In Box 43 I came across a document never referred to in any of the literature on Sheldon I'd seen. It was a faded offprint of a 1924 Sheldon study, "The Intelligence of Mexican Children." In it are damning assertions, presented as scientific truisms, that "Negro intelligence" c omes to a "standstill at about the 10th year", Mexican at about age 12. Meanwhile, I plunged into the written material, hoping to find answers to several mysteries.Although I did not find substantiation in those files for Hersey's belief that Sheldon was engaged in a master-race eugenic project, I did find stunning confirmation of Hersey's charge that Sheldon held racist views. To see the photographs, I would have to petition the chief of archivists.Determined to pursue the matter to the bitter end, I began the process of applying for permission. And they did not make it easy for me to gain access.On my first visit, I was informed by a good-natured but wary supervisor that the restrictive grant of Sheldon's materials by his estate would permit me to review only the written materials. In 1987, the curators of the National Anthropological Archives acquired the remains of Sheldon's life work, which were gathering dust in a warehouse in Boston.While there were solid archival reasons for making the acquisition, the curators are clearly aware that they harboured some potentially explosive material in their storage rooms. Although it contains a rich and strange assortment of archival treasures, it is particularly notable for the number of Native Americans who travel here to investigate centuries-old anthropological records.
But thousands more escaped the flames: tens of thousands that Sheldon took at Harvard, Vassar, Yale and elsewhere but sequestered in his own archives. And what became of the archives?Down a dimly lit back corridor of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, far from the dinosaur displays, is a branch of the Smithsonian not well known to the public: the National Anthropological Archives. Thousands more were burned at Harvard, Vassar and Yale in the Sixties and Seventies, when the colleges phased out the posture-photo practice. The angry crew then shovelled the incendiary film intoan incinerator.A short-lived controversy broke out: Was this a book-burning? A witch hunt? Was Professor Sheldon's nude photography a legitimate scientific investigation or just raw material pornography masquerading as science?They burned a few thousand photos in Seattle. The next morning, a battalion of lawyers and university officials stormed Sheldon's lab, seized every photo of a nude woman, convicted the images of shamefulness and sentenced them to burning. He had begun taking nude pictures of female freshmen, but something went wrong One of them told her parents about the practice.
His downfall was his never completed, partly burned Atlas of Women. In attempting to compile what would have been a companionvolume to Atlas of Men, he made the strategic mistake of taking his photo show on the road.In September 1950, he and his team descended on Seattle, where the University of Washington had agreed to play host to his project. (By the time Hillary Rodham arrived on the Wellesley campus, women were allowed to have theirpictures taken only partly nude.)What Sheldon did was appropriate the ritual of the Ivy League "posture photos" as part of a facade for what he was really doing. But it was at Wellesley College in the late Twenties that concern about postural correctness metamorphosed into a cottage industry with pretensions to science. The department of hygiene circulated training films about posture measurement to other women's colleges, which took up the practice, as did some "progressive" high schools and elementary schools. None the less, in the late Forties and early Fifties, Sheldonism seemed mainstream, and Sheldon took advantage of that to approach Ivy League schools.Many, like Harvard, already had a posture-photo tradition.
[...]