The Law of Averages 2: American Adonis

“Average Man of America on Average Chicago Visit,” began the headline of a 22 October 1927 Washington Post story picked up from the Associated Press.^[1] Shadowing Roy L. Gray, an Iowa clothier selected by national survey as a representative specimen of the national species, the correspondent chronicled with deadpan sincerity Gray’s ordinary activities, desires, and reactions to the sights and sounds of the nation’s Second City. This journalistic curio derives from a popular discourse that emerged after Columbia psychologist, Harry Hollingworth, published his “composite portrait” of the average man. But if Roy L. Gray gave the average citizen an appealing, albeit comic, form, Hollingworth’s portrait suggested something more alarming. “The Average Man Found By Science,” the New York Times exclaimed. “He is Shown to Be Superstitious, Ill Educated, Conventional and Possessing the Mind of a Boy of 14 Years.”^[2]

This “Average Man” was first rendered in three dimensions when Jane Davenport, daughter of Charles B. Davenport, American promoter of eugenics and founder of the Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, sculpted a 22-inch plaster composite of 100,000 veterans. The sculpture was based on her father’s research for the Surgeon General’s Office of the War Department during World War I, which had been disseminated through Carl Brigham’s A Study of American Intelligence in 1923 and contributed to Hollingworth’s portrait.^[3]

It was at the 1932 Third International Congress of Eugenics, held at the American Museum of Natural History [AMNH], that this statue of the “Average Man” occasioned the outrage of New York Times art critic, Edward Alden Jewell. Castigating Davenport’s “condensed doughboy” as “that luckless objectified eugenic figment of the brain at the museum,” Jewell maintained that man was better represented in the aesthetic cannons of antiquity than by contemporary scientific means; the “masterpiece,” he argued, not the “modeled chart.”^[4]

While not intended as art, the problem was that Davenport’s “American Adonis” did partake of the classical tradition Jewell favored. Standing in contrapposto and molded in white plaster, Davenport’s man invoked—if only to disappoint—the numerous plaster casts of Greek and Roman statuary still prevalent in the nation’s municipal art museums. Iconic of civilization and self-consciousness (signaled in the purposive stance and arrested movement of the figure), classical sculpture was the dominant representational form of whiteness in scientific illustration as well.^[5] As an image of the national body, the "American Adonis" cast the nation in decidedly white and masculine form, but in a degraded state of nature rather than an exalted state of culture. While “inferior races” had long been rendered as “types,” whiteness had always been identified with high culture, in particular the Apollo Belvedere, and lifted out of space and time as an ideal rather than a scientific specimen. Jewell’s defense of humanism against scientific positivism was therefore an anxious response to the degeneracy of white manhood on display at the AMNH.

However, the reception of the sculpture depended less on its formal properties than on the situated meaning of its display. Interestingly, the sculpture had been exhibited once before. Included in the exhibitions accompanying the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921 at the AMNH, the sculpture was hardly mentioned in reviews. The reason being that it was exhibited alongside an idealized statue sculpted from the measurements of the “50 strongest men of Harvard.”^[6] Displayed at opposite ends of the exhibition hall, these two composites embodied the Alpha and Omega of whiteness as it was understood in the 1920s.

Prior to the 1840s, whiteness was codified within a political struggle over slavery, with blacks providing the foil to people of European descent. Afterwards, mass immigration provided the anxious backdrop for the recodification of whiteness as a plural and internally differentiated category. Nativists, who identified predominantly with “Anglo-Saxon” or “Nordic” stock, reacted to the influx of German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants by placing themselves at the top of a hierarchy of white races in which “Teutons,” “Semites,” “Celts,” and “Mediterraneans” (among others) were deemed inferior in mental and physical ability.^[7] This pluralization of whiteness was reflected in the 1921 displays where the Harvard athlete offered a eugenic (read, white native) ideal against which to measure the racial degeneracy of the mongrel body of an insurgent immigrant nation.

In 1932, however, the “Adonis” stood alone as a normative representation of the national (Caucasian) body—the “Average American.” This display strategy reflected the changing agenda of eugenicists. Between 1921 and 1932, eugenicists shifted their attention from the problem of immigration to the problem of domestic reproduction as the Johnson Act of 1924, legislation they had helped to pass, made the “rising tide of color” an obsolete concern. The new target of eugenics was not the dysgenic body of the immigrant, but—in the midst of the progressive social reforms of the New Deal—white, middle-class women.^[8]

In both exhibitions, the grotesque body of the “American Adonis” gave visible testimony to the decadence of the national body and the need for eugenic reform, but only in the second exhibition, when the idealized type was entirely replaced with this sculpture of scientific averages, did it mirror, rather than foretell, the physical and racial degeneracy of its audience. Hence, we can better understand the displeasure of Edward Alden Jewell.