from
Louis Agassiz
Creator of American Science
by
Christoph Irmscher

Agassiz the selfless promoter of scientific truth? His former disciple didn’t think so. Clark, who was happiest when the waters of the Atlantic lapped around his feet as he looked for new jellyfish, found himself as a student caught between two personalities and two world-views: Agassiz, the omnivorous Captain Ahab of American natural history, entranced less with the results of scientific investigations than with the idea of science as a heroic activity in which everyone could participate as long as the captain himself remained in charge, and the benign Dr. Asa Gray, who believed that only patient accumulation of facts would, in due course, yield knowledge—specialized knowledge, that is—that would not interfere with, or contradict, established religious belief. Clark, the son of a Swedenborgian minister, eventually pursued what he perhaps never himself realized was a fantasy: that he had been present when life, as he conceived of it in the passages on spontaneous generation in Mind in Nature, first came into being. In this fantasy, Henry James Clark was in a sense the world’s first scientist, one who had incurred no debts, financial or otherwise, and who didn’t need anyone to teach him or tell him what to do. Someone, in short, who was the product of his own spontaneous generation.

What does Agassiz stand to gain from making human racial groups equivalent to different animal species—a conclusion that he has been working up to, more or less systematically, since that day in Charleston when he jumped up to offer his support for Nott’s racist ideas? On the one hand, we may assume that Agassiz’s theorizing is driven by a genuine and, in the context of the science of his time, quite radical need to treat humans as not fundamentally different from animals: “The laws which regulate the diversity of animals, and their distribution upon earth, apply equally to man, within the same limits and in the same degree.” On the other hand, though, considering human species as racially distinct also serves a more conservative purpose—namely, that of fending off any notion that nature might have developed to where it is today. What worries Agassiz, in other words, is the idea that whatever we perceive as diversity today must have been the product of a series of changes over time, an assumption that would also require us to assume that there was—horrible thought!—no general plan in place at the beginning of the Creation.

But there was yet another reason behind Agassiz’s well-publicized racism, beyond the need for order. This was the desire to align himself, as an immigrant, as firmly as he could with other whites of European descent in America, the need to construct a genealogy for himself that would make the New World seem rather old indeed.

The puzzling case of Howe the courageous abolitionist and bigoted mulatto-hater serves to put Agassiz’s racism in perspective: as far less extreme, more mainstream, more deliberate, and therefore perhaps even more horrifying than previous biographers and historians have assumed. James MacPherson, the eminent Civil War historian, faults Agassiz with having infected the “equalitarian” Howe with the bacillus of racism. But Howe, though he probably didn’t realize it, had been a bigot in racial matters long before his notorious exchanges with Agassiz.

In a long footnote to his definitive biography of Lincoln, David Herbert Donald reminds his readers that Lincoln never was a “militant” racist and never spoke of African Americans as physically or mentally inferior. He also points out that even Frederick Douglass had deemed Lincoln free “from popular prejudice against the colored race.” The fact remains, though, that when it came to racial coexistence his publicly articulated views differed not at all from those of the more readily vilified Agassiz or the more generally admired Howe.

Reading Agassiz and Shaler and, yes, Darwin too, one suddenly realizes why racial mixing was so unacceptable to many of the participants in the grand palaver about race that dominated the nineteenth century. It blurred alleged biological boundaries but it also threatened to do away with the one position the black man or woman was indisputably allowed to assume in the national and international conversation about race—object of debate, rather than debater. If American writers left “the negro” unwritten, as Daniel Aaron showed some time ago in his provocative book about the Civil War, the same is true of the various parties that chose to make him or her (or, more generally, the issue of race) a subject of intense scientific debate.

As this chapter should have reminded us, there was a dizzying spectrum of possible positions on this issue: one could be an apologist for slavery and yet an opponent of polygenism (John Bachman), a defender of slavery and a polygenist (Josiah Nott), an opponent of slavery and a polygenist (Louis Agassiz), an abolitionist and a polygenist (Samuel Gridley Howe), an abolitionist and a believer in the common origin of all humankind, yet a segregationist (Abraham Lincoln), a unionist and a gradualist when it came to racial integration (Herman Melville), and so forth. Having an opinion on race, even if it was the wrong opinion, was de riguer in nineteenth-century America, and sometimes the positions held differed only in nuance.

One might interpret such episodes as a fawning tribute to Agassiz’s patriarchal hold on scientific truth: when women try their hand at experiments, things go wrong. A more compelling way of reading the scene would be to assume that Elizabeth Agassiz is making fun of the pretensions of scientific authority. She gives us “science lite,” a way of writing that freely expresses the author’s own (sometimes wrongheaded) opinions yet manages to avoid the dogmatic inflexibility that marred her husband’s scientific pontifications as well as Darwin’s allegedly superior claim to the scientific truth.