Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,820
By This is the grave of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler.
Born in Newport, Kentucky in 1841, Shaler grew up in a well-off slaver family. It might have been northern Kentucky, but Kentucky it still was and status was determined on the ownership of human beings. He ended up Harvard, where he studied under Louis Agassiz. He was a favorite student of Agassiz and so the great scientist used his influence to keep the kid on there after the Civil War. Shaler graduated in 1862, but he was in the Union Army as an officer for two years before returning to Cambridge. At least he was a unionist, though he was terrible on race his entire life. In fact, Shaler would stay at Harvard for his whole life. Harvard hired him as a lecturer first, but he became a professor of paleontology in 1869. He switched to geology in 1888 and stayed in that role until his death, while also being a dean. Stephen Jay Gould has written about Shaler in Bully for Brontosaurus, and he basically accuses the earlier scientist of being a pathetic hack for Agassiz, afraid of stepping out of the latter’s shadow and parroting him until Shaler was completely secure in his career.
Initially, Shaler’s science followed Agassiz. The latter was a great early scientist, but he really struggled with the rise of Darwinism to explain the world. Fundamentally. Agassiz remained a creationist. So was Shaler, for awhile. But Darwinist ideas really appealed to him, especially as people such as William Graham Sumner started applying them to society. See, Shaler might have been a unionist in the Civil War, but then remember that for most whites, being for the Union had nothing to do with supporting Black rights, and that includes for most people who actively opposed slavery. The problem with slavery is what it did to white people, not what it did to Black people. But for someone like Shaler, there was no problem with slavery at all, except that it didn’t exist anymore. He believed in the Union more than slavery, but not by much.
So Shaler quickly adapted the insights of the theory of evolution to explain the obvious fact to him that whites were the superior race. He published widely about this as well, trying to push the idea that his biases were all purely scientific. In 1884, he wrote a widely shared article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Negro Problem.” In it, he wrote that freed slaves were “like children lost in the wood, needing the old protection of the strong mastering hand,” that they became increasingly dominated by their “animal nature” as they grew from children into adults, and American slavery had been “infinitely the mildest and most decent system of slavery that ever existed.”
Ah, OK then. Naturally, he openly defended lynching, using the whole “we need to save white women from these out of control lecherous black men” justification. None of this would have made him out of fashion in Cambridge society. The North was and remains just as racist as the South.
Now, Shaler was a legitimate scientist, but despite what people want to believe today, scientific racism was part and parcel of science. The problem of course is that science, when done by racist, is going to be racist. And since white people are almost all racist, then science, then and now, is likely to be racist in practice. So for Shaler, who did important scientific work on ants, extending a lot of early evolutionary thought to the observation of different species, there wasn’t any difference between this and his racism. It was all science. So he did all sorts of legit science, but it is the racial stuff that made him famous and what people remember him for today, to the extent that they do. He wrote Nature and Man in America in 1891, which was a scientific justification of the Aryan race being on top of the world. He wasn’t even correct about where these people came from, as he claimed these were Scandinavians. But the broader point is that he believed everything about Europe–topography, climate, etc–made the perfect specimen of the human being, “marvelously suited to be the cradles of people,” as he stated.
Then he compared Europe to native peoples in other continents–not so much Asia, which he dismissed separately (harder to just call Mesopotamia, India, and China inferior, not to mention the rapid rise of Japan taking place at this time)–but Africa, the Americas, and Australia. He stated that these continents, “have shown by their human products that they are unfitted to be the cradle places of great peoples.” But the central argument of the book is that while the Americas, and particularly the lands of the United States, were not well suited to creating great cultures, they are perfectly suited for Europeans to come in, take over, and improve. In other words, it found an argument to support his desired justification.
Sure, this is all bullshit. But it’s still science. Arguments about “pseudoscience” today are totally fallacious, for they start with what is correct to the 2025 mind, ignoring the process. This doesn’t legitimize the racist ideas of people such as Shaler. Rather, it shows the deep fallacies within the scientific process and the significant limitations of liberals today who want to believe in science as a religion that can’t failed, but rather can only be failed. And maybe that’s true that science can only be failed, but since science is conducted by humans, it is guaranteed to fail.
In addition to working at Harvard, Shaler headed the Kentucky Geological Survey, beginning in 1873 and working part-time in that position until 1880. In 1884, he became the head of the Atlantic Division of the U.S. Geological Survey. For some reason, he was also appointed commissioner of agriculture in Massachusetts for awhile. In 1895, he was elected president of the Geological Society of America. Moreover, Shaler was a central figure in building up Harvard’s scientific legacy, convincing his rich friends to leave their fortunes to the school. In addition to writing up his scientific racism, he authored a variety of books, including a book on domesticated animals in 1895 and a comparison of the features of the sun and moon in 1903. He wrote a memoir in 1909. He even wrote a historical fiction called Elizabeth of England: A Dramatic Romance in Five Parts, which sounds dreadful, in 1903, and published a book of poetry about the Civil War in 1906.
Shaler died in 1906. He was 65 years old. There’s actually a biography of Shaler published some years ago by the University of Alabama Press, but I haven’t read it.
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
If you would like this series to visit other scientific racists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Josiah Nott is in Mobile, Alabama and Samuel George Morton is in Philadelphia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.