The Rockefeller Foundation funded medical research in Ireland and in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It also funded various anthropological surveys, including the work of the Harvard Mission to Ireland. Practical social problems relating to race and immigration influenced the focus of American anthropology in the 1920s and this was reflected in the interest of the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council in such projects.14 In the 1930s biological determinism in anthropology was hotly debated in academic circles. This followed the Social Darwinian ideas and eugenic discourse on race prevalent at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century in America and Europe. In the nineteenth century, inferiority based on racial classification was used to justify colonialism, slavery and dispossession. A similar classification through the medium of physical anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s could be used to justify harsh immigration laws in the United States, discrimination and segregation laws.
One of the aims of the American eugenics movement was to ‘create an American eugenic presence throughout the world’. To this end a ‘network of eugenic investigators’ was installed in Belgium, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Holland, Poland, Germany and the Irish Free State. Potential immigrants to the United States were ‘eugenically inspected’.15 This ideology drove the Harvard Mission to Ireland. Hooton stated that the purpose of the physical anthropological work conducted in Ireland, which involved measuring and observing the bodily features of thousands of Irish men and women, was ‘to determine their racial affinities and their constitutional proclivities’.16 At that time it was believed that proclivities for drunkenness, criminality, laziness or other socially deviant behaviour could be ascertained through the examination of physical attributes. Equally, more positive attributes of those deemed to be superior races could be ascertained.
Edwin Black claims in his book War Against the Weak Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, that the AES supported Germany’s eugenic programme.17 However, Hooton was staunchly anti-Nazi in his writings in the late 1930s.18 Hooton, it seems, could not see the inherent paradoxes in his own beliefs and wrote of his disapproval of Nazi distortion of anthropological ideas:
There is a rapidly growing aspect of Physical Anthropology which is nothing less than a malignancy. Unless it is excised, it will destroy the science. I refer to the perversion of racial studies, and of the investigation of human heredity to political uses and to class advantage. Man has long sought to excuse his disregard of others’ rights by alleging certain biological differences which determine the superiority of his own race or nationality and the inferiority of others. The allegation of racial superiority or inferiority previously dismissed as a mere sophistry now assumes the nature of a valid reason for wholesale acts of injustice.19
Hooton’s apparently contradictory views on race and eugenics were commonplace at that time. He was appalled at the ‘national sadism and sheer suicidal lunacy as impels the present German government to destroy that minority element which has been responsible for some of its most brilliant cultural achievements’.20 Christopher Hale described Hooton as ‘a fervent eugenicist’ and a ‘disciple of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’ who had ‘disliked blacks and Jews’.21 Hooton was disciplined by the President of Harvard for his ‘inhuman’ teachings.22 However, despite being a eugenicist who advocated better breeding for the human race and the removal of those deemed unfit for human society such as the disabled, the insane, the criminal and the economically unviable, Hooton was not overtly racist in the sense that he believed that the unfit from all races, including the white race, should be removed from society. He proposed the establishing of ‘an America national breeding bureau that would determine who could reproduce with whom’.23 It was no coincidence, however, that in America, those who fitted many eugenic categories also fitted the category of poor immigrants including ‘Negroid’, Italian, Mexican and poor rural Americans. Indeed Black’s definition of the eugenic movement was ‘It was a movement against non-Nordics regardless of their skin color, language or national origin’.24 Germany’s eugenic programme was getting a very bad press by the late 1930s in the United States.25 Prior to that there was much support for Hitler among eugenic societies and in universities. A Nazi eugenics exhibit, organised by the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, was shown across American between the years 1934 and 1943. It was sponsored by the American Public Health Association. It was hoped that it would ‘make the case that eugenics provided an economically viable and scientifically valid alternative to the social welfare programs initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt’.26 Roosevelt’s New Deal included unemployment schemes for archaeological research which, in turn, influenced a similar scheme in Ireland. (See Chapter 7)
The Study of the Celts in Ireland
The quest for the recovery of scientific evidence for the long-headed Celt and ancestor of the European white man was pursued by Hooton through the work of the Harvard Mission. By the time the American academics arrived in Ireland in 1932 to study the Celtic race, using new archaeological science and physical anthropology, academic interest in Celtic origins and identity was well established. While the idea of a Celtic race was fixed in literature, attempts were made initially in the nineteenth century to classify it scientifically. The inhabitants of the Aran Islands were a case in point. They were deemed to be primitive and therefore an uncontaminated race. The traditional belief was that the Aran islanders were descended from the Celts. Samuel Ferguson had written about them in 1852: ‘If any portion of the existing population of Ireland can with propriety be termed Celts, they are this race’.27 William Wilde, the polymath, eye-surgeon, archaeologist and father of Oscar, led the Ethnological Section of the British Association to Aran in 1857.28 The famous archaeologist, George Petrie, was also interested in the islands and wrote that ‘In the Island of Innishmain alone, then, the character of the Aran islander has hitherto wholly escaped contamination, and there it still retains all its delightful pristine purity’.29 The so-called purity of race and culture of the inhabitants were viewed in nationalistic terms by some writers and was described by Scott Ashley as follows:
The Aran Islands were being invented as bastions of the ancient sublime, so the islanders themselves were endowed with nationalist and racial significance. They were modern primitives, insulated from the deadening hand of progress and Anglicization, true Irishmen and women, models for an Ireland freed from British dominion. They were a pure Gaelic stock uncorrupted by infusions of degenerate blood from the mainland; they were perhaps, the last true descendants of the Fir-Bolgs, the primeval inhabitants of Ireland.30
A.C. Haddon and Dr C.R. Browne, who carried out a scientific survey of the Aran Islanders in 1892, were also influenced by the work of J.T. O’Flaherty who published ‘A Sketch of the History and Antiquities of the Southern Islands of Aran, lying off the West Coast of Ireland; with Observations on the Religion of the Celtic Nations, Pagan Monuments of the early Irish, Druidic Rites, & Co’ in Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy for 1825. O’Flaherty in his paper asserted that ‘In no part of the Celtic regions are the Celtic habits, feelings, and language better preserved than in the southern Isles of Aran’.31 Like other nineteenth-century romantics writers, he believed that Aran was a microcosm of Ireland which in turn was a microcosm of Celtic Europe. He pointed out that Gaul, Spain, Britain and the other Celtic States had lost all their records of remote antiquity but that Ireland had preserved historic evidence ‘illustrative not only of her own antiquities, but, in a great measure, of those of Europe’.32 The Aran Islands survey was carried out by the Anthropometric Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. A study of the ethnography of the Aran Islands was to be the first in the series of such studies to be undertaken around the country by the committee. The emphasis was on the routine observations made in the Anthropometric Laboratory and in researches in country districts.
Eoin MacNeill got his own anthropometric chart completed at the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, Trinity College Dublin.33 It was dated 11 February 1893 and signed by Professor A.C. Haddon. Haddon, described by H.J. Fleure as ‘a pioneer of modern anthropology’, and a ‘keen and vigorous evolutionist’ was a demonstrator in zoology at Cambridge from 1879 until he left his position to take up a Professorship at the Royal College of Science in Dublin in
