1

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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