Family Trees and Timber Rights: Albert E. Jenks, Americanization, and the Rise of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota¹

Mark Soderstrom
University of Minnesota

Hindsight allows present-day scholars to view the development of academic disciplines in a light that contemporaries would never have seen. Hence, from our perspective, Mary Furner's assertion that anthropology developed as a profession reacting against biology and the physical sciences makes sense,2 for we tend to celebrate the triumph of cultural anthropology as the coming of age of the discipline.3 However, this trajectory of professional development was not a necessary or predestined development. Rather, the eventual (if occasionally still embattled) predominance of culture over the categories of race, nation, and biology was only one of many possible outcomes. This paper investigates a different trajectory, one that most current scholars would hope has been relegated to the dustbin of history. It is still a cautionary tale, though, in that while the racial anthropology followed in this narrative did not survive World War II, its practitioners did enjoy a degree of prominence and influence that was much greater and longer than has been generally acknowledged by current accounts.	1
In one such account, a 1990 history of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Professor Elden Johnson delineates the separation of the Anthropology and Sociology Departments in 1918, and remarks on the newly-independent department's 1919 catalog. Johnson only considers six of the twenty-two courses listed to be truly "anthropology courses," stating that the rest of the fledgling department's offerings were merely practical courses taught by social activists whose anthropology was at best questionable.4 His determinations are intriguing, since the man who designed and taught many of the disputed courses„Albert E. Jenks, founder and head of the department„enjoyed statewide and national prominence in his field. Jenks, as the man primarily responsible for the inception and early shape of the University of Minnesota Anthropology Department, merits a closer look. His use of emerging methods in physical anthropology to manage populations, secure property, and reify racial hierarchy, were part and parcel of the race-based nationalism then prevalent in American intellectual life. Such racial thought formed the disciplinary base of anthropology. Jenks's life and career provide a useful lens through which to examine the evolution of anthropology as a discipline within its national context.	2
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