natural indolence.

When Gervaise's husband, Copeau, the father of Nana,

was admitted to hospital with the D. T. s, the first question the physician
asked him was, "Did your father drink?" The public consciousness of the
period both in Europe and North America was permeated with the notion
that intrinsic differences in temperament and merit will finally dominate any
mere effect of education and environment.
The fictional Rougon-Macquarts are seen again in the equally fictional but
supposedly real family of Kallikaks, who graced virtually every textbook of
American psychology until the Second World War. The Kallikaks were
supposed to be two halves of a family descended from two women of
contrasting nature and a common father. This piece of academic fiction was
meant to convince malleable young minds that criminality, laziness,
alcoholism, and incest were inborn and inherited.
Nor were supposedly innate differences restricted to individual variation.
Nations and races were said to be characterized by innate temperamental
and intellectual differences. These claims were made not by racists,
demagogues, and fascist know-nothings but by the leaders of the American
academic, psychological, and sociological establishments. In 1923, Carl
Brigham, who was later secretary of the College Entrance Examination
Board, produced a study of intelligence under the direction of R. M. Yerkes,
professor of psychology at Harvard and the president of the American
Psychological Association. The study asserted: "We must assume that we
are measuring inborn intelligence. We must face the possibility of racial
admixture here in America that is infinitely worse than that faced by any
European country for we are incorporating the Negro into our racial stock.
The decline of the American intelligence will be more rapid. . . owing to the
presence here of the Negro. "5
Yet another president of the American Psychological Association said that
whenever there has been mixed breeding with the Negro, there has been
deterioration of civilizations.6 Louis Agassiz, one of the most famous
zoologists of the nineteenth century, reported that the skull sutures of Negro
babies closed earlier than the sutures of white babies, so their brains were
entrapped, and it would be dangerous to teach them too much. Perhaps the
most extraordinary of claims was that of Henry Fairfield Osborne, president
of the American Museum of Natural History and one of America's most