Lester Frank Ward - White Supremacy and Race

White Supremacy and Race

Ward's views on the question of race and the theory of white supremacy underwent considerable change throughout his life. Ward was a Republican Whig and supported the abolition of the American system of slavery. He enlisted in the Union army during the Civil war and was wounded three times. However, a close reading of "Dynamic Sociology" will uncover several statements that would be considered racist and ethnocentric by today's standards. There are references to the superiority of Western culture and the savagery of the American Indian and black races, made all the more jarring by the modern feel of much of the rest of the book. However, Ward lived in Washington D.C., then the center of anthropological research in the US; he was always up-to-date on the latest findings of science and in tune with the developing zeitgeist, and by the early twentieth century, perhaps influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois and the Franz Boas he began to focus more on the question of race. During this period his views on race were arguably more progressive and in tune with modern standards than any other white academic of the time, with, of course, the exception of Boas, who is sometimes credited with doing more than any other American in combating the theory of White supremacy. Ward, given his age and reputation, could afford to take a somewhat radical stand on the politically explosive question of White supremacy, but Boas did not have those advantages. After Ward's death in 1913 and with the approach of World War I the German-born Boas came to be seen by some, including W.H. Holmes, the head of National Research Council (and who had worked with Ward for many years at the U.S. Geological Survey), as possibly being an agent of the German government determined to sow revolution in the US and among its troops. The NRC had been set up by the Wilson administration in 1916 in response to the increased need for scientific and technical services caused by World War I, and soon Boas's influence over the field of anthropology the US began to wane. By 1919 he was censured by the American Anthropological Association for his political activities, a censure which would not be lifted until 2005. (See also: Scientific racism, Master race, and Institutional racism) (the source for the information about Boas is Gossett, Thomas F.; Race: The History of an Idea in America)