Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism

Smithsonian curator Lunde debuts with a gripping investigation into the origins of the large mammal collection at the American Museum of Natural History, including its surprising ties to eugenics. At the center of the story is blue-blooded New Yorker Henry Fairfield Osborn, who led the museum at the turn of the 20th century. Osborn saw the museum as an instrument to popularize his belief that “white humans originated in Central Asia and not Africa” and were a separate, superior species from Black humans. Toward this end, Osborn sent expeditions to bring back megafauna from Africa, the very existence of which Osborn saw, in a twisted turn of logic, as proof of the genetic inferiority of Africans, since it showed that they, unlike “superior” Europeans, had not become their continent’s “destroying angels” by exterminating all their large mammals. Osborn also saw these expeditions as demonstrations of the kind of “taut masculinity” that he and many white elites believed was “under threat” due to the sedentary lifestyles brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the influx of Eastern and Southern European immigrants to New York. Osborn and his fellow curators explicitly hoped, Lunde shows, that the megafauna exhibits would inspire in the “American Nordics” who visited an appreciation of their own “lordly race.” It’s a revelatory look at the deep influence of eugenics on the sciences. (Nov.)