G. Stanley Hall, racist, sexist, Nazi

An interesting Biography of G. Stanley Hall by Clarence Karier can be found at:
http://mises.org/journals/jls/7_1/7_1_2.pdf in which he is characterized as an important historical intellectual, but also as a sexist, racist, pre-nazi.

Some quotes from the article below:

Through his "scientific" studies of human development came his elitism, his racism, his sexist chauvinism, his penchant for primitivism, as well as his authoritarianism: all the integral elements of his personal value system. So we find him recommending that, "there are many who ought not to be educated, and who would be better in mind, body, and morals if they knew no So, too, he argued, that to educate girls to be self-supporting is "wrong and vicious," for to scientifically follow nature, "Every girl should be educated primarily to become a wife and mother." He further insisted that Dressur was necessary for elementary students because the preadolescent was passing through an abbreviated form of the savage stage. In like manner, he believed the adolescent was passing through the stage when civilization and reason began to dawn and therefore courses in "heroalogy" were appropriate to teach the noble lesson of service to the collective soul of the people. Long after the recapitulation theory had been discredited, Hall continued to cling to this evolutionary structure. He fought a delaying action when confronting movements which ran counter to his belief system. Typical of his approach was his resistance to the women's rights movement. In a variety of public arenas he argued that women belonged in the home. However, when women began to gain some entrance to higher educa-
tion he insisted that at Clark University they were treated fairly. Nevertheless, in a private letter to Col. Bullock, one finds him saying, "I am strongly opposed to giving women the slightest foothold in the college, even if we could do so under the founder's will. I feel that they would crowd out the best men a little later." Hall went on to say that he was inclined to leave the doctoral degree open to women because so few had gone through in the last ten years. Besides, he added, "it would save us a good deal of pounding by feminists; and by depriving it we would needlessly shut off possible bequests from women who have borne a pretty large part in the endowment of universities."

Here Hall was practicing explicit institutional chauvinism. What would appear to many on the outside as a relatively open system was, in fact, highly discriminating in intent as well as practice. Hall knew women had a place and for hi it was not in the advanced centers of learning. He romanticized women as something very special, close to nature, hearen of the race, and, indeed, the conduit through which "Mansoul" might some day become a "supermansoul." Hall's personal values were perhaps best revealed when he reacted to his son's announcement that he had found a girl whom he wished to marry. Hall said, "I hope she is physically strong and with good heredity. What's her complexion? Send me her photo." Hall had raised physical and mental health to a near cult. His book on Morale, which was subtitled "The Supreme Standard of Life and Conduct," was addressed to the physical and moral athlete, calling for a new collective ideal firmly rooted in the collective Yolk. As he described it: Thus my book is a plea for nothing less than a new criterion of all human worths and values. I would have the home, the state, the church, literature, science, industry, and every human institution, not excluding religion, and
perhaps it most, rejudged and revaluated by the standard of what they contribute to individual, industrial and social morale. This would give us a new scale on which to measure real progress or regression.

Hall's scale for measuring progress toward a new order was clearly a totalitarian one. While the social system could thus be improved, Hall also stressed heredity as of great importance and argued that a pound of heredity is "worth a hun-
deadweight of education." Thus it is necessary to pay attention to better breeding:
"The nation that breeds best, be it Mongol, Slav, Teuton or Saxon, will rule the world in the future." Eugenics, he insisted, was not merely medical certificates for fitness to marry or taxing bachelors for failing to breed their kid, or even steps to prevent the unfit from propagation, but rather it meant the constant encouragement of the "Abrahams" of the race to breed a better race. If farmers who can breed cattle. shew and horses. can also learn how to breed good men and women, the problem is solved: Germ plasm is the most immortal thing in the physical wodd. Backward it connects us by direct and unbroken lines of continuity with our remotest ancestor, be it Adam, the anthropithicus. the amoeba or whatever else ... [T]he best survive and the worst
perish.

His complete vision ultimately would include breeding for a super-race. Hall went on, If God, [one should be reminded here that "God for Hall is a collectiveterm for "Mansoul" l the great stim-culturist of man were to create or choose ... an ideal environment for improving the human stock where the pure air and water and right, simple living and high thinking with correct adjustment of all the influences that work for the right balance between those supreme human
forces. individuation ... is struck, and thus establish a nursery for the slow evolution of the superman who will in body and soul realize ail the richest human ideals and make what we have already dreamed must sometime come to the world, a new paradise, what better cradle or nest in which to incubate the overman of the future could he [be] found than here? The new Paradise which Hall had in mind was the superstate9' which he portrayed in the "Fall of Atlantis." In Hall's ideal kingdom men practiced religion in all forms, from fetish and nature worship to Mansoul worship according to each person's development on the evolutionary scale. Everyone in this society dedicated his total self to the interest and service of the society under the enlightened guidance of those Hall called "heartfomrs" (psychologists). The entire society was organized into groups according to their working productive function in that society.' Each group was dedicated to the ideal of being the very best of what they were destined to be. Thus, service was emblazoned on everyone's consciousness. At the top of the social hierarchy could be found the supermen, in the form of scientific researchers, constantly seeking more and more knowledge of Mansoul. Hall's message was clear: through selective breeding, genetic psychology, and a well- planned educational system, the real nature of Mansoul could flower in the form of the superstate. However, something went wrong. Hall's idyllic state eventually ended in chaotic destruction. Individual freedom at the expense of the collective ideal had eaten away at the very foundation of Hall's totalitarian collective ideal. Here, Hall's second message was also clear: if America was to arrive at the promised land of "Mansoul" it would have to learn to tighten up and discipline itself to the collective ideal of Morale. This, then, was Hall's ultimate vision and promise for America.

Charles Burgess best captured the sense of what Hall strove for when he said: ... with the colossus of a Christ-like superman standing on Liberty's vacated pedestal, with sublimation of self to the State therefore permeating every hierarchical layer from the slave to the uebermensch, Hall would at last be able to say that his battle had ended. The dawn of the new day would be upon the world.9' Before World War I, Nietzsche's view of the uebemnsch often served as Hall's model man. In many ways Hall's superman was virtually the same as Nietzsche's. However, after the disillusioning experience of the war, Hall came to believe that his superman was unlike Nietzsche's which he believed had succumbed to German militarism. Nietzsche's uebemnsch became for Hall a superman of sheer power. In contrast he believed his superman was more moral and cultural. His was more a Christ-like colossus, a product of the evolutionary Mansoul. For Hall, the Germany he had loved so dearly had destroyed itself by its turn toward militarism. This militarism, he believed, could also infect other cultures and nations and would ultimately lead, if not checked, to the destruction of all culture. While Hall's ideal state was not a militarized state, it was clearly a totalitarian state, for Hall had the mind of a totalitarian. He envisioned not only a total culture where all would be subservient to the ideal, but a total humanity where ultimately the best would come to see, as he, Christ, and Buddha had seen, that view from the mountaintop.

Hall had thus preached a new religion, a totalitarian, naturalistic faith fortwentieth century man, where the psychologist replaced the priest and where sickness replaced the age-old concept of sin. Hall, however, was more. He was also a prophet of the twentieth century's totalitarian man. Being tuned into the deeper under-currents of western culture, he felt the pangs of man's alienation and intuitively sensed the symbolic structure for which such vulnerable people came to yearn. Thus he not only sensed the truly reactionary longings of an alienated man, but also intuitively grasped the kind of symbols which could satisfy those longings and, in doing so he seemed to touch the future. Hall was not long in his grave when western man began to hear those strange Hallian themes of hack to nature, soil, fatherland, hearth and home, health, strength through joy, agrarian virtue, world order, new order, charismatic leadership, supermen and superrace, ancestral calling, thinking with one's blood, and ultimately the Triumph of the echoing off those cold gray walls of the sports colossus at Nuremberg. Hall had touched the symbolic structure which the National Socialists would use to weld Germany into an ironclad soul of "obedient servants." Perhaps Hall was correct in arguing that it was not German cultural ideology that led Germany astray in World War I but rather the growth of German militarism that was to blame. Nevertheless, the unanswered question remains: what role did these complex ideological, cultural currents play in keeping the trains running on time to Auschwitz and the fires burning in the crematoriums? It might be, as Hall had argued, that these "cultural currents" of Mansoul were innocent "victims" rather than "perpetrators" of the catastrophe which ensued. The fault lies, he might have said, with a growing cancerous military mind. Then again it just might be the case, as another enlightened utopian visionary once claimed, that, "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions."' Perhaps if we were to look more carefully at those conditions which require illusions, we might find those cultural ideological conditions which helped propel Germany not only into National Socialism, but into militarism itself. It is possible that Hall was wrong in blaming solely the military. Perhaps some combination of cultural conditions along with militarism concocted that witch's brew. The current American trends toward longing for a reactionary past, charismatic leadership, health cults, back to the soil, nature, religious cults, as well as a search for mystical roots and the simple virtues of "manhood," "womanhood," and "motherhood," stand pale in isolation. However, it may well be that such an ideological pallor in conjunction with the growth of American militarism in our atomic age may be the spark that will light the path of Mansoul to an even greater if not final catastrophy.

However one interprets these American developments, it does seem that Lawrence Cremin was correct when he said of Hall: "he injected into the mainstream of American educational thought some of the most radical-and I happen to think virulent--doctrines of the twentieth century, and there is no understanding the present apart from his contribution."

While many of Hall's doctrines can be viewed as "virulent" in the context of the twentieth century, it is equally and perhaps more importantly clear that the conditions which gave rise to such ideas need further, more intensive examination. It is, however, also clear that just when it seemed that America was about to lose its traditional religious moorings, G. Stanley Hall, as a priestly prophet of the twentieth century, did more than any other single individual to help construct that new faith, that new religion of psychology, in which so many have now come to believe.