Two letters to the Enterprise about the 19th century scientist Louis Aggasiz state opposite views on whether a man of his stature, whose research was tainted by racist ideas, should be honored today. Ruth Gainer says he should not be, while Frank Messman mockingly dismisses people like her who, in the name of political correctness, accuse Aggasiz of Bad Think.
Mr. Messman defends Aggasizs racism as typical of his time, the mid-19th century, and then indulges a typical right-wing what about. He argues that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, also typical of their time, ignoring the fact that they were from an earlier generation, and their roles as plantation owners, and as public men who led a revolution that established the American democratic republic, were manifestly different from Aggasizs role as a scientist.
The plantation economy in the American South, before the Civil War, depended on slave labor, not as something Washington or Jefferson devised but which had been the primary source of plantation labor in the Americas since the early 1500s. They inherited plantations along with slaves from their fathers, and were part of a wider economy that exploited slave labor, including Yankee ship owners who brought captured Africans to America, bankers who financed the ship owners, and textile mill owners who bought cotton picked by slaves.
These facts do not apologize for slavery, but indict a much broader spectrum of the post-revolutionary American economy than just the southern plantation owners. Meanwhile, Washington freed his slaves in his will, while Jefferson came to view slavery as a moral depravity, a hideous blot on the newly created American republic he helped create and largely defined. The views of both men on the peculiar institution of slavery had evolved and changed with the times.
Aggasiz held onto his racial theories through the end of his life, in 1870, long after the views of most Americans in the North had changed, and a war had been fought to establish Jeffersons principle that all men are created equal. Aggasizs professional work was done independently, through science purporting to explain the natural world, and Ms. Gainer condemns him for misuse of science to push his racist ideas, but it was not quite that simple.
Aggasiz was an ardent critic of Darwins theory of evolution, described by one biographer as someone who clung to a vision of well-ordered nature assembled by special creations. It is thus equally likely that Aggasizs science was corrupted by his pre-existing belief in Judeo-Christian creation mythology as it was on racismchicken or eggbut equally at odds with scientific rationalism. Aggasiz did, however, exploit racist ideas that were common in his time, using racial differences in morphology to support his theory of separate evolution of the races.
Ms. Gainer rightly condemns Aggasiz for allowing his science to be corrupted by a priori religious beliefs, and for exploiting racial differences to support his theories. Still, he ran a summer academy for marine biology on Penikese, which in part served as the impetus for basing the MBL in Woods Hole. For that reason only, his name should remain on a street in the village that now harbors several of the most-prominent scientific institutions in the world. So, Mr. Messman is right in a way, but for all the wrong reasons.
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Professor Aggasiz - Letter | Falmouth Opinion - CapeNews.net