Behind the Bastards - Part One: Phrenology: The Bastard Science of Racism

Episode Date: December 4, 2018

For some people, racism isn’t enough. They aren’t satisfied with just hating someone because of their appearance. They need a scientific justification for their bigotry. In episode 36, Robert is joined by podcast pioneer Josh Clark (Stuff You Should Know, The End of the World) to discuss the long, long chain of scientific racism. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everyone, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Once Again, Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now, my guest today who is coming in cold to our topic is Josh Clark, host of End of the World, a new podcast on the Stuff Network, and Stuff You Should Know, a not new podcast on the Stuff Network, a flagship podcast, you could say. How are you doing? Thank you very much for having me on, I'm doing great.

It's great to have you on. So you're a bit of a science buff, would that be fair to say? Sure, yeah, I like science as much as the next guy. Well, today I've prepared a special topic for you, and it is about the science of racism. Oh good. Yeah, so we're going to have us a fun talk. Are you familiar with phrenology? I am, I'm a professional phrenologist, it turns out.

Oh, that is unsettling. No, I've always wanted one of the original phrenology busts. You can get like knockoffs of them, but you can just tell it's a knockoff of modern one. But to find an original one that somebody used to actually like diagnose things, I would love to have that. Well, we're going to talk a lot about where some of those busts came from. Would you tell me what your knowledge, explain to the audience sort of what you understand as phrenology is or was? Phrenology, from my understanding, is you could determine things about an individual based on bumps on their head that are in their skull, the shape of their skull. Just basically feeling the person's skull, you could glean information about their character, their heritage, all sorts of stuff.

And of course, it was just complete and total hogwash. Yeah, and that is a good cliff notes of phrenology, but the real story of this science, and it was seen as a science for a long time, is much deeper and is inextricably connected to racism both in the past and today. And so that's what I'm going to be talking about today. So I wanted to get started with a little bit of background, though, on just sort of the evolution of scientific racism, which started out a lot earlier than I think most people would expect. It's a long, long chain and it really kicks off in the third century BC with a guy you've probably heard of named Aristotle, often called the father of Western philosophy. Aristotle was also the father of using pseudoscientific rhetoric to justify being a dick to people that he thought weren't as good as he is. Now, by the time he started laying down his theories on natural science, the whole idea of science itself was pretty new. And Aristotle was one of the first people to try and create a biological taxonomy of animals, sorting them into categories and species.

This is fine and obviously a major underpinning of biology today, but Aristotle couldn't resist taking his research beyond, you know, the fact that wolves and dogs looked like they might be related, and extending it to creating taxonomies of governments and of human beings. So I'd like to read a quote from a Washington Post article titled, Aristotle, Father of Scientific Racism. In the first book of his politics written in the 300s BC, Aristotle uses these taxonomies to justify the exclusion of certain people from civic life. While condemning the predominant method of acquiring slaves in his day, capturing prisoners in war, Aristotle argues that some people are by nature rather than circumstances fit to be slaves. For that some should rule and others should be ruled is a thing not only necessary but expedient. From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. Only were some people slaves by nature, but it was clear that for them, quote, slavery is both expedient and right, he wrote. So that's Aristotle in 300s BC.

And you can see how you can see why Aristotle was a popular philosopher among some of the Confederate intellectual nobility in the 1860s. I think it's obvious where that comes from. So Aristotle's ideal society would have had a strict hierarchy where each type of human fulfilled a certain role and contributed to a perfect whole as long as nobody got too big for their britches and decided, for example, that they didn't really want to be a slave. So it's not fair to call Aristotle a racist in the same way we think of a guy like David Duke, because obviously the idea of whiteness hadn't been invented yet. Aristotle's categories weren't based on anything we recognize as race by the modern sort of definitions of racism. But it had an impact on everything that descended after it, and it was sort of the start of a chain of scientists really trying to find ways to justify the biases in their cultures using sort of scientific method that was, you know, evolving in their day. Carolus Linnaeus, an 18th century naturalist known as the father of taxonomy, sorted human beings to. But unlike Aristotle, he sorted them into different races rather than just dividing up society into different classes of people. Linnaeus believed that the four varieties of human being were European, American, Asiatic, and African.

Petrus Camper, a Dutch anatomy professor in the late 18th century, considered Greeks to be the highest form of human being because their statues were really sexy. So he ranked different varieties of human being by how far their faces varied from Greek statues, which is kind of a whimsical attitude towards racism. That's the one you come up with and then do a little twirl and celebration after it. These guys' statues are so hot, they must be the perfect human beings. Look at those abs, yeah. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist, invented the phrase Caucasian in 1795. He believed Caucasians were the, quote, original race of human being and also the most beautiful. In the mid-1800s, an American anthropologist named Samuel Morton theorized that intelligence and brain size were linked. So it was into this sort of intellectual atmosphere that Franz Josef Gaul was born in 1758. Have you ever heard of Gaul? Yeah, but I don't know what he did. I just heard the name.

He did some good, very useful stuff in terms of, like, studying the brain, and so he was one of the first guys to really lock down that the brain was sort of the locus of thought and whatnot, because that, you know, was a controversial idea for a while. That's a big one. He unfortunately made a couple of intellectual leaps too far. He came to believe that the brain had multiple organs that were each responsible for different personality traits. On one hand, knowing what we know now about, say, the hippocampus in memory or the frontal lobe and thought, you know, it might seem like he wasn't that far off from the truth, considering he was working in 1805. But he leapt from that to claiming that the different shapes of human skulls corresponded to the shapes of the brain inside, and so you could determine aspects of a person's character without knowing that person just by measuring their head. But isn't that a trend that we're starting to see here? It's basically like, you start out scientifically maybe with a good idea, and then it just takes a hard left turn to, but I think you look differently from me, and therefore I'm superior to you. Yeah, you start out being like, oh wow, dogs and people are different things, so we should try to figure out, like, how to categorize them, and then you're like, well, but this guy who has to clean up everything in the street and doesn't get to do what he wants has to be different from me. Otherwise, it's terrible that I'm making him do this, so he's got to be a different kind of thing, too.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's how it works. So in 1800, Franz Josef Gaul invented cranioscopy, a method of determining someone's personality by measuring their head. Cranioscopy would eventually come to be known as phrenology. Boom. So this is, there we go, we're into it now. Gaul and his early followers in Europe weren't motivated primarily by racism. It didn't appear to be much of a factor at all in the early days of their research. The early phrenologists and Gaul focused mostly on criminals. During a lecture tour across Western Europe, he visited prisons and, quote, gave the most convincing proofs of his ability to discover, at first sight, such male factors, thieves, and men of particular talents as were amongst the convicts and prisoners.

So he's going into jails and being like, oh, you can tell by this guy's head that he was destined to do the stuff that he's, you know. Right, and look at the size of those knuckles, too. I wouldn't trust him for these knuckles alone, let alone his head shot. Now, you see, knuckles seems like a more reasonable thing to measure, because if someone's got real callous knuckles, they're probably doing too much punching, right? You know, it's interesting that he went and looked at criminals. I mean, I guess if you're trying to separate the good from the bad, that's a good place to start as prison. But from what I understand, that eventually kind of translated over to a lot of the fields of forensic science, like the basis of forensic science. I think phrenology was one of the forensic sciences originally. Yeah, I mean, he is really one of the very first people looking at crime and criminals and the causes of crime in a scientific way. Unfortunately, he's sort of working backwards from, okay, this guy's a murderer and he's got a head shaped like this, which means anybody with a head that has a bump here has a murder lobe in their brain.

That's what we call overgeneralizing in the scientific community. Yeah, you know, we didn't start out being good at science. It's been a bit of a learning process for the whole species. Indeed. It's fair to say that. So racism crept slowly into Gaul's work as his ideas evolved. He began to classify certain groups of Asian people as inclined to quote, theft and ruse by the shapes of their skulls. Several groups of Indians, like subcontinental Indians, were described as inherently, quote, cruel, superstitious and stupid. Gaul's protege, Johann Spursheim, came to believe in the destructiveness of Caribbean islanders. Now, the Catholic Church was an early opponent of Gaul's ideas, not because they were concerned about the racism, but because they thought that the idea of the human mind having a physical location was horribly offensive and probably inspired by the devil.

So the Catholic Church is on the right side of this, but for the wrong reasons. Sounds right. Yeah, sounds like the Catholic Church. Yeah. While there are reasons for doing so differed, mainstream scientists at the time also offered a great deal of resistance to Gaul's ideas, mainly because he was unable to present any sort of, you know, empirical proof for anything that he said. So a lot of scientists are pointing out the problems in his research as he starts off. And I'm sure he retorted with, well, look at the shape of your head, you wouldn't know anything. You're clearly too dumb to understand my ideas. You've got the head of an idiot, I can tell.

Look at that bump. Yeah. So yeah, Gaul's science picked up the name for knowledge and almost immediately became known as a haven for con artists and charlatans who would travel from town to town in Europe offering, for example, to advise parents on what type of thing their children should go to school to specialize in based on the shape of their skull. They'd also testify on whether or not a condemned man should be shown leniency. So you could essentially say like, oh, you know, this might have been a crime of passion because he doesn't have the skull of a murderer. Or as was probably more often the case, this guy should stay in prison forever because the shape of his skull means he can't be rehabilitated. We can tell that he's just got the brain of a criminal. It's the size of a watermelon.

Yeah. And the shape. Now, Gaul was eventually run out of Austria as a result of, you know, the fact that phrenology acquired a reputation as a con man science. He moved to France in 1805 and in 1808, the Institute of France subjected phrenology to a scientific committee, which concluded that it was basically hogwash. Now, one source I've read said that this was secretly because the emperor Napoleon hated phrenology. And this source says that Napoleon hated phrenology because he let Gaul phrenologize his head and Gaul apparently concluded that Napoleon was not as great as Napoleon thought he was. That's not the smartest phrenology move you could have done. You really should probably flatter Napoleon.

Right. You come across that one bump, you keep it to yourself when you're feeling Napoleon's head. Yeah. 1805, he's a really good guy to be on the good side of. Now, it is possible that that's not fair to Napoleon. I found a book written by the wife of the governor of Paris at the time and she spent a significant amount of time in Napoleon's company and also met Gaul. Her explanation of why Napoleon soured on phrenology seems a lot more reasonable and she also has a story of Gaul trying to diagnose her son, so I'm going to read some of her writing. Quote,

According to this lady, Napoleon basically hated phrenology because he thought it was going to lead to something terrible. And in fact, if her depiction is accurate, Napoleon actually kind of predicted what's going to come next in the story. She quotes Napoleon as saying, A man like Dr. Gaul is good for something at least. I think I shall establish for him a professor's chair so that he may teach his system in all of the basically colleges of Paris. It may then be ascertained as soon as a child comes into the world what he is destined to be. And if he should have the organs of murder or theft very strongly marked, he may be immediately drowned as the Greeks used to drown the crooked legged in the hunchbacked. So essentially Napoleon said that Gaul's ideas were destructive of order and law, that they would lead to children being judged before they'd done anything and punished for the shape of their skulls.

Basically like a 19th century minority report. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So woke Napoleon did not get on board phrenology. It's impressive, I had no idea. Yeah, you know, he's not a dumb man and clearly saw some problems in this science, which will become clearer as we continue to talk about its history. So the first country where Gaul saw success with phrenology then was not Austria where he was educated or France where he came to live. It was England. The early 1800s were a time of wild expansion in the British Empire.

The British East India Company conquered huge swaths of India and Southeast Asia and spread from the east to the west coast of Canada. The Empire grew by leaps and bounds and as it did it needed a good way to justify its dominance over increasingly vast chunks of humanity. Phrenology was seen as establishing scientifically the inferiority of British colonial subjects, particularly at first the Irish, because obviously the shapes of Irish people's skulls mean that they need to be run by the British. Other great minds of Europe jumped on phrenology and the chance to justify colonialism. Dr. Jean Bourdon concluded that it was Europe's destiny to educate and conquer the quote, less intelligent races, many of which he considered intermediates between humans and apes. Hubert Laverne, a prominent 19th century physician, built on the methods pioneered by Dr. Gaul to establish the quote,

immutability of the Jewish type. As the 1820s roared on, the phrenological journal warned that British soldiers ought not marry members of more primitive races in their domains, lest they, you know, essentially weaken the intellect of the British people. By the late 1820s, the science of phrenology found a second welcoming home in the United States. In the early 1830s, abolition had caught on like wildfire in Europe and was starting to catch on in parts of the United States. Great Britain banned slavery in 1833. So American slave owners were eager for a science that could justify their continued subjugation and, you know, enslavement of African peoples. They also were looking for a science that could sort of justify their extermination of the Native Americans,

and obviously phrenology offered them a really good excuse to do that, because, you know, if you're saying on one end that all human beings are human beings, then it's horrible to do all the things that we were doing. But if some people by their skulls just can't reason or whatever, then yeah, it's reasonable that you would have to hold them in bondage. So I think if I may cut in for a second, I think it's the exact same thing that was being done prior to science, I'm making scare quotes, coming into justify subjugation and colonization. Before that, it was that, say, Native Americans that were being encountered by explorers in the 15th century and 16th century, they didn't have souls, they weren't humans. So this is just a variation on that theme with kind of like a scientific gleam to it, you know, like the Irish have a certain kind of head,

the British can subjugate them, or the Spanish can subjugate the Seminoles. It's the exact same thing, it's just science-based rather than, you know, religious-based. Yeah, and that's sort of what was necessary in this era, because this is really a time when religion is less and less sort of the... You can't justify your political actions of your nations just by religion, you know? It's too late in the game to justify a crusade essentially that way. So if you look at like the spread of the British Empire when the East India companies first started taking land in India, they weren't conquering land, they were basically saying to like, we'll know these princes have asked for our help, so in exchange for lending them use of our military, we're getting certain rights.

And as the British Empire did more and more just straight-up conquering, you know, they needed some sort of reason to justify it. And so, yeah, this is, in a way, it's very true that people have always found a way to sort of push aside the humanity of the people they screw over. But this was a way to do that while still pretending that we're getting more enlightened and we're on board with science. Plus it was new and shiny. It dazzles a lot of people's minds. It's very shiny, and instead of like, you know, it didn't seem hateful when some doctor takes out a skull and explains to you why an Irishman is different from an Englishman, or why a Cherokee is different from a Caucasian American. You know, that doesn't seem hateful, which I think a lot of people were starting to feel guilty about hate and being able to sort of justify it with science was attractive.

So Francis Gall died in 1828, leaving his protege Spursheim as the head of the phrenology movement. Spursheim traveled to the United States in 1832 to lecture American thinkers on this exciting new science that would give them a reason to keep their slaves beyond the fact that they just didn't like working. Americans took to phrenology like a bat takes to sleeping upside down. Spursheim's lectures were wildly popular among the intellectual set. Phrenology was not accepted wholesale, though, as this poem written in a local newspaper makes clear. Great man of skulls, I must let loose, my pen against you, more's the pity, for surely you have played the deuce among the noodles of the city. I won't malignantly assail your fame and say you mean to joke us, but faith I can't make head or tail of all this mystic hocus pocus.

Wow. Yeah, I miss the days when people threw shade in poems. In the newspaper. Yeah, in the newspaper. Whatever happened to that? It may have just been this particular person at one time. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like there was an age where people really appreciated a good poem or limerick, and that was, I don't know. It does seem like the middle of the 20th century was the last time funny joking rhymes were popular.

Yeah. Like Alan Sherman songs and stuff like that, you know? Yeah, it's just, I guess now we have rap, maybe that's it, like hip hop took the place. Right, but it's not jokey. Yeah. Really, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's one aspect or the whimsical aspect of it that is really newspaper centric.

Yeah. Any poets out there listening start contributing political poems to newspapers, bring it back to the public life. Now, we're going to get back when talk about sort of how phrenology continued to spread across the United States and how it was used to justify both sides of America's abolition debate. And then we're going to get into a number of other horrifying things, including the growing bone industry that was created by sort of phrenology's peculiarities. But first, speaking of industries, it's time for some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

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How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So we just read a cheeky little poem about phrenology. And we talked about sort of how Spursheim, the protege of phrenology's inventor Gaul, you know, had traveled to the United States to start lecturing. He did that in 1832, but he didn't last long. He died in Boston a few months after he arrived in America. And his death was, yeah, well, I mean, it was 1832. People died for no reason back then. Or the Irish found out what he'd been saying about them. He didn't make it out of Boston a lot.

Yeah, Boston's a bad place to talk about how Irish people have bad skulls. This is the same man who told Napoleon. He was like, meh. Well, this is his protege, but yeah, I'm sure Napoleon didn't like this guy either. So Spursheim's death in Boston was sort of seen as spurring the phrenology movement to popularity in the United States. The entirety of Harvard Medical School's teaching staff showed up at his funeral. He was called a prophet. In general, there was an attitude that phrenology was a scientific leap akin to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Now, people really took this seriously. And scientists took this seriously. At this point, these ideas haven't really spread to the common man much, right?

This is just something that, like, especially in America, educated people are really into. Now, with Gaul and Spursheim dead, the phrenology movement temporarily lacked a figurehead. And so instept Dr. Charles Caldwell, a slave owner from Kentucky, who fell in love with phrenology while visiting Paris in the 1820s. Despite being a doctor, Caldwell didn't actually have a medical practice for the last 50 years of his life. Unlike doctors Gaul and Spursheim, he did no actual research. Primarily, he lectured about phrenology, and when he lectured about phrenology, he was mainly lecturing about why black people should be owned by white people. Thanks to Caldwell, American phrenology took off like a bullet in the 1830s and 40s. Here's how an article I found in the historical journal by James Poskitt described Dr. Caldwell's life as a phrenological advocate.

Every spring, Charles Caldwell set off from his hometown in Kentucky, traveling down the Mississippi River by paddle steamer before finally arriving in New Orleans. Once there, he would unpack his collection of phrenological busts, ready to begin his annual lecture tour. At the New Orleans Lyceum, the governor of Louisiana listed attentively, whilst the local organizing committee praised Caldwell for his highly intellectual and interesting exposition of the philosophy of the human mind. Following Caldwell's initial tours in the 1820s, white southerners took an increasing interest in phrenology. Caldwell even complained of competition from itinerant lecturers in Louisiana. Local enthusiasts in Alabama also printed an account of a Negro boy exhibiting exceptional mathematic ability. Despite describing the young slave as a living wonder, the authors proceeded to offer the boy's skull as a valuable acquisition to any phrenological collection. One phrenologist even admitted to acquiring the skull of a slave who had been struck on the head with an axe by his master.

In the South, phrenology and violence went hand in hand. So even at this point in the 1820s, people who get interested in phrenology are picking out living slaves like this little black boy who's apparently good at math and saying, oh, we should take his skull when he dies. While he's still alive, sort of marking out that like, oh, that would be an interesting skull to measure. It's further commodifying people's bodies because of sort of the value of these skulls as scientific aids or whatever. I'm starting to see where you're going and I'm getting a little uncomfortable. None of these podcasts ever go in a good direction, and this one is going to be no exception to that. It just gets more and more terrible.

I mean, as a little bit of a spoiler, we wind up at the Rwandan genocide, so buckle in. In 1838, on a trip back to Paris, Dr. Caldwell met a French phrenologist named Pierre Dumotier. Now, Dumotier had just spent three years traveling around the world and collecting skulls. He and Caldwell spent long days hanging out at the Musée d'Phrenologie in Paris, feeling for bumps on the skulls of dead Tahitians and Africans and assorted other non-white peoples. They made wild pronouncements about what these bumps meant about the characteristics of these races. Most excitingly, from a standpoint of outrageous racism, Caldwell found that areas in the top and back of the skull of Africans, which corresponded, he said, to veneration and cautiousness, were enlarged in Africans.

During an exchange of letters, one of his colleagues noted, quote, They are slaves because they are tamable. Caldwell replied, Depend upon it, my good friend. The Africans must have a master. Now, Dr. Caldwell is evidence of a type of asshole that I don't think we talk about quite enough when we talk about slavery in the United States. Usually slaveholders are just portrayed as like wildly cruel, whip-happy bigots, almost comedically monstrous individuals. And while what was going on was monstrous in every case, I think it's important that we remember that a lot of these slave owners were mild-mannered people who found ways to justify owning human beings. It was clearly important to Dr. Caldwell that he be seen as kind, generous, and almost parental to the people he owned.

In letters to his abolitionist friends, he wrote things like, My slaves live much more comfortably than I do. So Caldwell was someone who was not comfortable with just owning another human being. He needed this sort of science as a justification for his slavery. He needed to feel like what I'm doing isn't wrong, what I'm doing is necessary. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's an important nuance because nobody wants to feel like a bad guy. You know, none of these people are mustache twirling villains. They want to feel like a good person. I think that's important to understand if you understand how this lasted so long in the United States.

I think another way to put it too is that their consciences started nagging at them. Yeah, I think you're right. I think a guy like Caldwell clearly educated enough, something about this must have bothered him, which is why I think he would have sought out phrenology and found it almost like a breath of fresh air as he starts to realize how messed up the system of slavery is. And I should note that a lot of Dr. Caldwell's abolitionist friends were phrenologists too. The two things were not mutually exclusive and actually many abolitionists in America were phrenologists as well and in fact justified their abolitionism via phrenology. One such man was George Combe. He was a friend of Dr. Caldwell, a phrenologist, but he was an abolitionist.

During the 19th century, Combe's books on natural science actually outsold Charles Darwin's. The reason you haven't heard about Combe is that he wrote heavily about phrenology, which we now know is nonsense. He and Caldwell were friends, or at least friendly, and they wound up on opposite sides of the slavery issue. Combe and Caldwell wrote many letters to each other, actually debating whether or not it was okay to keep slaves, so we have evidence of how their ideas on the matter evolved over time. We know that Caldwell attempted to convince his friend that Africans were born to be slaves. I'm going to quote from a paper titled Phrenology, Correspondence, and the Global Politics of Reform. Quote, invoking the idea of an omnipotent creator, common to Southern arguments against abolition,

Caldwell suggested to Combe that by original organization and therefore radically and irredeemably, the African is an inferior race. Nothing short of the power that made them can ever raise them to inequality with the Caucasian. For Caldwell, it was the large animal organs located at the back of the head which rendered Africans unfit for freedom. In a long letter to Combe on this subject, Caldwell drew repeated parallels between animals and slaves, writing that, by good pasture and feeding, you may increase the size of your horses and cows, but you cannot bestow upon them the bulk of the rhinoceros or the elephant. In another letter, Caldwell wrote that he found the difference between Africans and Caucasians to be much greater than the difference in organization between the dog and the wolf

or between the fox and the jackal, yet they are acknowledged to differ in species. Abolitionists could not hope to change either the Ethiopian skin or the leopard spots. In conclusion, Caldwell argued, the Africans must have a master. Now, what's interesting about this to me is that Combe didn't disagree with Caldwell in any of his scientific conclusions about the skulls of people who weren't white. Combe was just as racist as his friend. But where Caldwell saw Africans as unfit for freedom, Combe saw them as so inherently docile and simple-minded that it was cruel to keep them as slaves, writing, quote, the qualities which make them submit to slavery are a guarantee

that if emancipated and justly dealt with, they would not shed blood. So there's this debate we have in the United States about our founding fathers, most of whom were not abolitionists and many of whom were slave owners, most of whom were slave owners. On one hand, there are people who say that any slave owner was a bad person, and this is my attitude. Other people will argue that, well, everyone was very racist back then, and you can't judge people 300 years ago by the terms of modern morality. And I think Caldwell and Combe's argument proves that you can grow up in a racist age and believe racist things because those are the popular beliefs of the era

and still wind up on the right side historically of an issue like slavery. Combe was a racist, but he still opposed slavery. Caldwell was a racist too, but he supported slavery because I think he was just a worse person than Combe. So yeah, I don't know, that's an interesting moral point to me, the way that you can kind of see the inherent moral character in both people. So despite both growing up in a racist era and both growing up sort of enthralled to these ideas, Combe still had enough of a decent person inside him that he was like, no, slavery is just not okay. Right, I think it is kind of a prickly topic of conversation,

whether you can hold people in an era accountable when everybody in an era was thought a certain way and you were raised to think a certain way. But I think, particularly with slavery, it's such a horrific concept and such a horrific thing in reality as well, that the very fact that there was such a thing as abolitionists, there were such a thing as people who were opposed to slavery in the context of a slave-holding era of the United States. I think you can hold the people who were ardent slaveholders accountable or anybody who held slaves accountable for holding slaves. Yeah, and especially when you start talking about like the guys who founded the country,

most of them were slave owners, but not all of them. The guy who wrote Common Sense. Thomas Paine? Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine was a lifelong abolitionist, was never okay with slavery. And so it's not a matter of the fact that like, well, no, they all believed this thing, because I'm sure Thomas Paine would not qualify as woke on racial issues by 21st century standards, but he was clearly a good person because he wasn't willing to accept this system. Right. And you have a guy like Benjamin Franklin who did own slaves for a period of time

and then as an older man had a friend who ran essentially a home for orphaned children and he met a couple of young black children at that home and realized that he'd been wrong his entire life and became an abolitionist near the end of his life. So again, yeah, even within these guys, like, you can see who was a decent person and not. It's the people who came around on the issue who recognize that, you know, whatever else they may have believed, it's not okay to own people. What do you think that is in somebody that even amid everybody else thinking that something is fine or acceptable or right or whatever you want to call it, that you can still see that something's wrong

when it's actually wrong? Like, what is that? Is that how you're raised? Are you born with that level of character? What do you think of that? I don't know. That's a really fascinating and an important question. You know, morality is, to an extent, dependent upon the time. Like, you look at World War II and it's clear that one side was better than the other, even though both sides were willing to consider civilians an acceptable target in warfare, which is not a thing that we think is okay today. But, you know, it's a matter of like what one side was fighting for versus what the other side was fighting for

and the allies were fighting for something a lot better. I don't know. It's tougher when we go further back in time and, you know, you talk about like the Roman Empire, where it was just accepted that like, oh no, when you sack a city, you burn that city to the ground, the women are going to get raped, the young men are going to get killed. That's just how we do war. And then you run into a guy like Spartacus. He's a really fascinating case because he's one of these clear examples you get of someone with a really strong and really modern moral compass a couple of thousand years ago.

Because he's leading the slave revolt against the Roman Empire. And he and all of the people who are in the revolt have been horrifically, brutally treated by the Romans. And yet as they're beating these Roman legions and rampaging through Italy, he refuses to attack Roman towns. He refuses to let his army sack towns or punish the people who had been holding them as slaves. He's just trying to escape. Which is, yes, some people have that enough of a, I don't know what it is. I guess if we could answer that, we would be pretty far along in our own development.

We would be philosophers like Aristotle and thus we would also be racists. Look at the faces on those statues. I do think there's something about, like when you talk about a guy like Benjamin Franklin, who was willing to admit that he'd been wrong and taking part in a bad system his whole life and try to change it once he realized he'd been wrong. I think one aspect of being a good person is being willing to admit that, number one, there's no privileged position in history just because something is normal and accepted by your culture doesn't mean it's okay. And also that just because you've done something your whole life doesn't mean you have to defend it reflexively.

You can recognize your mistakes and try to be better. I think that's an important aspect. I agree. Yeah. So, phrenology. We're talking about Caldwell and Combe, who both wound up on different sides of the abolition argument in spite of the fact that they were both phrenologists. Phrenology wound up to also have an impact on US policy towards Native Americans.

In the 1830s and 40s, a time when the US was expanding rapidly and taking away a lot of land it had previously promised to Native tribes, people didn't want to feel like they were bad for supporting the government's stealing land from Native people. So they needed a justification for why the US government was continually screwing over Native Americans. Enter Samuel Morton. Now, Morton was the author of an 1839 book called Crania Americana, which included detailed drawings of skulls and assessments of the mental capacities of the various peoples of North America. Now, the article includes an excerpt from Crania America, and it's pretty racist. It looks like what you'd expect from a pre-Civil War textbook, but somehow it's even worse than I would have guessed.

I don't know if you're going to be able to see this over the webcam. Oh, my. Yeah. Just to describe this for the readers, this is a page that has, the top appears to be a picture of a Greek or Roman statue, clearly representing a Caucasian. The middle picture is a very offensive caricature of a black man, and then the bottom is a monkey. And the clear inference is that the skulls of the black man and the monkey are more similar than they are to the skulls of the white man. Well, plus also just even how it's laid out on the page with the Caucasian statue at the top.

Exactly. I mean, there's a lot in that visual right there. Yeah. And then there's even more racist drawings of black people to the right of it. It's very racist. It is like the picture of scientific racism. So Morton in Crania Americana divided North America's human beings into four separate species, including whites, Native Americans, and Africans. He rejected the idea that people's environment and culture might have any impact on the way they looked or think, and instead decried that when it came to Native Americans,

quote, the structure of his mind appears to be different from that of the white man. I found a lovely article on this on Vassar University's real archaeology blog, quote. His study of skulls concluded that Native American minds were different from that of the white man and was cited in articles targeted at Western settlers encountering Native Americans. One article stated that Native Americans were adverse to cultivation, slow in acquiring knowledge. This view of Native American existence and society is not conducive to industrialization and progress, helped justify Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policies and allowed Western settlers to continue taking land of Native Americans. Now, this is the point at which phrenology starts to spread outside of, you know, educated slave owners arguing with their northern friends and trying to like, you know, and spreads to the common man. So the average guy on the street starts to get, especially the average white guy on the street, starts to get an understanding of phrenology at this point. We did a two-part episode on the Trail of Tears starring Andrew Jackson.

Oh boy. We should know. Yeah. And he was a huge prism for that kind of thinking into popular culture in America because he was a huge populist president. But one of the platforms that he used to justify the removal of Native Americans was that they were getting in the way of forward progress of the United States. There was all about pushing westward and starting to build railroads and using the timber for industry and money. And the Native Americans were doing nothing with this land. So we need to just move them and move through them.

Exactly. And you can see how phrenology would be useful in terms of making that argument in a way that doesn't make you feel like a terrible person for making it. Because it's one thing to have to say, you know, oh, they don't want the same kind of progress we want. Because then you have to argue about, well, you know, what aspects of there maybe is maybe the way they're doing it, you know, better than the way we're doing it. Why is our way right? And instead you're saying, no, no, no, no, no, because of these physical scientific reasons, they're not capable of civilizing themselves. And so it's our duty to push them. And this is what the science says. So yeah, this is very much sort of, and again, it's not to say Andrew Jackson would have been nice to the Cherokee or any other Native tribes if phrenology hadn't come around. But it provided an ideological justification for what was happening, which I do think is important.

Now, I read one article from a Cambridge PhD student that defined Crania Americana, Morton's book, as undoubtedly the most important work in the history of scientific racism. With its detailed illustrations and scientific appearance, Crania Americana was exactly the kind of work necessary to make phrenology and the entire idea of race-based science go viral across the world for the very first time. Quote, Within a few years, Crania Americana had been read in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and India. James Cowles Prichard, the founding father of British anthropology, described it as exemplary, whilst Charles Darwin considered Morton an authority on the subject of race. Later in the 19th century, other European scholars produced imitations with titles including Crania Britannica and Crania Germanica. So, only a few copies of this book were ever printed. Morton paid the modern equivalent of around $50,000 to even have a run of his book printed, and the copies cost around two months' wages for an average person. So, only institutions were able to afford these books. But the whole idea behind Crania Americana was too good for the yellow press to ignore.

Cheap dime store magazines and newspapers ran spreads on it, including crude copies of Morton's illustrations. So, this is how, for the first time, phrenological science spread to the common man and the common woman. Quote, In 1840, the Ladies Repository, a magazine from Methodist women in Ohio, quoted Morton in an article entitled Man. The author described Native Americans as, adverse to cultivation and slow in acquiring knowledge. For white settlers living to the west, this was exactly what they wanted to hear. Crania Americana was published just as the remaining Shawnee peoples of Ohio were forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River. So, it's worth noting that phrenology was not initially accepted by the European Literati. The scientific establishment continued to harbor doubts about whether or not it was nonsense. But the sheer popularity of newsletters and journals in that era and the expansion of the global post, through which people at Caldwell & Combe could work out their ideas without pesky peer review, meant that ideas behind phrenology spread through the common classes even when they met with resistance from the scientific establishment. It's a little bit like how the internet has affected the spread of misinformation, you know? Prior to this era where you can send a letter to France and know that you're going to get a letter back.

Ideas only spread if you were able to get your books published in universities. Other universities would buy that book and there'd be lecturing tours. Now, people can spread their ideas via mail and via newsletters, and so people who are living on the prairie in the middle of nowhere can get a magazine with drawings of different people's skulls and read about this thing that, you know, 50 years ago would never have gotten off of Harvard's campus. Plus, also, right then, seeing that picture, seeing that smart people that we venerate and pay lots of money to are saying these things, immediately exonerated any feelings of guilt that that person might have had about how they felt or how they were treating these people whose land they were stealing. Exactly, exactly. It's this kind of thing where, and I think this is a really important dimension that we don't often get to history. We hear about the terrible things that happened. But, you know, people who are watching the forced relocation of the Native Americans, the white settlers who would have seen aspects of the Trail of Tears, some of those people may have been sociopaths, but most of them, you watch human beings suffering that way and it does something to you. You need a lot of justification to sort of ignore the terrible things that you're saying. I think it's the same with slavery. Now, we're going to continue to talk about sort of how phrenology spread through the post and how it became a global science and wound up being sort of one of the underpinnings of the idea of colonialism. But first, we're going to talk about products and services. So, yeah, here's some ads.

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How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Those were some lovely ads. They were, they were nice. Oh yeah, really good. Better than phrenology. I'm going to go ahead and say that all of the products that support us are better than phrenology, which is a low bar. So let's get back into it. Phrenology was not initially accepted by European, you know, scientists. The, the, the high ranks of sort of you, like the British loved it, but out on the continent, it was not very popular.

The scientific establishment, Harvard grave doubts about whether or not it was nonsense. But the sheer popularity of newsletters and journals in that area in the mid 1800s and the expansion of the global post allowed it to spread like wildfire. And in fact, when phrenology adherents were forced to defend their super news, super racist science, they often argued that in essence, how could it be bullshit if it was so popular? I'd like to read another quote from that historical journal article on phrenology in the post. Quote, for these 19th century materialists, the global was also a guarantee of truth. Combe made this explicit when he challenged Thomas Stone, one of the foremost critics of phrenology in Edinburgh, to explain how a false science could have so quickly spread over Europe and taken root in Asia and America. According to Combe, nothing but the force of truth could account for the emergence of phrenology as a global science. If people are talking about it, it's got to be true, right?

Sure, yeah. We know that. That's how it's always worked with science. You get the people talking and it just becomes true. Exactly. That's why Twitter has been the greatest tool for the spread of truth in human history. It's hilarious, but it actually is true in reality. It is true in reality. I mean, it's true that people's minds do work that way because someone will see on Facebook a post that's been shared 100,000 times about how MS-13's hiding in this migrant caravan or something. Right. We're all sitting on the frontier reading our newspapers about how one group's inferior to us so we can feel better about how we lock them up.

Yeah, exactly. People don't change. We just get like 3% smarter every 120 years. Or we go from one group to another. Okay, all right, this group went through this horrible struggle that lasted forever and then they were beaten up and mistreated by everybody, but now we think they're okay. Let's move on to the next group and do the same thing to them rather than learn from just one group that extrapolates on to every human being. Yeah, and that is an uncomfortable reality. It's not that people learn en masse that racism is wrong. It's that they learn like, oh, it's wrong to be racist against the Irish, and then they learn it's wrong to be racist against the Germans, and then eventually they learn, oh, it's wrong to be racist against black people, but they're still racist against, or maybe they move beyond racist and say, people who live in this country, but it has nothing to do with race or whatever, but yeah, getting people to see other people as human beings is a big long uphill battle that's been going on for a while. I wonder, I mean, I'd like to think that we're eventually going to run out of others, and finally everybody will fall under the umbrella of acceptance, general acceptance.

I mean, I feel like if aliens show up and they're the kind of aliens we can beat in a fight, that might really deal the deathblood of racism. Once we have another intelligent species to be racist against, like, yeah. Well, there's nothing that gets a country together better than war, you know, nothing gets people under the national flag than war does, you know, I think if it were an alien war, yes, the whole globe would come together. Yeah, exactly, and that would be the end of one type of racism and the beautiful beginning of a new kind of racism. So, now, as phrenology became a global science, it started to pick up in popularity on the continent. They hadn't liked it when, you know, Gaul had been sort of going around and measuring the skulls of convicts very much for, you know, the reasons that Napoleon stated, but they really came to like it when it provided a justification for why Europeans should rule Africa. That's kind of what the Europeans started being like, oh, okay, maybe this is true.

Since we feel like we should own everything in this continent and this science seems to justify why we should own everything in this continent, maybe we're okay with phrenology now. So, phrenology had a mixed impact on slavery. You can really make a good case that it furthered abolition even more than it furthered the cause of slavery. It's a muddled issue. It definitely had a negative issue on sort of American policy towards Native Americans, clearly. But phrenology had a very one-sided impact on the birth of colonialism, because after all, if science had proved that some people were meant to be ruled and others to rule, what argument could you make against the British Empire scooping up every last sliver of land they could find? Now, when we come back on Thursday, we're going to talk about another nation who had a love affair with phrenology, Belgium. We're going to trace how this quirky little skull-measuring science helped cause one of the worst genocides in the 20th century, too, actually,

justified Nazi sterilization methods, and of course, we're going to talk about how capitalism and phrenology combined to make an industry out of stealing the bones of non-white people. So, that's coming up on Thursday. Josh, you got any pluggables you want to plug on down to Plugging Town? Sure, yeah. You can check out SYSK Podcast on Twitter and Instagram. You can check me out. I'm Josh Um Clark. I say Um a lot, so it's in my Twitter and Instagram handle. And I started a hashtag for my series, The End of the World with Josh Clark, which you can get everywhere you get podcasts. It's hashtag EOTW Josh Clark. I do feel like Um is the comma of the podcasting industry.

Oh, yeah. I just did it now, and I wouldn't be able to get through an episode without quite a few ums. No, I don't know how we would. No, no, it's necessary. It's better than silence, but easier than words. Alright, I'm Robert Evans, and this has been Behind the Bastards. We will be back Thursday with part two. Until then, you can find the sources for this episode on our website, BehindTheBastards.com. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. I have a book you can find on Amazon.com, a brief history of vice.

You can find our t-shirts at t-public, Behind the Bastards. You can get shirts, you can get phone cases, you can get coffee mugs, you can get raps for your Humvee, you can get painted coats for your machine guns. None of those things? You're shaking your head on some of these. No, Sophie? Well, you can get stickers. You can put a sticker on anything, so you can cover your Humvee in stickers. So, someone buy 150 stickers and coat a Humvee in them. Alright, that's the episode. I'm Robert Evans, and until next time, I love about 40% of you.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. He had a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.