Beneath the "Thin Veneer of Civilization": Evolution, Masculinity, and Race in the Early Twentieth Century United States

By the turn of the twentieth century, many Anglo-Saxon American men of a middle and upper class background began to define their identities by appealing to evolutionary thought.Homo erectus nordicus, they believed, was the greatest physical and mental specimen among the races of the world.Yet this narrative of evolutionary greatness through a history of Spencerian struggle in the natural world, defined by popular and scientific literature, seemed at odds with the condition of the modern American man.Their grand narrative of natural history stressed the need to engage with nature to embrace one's authentic identity as a man, in contrast to the effeminate and degenerative influences of civilization-which had been compromised, they believed, by the unnatural, growing cultural authority of women, immigrants, and organized labor.In this thesis, I argue that these evolutionary narratives of white masculinity portrayed the white male body as powerful yet vulnerable to degeneracy, setting an alarmist agenda for reclaiming a conservative cultural identity for the nation.Chapter 1 Introduction: The White Male Body and the New Biology in America "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan The proper study of Mankind is Man." -Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1734) The publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 may have precipitated one of the most profound revolutions in Western scientific thought, but his ideas were initially slow to take root in the United States.Louis Agassiz, the preeminent American biologist of his day, discounted not only Darwin's theory of natural selection but the concept of evolution entirely.Botanist Asa Gray, the most vocal American supporter of Darwin's views, was nevertheless uneasy about the Origin's seemingly materialist overtones.Gray was strongly committed, more so than most of Darwin's allies, to divine agency in evolution.1 In short, Darwin had no bulldog in the United States-at least not yet.After the death of Agassiz in 1873, evolution and the concept of natural selection would take root in American universities under a new generation of biologists.Yet, while few scientists were prepared to deny evolution outright, there was considerable disagreement as to the mechanisms that drove this change.2 Darwin's views came to be known as gradualism: the argument that members of a species (through methods that were admittedly not yet fully understood) would change slowly over time and environmental factors would drive some of those organisms to extinction while others would survive to reproduce.3 The evolutionary thought of Herbert Spencer placed special emphasis on competition between organisms, which 1 Mark A. Largent, "Darwinism in the United States, 1859-1930," in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge:

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