Ashley Montagu

Anthropologist and educator Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) focused on human bio-social evolution and maintained throughout his long career that cultural phenomena are not genetically predetermined. In more than 50 books published for both an academic and general readership, Montagu broadened understanding of human social evolution. His topics ranged from human aggression and the use of profanity to infant nurturing, the importance of touch, and the nature of human love.

Montagu committed himself to popularizing the findings of modern science in the hopes of improving civil society and the quality of life. He brought his message to the public not only in books, but also in college classrooms, lecture halls, articles appearing in periodicals ranging from the Washington Post to Ladies' Home Journal, and appearances on popular television talk shows.

Took Aristocratic Name

The son of Jewish tailor Charles Ehrenberg and his wife, Mary Plot Ehrenberg, Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg on June 28, 1905. He was raised in London's working class East End neighborhood. It is not known why he decided to change his name, but it may have been due to prejudice against East End Jews in those days. The young boy's decision to take the aristocratic name Ashley Montagu distanced him from his father's Polish and his mother's Russian ethnic roots.

By age ten Montagu was a keen observer of human behavior, and he closely studied the linguistic differences between his Cockney neighbors and the more educated university students who rented rooms in his parents' home. Anatomy was another interest—one that would continue throughout Montagu's life—and in 1917 he made an unannounced visit to British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, hoping Keith would help him identify a skull Montagu found. Keith was so impressed that he invited the 12-year-old to visit him at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons and continue his study of anatomy.

Many adults encouraged young Montagu's intelligence and curiosity, and he read philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Friedrich Nietzsche at a relatively young age. His interests included biology, psychology, and anthropology. When he was 15, Montagu won a literary contest and chose as his prize a book titled Introduction to Social Psychology. His early interest in the relationship between environment and behavior foreshadowed Montagu's long career in the social sciences.

Published Works on Race

After completing his secondary education in London, in 1922 Montagu enrolled at the University of London and spent the next three years studying anthropology. Witnessing the British government's harsh treatment of striking workers during a general labor strike in 1926 prompted the idealistic 21-year-old to leave England. In late 1927 he arrived in New York City and took several classes at Columbia University. He was quoted in a Los Angeles Times obituary as once commenting: "I was brought up as a stuffed shirt Englishman. I wasn't very human. What America did for me was humanize me, democratize me." Traveling to Italy in 1928, he took classes in ethnography and anthropology at the University of Florence, broadening his knowledge and developing the framework for his compelling arguments against biologically determined concepts of race. In 1931, while working as an assistant professor of anthropology at New York University, Montagu married Marjorie Peakes; the couple would have two daughters, Audrey and Barbara, and a son, Geoffrey. In 1934, Montagu resumed his studies at Columbia and earned his Ph.D. there in 1936 under noted professors Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940.

In 1937 Montagu published his first book, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines, which was based on his dissertation. As a newly graduated Ph.D., he left New York University and joined the staff of Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1938. While at Hahnemann, he published a number of papers on the topic of race. With the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism and the persistence of American racial segregation, Montagu decided that his ideas would be valuable to the public, and he condensed them in the seminal 1942 work Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. In it, he challenged the then largely accepted notion that characteristics based on race were a biological construct. He argued that since humans in all parts of the world developed in hunter-gatherer societies, the challenges they faced in order to survive were similar and their mental capacities equivalent. Given similar genetic traits, differences in the development of human cultures in different parts of the globe must have been caused by external conditions, such as geography, climate, and the availability of natural resources, he argued.

Man's Most Dangerous Myth was highly influential, and Montagu's argument revolutionized the perception of race. In 1949 he was asked to serve on a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) task force and became the principal author of that committee's "Statement on Race." Montagu was not, however, an ardent UN backer. He once commented: "Most of the United Nations is really a forum for the exhibition of national prejudices on a hitherto unprecedented scale. … It's a colossal disaster. What it reflects, of course, is the dehumanization of human beings as human beings." Man's Most Dangerous Myth was revised several times, including in the 1990s to incorporate Montagu's thoughts on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and several African nations and the debate over IQ testing, affirmative action, and race. Considered a classic, the book remained in print 60 years after it was first published. Others expanded on Montagu's ideas in the 1975 book Race and IQ, a collection of essays edited by Montagu.

On Love and Gender

Montagu became involved in many projects that brought scientific findings to mass audiences. Involved in drafting the bill creating the National Science Foundation in 1946, he also wrote, directed, and produced the documentary film One World, or None. In 1948, Montagu organized an archaeological dig in Kent, England. Leaving Hahnemann Medical College in 1949, he became professor of anthropology at Rutgers University and chair of the department.

In addition to teaching, Montagu continued to spark discussion with a number of books on sociology. One topic that fascinated him was the role of love in the formation of personality. For Montagu, the benefits of encouraging a caring, committed love for others far outweighed those of organized religion. 1950's On Being Human and 1955's The Direction of Human Development: Biological and Social Bases are among books Montagu wrote about the scientific basis and social manifestations of love. In a 1981 interview for Contemporary Authors, he commented: " … in our modern societies, especially in America, … we have a great deal of talk about love, but it's love of an unloving kind, an absence of the real love behind the show of love, which literally means that children and others are being unloved to death."

While at Rutgers, Montague wrote perhaps his most famous work: 1953's The Natural Superiority of Women. First serialized in the mainstream Saturday Evening Post, the essay takes a somewhat humorous tone in discussing men, who possess "the bruited advantages of larger size and muscular power" that in a modern society of desk workers has led some of them to become psychopaths, drug abusers, and barroom brawlers. Examining each sex from an anthropological perspective, Montagu concluded that women are superior because their genetic "bag of tricks" has enabled them to survive both as individuals and in a group during the evolution from a hunter-gatherer to a technological society. For its time, The Natural Superiority of Women was a radical work: Montagu suggested that women should receive equal pay for doing equal work. However, it angered feminists, who took umbrage at Montagu's views that women should stay home to raise their children rather than leaving the home to work.

Broadened Public Presence

Montagu's decision to leave Rutgers in 1955 was guided by his continued success as an author. At 50, he wanted to devote more attention to writing. He continued to teach, however, as a visiting professor at universities such as Harvard and Princeton. Montagu increased his involvement in the public sector by serving as the director of the New Jersey Committee on Physical Growth and Development from 1951 to 1957, as chairman of the Anisfield-Wolf Award Committee on Race Relations, and as an advisory consultant to the International Childbirth Education Association and the Peace Research Institute. He continued to attract acclaim and detractors with outspoken criticism of prominent theorists whose works he considered harmful to society.

In his later career, Montagu broadened his sociological scope to include anatomy, heredity, marriage, sex, and even the history of cursing, drawing on current scientific research to support his humanist position. He encouraged modern mothers to return to breast-feeding in 1971's Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. That same year, his book The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity inspired the Tony Award-winning play and a later motion picture with its compelling history of a horribly disfigured man in Victorian England.

Montagu's 1976 work, The Nature of Human Aggression, presents the argument that, unlike animals, humans are without instincts and therefore possess no aggressive instincts. In contrast to the position of such ethnologists as Konrad Lorenz, he maintained that all human behavior is learned behavior; while man has the potential for aggressive action, Montagu argued, he has an equal potential for a non-aggressive response.

After retiring from the academic world, Montagu continued to write, revising his earlier books as new scientific studies provided additional insights and reflecting on his own life and career. In his 1981 book, Growing Young, he encouraged readers to cultivate the qualities of curiosity, imagination, and the desire to learn, all inborn traits suppressed in adulthood due to time constraints and stress. Montagu remained a strong advocate of play and spent his free time in book collecting and vegetable gardening at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. Stricken with heart disease while working on completing his memoirs, Montagu was hospitalized in March 1999 and died on November 26, 1999, in Princeton, at age ninety-four.

Periodicals

American Anthropologist, October 1951; February 1969; October 1969.

American Journal of Sociology, January 1952.

Christian Science Monitor, June 20, 1968.

Commonweal, August 4, 1950.

Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1999.

National Review, November 28, 1967.

New York Times, November 29, 1999.

Psychology Today, August 1977.

Skeptical Inquirer, January 2000.

Online

Contemporary Authors Online,http://www.galenet.com/ (October 30, 2001). □

Montagu, Ashley 1905-1999

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was born as Israel Ehrenberg into a poor Russian Jewish immigrant family in the East End of London. He was a precocious schoolboy, and with the encouragement of a kind schoolteacher, he took a skull found on the banks of the Thames to the anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955), and peppered the great man with questions. As a result of Keith’s encouragement, he was admitted as a diploma student to University College London at the age of seventeen, and studied physical anthropology with Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937) and statistics and psychology with Karl Pearson (1857–1936) and C. E. Spearman (1863–1945). He was, at the same time, Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1884–1942) first student in social anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Israel Ehrenberg immigrated in 1927 to the United States, where he changed his name to Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu (he was an admirer of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [1689–1762]). He explained that this name opened doors that were at that time closed by anti-Semitic prejudice. He completed a PhD with Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) at Columbia University (1937) and taught at various universities and medical colleges, but he largely supported himself independently through writing and lecturing. He became, with Margaret Mead (1901–1978), one of the most effective communicators in anthropology, becoming a regular guest on The Tonight Show.

Montagu’s sixty books cover an enormous range and vary from technical tracts on human genetics and Australian Aboriginal reproductive beliefs, to more popular accounts such as The Elephant Man (1971), which became the basis for the play and film of that name. In all his work he emphasized the interplay of genetic and environmental factors in producing human behavior. Two books in particular had tremendous influence: Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942) and The Natural Superiority of Women (1953). The former stemmed from his work for UNESCO in its “Statement on Race” (1950), but he had long opposed the orthodox view of the existence of discrete races, and his position that “race” was not a scientific category but a “social construction” has become, in turn, its own orthodoxy. The matter is still in dispute however, and proponents of the “reality” of racial differences are making a comeback. His position on women was prescient, but his argument that their superiority was based on their quality as nurturers of the young caused him to be attacked by early feminists.

Montagu saw himself as carrying out the Mali-nowskian program of understanding culture in terms of human needs, and this required a detailed knowledge both of culture and of human evolutionary biology. He championed the idea of neoteny —the retention of infant traits into adulthood—as the basis of human sociability, with a consequent stress on playfulness, creativity, curiosity, and love. Love he saw as the basic human attribute, rooted in the mother-child relationship, and our failure to capitalize on it as our greatest danger. Human neoteny was biologically rooted, but it gave us an astonishing flexibility and the opportunity to create cooperative societies. Montagu’s vision of a unified anthropology that would use knowledge of our evolutionary past to illuminate the possibilities of a peaceful future was perhaps his greatest gift to science and to humankind.

SEE ALSO Anthropology; Race

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Montagu, Ashley. 1942. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. New York: Columbia University Press.

Montagu, Ashley. 1953. The Natural Superiority of Women. New York: Macmillan.

Montagu, Ashley. 1996. The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. 3rd ed. Lafayette, LA: Acadian House.

Robin Fox

Montagu, Ashley 1905–1999

One of the most successful and prolific scholars of anthropology of the twentieth century, Ashley Montagu is most noted for addressing important social issues in terms accessible both to scholars and to the lay public. Born in London in 1905 (as Israel Ehrenberg), he was educated at University College, London and at the London School of Economics. After leaving England and settling in the United States, Montagu taught anatomy at the Graduate School of Medicine, New York University, from 1931 to 1938. After earning his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1937, he taught at the Hahnemann College of Medicine in Philadelphia and then at Rutgers University from 1949 to 1955 (as well as, briefly, at New York University, Harvard, and Princeton). He was a scholar with a significant record of scientific work and a record of iconoclastic ideas about anthropological problems. He had a history of challenging anthropological shibboleths and some of their famous proponents. In one instance, he attacked a physical typology of criminals proposed by the enormously influential anthropologist E. A. Hooton.

After retiring from Rutgers in 1955, Montagu shifted his focus increasingly toward the study of social problems, becoming a very effective social critic. He became widely renowned as a public speaker, occasionally appearing on television. His success as a “popularizer” of anthropological ideas and his own iconoclastic ideas made him anathema to a discipline priding itself on its relative inaccessibility to the public. But despite his “outsider” status, he was ultimately awarded both the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Anthropological Association and the Darwin Award of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Montagu wrote about an enormous range of topics, including the nature of humanity; “race” and racism; evolution and genetics; sexuality, reproduction, childbirth, and breastfeeding; gender and women’s rights; anatomy; aggression, violence, criminality and war; creationism; and even Joseph Merrick (the “Elephant Man”). Of a total of more than eighty books, his most important works include Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942, with multiple revisions through 1977), The Natural Superiority of Women (1953; revised ed. 1970), The Concept of Race (1964), The Elephant Man (1971), The Nature of Human Aggression (1976), and Science and Creationism (1984).

Montagu was an early “feminist” and an early critic of the concept of “race.” Much of his most important work focused on dispelling the myth of “race.” His analysis embraced not only blacks but also Native Americans and Jews. He has been called the most important theorist of race and race relations of the twentieth century. Montagu was one of the first to argue forcefully that the human species could not, scientifically, be divided into “races” despite the assumption, very widespread in both scholarly and popular circles, that such races were not only well defined but blindingly obvious. A key argument was (at first in theory, later as a matter of fact) that the various traits thought to be packaged in stereotyped groups actually had independent and only partly overlapping distributions. A second key argument was that the boundaries of traits such as color were not abrupt but gradual, over geographic space, a pattern that had earlier been described as “clines.” Neither concept was entirely original to Montagu, as he admitted, but he was responsible for their broadest and most broadly influential presentation.

His stance on race, racism, and inherent human equality figured in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and he was the primary author of the United Nations Statement on Race (1949). His book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, first issued at the height of Nazi power and American racism, is arguably his most important work, standing as a landmark criticism of both race and racism that anticipated and helped frame much of the subsequent debate over racial issues by defining (and to a significant degree anticipating and answering) the questions involved: human biology and the erroneous perception of the existence of “races” and “racial” diversity; eugenics and genetic equality; the interaction of biological and social forces in defining human behavior; cultural definitions of race; and the role of race perceptions in social issues such as aggression, war, the measure of intelligence, and democracy itself. This book and a later edited volume, The Concept of Race (1964), still stand as significant rebuttal of contemporary racist assertions.

SEE ALSO Clines and Continuous Variation; Genocide; Genocide and Ethnocide; Great Chain of Being; Racial Hierarchy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Montagu, Ashley. 1942. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. New York: Columbia University Press.

_____. 1953. The Natural Superiority of Women. New York: Macmillan.

_____. 1964. The Concept of Race. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.

_____, ed. 1975. Race and IQ. New York: Oxford University Press.

_____. 1976. The Nature of Human Aggression. New York:Oxford University Press.

SECONDARY WORKS

Brace, C. Loring. 1997. “Foreword.” In Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 6th ed., by Ashley Montagu, 13–23. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Marks, Jonathan. 2000. “Ashley Montagu: 1905–1999” Evolutionary Anthropology 9 (3): 111–112.

_____. 1979. The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey.

_____, ed. 1984. Science and Creationism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mark Nathan Cohen