BETWEEN RACE AND SPECIES: Evolutionary Discourse and the Whitening of the Human ‘Race’

BETWEEN RACE AND SPECIES: Evolutionary Discourse and the Whitening of the Human ‘Race’

Excerpted from dissertation: Infrahumanisms: Race, Nation, and the Moral Economy of

Embodiment in 20th Century U.S. Culture

Megan Glick Visiting Assistant Professor of the Humanities, Brown University

© 2008

On August 6, 2006, a commentary appeared in the local section of The New York Times

describing the “scandalous” tale of Ota Benga, a Congolese “pygmy,” who had been exhibited at

the Bronx Zoo in 1906. Curiously, while purporting to offer the story as a “perfect illustration of

the racism that pervaded New York” at the turn of the century, the article instead managed to

replicate Benga’s tortured spectacularization.

Accompanied by a photograph of Benga holding a chimpanzee, the piece began coyly,

noting that,

When New Yorkers went to the Bronx Zoo on Saturday, September 8, 1906, they were treated to something novel at the Monkey House. At first, some people weren’t sure what it was. It – he – seemed much less a monkey than a man, though a very small, dark one, with grotesquely pointed teeth…Contrary to common belief…Benga was not simply placed in a cage…he was already spending much time inside the Monkey House, where he was free to come and go, and it was but a small step to encourage him to hang his hammock in an empty cage and start spending even more time there.”1 What is most striking about this narrative is not its historical inaccuracy, as sadly,

spectators of Benga’s day would have been quite accustomed to seeing foreign peoples displayed

like animals behind bars for public amusement. Rather, the article gives pause precisely because

it is so characteristic of the neoliberal impulse to be “scandal[ized]” at the sight of something that

is obviously racially offensive, while effectively reproducing the very same line of reasoning it

1 Mitch Keller, “The Scandal at the Zoo,” The New York Times (6 Aug. 2006) A4.

Megan Glick, © 2008. Draft: Please do not cite, reproduce, or circulate, 2

claims to protest against. Playing into the colonial fantasy that one could truly mistake a person

for a beast, the article suggests a problematic level of uncertainty about the nature of Benga’s

humanity, even as the photographs provided on the very same page could not be clearer (Fig.

2.0). If any of the patrons at the Bronx Zoo did not know what the Congolese man “was” in

1906, then surely, they could not have been more mystified than the author of the Times article

100 years later.

Fig. 2.0. Images of Ota Benga, c. 1906, reproduced in The New York Times, 2006.2

Such confusion, as it might be called, arises in part from the imperatives of contemporary

political correctness, which has served to erase our racial memory in order to “better” our

subconscious associations. People, we are told, are not animals, no matter if they are, as Benga

was described, “very small, dark…with grotesquely pointed teeth.” At the same time, however,

we do not have an adequate language from which to truly unravel the politics of racial and

species difference; they are indeed so closely woven together that it is often impossible to

distinguish one from the other. The trap that the Times article falls into is thus not only an issue

2 Ibid.


of lay ignorance, but rather suggests a pervasive cultural unwillingness to think through the

contours of “humanness” as a category imbued with important social meanings. Time and again,

the concepts of species and species difference continue to be relegated to the realm of science,

even as other modes of identity have been rescued from biologically deterministic frameworks.

Works that do treat the relationship between the categories of animality, race, and

biology typically do so in relation to a naturalized animal/human binary, and this has especially

been the case with regard to the assessment of nonhuman primates as objects of racial discourse.

In 1989, for instance, science studies icon Donna Haraway published her landmark study on the

history of primatology, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern

Science, which remains pointedly unrevisited, though frequently cited, by scholars across

disciplines. At once a contribution to the 1980s feminist critique of science and the Third-

Worldist critique of colonialism, Haraway’s Primate Visions explored the historical production

of bodily materiality, suggesting that the figure of the nonhuman primate offered a hopeful point

of liminality relevant to larger identitarian struggles. “I am writing about primates,” she

explained, “because they are…wonderful subjects with whom to explore the permeability of

walls, the reconstitution of boundaries, and the distaste for endless socially enforced dualisms.”

For Haraway, primates existed within the “border zones” of “nature and culture,” sites upon

which “love and knowledge are richly ambiguous and productive of meanings in which many

people have a stake.”3

Ironically, however, because Haraway chose to treat her subjects monolithically, without

regard to differences of species, the language of classificatory difference so critical to any

zoological project – let alone the burgeoning discipline of primatology – became lost. This point

3 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 3, 1.


has never been challenged, probably because Primate Visions gave a scientific-historical voice to

what was already known within the world of cultural studies, that, ultimately, the image of the

nonhuman primate was nothing if not a timeless shorthand for the primitive, the justification of

racist imperialism, and the languages of popular Darwinism.4 But because these symbolic

associations have gone largely unquestioned, they have also become historiographically fixed,

such that even as attitudes towards the category of race and the processes of racial formation

have changed over time, the sign of the primate has remained the same.

One consequence of this oversight has been a perpetual disavowal of the primate as a

form of racial shorthand, an idiom which understands corporeality to be a determining factor of

social difference, but which simply parodies racial logic rather than imagining a vital relationship

between the categories of race and humanness. In particular, political cartoons featuring simian

caricatures are often used in works of history to illustrate the paradigm of primitivist thinking, in

which the monkey stands in for the “savageness” of the non-white subject. What is striking about

this familiar image is its prevalence throughout eras in which Darwin’s theory of evolution had

yet to take hold of the public imagination. Indeed, throughout the late nineteenth century, despite

the fact that Darwinism was not widely upheld by either the scientific or lay communities,

monkey-like figures were used as placeholders for the “lower” races, suggesting that whether or

not one believed in monogenesis (a single point of origination) as it applied to the whole of

mankind, some relationship was understood to exist between nonhuman primates and the non-

white races.5 I would like to suggest that this mystification of race and species was not only a

4 Here I mean to suggest that because racist discourse has often employed the figure of the monkey, cultural representations of primates, particularly within colonial settings, are usually understood to be symbols of racism, though the issue is rarely pushed further to consider the actual construction of the primate, which in turn bears upon the construction of the colonial subject. 5 See examples of this phenomenon in Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Samuel J. Thomas, “Mugwump Cartoonists, the


crude form of racism, but also a mirroring of contemporary uncertainty within the scientific

community toward the nature of the relationship between apes and humans that operated

according to its own racial logic.

As such, this chapter offers a historically minded approach to the question of inter-

primate species difference by exploring the relationship between the conceptualization of racial

difference and speciation within the nascent field of primatology, the waning field of eugenic

science, and the landscape of popular culture during the early decades of the twentieth century.

By tracing the lineage of American primatology to the work and research facilities of leading

eugenicist Robert Mearns Yerkes, I identify the ways in which the categories of human racial

difference became mapped upon nonhuman primate species.6 In particular, I argue that the

chimpanzee rose to prominence as an important figure in early twentieth century scientific and

popular evolutionary narratives, both of which served to anthropomorphize and racially whiten

the species. This transformation is a critical missing link in the history of evolutionary

discourses, providing an “African” ancestor who was not “black” by prevailing understandings

of racial and species difference. The refiguring of the chimpanzee in this fashion thus provided

the white primordial ancestor so long yearned for within scientific and cultural imaginaries,

thereby easing the acceptance of Darwinian theories of evolution during the early decades of the

century.7 By contrast, scientific and popular discourses used the figure of the gorilla to maintain

Papacy, and Tammany Hall in America’s Gilded Age,” Religion and American Culture 14, no. 2 (2004): 213-50; Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). 6 Primatology as a field did not become formally founded until the 1950s, due to difficulties of budget and travel, a point which this chapter explores in greater detail in the second section. See Margaret Sykes Child, “Anthropoid Behavior,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 2, no. 1 (1927): 37-57. 7 On opposition to the idea of a common African ancestor, see George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1968); David W. Cameron and Colin P. Groves, Bones, Stones, and Molecules: “Out of Africa” and Human Origins (Burlington, MA, Elsevier Academic Press, 2004); Monique Scott, Rethinking Evolution in the Museum (London: Routledge, 2007). On the history of evolutionary thought and antievolutionism in the U.S., see Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America


racist attitudes towards African biological and cultural “inferiority” by aligning the species with

devolutionary trends.

By connecting the gradual rise of primatology to the decline of formal eugenic thought,

this chapter also seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature treating the eugenics

movement. In recent years, historians such as Alexandra Minna Stern, Nancy Ordover, and

Wendy Kline, to name a few, have pointed to the diffusion of eugenic thought throughout U.S.

culture, as well as the ways in which the formal disintegration of the movement under the stigma

of Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s did not in fact signal a termination of eugenic ideology.

Rather, it marked the beginning of new forms of racial consciousness which would continue to

evolve over the course of the century.8 This chapter looks to contribute to this scholarship by

illustrating the ways in which the project of cultivating a method of primatological study at once

bolstered, and provided a forum for, what were ultimately eugenic aims.

PREHISTORIES

Following Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 and The

Descent of Man in 1871, dozens of theories arose as to the direction, stages, and termination of

man’s evolutionary link to nonhuman primates. In fact, being a “Darwinist” during the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not necessarily mean understanding the evolutionary

schema exactly as Darwin had imagined it. Rather, it simply meant that one believed that linear

evolutionary tracks existed for nonhumans and humans alike. For many scientists, this did not (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Numbers, ed., Antievolutionism before World War I (New York: Garland Publishers, 1995); Douglas J. Futuyama, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 8 Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).


implicate a “common ancestor,” as is often associated with Darwin’s claims.9 For these reasons,

ideas ranged from the notion that there was in fact no evolutionary link between human and

nonhuman primates; that apes might have evolved from humans; and that the different races

could have evolved from local species of primates.10

Such schisms could exist within scientific opinion precisely because of the

interdisciplinary nature of evolutionary science, as various bids were made from the fields of

comparative anatomy, embryology, and paleontology. At the same time, each shared a common

rhetoric of “missing links,” which hypothesized the existence of intermediary races and species

that could not be accounted for by prevailing anatomical and ontogenetic evidence. For over fifty

years following Darwin’s publication, the fossil record could not be made to match what

scientists saw with their own eyes in the bodies of contemporary living organisms, enabling a

virtual phantasmagoria of evolutionary scenarios.11 This was in large part due to important

geographical divides between the assumed cradles of mankind (Europe and Asia) and the clear

nativity of higher order primates to the African continent, that appeared to bear the greatest

physical similarities to humankind. Because most scientists were unwilling to consider Africa as

a possible location of human origins, there remained a palpable silence between comparative

anatomists working on the riddle of the contemporary primate body, and paleoanthropologists

working on the riddle of the ancient human body.12

9 Richard G. Deslisle, Debating Humankind’s Place in Nature, 1860-2000: The Nature of Paleoanthropology (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2007), 84. 10 Ibid., 89, 100-101. 11 As Frank Spencer has noted, “Darwinists’ dreams of the missing link had to be sustained by speculative prophecies that were conceived as a collage of structural intermediaries between modern humans and extant anthropoid apes.” See Spencer, “Prologue to a Scientific Forgery: The British Eolithic Movement from Abbeville to Piltdown” in Bones, Bodies, and Behavior: Essays in Biological Anthropology, ed. George Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 89. 12 Craig B. Stanford, Biological Anthropology: The Natural History of Humankind (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006); Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995).


In 1912, the discovery of the Piltdown skeleton in Sussex, England confirmed what many

American and European scientists already believed: that the “missing link” species so long

sought after to fill the evolutionary gap between apes and modern man was, in fact, of Anglo-

Saxon origins.13 As can be seen below in Fig. 2.1, the possibility of human evolution on the

African continent was literally foreclosed within the contemporary framework, demonstrated by

the chart’s movement directly from the chimpanzee, a species native to Africa, to the Ape Man

of Java, Indonesia, and then to Germany, France, England, and France again. In this trajectory,

the ape is understood to make itself human at some point during its exodus from Africa, while

African people, on the other hand, were understood to have evolved from a primitive strain of

man who returned to the continent only to deteriorate.14 Importantly, this schematic did not

account for a broader human history in Africa; rather, it imagined the chimpanzee as the

primordial ancestor to the European races, a point to which this chapter will return shortly.

Figure 2.1. Evolutionary Chart, New York Times, December 14, 1913.

Almost forty years would pass before the Piltdown Man was revealed to be a hoax

perpetrated by British scientists, who had managed to literally fashion a white ancestor out of

chimpanzee, orangutan, and human bones. During the intervening years, scientists ignored the

13 On the history of Piltdown Man, see Frank Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (London: Oxford University Press, 1990); J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (London: Oxford University Press, 1955). 14 George MacAdam, “Prominent Scientist Holds that Man’s Ascent from Apes Means an Incessant Evolutionary Process for Humanity, Not Stopped by the Grave, and Proves the Existence of a Supreme Being,” The New York Times (14 Dec. 1913): SM11.


peculiar and ill-fitting remnants of the Piltdown Man, which lay on display at the British

National Museum for the folly of racial and national pride.15 Nor was the attempted erasure of

African humanness significantly troubled once recent human ancestry was discovered on the

African continent. In 1925, the unearthing of Australopithecus Africanus, vernacularly known as

the “African Ape,” ruptured the presumed relationship between human and nonhuman primates,

and remained a controversial discovery that many scientists refuted.16

At the same time, the fossil challenged preexisting models of human and nonhuman

primate classification. In his 1934 tome, Adam’s Ancestors, a work aimed at both expert and lay

audiences, prominent physical anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey noted that in light of recent

discoveries, “the usual subdivision of higher Primates into monkeys, apes, and men will no

longer serve our purpose.”17 [Section excerpted to meet length requirements.]

In the interest of creating a broader evolutionary discourse, a new zoological family was

created specifically for Australopithecus known as “Homosimiidae,” which literally meant

“man[-]ape” in contemporary scientific nomenclature. The hybridity and liminality implied by

this category was incredibly important, as it located the fossil as both apelike and manlike in its

morphology, and was therefore understood to pre-date the existing fossil records of Europe and

Asia. Indeed, scientists continued to hypothesize about the nationality of the African man-ape,

15 On this point, see Miles Russell, Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson and the World’s Greatest Archaeological Hoax (London: Tempus, 2003), 178-80 and K. P. Oakley and C. P. Groves, “Piltdown Man: The Realization of Fraudulence,” Science 169 (1970): 789. 16 On the controversy surrounding Australopithecus Africanus, see Sherwood L. Washburn, Human Evolution after Raymond Dart (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1985); Esteban E. Sarmiento, The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 17 Louis B. Leakey, Adam’s Ancestors: An Up-to-date Outline of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and what is known about Man’s Origin and Evolution (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1934), 173. Although Leakey was not himself an American, he became a central figure in the popular and scientific press. Known as the “white African,” for his birth to two British missionaries in South Africa in 1903, Leakey represented a post-Conradian vision of white colonialism in Africa, which favored a more heroic narrative reflective of a period of colonial maintenance, rather than expansionism. On the intended audience of Adam’s Ancestors, see “The Earliest Men,” The New York Times (11 Nov. 1934): BR 20.


suggesting, for example, that the finding did not implicate Africa as the only possible point of its

origination, insofar as there was geological evidence of movement between Asia and Africa.18

[Section excerpted to meet length requirements.]

The search for, and speculation surrounding, the missing link soon began to drain the

category of humanness of its primacy of meaning. As the “human” itself began to be defined in

opposition to an ever-changing terrain of anthropological discovery, scientists began to focus on

two central markers in determining a fossils’ relative humanity, brain size and tool making

capacity, which were thought to indicate relative intelligence.19

[Section excerpted to meet length requirements.]

Yet anthropology was not the only field that made use of intelligence as a barometer of

the human. Throughout the 1910s, eugenicists working in the field of psychology began to revise

older methods of intelligence testing for the purpose of creating standardization scales for

immigration, military recruitment, and psychiatric institutionalization. In particular, eugenicist

and psychobiologist Robert Mearns Yerkes became known for the development of the “Alpha”

and “Beta” tests during his tenure as president of the American Psychological Association,

exams which purported to measure “sheer native ability” through visual modes of analysis.20

Like most eugenicists, Yerkes saw his work as assisting in the process of natural selection by

18 These speculations were clearly driven by national and racial interests, as will be explored later in the chapter. On this point, see William K. Gregory, “Did Man Originate in Central Asia? Mongolia the New World, Part V,” The Scientific Monthly 24, no. 5 (1927): 385-401; see especially 397. 19 See for example, Leslie A. White, “The Mentality of Primates,” The Scientific Monthly 34, no. 1 (1932): 69-72; Leakey, Adam’s Ancestors, 182. 20 “Mental Tests,” The New York Times (30 Apr. 1922): 36. Whereas the Alpha tests required a certain level of fluency with the English language (and involved reworking improper or incomplete sentences and deciphering analogies), the Beta test was composed visually for those who were illiterate (and included a maze and picture recognition tests). The Beta test’s reliance upon cultural knowledge (such as one’s ability to recognize a can of Crisco or a picture of George Washington) and trained motor skills (one’s ability to hold and use a pencil) were just two of the areas which revealed that even the visual component of the test was, in the end, a reflection of a certain level of social education. On the assumed impartiality of Yerkes’ tests, see Stephen J. Gould, “A Nation of Morons,” New Scientist (6 May 1982): 349-52; Robert Mearns Yerkes, “Autobiography of Robert Mearns Yerkes” in History of Psychology in Autobiography Vol. 2, ed. Carl Murchison, (Worcester: Clark University Press, 1930), 300.


promoting the success and propagation of “superior” models of humanity; that particular races or

classes bore the brunt of eugenic instrumentation was, officially, a matter of biological

coincidence.21

To be sure, one of the more curious aspects of the eugenics movement was that it traded

on a universalizing language of human improvement, while ultimately creating a more precise

biologization of categories of difference that already existed within both scientific and popular

parlance. From their earliest conceptualization, eugenic definitions of human difference were

couched within broader terms of species survival, which borrowed both from the height of

intellectualism – Darwinian theories of evolution – and from agricultural practice – livestock

breeding. Wearing banners of “race betterment” and “racial hygiene” (in which “race” was used

to denote the entirety of the “human race”), the eugenics movement offered a feigned

humanitarian universalism motivated by the principles of physical and mental “fitness.”22 For

Yerkes, the intelligence tests provided an important method of separating the “fit” from the

“necessarily socially inadequate,” whom he called the “D-men,” and whom he felt “should be

allowed no place in this country and no voice in its affairs.”23 When properly implemented, then,

21 On the language of racial hygiene, see Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 110-15. 22 In this respect, eugenic science in the U.S. differed drastically from German conceptualizations, which focused explicitly on the purity of the Aryan race. Ironically, universalizing attitudes towards the concept of “race health” took hold of the scientific and popular imaginations in post-WWII Germany, during a time in which the German academy sought to rebuilt itself after the physical and ideological ravages of war. On this point, see Robert Proctor, “From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German Anthropological Tradition” in George Stocking, Jr., ed., Bones, Bodies, and Behavior: Essays in Biological Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988) 138-179. If one of the important advances on the part of historians of eugenics in recent years has been to point out the similarities and interrelation between U.S. and German forms of racial science in the years leading up to WWII, then it is certainly of equal importance to consider the critical differences between these strains of nationalist thought. In the above essay by Proctor, there is a chart which seems to locate chimpanzees on a lower evolutionary rung than those on charts from the U.S. This is a detail that requires further research. 23 Yerkes quoted in “Mental Tests.”


such testing had the capacity to rescue the character of the nation, which Yerkes believed to

depend upon the classification and harnessing of human behavior.24

By the 1920s, however, Yerkes and his colleagues began to come under criticism, due to

the persistent fact that foreign born and African American persons scored significantly lower on

the exams than their native born and Anglo Saxon counterparts. In particular, prominent laymen

such as journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann publicly railed against eugenic

intelligence testing, asserting that the tests measured economic and racial privilege rather than

“natural” ability, and as such, were inherently classist and racist.25 Perhaps it was for this reason

that Yerkes turned his attention toward nonhuman subjects for the better part of the 1920s and

1930s, when eugenic practices in their traditional forms began to decline in public popularity.

Prior to working on intelligence tests, Yerkes’ research focused on animal psychology,

and he spent years with mice, rabbits, and other lower order animals. During the 1910s, he began

publishing on the potential use-value of nonhuman primates in the study of “human nature,” yet

it was not until after he had made a name for himself in the field of eugenic intelligence testing

that he was able to receive the funding necessary to pursue his vision. Up until that point, the

remarkable transportation costs of African primates had managed to prohibit any long term study

of the animals by other researchers. With Yerkes’ name on the project, however, funding

agencies that were previously unconvinced of the purpose of studying primates began to change

their stance.26 By literally fashioning a new discipline out of the monetary and celebratory

24 As Yerkes remarked in an autobiographical essay, the development of intelligence testing grew out of the desire to aid in the war effort: “naturally, we asked ourselves what professional service American psychologists might hope to render in the military emergency.” See Yerkes, “Autobiography,” 390. 25 Walter Lippmann, “The Mental Age of Americans,” The New Republic 32 (25 Oct. 1922): 213. See also Michael M. Sokal, Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1930 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984). 26 Yerkes, “Provision for the Study of Monkeys and Apes,” Science 43, no. 1103 (1916): 231-34. On this point, also see the “history of attempts to provide for anthropoid research” in Robert Mearns Yerkes and Margaret Sykes Child, “Anthropoid Behavior,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 2, no. 1 (1927): 37-57.


remains of an old, he began to build an empire on the back of eugenic science that would

reinscribe the politics of human racial difference upon the bodies of a population that he

understood to be “almost human.”

PET PROJECTS

In 1914, Yerkes published his first article suggesting the importance of primatological

research. Making a “plea for special and unique facilities for the systematic study of apes” in

order to more fully understand “human nature,”27 Yerkes imagined that his work would be of

greatest consequence to “students of genetics, eugenic investigators, and sociologists.”28 By the

early 1920s, he had garnered enough funds to begin what he called his “pet project” – a venture

that would come to require layer upon layer of colonial organization – from the observation of

primate colonial practice in Havana, Cuba, to the establishment of an American scientific

presence in the French African colonies, to the making of a “subtropical breeding facility” in the

rural outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida, and finally, to the creation of a research metropole in

New Haven, Connecticut.29 “I am convinced,” Yerkes wrote,

that education and all other forms of social service will profit immeasurably from experimental studies of the fundamental instincts of the other primates and from thorough investigation of the forms of habit formation…[O]ur genetic psychology as well as other historical or genetic forms of biological description may be developed more rapidly and satisfactorily by the thorough study of the primates than by any other means.30 In order to do so, Yerkes initially kept a small population of the animals on a piece of

property in Kindia, French Guinea, where he, his colleagues, and their families came to live for

27 Yerkes, “Autobiography,” 385. 28 Yerkes, “The Study of Human Behavior,” Science 39, no. 1009 (1914) 625-33. 29 Yerkes, “Autobiography,” 399. 30 Yerkes, memorandum, “Provision for the Study of Monkeys and Apes,” 1920, file “Robert Mearns Yerkes,” box 12, Simon Flexner Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.


several years. Housing some of the animals in large, open cages, and others within his own

home, he routinely walked them out to a clearing, provided them with rudimentary objects (such

as wooden boxes or sticks), and observed their behavior. Later, when he transported the animals

to the U.S., he performed similar experiments in the closed environment of the laboratory.

Importantly, this meant that he did not believe that life had to be observed within its “natural

habitat,” as later primatologists would assert; rather, he understood primates to be empirically

natural subjects, free from the strictures of human civilization.31 Thus for Yerkes, you could take

the monkey out of the jungle, so to speak, but you could never extract the jungle from the

monkey.

This was important insofar as it mirrored a eugenic, biologically deterministic pattern of

thought invested in the power of body to speak the potentialities of the soul according to systems

of hierarchy and classification. To this end, ciphering the differences between his subjects

became a key component of his project, which he ultimately hoped would prove useful to his

colleagues, as well as to the lay public. Dismayed by the “superficiality of…[Americans’] lay

knowledge” when it came to the question of their nonhuman relatives, Yerkes remarked that

“most persons confuse the organ-utan [sic], chimpanzee and gorilla, for certainly these types of

ape do not differ more obviously than do such subdivisions of mankind as the American Indian,

the Caucasian, and the Negro [sic].”32 Because any good eugenicist – be he expert or pedestrian

– knew that the differences between such “subdivisions” were indeed vast and meaningful,

31 On Jane Goodall’s and Dian Fossey’s observation of primates in their natural habitats, see for example, Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 145-47; Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), 99-102. 32 Yerkes, Almost Human (New York: The Century Co., 1925), 134. The comparisons between the “American Indian,” the “Asiatic,” and the Orangutan were far more limited in Yerkes work than his treatment of the chimpanzee and gorilla. This is likely an instance in which cultural attitudes affected scientific attitudes; as is explored in the final section of this chapter, the 1920s saw the rise of a stringent black/white dynamic in U.S. racial politics.


Yerkes’ statement must be read with powerful irony, conveying the significance of species

difference through racial taxonomy.

Throughout his written work, Yerkes continued to rely upon categories of racial

difference to explain and rationalize the logic of species difference. While the orangutan was

consistently imagined as one of the “middling races,” as either “Indian” or “Asiatic,” and

generally received less attention, he wrote effusively and in racially charged terms about the

“Caucasian skin” and “straight hair” of the chimpanzee, as compared to the “black skin” and

“wooly hair” of the gorilla.33 Nowhere was the division more apparent than in Yerkes’

photographic records, which represent the animals in strikingly different ways. For this reason,

it is worthwhile to consider the patterns that emerge from within the archive of his published and

unpublished works. Though often “scientific” in nature, many appear to take their cues from

popular cultural representations, as the chapter will later demonstrate.

The images that follow are thus indicative of patterns within Yerkes’ archival and

published works, depicting common scenes and “characters.” The first three images shown were

taken in 1922 and 1923 at the Kindia colony in French Guinea. In Fig. 2.2, a child of one of

Yerkes’ colleagues flirts with the camera, clutching a young chimpanzee to her chest as though

he were a doll. In Fig. 2.3, Louise Mumpoting, one of Yerkes’ assistants, poses in an image of

pristine domesticity; her white dress and comfortable lap providing a refuge for Chim and

Panzee, Yerkes’ first chimpanzee “pets.” Last, in Fig. 2.4, the configuration of cross-species

kinship is reversed, with an adult chimpanzee caring for a human child (the son of one of

Yerkes’ colleagues). The obvious infancy of the child implies a somewhat unusual level of trust

in the caregiver.

33 Yerkes, The Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 265.


Figure 2.2. Child with Chimpanzee at Fig. 2.3. Louise Mumpoting with Kindia, 1922.34 Yerkes’ pets “Chim” and “Panzee” at Kindia, 1923.35

Fig.2.4. Chimpanzee with child at Kindia, 1922.36

The following images were taken from Yerkes’ foundational textbook on primate

behavior and the history of primate studies, The Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life,

published in 1929. Fig. 2.5 portrays a young chimpanzee, Ioni, with Nadia Kohts, a Russian

scientist known for her visual and behavioral experiments with chimpanzees. The tone of this

photograph is cooperative, as they play with a mirror.37 The second image, Fig. 2.6, portrays an

34 Yerkes, photograph album, “Kindia and Russia, 1922-1929,” folder 2240, box 131, Robert Mearns Yerkes Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Department, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Nadezha Ladygina-Kohts, known as Nadia Kohts in the U.S., was a pioneering Russian primatologist who worked primarily with a young chimpanzee named Ioni whom she raised in her own home. Because her publications were in Russian, and probably because she was a woman in what was then predominantly a man’s field, her work is less well remembered than many of her colleagues. On Kohts’ work, see Frans B. M. de Waal, “A Century of Getting to


infant chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden in 1925. Here, the swaddling cloths, the

almost audible cry of the baby, and the angle of the photograph all suggest the care and interest

of a proud parent.38 The story told by Yerkes’ chimpanzee photographs produce an effect similar

to that which theorist Marianne Hirsch has termed the “familial look,” a photographic gaze that

is at once “affiliative and identificatory,” repudiating difference in favor of “stability and union,

stasis and monolithicality,” and ultimately, promoting a sense of “universal comprehensibility”

across lines of difference.39

Fig. 2.5. “Ioni” with Nadia Figure 2.6. Infant chimpanzee at the Kohts, 1928.40 Philadelphia Zoological Garden, 1928.41

Such photogenicity was critical to Yerkes’ anthropomorphization of his chimpanzee

subjects. Not only did he imagine them as part of his own quotidian, domestic visual field, but he

also felt certain that they were able to see him in similar terms. “To see, in the visual way,”

Yerkes noted,

Know the Chimpanzee,” in Nature 427 (1 Sept. 2005): 56-59. The image of Kohts pictured here was taken from Yerkes, The Great Apes, 332. 38 Yerkes, The Great Apes, 264. 39 To be sure, Hirsch makes these points in relation to the project of the human family album; however, this work considers chimpanzees to be culturally and scientifically linked to humans in rhetoric of familiality. See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4. 40 Yerkes, The Great Apes, 110. 41 Ibid., 125.


is by no means a simple matter. In fact, there are many kinds of seeing, and visual impressions constitute systems of which color sensations and achromatic sensations are the chief types. Now it appears, from painstaking experimental inquiry, that the chimpanzee possesses color vision, as well as the ability to distinguish white, grays, and black. We may not say that its visual sensations are identical with our won, but they seem to serve like purposes in its adaptations to the world. Further, it has been shown…that the appreciation of distance or depth is dependent in the chimpanzee, as in us, on the use of two eyes instead of one. When both eyes are used, distance is more accurately gauged or estimated than when either eye is used alone. This is equally true, it seems, of man and chimpanzee.42 At a moment, and on a continent, in which anthropological photography was often

imagined to be met alternately by “native” resistance and childlike enthusiasm, representations

of the chimpanzee’s “almost human” sight, as well as its engagement with the camera, worked to

establish the species as presciently modern, to naturalize the use of technology by creatures of a

certain evolutionary order, and to mark the chimpanzee as an empirical subject unaffected by the

kind of magical thinking that made the camera an object of fear or fascination.43

It was not without context or consequence, then, that Yerkes chose to represent gorillas

distinctly as objects, rather than subjects, of the photographic gaze. Indeed, Yerkes’ portrayal of

gorillas is far from familial. Fig. 2.7, taken at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden and pictured in

The Great Apes, represents a young gorilla named Bamboo, who sits on the floor of a cage

munching hay, eyes cast to the side, as the camera bears down on him.44 Fig. 2.8 is of the

“Reichenow gorilla,” being held by a woman who is referred to in a similarly obscure manner as

“foster nurse.”45 Although the obstruction of her face by the camera suggests that she is not the

42 Yerkes, Almost Human, 100. 43 R. E. Dennett, “Bavili Notes,” Folklore 16, no. 4 (1905): 371-406; see also Charles Dundas, “History of Kitui,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 43 (Jul. 1913): 480-549, where he writes, “the Mkamba…say ‘We see a man’s shadow, and we say perhaps that is his spirit,’ and for this reason the camera is still feared, because it robs men of their shadows’” (535). 44 Yerkes, The Great Apes, 450. 45 Ibid., 445, 447. The “Reichenow gorilla” belonged to German zoologist Eduard Reichenow. The practice of affectionately naming chimpanzees was not always extended to gorillas; rather, they were sometimes referred to simply by their owners’ names.


proper subject of the photograph, her presence is nonetheless necessary for the interpolation of

the gorilla’s subjectivity.

Far from the serene, holistic, and naturalized image offered by Louise Mumpoting’s lap,

the representation of the young gorilla with its “foster nurse” is strikingly distanced, even when

she is portrayed elsewhere literally breast-feeding an infant gorilla.46 That the “foster nurse” is

never referred to by name is unsurprising, and given the location of the primate colony, which

was quite literally a colony within a colony, it is certainly possible that her labor was conscripted

against her will. Whatever the conditions of her “fostering,” the “nurse” is not credited properly

for her care of the animals, illuminating the ways in which the project of primate species

knowledge was built upon the back of racial theories which located African peoples as less than

human.47

Fig. 2.7. “Bamboo” at the Figure 2.8. The Reichenow Gorilla Phildelphia Zoological with “foster nurse,” n.d.48 Garden, 1928.49

46 Ibid., 443. After much thought, I chose not to include this image in the chapter. As Anne Fausto-Sterling and other scholars have pointed out, the continuing spectacularization of exploited persons can breach ethical standards of representation. See for example, Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815-1817,” in Feminism and the Body, ed. Londa Schiebinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203-233. 47 I have been unable to determine any further information about this particular woman and others, who appear in images but never in written word within both Yerkes’ published and unpublished papers. 48 Yerkes, The Great Apes, 477. 49 Yerkes, The Great Apes, 467.


Yerkes’ representation of his research with gorillas is similarly unfamiliar. Figs. 2.9 and

2.10, each compilations of photographs provided on pages of Yerkes’ photographic albums, offer

multi-perspectival representations of the cages in which he secured gorilla research subjects. In

Fig. 2.9, a research subject is tied to a tree with a chain, while in Fig. 2.10, a gorilla reaches out

toward experimental objects. Both compositions are peculiarly artistic in their rendering of the

gorilla’s inscrutable corporeality.50 Thus, while Yerkes’ gorillas belonged to the colonial

languages of surrogacy and spectacle, his chimpanzees were imagined to be equally at home

within the white domestic space and the modern laboratory. As will be explored in the next

section, these discourses were eventually self-fulfilling prophesies, which turned gorillas into

beasts to be feared and chimpanzees into objects of affection. Ultimately, the dichotomous

representation and treatment of these species – from the construction of “appropriate” artificial

habitats (from the cage to the home), to the provision or denial of necessary socialization

opportunities – shaped the minds and bodies of these animals in starkly different ways.

Fig. 2.9. Yerkes’ gorilla research Fig. 2.10. Yerkes’ gorilla subject and enclosures, Kindia, enclosures, Kindia, 1923.51 1923.52 50 Yerkes, photograph album, “Congo: 1925-1928,” folder 2238, box 133, Robert Mearns Yerkes Papers. It is unclear from the historical record exactly who took each of the pictures, though their presence in Yerkes’ own scrapbooks and, in certain cases, their selective publication in his written work, suggests that, at the very least, he directed the shots. 51 Ibid.


SPECIATION & THE CULTURE INDUSTRY

By mapping the language of racial difference onto the classification of inter-anthropoid

taxonomy, Yerkes and his colleagues contributed to the shifting politics of racial difference that

characterized the early decades of the twentieth century. The racialization of the chimpanzee and

gorilla in scientific works throughout the 1920s and 1930s paralleled a slow but certain paradigm

shift within the production of contemporary racial thought, which increasingly subsumed the

plurality of ethnic identities under the rubric of a white/black dichotomy.53 It was precisely at

this moment of racial consolidation that the chimpanzee emerged as the hero of interlocking

stories of whiteness and bio-cultural evolution, and that the gorilla became denigrated as a

cautionary tale of failed geography, psychology, and corporeality, both within the scientific

record and within U.S. popular culture. [Section excerpted to meet length requirements.]

Importantly, the discovery and interpretation of Australopithecus in 1925 was affected by

these structures of racial and species knowledge. The not-quite-human quality of

Australopithecus worked to mitigate the geopolitical dimensions of the discovery, as the

framework of the “whitened” chimpanzee provided a basis from which to understand the

potential whiteness of the “African Ape.” Imagining Australopithecus as less than human

enabled a slip of hand in which the fossil was not “black” by traditional standards, and yet at the

same time, was of African origins. In this way, the whitening of man’s recent nonhuman

ancestors mystified the potential national and racial origins of man’s recent human ancestors. If,

as Ann Laura Stoler has remarked, the European colonies served as the “laboratories of

52 Ibid. 53 On the transformation of racial categorizations, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), where he writes that 1924 “mark[ed] the beginning of the ascent of monolithic whiteness” (93). See also Ronald Takaki, From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997).


modernity,”54 then it might also be said that Yerkes’ primate colonies acted as the laboratories of

a very American form of modernity. The remainder of the chapter will consider the ways in

which ideas surrounding the relationship between species, race, and higher order primates made

their way into mainstream popular culture, and moreover, how they aided in the gradual

acceptance of Darwinian theories of evolution as the century progressed.

To be sure, the complicated relationship between the categories of species and race

throughout the early twentieth century created a wide spectrum of opinion regarding the nature

of human evolution. On the one hand, the adoption of social Darwinist principles provided an

important narrative framework for the logic of eugenic science, aiding in the rise of its

popularity. On the other, the actual details of anthropoid evolution were strongly resisted by both

the scientific community and lay public. As Darwin himself remarked about his own research,

“the main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-

organised [sic] form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons.”55 Darwin’s

predictions were of course correct, but it was not only the idea of evolving from “lowly”

creatures that caused panic; rather, it was also the implications of such reasoning, including the

the possibility of human devolution.

[Section removed to meet length requirements, includes a discussion of the Scopes Trial.]

Throughout this period of flux in scientific and popular evolutionary parlance, the

boundary between the animal and human worlds became a fulcrum from which to imagine

questions of species survival and racial purity. Films such as Dracula (1922), The Island of Lost

Souls (1932, based upon H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

54 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 145. 55 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. 2, 1871, ed. John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 404.


(1933) presented forms of bestialized humanity and anthropomorphized animality as metaphors

for the increasing dissolution of the white race. Beyond these representations, the 1920s and

1930s saw the rise of primates as figures of considerable interest within popular literature and

film. Like Yerkes’ and his colleagues’ work, popular cultural representations of these animals

tended to focus on the remarkable “humanness” of the chimpanzee and the bestiality of the

gorilla. While the former became a media darling and was imagined as a playful younger sibling

who could be dressed, taught to play musical instruments, and even act in short films, the gorilla

emerged as an untamable monster to be feared, pursued by skilled marksmen, and ultimately,

taxidermied.

The interplay between newfound species knowledge and public representation was

perhaps most obvious in the cultures of spectacularization which absorbed the gorilla into a pre-

existing script of black embodiment and corporeal exploitation. As Dr. Charles Hill-Tout of the

American Museum of Natural History noted in 1924, current scientific opinion on the gorilla

suggested that the species had managed to fall by the evolutionary “wayside…rely[ing] on

muscle alone,” and thereby “totally changing his skull.” Further, Hill-Tout noted, the “black

skins and hairy bodies of the gorilla…were developments which the human race avoided.”56 Carl

Akeley, the famous gorilla trafficker who was known for the delivery of dozens of gorilla

“specimens” to the museum, remarked tellingly that his life’s work “almost felt like murder.”57

In 1923 the New York Times reported that Akeley’s most recent work, Brightest Africa,

used “a new adjective to apply to the African wilderness…connot[ing] a change in the mental

attitude of man toward the wilderness and its inhabitants…which keeps the wilderness as a place

of happy and confident cheerful adventure and its animal life creatures that challenge man’s

56 “‘Hall of Man’ Attacked: New York Museum All Wrong about the Descent of Human Beings, Another Scientist Declares,” Special to the New York Times: The New York Times (8 Aug. 1924): E5. 57 “In Africa Day Dawns at Last,” The New York Times (18 Nov. 1923): BR2.


admiration, intellectual interest, sympathy and even affection.”58 The “challenge” of admiring,

intellectualizing, and sympathizing with animal subjectivity was indeed related to the broader

language of colonial paternalism. That Akeley could imagine “that dark continent” as ironically

“bright” through the hunting of almost human game, suggests the way in which the discourse of

species aided and erased the problem of human colonialism (Fig. 2.11).

Such presumptions were clearly evident in the 1933 blockbuster film King Kong, which

featured an overgrown gorilla living on an island peopled by primitive “natives” and a variety of

paleontologically inaccurate “prehistoric beasts” from the “dinosaur age.” Sought after by a

money-grubbing filmmaker who hoped to display him as a freak show, Kong spends the majority

of the film attempting to possess the “golden woman,” Ann Darrow played by Fay Wray, whom

the natives peg as his potential “bride.” And, although the racial logic of the film is quite explicit

(in which the structures of colonialism, sexual mythology, and racism appear in familiar ways), it

is nevertheless species-specific in its articulation. The natives’ ritualistic donning of gorilla

costumes and performance of gorilla dances (in which participants beat their chests and feign

quadrupedism) demonstrate that their alignment with Kong has everything to do with the fact

that he is ultimately a gorilla, rather than simply big, black, and monstrous (Fig. 2.12).59

58 Ibid. As Giorgio Agamben has written, there is no surer barometer of the value ascribed to life (bios) than the discourses which surround death. Whether one can be “murdered” or simply “killed” is indicative of one’s place within the political framework. The question of whether one can “murder” an animal is thus similar to the question of whether one can murder an individual who does not occupy a political identity. See Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 145-54. 59 Chapter 8, King Kong, DVD, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack (1933; Atlanta, GA: Turner Home Entertainment, 2005).


Fig. 2.11. Scene from a gorilla hunting Fig. 2.12. The gorilla dance, King expedition, Scientific American, 1932.60 Kong, 1933.

In 1937, a “real” King Kong materialized in the form of Gargantua, a 460-pound gorilla

displayed by the Ringling Brothers Circus, who was said to have “started life in an African

jungle, without even a name.”61 Like Kong, Gargantua was represented as a grotesque mutant,

both due to his size, and to his permanent “snarl” effected by a serious “accidental” acid burn.

“A single purpose occupies all his waking hours,” a feature article in Life magazine cautioned,

and “that purpose is murder. When Gargantua stamps, pounds his chest and utters his deep

chuckle of pleasure, it means that he has just devised a new trick for killing someone or that such

a trick has nearly succeeded” (Fig. 2.13). As the article reported, Gargantua’s “bad mood” was a

“mixed blessing”; for although he was difficult to handle, the “frightening” exhibit was so

popular that it managed to save the circus from an impending bankruptcy. When the circus first

acquired Gargantua, co-proprietor John Ringling North employed none other than Robert Yerkes

to examine the gorilla, who found him to be in “perfect condition” for display, in spite of his

unusual aggression, physical disfigurement, and chronic susceptibility to pneumonia.62

60 “Gorilla: Greatest of All Apes, Scientific American (12 Jun. 1932) 54. 61 Gargantua’s weight stated in “Gorilla v. Man,” Time (20 Jun. 1938): 32; quote taken from J. B. T. Scripps, “Gargantua: World’s Most Successful Animal Lives for One Purpose: Murder,” Life 8 (26 Feb. 1940): 64. 62 Scripps, “Gargantua,” 80, 82.


Fig. 2.13. Ringling Brothers’ poster for Gargantua, 1937.63

Unlike gorillas, chimpanzees were always portrayed as holistic subjects within popular

cultural contexts, often even with their bodies shrouded in human clothing. Throughout the early

twentieth century, dozens of short comedies featuring chimpanzees hit theaters as the “opening

acts” for feature films. Not only did chimpanzee “actors” appear by name in film advertisements

at a time at which people of color were rarely if ever credited for their work in artistic

productions, but they were also lauded by the popular press as being “more human than some

people,”64 possessing a level of “intelligence that astounds science.”65 Ultimately, there was little

question as to which “people” were being imagined as less human than certain apes. As Yerkes

himself remarked, it seemed “an odd fact that Africa, a continent rich in relatively primitive

varieties of the human species, [was] also home of the highest type of anthropoid ape.”66

This comparison was a theme that also emerged in popular literature. In 1931, the

humorously titled, His Monkey Wife, Or, Married to a Chimp, hit bookshelves across the

country. The novel, written by popular author John Collier, told the story of a British school

master living in the “Upper Congo” involved in a somewhat romantic friendship with a “civilised

[sic]” female chimpanzee named Emily, who, “devoured a good number of the Victorian

classics, [and] naturally became imbued with some of the softer virtues of Nineteenth Century 63 Ibid. 64 “The Newest Star,” The Atlanta Constitution (12 Oct. 1919): F14. 65 “Biggest Laugh of the Year,” Los Angeles Times (7 July 1922): B1. 66 Yerkes, Almost Human, 45.


womanhood.” Although the bulk of the novel details Emily’s pursuits once she is brought to

England, the story opens with her attempts to attend school with the local “pickaninnies [sic],”

whom she continually outsmarts.67

The notion that chimpanzees possessed greater mental faculties than humans of the same

“nationality” was also the evident in the Doctor Doolittle novels, a children’s series written by

British author Hugh Lofting and popularized in the U.S. between 1920 and 1952, which

portrayed the adventures of a “doctor” who speaks the “language of the animals” and travels to

“foreign parts.” One of the central characters in the books is Chee-Chee, a precocious

chimpanzee, who lives with the doctor and several other exotic animals. In the first of the series,

the Doolittle household travels to Africa to work with Chee-Chee’s relatives to treat a continent-

wide “monkey epidemic” that manages to elude the African people. Continually represented as

an obstacle to the implementation of proper colonial medicine, the African tribes people have to

be tricked by a band of chimpanzees into allowing the good doctor to set up shop.68

Similar themes appeared in the 1932 film Tarzan the Ape Man, in which a white child,

named “Tarzan,” which is said to mean “white ape,” is orphaned by way of a failed colonial

mission in Africa, and is subsequently raised by a group of chimpanzees. Importantly, in the

original Edgar Rice Burroughs novel published in 1912, the species of ape that adopts Tarzan is

not identified. Produced in a new era of species knowledge, however, the filmic version

interprets Tarzan’s family as a pack of chimpanzees, who are represented as intelligent, caring,

and sympathetic to white colonialism. The casting of the film further reinforced the

anthropomorphization of the chimpanzees as well as their familial relationship with the human

67 John Collier, His Monkey Wife, Or, Married to a Chimp (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1931), 4, front matter. 68 Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Doolittle (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1920).


race, by employing real animals to play the young chimpanzees, and by enlisting human actors in

costume to play the adult chimpanzees.

Although it is not remembered for it, Tarzan also featured a monstrous gorilla. Like King

Kong, Tarzan’s gorilla character is obsessed with yet another white woman: Jane played by

Maureen O’Sullivan, who lands in the tropics while traveling with her father’s missionary

expedition. During a scene following the capture of the missionary group by the “natives,” Jane

falls victim to a cruel form of entertainment in which the natives cast their captives into a deep

pit where a wild gorilla is kept. The piercing whiteness of Jane’s limp body against the dark

terror of the gorilla and the applauding natives again presents a familiarly racist image of

predatory black sexuality, serving to re-write the structural violences of the colonial system to

which Jane belongs. The inhumanity of the gorilla and the natives are thus aligned and set in

stark opposition to Tarzan and his chimpanzee sidekick, Cheeta, who is also peculiar to the film

adaptation. Not only does Cheeta manage to pick up more English during his brief interactions

with Jane than do the entire group of natives traveling with Jane’s father, but he also rescues Jane

by summoning Tarzan on her behalf. By the film’s end, Jane has decided to stay behind with

Tarzan and Cheeta; in the closing shot, they climb to the top of a rocky cliff, and as the camera

fades out, they stand like a light upon a hill, the future of an uncertain race (Fig. 2.14).69

Fig. 2.14. Closing scene, Tarzan, 1932. 69 Chapter 12, Tarzan the Ape Man, DVD, directed by W.S. Van Dyke (1932; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004).


To be sure, structures of kinship and intimacy in Tarzan are curious and remain largely

unresolved. That Tarzan is “adopted” by the chimpanzee clan rather than by the native

population certainly humanizes the former at the expense of the latter, but it also raises questions

about the nature of Tarzan’s own humanity. Whether or not one imagines his future as

biologically predetermined (i.e., regardless of the environment in which he was raised, his

biological makeup as a white, British child, presumably of means, would make itself known in

certain ways), Tarzan also displays a variety of nonhuman characteristics that he learns from his

host family. In addition to being primarily arboreal, he speaks no known human language and is

completely unfamiliar with “appropriate” human conduct (in many ways, the chimpanzees

demonstrate a greater level of civility and gentility toward Jane than Tarzan does initially).

Instead, Jane must teach Tarzan to be like her in mannerism, posture, and speech, and it is not a

task that can be purely reduced to the wiles of feminine colonial practice.

As much as Tarzan’s impending transformation parallels the logic of the typical

American bootstrapping paradigm, it also repackages the familiar syllogism along determinates

of race, nationality, and species difference. The establishment of Cheeta and Tarzan as

evolutionary subjects capable of fundamental transformation does not represent a reach beyond

biology; rather, it illuminates the end point of biological meaning, the triumph of the fit

individual over the processes of environmental change. Similar to Australopithecus’s

determination as the originary “man-ape” and Yerkes’ whitened chimpanzees, Tarzan emerges as

an evolutionary icon capable of African nativity and whiteness through a sort of trans-species

identification. Conversely, the native population and their savage gorilla remain tethered to

perverse economies of stasis and devolution.


Like earlier eugenic films which imparted new systems of industrialized knowledge and

scientific practice, popular cultural works which focused on the figure of the primate during the

second quarter of the century taught new systems of species knowledge and classification. The

representations of chimpanzees in King Kong, Dr. Doolittle, and Tarzan suggest a critical

departure from late nineteenth and early twentieth century portrayals of primates. Prior to the

exploration of the species boundaries within the burgeoning field of primatology, simian

representations appeared without particular logic. But as the findings of Yerkes and his

colleagues made their way into the public’s consciousness, they became rearticulated through the

popular cultural forms which in turn had provided the very framework of racialization that

Yerkes initially drew upon in his own formulations of primatological and eugenic thought. These

scientific and cultural transformations had profound consequences for the acceptance of

Darwinian theory, which became increasingly widespread by mid-century.

CURIOSITY

[This final section deals with the acceptance of Darwinian evolutionary thought, the rise

of Margaret and H. A. Rey’s Curious George stories (1941-1962), and speculates that the history

of the racialization of primates is partly forgotten because of the ways in which all nonhuman

primates (particularly chimpanzees) became necessarily de-anthropomorphized as they

increasingly became objects of biomedical experimentation by the 1960s.]

Documents

BETWEEN RACE AND SPECIES: Evolutionary Discourse and the Whitening of the Human ‘Race’