One fall afternoon in the mid-60's, shortly after I arrived in New Haven to begin my freshman year at Yale, I was summoned to that sooty Gothic shrine to muscular virtue known as Payne Whitney Gym. I reported to a windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. And then -- and this is the part I still have trouble believing -- they attached metal pins to my spine. There was no actual piercing of skin, only of dignity, as four-inch metal pins were affixed with adhesive to my vertebrae at regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it.
It didn't occur to me to object: I'd been told that this "posture photo" was a routine feature of freshman orientation week. Those whose pins described a too violent or erratic postural curve were required to attend remedial posture classes.
The procedure did seem strange. But I soon learned that it was a long-established custom at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools. George Bush, George Pataki, Brandon Tartikoff and Bob Woodward were required to do it at Yale. At Vassar, Meryl Streep; at Mount Holyoke, Wendy Wasserstein; at Wellesley, Hillary Rodham and Diane Sawyer. All of them -- whole generations of the cultural elite -- were asked to pose. But however much the colleges tried to make this bizarre procedure seem routine, its undeniable strangeness engendered a scurrilous strain of folklore.
. . .
"Ah, yes, the famous rumored stolen Vassar posture pictures," Nora Ephron (Wellesley '62) recalled when I spoke with her. "But don't forget the famous rumored stolen Wellesley posture photos."
. . .
Sally Quinn (Smith '63), the Washington writer, expressed alarm when I first reached her. "God, I'm relieved," she said. "I thought you were going to tell me you found mine. You always thought when you did it that one day they'd come back to haunt you. That 25 years later, when your husband was running for President, they'd show up in Penthouse."
. . .
This is where things get really strange. Shortly after Cavett's reply, George Hersey, a respected art history professor at Yale, wrote a letter to The Times that ran under the headline "A Secret Lies Hidden in Vassar and Yale Nude 'Posture Photos.' " Sounding an ominous note, Hersey declared that the photos "had nothing to do with posture . . . that is only what we were told."Hersey went on to say that the pictures were actually made for anthropological research: "The reigning school of the time, presided over by E. A. Hooton of Harvard and W. H. Sheldon" -- who directed an institute for physique studies at Columbia University -- "held that a person's body, measured and analyzed, could tell much about intelligence, temperament, moral worth and probable future achievement. The inspiration came from the founder of social Darwinism, Francis Galton, who proposed such a photo archive for the British population."
And then Hersey evoked the specter of the Third Reich:
"The Nazis compiled similar archives analyzing the photos for racial as well as characterological content (as did Hooton). . . . The Nazis often used American high school yearbook photographs for this purpose. . . . The American investigators planned an archive that could correlate each freshman's bodily configuration ('somatotype') and physiognomy with later life history. That the photos had no value as pornography is a tribute to their resolutely scientific nature."
A truly breathtaking missive. What Hersey seemed to be saying was that entire generations of America's ruling class had been unwitting guinea pigs in a vast eugenic experiment run by scientists with a master-race hidden agenda.
. . .
"From the outset, the purpose of these 'posture photographs' was eugenic. The data accumulated, says Hooton, will eventually lead on to proposals to 'control and limit the production of inferior and useless organisms.' Some of the latter would be penalized for reproducing . . . or would be sterilized. But the real solution is to be enforced better breeding -- getting those Exeter and Harvard men together with their corresponding Wellesley, Vassar and Radcliffe girls."
. . .
But most of those institutions said that they had burned whatever photos they'd had. Harley P. Holden, curator of Harvard's archives, said that from the 1880's to the 1940's the university had its own posture-photo program in which some 3,500 pictures of its students were taken.
. . .
Life magazine ran a cover story in 1951 on Sheldon's theory of somatotypes.While the popular conception of Sheldonism has it that he divided human beings into three types -- skinny, nervous "ectomorphs"; fat and jolly "endomorphs"; confident, buffed "mesomorphs" -- what he actually did was somewhat more complex. He believed that every individual harbored within him different degrees of each of the three character components. By using body measurements and ratios derived from nude photographs, Sheldon believed he could assign every individual a three-digit number representing the three components, components that Sheldon believed were inborn -- genetic -- and remained unwavering determinants of character regardless of transitory weight change. In other words, physique equals destiny.
And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been-and still is-narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.
I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe, I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.
And this being so, I cannot help thinking of one of his statements: "We aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law."
That rings clear, haughty, and brutal, and plants us squarely in the middle of howling savagery. But let us come down a step.
Who is speaking? I am ashamed to say it: it is the Western humanist, the "idealist" philosopher. That his name is Renan is an accident. That the passage is taken from a book entitled La Riforme intellectuelle et morale, that it was written in France just after a war which France had represented as a war of right against might, tells us a great deal about bourgeois morals.
I read Discourse On Colonialism by Aime Cesaire about how liberalism had to thread the needle between delegitimizing feudal reign but also legitimize rule over people in others ways, so European humanism and liberal ideology turn to phrenology, race science, the concept of innate genius, etc. for justifying why some people are simply better than others.
Edit: Might have been a Red Sails essay referencing this that said it, I can't remember. I read them back to back I think. The quote's from Cesaire of course.
:epstein: was just the tip of a really fucked up iceberg
