Henry Fairfield Osborn, Race Scientist & Pro-White Activist

Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1890 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

2,239 words

The situation for whites in America at present is bad, but it would be far worse if not for the efforts of an upper-class American man of science named Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935). Osborn’s life and work was mostly related to unlocking the secrets of biology and evolution, but he became involved in the immigration restriction debate at the turn of the twentieth century. His efforts helped bring about the 1924 immigration reform which stabilized America’s demographics, allowed the European immigrants who could assimilate into Anglo–American culture to do so, and kept Asians and other non-white groups out.

Osborn was born into a wealthy Yankee family. Through his mother, Virginia Reed Sturgis, he was descended from Congressman Jonathan Sturgis of Connecticut, who had been a delegate to the Continental Congress during the American War of Independence. Virginia was an extraordinary woman. Deeply religious, she imparted her views to Osborn such that he ultimately dedicated his life to synthesizing religion and science. His father, William Henry Osborn, was a railroad tycoon who had developed the Illinois Central Railroad, and his uncle by marriage was the financier J. P. Morgan.

Osborn was a shy boy, but his father was convinced that individuals could improve themselves through “struggle.” Thus, Osborn became the family spokesman at a young age to overcome his shyness. His father required him to check the family in at hotels, order food for the others at restaurants, get the tickets for the train, and so forth. Osborn’s confidence increased and he became convinced that improvement through struggle worked.

The 1870s were critical years for Osborn. He lost several family members when the SS Ville du Havre sank after colliding with another ship in 1873, a tragedy which inspired Horatio Spafford to write the hymn “It Is Well with my Soul.” Then, in 1875, two of his siblings died. Osborn was initially overwhelmed upon his arrival at Princeton University, but soon found his way through struggle. During a “cane spree,” where underclassmen attacked each other in the manner of Greek hoplites with bamboo canes, he was the last man standing and was noticed by an upperclassman named Charles Scribner, Jr., who would go on to become a publishing giant and who would print and distribute Osborn’s work.

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In 1877, at the age of 19, Osborn was inspired by a collection of fossils on display at Princeton. The fossils had been arranged to show the divinely–inspired progression of life on Earth by Professor Arnold Guyot. Guyot became a tremendous influence on Osborn’s life. He understood geology as the study of the planet’s strata as well as the progression of life upon it. Both, he believed, followed God’s laws. Guyot encouraged his students to use empirical methods to verify any hypothesis.

After graduation that year, Osborn, along with 17 other students and two faculty members, went on an expedition to Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah to hunt for fossils. The group dressed like Wild West cowboys and were armed to the teeth, calling themselves the Yankee caballeros. Their weapons and dress were not part of an act, however. The expedition was in fact a significant hardship. The West had not yet been “won,” and the group had to keep constantly on the lookout for hostile Indians while carrying out the project. The fossils they discovered were categorized and then sent to the museums in the East.

After this expedition, Osborn decided to become a scientist and attended graduate school in England to further his career. During a trip from England to Germany, he met an attractive woman named Clotilde Broderotti. He thought about marrying her, but he realized that her European Catholic background might clash with his Anglo-American Protestant background, so he didn’t pursue the relationship further. Instead, he married Lucretia Thatcher Perry, who was related to Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who had “opened” Japan to trade with the United States in 1854, as well as Oliver Hazard Perry, who had commanded the US Navy on Lake Erie during the War of 1812. Lucretia’s father had likewise been a General in the US Army during the Civil War.

Osborn’s temptation to woo an attractive foreign woman was entirely natural, although his good sense to marry a woman with a similar background to his own was ultimately a very wise choice. As one gets older, one’s identity becomes more important, and this can lead to conflicts — especially when one becomes an ethnic advocate, as Osborn did.

In the 1880s, Osborn became an academic partner of Edward Drinker Cope, a paleontologist who was involved in the scholarly “Bone War” with a rival paleontologist named Othniel Charles Marsh. Both Cope and Marsh used underhanded methods to further their respective goals. The conflict was both unpleasant and unprofessional, but the excitement it generated produced enough public interest in dinosaurs that they became a cultural force in America thereafter.

Cope was from an old Quaker family, but he rejected many of the denomination’s reforming ideas. In 1890 Cope wrote a book, Two Perils of the Indo-European, which argued against women’s suffrage and the presence of sub-Saharans in America after the end of slavery. He also argued against race-mixing, socialism, and immigration –and this was a time when most immigrants to the United States were white Europeans. About half of these new arrivals were “New Immigrants” from areas other than Northern Europe, however, and it was difficult to assimilate them.

Osborn taught at Columbia University starting in 1891, and he began working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City the same year. He also became involved in other zoological and conservationist organizations. He hired top talent, having assistants who could have been the template for Indiana Jones. He also commissioned Charles R. Knight to draw illustrations of dinosaurs and other pre-historic creatures that remain both exciting and brilliant.

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Osborn did much research himself, but more importantly he assembled, popularized, and spread the scientific research of others. He also discovered that fossils of similar animals could be found on separate continents, such as South America and Africa. He surmised that a land bridge had once connected the two continents, which another scientist named Gondwana.[1]

The actual explanation for this discovery was not a land bridge, however. The two continents had indeed been linked in the distant past, but had moved through the action of plate tectonics, which was not discovered until the mid-1960s. Nevertheless, Osborn’s efforts in finding and identifying similar fossils on the two continents became the stable data point which led to other scientific discoveries. This was consistent with Osborn’s thinking, as he recognized that accumulated facts can eventually create an “induction” in which those facts can be connected in order to form a coherent scientific explanation.

Osborn’s books are clearly written, and the basic ideas therein are still taught in geology and biology courses today. The illustrations in Osborn’s books showing evolutionary family trees likewise continue to be used today. His career peaked during the First World War and the subsequent “Roaring Twenties.” He led an expedition to the Gobi Desert in an attempt to find the origin of the Aryans. While he sought to synthesize religion and science, he differed from other researchers in that he didn’t see the Creation Myth in Genisis as a mythological retelling of the jump from hunter-gathering to agriculture. The religion Osborn relied on as a source was Theosophy, which postulated that the Aryans had evolved in Central Asia.

This expedition, as well as the expeditions he sponsored, led to the discovery of the velociraptor and fossilized dinosaur eggs. They also were able to prove that humanity had not originated in Central Asia. Osborn’s magnum opus, The Titanotheres of Ancient Wyoming, Dakota, and Nebraska, was published in 1929.

Osborn’s political work in defending Anglo-Americans began after he had secured his career by 1900. He greatly aided Madison Grant and other immigration reformers in getting immigration restrictions passed in the early twentieth century. He also wrote the Introduction to Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) as well as his better book, The Conquest of a Continent (1933). Although immigration restriction was not Osborn’s only political project. He also supported eugenics, which then focused on improving humanity by encouraging healthy, intelligent whites — especially Nordics — to have more children while encouraging those with criminal records and other problems not to breed.

Osborn’s political work was forced upon him by necessity. The waves of immigration he witnessed during his lifetime created many social disruptions. By the time of the First World War and thereafter, the alienation the new immigrants were experiencing in relation to American culture was plain for all to see, and included rioting, bombings, and Communist subversion. Osborn encountered resistance from the organized Jewish community, but it fortunately was polite and reserved. He frequently met with and corresponded with New York Jews throughout his life, and the meetings were cordial. He did recognize that ethnonationalist Jews had enormous influence over the media, however, and that this made the national narrative suspect.

Osborn’s biggest and most bitter rivals were Anglo-American Christian Fundamentalists who were led by Williams Jennings Bryan. Although Osborn had come from a deeply Christian home and sought to synthesize religion with science, the Fundamentalists nevertheless rejected his research. This split between two different Anglo-American groups probably later helped ethnonationalist Jews to push American into the Second World War, as they called attention to the fact that Osborn’s eugenic and evolutionary ideas had influenced the National Socialists. Osborn’s resistance to Jewish immigration and influence, however tepid, was nevertheless resisted by the Fundamentalists given that many of them believed in Dispensationalism, a theology which holds that modern Jews have a special place in the Divine Order.

Henry Fairfield Osborn died in 1935. Most of his views on immigration and eugenics were widely held and were influential on government policy at the time. Of his passing, Madison Grant said that “[w]e have sustained a terrible loss . . . and I for one feel his death very keenly.”[2]

After his death, ethnonationalist Jews led by Franz Boas took over university anthropology departments and began claiming that the anthropological theories of Osborn and those he had influenced and supported were pseudo-science. However, it was Boas and his disciples who were lying. The Jewish “scientist” Stephen Jay Gould falsified data outright in his book The Mismeasure of Man (1981) in his attempt to discredit the scientific school of thought that Osborn had helped to establish. Osborn’s stubborn focus on the collection of data, specimens, and facts continues to be built upon by scientists today.

Osborn’s children were accomplished in their own right, and they all had families of their own. Two of his sons served in the US Army as officers during the First World War. Alexander Perry Osborn was a Lieutenant Colonel in the American Expeditionary Force, while Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr. was a Captain in the 351st US Field Artillery, a segregated sub-Saharan regiment led by white officers. He received his commission at the Plattsburg Preparedness Camp, which Osborn called “a wonderful array of young men” in his Introduction to Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. The regiment arrived in France during the final weeks of the war.

Captain Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr. became a pro-white activist himself, thereby fitting into the trend of the Brave Captains of the First World War being the greatest of pro-white American activists. His military service in a segregated black unit didn’t dissuade his future activism, as he, like many whites, became more aware of racial issues while in the military.

Henry Osborn, Jr. went on to publish several books dealing with overpopulation in the 1960s, a postulate that is still being resisted by Anglo-American Fundamentalists today. But there is a third-worldist critique of concern about overpopulation which holds that the concept is a racist attack on the growth of non-white populations. Regardless, the idea seems to have been adopted by many non-white nations, especially in Eastern Asia. Currently Japan, South Korea, and China are experiencing a demographic crisis as their birthrates decline. Perhaps this will lead to East Asians in the West being encouraged to return to their homelands. Osborn’s father and the ethnic activists who worked with him would have seen such a development favorably.

Henry Osborn was imperious and haughty, which didn’t always help him. He also wasn’t a self-made man, having come from an accomplished family, possessing an enormous private fortune as well as a wealthy uncle, and being friends with presidents and major publishers. Osborn’s career was nevertheless vital, and his accomplishments in all areas should be remembered and built upon.

Bibliography

Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918)

Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933)

Henry Fairfield Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life, on the Theory of Action, Reaction and Interaction of Energy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917)

Brian Regal, Henry Fairfiled Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002)

Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation Eugenics and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, Vt.: University of Vermont Press, 2009)

Notes

[1] Henry Fairfield Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life, on the Theory of Action, Reaction and Interaction of Energy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), p. 188.

[2] Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, Vt.: University of Vermont Press, 2009), p. 352.