Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 58

56

Popular Culture Review

concept maintained that man was not descended from a single source
(i.e., the Judeo-Christian Adam and Eve), but that polygenesis
allowed for the creation of separate, and not equal, human races. ^^
The inferior races included all who were not of Caucasian origin.
Both scientific and political journals accepted the "evidence" of
differences in racial skull sizes and formation, as well as considering
the f)erceived failure to accomplish integration with mainstream
America as proof that neither the Negro nor the Indian would ever be
capable of the intellectual achievements of the white man. As the
two largest non-Caucasian minority groups in the country, the Negro
and the Indian were often compared and contrasted to each other.
The doctrine of the Unity of Race, so long believed by
the world, is ascertained to be false. We are not all
descended from one pair of human beings. This fact is
now as well established in the scientific world as
that a horse cannot produce a cat or a lion or a mouse.
The negro till the end of time will still be a negro, and
the Indian still an Indian.
Cultivation and
association with the superior race produce only injury
to the inferior one. Their part in this mysterious
world drama has been played, and, like the
individual, the race must cease to exist.
Translated into political doctrine, this type of "scientific"
research became one of the major rationalizations for the continuation
of slavery in the South, and the obliteration of the Indian in the
West. Further expanded, it provided the justification for the
removal of the Mexicans from the Pacific Coast and Texas. Near the
turn of the century, as the term "Caucasian" became further
delineated to mean "Anglo-Saxon," this attitude resurfaced in the
form of open hostility towards the thousands of European immigrants
seeking new homes in the United States.
Given these views, a part of the American psyche, consciously or
not, it is hardly surprising that few objections were raised to Buffalo
Bill's advertisements promising to show the "wild dusky warriors"
giving their "weird war dances." Nor could it be exj?ected that
audiences would do anything but respond enthusiastically to the
recreation of events showing the superiority of the white man, and