Franz Boas was not the father of American anthropology. But the fact that so many people think he was shows how thoroughly his relentless energy transformed the discipline as we know it today.
Boas was born in Germany in 1858. He grew up in the shadow of events that happened a decade earlier: The famous ‘Revolutions of 1848’, when people across Europe demanded an end to imperialism, monarchy, and the poverty caused by the Industrial Revolution. Boas grew up in a household of “forty eighters”, and became deeply committed to the ideals of liberty and progress which drove the revolutions. As a young man, Boas received a rigorous education and spent most of his free time outdoors, exploring the natural world. Like his idol Alexander von Humboldt, Boas combined a romantic wonder at nature's rich diversity with a naturalist's love of science, rigor, and classification.
Boas was Jewish, but not because he wanted to be. His parents were wealthy merchants for whom 'progress' meant shedding the ancient superstitions of the past. He didn't have a choice: Germany had given Jews the right to vote and own property, but remained an antisemitic place. Boas was labeled a Jew by others. So he learned to be fearless: In college when he was insulted he demanded a duel. He and his opponent would don goggles to protect their eyes, and then use their sabers to try to slash open each others’ face. “With the damn Jew baiters this winter one could not survive without quarreling and fighting.” He wrote his worried parents, reassuring them. “I remain unmolested since every student here knows that I would not be shy to defend my affairs with the sword.” He was not exaggerating. "He bears the mark of his German university training literally," the Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa noted, "in a somewhat disfiguring scar across his face". Indeed, one of the first things people noted about Boas were his scars.
Although he was academically gifted, Boas ended up doing a Ph.D. in the unprepossessing university of Kiel. His sister Toni was ill and the Boas family was tight-knit: He went to go live with her. The result was a miserable experience writing a Ph.D. on the color of seawater. His main discovery was that it was incredibly hard to measure the color of sea water. Later on, when he studied how perception is shaped by culture, these insights would come to help him. At the time, he was miserable.
Then love struck: Boas fell head over heels for Marie Krackowizer, a German-American lady whose family of “Forty Eighters” had fled to the US. She loved him too, but they could not be married until he got a job. For that, Boas needed to “habilitate”, a level of education above a Ph.D. He decided on a trip to the arctic, where he would study the influence of geography on Inuit people. He paid for it by writing an account of his travels for a German newspaper, and with a gift of money from the man who would be his principle benefactor in years to come, his uncle Jacobi. His parents insisted that he take along the gardener, Willie, so that he wouldn't be alone.
Boas posing in a German photography studio for an image to share with people demonstrating what his life had been like in Baffinland.
Boas spent a year in Baffinland, an island in the far, far north of Canada. The trip was unbelievably dangerous: Ships had to dock at the edge of the ice and then people would walk across the ice to the island. In the winter it was -40 degrees. Luckily Boas was energetic, focused, and driven by huge energy. He was the sort of person who was disgusted at himself for only working 20 hour days. He did research during the day and read Kant at night. Above all, he came to see Inuit people as people. "The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down on them," he wrote to Marie in a letter that was spattered with the blood of the raw seal liver he had been eating.
Boas's trip was a success. He habilitated and married his sweetheart Marie. Together they created a loving and warm family. Professional success eluded him, however. Antisemitism made it difficult for him to find a job in Germany, so he moved to the US, where Marie’s family was — there were more opportunities there and Franz was also attracted to America as a land where his political ideals of liberty and freedom were more realized than they were in Germany.
Franz and Marie's wedding portrait.
Unfortunately, Boas found that there were few good jobs for geographers in the US. What people were interested in was Native Americans. Back in 1879 (when Boas was still in school) anthropology as a modern discipline was born in the United States. The goal was to understand the 'natural history of mankind', which in the US meant the origins of Native Americans. Were had they come from and what were they like? Previous answers -- tenuously derived from the Bible -- were clearly inadequate in light of new theories of evolution.
So Boas retooled himself as an anthropologist. He made multiple trips to the Pacific Northwest, a region that he is most closely associated with today. Still, he struggled. He got a dream job as a professor at Clark, a brand new university — only to have the university close down after a few years. He organized anthropological exhibits at the World's Fair at Chicago, hoping it would lead to a permanent position, but it didn’t. It was a dark time for Boas. His third daughter, Hete, was born in Chicago, caught whooping cough, and died in his arms. She was ten months old. Finally, Boas took a job at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and started teaching part time at Columbia. Finally in 1899, at the age of forty, he got a permanent position: He was now a faculty member at Columbia.
"Boas with the George Hunt family. Left to right, standing: David, George, Lalaxs'a, Mary (Ebbetts), Jonathan and Franz Boas. Sitting: Marion and Lucy. From row: Mary and Stanley" from Franz Boas: An Illustrated Biography
At Columbia, Boas was cutting edge. At a time when Harvard and Yale were just beginning to update their medieval curriculums, he had a Ph.D., the new research-focused degree that had made German universities world famous. Boas made history by being the first person in the US to offer a Ph.D. His students included Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Robert Lowie, Alfred Kroeber, and many others.
Boas was also a tireless organizer, sitting on boards of journals, foundations, and associations. These positions allowed him to control funding and direct it to students. He was also a close friend of the millionaire feminist and activist Elsie Clews Parsons, who herself funded an entire generation of anthropological fieldwork. Boas worked his students very, very hard but also showed them tremendous loyalty. Boas not only lent money to students in times of need, in one case he signed on as a guarantor of a student loan, agreeing to pay it if the student defaulted.
Boas around the time he began working at Columbia.
True to his principles, Boas believed in meritocracy: If you could do the work, that was all that mattered. As a result he trained a generation of female students at a time when many universities didn’t accept female students at all. He also had few illusions about how much a white person could learn spending their summers on a reservation. For him, the best anthropologist was an insider with scientific training. As a result, he mentored scholars like William Jones (a Fox Indian) and Zora Neale Hurston.
“Elsie [Clews Parsons] and colleagues at. Lounsberry, mid-1920s. On the porch, Elsie (in shadow on left) talks with Pliny Goddard; on the steps are Margaret Mead, Esther Goldfrank, Franz Boas, and Mrs. Nelson”. Via Deacon’s Elsie Clews Parsons. This picture illustrates the close ties Boas had with his students.
In fact, Boas was an uncompromising opponent of racism. Famously, in May 1906, he traveled to Atlanta University at the invitation of W.E.B. Du Bois and gave a speech claiming black people were biologically equal to white people. This was not a small thing in the Jim Crow South. Four months later, 25 black people were killed in Atlanta in a riot against black people that turned into a massacre. Then in 1909 Boas and a team of twenty researchers made 13,000 measurements of the children of immigrants to see whether they inherited their parents’ ’racial’ features. To his own surprise, Boas found that they didn't -- height, weight, and other factors were the result of the environment, not heredity. His students did similar research. Margaret Mead wrote a paper demonstrating the black people in the Midwest (where there was a strong public school system) did better on standardized tests than poor southern whites: schooling, not race, seemed to determine intelligence. Southern politicians repressed the study.
Boas’s relationship with indigenous people was more complicated. He was not a champion for Indigenous rights. He considered Native Americans conquered by the US and on the verge of cultural and biological extinction. His goal was 'salvage': to make a record of a disappearing culture the same way we have a record of Ancient Greece and Rome. He worked with many indigenous informants like George Hunt, who he paid to write letters detailing their customs. This relationship remains an object of scrutiny today: Did Boas exploit Hunt? Was Hunt Boas’s teacher and mentor? How much should someone be paid to write descriptions of salmon fishing in 1900 anyway?
Whatever we think of Boas’s relationship with Indigenous people today, at Columbia no one thought Boas was a friend to white people. He was considered a dangerous radical who had to be canceled. Not only did Boas attack the racial foundations of America, but when the US entered World War I, Boas was became a public enemy for opposing the war. Remember, this was a time when people where lynched for being German in the US. Columbia stopped paying him. They kept him from teaching undergraduates. They took space away from the department, leaving him with just his office. Boas was, essentially, canceled by the right.
What’s more, Boas's life was beset by personal tragedy. In addition to the death of his ten month old daughter in 1894, in 1924 his daughter Trudel died of polio. In 1925 his son Heini was killed in a car accident. Then in 1929 his wide died in a hit and run accident - the driver who hit her was never found. Boas's misery was palpable even before Marie's death. In 1927 he wrote to his son Ernst:
"I have not the light spirit of others and when I do not work, or else am intensely occupied with something else I can think of nothing but Trudel and Heini. They are there when I get up in the morning and when I stop work at night they are there… If I do not work these thoughts would destroy me." [L-Z v2 275]
Franz Boas featured on the cover of the 11 May 1936 cover of Time Magazine. In his old age, Boas's fight against racism became popular in America again as the US prepared to fascism in Europe.
Late in life Boas received the recognition he deserved, becoming a world-renowned scientist. In America, his anti-racist thinking became more and more recognized as America geared up to fight fascism. In Germany, an event was scheduled to give him an honorary degree. The degree was canceled and his books were pulled from the library and burnt by the Nazis. His last great work of activism was to help Jewish and leftist scholars flee the Nazis and get visas to come teach in America.
When Boas retired, he handed Columbia a gift: despite its attempts to derail him, he had created perhaps the greatest department of anthropology in the United States. And yet here failure dogged him. He had hoped his students Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir would come to Columbia to continue his work. Instead they stayed at Berkeley and Yale. His successor became Ruth Benedict, but she was then pushed aside by the administration and replaced by first Ralph Linton and then Duncan Strong.
Boas suffered many setbacks in his life, but he also overcame many obstacles. He lived an extraordinary life: Born before the Civil War, he lived to see the Pearl Harbor bombings. He trained the anthropologists who went on to start departments at Yale, Berkeley, Oregon, and many other places. He produced his famous “six foot shelf” — enough books on Kwakwakwakw that is longer than I was tall. After his death, his grandchildren and George Hunt’s grandchildren had a family reunion, and Hunt’s great grandchildren study anthropology in University. Despite his incredible age, Boas did not live to see just how influential he would become. Although he did not know it at the time, he became one of the few people Boas did not quite Although he may not have recognized or admitted it, he had in fact become one of the most important anthropologists in the world, and left an indelible imprint on the discipline for generations to come.
Sources: This was drawn from Rosemary Lévy-Zumwalt's two volume biography of Boas. The quote from . The reference to 1879 as the 'founding' date of anthropology comes from https://www.jstor.org/stable/658142?seq=1 . The Te Rangi Hiroa quote is from Na to Hoa Aroha volume 3. The blood stained letter is from George Stocking's "From physics to ethnology", p. 148
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