such that ‘even passers by … can acquaint themselves with the
latest sociological and economic facts at a glance’. ‘Picture statistics’ (‘Bildstatistik’)
were abstract, clear-cut, regular forms that could be repeated and arranged spatially
in charts and maps to convey quantitative information to children and adults,
‘irrespective of language barriers or educational limitations’. Purportedly modern,
democratic, transparent and universal, Isotype embodied Neurath’s motto ‘Words
divide, pictures unite’ (Cartwright et al., 2008: 65).
24. Examples of Eakin’s paintings—though not her cartoons—are to be found on the website devoted to her former house in the southern French town of Menerbes, which remains a museum of Eakin’s work: www.jane-eakin.com.
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Over the decades, the aesthetic of Isotype proper had spread and developed beyond
the communication of statistical information (Burke, 2010; Lavin, 2001; Nikolow,
2003). After being exiled in Britain, Neurath and Reidemeister, now married to one
another, turned their attention to the production of a series of books devoted to the
‘visual education’ of children (Walker, 2013). No longer confined to purified
Bildstatistik, the Neuraths extended the kinds of information that could be conveyed
by Isotype, to history, the natural world, and the workings of machines, eventually
resulting in childrens’ books such as If You Could See Inside (1948), and two series: Visual
History of Mankind (1948) and Visual Science (1950–2). The graphical style of these were
colourful, pared-down, and used repeated elements, with ample use of double-page
spreads (Figure 3).
These were all qualities evident in Eakin’s designs for the UNESCO pamphlet,
presenting a stark contrast to those published in another abundantly illustrated book
on race, written by anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish for readers
within the US Army. The 31-page pamphlet The Races of Mankind (Benedict and
Weltfish, 1943)—originally ‘designed to fit a serviceman’s pocket’—was illustrated
with humorous line drawings by New Yorker cartoonist Ad Reinhardt.25 Prepared in
collaboration with a committee of the American Association of Scientific Workers,
which included Dunn and Otto Klineberg, The Races of Mankind was one of a
collection of educational volumes published by the US Public Affairs Committee
designed to convey ‘in inexpensive form’ research on economic and social problems
specifically in relation to American policy (Teslow, 2014: 246). The Races of Mankind
was enormously successful—by 1945 it had been distributed in 750,000 copies to
schools, churches, synagogues and other civic organizations—and became the basis
of first a major exhibition, then a short film, The Brotherhood of Man (1947), then 50-
page commercial book In Henry’s Backyard (1948) (Teslow, 2014: 251).
The contents of The Races of Mankind and What Is Race? are remarkably similar in
places making even more striking the contrast between Eakin’s bold, formal
25. All of my information about the Benedict–Weltfish collaborations derives from Teslow (2014; Chapter 6), who offers a detailed account of the reception of Races of Mankind and its derivatives. For a relevant account of the reception and assimilation of the Benedict–Weltfish scientific antiracism in US classrooms, see Burkholder (2011).
Figure 3: Illustration from The Wonder World of Long Ago. Source: Neurath M. The Wonder World of Long
Ago, Isotype Institute, 1955: 30 and 31). Courtesy of the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection,
University of Reading.
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illustrations and Reinhardt’s jocular cartoons.26 For example, the images in Figure 4
both convey the same argument using strikingly different styles of abstraction.
Underscoring the perceived significance of their aesthetic differences,, early in the
UNESCO race campaign Dunn had specifically asked acting head of the Social
Sciences Department Robert Angell whether he could make a pamphlet that
included cartoons like those in The Races of Mankind, and Angell had replied that he
thought that Reinhardt’s designs would not be legible to people living in all of the
intended countries (Gormley, 2009). Thus, in keeping with the pursuit of an
internationalist visual rhetoric conveying scientific objectivity, the UNESCO team
chose to concord with the aesthetic of the modernist Isotype, rather than with the
playful cartoons of the Benedict–Weltfish series.27
But looking at What is Race? alongside the Isotype Institute children’s books also
draws attention to some striking stylistic differences. Distinct from the geometrical
and static features of Isotype, Eakin’s drawings are characterised by a studied
irregularity. Repeated elements—such as chromosomes, eggs and sperm—are each
drawn slightly differently: cell nuclei are offset from the cell centre, maps have
uneven outlines, and each of the many arrows throughout the book (indicating spatial
and temporal movement) are irregular. A dominant motif of What Is Race? is its
abstract human figures in white, grey and black, many depicted as dancing (Figure 5).
The dynamism and irregularity of Eakin’s drawings were precisely in line with the
argument that the study of race was the study of genetic variation in populations
(Figure 6). UNESCO may also have been attempting to make the abstract aesthetic
less austere: Eakins’ drawings were a solution to the challenge of depicting scientific
knowledge as technical and objective while simultaneously appealing and legible.
Like Isotype books—which always contained some words although with no
duplication of message—What Is Race? juxtaposed text and pictures (Burke, 2010).
Also in keeping with Isotype, the visual elements of What Is Race? were not intended
to illustrate the text, rather to actively offer the same arguments in graphical form.
26. The similarities in content and sentiment are perhaps unsurprising given the links between their authors: Klineberg, Dunn, Benedict and Weltfish all worked at Columbia University New York, and were linked through influences from Franz Boas. 27. For a rich analysis of the fate of universalist graphic design in relation to public health campaigns in the postwar period, see Mitman (2010).
Figure 4: Same message, different graphic solutions. The first image (a) contrasts the lives of Johnny
(left), with his poor environment with Jimmy (right) living in an ordered neighbourhood. Source:
Benedict R. and Weltfish G. The Races of Mankind, Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 85 (New York: Public
Affairs Committee, Inc. 1943). The second image (b) contrasts a child with (top) an ordered home,
good healthcare and education, and (bottom) poor home, health risks and limited education. Source:
What Is Race? Paris: UNESCO, 1952: 61. Reproduced with permission from UNESCO, Paris.
Figure 5: Schematic illustrating how ‘Differences in Skin Colour May Have Arisen by Mutation’. The
horizontal plane indicates evolutionary time, and argues that at different stages ‘mutations’ have occurred
to produce three races with distinct visual characteristics. Source: What Is Race? Paris: UNESCO, 1952: 31.
Reproduced with permission from UNESCO, Paris.
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Despite the irregularity of some of its pictorial elements, the diagrams of the picture
book are extremely precise representations of contemporary scientific knowledge. For
example, Figure 7 is based on a schematic originally produced for the Musée de
l’homme in Paris, depicting evolutionary time from ‘the first primate’ to the
‘beginnings of Homo sapiens’ (UNESCO, 1952c: 10–11). Although the overall
impression is of a single lineage, several separate lines suggest links without
confirming them: a red line from ‘Swanscombe’ to ‘Fontechevade man’ lies alongside
a dotted black one that links ‘Steinheim’ to ‘Neanderthal’ man. ‘Piltdown Man’—at
that time still a puzzling aberration but shortly to be revealed as a hoax in 1953—is
not part of the main scheme but given a detour of its own; while the main actor,
Homo sapiens, is connected to other lineages with a large ambiguous question mark.
The graphic choices in the book suggest that while humorous line cartoons were
considered appropriate for US domestic and military audiences, the modernist
images were regarded by UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communication as more
scientific, universally appealing and fit for an international readership. Similarities of
graphic and narrative style with the Isotype Institute books reflected a shared general
belief by the Isotype Institute and UNESCO in the power of images to convey
complex scientific facts to a lay public in a transparent, universal manner.
3. Visual and textual arguments
The introduction to What Is Race? precisely reproduced the chosen rhetorical
structure of the UNESCO race statements: constructing an older, received view of
race in relation to an enlightened, modern scientific understanding (e.g. Müller-Wille,
2007; Reardon, 2004). Older views of race (the argument went) had led to the
horrors of the Second World War (‘The Nazi myth of Aryan superiority, for
example, was supported with just this kind of so-called “science”’). What Is Race?
strongly emphasised the perils of commonplace views (‘Race can be a dangerous
word’), and the capacity of science to correct the untutored prejudices held by the
public (‘If we can use in our own actions and thinking what may be called the
scientific method, we shall have taken a short step towards clarifying the confused
ideas in current circulation’) (UNESCO, 1952c: 6 and 71). The identification of Nazi
racial doctrine as the principle target of the campaign allowed UNESCO to sidestep
Figure 6: Rebutting Nazi notions of race purity, ‘Melting Pot of Peoples Before the Twelfth Century’, offered
a revised view of Europe’s racial composition. Abstract figures dance across an outline map, supplemented
with a caption that describes “successive waves” of migration. The continent, it argued, had long been home
to a mixture of races, represented here in several shades of grey. Source: What Is Race?, Paris: UNESCO,
1952: 40. Reproduced with permission from UNESCO, Paris.
Figure 7: “How races began” shows a provisional scheme for how humans evolved in relation to other
primates. The figure was originally produced for the Musée de l’homme in Paris. Source: What Is Race? Paris:
UNESCO, 1952: 10. Reproduced with permission from UNESCO, Paris.
14
the contentious issue of civil rights in the US, the UN’s most powerful member
(Hazard, 2012: 61; Teslow, 2014).28
Likewise, the arguments throughout What Is Race? take the general form of first
describing the apparently common and popular understanding of race—‘we think of’
(p. 41), ‘people often talk about’ (p. 47), ‘people used to think’ (p. 29)—and then of
explaining the corrective offered by science. Carefully constructing the commonplace
view, Tead and her colleagues suggested that the untrained observer was dangerously
prone to being mislead by characteristics of language and culture. The first page of
the book’s introduction (p. 5) asks: ‘Which of the following would you call races?’,
offering a choice of twelve population categories (including ‘Mediterraneans’,
‘Aryans’, ‘Whites’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Nordics’, and ‘Jews’). In a familiar, genial tone it
continues ‘As you can see, the word “Race” is a difficult one to use correctly’, and,
upside-down in small print at the bottom of the page, it provides the correct answers
(i.e. ‘Mediterraneans’, yes; ‘Aryans’, no; ‘Whites’, yes; ‘Negroes’, yes; ‘Nordics’, yes;
‘Jews’, no). In line with the race statements, What Is Race? does not reject the term
race, but insists that it is a technical biological term; it frequently refers to the ‘major
races of mankind … Caucasian, Negroid and Mongoloid’ (UNESCO, 1952c: 42), the
suffix ‘–oid’ deriving its technical connotations from work earlier in the century (e.g.
Kroeber, 1923).
Having established race as biological, the book goes on to describe the significance of
genetics. What Is Race? uses a historical narrative to present genetics as the
revolutionary agent capable of transforming a naïve view of race into the newly
enlightened field. Dunn made the same move in another pamphlet called Race and
Biology, published as part of UNESCO’s specialist Race Question series. There, he
underscores the redemptive work of genetics, describing Mendel’s laws as
‘revolutionary’ and attributing the ‘radical change’ in perceptions of race and racial
difference to ‘the rise in the science of genetics’ (Dunn, 1951: 5). As both Race and
Biology and What Is Race? explain, although scientific and popular understandings of
the world had been in concert half a decade before, scientific thinking had since
undergone a revolution. In both books, Gregor Mendel was the agent of this
28. Staffan Müller-Wille (2007) discusses how these narratives also helped set the conditions for UN legislation on race prejudice and genocide.
15
transformation, with What Is Race? reproducing this narrative using an abstract
figurative cartoon of Mendel as scientist–monk (Figure 1).
There was a distinctive Cold War dimension to the choice of Mendel as the field’s
founding father. As Audra Wolfe (2012) explains, in 1950 the Genetics Society of
America had hosted a high-profile Golden Jubilee of Genetics, marking 50 years
since the rediscovery of Mendel’s principles of inheritance. The Jubilee, of which
Dunn was one of the organizers, sought to celebrate the superiority of Western
science as a rebuttal to Soviet Lysenkoism.29 While seemingly side-stepping any
public criticism of Lysenkoism (Dunn himself insisted that the event should be kept at
a ‘scientifically high level’ and free of political dogma) the Jubilee presented Mendel
as a unifying figure; a suitable ambassador for a science that was at the same time
‘practical, inevitable and beneficial’ (Wolfe, 2012: 396–400). Two years later, and
consistent with this claim to political neutrality, Race and Biology and What Is Race? cast
Mendel as the consummate scientist, but one living in relative hermetic isolation,
virtuously free of political agenda, and untainted by society.
Turning back to UNESCO’s depiction of Mendel (Figure 1), we could view the
conspicuous crucifix in the image as simply a useful device for the figurative
abstraction of his character. But religious mythology plays a more prominent role in
both Race and Biology and What Is Race?, aligning a postwar vision of internationalist
governance with a universal spirituality. which What Is Race? asserted that the very
word ‘genetics […] comes from the same Greek word as genesis which means the
creation or the beginning’ (UNESCO, 1952c: 22). Even while promoting modern,
enlightened science, both books cite ancient and religious traditions to affirm genetic
knowledge as authentic truth. Race and Biology states that ‘the biological outlook’
restores ‘that view of the unity of man which we find in ancient religions and
mythologies’ [my emphasis]: truly a science for a postwar age (Dunn, 1951: 8).
Meanwhile What Is Race? used the image of the tree of knowledge (Figure 1) to argue
that genetic unity reflected knowledge embedded in Christian and Jewish cultures. It
recounts: ‘Our common ancestor could as well be called Adam, which also means
29. For more on Trofim Lysenko—an influential Soviet biologist and agronomist who rejected genetics—see the 2012 special issue of Journal for the History of Biology 45(3), ‘The Lysenko Controversy and the Cold War’.
16
man in Hebrew, for the familiar Biblical story foreshadowed the evidence of science
that present men derive from a common stock’ (UNESCO, 1952c: 12). Reflecting the
UN’s ‘family of man’ narrative (Haraway, 1989, 1992) this argument attempted to
align the objective scientific character of modern population genetics with apparently
deeper spiritual commonalities that tied together the peoples of the world.
But if population genetics could offer deep insights into biological difference, how
might it actually be studied? Much mid-century human genetics involved research on
blood groups, by that time a crucial component of blood transfusion protocols, and
still the only human traits understood to be inherited via Mendelian laws (e.g.
Schneider, 1996). Many geneticists believed that blood groups offered a methodology
for reforming human heredity (Mazumdar, 1992; Bangham, 2013), and,
notwithstanding their incorporation in interwar discourses about race and nation,
many viewed blood groups as the most promising refutation of notions of race purity
(Huxley et al., 1935; Sommer, 2014). Crucially, although different populations had
slightly different frequencies of blood groups, all blood groups could be found in all
races of the world, neatly affirming both the notion of racial difference and the unity
of mankind. What Is Race? devotes a whole section to the science of blood groups,
again presenting a so-called popular view of blood, before explaining the true
scientific one. It presents a schematic that demonstrates how blood groups affect who
can donate and receive blood (Figure 8a): the rules are very specific, but are
emphatically unrelated to the superiority or inferiority of races (Figure 8b). What Is
Race? asserts that evidence from blood-group distributions attested to the truth of the
genetics view of race: ‘Nowhere can we show more clearly […] that human groups,
whether they be called races, tribes or peoples, seem to have the same basic
assortment of hereditary characters’ (UNESCO, 1952c: 51). A planar schematic
(Figure 8b) flattened and neutralised racial hierarchies, turning blood-group genes
into the perfect mediators of racial difference. The message of the images was that as
long as the blood groups matched correctly, any human being could donate blood to
any other. Cohering with UNESCO’s broader philosophy, genetics offered a
scientifically objective basis for recognising ‘unity in diversity’ (Unesco, 1949: 11).
How persuasive were these visual arguments? It is difficult to recover the views of the
intended audiences of What Is Race?; it is not even clear the extent to which its
Figure 8: Schematic shows how people of different blood groups can safely give or receive blood. Source:
What Is Race? Paris: UNESCO, 1952: 50. Permission pending, UNESCO, Paris. (b) Schematic argues
that all blood groups can be found in all races of the world. Source: What Is Race? Paris: UNESCO,
1952: 49. Reproduced with permission from UNESCO, Paris.
17
ambitious plans for its distribution were realised. The book was meant to be given a
worldwide distribution, and its inside back cover lists distributors in 61 countries; but
although the Department of Mass Communication intended for the book to be
translated into several languages, in the end it only managed French. But several
journals of education, civil rights, science and medicine did review the book, offering
glimpses of how UNESCO’s approach was understood by selected communities and
institutions in the US and Britain. The book’s arguments apparently accorded
happily with prevailing views on high-school education in those countries. The Peabody
Journal of Education explained that it contained ‘an excellent presentation in text and
popular form diagrams’ (‘What Is Race’, 1953). Its simple design was a great hit with
The School Review, which, in its section ‘Materials Useful for Teachers’ (1953), flagged
the book as a great example of how ‘the principles of biology may be applied … in
promoting international good will and understanding’. Popular and specialist medical
and science journals published flattering reviews. The Science News-Letter listed What is
Race? in its ‘Books of the Week’, describing its ‘ingenious diagrams and simple text’
(‘Books of the Week’, 1952). The Quarterly Review of Biology noted the book’s
‘attractive, modernistic’ design, while the British Medical Journal praised it as ‘simple,
cool, amusing and informative’, capable of appealing to ‘both savant and schoolboy’
(‘What is Race?’, 1952). ‘Simple’, ‘modernistic’, ‘informative’: the reviewers writing
for these journals found the book coherent and legible.
Others were more critical. British geographer and anthropologist Herbert Fleure was
deeply suspicious of efforts produce a single institutional statement on a scientific
topic. he declared in Geography that ‘the apple is one of many regrettable items’ in the
book, and asked in Man ‘why drag in the old tale of the garden of Eden?’ (Fleure,
1953a, 1953b). Fleure regarded the ill-chosen imagery to be symptomatic of the error
of sacrificing the complexities of science for the sake of an authoritative statement.
Others were more sympathetic with UNESCO’s universalist objectives; a review in
the journal Phylon mildly reprimanded the book for its ‘Christocentrism’ but in the
end dismissed that feature as a ‘harmless’ deviation from ‘objectivity and
internationalism’, in a book otherwise ‘masterfully adapted’ to ‘reach all United
Nations countries’ (Iwanska, 1953).30 So What Is Race? appeared to have broad
30. Phylon was overseen by its founder W.E.B. Du Bois, historian, sociologist and top official of the US National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
18
support of scientific, pedagogical, medical and civil rights periodicals.31 But Eakin’s
images had lives beyond the book itself and these contexts reveal the reception to be
more mixed.
4. Media
Testifying to the perceived power of Eakin’s images as tools for the communication of
science, the Department of Mass Communication redeployed them in a range of
other media. Tead worked hard to get the images into Life, the pre-eminent
magazine in the US and Europe for the consumption of images with a weekly
circulation of over five million (Doss, 2001). Life magazine presented Eakin’s images
as independent visual elements under the subheading: ‘U.N.’s scientific pictures show
what races are, how they originated, and how they became intermingled’ (‘How the
races of man developed’, 1953). Life’s juxtaposition of Eakin’s images with
advertisements for shaving cream (Figure 9) and steam irons (not shown) produces a
teleological vision of the development of civilization, drawing attention to the very
specific cultural and historical context in which these images were consumed, and the
audience’s probable narrow racial and socio-economic composition.32 Indeed,
subscribers to Life were overwhelmingly white, well-educated, Americans, although
with a ‘pass-along’ factor of over 17 it had the potential to be read by a greater
diversity of people (Baughman, 2001).33 With those circulation numbers, Life was
likely the principle medium through which Eakin’s images were read.
In a further affirmation of Eakin’s images as pedagogical tools, UNESCO’s
Department of Mass Communication transposed the drawings into another medium
that privileged pictures—the filmstrip.34 A filmstrip consisted of a series of positive
18mm x 24mm images on a celluloid film that could be projected sequentially with
31. See Hazard (2012) for a much more complex, mixed and critical reaction to minority communities in the US. 32. On the final page of the feature, the image reproduced in Figure 4—on the effect of environment on a child’s development—was judiciously placed adjacent to the advertisement for ‘Westinghouse Open Handle Steam or Dry Iron’, which boasted ‘15 scientifically spaced steam vents’ (‘How the races of man developed’, 1953: 106). 33. When Tead heard that the Life editors were interested in the pictures, she wrote to her contact declaring: ‘If this leads to a double-page spread of the illustrations in “Life”, I will personally send you a case of champagne or the first copy of the booklet autographed by Jane [Eakin]’. Diana Tead, “To Gjon Mili,” September 11, 1951, 323.1 (094.4), UNESCO. 34. Diana Tead, ‘To David Ennals’, 1951, 323.1, UNESCO.
Figure 9: A single page in the Life magazine UNESCO feature. On the left, three pages
excerpted from What Is Race? align human with animal evolution in order to highlight the
zoological—thereby apolitical—meaning of race. The juxtaposition here with an advertisement
for shaving cream celebrating civilized, white masculinity draws attention both the large
numbers of people who would have seen these images, as well as the audience’s probable
narrow racial and socio-economic composition. Thanks to Sarah Blacker and Tracy Teslow
with their help in the reading of this image. Source: ‘How the Races of Man Developed’ Life,
May 18, 1953, 101–6.
19
live or recorded commentary. According to a UNESCO memo, the filmstrip
projector was an ideal tool for schools, ‘not so much as an aid to a lesson but as a
lesson in itself’.35 While What Is Race? offered an appendix for teachers that would
help them guide and discipline discussion on race, the filmstrip put the classroom
teacher fully in control. Not only did the filmstrip place special emphasis on the
presentation of images, but could also be overlaid with any given language and so
was seen as having the potential to be used in diverse parts of the world (Hawkins,
1949).
Translating the message into yet another medium, in late 1952 BBC producer
George Noordhof suggested that What Is Race? might be ‘made suitable for television
with very little difficulty’.36 In the early 1950s, only an estimated 14% of British
households owned a television. For major events at least, watching television was a
public activity, with audiences gathering in homes and pubs.37 Noordhof’s suggestion
cohered with several overlapping agendas of the 1940s BBC that aligned neatly with
many of UNESCO’s own. On the one hand, owing to intensive lobbying from the
Association of Scientific Workers and others, scientists were increasingly represented
within the corporation’s ranks, and science a central theme in its programming
(Boon, 2008; Briggs, 1985). On the other, in the corporation’s output was reflecting
new anxieties about race relations in Britain (Cardiff and Scannell, 1987; Paul, 1997;
Waters, 1997). Testifying to the perceived urgency of the topic in a country awash
with anxieties about immigration and its declining empire, the race relations
programme was originally meant to be about British experiences, but the BBC
eventually decided that this would be too inflammatory and chose instead to make
the series about race relations in Africa (Newton, 2012). Noordhof suggested that a
scientific programme on race might serve as a useful preamble to this series.
Race and Colour was produced by the Television Talks Department, which handled
most science programming in the 1950s and specialised in studio-based television.
Perfectly in line with UNESCO’s own model of science education, and with the
35. UNESCO, ‘Notes for Filmstrips: What Is Race?’, 1953, 307.778.5, UNESCO. 36. Noordhof, George, ‘Race Programme’, 1 May 1952, T32/209/1, BBC Written Archives. 37. At this time, BBC television was broadcast live from Alexandra Palace: it was an ephemeral performance, and not a permanent medium. For this reason, no footage of Race and Colour exists, so my analysis is gleaned from scraps of papers and draft scripts from the BBC Written Archives.
20
cultivation in the first half of the century of the expert–scientist–author (Bowler,
2009), the format of a ‘TV talk’ consisted of ‘expert opinion or information […]
conveyed directly from the authority to the viewer’ (Boon, 2008: 186, 195). The
producers cast among their ‘authorities’ on race: Julian Huxley, anthropologists Jack
Trevor and Maurice Freedman, and haematologist Arthur Mourant, with well-
known broadcaster Richie Calder chairing the discussion. The producers already had
a good idea of what they wanted their experts to say: in line with UNESCO’s notion
of scientists as instruments of reform, the producers convened a meeting ‘with the
intention of persuading the scientists to fit what they want to say to the conclusions
which we want them to reach’ [my emphasis]. They warned Calder that some
participants might ‘require a good deal of “producing”’.38
Calder apparently managed to successfully ‘produce’ his on-air guests without
controversy, and their discussion was interposed with an array of visual devices: from
Eakin’s images, to a collection of skulls, to a display of six people apparently
representing the ‘Negro’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘White’ races.39 Remarkably, one
representative of the latter category was David Attenborough, who had been in the
BBC canteen one lunchtime, having recently begun his first job for the BBC, when a
producer came in looking for a ‘Caucasian’ representative.40 More dramatically still,
these six individuals—referred to in the script as ‘profiles’—then had their blood
groups tested on air by distinguished haematologist Arthur Mourant, prolific author
of papers on blood groups, co-author of the 1952 UNESCO statement on race
(Bangham, 2014). In line with the argument in What Is Race? about blood groups,
Mourant first introduced their functions in blood transfusion using a ‘chart showing
the blood groups (animating)’—almost certainly a modified version of one of Eakin’s
drawings.41 Emphasising the technical nature of blood-grouping work—and the
property of blood groups as traits that are invisible to the non-expert eye—Mourant’s
demonstration included the use of a microscope. No fragments remain of the draft
scripts relating to any subsequent discussion of the blood groups, but, in any case,
what could have been understood from seven blood tests on seven individuals? 38. Bredin, J., ‘Memo: Africa Series: Scientific Programme, To Wyndham Goldie’ October 15, 1952, T32/209/1, BBC Written Archives. 39. 'Diagrams', c 1952, T32/209/1, BBC Written Archives. 40. David Attenborough, personal communication. 41. ‘Memo: Race and Colour, Monday 10th November 1952.’, c 1952. T32/209/1. BBC Written Archives.
21
Certainly nothing conclusive about racial differences. Rather, the message seems to
have been simply that blood groups were the route to the scientific study of race.
Blood groups were not only crucial objects of medical practice but were invisible,
technical objects that had the potential to deflect attention away from physical
differences such as skin and hair colour.
Thus, taking their lead from UNESCO, the BBC producers used blood-group
genetics as a way of establishing race as the domain of scientific experts. Race and
Colour was broadcast on Tuesday 10th November, and (optimistically) at peak
viewing time, between 19.45 and 20.25. As was routine for new programmes, the
corporation commissioned a Viewers Research Report to garner responses to the
programme from selected members of the viewing public. They were dismayed by
the results: the programme received a ‘disappointing reaction index of 54 […] well
below the current average (62) for television talks’. Viewers were deeply sceptical that
science might have the capacity to defuse social tensions. One complained that the
technical discussion obscured the ‘real issues of the racial problem’; another could see
little point ‘in worrying whether man, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, had a square head, a
round head, or no head at all!’. Others felt that the science was simply too
inaccessible: ‘I do think the experts could have simplified the discussion by cutting-
out their phrase-codes when referring to blood-categories and so on. It was like
listening to a lot of doctors at a medical confab’. The report itself summarised the
viewers response: the ‘most emphatic criticism was that it was “much too
technical”’.42
The BBC (and by extension UNESCO) was attempting to strike a delicate balance.
One the one hand, the construction of race as ‘much too technical’ cohered perfectly
with the image of elite scientific expertise that the two organisations were trying to
cultivate. On the other hand, it ran the risk of undermining the hoped-for political
function of science, as a remedy for social tensions. The television-viewing public
were not ignorant of the reality of what race relations meant in postwar Britain: for a
country struggling to come to terms with changed relationships within its empire, a
42. ‘A Viewer Research Report: “Race and Colour”’, November 26, 1952. T32/209/1. BBC Written Archives.
22
severe labour shortage, and demographic crisis, they were sceptical of what the
biological study of race had to offer.
Conclusion
Despite local failures to move its hoped-for popular audience, the UNESCO
campaign helped to advance the postwar professionalization of human genetics
(Brattain, 2007; Bangham and de Chadarevian, 2014; Gormley, 2009; Reardon,
2004). The field’s redemptive framing included the renaming of its major journals in
the late 1940s and 1950s (from the American Journal of Eugenics to the American Journal of
Human Genetics, the Annals of Eugenics to the Annals of Human Genetics) and its first
International Congress in 1956. Also tied to urgent questions about the hereditary
effects of atomic radiation (Creager, 2013; Lindee, 1994), books and conferences on
the role of genetics for understanding the past and future of mankind proliferated.
Genetic medicine flourished (Lindee, 2005) and studies of human genetic diversity
and ancestry prospered (Sommer, 2008), as blood groups were later joined by an
abundance of new protein markers. The postwar construction of human genetics—to
which the UNESCO campaign contributed—was enduring: the framing of genetics
as a neutral methodology for studying human diversity persists today in medical
(Fullwiley, 2008), forensic and commercial settings (Gannett, 2014), where human
ancestry and racial difference are articulated in terms of genetic diversity (Sommer,
2010).
What Is Race? highlights some of the specific historical contexts in which these
disciplinary interests were productively tied to larger-scale political concerns. The
existence of the Department of Mass communication draws attention to the
prevailing paternalistic model of public education; its choice of genre (a picture book)
points to a confidence in the remedial power of science; and decisions about graphic
design to a belief in the universal comprehension of a modernist pictorial language.
Broader political contexts were consequential to the arguments made in What Is
Race?: its narrow framing (dealing with ‘the biological aspects of race’ and not ‘race
relations’) points to domestic struggles in the US and the power dynamics within
UNESCO, while the book’s striking caricature of Mendel reminds us of the Cold
War significance of genetics. We get a glimpse of the kinds of work that was
23
undertaken to make genetics apparently politically neutral in order that it could serve
as an instrument for the (deeply political) UNESCO cause. Meanwhile, the book
confirmed the truth of genetics via reference to religious, and specifically Christian,
narratives. It also aligned textual and visual appeals to supposed intuitions about a
universal human spirit with a postwar vision of internationalist government. In
summary, What Is Race? suggests that the enduring image of genetics as universal,
technical, and neutral was in part constructed through the postwar projection of the
discipline to audiences outside its own community, in a very specific historical and
political context.
Eakin’s images circulated beyond What Is Race? as they were abstracted and
transposed into other forms. Although my analysis of the distribution and reception
of the images is very partial, their appearance in Life and on the BBC suggests that
they were primarily consumed by the US and British middle class, rather than people
in other United Nations countries. This may not be entirely contradictory (given that
both countries were struggling with tensions relating to racial prejudice) but these
audiences certainly fall short of UNESCO’s stated international ambitions. The
publication of the images in Life also draws attention to the possibility that What Is
Race? and other elements of the campaign were not only attempts to reach a
consensus on race and to ameliorate social tensions, but were also performances to
demonstrate the power of science, and the authority and ambitions of UNESCO. In
other words, UNESCO’s race campaign was not just the story of a struggle among
experts about the right ways to think about human difference, it was also an
expression of the identity, objectives and power of a new postwar institution.
Although genetics was not the only discipline instrumental to this task, it offered
especially useful resonances: with implications for understanding human evolution
and origins it was a field that could speak to what it meant to be human. More
specifically, it helped to articulate a vision of what it meant to be a post-World War
Two human: unprejudiced, civilized, scientifically literate, and living under the
banner of the United Nations.
24
Acknowledgements
For their time and generous insights I am very grateful to Sarah Blacker, Nick
Hopwood, Boris Jardine, Nick Jardine, Judith Kaplan, Veronika Lipphardt, Joshua
Nall, Jenny Reardon, Hallam Stevens, Marianne Sommer, Tracy Teslow and two
anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to the UNESCO archives and the BBC Written
Archives for their work in finding relevant materials, and to Eric Llaveria Caselles,
Nina Ludwig and Leon Kokkoliadis for their help in obtaining figure permissions.
The research carried out for this paper was supported by the Max Planck Institute
for the History of Science, Berlin.
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