Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

In 1907, Congress formed a group called the Dillingham Commission for a study intended to decrease the influx of European immigrants. The report intended to use scientific racism (eugenics) to prove that the immigrants were degrading the quality of American society. Boas and the others who undertook the study disproved this theory, but when the reports of the Dillingham Commission’s findings were published in 1911, the authors of the reports ignored Boas’s conclusions. The authors claimed that those who immigrated after 1880 could not be considered loyal to the United States, as they were a less desirable class of people.

World War I brought sweeping anti-German sentiment. Boas disagreed with the United States’ decision to enter the war and was anxious at seeing the United States move towards nationalism, a dangerous trend he recognized from his home country. Nicholas Butler, president of Columbia University, denounced Boas’s opinions as treasonous and not representative of the position held by the university. Butler phased out the undergraduate program in anthropology, cut Boas’s funding and salary, and attempted to paint Boas’s way of thinking as grounded in German philosophy.

Now stifled at Columbia, Boas accepted a position at Barnard College, the women’s branch of the university.