This week in 1913, students at the University of North Dakota were writing their final exams for the fall semester of 1912. Some of these classes were offered by the Sociology Department.
That year's course catalog lists Ethnology for the fall semester, taught by Professor John Gillette. The class's first half featured “Man's place in nature. His physical and mental development in their race aspects.... Criteria, classification, and distribution of races.” Its second half featured “Special studies of our dependent and backward races … to throw light on our colonial and race problems.”
Professor Gillette used “Races of Man” by Joseph Deniker as his Ethnology textbook.
A decade later, UND's Sociology Department's course listing for “Ethnology and Immigration” read, “This course is intended to develop a scientific view of races as a basis of interpretation for modern immigration and race conditions.”
In modern times, this coursework would be called Scientific Racism. In this, UND was no different from other institutions in American academia.
The Sociology Department taught two courses required for medical and nursing students – “Charity and Philanthropy” and “Criminology,” which taught what it called “the principles of eugenics.” Eugenics included forcible sterilization of people whom government authorities deemed defective. So, it was no accident that Professor Gillette, as head of the Sociology Department, was the man whom President Thomas Kane would turn to in 1919 with his unsuccessful proposal to create a Eugenics Department at UND.
Even in the 1910s, serious scholars were questioning the validity of the very idea of race. Noted anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber even referred to eugenics as a joke.
So, while Professor John Gillette was a man with progressive values and socialist sympathies, he was also a man of his time. He taught trendy ideas that were regarded as cutting edge, yet are now regarded with disgust.
These Sociology courses should be considered a cautionary tale. Scholars are only human, and have been known to make mistakes rooted in contemporary prejudice.
Dakota Datebook by Andrew Alexis Varvel
