"New" Shakespeare likeness

The Washington Post has a long article on the Cobbe portrait:

Just two images of Shakespeare are considered authentic by scholars, and both were done after the playwright died. [. . .] Both depictions are so unintelligent-looking that scholars blame them for instigating the Author Controversy, which is not really a controversy so much as a campaign by conspiracy-minded amateurs to prove that someone more visually appealing wrote the plays. The thinking goes that the "peculiar dough-faced man" in the Droeshout, as Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University calls him, is too stolid to have written such soaring words. Someone else must have, preferably someone good-looking. As scholar Marjorie Garber writes, "We'd rather he not look like an egghead."

The Author Controversy persists despite considerable documentary evidence. We have the man from Stratford's pay stubs for performing at court, his certificate of occupancy for the Globe Theatre, and his will, in which he left memorial rings to some London actors. Funny he would do that if he was just a country burgher who didn't write the plays.

Still, it would help to have a decent picture of the man in his prime to keep the conspiracy theorists at bay. [. . .]

Ending No. 1: It's him. Someone discovers proof. [. . .] In which case our view of Shakespeare must shift. He is no bourgeois pudge but rather neck-deep in romantic and political intrigue, until he is forced back to the humdrum of Stratford only grudgingly, by some disgrace. [. . .]

"Sometimes people say, 'Well, does it matter what people looked like?'" Wells says. "Well, of course it matters. It's why we have portrait galleries. It's why we want to know what Shelley and Keats looked like -- and sometimes they look as we would like them to look."

Recent genetics publications

John Hawks comments on a questionable paper attempting to model the spread of lactase persistence.

Dienekes links to a recent, open-access autosomal SNP clustering paper, European Population Genetic Substructure: Further Definition of Ancestry Informative Markers for Distinguishing Among Diverse European Ethnic Groups (doi: 10.2119/molmed.2009.00094).

Paul Gottfried hates "WASP" people

Update: This article puts Brewster's remarks (made years after Gottfried completed his PhD, and which said nothing about "unqualified" support) into context:

On March 19 national Panther chief of staff David Hilliard set the tone for the coming weeks in a speech to 2,000 students at the University of Connecticut. "Not only will we burn buildings," Hilliard vowed, "we will take lives." [. . .] Memos traveled from office to office within the FBI warning of violence-bent crazies descending on New Haven. "As many as half a million persons," said one FBI teletype. [. . .] On April 15, in Cambridge, 1,500 demonstrators showed up for a march at Harvard -- only to find the Harvard gates along their parade route locked shut. Incensed demonstrators smashed windows, threw rocks, lit fires. Some 214 people were hospitalized; $100,000 worth of property was destroyed. At the rally, Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman vowed that marchers would burn down Yale on May 1.

The patricians entrusted with Yale University's future knew it was time to swing into action.

The evidence suggests Brewster was acting out of "pragmatic" spinelessness in the face of violent agitation by radical Jews and blacks, rather than "white guilt".


At Takimag, Paul Gottfried (proud father of one of Sonia Sotamayor's speechwriters) posts a rambling screed against "WASPs", the substance of which follows:

There is now a debate over on the unauthorized right between zealous critics of Jewish influence in Western countries and those who, like myself, believe that WASPdom has destroyed itself. To put my cards on the table: I’ve never heard American Jews or American blacks pour as much contempt on white Protestant America as I hear coming from white Protestant intellectuals and clergypersons.

Seriously? Gottfried must not hear well, or must be very selective in what he chooses to remember.

One of my most vivid graduate school memories was listening to a speech given by Yale President Kingman Brewster expressing unqualified support for the Black Panthers. I recall being shocked to hear this direct linear descendant of two founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony [sic] behave like such a jerk. But Brewster was certainly not a more extreme anti-racist than his fellow-patrician and Yale chaplain, William Sloan Coffin. This Congregationalist chaplain had trouble even finishing a sentence without deploring the slave trade in which his ancestors had once been implicated.

Whereas, presumably, Gottfried finds it perfectly natural and understandable for someone like David Horowitz to more than merely "express" support for the Black Panthers.

And if I think back hard enough, most of the WASP patricians whom I met at Yale as a graduate student were almost as whacky as Brewster and Coffin. Their pompous self-debasement had progressed so far then that they didn’t need Alan Dershowitz or Cornell West to come scourge them.

Did Gottfried ever stop to ask himself if "WASP patricians" interested in befriending or talking politics with a Jewish dwarf were representative of "WASP patricians" generally?

The tirades against WASP nativism and close-mindedness, often produced by their tribe, have caused me to wonder by what ethereal standard these critics are judging their past. What other group in world history has been more “tolerant” or less hostile to outsiders than were white Protestants? Although some of their progenitors had engaged in the slave trade, so had the rest of the human race, and particularly blacks for a far longer time. And only WASPs feel guilty about social institutions that most other groups have taken for granted. Needless to say, these other groups are all too happy to browbeat masochistic Westerners about doing what everyone else has done.

A Steve Sailer commenter recently mused:

I've oftened wondered why certain Jews seem to bear such overwhelming hostility for a country and its people that have been far more hospitable to them than any other place on Earth. It's almost as if they hold us in contempt for not hating them.

Whether or not this observation holds true for the typical Jew, it seems to apply perfectly to Gottfried. No doubt "WASPs" were excessively tolerant (even during the era of "quotas", Jews remained overrepresented at elite colleges), but as a group, they were never the cartoonish masochists Gottfried paints them as. By the time Gottfried was in college, American society had already been radically transformed with plenty of help from Jews. I also find people like Brewster and Coffin contemptible, but to pretend they were the source of the wave of social change they were riding is highly disingenuous. While "patrician WASP" William Sloane Coffin, Jr., came to national prominence in connection with "freedom riders", "it is estimated that half of the white Freedom Riders were Jewish" (source), and Yale alumni took issue with Coffin's activism, many calling for his removal as chaplain. Coffin was, in fact, influenced by and surrounded with Jews. In Warren Goldstein's William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience, we learn:

Coffin quickly came to the attention of his elders. During his junior year he worked for the Yale Law School Professor Eugene V. Rostow [Jew] in a campaign on behalf of the Stratton Bill, an ultimately--though very modestly--successful proposal to allow greater numbers of European DPs, especially Jews, to enter the United States. Rostow, who had been Connecticut chairman of the effort, wrote a letter introducing Coffin to such foreign policy mandarins as Dean Acheson and Chester Bowles

(In other words, Coffin's connections were not merely the result of his "patrician WASP" background.)

Coffin's adoption of neo-orthodox "Hebraism" had unforeseen consequences: an emphasis on "prophetic Christianity" (which he knew little about because he never studied the prophets in seminary) and his openness to ecumenism, particularly as regarded Jews. For the whole notion of a "Judeo-Christian" heritage and creed, according to the historian Mark Silk, was literally created and publicized in the face and wake of fascist anti-Semitism by Christian and Jewish neo-orthodox theologians ranging from Niebuhr and his Union colleague Paul Tillich to Jewish Theological seminary's Abrahama Joshua Heschel and the more popular Will Herberg.

[. . .] Coffin was bored. He was also offended by the discrimination against Jews that he saw on Campus and in the fraternity system. His own casual anti-Semitism had been challenged in Europe, where he had visited Buchenwald after the war. "What the Germans did to the Jews was to me so appalling and so shocking," he recalled, "that we should fight a war condemning the Nazis for the horrors they perpetrated, particularly against the Jews, and then come back and have country clubs that didn't take Jews. It was absolutely outrageous to me."

[. . .] Coffin attacked the fraternities on a variety of grounds but mainly because they discriminated, either explicitly or implicitly, against Jews and blacks as well as against those outside a "narrow range of associates."

[. . .] Coffin soon got a chance to have a significant effect on the matter of Jewish students at Yale. Yale's new Hillel director, Rabbi Richard Israel, who arrived a year after Coffin, had been trying to find out if a quota limited Jewish admissions at Yale. While the number was not public knowledge, the percentage of Jews had hovered int he range of 10 to 15 percent for quite a long time, while at both Harvard and Cornell Jews made up nearly 25 percent of the undergraduate student body. Prodded by Israel, Coffin went to see Griswold and eventually got the information. He had been convinced that Yale's numbers fell substantially below Princeton's and Williams's, but the facts showed otherwise: Yale's Class of 1963 (which had entered in 1959) had roughly 11.5 percent Jews, about the same as the Class of 1964 at Princeton and a little higher than that at Williams. [. . .] But neither Coffin nor Israel let the matter drop. Coffin discussed the question of Jewish admissions with a number of administration officials. His notes on meeting with Dean William DeVane and Provost Buck indicated the persistence of stereotypes at the highest levels: "However bright not all Jewish applicants are 'beauties.' "Twerps,' said Buck. Personalities not always attractive, self-serving, aggressive. Lack of breadth of view."

[. . .] Moreover, while never abandoning his own Christianity, Coffin preached to Jews as well as gentiles at Yale and elsewhere. Profoundly influenced by the Ecumenical spirit of American religious activism in the early 1960s, Coffin lived in an ecumenical world, relied on ecumenical audiences, and worked on political issues in an ecumenical manner. While it shocked some Riverside Church members when Coffin hired a Jew to run the Disarmament Program, he himself gave the question no thought at all. Deeply affected by Heschel (and later by the Rabbi Marshall Meyer), and drawn above all to the Old Testament prophets (and Paul in the New Testament), Coffin preached a more open theology [. . .]

Coffin's first wife was half-Jewish, half-Catholic Eva Rubinstein (interesting spouse selection for a Protestant clergyman).

Incidentally, Coffin's great-grandfather was a Scottish immigrant. I don't find this fact hugely important, but I mention it for the benefit the handful of ignorant "Celtic"-identified types who fancy that American history is best conceived of as a battle between radical leftist pure-English northeastern Puritan "WASPs" and wholesome, conservative Scotch-Irish, Irish Catholics, friendly Jews, and the like.

German-identified types eager to rant about "WASPs" should note that the strongest non-Jewish influences on Coffin included a German immigrant (Paul Tillich) and the son of a German immigrant (Reinhold Niebuhr).

Some context on Kingman Brewster, from The guardians: Kingman Brewster, his circle, and the rise of the liberal establishment by Geoffrey Kabaservice:

At this moment in American history, some leaders were aware that the nature of authority was changing. Brewster had moved Yale away from its deeply conservative New England roots, transforming it into a modern international institution. The university's culture, reflected in its policies in administration, faculty hiring, and undergraduate admissions, had long stressed the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant leadership. Brewster reshaped Yale to emphasize merit rather than background. He redefined leadership to include individuals from nonprivileged circumstances, minorities, and women. Yet he did not turn his back on Yale's heritage, its hallowed tradition of community, or its distinctive reputation for producing leaders and achievers. He sought a middle course through the Sturm and Drang of the era--a difficult balancing act--and found himself pressed between impatient students and angry conservative alumni.

Kingman Brewster's story exemplified the experiences of the leadership class of "the greatest generation." Brewster and most of his friends and associates traced their ancestry to the New England colonists, and they shared backgrounds of at least modest privilege. Educated at a handful of private schools and colleges, they were brought together from an early age and throughout their lives. And they achieved leadership positions in careers and in institutions that historically had been tilted in favor of their class. [. . .]

Yet the establishment was not a monolith of ideas shared by a group of identically minded individuls. The dominant strain undoubtedly was the rock-ribbed Republicanism for which New England had been known. Men who inclined toward this view--including most of the leaders of Brewster's father's generation--generally tried to preserve the social and political privileges that their class enjoyed. This is to be expected; ruling classes typically attempt to reproduced themselves.

Yet, surprisingly, the establishment leaders of Brewster's generation were mostly liberals, who in different ways set out to reform the institutions and the society that had given them their advantages. In matters of appearance and custom, they were much like the older generations. [. . .] But they sensed and responded to the new generation's desire for a more just social order, what Brewster in his inaugural address called the yearning of the young "to be involve in something more meaningful than inherited patterns of success."

I don't accept the premise that "the establishment leaders of Brewster's generation were mostly liberals". (I'd like to see some stats and definitions of "establishment" and "leader". On the general question of the politics of rich "WASPs", see The Myth of Old Money Liberalism.) But the broader points, that (1) Brewster was responding to larger trends and (2) Brewster was not the most radical of leftists, are correct.

When the members of this new, liberal establishment came to positions of responsibility in the 1960s, their background conditioned their responses to the urban and racial crises, the trauma of the Vietnam War, and the alienation of the younger generation. None of them could have kept aloof from the problems of the 1960s even if they had wanted to. The disruption provoked by the era kept bubbling up into their spheres of politics, education, administration, diplomacy, philanthropy, and religion. Their responses followed similar patterns, for reasons that had to do with background and temperament, and the interactions among the elites.

Most important, perhaps, was the fact that Brewster and his friends though of themselves as society's guardians: modern leaders of the country's institutions, who had national responsibilities and tried to take a national perspective. As their conception of the national interest changed during the 1960s, they responded in ways that many other leaders, and people who shared their background, did not. At their best, these men held out the promise that they could overcome the flaws and prejudices of their fathers' generation while retaining the positive attributes of that old WASP elite. Their supporters praised them as pragmatic idealists, while their enemies damned them as oppressors or as traitors to their class.

[. . .] Subsequent years have not been kind to the reputations of the members of Brewster's establishment. When they are remembered at all, it is largely by their enemies, who recall them either as villains who promoted the Vietnam War or as social engineering elitists. Despite their best intentions, Brewster and his circle were divisive figures. They infuriated even some of the people they helped simply because of who they were, with their funny names, ingrained upper-class traits, polished intellects, high-minded liberalism, and the aura of natural superiority that derived, ironically, from the tradition of WASP leadership they helped undermine. "Vote for Elliot Richardson," read a bumper sticker printed by the Bostonian's electoral opponents, "he's better than you." Guardianship is an alien concept to most Americans, and the members of the establishment provoked a fierce resentment of liberals, intellectuals, and the like that continues to drive current poltiics.

(The bit about "ingrained upper-class traits" and "the aura of natural superiority" infuriating "even some of the people they helped" I suspect helps explain much of Gottfried's continued compulsion to trash Yale "WASPs" 40+ years after he left.)

Who shaped these men's "conception of the national interest [. . .] during the 1960s"? For that matter, where did they pick up their liberalism in the first place? In Brewster's case, at least, it certainly wasn't from his father:

Brewster [Sr.], described by one acquaintance as "a crustacean McKinleyite Republican," entertained many members of Congress at his Catoctin retreat. [. . .] Brewster's politics, however, were too extreme to be openly expressed in the mainstream GOP. His anti-Communism was so rabid and sweeping that his son remembered that "if I were considerate enough to visit him in Washington with a friend whose parents were somehow associated with the Roosevelt administration, it was natural that he should refer quite regularly to my 'Communist friends.'" [. . .] Brewster's political opinions and his business contacts with Germany led the FBI to start a file on him. While various information testified that he admired the Nazi system and claimed to have met personally with Hitler on visits to Germany, the FBI's investigation revealed little aside from the fact that "BREWSTER possessed a great hatred for Jews and regarded them with suspicion at all times."

Brewster's views on race and religion were perhaps most fully expressed in the works of his good friend the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, who believed that Anglo-Saxon civilization and America's ancestral purity were under threat from inferior races. Stoddard was, like Brewster, a Harvard Law School graduate and sometime resident of Brookline, Massachusetts. (Brookline was, not coincidentally, the location of the nation's first country club.) Stoddard's works included evocative titles such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man.

American society, according to Brewster and Stoddard, was a racial aristocracy under threat [. . .] Many upper-class East Coast gentlemen shared the view that snobbery and racial exclusion were necessary to preserve their elite culture, even if they stopped short of Stoddard's conclusion that "race cleansing is the obvious starting-point for race betterment." Although Brewster's virulent racial opinions were welcome in polite society, most of his peers expressed themselves in more decorous terms. [. . .]

Brewster Sr. was a strikingly handsome man, with a magnetic appeal to women. He was married five times, although the legality of several of those unions was questionable. [. . .] Kingman Jr. recalled that at his father's funeral, it was his role to keep the wives apart; they were all still fond of him.

Kingman Jr. once told an interviewer that he had been "terrified" of the father who had given him "a stepmother in every port." [. . .] The son detested his father's fascism and ultraconservatism, and so kept some distance. [. . .]

Kingman Sr.s paranoid racism, extreme anticommunism, and unbridled hatred of Franklin Roosevelt reflected an entire class's inability to cope with drastic change.

Some members of Kingman Jr.'s generation adopted the reactionary outlook of their fathers. Others turned against their class and toward communism and other radical philosophies. But Brewster and his cohorts in the liberal establishment would seek to change in order to preserve, in FDR's well-known formulation.

"WASPs" indeed were not monolithic in political opinion (whereas Jews were quite monolithic in their desire to tear down America as a "WASP" country).

Recording of a 1961 speech by Carleton Putnam

A commenter at HBD Books directed my attention to this audio recording:

Carleton Putnam, author of Race and Reason: A Yankee View giving a speech in Jackson Mississippi on 10/26/61 at a banquet held at the Olympic Room of the Heidelberg Hotel. In this speech Mr. Putnam addresses the following topics; timelessness of American ideals, integrity of the Jackson leadership and press, What is the Problem?, origins of equalitarianism [Franz Boas,Lysenkosim], persecution of legitimate scientists, UNESCO, race and environmentalist propaganda, the role of the church in the spread of equalitarian race doctrine, perverting Lincoln's words and ideas, northern indoctrination as "moral" crusade, integrity of civilisation, not states rights must be the defence for racial problems and leftist "change" [prophetic!]

Tangentially related: Several episodes of the 1950s television show "What in the World?", featuring Carleton Coon and other experts (inluding, in one instance, a surprisingly knowledgeable Vincent Price) attempting to place archaeological and ethnological artifacts, are now up on youtube (via Dienekes).

A program for estimating the proportion of Jewish names on a list

Here is the Windows version of Hoozajew 1.1: hoozajewPCf.zip. Newer versions of the program were released before the programmer's website was suppressed by the ADL in 2003, though I don't know what improvements may have been made. A pdf file that accompanies the release ("Counting Jews: An Onomastics Challenge") contains some background information and methodological details.

"WASPs" vs. Jews, pt. 7

A commenter at Steve Sailer's linked to this 2007 Jewish Journal article, which mixes ethnic triumphalism with whines about the "anti-Semitism" (and table manners) of the old Los Angeles elite.

Happily for them, most of the old-time Los Angeles anti-Semites who used to hang out at the downtown California Club are either dead or too old to care that a Jew is on the verge of owning the L.A. Times.

Not just any Jew. Sam Zell looks as though he's one tough Jew, probably even tougher than the old California Clubbers who stole the water from the Owens Valley and got rich in sneaky San Fernando Valley land deals. [. . .]

However it turns out, we'll probably have a Jew in charge of the Times, which was once one of old Los Angeles' most famous WASP institutions. What a great day for old L.A. Jews with long memories of country clubs and downtown clubs that banned them; restrictive covenants that kept them out of certain fancy neighborhoods; anti-Semitic fraternities and sororities at USC and UCLA and law firms that never seemed able to find a place for a smart Jewish attorney. They also may have memories of the old Times, which, while not anti-Semitic, was a perfect reflection of the conservative Republican WASP culture of Los Angeles' upper classes. [. . .]

This was not the story told by most of those at the top levels of the Times when I got there in 1970. I was invited to luncheons for dignitaries in the most exclusive executive dining room. Everyone ate slowly and talked quietly. Silences were broken by the clink of expensive silverware. Nobody asked the dignitaries rude questions. I learned to eat slowly and not talk with my hands.

But the old Times was disappearing. Jews moved into top positions. As the years went on, one of our publishers was Dave Laventhol. We had a Jewish managing editor, a Jewish national editor and many other Jewish editors and reporters.

More than that, the grand lady of the Times, Dorothy Chandler, who was a daughter of a Long Beach merchant family and not part of the L.A. establishment, had made friends with Westside Jews. She was building the Music Center and figured that the culture-loving Jewish community would help finance the place. She helped Jews join the L.A. mainstream.

Even with the changes, there was something sedate, non-Jewish, about the Times. It was too dignified for a newspaper, too conscious of its long history. From the busts of the Chandlers in the Globe Lobby to the reception and dining rooms on the sixth floor, gravitas was deeply embedded in a building put up in 1934 during the era of rich WASP L.A. supremacy.

Interesting-sounding posters from 2009 ASHG meeting

Titles only -- abstracts aren't up (via Polak):

Accurate inference of individual ancestry geographic coordinates within Europe using small panels of genetic markers. P. Paschou, J. Lewis, P. Drineas.

Super Y-chromosomes in Eurasia and the impact of social selection and Neolithic transition. P. L. Balaresque, E. Heyer, M. A. Jobling.

Admixture between Ashkenazi Jews and Central Europeans. W. Klitz, L. Gragert, M. Maiers, M. Fernandez-Viña, Y. Ben-Naeh, G. Benedek, C. Brautbar, S. Israel.

Patterns of correlation between genetic ancestry and facial features suggest selection on females is driving differentiation. D. K. Liberton, K. A. Matthes, R. Pereira, T. Frudakis, D. A. Puts, M. D. Shriver.

Fine-scale Population Structure in Worldwide Ethnic Populations as Revealed by Identical by Descent Segments. B. M. Henn, L. Hon, J. M. Macpherson, N. Eriksson, A. Wojcicki, L. Avey, S. Saxonov, J. L. Mountain.

I doubt that 23andMe's presentation (last entry above) simply "pertains to the methodology behind their company's Ancestry Painting tool", as Polak speculates. Sounds like something more interesting. Update: I'm right. The abstract has been posted at 23andMe.

Fine-scale Population Structure in Worldwide Ethnic Populations as Revealed by Identity by Descent Segments

Brenna M. Henn1, Lawrence Hon1, JM Macpherson1, Nick Eriksson1, Anne Wojcicki1, Linda Avey1, Serge Saxonov1, Joanna L. Mountain1*

It is well established that human population genetic diversity reflects continental-level geographic divisions, and that within-continental geographic and linguistic differences contribute to population structure between regions. The continental and regional differences reflect ancient demographic events, such as early migrations Out of Africa into Eurasia. However, it is not clear how recent demographic processes occurring on the order of hundreds, rather than thousands, of years affect patterns of genomic diversity. We analyzed the sharing of DNA identical by descent (IBD) inferred from 580,000 SNPs using a large database of individuals with European ancestry, including a subset identifying as Ashkenazim. We also explored the pairwise distributions of identical by descent segments in populations from the Human Genome Diversity Panel (HGDP-CEPH), a diverse set of ethnic groups from across the world. We observed that the average number and sizes of shared genomic segments differ substantially across the ~55 populations. The different patterns are likely attributable to differences in population histories such as recent bottlenecks and sub-structure. In particular, populations that are highly structured will contain individuals that share elevated amounts of IBD, indicative of recent common ancestry through multiple ancestors. In order to understand the pattern of the observed population-level sharing, we simulated extended pedigrees using empirical data from several populations and calculated the expected amounts of sharing for 1st through 10th cousins. We assumed random mating within each population for the simulations. Interestingly, the average sharing in the simulated distant cousins was consistently less than the observed average sharing in each population sample. This finding indicates the presence of fine-scale population structure for many ethnic groups, such as the Ashkenazim, within the last 10 generations (200-300 years).

Diet, dental reduction, and facial reduction

Compend Contin Educ Dent. 2009 Jun;30(5):292-300.

Origins of dental crowding and malocclusions: an anthropological perspective.

Eose JC, Roblee RD.

The study of ancient Egyptian skeletons from Amarna, Egypt reveals extensive tooth wear but very little dental crowding, unlike in modern Americans. In the early 20th century, Percy Raymond Begg focused his research on extreme tooth wear coincident with traditional diets to justify teeth removal during orthodontic treatment. Anthropologists studying skeletons that were excavated along the Nile Valley in Egypt and the Sudan have demonstrated reductions in tooth size and changes in the face, including decreased robustness associated with the development of agriculture, but without any increase in the frequency of dental crowding and malocclusion. For thousands of years, facial and dental reduction stayed in step, more or less. These analyses suggest it was not the reduction in tooth wear that increased crowding and malocclusion, but rather the tremendous reduction in the forces of mastication, which produced this extreme tooth wear and the subsequent reduced jaw involvement. Thus, as modern food preparation techniques spread throughout the world during the 19th century, so did dental crowding. This research provides support for the development of orthodontic therapies that increase jaw dimensions rather than the use of tooth removal to relieve crowding.

Jewish genetics in The Forward

Genetics 2009 features a dozen or so articles, mostly focusing on Jewish diseases. I see nothing new in David Goldstein's article on "Jewish Genetic History". The article seems to be a rehashing of old information padded with suggestions for future research.

How did members of various Jewish populations come to look so different from one another

We now know that Jewish populations have substantial Near Eastern ancestry. [. . .] Y chromosomes from different Jewish populations — including those from Europe — usually look like those commonly found in people from the Near East.

The rest of the Jewish genome paints a similar, though less pronounced, picture. [. . .]

Ultimately, [. . .] research is needed to shed further light on this question. Before too long we will be able to sequence people’s entire genomes and track where individual parts of genomes come from. This will likely yield additional insights about the specific genetic inputs into Jewish populations from surrounding communities.

Goldstein attributes the varied phenotypes of Jewish groups exclusively to intermarriage, ignoring the likelihood that selection has played a role.

Latin American "white"

A recent study finds Amerindian mitochondrial DNA haplogroups predominate in the population of Argentina:

Amerindian haplogroups were most frequent in the north and south representing more than 60% of the sequences. A slightly different situation was observed in central Argentina where the Amerindian haplogroups represented less than 50%, and the European contribution was more relevant. [. . .] A minor contribution of African lineages was observed throughout the country.

Autosomal evidence indicates Argentinians harbor substantial Amerindian and minor African admixture.

Regarding autosomal evidence of admixture, the relative European, native American, and West African genetic contributions to the gene pool of La Plata were estimated to be 67.55% (+/-2.7), 25.9% (+/-4.3), and 6.5% (+/-6.4), respectively.

Argentina is generally perceived to be the whitest country in Latin America. See Brazilian or Puerto Rican "whites" if you require further evidence "white" doesn't have the same meaning in Latin America as it does in America.

Moldbug: "Bring back Monarchy so I can live out my dream of becoming a court Jew"

OK, he didn't actually say that. He did say he thinks democracy is "bad for the Jews". In case there was any question about Mencius Moldbug's political priorities:

And there would be a lot more Jews in the world. This is the bottom line on democracy: it's been bad for the Jews. I'm aware that others have other criteria, but this is mine and I like it just fine.

Skulls of Old New Yorkers

H. L. SHAPIRO
Old New Yorkers
A Series of Crania from the Nagel Burying Ground, New York City
AXEPIICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL. XIV, NO. 3
JULY-SEPTEMBER. 1930

Among the various elements which make up the heterogeneous population of the United States, there is one which may conveniently be called Old American. Its exact proportion in the present population is unknown, and naturally would vary with the arbitrary standards one might adopt for such a classification. Following, however, the precedent of Hrdlicka (1) , Old Americans are “those American whites who those Americans whose ancestors on each side of the family were born in the United States for at least two generationsin other words, all those whose parents as well as all four grandparents were born in this country. The third native generation of adults means roughly an ancestry on each side of the family of at least 80 to 150 years American.” On the basis of this classification HrdliEka has made in his “Old Americans’’ an important contribution to the study of the somatological characteristics of the oldest American white stock in the population of this country. Unfortunately, up to the present time there have existed no data on the actual ancestors of the population with which HrdliEka was dealing. Consequently, a study on the stability of this physical type was hardly possible. One might, for example, compare Old Americans with the inadequate data on living Englishmen, but that is hardly as satisfactory as a comparison with ancestral whites of the colonial period, for inevitably the question of selection comes up. What has been needed, then, is data on the physical type of the colonial immigrants to the United States.

In this paper I am presenting such data on the actual American ancestors of the old American stock. The principal problems dealt with are the characteristics of a local New York group, their relationship to Old World types, whether they represent a random or selected type, and, finally, if their descendants have preserved the same characters under the influence of the American environment. The answers to these questions are vital in both a practical and a theoretical sense, but they can only be regarded as tentative until vastly more material is available to confirm or alter the conclusions suggested by the material in this paper. [. . .]

Late in November, 1926, I became aware that during the course of some excavations for the 207th Street Yard of the Rapid Transit System of New York City an obliterated burial ground was discovered between 212th Street and 213th Street, near the Harlem River. This district is in the northernmost part of Manhattan and within the present city limits of New York. Upon investigation by the Board of Transportation, it was learned that this site was the former Nagel, or Nagle, Cemetery, [. . .]

The origin of the Nagel cemetery was apparently as a family burial ground for the Nagels and the Dyckmans, who were settled in the neighborhood in the second half of the seventeenth century. [. . .]

The national origin of those buried in the Nagel cemetery is mainly Dutch and English. The principal landholders who inhabited the neighborhood of the Nagel cemetery were, in the late seventeenth century, the Dyckmans, the Nagels, and the Kortrights. Jan Dyckman and Jan Nagel, the original immigrants, were from Westphalia. Kortright was Dutch. Another important neighboring family was the Vermilyeas (Vermilye, Vermilya). The first Vermeille was a French Huguenot, who, after residing in Holland, emigrated to America. By 1800, when the headstones were generally inscribed in this cemetery, the Kortrights were no longer residents of the district. Many of the Nagels had moved to Westchester as a result of the Revolution, but William Nagel, the surviving brother of a large family, continued to live here until after 1800. Of these original families, only the Dyckmans and the Vermilyeas are marked by inscribed headstones. Nevertheless, we know from town records that this district of upper Manhattan was occupied principally by Dutch families in the early days. Intermarriage was the rule, so that the few Huguenots were soon absorbed in the dominant Dutch strains. Genealogical records also indicate that the Dyckmans and Nagels very early married into Dutch families. After Manhattan was taken over by the English in 1674, very few new Dutch settlers migrated to New York. During the eighteenth century the English immigration attained considerable proportions, coming in part from the New England colonies and from the home country. Just when the displacement of the Dutch in upper Manhattan by newer English settlers took place is difficult to estimate. Mr. Bolton is of the opinion that by the second half of the eighteenth century upper Manhattan was already largely English or mixed Dutch-English, for many of the original families were marrying the newer stocks. At any rate, when our information becomes definite, after 1800, the names recorded on headstones are predominantly English.

[. . .] the series, represented in this paper, are in all probability largely of English origin, with some Dutch admixture, and dating from the eighteenth century. [. . .]

In spite of what we might reasonably expect in a former Dutch colony, the physical type of the New Yorker in the eighteenth century was similar in most respects to that of the seventeenth century Londoner and the Lowland Scot. In relation to both these types, the Nagel series appears to represent a group from the same fundamental population, with the discrepancies one would expect in a small sampling. The one notable exception to this broad but tentative generalization is the marked difference in cranial height between the Nagel and London crania. This map be accounted for by regarding the Londoners as variants of the generalized English type in the direction of low-vaulted crania. The other alternative is that in New York the presence of a Dutch strain has made for a cranium much higher than is to be found in the London cousins of the New Yorkers of the eighteenth century. This latter hypothesis is unnecessary, in view of the presence of the same degree of head height in other British series.

[. . .] by estimating cephalic means from the cranial averages of the Nagel series, a cursory comparison with living Old Americans was possible. Recognizing the error inherent in such a procedure, it is interesting to note that, even after a century, apparently the Old Americans have remained similar to their colonial ancestors of New York.

Height of Northern Europeans and Italians in the U.S.

HOWARD V. MEREDITH
Stature of Massachusetts children of North European and Italian ancestry.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTRROPOLOGY, VOL. XXIV, NO. 3
JANUARY-MARCH, 1939

[. . .] The subjects were 237 males and 190 females in attendance at the public schools of Beverly and Revere (two small cities in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts) during the years 1923 to 1934. They represented two racial groups. One hundred and fifty-seven of the males and 124 of the females were of North European ancestry. The remaining eighty males and sixty-six females were of Italian stock.

Two methods had been used to determine the racial stock of the subjects. Initially the Growth Study staff had employed geographical and sociological criteria. Here, the main basis of classification had been the birth-place of the parents, though such items as the language spoken in the home and the family name had also been considered. North European subjects included ‘descendants from the Old American stock together with more recent arrivals from the British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltic States, as well as English speaking Canadians and Newfoundlanders.' Italian subjects, as determined by this approach, were children of parents born in Italy, children from Italian speaking homes, and children whose family names were Italian and whose general physical appearance did not contradict Italian descent.

It had been decided later to differentiate racial groups in a strictly anthropological manner. Criteria involving nationality, language, and culture had here been abandoned. Classification was made solely in terms of combinations for physical items such as skin pigmentation, facial features, eye and hair color, form of hair, and type of build. The disagreements for the two methods were found not to involve more than 4% of the Growth Study cases. [. . .]

1. The mean stature for males of North European descent exceeds that for males of Italian descent over the entire period from 7 to 17 years. In amount, the difference is 4.2 cm. at 7 years, 4.6 cm.. at 10 pears, 4.7 cm. at 13 years, and 4.5 cm. at 17 years. On the whole, during the decade of growth under study the North European males are taller than the Italian males by 4.6 cm., or 1.8 inches. [. . .]

Gebhart, in 1924, published stature means for children of Italian stock living in “a congested Italian district in New York City.” His study was made in connection with a ‘practical health program’ conducted at the Mulberry .Health Center. [. . .]

Stature means for children of North European stock in attendance at private schools in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and California were published in 1931 by Gray and Ayres. The subjects of this particular racial grouping were all children of parents born in the United States. Two or three of the grandparents of each child were born in the United States, while the remaining one or two grandparents were born in Canada or in Northwest Europe (Scandinavia, Netherlands, British Isles, France or Germany). [. . .]

During the age interval common to the studies of Gebhart and of Gray and Ayres, the mean stature for males of North European descent in attendance at private schools exceeds that for Italian males from a congested urban district by 14.8 cm., or 5.8 inches. This amount of difference is striking. In the opinion of the writer, it constitutes a forceful challenge to intensive investigation of the question, What specific constellations of factors relating to racial descent and socioeconomic status are sufficiently potent to produce such wide divergence in the mean stature of children of school age living in the United States.

MacDonald on Kaufmann

Update: Prozium and Vanishing American comment.

Kevin MacDonald reviews The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America at VDARE (longer version):

Kaufmann charts the decline of Anglo-Saxons and the rise of the Jews in all areas of the American elite, from university departments of political science to the federal civil service. “For twenty years, the de-WASP-ing of the ruling elite in America has proceeded at a breathtaking pace.” Kaufmann cites the important study of Lerner et al. (American Elites,Webbug 1996) showing that by the1990s there were “roughly the same proportion of WASPs and Jews at the elite levels of the federal civil service, and a greater proportion of Jewish elites among corporate lawyers.” Jews outnumbered Anglo-Saxons 58–21 among elites in television, 48 to 25 among “public interest” elites, and 40 to 21 among legal elites. The same study found that, “in stark contrast to the Jews, WASPs were not overrepresented within the ranks of the national elite.”

Given that Jews constituted less than 3% of the population, these are very high overrepresentations indeed. In contrast, White Protestants became underrepresented in corporate elites by the 1980s, and there was a steady decline in their political power in Congress. [. . .]

A final lapse in Kaufmann’s argument: he never mentions coercion and the penalties that are imposed on people who dissent from the elite cosmopolitan consensus. The fact is, Whites who violate these strictures are severely censured — a phenomenon with which I have considerable personal experience.

Kaufmann presents the views of elite Whites who are cooperating in the demise of their own people as nothing more than the enlightened opinions of an intellectual and moral elite. But it is far more than that. Since the 1960s, Whites who depart from the consensus of cosmopolitanism have been penalized in a wide variety of ways — from lack of access to the mainstream media, to firing from their jobs, to social opprobrium. Conversely, those who collaborate are rewarded. This revolution is neither peaceful nor bloodless.

[. . .] although the cosmopolitan revolution took advantage of pre-existing Anglo-Saxon tendencies toward individualism, in the end the institutional structure that is being pursued after attaining power is profoundly anti-individualist. America remains somewhat of a laggard in these trends because of the First Amendment, but other Western societies, lacking such formal declarations of individual rights, have succumbed to a stifling political correctness that essentially legislates the triumph of cosmopolitanism - and Western suicide.

If a robust Darwinian intellectual elite had remained in place despite the assaults of the Boasians, the Frankfurt School, the Marxists, and the New York Intellectuals, the cosmopolitan revolution never would have occurred. The Anglo-Saxon movement of ethnic defense culminating in the immigration law of 1924 would have become institutionalized. A robust, sophisticated Darwinian culture would have provided a powerful argument for ethnic defense. Critically, such a defense would have emphasized creating a culture in which individualism was seen as a valuable Anglo-Saxon ethnic trait — as was the case during the 18th and 19th centuries. Immigration policy would have been carefully formulated to ensure that immigrants were similar to the founding stock and to ensure the continued dominance of peoples prone to individualism — just as American immigration policy was in fact crafted until 1965. This ethnic defense would have been energized by the sociobiological revolution of the 1970s and the firm mathematical grounding for the understanding that all peoples have ethnic genetic interests.

Instead, in cosmopolitan post-America, even the sociobiological revolution has been stripped of its most dangerous and powerful ideas. As Frank Salter has shown, the revolution in population genetics of the1970s demonstrated very clearly that people controlling a piece of land have a huge genetic interest in preserving their control--but this finding has been suppressed and misinterpreted by people at the top of the academic hierarchy.

This suppression must continue--because cosmopolitanism has a hopelessly shaky intellectual basis. Built on theories that were motivated far more by ethnic interests of the rising elite of Jewish intellectuals than by a respect for scientific truth, cosmopolitanism has no choice but to secure its future by coercion.

And for the Anglo-Saxon Americans--indeed all Christian-stock Americans--this substitution of cultures is a disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

More on "Old Americans"

I came across a 1917 publication (full text freely available at Google Books) in which Hrdlicka outlines his rationale for studying "Old Americans" and some of his preliminary findings. More complete findings were published in 1925 in The Old Americans.

The Old White Americans
Ales ̆ Hrdlic̆ka.
Published: Washington DC : [s.n.], 1917.
Series: Proceedings of the International Congress of Americanists ; 19th, December, 1915.

Introduction

FROM early in the seventeenth century the Temperate Zone of North America has been receiving successive contingents of the white race who have settled on the available land and multiplied and spread, thus forming the American nation. These newcomers were derived from Europeans of various physical types, ranging from the prevalently tall, blond, blue-eyed dolichocephalic Northmen to the mostly dark-haired, brown-eyed, medium tall, and brachy- cephalic Celts; and according to all indications they were, as a lot, physically, and especially mentally, above the average of their parent groups, for both the pioneers, whose ideals were religious and political liberty, and who would brave the dangers of the long sea journey with the hard conditions of life in the New World, as well as those commonly classed as adventurers, can well be assumed to have been on the whole men with a surplus of mental power and physical energy.

The men, and the women who accompanied them and who were probably of similar good material, encountered in large measure new environments and lived a new life. They reared their families under these changed influences, and the children accommodated themselves completely to the new conditions—they became Americans. Then followed intermarriage, both within and without the various contingents that reached this land, and the original heterogeneity slowly gave place to a blend which constituted the body of the rising nation.

How successful this new conglomerate proved to be, morally, intellectually, in defense and otherwise, are matters of history. It is certain that there was no loss of the original endowments; and also that there resulted in the course of time a considerable approach to unification of all those characteristics of mentality and behavior which are most readily subject to adaptation. It may be safely said that so far as outward manifestations are concerned, the descendants of the Old Americans constitute today a fairly easily separable strain of white people, which is no longer English, Dutch, French, or Irish, but American.

In view of these interesting facts anthropology for a long time has been confronted with the question, Have there also taken place in the descendants of the Old Americans physical changes which produced, or tend to produce, a separate sub-type of the white people?

[. . .] Possibly even in some important respects the type has already passed its zenith, as would seem to be indicated by the lowering birth-rate among its latest representatives, a rate now hardly sufficient in many districts to keep up the numbers of the Old Americans. And how will the type, if it exists, be affected by the growing mixture with whites of recent immigration? Would it be well to try to keep it pure—have the Old Americans marry only among Old Americans—or is new blood desirable?

It is well known that such nationalities as the French, English, German, and others possess, notwithstanding their mixed and relatively recent origin, distinctive physiognomy and other physical features by which in a large majority of cases it is possible to segregate both men and women who belong to them, and the claim has often been made that much the same is true in relation to the Americans. Writers and illustrators have made frequent efforts to define this hypothetical American type, and have even arrived at certain crystalized conceptions, such as "Uncle Sam", the "American girl", and the "American young man", though inconsistently leaving out the remaining periods of life. The Southerner in particular, and the Yankee, as well as the Westerner, a're believed each to have distinctive characteristics by which in the majority of cases they can readily be identified; yet at the same time these "types" are supposed to differ from each other so that any one of wider experience can readily distinguish them. Writers who attempt to define the American physical type do so generally without entering into embarrassing particulars; and the artist either follows certain famous or admired individual types or creates abstract conceptions of what he would have as Americans. Suggestions have even been advanced by some, who might have been expected to know better, that the American type is approaching that of the American Indian, the idea being presumably that the American environment produced the Indian and that it would in due time shape other peoples here to the same mold. Finally, certain scientific reports on the physical changes of Jewish and Italian children in this country appeared to show that the type of the immigrant changed with remarkable rapidity.1 Were this true, the formation of a new, more homogeneous American type ought to be a question of but a few generations, and the type should be already well advanced toward maturity among the descendants of the oldest American families. Unfortunately, however, although under good direction, the examinations on which these results were based were made by college students and not by trained anthropologists; the grandparents and parents of the supposedly changing children were not examined, nor were the children themselves studied at different periods of development; and no data have been given on the important and often significant variations in the children of individual families; so that it is not certain whether the differences the Jewish and Italian children seemed to show from the general type of their nationality or group were not perhaps fortuitous, or hereditary, and thus of pre-American origin.

The above uncertainties can properly be met in but one way, and that by anthropological observations on normal living representatives of the oldest American families, carried on under favorable circumstances and with the greatest possible care and precision. Such a test the writer decided to apply, so far as it might be in his power; and with this view arrangements were made, in the fall of 1912, in the anthropological laboratory of the United States National Museum, for a series of investigations which should extend to at least 300 healthy adult descendants from old American families. Since that time, save for interruptions due to other demands on the writer's time, the work has been progressing slowly. The number of subjects stated, 150 men and 150 women, is regarded by the writer as the smallest number which in a fairly uniform group would cover the more important individual variations in the group and thus give a reasonably clear notion of the type. To make certain that only those would be included in the series whose families have long been subject to the effects of the American environment, it was decided to examine only those who on both sides were American for at least three generations; in other words, those whose parents and all grandparents were born in this country. As to locality, Washington was recognized as the most suitable for the study, for among those settled here as well as among visitors there are Americans from all parts of the country. The measurements and tests, finally, were to be sufficiently thorough to show clearly the physical type of those examined, but involve only a minimum of inconvenience to the subject and a minimum of exposure of the body. To avoid including those not fully developed and the decrepit, the age limits were set at from 24 to 60 years; otherwise there was no selection. [. . .]

As a total result of the efforts made there have been examined to date 140 men and 135 women, including representatives of some of the very oldest and best American families. The conditions of the examination have been ideal: a well-lighted laboratory, the best of instruments tested by standards, no haste, and every subject dealt with with all due care by the writer himself; the possibilities of error, therefore, it is safe to say, have been reduced to the minimum, and the data obtained may claim more than ordinary confidence. They are presented here in preliminary form, yet even thus they are of considerable interest.

The present report will deal, for the sake of easier presentation of the results, with the first 100 men and 100 women who were measured. The data will be given in brief form only, detailed discussion being reserved until the work shall have been completed. The results will doubtless be modified somewhat by the additional number of subjects to be examined, yet on the whole the changes can not be expected to be very material and the data as here presented may already be regarded as fairly definite. [. . .]

Besides the individual variations, certain marked differences will be seen to appear in both the physical and the physiological status between the two sexes. On the whole, it may be said that the male representatives of the Old Americans are excellent specimens of humanity, and there are also physically splendid individual women; but a certain proportion of the latter sex shows a physical development, especially in the upper part of the body, which leaves more or less to be desired. It seems, however, that this is largely a result of long-lasting defects in the proper rearing of female children from the physical standpoint rather than a matter of heredity, and that conditions in this respect are much improved in the present generation of young women. [. . .]

The head among the Old Americans is in many cases remarkable for its good development. This is particularly noticeable in the males, as will be seen from the following tables, especially from that showing the cephalic module, or mean diameter of the head. It will be interesting to note in this connection that among twelve groups of male immigrants from Europe measured within the last two years at Ellis Island under the writer's direction, and comprising together more than 500 individuals, not one group equals in this respect the Americans, the closest approach being noted in the Irish, English, Poles, and North Italians. [. . .]

Conclusions

The study of the actual representatives of the oldest American families has proved throughout one of absorbing interest. The results, however, may prove quite sober and disappointing to those inclined to expect sensational revelations. Nevertheless, they will be valuable both to science and in application. They show quite clearly that no definite, already formed, strictly American type or
sub-type of the whites as yet exists; and as intermarriages of the Old Americans with more recent elements in this country are rapidly becoming more numerous there seems no chance for the formation of something like a separate American type of population, at least within many centuries.

The examinations have shown in many instances a remarkable persistence of heredity characters and their strong individuality, as we may express it, with slow, irregular, unwilling yielding to a complete and permanent fusion with other characters of the same class.

Yet there are indications that some progress has been made toward such a fusion, and that if the Old American families could be kept in full vitality and free from intermixture with newer elements for several more centuries, there would eventually come into existence in this country a real separate sub-type of white people, which would possess numerous if not great distinctive characteristics from the European whites and would be strictly American.

Some anatomical trivia

"The anthropoid pelvis is common in men and occurs in 20%- 30% of white women and nearly 50% of black women." [Source]

"The anthropoid pelvis is present in about 85% of black women and 20% of white women." [Source]

"The anthropoid pelvis receives its name from its resemblance to the pelves of monkeys and apes" [Source]

Intermarriage and Social Distance

[Intermarriage and Social Distance Among U.S. Immigrants at the Turn of the Century
Author(s): Deanna L. Pagnini and S. Philip Morgan
Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Sep., 1990), pp. 405-432 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781107]

The pattern of assortative mating among European immigrants and native whites is examined by ethnicity and generation using a na­tional sample drawn from the 1910 census manuscripts and a sam­ple of marriages registered in New York City between 1908 and 1912. The pattern of assortative mating is virtually identical in the two data sets. Endogamy was strong for all groups examined, but was castelike for the "new" ethnics from eastern and southern Europe. Marriages between "old" and "new" ethnics were espe­cially rare. The pattern of ethnic intermarriage was nearly identical for men and women. [. . .] While the existence of ethnic and generational endogamy at the turn of the century is not surprising, its strength has not previously been estimated with appropriate statistical tech­niques. Further, these techniques reveal more detailed features of the pattern of assortative mating that are not well known and pro-vide important facts for theories of immigrant assimilation and as­sortative mating.

[. . .] This im­migrant flow included a number of what historians termed "new" immi­grants. These included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe: the Italians, Russians, Poles, and Jews, who had not emigrated in large numbers before the 1880s. These groups were very different from the "old" British, Irish, Scandinavian, and German immigrants in appear­ance, customs, and demographic characteristics (Lieberson 1980; Higham 1963; Abrams 1973; Kraut 1982). [. . .] The groups most inclined to congregate in the cities were the Jews, Irish, Poles, and Italians. [. . .]

While physical distance was a factor affecting mate selection, social distance was important also. The ability to speak English, which allowed for interaction with those of other ethnic groups and with natives, was an important aspect of social distance. The new immigrants were the least likely to speak English (table 2, col. 2), especially the Poles and Italians (see Cheney 1988).4

Further social distance arose from the xenophobia of the native whites. Native whites perceived the new immigrants as a threat to the old Ameri­can order and as a possible contamination of the white American race. While each immigrant group had its own stereotyped reputation, the new immigrants were always perceived as the worst. The new immigrants were seen as inferior in looks, morals, and intellect (see Hall 1915, pp. 69-70). According to a sociologist at the time, that the new immigrants "are morally below the races of Northern Europe is as certain as any social fact" (Ross 1915, p. 74). [. . .]

Xenophobia, coupled with the high birthrate of the new immigrants and the low fertility of the native whites, led to the fear that the American race was being diluted by "unworthy bloods." Many believed that "the peoples of the Mediterranean region were biologically different than those of northern and western Europe and that the differences sprang from an inferiority of blood and could be observed in certain social characteris­tics" (Handlin 1957, p. 77). Ross stated that "it is fair to say that the blood now injected into the veins of our people is sub-common" (1915, p. 73). Those concerned over the intermingling of blood clearly opposed inter-marriages. The fact that some immigrants were seen as providing good genetic stock while others were undesirable provided ideological support for a range of sanctions against intermarriage. Resistance to intermar­riage may have come from within the immigrant groups as well, as the older generation tried to maintain the traditional culture.

[. . .]

Net of the social distance parameter between old and new immigrants, an examination of residuals revealed several additional areas of special affinity. First, as mentioned previously, there was a much greater ten­dency for British and Irish immigrants to marry each other than other-wise implied by model 2 (such a match was over five times more likely than one with other old immigrant groups [. . .]

The next pattern of attraction crosses the new-old ethnic boundary: Germans were much more likely to marry Poles than any other new immigrant group. Furthermore, Germans were the only old immigrant group especially likely to marry Poles. If national data are used, German-Pole marriages were 5.5 times more likely than any other new-old immi­grant match. The greater ethnic detail in the NYC data allows us to say that disproportionate numbers of these German-Pole marriages are with Poles from Austria-Poland, not those from Russia-Poland.

The third pattern of attraction is between the central and eastern Euro­pean Jews. This is the strongest pattern of intermarriage by far. In the national data, eastern-central European Jewish intermarriages are close to 500 times more likely than any other Jewish intermarriage. In the NYC data the effect is roughly two times larger-Jews from central and eastern Europe were over 900 times more likely to marry among themselves than to marry other groups. Thus, while there was social distance between these two groups of Jews, marriages with other Jews were clearly more common than marriages with non-Jews. Attitudinal data presented by Bogardus (1928, table 4) from native-born Jews are consistent with the actual marital data we present. He demonstrated that Jews clearly pre­ferred to marry other Jews.

The final two zones of attraction also involve Jews but are different in two respects. First, they are only fitted to the NYC data; there were too few Jewish intermarriages in the national data to detect these patterns. Second, these are the only asymmetric effects fitted in either table. To explain, a Jewish husband (from central or eastern Europe) was less likely to marry an Italian or Polish woman than a woman from the old immi­grant stock (i.e., a British, Scandinavian, or German woman). Net of other effects, Jewish men were only about .3 times as likely to marry these non-Jewish new ethnics as those from the old ethnic groups. The result is that the old-new social distance effect is partly neutralized for Jewish men. Again, such preferences for old stock groups, following the prefer­ence for Jewish intermarriage, can be seen in Bogardus's (1928, table 4) attitudinal data. For "Americans," new immigrants, and especially Jews, were the least-desirable spouses. For Jews, the old immigrants were the first preference as intermarriage partners after other Jews. The NYC data suggest these differential social distances are canceling one another out. We are unable to explain why this effect is asymmetric, holding only for Jewish men. But perhaps successful Jewish men were able to marry "up" in status while Jewish women were less able to do so. The final effect operates in the opposite direction for eastern European Jewish women. They were three times more likely to marry Italian men than Polish men (or, net of other effects, men from old immigrant groups). Perhaps Jewish women, unable to marry "up" as Jewish men did, "settled" for Italian men who far outnumbered the available Italian women. Detailed tabula­tions (using the NYC data) not shown here reveal that these Jewish-Italian marriages most often involved men from southern Italy and Jew­ish women from Hungary and Russia. Both of these asymmetric effects operate regardless of spouses' generations.

[. . .] the greater endogamy for new (compared to old) immigrants that we document still persists, although endogamy is much less extreme for all white ethnics now. In the contemporary period, Lieberson and Waters (1988) partly attribute this greater endogamy of the new immigrants to less intermarriage in the past, giving these groups less highly mixed an­cestral categories. Our paper shows which groups intermarried at the turn of the century, yielding more mixed groups. An important difference in the historical and the contemporary pattern lies in the strength of the old-new distinction. Marriages across this old-new distinction were quite rare in 1910. Historians of the turn of the century, and writers at the time, described the discrimination, differences, and social distance between the old and new immigrant groups. In large measure, our analysis of data on assortative mating fits well these characterizations of intergroup rela­tions. This old-new distinction is much less visible now (see Alba and Golden 1986), a change that reflects the socioeconomic integration of these groups (see Neidert and Farley 1985; Lieberson and Waters 1988).

[. . .] Lieberson and Waters show that intermarriage rates between two groups are higher when the proportion of Catholics in the two groups is similar. This result implies that ethnic intermarriages are frequently religiously endogamous. We found this to be true at the turn of the century for Jews, and possibly for Poles and Italians. But we found no heightened tendency for Irish to marry Poles and Italians-a straightfor­ward expectation if religion played a dominant role in assortative mating. Other work (see Peach 1980a, 1981) has challenged the claim that there was a Catholic melting pot including Irish, Poles, and Italians. The ab­sence of any special affinity between these groups illustrates the over­whelming power of nonreligious factors reflected in the old versus new distinction. These factors included (1) high levels of residential and occu­pational segregation, (2) period of immigration and the selectivity operat­ing in different immigrant streams, which produced ethnic socioeconomic differentials, and (3) great social distance between groups supported by an ideology heavily laced with xenophobia.

"WASPs" vs. Jews, pt. 6

Beckert recognizes that one of the most significant components of the New York bourgeoisie's self-identity was anti-Semitism. By the 1890s, upper-class anti-Semites had driven Jewish members out of the Union Club, closed Saratoga hotels to Jews, and banned Jewish organizations from the Social Register. Beckert, however, downplays this prejudice. He emphasizes that Christians and Jews interacted in a range of institutions extending from the Democratic and Republican parties to the Hardware Club. The Chamber of Commerce increasingly welcomed Jews as well as other Christian immigrants. At the Philharmonic, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Steinways, Seligmans, and Rothschilds all rubbed shoulders while listening to Mozart and Beethoven. Anti-Semitism "captured the imagination of bourgeois New Yorkers," argues Beckert, but those religious identities "did not overwhelm class identities" (pp. 265-69).

But does listening to classical music in the same orchestral hall signify a shared social identity? In many ways- participation in party politics, the creation of trade associations, the increasing hostility to organized labor, the construction of armories-elite New Yorkers of all religious and ethnic persuasions shared common economic interests and interacted within certain circles. But consensus over one's enemies, be they unions, socialists, or single-taxers, does not a culture make. Some will argue that these examples reflect convenient and temporary coalitions. The imposition of anti-Semitic quotas at elite northeastern universities in the early twentieth century and the persistence of ethnically defined law firms, banking houses, and accounting institutions well into the century more accurately reflect the workplace division and chauvinism among the New York bourgeoisie. Most conspicuous was what many demographers and students of ethnic identity consider the best measurement of assimilation or the breakdown of ethno-religious identity-intermarriage. The absence of significant levels of intermarriage between Jews and Christians during this time illustrates the persistence of identities determined by social and religious factors rather than those found in the workplace.

[Review: Making an American Upper Class
Author(s): Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Reviewed work(s): The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 by Sven Beckert
Source: Reviews in American History, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 279-287]

Note, though, that even during the era of "anti-Semitic quotas" Jews were overrepresented at Harvard, and the restrictions were driven by quite rational calculations.

As the nation moved to limit the number of Jewish immigrants, the Big Three confronted their own "Jewish problem." Harvard, just minutes away from the nation's fourth-largest concentration of Jews and long considered more open and democratic than Yale and Princeton, was particularly vulnerable to a "Jewish invasion." By 1918, when the Association of New England Deans first discussed this issue, Harvard's freshman class was 20 percent Jewish. This was by far the highest proportion in the Big Three: three times the percentage at Yale, six times that at Princeton.

A vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, President A. Lawrence Lowell was no friend of the Jews. But even had he been free of anti-Semitic sentiments, he would have had reason to worry about the consequences for Harvard of its growing Jewish presence on campus. For at a certain point, the arrival of the Jews would mean the departure of the sons of the Protestant upper and upper-middle classes whom Harvard most wished to enroll. Far more than an expression of cultural prejudice, Harvard's preference for these young men -- which it shared with all the other leading private colleges -- was quite rational from an organization perspective. After all, who but the sons of the Protestant elite would provide the "paying customers," the gentlemanly atmosphere, and the future leaders in business and government -- not to mention generous donors -- on which Harvard's claims to preeminence ultimately rested?

For anyone who doubted the existence of a "tipping point" of Jewish enrollment beyond which the WASP elite would abandon a college, Columbia served as a sobering example. [. . .] a visitor to Princeton reported sentiment among the students that the Jews had already ruined Columbia. [. . .]

By the time Columbia finally moved vigorously to repel the "Jewish invasion," it was far too late. Though the proportion of Jews, which had reached perhaps 40 percent, was reduced to 22 percent by 1921, the sons of the Protestant elite had abandoned Morningside Heights, never to return. In the 1920s, just 4 percent enrolled at Columbia; meanwhile, 84 percent matriculated at the Big Three. A contemporary observer, writing under the veil of anonymity, captured what had happened to the Columbia campus:

As one casually observes the men of the College, one is struck by the complete lack of undergraduate atmosphere about any group of them. Singularly absent is the grace, the swagger, the tall attractive sleekness which, if it does not always dominate the usual college group, at least always touches it importantly. These men, one senses at once, are not of the highest caste, nor have they among them an influential sprinkling of members of the highest caste for their models . . . Seen quickly, there is even a certain grubbiness about them. One somehow expects them all to be Jews, for it is usually the Jewish members of such a group who lower the communal easy handsomeness.

Lowell explained that his main concern was that the sheer number of Jews would cause the flight of the Protestant elite and thereby "ruin the college":

The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also. This happened to a friend of mine with a school in New York, who thought, on principle, that he ought to admit Jews, but who discovered in a few years that he had no school at all. A similar thing has happened in the case of Columbia College; [. . .]

[Jerome Karabel. The Chosen.]

Muscular strength, appearance, and race

A few more notes from aborted replies to Guy White:

In testing the muscular strength in the south African natives the writer was somewhat surprised to find that these negroes gave rather smaller figures than one could expect with regard to their generally fine physiques.
[. . .]
the average strength is 29.5 for the right hand in men and 23.7 for the same hand in women. These figures, so far as the males are concerned, are decidedly behind those of whites. Hrdlicka,13 in normal “ Old Americans,” using same type of instrument and same method, found the pressure strength in the right hand to average 41.8 kg. in the males and 23.2 kg. in the females.
[. . .]
These differences are noteworthy. [. . .] Every student carefully observing the everyday life of intelligent people will surely have noticed the fact that their physical output of work is often remarkable even with relatively poor muscles. This and observations such as those above render it probable that, other factors being equal, the more intelligence there is, the more physical as well as other efficiency.
[V. Suk. Anthropological and physiological observations on the negroes of Natal and Zululand. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Volume 10 Issue 1, Pages 31 - 64 1927]

Strength has a large CNS component.

The central nervous system (CNS) is of paramount importance in the exertion and development of muscular strength. Muscular strength is determined not only by the quantity of involved muscle mass but also by the extent to which individual fibers in a muscle are activated (by intramuscular coordination).
[Vladimir M. Zatsiorsky and William J. Kraemer. Science and practice of strength training.]

There's a fair amount of evidence whites average greater strength per unit of muscular cross section than blacks.

Among young men in the U.S., blacks are certainly leaner on average than whites. They probably average slightly greater muscle mass -- though, I don't know whether or not the difference would remain after controlling for higher levels of physical activity and greater energy intake in black males. The differences in muscle mass are also not of sufficient magnitude to explain the awe in which certain [1] internet posters hold black male physiques.

[1] Usually, it seems, "ethnic" urban types, as I suspect guywhite is. See also Peter "ironrailsandweights" Rosa, Steve Sailer, and too many Jews to count.

This goes out to agnostic

Marius Zaromskis winning the Dream Welterweight Grand Prix earlier this week.

(CTRL+F "Finland" here for context. Zaromskis is Lithuanian, which I figure is close enough. For anyone wondering, "agnostic" is a gnxp poster of no consequence, but his delusional thinking and hilariously off-base theories sometimes make for unintended entertainment.)