Gene Weltfish facts for kids

Gene Weltfish (born Regina Weltfish) (August 7, 1902 – August 2, 1980) was an American anthropologist and historian. She worked at Columbia University from 1928 to 1953. Gene studied with a famous anthropologist named Franz Boas. She became an expert on the culture and history of the Pawnee people from the Midwest Plains.

Her 1965 book, The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture, is still seen as the most important work about Pawnee culture today. She also helped write a pamphlet for the U.S. Army in 1943 called The Races of Mankind. She wrote it with Ruth Benedict. This pamphlet aimed to teach soldiers about different cultures around the world. It said that differences between races are about culture, not biology.

In the 1940s, Gene Weltfish was involved in social activism. This caught the attention of the FBI. They thought she might be a communist. In 1952 and 1953, she was called to Congress for questioning. This was during the 1950s red scare, when people were worried about communism.

Two weeks before a hearing in 1953, her job at Columbia was ended. She refused to answer questions about whether she was a communist. After this, she was blacklisted. This meant she couldn't find an academic job for almost ten years. Later, she taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University and continued teaching part-time after retiring.

Biography

Regina Weltfish was born in 1902 in New York City's Lower East Side. She came from a German Jewish family and had one sister. She grew up speaking German, taught by a governess. Her father, whom she was very close to, died when she was 13. Her grandmother encouraged her to say the kaddish (a prayer for the dead) for him every day for a year. This was usually done by a son.

After her father died, the family faced money problems. Because he died without a will, the state managed his money. Her mother had to ask for money with formal, notarized requests. To help her family, Gene started working as a school clerk at age 14. She also went to high school in the evenings.

Education and Early Career

Gene Weltfish graduated from Wadleigh High School for Girls in 1919. She then went to Hunter College to study journalism. She later moved to Columbia University's Barnard College. There, she studied philosophy with John Dewey. She graduated from Barnard in 1925. Then, she joined Columbia's graduate program in anthropology. She had already taken classes with Franz Boas and continued to study with him.

During this time, she married Alexander Lesser, who was also a graduate student and anthropologist. They were married for 15 years and had a daughter named Ann in 1931. They did their first field work together in Oklahoma. They studied Siouan kinship systems.

Weltfish met a Pawnee man named Henry Moses in New York. This led her to study his tribe for her dissertation. She traveled to the Pawnee reservation in Oklahoma. There, most tribal members still spoke the Pawnee language. Weltfish learned the language during her studies. She focused on art and craftsmanship, especially basket-making, which Pawnee women did. Her doctoral paper was about how technique and design are connected in North American basketry. She finished her paper in 1929 but officially received her Ph.D. in 1950.

Working at Columbia University

In 1935, Franz Boas invited Weltfish to teach at Columbia University. She taught there year-to-year until 1953. Some of her students included Eleanor Leacock and Vera Mae Green. Columbia University never gave Weltfish a permanent teaching position (called tenure). This was likely due to a long history of unfair treatment against women. Ruth Benedict was the first woman to get tenure at Columbia in 1938. She even spoke up for Weltfish at a board meeting.

The Races of Mankind Pamphlet

One of Gene Weltfish's smaller works, written with Ruth Benedict, had a big impact. It was published in 1943 and was a pamphlet for American troops. It used simple language and cartoons to explain why racist ideas were wrong. This pamphlet caused a lot of political trouble in the 1950s. Some people called it "socialist propaganda." This brought attention from anti-Communist authorities.

The authors shared results from IQ tests given during World War I. At that time, many white people thought they were smarter than black people. But the tests showed that "Southern Whites" scored lower than "Northern Negroes." Weltfish and Benedict explained that these differences were due to things like income, education, and opportunities. They said southern schools spent much less on education than northern ones. This made some military members angry, especially those from the South. The pamphlet mostly explained that differences in group abilities come from social and cultural factors, not biology.

This pamphlet showed the ideas of Franz Boas about race. These ideas later became the standard view in anthropology. In 1948, UNESCO supported this view. At the time, saying that race was a social idea was controversial. Especially in the American South, where Jim Crow laws, racial segregation, and white supremacy were common.

More than 20 years later, Weltfish explained why she wrote the pamphlet:

"During my first four years of graduate school, Hitler came to power in Germany. He used racist ideas to support his terrible actions. Books by Franz Boas were burned in Germany. In 1942, after Boas died, Ruth Benedict and I felt we should continue to fight against racism. In 1943, we wrote "The Races of Mankind." It was published for the U.S.O. to give to soldiers. These soldiers had to fight alongside allies like the Huks in the Philippines and the Solomon Islanders. "The Races of Mankind" was used by the army and also in Germany after the war to help people understand anti-Nazism. "

Some far-right groups in the US still believe Weltfish's work is part of a conspiracy theory. They think it was a plan by Boas and his students to stop the study of race.

Blacklisted During the McCarthy Period

In 1953, Gene Weltfish lost her job at Columbia University after 16 years. The FBI had been watching her political activities for some time. In 1944, the head of the Anthropology department, Ralph Linton, reported her to the FBI. He thought she might have communist sympathies. The FBI looked into her activities. They noted her involvement in the Congress of American Women and her signing civil rights petitions. The FBI saw the Congress of American Women as a "subversive" group.

In 1952, Weltfish was quoted in the Daily Worker newspaper. The article said she repeated a claim that the US Army used germ warfare in the Korean War. Soon after, she was told to appear before the McCarran Senate Judiciary Committee. She refused to answer questions about her political groups. But she said the Daily Worker article had misquoted her.

In 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy's committee was checking if American libraries were buying "un-American" books. Weltfish was called to answer questions about The Races of Mankind pamphlet. The committee said it was "subversive." Two weeks before her hearing, Columbia told Weltfish her contract would not be renewed. The university said it was a new policy against long-term annual contracts. But other lecturers affected by this change were given permanent jobs, not fired. Weltfish believed she was fired because she was a woman. Later historians think she was fired because the university saw her as a political problem. They worried she could threaten funding during the "red scare."

On April 1, 1953, Weltfish was questioned by the Senate committee. She refused to name colleagues with communist sympathies. When asked about her own political views, she refused to answer. She used her right under the Fifth Amendment. Weltfish simply said she saw herself as a good American. She acted on issues based on her conscience and knowledge. When asked about the pamphlet's claim that some northern black people scored higher on IQ tests than southern white people, Weltfish said that data came from US Army records.

After losing her job at Columbia, Weltfish was blacklisted. She could not find a teaching job for eight years. The Nebraska and Bollingen Foundations gave her some money. This allowed her to study Pawnee collections at the University of Nebraska. Based on this and her earlier work, she wrote The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture (1965). This book was about Pawnee history and culture.

Later Years

In 1961, Weltfish was hired at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. She worked there until 1972, when she reached the retirement age of 70. After retiring, Weltfish continued teaching part-time. She taught at the New School for Social Research and Manhattan School of Music in New York City. She was also a visiting professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. At Rutgers, she joined a new program about aging (called gerontology). She died on August 7, 1980, just five days before her 78th birthday.