`  == Eli Siegel was an anti-racist in 1923  some background ==  Dear Wllmcw,  Just to be absolutely clear, in case there is any doubt, I give more reasons to see that Eli Siegel's magazine essay ``The Equality of Man`` is an anti-racist work. The modern reader wouldn't be expected to know the background that was vivid in the the 1923 reader's mindthe reader for whom Mr. Siegel was writing.  First, of course, he did not use the term racism in this essay because it didn't exist. ``The term ``racism``, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, emerged in the early 1930s as distinct from the ``theories of race`` which had existed for at least a hundred years before that.``    I do not believe it was necessary to use the term ``race`` in the essay eithera word much misused and which is almost impossible to define, even today. His readers knew what he meant.   It is clear that Mr. Siegel was criticizing the racial theory of hereditary intelligence. He names five particular writersthe big names of the daywhose point of view the essay is a refutation ofa refutation solely by means of clear logic, blasting apart their fake arguments:   :[Siegel wrote:] ``The world has always been carried on as if men were unequal....the Galtons, Nietzsches, McDougalls, Termans, and Menckens are the present enunciators of the theory...that to some men nature has seen fit to give so much more intelligence than to others, that these first are fit by birth to rule the second....This writing will aim to show that Men Are Equalin the clear and full meaning of the words.`` [The Modern Quarterly vol 1, no. 3, December 1923]  People reading ``The Equality of Man`` in 1923 would know these Galton, Nietzsche, McDougall, Terman, and Mencken (and their followers) promulgated the racial theory of inferiority. Even Siegel's title ``The Equality of Man`` contrasts dramatically with Galton's most popular title, ``Hereditary Genius.`` Let's look at these five men one by one:  1. Galton. The readers of Siegel's article would know that Galton (Sir Francis Galton) was for racial INFERIORITY:  ``One of the historical peaks of scientific racism was the establishment of eugenics. Francis Galton, who happened to be cousin to Darwin, is conventionally held responsible for the beginning of this scientific study of breeding and its improvement. In the chapter of his book Hereditary Genius - published in 1869 - entitled ``The Comparative Worth of Different Races,`` Galton uses a sort of grading scale to point out [the place of] each race in the classification system he used....  ``The works of these authors [Petty, Darwin, Galton] have been used to justify many atrocities, including slavery, colonization, and racial genocide during the period of the authors' lives to more recent violations of human rights and attempts to keep races 'pure' - i.e. Adolf Hitler's notion of the Final Solution and the master Aryan race.`` (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f00/web1/hossain.html)   2. Terman. The readers of Siegel's article would know Lewis M. Terman, psychology professor at Stanford University, was for racial INFERIORITY.  For example:   :``Chorover credited Terman with 'injecting race into the IQ debate.' Terman claimed that mental deficiency is very common in Spanish-Indian and Mexican families...and also among Negros. He also warned that ``if we would preserve our state for a class of people worthy to possess it, we must prevent, as far as possible, the propagation of mental degenerates.`` (Lenny Lapon, URL: http://www.truthseekers.freeserve.co.uk/truth/tr8murderers.html)  :``The beginning of the IQ-testing movement overlapped with the eugenics movement — hugely popular in America and Europe among the ``better sort`` before Hitler gave it a bad name — which held that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing.`` (http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/other/iq.html)   3. McDougall.  The readers of Siegel's article would know that William McDougall of Harvard University was a racist.  McDougall was given the William James Chair of Psychology at Harvard University. However,  :``McDougall was not well-received at Harvard, due to the racist nature of his views on eugenics and his opposition to behaviorism.`` (Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology. URL: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2699/is_0005/ai_2699000543)  4. Nietzsche. The readers of Siegel's article would know that Friedrich Nietzsche was was for racial INFERIORITY.   Nietzsche wrote, for example,  :1. ``The negro represents an earlier phase of human development.`` [pp. 199-200](http://www.friesian.com/nietzsch.htm)  :And 2. ``...Let us face facts:  the people have triumphed  or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call them  and if the Jews brought it about, then no nation ever had a more universal mission on earth. The lords are a thing of the past, and the ethics of the common man is completely triumphant. I don't deny that this triumph might be looked upon as a kind of blood poisoning, since it has resulted in a mingling of the races, but there can be no doubt that the intoxication has succeeded. The 'redemption' of the human race (from the lords, that is) is well under way; everything is rapidly becoming Judaized, or Christianized, or mob-ized  the word makes no difference....`` [p.169-170]  :[The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956.]   5. Mencken.' The readers of Siegel's article would know that H.L. Mencken was for racial INFERIORITY.  :``Mencken considered everyone inferior to his 'superior men.' But, he believed Jews and blacks to be most inferior of all.`` [Commentary: Mencken and the inferior man Posted by Mac Diva on April 03, 2004 11:49 AM (http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/04/03/114957.php)]  And this is some of what Mac Diva quotes Mencken as writingand this is what readers of Eli Siegel's refutation, ``The Equality of Man,`` would have had in their minds in 1923:  :The negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a race, in a condition of subservience; that he must remain the inferior of the stronger and more intelligent white man so long as he retains racial differentiation. Therefore, the effort to educate him has awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which, in the very nature of things, must go unrealized, and so, while gaining nothing whatever materially, he has lost all his old contentment, peace of mind and happiness.  And Mencken also wrote this:   :The fact remains that the Southern whites have to deal with the actual Negroes before them, and not with a theoretical race of African kings. These actual Negroes show actual defects that are very real and very serious. The leaders of the race, engrossed by the almost unbearable injustices that it faces, are apt to forget them.   :[Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist'' [1910] (http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/megaquotes.html)]  Eli Siegel was against this horrible, ugly way of thinking, writing, talking, feeling, and even legislating from the very beginning. The U.S. eugenists, including these 5, were used by Hitler as models for his goal. It was racism. Siegel hated it.   `